The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Third Lecture

[ 1 ] Yesterday we discussed the path that a human being travels between death and a new birth, and from the entire context I have already outlined, you will be able to see that every night, when we fall asleep, we must actually find our way back to the starting point of our earthly life. This is indeed an important insight we can gain: that even when we fall asleep—as I have already explained in the course of these lectures—we do not remain, so to speak, at the point in our earthly life’s journey where we have arrived, but rather, as we fall asleep, we are truly transported back to the starting point of our earthly life. Every time we fall asleep, we are transported back to our childhood, indeed even to the state before we entered childhood, before we arrived in earthly life, so that while asleep we are always transported—with our “I” and our astral body—into the supersensible world from which we originated, which we left behind when we became earthly human beings.

[ 2 ] This makes it necessary, at this point in our reflections, to once again allow what a person experiences unconsciously while asleep—but no less vividly for that—to pass more closely before our minds. The length of sleep is not really that important in this context. Admittedly, it is difficult for ordinary consciousness to properly imagine that the conditions of time and space become entirely different when we are in the spiritual world, but we must form these concepts, for these conditions do indeed become entirely different.

[ 3 ] As I have already said: When, because of me, we have fallen asleep—that is, crossed over into unconsciousness—and then suddenly wake up, we experience, in the very moment of waking, everything we would have experienced had we continued to sleep for a long time. The length of sleep, measured in physical time, is significant only for our physical body and also for the etheric body. For what we experience as the “I” and the astral body, entirely different time conditions apply; thus, what I am about to explain to you applies equally to both a short and a long sleep.

[ 4 ] When a person enters sleep with their soul, the first state they experience—all of this takes place in the unconscious, but it is very much alive—is that they feel as if they are living within a universal cosmic ether. I say “feels”—it is an unconscious feeling—but one cannot express these things any other way than by using terms from ordinary consciousness. One feels, as it were, expanded into the entire cosmos. And the specific perception one previously had—which implies a connectedness with the things in the earthly environment around us—these specific perceptions cease. A general sharing in the weaving and activity of the cosmos sets in at first. This is connected with the fact that one experiences oneself, as it were, as a soul in the boundless. In this experience of the boundless, a strong impulse arises within the soul to be supported by the divine, so that every day as we fall asleep, we actually experience the religious need—precisely during the state of sleep—to have the entire world permeated and suffused with a divine-spiritual presence that is spread out everywhere. We actually experience this as we fall asleep. And through our entire human constitution, we carry this need for the divine with us into the waking state. We owe the renewal of our religious need anew every day to our sleep experiences.

[ 5 ] Thus, it is only by contemplating the whole nature of the human being that we truly come to understand the states of life we go through. We live, essentially, quite thoughtlessly, merely going through the motions of life that unfold consciously from morning to evening, for much of what we experience flows in from our nighttime experiences. People are not always clear about where their vital religious need comes from. It comes from this general experience that we have every night in the first stage of sleep, and which we also have—albeit perhaps with less intensity—when we take an afternoon nap.

[ 6 ] But then something happens during every sleep—as I said, it remains unconscious at first, but is nonetheless experienced just as vividly—as if the human being were no longer so broadly spread out in the cosmos within his soul, but rather as if he were distributed among the individual parts of his being. How fragmented one feels. one feels—that is to say, one would feel fragmented if one were to feel what one is experiencing, if it were to become conscious. And deep within the soul, an unconscious anxiety takes hold. We experience this anxiety—of being divided throughout the entire universe—every night in our sleep.

[ 7 ] You might say: Why should we care, since we don’t know that anyway? — But it matters to us very much nonetheless. I’d like to use an analogy to illustrate why it matters to us. Suppose we become anxious in our ordinary daily lives. We turn pale. The fact that we become anxious is a conscious process of the soul; the fact that we turn pale is a specific change in our organism. The blood withdraws into the interior of the body. This is an objective process. We can also describe anxiety in terms of the objective process that takes place in the physical body while we are awake during the day. What we experience psychologically is, in a sense, the psychological reflection of this withdrawal of blood from the surface of the body into its inner regions. So there is an objective process that corresponds to fear during wakefulness. Similarly, there is also an objective process in the astral body that we undergo when a person sleeps, which is entirely independent of consciousness.

[ 8 ] Those who are imaginative and inspired experience this objective process in the astral body as a state of fear, but this objective aspect of fear is something that a person actually goes through every night because their soul is divided. And how is the human being divided? In fact, every night the human being is divided and sent to the world of the stars. One part of our being strives toward Mercury, another part toward Jupiter, and so on. However, in order to characterize the process taking place here I must say that during ordinary sleep it is not the same as on the path between death and new birth, where we actually ascend to the starry worlds; rather, during the night we experience this division not by being truly divided among the stars, but among the afterimages of the stars that we continually carry within us throughout our lives. During our nightly sleep, we are divided among the afterimages of Mercury, Venus, the Moon, the Sun, and so on. So these are afterimages, not the original stars themselves.

[ 9 ] And this anxiety we experience—which arises relatively soon after falling asleep—can be resolved in a person only if they are truly united with Christ. It is here that one comes to understand the necessity of a person’s union with Christ. However, when speaking of this connection, one must take into account the evolution of the human race on Earth. This evolution of the human race on Earth can only be understood if one is able to correctly grasp the significant turning point in this evolution brought about by the Mystery of Golgotha. Spiritually and psychologically, human beings were quite different before the Mystery of Golgotha took place on Earth. And when one considers human beings from a spiritual perspective, one must always take into account that people were different before the Mystery of Golgotha than they were afterward.

[ 10 ] When people faced the Mystery of Golgotha—we were all in this situation in earlier earthly lives; indeed, we ourselves are those people we are speaking of, for we were there in earlier earthly lives—when people in earlier earthly lives fell asleep and experienced the anxiety I have described, Christ was always present in an afterimage from the world of the stars, just as the afterimages of the other stars were present. And Christ approached people in every state of sleep, offering help and dispelling their fear—thus driving the fear away. In earlier times, even with their instinctive clairvoyance, people still had a kind of memory upon waking—like a dreamlike recollection—that the Christ had been with them during sleep. Only they did not call him the Christ. They called him the Sun Spirit. But it was the deep conviction of these people, who lived before the Mystery of Golgotha, that the great Sun Spirit is also the great guiding helper of humanity and that every night, in sleep, he approaches human beings to take away their fear of being scattered throughout the world. Christ appeared as the Spirit who strengthens and inwardly consolidates human beings.

[ 11 ] What holds a person’s forces together in life? — This is the question the followers of the ancient religions asked themselves. It is the great Sun Spirit who holds the individual elements of the human being together, uniting them into a cohesive personality. And the followers of the ancient religions held this belief based on their memory that every night Christ approached humanity. We need not be surprised that this was so, for in those ancient times, when instinctive clairvoyance was still common among people, they would, at special moments in their lives, always look back to the time they had spent before descending to Earth as spiritual-soul beings and taking on a physical body. At that time, it was quite natural for people to look back upon their pre-earthly existence.

[ 12 ] But isn’t it true, as we have just discussed, that every sleep takes us back to our pre-earthly existence—to the time before we truly became conscious children? Yes, that is so. And just as people knew that in their pre-earthly existence they were together with the high Sun Spirit, who gave them the strength to pass through death once more as immortal beings, so too did people have a recollective awareness after every sleep that this high Sun Spirit had stood by their side to help them, enabling them to become truly cohesive personalities within themselves as human beings.

[ 13 ] The human soul experiences this state during sleep, as it becomes acquainted with the planetary world. It is as if the soul were divided yet held together by Christ within the afterimages of the planets.

[ 14 ] This entire experience of the soul during sleep has changed for human beings since the Mystery of Golgotha. The Mystery of Golgotha ushered in the development of a strong sense of self for the people of Earth. In ancient times, before the Mystery of Golgotha, people had a strong sense of connection to their pre-earthly existence, but they lacked a strong sense of the “I.” This sense of the “I” developed only gradually after the Mystery of Golgotha, but especially—and in fact only truly—through civilized humanity beginning in the first third of the 15th century. And this strong sense of self causes human beings, as free, fully self-aware beings, to place themselves within the sensory world; on the other hand, as if by way of a counterbalance, their looking back into pre-earthly existence is obscured, as is their consciousness—their remembering consciousness—of the fact that during sleep, Christ steps alongside them to help them.

[ 15 ] What is truly remarkable about what has unfolded for the development of humanity in the course of the Mystery of Golgotha is that people have grown stronger in their “I”-consciousness during waking hours, yet complete darkness has gradually spread over that which once shone forth from the consciousness of sleep. Therefore, since the Mystery of Golgotha, human beings must consciously establish their relationship to Christ Jesus during waking life by consciously acquiring an understanding of what actually happened through the Mystery of Golgotha—how, through the Mystery of Golgotha, the high Solar Spirit, Christ, descended to Earth, became human in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, passed through earthly life and death, and remained a teacher even after death to the disciples who were able to behold him in his ethereal body after his “death.”

[ 16 ] As people in the time following the Mystery of Golgotha develop an awareness of their oneness with Christ during their waking hours—by forming vivid mental images of what took place through the Mystery of Golgotha—the possibility arises once again for them that the Christ impulse, in its aftereffect, will now assist them from their waking state during the night. This is the great difference between the state of sleep before the Mystery of Golgotha and after the Mystery of Golgotha. Before the Mystery of Golgotha, the help of Christ was, so to speak, always present during sleep as a matter of course, and a person could even remember while awake that Christ had been with them during the night’s sleep. After the Mystery of Golgotha, human beings would be completely forsaken by Christ if they did not establish a conscious relationship with Christ during their waking hours and thereby carry the resonance, the aftereffect, over into sleep, so that during sleep they can once again be held together as a personality through Christ’s help.

[ 17 ] Following the Mystery of Golgotha, it has emerged as an inner spiritual obligation for human beings that what they unconsciously received from the heavenly realms before the Mystery of Golgotha—the help of Christ—must now be gradually earned by establishing a conscious relationship with the Mystery of Golgotha. And indeed, we cannot properly study the nature of human sleep unless we take into account this great, profound difference between human sleep before the Mystery of Golgotha and after the Mystery of Golgotha.

[ 18 ] But when we slip into sleep, our entire world is different from what it is during the waking state. How do we, as human beings, live on Earth during the waking state? Through our physical bodies, we are bound by the laws of nature. The laws that operate out there in nature also operate within us. What we recognize as moral obligations, as moral impulses, as the entire moral order of the world, stands, so to speak, as an abstract world within the laws of nature. And because modern natural science takes into account only the waking world, the moral world is completely overlooked by this natural science.

[ 19 ] Here, natural science tells us about this— albeit hypothetically—but this is entirely in keeping with the spirit of natural science—that the Kant-Laplacean primordial nebula—which has been modified today but still essentially governs scientific conceptions of the starting point of our universe’s development—was the origin of our universe, and that at the end of this cosmic evolution, heat death will set in, when everything will be buried on Earth as if in a vast cemetery of living things. Natural science describes the evolution of the cosmos as a progression from one physical state to another. The moral order of the world is a stranger to this. Human beings would not perceive their dignity; they would not be able to experience themselves as human beings at all if they did not experience themselves as moral beings. But were moral impulses already present in the Kant-Laplacean primordial nebula? No, there were only mechanical laws, physical laws. Will they still exist when the Earth has reached heat death? No, then again only physical laws will prevail, according to natural science, and from the processes governed by natural law springs forth all that is living, and from the living, the human-spiritual. Human beings form concepts: You should do this; you should not do that. — They experience a moral world order. Yet this order has no foundation in the laws of nature themselves. To the awakened human being, the moral world order appears like a mere abstract world superimposed upon the solid, massive world governed by the laws of nature.

[ 20 ] When the imaginative, inspired, and intuitive consciousness undergoes what a person experiences in the “I” and in the astral body from the moment of falling asleep until waking up, it is entirely different. There, the moral world order is firm and real, and the natural order below appears like something dreamt, like something merely abstract. It is hard to imagine, but it is so. The whole world is turned upside down. If the sleeper were to become clairvoyant in his sleep, the moral world order would appear to him as the real, the certain, and the physical world order governed by the laws of nature would appear as that which now hovers not above but below it. And if the sleeper were conscious, he would not place the Kant-Laplacean theory at the starting point of the world order and heat death at the end, but rather he would place at the starting point the world of spiritual hierarchies, consisting entirely of spiritual-soul beings who guide human beings into existence, and at the end of the world order, not heat death, but again spiritual-soul beings who welcome human beings—who have passed through a series of developments—into their community. And beneath this, the abstract physical world order would float and flow undulatingly, like an illusion.

[ 21 ] If, between falling asleep and waking up—right in the middle of it all—you were to develop clairvoyant abilities, you would see everything you have learned during the day as the laws of nature as if they were dreams dreamed by the earth. And what would give you a firm foundation would be the moral order of the universe. One experiences this moral world order by working one’s way—after Christ has granted the help described—into the tranquility of the fixed-star sky, though now, once again, during nighttime sleep, in the images. From the fixed stars, one looks down upon the earthly realm and the laws of nature through these images.

[ 22 ] This is the entirely different kind of experience that a person has between falling asleep and waking up, and which every night brings their soul into the image of the cosmos. Just as, between death and a new birth—as I explained yesterday—a person is guided down to earthly existence at a certain point by the forces of the Moon, developing a kind of need for earthly existence, so too, after having lived through celestial existence in the manner described—let us say, while sleeping—the need to submerge once more into their physical body and their etheric body.

[ 23 ] Now, as human beings who, from the moment of our birth, become accustomed to life on Earth, we are also in a kind of state of sleep and dreaming. So when you look back in the morning—setting aside your dreams, let’s say when you’ve been awake for an hour—on the moment of waking, your consciousness breaks off and you slip into the darkness of sleep; it is much the same when you look back on your childhood. For some, it happens earlier; for others, later—for some in the fifth year, for others in the fourth—that is when consciousness breaks off. There lies something beyond this point of memory—the furthest back one can recall—and beyond it lies something that is just as immersed in the darkness of the sleep and dream life of early childhood as the life of the human soul is immersed every night in the darkness of sleep. But it is not a state of complete sleep; it is already a kind of waking dream that the child experiences. Yet during this waking dream, three important stages of human life now take place, which I alluded to yesterday in the order I characterized them, and in which we can see echoes and aftereffects of the life between death and a new birth. First, the child learns—out of its dream-sleep life—what we simply call learning to walk. Yes, it is learning to walk that strikes us most. But what is happening to the child there is something all-encompassing; for those who can truly look into every detail of how the finest aspects of the human being are being transformed, it represents something immensely magnificent and powerful. The child learns to position itself within the world, adjusting to all the gravitational forces through a state of balance. The child stops falling over. By unfolding inner forces, it adapts to the spatial directions.

[ 24 ] If we had to do this consciously—to bring our organism from a state of complete lack of balance and stability into a stable state of equilibrium in all three spatial directions, whereby we even learn as children to maintain this state of equilibrium by performing these kinds of pendulum-like movements with our legs as we learn to walk— this is such a monumental mechanical task that the child performs unconsciously—because it performs it as an echo of what it experienced among spirits between death and a new birth—that it is something so all-encompassing, so magnificent, that no human science, not even that of the greatest engineer, would be capable of calculating it. The way human faculties fit into the spatial context of the world—what a human being unconsciously accomplishes as a child—is the most magnificent aspect imaginable in the development of mathematical, mechanical, and physical forces. We describe this with the simple term “learning to walk.” Yet it is precisely in this process of learning to walk that something truly magnificent lies.

[ 25 ] And as children learn to walk, they also develop the proper use of their arms and hands. This entire process of orienting oneself as a physical being in the three spatial dimensions is, in turn, the foundation for everything involved in learning to speak. Physiology knows little more about this connection between human walking and standing dynamics and the process of learning to speak than it does about the fact that the language center in right-handed people is located on the left side of the brain—because the gestures of the right hand, which are vigorously executed by the person’s will, mysteriously continue inward into the brain and perform there the function that then leads the person to speak. But it is not only this connection between the right hand and the left third frontal gyrus—the so-called Broca’s gyrus—in the brain; it is the entire range of motion of the legs, arms, and fingers, the entire mobility and balance of the human being, that surges upward into the brain, becomes part of brain development, and from there surges into the larynx. And language develops from the very foundation of walking, grasping, and the gestures of the organs of movement,

[ 26 ] Anyone who has developed a true ability to observe these things knows that a child who tends to step more with the toes also speaks differently and nuances their sounds differently than a child who tends to step with the heels. The speech organism—the ability to speak—develops from the walking and movement organism. And this speech, in turn, is a reflection of what I showed you yesterday as the passage through the revelation between death and new birth. As the child learns to speak—it does not yet understand the words intellectually, but only emotionally—the child lives in language as in feelings and, if it develops normally, only learns to imagine and think after it has learned to speak. In reality, the child’s thoughts develop from words. Just as walking and grasping—the movements of the legs and hands—surge upward into the speech organism, so too does that which lives within the speech organism and is acquired through adaptation to the language of the environment surge upward into the organs of thought, and the child develops thinking in the third stage.

[ 27 ] In this dream-like state of sleep, the child goes through these three stages of development: walking, speaking, and thinking. These are the three earthly reflections of what we experience between death and a new birth: the living passage through the spirit world, the revelation of the spirit world, and the drawing in of the world ether to form our etheric body. One can properly assess what the child develops during these three stages only by observing the adult in their state of sleep. There one can observe how, as a person falls asleep and ceases to think—for thoughts do indeed fall silent upon falling asleep—how, by ceasing to think, that person allows the power of their thoughts to be further nurtured between falling asleep and waking up by those beings we know as angelic beings, Angeloi. They approach the sleeping person and nurture their thought forces while the person themselves is not doing so.

[ 28 ] And people do, after all, stop talking. It is only under abnormal conditions—which can, of course, be understood—that people speak in their sleep. But we don’t need to discuss that right now. In a normal person, speech ceases when they fall asleep. It would also be terrible if some people were to keep talking to us even while they were asleep. So speech ceases during sleep. It is the beings from the hierarchy of the Archangels who now care for that aspect of the human being during sleep which leads to speech. And apart from sleepwalkers, who are in an abnormal state, people are also still during sleep; they do not walk, they do not reach out—their movements cease. That which is present in the human being as forces during waking hours and which brings movements forth from the will is cared for from the moment of falling asleep until waking by the beings we count among the hierarchy of the Archai.

[ 29 ] Once we come to understand this connection, we see once again how, between falling asleep and waking up, the beings of the next hierarchy—which stands above humankind—the Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archaei—and we will also understand what happens in a small child as it masters the three activities of walking, speaking, and thinking. We learn to see how, as the small child enters into the dynamics of life—into walking and grasping—it is the Archai who carry over what the human being experienced between death and a new birth in interaction with spirit-soul beings, and transform it into a reflection in the child’s walking. The Archai, the primal forces, convey the entirely spiritual movement among spiritual-soul beings between death and a new birth into its reflection here in the physical world when the child learns to walk.

[ 30 ] And the Archangels bring over what the human being experiences between death and rebirth in the realm of the Unseen, and they are at work as the child learns to speak. And the angels, the angelic beings, carry over what the human being has developed in terms of powers by gathering together his etheric body from the entire substance of the world ether. They carry these powers over, form them into an image within the organs of thought—which are plastically shaped—so that the child learns to think through language.

[ 31 ] Through anthroposophy, we do not merely learn to look at the physical world and always say: “There is a spiritual element underlying it.” — That is, after all, too easy. We do not thereby acquire a true conception of the spiritual world. Anyone who, philosophically speaking, would always say, “Well, yes, everything physical has a spiritual basis”—would be like someone who wants to walk across a meadow, and another person says to him, “Look, there are dandelions, there are daisies, and so on”—but he replies, “I don’t want to know any of that.” There’s a flower, a flower, the abstraction of a flower!”—That is how the person stands who, as a philosopher, wants only to recognize the pantheistic, spiritual aspect everywhere, but refuses to engage with the concrete, specific manifestations of the spiritual.

[ 32 ] What anthroposophy offers us shows us how the divine-spiritual lives everywhere in the individual forms of life. We observe the way in which the child transitions from the crawling, clumsy state to the walking state. We surrender ourselves in admiration and reverence to these magnificent phenomena of the world and see in them the work of the Archai, who are at work there, carrying over into the child’s earthly form what is experienced between death and new birth. And we observe how the child brings forth speech from within, observe the activity of the Archangeloi, and again, in the child’s thinking, the activity of the Angeloi. But this also has its profound significance and its practical side. This can be seen especially in our highly materialistic age. In our highly materialistic age, for many people, words no longer signify anything deeply spiritual. People have gradually come to use words really only to designate physical things in the external world. One can certainly notice this. Just think how many people there are in the world who can no longer imagine anything at all when you speak to them of something spiritual, because the words no longer have any spiritual meaning for them—because the words are applicable only to physical things. For many people, language itself has already taken on a materialistic character. It is applicable only to physical things. And we now find ourselves in a civilization where language itself is becoming more and more materialistic. And where does that lead?

[ 33 ] This becomes evident when we correctly examine the connection between the waking state and the sleeping state as it relates to language. During the day, while awake, we speak to other people. We cause the air to vibrate. The way the air vibrates conveys what we wish to communicate emotionally. But within the human being lie the impulses—the emotional impulses—behind these words. Every word corresponds to a spiritual impulse, and the more idealistically a person speaks—the more they are aware that their words also contain spiritual meanings—the stronger that spiritual impulse becomes. Once you know this, you can see exactly what is happening. Take, for example, a person who, in their speech, understands only materialistic concepts. By day, they appear much like any other person who also has idealistic and spiritual elements in their speech—who is aware, in fact, that words are inspired by the spirit. But at night, this person, with their ego and astral body, carries the spiritual-soul aspect of language out into the spiritual world. They return to the spiritual source. Those who speak only in materialistic language do not find their Archangel. They do not find a connection to the world of the Archangels. Those who still speak in idealistic language find a connection to the world of the Archangels.

[ 34 ] This is the tragedy of a materialistic civilization—one that is already expressed in its language—namely, that as language becomes increasingly materialistic, people may lose their connection to the world of the Archangels in the night. This is indeed something that is heart-wrenching for the true spiritual researcher within contemporary civilization, as people—by increasingly forgetting to imbue their words with spiritual content—lose their connection to the spiritual world—namely, at the proper point with the archangels. This is the terrible aspect of our increasingly materialistic civilization. And one only begins to recognize this horror when one contemplates the true nature of the state of sleep.

[ 35 ] You cannot truly become an anthroposophist if you wish to remain a mere theorist. You can formulate indifferent theories about cockchafers, earthworms, and cells—theories that won’t break your heart. After all, the fact that cockchafers and earthworms are built from a single cell can’t lead to anything heartbreaking. But when you take in the full scope of anthroposophical insights, you look into the depths of the human being, human development, and human destinies, and your heart is always involved in these insights. There, the sum of these insights settles into your emotional and sensory life. There, you become empathetic toward the whole world—and then, indeed, willing with it. This is the essence of anthroposophy: that it does not merely engage the human intellect, but that it engages the whole human being, and that through this it also shines into—but shines with the power of the soul and the emotions—the destinies of culture and civilization as well as into the destinies of the individual human being.

[ 36 ] One can only truly experience human life on Earth when one also views this other side—the spiritual side—as it can only be revealed to us, and when one incorporates into this understanding the states of sleep through which human beings repeatedly return to the spiritual world. Then, however, spiritual science becomes a genuine spiritual, psychological, and ultimately also social, religious, and ethical human life. This is what true science—which becomes wisdom—is meant to be. Humanity has a great need for such a life-affirming science, so that it does not sink deeper into ruin but can instead rise again.

[ 37 ] In the next few lectures that I am still able to give, let us therefore delve even deeper into the relationship between human beings and the world, and thereby also into an understanding of the destiny of the individual human being as it takes shape through repeated earthly lives. More on this tomorrow.