The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Eighth Lecture

[ 1 ] You will have seen that the initiation into the Hybernian Mysteries described yesterday aims at a true understanding of the mysteries of the world and of humanity, for the inner soul experiences I had to speak of were of a profound nature for the life of the human soul and mind. And in fact, everything that is intended to lead the way into the spiritual world is based on the fact that, through particular, profound inner experiences, a person achieves certain triumphs; in this triumph, their strength is significantly enhanced, and through this, they penetrate into the spiritual world in one way or another.

[ 2 ] Now we have seen how, during the initiation in Hybernia, the initiate stands before two—and one must not misunderstand the word—symbolic statues. And I have described to you, first, what these statues were like, and second, through which feelings and inner spiritual experiences the student was guided while contemplating these statues.

[ 3 ] Now you must be clear about this: the impression one gains of such majestic statues under the circumstances I have described to you is, of course, by no means the same as the one one gets when simply hearing about these things as described; rather, it is one that is extraordinarily powerful on an inner level. And that is why it was possible for the initiators—after the student had gone through everything I described yesterday—to ensure that the experiences he had lived through, the experiences associated with each of the individual statues, would continue to resonate within him for a long time. The student was simply encouraged to allow what he had experienced at the male statue and what he had experienced at the female statue to resonate within him. For weeks—the duration varies according to the individual’s karma, sometimes longer, for some shorter—the students were encouraged to first feel within themselves the resonance of the one, the male statue. The exercises I spoke of yesterday were first performed with both statues, for what emanated from both statues together was to converge in the student’s future spiritual life as well. Nevertheless, the student was encouraged to first allow the impression he had received from the male statue to resonate within him very intensely. And I will now describe to you this impression as it resonated within him. Of course, one must use words that are not specifically coined for such initiatory experiences; therefore, much of what is expressed in these words will actually have to be felt in order to grasp their true inner meaning.

[ 4 ] What the student initially experienced when he surrendered to the impression of the male statue I described yesterday was a kind of emotional numbness—a genuine emotional numbness that set in more and more the longer the student was transported back to those times when he was supposed to let things resonate within him: a spiritual numbness that also felt like a physical numbness. In the intervals, the student was certainly able to attend to the necessities of life, but time and again his soul was drawn back into this lingering resonance, and he then experienced this numbness. This numbness—it was indeed an initiation that still strongly, though not quite in the same way, recalled the ancient style of the primordial mysteries—this numbness led him to a change in his consciousness. One could not say that his consciousness was, for example, subdued, but it became such that the student felt: “The state of consciousness I am entering is completely unfamiliar to me. At first, I cannot really handle it; I don’t know what to make of it.” And so the student felt, in essence, that this entire state of consciousness was filled with the sensation of stillness. But then it was as if the student felt that what had become rigid within him—that is, his very self—was being absorbed by the universe; he felt as if he were being transported out into the vastness of the universe. And he could say to himself: “The universe is taking me in.”

[ 5 ] But then—it was not a fading of consciousness, but rather a transformation of consciousness—then something very special happened. When the student had undergone this kind of stillness for a sufficiently long time—and the initiators had to ensure that it was indeed a sufficiently long time—this absorption into the universe, he would say to himself something like: The rays of the sun, the rays of the stars are drawing me in; they are pulling me out into the entire universe, but I actually remain whole within myself. Once the student had gone through this for long enough, he gained a strange insight. Only now did he truly understand the purpose of this state of consciousness, which had already arisen during the state of stillness, for now—depending on his experiences, resonating with this or that—he received the most varied impressions of winter landscapes. Winter landscapes appeared before him in his mind’s eye—landscapes in which he gazed into swirling snowflakes filling the air—all, as I said, seen in his mind’s eye—or landscapes where he gazed into forests where snow lay heavily on the trees, or the like; indeed things that, as mentioned, echoed what he had seen here and there in life, but which always gave the impression of reality. So that, after being absorbed by the universe, he felt as if his own consciousness were conjuring up entire journeys through time across winter landscapes. And in doing so, he felt as if he were not actually in his body, but rather in his sensory organs; he felt his essence in his eyes, he felt his essence in his ears, he felt his essence even on the surface of his skin. There, especially when he felt his entire sense of touch extended across his skin, he also sensed: I have become like an elastic but hollow statue. And he felt an intimate communion, for example, between his eyes and these landscapes. He felt as if, in each eye, “this entire landscape that he was surveying” were active, as if it were working its way into the eye from all sides, as if the eye were an inner mirror for “what appeared out there.”

[ 6 ] But what he still felt was this: he did not feel like a single entity; rather, he essentially felt his “I” multiplied as many times as he had senses. He felt his “I” multiplied by twelve. And from the fact that he felt this “I” multiplied by twelve, a very strange experience arose for him, in which he said to himself: There is an “I” that sees through my eyes. There is an “I” that acts in my sense of thought, in my sense of language, in my sense of touch, in my sense of life. I am, in fact, split apart in the world. — From this arose a vivid longing for union with a being from the hierarchy of the Angeloi, so that through this union with a being from the hierarchy of the Angeloi he might gain the strength and power to master the fragmentation of the “I” into the individual sensory experiences. And from this, from all of this, the experience arose within the “I”: Why do I have my senses?

[ 7 ] And this very peculiar thing turned out to be that the student now sensed how everything connected with the senses and with the extensions of the senses inward—toward the inner being of the human being—is related to the actual environment one experiences on Earth. The senses belong to winter—that is what the student felt. And from this entire experience he was going through—in the ever-changing winter landscapes that, as mentioned, echoed what he had seen in life, yet which shone out at him with great beauty precisely from the spiritual realm—from all these experiences, the student then took away an overall state of his soul. This overall state of his soul comprised, roughly, the following elements:

[ 8 ] During my Mysterious Winter Journey, I experienced what has truly transpired in the universe. The masses of snow and ice in my Enchanted Winters have shown me the deadly forces at work in the universe. I have come to know the impulses of destruction in the universe. And my numbness, as I was on my way to my mystical winter journey, was precisely the announcement that I should look into the forces present in the universe—forces that come from the past into the present, but arrive in the present as dead cosmic forces.

[ 9 ] This was initially conveyed to the student through the lingering impression of his experiences with the male statue.

[ 10 ] Then he was led to carry within himself the lingering echo of his experiences with the sculptural, non-elastic statue. And it seemed to him as if he were now falling not into an inner rigidity, but into an inner heat—as if into a feverish state of the soul, a feverish state that had the effect of causing the things that can have such a powerful effect on the soul—precisely because they are like that inwardly—to begin manifesting as physical symptoms. The student experienced this as if he were being pressed inwardly, as if everything were pressing too hard—his breath pressing too hard, his blood pressing too hard in every direction. The student was overcome by great anxiety, verging on a deep inner distress of the soul. And in this deep inner distress, the second thing he was to go through then dawned on him. And that was that, emerging from this distress, something arose for him that could be expressed in the following words:

[ 11 ] There is something within me that is demanded by my physical nature in ordinary earthly life. This must be overcome. My earthly self must be overcome. — This was very much alive in the student’s consciousness.

[ 12 ] Then, after he had endured this inner heat, this inner distress, this feeling of needing to overcome the earthly ego for a sufficiently long time, something arose within him that he knew was not the state of consciousness he had experienced before, but rather a state of consciousness well known to him, it is the state of consciousness of dreaming. Whereas during the first experience—which emerged from his state of numbness—he had clearly felt that he was in a state of consciousness unknown to him in ordinary life, he now recognized his state of consciousness: a kind of dreaming. He was dreaming; but unlike what he had dreamed before, he was now dreaming—in harmony with what he had experienced—the most wondrous summer landscapes. But he knew these were dreams—dreams that gripped him inwardly with intense joy or intense sorrow, depending on whether what came to him from the essence of summer was sorrowful or joyful—yet with precisely that intensity of feeling with which dreams take hold of us. You need only recall what a dream is capable of—one that first appears in images, from which you awaken, awakening with a pounding heart, flushed, and in fear. The student now interpreted this inner stirring in a “quite elementary, self-evident way,” so that he said to himself: My inner being has brought summer to my consciousness as a dream—summer as a dream.

[ 13 ] At the same time, the student now knew: That which was—or is—present before his consciousness as a “magical summer,” in a state of constant transformation, is something like impulses reaching out into the vast future of the universe. But he no longer felt as he had before—as if he were fragmented and multiplied across his senses—no, he now felt, deep within, as if he were truly gathered into a single unity; he felt as if he were gathered into his heart. And that is the culmination, the highest intensification of what he was going through: this being gathered into his heart, this inner grasping of and feeling of kinship within the innermost human nature—not with summer as it is seen externally, but with the dream of that summer. And the student rightly said to himself: “In what the dream of summer offers—what I experience inwardly in my human being—there lies the future.”

[ 14 ] And once the student had gone through this, he came to experience that these two states followed one another. He looked, so to speak, out over a landscape consisting of meadows, ponds, and small lakes. He looked out over ice and snow, which transformed into swirling, falling snow—like misty snowflakes—that grew thinner and thinner until it dissolved into nothingness. At the very moment it had dissolved into nothingness—when he felt, as it were, in the empty expanse of the universe—at that very moment, the summer dreams took its place. And the student was aware: Now the past and the future touch one another in my own inner life.

[ 15 ] And from that moment on, the student had learned to look at the outer world and to recognize from this outer world a truth that would remain with him forever: In this world that surrounds us, in this world from which we derive our physical existence, something is constantly dying. And in the snow crystals of winter, we see the outward signs of the spirit that is constantly dying within matter. As human beings, we are not yet predisposed to fully feel this dying spirit—which is rightly symbolized in snow and ice in the external natural world—unless initiation has preceded us. But once initiation has taken place, then one knows: the spirit is constantly dying within matter, announcing itself in nature as it solidifies and becomes frozen. There, nothingness is ever present. And out of this nothingness, something like nature’s dreams is first born. And these nature’s dreams contain the seeds for the future of the world. But the death of the world and the birth of the world would not touch one another if the human being were not standing right in the midst of it all. For if humanity were not standing right in the middle—as I said, I am simply describing to you the experiences the student of the Hybernian initiation had inwardly—if humanity were not standing right in the middle, then the actual processes into which the student looked through the new consciousness born out of solidification would be a true death of the world, and the dream would not follow the death of the world. No future would emerge in relation to the past. Saturn, the Sun, the Moon, and the Earth would be there; no Jupiter, no Venus, and no Vulcan. For this future of the cosmos to be linked to the past, humanity had to stand between the past and the future. The student simply knew this from what he had experienced.

[ 16 ] And what the student had experienced was now summarized for him by his initiators. Specifically, the first state—in which he had experienced a state of stillness and felt as if he were being absorbed by the universe—was summarized by his initiators in words that I can convey to you in German roughly as follows:

In the vast expanses you shall learn,
As in the blue of the distant ether
How the very essence of the world first fades away
And is rediscovered within you.

[ 17 ] These words truly summed up the feelings he had experienced. Then the feelings of the second state, under the aftereffects of the second statue, were summarized for him:

In the depths, you shall free yourself
From the feverish evil,
As truth ignites
And, through you, fathoms existence.

[ 18 ] Consider, my dear friends, that the student was dismissed at the stage I spoke of yesterday at the end of the presentation, with the words that took the place of the two statues: Science and Art. And “Science” took the place of the statue that had actually said: “I am knowledge, but I lack being.” And “Art” took the place of the statue that had said: “I am imagination, but I lack truth.” And the student had gone through all that heaviness—that terrible inner heaviness—to the point that, in his innermost soul, he had already chosen something else out of longing instead of knowledge. For it had become perfectly clear to him that the knowledge acquired on earth consists only of ideas, only of images; it lacks being. Now he had lived through the aftereffects. And from these aftereffects he had come to understand that human beings must find being for that which they possess in knowledge by losing themselves in the vastness of the worlds:

In the vast expanses you shall learn,
As in the blue of the distant ether
That the very essence of the world first fades away
And is rediscovered within you.

[ 19 ] For that was indeed the sensation: one storms out, as it were, into the ethereal distances bordered by the blue of the vast expanses; one becomes one with, and ultimately unites with, this blue of the vast distances. But what was once the earth is so scattered across the vast expanses that it seems to have been transformed into nothingness. And one has learned to sense this nothingness by gazing upon the enchanting winter landscape. And one now knows that only a human being can maintain their upright stance in these vast expanses that lead all the way to the blue distances of the ether.

[ 20 ] And in the second, human beings explore how, within their own depths, they find that which they must overcome—that which they must recognize as the evil rooted and springing forth from within humanity itself—which must be overcome by the impulses of good in human nature so that the world may have a future:

In the depths, you shall free
From the feverish evil,
>As truth ignites
And, through you, fathoms existence.

[ 21 ] The student had gone through the phase of imagination—not of truth—even the phase of being content with a relationship to the world that does not encompass truth, but rather unfolds in arbitrary images of subjectivity. But now, from that dreamlike, magical summer experience, he had gained the insight: I can carry out into the world what rises within me, just as the imagination that creates within me does. From my inner being, like the images of the imagination, the imaginations—the imaginations of the plants—grow forth. If I have only the images of the imagination, then I am alien to what surrounds me. If I have these imaginative visions, then what I find in this plant, in that plant, in this animal, in that animal, in this person, and in that person grows out of my own inner being. Everything I find within corresponds to something that is outside. And for everything I encounter externally, I can also draw from the depths of my own inner life something that is connected to it, something that corresponds to it.

[ 22 ] This twofold connection with the world—that is what truly stood before the student as an echo of the two statues, evoking a profoundly magnificent inner sensation. And the student had truly learned in this way to expand his soul, on the one hand, out into the vastness of the world, I would say, to expand spiritually, and he had learned to go deep into his inner self—where this inner self does not function with the lethargy with which it functions in ordinary consciousness, but where it functions as if it were permeated, shaken, and enchanted by a half-reality, namely, by dreams. The student had learned to connect this entire intensity of inner impulses with the entire intensity of outer impulses. Through his connection with the winter landscape and with the summer landscape, he had gained insights into outer nature and into his own self. And he had become deeply connected with outer nature and with his own self.

[ 23 ] Then he was well prepared to undergo, so to speak, a kind of repetition. During this repetition, his initiators made it very clear to him: You must come to a halt inwardly, with your soul in a state of stillness. You must come to a halt in this journey out into the distant realms. And thirdly, you must come to a halt by feeling as if you have been poured out and multiplied within your senses. You must make it clear to yourself inwardly what each individual state is like. You must be able to distinguish each of these three individual states precisely from the others. You must have an ethereal inner experience of each of these three states. — And when the student now summoned the state of inner stillness before his soul once more from full consciousness, then everything he had experienced before descending from the spiritual worlds to Earth—before the earthly conception of his body, when he had drawn together the etheric impulses and forces from the vastness of the worlds to surround himself with an etheric body—appeared before his soul. Thus was the initiate of the Mysteries of Hybernia introduced to the vision of the final state prior to descending into a physical body.

[ 24 ] And then he should make it perfectly clear to himself what the inner experience is like as it unfolds when he goes out into the vastness of the universe. This time, on his second attempt, during this repetition, he did not feel as if he were being absorbed by rays of sunlight and starlight; rather, during this repetition, he felt as if something were coming toward him—as if the hierarchies were coming toward him from all sides out of the vastness, and as if other experiences were also coming toward him. And he sensed what lay further back in his pre-earthly life. And then he was to make fully clear to himself the state in which he had poured out into the senses and found himself as if split apart into the sensory world. For there he had reached the midpoint of existence between death and a new birth.

[ 25 ] You see, that which enables the initiate to penetrate these hidden worlds—to which, however, human beings belong by their very nature—can be attained in a multitude of ways. And if we take a look around in the way I hinted at yesterday and on many previous occasions, you will be able to say to yourselves: In the various mystery centers, insight into this supersensible world was attained in the most diverse ways. Why such diversity was sought, why a unified spiritual path was not laid out across all the mysteries—we will, of course, discuss this in later lectures. Today I simply wish to mention this fact. But all these various mystery paths were intended to reveal the hidden aspects of the existence of the world and of the human being—aspects to which we have been repeatedly drawn, time and again, from the most diverse perspectives in these reflections here, as well as in other lectures and writings.

[ 26 ] And then it was made clear to the student that he should now also inwardly experience the other states—which he had experienced in the aftermath of the other statue—separately, so that for each individual state he would always have a clear, intuitive inner knowledge of how he was going through it, and that he should then recall this with full consciousness. He did so. And in what I have described as a kind of distress of the soul, he felt directly what followed death in the soul’s experience.

[ 27 ] Then came the insight through what he experienced next, where the external natural world appeared as a summer landscape, but like a dream of a summer landscape. As he repeatedly lived through this and now, with full consciousness, distinguished this state from the other state of consciousness, he came to recognize what constituted the further course of his life after death. And when he made it completely clear and vivid to himself what this “drawing into the heart-essence” was, then—by keeping it alive and present in his consciousness—he was able to reach the very center of existence between death and a new birth. And the initiator was able to say to him:

Learn to see winter with your mind
And you will behold the pre-earthly world.

Learn to dream of being in summer in spirit
And you will experience the afterlife.

[ 28 ] Please pay close attention to the words I use, for it is on this relationship—between the vision of the pre-earthly and the experience of the post-earthly, and between dreaming and seeing—that the immense difference rests which lay between these two experiences for those to be initiated into the Mysteries of Hybernia.

[ 29 ] How this initiation fit into the entire historical context of humanity, into the entire course of human development; what significance it held for human development; and to what extent it had a deeper meaning—namely, that precisely at the stage where I concluded yesterday, something like a Christ-vision arose in the student from Hybernia—I will describe that tomorrow.