The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Fifth Lecture

[ 1 ] Every single thing, every single fact in the world, and every single human behavior—they all have two sides; they form, as it were, two polar opposites.

[ 2 ] Yesterday I sought to draw your attention to how, through the empathetic understanding of our Spiritual Science worldview, reverence and devotion toward the spiritual worlds should find their way into the human soul. The other side of this attitude of reverence and devotion is the energetic work on one’s own inner life, the energetic taking in hand of the evolutionary factors of one’s own soul, and ensuring that we always use the experiences we go through to learn from them, to make a little progress in regard to our inner forces, so that—no matter what we encounter in life, no matter what may be happening around us, whether it is easy or difficult for us to understand—we always avoid the danger of losing ourselves. That we may always have the ability to sustain ourselves, that we may draw from within ourselves the strength to develop an understanding of that which often seems incomprehensible to us in what approaches us from the outside, that we may allow the reverence for things, as mentioned yesterday, to have such a powerful effect on our own soul’s evolution that this soul may gain a true understanding of existence in the world: that, my dear friends, is what I would like to say to you today at the beginning of the year as my New Year’s greeting. I would like to follow the remembrance of reverence with the remembrance of energetic work on our inner selves. A symbol of this sequence of remembrance is that on this New Year’s Eve, the full moon shines upon us from the cosmos. Had it been the other way around—had the year begun with the new moon—I would have been right to present these reflections to your hearts in the reverse order. Then I would have closed out the year yesterday with a reflection on the power of inner evolution and would have followed that today with a reflection on reverence.

[ 3 ] That such a symbol, as it shines forth to us from the macrocosm, is truly heeded—that is what, in turn, should be regarded more and more as something important. And when we have moments of quiet this year, let us allow this hint to take effect upon us—let it take effect in such a way that it may be of particular significance this year to first consider what the power of reverence can do for us, and then to consider what the power of inner preservation—the preservation of our inner soul energy—should do for us.

[ 4 ] The stars have revealed this sequence to us for this year, and the world will once again come to realize, little by little, that reading the stars does indeed hold significance for humankind. Thus, even in these details, we seek to observe the great law of human existence: to strive for harmony between the macrocosm and the microcosm. After all, the macrocosm expresses itself to us in the most elementary way through the phases of the moon these days, and we find harmony with this macrocosm within our microcosm when we conduct ourselves accordingly throughout the course of this year, which was born amid such painful circumstances.

[ 5 ] If you consider what has run like a common thread through the discussions of the past few days, you will find that, with regard to the facts that are particularly important to us—facts that have become important to us through reflections on Spiritual Science—we are living, in a sense, in a time of upheaval, in a sense, a time of hope—a time when we are to gain insights into what the future course of human cultural development on Earth will hold, and how a shift will take place from a purely materialistic to a spiritual worldview. However, what has been hinted at here cannot truly come to pass to its full extent unless it encompasses all areas of life and, above all, permeates the spiritual realms of life to a high degree.

[ 6 ] We have already been able to discern from various indications how the genuine, emotional—and not merely intellectual—grasp of the worldview of Spiritual Science must also bring about a transformation in artistic creation and in the appreciation of art, so that the forces arising from the perspective of Spiritual Science can, as it were, flow into our artistic perception of the world. Indeed, with our building, we have just attempted to suggest a kind of impulse for at least a small part of what can flow from impulses of Spiritual Science into artistic creation—into what we can experience artistically.

[ 7 ] We can envision a time when we fully immerse ourselves in the sensations and feelings that can arise from the worldview of Spiritual Science—a time when the path to artistry will, in many respects, be different from what it was in the past; a time when it will be much more vibrant; a time when the means of artistic creation will be experienced much more intensely by the human soul than it has been in times past, where color and tone will be lived through much more intimately by the human soul—in a sense, experienced morally and spiritually by the human soul—and where, in the artists’ creations, we will encounter, as it were, the traces of the artist’s soul’s experiences in the cosmos.

[ 8 ] Essentially, the behavior of both the artist and the art lover in the past era was a form of external observation, an appeal to whatever might approach the artist from the outside. The dependence on nature and on the model for external observation has grown ever greater. This is not to suggest, in a one-sided manner, a departure from nature or a departure from external reality in the art of the future. Far from it. The point is to emphasize an even more intense communion with the external world—a communion so profound that it extends not merely to the external impression of color, “tone,” and form, but also to that which can be experienced behind the tone, behind the color, behind the forms—that which reveals itself in color, tone, and form.

[ 9 ] In this regard, human souls will make significant discoveries in the future. They will truly unite their moral and spiritual nature with what the play of light brings us. An infinite deepening of the human soul can be foreseen in this area. Let us first take a single detail as our starting point. Let us simply consider the case where we direct our gaze toward a surface of color glowing uniformly in a deep vermilion red, and let us further assume that we manage to forget everything else around us, to concentrate entirely on the experience of this color, so that we do not merely have this color before us as something that acts upon us, but rather so that we have this color as something in which we ourselves are present, that we become one with this color. We will then, as it were, be able to have the sensation: You are now in the world; you yourself have become entirely color in this world; the innermost core of your soul has become entirely color; wherever you may go in the world with your soul, you will arrive as a soul filled with red; you will live everywhere in red, with red, and from red. — But this cannot be experienced in an intense spiritual life without the corresponding feeling merging into a moral experience, into a genuine moral experience.

[ 10 ] When one, as it were, swims through the world as red, having become one with the red—when, in other words, one’s own soul and the world itself are entirely red— then, in this world that has turned red—with which one is oneself red—one cannot help but feel as if this entire world, in its redness, simultaneously permeates us with the substance of divine wrath, which radiates toward us from all sides for all that exists within us in terms of the potential for evil and sin. We will be able to feel, as it were, as though we were in the infinite red space, as if in a divine court of judgment, and our moral sensibility will be like a moral sensation of our soul throughout the entire infinite space. And when the reaction comes—when something arises in our soul, when we experience ourselves in the infinite red—I might also say, in the sole red—then it can only be that one would like to describe it with the words: “One learns to pray.” When one can experience this in the red— The radiance and blaze of divine wrath, along with all the potential for evil that may lie within the human soul—and if one can experience within the red how to learn to pray—then that experience of the red is infinitely deepened. Then we can also sense how the red can take shape and establish itself within space.

[ 11 ] We can then understand how we can experience a being that radiates goodness, that is filled with divine goodness and divine mercy—a being that we wish to bring into the space through our inner feeling. Then we will feel the need to allow this sense of divine mercy and divine goodness to take shape within the space, emerging from color. We will feel the need to let the space open up so that goodness and mercy can radiate forth. Before it was there, everything was so contracted, entirely concentrated at the center; and now this goodness and mercy steps into the space, and just as clouds are driven apart, so it pushes it back, drives it apart, so that it gives way to the mercy, and we get the feeling: you must make this a fading red. And then we’ll get the feeling: Here (it was drawn) in the center, we’ll have to faintly suggest a kind of rose-violet as it radiates into the scattering red.

[ 12 ] We will then be fully present, with our whole soul, in such a process of color taking form. With our whole soul, we will empathize with what the beings felt—those who are particularly connected to our becoming human, who, having ascended to the state of the Elohim, learned to shape the world of forms out of colors. We will learn to sense something of the creative power of the Spirits of Form—who, as spirits, are the Elohim to us—and we will then understand how the forms of color can be works of art, as was hinted at in our first mystery. We will also gain some understanding of how, as it were, the surface of color becomes for us something that must be overcome, because we enter the universe with color. When this occurs in conjunction with a strong development of desire, a sensation may arise such as that which lives within Strader at the moment when he sees the likeness of Capesius and says: “The canvas—I would like to pierce right through it.”

[ 13 ] If you take a mystery play like this, you will see how these mystery plays attempted to artistically portray exactly what unfolds before us when our soul tries to allow itself to be embraced by the cosmic forces, when it empathizes with the spirits of the cosmos. That was truly the beginning of all art. But then the materialistic age had to come, and this ancient art—which appeared with its divine nuance, in which the spiritual reveals itself as an inner reality through matter—had to transform into the secondary, materialistic imitation art, which is essentially the art of the materialistic age, that art which cannot create but can only imitate. It is the hallmark of all secondary art, all imitative art, that it can only imitate, that it needs models to imitate, and that it does not generate form primarily at the same time as the material.

[ 14 ] Let’s take another example. Suppose we did the same thing we did here with the red area, but with an area that is more orange in color. We will have a completely different experience with the orange area. If we immerse ourselves in it and become one with it, we will not be able to have those sensations of countering divine wrath; rather, we will have the feeling that what is countering us there possesses, at most, only a faint trace of the gravity of wrath, but that it is something that wants to communicate with us—something that does not merely want to punish us, but rather wants to endow us with inner strength.

[ 15 ] As we enter the world and become one with the orange expanse, we move in such a way that with every step we take, we feel: Through this sensation in the orange, through this life within the orange forces, we will power our way into the world in such a way that we become stronger and stronger, so that not only does the judgment of punishment shatter us, but what comes toward us from the orange does not merely come as punishment, but as a source of strength. In this way, we live our way into the world through the orange. We then learn the longing to grasp the inner essence of things and to unite it with ourselves. Through life in red, we learn to pray. Through life in orange, we learn the knowledge—the longing for the knowledge—of the inner essence of things.

[ 16 ] If it is a yellow surface, and we do the same, then in this experience of yellow we feel, as it were, transported back to the beginning of our cycle of time. We feel: Now you are living within the forces from which you were created when you began your first earthly incarnation. — What one is throughout one’s entire earthly existence feels connected to what comes toward one from the world, into which one carries the yellow that has become one’s very self.

[ 17 ] And if one identifies with green and goes through the world with green—which can be achieved particularly easily by trying to let one’s eyes wander over a green meadow, to let one’s gaze sweep across it, and then try to disregard everything else, to concentrate entirely on the green meadow, to immerse oneself in the green meadow, to regard the green as the surface of a sea of color, and then to dive beneath the green: if one tries to live in the world in this way, one experiences an inner strengthening of what one is in this particular incarnation. One experiences an inner healing, but at the same time also an inner growth in egotism, a stirring of the egotistical forces within oneself.

[ 18 ] If one were to do the same with a blue surface, one would journey through the world feeling the need to move ever farther and farther with the blue, to overcome the selfishness within oneself, to become, as it were, macrocosmic, and to develop devotion. And one would find oneself blessed if one could remain in this mental image through the grace of divine mercy. How blessed by divine mercy one would feel, then, as one journeys through the world.

[ 19 ] This is how one learns to recognize the inner nature of color. And as I said, we can foresee a time when the preparation that the painter, as an artist, will undergo will entail such a moral experience in color—an experience that is far more inner, far more intimate than has ever been the case in times past—an experience that prepares one for artistic creation. For these are only a few hints I am offering here, which will be further developed in the future. With a colossal sense for artistic creation, they will be able to seize the human soul and bring it to life, whereas the encroachment of materialistic cultural development into our modern age has dried up the soul and rendered it passive. Souls must once again be stirred by inner strength; they must be grasped by the inner forces of things. The specific example I have used here is the colors that flood the world.

[ 20 ] In a very similar way, the world of sound will bring about a deepening and revitalization of human spiritual life. The essential aspect of the past period in this regard is, after all, that human beings experience a sound as such, and then the relationship between one sound and another. In the future, human beings will be able to go beyond the sound in their experience. They will, as it were, regard the sound as a window through which they enter the spiritual world, and then it will no longer depend on that vague feeling of how one sound follows another—forming melodies, for example—but rather, behind the individual sounds, the soul will once again experience moral and spiritual realities through the sound itself. As through a window, the soul will enter the spiritual world. The mysteries of the individual note will be revealed in this experience of the individual note, beyond the note itself.

[ 21 ] We are still far from that feeling that through every sound we can step, as through a window, from the sensory world into the spiritual world. But this will come. We will perceive the sound as an opening that the gods have created from the spiritual world beyond us into this physical-sensory world, and we will step through the sound from the physical-sensory world into the spiritual world. For example, through a prime that we perceive absolutely—not by reference to earlier notes on the scale—we will sense how we step from the sensory world into the spiritual world, and in a perilous way at that. The danger lies in the fact that this descent threatens to completely ensnare us, that the prime note seeks to draw us through the window of sound with a terrible suction, seeking to make us vanish entirely into the spiritual world. We will sense, then, when we perceive the Prime as an Absolute, that we are still spiritually too weak in the physical-sensory world and that we will be absorbed by the spiritual world once we have passed through this window. This will be the moral sensation we may experience as we ascend into the spiritual world through the Prime. But I am characterizing it here only in such simple terms; it will be a highly nuanced sensation, containing an infinite variety of details, that we will experience there.

[ 22 ] When we then ascend through the second sphere—as through a window—from the physical world into the spiritual world, we will feel as if there were powers over there in the spiritual world that take pity on our weakness, as it were, and say: Well, you were weak in this physical, sensory world! If you were to enter the spiritual world through the prime, I would have to dissolve you, absorb you, shatter you, or smash you to pieces. But if you enter through the second, I will offer you something from the spiritual world and remind you of something that also exists over there. - What is peculiar is that when we ascend from the physical into the spiritual world through the second, it is as if a sum of tones, a number of tones, resounded toward us, welcoming us. One enters a completely silent world when one enters the spiritual world through the absolute prime. One enters a world in which, if one listens closely, soft tones of varying pitches resound, seeking to comfort one regarding one’s weakness, when one enters through the second. But one must enter in this way—just as one naturally must not enter through a window into a physical, sensory house, for the owner would look at one strangely if one were to enter through the window and take the entire window with one. In the spiritual world, however, one must do just that; one must take the windows with one, take the sounds with one, and, identified with them, live entirely over there in the spiritual world, beyond the thin veil that separates us from the physical-sensory world.

[ 23 ] When one enters the spiritual world through the third, one will still have the feeling of a strong—indeed, an even stronger—weakness. When one enters the spiritual world in this way, one will feel that one was actually quite weak in the physical-sensory world with regard to its spiritual content. But with regard to the third—for one has become a tone, one has now become a third oneself—one will feel that there are friends over there who are not themselves thirds, but who draw near depending on one’s nature in the physical-sensory world. Whereas entering through the second is like the soft ringing of many tones—in which one generally lives—when one passes through them, friendly tones, as it were, will come to meet one through the third. Those who wish to become composers will have to enter specifically through the third, for there will arise the tone sequences and tone compositions that will inspire their artistic creation. It is not always the same “tone friends” that will come to meet you; rather, their nature will depend on your state of mind, your experience, your temperament—in short, your entire state of being—at the moment you enter spiritual life through the third: an infinite variety of the world of sound will unfold there.

[ 24 ] When one enters the spiritual world through the fourth, one will have a remarkable experience: the experience that, while no new tones emerge from any direction, what has already emerged—what one has gone through in the experiences with the third—lives on in the soul as easily evoked memories. And one will find, as one continues to live with these tone memories after having entered the spiritual world through the fourth, that these “tone memories” constantly take on different hues—sometimes developing into the brightest radiance and cheerfulness, sometimes sinking into the deepest sadness, sometimes sunny and bright, sometimes plunging into sorrow until they reach the stillness of the grave. The modulation of the voice, the rising and falling of the tone—in short, the progression of the mood in a musical work—will emerge through this path, through these musical memories.

[ 25 ] The fifth will yield more subjective experiences and sensations; it will have a stimulating and enriching effect on the emotional experience. It will act, as it were, like a magic wand that conjures up the secrets of the world of sound from unfathomable depths.

[ 26 ] One will have such experiences when one engages with things—with the phenomena of the world—not merely by looking at them or listening to them, but by experiencing them inwardly. Through this kind of experience—particularly with colors and sounds, but also with forms; in short, with the artistic—we must find the path that humanity must take in order to break free from a merely external relationship to things and their course—which is the hallmark of a materialistic age—and to penetrate into the inner depths of things, into their mysteries.

[ 27 ] Then a consciousness will dawn upon human beings—an immensely significant awareness of their connection to the divine-spiritual forces, which are subconscious to materialistic consciousness, yet which guide and lead them through the world. And then, above all, something like an inner experience of those forces will arise—forces that, for example, guide human beings from one incarnation to the next.

[ 28 ] If we do not stoke a locomotive, it cannot pull a train forward. The forces that bring about events in the world must be continually stimulated. Likewise, the forces that drive human beings forward must also be stimulated. And this does happen. But human beings must learn to recognize their connection to these forces.

[ 29 ] I once had the following remarkable experience. There was a legal scholar, a lawyer, who was quite famous in the place where I lived for a time—an extraordinarily famous lawyer whom people literally flocked to and whom they believed was bound to win even the most difficult cases. This had indeed been the case in many instances. His legal rhetoric was extraordinary, and the people who knew him held it in the highest regard. Then, one day, he was entrusted with a difficult case involving a wealthy man. If convicted, the outcome of the trial would determine whether this wealthy man would face a severe penalty. The attorney displayed the utmost skill in argumentation and the most marvelous legal dexterity. He delivered a long speech, and the audience was left with the distinct impression that if the jurors—it was a jury trial—did not now acquit the defendant, then one would truly be at a loss to imagine what further feats of legal artistry could possibly be achieved. All those who had heard the tremendous skill displayed by the defense attorney were under the distinct impression that the jury would now retire and acquit the defendant.

[ 30 ] However, the court had not only a skilled attorney but also a skilled presiding judge, and although it was not yet so late that a verdict could not have been rendered, the presiding judge nevertheless said: “Let us adjourn the session today and resume it tomorrow.” - The jury was scheduled to meet the next morning, which meant the jurors had the night to think the matter over once more. The next day arrived. This “delaying until the next day,” as he called it, had already been quite unpleasant for the attorney. The session began; the jurors retired to deliberate, and everyone waited with bated breath for their return—but the lawyer in question was the most anxious of all. After just a quarter of an hour, the jurors returned, and when the lawyer heard them coming back from the deliberation room after such a short time, he fainted. Yes, he fainted. He regained consciousness, supported by one of his friends. The defendant had indeed been convicted. But the lawyer did not learn this until after he had recovered from his fainting spell.

[ 31 ] What could one say, then, if one looked at the sequence of events from the outside, based on what was apparent to the human eye? One could say: The lawyer is a very ambitious man, for he was so determined to win this case that he lost consciousness before the verdict was announced. When he saw how briefly the jury had deliberated, he was certain that the defendant would be convicted, for if they had acquitted him, they would naturally have needed much more time.

[ 32 ] But that was not how things were; that is only how they might have appeared to an outside observer. There was, as it were, another layer of events underlying what I have just recounted. This other layer, or story, is as follows: The lawyer in question—whom I knew well—had been gripped, prior to this trial, by what one might call a gambling addiction. He took the funds entrusted to him as a deposit and gambled them away on the stock market. It was a pure passion for him, and shortly before the start of this trial, he had reached the point where he had gambled away large sums of money that had been entrusted to him. However, he had been promised that if he won the trial, he would receive enough to roughly make up the difference.

[ 33 ] So he did not faint merely out of wounded pride, but he fainted when, after a quarter of an hour, the jurors returned with a verdict of guilt, because his livelihood had in fact been destroyed. For now he could never again hope to recoup what he had gambled away from his trust funds. His entire existence thus hung on the outcome of this trial. He fainted as a symbolic indication that he was now utterly ruined for this incarnation. He then had to flee to America and had to endure a less-than-enviable existence there for the remainder of his incarnation.

[ 34 ] In a case like this, we see the following. We see that judgment is very often mistaken in life, for there could very well have been people who never learned anything about what was going on behind the scenes of the trial. If they had merely listened to the lawyer—who was so well-versed in dialectics—during the trial and seen him faint, they could very well have concluded: There are people who are so ambitious that they lose consciousness when they make a misstep in their speech. —- One could have left it at that conclusion.

[ 35 ] To be able to judge this correctly, one would have had to know yet another layer of the facts. For many things, one must even know many more layers, because otherwise one might be right regarding the one layer that one overlooks, and yet still reach a wrong conclusion. That is the external aspect. But there is yet another layer to the matter. After all, the man also had to find a path from this incarnation into the next. And so we have here an example of how the wise guidance of the universe, as it were, instills within the soul the forces necessary to guide the soul from one incarnation into the next. The man had become embroiled in such a life conflict that this conflict had consumed his very possibility of existence. A terrible situation had arisen; a situation had thus been created in which there were no longer any forces available that could carry him over into the next incarnation. But a situation had also arisen in which such forces could not be brought into his consciousness. Consequently, his consciousness had to be briefly extinguished. And during the brief period when consciousness is extinguished in the human soul, the most diverse elements of external spirituality can penetrate the human soul. At that moment, therefore, forces entered him that were capable of giving him, once again, the impulse, the drive for the transition to the next incarnation. Of course, the imparting of this drive, this impulse, occurs in the most varied ways. What I have described was one such special case.

[ 36 ] These impulses are always present. But I only wanted to show you how a person’s conscious life is linked to an unconscious process, and how there really are points in the conscious process where consciousness is squeezed aside so that something from the unconscious can come in. These unconscious moments do not always have to be long; they can be brief, fainting-like states. Nevertheless, an immense amount of spiritual and vital forces can radiate into human nature during such moments—both good and evil forces capable of this or that.

[ 37 ] I cited this latter example—and what I intend to elaborate on in it—in order to show how, in its view of the world, humanity must strive to take into account connections that are meaningless to a materialistic worldview.

[ 38 ] We will gradually come to understand the interconnections of life in such a way that we recognize the moments when the spiritual approaches each person. In the future, the world will no longer be portrayed as unambiguously as it is now—by explaining it through material causes—but rather it will be portrayed in such a way that the material will be placed in its proper place, while at the same time recognizing that there is more than mere material appearance, and that the spiritual shines through the material appearance.

[ 39 ] If we have seen in colors and tones windows through which we pass, spiritually, into the spiritual world, then life in turn brings us windows through which the spiritual world enters our physical world. The lawyer’s fainting spell was such a window. If we interpret this event correctly, we must say: Spiritual life flows in to us through this window. We see that forces are at work within us here that we cannot interpret solely through our senses. There are, therefore, windows in sounds through which we ascend from the physical-sensory world into the spiritual world. And there are, in turn, windows through which—when we remain in the physical-sensory world—the spiritual ascends into us.

[ 40 ] If we do not realize that the spiritual enters our lives through such windows, then it is as if a person who cannot read were to open a beautiful book. He has the same thing before him as someone who can read, but the person who cannot read sees only scribbles and squiggles on the white paper that he cannot interpret; at most, he can describe them. Only the one who can read is able to trace, perhaps, a destiny or a wisdom in this book that has been embedded in these strange symbols. Those who cannot “read” the phenomena of the world stand before them just as an illiterate person of the cosmos would. But those who can “read” can discern the course of the spiritual world from these things. What is characteristic of the present materialistic age is that, because of materialism, people are illiterate with regard to the cosmos—and this is true of nearly one hundred percent of them. At a time when people are so proud of having reduced illiteracy rates so significantly in developed countries, they are enthusiastically heading toward illiteracy in a cosmic sense.

[ 41 ] It is the task of Spiritual Science to overcome this cosmic illiteracy. Today, there are few people who are illiterate in the ordinary sense. In the days of ancient clairvoyance, people were far less spiritually illiterate. But none of this should make us proud. It is true that, as we sense our task within the Spiritual Science movement, we are meant to transform ourselves from spiritual illiterates into readers of the cosmos. But we must not lose our humility in the process, for given the state of the times today, we are still very much in need of elementary schooling. We have barely begun to truly read; rather, we are still only at the stage of spelling. Yet we can still be moved by the impulse for transformation that is thereby breaking in for the development of humanity. And when we are moved by this, then we position ourselves correctly in relation to what, so to speak, the signs of the times demand of us; we place ourselves within the Spiritual Science worldview movement as its true members.