The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Third Lecture

[ 1 ] My dear friends! It seems that for a pursuit such as yours, the most important thing is to acquire as sure an impulse as possible for sensing the spiritual world; and it is precisely about attaining such an impulse—but from the perspective of your movement—that I have decided to speak to you a little more today. You see, the point is really that one must begin at a specific point in order to receive a spiritual impulse if one wishes to be a person active within a particular sphere—and that is, after all, what you all wish to be. The task, then, is to receive an impulse that is specifically suited to this particular activity. Based on my observations from the spiritual world, the following seems to me to serve this purpose for you.

[ 2 ] We can begin by considering the workings of the spirit of language, the workings of the genius of language. We need only make it clear to ourselves, my dear friends, just how far human beings are generally removed from grasping language through a genuine, inner spiritual activity. We take in language, but we essentially take it in without its sacredness. We take in language in such a way that, by using it in everyday life, we actually profane it. As people of the present, we usually do not even attempt to revere language in the appropriate way as we use it. We speak, in essence, sinfully, and only the awareness that we speak sinfully can give us an impulse to receive a spiritual impulse precisely through our position—I would say, through our relationship to language. Examples that corroborate this can, of course, be found on all sides.

[ 3 ] How many people today have actually received any guidance on how to empathize with every sound of language? This naturally implies that a large number of sounds are spoken today in a conventional and inhuman way—that is, without understanding, or at least in a way that is beyond human. Who, when pronouncing the word “harden,” feels as they speak it that their mind is pierced by something that is mineral-hard and at the same time makes the mind somewhat cool? Who feels, when pronouncing the word “word,” that this has a great deal to do with the experience of what has passed, of past mental activity, which is, so to speak, killed off in the present, crystallized, and exists as the past, and so on? We no longer have any experience at all with the most important words. I would like to know how many people today have an experience associated with the word “think,” how many people today have an experience associated with the word “feel,” or the word “will.” But I am telling you this for now merely as a hint at what I actually wish to share with you today.

[ 4 ] Of course, you can refer to yourself using a wide variety of linguistic expressions. You can say “I” to yourself, as one does in everyday life, or you can begin to theorize about yourself; you then tell yourself that you are a “human being.” In doing so, you place yourself within the realm of language and define your own nature from within that realm. But people today have the feeling that when they do something like this, they have applied a word—which serves as a designation for them—to themselves. When people today say to themselves that they are a “human being,” they think, under all circumstances, that they have designated themselves in a way they can understand using a word and, through that, they believe, an idea.

[ 5 ] Now, it is good to start from the very beginning with this realization: In the true sense of the word, one understands language so little that such a designation—which one applies to oneself as a human being—is actually something one must first force oneself to comprehend, something one must first come to understand. One should actually start from the realization everywhere that, when I believe I am describing myself with any word—even one from my native language that is familiar to me—this is an infinite arrogance on my part. If we allow ourselves to be imbued with this realization—that we hold the belief we could truly wield a language—even our mother tongue—from the spirit to such an extent that we can rightly call ourselves human beings and designate ourselves with the word “human,” and if we regard this belief as a terrible arrogance on our part, then we have the first preparatory feeling needed to awaken within ourselves a certain spiritual impulse, as I mean it today. Rather, one must be able to say to oneself: I have been placed on Earth as a human being through divine connections unknown to me, and this prompts me to call myself a “human being,” but the reasons for this designation lie far beyond my horizon. It is the will of the gods that prevails here, prompting me from deep, unconscious depths to call myself a “human being.” As a human being—as this individual human existence standing upon the earth—I have absolutely no right to coin a designation for myself. The next step, then, must be to say to oneself: Before I will even be capable of understanding the entire process that exists when I say “I” to myself, I must pass through three stages of development. Before I can reach the conclusion that I am entitled to call myself a “human being”—I will therefore have to go through three stages of development beforehand; I will have to bring myself to pass through three trials. Once I have passed these three trials in a manner satisfactory to myself, I may hope to be justified in saying to myself: You are a human being.

[ 6 ] This is actually how we should feel about every spoken word: a humility that ennobles us immensely as the starting point for the development of spiritual impulses. We should say to ourselves: Just as we, as human beings on Earth today, stand in our fifth post-Atlantean period, we—if we were honest people—would have to begin by remaining silent, by not naming anything, and then begin to overcome the three stages that will give us the right to name things of our own accord. Only then will we gain a sense of what an extraordinarily significant cosmic experience it was—one alluded to in Scripture by the fact that, in the presence of God, Adam was permitted to name animals and things, a right that could only be granted to him by his closeness to God. Through such experiences—which, however, must be our own concrete experiences—we will also gain the necessary depth for the word of Scripture, so that it may then, through the inner strength we can give it, acquire the necessary nuance and color, enabling that level to resound from the word—a level in relation to which we cannot merely say: “We do not have the right to name things”—but rather: “Through God, we are [given the right] to name things of our own accord.”

[ 7 ] These things must once have been lived out in the depths of our souls in order to be able to face the world in a truly priestly manner. Outward gestures do not make a priest. What makes a priest is what springs from the deepest inner self. If we wish to apply the word “human being” to ourselves as such, we must first pass through the three stages:

— The being I wish to describe with the word “human” has depths that I must first fathom;
— The being I wish to describe with the word “human” has heights that I must first scale;
— the being I wish to describe with the word “human” has expanses that I must first take in.

[ 8 ] These three sentences contain something profound: the human being. And if you reflect deeply on these sentences as meditative phrases, they can take you a long way.

[ 9 ] Truly, it is so: When a human being is brought into this earthly existence, they are placed here from spiritual heights. And the sole fact that our earthly existence serves a purpose for our entire human development justifies, from a cosmic perspective, that we spend a part of our total life as inhabitants of Earth. As we walk upon the Earth between birth and death, the Earth shapes us into earthly human beings, and everything that is shaped by the Earth originates from depths that are actively involved in every single form, down to the smallest organ within us. Imagine this: The Earth is a being in the cosmos that harbors infinite mysteries within itself and exerts a formative influence. The creative forces within the Earth are responsible for how your eye and your ear are formed, and for how every single, even the smallest, part of your body is shaped and formed. And if we succeed in gradually grasping—through thinking, feeling, and willing—what the Earth reveals on its outer surface as an expression of its inner being, as a unveiling of the Earth’s inner mysteries, then, through meditation, we will little by little arrive at an answer to the question: How do I fathom the depths of the human being? If we succeed in putting ourselves in the place of the Earth—which crystallizes our bodies in the most manifold ways, only to dissolve that crystallization again, pulverizing it into dust—if we succeed in seeing in this process of taking shape; pulverization, and reshaping—which, over the course of time, have always shaped sentient human beings into something like, for example, Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva—if we succeed in perceiving this entire process as that which is for us a kind of bed of the deity into which we are embedded, so that this being embedded within the Brahma-Vishnu-Shiva process is for us something like a cosmic sleep during our earthly existence, when we perceive the crystallization and dissolution of the Earth as something that permeates us with a cosmic urge to sleep, when we can say: the human being is so deeply, so profoundly rooted in earthly existence that, in the depths, it cannot endure consciousness but, together with the entire formative Earth as its physical body, falls into cosmic sleep—then we are on the verge of gradually gaining a sense of what it means to be connected as a human being to the depths of the Earth. And when we can finally say to ourselves: The Earth shapes us according to its depths; it permeates us from its depths with earthly sleep, because from the depths of earthly sleep the primordial divinity works in full awakening—then we sense something of this earthly depth of the human being. When we can say to ourselves something like this: The harder the Earth appears to us—as hard as diamond—the harder in some of its parts, the more truly and powerfully the luminous spirituality of the Divine, which is active and watchful for us within the Earth, speaks out of that diamond-like hardness, which is like the state of sleep of the spiritual.

[ 10 ] Thus, through meditation—by immersing ourselves ever more deeply, on an emotional level, into the earth’s depths—we must tell ourselves:

[ 11 ] O© human, before you can name yourself, before you can fathom your depths, you must delve ever deeper into the earth’s depths. — When we see a plant sprouting from the earth, we must cultivate a higher sense of reverence, a sense of awe that allows us to perceive, in every single part of the plant, something within ourselves—something like a revelation of what is actually taking place deep within the earth. We must truly begin to understand the interplay between the depths of the earth and the vastness of the heavens. When you see the blooming rose sprouting from the earth, when you see the rosebud clenched into a certain smallness, imagine it expanding toward the earth’s core, toward the center of the earth, as a mighty rose of light, permeated by divine gestures of thought that must remain vigilant so that the sleeping rose within the bud may unfold upward. For every sleeping rosebud, sense the watchful, creative, living rose of light in the depths of the earth. And so it is with all plants. Look at the Earth’s verdant vegetation and sense, for all that sprouts green from the Earth toward its depths, that this entire radiance is permeated by a deep violet that radiates out into the world, weaving through it and enlivening it. Then you will have something that tells you: I may not call myself a human being until I have fathomed the depths of the earth.

[ 12 ] Thus, one must come to feel that one must first become worthy—through such meditative exploration, through overcoming this first stage—to use the word “human” in reference to human beings. When one regards what the profane person takes for granted as something floating high above one’s own level, and considers that one must first attain this, that one must first climb to this level by becoming three times more humble than the ordinary person, by humbling oneself three times below what the ordinary person believes oneself to be, only then does one begin, little by little, to feel the priestly vocation within oneself.

[ 13 ] And once one has gradually guided oneself in this way to overcome the first stage, one approaches the second stage, which allows us to look up into the infinite expanses of the universe, and says to oneself in today’s world: Oh, how trivial this world has become, since humanity has developed only trivial notions of the vastness of the universe. Indeed, Stifter’s grandmother was wiser than the wisest scholar; when asked what the evening glow was, she replied that it was the Mother of God’s clothes, hung out to air in the sky. — This vivid, naive image is far wiser than scientific knowledge, far wiser than the most learned astronomy.

[ 14 ] One must be able to take this in: To see stars truly shining across the vastness of the worlds—stars that are, in essence, the eyes of the divine-spiritual beings who turn their gaze down upon us, the children of the Earth, because they have extended their spiritual hands to our spiritual hands, and because we have extended our spiritual hands to theirs, since we were with them before we descended into earthly existence. The gods watch over us from the vastness of the worlds, from the heights of the worlds, to see how we fulfill what they have ordained, just as we extended our spiritual hands to theirs. When we come to develop as many ideas as possible about the heights and increasingly sense how the human being originates from those heights—which it must first climb once again in earthly consciousness—then we will in turn become one step closer to earning the right, as human beings, to call ourselves “human.”

[ 15 ] The word “human being” must first be immersed in the depths of the earth, as I have suggested, so that, through what it has received during that immersion, it may become something in our minds of which we can say: we understand it. And then the word “human” must first be sent up into the heights with the rising waters, and the feeling must arise within us that we receive it back with the falling rain, if the word “human” is to carry within itself that which makes it possible for us to learn to understand it in our hearts. We must truly begin to grasp all the interactions between the depths of the earth and the vastness of the heavens. We must be able to vividly follow the droplets of mist rising from the forests and mountains. We must not believe that these droplets of mist rise into a region that is like a region of the Earth. We must develop the humility that regards as a mere drop the person who launches a kite with a thermometer or barometer to take measurements. After all, we merely immerse the whole thing in earthly concepts. We must come to say: How foolish it is to believe that lightning arises from the friction of clouds, which are supposed to be made of water, when every child knows that one must carefully remove all moisture from a glass rod with dry cloths if electricity is to be generated. — Of course, only folly results when a person tries to apply to the heights of heaven—from which he has descended and with which he must feel a kinship if he is to call himself a “human being” with dignity—the very experiences he has on Earth. We must be clear that when the mist rises from the mountains and forests, it goes into regions where water is something different than here on Earth—regions where water itself becomes spiritualized, where it is de-materialized and passes through spiritual processes, so that it must first be rematerialized before it comes down as rain from spiritual regions. We must know that when we ascend into such regions, they are akin to those regions from which we come when we descend from pre-earthly existence into earthly life. We must know that lightning is something that reigns and weaves in spiritual regions, and that the ancient conception—in which lightning was the arrow of the gods—is wiser than any conceptions we form for ourselves.

[ 16 ] We must be able to quietly develop such meditative concepts deep within our hearts so that we can serve as guides for a completely de-spiritualized world culture on the path toward the spiritual. When we turn to the hard earth, when we sense the earth as hard as diamond, then we must also turn to the soft, flowing water, which contracts in the depths to the smallest material particle, which must expand and disperse in the heights, and which, in its contraction on earth, becomes rain. We must listen to all the secrets of water, gathering within our minds everything related to the workings of water. We must meditate on this; we must ask ourselves: How does the sun’s warmth reach the earth from the vastness of the cosmos during the summer to bring plants and fruits to maturity? How, then, does the sun’s warmth sink into the earth so that the farmer can entrust his seed to the earth’s warmth in winter? It is this warmth that, when winter draws to a close, returns to the vastness of being. It is this warmth that, in all realms of being and in all cosmic processes, is a communion—a mutual relationship between the heights of the world and the depths of the earth. We humans originate from both. We must fathom the depths of the earth before we can enter the vastness of the cosmos.

[ 17 ] As we immerse ourselves more and more in such meditations, we enter—emotionally and mentally—into the second stage, which grants us the right to apply the word “human” to ourselves. We must gain an awareness that all language can only be provisional until, through the third stage, we attain that union with the genius of language, which otherwise speaks within us in the unconscious; whereas, if we wish to make ourselves instruments of the Word of God, we must first have the right to apply the word “human being” to ourselves.

[ 17 ] As we immerse ourselves more and more in such meditations, we enter—emotionally and mentally—into the second stage, which grants us the right to apply the word “human” to ourselves. We must gain an awareness that all language can only be provisional until, through the third stage, we attain that union with the genius of language, which otherwise speaks within us in the unconscious; whereas, if we wish to make ourselves instruments of the Word of God, we must first have the right to apply the word “human being” to ourselves.

[ 17 ] As we immerse ourselves more and more in such meditations, we enter—emotionally and mentally—into the second stage, which grants us the right to apply the word “human” to ourselves. We must gain an awareness that all language can only be provisional until, through the third stage, we attain that union with the genius of language, which otherwise speaks within us in the unconscious; whereas, if we wish to make ourselves instruments of the Word of God, we must first have the right to apply the word “human being” to ourselves.

The depths of the Earth in your physical body
The vastness of the worlds in your astral body
The heights of the heavens in your etheric body.

[ 20 ] In this way, you can feel the entire cosmos in all its dimensions within yourself. In this way, when you turn your awareness toward the diamond-like earth, you can feel how you are a sleeping being. In this way, when you turn your gaze upward toward the heights of the heavens, you can feel how they snatch you away from the Earth’s slumber, how you are a dreaming being. But you can also feel how you are a waking being in the vastness of the worlds. In this way, you gradually learn to recognize the cosmic human within your earthly human.

[ 21 ] In this way, you learn to recognize how you, as a human being, are actually shaped by the Divine from within the entire cosmos and placed on Earth by the Divine. In this way, you learn to feel your threefold placement within the cosmos. In this way, you learn to sense the Father God working from the depths of the earth, whose living activity must be sought primarily in the past; from Him remains the solid ground on which we stand, the firmly formed structures that take shape in the world; from Him remains everything that appears to us in solid forms. As we immerse ourselves meditatively in the depths of the earth with our minds, we hear the voice of the Father God resounding upward to us from the depths of the earth. We hear the present God speaking to us from the heights of heaven, only here the language is deeper and more complex than human speech. This God had to descend from the heights of heaven to earth and pass through the Mystery of Golgotha in order to allow the language of heaven to penetrate our speech. We will see the true communion of the earthly with the heavenly manifested in the rising water vapor, in the rain falling back down, in the warmth of the world descending and then receding. If we allow this to take effect within us, it will become so spiritualized that we will sense the Christ who is present in what we, as people of today, feel within ourselves under the influence of the heavenly heights. When we respond to what flows through us in our breath from the vastness of the worlds, when we humbly direct our feelings toward what is happening in every moment, when we feel the matter—governed by the forces of the Earth’s depths—being shaped and formed through the heavenly heights under the guidance of Christ Jesus, then we will truly sense and penetrate the work of the Holy Spirit as the fulfillment of the Trinity, and we will then be able to say to ourselves as the result of our meditation:

God the Father has bestowed upon me the strength that lies within my very being, which is spirit made dense.

God the Son is always the life within me that has come from heaven, which acts and weaves like the presence of water in the cosmos—which serves as a symbol, an image of it. I feel the Christ-God in all my weaving and living, in that which transforms me from a small child into an adult, which must grow and perish anew within me every day so that I, as an earthly human being, may be a being in the process of becoming.

I feel the Spirit-God as the one who carries into the future what has become part of us from the past through Christ Jesus.

[ 22 ] You see, when we have thus, through meditation, given birth to the meaning of a word that flits about—a word we previously used only provisionally—then we have earned the right to call ourselves “human beings.” And we should begin by worshiping the genius of language, for what is gained in such meditation is true worship. We should begin to prove ourselves human not only through our outward human form, but by revealing in our language the human being fashioned by God, conceived by God, and fulfilled by God.

[ 23 ] When we first prepare ourselves for the single word “human” through such meditation, the urge already arises to prepare ourselves in three stages for many other words and to use human language on earth in the proper way. Then the genius of language teaches us how we can become living instruments for the Word of God when we are to bring this Word of God to life for the congregation. For the Word of God is always present, and what we do is an instantaneous bringing to life of the Word of God that ever reigns in the spiritual worlds. In the very beginning was the Word, and even in the very beginning it was divine. But if we are not able to sense the sanctity of the word “human being” for human beings, then we are not properly endowed with the dignity that also enables us to speak the opening words of the Gospel of John in the right way. The priest today is not yet ready to speak the Word in this way.

[ 24 ] In this day and age, if a priest is to advance in his vocation, these things are required of him above all else. For what remains of the ancient words revealed from the sacred heights of the earth? What remains of the words “Deus,” “Christus,” “Geist”? — They are earthly sounds that have hardened into dogmas. The truth of the words must be awakened within us; the truths of these words must live within us. We must not neglect anything that enables the ancient, hardened—and therefore dogmatic—words to come alive within us once more. We must no longer twist and manipulate the Word of God in the way it was done in those ancient times when the Catholic Church derived the Mass from the Mysteries.

[ 25 ] In the ancient mysteries, the priest was even more humble than today’s priest—if the latter is as I have just described. The ancient priest told himself that he could not possibly be human as he was. Therefore, before he was permitted to speak, all those rites were performed of which a final remnant is still contained in the incense offering. Through the incense offering, which has rightly found its way into our ordination rite, it is indicated that in the ancient mysteries the priest used external means to transport himself into a different state of consciousness, through which he felt himself outside his body and was possessed by the genius of speech, who led him to the higher genius, so that the ancient priest experienced the divine being from outside his body. No priest believed that he could move his tongue from within when speaking the words of God; he knew that he first had to step outside of himself and that his tongue had to be moved from without. We can no longer do this today, nor should we, but we should work our way up through inner spiritual means, with inner feeling and will, to an understanding of the process when we call ourselves “human beings.”

[ 26 ] And consider, my dear friends, what the rite of consecration will become under your guidance if, starting today, you incorporate some of what has been spoken here today into your priestly meditation. After all, these things can only be assimilated within us little by little. Humanity has, indeed, strayed far from the Divine and must first find its way back. We have incorporated the Rite of Human Consecration into the Christian religious renewal movement, initially in the manner of the religious artist. Today we have come to the point where we can take in that which initially had to be received merely as a form of religious art in such a way that we are able to transform it into a truly living organism, so that the Rite of Consecration of Humanity becomes a living entity and is continually revitalized within the Christian community with every performance by each individual, just as the physical body is revitalized anew with every meal by each individual.

[ 27 ] This, my dear friends, is what you must take to heart: that the rite of human consecration must become a living reality. Then you have the right to place yourselves within the process of earthly becoming in such a way that, through this rite of human consecration, you stand truly at the very heart of that process. Then you may tell yourselves what is true: If this human consecration were not performed on Earth, the Earth would wither away and be left without nourishment. It would be just as if no plants were growing. Plants grow in the physical realm; the human consecration must grow in the spiritual realm. If it were not there, it would be, on a higher level, the same as it would be on the physical Earth if no plants were growing. But one has the right to say this only when one succeeds in making the human consecration a lasting, living entity by having attained this self-forged word, just as one has attained the word “human” in its proper action, being, and interweaving within earthly existence through a three-stage inner soul development.

[ 28 ] Then, my dear friends, if you can feel this way, you have also sensed something of what it means to truly be present in our time. Since you felt the need to gather again after some time, I had to tell you this, for it is part of the overall development of the Christian community. And so you have once again taken in something alive that can have a revitalizing effect on you. I would like today’s message to be received with deep sincerity.