Understanding Human Development
through Spiritual Science
In 1915, at the beginning of World War I, Rudolf Steiner Steiner discussed the beginning of a new age in which humanity must shift from materialistic thinking to perception of the spiritual impulses and forces behind material sense phenomena. He repeatedly pointed out that he had already warned of a “cultural carcinoma” that would arise from the unhealthy processes of the economy having terrible consequences.
[J]ust as the pendulum, having swung to one side, must swing back to the other side, in the opposite direction, so we are facing a time in which the human soul must once again be seized by the feeling that in all that is sensory, in all that is material, spiritual impulses are hidden, spiritual forces are hidden, and Spiritual Science is essentially meant to convey the knowledge and experience of these spiritual forces behind sensory and material phenomena and experiences—the spiritual forces to which humanity has been able to devote less attention and less interest over the centuries.1Paths to Spiritual Insight and the Renewal of an Artistic Worldview, GA 161, 1 May 1915, Dornach.
We can come to know those spiritual forces through the science of the spirit.
Science will lead us to recognize something akin to what Spiritual Science posits: that within the physical body there exists a spiritual human being. And it is the nature of this spiritual human being’s consciousness that Spiritual Science points out to us.
But a study of the spiritual and imaginative consciousness is difficult. Clear vision or “clairvoyance” requires the development of nonphysical organs of perception.
Everything I have now described as the normal path to clairvoyance consists in the human being lifting his etheric body, indeed even the higher members of his organism, out of the physical body, so that he incorporates a heart outside the scope of the physical body.
He contrasts cerebral thinking and clairvoyance as follows:
Here (see Figure I) is the external world; here is the physical body (during cerebral thinking); here, in clairvoyance, is the external world—that which we process with the astral body (see Figure II); we have the etheric body reflect this back, and we leave the physical body completely switched off.
The moment we shut down the physical body and allow our thoughts to radiate back from the etheric body, we live in what we carry through the gate of death. As long as we allow our thoughts to radiate back from the physical body, we live in what exists between birth and death. But when we will, our volition belongs solely to our physical body. Our physical body is there so that it may develop activity. While thinking stands, so to speak, already at the gate of eternity, volition is intended for the physical body.
The next day, he reiterated how our thoughts are active in the etheric body and are merely reflected in the physical body. We think outside of the physical realm.
Just as, when we stand before a mirror, it is not our face but its image reflected from the mirror that comes to our consciousness, so in everyday life it is not thinking itself but its reflection, as the content of thought, reflected back from the physical body-mirror, that comes to our consciousness. 2Paths to Spiritual Insight and the Renewal of an Artistic Worldview, GA 161, 2 May 1915, Dornach.
Our thinking is always outside the physical body. Our willing, on the other hand, penetrates the physical body.
We can therefore say: as human beings living in the physical world, the fundamental force of the will radiates from the spiritual realm into our organism and performs certain activities within the organism enclosed by the skin. We are thus permeated by the forces of the will in the time between birth and death, whereas the content of thought does not take place within our organism, but outside of it. From this you can conclude that everything pertaining to the will is intimately connected with what the human being is in his physical existence between birth and death through his physical body. The will is indeed intimately connected with us, and all expressions of the will are closely linked to our physical organization, to our physical human being, as long as we stand between birth and death. This is why thinking truly has a certain character of detachment from the human being, a certain independent character in relation to the human being, which the will can never possess.
We can apply Spiritual Science to arrive at this understanding. Rudolf Steiner concludes:
So we can say: it is precisely into these facts of life—which must appear so mysterious to our soul whenever we reflect on life at all—that what we gain through Spiritual Science sheds light. Spiritual Science will be able to enlighten humanity ever more deeply about what happens in everyday life, because everything that happens depends on supersensible causes. The most ordinary events are so dependent on the supersensible and can only be understood if we are able to look up to the supersensible causes.
In this lecture, Rudolf Steiner instructs us on the requirements and level of inquiry necessary to develop the soul and how we can strengthen our capabilities through meditation and concentration. He concludes with the ultimate need for Spiritual Science which leads to its highest purpose—knowledge of the Christ.
One must look deeply into all these things. In doing so, one struggles to arrive at a feeling that contains intuitive knowledge. It will, however, be particularly difficult to truly bring into today’s world culture that which, I might say, is the pinnacle of our Spiritual Science: the knowledge of Christ. Knowledge of Christ is that to which what we have in Spiritual Science leads us as the purest, holiest, and highest. In many lectures I have tried to make clear how, especially in our time, the Christ impulse that came into the world through the Mystery of Golgotha must be made accessible to the human soul through the instrument of Spiritual Science. In a variety of ways I have tried to make clear the manner in which the Christ impulse has worked. Just think of the lectures on Joan of Arc, Constantine, and so on. In a variety of ways, I have tried to make clear how the Christ impulse has been drawn more into the unconscious over the past centuries, but how we now live in a time when it must enter human life much more consciously, when a true understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha must come. One will not be able to come to know this Mystery of Golgotha unless one takes up such mental images as were touched upon during the Easter celebration—regarding Christ in connection with Lucifer and Ahriman—and penetrates them through Spiritual Science.
To come to know the Christ, we must rise to a conception of mankind as one great whole, a unity.
Then the overwhelming necessity gradually rises within our souls to recognize how a descending and an ascending development exist within humanity. One must feel at one with humanity in the course of historical development; one must look back to the very origins of the Earth, take in the descending and ascending development, at the center of which stands the Mystery of Golgotha, feel connected with all of humanity, and feel connected with the Mystery of Golgotha. Today, the human soul is closer to the spatial cosmos than to the temporal cosmos—that which has unfolded through the succession of stages of development. But we are led to this realization when, through Spiritual Science, we feel ourselves incorporated into the entire course of human development. For then we cannot help but see that there was a point in human development where something approached this development that could not have entered it through human power alone. It had to enter human development through an impulse from the spiritual world itself, which penetrated earthly development through a human body and was present at the beginning of the Christian era. It was a contact between heaven and earth.
Spiritual Science will have to sink into people’s feelings so that these people may come into connection with the Mystery of Golgotha and find the Christ impulse in such a way that they can no longer lose it—not only in their vague feelings but also in their clear consciousness. Spiritual Science will work. We have recognized the necessity of this work and have often emphasized it, and in essence, you are all sitting here to demonstrate that you all wish to participate wholeheartedly in this Spiritual Science movement. And when difficult times once again befall humanity in the future, may Spiritual Science have already found the opportunity to ensure that a deepening of the human soul can be connected not merely with abstract awareness of God, but with concrete, historical Christ-consciousness.
Read more: Rudolf Steiner, Paths to Spiritual Insight and the Renewal of an Artistic Worldview, GA 161, 1 May 1915, Dornach.