The Inner Nature of Man and the Life Between Death and a New Rebirth
GA 153
11 April 1914, Vienna
Lecture III
In this lecture we shall have to draw attention to several positive results of occult investigation which will enable us to penetrate into the nature of man and will also show us what a complicated being man really is as he exists in the world. Can we think otherwise than that this human being must be a very complicated being, when we reflect how the true ideal of man, that which it is possible for man to become if he really develops all the possibilities contained within him, is fundamentally the content of the religion of the Gods and that all the Spiritual Beings belonging to the various hierarchies whom we know to be connected with human nature really work together with one object, that of building up man out of the whole cosmos, as the purport of that cosmos.
The first thing we remark is that when a human being receives impressions of the outer world, he actually receives into his consciousness only a small portion of what really surges in upon him. When in the physical world, he opens his sense organs and the intellect connected with his brain and nervous system, when he considers the world and tries to explain what comes to him in this way, only a small portion of what surges in upon him, really attains the form of ideas, only a tiny portion really enters the consciousness of man. Light and colour contain much more than what enters man's consciousness. In sound there is much more than what comes into the consciousness of man. External materialistic physics in its childish idea of the world says that behind colour, behind light, etc., there are material processes, vibrations of atoms and so on. This is indeed but a childish conception of the world, for in reality the following comes to light:—
We must investigate human perception with clairvoyant vision, for only by observing the actual process of perception can we understand man's relation to the surrounding world, even though we consider only the physical world. Something quite unique appears when we observe the process of perception clairvoyantly. Let us suppose some object affects our eyes, we perceive light or colour, and thus we have in our consciousness the sensation of light or colour. The remarkable fact one discovers through spiritual investigation is that in the human being there appears not only this light and this colour, but, in consequence of light and colour, there appears what we might call a sort of light-corpse or colour-corpse. Our eyes cause us to have the sensation of light and colour. Thus we might say: The light streams towards us and brings about in us the sensation of light; but looking deeper into our being we discover that while we are conscious of light, our human nature is permeated by something that has to die in us in order that we may have the sensation of light. We can have no perception, no sensation from outside without a sort of corpse being formed as the result of this sensation.
The spiritual investigator has to say: ‘Here I see a human being; I know that he has the sensation of red. But I see that this red which is in his consciousness pours forth something, pervades his whole being with something which in so far as it has entered within his skin and the limits of his etheric body—kills something in him which becomes like the corpse of the colour. Imagine that whenever we confront the physical world and have our sense-organs open, we always receive into us the corpses of all our sensations, as phantoms—but active phantoms. Whenever we perceive the outer world, something dies in us. This is a most remarkable phenomenon. And the spiritual investigator has to ask: What happens here? What is the cause of this very remarkable phenomenon?
One has to consider what it really is that comes to us as light. This light has a great deal behind it. What manifests as light is only the forerunner, as it were, of that which surges in upon us: at any rate there is not behind the light that undulating motion which external physics fancies, but behind the light, behind all sensations, behind all impressions, there is that which we only comprehend when we view the world occultly through Imaginations, through creative images. The moment we perceive all that lives in light, in sound or in warmth, we perceive, behind what reaches our consciousness, creative Imagination, and within this again is revealed Inspiration, and within that, Intuition. That which comes into our consciousness as the sensation of light or sound is but the outermost layer, only the froth, as it were, of what comes to us; but within it there is that which, if it were to enter our consciousness, could become in us Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition.
In what we perceive, we really only receive one-fourth of that which assails us; the other three-fourths penetrate into us without our being aware of them. When we perceive colour, there presses into us, as it were, below the surface of the sensation of colour,—creative Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition; these sink into us. When we investigate more closely into that which thus enters into us, we find that if Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition were really to enter our organism as they wish to do through sense perception, the result would be, that even during the period of our physical earthly existence between birth and death, they would bring about the same spiritual effect as I mentioned yesterday as a possible result of the temptation of Lucifer. This Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition would so act upon us that we should have the impulse to cast behind us every possibility that exists for our becoming the Ideal Man in the far-distant future, and we should want to spiritualise ourselves as we are now; we should want to become spiritual beings at the stage of perfection we have now reached through our previous life. In a certain sense we should say to ourselves: ‘It will be too great an effort for us to become man, for to reach this goal we should have to tread a difficult path in the future. We shall forego the possibilities yet lying in man, we prefer to become angels with all our imperfections, for then we can rise at once into the spiritual world, we can then spiritualise our being; we shall however, be less perfect than we might be in the cosmos, in view of our possibilities, but still we shall be spiritual, angelic beings.’
Here again, you see from this example the great importance of what is called the threshold of the spiritual world, and how important the Being is, who is called the Guardian of the Threshold. For there he stands, at the point of which I have just spoken. It is he who only allows sensation to enter our consciousness, and does not allow Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition to enter; for if these were to enter they would rouse within us a direct impulse to spiritualise ourselves just as we are, foregoing all the subsequent life of humanity. This has to be veiled from us; the door of our consciousness is closed against this impulse which penetrates our being. And in so far as it penetrates our being without our being able to illuminate it with the light of consciousness, as we are obliged to let it descend into the dark depths of our subconsciousness, there come towards it those Spiritual Beings to whom Lucifer is opposed. These come into our being from the other side and now arises within us the war between Lucifer, who sends in his Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition, and the Spiritual Beings to whom Lucifer is opposed. With every sensation, with every perception we should behold this battle, if the threshold of the spiritual world were not closed to our outward perception. But to clairvoyant vision it is not closed.
From this you may see what a great deal really takes place in the inner part of human nature, and the result in us of the battle which takes place there is what I have described as a sort of corpse, a partial corpse. This corpse is the expression of that which has to become entirely material in us, it is like a mineral deposit, which we are unable to spiritualise. If this corpse were not formed through the war between Lucifer and his opponents we should have, instead of this corpse, the result of Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition within us and we should rise at once into the spiritual world. The corpse forms the dead weight by which the good Spiritual Beings—the opponents of Lucifer—detain us at first in the physical world, detain us in it so that because of this veiling we should strive towards the true ideal of human nature and the fulfilment of all the possibilities that may be ours. Through this content, this corpse-phantom being formed in us, through our receiving into ourselves, every time we perceive, something which is at the same time a corpse, we kill in us during the act of perception this ever-springing impulse towards spiritualisation. It is while this deposit is forming that what I have often mentioned occurs, and of which it is so important we should recognise the full significance. Just consider! When you look into a mirror you have a sheet of glass before you; this you would see through, if it were not for the mirroring substance spread on it. Through the mirroring substance being upon the sheet of glass everything that is in front of the mirror is rejected. If you were really to stand before your physical body in such a way that you experienced the perceptions which pass into it from Imaginations, Inspirations and Intuitions, you would then see through the physical body, and your feeling would be such that you would say: ‘I will have nothing to do with this physical body; I will take no notice of it, but I will rise just as I am into the spiritual world.’
The physical body would really stand before you like a pane of glass without any mirroring substance behind it. But the physical body is now permeated with the corpse which resembles the mirroring substance of the mirror and it reflects everything that falls upon it, exactly as in the case of sense perception. It is in this way sense that perceptions originate. The permanent corpse we bear within us is the reflecting substance of our whole body and we thereby see ourselves in the physical world. It is because of this that we are individual physical beings in the physical world. How complicated does the human being now appear to us!
Let us take the other case, in which we not merely perceive, but we think. When we think, it is not a sense perception. Sense perceptions may give rise to thought, but true thought does not consist of sense perceptions, it is a more interior process. When we think, we make no impression in our physical body with the actual thought, but we do upon our etheric body. When we think, all that is in the thought does not enter into us. Were all that is contained in thought to enter into us, we should feel, every time we think, nothing but living, elemental beings pulsing in us; we should feel inwardly alive. I mentioned once at Munich that if a person were to experience thoughts just as they are, he would feel somewhat as if he were in an ant heap. Thoughts would live in him, everything would be alive. We do not perceive this life in our human thought, because again, only what is like the froth of it enters our consciousness and forms those shadow-pictures of thought which appear in us as our thinking. On the other hand, that which permeates thought as living force, sinks into our etheric body. We do not perceive the living beings, the living elemental beings swarming through us, but only an extract, something like a shadow of them; but the other part, the life, does enter into us and as it enters into us pervades us in such a manner that again a battle takes place, this time in our etheric body, between the progressing spirits and Ahriman, the Ahrimanic beings. And what is the outcome of this battle? It is that thoughts do not appear in us as they would do if they were alive. Were they to appear as they actually are, we should feel ourselves within the life of the thought-beings moving hither and thither; but we do not perceive this, and our etheric body, which otherwise would be transparent, is rendered opaque. I might say that it becomes somewhat like a smoke-topaz, which has darker layers in it, while quartz is quite transparent and pure. In the same way our etheric body is filled with a spiritual obscurity and that which thus fills our etheric body is the treasure of our thought.
This treasure of thought arises through thoughts being reflected, as it were, in our etheric body in the way described, but in this case, in ‘time’, they are reflected back as far as to the point of time to which our memory extends in physical life. Memory is rejected thoughts, thoughts reflected in time. But deep down in our etheric body, behind memory, work the good divine Spiritual Beings to whom Ahriman is opposed and there they create, they construct the forces which are able to reanimate what has died in the physical body as the result of the above-described process. Thus whereas in our physical body a corpse is produced (a corpse which has to be produced, because otherwise we should have the impulse to spiritualise ourselves with all the imperfections we possess), something like an invigorating vital force proceeds from the etheric body, so that in the future that which has been killed can once more be regenerated.
We now see for the first time the significance of ‘before’ and ‘afterwards’. If in the immediate present we were fully to experience the Intuitions, Inspirations, etc., which enter into us, we should spiritualise ourselves, but through their being thrown into the future by Ahriman, through their not being used now, but being preserved as germs for the future, they attain at last to their true nature. That which we should misuse at the present time we shall employ in the future, when we have passed the portal of death, to shape a new life for ourselves from out the spiritual world. That which—if we were to use it in the physical world—would lead us to spiritualise ourselves with all our imperfections is the force that leads us after death to apply ourselves again to physical earthly life. In such opposite directions do things work in different worlds!
Such is the case with respect to our thought. And now let us consider feeling, that which we have within us as inner feeling. That which we perceive as inner feeling is, once more, not really what it could be according to its whole inner nature. What we have within us as feeling, what enters our consciousness as feeling, is only the shadow of what really lives within us; for here again, in our feeling Spiritual Beings live. Remembering what I said in the first lecture, you will perceive that in feeling live the Spiritual Beings who are really at the back of the whole of our planetary system, only they do not enter our consciousness. Feeling, as we know it, enters our consciousness; the rest remains outside our consciousness. What does it really mean when we say that the rest remains outside our consciousness? It is really very difficult to find words in ordinary language which exactly describe these things. Just as we must say perception and thought produce within us something that is really like a ‘killing’—but in the case of thought, through counteraction, there is at the same time a sort of impulse towards a future ‘making alive’—so also we have to say that every feeling we have is not really born in us, it does not come fully into existence. If everything that is in us when we feel were to emerge, what is contained in the feeling would lay hold of and give force to that which is behind the feeling in quite a different manner. That which really makes feeling into a living being, into a living being whose life is nourished by the entire planetary system, does not appear directly. Feeling does arise in us but as a shadow of what it really is. The result is that however profoundly a person may enter into his world of feeling, however deep his feeling for humanity, he is really aware of something unsatisfactory in respect of every feeling. He perceives that each feeling might be enhanced, it might come forth with more power. Especially as regards feeling we have something like a secret consciousness that it could reveal to us much more than it does; it hides something that lives in our inner being, something that is in the depths of our soul and that is only half born.
When we pass on to our will, to all that as wish and will can arise within us, the case is the same as with feeling, but to a higher degree; for behind the will is to be found the Spiritual Being, the Causal Being, who really lives in the sun. In the will there lives not merely that which lives in the planets, but that which lives in the sun itself—but hidden. The will is still less entirely born than is feeling. The will would permeate us very, very differently, if all that is contained in it were really to manifest itself in our consciousness. Only the outermost surface of the will, only it's most superficial part is really expressed. The other remains hidden from us. Why does a whole world remain hidden from us in feeling and in will? It is because if that which remains hidden from us were to be seen from the physical plane, we could not bear it. Seen from the physical plane it would have such an appearance that we should want to ward it off, we should want to turn away from it.
That which lives in feeling and in will, and remains unborn, is karma in process of development, evolving karma. Let us suppose, to choose a concrete example, that we have a hostile feeling towards someone. That which comes into our consciousness when we have this hostile feeling is but the ripple on the surface; below, forces are active which extend over the whole of our planetary system. But it is precisely that which remains hidden that says to us: ‘Through thy hostile feeling thou art implanting in thyself something that is imperfect,’ this thou must make good. The moment that were to appear, which dwells below the surface, we should see before us the ‘Imagination’ of what karmically must balance this hostile feeling. In order to avoid the compensation we should unite ourselves with Lucifer and Ahriman, because we should judge what we saw from the standpoint of the physical plane. On the physical plane this is hidden from us; the Guardian of the Threshold hides it from us because we can only judge the things which are unborn in our feelings and in our will when we live in the spiritual world between death and rebirth. There we will what otherwise we never should will; there we will that what corresponds to a hostile feeling shall really be corrected, because there we have a true interest in the contents of divine religion, in the perfect ideal of humanity, which would make of us perfect human beings. From this we know that what has come to pass through a hostile feeling must receive its equivalent compensation. It has to be held over till the future, only after death may that appear which has remained unborn in our feeling and will.
Thus you see I have presented to you four things connected with the human soul. That which remains unborn in our feeling lives in the astral body. That which remains unborn behind our will, lives in the ‘I’. Again, when we receive impressions of the outer world we receive into us at the same time something like a physical corpse, which is really the mirroring-substance of our physical body. We also have within us a deposit, resembling a beclouding of the etheric body. In our astral body we have something which does not come to birth in the period between birth and death; and in our will we also have something which is not born during this period. This fourfold possibility which a human being bears within him, must be aroused in the period between death and re-birth. It lives within us as the kernel of our soul, just as surely as the seed for the following year lives in the plant. Thus we do not only speak of a soul-seed in a general way, but we can even comprehend this soul-seed in its fourfold nature. When we have a feeling which produces an inward uneasiness, when we are not in harmony with life, it is because a certain pressure is exercised upon the conscious part of our feelings by the unborn part of our feelings. How can this pressure be relieved? Now this pressure is something to which every human being is continually exposed; for what I have just described—in so far as it relates to feeling and will, that is, to what is really our soul-life—is that which brings us into inner disharmony. If there were true unison between that part of feeling and will which is born, and that which remains below the threshold of consciousness, if the right relationship, the right harmony existed, we should live in this sense-world as happy and useful human beings. Here lies the real reason for all inner dissatisfaction. If anyone is inwardly dissatisfied, it comes from the pressure of the subconscious part of his feeling and will.
Now, to the explanation I have given, I must add that the nature of man has changed in the course of his evolution. What I have just described applies particularly to the present time, but it was not always thus. In ancient periods of human evolution, let us say in the ancient Persian, Egyptian and Indian ages, it was different. Of course man's perceptions arose in exactly the same manner, and Imaginations, Inspirations and Intuitions were contained in them; but in ancient times these Imaginations, Inspirations and Intuitions were not so entirely without effect upon man as they are to-day. They did not kill so completely the inner physical part of man. They did not make such a dense mineral deposit. This was because, in those ancient times under certain conditions when perceptions came from outside, something shot up out of feeling and will to meet it. If, for example, we go back to the Egyptian or the Babylonian civilisation and observe human beings, then we find that they perceived quite differently. Of course they confronted the outer sense-world just as we do, but their bodies were so organised that the Imaginations hidden within the sense-perceptions had not only their destructive effect, but they entered with a certain life-giving power. Because they entered in this living way they produced inwardly the reflection of that which now remains entirely hidden in the Ego and astral body. The Spiritual Beings belonging to the sun and planetary system pressed out from within and reflected as it were that which was animated by the Imagination; so that to the people belonging to the ancient Egyptian and Babylonian civilisations there were certain times when, on turning their gaze to the physical world, they did not only have physical perceptions as we have them, but life-endowed perceptions.
The Egyptian knew that behind his perceptions there was something which expressed itself in Imaginations. Hence he was not so foolish as to suppose that behind the perceptions there were vibrations of material atoms, as our present physicists do, but he knew that there was life behind them and from his inner being there streamed towards him pictures of the animated starry heavens and the living sun.
This was particularly strong during the Persian culture, when, together with the outer perception, something like the inner, spiritual force of the sun shone forth—Ahura Mazdao! If we go back to still more ancient times we find this interaction, this meeting of the inner and the outer expressed very much more strongly. To-day this can no longer be the case; but there can be a substitute, and here we reach a point where from the very nature of the thing we can really understand the task of the anthroposophical conception of the world. A substitute has to be produced. We confront the outer world with our perceptions. We think about it, a part of this outer world remains hidden from us, and this has a deadening and darkening effect upon us, but through Spiritual Science we can restore that which is thus darkened and deadened. It is precisely through the restoration of what otherwise is killed and darkened, that the science originates which portrays evolution through the Saturn, Sun and Moon Periods, as described in my book Occult Science. Every human being possesses this knowledge regarding the evolutions of Saturn, Sun and Moon, only it is in the background of his consciousness. He would prefer not to be an earthly man were he able to see it directly, without the necessary preparation: he would prefer not to have any connections with the earth, and to end with the Moon evolution. All the knowledge we are able to acquire through Spiritual Science illuminates the hidden part of evolution in the past. That which as Imaginations, Inspirations and Intuitions lives outside and does not consciously enter into us, is really what we have gone through in the past. To gain this knowledge we must pass beyond the veil of sense-perception.
It is somewhat different regarding what is contained in our feeling and will. A person may say (and many have the impulse to say this at the present time): ‘Why should I concern myself with what these odd people think out, or have thought out, regarding a super-sensible world? I do not accept such ideas!’ A person who says this has never formed any idea as to why religions have come into our evolution. The one thing which all religions have in common is that they relate to things we cannot perceive with our senses: a person who accepts religious ideas fills himself with something he cannot perceive with his senses. Ideas which come from what we sensibly perceive, never give such an impulse to our feelings and will as may have an uplifting power after death. In order that the ‘unborn’ part of our feeling and will may continue to be active after death—as indeed it must—we do not use ideas gained through the perception of the senses, or through the intellect attached to the brain. These do not help us at all. The only ideas which give us the impulse and power which we need after death, are the ideas which correspond to that which is not outwardly real, the conceptions which when accepted make us pious and by which we look up to a spiritual world. Religious conceptions are those which cannot work in us as yet, but they become active forces after death. When we acquire religious conceptions we are not merely acquiring knowledge, but something that can become active after our death. For this reason it must be that anyone who does not want to reflect upon active forces of such a nature may laugh about them and in his materialism may reject them, but if he does not acquire ideas regarding what is super-sensible he will have but crippled powers wherewith to develop that which has remained unborn in his feeling and will.
Therefore it must frequently be stated that light is thrown on the past by clairvoyant consciousness. This is recognised at the present time in so far as it exists behind the veil of the sense-world as Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. In former times this consciousness was given to man as a religious belief, in order that he might not lose all uplifting power for the period after death and that he might have something in his soul—like a seed—that could carry on the life of the soul even when he had laid aside the physical body. The time has now come when mankind ought to acquire ideas about the super-sensible worlds through the understanding of Spiritual Science. For this reason it cannot be too often stated that the spiritual investigator alone can investigate these matters in the super-sensible world; but when they have been investigated and then imparted to us, there is something in our inmost soul which is a hidden language of the soul, which can grasp and understand the discoveries made by the spiritual investigator. It is only when the prejudices of the mind and senses hold sway that the super-sensible ideas furnished us by spiritual research are looked upon as nonsense, as foolishness and fantasy—ideas which, when accepted, endow the soul with an uplifting power which enables it to find its way in the cosmos through all the ages to come. It will always be the case that only those who have gone through an esoteric development will be able to investigate the contents of the spiritual world; but to know these contents, to work upon them inwardly in the consciousness, to hold them as ideas and conceptions, to possess the spiritual world as a certainty of the soul's existence is something that humanity will have need of more and more as its necessary spiritual food.
It is this which shows us how, from its very nature, the mission of our Anthroposophical Movement can be understood. In ancient times it still was the case that knowledge was animated from above and the capacity for receiving this knowledge came from below. Hence the ancients still possessed a direct consciousness of the spiritual worlds, but this consciousness gradually became dim and dark. Had this not come to pass, man would not have arrived at the full consciousness of the Ego, He can only attain to full consciousness of his Ego by developing to the highest degree in his physical body, the phantom-corpse of which I have spoken. Our physical body, as a transparent being, must be, as it were, entirely overlaid with ‘mirror-foil’ and only when it is completely overlaid, are we so conscious of ourselves that we can say: ‘I am an I’. But the complete overlaying has only been done slowly and gradually, for it has developed in the course of the evolution of humanity: it was completed in the age in which the Mystery of Golgotha took place.
The application of the ‘mirror-foil’ was then completed. Before that time the higher and the lower natures of man still met, what was below and what was above in a human being came together. One may say that through the covering of ‘mirror-foil’ being perfected, the higher and the lower were completely forced apart and this only came about when the event of Golgotha drew near.
What had then really taken place? Let us look more closely at what had taken place. Picture to yourselves the consciousness of these ancient people before the Mystery of Golgotha. From outside comes the life-giving force of Imaginations; from within arise pictures of the superhuman spiritual world. What are these pictures which thus arise in the human being? As we know, this was possible in ancient times, owing to the clouded condition of human consciousness. Those who knew these things, those who as Initiates were able to see the human soul and who saw it in this meeting of the life-giving Imagination from without and the vision from within, these did not say, ‘Man alone sees this’; but these ancient Initiates—the ancient Jewish Initiates, for example—said: ‘Jahveh or Jehovah looks upon His world in man. God thinks in man.’ Just as at the present time, in our cycle of evolution, when we have a thought, we may say ‘I think’, those who knew these things in ancient times said, when the pictures from the spirit-worlds appeared to them, ‘The Gods are thinking in us.’ Or as they recognised the unity of Divinity in Monotheism, they said, ‘Jehovah thinks in man; man is the stage whereon the play of divine thoughts is carried out.’ Men felt themselves inflamed by these thoughts; therefore they said, ‘In me the Gods think.’ But the necessity arose in human evolution that this should become more and more impossible and that darkness should spread more and more. The possibility of seeing visions, the thoughts of the Gods in man, ceased. The phantom-like corpse in man became more and more pronounced. The time drew near, when no more thoughts came forth from our human nature to meet the Gods. The Divine Being regarding whom it was said that He thought through man, felt His consciousness becoming dimmer and dimmer—for His consciousness consisted in His thoughts. And the longing arose within this Divine Being to awaken a new form of consciousness. When men acquire a different form of consciousness, they acquire something of the utmost importance. When the Gods create a new form of consciousness, they create with it something essential; something of the most profound moment occurs. The thing of profound importance that now came into being was the Christ. Christ the child of the Godhead, restored to man the power whereby he was conscious of God—restored the consciousness which the previously mentioned Divine Being had felt to be darkened. To accomplish this the Christ had to enter into and become a part of human nature. We must become fully aware of the fact, that in the act of perceiving the sense-world we receive continually into ourselves the content of death; that when we think about this world we are receiving obscuration and darkness into ourselves; and when we feel and will, something remains unborn in us. All these remain below in the depths of our consciousness, and with them there enters into us the content of something dead and something unborn which we can only first make use of after we are dead. But the power to do this would be crippled, if we could not let it sink into the Being whom the Godhead has brought to birth as the principle of a new consciousness, if we could not let it flow into the Christ-Being. When through spiritual science we really recognise the meaning of evolution, we become conscious of the following:—We realise that we send down into the subconscious depths of our being that which dies in us; but the death which we send down more and more into our own being is received by the Christ Who comes to meet us with life-giving power. Christ gives life to that which dies in us, which darkens in us, which remains unborn in us. We allow that to die in us, which must die in order that we may approach the true ideal of humanity with all the possibilities it contains; but the death-content which streams into us we pour into the Christ-Being, for He has pervaded human evolution since the founding of Christianity, and we also realise that what remains unborn in us, our feeling and will, is received by the Christ-substance into Whom it will sink after death. For within us dwells the Christ ever since He passed through the Mystery of Golgotha. Into Christ we let sink the death-content which is present with every perception; into Him we allow the darkening of our power of thought to sink. Into the light, into the spiritual sunlight of Christ we send our darkened thoughts, and when we pass through the portal of death, our unborn feeling sinks within the substance of Christ and so too does our unborn will. When we understand evolution aright we say to this evolution:
In Christo MorimuR
Dritter Vortrag
Zunächst werden wir heute aufmerksam zu machen haben auf einzelne positive okkulte Forschungsresultate, welche auf der einen Seite sehr geeignet sind, uns in das Wesen des Menschen hineinzuführen, die aber auf der anderen Seite uns zeigen, als welch kompliziertes Wesen eigentlich dieser Mensch in der Welt darinnensteht. Aber können wir denn anders denken, als daß dieser Mensch als ein recht kompliziertes Wesen in der Welt darinnensteht, wenn wir erwägen, daß das eigentliche Idealbild des Menschen, das, was der Mensch sein kann, wenn er alle in ihm liegenden Anlagen wirklich zur Entfaltung bringt, im Grunde der Inhalt der Götterreligion ist, und daß im Grunde genommen all die geistigen Wesenheiten der verschiedenen Hierarchien, die man im Zusammenhang mit der menschlichen Natur kennenlernen kann, ihre Ziele zusammenwirken lassen, um aus dem gesamten Kosmos heraus den Menschen wie den Sinn dieses Kosmos aufzubauen!
Das erste, was zu sagen sein wird, ist, daß der Mensch mit den Wahrnehmungen, die er von der äußeren Welt empfängt, so wie sie ihm in seinem Bewußtsein erscheinen, eigentlich nur einen kleinen Teil dessen wirklich aufnimmt, was da auf ihn einstürmt. Indem der Mensch in der physischen Welt darinnensteht, seine Sinnesorgane geöffnet hat, mit seinem Verstand, der an sein Gehirn, an sein Nervensystem gebunden ist, die Welt betrachtet und sich zu erklären versucht, was da auf diese Weise an den Menschen herankommt, gelangt eigentlich nur ein kleiner Teil dessen, was da heranstürmt, wirklich zur menschlichen Vorstellung, tritt nur ein kleiner Teil wirklich in das Bewußtsein des Menschen ein. Im Licht und in den Farben, im Ton und so weiter ist viel mehr enthalten, als dem Menschen zum Bewußtsein kommt. Die äußerliche materialistische Physik spricht in ihrer kindlichen Weltauffassung davon, daß hinter den Farben, hinter dem Licht und so weiter materielle Vorgänge seien, Atomschwingungen und dergleichen. Das ist eben wirklich nur, man kann schon sagen, eine kindliche Weltauffassung. Denn in Wahrheit stellt sich das Folgende ein.
Wir müssen mit dem hellseherischen Blick das menschliche Wahrnehmen erforschen, denn von diesem Beobachten des wirklichen Wahrnehmungsvorganges kann erst ein Verständnis über das Verhältnis des Menschen zu der Umwelt, die ihm vorliegt, ausgehen, wenn wir auch nur auf dem physischen Plane bleiben. Etwas höchst Eigentümliches zeigt sich, wenn man den Wahrnehmungsvorgang hellseherisch beobachtet. Sagen wir, irgend etwas wirke auf unser Auge, wir nehmen Licht oder Farbe wahr, wir haben also in unserem Bewußtsein die Empfindung des Lichtes oder der Farbe: das Merkwürdige, was man nun entdeckt durch die Geistesforschung, ist, daß im Menschenwesen nicht nur dieses Licht und diese Farbe auftreten, sondern daß da wie im Gefolge von Licht und Farbe gleichzeitig mit unserer Empfindung von Licht- und Farbenbildern, man möchte sagen, eine Art von Licht- oder Farbenleichnam in uns auftritt. Unser Auge veranlaßt uns, daß wir die Licht- und Farbenempfindung haben. Man könnte also sagen: das Licht strömt zu und bereitet uns die Lichtempfindung, aber tiefer in unser Wesen hineinschauend, entdecken wir, daß, während in unserem Bewußtsein das Licht sitzt, unser Menschenwesen durchzogen wird von etwas, was in diesem Menschenwesen sterben muß, damit wir die Lichtempfindung haben können. Keine Wahrnehmung, keine Empfindung von außen können wir haben, ohne daß sich gleichsam durchdrückt durch diese Empfindung eine Art Leichenbildung, die wie im Gefolge dieser Empfindung auftritt. Geistesforschung muß eben sagen: Da schaue ich mir den Menschen an, ich weiß, jetzt empfindet er rot. Ich sehe aber, daß dieses Rot, das in seinem Bewußtsein lebt, von sich gleichsam etwas ausgießt, sein ganzes Wesen, insofern es in seine Haut und in die Grenzen seines Ätherleibes eingeflossen ist, durchdringt mit etwas, was wie der Leichnam der Farbe ist, was etwas ertötet in dem Menschen. Denken Sie nur einmal, daß wir eigentlich immer, indem wir der physischen Welt gegenüberstehen und unsere Sinnesorgane offen haben, die Leichname aller unserer Wahrnehmungen wie Phantome, aber wirksame Phantome, in uns aufnehmen. Immer stirbt etwas in uns, indem wir die Außenwelt wahrnehmen. Es ist das ein höchst eigentümliches Phänomen. Und der Geistesforscher muß sich fragen: Ja, was geschieht denn da? Was ist denn die Ursache von diesem höchst eigenartigen Phänomen ?
Da muß man betrachten, wie es sich eigentlich mit dem verhält, was da wie Licht an uns heranstürmt. Dieses Licht hat eben vieles hinter sich. Es ist gleichsam das, was das Licht offenbart, nur der Vorposten desjenigen, was an uns heranstürmt. Hinter dem Licht steht allerdings nicht jene Wellenbewegung, von der die äußere Physik phantasiert, sondern hinter dem Licht, hinter allen Wahrnehmungen, hinter allen Eindrücken steht zunächst das, was wir nur erfassen, wenn wir geisteswissenschaftlich die Welt anschauen durch Imaginationen, durch schöpferische Bilder. In dem Augenblick, wo wir alles sehen würden, alles wahrnehmen würden, was in dem Licht oder in dem Tone oder in der Wärme lebt, würden wir hinter dem, was uns zum Bewußtsein kommt, die schöpferische Imagination wahrnehmen und in dieser sich wieder offenbarend die Inspiration, und in dieser die Intuition. Es ist dasjenige, was uns zum Bewußtsein kommt als Licht- und Tonempfindung, gleichsam die oberste Schicht, gleichsam nur der Schaum dessen, was an uns heranschwingt, aber es lebt darin, was, wenn es uns zum Bewußtsein käme, zur Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition in uns werden könnte.
Also eigentlich haben wir nur ein Viertel von dem, was an uns heranstürmt, wirklich in der Wahrnehmung gegeben, die anderen drei Viertel dringen in uns ein, ohne daß es uns zum Bewußtsein kommt. Während wir also dastehen und eine Farbenempfindung haben, dringen, gleichsam durch die Fläche der Farbenempfindung, die schöpferische Imagination, die Inspiration, die Intuition in uns ein, versenken sich in uns. Wenn wir sie näher untersuchen, diese drei letzteren Eindringlinge, so finden wir, daß, wenn diese Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition so, wie sie sich durch die Sinnesempfindung in unseren Organismus hereindrängen wollen, wirklich in diesen hereinkämen, sie so wirken würden, daß sie auch noch während der Zeit unseres physischen Erdendaseins zwischen Geburt und Tod eine solche Vergeistigung in uns hervorrufen würden, wie ich sie gestern angedeutet habe als ein mögliches Ergebnis der Verführung Luzifers. Es würden diese Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition so auf uns wirken, daß wir den Drang bekämen, alles, alles legen zu lassen, was noch an Anlagen für unser Streben nach fernen Zukünften, zum Menschenideal, in uns vorhanden ist, und wir würden uns vergeistigen wollen mit all dem, wie wir sind. Wir würden geistige Wesenheiten werden wollen auf dem Vollkommenheitsgrade, den wir bis dahin erlangt haben durch unser Vorleben. Wir würden uns gewissermaßen sagen: Mensch zu werden, das ist uns eine zu große Anstrengung, da müßten wir noch einen schwierigen Weg in die Zukunft gehen. Wir lassen das, was noch an Möglichkeiten zum Menschen hin in uns liegt. Wir werden lieber ein Engel mit all den Unvollkommenheiten, die wir an uns tragen, denn da kommen wir in die geistige Welt unmittelbar hinauf, da vergeistigen wir unser Wesen. Wir werden dann allerdings unvollkommener, als wir nach unseren Anlagen werden könnten im Kosmos, aber wir werden eben geistige, engelartige Wesen.
Da ersehen Sie wiederum an einem Beispiel, wie wichtig das ist, was man nennt: die Schwelle der geistigen Welt, und wie wichtig die Wesenheit ist, die man den Hüter der Schwelle nennt. Denn da steht er schon an dem Punkt, von dem ich eben jetzt gesprochen habe. Er läßt in unser Bewußtsein nur die Empfindung selber herein und läßt nicht dasjenige hereinkommen, was als Imagination, als Inspiration, als Intuition, wenn es in unser Bewußtsein eintreten würde, einen unmittelbaren Drang nach Vergeistigung, so wie wir sind, mit Verzicht auf alles folgende Menschheitsleben in uns erzeugen würde. Das muß uns verhüllt werden, davor wird die Türe unseres Bewußtseins zugeschlossen, aber in unsere Wesenheit dringt es ein. Und indem es in unsere Wesenheit eindringt, ohne daß wir es mit dem Lichte unseres Bewußtseins durchleuchten können, indem wir es hinuntersteigen lassen müssen in die finsteren Untergründe unseres Unterbewußtseins, kommen die geistigen Wesenheiten, deren Gegner Luzifer ist, von der anderen Seite in unser Wesen herein, und es entsteht jetzt in uns der Kampf zwischen Luzifer, der seine Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition hereinsendet, und denjenigen geistigen Wesenheiten, deren Gegner Luzifer ist. Diesen Kampf würden wir immer schauen bei jeder Empfindung, bei jeder Wahrnehmung, wenn nicht für das äußere Wahrnehmen die Schwelle der geistigen Welt gesetzt wäre, der gegenüber sich nur der hellseherische Blick nicht verschließt.
Daraus ersehen Sie, was sich eigentlich alles abspielt in dem Inneren der Menschennatur. Das Ergebnis dieses Kampfes, der sich da abspielt, ist das, was ich als eine Art von Leichnam, von partiellem Leichnam in uns charakterisiert habe. Dieser Leichnam ist der Ausdruck für das, was in uns ganz materiell werden muß, wie ein mineralischer Einschluß, damit wir nicht in die Lage kommen, es zu vergeistigen. Würde sich dieser Leichnam durch den Kampf von Luzifer und seinen Gegnern nicht ausbilden, so würden wir statt dieses Leichnams das Ergebnis der Imagination, Inspiration und Intuition in uns haben, und wir würden unmittelbar in die geistige Welt aufsteigen. Dieser Leichnam bildet das Schwergewicht, durch das uns die guten geistigen Wesenheiten, deren Gegner Luzifer ist, in der physischen Welt zunächst erhalten, so erhalten, daß wir darin gleichsam verhüllt haben, was als Drang in uns entstehen müßte nach Vergeistigung, damit wir anstreben nach dieser Verhüllung das wirkliche Ideal der menschlichen Natur, all die Entfaltung der Anlagen, die in uns sein können. Dadurch, daß also dieser Einschluß, gleichsam dieses Leichnamphantom sich in uns bildet, daß wir, indem wir wahrnehmen, uns immer sozusagen durchdringen mit etwas, was zu gleicher Zeit Leichnam ist, dadurch ertöten wir in uns während des Wahrnehmens dieses immer aufsteigende Drängen nach Vergeistigung. Und während sich dieser Einschluß bildet, entsteht das, was ich öfter angedeutet habe und was wichtig ist, daß man es einsieht in seiner ganzen Bedeutung.
Sehen Sie, wenn Sie in einen Spiegel hineinschauen, so haben Sie eine Glasscheibe vor sich, aber durch diese Scheibe würden Sie hindurchschauen, wenn sie nicht mit einem Spiegelbelage belegt wäre. Dadurch, daß die Glasscheibe einen Spiegelbelag hat, spiegelt sich, was vor dem Spiegel ist. Wenn Sie vor Ihrem physischen Körper so stehen würden, daß Sie erleben würden, wie außer den Wahrnehmungen auch die Imaginationen, Inspirationen, Intuitionen hineingehen, dann würden Sie durch den physischen Leib hindurchschauen, und Sie würden ein solches Gefühl erleben, daß Sie sich etwa sagen würden: Ich will mit diesem physischen Leibe nichts zu tun haben, ich beachte ihn gar nicht, sondern ich erhebe mich, so wie ich bin, in die geistige Welt. Wirklich, es stünde der physische Leib vor Ihnen wie der Glasspiegel, der keinen Belag hat. Aber nun ist der physische Leib durchdrungen mit diesem Leichnam. Das ist wie der Belag des Spiegels. Und jetzt spiegelt sich alles das, was darauf fällt, aber eben nur so, wie wir es in den Sinneswahrnehmungen haben. Dadurch entstehen die Sinneswahrnehmungen. Unser ständiger Leichnam, den wir in uns tragen, der ist der Spiegelbelag unseres ganzen Leibes, und wir sehen uns dadurch selber in der physischen Welt. Dadurch sind wir als dieses einzelne physische Wesen in der physischen Welt da. So kompliziert schaut sich das menschliche Wesen an.
Nehmen wir den anderen Fall, daß wir nicht bloß wahrnehmen, sondern daß wir denken. Wenn wir denken, dann sind es ja nicht Sinneswahrnehmungen. Die Sinneswahrnehmungen können die Veranlassung dazu sein, aber das eigentliche Denken verläuft nicht in Sinneswahrnehmungen, sondern verläuft innerlicher. Wenn wir denken, machen wir mit dem wirklichen Denken keine Eindrücke auf unseren physischen Leib, wohl aber auf unseren Ätherleib. Aber indem wir denken, kommt wiederum nicht alles das, was in den Gedanken liegt, in uns herein. Würde alles das, was in den Gedanken liegt, in uns hereinkommen, dann würden wir jedesmal, wenn wir denken, zunächst lauter lebende Elementarwesen in uns pulsieren fühlen, wir würden uns ganz innerlich belebt fühlen. In München habe ich einmal gesagt: Wenn jemand die Gedanken erlebte, wie sie sind, so würde er sich in den Gedanken in einem solchen Gewirre fühlen wie in einem Ameisenhaufen, alles würde Leben sein. Dieses Leben nehmen wir nicht wahr in dem menschlichen Denken, weil wiederum nur gleichsam der Schaum davon uns zum Bewußtsein kommt und eben die Schattenbilder der Gedanken bildet, die da als unser Denken in uns auftauchen. Dagegen senkt sich in unseren Ätherleib ein dasjenige, was als lebendige Kräfte die Gedanken durchzieht. Wir nehmen die lebendigen Elementarwesen, die uns da durchschwirren, nicht wahr, sondern wir nehmen in den Gedanken gleichsam nur einen Extrakt wahr, etwas wie eine Abschattierung. Das andere aber, das Leben, zieht in uns ein, und indem es in uns einzieht, durchdringt es uns wiederum so, daß neuerdings in unserem Ätherleib ein Kampf entsteht, jetzt ein Kampf zwischen den fortschrittlichen Geistern und Ahriman, den ahrimanischen Wesenheiten. Und der Ausdruck dieses Kampfes ist, daß sich in uns die Gedanken nicht so abspielen, wie sie sich abspielen würden, wenn sie lebendige Wesen wären. Würden sie sich so abspielen, wie sie wirklich sind, so würden wir uns in dem Leben der Gedankenwesen fühlen: die würden sich hin und her bewegen - aber das nehmen wir nicht wahr. Dafür wird unser ätherischer Leib, der sonst ganz durchsichtig wäre, gleichsam undurchsichtig gemacht; ich möchte sagen, er wird so, wie etwa Rauchtopas ist, der durchzogen wird von dunklen Schichten, während der Quarz ganz durchsichtig und rein ist. So wird unser ätherischer Leib von geistiger Dunkelheit durchzogen. Das, was da unseren ätherischen Leib durchzieht, das ist unser Gedächtnisschatz.
Der Gedächtnisschatz entsteht dadurch, daß wiederum in unserem ätherischen Leib, durch die erwähnten Vorgänge, sich die Gedanken gleichsam spiegeln, aber jetzt in der Zeit sich spiegeln, bis zu dem Punkte hin, bis zu dem wir uns eben erinnern im physischen Leben. Das sind die gespiegelten Gedanken, die wir im Gedächtnis haben, die aus der Zeit heraus gespiegelten Gedanken. Aber da tief unten in unserem Ätherleib, hinter dem Gedächtnis, da arbeiten die guten göttlich-geistigen Wesenheiten, deren Gegner Ahriman ist, und da schaffen sie, zimmern sie diejenigen Kräfte, die wiederum das beleben können, was im physischen Leib durch die vorher geschilderten Vorgänge abgestorben ist. Während also in unserem physischen Leib ein Leichnam geschaffen wird, der geschaffen werden muß, weil wir sonst den Drang hätten, uns zu vergeistigen mit all den Mängeln, die wir an uns tragen, geht etwas wie eine anfachende Lebenskraft vom Ätherleib aus. So daß wirklich nun in der Zukunft wiederum lebendig umgeschaffen werden kann, was da abgetötet worden ist.
Aber jetzt sehen wir erst ein, welche Bedeutung das Vorher und das Nachher hat. Würden wir nämlich in unserer unmittelbaren Gegenwart die Imaginationen, Inspirationen und Intuitionen, die in uns eindringen, ausleben, so würden wir Luzifer folgen und uns vergeistigen. Dadurch aber, daß sie in die Zukunft geworfen werden, daß sie jetzt nicht zur Geltung kommen, sondern aufbewahrt werden als Keime für die Zukunft, dadurch gewinnen sie wieder ihre richtige Wesenheit. Was wir gegenwärtig mißbrauchen würden, werden wir in der Zukunft dazu verwenden, wenn wir dutch die Pforte des Todes gegangen sind, um uns aus der geistigen Welt heraus ein neues Leben zu zimmern. Was uns, wenn wir es in der physischen Welt verwenden würden, anleiten würde, uns zu vergeistigen mit unseren Mängeln, leitet uns nach dem Tode als Kräfte an, uns wiederum in das physische Erdenleben zu begeben. So entgegengesetzt wirken die Dinge in den verschiedenen Welten.
So ist es mit unserem Denken. Und nun betrachten wir unser Fühlen. Ja, was wir so als inneres Gefühl, als innere Empfindung in uns tragen, das ist wiederum nicht so, wie es eigentlich nach seinem ganzen inneren Wesen sein könnte. Was wir da als Gefühl in uns tragen, was uns zum Bewußtsein kommt als unser Gefühl, das ist eigentlich wiederum nur ein Schattenbild von dem, was wirklich in uns lebt, denn auch in unserem Gefühl lebt geistige Wesenheit. Wenn Sie sich erinnern an das, was ich im ersten Vortrag gesagt habe, so werden Sie empfinden, daß darin die geistigen Wesenheiten leben, die eigentlich dem ganzen Planetensystem zugrunde liegen, nur kommen sie uns nicht zum Bewußtsein. Das Gefühl, so wie wir es eben kennen, kommt uns zum Bewußtsein, das andere bleibt außerhalb unseres Bewußtseins. Was heißt das eigentlich: das andere bleibt außerhalb unseres Bewußtseins? Es ist wirklich sehr schwierig, aus der gewöhnlichen Sprache die Worte zu finden, die diese Dinge genau charakterisieren. Wie man sagen muß: Wahrnehmen und Denken erzeugen in uns etwas, was eigentlich wie ein Ertöten ist - beim Denken allerdings durch die Gegenwirkung zugleich eine Art Anfeuerung zu einem künftig Lebendigen -, so müssen wir sagen: Jedes Gefühl, das in uns sitzt, jedes Gefühl, das in uns auftritt, wird eigentlich nicht ganz geboren in uns, kommt nicht ganz zum Dasein. Würde alles, was in uns sitzt indem wir fühlen, herauskommen, so würde uns das, was da im Gefühle lebt, ganz anders ergreifen, ganz anders durchkraften. Das was hinter dem Gefühle sitzt, was das Gefühl zu einem Lebewesen macht, zu einem Lebewesen, dessen Leben gespeist wird aus dem ganzen Planetensystem, das kommt nicht unmittelbar heraus. Das Gefühl kommt wiederum nur wie ein Schatten dessen, was es eigentlich ist, aus uns heraus. Das bewirkt, daß wenn man einmal so recht in seine Gefühlswelt mit einer tieferen Menschheitsempfindung Eingang findet, man eigentlich jedem Gefühle gegenüber etwas Unbefriedigendes empfindet. Jedem Gefühle gegenüber empfindet man, es könnte gesteigert werden, es könnte stärker hervortreten. Namentlich muß man dem Gefühle gegenüber etwas wie ein geheimes Erlebnis haben: es könnte uns viel mehr verraten von dem, was in ihm liegt, es verbirgt etwas von dem, was in unserem Inneren lebt, was in den Tiefen der Seele ist, und was nur halb geboren heraufkommt.
Wenn wir auf unseren Willen eingehen, auf alles das, was in uns Wunsch und Wille sein kann, so ist es hier, nur in einem höheren Maße, ebenso wie es beim Gefühle ist. Nur daß hinter dem Willen die geistige Wesenheit, die Grundwesenheit steht, die eigentlich in der Sonne lebt. Nicht bloß das, was in den Planeten lebt, sondern das, was in der ganzen Sonne lebt, lebt da im Willen auch mit darin. Aber es verbirgt sich. Der Wille wird noch weniger ganz geboren als das Gefühl. Der Wille würde uns ganz, ganz anders durchdringen, wenn alles, was in ihm liegt, wirklich in unserem Bewußtsein zum Vorschein käme. Es kommt wirklich nur die alleräußerste Oberfläche des Willens, es kommen nur die alleroberflächlichsten Schaumgebilde des Willens zum Ausdruck. Das andere bleibt uns verborgen. Und warum bleibt uns im Gefühl und im Willen im Grunde genommen eine ganze Welt verborgen? Weil das, was uns verborgen bleibt, wenn es angeschaut würde vom physischen Plane aus, von uns nicht ertragen werden könnte, Vom physischen Plane aus nähme es sich so aus, daß wir es abwehren wollten, daß wir uns abwenden wollten davon.
Das, was da im Gefühl und im Willen lebt und ungeboren ist, das ist werdendes Karma. Sagen wir, wir fühlen eine feindliche Empfindung gegen irgend jemand, um ein konkretes Beispiel zu wählen. Ja, was da in dieser feindlichen Empfindung zu unserem Bewußtsein kommt, das ist eben nur das äußerliche Wellenspiel. Da drinnen liegen Kräfte, die über das ganze Planetensystem ausgebreitet sind. Aber das, was uns verborgen bleibt, das ist gerade das, was uns sagt: Durch deine feindliche Empfindung pflanzest du in dich etwas Unvollkommenes, das mußt du ausgleichen. -In dem Augenblicke, wo herauftauchen würde, was da unten mitlebt, würde vor uns die Imagination desjenigen auftauchen, was im Karma die feindliche Empfindung ausgleichen muß. Und wir würden uns mit Luzifer und Ahriman verbinden, um abzuwehren diesen Ausgleich, weil wir von dem Standpunkt des physischen Planes aus urteilen würden. Aber es wird uns auf diesem physischen Plane das verborgen; der Hüter der Schwelle verbirgt es uns aus dem einfachen Grunde, weil wir diese Dinge, die nicht geboren werden an unserem Gefühl, an unserem Willen, nur beurteilen können, wenn wir in der geistigen Welt zwischen dem Tod und einer neuen Geburt leben. Da wollen wir das, was wir sonst nie wollen würden, da wollen wir, daß das, was einer feindseligen Stimmung entspricht, wirklich ausgeglichen werde, weil wir da das rechte Interesse haben an dem Inhalt der Götterreligion, an dem vollkommenen Menschheitsideal, das aus uns den vollkommenen Menschen machen will. Von dem wissen wir, daß durch einen entgegengesetzten Ausgleich das wettgemacht werden muß, was durch eine feindselige Empfindung verursacht worden ist. Es muß für die Zukunft nach dem Tode aufbewahrt bleiben, und dann erst darf herauskommen, was ungeboren ist an unserem Gefühle und unserem Willen.
Nun, sehen Sie, ich habe Ihnen, ich möchte sagen, ein Vierfaches von dem menschlichen Seelenkern dargelegt. Das, was von unserem Gefühl ungeboren verbleibt, lebt im Astralleib; das, was vom Willen ungeboren bleibt, lebt im Ich. Wir haben also, indem wir die äußere Welt wahrnehmen, etwas wie einen physischen Phantomleichnam in uns, der eigentlich der Spiegelbelag ist für unseren physischen Leib. Wir haben in uns einen Einschluß, gleichsam eine Durchdunkelung des Ätherleibes. Wir haben in uns etwas im Astralleib, was nicht zur Geburt kommt in der Zeit zwischen der Geburt und dem Tode, und wir haben von unserem Willen etwas, was nicht in dieser Zeit zur Geburt kommt. — Dieses Vierfache, was der Mensch in sich trägt, das muß aufbewahrt werden für die Zeit zwischen dem Tod und einer neuen Geburt. Aber es lebt in uns als unser Seelenkern mit derselben Gewißheit, wie in der Pflanze der Keim für das nächste Jahr liegt. Sie sehen also, wir können nicht nur im allgemeinen von einem Seelenkern sprechen, sondern wir können diesen Seelenkern sogar in seiner Viergliedrigkeit erfassen. Wenn wir, sagen wir, eine Empfindung in uns tragen, die uns Unbehagen namentlich von innen heraus verschaftt, wenn wir mit unserem Leben nicht so recht einverstanden sind, so geschieht es dadurch, daß ein Druck von dem ungeborenen Teil der Empfindungen auf den bewußten Teil der Empfindungen ausgeübt wird. Wie kann dieser Druck abgehalten werden? Ja, sehen Sie, dieser Druck ist etwas, unter dessen Gefahr im Grunde genommen der Mensch fortwährend steht. Denn das, was ich Ihnen jetzt geschildert habe, das ist, insofern es sich auf Gefühl und Wille bezieht, also auf das, was eigentlich unser inneres Seelenleben im Sinne des ersten Vortrages so recht darstellt, dasjenige, was uns in innere Disharmonie bringt. Wir würden, wenn richtiger Einklang herrschte zwischen dem geborenen Teil von Gefühl und Wille und dem, was hinter der Schwelle des Bewußtseins bleibt, wenn richtiges Verhältnis, richtige Harmonie bestünde, als in der Sinneswelt befriedigte und tüchtige Menschen durch diese Sinneswelt gehen. Hier liegt eigentlich der Grund zu allen inneren Unzufriedenheiten. Wenn jemand innere Unzufriedenheiten hat, so kommt es von dem Druck des unterbewußten Teiles des Fühlens und Wollens.
Nun muß ich zu dem Auseinandergesetzten hinzufügen, daß sich in bezug auf alle diese Verhältnisse, die ich jetzt geschildert habe, allerdings die Wesenheit des Menschen im Laufe ihrer Entwickelung geändert hat. Genau so, wie ich die Dinge jetzt geschildert habe, verhalten sie sich eigentlich in unserer Zeit. Sie verhielten sich nicht immer so. In älteren Zeiten der Menschheitsentwickelung, sagen wir während der urpersischen, ägyptischen, der altindischen Epoche, war das anders. Da flossen ja natürlich in genau derselben Weise die Wahrnehmungen herein, und in ihnen waren enthalten die Imaginationen, Inspirationen, Intuitionen, aber es blieben für ältere Zeiten diese Imaginationen, Inspirationen, Intuitionen nicht so ganz wirkungslos auf den Menschen wie heute. Sie töteten nicht so völlig das innere Physische des Menschen, sie lieferten keinen so dichten mineralischen Einschlag, und das kam davon her, daß in diesen älteren Zeiten von der anderen Seite her, aus Gefühl und Wille etwas aufschoß, wenn die Wahrnehmungen von außen kamen unter gewissen Verhältnissen. Wenn wir zum Beispiel zurückgehen in die älteren Zeiten der ägyptischen, der babylonischen Kultur und dort die Menschen betrachten, so nahmen eben diese Menschen ganz anders wahr. Sie standen allerdings wie wir der äußeren Sinneswelt gegenüber, aber ihr Leib war noch so organisiert, daß die in den Sinneswahrnehmungen verborgenen Imaginationen nicht völlig ertötend wirkten, sondern daß sie mit einer gewissen Lebendigkeit an die Menschen herandrangen. Dadurch aber, daß sie lebendig hereindrangen, riefen sie innerlich im Menschen das Gegenbild heraus dessen, was nun für uns ganz verborgen bleibt im Ich und im astralischen Leib. Die geistigen Wesenheiten des Sonnenhaften und des Planetensystems drängten sich von innen heraus entgegen und spiegelten gewissermaßen das, was sich belebte durch die Imagination. So daß es für den Angehörigen der älteren ägyptischen, der babylonischen Kultur gewisse Zeiten des Wahrnehmens gab, wo er, wenn er den Blick hinausrichtete in die physische Welt, nicht nur so die physischen Wahrnehmungen aufnahm, wie wir sie haben, sondern wo sie sich belebten. Er wußte, dahinter steckt etwas, was in Imaginationen sich auslebt. Daher war er auch noch nicht so töricht, nach dem Muster unserer gegenwärtigen Physiker hinter den Wahrnehmungen materielle Atomschwingungen zu vermuten, sondern er wußte, daß da Leben dahinter ist, und aus seinem Inneren tauchten auf entgegenstrahlend die Bilder des belebten Sternenhimmels, sogar die Sonne. Besonders stark war das während der persischen Kultur, wo wirklich beim äußeren Wahrnehmen etwas wie die innere geistige Sonnenkraft aufleuchtete — Ahura Mazdao!
Wenn wir in noch ältere Zeiten zurückgehen, so finden wir dieses Zusammenwirken, dieses Entgegenkommen des Inneren und des Äußeren noch viel stärker ausgeprägt. Heute kann das nicht mehr sein, aber ein Ersatz kann da sein, und hier kommen wir an einen Punkt, wo wit, ich möchte sagen, aus der Sache selbst heraus unsere Aufgabe innerhalb der anthroposophischen Weltanschauung wirklich verstehen werden. Ein Ersatz muß geschaffen werden. Wir stehen der Außenwelt mit unseren Wahrnehmungen gegenüber. Wir denken über sie, indem uns ein Teil dieser Außenwelt verschlossen bleibt, der ertötend und durchdunkelnd auf uns wirkt. Aber wir können das, was da ertötet und durchdunkelt wird, durch die Geisteswissenschaft beleben. Und gerade durch die Belebung dessen, was sonst ertötet und durchdunkelt wird, entsteht solche Wissenschaft, wie sie dargestellt worden ist in der Entwickelung durch Saturn-, Sonnen- und Mondenentwickelung in meiner «Geheimwissenschaft». Dieses Wissen von der Saturn-, Sonnen- und Mondenentwickelung hat jeder Mensch, nur ist es in den Untergründen seines Bewußtseins. Er möchte nicht Erdenmensch sein, wenn er es so ohne weiteres schauen würde, ohne die genügende Vorbereitung. Er möchte, daß die Erde ihn gar nichts anginge und er mit derMondenentwickelung abschließen könnte. Alles das, was wir an Erkenntnissen erwerben können durch die Geisteswissenschaft, erhellt uns das, was uns von der Entwickelung der Vergangenheit verborgen bleibt, indem es in uns eindringt. Denn was da an Imaginationen, Inspirationen und Intuitionen draußen lebt in den Sinnesempfindungen und nicht hereinkommt, das ist eigentlich, wenn man es durch den Schleier der Sinnesempfindungen anschaut, dasjenige, was wir an Vergangenheit durchgemacht haben.
Etwas anderes ist es mit dem, was in unserem Fühlen und Wollen lebt. Der Mensch kann sagen — und viele Menschen der Gegenwart haben ja einen Drang, das zu tun -: Oh, was geht mich das alles an, was da diese vertrackten Köpfe aussinnen oder ausgesonnen haben über eine übersinnliche Welt. Ich nehme solche Vorstellungen nicht in mich auf. — Wer das sagt, hat sich niemals einen Begriff davon erworben, warum eigentlich in die Weltentwickelung Religionen gekommen sind. Das ist ja das Gemeinsame aller religiösen Vorstellungen, daß sie sich auf Dinge beziehen, die der Mensch nicht sinnlich wahrnehmen kann, daß der Mensch in religiösen Vorstellungen mit etwas sich erfüllen muß, was er nicht sinnlich wahrnehmen kann. Vorstellungen, die von dem kommen, was man sinnlich wahrnehmen kann, die können uns niemals für unser Fühlen und Wollen einen Impuls geben, der nach dem Tode Stoßkraft ist. Damit das wirken kann, was ungeboren in uns ist in unserem Gefühl, in unserem Willen, weil es ja wirken soll nach unserem 'Tode, brauchen wir dazu die Vorstellungen nicht, die wir uns durch unsere Sinnesempfindungen aneignen können oder durch den Verstand, der an das Gehirn gebunden ist; die helfen uns nichts. Einzig und allein diejenigen Vorstellungen, die dem entsprechen, was nicht äußerlich wirklich ist, die, wenn wir sie aufnehmen, uns fromm machen, durch die wir aufsehen in eine geistige Welt, die geben uns den Impuls, die Schwungkraft, die wir nach dem 'Tode brauchen. Religiös vorstellen heißt: das vorstellen, was jetzt noch nicht in uns wirken kann, was aber Wirkungskraft ist nach dem Tode. Mit den religiösen Vorstellungen nehmen wir nicht nur Erkenntnisvorstellungen auf, sondern etwas, was wirksam werden kann nach unserem Tode, und was gerade deshalb jetzt so sein muß im physischen Leib, daß derjenige, der auf solche Wirkungskräfte nicht reflektieren will, darüber lachen kann und es abweisen kann in seinem Materialismus. Er hat aber nur eine gelähmte Kraft, um vorwärtszubringen, was ungeboren ist in seinem Fühlen und Wollen, wenn er sich nicht durchdringt mit den Vorstellungen über das Übersinnliche.
Daher muß es so oft betont werden: Was vergangen ist, wird erleuchtet von dem hellsichtigen Bewußtsein. Es wird gegenwärtig wieder erkannt, auch insofern es hinter dem Schleier der Sinneswelt als Imagination, Inspiration und Intuition vorhanden ist und hineinwirkt in die Sinneswelt. Früher wurde es den Menschen gegeben als religiöser Glaube, damit die Menschen nicht alle Schwungkraft für die Zeit nach dem Tode verlieren, damit sie etwas im Seelenkern haben, was ihn lebendig erhalten kann, auch wenn er den physischen Leib abgelegt hat. Jetzt ist die Zeit gekommen, wo die Menschen aus dem Verständnis heraus, aus dem Verständnis der Geisteswissenschaft heraus, sich Vorstellungen aneignen sollen über die übersinnlichen Welten. Deshalb kann es nicht oft genug betont werden: Erforschen kann man nur als Geistesforscher diese Dinge in der übersinnlichen Welt. Sind sie aber erforscht und werden sie mitgeteilt, so gibt es etwas in unserer tiefsten Seele, was eine geheime Sprache dieser Seele ist, und was verstehen, begreifen kann dasjenige, was von dem Geistesforscher erforscht wird. Nur wenn die Vorurteile des Verstandes und der Sinne kommen, dann wird als Unsinn angesehen, als Torheit und als Phantasterei, was von der Geistesforschung als übersinnliche Vorstellungen gegeben wird, und was, wenn es aufgenommen wird, uns Schwungkraft gibt für den Seelenkern, damit er in alle Zukünfte seine Wege finden kann im Kosmos. Erforschen werden immer nur diejenigen den Inhalt der geistigen Welt, die eine esoterische Entwickelung durchmachen. Diesen Inhalt wissen, ihn innerlich im Bewußtsein durcharbeiten, ihn in Ideen und Begriffen haben, ihn als eine Gewißheit des Seins der Seele in der geistigen Welt besitzen, das ist etwas, was immer mehr und mehr als eine notwendige geistige Nahrung die Menschen brauchen werden.
Das ist es, was uns zeigt, wie man aus der Sache heraus die Mission unserer anthroposophischen Bewegung verstehen kann. In alten Zeiten war es eben noch so, daß die Erkenntnis von oben sich belebte und der Inhalt zu dieser Erkenntnis von unten entgegenkam. Daher hatten die Alten von den geistigen Welten noch ein unmittelbares Bewußtsein, das sich aber immer mehr und mehr abdunkelte und abdumpfte. Hätte es sich nicht abgedunkelt und abgedumpft, so wäre der Mensch nicht zum vollen Bewußtsein seines Ich gekommen. Zum vollen Bewußtsein seines Ich kann der Mensch nur dadurch kommen, daß er im höchsten Maße innerhalb seines physischen Leibes jenes Leichnamphantom ausbildet, von dem ich gesprochen habe. Es muß sozusagen unser physischer Leib als durchsichtige Wesenheit ganz belegt werden mit Spiegelbelag, und erst, wenn er ganz belegt ist, dann können wir uns ganz so fühlen, daß wir sagen: Ich bin ein Ich. Dieses vollständige Belegen hat sich aber erst langsam und allmählich gebildet. Es hat sich im Laufe der Menschheitsentwickelung gebildet, und es war diese Bildung vollendet in der Zeit, in die das Mysterium von Golgatha fiel. Da war der Spiegelbelag fertig. Vorher, da begegneten sich noch immer Unteres und Oberes, da kamen in der Menschenwesenheit Unteres und Oberes zusammen. Aber, man möchte sagen, ganz herausgedrängt wurde Unteres und Oberes dadurch, daß der Spiegelbelag vollkommen war, und der Mensch nur die Spiegelung aus dem physischen Leibe wahrnahm. Das war erst, als das Ereignis von Golgatha in die Menschheitsentwickelung hereinkam.
Was war denn da eigentlich geschehen? Ja, sehen wir nur ganz genau auf das hin, was da geschehen war! Stellen Sie sich so recht diese alten Menschen vor in den Zeiten vor dem Mysterium von Golgatha, stellen Sie sich dieses Bewußtsein vor! Da kommt von außen herein die Belebung von Imaginationen; von innen steigen auf Bilder der außermenschlichen geistigen Welt. Was sind diese Bilder, die da aufsteigen im Menschen? Wie wir wissen, war das in alten Zeiten bei herabgedämpftem menschlichem Bewußtseinszustand möglich. Diejenigen, die diese Dinge erkannten, die in alten Zeiten als Eingeweihte hinzublicken vermochten auf die menschliche Seele, wie in ihr noch lebte dieses Zusammenkommen der belebten Imagination von außen, und von innen das Schauen, die sagten nicht: Der Mensch schaut das allein -, sondern diese alten Eingeweihten sagten: Es schaut an seine Welt im Menschen zum Beispiel Jahve oder Jehova, wie dies bei den alten Juden der Fall war. Der Gott denkt im Menschen. Wie wir heute sagen in unserem Entwickelungszyklus, wenn wir Gedanken haben: Ich denke -, so sagten diejenigen, die die Dinge wußten in alten Zeiten; wenn die Schauungen auftauchten aus der geistigen Welt: Die Götter denken in uns. - Oder als man die Einheit des Göttlichen im Monotheismus erkannte: Jahve denkt im Menschen. Der Mensch ist der Schauplatz der göttlichen Gedanken. - Erfüllt wußten sich die Menschen, so daß sie sagten: In mir denken die Götter.
Aber in der menschlichen Entwickelung lag die Notwendigkeit, daß dies immer unmöglicher wurde. Man möchte sagen, immer mehr und mehr trat Finsternis den Schauungen, den Gedanken der Götter entgegen in der menschlichen Natur. Das innere Leichnamphantom wurde immer stärker, immer bedeutender. Die Zeit rückte heran, wo aus der menschlichen Natur heraus den Göttern keine Gedanken mehr entgegentauchten. Da fühlte diejenige göttliche Wesenheit, von der man sagen kann, sie dachte durch die menschliche Wesenheit, daß ihr Bewußtsein — denn dieses Bewußtsein besteht ja in ihren Gedanken immer dumpfer, immer dämmeriger wurde. Und die Sehnsucht entstand in diesem göttlichen Wesen, eine neue Form des Bewußtseins zu erwecken. Menschen kommen zu einer anderen Form des Bewußtseins. Götter, indem sie ein neues Bewußtsein schaffen, schaffen mit diesem etwas Wesentliches; für sie entsteht damit etwas Wesentliches. Und dieses Wesentliche, was da entstand, war für die jetzt gemeinte göttliche Wesenheit, die ihr Bewußtsein herabdämmern fühlte: der Christus. Der Christus ist das Kind der Gottheit, das wieder herstellt das Bewußtsein der Gottheit in der menschlichen Wesenheit. So mußte sich eingliedern in die menschliche Wesenheit die ChristusWesenheit.
Und wir müssen das Bewußtsein in uns aufnehmen: Indem wir die Sinneswelt wahrnehmen, strömen wir fortwährend in uns ein — Sterben. Und Finsternis und Verdunkelung strömen wir in uns ein, indem wir diese Welt denken. Und Ungeborenes lassen wir in uns einströmen, indem wir fühlen und wollen. Das alles sitzt unten in den Untergründen unseres Bewußtseins, da lassen wir hineinflieBen unser Sterben und unser noch Ungeborenes, das wir erst brauchen können, nachdem wir gestorben sein werden. Das aber würde lahm sein, wenn wir es nicht einsenken könnten in die Wesenheit, die sich die Gottheit wie die Wesenheit eines neuen Bewußtseins geboren hat, wenn wir es nicht einfließen lassen könnten in die ChristusWesenheit.
Dieses Bewußtsein können wir haben, indem wir den Sinn der ganzen Evolution wirklich erkennen durch die Geisteswissenschaft: Ja, wir senden da hinunter in die unterbewußten Gründe das, was in uns erstirbt. Aber aufgenommen wird es, dieses Sterben, das wir in unsere eigene Wesenheit immer mehr und mehr hineinsenken, aufgenommen wird es von dem uns entgegenlebenden Christus. In dem, was in uns erstirbt, in uns erdunkelt, ungeboren bleibt, lebt uns der Christus auf. Wir lassen hinuntersterben in uns dasjenige, was sterben muß, damit wir dem wirklichen Menschheitsideal mit all unseren Anlagen uns nähern. Aber das, was wir als Sterben in uns hineingießen, gießen wir in die Christus-Wesenheit, so wie sie seit der Begründung des Christentums die menschliche Evolution durchzieht, hinein. Und das, was in uns ungeboren bleibt, unser Fühlen und Wollen, wir wissen, daß es aufgenommen wird von der ChristusSubstanz, in die es eingesenkt wird nach dem Tode.
Da, in uns, lebt der Christus, seitdem er das Mysterium von Golgatha durchlebt hat. In den Christus hinein senken wir das Sterben, das vorhanden ist mit jeder Wahrnehmung. Und wir senken in die Christus-Wesenheit hinein die Abdunkelung im Denken. In das Licht, in das geistige Sonnenlicht des Christus senden wir unsere abgedunkelten Gedanken hinein. Und wenn wir durch die Pforte des Todes schreiten, dann tauchen ein unsere ungeborenen Gefühle und unser ungeborenes Wollen in die Christus-Substanz. Verstehen wir die Entwickelung recht, so sagen wir zu dieser Entwickelung: Wir sterben in den Christus hinein.
In Christo morimur.
Third Lecture
First of all, we will draw attention today to individual positive results of occult research which, on the one hand, are very suitable for introducing us to the nature of the human being, but which, on the other hand, show us how complicated a being the human being actually is in the world. But can we think otherwise than that the human being is a very complicated being in the world when we consider that the actual ideal image of the human being, what the human being can be when he truly develops all the potential within him, is basically the content of the religion of the gods, and that, basically, all the spiritual beings of the various hierarchies that can be known in connection with human nature work together to build up the human being as the meaning of the cosmos out of the entire cosmos!
The first thing to say is that with the perceptions he receives from the outer world, as they appear to him in his consciousness, man actually takes in only a small part of what is rushing upon him. When humans stand in the physical world with their sense organs open, observing the world with their intellect, which is bound to their brain and nervous system, and trying to explain to themselves what comes to them in this way, only a small part of what rushes toward them actually reaches the human imagination; only a small part actually enters human consciousness. There is much more contained in light and colors, in sound, and so on, than what comes to human consciousness. In its childish view of the world, external materialistic physics speaks of material processes, atomic vibrations, and the like behind colors, light, and so on. This is really only, one might say, a childish view of the world. For in truth, the following is the case.
We must investigate human perception with clairvoyant vision, for it is only from this observation of the actual process of perception that an understanding of the relationship between human beings and their environment can arise, even if we remain on the physical plane. Something highly peculiar becomes apparent when one observes the process of perception clairvoyantly. Let us say that something acts upon our eye; we perceive light or color, and thus we have in our consciousness the sensation of light or color. the strange thing that spiritual research now discovers is that not only this light and this color appear in the human being, but that, as if in the wake of light and color, simultaneously with our sensation of light and color images, one might say that a kind of light or color corpse appears in us. Our eye causes us to have the sensation of light and color. One could therefore say: light streams toward us and prepares us for the sensation of light, but looking deeper into our being, we discover that while light is present in our consciousness, our human nature is permeated by something that must die in this human nature in order for us to have the sensation of light. We cannot have any perception or sensation from outside without a kind of corpse formation pushing its way through this sensation, as it were, appearing in the wake of this sensation. Spiritual research must say: I look at a person and I know that he is now perceiving red. But I see that this red, which lives in his consciousness, pours something out of itself, so to speak, his whole being, insofar as it has flowed into his skin and into the boundaries of his etheric body, permeating it with something that is like the corpse of the color, something that kills something in the human being. Just think that when we face the physical world with our sense organs open, we are actually always taking in the corpses of all our perceptions as phantoms, but effective phantoms. Something always dies in us when we perceive the outside world. It is a highly peculiar phenomenon. And the spiritual researcher must ask himself: Yes, what is happening here? What is the cause of this highly peculiar phenomenon?
One must consider what actually happens to what rushes toward us like light. This light has a lot behind it. It is, as it were, what the light reveals, only the outpost of what rushes toward us. Behind the light, however, there is not the wave motion fantasized about by external physics, but behind the light, behind all perceptions, behind all impressions, there is first of all that which we can only grasp when we look at the world through spiritual science, through imagination, through creative images. The moment we would see everything, perceive everything that lives in light or sound or warmth, we would perceive behind what comes to our consciousness the creative imagination, and in this the inspiration revealing itself again, and in this the intuition. It is what comes to our consciousness as light and sound perception, as it were the uppermost layer, as it were only the foam of what vibrates toward us, but what lives in it is what, if it came to our consciousness, could become imagination, inspiration, intuition in us.
So actually, we only have a quarter of what rushes toward us truly given to us in perception; the other three quarters penetrate us without coming to our consciousness. So while we stand there and have a sensation of color, the creative imagination, inspiration, and intuition penetrate us, as it were, through the surface of the color sensation, and sink into us. If we examine these last three intruders more closely, we find that if imagination, inspiration, and intuition, as they seek to penetrate our organism through the senses, were to actually enter it, they would have such an effect that even during our physical existence on earth between birth and death, they would bring about in us a spiritualization as I indicated yesterday as a possible result of Lucifer's seduction. Imagination, inspiration, and intuition would affect us in such a way that we would feel the urge to abandon everything that still exists in us as a predisposition for our striving toward distant futures, toward the human ideal, and we would want to spiritualize ourselves with everything that we are. We would want to become spiritual beings at the level of perfection we had attained through our previous lives. We would say to ourselves, in a sense: Becoming human is too great an effort for us; we would have to go down a difficult path into the future. We will leave behind whatever possibilities for becoming human still lie within us. We would rather become angels with all the imperfections we carry within us, because then we would ascend directly into the spiritual world, where we would spiritualize our being. We would then become more imperfect than we could become in the cosmos according to our abilities, but we would become spiritual, angelic beings.
Here you can see again from an example how important is what is called the threshold of the spiritual world, and how important is the being called the guardian of the threshold. For there he already stands at the point I have just spoken of. He allows only the sensation itself to enter our consciousness and does not allow that which, as imagination, inspiration, or intuition, would, if it entered our consciousness, produce in us an immediate urge for spiritualization, as we are, with renunciation of all subsequent human lives. This must be concealed from us; the door of our consciousness is closed to it, but it penetrates into our being. And as it penetrates into our being without our being able to illuminate it with the light of our consciousness, as we must let it descend into the dark depths of our subconscious, the spiritual beings whose adversary is Lucifer, enter our being from the other side, and now the struggle arises within us between Lucifer, who sends in his imagination, inspiration, and intuition, and those spiritual beings whose adversary is Lucifer. We would always see this battle in every sensation, in every perception, if the threshold of the spiritual world were not set for external perception, which only the clairvoyant gaze does not close itself off from.
From this you can see what is actually happening within human nature. The result of this struggle is what I have characterized as a kind of corpse, a partial corpse within us. This corpse is the expression of what must become completely material within us, like a mineral inclusion, so that we do not come into a position where we can spiritualize it. If this corpse did not develop through the struggle between Lucifer and his opponents, we would have within us the result of imagination, inspiration, and intuition instead of this corpse, and we would ascend directly into the spiritual world. This corpse forms the center of gravity through which the good spiritual beings, whose adversary is Lucifer, initially sustain us in the physical world, sustaining us in such a way that we have, as it were, veiled within ourselves what must arise in us as an urge toward spiritualization, so that we strive beyond this veiling toward the real ideal of human nature, toward the full development of all the potentialities that can be within us. Through the formation of this enclosure, this corpse phantom, so to speak, within us, through the fact that in our perceptions we are always, as it were, permeated by something that is at the same time a corpse, we kill within ourselves, during the act of perception, this ever-rising urge toward spiritualization. And while this enclosure is forming, there arises what I have often hinted at and what is important to understand in all its significance.
You see, when you look into a mirror, you have a pane of glass in front of you, but you would see through this pane if it were not covered with a mirror coating. Because the glass pane has a mirror coating, what is in front of the mirror is reflected. If you were to stand in front of your physical body in such a way that you experienced how, in addition to your perceptions, your imaginations, inspirations, and intuitions also enter into it, then you would see through your physical body, and you would experience such a feeling that you would say to yourself: I want nothing to do with this physical body, I do not pay any attention to it, but I rise, as I am, into the spiritual world. Really, the physical body would stand before you like a glass mirror that has no coating. But now the physical body is permeated with this corpse. That is like the coating on the mirror. And now everything that falls on it is reflected, but only as we perceive it with our senses. This is how sensory perceptions arise. Our permanent corpse, which we carry within us, is the mirror coating of our entire body, and through it we see ourselves in the physical world. This is how we exist as this individual physical being in the physical world. This is how complicated the human being looks.
Let us take the other case, that we do not merely perceive, but that we think. When we think, it is not sensory perception. Sensory perception may be the cause, but actual thinking does not take place in sensory perception; it takes place more inwardly. When we think, we do not make impressions on our physical body with our actual thinking, but we do make impressions on our etheric body. But when we think, not everything that is in our thoughts enters into us. If everything that is in our thoughts entered into us, then every time we thought, we would first feel living elemental beings pulsating within us, and we would feel completely enlivened inwardly. In Munich, I once said: If someone experienced thoughts as they are, they would feel themselves in such a confusion in their thoughts as in an anthill; everything would be life. We do not perceive this life in human thinking because, again, only the foam of it comes to our consciousness and forms the shadow images of thoughts that appear in us as our thinking. In contrast, that which pervades our thoughts as living forces sinks into our etheric body. We do not perceive the living elemental beings that swarm around us, but rather we perceive in our thoughts only an extract, something like a shadow. But the other, the life, draws into us, and as it draws into us, it penetrates us again in such a way that a struggle arises anew in our etheric body, now a struggle between the progressive spirits and Ahriman, the Ahrimanic beings. And the expression of this struggle is that thoughts do not unfold within us as they would if they were living beings. If they unfolded as they really are, we would feel ourselves in the life of thought beings: they would move back and forth—but we do not perceive this. Instead, our etheric body, which would otherwise be completely transparent, is made opaque, as it were; I would say it becomes like smoky topaz, which is permeated by dark layers, while quartz is completely transparent and pure. In this way, our etheric body is permeated by spiritual darkness. What permeates our etheric body is our treasure trove of memories.
The treasure trove of memories arises from the fact that, through the processes mentioned above, thoughts are reflected in our etheric body, but now they are reflected in time, up to the point where we remember them in physical life. These are the mirrored thoughts that we have in our memory, the thoughts mirrored out of time. But deep down in our etheric body, behind our memory, the good divine-spiritual beings are at work, whose adversary is Ahriman, and there they create and shape those forces that can in turn enliven what has died in the physical body through the processes described above. So while a corpse is being created in our physical body, which must be created because otherwise we would have the urge to spiritualize ourselves with all the deficiencies we carry within us, something like a kindling life force emanates from the etheric body. So that in the future, what has been killed can truly be transformed back into life.
But now we can see the significance of the before and after. For if we were to act out the imaginations, inspirations, and intuitions that enter into us in our immediate present, we would follow Lucifer and spiritualize ourselves. But by being thrown into the future, by not coming to fruition now but being preserved as seeds for the future, they regain their true essence. What we would misuse in the present, we will use in the future, when we have passed through the gate of death, to build a new life for ourselves out of the spiritual world. What would lead us, if we used it in the physical world, to spiritualize ourselves with our shortcomings, leads us after death as forces to return to physical earthly life. Thus, things have opposite effects in the different worlds.
So it is with our thinking. And now let us consider our feelings. Yes, what we carry within us as inner feelings, as inner sensations, is again not what it could actually be according to its entire inner nature. What we carry within us as feelings, what comes to our consciousness as our feelings, is actually only a shadow image of what really lives within us, for spiritual beings also live in our feelings. If you remember what I said in the first lecture, you will feel that the spiritual beings that actually underlie the entire planetary system live within us, only they do not come to our consciousness. The feeling as we know it comes into our consciousness, the other remains outside our consciousness. What does that actually mean: the other remains outside our consciousness? It is really very difficult to find words in ordinary language that accurately characterize these things. Just as we must say that perception and thinking produce something in us that is actually like a killing—though in thinking, through the counteraction, it is at the same time a kind of encouragement to future life—so we must say that every feeling that is within us, every feeling that arises in us, is not actually born entirely within us, does not come into existence entirely. If everything that resides within us when we feel were to come out, then what lives in our feelings would affect us quite differently, would power us quite differently. What lies behind the feeling, what makes the feeling a living being, a living being whose life is nourished by the entire planetary system, does not come out immediately. The feeling, in turn, comes out of us only as a shadow of what it actually is. This means that once you really enter your emotional world with a deeper sense of humanity, you actually feel something unsatisfying about every emotion. You feel that every emotion could be intensified, that it could come out more strongly. In particular, one must have something like a secret experience of feelings: they could reveal much more to us about what lies within them; they conceal something of what lives within us, what is in the depths of our soul, and what only comes up halfway.
When we respond to our will, to everything that can be desire and will within us, it is here, only to a higher degree, just as it is with feelings. Only that behind the will stands the spiritual essence, the fundamental being that actually lives in the sun. Not only what lives in the planets, but what lives in the whole sun also lives there in the will. But it is hidden. The will is even less fully born than the feeling. The will would permeate us completely differently if everything that lies within it were to really come to the surface of our consciousness. Only the outermost surface of the will, only the most superficial foam formations of the will are expressed. The rest remains hidden from us. And why does a whole world remain hidden from us in feeling and will? Because what remains hidden from us, if it were viewed from the physical plane, would be unbearable for us. From the physical plane, it would appear in such a way that we would want to ward it off, that we would want to turn away from it.
That which lives in feeling and will and is unborn is karma in the making. Let us say, for example, that we feel hostility toward someone. What comes to our consciousness in this hostile feeling is only the outward wave motion. Within lie forces that are spread throughout the entire planetary system. But what remains hidden from us is precisely what tells us: through your hostile feeling, you are planting something imperfect within yourself, which you must compensate for. At the moment when what lives below would emerge, the image of what must compensate for the hostile feeling in karma would appear before us. And we would join forces with Lucifer and Ahriman to ward off this compensation, because we would be judging from the standpoint of the physical plane. But this is hidden from us on the physical plane; the guardian of the threshold hides it from us for the simple reason that we can only judge these things, which are not born of our feelings or our will, when we live in the spiritual world between death and a new birth. There we want what we would never want otherwise; there we want what corresponds to a hostile feeling to be truly balanced, because there we have a genuine interest in the content of the religion of the gods, in the perfect ideal of humanity that wants to make us perfect human beings. We know that what has been caused by a hostile feeling must be compensated for by an opposite compensation. It must be preserved for the future after death, and only then can what is unborn in our feelings and our will come out.
Now, you see, I have presented to you, I would say, a fourfold aspect of the human soul core. That which remains unborn from our feelings lives in the astral body; that which remains unborn from the will lives in the I. So, by perceiving the outer world, we have something like a physical phantom corpse within us, which is actually the mirror image of our physical body. We have an enclosure within us, a kind of darkening of the etheric body. We have something within us in the astral body that does not come to birth in the time between birth and death, and we have something of our will that does not come to birth in this time. This fourfold nature that human beings carry within themselves must be preserved for the time between death and a new birth. But it lives within us as our soul core with the same certainty as the seed lies in the plant for the next year. So you see, we cannot only speak in general terms of a soul core, but we can even grasp this soul core in its fourfold nature. When we carry within us, say, a feeling that causes us discomfort, especially from within, when we are not really satisfied with our life, this happens because pressure is exerted by the unborn part of our feelings on the conscious part of our feelings. How can this pressure be prevented? Yes, you see, this pressure is something that humans are constantly exposed to. For what I have just described to you, insofar as it relates to feeling and will, that is, to what actually constitutes our inner soul life in the sense of the first lecture, is what brings us into inner disharmony. If there were true harmony between the innate part of feeling and will and what remains behind the threshold of consciousness, if there were a true relationship, true harmony, we would go through the sensory world as satisfied and capable human beings. This is actually the root of all inner dissatisfaction. When someone has inner dissatisfaction, it comes from the pressure of the subconscious part of feeling and willing.
Now I must add to what I have said that, in relation to all these conditions I have just described, the nature of human beings has indeed changed in the course of their development. Things are actually as I have just described them in our time. They have not always been so. In earlier times of human development, let us say during the ancient Persian, Egyptian, and ancient Indian epochs, it was different. Then, of course, perceptions flowed in in exactly the same way, and they contained imaginations, inspirations, intuitions, but in earlier times these imaginations, inspirations, and intuitions did not remain entirely without effect on human beings as they do today. They did not kill the inner physical nature of human beings so completely, they did not deliver such a dense mineral impact, and this came from the fact that in those older times, something sprang up from the other side, from feeling and will, when perceptions came from outside under certain conditions. If we go back, for example, to the older times of Egyptian and Babylonian culture and look at the people there, we see that they perceived things quite differently. They faced the outer sense world just as we do, but their bodies were still organized in such a way that the imaginations hidden in the sense perceptions did not have a completely deadening effect, but approached people with a certain liveliness. But because they came in alive, they brought out in people the opposite image of what now remains completely hidden for us in the ego and the astral body. The spiritual beings of the sun and the planetary system pushed their way out from within and, in a sense, reflected what was enlivened by the imagination. Thus, for members of the older Egyptian and Babylonian cultures, there were certain times of perception when they looked out into the physical world and not only took in physical perceptions as we do, but saw them come to life. They knew that behind them was something that lived out in the imagination. Therefore, they were not so foolish as to suspect material atomic vibrations behind their perceptions, as our present-day physicists do, but they knew that there was life behind them, and from within them emerged the images of the animated starry sky, even the sun, shining back at them. This was particularly strong during the Persian culture, where something like the inner spiritual power of the sun really shone forth in external perception — Ahura Mazdao!
If we go back to even earlier times, we find this interaction, this accommodation between the inner and the outer, even more pronounced. Today this can no longer be the case, but a substitute can be found, and here we come to a point where, I would say, we can truly understand our task within the anthroposophical worldview from the thing itself. A substitute must be created. We face the outer world with our perceptions. We think about it, while part of this outer world remains closed to us, having a deadening and darkening effect on us. But we can enliven what is deadened and darkened through spiritual science. And it is precisely through the enlivening of what is otherwise deadening and darkening that such a science arises as has been presented in my “Secret Science” in the development through Saturn, Sun, and Moon. Every human being has this knowledge of the Saturn, Sun, and Moon evolutions, but it lies in the depths of their consciousness. He would not want to be an earthly human being if he could see this clearly without sufficient preparation. He would want the earth to have nothing to do with him and to be able to conclude his existence with the lunar evolution. Everything we can gain in knowledge through spiritual science illuminates what remains hidden from us in the evolution of the past by penetrating into us. For what lives out there in the sensory perceptions as imagination, inspiration, and intuition and does not enter into us is actually, when viewed through the veil of the sensory perceptions, what we have gone through in the past.
It is different with what lives in our feelings and will. People can say—and many people today have an urge to do so—'Oh, what does it matter to me what these confused minds have thought up or imagined about a supernatural world? I don't accept such ideas. Those who say this have never understood why religions came into being in the course of world development. The common feature of all religious ideas is that they refer to things that cannot be perceived by the senses, that in religious ideas human beings must fulfill themselves with something that cannot be perceived by the senses. Ideas that come from what can be perceived by the senses can never give us an impulse for our feelings and desires that will be a driving force after death. In order for what is unborn in us to have an effect in our feelings and in our will, because it is supposed to have an effect after our death, we do not need the ideas that we can acquire through our sensory perceptions or through the intellect, which is bound to the brain; they are of no use to us. Only those ideas that correspond to what is not really external, which, when we take them in, make us pious, through which we look up into a spiritual world, give us the impulse, the momentum we need after death. To imagine religiously means to imagine what cannot yet work in us, but which is effective after death. With religious ideas, we take in not only ideas of knowledge, but something that can become effective after our death, and which must therefore be present in the physical body now, so that those who do not want to reflect on such forces can laugh at them and reject them in their materialism. However, he has only a paralyzed power to bring forward what is unborn in his feeling and willing if he does not permeate himself with ideas about the supersensible.
That is why it must be emphasized so often: what has passed is illuminated by clairvoyant consciousness. It is recognized again in the present, even insofar as it exists behind the veil of the sensory world as imagination, inspiration, and intuition, and works into the sensory world. In the past, this was given to people as religious belief so that they would not lose all momentum for the time after death, so that they would have something in the core of their souls that could keep them alive even after they had laid down their physical bodies. Now the time has come when people should acquire ideas about the supersensible worlds out of understanding, out of the understanding of spiritual science. Therefore, it cannot be emphasized often enough: only spiritual researchers can explore these things in the supersensible world. But once they have been explored and communicated, there is something in our deepest soul that is a secret language of this soul, and what is explored by the spiritual researcher can be understood and comprehended. Only when the prejudices of the intellect and the senses come into play is what spiritual research presents as supersensible ideas regarded as nonsense, folly, and fantasy. Yet when these ideas are accepted, they give impetus to the core of our soul so that it can find its way into all futures in the cosmos. Only those who undergo esoteric development will ever explore the content of the spiritual world. To know this content, to work it through inwardly in consciousness, to have it in ideas and concepts, to possess it as a certainty of the soul's existence in the spiritual world—this is something that human beings will need more and more as necessary spiritual nourishment.
This is what shows us how we can understand the mission of our anthroposophical movement from the nature of the matter itself. In ancient times, it was still the case that knowledge came from above and the content of this knowledge came from below. Therefore, the ancients still had a direct awareness of the spiritual worlds, but this became increasingly obscured and dulled. If it had not become obscured and dulled, human beings would not have attained full consciousness of their ego. Human beings can only attain full consciousness of their ego by developing to the highest degree within their physical body that corpse phantom of which I have spoken. Our physical body must, so to speak, be completely covered with a mirror coating, and only when it is completely covered can we feel ourselves to be completely ourselves, so that we can say: I am an I. However, this complete covering has only developed slowly and gradually. It developed in the course of human evolution, and this development was completed at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. Then the mirror coating was finished. Before that, the lower and higher still encountered each other; the lower and higher came together in the human being. But one might say that the lower and higher were completely pushed out by the fact that the mirror coating was complete, and human beings perceived only the reflection from the physical body. That was only when the event of Golgotha entered human evolution.
What actually happened there? Yes, let us look very closely at what happened there! Imagine these ancient people in the times before the Mystery of Golgotha, imagine their consciousness! From outside comes the stimulation of the imagination; from within arise images of the spiritual world outside of humanity. What are these images that arise within human beings? As we know, this was possible in ancient times when the human consciousness was in a subdued state. Those who recognized these things, who in ancient times were able to look as initiates into the human soul and see how this coming together of the animated imagination from outside and the inner vision still lived there, did not say: “The human being sees this alone.” Instead, these ancient initiates said: It looks at its world in man, for example, Yahweh or Jehovah, as was the case with the ancient Jews. God thinks in man. As we say today in our cycle of development, when we have thoughts: “I think,” so said those who knew these things in ancient times; when the visions arose from the spiritual world: “The gods think in us.” Or when the unity of the divine was recognized in monotheism: Yahweh thinks in man. Man is the theater of divine thoughts. People felt so fulfilled that they said: The gods think in me.
But in human development, it became increasingly impossible for this to be the case. One might say that darkness increasingly opposed the visions and thoughts of the gods in human nature. The inner corpse phantom became stronger and stronger, more and more significant. The time approached when no more thoughts emerged from human nature to meet the gods. Then the divine being, of whom one can say that it thought through the human being, felt that its consciousness—for this consciousness always consists in its thoughts—was becoming ever duller and dimmer. And a longing arose in this divine being to awaken a new form of consciousness. Human beings come to a different form of consciousness. By creating a new consciousness, the gods create something essential; something essential arises for them. And this essential thing that arose was, for the divine being now meant, who felt its consciousness dimming, the Christ. Christ is the child of the Godhead who restores the consciousness of the Godhead in the human being. Thus, the Christ being had to become incorporated into the human being.
And we must take this consciousness into ourselves: by perceiving the sensory world, we are constantly flowing into ourselves—dying. And darkness and obscurity flow into us as we think about this world. And we allow the unborn to flow into us as we feel and will. All of this sits deep in the depths of our consciousness, where we allow our dying and our unborn, which we will only be able to use after we have died, to flow in. But that would be useless if we could not sink it into the essence that the Godhead has born as the essence of a new consciousness, if we could not let it flow into the Christ essence.
We can attain this consciousness by truly recognizing the meaning of the whole of evolution through spiritual science: Yes, we send down into the subconscious depths that which is dying within us. But this dying, which we sink more and more into our own being, is taken up by the Christ who lives toward us. In what dies in us, darkens in us, remains unborn, Christ lives us. We allow what must die to die within us so that we may approach the true ideal of humanity with all our faculties. But what we pour into ourselves as dying, we pour into the Christ being, as it has permeated human evolution since the foundation of Christianity. And what remains unborn in us, our feelings and will, we know is taken up by the Christ substance into which it sinks after death.
Christ has lived within us since he lived through the mystery of Golgotha. We sink our dying, which is present in every perception, into Christ. And we sink the darkness in our thinking into the Christ being. We send our darkened thoughts into the light, into the spiritual sunlight of Christ. And when we pass through the gate of death, our unborn feelings and our unborn will immerse themselves in the Christ substance. If we understand this development correctly, we say of this development: We die into Christ.
In Christo morimur.