84. What is the Purpose of Anthroposophy and the Goetheanum?: The Soul Life of Man and its Development Towards Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition
15 Apr 1923, Dornach Rudolf Steiner |
---|
We draw water from the entire water supply of the earth. Of course, we are not under the illusion that our tongue produces the water. Only when we think do we do that. There we speak of the brain producing thought, while we merely draw from the total thought that is universally spread out in the world, which we then have within us as a sum of thoughts. |
But you see, everywhere one can point to the concrete processes that underlie what the outside world finds so fantastic when anthroposophy speaks of man not consisting of the physical body alone, but of the physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego. |
They stand side by side in such a way that even today theology would like the sensory world to be understood only sensually, and for the moral world there would be a completely different kind of knowledge. |
84. What is the Purpose of Anthroposophy and the Goetheanum?: The Soul Life of Man and its Development Towards Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition
15 Apr 1923, Dornach Rudolf Steiner |
---|
Yesterday I tried to look at the essence of man and the essence of human life from the point of view that arises when human life in its completeness is placed before the soul. I said that this human life does not only flow during the waking hours, but that about one third of the entire human life flows during sleep. And initially, if we consider only the ordinary human consciousness, we stand before this human life in such a way that when we look back into our earthly existence in terms of memory, we actually only ever remember the days, those times of our life that we spend awake. We always overlook, so to speak, that which takes place in the time that we have slept through. Now, however, it must be said: For what we have to create outwardly for earth culture, earth life, our waking day life comes into consideration; but it is a question of whether only those ideas come into consideration that take place in the waking day life before the ordinary consciousness. That this is not the case can already be taught by a superficial consideration. Only those considerations which I want to make today and in the last days of this week will show that the events which the human soul experiences from falling asleep to waking up remain hidden, but that these events are still incomparably more important for the inner being of the human being on earth than the events which take place during the day. Today, in continuation of what was said yesterday, we first want to consider some things which again result from a comparison of the sleeping life and the ordinary waking life. The life of sleep takes place partly in complete dreamless sleep. The time we spend with our earthly life during this dreamless sleep, if it contains events for our life, is completely unconscious. From this unconsciousness, from this complete darkness of consciousness, dreams then emerge, and from dreams we either wake up to ordinary consciousness, in that earthly reality is given to us through sensory perception and through the combination of the intellect, or we also sleep from this reality through the dream into dreamless consciousness. Let us once again make it clear to ordinary external observation what the difference is between dreaming and external sensory observation, which lives in images and concepts of the mind. We can say that for many people dreams often contain a more vivid reality than that which takes place in waking daily life. But this is a pictorial reality that we do not follow with our will, but inevitably with our soul. And we can precisely indicate the difference between following these dream images and following the ordinary reality images of waking daily life. We do not want to get involved in particular philosophical speculations. These could also be made, but we will refrain from them now. We only want to look at what the very popular consciousness gives us. We can say that the dream images are such that we live in them. We live in the images themselves. We live with the images. In waking daytime life we naturally have color images, sound images and so on before us in the same way as in dreaming experience. But we are compelled to relate these images, be they facial images, sound images, thermal images, tactile images and so on, to a certain extent to hard reality. We see everywhere in day-to-day reality the need to come up against what the image shows us with our will, so to speak. This is not the case with, well, let's say dream reality. Dream reality is, if I may put it crudely, to be penetrated everywhere. We can only find the point of view from which we judge the significance of dream reality within waking daily life. As long as we dream, we consider the dream to be reality, and if we were to dream our whole life, dream reality would be the only reality for us. We need not imagine that outer life would then be different from what it is now. We could imagine that individual human beings would not meet in life through their own will, but would be pushed towards each other as if automatically by natural forces or pushed towards each other by some higher being. We could also imagine that people are driven to their work, pushed by higher beings or by forces of nature. In short, everything that happens to us in waking life could happen. We don't need to know anything about it. If we were only dreaming, we would have a dream reality before us. It would not occur to us to want to somehow break through this reality to another reality. We wake up through the natural organization of our organism and then gain the viewpoint within sensory reality to judge the other relative reality value of the dream. So it is only when we go through this life-jolt from dreaming to waking that we gain the point of view to judge the relative reality value of the dream. But we must now ask ourselves: Is everything that we experience during daytime waking really a waking state? Well, yesterday I explained in detail that this is not the case. I explained in detail that actually only our imaginations, but these only in so far as they depict external reality, bring us into wakefulness. So that we are actually only awake in our imaginations. In our feelings we have no other reality before us with regard to the state of the soul than in dreams; only that the dream appears to us in images, the feelings in that indeterminacy with which they emerge from the depths of the life of the soul. However, if one is not an ordinary psychologist who forges everything according to some preconceptions, but if one approaches the emotional content of the soul with impartial observation, one sees how the feelings, which, if I may put it this way, shoot up against the life of imagination, show a blurring, a fluctuating merging like the dream images. We also dream with feeling when we are awake. Only because, I would like to say, the substance in which the dream images appear is different from the substance of the feelings, we do not come to the conclusion that actually all feeling has only the meaning of reality that the dream also has. So that, while we are really imagining while awake, our imaginations are continually flooded with the indeterminate subjective contents of feeling. Imagine vividly how, on waking, the dream images play into the waking consciousness of the day, how in the dream images everything is fluctuatingly enlarged, diminished - as the case may be - so you will be able to say to yourself: Something comes, seemingly naturally, to the human being in images, which otherwise comes to the human being in the emotional life, again blurred, subjectively enlarging, reducing things, from within. And with regard to our volition, we are also in deep sleep when awake. We only know the intentions of our will. But these are thoughts, ideas. If I want to go for a walk, I first have the idea of going for this walk. This is my intention. Ordinary consciousness shows just as little of how this intention constantly enters my organism as it shows what passes from falling asleep to waking up. Again, I can only measure the success by the movement that I make, by the change in the aspects that appear before me when I take the walk - in other words, again by ideas. What actually takes place in the organism between the idea of the intention and the idea of success, I sleep through for the ordinary consciousness just as I sleep through what takes place from falling asleep to waking up. So we can say that man is willing, even when he is awake, in a deep dreamless sleep, that he is sentiently dreaming, even when he is awake, and that he is only awake in a certain way when he lives in ideas. But if man really looks honestly within himself, he realizes that these ideas are only awake in relation to external nature, not in relation to their own life. In relation to his own life of imagination, man cannot come to a real wakefulness. One only has to be clear about the fact that for most people, if they cannot imagine anything external, imaginative activity no longer exists at all. But that is actually only because, especially in today's culture, man is devoted to the outside world, so that we can compare this devotion to being in a roaring, roaring world. Imagine someone here playing the piano or some instrument, and out there the machines are roaring in a quite extraordinary way. You would hear the machines. You would hardly be able to hear the piano, especially if you were a little further away from it. Basically, it is the same with what actually lives inside the human being from the activity of thinking. But we have to use the comparison correctly. When we learn external natural science today, when we absorb all the concepts that are brought to man in the external theory of evolution, then it is basically a din of thought, a noise of thought. And this noise of thinking, which today's man indulges in, especially if he is a scientist, disturbs his finer perception of inner thinking activity. That is why he sleeps through the inner activity of thinking. In my “Philosophy of Freedom” I referred to this pure thinking, which does not think something external, but which runs entirely within the human being. But I am also aware that with this pure thinking I have actually described something of which many of our contemporaries say that it does not exist; just as someone who hears the roar of machines out there and not the piano would say that it does not exist. But if this is so, we can see something extraordinarily important from it, namely that we are actually only awake for thinking, insofar as it has an external natural content, but that we are at most dreaming with regard to the inner activity that we accomplish there. Moreover, we dream the feelings and sleep through the will. Thus the activity of the soul, that which lives within us, is basically not awakened when we are awake to the sense world. We continue to sleep, even during daytime waking, for our thinking activity, for feeling, for willing. We only wake up for external nature. And this waking up is something we are still developing through instruments, through experimental methods, and thereby arrive at the meaningful natural science of the present. This must come into being by reflecting the external processes in our ideas, so to speak. But we do not wake up to the same extent for our thinking, feeling and willing. And whoever can observe impartially how the dream actually differs from the outer physical-sensual world of perception, will not find the life of the soul according to thinking, feeling and willing similar to that which outer sensual perceptual impressions are, but will at most find this life of the soul similar to its most significant element, dreaming. With regard to the content of our soul, we are actually dreaming and sleeping all the time. We only wake up to the content of nature. We do not wake up at all to the content of our soul in ordinary consciousness, we sleep gently away. And as we said, the dream images are, so to speak, such that one can penetrate them, that they do not rest on a hard external reality that is subject to the will. But our soul content is also like that. It lives in images. And anyone who has the ability to compare qualities, not just quantities, will find that if he attributes pictorial character to the dream content, which initially does not point to a reality, he must also attribute pictorial character to the content of his own soul. But then a meaningful question arises from this. If I live in dreams, I wake up to physical reality, then feel connected to physical reality as a reality by the fact that I am switched on with my will in my body, and from the point of view of this physical reality I attribute to the dream at most a relative, a completely different reality. Can I now - so the question is - wake up to the life of the soul in the same way as I wake up to nature? Can I switch myself on, just as I switch the dream images into what is the structure of reality through my will, which I press into my body, can I also switch thinking, feeling and willing into a corresponding reality through a higher awakening? This, you see, is the question: Can I wake up to the life of the soul in the same way as I wake up to nature? The content of nature, which I experience as a human being during my earthly existence with the outer physical-sensual reality, appears to me pictorially in my dreams. But the whole life of the soul also only appears to me pictorially as in a dream. So, can I wake up to the life of the soul? Yes, you can wake up. One can awaken by first sharpening and internalizing one's thinking through such exercises as I have given in the book “How to Gain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds” and in my “Secret Science”, by not merely allowing oneself to be stimulated to a thought content from outside, but by giving oneself a manageable thought content, which is not suggested to one, from within, then resting on this thought content, concentrating on such a thought content actively given to the soul from within. In this way, one gradually arrives at the real consciousness of thinking. You do not have the consciousness of thinking at all if you only allow yourself to be stimulated for the ideas from the outside. Only if one stimulates oneself to think from within again and again through meditation, through concentration on the content of thought, then one becomes aware of oneself within thinking. Then you realize that you actually live in this thinking, but that you only don't know it when you allow yourself to be stimulated from the outside. Thinking becomes alive in this way, whereas otherwise it is abstract and dead. Thinking becomes something that does not merely exist in the shadows of thought that we receive from outside, but something that stirs inwardly like the blood of the soul. One becomes as if filled with a second humanity. The thoughts become living forces, image forces, as I have also called them in my book “Theosophy”. And one becomes aware that one actually carries thinking within oneself as a second body, as the etheric body, as the body of formative forces; for one becomes aware that that which otherwise exists only shadowed in thoughts is actually the same forces that bring about our growth. One withdraws into the growth of one's human being, and one comes to realize how that which would otherwise proceed merely chemically as processes according to the peculiarities of the substances we absorb is processed through the same inner spiritual corporeality, etheric corporeality, which forms our thoughts, how we become a unified inner human being through these inwardly living, stimulating thoughts. In this way, we get to know a second person within ourselves. But you also come to something else. This second person, whom we get to know, is not merely a cloud that fills the physical body in a vague way. This second person is actually in constant motion, and it is not possible to hold him in one moment. You see, it is actually like this: if we have the physical body of the human being in a certain point of life, then we can draw what we experience in this way, and what is identical with our thinking - only that in ordinary thinking we have the shadows of thoughts, not the living thoughts themselves - for a moment there (see drawing). What pervades the human being as such a second etheric or visual force body can only be captured for a moment. In the previous moment it was quite different; in the next moment it will be different again, and so on backwards and forwards. But this leads to the conclusion, if one comes to it in the inner, contemplative experience, that this body of formative forces, which for the ordinary consciousness expresses itself as the shadowy abstract thoughts, is nothing spatial at all, that it is something that runs in time. This leads us back as a living tableau to a certain moment of our first childhood. I will now draw this schematically. \ Imagine that we are already an older person in this time; but this pictorial body of forces is not limited to one time, but leads back to our childhood. We do not view our life in terms of memories, but like a tableau all at once. What I am drawing here spatially is temporal. This now leads back to our childhood, to the time in our childhood up to which we usually remember. There is now also this etheric body, this body of imagery. But if, through careful practice, you acquire the ability to look back to that point, then you reach the point where you learned to think as a small child. It is as if one reaches a limit with thinking, at first with ordinary thinking. For ordinary consciousness, for ordinary memory, you reach this limit. In the imagination you come further back to the other side. One looks into the soul content of the child that one had when one was not yet able to think, when one dreamed oneself into the world as a child. For it was only at a certain moment that thinking occurred, namely after speaking. Now you can see into time, see what it was like in the soul before you had the shadowy abstract thoughts. Then we still had living thinking. And living thinking had a powerful plasticizing effect on the human brain, on the entire human organization. Later, when much of this thinking is taken into the abstract, into the dead, there are only remnants left to work on the human physical organization. While one is dreaming as a child, not yet able to think, thinking is active. Precisely because in later life one cannot look at such thinking through the noise of the world, it does not happen at all that one looks back into the thinking that was still active. Now one can look back. And then this thinking appears as the sum of the forces that actually built you up as a human being, as forces of growth, as forces of nourishment and so on. One notices how the human organization is built out of the ether of the world, for these forces lie within it. You get closer and closer to the etheric body. One knows how this etheric body is most active from the outside into the child in the very first years, when the child cannot yet think, when it still spends its life dreaming. This is how one advances to the imagination. But something can remain. You don't realize it if you don't do the exercises I've mentioned in the books I've mentioned in the face of today's culture, which is roaring with scientificity. But then you realize that something has remained of this thinking from the other side, as you had it as a small child. This thinking, which is constructive, formative for the organism, to which one owes one's outer physical organism in the first place, this lively thinking I have called imaginative thinking in my books. But something of this imaginative thinking remains with you, and through practice you can also explore it again in later life, so that you can approach the etheric body. I already drew attention to this yesterday, but since not everyone was there, I would like to point it out again: Take the human eye, the optic nerve of the human eye, which goes inwards, spreads out in the eye. If you go so far with the visual force body (purple-red), which essentially follows the outer physical nerve processes (yellow), that you come close to those processes (red) where the outer world is reflected through the eye, then you have perception of the outer world. And what then establishes itself in the nerve - I will now only describe this approximately, it would take too much time if I were to describe the exact process - that which establishes itself through the nerve in the body of visual forces can then always be stimulated to activity again. With the activity of the body of visual forces, the nervous system, one reaches the point where the nerves end (yellow). One does not, so to speak, penetrate the nerve as far as the processes that reflect the outer world, one only gives an impulse to that which lives in them in the formative forces body, pushes this formative forces body to where the nerve stumps end, then one receives the memory impression. The memory impression consists essentially in the fact that one reaches the nerve endings with the inner activity; while for the sensory impressions one pushes through the nerve endings and advances to the processes in the senses that are mainly caused by the blood. There you see the living activity of the body of formative forces. But everything that you push into memory must have entered the nervous system, so it has only been there since we learned to think as a very small child. What was there before is now so - and if one has now trained the mind through exercises and looks back, one sees this in retrospect through the temporally passing second human being -: There one becomes aware of how, on the same paths on which otherwise the impressions entering from outside turn around again through the memory in the memory faculty, how that which is now also the activity of the body of formative forces comes in from behind, so to speak. We actually have these two activities all the time. But in ordinary consciousness man knows only of the one, of memory. But one has these two activities: That which stems from the external sensory perceptions, which are pushed back and can in turn be pushed forward to the nerve stumps, so that the memory images emerge; but there is also something that pours into the whole nervous system from that side, so to speak, in a human-creative way, where one does not perceive sensually with the same strength as on the front of the body. The creative forces enter the human being from behind - of course, this is not entirely accurate - but from behind: In early childhood, when one is not yet able to think, quite powerful, later weaker. This is the thinking that is not taken from the sensory world, that is taken from the entire universe, that is taken from the world ether, that we acquire by descending from pre-earthly existence into earthly existence, that we still retain superhumanly until the moment when we learn to think. At the moment when we learn to think, we close the door, so to speak, to this active thinking, to this development of the human formative forces in the formative body, in the etheric body, according to the continuous stream of our life. Learning to think for the outer sense world means closing the gate for the universal world-forming powers of thought. When we were children, we closed the gate for the world-forming powers of thought. But they remain in us, because we need these formative forces continuously in the first period of our lives, as long as we are growing as growth forces, and later as the processing forces for what we absorb as nourishment and so on. But we do not notice them. We only notice that which is reflected by the formative forces in the body from the impressions we have absorbed, which then reach the nerve endings in the memories. But through exercises in concentration and meditation we can become aware of that which now forms us from the world etheric. In our self-perception we become aware of processes which also take place in time, which we have not absorbed through external impressions, but which only have a flow to one side. If we then follow these up to the point where the nerves run out, where we otherwise have the memories of external impressions, then we not only get the image of our etheric body, but the image of how we as human beings are contained within the entire world ether. We become aware of ourselves as a second human being. We learn to recognize how the etheric forces move in and out, and how everything that is everywhere outside as a universal play of world forces and moves into us is the same as the weaving of thoughts within us in the shadow image. We become aware of how the thoughts within us are the shadow image of the etheric body, how the etheric body is actually a living thing, how it is a link in the whole world ether. We have reached the first stage of supersensible knowledge. You could say: What comes to light in thinking is actually formed as if through a mirror (see drawing). There is the coating of the mirror. Thus the mirror is directed forwards, towards the senses (red arrow). That which is taken in through the senses is reflected back and comes to consciousness when it reaches the nerve stumps. But there is also an inner activity which does not proceed in this way, but which passes through the mirror (purple arrows). If we follow this, then we have a body of image forces that is part of the image forces of the whole universe. In this way, however, we have come to the other side, so to speak, for thinking. What is this practicing that leads to imaginative thinking? It consists in the fact that, whereas otherwise one always sees only as far as the mirror of one's inner being, to that which is reflected from within, but which is nothing other than outer nature, one now acquires the ability to see behind the mirror. There is not the same as in outer nature; there are the human-creative powers. This is the other side of thinking. Here is dead thinking, also called abstract thinking. There is living thinking. And in living thinking, thoughts are forces. This is precisely the secret of thinking, that what one actually has within oneself in ordinary thinking is only the shadow image of what true thinking is. But true thinking pervades the world, is in the world as a power structure, not just in man. It is not very clever at all for man to believe that thinking is only in him. It's a bit like drawing water from a stream and drinking it and then thinking: Yes, my tongue, it has continually brought forth the water. We draw water from the entire water supply of the earth. Of course, we are not under the illusion that our tongue produces the water. Only when we think do we do that. There we speak of the brain producing thought, while we merely draw from the total thought that is universally spread out in the world, which we then have within us as a sum of thoughts. Man indulges in yet another illusion when he thinks of his imagination, an illusion that I can compare with the following. Imagine a path like the one down to Arlesheim and Dornach, such a soft path! I am now walking over it. You will see the tracks of my feet (see drawing, red). Now someone comes from Mars, has never seen anything like it on Earth, sees the tracks. He doesn't know any humans, because he comes from Mars, and it's at a time of day when no one has ever walked before. He sees the tracks. Aha, he thinks, there's the earth, there are the tracks; down there is earth, that's substance - he already knows that from Mars - down there in the earth's substance are all kinds of forces, vibrating forces, or whatever, ions or electrons, whatever it may be. These forces, they play below, and they cause the traces here, and that is why you can see the traces. But the good inhabitant of Mars is mistaken, he does not notice that I have gone over there and that the earth has done nothing at all, that this earth down to Arlesheim is most innocent of these traces. There are no forces down there that have caused it to be configured, it came from outside. Man also indulges in these illusions with regard to the brain. Such structures are also there, and he thinks that these structures are caused from within, and that this then appears in the thoughts. But they are traces made from the outside. We really do find a complete imprint of thought in the brain. There is nothing better to do than to follow how a person's thinking is represented down to the smallest detail in the forms of the brain. But just as little as the footprints in the earth have arisen from below, just as little have these formations of the brain arisen from anything other than impressions which the living thinking, which comes from the world ether, which lives and lives in the world ether, has dug into it. What I am telling you now becomes a living view when one penetrates to this imaginative thinking. And just as you can grasp thinking from the other side, so to speak, you can now grasp another element that you experience somewhat earlier in normal human life, speech, also from behind, so to speak, from the other side. Imagine that you let the air flow inwards through your lungs, through the larynx and through the other organs of speech. Through the formation of the larynx, the tongue, the palate and so on, the sounds are formed on the outside. If you follow this whole process from a certain point in the organism, you will have outward speech. But imagine that you are not tracing speech outwards from the speech organs, but you are tracing the process backwards (see drawing, red) to speech. Again, you cannot do this with ordinary consciousness, you must achieve this through exercises, that you follow the inner up to the point where the speech of earthly life forms outwards, that you follow the inner up to this point where speech first forms. This is not found in the physical and not in the etheric body, this is now found in an even higher part of the human organism than the etheric body or the body of formative forces, this is found in what I have called the astral body in my books. What is spoken outwardly is language for earthly life. That which approaches the human being from behind, as it were, that which reaches the organs of speech, that which does not sound outwards as speech, but that which speaks inwards, that which does not emerge from the larynx outwards as earthly audible speech, but that which comes from behind, stops at the larynx, becomes mute there, instead of speech beginning there, which goes out earthly: that is spiritual speech. This is what we can call the spiritual language that is spoken to us from the spiritual world. The impression that one receives through it, that is the inspiration, now meant in a quite rational sense. This inspiration must be brought about by withdrawing the consciousness, again through the exercises which I have described in the books I have mentioned, from being devoted to the outer words. Again, that which reaches the larynx or the organs of speech was particularly strong, and that which speaks to us from the world, whereas otherwise we speak to the world through our organs of speech - this inspiring was particularly strong in childhood, until we learned to speak. When we learned external language, these forces ceased to work in this way. They are now only present within us, and we attain them when we rise to the gift of inspiration. Then we become aware of a third element within us, a third person who now does not belong to space and time, but who is strong and formative within us. This is the astral body. It is the astral body in which the processes are inspirations, where we experience what is actually behind our emotional life. The emotional life is the dreaming of that which flows into us in an inspiring way. And this emotional life is intimately connected with the breathing and speaking process. Therefore, in older times, when people wanted to ascend into the spiritual world in a different way, this breathing process, the inner breathing process, was influenced by exercises. And the old yoga exercises were calculated to direct attention to that which lies behind speech. By putting artificial breathing in the place of natural breathing, one became aware of it, just as one becomes aware of something everywhere when one deviates from the ordinary. Just think that you perceive the water in a river around you in different ways when you swim with the speed of flowing water, or when you swim slower or faster. If you swim at the speed of flowing water, you do not perceive a certain counter-pressure. If you swim more slowly, you will perceive it. Because the Indian yogi shapes his breathing in a different way than it naturally proceeds, he perceives that which is in the breathing stream as spiritual, that spiritual through which we have our astral body, and through which we in turn project into a higher world than the etheric world. For us these exercises are the right ones - because humanity is progressing - which I have described in “How do you gain knowledge of the higher worlds?”. But you see, everywhere one can point to the concrete processes that underlie what the outside world finds so fantastic when anthroposophy speaks of man not consisting of the physical body alone, but of the physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego. We will talk about this next time. But these things have not been pulled out of our fingers, these things have not been speculated, but have come about through careful research, which takes the scientific method further right up to the human being, to the whole being of the human being - albeit research that is dependent on the human cognitive faculties being increased more and more. So what does the imagination consist of, through which one penetrates into the etheric world and into the actual etheric life? This imagination consists in the fact that one not only pursues into the senses the processes that are first pushed backwards through the senses and can then be pushed forward again to the nerve endings, but that one becomes aware of that which is from the universe, from the cosmos, of the same kind as the sensory perceptions, but now belongs to the supersensible world, that one becomes aware of it as otherwise only the memories do. If one becomes aware of the world-creating forces, as one otherwise perceives the memories, then one has imaginative being, then one experiences the etheric being of the world. If one becomes aware behind the language of that which now does not go out from the larynx to the front, but speaks in from the other side from the universe, from the cosmos, but falls silent at the larynx, then one becomes aware through inspiration of a further world to which we belong with our third human organism, with the astral body. However, one thing becomes apparent. Here in the physical-sensory world we have on the one hand the physical processes and on the other the moral impulses that rise from within us. They stand side by side in such a way that even today theology would like the sensory world to be understood only sensually, and for the moral world there would be a completely different kind of knowledge. The moment we advance to inspiration, when we live not only in the world in which we speak from the larynx forward, but when we live in the world which speaks through our whole human being, but falls silent at the larynx, because we push the gate forward when we learn the outer language, so that we experience the outer language as a substitute for the heavenly language - the moment we live into this world, when we live into this world, which now ends at the larynx, then we experience the inspirational content of the world, then we experience the secrets of the world, and then we do not merely experience a nature which moral impulses cannot approach, but we experience a world behind the natural existence where natural impulses, natural laws and moral laws are interwoven, where they are one. We have lifted the veil and found a world in which the moral and the physical resonate with each other. And we shall see that this is the world in which we were in the pre-earthly existence before we descended to earth, into which we enter again after we have passed through the gate of death. |
84. What is the Purpose of Anthroposophy and the Goetheanum?: Soul Immortality in the Light of Anthroposophy
27 Apr 1923, Prague Rudolf Steiner |
---|
To speak from the point of view of Anthroposophy today still means, quite understandably, to have great opposition, for Anthroposophy wants to speak about things of life and reality in a way that seems to many in our time to be something quite outlandish. |
But even during waking we are quite aware that in this extraordinarily interesting 'dream world we are dealing at most with a relative reality, which we can only understand if we understand it from the point of view of waking life. After all, one can at first imagine hypothetically that man dreams throughout his whole life, that he has never experienced anything in his consciousness other than the colorful, manifold dream images. |
Anthroposophy now makes such an attempt to develop that which underlies the ability to remember, in order to arrive at this second awakening through the inner practice of life. |
84. What is the Purpose of Anthroposophy and the Goetheanum?: Soul Immortality in the Light of Anthroposophy
27 Apr 1923, Prague Rudolf Steiner |
---|
To speak from the point of view of Anthroposophy today still means, quite understandably, to have great opposition, for Anthroposophy wants to speak about things of life and reality in a way that seems to many in our time to be something quite outlandish. And in particular, when a subject is discussed, such as the one that has been chosen for this evening, the immortality of the soul, then very powerful voices immediately rise up from the more scientifically educated circles of our time, who believe that such things cannot be discussed at all from the point of view of knowledge, because these things must be left to the beliefs, the revelations of human feeling, which is not based on direct knowledge, and because in relation to them man has insurmountable limits to his knowledge. Now, however, anthroposophy assumes that it can speak about precisely such things of life in the same way that today, with strict methods and with a discipline that is aware of its responsibility, it speaks from the point of view of the natural sciences. It is only a question of anthroposophy having to address itself to forces of knowledge which are certainly present in ordinary life and in ordinary science, but which are present only for the starting points of their development, not for the further steps. And these further steps must be taken in order to penetrate the spiritual realms of life precisely from the point of view of real knowledge, not from that of nebulous mysticism. The starting point must be what I would call a union of intellectual modesty on the one hand and absolute trust in the perfection of the human powers of cognition on the other. By seeking to unite these two soul impulses, anthroposophy is able to explore the so-called supersensible realm with the same certainty as the senses and the natural sciences are used today to penetrate the realm of the sense world, of physical existence, with such great success and certainty. What should be called intellectual modesty in this context? We know that within our soul life we have started from the childlike state of soul. We can very well compare this childlike state of soul with dreaming, even in a certain respect with sleep. And just as we awaken every morning from ordinary sleep, so we have awakened from our childlike state of soul to that which is our capacity for knowledge for science and for the purposes of practical life. If we now take the standpoint of intellectual modesty, we say to ourselves: Those powers which you had then as a small child, you have perfected through education and through the influence of life and your surroundings, and you have developed to that point of view from which you today gain your knowledge and your impulses for human life. This is not said with full intensity without intellectual modesty. Rather, one says: From the point of view that I have once acquired, I must be able to say yes and no to all sorts of things, if only I apply the correct methods that are common today. I must also be able to decide what is recognizable and what is to be relegated to the realm of mere belief. -- Anthroposophy counters this by asserting that it is perhaps possible to go beyond the powers of the soul that one has acquired as an adult, just as one can go beyond the cognitive abilities of the dreamy soul of a small child. Of course, it depends entirely on whether such a progression really succeeds, and I would like to speak to you this evening about this progression with reference to the field of soul immortality. On the other hand, however, anthroposophy has full and intense confidence that the powers of cognition attained by each person can be perfected more and more. Thus it ventures on such a path of perfection, and it begins by saying something like the following: Today we have achieved a certain concept of knowledge through the great successes of the natural sciences. But has this concept of knowledge really been taken out of the full depths of life? It is certainly justified for everything that we strive for in its field. But is it taken out of the full depths of life by considering precisely those questions of human existence that are connected firstly with the deepest longings of human life, secondly with everything that man calls the consciousness of his human dignity, thirdly with everything from which he derives the actual meaning of life: the moral impulses? All this nevertheless leads us to take certain borderline areas and borderline phenomena of life into consideration when it comes to gaining insights into precisely these most intimate needs and questions, especially those of the soul's existence. Not in order to say anything valid for knowledge from the outset, but to gain a comparative starting point, let me point out something that presents itself as a dark area and yet as an area that challenges many riddles in life. It is the area that man knows well, the area of dreaming as man experiences it while asleep. I would like to emphasize this explicitly: Nothing is to be made out for knowledge by my mentioning dreams and sleep, but only a starting point is to be gained for our present understanding. Let us imagine in front of our soul these manifold and colorful worlds of images that dreams conjure up for us. We can be sure that they come from the same depths of human life from which our 'daytime imaginings usually emerge. But even during waking we are quite aware that in this extraordinarily interesting 'dream world we are dealing at most with a relative reality, which we can only understand if we understand it from the point of view of waking life. After all, one can at first imagine hypothetically that man dreams throughout his whole life, that he has never experienced anything in his consciousness other than the colorful, manifold dream images. Couldn't life nevertheless proceed in the same way as it does today? We could be driven by certain forces of nature or spiritual powers, without having an awake consciousness, to our daily work and - even if it may seem reprehensible to some listeners - perhaps even to scientific activity; we could carry out this activity, as it were, sleepwalking. Within ourselves, however, nothing could take place except that which we know as the dream world; the outer world would then be completely different from that which we have in our inner consciousness. If you think about it properly, you come to say to yourself: This world of dreams, we never know it when we are in it ourselves. We would regard the dream world as our reality, which we would dream from the beginning to the end of our lives in the manner described above. That we recognize the subordinate reality value of the dream depends on the fact that we go through the life-jolt from sleep to awakening, that we become conscious of it - I am not speaking now in philosophical consideration, but from the standpoint of popular consciousness - through this life-jolt. Through it we switch that which is our human nature, namely that which is of a volitional nature, into our physical body. Anyone who observes closely also knows that everything that is conveyed to us through the senses in waking life is based entirely on the unfolding of real life in the physical body during waking. Through this involvement of our will in the physical body we arrive at the point of view from which we distinguish the subordinate reality value of dreaming from that reality value which the sense world has for our awakening consciousness. We now know that we are in contact with an external reality through the will inserted into our body. Again, I do not want to speak about this in philosophical considerations, but entirely from the standpoint of popular consciousness. Now the question arises: Could there perhaps be a second awakening, a second life-jolt out of this ordinary day-waking on a higher level, through which we switch on our life forces into a new element, just as we switch on our will when we come out of dreaming into ordinary wakefulness? - Of course, this is only a question, and the answer to it depends entirely on whether we can set out on a path that is, firstly, inwardly safe and, secondly, can be walked by every person through their own efforts. If we were to come to such a second awakening, then through this second awakening we would gain a point of view through which we would recognize the reality value of our waking life, observing it from a higher perspective, as we observe it in dreams from the higher perspective of ordinary consciousness. In order to bring about a second awakening, anthroposophy turns first of all to soul forces as they are present in ordinary life, but which already indicate through their ordinary nature that they are capable of development. Now even philosophers admit that what we call human memory points to a more spiritual nature of the human soul; that we cannot treat memory in the same way as we treat those soul faculties which are directly bound to the impressions of the outer sense world. Again, let us not adhere to philosophical considerations, but, as we do in ordinary consciousness, to that which plays a role as memory in man. Through memory we can call up images of experiences we went through many years ago. Depending on our disposition, these images may be more vivid or more shadowy, but they are there before us. When we indulge in ordinary sensory observation, that which we imagine must be present; that which memory gives is not present, it may be long gone. Through our imaginative power we conjure up, as it were, from our own inner being something before our soul which was once there, but which is no longer there, which cannot have a present existence. In this way we gain the insight that we are able to drive out of the human inner being forces of cognition which imagine something that does not exist in the present. And the question arises: Can perhaps through a certain further development of the powers of the soul, as we have developed them since our first childhood, that which underlies our power of memory be further developed? Can it be developed in such a way that we not only imagine what is not there at present but was once there during our life on earth, but that we imagine something that is not there at all? Then we would make the leap of life into a higher reality, into a reality from which ordinary earthly life would appear as the dreaming life does to the waking consciousness. Anthroposophy now makes such an attempt to develop that which underlies the ability to remember, in order to arrive at this second awakening through the inner practice of life. It addresses itself to the human powers of thought. After all, they are the ones who conjure up in our imagination what we have once experienced. And anthroposophical research proceeds in such a way that it does something with thought that is not actually done with thought in the present age. Today's thinking is - and rightly so from certain points of view - more oriented towards surrendering to the outside world. To allow the impressions of the external world to act first on the senses, to process them by counting, measuring, weighing, to combine them with thinking, is passive thinking, a thinking that man considers all the more secure with regard to knowledge, the more passive it is, the more it surrenders to what the external senses and organs say. Indeed, in order not to gain a fantastic knowledge as some philosophers do, anthroposophy turns to thinking in such a way that it seeks to develop this thinking further than it is in ordinary life. To this end, easily comprehensible ideas, which at first are not even considered in terms of what they mean, are placed at the center of ordinary consciousness and the whole life of the soul is concentrated on such ideas. The life of the soul is completely withdrawn from external impressions and external life by seeking more and more to make this life of the soul stronger and stronger on one or a series of manageable ideas. The result is something that lasts shorter for one person and longer for another, depending on their soul disposition. One person needs three months, another many years. If you repeat these exercises in rhythmic succession, after a while you will notice something in your soul life that I would like to compare with something in your outer life: If you strain a muscle again and again, it strengthens and becomes strong. In the same way, one feels the soul's imaginative faculty strengthening by always concentrating on an easily comprehensible idea; and finally one feels how the whole thinking becomes active, how real life, inner life in the true sense, moves into this thinking. One gradually feels the great difference, which is not only a figurative but a real one, between dead and abstract thinking and that towards which we strive and which we want to absorb into an inner life in the thinking element. I said that one must start from a manageable idea. In what I am going to tell you today about the exercises of the life of the soul, it is a question of following each step with full human prudence, as otherwise only the mathematician follows his steps, or the geometer, who is aware, when he brings one out of the other, how figure follows figure, how number follows number. This consciousness, which the anthroposophical researcher feels like the strict mathematician: to be accountable as a researcher - this consciousness must prevail. Of course, all self-suggestions, everything somehow subjective must be excluded. But this can never be ruled out if we take up arbitrary ideas from our mental life; they have many echoes of life in them, they often suggest something to us. But if we put together ideas that perhaps have no external meaning for us at all, such as “light - wisdom” - and concentrate again and again on such an idea, whose reality value remains indifferent to us, with the whole life of our soul, then the thinking ability in us strengthens. In this way we come to know - as I said, for one person it takes less time, for another it takes longer - what this means: life in thinking; for a kind of detachment of a higher person from the person we know lives in our physical body does indeed gradually take place. Just as we become aware in our physical body that it is something living when we move our legs, move our hands, so we become aware through such an exercise: It is something real, living, real, life-real, when I move in the strengthened thinking. One could roughly say: We finally come to experience a higher person in us through these power phenomena, through which one gropes spiritually, as one otherwise gropes physically with one's fingers. In this way we gradually experience how a higher man, who is experienced in this thinking, is torn away from the physical man; and we have arrived at the supersensible experience, at the experience of the supersensible man, in so far as he passes through earthly life between birth and death. By the fact that one has risen to observation in the inner ability to think, one comes to the fact that one overcomes space through this ability to think, overcomes the present in general and comes to an experience in time. Yes, one feels that which one experiences as the second, detached human being, not actually as a spatial human being. This is the physical human being. One finds that one experiences the second in this way as a human being fluctuating only in time. And that which one experiences there is structured into a kind of tableau which, in a relatively short time, allows one to survey life on earth from earliest childhood to the point in time one has just reached. There is a big difference between the two things: the life tableau and my memories. You could say: I can also put together this earthly life from my memories. I can put together from my memory what I experienced a short or long time ago. And if I make the effort and if I take my time, then I will have an overall memory of my life on earth. And it could be that I am deceiving myself that in such an examination I have something in my life tableau, which is manageable in a short time, which with the help of subconscious soul forces would bring something similar to a conscious memory picture before my mind. - But one gradually realizes that there is a great difference between what one puts together in one's memory and such a tableau of the soul's life, which stands before the soul as a first supersensible knowledge, initially as a self-knowledge. For when you compile your experiences as a memory picture, you actually always see in front of you what has had an effect on you from the outside. You see people, natural events, the external things that are of interest to you. This life tableau is completely different. There you have much less of an eye on what has come to you from the outside, so to speak, and more of an eye on what has worked from within. If I have gotten to know a person in life, I remember much less through this life tableau how he or she came across to me, but rather what longings were aroused in my own breast in order to find something special about this person. If I have any natural phenomenon in this life tableau, it is not so much the interesting aspects of the natural phenomenon that make themselves felt, but those impulses from my own human life that follow this natural phenomenon with particular sympathy or antipathy. That which stands before my soul in this tableau is myself, how I have behaved in relation to what I have gone through. One could say, if one wants to draw rough comparisons: This memory tableau that I have described, which can only be obtained after such an examination, is as different from an ordinary memory tableau brought about by memory as the impression in the seal is from the impression in the sealing wax. It is like the negative image to the positive image of that which we can put together through the ordinary memory image. Thus, when we have gone through the first stage of spiritual practice, we have come to a true self-knowledge of our earthly life. For such self-knowledge is there. There are always nuances mixed in. In this memory tableau you see what has brought you forward; then you say to yourself: “There is something that has made you imperfect, that has brought you back. -- One places oneself in this tableau of memory with human worth and human dignity, and through the realization that is first awakened one attains an idea of that which one is actually only now entitled to call the “ether” of the world in relation to external reality and the sensual forces. The ether of the world, which lives only in the temporal and which to a certain extent gives us a piece of what I have now described as the first form of the higher human being detached from the physical. But one has not been long enough with this first step. If you want more, you must undertake to continue these exercises of the soul. The next soul exercises consist in using a strongly activated inner will to remove the ideas from the consciousness, just as one has used one's will to place such ideas into the consciousness to strengthen the being and to concentrate on them. As I said, there must be complete prudence, as with the mathematician. For it must be said: We are in a certain way taken in with our whole soul-life by the conception which soon moves into the center of consciousness. And especially when thinking has already become so vivid that we have only this idea itself in consciousness, and that not only such ideas are there, but that our own inner experience appears as in powerful pictures in the tableau described - then we are strongly taken in by what we have before the soul in such a picture heightened to vividness. A greater power is necessary to remove such images from the consciousness than is necessary to remove ordinary images from the consciousness. One knows, by the way, what it means to remove ordinary ideas from the consciousness. Try to admit this to yourself honestly. When the senses are silent, moreover when the sensually perceived is silent, when the combination of thoughts is silent and the ideas and sensations are, as it were, removed from the consciousness, then man falls asleep. If there is no stimulation from the imagination, he does not have the strength to maintain the waking state. But if one has that strength of soul which is necessary for what I have described, then one also has the strength to take away the acquired ideas which come into us in this way through an inner strengthened life, to keep the whole consciousness empty of imagination and yet to remain awake. Just being awake, imagining nothing, that is what must be striven for as a second state: A waking consciousness empty of content! But this contentless waking consciousness, one can become aware of it inwardly, but it does not remain so for long. Once it has been established, however, the second stage of spiritual cognition occurs. Then one not only becomes aware of what has just been described, which lives in the human being, then the spiritual content of our world environment forces its way into this waking, content-free consciousness, into this empty consciousness. And the second human being, who has first detached himself from the physical, corporeal human being, who was conscious of himself in the course of his entire life on earth, will now not only be conscious of himself, but through this higher self-consciousness he will absorb a spiritual world of his surroundings. Again something appears before our soul which seems strange and foreign to the present man, but which is nevertheless contained in what I have called the second stage of man's spiritual knowledge, inspiration. An exact inspiration occurs there; just as everything I have described here must not be confused with what is often called clairvoyance in a nebulous mysticism. If one wishes to use this expression, one may only speak of an exact voyance, which is only based on the development of the soul forces, like mathematical thinking, which has no external reality in itself, but only one that is formed internally, and to which only mathematical thinking must be added when it extends to the sensory world, as in measuring, counting, weighing and so on. To this, what one has conceived in an inwardly living thinking, which is modeled on the particular mathematical thinking, must be added what I have described to you here. And through this spiritual work one arrives at knowledge in the same way that we arrive at knowledge through measuring, counting and weighing. And that which occurs is a state of soul life which is not known in ordinary consciousness because it is not necessary. I would like to make clear what state of soul life occurs when awake, empty consciousness is reached. First we think of ourselves in a modern metropolis, with all its noise, its din; we ourselves do not come to rest, we ourselves are absorbed in this noise, in this din. Then we move away from this cosmopolitan city - the din, the noise become quieter and quieter; if we move further away, even quieter. We imagine ourselves in the solitude of the forest. There is a silence that we can describe as zero in relation to the noise of the city. Silence around us, silence within us. But now something else can occur, although it is not observed in ordinary life. We have to use a second comparison. As you know, if someone has a certain amount of wealth, this wealth can be spent little by little; he owns less and less. If he earns nothing extra, if he continues to spend, then he is down to zero. If he has nothing at all and continues to spend, he is in debt; then he has less than zero. Mathematicians call this negative values, minus. Now imagine that: We have descended from the loud roar, the noise of the big city to silence zero and descend further, and it becomes quieter and quieter than silence and silence zero, so that we have less around us than mere silence, that it is quieter, quieter than quiet. This is the state of soul that gradually occurs when we pass through the empty but still awake consciousness. Little by little we feel quite clearly what I would like to call the deep silence of the human soul. This deep silence is not just silence, it is more or less, as you like, than silence. In terms of tranquillity, it goes below tranquillity zero. But then, when this deep silence of the soul is really experienced, everything that is of spiritual essence around us emerges from this deep silence of the soul. And the full inspiration occurs. Then we are put into the position, when we have experienced this deep silence of the soul, to actually also now hear spiritually that what lives in the spiritual world. And the ordinary sensory world becomes a means for us to hint at what lives in this spiritual world. I would like to speak quite concretely of real spiritual knowledge. Something sounds out of the deep silence of the soul that makes an impression on me: it excites me, it strikes me with a certain liveliness. I say it is something that makes an impression on me, just as the yellow color of a lively soul life makes an impression on me. Then I have something in the sensory world through which I can express what I have experienced in the spiritual world. I describe this knowledge by saying: It has an effect on me like the yellow color of the sense world, or like the tone C or C sharp, like warmth or cold. In short, that which I have experienced in the sense world becomes for me a material, just as what appears to me in the spiritual world can be described in ordinary words. The whole sense world becomes something like a language to express what one experiences in the spiritual world. This is not understood by those who want to make progress too quickly and therefore stop at superficial judgment. The investigator encounters an experience that makes the same impression on him as the sensual color, and therefore he describes what he experiences spiritually through colors, sounds and so on. Just as one should not confuse the word “table” with the real table, so now one should not confuse it with that by which it is described, the spiritual world itself, which sprouts from the deep silence. Once one has reached this point of view, one comes to extinguish this whole tableau of life, which one first conjured up, within oneself; not only to evoke empty consciousness towards individual ideas, but towards the whole earthly life of man, and indeed precisely in his inner form. One then, so to speak, extinguishes oneself as an earthly human being. But by now having the possibility to experience the deep silence of the human soul after the extinction of the earthly self, which is bound to the physical body of man, one now experiences that which one has become as a spiritual-soul man before one has descended from the spiritual world and has clothed the physical body around oneself. Out of the deep silence of the soul one experiences the spiritual-soul that one was in the pre-earthly existence. And just as one arrived at one's physical surroundings in the physical body, so, by placing oneself in that which one was in the spiritual-soul world, one arrives at recognizing how one was in the pre-earthly existence in the surroundings of spiritual-soul beings, even as a soul-spiritual being, as a similar being. One enters fully into that spiritual world from which one has descended to earthly existence. You can realize that in ordinary life the eternity of the human soul is only explored in one direction, the immortality of the soul. But this immortality of the soul has another side, for which the older language still had a word, but no longer the modern language. This soul immortality has not only one side, that of immortality, but also that of unbornness, and it is only from unbornness and immortality that the full soul immortality is composed. Thus one does not arrive through metaphysical speculation, but by awakening the soul itself, and out of the deep silence of the soul to that which is eternal in the human soul, was eternal and was spiritually present before man descended to earthly existence, and remains eternal by dwelling in the physical human body between birth and death. But we can only approach the eternal character step by step, also through anthroposophical spiritual research. As the third stage I must mention something that may cause a slight shudder, perhaps an inner mockery, especially for those who are sitting here with the usual scientific ideas. I can understand this very well, as I can understand all opposing objections to anthroposophy. Something that we already have in ordinary life can be further developed into a higher power of cognition, like the powers of a child into what we have developed in our adult state, and that is the power of love. Loving is something quite different when it is bound to the human body, when it surrenders to the passions that live themselves out in loving, than when, as I have described, after the physical ego, even the earthly ego from birth to death, has been stripped away, when the human being lives himself out of the physical existence into the state in which he faces the purely spiritual. When he thereby develops the powers of love, of complete surrender, then that which he has experienced in the pre-earthly state, which he now fully realizes, is transformed into knowledge. He experiences what it means to experience full consciousness with reality outside his physical body. And when he experiences this surrender to spiritual experience in this way, then his ego is returned to him in a new way. The ego, which in earthly life lives in selfishness and egotism, which is overcome by acquiring such self-knowledge as is acquired when this ego is twice extinguished, thus develops full love on a soul-spiritual level, and something then confronts you which at first appears to you like a complete stranger, like a completely alien personality. If you strive for this, it will happen in the least. One should strive for the love I have described. Then, because one can go completely out of oneself, one is confronted by what one is oneself, but like a foreign personality, and one only then realizes what this self was like in the past life on earth, which one went through before one came to this life on earth; one only then realizes how the ego was present in the earlier stage of existence on earth, when one is able to feel like a second person through increased, strengthened love. One looks back to a certain point in the development of time where the ego as ego had a beginning, where the repeated earth lives had a beginning. But we cannot speak of that now. We can only speak of the fact that we can look back on a series of earth lives, which are passed through to full human life, between which there are always lives in pre-earthly or post-earthly existence between death and a new earthly birth. This is the one thing one experiences of the eternal and immortal character of the soul when one has made up one's mind to the recognizing view. The other thing, however, which one acquires through the love that has increased to knowledge, is to be able to experience the higher human being outside of his physical body. That which one acquires further is that one sees how this being is without a body, and the realization of how the body becomes a corpse in death, how this body falls away, how the human being enters the after-earthly life. Just as one has a view of the pre-earthly life, of the unborn, one now has a view into immortality, into the after-earthly life. The moral impulses one has acquired as an earthly human being, which one carries through the gate of death, and how one prepares a new earthly existence together with the spiritual world in order to descend to earth as an earthly human being, this now appears before the soul in vivid vividness, which is based on intellectual modesty, but also on a certain trust in the powers of the human soul. This leads knowledge to that area of life which is so close to the longings and needs of man. We look at those whom we have loved in life, who are close to us through blood ties or soul ties; we look at the gate of death and ask: What will become of the ties that the blood has spun and of the ties that the soul and spirit have woven when a person has passed through the gate of death? If one has this insight, one knows how the outer physical shell of the physical body falls away from what man is as an eternal being, how man rises into the spiritual world with those laws and lives there with the forces which he has already brought down and with which he has lived in his physical life on earth. We then experience how that which we have in common with other people as blood ties, as bonds of friendship, as bonds of love, falls away from our communities just as the physical body of man itself falls away; and we know from the realization that we meet again the souls with whom a bond has connected us, in pure communion of the spiritual world, because the physical obstacles are no longer there. That what men do not demand to know out of a curious instinct, that what was human dignity, the fate of the souls, that becomes in this way a real knowledge. And still other things become a real knowledge. The reality of the outer physical world eludes the dream because the will is not involved in the physical body. In dreams man takes the world of images for reality; thus we take much for reality before we awaken in the manner described to the deep silence of the soul, to the spiritual life. When we wake up to the waking spiritual life, after we have gone through the second life-jolt and the physical reality experienced awake appears to us as mere dreaming, then many things that were reality to us in the physical-bodily life appear to us in the higher sense, in the sense of the physical-spiritual life, as a dream. Just as the dream reality is captured by the physically tangible reality, so that which we experience in physical life as moral or religious people is now captured by that to which we awaken through the second life pressure. And we become aware of what was actually meant by people like Knebel, Goethe's friend, who said as an old man: “When one has grown old, one finds that in the face of the decisive events of existence everything seems as if it had been prepared long ago. Everything seems to have been planned by man himself, which has had a profound influence on him as a man or as a youth. And all his steps as a youth seem to point to this experience. - This idea continues to develop and becomes true in the process of formation. If one penetrates this idea further with the knowledge that one gains in the way described, one sees that this is indeed the case in life. One experiences something quite decisive. One is led to a person with whom the further course of life is to be walked together. You look at the steps that have led you to this person. They come from the longing to experience precisely what you can experience with this person until you reach the goal that corresponds to a longing of the soul, a test of the soul in the right way. That which lives in man, through which he conjures up his destiny as if out of himself, must be connected to the view of the earthly lives lived through, in which one was a morally such and such a person, did this and that. And one sees that what one does now seems instinctive in this life, like chance; it is fatefully linked to what one was in the previous earthly life. This seems to be a devastating thought. But just as little as the fact that we have blond or black hair, blue or brown eyes, lean or full hands affects our freedom, dignity and full responsibility as human beings, so little does it affect what we are as free, responsible human beings when we know that it is the soul that configures us, that as free human beings we have to carve out our life's destiny on a fated basis. But life becomes comprehensible when man learns to look at it, imbued with this idea of destiny, which is quite compatible with freedom, that he does not stand in life in such a way that every moment is like chance to him, but that he feels himself placed in the world of natural necessity, as in the world of a real spirituality, in which he stands as a higher man with his moral, fateful powers. In this way, such knowledge leads man from outer life to the immortality of the soul. One can still object: Yes, individual spiritual researchers can indeed recognize this, but what does it mean for the ordinary person? - It means just as much as an artistically painted picture to someone who has not become a painter. It would be sad if you had to be a painter to understand a work of art. You only need a certain healthy feeling to experience the artistic, and only healthy human judgment to experience what the spiritual researcher describes. Only if one throws the unfortunately so numerous prejudices in one's own way, then one places oneself before the pictures which the anthroposophical spiritual researcher sketches, as one places oneself before a picture in which, instead of seeing a world, one sees nothing but splashes of color placed side by side. This world is also fully comprehensible to those who live a simple, ordinary life from the description of the anthroposophical spiritual researcher, although he is always able to understand it through books such as “How does one attain knowledge of the higher worlds? “ he is always able to go so far on the path of spiritual research without influencing his outer life that he can check what the anthroposophical spiritual researcher tells him, that he can check whether this anthroposophical spiritual researcher is speaking out of fantasy or whether his view is something that has been firmly acquired, just as mathematical judgments, measuring, counting, weighing and so on are themselves firmly acquired. This is what spiritual science wishes to introduce into the present spiritual life of mankind. It is that which it must believe corresponds to the numerous innermost needs of the soul. For it is so that today many people instinctively, unconsciously, precisely through what one has become through education, out of the natural scientific prerequisites, gain the longing to know something in a similar way, encompassing the experiences, about that which is so close to the soul and of which I have only spoken today as an example of the immortality of the soul and that which is connected with immortality. But of course this puts something into the world that is like the Copernican world view compared to the one we were used to at that time. But it is so that what appears to be a human “folly” gradually becomes a matter of course. The Copernican world view even had to wait a very long time before it became self-evident. Anthroposophy can wait. But it must say, out of an obligation to culture and civilization, that it is fully understandable to it when ordinary natural science, which considers itself sovereign with its means, has arrived at a doctrine of the soul without a soul through an ordinary pursuit of the life of the soul with the external means of calculating, counting, weighing, and that it finds an ideal in it. Anthroposophy, however, would like to add to that which it does not deny the justification of on the one hand, to a doctrine gained from natural science, through developed full comprehension of the innermost essence of the human soul, what is soul-spiritual in man as eternal life, what is soul-spiritual in the whole world, in the whole cosmos as eternal life, so that man can recognize himself as eternal, intimately connected with the eternal in the cosmos, as immortal in the cosmos. Anthroposophy therefore wishes to give knowledge of the present human life and the human life of the near future, so that it meets a necessity of the time by adding to the present teaching of the soul without soul a teaching of the soul awakened vividly out of the human soul, which then follows from such a teaching again a teaching of the world permeated by soul, permeated by spirit. And this will be needed more and more. |
84. What is the Purpose of Anthroposophy and the Goetheanum?: The Development and Education of the Human Being in the Light of Anthroposophy
30 Apr 1923, Prague Rudolf Steiner |
---|
Such discussions could be made, but what is meant from the point of view under discussion here will be best understood if I stick to the popular. What lives in our memory, what makes our personality complete, so that we are able at any moment to conjure up before our eyes what we have been through, is indeed brought into the human soul through impressions from the outside world. |
If it is a memory that can be compared to a habitual movement, then one can say that for memory one image follows another. In short, what we call memory undergoes a metamorphosis when children change teeth around the age of seven. It undergoes a metamorphosis from more physical-bodily experience to spiritual-soul experience. |
It could now be objected that only those who have undergone what qualifies them to look into the spiritual world can have an interest in such knowledge of man. |
84. What is the Purpose of Anthroposophy and the Goetheanum?: The Development and Education of the Human Being in the Light of Anthroposophy
30 Apr 1923, Prague Rudolf Steiner |
---|
The words of the ancient Greeks, addressed to man, sound like a deep spiritual admonition: “Know thyself!” These words can be applied to general knowledge of human nature, not so much to personal knowledge. In this way, knowledge of human nature is, as it were, designated as the summit of all human knowledge and striving. And we can also feel from the way this word sounds to us that it is not meant merely in a scientific-theoretical sense, but that it is meant as a spiritual admonition in a moral-religious sense. And one would like to say: After the expiration of a many-sided, self-contained spiritual development epoch of humanity, today a kind of counter-word stands before our soul. This counter-word was pronounced almost fifty years ago and has today, in a certain way, even been forgotten, disappeared from the consciousness of mankind. Nevertheless, the whole modern state of mind, what one carries within oneself today as the great soul conflicts, lives under the influence of this newer word. It is the word that Du Bois-Reymond pronounced, the word: “We cannot recognize,” the word: “Ignoramus, ignorabimus.” Even if many today believe themselves to be beyond the confession of this word, in the way we relate to the world as humans, this word is still deeply involved. It is, so to speak, the confession, expressed or unexpressed, of the results of scientific research in their significance for a general knowledge of the world and view of life. But anyone who has been involved in intellectual life for decades and has observed how this intellectual life has developed over the last three to four centuries can do no other than justify, as it were, what is regarded as knowledge today in relation to science. Natural science has indeed achieved so much in terms of exploring the external world of the senses; it has achieved so much in terms of applying instruments and experimental methods to research into this external world and its great laws, and it has confirmed and corroborated what it has discovered through the manifold empirical, technical and practical applications, without which we could no longer imagine our modern life. This natural science assumes that it can gain knowledge of the world that is as independent as possible of what man, out of his desires and his prejudices and preconceptions, can bring to the knowledge of the nature of things and world processes. And it is precisely by excluding all personal factors that science has achieved all its successes. But now, precisely the person who stands quite honestly on the ground of natural science, who sees through how beneficially this natural science has worked precisely for the knowledge of external nature, must say more and more to himself, out of the handling of the applied methods: to those regions in which the human soul-spiritual reigns, precisely natural science, as it has developed today, cannot penetrate. One might say, not because of its shortcomings, but precisely because of its merits. If we survey what has been achieved in the various fields of natural science, we will see that this science naturally also strives to return to the human being. It strives to apply its methods to the nature of the human being. But it can only research the external, bodily, physical nature of the human being. We see this most clearly when the scientific method is applied to the human being, when experimental psychology is used, and when truly magnificent scientific research methods are employed. We see how the expressions of the soul in the human constitution are examined. But we become aware that through all these investigations we cannot get at what can be called the eternal in human nature, what must be called that in human nature, in the face of which man carries the deep longing to recognize it in its true essence, and from which he at least initially has hope that it will arise for him as something beyond the limits of earthly life, as something beyond birth and death and having an effect beyond it. Nothing should be said here against such experimental methods as those of experimental psychology. The very field of research from which I take the liberty of speaking to you this evening recognizes the full validity of these methods. But precisely because they can be seen through from this point of view, even within their limitations, it must be said that these methods cannot approach the actual essence of the soul and spirit. And this was what compelled a few insightful researchers to admit that natural science cannot reach what, on the one hand, is the nature of matter itself and, on the other, the nature of human consciousness. But if man cannot explore how his consciousness, that is, the soul-life at work within him, takes hold of matter, then he must bid farewell to that great challenge: “Know thyself!” Then we would have concluded that period of human spiritual development since ancient Greece with the admonition “Know thyself!” as a beautiful, powerful — but nevertheless only one illusion of humanity. Then we must confess: this demand cannot be fulfilled. The deeper one penetrates into the spirit of nature research, the more one must admit from the point of view of anthroposophy that those who speak of the “ignorabimus” of natural science are right, who speak of the fact that there are limits to natural science that it cannot exceed. But the question arises as to whether the human mind can be easily consoled by the mere recognition of such limitations, and whether it does not seek from the outset to disregard what the human heart desires in this respect, as something particularly prejudicial. The aim of what I would like to characterize to you this evening as anthroposophical research is to provide an answer to this. It seeks to recognize the extent to which this demand of the soul is somehow justified. Many people today see what science has achieved on the one hand, and on the other hand they feel that science cannot get to the actual soul-spiritual. And so many of those who do not want to stop at the confession of the limits of human knowledge turn to one or other kind of mysticism, that mystical way of looking at things that attempts to reach that which relates to the eternal in the human being by immersing oneself in one's own inner self. And through such mystical contemplation many beautiful things have been brought up from the depths of the human soul, from the depths of life that otherwise remain in the subconscious or unconscious. Through such mystical contemplation many people have come to believe that what is brought up from the depths of the soul, what is present in man, is directly rooted in the divine-spiritual existence, so that by brings the divine-spiritual to revelation in the recognition of the human being himself, and thereby advances to the exploration of the eternal character of man and to the connection of man with the divine. Thus anyone who raises the big questions of human existence today finds themselves, I would say, between two cliffs that seem to set insurmountable limits to knowledge: on the one hand, natural science, and on the other, mysticism. However much mysticism promises, however beautiful and magnificent it draws from the human soul, most mystical attempts cannot stand up to truly scientific and disciplined knowledge. For anyone who has been accustomed to judging all things, including those within himself, by the conscientious methods of natural science, will soon find that what the mystic often brings up from the depths of his soul is nevertheless nothing other than what he may have received or acquired in the outer world in the form of ideas or feelings from some distant period in the past feelings, which then, perhaps through a beautifully working imagination, have grown into powerful images, but which ideas and feelings, by descending into the depths of the human being, have been changed by the human organism, which for external knowledge has such a secret and meaningful connection with the soul. And it is precisely to the deep soul-searcher that it reveals itself, how that which one, in a mystical way, has gained, one holds for eternal, is nothing more than a modified, even modified by the human organism itself, result of memory. And so, in the end, if one wants to approach deeper experiences, the great questions of human existence, one must admit: natural science offers no possibility of penetrating into these questions. It closes its insights in one area, so that with its insights one can only recognize the external aspects of the human being, and one cannot get close to the human being with them. This is the necessary conclusion that one must come to. Especially serious and honestly meant natural science does not come close to the human being. And mysticism, as it usually appears at first, does not come from within the human being. By penetrating into the world, natural science does not come from the world to the human being; by penetrating into the human being, mysticism does not come out into the world from the human being. If we allow ourselves to be deeply affected by what the soul receives from these two perspectives, we cannot but ask ourselves once more: Is it not perhaps possible to go even further than what mysticism gives on the one hand and what knowledge of nature gives on the other? Now, in the lecture I was privileged to give at the Urania a few days ago, I took the liberty of pointing out how anthroposophy, as spiritual research, strives to take a close look at what a person acquires in memory. And so, in the end, memory turns out to be what can be deepened. Today, as a few days ago, I do not wish to delve into deep philosophical or epistemological discussions, but to remain with popular consciousness. Such discussions could be made, but what is meant from the point of view under discussion here will be best understood if I stick to the popular. What lives in our memory, what makes our personality complete, so that we are able at any moment to conjure up before our eyes what we have been through, is indeed brought into the human soul through impressions from the outside world. They are sensory impressions that we absorb and process with our ideas, and which change in the human being in an unknown way and then come up again; they come up of their own accord or with effort, when the person needs them, and are brought up by the person from the soul. And if we want to visualize what actually lives in the memory for the human soul, we can come to no other conclusion than to say to ourselves: It is like something that is reflected from the mirror of the soul, which lies deep and forever in our human being, even if it is after a long time. The external world is reflected in our soul because we have memory, because we have the ability to remember. And as I said, even if I am not immediately able to explain the nature of this mirror of the soul due to the limited time and circumstances, the image will suffice for our understanding. We do not get to the bottom of the essence of our soul with our memory. Just as when we have a mirror before us, we see what is in front of the mirror, so memory, in the mystically evoked images, offers us nothing other than the reflection of the outer world. If one wants to see what is behind the mirror, then the mirror must either be removed or the mirror must be smashed. In a sense, we have to break through this inner mirror, this power of memory within us, in order to look deeper into our being. And we break through this soul mirror, that is, we go even deeper into the human being through that which this mirror allows us to see as mysticism, when we inwardly bring our thinking, which we otherwise allow to be stimulated by experiments, into activity, when we meditate and concentrate on a particular thought content, repeatedly strengthening the soul forces. I described it in detail in my Urania lecture and discussed it in my books: how, through a special activity of thinking, we can go below the memory level and look more deeply into our being. One might assume that we would then see what our physical organization is. For there is no doubt that, for ordinary consciousness, we only penetrate to the memory mirror in our soul, and in doing so, the processes of the physical organization change the image from the outside, which we see in the soul mirror, into a distorted image. But if we create an ever more activated thinking, with which we live inwardly as with our blood and our breath, so that our whole being participates in this inwardly living thinking, we penetrate deeper into our human nature, then not a physical human being is revealed to us, but a spiritual-soul being, which can only be revealed to us through this strengthened thinking. Then that in man reveals itself to us which is entirely of a spiritual-soul nature, which remains unconscious to consciousness, but which, by its own nature, shows that it was present before man, through birth, even through conception, entered upon his earthly existence. That this can be the case can be understood when we consider how memory, through its own content, indicates to us that we are not dealing with the presentation of a present event, but with a past one. We have the same certainty about the character of our experience when we approach the event that characterizes us, which leads us deeper than mystical contemplation. Then we gain a mental picture of all that is actually creative in that first epoch of man's life, in which such a wonderful plastic activity is carried out on the sensory nervous system, on the brain and on the rest of the human organization. But through such contemplation we follow the human soul-spiritual being beyond birth and death; we look into a spiritual world in which we were as spiritual-soul human beings with our core being before we descended into this earthly world and clothed ourselves with what our ancestors gave us, with a physical human body. It is certainly the case that one comes to this view not only through that nebulous gift of man that is today called “clairvoyance”. Even if one uses the word “clairvoyance” for what I have just spoken of, one must address this as exact clairvoyance. For the one who sets out on the path of spiritual research like an exact scientist activates thinking in such a way that this thinking brings forth from the human being not only the memory images, but also things that lie below the ability to remember, that were creatively in the human being before the ability to remember had developed, before the human being began his earthly existence. This is one side of the coin that anthroposophical research turns to when faced with the two principles characterized. It seeks to deepen the spiritual through exact thought processing and, on one side, goes beyond birth to the realization of the eternal essence of the human being. But just as one must recognize how the mystic develops what he so beautifully calls his contemplation, which leads him to illusions, how one must recognize this if one wants to arrive at a scientific knowledge and not stop at the points where the mystic , how one must strive for knowledge of the prenatal human being in the continuation of the mystical, and on the other hand, one must try to take a further step in spiritual knowledge by deepening scientific research. And that arises in the following way. Yes, we come up against limits, especially when we honestly apply scientific methods to the world; we come up against limits when we apply them to natural processes in a real way. We come up against limits that we formulate in the concept of “material consciousness” and so on. But it is one thing to recognize these limitations and to say, “The human being cannot go beyond these limits”, and to have to reassure oneself, or to begin to struggle with all of one's humanity precisely at these limits, saying, “Perhaps these limits arise from the fact that one limiting the abilities one has within oneself here in order to perfect natural science – but then, if one continues to struggle, using one's full human abilities to struggle with these ideas, which will then gain boundaries; perhaps then one will go beyond these boundaries. I know that an objection can easily be raised; people will say: Yes, it is so good, so beneficial that science has understood how to exclude the human element from scientific methods, to stick to measuring, counting, the results of the scales, and so on, in other words, to separate what is known as research methods, what is recognized, from the human being. It is dangerous to mix people back in. If you do this in the way that anthroposophical research wants, namely that you first stand on the point of view of science, that you have fully mastered the objective detachment of research methods from the human being and have introduced personal struggle into the detached, then something else comes out. Then you respect the demands of natural science and at the same time you introduce the human element into the objectivity of natural science. And here one must say: if you have absorbed yourself in the knowledge of the natural sciences of the last few centuries, especially the nineteenth century, so that you have, so to speak, completely imbued yourself with the spirit of the natural sciences, and can one still give oneself with one's whole personality, precisely to the things that science describes, then a gift of human nature, which is otherwise not at all regarded as a power of knowledge, becomes a power of knowledge. This devotion to something that is attained as something objective ultimately also becomes an objective expression of human love. When one can express this way of thinking with full respect for the scientific way of thinking, after having surveyed the phenomena of the world from a scientific point of view as far as possible, when one musters enough heroism in research to immerse oneself in what is scientifically given with such devotion, as one otherwise only immerses oneself when one develops love in the world, especially human love, then love itself becomes knowledge, and then, with the love that has undergone the metamorphosis to become the power of knowledge, one penetrates behind what science is able to give. This is the work not of a day, but of long epochs of human life, to penetrate to those entities that lie beyond the boundaries of science. But what then emerges is the following: At the moment when one breaks through those boundaries, as it were, and looks behind the scenes that are erected by scientific knowledge, something about the human being himself becomes strangely transparent, which previously always remained opaque: we wake up in the morning, spend our day with a waking consciousness out of the forces of our earthly feelings and our soul, we fall asleep in the evening. What happens to the soul and spirit in the physical and bodily is beyond human consciousness. What plays into human life are confused dreams without cognitive value. So that we can say: the entire development of human life consists of what we live through while awake and what we spend while sleeping. And we do not pay attention to the fact that when we look back, we always piece together the morning and the evening, and let that fall out of consciousness that we cannot reach with it, that withdraws from consciousness, that we switch off the stretches that we have slept through. Now the question arises as to whether what sleep gives us spiritually and mentally is not just as important as what being awake gives us. Of course, only being awake can be considered for our outer life, and the more civilization has turned to mere observation of the outer life, the more it relies on observing the waking state. But for the life of the human being itself – something that even level-headed philosophers have already conceded – what happens in the abundant third of life on earth that we sleep through is no less essential than what we experience while awake. But it only becomes vividly apparent when we have broken through the boundaries defining things through the struggle with nature through ultimate perceptions. Then it happens that the empty space of experience, which we otherwise sleep through, which otherwise contains nothing for us except dreaming, that this empty space of knowledge is filled with content, that we learn to look at that which otherwise shrouds itself in the darkness of sleep. Just as we can look back on what presents itself in waking life as the knowledge that we, as physical-sensory human beings, have experienced with the earth and its phenomena, so now knowledge of a spiritual-soul nature arises from the state in which the human being finds himself from falling asleep to waking up. The darkness between falling asleep and waking up is illuminated, this third of our life becomes transparent to us, and what we see is then our true self, the form of thinking, feeling and willing. We see that which, without our consciousness knowing it, is constantly at work within us, shaping our spiritual and psychological being. We see through to the content as that which is separated from us by the gate of death when we lay down the physical body. As sleep becomes transparent to us, we learn to recognize the true nature of human immortality. When we look beyond the mystical, when we go further than ordinary mysticism, we get to know the prenatal nature of the human being when we take natural science seriously, but when we begin to struggle at the boundary, we get to know what immortal existence the human being carries within. And so, for us, the human being comes together in its development, in that we see, so to speak, how a prenatal human being enters into the physical human organization, I would even say becomes more and more absorbed in this physical human organization, how the physical human organization becomes more and more becomes mightier and mightier, how that which has entered into the human being through birth, in the physical human existence, fades more and more in the further development of the human being, how, so to speak, the human being from this side becomes more and more a physical-bodily being. But in the same measure as this development proceeds, in the same measure as the spirit and soul that are innate in us submerge in the physical body, so that which appears to us, when we observe sleep, as the future being of the human being emerges. As we look more and more towards the end of the normal human life, we see how, on the other hand, the spiritual-soul being of the spiritual post-mortal human existence emerges in contrast to the dying spiritual human life of prenatal existence. In every moment of earthly life we see a measure of what the human being has brought with them from the eternal worlds into earthly existence, what they are forging in order to carry it through the gateway of death into a spiritual world; cognitively we advance to immortality. The path I am describing to you, in order to arrive at an understanding of the human being by going beyond mysticism and natural science, is not one that can be dismissed by casually labeling it “clairvoyant.” This is a path in which one knows how each step follows the previous one, just as the mathematician knows how one mathematical derivation follows another. The path that I have been able to sketch for you – with reference to the books mentioned – is the path of anthroposophy, the path that leads to the unborn and immortal nature of the human soul in a way that could be explained to a strict mathematician, and which shows how one does not have to stop at the world in order to penetrate into the human being, as one does not have to stop at the human being in mysticism in order to penetrate into the world, but how one can connect the knowledge of the world with the knowledge of the human being. If enough natural science and enough mysticism is pursued in this way, then the possibility will arise for the future spiritual civilization of humanity to fulfill the word that approaches man so powerfully admonishing, the word “know thyself!” Such knowledge as I have just described, however, differs from the knowledge that is bound to the nervous system, which is essentially knowledge of the head. And allow me to make a personal remark, which is, however, completely factual. As a spiritual researcher trying to penetrate this realm, which I call the realms that one has to pass through before birth and after death, one is aware that you cannot get by with the thinking that otherwise serves you in life. You have to develop a strengthened thinking that engages the whole person. One does not become a medium through this, but the whole human being must be taken up by such thinking. Such thinking penetrates into feeling, into emotion, and even demands that the human being surrender himself to it with the whole content of his will. At the same time, thinking about spiritual content is such that it cannot be incorporated into the memory in the usual way, like any other. Here too I would like to make a personal comment: You see, when a spiritual researcher gives a lecture like the one I am giving here, he cannot prepare it in the same way as other scientific lectures. In that case he would only appeal to memory. But what has come about through such a deepening cannot be assimilated by memory, it must be experienced again and again in every moment. It can be brought down into those regions where we put our knowledge into words, but one must endeavor to do so with one's whole being. And that is why I have a profound experience of only being able to incorporate into human language that which I succeed in researching in the spiritual world. And by incorporating it into human language, it also becomes incorporated into memory; I only succeed when I draw or write down a few lines, so that not only the head but also all the other organ systems are involved. You have to feel the need to take one or the other to help you, because you can't manage it, it fluctuates when you want to grasp it with your head. The important thing is that I express the thought with lines and thus fix it. So you can find whole truckloads of old notebooks of mine that I never look at again. They are not there for that either, but so that what I have laboriously extracted from my mind can be developed to the point where it can be clothed in words and thus brought to the memory. Once it has been written, one has participated in the spiritual production with something else in one's organism than merely with the head, with thoughts, then one is able to hold on to that which wants to escape. The rest of the human organization is initially uninvolved, unconsciously more dormant than the mental processes, and when we incorporate something into our will, we make use of those organs that are in a state that we describe as dormant when we are awake. We are actually only awake in our thoughts and imagination, for the way in which our mental images penetrate into our organism as a volitional decision, to become a movement of the hand or fingers, remains completely shrouded in darkness in ordinary consciousness. Only the spiritual researcher will recognize what happens between the process in the brain and the movement. And so spiritual knowledge, which is not ordinary head knowledge, is entrusted to the whole human organization. By acquiring knowledge of the human being from within the whole human being, one is able to apply this knowledge of the human being, which can take the prenatal and the after-death as a tangible reality, to practical life in a completely different way than one would be able to without this true knowledge of the human being. Now those who are grounded in anthroposophical research dare, I would say, through a twist of fate that also extends to the other areas of human education, pedagogy and didactics, to introduce human education into practical life. Those who imbibe the knowledge of the human being that has been brought forth from such research as I have mentioned acquire a more refined instinct, a spiritualized instinct, for everything that develops in the human being through the different ages from birth to death. We must then only have the courage to look at human development, the knowledge of which we need, at a higher level, in the same way as we otherwise look at anything with strict scientific methods that lies within the scientific world. For example, the following arises: We are always thinking about what the effect of the soul and spirit on the physical body of the human being might actually be. But we do not consider that we should not apply the methods of speculation to such questions, but should also apply the methods of observation to such questions. When real observation of human beings is developed humanely, then we see – I am speaking from a popular point of view – how in the first age of the child, from birth to the change of teeth, in a wonderful way the most significant abilities of the human being emerge from the indeterminate depths of his being. We see how the dynamic develops through which the human being, as an upright creature, places himself in the world in his balance, how speech and thought emerge from the depths of the soul and are physically realized. But what we see culminates organically in the change of teeth. This has the peculiarity of being a unique event in human life. What happens during the change of teeth does not repeat itself. In a sense, a conclusion is made with a sum of forces in the human organization. Only someone who does not know this human organization can believe that the change of teeth stands alone. No, it does not stand alone, it stands as the outwardly perceptible expression of what is going on in the whole human organism. The human being is going through something that he will no longer go through in later life, otherwise he would always change his teeth in a periodic sequence. But those who observe the human being are aware of this significant transformation of the spiritual and psychological nature of the human being But this change, which takes place during this epoch of the human being's life, is not observed. If I were to present what educators and didacticians should know, what underlies the human knowledge I want to talk about here, it would go far beyond the scope of a lecture, and so I will just sketch it out. Take memory, for example. On superficial examination, we say that memory behaves in a certain way up to the change of teeth, then it changes somewhat. But it is something different, the memory before the change of teeth and the memory after the change of teeth. Today, due to our scientific attitude, we do not have the right talent for observation for such intimate expressions of human nature. For a correct observation, it can be seen that the wonderful memory before the change of teeth is nothing more than the completion of habits expressed from within. From the forces of habit, memory is built up until the teeth change. If it is a memory that can be compared to a habitual movement, then one can say that for memory one image follows another. In short, what we call memory undergoes a metamorphosis when children change teeth around the age of seven. It undergoes a metamorphosis from more physical-bodily experience to spiritual-soul experience. Once one begins with such an observation, further ones arise that are tremendously characteristic of the further development of the human being. For example, when one has acquired the instinct of observation, when one has assimilated the knowledge of spiritual research, one sees that the child, up to the change of teeth, is an imitative being. Of course, one must not take such things crudely, but the child in the first period of life is, so to speak, one single large sense organ. We can compare the whole life of the child in the first period with a single sense organ, we can compare it with the internal organization of the eye. Just as the eye takes in the external world and, through the application of willpower, builds up the image of what is impressed upon the eye organ through the agency of the organic within, so the child is constantly striving to reproduce what is present in its environment through imitation, which emerges from the inner being. The child is entirely sensory organ, entirely active sensory organ. Because the whole being of the child functions as a sense organ, the child not only imitates and inwardly experiences, in a dreamy state, quite unconsciously, what is external movement, gesture, what is speech sound, what is thought in speech sound, but it always arises - and this is the peculiar thing - from this starting point: the imitative child observes the moral significance of the gestures of father and mother. The moral significance of facial expression, for example, finds its counterpart in the child's sense of it; it becomes ingrained in the child, in its physical organization. The child organizes itself right down to the cellular level by empathizing with what is happening in its environment. Only when we consider the implications of this will we be able to distinguish between what is inherited and what is acquired in this way during the first childhood epoch through imitation from the environment. Then we will see the wonderful interaction between the environment and the child, and the real, for the sober-minded observer mystical, concept of the science of heredity will be able to be placed on a completely different footing. But it also shows the special nature that the human being brings with them, in that they enter earthly existence as spiritual-soul beings with an etheric body, which is something that is unfamiliar to today's way of thinking. What characterizes the child is a bodily-religious being. It is actually the case that the child is given over with its body to the physical outer world and its moral content, just as we can be given over in a religious mood to something that reveals itself to us as divine. It is in a bodily-religious mood; because this mood is purely bodily-religious, it does not, of course, have the mood of piety and similar states that later become mental religiosity. But if we follow the development of the human being, we see how what remains in the body until the teeth change then appears differently, how what is completely contained in the bodily-physical in the first epoch moves into impulses of feeling and will. And when we send our children to primary school, we must realize that the inner life of the child undergoes a metamorphosis. After the final point mentioned, which is the change of teeth, what was physical experience is partially left behind in the physical development and appears in a different form as soul and feeling. That which was first in the growth forces, in the plastic formative forces, that which has worked in the body as spiritual-soul during the change of teeth, part of this detaches itself and transforms into the free soul-spiritual after the change of teeth. And what we call growth, what has been working in the body, gradually transforms into the spiritual-soul. If we pay attention to this and are equipped with this knowledge, then we as teachers and educators face the child to be educated with our whole attitude and all our knowledge in the right way. Then we know that in this physical, bodily, sensual being, which is in a religious mood of devotion to its environment, as it grows into a bodily-religious being, the spiritual-soul being that was there in the pre-earthly existence. Let us put ourselves in the shoes of an educator who is confronted with the child in this way. He will be aware of his responsibility, he knows that the spiritual worlds have sent him to guide a being that he has to guess at and unravel through its physical expressions. He will stand before the being in such a way that he devotes himself to helping everything that the child has brought with it from the spiritual and soul worlds to truly come to manifestation. And with reverence for his calling, the educator will stand before the child, seeing with each month, with each year, that all that it has brought with it from the spiritual and soul world is transformed into the physical and bodily. And he will observe the way in which he can influence the child, and he will be able to perceive what was bodily-physical before the transformation, in the first epoch until the change of teeth; in the second epoch, from the change of teeth until sexual maturity, it transforms itself as a transition into the soul, and only with sexual maturity does it transform itself into the spiritual. The human being then presents himself to us in such a way that what has been experienced in his organization in the first years of childhood now comes to expression in his spiritual grasp of the world: the bodily-religious becomes spiritual-religious. Now we can see the connection between what is physical and what becomes soul and spirit. Now we no longer speculate about the physical and bodily, about spirit and soul; now we see how, in the different ages of life in human development, the spiritual and soul-like is directly revealed. Now we gain an understanding of the human being based on the interaction between body and soul, on the basis of observing human beings, which becomes the basis for proper human education. By the will of fate, the opportunity arose to apply what results from such observation in a practical, didactic and pedagogical way in the years when one is able to guide the destiny of the child. In Stuttgart, Mr. Emil Molt founded the Waldorf School as a free elementary school, to which the lower classes of the middle school were later added. The leadership was given to me. I was now able to apply the methods that result from the human knowledge described above. The aim is to initially leave aside what is otherwise called the “teaching goal”, and to read this from the human development itself. What I have described is only a rough sketch, but it can be observed from day to day in a new form in the child through the pedagogical instinct that arises from working with the child. Through this, one can see how the child's life unfolds; one can see what dictates what you, as an educator, should bring to the child each week, each month, and that you let the human being's inner being dictate what you, as an educator, should bring to the child. For example, when you first send your child to primary school, it is only natural that he or she should have an aversion to learning to read and write. And that is understandable. Consider that these strange signs, which we call letters and by which we read and write, which are something completely foreign to the human being, have emerged from the original characters in a long cultural development. The original writing emerged from the images and signs of what it represented; it was even closer in expression to what it meant; it was still similar to what one perceived directly. The child who comes to school and is supposed to learn the derived characters feels no affinity with the characters that are foreign to his or her perception. This understanding only awakens with sexual maturity and is quite different from that between the sixth and eighth years and between the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth years of life. The child, because it is only there emotionally, relies on the pictorial, which presents itself to it in the same way as sensory perception and sensory vision. If we recognize this, then we will introduce the right educational impulses for this age; but then we must move on to those things that we have introduced in our school in Stuttgart. The aim is to bring the child to a stage where they can draw by painting and paint by drawing. They should not be engaged only with their heads and eyes, but with their whole being. It is amazing what emerges in terms of pictorial quality when children draw and paint. If this is properly directed, it is possible to develop the letters, writing and reading from what is close to the children. We learn to read after learning to write because reading only involves the head, whereas writing involves the whole person. This is an example of how we try to achieve, through practical pedagogy and didactics, what human education should achieve, based on knowledge of the human being. The person who looks at how the human being is predisposed in terms of their religious life will also find the opportunity to bring in the moral-religious impulses. In this way, the following is revealed: It is remarkable how children between the ages of nine and ten, in the first third of the second stage of life, go through something like this in this stage of life. All this takes place unconsciously. We see how the child, having changed teeth, makes the transition from being an imitative being to one who, in response to the authority of the educator and teacher, acquires everything. You will believe the person who wrote the “Philosophy of Freedom” thirty years ago when he says that he does not approach you as an advocate for authority, but precisely when you have recognized from that “Philosophy of Freedom” what freedom means , then one can also appreciate that it is out of the lawfulness of the human being that the child, from the change of teeth to the time of sexual maturity, is a being that completely imitates what it sees in its teacher or educator. We see that the child not only wants to model itself on the teacher or educator through language, in accordance with its own inner laws, but that it wants to model itself on the whole of human life. When the child has become immersed in this necessary, self-evident sense of authority, we see how it undergoes a kind of crisis between the ages of nine and ten. Everything happens emotionally and intuitively, the child does not give it any thought, but it approaches the teacher and wants something special. And if we want to put it into words, the child thinks: Until now, the beautiful was beautiful because the teacher and educator thought it was beautiful, until now the true was true because the teacher and educator thought it was true. But from this point on, the child feels: Who justifies this authority before the whole world, where did it get the true and the beautiful as true and beautiful? The child is going through a crisis, it knows nothing of what I have formulated here, it only senses something. And we, as teachers and educators, must observe this moment so that the right word can be spoken from the educator to the child, over and over again, if necessary. For it is a matter of the fact that our actions in this moment of crisis determine the whole of later life, whether it is full of joie de vivre and security or is alienated and inwardly paralyzed. An educational method of this kind shows us that we, as educators, must do what is beneficial for life as a whole. If we enter into such a study of life, we will see how something that is properly introduced into a child at an early age only comes to fruition in later life. I will give you an example here. We know people who, when they get older, perhaps when they are very old and enter into some society, they do not need to say much, they are something that brings calm, peace, something that blesses into society. These are people who, often only through the nuance of their words, through the way they speak, can have a magnificent effect on their fellow world, with moral impulses, dispensing grace. If we are not satisfied with observing life in shorter periods, and if we make the effort and are able to observe the whole of human life, then we know that such people, who bring such blessings, had the good fortune as children to look up in adoration to other people or to something that was shown to them. From this veneration between the ages of ten and fourteen develops that which makes us benefactors in later life, which, figuratively speaking, I want to say: No hand can rise in blessing in later life that has not learned to fold in prayer in childhood. This is just a pictorial way of indicating how a true knowledge of the human being brings such things to the child that the feeling for moral good and the antipathy for evil grow and live, that they grow as the human body itself grows. One has the feeling that if one brings sharp contours into definitions to the child, it would be as if one were to shackle the child's organism. We must give the child concepts and impulses that can grow like the organism, that can grow spiritually and soulfully, that spiritually carry within them the inner possibility of becoming ever richer and richer, so that later one can look back with joy in one's memory that the child's life has sprouted in the aged human body. I would like to show you with a few pictures how a real knowledge of the human being, gained in the way I described at the beginning of my lecture, can be applied to the education and development of the child. You will see in the Stuttgart School how it will have to prove to you what I have described to you here, how it provides, so to speak, the practical proof of life that exists to a certain degree, even if we want to be modest about the results. It could now be objected that only those who have undergone what qualifies them to look into the spiritual world can have an interest in such knowledge of man. But it is not so. Although anyone who has gone through the path of knowledge, as described for example in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds,” can verify for themselves what spiritual research says, this is not even necessary for judgment, just as anyone who is not a painter themselves can judge the beauty of a picture. Although only the researcher can describe the spiritual world, those who have retained a healthy sense of judgment can certainly see through the truth or untruth of what is being researched from the spiritual world. Therefore, those who profess this spiritual research should not be portrayed as a sect or as blind. Anthroposophy does not want to be a sect; it wants to be a continuation of scientific research, which has developed over centuries to its culmination in the nineteenth century, and we are still in the process of developing it today. Only by following these guidelines can it become a true knowledge of the human being and thus the basis for an education that is appropriate for humanity and in keeping with human dignity. For it is not only through knowledge of the world that we can cope in life, since neither science nor mysticism can lead the human being to a full knowledge of his or her own humanity. For it is like breathing: there must be an interaction, a kind of inhalation and exhalation, between knowledge of the world and knowledge of the human being. But such knowledge alone can only be the basis for an education that pursues the spiritual and soul aspects of the human being until they are transformed into the physical and bodily aspects. It is the basis for that aspect of the state of human culture that needs to be transformed. For anyone who looks at today's life will be able to say to himself: This state cannot be transformed by external transformation, it cannot be brought about by it alone, what we desire for the continuation of our civilization, which is threatened, but only by that which comes from the spirit, and only those human deeds and actions that are borne by the spirit will fit in with social progress. Let me summarize briefly: spiritual knowledge gives man, immersed in spirit, the ideas that can fill his whole being, that can lead to spirit-filled deeds, to spirit-filled actions and to a spirit-filled social, to a spiritual human coexistence steeped in love. And that is what we will most urgently need in the near future. |
84. What is the Purpose of Anthroposophy and the Goetheanum?: How to Know Things About the Supernatural World
26 May 1924, Paris Rudolf Steiner |
---|
The mysteries were strictly segregated sites, strictly governed by priestly sages who could arrange the external performance in such a way that a person really did develop the habit of keeping their soul independent of the body and, with this independent soul, of entering the spiritual world, by undergoing the process over a period of years. Modern man would have no trust in people who have to seek the way into the spiritual world in this way. |
84. What is the Purpose of Anthroposophy and the Goetheanum?: How to Know Things About the Supernatural World
26 May 1924, Paris Rudolf Steiner |
---|
Anyone today who strives from within to gain knowledge of the supersensible world is usually referred to the methods and results that come from ancient times. If one then takes a closer look at what is referred to, one encounters the so-called mysteries in the development of mankind. These were places where, on the one hand, religious and cultic life was cultivated - the spiritual flowed through the religious and cultic - and, on the other hand, what we call scientific knowledge was cultivated. The spiritual flowed into this other form of human perception. And a third aspect was the artistic, which was expressed in the mysteries. On the one hand, what flowed through religion, cult and science revealed itself to the senses, to the directly perceptible view of life. And on the other hand, what flowed through art revealed itself. Basically, humanity, which strives for the supersensible, still lives today from what tradition has preserved from ancient times. In today's lecture, I do not want to speak of these old traditions, nor of the old mysteries; but I would like to speak of the possibility of a new mystery life, of the possibility of a new path to the supersensible worlds, which in its meaning and conception can be greater than what is demanded today as scientific knowledge by the enormous progress of scientific thinking in modern times. When we look into our own inner being, we find the following activities within it: thinking, feeling and willing. Of these soul activities, only our thinking is independent of our physicality, as long as this thinking is healthy. The person who is able to completely surrender to the character of thinking with their soul knows that there can only be independent, logical laws because healthy thinking in the natural human being is independent of the physical. It is only when a person begins to think pathologically, when something morbid enters his thinking, that he becomes dependent on the physical. But what does that mean? It means nothing other than this: as long as thinking is healthy, it remains outside the physical; it only submerges into the body, only enters the unconscious when it becomes ill. This is not the case with our feelings, nor with our will. In its completely normal state, our feeling submerges into physicality and is hardly conscious to us as something dream-like. It dwells entirely in physicality. It is the same with our will. In our ordinary lives, we are not aware of the actual process of willing because it is deeply submerged in physicality. If we now want to attain a higher knowledge, then we must develop abilities as human beings that are just as independent as our ordinary thinking is from this physicality, but which are capable of perceiving higher worlds than this ordinary thinking, which in the present state of humanity is only capable of perceiving and dissecting the physical-sensual environment. In the ancient mysteries, this release of spiritual abilities from the physical organization was brought about by external processes. Let us realize, for example, what effect a sound, a tone, that moves quickly, has on our soul, a sound that startles us. This rapid impression does not allow us to immerse what is happening emotionally in our soul in the physical. And if we experience shock, fear and dread in quick succession, we are able to hold the soul qualities outside the physical. The very methodical events of the ancient mysteries consisted of freeing the soul from the physical in this way. Frightening, dramatic processes that lead the soul life to a peak and then let it fall were designed to let people experience the soul life as something that remains outside the physical, not submerged in the physical. When a person came to after such processes, it was clear to him: during such experiences he had gained insight into a world into which he would not otherwise have seen. And he called this world the “supersensible”. Such external practices, which for the most part have taken on a cultic form in the old mysteries, are no longer suitable for modern humanity. They also presuppose that those who have been led to higher knowledge isolate themselves. The mysteries were strictly segregated sites, strictly governed by priestly sages who could arrange the external performance in such a way that a person really did develop the habit of keeping their soul independent of the body and, with this independent soul, of entering the spiritual world, by undergoing the process over a period of years. Modern man would have no trust in people who have to seek the way into the spiritual world in this way. For these methods require strict separation of the spiritual seeker from the world, and in ancient times it was the case that one only had trust in the spiritual man when he separated himself from the rest of humanity. Today, one can only have trust in the man of knowledge if he is fully involved in life, if nothing is alien to him from the full, direct human life. Therefore, the present time and the near future will require methods for the path to the spiritual world that are more inwardly soul-based, so that in pursuing these methods, man is independent of external activities and influences. I would like to speak to you about methods for the path to the spiritual world that work quietly within the soul, but which lead just as surely to knowledge of the spiritual world, that is, to initiation, as the older methods of the mysteries led to this initiation. In my book “How to Know Higher Worlds,” which has been translated into French as “Initiation,” I discuss the modern methods of initiation. This evening, I would like to speak in principle about what these modern methods of initiation are. The beginning of the path to knowledge of spiritual worlds must be made through a special inner soul treatment of our world of thoughts, our powers of thought. In our ordinary life we devote ourselves to the outer world or to the thoughts that arise from our inner being. And however much we develop relative activity in this ordinary consciousness, in our thinking as a whole we are still passive, devoted to the sensual or the inner soul world. Indeed, modern man even places great value on remaining in this passivity of thought because he is afraid that in the moment when he forms his thoughts out of himself, he will enter the unreal, the realm of fantasy. This whole attitude towards thinking must change if man wants to enter the supersensible world. He must activate his thinking. I have named this activation of thinking 'meditation' after an old custom. It consists of our not giving ourselves over to our thinking, to anything objective, but rather, out of the inner strength of our soul life, we place a clear thought content of the simplest possible kind at the center of our consciousness and, for a certain period of time, with the exclusion of any other attention, we focus all the soul's attention on this one soul content. When we rest actively with our whole soul on a soul content, something occurs with the soul forces that otherwise occurs with the physical forces when, for example, we use a muscle repeatedly in the course of our work. The muscle grows stronger. In the same way, the soul forces are strengthened and invigorated inwardly when the soul's activity is repeatedly directed towards one content. This content must be clear and transparent, because it must not contain anything that can come from the unconscious. We must rest entirely on this soul content with all the deliberation of which we are capable. If we take something complicated, something that may have been brought up from memory as reminiscences, something that is linked intellectually or emotionally to these old soul contents, that must not be. We therefore do best if we allow such soul content to approach us either by, let us say, taking a completely unknown book that we have certainly never read before, we open it somewhere, we read a sentence that otherwise does not interest us at all, the content of which otherwise has no interest for us. We place this sentence at the center of our consciousness and rest on it. We concentrate all our soul life on such content for a long time. It is even better if we can gain the confidence to go to someone who really has knowledge in these matters and have them give us a soul content of the characterized kind. Then, if he is already a spiritual researcher, he will have practice in simply telling us, from the mere sight of us, what kind of spiritual content is best for our meditation. If we take such a content, which is fully present in our consciousness and easy to grasp, concentrate on it, and remain in that concentration in a completely meditative way, our thinking will gradually be completely transformed. All abstractness in our thinking disappears, all coldness disappears. Thinking becomes entirely pictorial; we gain the ability to think in saturated images that become ever more saturated and colorful. Images that gradually resemble living dream images, but have a completely different soul character, enter our consciousness. We experience something that we have never experienced before in this consciousness. We experience the possibility of thinking as calmly as only the most calm logician or mathematician can think, but not in the abstract, not thinking natural laws, but thinking in images that we do not initially know where they come from. This first step in the recognition of the supersensible may be called imaginative knowledge. We must develop these faculties if we want to enter the first sphere of the supersensible world. If such exercises are continued long enough — for some people, depending on their individuality, they take years, for some months — then the person finally comes to develop, in a sense complete, an ability to think in images, in the same way that one can think abstractly in ordinary consciousness; not dreaming in images, but being able to think in them. But then, when one has progressed far enough with such pictorial thinking, then one knows through direct awareness: this pictorial thinking does not descend into physicality, it is free and independent of physicality. One now feels oneself in this independent pictorial thinking, one lives entirely in it, one now lives in this independent pictorial thinking as one otherwise lives in one's physical body. Just as one feels in one's physical body with one's general bodily feelings, with all that one feels flowing from this body into the soul, perhaps in the form of pain or general well-being, in short, just as one feels in one's physical body, one now feels in a finer, in a second human being. One has detached this second person from this physical body and one can then say from inner experience, from direct life: I experience myself as a human being not only in the physical body, I experience myself as a human being in an etheric body, in a body of finer substantiality. One now knows from experience that a second person is contained in the first. Just as one can perceive through the physical tools of the physical body in the physical world, through the eye the colors, through the ears the sounds, so one can now - when one feels in the etheric body and knows oneself as a second person through this etheric body, which is organized in the same way as the physical body - perceive a new world that remains impenetrable to the physical body. The first new world that one perceives is the world of one's own last life on earth. In a mighty tableau, majestically standing, everything that was in succession in time – simultaneously as in a panorama – our life on earth stands before us from the present moment in which we live, looking back to our birth. Just as things usually stand next to each other in space, so in this retrospective, the experiences we went through in the eighth year of life, for example, stand simultaneously with those we went through in the twentieth and fiftieth year of life. Time becomes like space. And what we experience there in vivid images in a majestic panorama of life, we learn to distinguish well from ordinary memory. The ordinary memory, which we bring forth in individual thoughts, ideas, images from our human nature, is weak and pale. What we see in this overview is full of content, powerfully colored, if I may use the expression. But everything also appears to us as external things appear to us. We now know, in the overview of a moment that is, however, expanding somewhat, how our life appears to a soul's gaze. And there it shows us that in every moment of our earthly existence since our birth, or rather since our conception, a spiritual-soul element has been surging and weaving within us. This spiritual-soul substance condenses into the power of growth, the power of nutrition, into all that surges and weaves in our physical body, but ultimately it is a spiritual substance that we see when we ascend to the first step of supersensible knowledge. But at the same time we learn to recognize, besides our own etheric body, the etheric world that is around us and to which our etheric body belongs; we learn to recognize how differently we relate to this etheric world - which is there like the physical world - than to the physical world. In the physical world, the thing is there, I am there. I speak of physical things as something that is strictly separate from me; I point to it. With the etheric world, I am connected through my etheric body in the same way that a limb of my organism is connected to the whole organism. And just as a limb, my finger, separates itself from my organism, so the etheric body separates itself from the etheric universe, but it is still a limb in it. We are much more one with the world that stands behind the physical world than the physical body is one with the physical world. That is the first step in the supersensible world, and that is also the first supersensible world that we reach on the way to supersensible knowledge. The level of supersensible knowledge that I have described so far does not go further than an insight into this essence of human nature, which from birth to death develops and changes as a unity, but remains permanent remain throughout our entire life on earth, while the individual substances that we absorb are absorbed by us and then expelled by us, so that we, as physical human beings, are constantly renewing ourselves, even during our life on earth. That which is the etheric body remains as a unity from birth to death. But if we want to go beyond this first supersensible realm, then a second level of knowledge must be developed within the soul. This can be done by activating our thinking, which we had to do in order to grasp and take hold of ourselves in our etheric body, so that we can grasp and take hold of ourselves in our etheric body, and then, for the second level of knowledge, we must again remove from our consciousness everything we gain in this way through activated thinking. Once we have firmly brought a content into our soul by concentrating with all our might, we must now leave it out again. You know what state a person enters when they have to remove the usual content of their soul, the world that the senses give them: they fall asleep. Gradually, they sink into a paralysis of the soul. This must not happen and does not happen. It is difficult to remove from the soul the content that we have brought into consciousness with all our strength. It is harder to remove this content than the content of ordinary consciousness. But if we succeed in removing it, something has occurred that is otherwise never there. A complete emptiness of consciousness has occurred in the human soul life. Through what the human being has gone through in the powerful experience of his own etheric body, he becomes able to abstract, to detach himself from all the sense world and from all ordinary thinking. He lives in a higher region. If he now removes this higher region, his own life tableau, then his consciousness becomes empty and we are in that state that is significant for all higher knowledge: we are in the state of mere waking, without this waking having any soul content. We direct an intensified, strengthened consciousness out into the emptiness of the world. We do not fall asleep while performing this task, but we remain awake, but for a moment we are only confronted with nothingness. This does not last long. When we have maintained mere waking in our consciousness, real empty consciousness, then a spiritual world penetrates into us that is not our etheric body, not that which is related to it, but which is now a spiritual world that is initially very distant. The real spiritual world penetrates into mere waking and empty consciousness, but this empty consciousness and waking must be acquired through long soul exercises, which I could only describe in principle. For this suppression of all content does not succeed at the first attempt. It must be practiced again and again. Again, for some it takes years, for some, if they are predisposed to it, depending on their destiny, it takes months to achieve that they can keep their consciousness empty without lulling it to sleep, so that the spiritual world can penetrate them. Of course, one could say that when a person enters the spiritual world, it could be mere suggestion, an autosuggestion. How can one distinguish between suggestion and what the spiritual researcher, the initiate, calls the real spiritual world? One can only distinguish between them through life. Just as one distinguishes in life between a hot potato that has been imagined and a real hot potato, because one does not get burnt by an imaginary hot potato, but one does get burnt by a real hot potato, so one experiences real facts in the spiritual world that flows into the empty consciousness. One simply knows, just as one can distinguish a real live issue from an imagined one, through life, whereby this spiritual reality is distinguished from mere autosuggestion. In the book mentioned earlier, I referred to this second stage of supersensible knowledge as inspired knowledge, according to an old usage that need not be objected to – we need a terminology. When one arrives at inspired knowledge, one experiences oneself, as it were, still in a third man. First there is the physical human being, then the etheric human being, and now one experiences oneself in a third human being. But by experiencing oneself in this third human being, one knows oneself not only through the strengthened, imaginative thinking independently of one's physical body, but completely outside of one's physical body. One has attained the state that can be called: life in the spirit outside of the physical body. Then the human being is also able to leave the etheric body, that is, as he has erased all imaginative content from his consciousness, he can completely erase this life tableau, to which he first came, and dive into the unconscious and live outside of his physical and etheric existence. But then, when a person achieves this, the retrospective view extends further into the past than just to the birth or conception: we look into a spiritual world in which we were as spiritual beings before we descended into the physical world. We see ourselves acting and living in this spiritual world, just as we see ourselves as physical human beings in the physical world. We learn to recognize that what nature develops as our physical human germ must unite with what descends from the spiritual worlds, for that is what we now see for ourselves. And when we have attained this knowledge, through which we go completely out of our physical and etheric bodies, then, when we go back again – that is, when the moment of our beholding the spiritual world has ceased – we look into our own physical and etheric bodies and find that our earthly life is a reflection in the soul-spiritual of what we were in the spiritual-soul before we descended to earth. And precisely by entering into our body again, into the physical and etheric body, we acquire the power of a, I would say, configured, individualized vision. Now that we are experiencing more of the general spiritual world that we passed through in our pre-earthly existence outside of our physical body and our etheric body, now that we are returning to the physical and etheric body, now we are learning, not by immersing ourselves, dive into them, but I would say to dwell in them, to live in our physical and etheric bodies, now we learn to distinguish between the spiritual beings of a higher world, with whom we were united before we descended to earthly life, and how we distinguish between individual human beings here. We learn to recognize beings that never descend to earth, that never take on a physical body, divine spiritual beings. We are fellow inhabitants of the spiritual world with them before we descend to this earth. And we learn to see, precisely because we can now be alternately outside and inside our body with the spiritual and soul, we also learn to recognize how human souls are now among these higher spiritual and soul beings, among whom we were before we descended to earth, waiting to descend to earth in order to experience it in a later time than we did. And so, through this stage of inspired knowledge, we learn to recognize that part of the eternity of the human being that is very little considered by our sense of time, even by the religious. The present does not like to look at the pre-earthly existence. It is true that man is interested in facing up to what lies beyond death, even if only through faith or tradition, because that must come first, while man is present and therefore does not need to reflect particularly on what existed before birth. He is here, after all! But whether he will also remain here is of interest to him; in his selfishness he is interested in the second part of eternity, immortality. We do not even have a word in modern languages for the other half of eternity, for the pre-earthly existence, which is as infinite in the past as immortality is in the future. For in truth, one only comes to recognize the eternity of human life when one can again point to the words that the original languages had for eternity, and which spoke just as meaningfully of unbornness as of immortality. More recent esoteric teachings on initiation again define the eternity of the human being as consisting of the unborn and the immortal. However, the unborn is needed less for selfishness than for true knowledge. People can remain with mere belief when it comes to the immortal. Only by looking at the unborn within me, not only at the immortal, can I learn to recognize the unborn, the certainty that a spiritual essence, existing before my physical formation, is my being. When one has emerged from one's physical and Arther body in this way and feels among spiritual beings, as one previously felt among physical beings and things in the physical body, one always knows oneself as a human being, as this particular self. And so, in a sense, one only has to start the journey back, going backwards through the sequence of times into the world that one has lived through before life on earth. But if a person, when he feels himself outside his physical and etheric bodies within a spiritual world, then looks down at the world of the stars, and the stars no longer appear to him as stars, but as worlds where higher or even lower entities dwell, then everywhere where there is a star for the physical eye, there is a world sphere of other entities. When man, as he otherwise feels in the physical body on earth, now feels in the starry world in a spiritual world, then one can speak of the astral body, as one speaks of the etheric body in the first stage of supersensible knowledge, because one is now within the spirituality of the starry world. If man wants to progress further, then he must add to imagination and to the empty consciousness a third faculty of perception, a faculty of perception that is very often not regarded as a faculty of perception by today's consciousness. It is an ability that plays the greatest conceivable role in human life, but which is not recognized as having any right to be part of knowledge. That is the human power of love: love that brings people together in such a way that they approach the being they love through the physical body or through the embodied soul or embodied spirit. By further developing this love, so that this love can reach into the experience of the etheric body first, but that one can also bring this love over into the experience in the astral body, by further developing this ability to love, we finally not only come to but we gradually develop the ability to increase our love to such an extent that we not only see other beings, but also enter into a relationship with these other spiritual beings – we ourselves then become spirit – in the same way that we have entered into a relationship with physical people on earth. Intuition gives us the opportunity to interact with spiritual beings, just as physical abilities give people the opportunity to interact with physical people on earth. But when we have developed our ability to love to such an extent that the spiritual becomes objective to us, as the sensual is objective to us in the physical world, then we not only look back into our pre-earthly spiritual existence, but we look back into earlier earth lives, and it becomes a fact that we go through the whole human life in forms of existence between birth and death and then between death and a new birth, again from birth to death, again from death to a new birth, that we live through life in successive earthly lives and in successive purely spiritual lives. We learn to look back on our previous earthly lives and see the present, current life as a repetition of these earlier ones. But no one can arrive at the realization of what he was like, what he was, that he even existed in a past life, who has not progressed to the point of developing love to the point that he can face himself as well as another, as another being faces him. There must be a mighty difference between the ordinary power of perception and that power of perception steeped in love, through which we see our previous lives on earth as we see the life of another person in the present. When we ascend to this level, which I have called the intuitive, the truly intuitive level, we see ourselves in our mind's eye as spiritually effective beings in repeated earthly lives. Only then are we completely outside of our physical life. But he who experiences this, he knows what death is. Death now stands before him as the external, objective realization of what he himself has experienced in knowledge. Just as he has discarded his physical and etheric bodies in knowledge, so he knows that death only discards the physical and etheric bodies, and that through the gate of death man enters into a spiritual world. Belief becomes knowledge, opinion becomes insight. We are given certain, exact, vivid science by that which we otherwise call immortality in life. We look at the immortality of our own human life, at the entry of this own human being into a post-mortal life, as we look at a prenatal spiritual life, at a pre-earthly life. But we also look at what has developed between people in physical life during physical life on earth, at the relationships that exist in the family, where one person comes into contact with another, at the relationships that are brought about through love and friendship in human life. We look at all of this. Just as the physical body of the individual falls away at death, and the soul ascends into a spiritual world, so too, when people who have been brought together on earth by their destiny have passed through the gate of death and find themselves there among higher beings, what is physical in friendship, in love relationships on earth, falls away, and a more soulful, all the more intimate life together then occurs. Modern initiation can only show how to find the path that is otherwise a matter of mere belief, through seeing, to secure for knowledge that which is immortality, the other side of eternity. Thus man ascends through imaginative knowledge to the view of that which lives between birth and death. Man then ascends when he acquires this knowledge to his etheric body. Inspired knowledge leads man to his astral body, and through it he enters the world he passed through before his birth, which he will enter again after death. In the astral body, one becomes acquainted with the pre-earthly and post-mortal life spheres of the human being. In the ascent to intuitive knowledge, one becomes acquainted with the fourth aspect of the human being, the true, eternal self, which passes from earth-life to earth-life and which, between individual earth-lives, has purely spiritual forms of existence. In conclusion, now that this path of modern initiation has been sketched out in a few strokes, at least in principle, let me say this: when one looks at the ancient knowledge that was acquired in the manner described at the beginning, through external cultic and other events, this knowledge was more dream-like, instinctive. And from old instinctive, dream-like knowledge, men's convictions about the supersensible, about the spiritual, have finally emerged and remained as tradition. But today one can already sense that more people than they realize have the urge, the deep longing to rediscover the paths to the spiritual worlds. Few people are the first to admit this consciously, but in the subconscious, if one is able to see such things, one can see today how numerous people are who long for mysteries again because they want to find the way to supersensible worlds. We were only able to make a timid beginning with what we call the Goetheanum in northwestern Switzerland, where a place of mystery was created, where man was to find a way into the supersensible in a similarly modern and prudent way as he found a way into the mysteries in ancient times in a more instinctive way. Enemies have snatched this place from us. It was destroyed by arson some time ago. These things also have their eternity. The physical fire could take from us the physical building, the Goetheanum, the physical building in which until then that spiritual science had been cultivated, of which I was allowed to give you a hint. But there is also a spiritual fire. This spiritual fire does not burn physical sites, but will always let them arise again. In the new mysteries, the students of spiritual wisdom will approach their task quietly and not as noisily as in the old mysteries. They, in turn, will bring people the knowledge of the eternal in man and the world that they so urgently need. For people need this knowledge for their thinking, for their feeling and willing, so that they may come to clarity within themselves, to a life of inner harmony, and so that they may also gain strength and security for their outer life. He needs the connection with the spiritual world. And something like the spiritual school in Dornach, on the border of Switzerland towards the northwest, will awaken more and more as a longing in human souls, born out of humanity's eternal urge for the spiritual. This urge rested for a while through centuries. These centuries have brought people the magnificent external knowledge of nature. Today, man stands and knocks again at the door that leads to the supernatural, because he cannot advance his soul with knowledge of nature. That which yearns for the spiritual world, consciously in a few people but unconsciously in a large part of humanity, can only be satisfied by the modern mysteries. Anyone who is sincere about the spiritual world will see that people will definitely crave new mysteries in the future, because spirituality will only come back to people when new mysteries arise in which people can find the spirit in a more sober and enlightened way than in the old mysteries, but in which they can be led in a more developed and perfect way through the mysteries back to the spiritual, divine world and thus to the source of humanity. |
87. Ancient Mysteries and Christianity: On Heraclitus
19 Oct 1901, Berlin Rudolf Steiner |
---|
We now have two books which are still [a beginning], but which already show a deeper understanding. That is the German book by Lassalle and then the book by [Bywater]. Both must be consulted if one wants to understand Heraclitus. But Pfleiderer wrote what forms the basis of Heraclitus' understanding. He was able to write this because he still came from the Hegelian school and therefore still had an understanding of it. |
Now we will also understand what it means when Heraclitus speaks of fire and why he rebukes the Greek poets because they understand and describe the world in a completely external way. |
87. Ancient Mysteries and Christianity: On Heraclitus
19 Oct 1901, Berlin Rudolf Steiner |
---|
Dear guests! As I have the pleasure of continuing this winter the lectures that I was able to begin last year, I have set myself the task of making the period that precedes the one I considered last year the subject of our contemplation, of considering it in so far as in this period lie the seeds of everything that later medieval mysticism produced in the first place. [The booklet of last year's lectures, which is now being published, deals with German mysticism from Meister Eckhart to Angelus Silesius]. Mysticism is to be understood by itself through the tremendously high spirits of the personalities who belong to this mysticism. If one delves into the peculiarities of the mystical teachings, if one gets to know the character of these teachings, the German mystics and the contemporaries of the German mystics, one can understand them personally and their teachings from within oneself. However, a completely different light is thrown on this later mysticism and its basically thoroughly esoteric teachings if one considers the preconditions underlying the Greek Mysteries and the Mysteries of the first Christian centuries. First of all, German mysticism is linked to the mystery teachings, not only to what St. Augustine teaches, but also to the teachings of Scotus Eriugena, who was basically, more or less unconsciously, the great teacher of these mystics - of Nicholas Cusanus, Angelus Silesius, Meister Eckhart. So I think you get a completely different picture if you look at things from the Greek mysteries. Greek mysticism is an ancient primordial doctrine whose origins are lost in Greece itself until the eighth century BC. However, these mystery teachings have [received] important influences from all mystery teachings: from the Egyptian, Persian and also Indian mystery teachings. The Greek mystery teachings are very complicated. In order to gain an insight, [I first give] a historical view, because only through the certain historical facts can one penetrate into the actual basic wisdom of these teachings. I would therefore like to penetrate more from the outside to the inside: first the historically established, in order to then penetrate more and more into the actual secret knowledge of these Greek mysteries. If we look at the matter historically, there were enormous difficulties until a few decades ago, because although we knew what a tremendous impression had been made on those who had been touched by [the Mysteries], we had no testimony from those who had been initiated. A testimony that must satisfy all would be that people of the Greek and Latin contemporaries saw their wisdom. But what the basis of this primordial wisdom may have consisted of is something we have not been able to understand properly until recently. It is easier for us [to understand this] because we know how to see one of these spirits, who was deeply initiated, in the right light, who in the past, at least from our Western point of view, was taken for a philosophical thinker, which, however, according to our current knowledge, he was by no means just that. I am referring to Heraclitus, who lived around the year 500 B.C. and who was deeply involved in the Greek mystery teachings because he was one of the initiates in Ephesus. Today we have a completely different idea of why this Heraclitus was called the "Dark One" right up to our own time. It is difficult to understand. Difficult, not because he wrote in a language that is difficult to understand. Because it is not his language that is difficult, but the actual inner meaning of what he has to say. It is not difficult in the sense that you cannot understand what he is saying, but in the sense that you have to know from which original wisdom he has grown. If you want to understand his teachings, you have to know from which primordial wisdom they were born. So he lived [in the transition from the sixth to the fifth century] before the birth of Christ. What is said of him is that he taught that fire was the primordial principle, just as Thales had established water as the primordial principle. He also taught that everything "is in eternal flux, there is no "being, but an eternal "becoming. This is illustrated by the fact that he says that you cannot step into the same river twice. And so it is with all events in the world, with all facts. Man, too, is in "eternal becoming. He is a different person at this moment than he was a quarter of an hour ago. Everything is in an eternal course, in 'eternal flux'. This is what is usually put forward by Heraclitus. We now have two books which are still [a beginning], but which already show a deeper understanding. That is the German book by Lassalle and then the book by [Bywater]. Both must be consulted if one wants to understand Heraclitus. But Pfleiderer wrote what forms the basis of Heraclitus' understanding. He was able to write this because he still came from the Hegelian school and therefore still had an understanding of it. Pfleiderer pointed out in a really energetic way that Heraclitus was not a philosopher like Anaxagoras or Parmenides and others. These were thinkers that we can compare with other philosophers. Heraclitus should not be placed in this category, but must be understood in the context of the entire Greek spirit. He himself belonged to the family of the [Kodrides], he was the head of a branch of the Eleusinian Mysteries, in which the purest and noblest cult was cultivated in that century. These mysteries, which we shall gradually become acquainted with, were regarded by those contemporaries who knew anything about them as places where one could find the greatest possible satisfaction of all human spiritual needs. We have a [comprehensive] description of the impressions of contemporaries of what could be gained from the Mysteries. Most important, however, seems to me to be a testimony by Plutarch, who draws attention to this and says that these mysteries were actually only drawn down to a certain humanity. [Plato says]: Those who are initiated into the Mysteries are partakers of an eternal life, while the others, when they suffer death, must simply sink into the [mud]. .How they understand the position of the Mysteries in relation to the scientific teachings, we get an idea from some passages in Aristotle. He says: "The participants in the Mysteries were less obliged to absorb a certain knowledge, less obliged to absorb certain substantive truths. These could also be acquired in other ways. They were more required to live within a certain circle of life and to absorb these things. - He therefore knew that it was not a question of teaching truth, but of experiencing truth. So it is not a question of having received truths, but of having lived them for such and such a long time and having lived with the truth in such circumstances. Life is what has been cultivated within the Mysteries. This is what Aristotle tells us. Although [Pfleiderer] says that [Heraclitus] gave up the office of director in the branch of the Eleusinian Mysteries to his brother, we may assume that he was to be regarded as a leading personality and that he was one. And one thing indicates that he was one of the initiates. One work in particular, i.e. only individual pieces of this work, indicates this. The work was probably entitled "On Nature". This gives us an idea of what he said. He wrote this work in the temple of Artemis in [Ephesus] because he was convinced that he could only really find understanding in the circle of those around him. It should also be borne in mind that Heraclitus was not of a nature that wanted to engage with the views of the market, with views that prevailed among the masses. He did not mean only the quite banal truths of everyday understanding, of which he wanted to know nothing and which he considered to be a trivial matter, but he understood by it something that was far removed from the truth of an initiate. He also understood it to mean everything Homer said and all the Greek doctrines of the gods, which he rejected out of hand. He thought that it was best not to bother with Homer at all. Heraclitus is to be understood as if he detested the "great mobs" and led a detached existence. We will gain a better understanding if we look at individual sentences of this work and examine these individual sentences. Here we have one that can illuminate Heraclitus' entire way of thinking in a flash: The senses, eyes and ears, are actually liars, and those who only want to experience through eyes and ears will never experience anything because they are barbarians of the soul! We must not think that Heraclitus believes that the senses lie to us. No, he expressly emphasizes that it is through the eyes and ears that we get everything. We find mysteries everywhere, wherever we turn. He took the "everyday. That was mysterious enough for him, so he was less interested in seeking out the rarities, the oddities and solitudes of life. He believed that he who, like a blind man, like a dreamwalker, sees and hears only with his eyes and ears, is a barbarian of the soul, for whom it is impossible to awaken the soul to a higher existence. Heraclitus was convinced that all the views of the great multitude are nothing other than those gained through the external senses. We must be aware that the religious views of Homer, Hesiod and other Greek poets also go back to deeper wisdom teachings that were found within the Mysteries and had been preserved there. But we must also remember that they had taken on a different form. Heraclitus reproached Hesiod in particular for the fact that he and other Greek poets had resorted to external forms, to pure sensory truths, and did not stand by the wisdom teachings that the Mysteries could have passed on to them. Heraclitus was initiated into the original form of wisdom teachings from which Greek mythology descends. Heraclitus, as a leader, was initiated into the ancient cults, in which the deepest foundations of Greek mythology were known in a completely different form. We already have an idea of what was actually the keynote of what one was initiated into, even if there were people who did not yet know much about it; we come to this idea when we go into what is to be understood by the Greek mysteries. We learn [from Cicero] that these are not divine truths, but "natural ones". We must not misunderstand this. When it is said that we are not dealing with divine truths, we must realize that we could only be dealing with Greek gods. But it should be about deeper forces of nature, about the greatest that man can experience in a symbolic form, namely in the form in which the actual drama of man was experienced in the Greek mysteries. That which was to be revealed was the human being, self-knowledge. This feeling of the whole person was a need: "Know thyself". That was the task the Mysteries had set themselves. Now Heraclitus stood within these mystery cults, and I therefore cite Heraclitus in order to gradually penetrate the mystery cults. I regard Heraclitus as an exquisite personality who was particularly deeply initiated into the secrets of the Mysteries. And on the other hand, he had a special ability to express the mysteries in a clear and classical way. But now you can only understand Heraclitus if you look at him on the basis of what the Mysteries had offered him. The Mysteries were only accessible to select spirits. [However,] the mysteries we are told about were popular cults. The Eleusinian, the Orphic and so on, these were popular creations. That is why Heraclitus could have made the mistake of not wanting to know anything about all these mysteries. There are passages where he speaks just as sharply about the Mysteries as he did against Homer, Hesiod and others. On the one hand, he lays down his work in the temple of Artemis; on the other, he rejects these mystery cults. If we now look at his words: 'There the Greeks celebrate Dionysus and depict him in obscene scenes - so that those who did not see deeper could actually only see something shameless in it. However, Heraclitus expressly emphasizes that these shameless scenes only appear shameless when viewed in their popular form, but that there is something important underlying them. - They can be forgiven because this Dionysus is nothing other than Hades. On the one hand, Dionysus is the god of constant growth, the god of life, of pleasure, the god of debauched sex life. On the other hand, he also calls him the god of the underworld, the god of Hades. He regards these two as one and the same. The fact that Heraclitus regards the god of sprouting life and the god of death as one and the same entity is something he experienced within the mystery cults. The Mystery Cults were about evoking an idea that the common notion that life is in a perpetual oscillation must be overcome. Life comes and is replaced by death. This idea, which man initially forms according to the impressions of his senses, is a first stage. This stage should be overcome. The matter will become even clearer to us if we consider a later word that I quoted from Jakob Böhme last year. It turned out that this word is nothing other than an interpretation of the Indian mysteries: "And so death is the root of all life." Heraclitus saw that death is the same as life, and he therefore also saw the god of death in the god of life. He saw that there is no difference between life and death, saw that death is just another form of life. This is something that lives in the Mysteries and that also lives in Heraclitus. That is why Heraclitus says: By living [and by dying], we have living and dying in us. - Living is in dying and dying is in living. Heraclitus, like the initiates, says: "Not once do we become and pass away, but we are in an eternal transformation, in an eternal weighing up and weighing down of all things." Even as the senses convey it to us. But he does not stop there, he says he sees how something new comes into being. He sees how death is only the great artifice to awaken life in the cosmos again and again. This seems very simple in the ordinary world of imagination. But the great depth of feeling was awakened by the fact that people saw events through which they were taught how new things arise from death. It sticks much better when you perceive such processes with your senses, when you see them with your eyes. So sensual events were created in which one could recognize the great mystery of the equality of death and life. This eternal being, this eternal life passing through life and death, is represented there. And when Heraclitus speaks of it and says that everything is in an eternal flow, then this appears to us as a deep basic current of his life. We also see that this "dark truth is born out of the deeper Greek wisdom of the mysteries. This mystery wisdom aimed to show that the sensory way of looking at things must first be overcome if the mystery character of truth is to emerge. This is the sentence: Life means nothing other than that we perceive with our eyes and ears what we can perceive. But we can also perceive this if we are animators of the soul. For those who seek deeper wisdom, a time now begins in which that which is conveyed indirectly [through the senses] in the legends and myths comes to life inwardly. Nature does not begin to cease for him, nature does not begin to become colorless, as so many who cannot ascend think, because they only want to fill nature with dead, empty concepts. But Heraclitus says: one then receives a nature from the second degree, from second hand. - This is nothing other than what we find in later times as the nature reborn from the spirit, as it confronts us from the spirit of the German mystics. First it is gained from outside, then the spirit is sunk into it and emerges from it again. This reborn nature is that which stands before Heraclitus as life, as a new nature. But it is not a life that has death and life in it, but that which has overcome death and life. That is the living thing in which he can see his god Dionysus and his god Hades as a unity. That is why he can also say that these gods are difficult to understand, because they are the expression of deep, profound truths. But these deeper truths are only accessible to those who perceive more deeply. To those who perceive only with the senses, they will remain a mystery, just as it will remain a mystery to them that the work [Heraclitus] had to be laid down in the temple of Artemis. Pfleiderer, in what he wrote about this in his writings, said that Heraclitus had gained such views from the Greek mysteries. And I can say that we find these views again in Plato, then also in Pythagoras and others. These then passed over into the later views. Now something else happens. We hear Heraclitus speak of Pythagoras as he spoke of Hesiod earlier. He says: "Much knowledge does not teach the mind, otherwise it would have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras - and enlivened them. Heraclitus was therefore convinced that Pythagoras did not belong to those who were initiated into the Greek mysteries. Pythagoras [of all people] was most interested in proclamation, like a scholar. He sought to gather his own wisdom from it: 'Much knowledge is a bad art. Now, however, we must realize that what we know as Pythagorean views and mystery cults also contain wisdom, just as Heraclitus did. Pfleiderer could not solve the riddle that lies hidden here because Pfleiderer was not clear about the relationship of Heraclitus and Pythagoras to the Mysteries in antiquity. Heraclitus was initiated into the Greek primal mysteries, into those cults which can be traced back to the eighth century before the birth of Christ and then disappear, but which only lived in Greece itself. Heraclitus became acquainted with Pythagoras when Pythagoras was nothing more than a scholar; Pythagoras [later] became acquainted with wisdom in the Orient and was fertilized by it. Pythagoras then returned to Greece with this oriental wisdom and was then able to recognize what Heraclitus meant. Likewise Plato. We therefore have a more comprehensive teaching of the mysteries with the Greeks, while with Heraclitus we have the oldest, the most original ones. Heraclitus is said to have regarded fire as the origin of all things - on the one hand; the eternal becoming and undulating, the eternal flow, the basic characteristic of the world - on the other. This was difficult to understand. It went so far that even Lassalle could not explain that Heraclitus understood fire as a symbol for something other than the becoming of the world. It is meant to symbolize the external weighing up and weighing down. But he meant that fire should be nothing other than an external symbol. Just as a lion [as] a symbol [of] bravery, Heraclitus would have used fire to mean the inner restlessness, the actual spirituality of things. We have never really got over this idea, because we have not exhausted the full scope of the fact that Heraclitus stood on the foundation of mystery wisdom. But if we try to do so, we will understand how he came to make the seemingly external material the primordial ground of the world. We can only understand why Heraclitus comes to the fire when we penetrate the mysteries. We need only go into the outer Orphic Mysteries. We then find that since the eighth century before the birth of Christ the view prevailed that fire arose from eternity, from eternity seen in the spirit. This fire is not only seen as an external substance, but at the same time as the spirit that permeates the whole world. Love on the one hand, spirit on the other. Within the Greek mysteries, "fire" also means "love" and "spirit". There was nothing other than this idea and that the external talk [about such a] restless element as fire is overcome when one no longer sees merely with the senses, but when one also sees with the spirit and grasps the spiritual. Thus for the seekers in the Mysteries [everything] was transformed into a supersensible, spiritual element. When they then spoke of fire, they were no longer speaking of something that they saw with their eyes and heard with their ears, but they were addressing the love that permeates the whole world; [it would have evaporated] into that. Therefore it must be clear to us that when Heraclitus speaks of fire, he does not mean ordinary fire. Thales, when he speaks of water, speaks of real water. But when Heraclitus speaks of fire, we must not understand such a substance by it as Thales does by water. We must seek out the meaning of it in order to know what he means by it. He speaks of nothing other than this nature reborn in the spirit. He expresses this only with the old familiar word "fire, and its meaning can be known to those who know the Greek mysteries. Only if you understand the matter in this way will you have a correct idea of it. German scholars such as Schleiermacher, Pfleiderer, Teichmüller and others have pondered this for a long time. They have not been able to find a satisfactory explanation of how this inner spiritualized doctrine is connected with Heraclitus' view that everything derives from fire. But if [the] world [is] based on fire, there is no longer any difficulty. We can only understand Heraclitus if we regard him as an initiate into the world of the Greek Mysteries, and conversely we can get an idea of what was sought in the mystery cults if we understand Heraclitus' teachings in the right way. Now we will also understand what it means when Heraclitus speaks of fire and why he rebukes the Greek poets because they understand and describe the world in a completely external way. He rebukes Homer because he describes that there is fighting in the world, while people should strive for peace, since a peaceful state should be established in the world. Heraclitus had another view that sprang from the Mysteries. In addition to the eternal One, the "eternal love, they also allow the strife, the "struggle to be born out of the primordial [existence]. Where there are opposites, balance can only be found in a higher harmony. Strife, says Heraclitus, is the father of all things. - Only from strife can a higher harmony emerge. The image [of the lyre and the bow, the image in which] forces that oppose each other [find their harmony] in a higher harmony, this image becomes the image of the world for him. Thus Heraclitus does not seek the primordial ground of the world in an empty harmonious unity. Rather, he seeks the greatest possible opposites and tries to dissolve them in a higher harmony. Now he rebukes the Greek poets for describing day and night, war and peace and so on. [Heraclitus says: God is day and night, God is war and peace. Hunger and satiety and so on. But he transforms himself. His views are like mixing [embers] with incense. One sight is called fire, love, the other is called fight and strife. - Heraclitus has been called the "Dark One"; fire is probably related to this. One may have called him this, the other that. Heraclitus, however, also expresses the view that above the multiplicity of ideas that man can form about the primordial causes of existence, there is basically only one unified primordial all-being, that above the greatest opposites of existence there is only the greatest unity. Thus, on the one hand, he regards conflict as the essence of all things. In strife the opposites are at war with each other, but they dissolve in the highest harmony. Heraclitus only sees this ultimate insight realized in true self-knowledge. In this respect, Heraclitus is the first great personality to recognize that self-knowledge is the highest knowledge of the world. That is why we find in Heraclitus - anticipated by the Occident - the first important personality to recognize that the highest truths can be found within man himself, [that the true self is not the individual self. One has become myst]. Then Heraclitus says what the individual self is, and continues: "Since I have become a man, it is not the individual man who speaks, but the general spirit of the world, the Logos, who speaks in me. The Logos begins to speak when nature has been reborn in a higher nature. It then appears as self-knowledge. But this does not deliver the self of man, but the essence that underlies everything. That is why he says: The general world reason, the Logos, speaks from me. - And whoever has risen to this point of view is considered by him to be ten thousand. He also says that he only listens to the one who is an [excellent] one. Now we also encounter in Heraclitus what we encounter in all such personalities, [and what probably sounds like arrogance and immodesty], in that he says: "I know everything." By this, however, he probably means nothing other than the following: When I was still a boy and a youth, I saw with sensual eyes and heard with sensual ears, I perceived with my senses. When I became a man, I saw things [as they are] in the second nature, [as they are] in the Logos. - But he was still limited. He therefore says: I did not mean that I was always seized by all wisdom. I meant: I know how to look at the universe. - He did not mean that he sees everything, nor that he sees more, he only meant that he sees what others see in a sensual way in a different, spiritual way. This became possible through self-transformation, through the transformation of the individual self into the universal self. He saw out of the universe into the universe. This is what Heraclitus believes he achieved when he said: "I know everything in myself [now]. - At the same time, he had reached the point where he could say that he had attained that intimate union with the higher self, where knowledge had been transformed, where it was no longer an external view of the things that confront you, but had taken on a different form, where knowledge had taken on the form that he had intimately united himself with things. [The lower cognition consists in the fact that we stand as individual human beings in outer space. The other consists in the fact that we stand outside of space, that we see with the eyes of the universe], so that this small self expands into the general world-self. We can use Goethe's words [with which he replies to the Philistine saying] "No created spirit penetrates into the interior of nature" etc. ["We think: place by place: ["We think: place by place we are within." So he says:] There is no within and no without; what is within is without and no without; what is within is without. Heraclitus had reached this level of knowledge. He expresses it in an image [by] saying that he who sees as he does sees the world [with the gaze] of a child at play. This word has often been misunderstood. That the world is for him as the playing child sees the world is to be understood in such a way that just as the playing child has nothing to do with anything but itself, so that the toy belongs to it as it were, so that it accomplishes with it nothing other than what it itself needs, that it has no other purposes to accomplish, so also the man who has reached a higher stage is only subject and object, which have to do with each other, which are inwardly [enclosed] with each other. Heraclitus compares this with the image of the child at play. This is often interpreted in such a way that one says: He means that one must view the world aesthetically, as an artist. This is also the case in Kühnemann's book, where the matter is presented as if Heraclitus had only professed aesthetic views. This image [of the child at play] is intended to represent nothing other than the point at which the dividing wall between the personal self and the All-Self no longer exists. So we have become acquainted with a personality who inspires tremendous interest, who appears of tremendous profundity and the greatest acumen at that time, but who is of great value because what has come down to us from this personality gives us the first insights into the Greek mysteries and shows us how they have manifested themselves over the centuries. It sheds light on this search for truth by the ancient Greeks. Behind the outer Greek mysteries, and also behind the inner ones, are mysteries that still exist today. Until Philon, the matter must be viewed historically; only from Philon onwards can it also be viewed inwardly. |
87. Ancient Mysteries and Christianity: Greek Mythology
26 Oct 1901, Berlin Rudolf Steiner |
---|
They fought this view of the Greeks because they saw that this absorption in beauty, this search for playful activity, rested on a deeper foundation. This is how Nietzsche came to understand Greek tragedy, the Greek work of art, not as it had been understood until Rohde, but in a completely different way. |
But since he is born, it is best to die. - It is to the credit of Rohde and Nietzsche that they have correctly understood this saying and understood Greekism in this way. It is not pessimism. Nietzsche called his first work "The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music" because music is only a symbol for beauty, for the conception of the world as a work of art. |
And in the whole of Greek mythology, this drawing from one consciousness to another was represented under the image of the goddess, under the image of the woman. Goethe expresses this drawing towards with these words. |
87. Ancient Mysteries and Christianity: Greek Mythology
26 Oct 1901, Berlin Rudolf Steiner |
---|
Ladies and gentlemen! Eight days ago today I tried to present Heraclitus on the basis of the Greek Mysteries, because it seems to me beyond doubt that this personality and his world view can only be understood from this point of view. I mean that if one has before one such a personality from the [transition from the sixth to the] fifth century before our era and has only a series of fragmentary sayings from his life at one's disposal, and if one then tries to form a picture of the world view of this personality, and if one looks at this world view from the point of view that one gains when one starts from ordinary philosophy, and finds that one does not know what to do with this world-view, whereas with the contemporaneous, earlier and later Greek philosophers one is very well able to penetrate to a deeper understanding without further, deeper insights, this must make one suspicious, and one must look for the source elsewhere than in the source of reflection and pure science. I have said that the source that provides us with the conviction that Heraclitus has drawn from the immense depths of the Hellenic world view is nothing other than what Heraclitus implies when he says: 'If one looks around and sees the Mystery Being with the eyes of the layman, it might appear that the Mystery Being contains nothing special, contains nothing other than a cult of the lust for life, of the pleasure of the senses, a cult of the urge for the continual rejuvenation of existence. - There is no doubt that the god Dionysus was worshipped by the masses as nothing other than the god of the effervescent lust for life. If we look at Nietzsche, this Dionysus deity appears to us in a serene and profound way, but only in the form in which the researcher of Greek culture can see it. You can see what ideas you can gain [about the] god Dionysus if you don't delve deeper. I would like to say a few words about Nietzsche's conception of the god Dionysus. For the first time, he and his friend Erwin Rohde, the [philologist], [fought] the view [prevailing] throughout the nineteenth century that it was the people of childhood who lived in eternal serenity, for whom the whole life of the day ran like a game. They fought this view of the Greeks because they saw that this absorption in beauty, this search for playful activity, rested on a deeper foundation. This is how Nietzsche came to understand Greek tragedy, the Greek work of art, not as it had been understood until Rohde, but in a completely different way. Until Nietzsche, the saying was not understood in the right way: The worst thing that could happen to man is that he lives at all; and the best thing would be that he is not born at all. But since he is born, it is best to die. - It is to the credit of Rohde and Nietzsche that they have correctly understood this saying and understood Greekism in this way. It is not pessimism. Nietzsche called his first work "The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music" because music is only a symbol for beauty, for the conception of the world as a work of art. Together with Rohde, Nietzsche understood that even the Greek could not find satisfaction in everyday life, but that he also had to rise above his unsatisfactory existence. This is why Nietzsche says that he wanted to see it as an urge not to perceive the world as it appears to us, but as a work of art. And the world as we see it with the Greeks is to be endured as such. He perceived life, the everyday, as a tragedy. And then you can only bear it if you see it in the mirror image [of art]. What the world is as a work of art is that which is intended to console us about the world of everyday life. Nietzsche understands this service as the cult of Dionysus. For Nietzsche, the urge for the life of appearance, of reflection, was the Dionysian urge. Nietzsche's entire urge to live emanates from here, and it continues to develop in him later. The idea of the eternal return [of the same] is not to be confused with the idea of reincarnation. If you put Nietzsche's idea together with that one, it looks very dull. Nietzsche says that everything that is taking place here before our eyes has already happened an infinite number of times and will happen an infinite number of times. Nietzsche developed the idea of the eternal return of the same from his own life. This is a specifically Nietzschean form of the urge to live. This Nietzschean idea is a subsequent construction, which he gained from the observation of externalities. But if we start from the point we emphasized last time, that the cult of Dionysus can only be understood if we know that the Greeks also worshipped [Hades], the god of death, the underworld, in him, then we also get an idea of what to think of Heraclitus, who was deeply initiated into the meaning of the mystery cults and had the concept of the mystery cults themselves, which enabled him to give an image of those great truths that later reappear in our German mystics, in all those who were at all capable of living within the mystical world of imagination. Thus death is also the root of all life, which is also expressed in the saying of Jakob Böhme: "He who does not die before he dies, perishes when he dies." What I am about to say should lead us into what the Greek cults wanted. This is not easy to say in a nutshell. What we can say in words about what lies at the heart of this is what we find in Aristotle. It is not a question of knowledge that can be expressed, but of having stood in the cults in order to have experienced these truths for oneself. We also know that the people who taught the mysteries said that those who were initiated into the mysteries were freed from all destruction, that they were partakers of an eternal life, that they praised initiation as the highest happiness of their lives. Plato does the same. And this would be recognized by anyone who was able to grasp his doctrine of ideas - which, however, is something quite different from what it is usually taken to be. So what are those who were initiated? Aeschylus was the predecessor of the Greek tragedians. Aeschylus was accused of betraying the Greek mysteries. The betrayal of the mysteries was punishable by death. He was also condemned. He could only save himself by proving that he had not been initiated into the mysteries at all. What does this mean now? Is this [story] to be taken as it is told to us? Was he really not initiated into the mysteries? Anyone who knows how to interpret such a tradition will see that this [story] is not a [story], but has an allegorical meaning. The whole [story] that he was accused of having betrayed the mysteries and then provided proof that he was not initiated at all is to be taken as an allegory. What does it mean that Aeschylus was actually highly versed in the Mysteries and, as far as we can know about this wisdom, was initiated? And what does it mean that he proved that he was not initiated? He has shown that what he said was not mystery wisdom at all, that it did not refer to mystery wisdom. The Aeschylus who was initiated could not reveal anything. The wisdom of the Mysteries could not be betrayed. One could say something about the wisdom of the Mysteries to this or that person. But anyone who doesn't start to really get into it hears words but doesn't understand their meaning. Aristotle is not talking about this or that truth, but that those who participate in the mystery cults live these mysteries and absorb them as wisdom. Then it reveals itself as the greatest secret that could be transmitted to them, that what can be sought is nothing other than man himself. He is the highest and at the same time the deepest; he is that which reveals itself to the participant in the secret teaching. It is now a matter of presenting what it means: ["Man, know thyself!"]. We will stick to the external tradition. There is also a tremendous amount to learn from it. We cannot participate directly in the mysterious, at least not in the way it was understood when the Greeks spoke of the mystery being man. This teaching, it was said, was a corrupting truth. It was seen as destroying everything that existed in the Greek truths of faith. That is what is being emphasized. It should not be brought to the people because it was likely to overthrow all the old deities. We hear that something is being done which was capable of destroying the whole world of gods. Now, let us stick to the mystery truths. If these are supposed to have been capable of destroying this religious world of the people, this world of the gods, then they had to have some relation to it. They could have appeared and had to have some relationship, and they did have a relationship. If we are clear about the relationship between mysteries and religious ideas, we can start from our most trivial concepts within our own worldview. We always hear that humans anthropomorphize, humanize the processes in their environment. There is no other way. It is said that pagans humanize thunder and lightning, that they see the alternation of day and night as a battle between the gods, that they imagine that the gods are only related to each other in the same way as humans. This humanizes nature. Man humanizes it. When we progress to scientific ideas, we can't help it. We often don't even know that we are doing this. The natural scientist will not present the sun as a light [deity]. He has sifted ideas. But they have become so refined that he no longer realizes that he is on the level of pagan mythology. Let us take the idea of impact as an example. Atoms collide in space. This looks very scientific, very advanced. But if we go back to the impact of two bodies, it is nothing other than a humanization. We transfer our subjective power to the being outside us, [even] if we are [often] not clear [about it] and no longer keep present how we have taken the ideas from nature. All this is not merely a crude description, a crude enumeration of what the eye sees: A ball rolls this far and hits another one there, then this one stops and the other one rolls. If you go just one step further, then you have humanized nature, then you have done the same as the pagan "researchers". We have such humanizations before us in natural science. Man puts his own nature out into the world as pure fact. We must hold fast to the fact that in pagan religion and in scientific ideas, when we speak of the outer world, we speak of nothing other than digging our own inner life into the outer world and this into our inner world and then seeing the whole inner and outer world come towards us as harmony. So if we want to make the outer world understandable and worthy of worship, that is our inner world. All that I have said about the humanization of the outer world lies in religion, is what I have called the "conception of the great mass and what man wanted to get beyond. Is what Heraclitus wanted something else? It is something that stands in a certain contrast to the point of view of the world view [of the great masses]. The Mysteries are something quite different, something exactly opposite to the exoteric religions, which view the world in the way I have just described. The Mysteries begin with simple truths, with simple insights, so that what I have just said also applies to them. I mean that the simple truth, whether it be primitive religion or science, arises from the confluence of the spiritual and the material, from what lies subjectively within us and from what lies outside. Man must realize this first truth. If he feels this truth, then he must ask: How do I see that which I seek as truth from the ideas in its pure form? At this preliminary stage I have humanized the world for myself. Now I must see in its purity that which I have contaminated in myself with real existence, with that which exists in the outer world. Now the great cliff begins, that it is now possible that you try to get out of the world view filled with the content of the world of legends, but that you see nothing at all. This is because people tell themselves that they see nothing other than the gray, the abstract, the general. Just as someone whose eyes are not suitable for seeing colors sees the world grey in grey, i.e. not in colors, so it is with someone who has passed the first stage and still wants to retain a content, even if he no longer uses his senses, his eyes and ears to help him. So the really big question is this - and a personality like Heraclitus has to ask it: If I renounce everything I have through the senses, do I still have any content at all? And if so, then it cannot be sensory content, but only spiritual content. This gift is called intuition, genius, grace and so on. But the basic level is this, the ability to experience something when the entire external world, which is perceived with the eyes and ears, is no longer there. This is a correct understanding of the word: experiencing knowledge. - To experience means not to have gained knowledge through external sensory impressions, not even through religious ones, but to allow spiritual knowledge to light up within oneself, to be reborn from within into a state of consciousness which is higher than the everyday one and which at the same time has the effect that it has swallowed up the ordinary state of consciousness, that it is no longer there, but is reborn on a higher level. He is spiritually reborn, and that is a purely inner state of consciousness. But if he then [has gained such a] state of consciousness, then he must go through the same process again, he must go through the process from the outer worldview to the inner worldview again, he must be born again. And when this has taken place, then he is no longer born as a human being, but at the higher level, where the human being is no longer an individual being, but is aware of what shines above every single thing, shines above everything - and that this light is a light, of which Heraclitus says: Now I know everything. - He did not mean to say that he knows all the details, but only that he has reached a state of consciousness where not the personal human being but the eye of the primordial human being sees. We therefore have to distinguish three stages: 1. the ordinary world consciousness, interspersed with sensory perceptions, 2. the consciousness that is also still sensual, but which has fought down the sensual, 3. the purely spiritual consciousness, in which man still sees what is extinguished and intertwined; all perception has become one with the all-perception. - Heraclitus and his comrades had these three states in mind, had them in mind as lived states that they had actually experienced. How do we imagine these purely internally experienced states? We have to think of them in a completely different way than in space and time. We can no longer say: this is this person and this is that person. In this third state of consciousness, there is no talk of multiplicity, but only of the all-consciousness that lives - and sees - in each individual. Heraclitus and his comrades also have this experience in the ordinary ideas of the people, in the ordinary world view. But the ordinary world view now relates to these inner experiences in the opposite way to how these inner experiences used to relate to the outer processes in the world. When Heraclitus and his comrades (those who had these experiences) came to the people, they were confronted with the doctrine of the gods as we find it in Hesiod and Homer. They spoke of the existence of gods. They spoke of Uranos and that he had a wife, Gaea, and that this pair of gods was then replaced by Kronos and Rhea - not without them defeating them. The third pair of gods is Zeus and Hera, because Zeus was saved and defeated his father Cronus. So we see a series of Greek gods and goddesses. They form the content of the Greek consciousness of the gods. This consciousness of the gods relates to the inner experience of the myths in the same way as the outer facts relate to the inner facts. While the external facts are lifted up so that they merge with the spiritual ones, [the myths] are created by the fact that all this gradually comes up and is only projected out into the world and that then nothing else is reflected in the experiences of the gods than the inner experiences. Uranos and Gäa are the first consciousness. It was swallowed up by the second consciousness, by Kronos and Rhea. And the third is the general world light that shines in man, which has its outer projection in Zeus and Hera, who let all the earlier generations of gods sink into night. Just as the individual consciousness sinks into the night, so do they. Just as the individual consciousness is immersed in the outer world, so they are immersed in the inner world. Exactly the opposite process occurs. Therefore the doctrines of the gods first appear as something that is not known to those who have them before them only as doctrines of the gods, just as those who dream do not know the origin of the dream, but only know the dream. He who only sees the dream images would rightly consider them to be reality. He who lives only in the outer projection can take them for reality. And rightly so. But anyone who has seen through them and sees that they are nothing more than projections will no longer regard them as realities. This is why the Mystery Being is a meaningful allegory. The world of the gods is dead to the mystic. The mystery cult represents the twilight of the gods. The outer concept of the gods is an inner state of consciousness. What burns away the outer conception of the gods and allows it to reappear as a purely spiritual state of consciousness, this primal element of the world is what Heraclitus also knew, it is what he and his contemporaries called the "fire" that causes the great world conflagration. The twilight of the gods consists of everything being burnt in order to dissolve it and allow it to reappear on a higher level. When we look at our inner state of consciousness, we always have two things in front of us. First, we have to consider the content of what lives within us; and then we have to focus our attention on that which absorbs the content. In other words: We have to distinguish between the spiritual that is absorbed by us and is always reborn at a higher level, and the power that stands behind this activity of giving birth and rebirth. We have spirituality on the one hand and consciousness on the other. We have to distinguish between the world and the senses that grasp this world, and then the senses reborn in the spirit and the consciousness itself. Consciousness itself and that which is at the highest level of consciousness are the same thing that is seen. At the highest level they are one and the same. We always have to distinguish between these two powers, these two potencies. That which forms the content, which fills the consciousness, and that into which this content must submerge and through which it is reborn. The Greek world of the gods also has a personification, a clear expression, for this inner process, for this division of spiritual life into two potencies. Otherwise we would have to wonder why this world of Greek gods always places the goddess next to the god, for example Gäa next to Uranos. If we stick to external mythology alone, we cannot find a real reason for this. But we must not imagine the matter so superficially. We must be clear about the fact that when we project the inner consciousness into the outer world, the fact that we are dealing with two different forces, with two potencies, enters our consciousness as that which is [devoured] and that which is reborn. This fact is expressed in the two sexes, in Uranos and Gäa, Kronos and Rhea, Jupiter or Zeus and Hera. The feminine in mythology means nothing other than consciousness. A woman, when she appears in mythology, signifies consciousness. The masculine signifies that which is absorbed by consciousness. The feminine is always the driving force. The female is what saves Zeus. Likewise, consciousness is the actual driving force, it is what brings about the various successive states. Now we will also understand why the deepest mystery, the symbol of the deepest mystery, which was offered to those initiated into the Mysteries, presents itself as the human being. This is nothing other than the highest level of development of consciousness. Then he has answered this "Know thyself" for himself. Therefore, the human being must also be regarded as the symbolic solution to the riddle of the world. And this person who confronts him is no longer bisexual, but unisexual. It is exactly the same as with the content of consciousness and the consciousness that has always confronted him as bisexual. Just as the latter then presents itself as unisexual, so there is no longer any separation in consciousness, but rather, to put it in the words of Meister Eckhart, that what sees and is seen is one and the same. The primal being sees itself. It only has to do with itself. In this, the highest solution to the riddle of the world presents itself as a being that is male and female at the same time. These are the various clues that clearly show us that [in the Greek doctrine of the gods] we are dealing with a projection of inner states of consciousness. In addition, there is the myth of Dionysus, which has made its way along various paths. In Egypt in particular, we are dealing with the Osiris and Isis myths. However, we cannot go into details here. Dionysus is the son of Persephone. Persephone is the daughter of Demeter - these are nothing other than states of consciousness; [Dionysus] is overcome and dismembered by the Titans. Only the heart is saved. Zeus revives the heart. The limbs of Dionysus, Persephone's brother, are buried, and from them humans are born. So we see that this myth unites man with the supreme deity, i.e. with nothing other than his consciousness. Persephone is a daughter of Demeter and she is a daughter of Kronos. A higher state of consciousness emerges from the lower state of consciousness. This presents itself to us in Demeter. In Persephone an even higher level of cognition presents itself to us. From this highly developed stage emerges the consciousness of man, the answer to the question "Know thyself". But this answer is such an immense gulf, presents itself as so incomprehensible that man cannot bear it, that man first fragments the man he comprehends, that is, that he seeks to comprehend man in the general world consciousness. From the general world consciousness, from the phenomena of nature, he first builds the human being again. He must first bury this first man, who handed him the questions, in the world and must then build the younger Dionysus from the entire world consciousness. In this way, Zeus rescues him from the old man's substance. This expresses nothing other than the various experiences, the various transformations that are expressed in individual Greek myths. Thus we now understand why the knowledge of the Greek mystery world would have meant the death of external popular ideas. We must also realize that only those who could go through this inner state of consciousness were mature enough to overcome the gods. You had to experience Dionysus yourself, be dismembered yourself and collect the pieces in order to put the younger Dionysus back together again. To hand this over to the one who stands on the outer standpoint would have been poison for him and thus for the great crowd. It would only have taken something from her that could not have been replaced. If the gods had been taken from her, she would have been left with absolutely nothing. Nothing else would have given her other ideas of gods, other commandments. Aeschylus' statement shows us this: "It is impossible to speak of the [mysteries] and to guess or reveal anything about things. - The mysteries, he says, are only a communication of things that can only be experienced, not expressed in words. What one expresses in the mysteries is a projection of the inside outwards. That was the urge to recognize man, the illumination of the great question "Know thyself", since man's greatest enigma was man. At the same time, this was connected with the great destruction of this basic conception of man, this dissection and dismemberment of Dionysus in the world, the gathering of him and his rebirth on a higher level of existence. If one has such an understanding, then many things become comprehensible that otherwise sound like empty words and cannot be understood. Everything must be understood as a fact. One of the most difficult tasks in life is to bring the details back together. This is nothing other than what the Greek mystics expressed with the words: [gap in transcript] [Answer to question:] And what Goethe expresses in his "Faust" is almost the same: "Everything transient is only a parable." [Goethe] means nothing other than that the world of sensory existence is only a parable for those who embark on the path to a higher consciousness. This world is perishing. "The inadequate, here it becomes [event], the indescribable, here it is done", that is, that which cannot be described but must be experienced, here it is done. A special light then falls on the final words of the Chorus mysticus: "The eternal feminine draws us in." The eternal feminine means nothing other than the upper state of consciousness, consciousness itself. And in the whole of Greek mythology, this drawing from one consciousness to another was represented under the image of the goddess, under the image of the woman. Goethe expresses this drawing towards with these words. Thus, the stage of Heraclitus leads him to the Mystery Being, and to have gained the stage of Heraclitus means for him to have gained the first stage to the Mystery Being itself. He believes he has shown that when Heraclitus says: The world came into being from fire - this means nothing other than: The world originated from the Mystery. And the mystery always reverses the concept of the relationship between becoming and passing away, namely in such a way that the perishable is immersed in the imperishable. And now consciousness turns this around. The world must be remelted in the fire in order to submerge through its consciousness into the innermost state of consciousness. For those who look outwards, matter gives birth to the feminine, everything that is power, form, shape, mineral being.Through Paracelsus we have a transition. Nicolaus Cusanus is the forerunner of modern world views. At the same time, he had a deep understanding of the world. The opposites always dissolve at the next higher level. All knowledge is: annihilation in order to be reborn at a higher level. The whole process is illuminated again from behind, as it were. Those who lose themselves in the sciences flutter away too easily. Heraclitus did not have as much to overcome as Paracelsus. Fichte overcame pantheism and thus arrived at an inner view. Schelling also had this. His "Mythology" is the most important work we can read today. In the "Theologia Deutsch", the language has become old. |
87. Ancient Mysteries and Christianity: Heraclitus And Pythagoras
02 Nov 1901, Berlin Rudolf Steiner |
---|
He regarded the rising and falling, the coming and going, which Heraclitus imagined under the image of fire, as the eternal flow of things. The human ego, the human soul, is woven into the cosmic world process. |
The myst should be brought to the point of learning to understand this most terrible event not as that terrible event, but as a symbol of the deepest realization. |
We would never be able to say that they are one and the same. We would not understand this. The one who cannot perceive soulfully will say: They have nothing to do with each other. |
87. Ancient Mysteries and Christianity: Heraclitus And Pythagoras
02 Nov 1901, Berlin Rudolf Steiner |
---|
Ladies and gentlemen present! In the last two lectures I took the liberty of presenting Heraclitus as the representative of the deepest knowledge, the deepest wisdom, as it was at home in ancient Greece up to the fifth and sixth centuries. And I tried to present what has been handed down to us from him, that wisdom which Aristotle says is not something to be absorbed intellectually, and that within the circle in which this wisdom was cultivated, people allowed themselves to be initiated, that they participated in this experience with their own personal involvement. The purpose of this contemplation of Heraclitus was to show how far a single personality, such as Heraclitus, can come, and how, on the other hand, the teachings of such a personality lead into the deepest spiritual life, against the background of which Heraclitus also had his views. Now I would like to add, as it were to supplement and confirm what I have said, some sayings, some doctrines of Heraclitus which show us quite clearly how directly from these views - as I took the liberty of developing last time - the whole essence of Heraclitus' world view flowed from the relationships of the external world to human consciousness itself. I have shown that the essence of the Mysteries consisted first of all in the fact that all the views which the great masses had of the origin and nature of the external world are submerged in that view of man which the man of everyday life takes of his ego; that everything appears in a higher light, that man no longer seeks the light outside in space, but within himself, that therefore the highest knowledge is no longer external knowledge of the world, but his own self-knowledge, that this "know thyself", which runs through Greek wisdom, is not something secondary, but the foundation stone of all Greek wisdom. Knowledge of God can be found in self-knowledge: That, after all, is the essence of the mystery teachings. If we are ultimately led back to our own self, to the soul as that which we find when we look within ourselves; if it is true that - as in the image of Sais - we find nothing but the human self, then this human self, which [man] believes to be enclosed in his bodily life between birth and death, is not a finite self, but this seemingly finite self, this enclosed self expands into the whole universe, so that it ultimately becomes nothing other than the self. This is the deeper meaning underlying the mysteries. The cosmologies, the doctrines of the origin of the world, represent nothing other than the human being who is able to develop to the highest rungs of consciousness. If the self really is the ultimate being of the world, then one must say that this self has actually been present in what is called world creation, world development. That which constitutes the human being is not merely a reflection of the real, as is assumed in the theory of knowledge. It is assumed that the being of the world is complete and that the human being is nothing other than a mere mirror image. This [mirror image] ceases immediately when this self no longer appears as an individual being, but as a primordial being that has always been present in the whole process. It [is] therefore what man himself is. Any external fact appears to the senses in a very specific way. Man's belief clings to sense knowledge. This [splits into individual events, into the individual beings] in space and in time. Now man takes this whole event out of time and immerses it in the fire of his consciousness. Only then does it become what it is in its nature, so that the process of cognition is not merely something that runs alongside the world process, but something that is within it, that is there before it. Cognition is therefore not a repetition of the world process, but a deepening back into the primordial being of the world, into that which actually underlies the world. So whoever is convinced that he is not merely absorbing, but rather pouring out his own essence, connecting with the essence outside, recognizes himself in the world [...]. But man can only achieve this if he climbs up the various rungs [of spiritual development]. That Heraclitus saw in knowledge nothing other than the highest flowering that the world can bring forth, that he did not regard it as something that could also remain absent, emerges from what has come down to us from him. Knowledge appears to us [normally] as something that has been added to the whole world process by chance. That is not how it appears to Heraclitus. For him, the cognizing human being was the truly existing human being; and when we understand this, Heraclitus' worldview will become completely clear to us. Until Pfleiderer, his worldview was not clearly recognized because man himself is in a constant state of flux. Pfleiderer could not think otherwise than that Heraclitus was caught up in a contradiction. He regarded the rising and falling, the coming and going, which Heraclitus imagined under the image of fire, as the eternal flow of things. The human ego, the human soul, is woven into the cosmic world process. And yet, says Pfleiderer, it is as if Heraclitus assumed an eternal soul. On the one hand we have the highest world principle, the primordial being, which completely excludes individuality, and on the other hand we have the human being, who nevertheless has a certain immortality. On the one hand we have the great world process in the continuous coming and going, and on the other hand the individual self, which is enclosed between birth and death, but can expand into the divine. The mystic, the initiate, differed from the ordinary person precisely in that the observation of the world and the observation of one's own self was a contradiction for the latter and not for him. The essence of the Mysteries consisted precisely in the fact that through life within the Mystery world this contradiction ceased to be a contradiction. People were supposed to experience something that made the deep disharmony of the world disappear. The initiation, the participation in the Mysteries, was precisely the way to make the contradiction that clings to the ordinary view of things disappear. Thus for the mystics, for those who allowed themselves to be initiated, the ultimate goal was this: to no longer view in this way that which brings the greatest fear to ordinary people, because it apparently makes the physical sense world, the up and down world, the eternally coming events and deeds disappear as if into nothingness, this phenomenon of death. That was the goal of the mystic. The myst should be brought to the point of learning to understand this most terrible event not as that terrible event, but as a symbol of the deepest realization. So what was the most terrible, the most horrible thing for the ordinary person, he should see as an experience. That is why the god of death, Hades, was also the god of life, Dionysus. Death as a symbol, not as a fact, should be presented to the mystics. This is what hovers over all of Heraclitus' sayings, and they can only be understood from this point of view. When Heraclitus says: corpses are to be regarded as ordinary things, nothing is to be given to the corpse - this takes you much deeper into the Heraclitean view. In Greek there is a certain temptation to compare the human body with the burial mound, because such a comparison can be brought about by a simple play on words. Som" means "body" and "sema" means "burial mound". This play on words was not only used by Heraclitus, but by all those who had anything to do with Greek wisdom. This word leads us much deeper into the matter. Heraclitus is thoroughly imbued with the view, which runs through the whole of Greek mysticism, that what the wise man calls "soul" rests in the body like the body in the burial mound. With an almost sublime word he says that the gods live that which for the ordinary being is death. The immortals live the death of mortals. Here, in a saying of Heraclitus, we have another form of ordinary understanding, of ordinary Greek wisdom, which consists in seeing death as a symbol, not as a fact, because all the individual things of the external world lose the meaning they have for the everyday man, submerge into the spiritual world and become something completely different there. The things in their ordinary meaning are killed, die under the hand of the recognizing human being. They appear in their infinite, eternal meaning. That which the ordinary man calls life, that which for him is the most fruitful, the real, ceases to be the real. Thus that which the ordinary man calls life, that which the man calls sensuous reality, can be nothing other than that which first gains life and first causes the sensuous to die. That is why death becomes a symbol for this higher view. Now for Heraclitus another view is connected with this, with which he, I would like to say, at the same time also shows in himself what is the basic conviction of all mysticism, namely that of the infinity of knowledge. Those who cling to the ordinary wisdom of the day usually come to the conclusion that we cannot go beyond the sensual. We cannot penetrate into the fundamental being, into the "thing in itself", says [Kant]. Only a single real look into Heraclitus' basic view can show us that Heraclitus was much further along on this point than the followers of Kant's philosophy around the year 1900. Heraclitus is convinced that he who is really able to walk the path will achieve a deep inner experience as a result, which we also find again in the German mystics and especially in Tauler, that if we penetrate into the very essence of the soul, if we immerse ourselves completely in it, we will come to no limits. There are no limits to knowledge. The external things are closed. We can only penetrate them according to our senses. However, at a certain depth of our self-knowledge, we can step out to even greater depths. There are no limits to knowledge, because self-knowledge cannot stand still. A God who knew everything, who knew everything, would be an obstacle for the mystic. Therefore, there cannot be an all-knowing and all-wise God. For the mystics, there must be something unfinished, there must be the possibility of becoming even more divine and ever more divine, of ascending to ever higher levels of perfection, of deepening more and more. In this way, Heraclitus expands the world in the direction of self-knowledge to an infinite depth. This saves Heraclitus from any accusation that he said: "I know everything." - For he was also convinced of the impossibility of ever reaching a limit. This shows that Heraclitus also had the true, great, genuine humility that is the consequence of true, genuine self-knowledge, which can never be something perfect and complete. Thus we see that [there is] never despair of knowledge on the path that constitutes the fundamental nature of all mystical contemplation, but the true, genuine confidence that ever new, ever deeper knowledge can be achieved through continuous deepening. This is what underlies Heraclitus' worldview. And this conviction that comes over a person when he realizes this through continuous deepening into his inner being is what Heraclitus describes by saying that the soul strives more and more to come out of the wet into the dry. The wiser a soul is, the more it moves away from the wet, the drier it is. Wisdom passes through it like lightning. This shows that Heraclitus had arrived at the point where all external views of the world are remelted in the fire of knowledge, where they begin a higher life. Now what initially appears to us as a contradiction dissolves into a higher harmony. The contradiction that exists [on the one hand] between the cosmological worldview, which sees the world before us in steady coming and going, in a great world harmony, and [on the other hand] the [individual] human being, which is clamped between birth and death, and which then forms an encroachment into the world of man, is resolved by the fact that the [individual] being is only a truth for the lower levels of cognition and that this ceases for the higher [cognition]. [It also ceases] within the temporal life between birth and death, [when] the light of the eternal [shines] into the temporal life, so that it appears as one and the same with the temporal. When [in this way] individual human life appears as equivalent, as synonymous [with the eternal], then the contradiction ceases. This happens because Heraclitus, on the one hand, has a great harmony and, on the other, dissolves the individual entities as if into an immortal entity, as if into an eternal entity. To recognize is to live, and to live is to overcome a contradiction that exists from the beginning. Whoever believes that he can resolve a contradiction by spintizing the intellect will not get beyond the contradiction, will not be able to grasp the essence of mystical views. The mystic knows that there must first be a contradiction and that life consists in overcoming the contradiction in one's own life. This is what Heraclitus wanted to say with his various scattered sayings. But if we have a background in the Mysteries, we can combine these sayings and then get a coherent world view that shows us how this personality shines far into modern times, and that we can gain a great deal if we immerse ourselves in the philosophy of this wonderful personality, if we raise ourselves up by it. Now a few words about the Greek mystery teaching after we have gone through Heraclitus, because I have to deal with the Orphic teaching together with the Pythagorean school, which spread at about the same time as the Orphic teaching had reached its height. This Orphic teaching also developed a mysticism, and this appears to us next to the mysticism of the Pythagoreans like a light next to another light. [We have the Orphics on the one side and the Pythagoreans on the other. We get to know the confluence of these two currents about two hundred years later in the Platonic world views. In this, the two currents flow together. There suddenly appears to us a higher balance between Pythagorean and Orphic mysticism. Greek mysticism had the goal of transforming the most terrible event, death as a fact [into a] symbol for knowledge that continues to deepen. This was only possible if the mystics were introduced step by step, on the higher levels of knowledge. They were led very slowly. The Pythagoreans also practiced slow guidance. It had to be this way because it was not a matter of logical penetration, but of a lively passage through the individual stages of knowledge. When we look at the content of [their] worldview, the Orphics appear to us to be on a higher level of scientific development than what is contained in the Greek belief in the gods. When we consider the cosmogony of the Orphics, it initially appears to us as a description of external processes. It appears to us as nothing more than mythology translated into scientific language. So in the profound Orphic world view we have given a world view which first of all regards time as that which existed in the beginning. So it was time from which everything has its origin. From time sprang the ether and chaos. The ether is roughly what we know from Heraclitus as fire. Chaos is the entire abundance and diversity of the material world. From the connection of chaos with the ether, i.e. the most unlimited and [the] most solid, becoming thus arises with chaos. Becoming presented under an image is the direct outflow of the most rigid. It presents itself as giving birth, as bringing forth. It arises from the fluid. Becoming from the limited and unlimited. From the egg, Chaos first gave birth to a male-female being. This brought forth from itself a mere female. And from these two emerged the first of what we encounter in Greek mythology as Uranos and Gaea. Uranos and Gaea are swallowed up by [Kronos], so that Zeus in turn absorbs all the earlier world entities that I have just mentioned, [...] and revives them through himself. We can only translate this world-creation process into inner processes of consciousness. Thus, with this description of external facts, we have what should initially be held against the mystic. We must realize that for the mystic, time, Kronos, [...] has become a vivid experience as an existing emptiness, as that which is not yet, but which can produce everything from itself. Unfulfilled time appears as the most congruent image of becoming. For consciousness, this can be translated into a state of consciousness with nothing other than memory, so that under Kronos we have to imagine nothing other than the eternal world memory. If we now translate the individual beings, not the state of consciousness of the individual beings, but if we imagine the humanly overcome being, then we attain a state of consciousness that exists only in memory, that things are behind and next to each other and can only be held in [coming] and going within time by connecting the individual with the other individual to the eternal world memory. From this eternal world memory arises an eternal separation into the most solid and the most rigid. Within the memory, no distinction can be made between the ether and chaos. This only happens when it becomes possible to distinguish between the material and the spiritual from the eternal. These two stand opposite each other in such a way that the spirit creates its own dualism. It is a matter of allowing consciousness to separate for itself. This creates the material and the spiritual, and
Through this, man first gains the possibility of recognizing something of the very lowest level of the world. The world is in an eternal becoming, and this is nothing other than the eternal transition from coming into being to passing away, from being to non-being. This eternal emergence of that which is not perceptible to the senses into a sensuous existence is the interplay between spirit and matter. The highest spirits have made this interplay an integral part of the basic teachings. Let us stop here for a moment with Goethe. He is known to have written something about the metamorphosis of plants and animals. He was of the opinion that the beings of the animal and plant kingdoms come into being through the fact that everything is in a state of eternal transformation. Goethe came to this conclusion because he believed that there is a constant interplay between spirit and matter. Goethe looks at a seed, a small material grain, it seems, a piece of formless matter, which is nothing more than matter, enclosed between certain boundaries. But is that the truth? The same thing that we have before us today as a small material particle will be before us in a very short time as a fully developed plant, with leaves and flowers. The fully developed plant and the small seed are in reality the same thing, one and the same at two different times. They are different in substance, but one and the same. What is one and the same? The small seed is the same as the large plant. The whole plant is contained in spiritual form in the seed. The spirit has withdrawn into seclusion. This same spirit, which is sensualized in the plant, was already present. The spirit reveals itself in sensual existence and is later present in the plant. In our world of the senses there is a continuous multiplicity of the spirit, which hides itself, withdraws into a point of matter and then spreads out again and becomes visible, so that what it previously kept invisible, it presents visibly before us. But only by distinguishing between the two entities of spirit and matter are we able to penetrate this interplay. Seed and plant would fall apart. We would never be able to say that they are one and the same. We would not understand this. The one who cannot perceive soulfully will say: They have nothing to do with each other. The other will say: The whole plant already lies within the seed as the multiplying spirit, which is once in sensual existence and then withdraws again. Only by peeling apart the whole of reality into spirit and matter and following the interplay are we able to understand the interplay. Then we have arrived at the state that presents itself to the physicians as a state of becoming and giving birth. This is nothing other than the mystery of the presence of the spirit in the real world. We can imagine this under the symbol of the egg, the thing that can bring forth another thing that is spiritually completely equal to it, but sensually different. Thus the whole manifold world no longer presents itself as it appears to the sensual imagination, but as it appears to the spiritual eye before the soul. Now we have seen that what penetrates upwards is in the seed, then rises upwards, becomes a plant and has thus assumed sensual existence. If we have a plant before us, then the plant is still something that conceals the spirit, that has more spirit than it shows. A higher being, an animal, shows still more spirit; and even in man a great variety of spirit comes to a directly sensuous existence. But the whole essence of the spirit can only be perceived through spiritual work in self-knowledge, so that that which rests in the seed ultimately stands before self-knowledge in its true unveiled form as its own spiritual entity, and the consciousness that contemplates itself, the soul that faces itself, recognizes nothing other than in a revelatory way that which is generally hidden. The spirit that is in the seed is the same spirit that self-consciously confronts the other being, the male-female being that emerges in the multiplicity of the world. Comprehending this being is a goal of the mystical worldview. It is to be grasped in such a way that the entire consciousness of the person stepping before it becomes spiritualized, that it becomes spirit, will, that it does not merely enter into the person, but presents itself to us illuminated in the outside world. This is what presents itself to the mystic, who now gives birth to the whole world of his own accord. So it is like Zeus, who represents the highest state of consciousness, who has devoured everything and himself. So the whole cosmogony was nothing more for the mystic than a point of support for understanding the progress and deepening of man. Yes, but the concept is nothing but its own realization. Yes, there was the conviction that knowledge is not something that is added to the world, but that it is precisely the essence itself. The mystical experiences were to be brought to a higher level, for the mystic says that the spirit is present but not yet sensually present, like the spiritual in the seed, which has not yet spread into the plant, but has already been present as such. This is why all the Greek mystics say that the primordial being should not be sought in the past. The cosmogony is not constructed in such a way that the primordial being stands there as creator, but appears as something in Greek mysticism that is finally climbed as a stage of cognition, so that the process of cognition within Greek mysticism is not a kind of communion, not a connection of man with the eternal world being, but an actual bringing forth. I emphasize: an actual bringing forth, so that for the Greek mystic the most perfect indeed appears as a sensual creation of the world. Sensual creation and spiritual perfection could coincide for the mystic. The other side of the mystical world view, which did not seek to penetrate to the primordial being, but endeavored to recognize the world by delving into our inner world, emerges in the Pythagorean. One school endeavored to plant the seed in moist soil. The Pythagoreans did not plant the seed in the soil, but invented a method of discovering the spiritual plant in the seed itself, without sinking the seed into the soil before bringing it to development. In what way? By bringing the seed [spiritually] to development. In what way they [...] wanted to discover the spirit in the seed, we will look at that next time. Answer to the question: The question of "where from" is an inherited question for humans. We ask because we see becoming in the process of becoming. We see the thing becoming more perfect. There can be no doubt that the sensual plant is more perfect than the seed. The later is contained in the earlier, only not in reality, but in a spiritual way. The word "beginning" is something future in the doctrines of the origin of the world. A final reflection of the approach of a perfect kingdom is present in early Christianity. It is the same as the kingdom of Zeus. There can be no cause without a corresponding effect. If we ask: Is the one there earlier than the other, it is only because we consider the one earlier. I add the force that is needed to write with a pencil because I feel it; and this expenditure of force is projected out into the world. I also find forces in the outside world. You humanize the outside world. I really put myself into things, I am really in them. The act that you carry out in your head is the initial force of the world. The "before and after" loses its meaning. The seed can look back to the plant that brought it into existence. Its own cause is already present as its own cause, but not in a sensual but in a spiritual way. Every thing is its own cause and does not have a cause. The effect produces itself. We call it force because it is sensual, dull striving. If we want to imagine the power in the seed, that is already the plant. If God were to divide his work into time, he would also have to strive for perfection. Only when he is elevated above time and space is everything there at the same time, then he is perfect. All opposites have a point where they meet. "To whom time is like eternity and eternity like time, he is freed from all conflict" [according to Jakob Böhme]. Eternity broken down into individual moments is time. Time summarized is eternity. The circle is limited, the straight line is unlimited, infinite. The Orphics did not arrive at the concept of numbers like the Pythagoreans. Why did Plato give his views in conversations? He could not have presented it any other way. If you take Plato's "Phaidon" and follow it properly, you will find that it is a conversation between a Socratic initiate and a Pythagorean. The method of the Mysteries led to expression through conversation. |
87. Ancient Mysteries and Christianity: The Pythagorean Doctrine
09 Nov 1901, Berlin Rudolf Steiner |
---|
Take his "Apprentices at Sais". This is something that can only be understood in its esoteric meaning. But anyone who knows the personality of Novalis - he was born in 1772 and died in 1801, so he was 29 years old - will understand this. |
I just wanted to say that this world view of the Pythagoreans can only be understood if one understands the immersion of Novalis, which must be understood mathematically - of Novalis, who was of a thoroughly poetic nature and as such was what literary history calls a "Romantic", yet was rooted in such laws that he could see strict mathematics as the primal source of existence. |
But if we understand this for the whole sum of world phenomena, if we understand that the spiritual can be detached from the material, then this leads us up to higher levels. |
87. Ancient Mysteries and Christianity: The Pythagorean Doctrine
09 Nov 1901, Berlin Rudolf Steiner |
---|
[Ladies and gentlemen present! The last time I drew attention to the fact that I wanted to talk about Pythagorean teaching. Pythagoras had founded a school in Lower Italy. It was not so much a school, but rather a discipleship whose spiritual leader was Pythagoras. He formed a doctrine. We can no longer say how much of it belonged to Pythagoras and how much to his disciples. The world view of the Pythagoreans emerges before us, and this shows itself to be one of the most profound world views we have. Since it is very important for us to really introduce the things we are dealing with, I would like to introduce a modern Pythagorean before I mention Pythagoras himself, a Pythagorean who lived in Germany himself and whose world view always seems to me like a forecourt to Pythagoras. You can understand this world view much better if you are familiar with the works and views of Baron von Hardenberg - Novalis, a poet of a thoroughly mystical nature. No one who knows his writings will doubt this. Take his "Apprentices at Sais". This is something that can only be understood in its esoteric meaning. But anyone who knows the personality of Novalis - he was born in 1772 and died in 1801, so he was 29 years old - will understand this. This Novalis seems to have remained the most innocent youth throughout his life. He seems to us more like the revelation of an unearthly individuality than an earthly personality. It is quite impossible to understand that this immersion, this contemplation, could have been acquired in his immense youth. When we read his "Heinrich von Ofterdingen", we find that he drew from direct sources, from the sources of mysticism. He then incorporated these into his novel "Heinrich von Ofterdingen" and thus showed that he understood the mysticism of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. If we look at his basic ideas, we will find a certain similarity with other mystics. He searched for the "Blue Flower. People have often mocked this "Blue Flower. We will understand each other better if we remember Goethe's "Prophecies of Bakis", where he speaks of the serpent's thread and the flower, where he says that man can walk the path that is long and narrow. When man then walks this path, he sees knots before him. He also sees the knot in which lives are tied together. Behind him, he trails a snake. The snake disappears and the knot transforms into a flower in front of him. This image, which Goethe repeatedly refers to, is egoism, the approach to the highest spirituality or deepest knowledge. The symbol for this is the "blue flower. It is also a symbol of that which arises for man as an entanglement of life when he progresses along the path of knowledge. It is this "Blue Flower" that Novalis has in mind for his Heinrich von Ofterdingen. We also find this flower in Master Klingsohr, who can prophesy. The future lies open before him. Goethe says: The future also lies open before him who really has a complete overview of the past. [...] - Master Klingsohr reveals the future to Heinrich von Ofterdingen. This satisfies him to such an extent that he is able to see the individualized Blue Flower in the daughter, as he has progressed so far that he can see the highest in the female being. Matilda dies away from Henry of Ofterdingen. He decides to die after his beloved. For him, reality turns into a dream. What he was previously inclined to regard as a dream, the higher spiritual world, is now reality. He no longer finds this highest in the individual being, but he finds it in other beings as well. He finds a second girl. It is the same for him. He finds Mathilde again in Cyane. She is like a new embodiment of him. He lives a life of the afterlife. We find the idea of this in his "Apprentices of Sais". A beautiful fairy tale is woven into it about the boy Hyacinth, who loves the girl Rosenblüthe. Only the trees and birds of the forest know of this love. Then we find Hyacinth changed. He is overcome by a longing to seek something deeper. He leaves Rosenblüthe without sufficient reason. Then he comes to the evil old man, who plants in him the longing to seek the mother of all things, or the veiled maiden. He sets off on his journey to the temple of Isis, comes upon an image, and when he unveils it, he finds nothing but roses. [He finds the beloved as the solution to the riddle, as the veiled image of Sais. This is reminiscent of the higher concept of "Know thyself", as he expressed it in an epigram. He stands before the veiled image at Sais. He lifts the veil and - wonder of wonders - he finds himself. A magical individualism consists in the fact that one can find the infinite in the finite, [that one can turn the spirit into immediate reality]. So in Novalis we undoubtedly find a mystical personality. So if we assume that in Novalis we are dealing with a deep-seated, mystical nature, and if we then get to know him, he does not appear to us as a mystic, as he has just been described, but as a resurgent old Pythagorean disciple. When we let Novalis pass us by, when he seems more like a memory, and when we then see how this touch of the earthly, how this personality nevertheless stands firmly in life, has tendencies that we would least expect to find in such romantically inclined natures, then we are referred to the Pythagoreans as to fleeting ghosts. We must by no means equate this view and philosophical contemplation, as we have it of Romanticism in him, with the view of the other Romantics, with contemporaries of his who lack any depth. Friedrich Wilhelm Schlegel or Tieck, [E-T.A.] Hoffmann and so on must not be confused [with him]. But anyone who allows Novalis to have an effect on them will not be tempted to make such a confusion. What is astonishing about Novalis - despite his [poetic] nature - is that he is one of the most enthusiastic admirers of everything mathematical. He has a thoroughly educated, mathematical psyche, an immediate revelation of what he calls the magical in nature. In this he finds the law of the spirit. That which he who wishes to enter the higher regions would like to leave behind, we find in Novalis as the main thing, as that which led him to emphasize the magical in his [idealism]. In the concatenation of basic mathematical concepts he sees the most intriguing revelation of the mystery of the world. He sees free matter at the bottom of things. Mathematics is the foundation on which existence rests, it is therefore nothing other than the highest form, the purest form of spirituality. If we find this as the basis of his view, then he appears to us as a representative of Pythagoreanism. We can understand Pythagoreanism much better if we imagine it like Novalis. The Pythagorean soul must be imagined in this way, then we arrive at where Novalis stands; [just as] Pythagoras was able to arrive at the view that the basic structure, the basic essence, the basic spirit of the universe is actually given in the connection between numerical quantities and spatial quantities in this harmony. If we want to gain an insight into a Pythagorean soul from the first elementary beginnings, we must imagine it in the following way. The pupil was led up step by step to the knowledge to which he was to come. He was guided in a very careful way. The first was mathematical knowledge, the second astronomical. Astronomy was preferably mathematical. The regularity resulted from the numerical relationship in the universe. He was first introduced to these numerical relationships. Then he was gradually led on to the knowledge of man himself. The fulfillment of the desire "Know thyself" [came] last. First he was introduced to mathematics. How can one imagine that man can actually come to the idea that mathematics is the spiritual foundation of the entire universe? How can this be imagined in the form of harmony, formed in space and time? If we immerse ourselves in those areas of space and time which outwardly already show a regular grouping, such as the movement of the celestial bodies, if we immerse ourselves in that, then we have basically given nothing other than an embodied mathematics, an embodied arithmetic, in this construction of the celestial vault that we perform in our minds. No human being can actually find anything of a mathematical structure, of a spatial structure of geometric figures in the world and in reality, if he has not first formed these mathematical figures in his mind. If someone described a circle or an ellipse, we would not know what it is that he is describing as an object. We would be able to trace the line in the various places in space and connect these places. But we would not be able to connect a concept with the whole line that describes the object if we had not already formed the concept. We can draw a star and then think about what kind of line the star describes. But only then can we find the figure if we already have it in our minds. The same is also the case with other things, even if we take the numerical relationships. We will only recognize the objects outside in space in their certain mutual numerical relationships, in their numerical diversity, if we have formed these relationships in our minds. If we know that 2 x 2 = 4, then we can also recognize it outside in space. We would not be able to connect any concepts with reality, we would not be able to grasp them at all, they would pass us by like nothing, they would not be there for us at all, if we had not formed the images in a purely spiritual way in our psyche. So it is that the Pythagoreans could say: That which I see outside must also be contained in a certain way in my mind. What emerges from the source point of my soul is the same as what I perceive outside as the primordial ground of the world itself. The Pythagoreans thought about this more deeply and said to themselves: "It is impossible that two things that are completely separate from each other, spirit outside and world inside, [merely] exist side by side [and do not agree]. The coincidence would only have meaning if what is in the spirit is exactly the same as what is outside in space. If the circle, the ellipse that I perceive within me, the numerical relationships, are the same as those outside, which I see in the outer world, then it makes no sense at all if [the Pythagorean] does not have something that he forms within himself. If he sees the spirit of things and has it within him, then it has only one meaning. Therefore the Pythagorean did not initially think like the philosophers of the nineteenth century under the influence of Kant. He did not ask: How is it that my imagination inside me corresponds to the things outside? My experience is quite different. That is the unquestionable unity of what is outside and what is in my mind. This is how the Pythagorean thinks. It makes no difference whether I take the ideas of the Pythagoreans' astronomy or apply the new ones. It doesn't matter at all. So when the Pythagorean sees the celestial body describing an orbit in the form of an ellipse, it is a direct experience for the Pythagorean that the ellipse that he perceives within himself and the ellipse that exists outside as the orbit of a star are not two ellipses, but only one. And that is experience. Schelling also expressed this, and this makes the matter clear in the simplest way. He has taken up the "power of attraction that physicists have always [known]. They imagined that objects exert a force of attraction on each other. The earth attracts the moon, the sun attracts the earth. When the sun attracts the earth, it acts on the earth. It is difficult to attribute an effect to a body where it does not exist. But the fact is that when a body acts on the earth, it is on the earth. A body is where it acts. The boundary of light is not the boundary of the real sun. The sun is in the entire space where it exerts its gravitational pull. The space that the earth fills is also part of solar space. Imagine this Schellingian idea as [already] underlying the Pythagorean doctrine. The human spirit fills the entire world space. It is not enclosed in a single organism. The spirit is where it perceives. For the philosophers of the nineteenth century who followed Kant, the question is this: How is it that the mind perceives what is outside it? - The Pythagorean does not say this at all: How is it that the mind perceives that which is apart from it? The Pythagorean says: If the mind perceives an ellipse in the sky, then it is a fact that the mind is not enclosed in the organism, that it is not there where it perceives with the senses, but that it is there where it perceives [mentally]. The limit of the spirit is not the sense, but the spirit is where it perceives. - There is a separation between the numerical relationships in space and what exists in our head as numerical relationships, which does not exist for the Pythagoreans. The Pythagoreans do not recognize the idea that man is initially a sensual, finite being, enclosed with the psyche in a fabric that connects the senses with the outside world. This gives people today the impression that the mind is also enclosed in [a] housing. When other philosophers take this for reality and ask: "How is it that we perceive external things?", the Pythagoreans take the opposite view. They do not ask: How is it that the mind is enclosed in such an organism? - It is perhaps better that I do not say "individual", but "individual being". This then leads to an understanding of a world view such as the Pythagorean one. It leads to an understanding that can only be grasped if one sees in the mathematical that which constitutes the basic structure in the universe, and which, if one thinks of the whole world as filled with spirit, constitutes the basic structure of the spirit itself. So we actually have in the basis of the thing that can be perceived with the senses deep down, on a lower level, in the spatial-temporal of the universe, commonalities that can be expressed through spatial sizes and numerical ratios, that which appears to the spirit on a higher level. The spirit has a numerical, geometrical basis. The spirit has its origin where things are regular. The spirit grows out of the mathematically constructed world. Therefore [the Pythagorean] seeks the primordial grounds of existence in the mathematically constructed world. I have pointed out that there is a difference between the Greek worldview, as represented by Heraclitus, and the Pythagorean one. At the time, I constructed my remarks in such a way that they came back to Goethe's basic view. I said then that Goethe says that the seed and the plant are one and the same being. The material seed contains everything that is still in it in complete concealment. It is the same as the fully developed plant. The plant is not in it, but it has the sense that in a spiritual way the plant is the same in every form as in another form, so that the plant with its foliage and petals, with its whole fruit and with all that is in it, is to be regarded as that which has become material, materially, which is in the seed in an ideal way. Goethe therefore says that the seed is the whole plant, except that the spirit is still concealed behind it. That which is ideal in the seed becomes material reality in the whole plant. The same image can be applied to the whole world. One can understand the world by observing it in its highest state, by immersing oneself in its blossom and fruit, in the human soul, by studying the "Know thyself" and going to the human being. There, where the purely spiritual-soul then appears directly, i.e. in the deepening, in the direct immersion into the self, one can first look for a world view, a world view. But you can also examine a seed. You can find ways and means to examine the seed. One can assume that what lies in the seed is already indicated and that the world view that is gained from the human being is the highest. The Pythagoreans do not seek man where he is soul, nor where he appears as spirit, but where he is apparently not spirit at all, where he apparently is not at all. The Pythagorean seeks certain reality through indifferent numbers. And that is why he seeks the spirit where he already knows the spirit. That is why he also finds the primal source, the basic structure of existence, in mathematics. I just wanted to say that this world view of the Pythagoreans can only be understood if one understands the immersion of Novalis, which must be understood mathematically - of Novalis, who was of a thoroughly poetic nature and as such was what literary history calls a "Romantic", yet was rooted in such laws that he could see strict mathematics as the primal source of existence. That is why the Pythagoreans, because their spirit was powerful enough, were able to find spirit in the relationships of numbers. They started from the lowest level of the spiritual. Just as the seed is not yet a plant, but can become a plant, so they ascended from the seemingly unspiritual to the spiritual. This is what can make us understand the whole world view of the Pythagoreans. The Pythagorean worldview is usually presented as if it were the numerical aspect of the world that led the Pythagoreans to regard number as the origin of things. And one cannot quite imagine what they meant by that. I must confess that if we follow what is written in the textbooks and read that the Pythagoreans regarded number as the origin of all things, it would seem meaningless to me. Only if I imagine how it is in reality, if I assume that they grew up in a completely different theory of knowledge, can I understand what they meant. Their view is simply described by the word: the Pythagorean did not look for the spirit where it appears to be a sensual entity, but where he perceives it as something that fills the whole of space. That is one side of the Pythagorean world view, that is the reason why they descended to numbers and geometric shapes. On the other hand, the reason is also because they found something in these numbers and geometric figures that they could address as spirit. What do geometric or mathematical ratios mean? Anyone who can only imagine a circle or an ellipse when they are drawn on the blackboard cannot be said to have any idea of the real geometric or mathematical relationships. If he has to put five peas or beans on the table when he wants to imagine the number <>, we cannot say that he has an idea of the real numbers. On the contrary, we are aware that what we call a circle, what we call an ellipse, can only be represented approximately in material reality. We know that the material circle we draw is only an approximation of what we can create in our minds. We also know that what the celestial bodies in outer space describe is only an approximation of a circle. However, it is the same law that governs the creation of the world as the law that governs us when we imagine a circle in our minds, when we no longer need to deduce the spiritual from the sensual. That is why mathematics would be the best thing to introduce us to the spiritual. This is also why the Pythagoreans placed the highest value on mathematics. So if you really want to recognize the spirit, you have to be able to disregard everything sensual. You must be able to realize that it is not what you draw on the blackboard with chalk that is a real circle, but what remains for the spirit without the chalk drawing on the blackboard. Using the salt cube, it was possible to show that the cube is something completely different from the [salt] cube. In this way, the pupils could be shown that the spiritual - also of other things - can only be understood if the sensual remains absent. This is easy to show with the salt cube. The spiritual content is not the same as the outer cube. But if we understand this for the whole sum of world phenomena, if we understand that the spiritual can be detached from the material, then this leads us up to higher levels. Everyone admits that mathematics has nothing to do with the things of the world, but with the spiritual. But if this goes further up, people confuse the spirit with reality A strange document on the confusion of the spirit with reality has just come out these days. A book has been published entitled "Kritik der Sprache" (Critique of Language) by Fritz Mauthner, which aims to show how all our knowledge floats in the air, how nothing is given to us but the sensory world, and if we disregard the sensory world, we have nothing more in our imaginary world than empty words. Now, ladies and gentlemen, this is something that someone who is unable to detach the spirit of things at a higher level of reality, as he can do with mathematical entities, can very easily come to. He who has no intuition, who does not really have from the source point of his spirit what he has to hold up to things, who is sterile and barren, who cannot fill his soul with spiritual realities, believes that he has nothing more when he goes beyond [the sense world] than words. Instead of a "critique of knowledge, he writes a "critique of language. The book comprises two volumes. It seems to me as if someone wanted to write a critique and had not mastered what he wanted to criticize. He confuses what the mind adds to the formations. What Mauthner gives would be - compared to what spiritual content can and should give - a critique of pencil drawing. It shows how much the pencil is capable of depicting circles. Thus sterile views cling to those who are unable to feel the true content. He does not know that the spirit gradually acquires the ability to ascend to the higher realms of existence and is aware of its difference from material things at every stage of spiritual life, just as the mathematician is able to detach the spiritual, the spiritual from things, i.e. to advance from what is not yet spirit to the immediate God in the world. This was something that the Pythagoreans sought to achieve step by step by trying to lead the student from the lower to the higher. They were convinced that by ascending from the lower to the higher, man was not merely having an experience within himself, but was fulfilling a task in the universe itself. They were convinced that he was doing something in the world, they were so convinced that they only compared the ascent with the numerical relationships themselves. They said to themselves: The individual human being who perceives is apparently a duality. The perceiver and the perceived. These two great opposites stood for the Pythagoreans at the basic level of their table of knowledge. But they said to themselves: All this is only apparent because man does not stand on the highest level of perfection, but on the lower levels. The perceiving and the perceived must be overcome if they are to become one. Thus the Pythagorean imagines that, just as now in human cognition, unity triumphs over duality, over what is separate in the world, the Pythagorean must imagine everything according to numerical relationships and specifically again in such a way that what is separately a duality presents itself to him as unity. Now the Pythagorean is convinced that the whole multiplicity of the world, the fact that there are many things in the world, derives only from the fact that man first sees the appearance, not the thing, that he does not see things as they are, but that he sees them as they are not, because of the limitations of his own existence. He sees that this multiplicity, when he overcomes appearance, then presents itself in reality, in truth, as unity. What man ultimately achieves is the primordial unity, the primordial One of the world, and the Pythagorean also sees this as the foundation from which everything springs. This is what makes it possible for man to perceive something in space. This is the general unity of the world, but man can only gradually ascend to it. What is revealed last is there first, and that is because it is a member of this multiplicity. After it has been placed in a corner for a while, it integrates itself into the world structure and becomes one with the world harmony. The numerical harmony, the geometric regularity of the world view embraces the human being. And so he finds it by integrating himself into the structure of numbers. Therefore, the Pythagorean can say that all good, all virtue consists in man overcoming appearances and finding numerical, geometric regularity, whereby he integrates himself into the great world existence. Thus man appears to himself like a tone in harmony, and because he appears to himself like a tone in harmony, he has to give himself the right tone and the right proportion. He does not fulfill a task for himself, but fulfills a moral task. If he does not fulfill it, then he is not in the right numerical proportion. He has something to [contribute] not to himself, but to the whole structure of the world. Through every transgression, man brings upon himself an unlimited responsibility, and, recognizing this, he should strive more and more to attain the mood that he has to fulfill in the great music of the world. So to the Pythagorean, what is spread outside in space and time appears as a moral task itself. For the Pythagoreans, the moral task is not to be understood as a mathematical one on a higher level. The mathematical task is that he discovers the world space, but in such a way that he is thereby integrated, that he is thereby integrated like a tone in the world music, like a number in the law of numbers. He then discovers that when he does something - because he is not just his own redeemer - it is not just important for himself, but something that concerns the whole universe. The spirit is not only in me, but also where it works. He then sees that the spirit not only has to work on its own moral perfection, but also on the harmonization of the whole universe. When the Pythagorean imagines the harmony of the universe in such a way that he thinks of the world as permeated by musical tones, by music of the spheres analogous to music itself, this happens because music is based on tonal relationships. The Pythagorean translates this by saying: Just as the tonal relationships become perceptible to our senses as a harmony of tones, there is also a harmony of tones, a music of the spheres in the world, which acts like the numerical relationships in the world. But if it does not find the right numerical relationship, the right tonal relationship to the world within itself, then it disturbs the harmony of the world. This is why the insights of the Pythagoreans had to lead to the strictest educational system. The Pythagorean is aware, when he teaches the individual this or that, that he is taking upon himself a responsibility, not only towards that person, but towards the whole universe. Answer to the question: Everyone's special disposition enables them to gain knowledge of the spirit. The Pythagoreans endeavored to create this possibility for everyone. [Mathematical ideas are only easy to prove because they are simple, almost without content. For those, however, who are not at all suited from the outset to immerse themselves in the content of the world, the best and safest school will be to go through mathematics. Plato therefore demanded a thorough knowledge of mathematics from his students. Otherwise it might not have worked for everyone. I would like to explain this to someone who has gone through the Pythagorean school: Let's imagine a person who can only feel. Such an organism would be able to perceive geometric shapes and also be able to conceive of numbers. In fact, blind and deaf people have been taught these relationships and turned into accomplished mathematicians. Such an organism can also arrive at music in a mathematical way. The numerical relationships only appear to him in a shadowy way. Now let us imagine that such a person suddenly hears. He will then perceive the same thing that he had previously understood. He now perceives it with his ears. It is the same with the blind. Through an explanation of the vibrations of the world, he can get an idea of the colors through the numerical relationships. The Pythagorean should now also bring the higher senses to rise. It is the same thing as when a mathematician comes to a musician who is constructing his work himself and calculates it for him. Then the musician can say: "Stay away from that. If you have the necessary receptivity, you can have perceptions even without mathematical representation. I have contrasted two currents. One current within Hellenism, which starts from Heraclitus, and the other, which starts from Pythagoras. Heraclitus and Pythagoras stand before us as two who have the same object. Heraclitus, as it were, as the composer, Pythagoras as the one who mathematically calculates his subject. It is the same with us as with Pythagoreanism. You first have to teach the blind and the deaf and then you can lead them to higher levels. Mathematical concepts devised by humans are often confirmed in the outside world. In the case of electricity, people calculate that this or that must be one way or the other. If you then carry it out in reality as an experiment, it must agree [with the calculation]. I would like to cite a famous conversation between Schiller and Goethe. Goethe and Schiller left a scientific lecture together and got into a conversation about what they had heard. In the course of the conversation, Goethe took a piece of paper and drew a symbolic plant, an ideal plant, saying: "This plant is actually in every plant. Every plant is actually an individual embodiment of this general plant. To which Schiller replied: Yes, but that's just an idea! To which Goethe replied: But then I see my ideas with my eyes. [Or let's take a] triangle [it is presumably drawn]: The angles add up to 180 degrees. Because we have seen a triangle, we can form a quadrilateral by connecting the blue one with the green one. This can be extended in the mind. We can move from the triangle to the square. But we cannot go from one shade of color to another. We can only perceive sensually what belongs to the world of the senses. In mathematics, the spiritual is the easiest to grasp. The mathematical is the most spiritual. You don't know how to perceive sounds from numerical relationships? Sounds are not perceived [with the ears], only thought. Composers who become deaf therefore only have a surrogate. It is the same as when we deduce one mathematical entity from another. It is not [sensory] perception, but a mental experience. The sensual is transformed [into the spiritual], it is elevated. Studying mathematics makes no difference, but recognizing the essence of mathematics does. The most superficial person just splashes and splashes around in the primordial being. Someone can also have studied mathematics. Goethe studied little mathematics. But no one understood the essence of mathematics more than he did. Goethe arrived at his magnificent world of metamorphoses precisely because he had such a great idea of the nature of mathematics, even though he was only able to arrive at the [gap in the transcript] theorem. He who can make razors may not be able to shave, and he who can shave usually cannot make razors. Thus the mathematician who knows mathematics [only] in form need not know its meaning and its application to the primal being. |
87. Ancient Mysteries and Christianity: The Pythagorean
16 Nov 1901, Berlin Rudolf Steiner |
---|
But this only lives in the minds if they cannot become aware of the inner rapture, if they cannot understand, if they cannot grasp how for the Pythagoreans the whole counting becomes different when we have arrived at the ten. If you don't understand this purely in the way the Pythagoreans understood it, you won't understand what the Pythagoreans meant. |
According to the Pythagoreans, it is precisely in counting that we have a means of raising ourselves more and more into the spiritual realm. You have to consider what he understands by the so-called "gnomons". He understands this to mean nothing other than the inner lawfulness that prevails in our world of numbers if we study this world of numbers in the right way. |
87. Ancient Mysteries and Christianity: The Pythagorean
16 Nov 1901, Berlin Rudolf Steiner |
---|
[Dearly beloved!] I must apologize for my cold; it will be difficult to hear me. I have tried to show that this Pythagoreanism, which lived in southern Italy in the sixth century BC - this strictly self-contained and yet not self-contained school - had a great influence in all the centuries following Pythagoreanism, and that this whole direction was acquired in a difficult course of study that lasted many years. You really had to do a lot of exercises before you could grasp things in a purely spiritual way. I [wanted] to show that it is a pity not to have such a school today. I [wanted] to show that the Pythagorean is not so isolated, but that in Novalis we have a personality who thought in quite the same way. But there is something else. It can seem somewhat strange when we hear that the Pythagoreans sought something in the strange harmony of numbers, in numbers and in the combination of numbers that represents the primal causes of things. It will not surprise us if we make the assertion that our science, ordinary natural science, insofar as it is physics and chemistry today, is on the way to becoming Pythagoreanism. In the course of the nineteenth century, only a certain group of sensual views prevented natural science from merging into Pythagoreanism. Today we are facing the reformation of natural science. We are on the verge of chemistry and physics becoming completely materialistic because only scientific ideas have been adopted. But perhaps in a few years' time we will no longer be able to think only materialistically about chemical and physical matters. Helmholtz, despite his merits and enormous inventions, and although he never got beyond a certain materialistic presentation at the end of his life, adopted a kind of idealism. At the Naturforscher-Versammlung he announced a lecture on "Apparent substance and true movement". Unfortunately, no notes remain in his estate. However, we can imagine what Helmholtz wanted to say. The physicist only gives a lecture [with such a title] when he has to. Having to give a lecture on "Apparent substance and true motion", on the fact that everything substantial is only apparent, and then the spiritual, the motion is the true, is of great importance. For it is not immediately possible for the physicist to ascend to the spirit. But it is already something if the physicist does not regard matter as the real, but only as something apparent. That is a symptom. Our entire natural science is basically out to confirm the old Pythagorean theorem that everything that exists in space can be traced back to numerical relationships. To indicate what I mean when I say that natural science is Pythagoreanism, that it is on the way to seeing the decisive factor precisely in numbers, let us take the chemical substances: oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, lead or any of the various other elements. They form compounds, as we know. For example, when lead and oxygen combine, what is the decisive factor? The number! The number is the decisive factor when these two substances combine to form lead oxide. I can't go into this in detail, nor can I go into how the two substances can be separated again, because it would be going too far. However, it is enough for us to know that when lead and oxygen combine, they always combine according to a certain numerical ratio. But this goes even further. Suppose mercury combines with oxygen. For example, 103 grams of mercury only combine with 8 grams of oxygen. You can see beforehand that if you want to combine 8 grams of oxygen, you need 103 grams of mercury. But now it's like this: oxygen always combines with all other elements in such a way that certain parts by weight of other elements combine with eight parts by weight of oxygen. This is the case with all elements. For each of the seventy-three known elements there is a number that indicates the weight fraction with which it combines with all the others. The chemist must recognize this from a wealth of facts. That is just it: We have many more facts than the ancients. They had the same thoughts, but fewer facts! Lead oxide combines 103 parts by weight of lead with 8 parts by weight of oxygen. If we combine lead with sulphur, 103 parts by weight of lead combine with 16 parts by weight of sulphur. So, if you construct the whole world materially, you do not have something chaotic and arbitrary, but - as the Pythagoreans thought - something ordered according to the harmony of numbers. And the further we go in science, the more we see that the organization and construction [of nature] can be expressed by numbers. Today's science provides confirmation of the correctness of the Pythagoreans' spiritual construction that we are dealing with numbers in nature. Helmholtz seems to have wanted to say the same thing in his lecture. We are ultimately dealing with the spirit. Whether the mind is expressed by numbers or viewed in some other way, we will leave that aside for now. If we extract everything that lies dormant in the substance, then we finally come to the conclusion that we are dealing with spirit. Science also provides us with proof of this. Science is disproving materialism more and more every day. The opinion that natural science needs materialism may still exist in some people's minds, but the truth is that nothing disproves materialism more than natural science. I would like to give you an example from contemporary natural science to show you how this natural science is overcoming materialism bit by bit day by day. You know that the human eye consists of a displaced spherical envelope or shell filled with a glassy, watery liquid, the vitreous body, and that seeing an object is made possible by the fact that embedded in this mass is a small crystal lens that images the image on the background. Light penetrates through the black in the eye. This light is refracted in the lens, creating a small image, and this image becomes the cause of our vision. The various animals, vertebrates and also a number of invertebrates have similarly constructed eyes. The octopus also has an eye that appears to be similar to that of humans. It has an eye with a vitreous body, embedded in the vitreous body is a lens that mediates vision. The interesting thing is that in humans, the crystalline lens grows in a completely different way to the octopus, even though both are crystalline lenses. In the octopus, the crystalline lens is formed because the crystalline lens has grown within the aqueous fluid of the eye [through excretion and thickening]. Now you can say to yourself: the eye with the aqueous fluid and the lens resembles a camera obscura. In humans, however, the lens is not formed by excretion and thickening, but by the surface pulling the lens out of itself and then pushing it into the eye. This crystalline lens emerged once from the eye and the other time in a different way from the outside and was then pushed into the vitreous body! Can we still say, when we see how a material structure can arise in so many different ways, that it is the material that forms nature? Should we not say that nature is not built up according to material powers, but according to purely spiritual powers? The natural substance does not matter at all. One time it is formed from the inside, the other time from the outside. The substance as such is therefore basically the same for the construction of organisms. The mind constructs things. The further we get in natural science, the more we find that we can never say what would come into being if we [only] took the substance into account. It is the spirit that uses matter to create forms. That is why the Pythagoreans divide the world into these two components: On the one hand, they conceive of the world as that which makes it perceptible/and then again as that which is not perceptible in the world, or let us say better, that which is only perceptible, recognizable to the mind; they have there clearly set apart two things in the human and animal eye; they see how the same eye is constructed in the one and in the other case. This law - in general the whole spiritual that makes use of the material - cannot be perceived with the senses, it can only be perceived in a spiritual way. But space could not be fulfilled if the spirit could not make use of the perceptible. The Pythagorean separates these two things: on the one hand, he has the eternally creative, the spiritual, which uses matter to create countless forms; on the other hand, he has matter, which is not active for itself, but only to make visible something that cannot be perceived by the senses. The Pythagorean composes the whole world from the perceptible and the imperceptible. For him, the one is the number one. It forms the boundary for him. Something exists for us because it becomes one, because it becomes individual. But this is only apparent; it is connected to all other things in the world. And the "how" is conveyed by the number symbolism and the number context. And so we can understand it, because the Pythagoreans had this connection, they saw how much the number rules when it comes to material things and objects. But they also saw how the Pythagoreans endeavored to find the wonderful connection within the numbers and to find what they had found internally confirmed externally. Whoever does not pay attention to this, whoever does not realize that it was the harmony of the inner and outer, whoever does not take this into account, that it was the delight for the Pythagorean, can very easily find gimmicks in the Pythagorean number teachings. But this only lives in the minds if they cannot become aware of the inner rapture, if they cannot understand, if they cannot grasp how for the Pythagoreans the whole counting becomes different when we have arrived at the ten. If you don't understand this purely in the way the Pythagoreans understood it, you won't understand what the Pythagoreans meant. As long as we count to ten, we are dealing with units where we add one number to another. But when we reach ten, we continue counting. But we don't just count units, we count the tens: 10 = 1 x 10, 20 = 2 x 10, 30 = 3 x 10. While we have 10, we add 10 others. So we count in a spiritual way what we used to count materially. We count the numbers themselves from 10 onwards, so that when we count to 10, we are actually counting materially in the Pythagorean sense. But if we continue counting the tens, we can disregard the material. We do this by saying: 1 x 10, 2 x 10 and so on. And then we come to the hundreds. The further we count up, the more we forget the material basis and what we used to count. According to the Pythagoreans, it is precisely in counting that we have a means of raising ourselves more and more into the spiritual realm. You have to consider what he understands by the so-called "gnomons". He understands this to mean nothing other than the inner lawfulness that prevails in our world of numbers if we study this world of numbers in the right way. Take the following: If you take the consecutive numbers and multiply them, each number by itself, you get the so-called square numbers: 2 x 2 = 4, 3 x 3 = 9, 4 x 4 = 16, 5 x 5 = 25. So if we multiply the individual numbers by themselves, we get the square numbers. However, there is a strange relationship between the numbers and the square numbers. This relationship was first explored by the Pythagoreans. If you now take what is not yet in 2x2, take what is new for the 4; the 5, and add to it, you get the second square number. Strangely enough, this law applies continuously through the whole square numbers. 4 is the first square number, 9 is the second, 16 is the third. 2 + 2 = 4; the next new number is 5, so plus 5 = 9. Take 3 + 3 = 6, the next new number is 7, so 3 x 3 = 9, plus 7 = 16. You can continue like this. And this is what the Pythagoreans called the "gnomons". Take 4: 4 x 4 = 16.16 + ( 4 + 4 + 1 =9 ) = 25, the square number of 5. Take the 5: 5 x 5 = 25. 25 + ( 5 + 5 + 1 = 11) = 36, the square number of 6. Take the 6: 6x 6 = 36. 36 + ( 6 +6 + 1 = 13 ) = 49[, the square number of 7]. You can find this inner regularity throughout the entire number range. Here you get an inner insight into the context itself. This was what compelled the Pythagorean to believe that the numerical has an inner regularity of its own. He found this in things like gnomons, so that the Pythagorean could say to himself: The same thing that I form within my mind I find outside in the cosmos, and the same thing that forms the inner context is in an inner harmony with the cosmos. If we have 3 x 3 things outside [in the cosmos] and have arranged them in this way, they correspond to what we have brought out in the spirit. We can form the whole of mathematics in our minds, we can form the whole of the theory of numbers, we don't need to know anything about the outside world. If we then close our eyes, the outside world will obey the laws we have devised! This is what led Pythagoras to recognize a numerical law - and everything else that lies within it. I would just like to draw attention to the great chemical discoveries of Lothar Meyer and the Russian Mendeleev, which are a complete confirmation of what the Pythagorean wanted with his views. I have said that the elements all combine in certain numerical ratios: Hydrogen always combines with oxygen in such a way that it is in a ratio of 8 or a multiple of 8. If we now examine the space between the individual given numbers, we get a complete regularity. We ascend from the oxygen with 16 or also from the element which has 7. The elements cannot combine with others according to a numerical ratio other than their own, but there is a regularity in these combinations. Lothar Meyer gave an interesting lecture on these things at a meeting of natural scientists about lithium, potassium and sodium, which combine with the other elements in the following weight ratios:
If you put these figures together, you get some strange correlations. If we take the weight ratio of 7 to 23, we get a difference of 16. If we take the weight ratio of 23 to 39, we get a difference of 16 again. There are many such consecutive triads of three consecutive substances in chemistry. We could also take other three elements and we would find that the same number spaces arise between them. If we took the whole elements, we would always find spaces that can be expressed in numbers. We have certain substances that are grouped together quite nicely. But a number is missing in between. Let's assume we have lithium and sodium, we also have other substances and we know that there is a certain space between them; but then we are missing something in between! Now the chemist has become accustomed to something; he no longer says: There is an irregularity here, but he says: It is because we do not yet know the substance that has this numerical ratio. Many substances have been found recently. At first, we only suspected that they must exist. But later they were found. Trusting that the spirit would find it led to the spirit really finding it out. [Uranus was found through observation. Neptune was predicted on the basis of calculations]. The laws according to which the planets move were seen. These laws did not apply to Uranus, and they said to themselves: there must be another body at a certain point in space [that deflects Uranus from its calculated orbit]. One has more confidence in the spiritual law than in sensory reality, and this has completely confirmed the spirit, has proved the spirit right. This harmony between spirit and matter, as established by the Pythagoreans, is confirmed bit by bit by natural science. It will increasingly overcome what we see as material. It will increasingly come to the point where the apparent substance dissolves into spiritual relationships. Matter is not merely frozen spirit, is not merely appearing spirit. It dissolves piece by piece, so that the spirit does not perceive something else, but itself. So what is emphasized today by the most diverse sides, natural science provides us with proof of this. Annie Besant has drawn attention to similar relationships between her views and natural science. Starting from these basic views, the Pythagorean immersed himself in the world and now arrived at a view that must be particularly valuable to us because Goethe, in turn, arrived at a similar view in recent times, based on his scientific principles! The Pythagoreans imagined the constitution of the world in such a way that this spirit, which they sought to capture in number, is limited by the unlimited and becomes perceptible by being limited. Now the Pythagoreans imagined that all this becoming is the continuous interpenetration of the limited and the unlimited. The appearance of the unlimited as a boundary [they imagined] as a kind of matter. Matter is the indifferent that does nothing other than make the spirit visible. In order to form the entities out of matter, the spirit breathes in matter and breathes it out again into the world space. Therefore, the spirit [works] in a continuous inhalation and exhalation, a breathing process. Goethe also uses this image, imagining this process as inhaling and exhaling the air. Goethe imagines that the earth influences itself from the outside with the air space, that it literally contracts into itself, breathes in what it needs in terms of world space and then breathes out again what it has processed within itself. It is a different air pressure when you inhale and exhale, a becoming stronger and also a becoming weaker. People left this path because they didn't want to believe in such regular ideas. [Goethe] wanted to show that the fluctuations of the barometer are not arbitrary, but essentially point back to basic fluctuations, to something that is quite regular. In the seemingly irregular processes, one can see regularity that stems from the fact that the earth breathes in air and then breathes it out again, a regularity that then produces regular fluctuations that indicate that we are dealing with inhalation and exhalation on the earth. Goethe shows us this in an interesting way. I do not regard this as indifferent, but it seems to me that it is tremendously important that our ideas are spiritualized by such ideas. We can follow the processes in the outside world all the time, such as barometer fluctuations. If we have not grasped them, at least in terms of direction, we will not be aware of them at all. Such regular fluctuations are also found when we examine the irregular and then subtract the regular. What remains is then irregular. I wanted to point out that what the Pythagoreans taught is not something outdated, but that it is used in today's natural science. [The Pythagoreans approached astronomy in such a way that they also applied the spatial view of the bounded and unbounded to the cosmos. Each time can only understand the various perceived things in the way that the state of the relevant perceptual science - astronomy, for example, and so on - is at that time. Research is carried out in the field of experience. The Pythagoreans also had to reckon with [the ideas of their time]. They placed themselves before the central fire, which represents the unity, the primordial ground of the world; that which continually breathes matter in and out and therefore brings the world into being. The stars with their regular movement represented to them a regular multiplicity, which was expressed in the numerical relationships. And what took place in the sphere below the moon was an irregularity, a continual struggle between the limited and the unlimited. But in that which lies above, the struggle is balanced to a great harmony. There the world bodies move in regular orbits. This has resulted in the regular orbits taking the place of the point, the sharply defined One. We are no longer dealing with the One, but with unity. This battle, which is constantly taking place before our eyes, is taking place between the earth and the moon, is taking place as an eternal battle. On earth, harmony and disharmony are constantly alternating. Man stands in this struggle because he is a unity. He seeks to reconnect, since he is torn out of the harmony of the world, by trying to come back into harmony with the world through what the Pythagoreans call virtue. You see that the Pythagorean penetrates from the lowest phenomena to those of human life with numerical ideas. Now we are left with the most important things from the Pythagorean world of ideas, namely those elements of spiritual life to which the ethical sphere rises by the spirit attempting the deepest immersion into its own inner being. The Pythagoreans also had certain views on this, which were taken from cosmological ideas. In that the Pythagoreans sought to establish an extraordinarily deep harmony with the world, with that which separates man from the whole universe, they arrived at the idea of reincarnation, of the connection between the various embodiments of all beings. This is a matter that will occupy us in particular next time. I wanted to discuss the basic question, which was first communicated through Pythagorean physics and ethics, which was formed through such a world of ideas as has just been described, after a long period of training. One must not imagine that the communication of reincarnation or re-embodiment took place immediately! The pupil was first trained through things such as those expressed in the regularity of the world of numbers, which then led him deep into the matter. Then he was also shown what he had to do to achieve world harmony, to eliminate the so-called original sin from the world. The problem: How can the separation of the individual soul from the universe be justified? - became the great Pythagorean question. And this question led the Pythagoreans to solve it within Pythagoreanism, and this is the basic feature of the Pythagorean training that we will talk about next time. Question answer: Question: [?] Dr. Steiner's answer: The way a person breathes is intimately connected with the fact that a person can speak. If humans did not have a vertically positioned lung and a vertically positioned larynx, they could not speak. A dog could never speak words. In general, dogs are more intelligent than parrots and starlings, but parrots and starlings can be made to speak more easily than dogs. This has to do with the whole constitution of the human lungs and larynx, and in particular with the fact that the lungs and larynx are upright. The production of articulated sounds can only take place with an upright larynx and upright lungs. Monkeys cannot produce articulated sounds, even if they can be made to walk upright. The organism is not built that way. The upright larynx exhales and inhales air in a peculiar way. This exhalation and inhalation produces articulate speech. And if we know that articulated speech is connected with the spirit, then we have the scientific possibility of the spirit taking hold in the organism. This possibility is only given in upright walking beings. Only when the body [knew how to walk] upright could the spirit take hold. Beings who still use their front limbs to move forward cannot harbor a spirit. In the Tertiary Period, namely in the Diluvial Period, we had gibbons, highly intelligent creatures. After it became colder, they migrated, but came back again and then had to live in colder climates where the plant life was not so abundant. They had to use their front legs as tools, then gradually learned to walk upright, and the spirit was then able to take possession of the brain. Question: Can an octopus see like a human? Answer: Kurd Laßwitz has written a fairy tale that deals with this question. It is highly probable that what comes about in the eye of a human also comes about in the eye of an octopus. One makes the crystal lens from glass, the other from rock crystal or another similar material, and the same thing comes about through the crystal lens. In humans, the same thing is formed in another substance as in the octopus. But even if the octopus has the same image as the human being, the image must first be spiritualized, processed. Because you have a red circle in your eye, you do not yet have an object. It has to be connected with other images. We don't know whether the octopus can do this. One could assume that the same animal is created in completely different ways. In the case of the dog, we are dealing with organically structured matter that is permeated by laws. The indifference of matter is what physicists see in the conservation of force or substance. What is used for the eye today can be used for something else tomorrow. Matter is the indeterminate. It would be different if matter had laws within itself. The same thing can consist of different material preconditions. The lawfulness does not depend on matter, but can be devised by us. That is the delightful thing for the Pythagoreans. The matter of the eye is the same as the matter of the ear. On the other hand, if one could make each of them, one would have to demand that one could see with the ears and hear with the eyes! Disharmonies arise that balance each other out again. Question: [2] Answer: We no longer know the sublunary circle today. [Question:] How is it that people fall so completely out of harmony? [Answer:] The Pythagorean view is that there is no perfect harmony on earth, but a becoming of the harmonious out of disharmony. There is only a continual falling out and a drawing back into harmony. This is what forms the individual being. In the individual being we have the detached being that longs to return to harmony. The world bodies as a whole describe their paths, which do not disturb each other. This is perfect harmony. There is also harmony and disharmony in hunger and satiety: the balance is life. There are beings at rest in themselves as opposed to those in motion. The [individualists] have restlessness within themselves. Christ says: "Where two or three are together, I am in their midst." That is a Pythagorean idea. And it is this: The Pythagorean sees the beginning in the one, in the two he sees the indeterminate added, and the completed being is where the three is added. Think of two points, connect them and you have a line. With three points you have a plane, the triangle. Something planar is only determined by the three. The three has a center, the two only has a side by side. The three has to achieve a balance. It is the spirit that connects them. Question: [?] Answer: The Bible is made up of the whole world. Nothing is easier than interpreting the Bible. With the esoteric interpretation, you can get it about right, but you can't know if you're getting it historically [right]. Question: [2] Answer: Neptune would not be the last planet. In 1839, [Dawes] already communicated this. Kunowsky is a pleasing apparition. |
87. Ancient Mysteries and Christianity: The Relationship of the Mental and Spiritual to the Physical World
23 Nov 1901, Berlin Rudolf Steiner |
---|
If you think you can only look at them superficially, you will find that you cannot understand them. They can only be understood if they are interpreted in a deeper way. We will look at this in more detail when we consider the Platonic world of ideas. |
It always indicates that we have something to look for underneath. The legend of Theseus is a symbol of the fact that, once Theseus was freed from certain passions, from certain connections with materiality, i.e. once he had undergone a certain development, he no longer needed to make the sacrifices that others had to make to sensuality. |
The fact that Socrates overcame death in accordance with the facts is intended as a symbol of what and how the Pythagorean must overcome in the sequence of stages of his teaching. Thus we also see that the Pythagorean understands the soul as something that transcends the individual and that he thereby leads his students to a spiritual understanding of the world. |
87. Ancient Mysteries and Christianity: The Relationship of the Mental and Spiritual to the Physical World
23 Nov 1901, Berlin Rudolf Steiner |
---|
Ladies and gentlemen present! Today it falls to me to speak about the relationship of the soul and spirit to the physical world among the Pythagoreans. Up to now I have spoken primarily about the organization of the universe among the Pythagoreans and today I would like to add what we can know from the Pythagoreans about the ideas of the soul, of the spirit and of their relationship of the spiritual and the spiritual to the physical world. Historically, we know about Pythagoreanism in this area not only from the scanty information we have from the Pythagoreans, but we know much more precisely from the Platonic discussions! A large part of what Plato worked on comes from Pythagoreanism. Plato went to school with the Pythagoreans and drew a large part of his teachings from Pythagoreanism. However, the teachings of Pythagoreanism can only be properly understood if one starts from certain ideas - which can be gained at all times - and from certain relationships of the spiritual [to] the physical and asks: How do the views of the Pythagoreans relate to these, how do they compare to them? The Pythagoreans had the deepest immersion in the human ego! They transferred a view to their disciples that grasped the human self to the extent that it must be grasped if it is to spill over into the material world. At a certain level, the material ceases to have meaning; space and time also cease to exist. Images are afflicted with all the properties of sensual nature. If we continue to ascend and imagine these images more spiritually and more spiritually, then we come closer and closer to the spiritual - not insofar as it is spatial and temporal, but only insofar as it is eternal. The Pythagoreans had this view that things are based on a being that is the same at all times, regardless of whether we look at this or that thing. They rose to this view, not only to the view of the conceptual, but actually to the view of the One. It was precisely through the way in which they developed the theory of numbers that they showed that they saw in the great harmony nothing other than the embodiment of a deity in the universe. The Pythagoreans were influenced by Egyptian views. This Egyptian symbolically shows us the view that the "Nous lives in everything. The Egyptians used symbols in their knowledge that we also find in the Pythagoreans. It is impossible to misjudge these symbols among the Egyptians. If you think you can only look at them superficially, you will find that you cannot understand them. They can only be understood if they are interpreted in a deeper way. We will look at this in more detail when we consider the Platonic world of ideas. I must draw attention to this in order to make it easier to understand Pythagoreanism and its doctrine of the soul. I have already hinted at the doctrine of Osiris. In this legend we meet Osiris, who is dismembered by a hostile force called Typhon and scattered throughout the universe; and Isis, a female deity, reassembles the ruins of Osiris. These are then the human being. A second Egyptian legend follows, according to which the younger god Horus is born of Isis after the death of Osiris. According to the news, legends and stories, these views indicate that the Egyptians symbolically expressed the view in this legend that the universe has flowed out into the world of appearances, into the world that is riding towards us. And the fragmented God is the All-Spirit, which for the Egyptians dissolved into the four elements: Water, Fire, Air and Earth, reunites and binds them, and brings about the various numerical ratios in the mixture of substances. This then became part of the Greek view. We find it in the form that love and hate hold the world together. These are the thought powers of Osiris, Isis and Typhon. Osiris lives on only in the four elements, which are presented as "Osiris. It is hatred that forces the elements to lie next to each other as multiplicity, and love that wants to lead the fragmentation back into unity. This is also how we have visualized the idea of the gods among the Greeks. We can also find this symbol when we look at an Egyptian obelisk. It is four-sided and runs together in a point. This symbolizes the four elements that make up the harmonious unity of the world. The obelisk is decorated with the image of a beetle spinning a ball, or with the image of a ram carrying a ball [on its head]. We know that the Egyptians thought of the sphere as the All-Unity. Now, however, one thing must be noted about this idea: Pythagoreanism can only be fully understood - insofar as it is a world view - if it is based on the idea that Osiris has actually dissolved into the four elements, that he no longer leads a separate existence. Through the separation of the forces, Osiris has been split into the elements, into the elements existing in the outside world. The Pythagorean was therefore clear about the fact that when he was searching for Osiris, on the way to recognizing God, he did not have to look for this God outside the world in a "thing in itself", but where he could only be found, in the world as such. He was clear about the fact that God is in the world. Therefore, the Pythagoreans did not regard the world as God's creation, but as God's existence. Whoever lives in the world lives in God! The Pythagoreans sought God only within the world. Pythagoreanism is therefore a doctrine that deals with the world and its relationships. It is interesting how they attached Greek names of gods to some numerical relationships. So we see from this that what the Greeks represented as images of gods, the Pythagoreans represented in the numbers that held the world together for [them]. Pythagoreanism appears as the highest expression of what was present in the world. Just as the Pythagoreans envisioned the world as the confluence of the four elements, they also envisioned man. For the Pythagoreans, the human being was nothing other than the most harmonious combination of the four elements. By "elements [they imagined] not coarse substances, but potencies! It was not a material interaction, but something similar to what [they] imagined by "harmony in music". In the same way, what appears in the human soul was best expressed in the harmony produced by the body. The soul therefore always emerges in the form of the symbol of the body, which is, as it were, composed of the elements. They distinguished three things in human organics. They realized that man has a longing to return to that from which he originally came. They were clear that man was nothing other than an incarnation of Osiris, an incarnation of the deity that had flowed out into the world. This was what emerged in their view of the world and of which they were convinced that it was the same in every human being, that it was the same in every being. Whoever was able to develop the view in his consciousness saw the world as a whole - by seeing himself. The universe expanded into selfhood within the ego, and the ego became the universe! But man could only go through this as an individual being. Man is only man in that he has this urge, this inclination towards Osiris, and that he has this power only in so far as he is in a power connection with the whole material world. Therefore the Pythagoreans first distinguished the actual Osiris nature in man and in the universe, the All-I, which was present as a single entity in the universe, and as a second entity a part of the manifold, the corporeal man, a part of the merely sensual-physical man, which arises and passes away and which can be observed through the senses. Man presents himself as a sensory being, perceptible to himself and to others, and then also as a being that is seen purely from within, which is nothing other than a reflection of the light that has flowed down from the Godhead. Now the Pythagorean had to come to the conclusion that these two opposing things behave in the same way as all other dualities among the Pythagoreans, i.e. that everything diverges into a duality. They distinguish a duality in everything, including man. I could list the various dualities that the Pythagoreans had in the world. Everywhere they looked for them, everywhere they looked for a kind of polarity: that was the "limited and the "unlimited, the "even and the "odd, the "good and the "evil, the "square and the "cube, the "rectangle" and the "column and so on. Thus they distinguished a duality everywhere, in every spiritual and physical identity. Now in man it is not spiritual and physical, but as I have described it. Let us stick to what I have described. This duality needs a connection, and this connection is the third part of which the Pythagoreans composed the human being. This third part is what is called the soul in the Greek world view and in all later world views. This third is a combination of spiritual allness, all-unity on the one hand with diversity, materiality on the other, so that we have three parts: spirituality, materiality and, as the third, the soul. On the one side is the material, and on the other side is the highest spirituality. Together with the other, the third side, this is what makes up the unique human personality. So for the Pythagoreans, the human personality only exists because the unified spirit, with the help of the soul, is connected to the diversity of materiality. Man discovers the soul within himself and has a right to spirituality when he directs his gaze towards the sphere of spirituality, i.e. when he belongs to the material world on the one hand and is an inhabitant of the spiritual world on the other, with which he is supposed to connect. Thus, for the Pythagoreans, man is divided into three potencies:
They distinguish that which belongs to the individual human being, which shines upwards towards the spiritual, but which at the same time also shines downwards towards the physical. So that which the Pythagoreans recognize as the third, which mediates between the divine and the material principle. So not only Osiris is incarnated, but also something that is closer to the individuality than Osiris as such. So something is reincarnated that is between the personality - to which sensuality belongs - and spirituality - to which sensuality no longer belongs - something that participates in the world and that is both singularity and allness at the same time! This something [incarnated in man] constitutes that which is the unified Osiris-nature, the individuality, which here below individualizes into the personality - which is not the same for the Pythagoreans - and which, through the mediation of the personality with Osiris, constitutes a unity. This individuality does not live itself out completely in the personality, so that the latter will find something in itself if it looks around within itself and measures its consciousness, where it must say to itself: This does not belong to the piece in which I am incarnated; it is this individualized piece which is the individual.
This individuality is not only linked to the individual manifestation of the personality, but means more than the individual personality. What can be found in the individuality does not coincide with what can be found in the individual personality. When the follower of Pythagoreanism looks around to explain this, he will not be able to stop in his consciousness at the personality, but will have to reach out to other individualities. Within his individual personality he will not be able to find everything that lives as a being in the personality. He will find: Man cannot be explained by himself. Only if he assumes in relation to the individuality, the personality - no matter how metaphysically conceived - that the individuality can remain, can incarnate itself in other details, so that a series of developmental stages, a series of such personalities come into consideration for the individuality, will he find the explanation. And here you also have the form which the Pythagoreans gave to the [idea of reincarnation]. In the second potency, the Pythagoreans recognized the soul as encompassing a single personality, and they recognized that more goes into it than the single vessel, the single personality, so that we may therefore speak of a pre-existence of that which lives itself out as individuality in the single personality. Plato also expounded this doctrine in his discussions. In it, he made Socrates a teacher, and we can imagine that Plato therefore put his teachings into conversational form and made Socrates a teacher in order to show how a pupil can gradually be led up to the highest level. If we want to imagine the development of a Pythagorean, we can take the discussion on the development of the soul, "Phaidon", to hand. The "Phaidon" is not to be understood as an exoteric conversation, but as a symbol for Pythagorean teaching. This is clearly demonstrated by a passage in the introduction. We know little about the historical Socrates, and what is false in the external, tangible sense, we can easily leave out. Therefore, when Plato places special emphasis on external facts and communicates them, as is the case in the Phaedo, where he tells us that the delivery of the cup of hemlock is delayed because a certain ship is sailing to Delos, we must see something special in this communication. We can see from the story that in Greece they were forced to send seven young men and seven virgins to King Minos for a time. They were freed from this plague by Theseus, who killed the Minotaur. In return, the Greeks sent a ship to Delos at certain times to make offerings [to Apollo]. No one was allowed to be executed during this time. The condemnation of Socrates took place just at this time and it was therefore necessary to wait. This fact was told to us at the beginning of the "Phaidon". It is not at the beginning by chance. It has a certain meaning. It's just like the Egyptians. When we see a sphinx standing there, it means that we must not limit ourselves to being satisfied with the simple description, but that we should seek deeper truths behind it. This story at the beginning of Plato's "Phaedo" is just such an allusion. It always indicates that we have something to look for underneath. The legend of Theseus is a symbol of the fact that, once Theseus was freed from certain passions, from certain connections with materiality, i.e. once he had undergone a certain development, he no longer needed to make the sacrifices that others had to make to sensuality. Only after he no longer needed to make these sacrifices did he reach a certain stage of development. This is expressed in the overcoming of the Minotaur. That is symbolic. We are therefore dealing here with the representation of Pythagorean teaching. The fact that Socrates overcame death in accordance with the facts is intended as a symbol of what and how the Pythagorean must overcome in the sequence of stages of his teaching. Thus we also see that the Pythagorean understands the soul as something that transcends the individual and that he thereby leads his students to a spiritual understanding of the world. The "Phaidon" presents us with the ascent to spiritual individuality. This is introduced by the legend of Theseus, who found his way out of the labyrinth. The labyrinth represents the path that the individual personality has to go through in order to find its way back to the light of Osiris. Here, then, we encounter the soul doctrine of Pythagoreanism. We may assume that we have here given the soul doctrine of Pythagoreanism in a form that [Plato] believed he could already communicate to certain initiated disciples. The essence is developed and first shown through all kinds of considerations that the essence of the soul is something that goes beyond the material, which no longer has anything to do with the material as such. This problem of the soul is solved in many different ways in the "Phaidon". Firstly, it is based on the world of the senses, which is in eternal development. Every being develops from what it is not. In the same way, death emerges from life and life from death, so that we are dealing with the alternation of death and life. But that is only the lowest level. Now a Pythagorean appears here in the conversation, who presents his image of the lyre with its strings. [...]. Socrates thinks that we cannot compare [it] with harmony. The strings are there first. But the harmony is not in the strings as such, but in the harmony of the strings, in something that first emerges from the strings. And now Socrates rises to a spirituality that is no longer bound to physicality. Socrates leads upwards: I have looked around at all the sciences, at all the philosophers. When I say: I have seen, or: I am going, people everywhere ask: Why? And the answer is: I have, because ..., I go, because ... Everywhere I go I am only told the reasons. That has never satisfied me. The thing is far from being explained when we know the cause. Now Socrates uses a subtle comparison to make it clear that a thing is not yet explained by stating the cause. He says: I am sitting here in prison. The Athenians have condemned me to this. I expect to die because I didn't want to escape. So what would the natural scientist say? He would give all the causes. But what if Socrates had escaped? Then [the naturalist] would also be able to find the causes there; you can state causes everywhere, collect causes. They are true, but nothing is explained by them. If he had fled, there would also be causes. If I am sitting here, the causes are also there. So there must be something that transcends purely natural existence. It is that which is not identical with that which can be grasped with natural causes, which has nothing in common with the natural, but with the world that stands above the natural facts; which is indeed expressed in the world of causes, but which stands above the world of causes. So he seeks to make comprehensible in words that which is incarnated for him in the world of causation and is expressed within the world of causation. Now we must ask: How was this way of looking at things in the Greek world - causality links the natural world, in which the soul does not merge - to be justified in the natural science of the Greeks? It seems important to me whether such a thing can stand up to our present-day knowledge. We must draw attention to the fact that natural science struggles to achieve a spirituality in order to give birth to a world view out of itself. That spirituality cannot be exhausted in the world of causes can already be proven by natural science. It can be proven that the physicality in which we now live is enclosed within quite [certain limits], that it is a limited thing, and that this already has a certain significance. I want to show you how natural science today can already show that corporeality has a limit, that the spiritual must extend beyond this corporeality, that it is only incarnated in this corporeality, so that corporeality is something that cannot encompass the spirit. This seems to me to be something that needs to be emphasized. The modern world view has led us to no longer see the world as if it were a random structure of things, it has led us to see transformations of the elemental force in the individual forces of the world. We no longer say that mechanical work is present in electricity, heat, magnetism, pressure and so on, but we see all of these as forms of a single elemental force. Today we say to ourselves that if we apply a mechanical force, for example by exerting pressure on a table, the area of the table is heated. This heat is generated by pressure. Today we have the view that the force that pushes the locomotive forward is nothing other than the force of steam, and this in turn is nothing other than the force of coal and so on. So we have a constant transformation. When we heat a room, we heat it with what was stored up as chemical forces a myriad of years ago. The plants have transformed into denser matter, then into the chemical forces of coal. These are transformed back into heat. So what we use to heat our rooms today is what came from the sun millions of years ago. So even in physics we are dealing with a constant transformation of forces. What is exactly true is the connection between thermal and mechanical energy. Heat is converted into mechanical working power in order to move something forward. What happens in the steam boiler is exactly the same as what moves the train forward. The heat is transformed into mechanical work. This happens because the heat is lost, because it is no longer present. This heat that has been transformed has disappeared, has been transformed into something else. We see this process everywhere in the universe. Fifty years ago, people were still saying that solar heat is transformed into chemical power, chemical power into mechanical work and so on. So we can imagine that one transforms into the other, that the cycle of forces is formed. This creates an eternity of the material world. The forces are transformed into an eternal cycle. Today we have to admit that this material world does not allow such a cycle of matter, but is limited. We have to admit that what exists is self-explanatory. If we transform the heat of the steam into that which moves the train forward - for heat is always lost, and it is impossible to transform all the heat into mechanical power - then the heat suffers a loss. This is not because the machines are imperfect; the complete transformation cannot take place, a certain amount of heat would always remain. Wherever something happens by transforming heat into mechanical power, a mechanical residue remains. If we continue this and imagine that all the work is done, something would always be left behind. The consequence of this would be that once all possible heat [would] be transformed, that eventually a state [would] occur where it [would] no longer be possible to develop any amount of heat from things. The available heat [would] reach a minimum. [If this state was reached, it would no longer be possible for anything to happen in this world. It [would] no longer be possible for any work to [emerge] from any heat source. Life [would] be extinguished. This whole incarnation of the earth [would be] self-contained. So we see that the spiritual is not exhausted by reincarnation, but that the spiritual spills over into the [associated material] world, that the spiritual is that which will have to seek a new expression or return into itself. However, this material world can only exist because it is permeated by the spirit. The moment this material world is exhausted, the spirit is no longer that which can dominate the world. It has then lost its meaning, it has stepped out of being into non-being. The spirit has then purified itself of all this. This is not the result of a philosophical consideration, nor the result of a metaphysical consideration, but merely what every physicist must also admit. It is the same as what the Greeks say, that the One lives itself out in the world, lives through it, and that the world as such comes to an end and then, as we have seen, will again be the unlimited and will stand purified in itself as the All-One. This is the great world process that takes place in what the Pythagoreans see as the overarching. He saw this overarching element at the lower level in individuality. This is the method by which the Pythagorean says: If I find something in the personality that transcends into the spiritual, then I must assume that individuality is as little exhausted with the individual personality as the Osiris unity is exhausted in the individual world. - In the Pythagorean world the unity is not exhausted, but it lives itself out in the worlds, which are limited, closed. In the Pythagorean view, individuality lives itself out in such a way that it only seeks its incarnation within the continuous individual existence. So in the Pythagorean world view we have a strictly closed chain of ideas that leads us upwards from the earthly level to the highest spiritual unity. But in Pythagoreanism we have a strict adherence to the doctrine of individuality, which reaches beyond the individual personality. From this flowed for the Pythagoreans the view that the individual personality, when it rises to the view of individuality, can no longer merely feel responsible for what it does as an individual personality, for what occurs in it, in so far as it is an individual being in the sensuous manifold, but that it must also feel responsible in so far as it must cooperate and collaborate in that which goes beyond the individual personality into individuality. The ordinary person does not feel responsible for what goes beyond the personality. This is roughly what can be said about the Pythagorean doctrine of the soul. We may therefore say that the Pythagoreans reached the view that they imposed a much higher responsibility on man, namely that which he bears as an individuality and which is not exhausted in the individual personality. This is the idea of reincarnation seen from within. Answer to the question: Question: Did the views of the Pythagoreans come over from Atlantis? Rudolf Steiner's answer: The idea is very obvious. A purely external fact can show this, for there is no other way to explain the fact that the Chinese have exactly the same views on the number mysteries as the Pythagoreans. Since we have here such separate areas of world view, spatially, between which no external mediation has taken place from people to people, they must be views that have emanated from a common source. This agreement is striking. Many felt themselves to be part of the great world harmony, as the appearance of unity, duality and multiplicity. We find all this in the Pythagorean and Chinese teachings; that is the proof of it. And now the strange thing is that we have a wide area in between that has a separating effect, the area of "Parsismu®, which does not have these views. It recognizes the great periods of the world, a kind of twilight of the gods. However, Parsism does not recognize the nature of individuality within this great development. This is something very strange. This teaching also appears among the Druze, but as if from a different source. Pythagoreanism has never died out in the West: In twenty-five years the whole of physics will be Pythagorean. This will happen through the thing itself. Just as the Pythagoreans [developed] the thing, so [it] will develop again. The ancient cultures of Peru and Mexico have been rediscovered. The demise of Atlantis is a scientific fact. There is nothing theosophical or mystical about it. The rest of it is the floating seaweed. The Pithecanthropus also seems to be a real remnant of it. It is a creature that stands between man and ape. An individual, lost, who has come to Java. The origin of the human race can only lie in this place because there was only the possibility of living within certain primitive cultural conditions. Under other conditions, the fragile human race would not have taken up the battle with nature. Our region had a tropical climate relatively recently. The Pythagoreans saw Pythagoras as a divine incarnation of Osiris. Pythagoras was dissolved into the Pythagorean spirit; Pythagoras is always among us. In order to assert this outwardly, the name was not even allowed to be pronounced. The older founder was Apollo himself. Apollo was the "first Pythagoras, Pythagoras was the "second Apollo. When you became a Pythagorean, you first learned history in the form of dramas and symbols. These were the orgies; they are the means by which man is prepared to gradually understand the spiritual as such by symbolically representing it externally. That was the external service of Bacchus, the service of Dionysus. This was then transformed into the inner service, transformed into the service of Apollo. Apollo is the inner Bacchus, Bacchus the outer Apollo. A superficial precipitate of this has been propagated. It is said that the entire Greek world view is made up of the "Dionysian" and the "Apollonian" principle. In Richard Wagner's school and also in Nietzsche's "Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music" you will find this statement. The Greeks derived all culture from it. Now this is already a journalistic buzzword. Nietzsche could not follow the Greek world view; he did not have the organ for it. "Manifoldness is a Pythagorean concept and is in accordance with the elements of the Egyptians. That is why [there is] precisely the physical multiplicity, because it is a shattered, destroyed unity. The soul is the sum of the rays that lead from the totality to the particulars. You could perhaps say: [it] is nothing real. But it is spiritually real because [it] must transcend. [It must also participate in both. It is manifold on the side of diversity, one on the side of unity. The myth makes this very clear: the life that strives to come back is the soul; it is the longing that is essential. It is a work to return to unity. Every individuality is nothing other than such a return. If we could grasp the world in outer consciousness as one, then everything would be solved. It would then be one in space and time. So we live downwards and upwards and on both sides. The development of individuality is expressed in the continual overcoming of spatiality and temporality. The whole universe is in this development. Individuality is the All-One, because only the All-One exists. But it has not yet realized it within itself. It has not yet brought it out. You can think of it like a seed: the seed is the plant. And so the whole world belongs to every individuality. The whole world belongs to everything that happens. If the seed has no rain and no light, it lacks something that belongs to it. In every plant there is an infinite series of plants, both forwards and backwards. Question about the 'all-unity' Answer: The plant in the all-unity is a self-contained individuality. Imagine the temperature of the world fifty degrees higher and there are no more plants. Plant and seed are individual beings, but then we also have individuality and the individual streams of individuality alongside the set of individual beings. Question: Is individuality that which has an effect on the generality? Answer: An individual personality is enclosed between birth and death. However, there is a great deal in the life of the individual that we cannot explain. We can indeed educate people. But there is already something there. We are not dealing with the general world entity, but with a finished entity when a person is born. The Pythagoreans attribute this to a life that must have existed in the past. I am reluctant to say that this is the Indian doctrine of the migration of the soul or the transformation of the soul. Goethe calls individuality "Entelechy." |