| 115. Wisdom of Man, of the Soul, and of the Spirit: Higher Senses, Inner Force Currents and Creative Laws in the Human Organism
26 Oct 1909, Berlin Translated by Samuel P. Lockwood, Loni Lockwood |
|---|
| While the sound we hear is a different one in every language (amor and Liebe), it nevertheless points the path to an identical underlying conception. Whether the word used is amor or Liebe, it appeals to the sense of visualization underlying it. This underlying sense of visualization is always uniform, regardless of all the differences in the sound formations. |
| The nature of this spiritual being helps us to understand what exists in man as form. That is the way in which the spirit works on the form of the human body. |
| 115. Wisdom of Man, of the Soul, and of the Spirit: Higher Senses, Inner Force Currents and Creative Laws in the Human Organism
26 Oct 1909, Berlin Translated by Samuel P. Lockwood, Loni Lockwood |
|---|
In the last lecture we dealt with the sense of speech, and today we will examine the sense of concept. The term “concept” is, of course, not intended here as pure concept, but in its everyday meaning. That is, I hear a word spoken and I visualize its meaning. This sense could also be called the sense of visualization.1 In order to understand how this sense comes about we must glance back once more to the sense of tone or hearing and to the sense of speech or sound, asking ourselves what it means “to have a sense of speech.” How does the perception of sound2 come about? What particular process takes place when we perceive a sound like “a” or “i”? To grasp this we must understand the apparatus of sound perception, and we will give a few indications that you will be able to substantiate later. In music we distinguish between the single tone, the melody, and the harmony. Harmony implies perception of tones occurring simultaneously, melody calls for the mental co-ordination of a sequence of tones. The mechanism of sound perception can be comprehended by studying the relation between the tonal element in sound and sound itself. Suppose we could raise into consciousness what we accomplish subconsciously in perceiving sound. We would then no longer be dealing merely with a sense perception but with a judgment, with the formation of a concept. If we were able, in hearing a melody, so to crowd the single tones in time as to perceive them simultaneously, to cause past and future to coincide; if in the middle of a melody we already knew what was to follow, knew this so vividly as to draw the future into the present, then we would have consciously converted the melody into a harmony. We are not able to do that, but what we cannot execute consciously actually takes place unconsciously in the sense of sound. When we hear an “a” or an “i” or other sounds, a subconscious activity momentarily transforms a melody into a harmony. That is the secret of sound; it is melody transformed into harmony. This marvelous subconscious activity proceeds in approximately the same way as the various refractions in the eye are carried out according to physical laws, which is another process we can call to consciousness after it has taken place. But this subconscious activity that instantly converts a melody into a harmony is not enough; something more is needed if the sound is to come forth. A musical tone is not a simple thing. A tone is a musical tone only by virtue of its harmonics3 (overtones) that sound with it, however faintly, in contrast to noises, which have no harmonics. In a harmony, therefore, we hear not only the separate tones but the harmonics of each tone as well. Accordingly, if we crowd a melody into a harmony, we have not only the separate notes of the melody crowded into simultaneity, but the harmonics of each note as well. Now, the final step. Through the agency of that subconscious activity, the attention of the soul must be distracted from the fundamental tones of the melody. These must in a sense be aurally disregarded, and only the harmony created by the harmonics be comprehendingly heard. A sound comes into being when a melody is transformed into harmony and then the fundamentals disregarded, attention being directed exclusively to that harmony of the harmonics. What these harmonics then yield is the sound “a,” “i,” etc. In this way we have explained sound perception as taking place in the same way that sight does in the eye. The next question is difficult but important. How does the perception of visualization come about? How does it happen that when we hear a word we understand its meaning by means of the word itself? That this is a question by itself can be seen from the fact that in different languages the same thing is designated by different sounds. While the sound we hear is a different one in every language (amor and Liebe), it nevertheless points the path to an identical underlying conception. Whether the word used is amor or Liebe, it appeals to the sense of visualization underlying it. This underlying sense of visualization is always uniform, regardless of all the differences in the sound formations. But now, how is this perceived? In studying this process, the perception of visualizations or conceptions, we should keep in mind our premise that conceptions reach us by way of sounds. To enable a conception to come about, attention must be still further diverted; the whole harmonic series must be ignored. At the moment when the soul as well is unconsciously distracted from the harmonics, we perceive what has incorporated in the sounds, what pertains to them as conception or visualization. This implies that the visualization reaching us through sounds—the visualization that, as something universally human, pervades all sounds and languages—comes to us slightly colored, toned down. Incorporated in this harmonic series, which creates the timbre and intensity and the various sounds in the different languages, which vibrates into the human organism, are the Folk Spirits. These manifest themselves through the sounds of the language. Language is the mysterious whispering of the Folk Spirits, the mysterious work upon the fluids, that vibrates into our organism through the harmonics. But what underlies the harmonic series is the universal human element, the common spirit of man that suffuses the whole earth. The universal spirit of man can be perceived only when each of us, from his own particular locality, ignoring the harmonics, listens for what is inaudible, for what belongs in the realm of conceptions. In the course of historical evolution, men did not acquire the capacity to comprehend what is universally human until they learned to recognize common factors by disregarding, as it were, the shades of sounds. Only in our life of conceptions can we begin to grasp the Christ Spirit in His true being. The spiritual beings whose task it is to proclaim Him in manifold forms—His messengers to whom He has assigned their missions and tasks—are the Folk Spirits of the various folk individualities. This thought has found very beautiful expression in Goethe's fragment, Die Geheimnisse. That will give a picture of what the sense of visualization is, bringing us to an important milestone. We have exhausted what we have in the way of ordinary senses, finally arriving at the study of the subconscious human activity that is able, through the force of the astral body, to push from consciousness even the harmonic series. It is the human astral body that pushes aside this harmonic series as though with tentacles. If we achieve this power over the harmonics, which means nothing else than the ability to ignore them, it signifies increased strength in our astral body. But even this does not exhaust the capacity of the astral body; it is capable of still higher achievements. In the cases we have so far discussed, the appearance of a visualization has presupposed the overcoming of an outer resistance; something external had to be pushed back. Now we find the astral body to be endowed with still more power when we learn that its astral substance enables it not only to push back what is outside, but also, when there is no outer resistance, to stretch forth, to eject, its astral substance through its own inner strength. If one is able thus to stretch forth the astral tentacles, so to speak, with no resistance present, then there appears what is called spiritual activity; the so-called spiritual organs of perception come into being. When the astral substance is pushed out from a certain part of the head and forms something like two tentacles, man develops what is called the two-petaled lotus flower. That is the imaginative sense, the eleventh. In proportion to his capacity for stretching out his astral tentacles, man develops other spiritual organs. As his ability to thrust out astral substance increases, he forms a second organ in the vicinity of the larynx, the sixteen-petal lotus flower, the inspirational sense, the twelfth. In the neighborhood of the heart the third organ develops, the twelve-petal lotus flower, the thirteenth, the intuitive sense. These three senses, the imaginative, the inspirational and the intuitive, are additional, astral senses, over and above the physical senses. Beyond these there are still higher, purely spiritual senses, but let them here be merely mentioned. The question now arises as to whether these three astral senses are active only in more highly developed, clairvoyant people, or has the ordinary human being anything that can be called an activity of these senses? The answer is that everybody has them, but there is a difference. In clairvoyants these senses operate by stretching out like tentacles, while in ordinary people their effect is inward. At the top of the head, for instance, just where the two-petal lotus flower forms, there are tentacles of this kind that reach inward and cross in the brain. In other words, ordinary consciousness directs them inward instead of outward. All that is outside us we see, but not what is within us. Nobody has seen his own heart or brain, and it is the same with spiritual matters. Not only are these organs not seen, but they do not even enter consciousness. They can therefore not be consciously employed, but they function nevertheless; they are active. Here consciousness makes no decisions whatever regarding reality. These senses, then, are active. They direct their activity inward, and this impulse directed inward is perceived. When the imaginative sense pours inward there arises what in ordinary life is called outer sensation,4 outer perception of something. We can have an outer perception only because what appears in the imaginative sense works its way into us. By means of this imaginative sense we are able to “sense” a color, and that is not synonymous with seeing a color, or analogous to hearing a tone. When we see a color, we say, for instance, it is red. But through the activity of the imaginative sense we can also have a sensation connected with it—that color is beautiful or ugly, pleasant or unpleasant. The inspirational sense also directs its activity inward, and this produces a more complicated sensation: feeling. The entire life of feeling is an activity of the inspirational organ streaming inward. When the intuitive sense pours inward, thinking proper arises, that is, thought forming. So the order of the processes is: We sense something, we have a feeling connected with it, and we form thoughts about it. Thus we have ascended from the life of the senses to the soul life. Starting from without, from the sense world, we have seized hold on the soul of man himself in its activities of sentience, feeling and thought. Were we to continue along this path, examining the still higher senses that correspond to the other lotus flowers—they can hardly be called senses any more—the entire higher life of the soul would be revealed to us in their interplay. When, for example, the eight- or ten-petal lotus flower directs its psychic activity inward, a still more delicate soul activity is engendered, and at the end of the scale we find the most subtle one of all which we call pure, logical thought. All this is produced by the working of the various lotus flowers into the inner man. Now, when this inward motion is transformed into an outer motion, when the astral tentacles stretch outward and criss-cross, directing, as so-called lotus flowers, their activity outward, then that higher activity comes into being through which we rise from the soul to the spirit, where what normally appears as our inner life (thinking, feeling and willing) now makes its appearance in the outer world, borne by spiritual beings. We have arrived at an understanding of the human being by ascending from the senses by way of the soul to what is no longer in him, to spirit acting from without, which belongs equally to man and to surrounding nature, to the whole world. We have ascended to the spirit. As far as we have gone, I have described the human being as an instrument for perceiving the world, experiencing it with his soul and grasping it spiritually. I have not described something finished, but something that is active in man. The whole interplay of forces and activities of the senses, the soul, and the spirit is what shapes the human being as he stands before us on earth. How does this come about? We can give but brief intimations, but such as we find substantiated on all sides. What we see before us in observing a human being merely with our senses really does not exist at all; it is only an optical illusion. Spiritual-scientific observation actually perceives something quite different. Remember that sensibly we cannot perceive ourselves completely. We see but a part of our surface, never our back or the back of our head, for example. But we know, nevertheless, that we have a back, and we know it by means of the various senses, such as the sense of equilibrium or of motion. An inner consciousness tells us of the parts we cannot perceive externally. Indeed, there is a great deal of us that we cannot perceive unless the appropriate organs are developed. Let us further consider the portion of the human being that he himself can perceive sensibly—with the eye, for instance—and let us delimit it. Through what agency is he to perceive it? Actually, all that we can see of ourselves with our eyes we perceive through the sentient soul; the sentient body would not be able to perceive it. It is the sentient soul that really comprehends. The portion of the human being that he sees with his eyes, which the sentient soul confronts, is nothing but the image of the sentient body, the outer illusion of the sentient body. We must, of course, extend the concept a bit to cover those portions of the body we can touch though not see, but there, too, we have the image of the sentient body. Perception comes about through other activities of the sentient soul. The latter extends to every point at which outer perception occurs, and what it perceives there is not the sentient soul but the illusion of the sentient body. Could we perceive this, we would see that astrally something endeavors to approach but is pushed back. This image of the sentient body comes about as follows. From back to front there is co-operation of the sentient soul and the sentient body. When two currents meet, a damming up occurs, and thereby something is revealed. Imagine you see neither current, but only what results from the whirling together of the two. What shows as a result of this impact of the sentient soul thrusting outward and the sentient body pressing inward from without, is the portion of our external corporeality that the eye or other outer sense can perceive. We can actually determine the point on the skin where the meeting of the sentient soul and sentient body occurs. We see how the soul works at forming the body. We can put it this way. There is in the human being a cooperation of the current passing from back to front and the opposite one, resulting in an impact of sentient soul and sentient body. In addition to these two currents there are those that come from the right and from the left. From the left comes the one pertaining to the physical body; from the right, the one pertaining to the etheric body. These flow into each other and intermingle to a certain extent, and what comes into being at this point is the sensibly perceptible human being, his sensibly perceptible exterior. A perfect illusion is brought about. From the left comes the current of the physical body, from the right that of the etheric body, and these form what appears to us as the sensibly perceptible human being. In like manner we have in us currents running upward and downward. From below upward streams the main current of the astral body, and downward from above the main current of the ego. The characterization given of the sentient body as being bounded in front should be understood as meaning that it operates in a current upward from below, but that it is then seized by the current running forward from the rear, so that in a certain sense it is thereby bounded. But the astral body contains not only the one current that runs upward from below as well as forward from the rear, but also the other one running backward from the front; so that the astral body courses in two currents, one upward from below and the other backward from the front. This gives us four intermingling currents in the human being. What is brought about by the two vertical currents? We have one current running upward from below, and if it could discharge unobstructed we would draw it thus as in the diagram, but this it cannot do. The same is true of the other currents. Each is held up, and in the center, where they act upon each other, they form the image of the physical body. Actually, it is due to the intersection and criss-crossing of the currents that the threefold organization of man comes into being. Thus the lower portion that we ourselves can see should be designated as the sentient body in the narrower sense. Higher up lies what in the narrower meaning we can call our senses. This portion we can no longer perceive ourselves, because it is the region where the senses themselves are located. You cannot look into your eyes but only out of them, into the world. Here the sentient soul, or its image, is active. The face is formed by the sentient soul. But the two currents must be properly differentiated. The lower currents, streaming from all sides, are held down from above, and this lower part we can designate the sentient body. Below, the impulses proceed largely from without; while above, it is principally the sentient soul that makes itself felt. From above there streams the ego, and at the point where this current is strongest, where it is least pushed back by the other currents, the intellectual soul forms its organ. Now, in addition to this ego current we have one from left to right and one from right to left. Again the whole activity is intersected. There is further a current running through the longitudinal axis of the body, effecting a sort of split up above. At the upper boundary a portion of the intellectual soul is split off, and this is the form of the consciousness soul. There the consciousness soul is active, extending its formative work into the innermost man. Among other things, it forms the convolutions in the grey matter of the brain. The nature of this spiritual being helps us to understand what exists in man as form. That is the way in which the spirit works on the form of the human body. It evokes all the organs plastically, as the artist chisels a figure out of stone. The structure of the brain can be comprehended only with the knowledge of how these separate currents interact in man; what we then see is the joint activity of the various principles of the human being. Now we must go into a few details in order to show how these facts can be fruitful when they will have become the common property of a true science. We have learned that up above there came into being the organs of the consciousness soul, the intellectual soul, and the sentient soul. The ego acts downward from above; the main portion of the astral body, upward from below. In their mutual damming up, a reciprocal action takes place that extends along the whole line, so to speak; it forms the longitudinal axis of the body, and the effect of this will be a different one at every point of the line. When the ego, for instance, is called upon to perform a conscious act, this can only be done at the point where the sentient soul, the intellectual soul, and the consciousness soul have developed their organs. Through the intellectual soul, for example, reasoning comes about, and a judgment must be localized in the head because it is there that the appropriate human forces find expression. Now let us assume that such an organ is to come into being, but one in which no reasoning takes place, in which the intellectual soul has no part, an organ independent of the work of sentient, intellectual and consciousness souls, in which only the physical, etheric and astral bodies and the ego have a part—an organ in which an impression received from the astral body is immediately followed by the reaction of the ego, without reasoning. Suppose that these four members of the human being—astral body and ego, etheric body and physical body—are to cooperate without any delicate activity such as reasoning or the like. What would be the nature of an organ in which these four currents work together? It would have to be an organ that would not reason. The reaction of the ego would follow directly, without reasoning, upon the impression received by the organ in question from the astral body. That would mean that the ego and the astral body act together. From the astral body a stimulus proceeds to the ego, the ego reacts upon the astral body. If this is to be a physical organ it must be built up by the etheric body. From the left would come the current of the physical body, from the right, that of the etheric body. They would be dammed up in the middle and a condensation would result. In addition, the currents of the ego and the astral body, from above and below respectively, would undergo the same process. If we draw a diagram of such a structure, where in one organ the currents of the physical and etheric bodies are dammed up against those of the ego and astral body, the result is nothing less than the diagram of the human heart with its four chambers:  That is the way the human heart came into being. When we consider all that the human heart achieves—the co-operation of the physical, etheric and astral bodies and the ego—it will be borne in upon us that the spirit had to build the human heart in this way. Here is another example. We have learned that in visual activity there is really a subconscious thought activity present. Conscious thought activity comes about only in the brain. Well, how must the brain be built in order to make conscious thought activity possible? In the brain we have the outer membrane, then a sort of blood vessel membrane, then the spinal cord fluid, and finally the brain proper. The latter is filled with nerve substance, and when sense impressions are communicated to this nerve substance through the senses, conscious thought activity arises. The nerve substance is the outer expression of conscious thought activity. When an organ is to be created in which not a conscious but a subconscious reaction to an external impression is to take place, it would have to be built in a similar way. Again there must be a sheath and something like a blood vessel membrane against the back. The spinal cord fluid must dry up and the whole brain mass be pushed back to make room for a subconscious thought activity undisturbed by a nervous system. Were the nerve substance not pushed back, thinking would take place there; when it is pushed back, no thinking can take place. Thus an external impression is first digested by subconscious thinking on the part of those portions not interlaced by the nervous system, and only later does it penetrate to the instrumentality of sentience, feeling and conscious thought. The result of this pushing back of the brain, so to speak, to the rear wall is that the brain has become an eye. The eye is a small brain so worked over by our spirit that the nerve substance proper is pushed back to the rear wall of the eye and becomes the retina. That is the way nature's architects work. A single plan governs in building really all of the sense organs; it is merely modified in the case of each organ as occasion demands. At bottom, all sense organs are small brains formed in different ways, and the brain is a sense organ of a higher order. There is one more detail to be studied, but first we will interpolate a few elucidating remarks in the nature of theoretical cognition, which in turn will clarify the standpoint of anthroposophy. We have said that the standpoint of anthropology lies below, among the details of the sense life, that theosophy stands upon the summit, and anthroposophy half-way between the two. In a general way, anyone can become convinced of the existence of the sense world by means of his senses, and with his mind understand the laws governing there. For this reason most people believe unhesitatingly anything resembling their sense experiences, which can be checked. It could easily be demonstrated that formally there is no difference whatever between the spiritual scientist's statements concerning the existence of spiritual worlds and the belief that there was such a person as Frederick the Great. Formally there is no difference between the belief that there are Spirits of Will and the belief that there was a Frederick the Great. When someone constructs for you the life of Frederick the Great from external data, you believe that there was a person with the attributes set forth. The human being gives credence to what is told him, provided it resembles what he finds in his own environment. The spiritual investigator is not in a position to deal with such things, but it is none the less true that there is no difference in the attitude assumed toward such communications. We have described the standpoints of anthropology and of theosophy. Ours is between the two. A feeling of confidence and faith in theosophy's message is fully justified by our sense of truth; there is such a thing as well-founded acceptance of theosophic truths. Coming to the third possibility, the standpoint lying between the other two, we find that from this vantage point we can distinguish intelligently that there is a sense perception; I believe because I can see it. There is a spiritual perception; I believe because the spiritual scientist tells me it is there. But there is a third possibility. Here is a hammer; my hand grasps it, picks it up, and raises it from the horizontal to the vertical position. We then say that it was moved and raised by my will. That will not strike anybody as remarkable, for we see the underlying will embodied in the man that raises the hammer. But supposing the hammer were to raise itself up, without being touched by a visibly incorporated will. In that case it would be foolish to imagine such a hammer to be the same as other hammers. We would have to conclude that something invisible was at work in the hammer. What conclusion would we draw from this embodiment of a will or other spiritual force? When I see something in this world acting as it could not act according to our knowledge of the laws of outer form, I am forced to conclude that in this case I do not see the spirit in the hammer, but it is reasonable to believe in it; in fact, I should be a perfect fool not to believe in spiritual activity. Suppose you are walking with a clairvoyant and encounter a human form lying motionless by the way. With the ordinary senses it might be impossible to determine whether it was a living being or a cardboard dummy, but the clairvoyant would know. He would see the etheric and astral bodies and could say that that is a living being. You would be justified in believing him, even though you could not perceive the etheric and astral bodies yourself. But now the figure stands up, and you see that the spiritual scientist was right. That is the third possibility. Now I will tell you a case that you can observe and verify in ordinary life—close at hand in one sense, though not in another. We have considered the various currents in the human being and found them to run as follows:
The ego, then, acts downward from above; so how would its physical organ have to lie? The physical organ of the ego is the circulating blood; and the ego could not function downward from above without an organ running in the same direction in the human body. Where the main direction of the blood-stream is horizontal, not vertical, there can be no ego, as in men. The main direction of the blood-stream had to raise itself in man to the vertical in order to enable the ego to lay hold on the blood. No ego can intervene where the main blood-stream runs horizontally instead of vertically. The group ego of animals can find no organ in them, because the main blood-line runs horizontally. Through the erection of this line to the vertical in man, the group ego became an individual ego. This difference between men and the animals shows how erroneous it is to set up a relationship inferred from purely external phenomena. That act of rising from the horizontal to the vertical is an historic incident, but it could no more have taken place without an underlying will, without the co-operation of spirit, than the raising of the hammer could have done. Only when a will, a spiritual force, courses through the blood can the horizontal line pass over into the vertical, can the upright position come about and the group soul rise to become the individual soul. It would be illogical to recognize the spiritual force in one case, that of the hammer, and not in the other, in man. That is the third possibility, a middle way of conviction, as it were, through which we can verify all theosophic truths. The deeper we penetrate into these matters, the clearer it becomes that this middle path to conviction is universally applicable—this middle way that fructifies ordinary experience through spiritual science. External research will be stimulated by spiritual science. Comparing the results of genuine spiritual-scientific research with outer phenomena, we are forced to the conclusion that all external processes are really comprehensible only if we take into account, without prejudice, the experiences of spiritual science. Thus to observe the world without prejudice, that is the standpoint of anthroposophy. It receives fruitful impulses from above, from theosophy, and from below, from anthropology; it observes the facts of the spiritual world and the things of this world, and explains the latter by means of the former. The building of each of our organs can be explained through spiritual activity, just as we described the transformation of the brain into an eye, and the build of the heart. By showing how spiritual facts and earthly things are interwoven, how spiritual truths are verified in outer phenomena, anthroposophy leads to the conviction that it is senseless not to acknowledge the higher truths that spiritual science is in a position to bring us.
|
| 115. Wisdom of Man, of the Soul, and of the Spirit: The Elements of the Soul Life
01 Nov 1910, Berlin Translated by Samuel P. Lockwood, Loni Lockwood |
|---|
| Passing through a landscape you see cloud-capped mountain peaks, and you experience joy in your soul. What underlies this is that you love what you experience through this landscape. Whatever exists of joy or horror in an experience, that is love or hate. |
| This may sound dry, but it is indispensable for an understanding of the soul life. Neither the soul life nor its relation to the higher planes could be accurately comprehended without the knowledge that judgments converge into visualizations. |
| All love and hate can finally be traced back to what within the soul life we call desire. Entering from another direction and underlying love and hate, as these manifest themselves in the soul, desire can always be found streaming into our soul lives. |
| 115. Wisdom of Man, of the Soul, and of the Spirit: The Elements of the Soul Life
01 Nov 1910, Berlin Translated by Samuel P. Lockwood, Loni Lockwood |
|---|
At the General Meeting last year you heard a course of lectures on Anthroposophy. This year I shall deliver a series entitled, Psychosophy, from a similar point of view, and later on it will be necessary to give a third course on Pneumatosophy. In this way the three cycles will combine and form a bridge connecting the three worlds in which we live. This will close the circle that takes us in a roundabout way back to our starting point.1 Psychosophy is intended as a study of the human soul starting with what it can itself experience here in the physical world, but then ascending to higher realms in order to show that the life we encounter and can observe in the physical world leads up to glimpses of a higher soul life, from which the light of theosophy will come to meet us, as it were. A variety of considerations will occupy us during these lectures. Beginning with apparently simple matters, we will ascend to a contemplation of those phenomena of the soul life that we call attention, memory, passions, emotions. We will consider the realms of the true, the good and. the beautiful. Then we will examine the phenomena that affect human life beneficially or harmfully, out of which arise actual causes of sickness that at the present time intervene and influence our soul lives. This will bring us to the point where the psychic element enters our physical life, our daily work. We shall have to study the interaction of bodily weal and woe, and the forms of the soul life. Our observations will lead us up to the high ideals of human society, and we will consider phenomena of our daily life, such as the origin of means for passing the time and how these, in turn, affect the soul life and reveal themselves in manifold concatenations. Then the curious effects of boredom and much else will be presented, as well as remedies for poor memory, lack of forceful thinking, and the like. You will readily understand that a detailed exposition of the soul life calls for consideration of the adjacent realms. Theosophy, of course, has provided you with ready mental images for relating the soul life of man to other realms. You are familiar with the organization of the nature of man as body, soul, and spirit, from which it is natural to infer that the soul life comes in contact on the one side with the bodily life and on the other with the spiritual life. This is the step that leads up from anthroposophy to psychosophy, and at some future time we must ascend from psychosophy to pneumatosophy. If we would study this soul life by itself, within its two boundaries, we must ask what it is. Well, all that we are accustomed to call the outer world, all that we see before and about us—animals, plants, minerals, clouds, rivers—whatever we encounter on the physical plane, we do not include in our soul life, no matter what mental pictures we may add to our perceptions. A rose, when encountered on the physical plane, is not a part of our soul life, but when the rose gives us pleasure, when it stimulates something like gratification in our soul, this fact then pertains to our soul life. To meet a person and to form a conception of his hair, his expression, etc., is not a function of the soul life, but to take an interest in him, to feel love or antipathy for him, that is an experience of the soul. That is the way in which matters pertaining to the soul must be characterized. Now let us turn to something different. Suppose we are watching a man carrying out some action that induces the feeling in us of a good deed, morally laudable. A psychic experience of that sort comprises something more. Here it is not a question of how the action arose, nor even of whether we were moved by love or hate in estimating it; we find something beyond what has thus far been characterized. As soon as we judge an act to be good or bad, higher interests play a part. When we call an act good, we know that it would be wrong for this quality to depend upon our verdict. We must dissociate our personality from the question of whether an act is good or bad. True, the verdict must arise in us, but independent of ourselves. Nothing in the outer world can tell us that the act is a good one; the verdict must come about within ourselves, but uninfluenced by love or hate. In all such inner experiences that nevertheless have a significance independent of our inner frame of mind, so that it is immaterial whether we pass judgment or not—in all such experiences the spirit plays a part in the human soul. Thus we have characterized the relation of the soul to the outer world by reviewing these three cases precisely from the outer world. Summing up, first, we observe something as pertaining to the outer world: the rose. Second, we experience something in connection with it: pleasure. Third, something arises in us, but something that must be independent of us: judgment (good or evil). The outer world must reveal itself to the soul by way of the body. Soul experiences take place wholly within us, and the spirit declares itself within the soul. The point is to keep firmly in mind that the soul flows and ebbs in inner facts. It now remains to find something through which the character of our soul life is brought to our consciousness from within as well. Thus far we have considered the soul life as it is bounded from without. Now we shall see how it can be characterized from within, disregarding what is adjacent, and clearly expressing in a conception what we mean by the pure soul principle. We must acquire a mental picture of the nature of the soul as it has its being on the physical plane. The basic character of pure soul, of pure psychic experience, can be described in two ways. Speaking accurately in regard to earthly conditions, and indicating the inner phenomena of the soul life exactly as far as its boundaries, there are in the first instance two conceptions that we can apply to man's pure soul experiences and to nothing else. The inner phenomena of the soul life—its inner fluctuation—clearly indicate its boundaries, and the attributes of these boundaries must be mentioned. My next task will therefore be to characterize these inner phenomena of the soul life, and this, as I said, can be done in two ways. We will devote today's lecture to gathering conceptions, but never mind; it will greatly help us to understand phenomena that concern us intimately. It is a matter of gleaning hints that are extraordinarily important in connection with the soul life, whether healthy or diseased. One conception by which the pure soul principle can be characterized is reasoning. Reasoning is one activity of the soul, and all remaining psychic experiences can be summed up in what we may call the inner experiences of love and hate. Rightly understood, these two conceptions—reasoning, and love and hate—comprise the entire inner soul life. Everything else denotes something that derives from without through the body or from within through the spirit. We shall see how fruitful a careful study of the two psychic activities can become. Everything pertaining to the soul, then, is either reasoning or living in love and hate; at bottom these two conceptions are the only pure soul activities. Reasoning on the one hand, loving and hating on the other—these are the forces of the soul life exclusively pertaining to it. If we are to understand each other aright with regard to these two basic forces of the soul, it behooves us to visualize clearly first, the significance of reasoning within the soul life, and then, the role played in the soul life by love and hate. I refer to reasoning not from the standpoint of logic, but of the activity comprising the inner soul process of reasoning; not judgment, but the activity, reasoning. If you are led to concede that the rose is red, you have reasoned; the activity of reasoning is involved. If you are inwardly constrained to say that the rose is red, that man is good, the Sis-tine Madonna is beautiful, that steeple is high, you are dealing with activities of the inner soul life that we designate as reasoning. Now, how about love and hate? A little introspection will show you that we do not pass by the outer world in such a way that our soul remains untouched by the majority of external phenomena. Passing through a landscape you see cloud-capped mountain peaks, and you experience joy in your soul. What underlies this is that you love what you experience through this landscape. Whatever exists of joy or horror in an experience, that is love or hate. If love or hate hides in many kinds of soul experiences, that is merely because these accompany us incessantly from morning to night. If you see someone committing an evil deed and are repelled by it, you have a hidden experience of hate, exactly as you have when you turn from a malodorous flower. Love and hate accompany the soul life continually and so does reasoning. If we now observe an important concomitant of reasoning, we can learn to know the phenomena of the inner soul life better still. It is this, that all reasoning has an effect in the soul life, and this fact is the key to the soul life. By forming the judgment, “the rose is red,” “that man is good,” you retain a result in the soul. It can be characterized this way: When you have given the verdict, the inference is the conception, “the red rose,” “the good man.” The verdict “the rose is red” has been transformed into the conception “the red rose.” As a being endowed with soul, you then continue to live with this conception. Every judgment is a confluence of conceptions. Here we have, on the one hand the rose, on the other, red. These flow toward each other and combine in the conception “the red rose,” which you carry with you in your further soul life. This may sound dry, but it is indispensable for an understanding of the soul life. Neither the soul life nor its relation to the higher planes could be accurately comprehended without the knowledge that judgments converge into visualizations. Experiences of love and hate, on the other hand, do not give rise to the question of how do they converge, but rather as to where they arise. In the case of reasoning, the question is, Whither? and the answer is. Toward the conception. But with regard to love and hate the question is. Whence? We will always find one impulse in soul experiences themselves that gives rise to love and hate, an impulse that breaks into the soul life from another quarter, as it were. All love and hate can finally be traced back to what within the soul life we call desire. Entering from another direction and underlying love and hate, as these manifest themselves in the soul, desire can always be found streaming into our soul lives. Into one side of it flows desire, manifesting itself in love and hate. On the other side the activity of reasoning leads to visualization. Desire is something you can easily recognize as arising naturally out of the inner soul life. The external cause of it may not at all be known to you, but you do know that it appears in your inner soul life, and that invariably love and hate result. In like manner you realize that your verdict “the rose is red” arises in the soul, but when this verdict has culminated in a visualization, the latter must have external validity. Reasoning takes place in the soul; it arises out of the inner life. We can put it this way: primarily, desire—for reasons not known to us today—manifests itself in the soul and expresses itself in love and hate. But in the same way—also for unknown reasons—the soul is impelled to permit judgment to enter from the wellspring of its own being, and provided the verdict has been arrived at in a certain way, the visualization must be valid for the outer world. It will seem strange to you that I should be so prolix in expounding the elementary concepts of the soul life. You may think that these matters could be skipped over more rapidly, and indeed, they could, but just because these relationships remain largely unnoticed in scientific circles, error after error is committed. I will mention one prime error common today. By drawing far-reaching conclusions, those guilty of this error become entangled in misconceptions; they start from entirely false premises. In many books on physiology you can find the statement that the raising of a hand or leg is brought about by the fact that we have two kinds of nerves. Those that run from the sense organs to the brain or the spinal cord and that transmit messages to the brain, so to speak, are supposed to be contrasted with another set, called motor nerves, as against the sensory or perceptive nerves. According to this theory, when an object is seen, the message of the sense organ is first carried to the brain, where the stimulus thus exerted is supposed to stream out into a nerve that leads to a muscle, and only then does the impulse arise that entails motion. According to spiritual science, however, that is not the case. What is called the motor nerve does, in fact, exist as a physical unit, but it does not serve to instigate the motion. It serves only to enable us to perceive the motion ourselves, to check up on it, to bring our own movement to consciousness. Just as the optic nerve, through which we perceive an external event, is a sensory nerve, so the muscle nerve leading to the hand is also a sensory nerve, whose function is to keep track of the movement of our hand. This example of faulty scientific thinking is a prime error that has poisoned all physiology and psychology. Our task is clearly to understand the role played by these two elements of the soul, reasoning, and love and hate. They play an enormous role, for the entire soul life runs its course in manifold combinations of these two elements. We should misconstrue this soul life, however, if we failed to allow for extraneous forces, not properly psychic, that constantly enter in across the border. The first example that occurs to us, to be met with everywhere in daily life, around which, indeed, our everyday soul life is built, is that of sense experiences. These are the various experiences brought about by the ear, the eye, the tongue, the nose, etc. What we experience through our sense organs we take into our soul, in a way, and there it lives on. With this in mind we can actually speak of our soul reaching as far as a certain boundary, which is the boundary of the sense organs. We have posted sentinels, as it were, at the boundaries of our soul life, and what these sentinels report of the outer world we take into our soul life and carry further. We can now ask about those impressions in the soul that we experience through our sense organs. What is represented within the soul life by what we experience through the ear as tone, through the eye as color, through the nose as smell? Well, the study of these sense experiences is as a rule pursued in a lopsided manner. Science fails to face the fact that the processes taking place at the boundaries of the soul life are composed of two factors, two elements. One element is perception, our immediate experience of the outer world. You hold the tone, the color, the smell, and so forth—that is, the impression of these—only as long as you are in contact with the external stimulus. The impression, the interaction of inner and outer factors, ceases at once when you turn away, close your eyes, or the like. What does that prove? If you consider the immediate perception in conjunction with the fact that later you know something (you know the tone, the color, etc.), it proves that you have retained something of your experience of the outer world, even though the experience has ceased. What does this imply? That something has completely entered your soul life. Something that has become part of your soul life must inevitably run its course there because you carry it with you. If it were part of the outer world you could not carry it with you. You can continue to hold the impression of color, the perception of the color impression, only if it has remained within your soul. It is necessary to distinguish between a sense perception proper and what you continue to carry in the soul, what you detach from the outer world. The experience you thus derive from objects we will call perception, and what you continue to carry in the soul, sensation. As a foundation, then, for subsequent expositions, keep in mind the sharp distinction between sense perceptions and what we retain as sensation (sentience). The perception of color ceases when you turn away; the sensation of it remains. Ordinarily such fine distinctions are unnecessary, but for these four lectures they are apposite. So we continue on our way, carrying these sensations about with us in our soul. We now ask if it could be that these sensations, derived from external objects, constitute a new element of the soul life, as opposed to reasoning and the phenomena of love and hate, which we termed the exclusive elements? If that were the case I should have been guilty of omitting to name something that also constitutes an inner experience, namely, sentience. But that is not the way matters stand; sentience is not a separate element of the soul life. If you have sensed the color red, the color red is not an inner soul experience, for it is the object that is red. If “red” were an inner soul experience your whole color-perception of red would avail you nothing. The quality “red” did not originate in your soul life. What did arise there was the activity in which you engaged for the purpose of carrying away with you something of the red. What you did while confronting the rose, that is inner soul life. This activity of your inner soul is in reality nothing more than a fusion of what I have described to you as the two basic elements of the soul life. But then we must consider the following. If what I have told you of the two elements is true—if love and hate, deriving from desire, and reasoning lead to visualization—then what was characterized as sentience would have to be related to those two elements in the case of a sense experience as well. A sense experience must be accompanied by love and hate, and reasoning. Imagine you have a sense experience of color, and observe closely what happens:  Desire and reasoning flow to the boundary of the outer world and become visualization of the material object. Above the heavy line is the outer world, below it the world of the soul. The line is the boundary. When at this boundary an object makes an impression upon the sense organs and induces an experience—for instance, of color, this experience must be met by the result of love and hate and of reasoning, emanating from the soul as visualization. Nothing else can flow out of the soul. Note, however, an important distinction that can exist between different kinds of desire, different kinds of reasoning. As an example, let us assume that while you are waiting for a train, day-dreaming, the visualization of a disagreeable past experience appears in your soul life, and side by side with this appears another, namely, everything unpleasant that has happened to you since then as a result of that experience. Then you can sense how these two visualizations combine into a more intensive visualization of that distressing event. During this process nothing related to it has occurred in the outer world. A judgment has been reached that remains wholly within psychic experience. Nevertheless, love and hate appeared in the soul life; they amalgamated with the visualization, as it were. As you sit there dreaming, your environment need show nothing of all this; your surroundings are of no consequence; yet something occurs. A visualization comes about through love and hate, and reasoning, without any stimulus from without. That is quite a different thing from confronting a sense experience. When we perform such an inner act—let judgments arise, provoke love and hate—we remain within the sea of our soul life. But when a sense experience arises we must advance to the boundary of the outer world, and there it is as though the currents of the soul life were directly stopped by the outer world. Whenever a sense experience is involved we are stopped by the outer world. Desire, love and hate, flash to the boundary; the capacity for judgment flows there too, and both are obstructed at that boundary. The result is that reasoning and desire are checked. They are there, but the soul does not perceive them, and the sense sensation is brought about by this flowing to the boundary and there being stopped. The sense sensation is nothing but a phenomenon of love, hate and reasoning that remains unconscious, though these are obstructed and held fast from without (cf. previous diagram). We can put it this way. Ebbing and flowing in the sea of our soul life, psychically substantial, is what can be designated love and hate, and reasoning. This manifests itself in various ways. When a judgment is reached within the soul itself, the soul is aware of the activity of reasoning as visualization. When the soul directs the activity toward the outer world, it must stop at the boundary and it perceives the outer world: perception. When, however, the soul directs the activity toward the outer world but stops before it is reached, sensation arises. Sensation is the confluence of desire and reasoning within the soul life. If we consider what the soul life ordinarily comprises, we find that our inner experiences really consist, as a rule, of what we have carried away with us from sense experiences. A little introspection will convince you of this. If you want to create higher visualizations for yourself, you will notice how helpful it is for your inner soul life to try to substantialize what is not of the senses, to imagine it pictorially, to clothe it in a garb that is faintly a sensation of color or tone. Speech itself could teach us how extensive is the soul's need to express higher things in such a way as to symbolize them in sense sensations. As a rule, the symbol is a necessity, though people usually have no inkling of the fact, because in symbols the likeness is shadowy, nebulous. Try, for a moment, to imagine something without the aid of a symbol—a triangle, for example; a triangle without color or any link with any sense sensation. Just try it, and you will see how difficult it is to visualize a triangle un-symbolized, that is, a visualization not associated with any sense picture. Most people are quite incapable of accomplishing this. Symbols alone provide the possibility of rising to higher visualizations. Even language is aided by symbolization. Observe how we are forced at every turn to symbolize speech. I said that a symbol must be verknüpft (linked) with the visualization of a triangle: what a crude conception, knüpfen!1 Even words themselves disclose the prevalence of symbols, and we see to how great an extent the soul life consists of products of sensations. We have just one conception that cannot be directly classed as an outer sense experience, although it keeps recurring as an inner soul experience and we must continually relate it to the outer sense experiences: the conception of the ego. If we face the purely psychic state of affairs, we must concede that man lives largely in a world of sense sensations. In this world the conception of the ego keeps bobbing up and crowding forward, but this ego is not always present as a conception. It would be foolish to assume that the ego conception could be present continually or for a prolonged period. Fancy what it would be like to keep saying to yourself, to keep visualizing incessantly, I, I, I ...! No, that is not what you do. You have other conceptions, such as red, blue, tone, large, small. Nevertheless you know that your visualizing occurs in your ego, that your ego must participate whenever a sense experience takes place. What we call soul experience is in a sense at the same time ego experience. You know that soul experiences—desire, reasoning, etc.—must always be opposed by the ego, but no matter how insistently visualizations are stimulated by the outer world, the conception of the ego can never possibly be created merely through the outer world. It does not enter from without. True, the ego sensation, the ego conception, invariably accompanies these sense conceptions that originate in the outer world, but it does not itself arise there. It emerges from the sea of the soul life and, as a visualization, joins the other visualizations, as it were. Out of the sea of soul experience the other sense experiences emerge as well, but only when outer causes are in question. In this fact is to be seen primarily the sole difference between the ego sensation and sensations consequent upon sense perception. A significant phenomenon thus confronts us. In the midst of our soul life there appears a conception that joins the others coming from without. How is this to be explained? Among present-day philosophers and psychologists, even outside the anthroposophical movement, there are some who point out the importance of the ego conception, but strangely enough these psychologists, no matter how well-meaning, invariably overshoot the mark. The French philosopher, Bergson, was one who emphasized the significance, the distinctive character, of the ego conception. From this the philosophers infer a permanence of this ego conception, or at least, that it points to something permanent, and they substantiate this view as follows. The ego differs from all other experiences of the senses and the soul by participating, as it were, in the other experiences and conceptions in such a way as to lend them their true form; ergo, it must be of a permanent nature. Here, however, a grave error appears, and a certain objection that must be raised against Bergson's argument proves quite fatal for his inference. Let us assume that the ego conception yielded something that constitutes the soul within itself. The question would then necessarily arise as to what happens to this during sleep at night. The ego conception ceases entirely, of course, during sleep. All these concepts concerning the participation of the ego in visualizations apply only to our waking life. They merely appear anew every morning. If the ego conception were to prove anything concerning the permanence of the ego, it would have to remain present during sleep. From the absence of the ego conception during the night it follows that after death it need not necessarily be present either. Thus there is no testimony available for the permanence and the immortality of the ego. It might be lacking, for it disappears every day. Hence we must keep in mind that, on the one hand, the presence of the ego conception without external stimulus is significant, but that, on the other, this presence in no way proves the permanence of the ego, as the latter is away during sleep. In this way we have today reached an inference upon which we shall build further. We have seen that two elements emerge from the surging sea of the soul life: reasoning, leading to visualization, and love and hate, deriving from desire. At the boundary of our soul life is the confluence, of which we are not aware, of desire and reasoning. An ego conception appears without external stimulus, but it shares its destiny with the other visualizations of the soul life; just as tone, color, and so forth, come and go, so does the ego conception emerge and disappear. In the following lectures we will examine the connection of this ego conception, this soul center, with the other conceptions of the soul life—sensation, desire, reasoning, love and hate.
|
| 115. Wisdom of Man, of the Soul, and of the Spirit: At the Portals of the Senses
03 Nov 1910, Berlin Translated by Samuel P. Lockwood, Loni Lockwood |
|---|
| We shall see, however, that we can best understand the dramatic phases of the soul life if we approach the subject of feeling by starting from the two elements mentioned. |
| Observe, for example, those phenomena within the life of feeling that come under the head of concepts like impatience, hope, longing, doubt, even despair, and you have points of contact between these terms and something spiritually tangible. |
| From the point where it turns back, desire brings back the verdict. What sort of a verdict does it bring back? Under these conditions only aesthetic verdicts are possible, that is, judgments in some way linked with art and beauty. |
| 115. Wisdom of Man, of the Soul, and of the Spirit: At the Portals of the Senses
03 Nov 1910, Berlin Translated by Samuel P. Lockwood, Loni Lockwood |
|---|
Today our lecture will again be preceded by the recitation of a poem intended to illustrate various matters that I shall discuss today and tomorrow. This time we are dealing with a poem by one whom we may call a non-poet because, as compared with his other spiritual activity, this poem appears as a by-product, written for an occasion. It is, therefore, a soul manifestation that in a sense did not proceed from the innermost impulses of the soul. Precisely this fact will bring clearly to light a number of points connected with our subject. The poem is by the philosopher, Hegel, and concerns certain phases of mankind's initiation. Eleusis To Hölderlin
In the last two lectures it was stated that in studying the soul life we find it filled out up to its boundaries principally by reasoning and the experiences of love and hate, the latter, as we showed, being connected with desire. Now, it might seem as though this statement ignored the most important factor, the very element through which the soul experiences itself most profoundly in its inner depths, that is, feeling. It might seem as though the soul life had been characterized precisely by what is not peculiar to it, and as though no account had been taken of what surges back and forth, up and down in the soul life, investing it with its character of the moment, the life of feeling. We shall see, however, that we can best understand the dramatic phases of the soul life if we approach the subject of feeling by starting from the two elements mentioned. Again we must begin with simple facts of the soul life, and these are the sense experiences that enter through the portals of our senses, penetrating the soul life, and there carrying on their existence. On the one hand, the waves of the soul life surge to the portals of the senses and thence take back into it the results of the sense perceptions, which then live on independently in the soul. Compare this fact with the other one: that everything comprised in the experiences of love and hate, deriving from desire, also arise in the inner soul life itself, as it were. Desires seem to arise in the center of the soul life, and even to a superficial observer they appear to lead to love and hate. Desires themselves, however, are not originally to be found in the soul. They arise at the portals of the senses. Consider that first of all. Think of the everyday life of the soul. In observing yourself thus you will notice how the expressions of desire arise in you through contact with the outer world. So we can say that by far the greatest portion of the soul life is achieved at the boundary of the sense world, at the portals of the senses. This must be thoroughly understood, and we will best be able to grasp it by representing in a sort of diagram what we recognize as fact. We will be able to characterize the intimacies of the soul life by imagining it as filling out a circle.  Let us imagine, then, that the content of the soul life is represented by what the circle encloses, and further imagine our sense organs as a sort of portals, as openings leading to the outer world, in the manner set forth in the lectures on Anthroposophy. If we now consider what is to be observed only within the soul, we should have to represent it graphically by showing the flood surging from the center in all directions and expressing itself in the phenomena of love and hate. Thus the soul is entirely filled by desires, and we find this flood surging right up to the portals of the senses. The question now arises as to what it is that we experience when a sense experience occurs. What takes place when we experience a tone through the ear, a smell through the nose? Let us for the moment disregard the content of the outer world. Call to mind once more, on the one hand, the actual moment of sense perception, that is, the intercommunication with the outer world. Relive vividly the moment during which the soul experiences itself within, so to speak, while having a color or tone experience of the outer world through the portals of the senses. On the other hand, remember that the soul lives on in time, retaining as recollected visualizations what it acquired through the sense experience in question. Here we must sharply differentiate between what the soul continues to carry along as permanent experience of the recollected visualizations and the experience of the activity of the sense perception, otherwise we should stray into thought processes like Schopenhauer's. Now we ask, “What happened in that moment when the soul was exposed to the outer world through the portals of the senses?” When you consider that the soul, as experience directly reveals, is really filled with the flood of desires, and you ask what it actually is that flows to the portals of the senses when the soul lets its own inner being surge there, you find it to be the desires themselves. This desire knocks at the gate; at this moment it actually comes in contact with the outer world, and while doing so it receives a seal imprint, as it were, from the other side. When I press a seal with a crest into wax, what remains of the seal in the wax? Nothing but the crest. You could not maintain that what remains does not tally with what had acted from without. That would not be unprejudiced observation, but Kantianism. Unless you are discussing external matter you cannot say that the seal itself does not enter the wax, but rather, you must consider the point at issue: the crest is in the wax. The important thing is what opposes the crest in the seal and into which the crest has stamped itself. Just as the seal yields nothing out of itself but the crest, so the outer world furnishes nothing but the imprint. But something must oppose the seal if an imprint is to come about. You must therefore think of it so that in what opposes the sense experience an imprint has formed from without, and this we carry with us, this imprint come into being in our own soul life. That is what we take along, not the color or the tone itself, but what we have had in the way of experiences of love and hate, of desires. Is that altogether correct? Could there be something directly connected with a sense experience, something like a desire that must press outward? Well, if nothing of the sort existed you would not carry the sense experience with you in your subsequent soul life; no memory visualization would form. There is, indeed, a psychic phenomenon that offers direct proof that desire always makes contacts outward from the soul through the portals of the senses, whether the perceptions be those of color, smell, or hearing; that is the phenomenon of attention. A comparison between a sense impression during which we merely stare unseeing and one to which we give our attention shows us that in the former case the impression cannot be carried on in the soul life. You must respond from within through the power of attention, and the greater the attention, the more readily the soul retains the memory visualization in the further course of life. Thus the soul, through the senses, comes in touch with the outer world by causing its essential substance to penetrate the outermost bounds, and this manifests itself in the phenomenon of attention. In the case of direct sense experience the other element pertaining to the soul life, reasoning, is eliminated. That is exactly what characterizes a sense impression; the capacity for reasoning as such is eliminated. Desire alone prevails, for the sense impression of red is not the same as the sense perception of red. A tone, a perception of color or a smell to which you are exposed, comprises only a desire, recorded through attention; judgment is suppressed in this case. Only one must have clearly in mind the necessity of drawing a sharp boundary line between sense perception and what follows it in the soul. If you stop at the impression of a color you are dealing with just that—a color impression without judgment. Sense impressions are characterized by an operation of the attention that rules out a verdict as such, desire alone holding sway. When you are exposed to a color or a tone, nothing remains in this condition of being exposed but desire; judgment is suppressed. The sense impression of red is not the same as the sense perception of red. In a tone, in the impression of a color, in a smell to which you expose yourself, only desire is present, recorded by attention. Attention, then, manifests itself as a special form of desire. But at the moment when you say “red is ...” you have already judged: reasoning has come into play. One must always remember to make that distinction between sense perception and sense sensation. Only when you stop at the impression (say, of a color) are you dealing with a mere correspondence between the desire of the soul and the outer world. What takes place at this meeting of desire in the soul and the outer world? In distinguishing between sense perceptions and sense sensations we designated the former as experiences encountered at the moment of being exposed to them, the latter, as what remains. Now, what do we find a sense sensation to consist of? A modification of desire. Along with the sense sensation we carry what swirls and surges as a modification of desire, the objects of desire. We have seen that sense sensation arises at the boundary between the soul life and the outer world, at the portals of the senses. We say of a sense experience that the force of desire penetrates to the surface. But let us suppose that the force of desire did not reach the boundary of the outer world but remained within the soul, that it wore off within the soul life itself, as it were, that it remained an inner condition, not penetrating to a sense portal. What would happen in that case? When the force of desire advances and is then compelled to withdraw into itself, inner sensation,1 or feeling arises. Sense sensation, or outer sensation, comes about only when the withdrawal is effected from without through a counterthrust at the moment of contact with the sense world. Inner sensation (feeling) arises when desire is not pushed back by a direct contact with the outer world but when it is turned back into itself somewhere within the soul before reaching the boundary. That is the way inner sensation, feeling, arises. Feelings are, in a way, introverted desires, desires pushed back into themselves. Thus inner sensation, feeling, consists of halted desires that have not surged to the soul's boundary but live within the soul life, and in feeling, too, the soul substance consists essentially of desire. So feelings as such are not an additional element of the soul life, but substantial, actual processes of desire taking place in the soul life. Let us keep that in mind. Now we will describe a certain aspect of the two elements of the soul life, reasoning, and the experiences of love and hate originating in desire. It can be stated that everything in the soul arising from the activity of reasoning ends at a certain moment, but also, all that appears as desire comes to an end at a certain moment as well. When does the activity of reasoning cease? When the decision is reached, when the verdict is concluded in the series of visualizations that we then continue to carry with us as a truth. And the end of desire? Satisfaction. As a matter of fact, every desire seeks satisfaction, every reasoning activity, a decision. Because the soul life consists of these two elements—love and hate, and reasoning, imbued with a longing for satisfaction and decision respectively—we can deduce the most important fact connected with the soul life, that it streams toward decisions and satisfaction. Could we observe man's soul life in its fullness we should find these two currents striving for decisions and satisfaction. By studying his life of feeling we find the origins of many feelings in a great variety of satisfactions and decisions. Observe, for example, those phenomena within the life of feeling that come under the head of concepts like impatience, hope, longing, doubt, even despair, and you have points of contact between these terms and something spiritually tangible. You perceive that the origins of soul processes like impatience, hope, longing, and so forth, are nothing but different expressions of the constantly flowing current in its striving for satisfaction of the forces of desire and for decisions through the forces of visualization. Try to grasp the essence of the feeling of impatience. You will sense vividly that it contains a striving for satisfaction. Impatience is a desire flowing along with the current of the soul, and it does not cease till it terminates in satisfaction. Reasoning powers hardly come into play there. Or take hope. In hope you will readily recognize the continuous current of desires, but of desires that, unlike those of impatience, are permeated by the other element of the soul life, that is, a tendency of the reasoning powers toward a decision. Because these two elements precisely balance in this feeling, like equal weights on a scale, the feeling of hope is complete in itself. The desire for satisfaction and the prospect of a favorable decision are present in exactly equal measure. A different feeling would arise were a desire, striving for satisfaction, to combine with a reasoning activity incapable of bringing about a decision. That would be a feeling of doubt. Similarly, we could always find a curious interplay of reasoning and desire in the wide realm of the feelings, and if there remain feelings in which you don't find these two elements, seek further till you do find them. Taking reasoning capacity as one side of the soul life, we find that it ends with the visualization, but the value a visualization has for life consists in its being a truth. The soul of itself cannot judge truth; the basis of truth is inherent. Everyone must feel this if he compares the characteristics of the soul life with what is to be acquired through truth. What we are wont to call reasoning capacity in connection with the soul life could also be designated reflection; yet by reflecting we do not necessarily arrive at the right decision. The verdict becomes correct through our being lifted out of our soul, for truth lies without, and the decision is the union with truth. For this reason decisions are an element foreign to the soul. Turning to the other element, surging in as from unknown sources toward the center of the soul life and spreading in all directions, we find the origin of desire again to lie primarily outside the soul life. Both desires and judgments enter the soul life from without. Within the soul life, then, satisfaction and the struggle for truth up to the moment of decision run their course, so it can be said that in relation to reasoning we are fighters within the soul life, in relation to desires, enjoyers. Decisions take us out of our soul life, but regarding our desires we are enjoyers, and the end of desires, satisfaction, lies within. In the matter of judgment we are independent, but the reverse is true of desires. In the latter case the inception does not occur in the soul, but satisfaction does. For this reason feeling, as an end, as satisfaction of desire, can fill the whole soul. Let us examine more closely what it is that enters the soul as satisfaction. We have explained that sensation is fundamentally a surging of desire right up to the boundary of the soul life, while feeling remains farther within, where desire wears off. What do we find at the end of desire, there where the soul life achieves satisfaction within itself? We find feeling. So when desire achieves its end in satisfaction within the soul life, feeling comes into being. That represents only one category of feelings, however. Another arises in a different manner, namely, through the fact that actually interrelationships exist in the depths of the soul life between the inner soul life and the outer world. Considered by itself, the character of our desires expresses itself in the fact that these are directed toward external things, but unlike sense perceptions they do not achieve contact with them. Desire, however, can be directed toward its objective in such a way as to act from a distance, as a magnetic needle points to the pole without reaching it. In this sense, then, the outer world enjoys a certain relationship to the soul life and exercises an influence within it, though not actually reaching it. Feelings can therefore also arise when desire for an unattainable object continues. The soul approaches an object that induces desire; the object is not able to satisfy it; desire remains; no satisfaction results. Let us compare this condition with a desire that achieves satisfaction; there is a great difference. A desire that has ended in satisfaction, that has been neutralized, has a health-giving influence on the soul life, but an unsatisfied desire remains imprisoned in itself and has a deleterious effect on the health of the soul. The consequence of an unsatisfied desire is that the soul lives in this unsatisfied desire, which is carried on because it was not fulfilled and because in the absence of its object a living relationship is maintained between the soul and what we may call a void. Hence, the soul lives in unsatisfied longing, in inner contexts not founded on reality, and this suffices to produce a baneful influence upon the health of the physical and spiritual life with which the soul is bound up. Desires that remain should be sharply distinguished from those that are satisfied. When such phenomena appear in obvious forms they are readily distinguished, but there are cases in which these facts are not at all easy to recognize. Referring now only to those desires that are wholly encompassed by the soul life, let us suppose a man faces an object; then he goes away and says the object had satisfied him, that he liked it; or else, it had not satisfied him and he disliked it. Connected with the satisfaction is a form of desire, no matter how thoroughly hidden, which was satisfied in a certain way, and in the case of the dislike the desire itself has remained. This leads us into the realm of aesthetic judgment. There is but one variety of feelings, and this is significantly characteristic of the soul life, that appears different from the others. You will readily understand that feelings, either satisfied or unsatisfied desires, can link not only with external objects but with inner soul experiences. A feeling of the kind we designated “satisfied desire” may connect with something reaching far into the past. Within ourselves as well we find the inceptions of satisfied or unsatisfied desires. Distinguish, for a moment, between desires provoked by external objects and those stimulated by our own soul lives. By means of outer experiences we can have desires that remain with us, and in the soul as well we find causes of satisfied or unsatisfied desires. But there are other tiny inner experiences in which we have an unfulfilled longing. Let us assume that in a case where our desires face an outer object our reasoning powers prove too weak to reach a decision; you might have to renounce a decision. There you have an experience of distress brought about by your feeling of dissatisfaction. There is one case, however, in which our reasoning does not reach a decision, nor does desire end in satisfaction, and yet no feeling of distress arises. Remember that when we do not reason in facing the objects of daily life through ordinary sense experiences we halt at the sense phenomena, but in reasoning we transcend the sense experience. When we carry both reasoning and desire to the boundary of the soul life, where the sense impression from the outer world surges up to the soul, and we then develop a desire, permeated by the power of reasoning that stops exactly at the boundary, then a most curiously constituted feeling arises. Let this line represent the eye as the portal of sight. Now we let our desire (horizontal lines) stream to the portal of sense experiences, the eye, in the direction outward from the soul. Now let our reasoning powers (vertical lines) flow there as well. This would give us a symbol of the feeling just mentioned, a feeling of unique composition. Remember that ordinarily when reasoning power is developed the fulfillment of psychic activity lies not within but outside the soul. Then you will appreciate the difference between the two currents that flow as far as the outer impression. If our reasoning power is to decide something that is to proceed as far as the boundary of the soul, the latter must take into itself something concerning which it can make no decisions of its own initiative, and that is truth. Desire cannot flow out; truth overwhelms desire. Desire must capitulate to truth. It is necessary, then, to take something into our soul that is foreign to the soul as such: truth. The lines representing reasoning (cf. diagram) normally proceed out of the soul life to meet something external, but desire cannot pass the boundary where either it is hurled back or it remains confined within itself. In the present example, however, we are assuming that both reasoning and desire proceed only to the boundary, and that as far as the sense impression is concerned they coincide completely. In this case our desire surges as far as the outer world and from there brings us back the verdict. From the point where it turns back, desire brings back the verdict. What sort of a verdict does it bring back? Under these conditions only aesthetic verdicts are possible, that is, judgments in some way linked with art and beauty. Only in connection with artistic considerations can it happen that desire flows to the boundary and is satisfied, that reasoning power stops at the frontier and yet the final verdict is brought back. When you look at a work of art, can you say that it provokes your desire? Yes, it does, but not through its own agency. When that is the case, which is possible, of course, the arrival at an aesthetic decision does not depend upon a certain development of the soul. It is quite conceivable that certain souls might not respond in any way to a work of art. Naturally, this can happen in connection with other objects as well, but then we find complete indifference, and in that case the same process would take place when looking at a work of art as when confronting any other object. When you are not indifferent, however, when your soul life responds appropriately to the work of art, you will notice a difference. You let reasoning and desire flow to the boundary of the soul life, and then something returns, namely, a desire expressing itself in the verdict. That is beautiful. To the one, nothing returns, to the other, desire returns, but not desire for the work of art, but the desire that has been satisfied by the verdict. The power of desire and the power of reasoning come to terms in the soul, and in such a case where the outer world is the provoker only of your own inner soul activity, the outer world itself can satisfy you. Exactly as much returns to you as had streamed forth from you. Note that the actual presence of the work of art is indispensable, because the soul substance of desire must certainly flow to the frontier of the senses. Any recollection of the work really yields something different from the aesthetic judgment in its presence. Truth, then, is something to which desires capitulate as to a sort of exterior of the soul life. Beauty is something in which desire exactly corresponds to reasoning. The verdict is brought about by the voluntary termination of desire at the soul's boundary, the desire returning as the verdict. That is why the experience of beauty is a satisfaction that diffuses so much warmth. The closest balance of the soul forces is achieved when the soul life flows to its boundary as desire and returns as judgment. No other activity so completely fulfills the conditions of a healthy soul life as devotion to beauty. When a longing of the soul surges in great waves to the frontier of the senses and returns with the verdict, we can see that one condition of ordinary life can better be met through devotion to beauty than in any other way. In seeking the fruits of thought we are working in the soul with a medium to which the power of desire must constantly surrender. Naturally, the power of desire will always surrender to the majesty of truth, but when it is forced to do so, the inevitable consequence is an impairment of the soul life's health. Continual striving in the realm of thought, during which desires must constantly capitulate, would eventually bring about aridity of the human soul, but reasoning that brings satisfied desire and judgment in equal measure provides the soul with something quite different. Naturally this is not a recommendation that we should incessantly wallow in beauty and maintain that truth is unhealthy. That would be setting up the axiom that the search for truth is unhealthy: let us eschew it; wallowing in beauty is healthy: let us indulge in it. But the implication of what has been said is that in view of our search for truth, which is a duty, a necessity, we are compelled to fight against the life of desires, to turn it back into itself. Indeed, in seeking truth we must do this as a matter of course. More than anything else, therefore, this search inculcates humility and forces back our egotism in the right way. The search for truth renders us ever more humble. Yet if man were merely to live along in this way, becoming more and more humble, he would eventually arrive at his own dissolution; the sentience of his own inner being, essential to the fulfillment of his soul life, would be lacking. He must not forfeit his individuality through the constant necessity surrendering to truth; this is where the life of aesthetic judgment steps in. The life of aesthetic judgment is so constituted that man brings back again what he has carried to the boundary of the soul life. In that life it is permissible to do what is demanded in the light of truth. What is demanded by truth is that the decision be reached independently of our arbitrary choice. In seeking truth we must surrender ourselves completely, and in return we are vouchsafed truth. In coming to an aesthetic decision, in seeking the experience of beauty, we also surrender ourselves completely; we let our souls surge to their boundaries, almost as in the case of a sense sensation. But then we ourselves return and this cannot be decided, cannot be determined from without. We surrender ourselves and are given back to ourselves. Truth brings back only a verdict, but an aesthetic judgment, in addition, brings back our self as a gift. That is the peculiarity of the aesthetic life. It comprises truth, that is, selflessness, but at the same time the assertion of self-supremacy in the soul life, returning us to ourselves as a spontaneous gift. In these lectures, as you see, I must present matters ill adapted to definitions. We are merely endeavoring to describe them as they are by delimiting the soul life and studying it. In the lectures on Anthroposophy given last year we learned that in the downward direction corporeality borders on the soul life. At this border we endeavored to grasp the human being and thereby the human body, together with all that is connected with its constitution. The ultimate aim of these lectures is to provide rules of life, life wisdom, hence a broad foundation is indispensable. Today, we gained an insight into the nature of desires as they surge in the depths of the soul life. Now, in the previous lectures we learned that certain experiences allied to feeling, like boredom, depend upon the presence of visualizations out of the past, like bubbles that lead their own lives in the soul. At a given moment of our existence much depends upon the nature of the lives they lead. Our frame of mind, our happiness or distress, depends upon the manner in which our visualizations act as independent beings in the soul, upon the significance of boredom, and so forth. In short, upon these beings that live in our souls depends the happiness of our present lives. Against certain visualizations that we have allowed to enter our present soul lives, we are powerless; facing others, we are strong according to our ability to recall visualizations at will. Here the question arises as to which visualizations are readily recaptured and which not. That is a matter that can be of immense importance in life. Furthermore, can anything be done at the inception of visualizations to render them more or less readily available? Yes, we can contribute something. Many would find it profitable and could lighten the burden of their lives enormously if they knew how to recapture their conceptions easily. You must give them something to take along, but what? Well, since the soul life is made up of desire and reasoning, we must find it within these two elements. Of our desire we can give nothing but desire itself. At the moment when we have the conception, the moment when it flows into us, we must give as much of our desire as possible, and that can only be done by permeating the conception with love. To give part of our desire to the conception will provide a safe-conduct for our further soul life. The more lovingly we receive a visualization, the more interest we devote to it, the more we forget ourselves and our attributes in meeting it, the better it is permanently preserved for us. He who cannot forget himself in the face of a conception will quickly forget the conception. It is possible to encompass a conception, as it were, with love. We still have to learn, however, how our reasoning can act upon conceptions. A conception is more readily recalled by our memory when received through the reasoning force of our soul than when it has simply been added to the soul life. When you reason about a visualization entering the web of your soul, when you surround it with reasoning, you are again providing it with something that facilitates the memory of it. You see, you can invest a conception with something like an atmosphere, and it depends upon ourselves whether a conception reappears in our memory easily or not. It is important for the health of the soul life to surround our visualizations with an atmosphere of reasoning and love. In this connection we must also give due consideration to the ego conception. Our entire continuous soul life bears a constant relationship to our central visualization, the ego conception. If we follow the path indicated today, we shall in the next lecture discover how to correlate the directions of memory and ego experience. At bottom, the main tendency of the soul is desire. This being the case, anyone knowing that through esoteric development the soul's aims must be raised may be surprised to learn that in a certain sense desire must be overcome. “Overcoming desire in the soul,” however, is not an accurate way of putting it. Desire arises in the soul from unknown depths, yes, but what surges in with it? Of what is it the expression? If we would fathom these depths, we must temporarily interpret them in an abstract way as something that corresponds on a higher plane to desire, something proceeding from our own being as will. When, for the purpose of higher development, we combat desire, we are not combatting will but merely certain modifications, certain objects of desire. Then pure will holds sway. Will coupled with an object, with the content of desire, is covetousness. Through reasoning, however, we can arrive at the conception of wanting to rid ourselves of desire, so that a will of that sort, disencumbered of objects, is in a certain way one of our highest attributes. Don't confuse this with concepts like “the will to live.” That is a will directed at an object. Will is pure and free only when not modified into a definite desire; in other words, only when it leads in the opposite direction. When the life of the will surges into our feelings, we have an excellent opportunity to study the relation of will to feeling. Fantastic explanations of will are possible. One could maintain that will must necessarily lead to a certain object. Such definitions are wholly unjustifiable, and people who propound them would often do better to devote themselves to the genius of language. Language, for example, offers an inspired word for that inner experience in which will is directly converted into feeling. If we could observe within ourselves a craving of the will in the process of wearing off, we could perceive, in facing an object or a being, a surging of the will up to a certain point, where it then holds back. That produces a profoundly unsatisfied feeling toward that being. This sort of will certainly does not lead to action, and language offers the inspired term Widerwille.2 That is a feeling, however, and therefore the will, when recognizing itself in the feeling, is in fact a desire that leads back to itself, and language actually has a word that directly characterizes the will as a feeling. This shows us the fallacy of a definition implying that the will is only the point of departure of an act. Within the soul life we find on all sides a surging differentiated will: desire; therein are seen the various expressions of the soul.
|
| 115. Wisdom of Man, of the Soul, and of the Spirit: Consciousness and the Soul Life
04 Nov 1910, Berlin Translated by Samuel P. Lockwood, Loni Lockwood |
|---|
| A more intimate understanding of what was said yesterday and what still remains to be said will be brought about by endeavoring to compare the youthful Goethe's poem you just heard1 with that of Hegel, recited yesterday. |
| Lack of time restricts us to a mere mention of certain aspects, but we shall be able to understand each other. The poem you heard yesterday (Eleusis) was written by a philosopher who reached tremendous heights of pure thought. |
| He was bound to become mired, and from these lectures you will understand why. He had already defined and indicated what the second volume was to contain; he had planned to deal with the ego, with immortality. |
| 115. Wisdom of Man, of the Soul, and of the Spirit: Consciousness and the Soul Life
04 Nov 1910, Berlin Translated by Samuel P. Lockwood, Loni Lockwood |
|---|
A more intimate understanding of what was said yesterday and what still remains to be said will be brought about by endeavoring to compare the youthful Goethe's poem you just heard1 with that of Hegel, recited yesterday. This comparison will be enlightening as emphasizing the difference in the souls of the two personalities in question. Try to sense the profound difference between the two poems. Lack of time restricts us to a mere mention of certain aspects, but we shall be able to understand each other. The poem you heard yesterday (Eleusis) was written by a philosopher who reached tremendous heights of pure thought. We saw that thought itself become poetically creative, as it were, in Hegel. We felt mighty thoughts bearing upon the Mysteries, the enigmas of the world. At the same time we sensed a certain awkwardness in the poetical treatment of the material; poetry is not this man's chief mission. He wrestles with the poetic form, and we have the impression that the thought had to struggle to reach that realm where poetic form becomes possible. Clearly, not many such poems could have been written by Hegel. Let us compare this poem with the other from a definite point of view. In the first lecture an altered version of a youthful poem by Goethe was read to you, showing how two souls lived in his breast. Today, you heard another poem by the young Goethe that needed no alterations. The form in which it was written, with its mighty images, would have been worthy of the mature Goethe as well. In this poem we see working in Goethe a soul force totally different from the one activating Hegel. Unfailingly, a wealth of compelling imagery flowed into the young Goethe. His innate genius was such that an abundance of teeming images streamed into his soul life. We become aware that when the grandeur of the subject overwhelms him, much of what remained in his other poem to mar it has here been overcome by a powerful soul life that seeks to express itself in telling images. We find three points of interest in the poems recited. In Hegel, the thought is the motive force. It achieves images only with a struggle, and the intensity of this struggle is still discernible even in the pale images. In Goethe, on the other hand, a totally different soul force is at work, thundering along in mighty images. We perceive how this soul force can be impaired in another way, as in The Wandering Jew that has remained a fragment because of the conflict between the two soul forces. This points to the manifold nature of the soul life. In Hegel we find a thought force that penetrates with difficulty into that other soul force that was the stronger one in Goethe. On the other hand, we see how the best force in Goethe's soul bores its way into something opposed to it. Let us keep that in mind. Now we will resume our psychosophic studies. Remember what we found at work in the soul life: reasoning, and the experiences of love and hate that originate in the capacity for desire, but we could group this differently. By the power of reasoning we mean mental activity, the faculty that desires to understand the truth. We encounter an entirely different soul force when we think of the soul as being interested in the outer world, in one way or another. The soul is interested in the outer world in so far as love and hate take an active part in the latter. Even so, the phenomena of love and hate have nothing to do with the power of reasoning. Interest and the power of reasoning are two forces acting quite differently in the soul. For example, were you to seek will in the soul, imagining it to be a function by itself, you would discover interest in what is willed. In short, interest awakened by love and hate, and reasoning. Aside from these experiences you would find nothing in the inner region of the soul. They exhaust the content of the soul life. In the foregoing, however, one of the most important features of the soul life, one that we encounter at once, has been left out of account. It is what we designate with the word consciousness. Consciousness is an integral part of the soul life. When we search the content of the soul life from every aspect, we encounter the power of reasoning, and interest, but in dealing with the inner peculiarities of the two soul forces we may count them among the elements of the soul life only in so far as we can ascribe consciousness to the soul. Now, what is consciousness? I shall not proceed to define the word but will merely characterize. If you approach the concept “consciousness” in the light of what we have already studied, you will see that in view of the continuous stream of visualizations the condition of consciousness in the soul does not, after all, coincide with the soul life. Why is that? We have seen, you know, that the soul life differs from the condition of consciousness through the fact that a visualization can live on in the soul without entering consciousness. A conception out of the past lives on in our soul life. We can recall it, but if we do so only after a day or so, not immediately, it was not in our consciousness in the interim, it was only in our memory. Memory is not always conscious. The conception, then, existed in the soul but was momentarily not in our consciousness. Consciousness is not the same thing as the continuous stream of the soul life. We must put it this way. Representing the visualizations, which we may possibly remember some time, by an arrow pointing in the direction taken by the stream of visualizations in time, we thereby include all the visualizations flowing out of the past into the future. In order to be conscious of them we must first call them up out of the unconscious life of the soul by an act of will. When the soul is awake, the condition of consciousness is something that pertains to the soul life, but not in the sense that everything pertaining to it must pertain to the condition of consciousness as well. On the contrary, consciousness illuminates but a part of the soul life. If you ask the reason, someone could answer, “Well, what you designate ‘the continuous stream of visualizations’ is nothing but the established and permanent arrangement of nerves and brain, and all that is needed is that at a certain moment the brain arrangement should be illuminated by consciousness.” That would, indeed, be the case if the perception had not been robbed of something in becoming a visualization. In that case the perception would not have to be transformed into a visualization. The latter, however, is a response, a perception from within, that has robbed the outer perception of something that was not always linked with consciousness, but, rather, that must be illuminated by it. Next we ask how it is possible to throw light upon this continuous stream that embraces unconscious visualizations, to illuminate it in such a way that its content can become visible in memory. A certain fact of the soul life such as can occur on the physical plane will serve to illustrate. It is a fact totally ignored by physiology, but we are concerned with facts, not prejudices. We have many kinds of feelings, for example, longing, impatience, hope, doubt, and finally such feelings as apprehension, fear, etc. What do they tell us? Examination shows them to have something strangely in common. They all refer to the future, to something that may eventuate and that is hoped for. Our soul life, then, is so constituted that in our feelings we take an interest not only in the present but in the future as well, and a lively one at that. It is even stronger in the case of pronounced desires. Just try watching the upheaval in your soul when you desire something that is to materialize in the future! You can go farther; try to hunt up in your memory what you experienced as joy or sorrow in your youth, and compare it with similar feelings you have had recently. Try it, and you will see how pale such memories remain when you try to freshen them up. In the present, such memories are fresh and strong, but the farther we are removed from them, the paler they become. I should like to ask how many people bemoan something that happened to them ten years before, provided the cause has ceased to exist? There is a tremendous difference in the way we look at the future and the past. Only one possible explanation of this fact exists. What we call desire simply does not flow in the same direction as the stream of visualizations, but the latter comes to meet it. A powerful light will be thrown upon your soul life if you will take this one fact for granted. Desire, love, hate, wishes, interest, and so forth, form a current flowing from the future into the past, that is, toward you. It would take days to elaborate that in detail, but the riddles of consciousness will be solved and the whole peculiar nature of the soul life clarified if you start with the premise that the current of desire, love and hate comes to meet you out of the future, and meets the current of visualizations flowing out of the past into the future. At every moment you are actually in the midst of this encounter of the two streams, and considering that the present moment of your soul life consists of such a meeting, you will readily understand that these two currents overlap in your soul. This overlapping is consciousness. If at any moment of the present you search your conscious soul life, you will find there something that acts out of the past into the future and something that runs from the future into the past. Consciousness can be explained in no other way than by the overlapping of these two streams, and if you will visualize all the damming up that comes about here, you will see that the soul takes part in all that flows out of the past and in what streams to meet that current out of the future. Observing the conscious soul life at any given moment, you will see a certain interpenetration of these two streams. Here are all the conceptions you have brought along, there is everything that flows out of the future into the past, meeting the current of visualizations as interest, wishes, desire, and so forth. Since these two currents can be distinguished quite clearly, we will designate the soul life by two names, though the names themselves are immaterial. If I were giving a public lecture, I should choose curious names, as is customary. For example, I could call one current A and the other B; then you could get right to work on an equation, where A and B would be useful. The names are not what matters, yet I should here like to select names that will recall to your mind what you must already know from another angle, so that you can contemplate it from two aspects. First, from that of the pure empiricist who can choose any names he likes for the proven results of his researches, that is, where the name is immaterial, and second, from the point of view of one who selects such names because he observes the facts clairvoyantly. Thus, we will designate the current of visualizations, flowing from the past into the future, “the etheric body of the soul,” and the other, the current of desires, running from the future into the past, “the astral body of the soul.” Consciousness is the meeting of the astral and etheric bodies. You can test this. Try to recall all that you have learned from the research of clairvoyant consciousness about the etheric and astral bodies, and to apply it here. You only need ask yourselves what brings about the damming up, the intersection of the two streams. The answer lies in the fact that the two currents meet in the physical body. Assume for the moment that the physical and etheric bodies were removed. What would happen? The current from the past to the future would be missing, and the other, the astral current, would have an unobstructed course. Now, that is exactly what occurs immediately after death, with the result that during the period of kamaloka consciousness runs backwards. Thus in following our psychosophic paths we rediscover what we learned by way of exact theosophy. Many of the results of clairvoyant research will at first contradict observations made on the physical plane because the latter must first be properly arranged but, when this is done, the results of clairvoyant research can invariably be verified. The results of the two methods will coincide. Now we will examine another phenomenon of the soul life, in common parlance called “surprise,” “amazement.” What exactly is this? When can we be surprised by something we encounter? Only when, at the moment of encountering it, we are not at once in a position to reason when our judgment is not immediately equal to coping with the impressions made upon our soul life. The moment our reasoning becomes equal to the task, amazement ceases. Something our reasoning can at once cope with causes us no surprise at all, surprise doesn't enter. In encountering a phenomenon and experiencing surprise, amazement—perhaps even fear—that is, in receiving a conscious impression without our reasoning having time to intervene, feelings arise, but not at first reasoning. In seeking the reason for this we must realize that our state of interest, our capacity for desire, cannot flow in the same direction as the power of reasoning, otherwise the two would coincide; therefore, reasoning must be something different from ordinary interest. Neither can reasoning be identical and flow together with the soul current from the past to the future. Otherwise, reasoning would continuously coincide with the current of visualizations and the entire soul life would have to take part whenever we reason. Visualizations would have to have ceased at this moment. Reasoning, however, is conscious; yet at the moment of reasoning, how far we are from facing all the visualizations our soul embraces! Reasoning is not able instantaneously to grasp the continuous stream of the soul life, hence these two cannot coincide either. Nor can reasoning coincide with the current from the future to the past, otherwise, fear, anxiety, amazement, surprise would not be possible. Reasoning, therefore, coincides with none of these currents. Keeping this fact in mind, let us now examine the continuous stream of the etheric body that flows from the past to the future. It discloses, indeed, something highly peculiar, namely, that it not only can flow along in the soul unconsciously, so to speak, but can become conscious. Let us keep clearly in view that unconscious conceptions passing through the soul life can become conscious. They are always present, but not always conscious. Let us try by a simple example to focus our attention upon the moment at which such unconscious visualizations become conscious. You are walking through a picture gallery and stop to look at a picture. At this moment the same picture bobs up in your consciousness; you have seen it before. What was it that called up this memory? Well, it was the impression of the new picture that magically and visibly conjured up before your mind's eye the old visualization of the picture. If you had not encountered the picture, the old visualization would not have been stimulated to come to the surface. You can understand this process by explaining it as follows. What I term my ego has entered anew upon an interrelationship with the picture by confronting it. The circumstance that your ego receives something new into itself acts upon something that is contained in the continuous stream of the soul life and thereby becomes visible again. Let us try to get a picture of this by means of which we can describe the process. Think of all the objects that are at the moment behind you, but without turning around; you cannot see them. Under what conditions can you see them without turning around? When you hold up a mirror. Something similar must take place between the visualizations that live along unconsciously in the soul and the process produced by a new impression. The latter mixes with your old visualizations in such a way as to render these visible to the mind's eye. Then, what is it that blots out the view of the old visualization, rendering it invisible? It is your ego that stands in the way and, when a new process provides the impulse for a reflection, the result is the process of memory, of the becoming conscious of the old visualization. The stream of memory runs backward to the old visualization, just as the light rays run backward to the mirror, thence to be reflected forward. Enquiring next into the cause of such a reflection, let us recall the highly significant fact that man's retrogressive memory stops at a certain point. From that time back to birth he remembers nothing. Where does memory of past events commence? In fact, which processes of human life are the only ones that return to memory at all? Only those in which the ego participated, which the ego had really assimilated because it is at about the same time, according to the demands of a certain law, that the child can start to develop his ego visualization. Only such visualizations are remembered at all in our physical life as were received while the ego took part as an active force, conscious of itself. What about this ego during the first three years of a child's life? At first it receives all impressions unconsciously, so to speak; it is not itself present. Then it begins to unite with all visualizations received from without. That is the moment at which the human ego begins to stand in front of its visualizations, placing these behind it. Up to that time the whole life of ego visualizations was lived purely in the life of the present; now it emerges, faces the future in freedom, and is equipped to receive whatever comes to meet it out of the future, but past visualizations it places behind itself. What must take place at the moment when the ego begins to assimilate all visualizations, when it becomes conscious? The ego must join the continuous current we have called the etheric body. At the moment when the child begins to develop an ego consciousness the stream of life has made an impression on the etheric body, and therewith the capacity for ego consciousness comes into being. Ego perception can never come to you from without; the visualizations relating to the physical world are what is given from without. Previous to the moment at which the child begins to sense his own ego, he cannot feel his own etheric body, but from then on the ego reflects back into itself the current of the etheric body. This gives you the mirror as well. To sum up: While all other visualizations—those that relate to physical space—are received by the physical human being, the ego consciousness, the ego visualization, arises when the ego fills out the etheric body and is reflected, as it were, from its inner walls. The essential feature of ego consciousness is that it is the etheric body being reflected inward. What can bring about this inner reflection? The inner delimitation of the etheric body. Only through this does the ego become conscious as the result of inner reflection. We learned, you remember, that the astral body comes to meet the etheric body. It is the ego that fills out the etheric body and, through inner reflection, becomes conscious of it as such. This ego consciousness is powerfully gripped by all interest, all desires, for these implant themselves firmly in the ego. Nevertheless, even though this takes place to such a degree that we characterize it as egotism, there is something peculiar about this ego perception, something in a certain way independent of desires. There is a certain demand that the human soul makes upon itself, readily attested by the soul; every soul knows that mere desire cannot possibly call forth the ego. However much you want to do it, it cannot be done. Ego consciousness does not consist of the stream of desires any more than it does of the stream of visualizations. It is an element fundamentally different from either, but one that assimilates both streams. We can represent this state of affairs graphically by drawing the ego current at right angles to the stream of time. That gives a correct picture. That is the only way to account for all the psychic phenomena involved. You will always be able to cope with these if you assume a current running at right angles to the other two, to the one from the past to the future, and to the one from the future to the past. That is the current corresponding to the human ego element itself.  There is something else, something in the nature of a human-psychic experience, that is connected with the ego. It is the power of reasoning. This enters with the ego. If you visualize this picture, you will really be able to understand only the phenomenon of surprise, of interest, not the reasoning activity of the ego. The latter cannot possibly enter the process from the direction of the past, and unless the ego can enter simultaneously with desire, it is impossible for reasoning to meet the future-past current. What is indispensable if reasoning activity is to enter with the ego current? A reflection, and this must come about in such a way that the ego has the unconsciously flowing visualizations positively behind itself. That would be the case if the ego current entered from the direction indicated by the arrow in the diagram, but were then to change its course within the body to that shown by the other arrow, toward the future. Now the ego has joined the current of the etheric body, has entered the etheric body—has itself, so to speak, become a mirror. This tallies strikingly with the facts. If the ego has the unconsciously onward-flowing visualizations behind itself, what does it encounter in front, toward the future? Imagine you are looking into a mirror. If nothing is behind you, you see nothing but an endless void, and at first that is man's view of the future. When do you see something there? Only when something out of the past appears. You see the past, not the future; the mirror shows you the objects that are behind you. Now, if the ego is reflected inwardly at the moment when the child arrives at self-consciousness, the entire soul life from then on signifies that experiences and impressions of the past are reflected as well. That is why you can remember nothing that occurred before the ego became a means of reflection. If something out of the past is to be seen in the mirror, you naturally see nothing of the future, just as you see nothing behind the quicksilver that lines the mirror. It should be noted here that the child, when it is reflected in the etheric body at the inception of the ego, remembers nothing that happened previously. Everything is explained by the one essential fact that the human ego, in so far as it enters the etheric body and receives visualizations out of the past, itself becomes a reflecting apparatus impressionable to everything it receives from that time on. Now let us recall the fact, already mentioned, that there are two kinds of memories, the one resulting from the external repetition of a perception, the other called up out of the soul by the power of the ego, without external repetition. What must occur if the ego is to reflect past events? We can say that, if you receive an outer impression through a picture you have seen before and which you encounter for the second or third time, the raying of the reflection from the other side is thereby held back in such a manner as to make it strike the inner soul mirror. What if no repetition of the outer impression occurs? In that case the ego itself must gather what is to be reflected from within, that is, it must create a substitute for what is otherwise effected by the outer impression. What is this ego primarily as it appears in physical human life? It is the inner fulfillment of the etheric body. It must therefore itself be transformed into a mirror within the etheric body, and this is accomplished through the delimitation of the etheric body. With regard to your outer sense impressions you are sequestered by reason of being in a physical body, and it is due to this fact that what lives in the etheric body can be reflected. There must be, however, another force to account for what you remember freely. The etheric body must have a foil, like a mirror, and this is provided for the memories, which are called forth by the new impression, by the sense organs, the physical body. In the absence of anything acting from without, we must seek the foil elsewhere. The only alternative is to employ as an auxiliary force what approaches the ego at right angles, that is, desire, or the current flowing toward us. This we use as a foil for the mirror. Only by appropriately strengthening the astral body can we call in the force of desire and develop out of the ego a force capable of recalling to our memory those visualizations that otherwise refuse to appear. Only by strengthening the ego, as it expresses itself in the physical world, are we able actually to use the current flowing out of the future and to make a mirror-foil of it. Solely by strengthening the ego, by making it master of what comes to us out of the future (astral body), can we do anything about the visualizations that refuse to be mirrored, refuse to surrender to us. If we cannot recall the visualization, it is because our desire lacks the requisite strength. We must take out a loan in order to be able to reflect it. A strengthening of the ego can be brought about in two ways. In everyday life, for example, you experience things simply by following the continuous stream of experience. When a bell tolls you hear the first tone, the second, third, and so forth, in order; in a play you hear the various parts one after another, then you've finished. With your ego you live along in the continuous stream of etheric life but, if you systematically set about to experience the opposite stream of life, you follow the astral current. For instance, in the evening recall the events of the day in reverse order, or recite the Lord's Prayer backwards. You are then not following the usual ego current, which lives because the ego fills the etheric body, but the opposite one, and the consequence is that you incorporate forces out of the astral current. That is an extraordinarily good exercise for strengthening the memory. There is another exercise for the same purpose. If someone suffers from a particularly poor memory, he can combat the condition by trying with all his might to take up some occupation of his youth. Supposing he is forty, and he tackles a book that had entranced him at the age of fifteen. If he keeps on trying religiously to become absorbed in it with the feeling of that earlier time, he draws strength from the backward-flowing current. You recall the same facts you did in the past, then the current out of the future comes to your aid. Why, for example, does an old man like to recall the occupations of his youth? Such considerations can show you that actually your ego must fortify itself from the astral current that flows to meet the etheric current if it would strengthen the memory. If one were to pay careful attention to such matters in teaching, the effect would be highly beneficial. For example, seven school classes could be so arranged as to comprise a middle class, the fourth. In the fifth would be repeated in modified form what was studied in the third, in the sixth the subjects of the second, in the seventh, of the first. That would be an excellent way of strengthening the memory, and if people would put such things into practice they would see that ideas of that sort derive from the laws governing life. From all this we perceive that in our ego visualization, our ego perception, we have something that must first come into being. . It arises in early childhood through the inward reflection of the etheric body. No wonder there is no ego visualization in the night, for when the ego is out in space during sleep, it naturally cannot be reflected in the etheric body. That is why it must submerge in unconsciousness at night. The etheric body is the current continuously flowing in time, and in the course of time it receives the ego visualization through the circumstance that what flows forward in the etheric body is illuminated from the other side by the astral body. All that we have in the way of ego visualization is exclusively in the etheric body; it is merely the entire etheric body seen from within, reflecting itself within itself. Only the ego visualization is active in the etheric body, not the ego itself. What is the ego? It is the power of reasoning striking in at an angle. If you would comprehend the ego you must not turn to the ego perception but to reasoning. In relation to all else, reasoning is independent, and we must clearly distinguish between visualizing and reasoning. “Red” is not a verdict; reasoning stops at the sense perception. The moment, however, the verdict “red is” is pronounced—when the “red” is endowed with “being”—the ego stirs, the reasoning that is directed toward the spiritual. When the ego passes judgment based upon outer impressions, the latter are objects of judgment. Now, if the ego is a being apart from all its visualizations and perceptions, as well as from self-perception (just as a reflected image is not identical with the object reflected), and if, further, it is the impetus of self-perception, a verdict must be possible in relation to which the ego, as in all reasoning, feels itself master, and not dependent upon outer perception. This occurs at the moment, not when you have the ego visualization, but when you pronounce the judgment “I is.” Thereby you have filled out with reasoning capacity what otherwise lives in the “I” without achieving consciousness. What was previously an empty bubble is now filled with the power of reasoning, and when the ego thus fills itself out the spirit is encompassed by reasoning. Let us recall that reasoning is an activity of the soul, an inner activity; that soul activities arise within, in the inner soul life; that they lead to visualizations. Among the visualizations that appear, the ego visualization is one. True, we found that the ego visualization leads to a conception of the ego, but aside from that we could learn nothing about the ego. What we did learn, however, is that the ego visualization, though having the same character as other visualizations entering from the physical world, cannot originate in the outer world, the physical world. This being the case, and since reasoning, which is one of the elements of the soul life, must be applied to the ego, it follows that the ego must enter the soul life from the other side. This is conclusive evidence that just as the conception “red” enters the soul life from without and is then encompassed by a verdict, so something in the ego appears from the other side and acts in the same way. When we say “I is,” we receive an impression out of the spiritual world and encompass it with a verdict. “Red” corresponds to physical conditions of existence. The verdict “red is” can, as such, come about only within the soul life through the agency of the physical world. “I is” comes from the other direction; so we say that this impression comes from the spiritual world. “I is” is a fact of the spiritual life, just as “red is” is a fact of the physical life. The usage of speech expresses this coming from the other side by exchanging “is” for “am”: I am. The ego can be admitted to have being2 only when it can be encompassed by a judgment; when, just as in the case of “red,” something approaches the soul that can be encompassed by a verdict in the same way as can something coming from the physical world. When I now draw a line indicating the fourth direction, upward from below, you will not be surprised that this represents a physical force. Graphically represented, the impressions of the physical world proceed upward from below and manifest themselves in the soul as sense impressions. In one plane the ego and its bodily-physical sense organs are opposed, in the other, the currents of the etheric and of the astral bodies. When the ego makes contact with the physical body through the eye, the ear, etc., it receives impressions of the physical world. These are then carried on in the soul by reason of the latter's possessing consciousness, which in turn arises through the impact of the etheric and astral bodies upon each other. The whole picture shows that a comparatively good diagram of the co-operation of the various worlds in the human soul can be had by opposing the ego and the physical body in one plane, and at right angles, the etheric and astral bodies. Innumerable riddles will be solved for you if you will thoroughly work your way through this diagram. You will see that precisely this cross, intersected by a circle, gives you a good picture of the soul life as it borders below on the physical, above on the spiritual world. Now you must imagine the stream of time, and you must rise to a visualization of it, not as something flowing along smoothly, but as meeting the life of the senses. You must see that the life of the ego can be comprehended only when thought of as striking at right angles into the stream of time. With this in mind you will readily understand that quite different forces meet in our soul. Our soul is the stage, so to speak, where these forces encounter each other from many directions. As an example, take someone in whom the reasoning ego preponderates. He will find it difficult to endow abstract concepts with sufficient body to make them appeal directly to feeling; that is, a man like Hegel, who is strong in reasoning, will not easily give in full measure of what speaks to the feelings. On the other hand, one whose every tendency tells of a rich astral life, who is full of interests that flow against the continuous current of the physical life, will bring with him into the world the gift for living  concepts, because he is open to the stream coming out of the future. He will not appear on the physical plane as a man of thought, but rather, he will prove how readily he can clothe his inner experiences in words that speak powerfully to men. Such a one was Goethe. If you think of a man as bringing over from a former incarnation a tendency toward the one current or the other, you must imagine in Goethe's soul a predisposition for the stream out of the future. When he yields himself to it, he quite naturally gathers ideas of the future as vital concepts. Once Goethe permits all this to come into conflict with what has only been acquired in this incarnation, with the visualizations of the recently acquired etheric body, the result is something like what we designated worthless in his Wandering Jew. On the other hand, when a Hegel brings with him the gift for extracting mighty conceptions from his reasoning, he struggles with the current that streams from the future into the past. The fact is, we incessantly place our ego in such a position as to cover up the continuous stream. The ego covers it and lets the endless current of desire come to meet it, and into this focal point we peer as into a mirror. I have been able to evoke for you but little out of the infinite realm of psychosophy, but you will find the answers to many riddles of life by taking into account the presence of the unconscious visualizations of the etheric body. The physical body is in constant communication with the etheric body, and just because the visualizations are unconscious they can develop their lively activity in the other direction toward the physical side. Furthermore, precisely those visualizations that our consciousness is unable to call up out of our unconscious soul life are in this way immeasurably destructive; they develop destructive forces that penetrate our corporeality. It is a fact that something a person has experienced at the age of ten or twelve, and totally forgotten—something he is incapable of raising into consciousness because the ego lacks sufficient strength—continues to act in his etheric body and can impair his health. That means that in the etheric body there live visualizations that can cause sickness. If you know that, you also know that there is a remedy. It consists in robbing these visualizations of their power by deflecting them in another direction. You can help the sufferer, if he is not strong enough to do so himself, by providing him with associations that will bring these visualizations to consciousness. That accomplishes a great deal. It is really possible to bring a person's conceptions to his consciousness and thus call forth health-giving forces. Some of you will say that that sort of thing is being tried at the present time and, indeed, there are psychiatric cures that consist in calling forth visualizations. I cannot here mention the name of the school I have in mind because its aim is to unearth only visualizations of the sexual life—visualizations to which the matter here under discussion does not apply. In such cases it is of no avail, and for that reason the Freudian School in Vienna is such as to produce results that are the exact opposite of what is aimed at. You will have gathered that, if one goes to work conscientiously and intelligently in observing life on the physical plane, the knowledge acquired on the psychosophic path verifies what reaches us through clairvoyant research, but the latter does not seek the facts in order to see whether they tally with conditions on the physical plane. On the contrary, the clairvoyant seeker is often surprised himself to find the results of his research so beautifully borne out on the physical plane. If reversed, the process would hardly yield accurate information. Research practised on the physical plane alone tends to group things in a wrong way and to meet facts with a slap in the face. The fundamental impression I hope you have gleaned from these lectures is one of justified confidence in clairvoyant research. That is why, in addition to all that I tell you from clairvoyant sources, I am at pains to draw your attention from time to time in a matter-of-fact way to the laws of the physical plane because we are placed on this plane in order that we may learn to know it. We have a twofold duty. On the one hand, we must study the physical plane upon which the great world powers have not placed us fortuitously, and we must really identify ourselves with it by renunciative thinking. On the other hand, we have already arrived at the stage of human development at which we are aware that we can no longer cope with the physical plane without the aid of occult research. Science must inevitably err without occult science as a guide to point the lines of approach to all that can be learned through physical research. After the establishment of physical research at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, this necessarily remained the center of interest; now the time is ripe for another sort of research to intervene and indicate the lines of approach. If the occultist will not only learn this but count it among his duties, he will have fulfilled the demands of our time, namely, to spread the conviction that we base firmly on the physical plane. Certainly anyone who has grasped the idea of the astral current flowing in from the future can be depended upon in this matter. That this is true I have already proved to you by a fact. Only one of the many psychologists of the present has, with no knowledge of occultism whatever, approached the study of the soul with a fine schooling. He is Franz Brentano. He took up psychology in the eighteen-sixties and, although what he did amounted to no more than scholastic speculating, it was like a child's first steps in the doctrine of desire, feeling, and reasoning. What he says is all askew, but the tendency is significant. It could have been right had it not been for his complete ignorance of every occult context. The first volume of his work appeared in the spring of 1874 and the second was due in the fall of the same year, but to this day (1910) it has not appeared. He was bound to become mired, and from these lectures you will understand why. He had already defined and indicated what the second volume was to contain; he had planned to deal with the ego, with immortality. The stream of occult research, however, failed to enter from the other side; the fructifying element was not forthcoming. Franz Brentano lived as a child of our time, that is, he began to arrange facts into groups, so he could not get on. He is now living in Florence, an old man. Wundt also wrote a psychology, but it is nothing but a tangle of concepts. It contains nothing about the real soul life, nothing but the author's preconceived opinions. Such people thrash empty straw, even when dealing with the psychologies of peoples and of languages. All sciences would come to a similar impasse unless something came to meet them from the spiritual side. My dear friends, you have identified yourselves with a movement in which your store of knowledge can increase if you think of your present knowledge as a karmic fact. In that way you will have arrived at a crossroads, a vantage point from which vigorous co-operation in this work is clearly discernible as a task enabling you now or in a future incarnation to serve humanity. Do not think of that as an abstract ideal, but keep constantly returning to it in a practical way. This work must be made to bear fruit.
|