Man and the spiritual hierarchies

Cosmic creation is a constant dynamic of evolution, whereby everthing is entertwined and connected and nothing can be seen in isolation.

Spiritual beings evolve from CoC 1 to 12 (see Twelve conditions of consciousness), and along the way reach certain stages whereby they are able to play a particular role in the whole:

• one level is that of self- or I-consciousness, the ability to have thoughts and thereby start creating something new that adds to what was there before
• another level is that of selfless love and sacrifice, through which spiritual beings give life to others, enable a new creation/

In previous planetary stages,

• the 'lower' bodily principles of Man have hence been 'thought up' by the third hierarchy H3,
• the scaffold structure for Man's higher triad was created by the First Hierarchy
• and the second hierarchy, through their sacrifice, have created the life environment for Man, and still continue to do so in the form of the higher ethers and formative forces that 'ride' on the carrier of warmth substance from the Thrones.

See also FMC00.077A on Creation of solar system and especially FMC00.147 (and FMC00.149) on Man and nature's kingdoms in evolution. These schemas show how it is not only Man evolving, but all spiritual hierarchies intertwine and they are all in continuous development together.

Man has been, and is able to develop thanks to what are currently the three lower kingdoms. In the future, he will redeem these in his ascent.

Illustrations

Overview

Schema FMC00.666: provides an overview of Man and the spiritual hierarchies, integrating descriptions from five lectures (see upper right).

Perspectives from different lectures are in different colours so they can easily be traced back and read in context of the full lecture as part of study.

The main view is laid out as a 4 by 3 matrix of four of Man's bodily principles and the three subsystems of Man as a threefold being, well realizing that there are no strict boundaries and the main components interpenetrate eachother.

These two dimensions have to be supplemented mentally with a non-depicted third dimension, which is the type of working, influence or impact of any spiritual hierarchy along the planes or worlds of consciousness. For this, consider:

• first, the Force substance representation for an appreciation of the distinction and gradient between spiritual force or influence and matter or substance (see outer left and below right on this Schema)
• the interwoven nature of the spiritual hierarchies, see eg Schema FMC00.661A
• and how the effects concatenate in what is described as the Golden Chain (of Homer), with zodiacal influences modulated by the planetary spheres, and the working together of various spiritual beings (such as described as the Elementary Kingdoms, elementals of nature).

Schema FMC00.058 shows how the three subsystems in Man map to three different worlds and the formative activities and substance of three different groups of spiritual hierarchies.

Evolutionary

Schema FMC00.147B: is an older pivoted variant of Schema FMC00.147 that summarizes how Man owes everything to the spiritual hierarchies, how he has been created by them, and how they remained connected in his being.

Relate this to the roles of the hierarchies at a certain CoC in Schema FMC00.077A on Creation of solar system.

Schema FMC00.483 illustrates the relationship of the Spirits of Form (SoF) to mankind in the development over the planetary stages of evolution, as explained in 1908-02-29-GA102, and extrapolates this to the Third Hierarchy below the SoF.

In yellow is the bodily principle that is 'shining' or 'radiating down' as the principle below (in grey) gets sacrificed and let go (spiritualized).

Below, the human being and humanity 'shines', can be seen, in the physical world: mankind lives and acts in the physical. Similary, the archangels live in the astral world, in Man those are the astral body and spirit-self (or manas) - as explained in 1910-06-09-GA121 and 1923-04-06-GA224. This is essential to imagine concepts such as folk souls or archangel Michael.

In this representation, the bodily principles for each hierarchy are 'counted' as relating to the seven principles of the human being, hence the grey above represent higher principles beyond Man in this solar system evolution. Shown below are also the Conditions of Consciousness (CoC).

For Man, the three higher principles of Man's higher triad are not shown, because they are the developmental goals for the three next planetary stages of evolution. Nevertheless we are working these already in the Earth stage of evolution, developing spirit-self or manas in the current Postatlantean epoch, and life-spirit or buddhi in the next.

Compare also with Schema FMC00.472 and Schema FMC00.473 and their variants. As with every schema, click once to download, twice to maximize.

Perspectives of Man's current structure

Schema FMC00.472 illustrates the relationship of Man to the Third Hierarchy of angels, archangels and archai, and the Spirits of Form.

The concept diagram provides links to various processes on other topic pages through the Schema references given.

See oa: Man's bodily principles, Jehovah, Group souls of humanity, Monad, Three meetings, Structure of Man between death and a new birth, Man's transformation and spiritualization

Schema FMC00.492 illustrates how Man's structure contains substructures developed during the previous planetary stages Old Saturn, Old Sun and Old Moon and the current Earth, corresponding to Man's bodily principles (such as physical, etheric, astral bodies and I) active in the Spectrum of elements and ethers that was created during each stage. The human I uses these structures for the activities of the threefold soul with different levels or conditions of consciousness: for a bridge to human Thinking, Feeling and Willing and the various ethers, see Schema FMC00.245.

However, as Man's constitution consists of the spiritual hierarchies (see also Cosmic Fractal), it is the Third Hierarchy which lives in these bodily structures and soul activities, and they will carry further 'Free Man Creator's contributions through the developments of future worlds.

See more on Seeds for future worlds.

Schema FMC00.131 shows how the Third Hierarchy (H3) of angels, archangels and archai 'lives' in the soul activity of our human 'I', and how these soul capacities evolved after originating in earlier planetary stages of evolution.

Planetary influences

Schema FMC00.005 shows how the various planetary forces or spiritual influences work in Man, and the correspondence with the Spectrum of elements and ethers as well as metals. Compare with Schema FMC00.297 to overlay Ahrimanic and Luciferic influences.

Schema FMC00.155 sketches how Man is traversed by spiritual beings from Moon, Mars, Venus in circulating lymph and chyle fluids, and how Saturn beings take their abode in Man's sensory perceptions. Chyle, lymph blood are also called the three bodily humors as it existed in ancient Greece and the cultures before, and that based itself on liquids for health treatment.

Vision of Midnight Sun

Schema FMC00.662: shows the Blackboard Drawings by Rudolf Steiner when describing the clairvoyant vision of the Midnight Sun behind the Earth, when human beings are asleep at night, and the weaving activity of the spiritual hierarchies when the human soul is liberated from the body, free from its physical and etheric bodies, weaving in the streaming forces of the hierarchies. From lecture: What takes place as we sleep#1924-06-27-GA236.

Beholding the Midnight Sun around the winter solstice was an important experience in the ancient Mysteries that the pupils of the Initiates had to learn. (1922-12-24-GA219, see Mystery School tradition#1922-12-24-GA219)

For a complementary illustration of the interwoven nature of the spiritual hierarchies described here, see also Schema FMC00.661A.

Lecture coverage and references

Coverage

Main lectures suggested as a basis for study of this topic, to initialize one's understanding and build a first foundation:

• 1923-05-02-GA224
• 1923-08-23-GA227 - see Schema FMC00.058
• 1923-09-02-GA228
• 1924-03-02-GA235

Reference extracts

1912-04-08-GA136

We have said that characteristic of the beings of the third hierarchy is the fact that

• what is perception in Man is in them manifestation, and
• that what is inner life in Man is in them being filled with spirit.

Even in those beings who start immediately above man in the cosmic order, the angels, we already find this peculiarity, that they are actually conscious of that which they manifest from out of themselves.

When they return to their inner being, they have nothing independent, nothing self-enclosed, like the inner life of man; but they then feel shining and springing forth in their inner being, the forces and beings of the higher hierarchies above them. In short they feel themselves filled and inspired by the spirit and its beings, immediately above them.

1914-01-23-GA151

titled: 'Man's Place in the Spiritual Cosmos, Astrology, Man as a Thought of the Hierarchies

part of 1914-GA151 'Human and cosmic thought'

1920-02-13-GA196

discusses the life of angels in human memory, archangels in human intelligence, and archai in human sense activity. (as well as the relationship of the soul to spiritual substances (H3) and the relationship of the body to food). (SWCC)

And when you so much as listen to or look at what is around you, then you must say to yourself: "In my ears and in my eyes are the thrones of the archai." Whenever you find yourself asking: "Where are the archai, who rule over each age of the world as it follows on the next?"—then you should not go looking for them in above in the heavens or in distant unfamiliar regions; you need only to look in the sense organs of human beings. There is where they sit. ...

.. the human being is a temple for the gods that stand above him, meaning for the beings of the upper hier­archies. This is meant in the most literal sense.

For when you ask: "Where does one find the angels, archangels, and archai?"—then the answer is: "In the organs of human memory, human intelligence, and human sense perceptions." The human being is truly filled with spirit, meaning that it is filled with spiritual beings.

The Catholic Church did not want human beings to be aware of this, which is why in 869 C.E. at the Eighth Ecumenical Council, they forbade people to have any knowledge of or belief in spiritual things, establishing the dogma that human beings are comprised only of body and soul. ..

... the soul element of human beings has a relationship to the spiritual world, to spiritual substance. And the spiritual substance of archangels, archai, angels is in human beings just as the steer is in a human being after a person eats a piece of meat; they are in human bodies.

for the 'feeling' section (same lecture)

We must become able as human beings not only to chat with one another about the fact that a spiritual world exists; we must become able to feel the concrete relationships between human beings and the spiritual world. We must become able to feel that what echoes in us as the sense of hearing is actually a product of a long developing fact that is now intermingled with our world, something in which the archai are active. We must become able to understand that when we are thinking, we are existing in a world that is filled with archangels; whenever we recollect things, we exist in a world that is filled with angels; and when we become conscious of our "I," for which we always require our physical bodies most of all, then it is a revelation of our "I."

At that moment, we are for the first time in the world in which the human being moves and weaves. Even in the Greek Mysteries, it was said: "When you meet the Guardian of the Threshold, then you learn to recognize in a higher way the things that exist in human beings." On this side of the Threshold, we only come to know thoughts that hearken back to a prior experience. On the other side of the Threshold, the angels flit and scurry about us. On this side of the Threshold, we come to know the intelligent Being. On the other side of the Threshold, we experience the way in which the archangels flit and scurry about us. On this side of the Threshold, we perceive the sensory world. On the other side of the Threshold, we come to know the way in the archai, the spirits of time, move in and out through our eyes, through our ears.

We must therefore see to it that conscious awareness is awakened in each individual human being—the awareness that we each stand in a relationship to the spiritual world by the very fact of our physical constitution. This must, however, be awakened concretely in each of the individual organs.

We must learn to feel ourselves a part of a spiritual world, whereas the worldview which has presently reached its zenith only allows us to feel as though we live in the physical world. This feeling—that we are living only in a physical world—will forever be the dominant feeling, unless the occurrence at Golgotha is allowed to enter in. The fact that we have the ability to develop again a conscious awareness of our relationship to the spiritual is owed to the Mystery of Golgotha. But what we owe to the Mystery of Golgotha must be sought freely out of our own inner impulses. Christianity requires freedom.

1923-05-02-GA224

see: What takes place as we sleep#1923-05-02-GA224

1923-08-23-GA227

see Schema FMC00.058

talks about substance and influence or formative force for the three subsystems, see Force substance representation as related to Spectrum of elements and ethers.

full lecture

Dreams, of which I have already said something, pointing out that they should not be given too much importance in ordinary life on earth, are nevertheless of immeasurable significance to those wishing to gain knowledge of man's relation to the super-sensible world. They do indeed lead to that realm of experience where a man comes in contact with the super-sensible world, and the laws of nature cease to hold good. Thus the world of dream-pictures is really like a veil concealing the spiritual world, and we can say: Here we have a man, and there a dream-veil behind which lies the spiritual world. It makes a great difference, however, whether we enter the spiritual world unconsciously, as we do in dreams, or consciously through Imagination and Inspiration. For if we enter it consciously, everything there appears different from the physical world of nature. Behind the veil of the dream, behind what the Greeks called “chaos”, the moral world is found to be just as real as is the world of nature here in the sense-world, where the laws of nature rule. But the chaotic quality of the dream, its whirling confusion, show that its connection with the world lying behind the veil of chaos is a very special one.

It is really possible to speak of this world only when one's studies have reached the point to which these lectures have brought us. All that in his ordinary state of consciousness a man sees of the external world is merely its outward manifestation; in reality this is a great illusion. For behind it all is that spiritual reality which is active in it. When a man dreams, he actually sinks down into this spiritual reality, though without being properly prepared, so that what he meets appears to him in this whirling confusion. Thus, to begin with, our chief task is to learn why in dreams a man enters a world which, compared with that of nature, is so disorganised, so chaotic.

To help us on, therefore, in our study of dreams, I must now tell you something of what Imagination and Inspiration can perceive in the spiritual world.

We find above all that when through Imagination and Inspiration we enter the spiritual world in full consciousness, it immediately appears to us to be threefold. Hence we can speak of the world, and of our theme, the evolution of the world and of man, only when we have come to the point we have now reached. Only now can I speak of how a man, confronted by the external world, by all that manifests itself to the senses, is really facing the spiritual world in its threefold nature—facing actually three worlds. Once the veil has been lifted which creates the chaos, we no longer have one world only before us, but three worlds, and each of the three has its definite connection with the human being.

When we succeed in penetrating this veil of chaos—later I shall be showing how we can also describe this as crossing the threshold of the spiritual world—we perceive the three worlds. The first of the three is really the world we have just left, somewhat transformed but still there for spiritual existence. When the veil of chaos has been thrust aside, this world appears as though it were a memory. We have passed over into the spiritual world; and just as here we remember certain things, so in the spiritual world we remember what constitutes the physical world of the senses. Here, then, is the first of the three worlds.

The second world we encounter is the one I have called in my book, Theosophy, the soul-world.

And the third world, the highest of the three, is the true spiritual world, the world of the spirit.

[schematic drawing]

To begin with, I shall give you only a schematic account of all this, but from the way these three worlds are related to Man you will gather many things about them. To these three worlds as they appear in three ascending stages—the lowest, the middle one, and the highest—I will then relate Man's three members—the head; then the breast-organisation embracing all that is rhythmical, the breathing system and blood circulation; thirdly, the metabolic-limb system, which includes nutrition, digestion and the distribution throughout the body of the products of digestion, all of which engender movement. All this has to do with the metabolic-limb system.

If this scheme were drawn, there would have to be a closed circle for the breast; for the head a circle left open, and open also for the limb system.

When perceived physically, Man's head appears to be closed above and would have to be drawn so, but perceived spiritually, it is open. The part of a Man which does not belong at all to the realm of the spirit is the bony system, which is entirely of a physical nature; and when spiritually you study the human head, its thick skull is not seen. Only the skin is visible where the hair grows.

When this is looked at spiritually, however, something else appears. Ordinary hair is not there at all, but purely spiritual hair; in other words, rays which penetrate into the human organism and are held back, to some extent, only by the physical hair.

But it is just where there is bone in the organism that the spirit can enter most easily, and this it does in the form of rays.

So, on first looking at a Man with your physical eyes, you see his physical form with the head above, and on his head—if he is not already bald—there is hair. But then, where the dome of the skull comes, spiritually you see nothing of the physical man; you see rays, sun-like rays, pouring into him from the spiritual worlds.

Thus the reason for the circle not being closed for the head is that the surrounding bony vault of the skull enables the spirit to have continual access there.

Nothing in a Man is without purpose. By deliberate intent of the ruling powers—one might say—he has been given a head thus closed above, for here the spirit has the easiest access to his inner being because of the very thickness of the bone.

When we are in a position to observe man spiritually, we are astonished to discover how empty his head is of anything drawn from his own inner being. As regards the spiritual, he has almost nothing in him to fill the hollow globe sitting on his shoulders. Everything spiritual has to enter it from outside.

It is not thus with the other members of the human organism; as we shall soon hear, these are by their very nature spiritual. We can distinguish in man three members—head, or nerves and senses system, rhythmic system, metabolic-limb system, and they have a quite definite relation to the three worlds: the physical world, the soul-world, and the spiritual world. I will now go further into this.

---

First of all, it will be well to distinguish, in each of the three worlds, substance from activity. In reality, substance and activity are one, but they work in different ways in the world. You gain a clear idea of this from the substance of your own being. You have substance in your arm, and when this substance is out of order you will feel pain of some kind; it is obvious that something within the substance of the arm has gone wrong. If the activity of the arm is not properly controlled, you may perhaps hit your neighbour and he feels pain. This shows that the activity is out of gear. Nevertheless, though manifesting outwardly in different ways, the substance and activity in your arm are one.

If now we turn to the human head, we find its substance derived entirely from the physical world. During the formation of the human embryo the substance of the head comes from the parents; and the subsequent development of the head, and of the whole head and nerve-senses system, depends for its substance entirely on the earthly-material world. On the other hand, all the activity that has to do with the plastic forming of a man's head, the activity by means of which its substance is given shape, comes entirely from the spiritual world. So that in respect of activity, the head is entirely a spiritual formation. Therefore the head has to be left open—in a spiritual sense—so that activity can play into it.

At any time of life you can thus say: The substance of my head comes entirely from the Earth, but it is put together and plastically formed in such a way that it cannot be the work of earthly forces. The forms of this human head are shaped entirely from the spiritual world; they might be called a heavenly creation. Anyone who contemplates spiritually the human head, in relation to the world, has to go far and deep.

Now in the same way he turns his gaze to a plant. He says to himself: The plant has a definite form. Its substance is drawn from the earth, but its form comes from the etheric world—hence still from the spatial world.

Then he looks at an animal. The animal—he will say to himself—derives the substance of its head entirely from the world of space, but something spiritual certainly flows into its activity.

When we come to the human head, however, we find for the first time that something of the highest spirituality, something that can be called heavenly, is playing in. We see that the human head could never arise from earthly forces, though its substance is taken from earthly materials. So in the human head, which is itself a kind of miniature Cosmos, the spiritual world builds up a form out of earthly substance.

It is precisely the reverse with the metabolic-limb system, which embraces the organs for external movement—legs, arms—and the extension of these within the body—the digestive system.

For the present I am leaving out the middle system—the rhythmical system which embraces breathing and the circulation of the blood. I will deal now with the system which brings together the processes of digestion and nourishment, and the inner combustion which enables a man to move.

[substance of metabolic-limb]

[editor: that includes the skeleton]

Now the substance of this metabolic-limb system is not derived from the Earth. Improbable as it may sound, you bear within your metabolic-limb Man something which is not of earthly origin but consists wholly of substance from the third world, the world of the spirit. You may say: But I can see my legs; they are physically perceptible, which they would not be if they consisted of spiritual substance. This objection is quite justified, but there is something more to be considered.

Your real legs are indeed spiritual throughout; your real arms too; but the material for them is provided by your head. The head is the organ which fills spirit arms, spirit hands, spirit legs, spirit feet, with substance; and this substance penetrates into the spirituality of the limbs and of the digestive organs.

So that something which in reality belongs entirely to the spiritual world is permeated, flooded, with physical matter by the head.

That is why it is so difficult to grasp with the ideas of physical science that a man consists of head-breast-limbs-digestive organs. People think of the head as being there at the top, and they assume that when a Man is decapitated he has no head left. It is not so, however; a Man is substantially head all over. Even right to the end of his big toe he is head, for his head sends down its substance there.

It is only the substance of the head that is earthly in origin, and the head gives its earthly-material character to the other substances; while the substance of the metabolic-limb organs comes from the spiritual world.

If through vigorous auto-suggestion of a negative kind we can suggest away the head of a Man, so that in appearance he is headless, and if we can do this not only in thought but so that we really see the man as headless, then the rest of his organism also disappears; with the head goes the whole of the man as a being perceptible to the senses. And if the head is then to be there for us at all, the rest of the man has to be perceived spiritually. For in reality we go about under the imprint of higher worlds, with spirit legs, spirit arms, and it is only the head that fills them with physical matter.

On the other hand the forces, the activity, for all that makes up the metabolic-limb man are drawn from the physical world. If you make a step forward or lift an arm, the mechanism involved, and even the chemical processes that take place in moving an arm or leg, or the chemical processes in the digestive organs—all this activity is earthly. So that in your limbs you bear invisible substance, but forces drawn from earthly life. Hence we are built up as regards our head and its substance out of the Earth, but this same head is permeated with heavenly forces. In our limbs we are built up entirely from heavenly substance; but the forces playing into this heavenly substance during our life on Earth are earthly forces—gravitation and other physical and chemical forces all belonging to the Earth.

You see, therefore, that head and limbs are opposites. The head consists of earthly matter and is given plastic form by heavenly activity. The limbs and the digestive system are formed wholly of heavenly substance, and would not be visible were they not saturated with earthly substance by the head. But when anyone walks, or grasps something, or digests food, the heavenly substance makes use of earthly forces in order that life on Earth, from birth to death, may be carried on.

In this complicated way does a man stand in relation to the three worlds. The spiritual world participates with its activity in the head; with its substance it participates in a man's third organisation, his metabolic-limb system. The lowest world, the world most dominated by the senses, participates through its activity in the metabolism and the movement of the limbs, and through its substance in the head; whereas the substance in a man's third system is wholly spiritual.

In the middle system, which embraces the breathing and the circulation of the blood, spiritual activity and material substance work into each other. The spiritual activity, flowing through the movement of our breathing and the beating of our heart, is always accompanied to some extent by substantiality. And, in the same way, the substantiality of earthly existence, inasmuch as oxygen streams into the breathing, is to some extent accompanied by earthly activity. So you see that in the middle man, in man's second system, everything flows together—heavenly substance and activity flow in here; earthly activity and substance flow in there. By this means we are made receptive both to the activity of the middle world and to its substantiality.

So in this middle man there is a great deal of intermingling and for this reason we need our wonderfully perfect rhythmical system—the rhythm of the heart, the rhythm of the lungs in breathing. All the intermingling of activity and substance is balanced, harmonised, melodised, through these rhythms, and this can happen because man is organised for it.

In the head system and the limb system, activity and substantiality come from quite different sources, but in the middle system they come from all three worlds and in a variety of ways—at one place activity accompanied by substance, in another place substance accompanied by activity; here pure activity, there pure substance—all these variations flow through the middle man. If as a doctor you take a man's pulse, you can really feel there the balancing of the heavenly nature of the soul against earthly activity and substantiality. Again, if you observe the breathing, you can feel a man's inner striving for balance between the various agencies which relate him to the middle world.

All this is very complicated, you will say. It is true that a lecture-course is generally easy to understand up to a certain stage, but when it comes to the point where man's relation to the world has to be grasped, people often say: “This is becoming very difficult—we can't keep up with it.”

But look—with really flexible thinking, free from prejudice, you will be able to keep up. And for anyone who thinks in this way, with healthy human understanding, there is a certain consolation. As I said before, the actual thrusting aside of the veil of chaos and the entry into the threefold world, which sends its activity and substance into the physical world in so vastly complicated a way—this experience is so bewildering that full warning of it is given before the threshold is crossed. I will put it pictorially, but in full accord with the facts. The warning is: “If you are not willing to forgo what you have regarded as ordinary naturalistic logic and as the customary connections between things, if you are reluctant to leave behind this physical cloak, it is better that you should not enter the spiritual world, for there you will be obliged to make use of other associations of ideas, other orderings, and a completely different logic. If you want to take anything of your physical logic with you into the spiritual world, you will quite certainly get confused.” And among the matters that have to do with preparing ourselves for meditation and concentration, we have to remember the warning never to carry over the logic of the sense-world into the logic of the spiritual world.

This is the important warning given by that power we may call the Guardian of the Threshold—of whom we shall hear more in later lectures—to those who wish to pierce behind the veil.

But when we wish to return to the physical world, we receive from the Guardian another warning, clear and forcible. So long as we are men of Earth we return, or we should never get away from happenings in the spiritual world, and our deserted physical body would die. We must always return. In accordance with naturalistic logic we have to eat, drink, and adapt ourselves every day to customary activities. We are obliged to re-enter the world where things follow a naturalistic course—where, for example, we are called to meals at the usual hours. So, when we are returning from the spiritual world to the physical world, we must—to avoid an impossible situation—pay heed to the second warning given by the Guardian who stands where the veil of chaos separates the physical sense-world from the spiritual world. This, then, is the warning: “During your life on Earth, never for a moment forget that you have been in the spiritual world; then and only then, during the times you have to spend in the physical world, will you be able to guide your steps with certainty.”

Thus at the threshold of this threefold spiritual world, to which a man is related through his three members in the way described, he is warned to lay aside all naturalistic logic, to leave behind this cloak of the senses and to go forward prepared to adapt himself to a spiritual logic, spiritual thinking and the spiritual association of ideas. On his return he is given a second warning, just as stern, even sterner than the first: never for a moment to forget his experience in the spiritual world—in other words, not to confine himself in ordinary consciousness merely to the impulses of the sense-world, and so on, but always to be conscious that to his physical world he has to be a bearer of the spiritual.

You will see that the two warnings differ considerably from one another. At the entrance to the spiritual world the Guardian of the Threshold says: Forget the physical world of the senses while here you are acquiring knowledge of the spiritual. But on your return to the physical world the Guardian's warning is: Never forget, even in the physical world on Earth, your experiences in the heavenly world of the spirit; keep your memory of them alive.

---

With reference to what I said last time, there is another considerable difference between the men of an older evolutionary epoch and those of the present time. In the case of those I pictured coming to the Mystery centres as inspired pupils, or just as ordinary folk, the transition from sleeping to waking and from waking to sleeping was not made without their being instinctively aware of the Guardian of the Threshold. Three or four thousand years ago, as men were entering sleep, there arose in their souls like a dream a picture of the Guardian. They passed him by. And as they were returning from sleep to ordinary life, once again this picture appeared. The warnings they received on entering and leaving the spiritual world were not so clear as the warnings which I have said are given to those entering the spiritual world through Inspiration and Imagination. But as they fell asleep, and again as they awoke, they had a dreamlike experience of passing the Guardian of the Threshold, not unlike their other instinctive perceptions of the spiritual world. Further progress in the evolution of humanity—as we shall see in later lectures—required that man should gain his freedom by losing his spiritual vision, and he had to forfeit that half-sleeping, half-waking state during which he was able to behold, at least in a kind of dream, the majestic figure of the Guardian of the Threshold.

Nowadays, between going to sleep and waking, a man passes the Guardian but does not know it. He is blind and deaf to the Guardian, and that is why he finds himself in a dream-world which is so completely disorganised.

Now consider quite impartially the different way in which the people of older epochs knew how to speak of their dreams. Because of ignoring the Guardian every morning, every evening, and twice every time he takes an afternoon nap, a man to-day experiences this utter disorder and chaos in his dream-world. This can be seen in the form taken by any dream.

Only think: when we cross the Threshold—and we do so each time we go to sleep—there stands the majestic Guardian. He cannot be ignored without everything we meet in the spiritual world becoming disordered. How this happens is best seen in the metamorphosis undergone by the orderly thinking proper to the physical, naturalistic world when this passes into the imagery of dreams. Individual dreams can show this very clearly.

In the physical, naturalistic world people behave as they learn to do in accordance with its conditions. We will take a case in point. Someone goes for a walk. Now in a town to-day, you will agree, certain walks are taken particularly for the experiences they offer. For example, during a walk people meet friends; they can show off their clothes if so inclined, both to those they know and to strangers. All this can be experienced during a walk and the point of it is that it gives occasion for us to have thoughts, ideas, so that we are able—only our head-organisation is here concerned—to say: “I think.” By virtue of this “I think” it is possible to experience in the outside world the kind of thing I have just been describing. One meets other people, and it is an experience for them too. One displays one's clothes, perhaps a pretty face into the bargain. What matters is the experience. In this seeing other people, however, in this exhibiting to them our outward appearance, feeling also plays its part. One thing pleases us, another does not. Sympathies and antipathies are aroused. We like it when the people we meet say what is agreeable to us, and we don't like it when they say the opposite. Hence what is experienced on such walks is closely connected with what the head conceives by means of this “I think.” It is connected through the “I feel” of the rhythmical man—that is, with feelings of sympathy and antipathy. Because with this second member of our being we can say “I feel”, we are able to enlarge the experiences that come to us in thought during a walk.

But the third member of man also plays a part on this walk, if we are fully awake. Here we must turn to certain intimate details of human experience. There is a general feeling that civilised people to-day do not show themselves in public without clothes, do not go for walks without them; there is a general antipathy towards nudity and sympathy towards being properly clad. This goes right into our impulses of will. We clothe ourselves—even doing so in a specified way. Here the will comes into its own, the third member of the human organisation. Clothing ourselves is thus connected with the part of us that enables us to say “I will”.

I think

I feel

I will

So, through being able to say “I will,” we go for our walks clothed. When we are awake in the physical world, all this is regulated by the logic of this world. Either we are brought up to it, or we learn to conform to the outer conditions prescribed by the physical world and its logic. If we do not conform, but go for a walk without our clothes, then something within us is out of order. The ordering of the physical world, the logic of the physical world, go together in all this. It never occurs to us on a walk to wish to meet people without clothes. Here, our soul-experience is determined by the ordering of the world. And this shows how the three—I think, I feel, I will—are all connected with one another. It is the world that does this; the external world leads us to form this connection between thinking, feeling and willing.

When, ignoring the Guardian, we cross the Threshold, we confront three worlds, and we can make nothing of them because we partly carry over into the world of spirit the outlook we are familiar with in the waking world. The spiritual world, however, asserts its own order to a certain extent. Then the following may come about. Imagine you are asleep in bed. At first with your feeling, with the middle part of your being, you are entirely under the influence of sleep. Then the coverlet slips; part of your body gets chilled, and it enters your dream consciousness that some part of you is unclothed. Now, because you are all at sea in the spiritual world and do not connect the sensation with any particular part of yourself, this feeling spreads, and you fancy you are without any clothes at all. It may be only a bit of your body that is exposed, but that bit becoming cold makes you feel bare all over.

Now in your dream you are still concerned with an impulse of will holding good when you are awake—which is to put on clothes when bare. In your sleep, however, you feel: I cannot put them on, something is preventing me. You are unable to move your limbs and you become conscious of this in your dream.

You see how it is. These two things, I feel I've nothing on, and I cannot put on my clothes—the physical world being no longer there to combine the two, one of which belongs to world II, the other to world I—are wrongly combined in your dream. And because in that same night you had thought about going for a walk, this also enters the course of the dream. Three separate conditions arise: I am going for a walk; I am horrified to find I have nothing on; I cannot put my clothes on.

Now just think. These three things, which in our ordinary materialistic life can be logically combined, fall asunder when, in passing by, you ignore the Guardian of the Threshold.

In world I: the walk

In world II: being without clothes

In world III: the experience of not being able to put on clothes. In this situation you feel yourself in three parts, among strangers, exposed to view on all sides without clothes and without power to put them on. That is your dream experience. What is connected for you in ordinary life through natural logic is separated in your dream and connected, chaotically, in conformity with the custom you take with you across the Threshold. You connect it as if in the spiritual world, too, one has to concern oneself with garments. Because of ignoring the Guardian of the Threshold, you carry over into the spiritual world a custom suited to the physical world. You connect the three worlds chaotically, according to the laws of the physical world, and you feel yourself to be in this situation.

In countless dreams the essential thing is that when we pass the Threshold without heeding the Guardian's warning, what we perceive here in the physical, naturalistic world as a harmonious unity falls apart, and we are confronted by three different worlds. By faithfully observing the warning given by the Guardian of the Threshold, we must find the way to unite these three worlds. To-day, a man in his dreams finds himself faced by these three worlds—it was not so to the same extent for anyone in older epochs, as can be seen from the dreams recorded in the Old Testament—and he then tries to connect the three worlds in accordance with laws valid in physical life. That is the reason for the chaotic connections in the three worlds, as they are experienced by a man of to-day.

You will see, therefore, that dreams can show us this serious fact—that when we cross the Threshold to the spiritual world we are at once faced with three worlds, and that we have both to enter them and to leave them in the right way. Dreams can teach us a very great deal about the physical world of the senses, as it is to-day, and also about that other world—the world of soul and spirit.

1923-09-02-GA228

while asleep

... that which goes on for Man during the times when he is fast asleep is still more important for his whole existence - even for what he is and does in earthly life.

When we look back in memory from any given point in our life, we always exclude the times we spent asleep; we join the things we did and underwent by day and while awake, as though they were to form a continuous whole. Yet none of this would be possible without the intervening periods of sleep. Above all, if we want to know the true being of Man, we must pay attention to these periods of sleep.

A man might easily say that he knows nothing of what goes on during sleep. To ordinary consciousness this may seem true, but in reality it is not so. For if we had to look back into a life uninterrupted by sleep, we should be mere automata. True, we should still be spiritual beings, but we should be automata.

• Even more important than the daily periods of sleep throughout our life are the times we spent in sleep as very little children. We retain the good effects of those early periods of sleep all through our life; in a sense, we only supplement them by what accrues to us spiritually night by night during the rest of life. If we came into the world as little children wide-awake and never slept, we should, once more, be automata, in this automatic state we should be unable to do anything consciously at all. We should not even recognize what came about through us, as our own concern.

We may believe we have no memory at all of what transpires during sleep, but even that is not quite true. When we look back in memory, seeing the things we experienced while awake and omitting the periods of sleep, the fact is that we see a void, a nothing, in the intervals of time when we were sleeping. It is as though you were looking at a white wall where at one place the white paint was lacking; you see a black circle. Or there might be a hole with no light behind it; you see the empty hole inasmuch as you see darkness. So do you see the darkness when you look back on your own life. The times you spent asleep appear as darkness in the midst of life. And in reality it is to these darknesses of life that you say ‘I.’ If you did not see the darknesses you would have no consciousness of ‘I.’ You owe the ability to say ‘I’ to yourself, not to the fact that you were active every day from morning until night, but to the fact that you were also sleeping. The Ego as we know it in this earthly life is, to begin with, darkness of life, emptiness, even non-existence. If we consider our life truly, we shall not say that we owe our consciousness of self to the day but rather that we owe it to the night. This is the truth. It is the night which makes us real human beings and no mere automata.

Indeed if we look back into earlier epochs of human evolution upon Earth, though he was no mere automaton even then, for he already had certain differences between his waking and sleeping states, yet inasmuch as he was more or less aware of his sleeping states even in ordinary waking life, man's earthly life and action was far more automatic than it is today.

Truth is, we never bring our real and inmost I with us from the spiritual world into the physical and earthly; we leave it in the spiritual world. Before we came down into earthly life it was in the spiritual world, and it is there again between our falling asleep and our awakening. It stays there always, and if by day—in the present form of human consciousness—we call ourselves an ‘I,’ this word is but an indication of something which is not here in the physical world at all; it only has its picture in this world.

We do not see ourselves aright if we say: ‘Here am I, this robust and real man, standing upon Earth; here am I with my inmost being.’ We only see ourselves aright if we say: ‘Our true being is in the spiritual world, and what is here of us on Earth is but a picture—an image of our true being.’ It is entirely true if we regard what is here on Earth, not as the real man himself, but as the picture of the real man.

[picture of the Man]

I will now show how you can see this picture-character of Man more clearly. Let us imagine ourselves asleep. The I is away from the physical and etheric body; the astral body too is away.

• Now it is the I which works in the blood of man and in his movements. In sleep the movements cease, inasmuch as the I is away; the blood however goes on working, and yet the I is not there. We need only think of the physical body and we must ask ourselves: What happens to it while we are asleep? Something must still be living and working in the blood, even as the I lives and works in it by day.
• Likewise the astral body, living as it does in the whole breathing process, leaves it by night, and yet the breathing goes on. Here again, something must be there within the breathing process, working in it even as the astral body does in waking life.

Thus every time we go to sleep, with our astral body we forsake those inner organs which are the organs of respiration, and with our I we forsake the pulsating forces of our blood. What then becomes of them by night?

The answer is that while the Man lies asleep in bed, beings of the adjoining hierarchy enter into the pulsating forces of the blood from which his I has departed.

• Angels, archangels and archai are then indwelling the self-same organs in which the human I dwells in waking life by day.
• Moreover in the breathing organs which we have forsaken inasmuch as the astral body is outside by night, beings of the next higher Hierarchy - SoF, SoM, SoW (Exusiai, Dynamis and Kyriotetes) - are living then.

Thus when we go to sleep at night, setting forth with our I and astral body, leaving behind the body of our waking life, angels, archangels and higher spiritual beings enter into us and animate our organs while we are outside—until we re-awaken.

And what is more, as to our ether-body, even in our day-waking life we are not able to fulfill what is needed there. The beings of the highest Hierarchy - Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones - have to indwell this ether-body even while we are awake; they remain there always.

Lastly the physical body; if we ourselves had to achieve all the great and wonderful processes taking place there, we should not merely do it very badly; we could not set about it at all. Here we are utterly helpless. What outer anatomy ascribes to the physical body could not even move a single atom of it. Powers of quite another order are required here, namely none other than those that have been known since primeval times as the supreme Trinity: the Powers of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. They, the essential Trinity, indwell the physical body of Man.

[recap]

• Therefore in truth, throughout our earthly life our physical body is not our own. If it depended on us, it could not go on at all. It is, as was said of old, the true Temple of the Godhead, of the Divine threefold Being.
• Likewise our ether-body is the dwelling-place of the hierarchy of Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones. They have to help in caring for the organs which are assigned to the etheric body.
• As to those physical and etheric organs on the other hand which are deserted every night by the astral body, they are provided for by the second hierarchy—Kyriotetes, Dynamis and Exusiai.
• Lastly, the organs forsaken during sleep by the human Ego have to be cared for in the night by angeloi, archangeloi and archai.

There is a constant activity within the human being, proceeding not only from man himself. Only in waking life he lives in this bodily nature, so to speak, as a subtenant. For at the same time it is the Temple and the dwelling-place of spiritual beings of the Hierarchies.

Bearing all this in mind, we only see this outer form of Man aright if we admit: It is a picture, a picture of the working-together of all the hierarchies. They are within it.

Look at this human head in all the detail of its form; look at the rest of the body in its human form. I do not look at it truly if I describe it as a reality—as a real being, thus or thus. I only look at it truly if I say: It is a picture of an invisible, super-sensible working of all the hierarchies together.

• Only when things are seen in this way can one speak truly and in detail of what is commonly propounded in a rather abstract manner. The physical world is not the true reality, so it is said; it is a maya—the true reality is behind it. Yet such a statement does not help us much. It is too general, as if one were to say: Flowers are growing in the meadow. Just as this statement will only be of use if you know what kind of flowers, so too the knowledge of the higher world can only be applied in practice if one is able to point out in detail how it is working in the outer picture, maya, or reflection, which is its physical, sense-perceptible manifestation.

---

Man therefore, seen in his totality, both in his earthly life by day and in his earthly life by night, is related not only to his physical and visible environment on Earth but to a world of higher spiritual being. Through all the kingdoms of Nature upon Earth—mineral, plant, animal kingdom—there works what we may call a lower spiritual realm. So too throughout the world of stars there works a higher spiritual realm—a realm which also influences man. Looked at in his totality, man is related through his physical existence to plants and animals, to water and to air; so too, he is related spiritually to the world of stars. The latter too is but a picture, a revelation of the underlying spiritual reality. It is the Beings of the Hierarchies who are really there. When he looks up to the stars, man in reality is looking up to the spiritual Beings of the Hierarchies. That which is raying down upon him is but a kind of symbolic light which they send to him of their presence, so that here too, even in physical life, he may have some indication of the living Spirit which in reality fills the entire Universe.

Just as on Earth we may long to know this mountain or that river, this animal or yonder plant, so should we feel a longing to get to know the starry world in its true being. In its true being it is spiritual. In Penmaenmawr I tried to tell a little of the real spiritual nature of the Moon, such as it shines upon us from the cosmic spaces in the present phase of earthy evolution. When we look up to the Moon, we never really see the Moon itself; we see at most a scanty indication of it where the illuminated crescent is continued. What we are seeing is the reflected sunlight, not the Moon itself. So altogether, only the cosmic forces thrown back or reflected by the Moon reach us upon Earth, never what lives within the Moon itself. That it reflects the Sun's light to the Earth is but a part, nay, the smallest part of what pertains to the Moon. All physical and spiritual impulses that reach it from the great Universe, the Moon reflects to us like a mirror. And as we never see through to the other side of a mirror, so do we never see the interior of the Moon, where, in effect, there lives a spiritual population among whom are very high guiding Beings. These guiding Powers, with the rest of the Lunar population, were once upon a time on Earth, whence they withdrew to the Moon more than 15,000 years ago. Before that time the Moon looked even physically different. It did not merely reflect the sunlight to the Earth but mingled in the sunlight something of its own essence. This is however not the point which interests us now. What does concern us at this moment is the fact that in the present epoch the Moon is there like a fortress in the Universe—a cosmic fortress within which lives a population which fulfilled its human destinies more than 15,000 years ago, and, with the spiritual guides of humanity, withdrew thereafter to the Moon. For there were once upon a time on Earth very advanced Beings—Beings who did not put on physical human bodies as do the men of today. They lived rather in etheric bodies, yet for the men who lived on Earth at that time they were the great leaders and educators.

It was these mighty teachers and educators who brought to mankind, long, long ago, the primeval wisdom—the original and sublime wisdom-teachings of mankind, whereof the Vedas, the Vedanta, are but a distant echo. They now are living in the Moon and only radiating spiritually to the Earth what issues from the Universe outside the Moon.

Something of the erstwhile Moon-forces has indeed remained behind on Earth, namely the physical forces of reproduction in man and animal; but that is all. Only the most external and physical element remained behind when at a certain time of old Atlantis the great teachers of mankind migrated to the Moon, which had itself withdrawn from the Earth long before.

Therefore when we look upward to the Moon we only see it truly if we realize that there are lofty spiritual Beings there—Beings who were once upon a time on Earth and who now make it their task to ray down to Earth not what they bear within themselves, but the forces, both physical and spiritual, which they reflect and thus transmit from the great Universe. Whoever seeks Initiation-wisdom in present time, must among other things seek to receive into this Initiation-wisdom what the Beings of the Moon with their sublime spiritual forces have to tell.

Now this is only one of the ‘cities’ in the great Universe—one colony, one settlement among many. Others are no less important, notably those belonging to our planetary system. And as concerns ourselves—as concerns humanity on Earth—the other pole, the opposite extreme to the Moon, is the population of Saturn.

The Saturn population too, as you may gather from my Occult Science, was once united with the Earth, yet in a very different way from the population of the Moon. The Saturn-beings are connected with the earthly life in quite another way. They reflect nothing from cosmic space. Even the physical sunlight is only just reflected on to Earth by Saturn. Saturn like a lonely recluse wanders slowly round the Sun, shedding very little light. What outer Astronomy can tell us about Saturn is but a very small portion of the truth. The significance of Saturn for humanity on Earth is made manifest, if only in a picture, every night when man is sleeping, and it is realized more fully between death and new birth when man is going through the spiritual world—and therefore too through the world of stars—as I explained in a lecture here not long ago.

True, in the present phase of evolution man does not meet Saturn directly; yet by a roundabout way—which we need not go into now—he does come into contact with the Saturn-beings. Within Saturn in effect, Beings of high perfection, very sublime Beings live—Beings who are in near relation to Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones. Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones are as it were the Beings nearest to them—nearest among the Hierarchies.

The sublime Beings, whom we may call the Saturn population, do not ray down to Earth or give to men from Saturn anything that can be found in the external, physical world. But they preserve the cosmic memory, the cosmic record. All facts and all events, both physical and spiritual, which the planetary system has undergone, all that the Beings within our planetary system have ever experienced—the Saturn-beings faithfully preserve it in memory. In recollection they are forever looking back on the entire life of the planetary system. Even as we look back in memory upon the limited range of our earthly life, so do the Saturn-beings—in their collective activity—cherish the cosmic memory of what the planetary system as a whole and all the beings in it have undergone.

For man himself, the spiritual forces living in this cosmic memory are present, inasmuch as he comes into relation with the Saturn-beings between death and a new birth, and also—more in picture-form—every night. Thereby the spiritual forces proceeding from the Saturn-beings—forces in which the deepest inner life of the planetary system is contained—are also working within man. Even as memory is our own deepest inner life on Earth, so too what lives in Saturn represents the innermost and deepest ‘cosmic I’ of the whole planetary system.

Inasmuch as these influences are also there in man, many things are going on in human life, of the significance of which we are for the most part quite unconscious—which none the less play the greatest imaginable part in our lives. What we are conscious of, is after all only a very small portion of our life.

Say for example there was an incisive moment, an all-important event in your life. You met another human being with whom you then went on through life together; or it was some other event, essential to your future life. If you look back in time from this event, you will be struck by the fact that something like a plan was leading you towards it, beginning long before. Something that happened, say, between your thirtieth and fiftieth year—follow it backward through your life and you will very likely find: ‘I entered on the path leading to this event when I was ten or twelve years old; all that then followed was leading up to it, so that I landed there.’

Elderly people, looking back contemplatively upon their life, will find that it all works out. They will be able to say: ‘There was a subconscious thread running through it all. Unconscious forces were impelling me to the decisive events of my life.’ These are the Saturn forces—forces implanted in us through our relation, such as has been indicated, to the ‘inner population’ of Saturn.

While therefore, of the Moon, only the physical forces of reproduction are there on Earth (for these are Lunar forces, once again, which remained at the Moon's departure), the very highest forces, namely the cosmic moral forces, are on Earth through Saturn. The source of cosmic equity, the great ‘restorer of the balance’ for all that happens upon Earth, is Saturn. And if the Moon-forces, now upon Earth, have to do only with heredity—heredity through father, mother and so on—the Saturn forces enter into human life through all that lives in Karma, from incarnation to incarnation. In this respect the other planets are intermediate between the two—they mediate between the physical upon the one hand and the highest ethical upon the other.

Jupiter, Mars and so on are there between Moon and Saturn. They in their several ways mediate what Moon and Saturn at the uttermost extremes bring into human life—the Moon inasmuch as its spiritual Beings have withdrawn, leaving behind with the earthly realm only the physical aspect, the physical force of propagation; and Saturn inasmuch as it represents the moral justice of the Universe in its highest aspect. These two are working together in that the other planets are there between them, waving the one into the other. Karma through Saturn, physical heredity through the Moon: these in their interrelation show how man upon his way from earthly life to earthly life is connected with the Earth itself and with the great Universe beyond the Earth.

As you will readily understand, my dear Friends, the science of today, fixing attention upon the earthly life alone, can only tell about a very little part of man. It tells a lot about the forces of heredity, yet even here it fails to see that these are Lunar forces left behind on Earth. It fails to relate them to the cosmic activities, transcending the mere earthly life, to which they properly belong. And it knows nothing at all about the destiny of Karma with which this earthly life is infused. Yet in reality, even as physical man is pulsated through and through by the living blood, so are the Beings bearing within them the vast memory of the planetary system with all its cosmic happenings, pulsating through man's Karma upon Earth. Looking into our own inner life, we must admit: We are true human beings only inasmuch as we have memory. Looking out into the planetary system with all its physical and spiritual happenings, and reaching upward to Initiation-science, we must equally admit: This planetary system would be void of inner life were it not for the inhabitants of Saturn preserving through the ages the memory, the cosmic past thereof, and also pouring ever down into mankind the forces springing from this preservation of the cosmic past, whereby all human beings are immersed in a living spiritual-moral nexus of causes and effects leading from earthly life to earthly life.

---

In earthly life, as to his conscious action, man is confined—in his relation to other men—within narrow limits. But if he takes into account what he experiences between death and new birth, there his relation to other human beings, who like himself will be discarnate, living no longer in physical bodies, reaches far wider circles. True, between death and re-birth he is at one time more in the neighbourhood of the Lunar influences and at another more in the neighbourhood of those of Saturn, Mars and so on. Yet through the cosmic spaces the one kind of planetary force interpenetrates the other. As upon Earth we work from man to man across the narrow confines of terrestrial space, so between death and new birth there is a working from planet to planet. The Universe then becomes the scene of man's activity and of the mutual relations between men. There between death and new birth, maybe the one departed soul is in the realm of Venus while the other is in Jupiter's domain; yet the interactions between them are far more intimate and tender than is possible within the narrow confines of earthly life. And even as the cosmic distances are called into play, to be the scene of action of the relations between human souls between death and new birth, so too the Beings of the Hierarchies are there, working throughout the cosmic spaces. We have to tell not only of the working of the several kinds of Beings—say, the inhabitants of Venus, or of Mars. We have to tell of the relations between the populations of Mars and Venus—a never-ending interaction, a constant to and fro of spiritual forces between the population of Mars and that of Venus amid the Universe.

This which goes on in the Universe between the populations of Mars and Venus—this everliving interplay in the spiritual Cosmos, the deeds of Mars and Venus fertilizing one another—all this again has its relation to man. Even as the Saturn-memory is related to human Karma, and the physical Lunar forces, left behind on Earth, to the external force of reproduction, so is the hidden spiritual interaction between Mars and Venus related to what appears in earthly life as human speech. For we could never speak by virtue of physical forces alone. It is the eternal being of man, going on from earthly life to earthly life, living in effect between death and new birth, which radiates into this outer world the gift of speech. Whilst as a spiritual being we are on our way from death to a new birth, we come into the sphere of action of the mutually fertilizing life which goes on between Mars and Venus—between the spiritual populations of Mars and Venus. Their spiritual forces, raying to and fro, co-operating, enter also into us ourselves upon our way from death to a new birth. This too is reproduced on Earth as in a physical picture, out of the innermost being of man, entering into the organs of speech and song. Never should we be able to speak through these organs if they were not physically kindled by the forces we receive into the depths of our being between death and new birth—forces derived from what is ever streaming to and fro in the Cosmos between Mars and Venus.

Thus in our daily life and action we are under the influence of the same spiritual forces, to the outward signs of which we look up with awe and wonder when we look out into the starry heavens. He alone is able to look up with inner truth who knows that in the stars, raying down to us from cosmic space, are to be seen the signs and characters of the great cosmic writing. For they are but the written signs of the great Universe—of the eternal, all-embracing spiritual life and process which also lives within us and of which we, once more, are but the image.

Long, long ago, in an instinctive atavistic clairvoyance, mankind had vision and perception of these things. The vision faded. If he had kept it, man could never have grown free. The ancient vision was therefore darkened. In compensation, the Mystery of Golgotha came into earthly life. A sublime Being from the population of the Sun came to Earth. He could not, it is true, bring to mankind all at once a consciousness of what is going on in yonder world of stars, but He brought with Him the forces whereby this consciousness can gradually be achieved.

Therefore it happened that to begin with, while the Mystery of Golgotha was taking place, a Gnostic wisdom was still there, inherited from olden time, through which the Mystery was understood This wisdom too then faded out; during the fourth century after Christ it vanished altogether. Yet the spiritual force which had come to Earth through Christ remained. Man can now call this force to life within him, if he once opens his eyes to the reality of spiritual worlds, as he can do through the communications of modern spiritual Science.

How much is yet to come to the humanity of modern time through looking thus once more to spiritual worlds! It is a striking fact: yonder in Asia, in more than one Asiatic, Oriental country, are living those who still preserve some relic of the old instinctive wisdom. They are the educated people, the true scholars, in the Oriental sense. No doubt this remnant of an ancient wisdom no longer belongs, in the best sense of the word, to our time; it needs to be replaced by a more conscious wisdom. And yet these bearers of an ancient and instinctive wisdom look down with not a little contempt upon the people of Europe and America. They are persuaded that their ancient Oriental wisdom even in its decadence, even the remaining rags and tatters of it, are preferable to the kind of knowledge of which Western civilization is so inordinately proud. Hence it is interesting to see a book recently published by a Cingalese, an Indian of Ceylon, The Culture of Souls among the Western Nations, wherein the author says to the Europeans, in effect: Since the Middle Ages your knowledge of the Christ has died out. No longer have you any real knowledge of the Christ, for he alone who can look up into the spiritual world can have real knowledge of the Christ. Hence you must first let teachers come to you from India, from Asia, to teach you Christianity again. You can actually read it in this book. A Cingalese Indian says to the Europeans: Teachers must come to you from Asia; they will be able to tell you what Christ really is. Your European teachers no longer know it. Since the decline of the Middle Ages you have lost your knowledge of the Christ.

Yet in reality it is for Europeans and Americans themselves once more to summon courage to look into the spiritual worlds from which the knowledge of the Christ, the wisdom of the Christ can be regained. Christ is the Being who came down from spiritual worlds into the earthly life. Therefore in His true inwardness He can only be understood in the light of the Spirit.

Upon this way it is also necessary for man to learn to look upon himself as a picture—an image of the spiritual Beings, spiritual realities and activities, on Earth. And he can do so best of all by permeating himself with such ideas and perceptions as I presented to you at the beginning of this lecture. Amid his conscious experiences in the stream of time he looks into the emptiness. He becomes conscious that his true Ego never descends from the spiritual world; that in the physical world he is but a picture. The real ‘I’ is not here in the physical world at all. He sees, as it were, a hole in time—a seeming darkness—and it is to this that he says ‘I’.

Man should therefore become aware of the deep significance of this fact. When he looks back and remembers his past life, he must admit: I see in memory the experiences I underwent from day to day, but there is ever and again a hole, a gap of darkness. It is this darkness which in my ordinary consciousness I call ‘I’. But I must now become conscious of something more than this.

I have summed up this ‘something more’ in a few words, which—as a kind of meditation reaching out to the true ‘I’—may be inscribed in the soul of every human being of our time. Ever repeatedly we may call to life in us these words of meditation, which I will write as follows:

Ich schaue in die Finsternis:

In ihr ersteht Licht— Lebendes Licht. Wer ist dies Licht in der Finsternis? Ich bin es selbst in meiner Wirklichkeit! Diese Wirklichkeit des Ich Tritt nicht ein in mein Erdendasein. Ich bin nur Bild davon. Ich werde es aber wieder finden, Wenn ich, Guten Willens fur den Geist, Durch des Todes Pforte gegangen.

I gaze into the Darkness.

In it there arises Light—

Living Light!

Who is this Light in the Darkness?

It is I myself in my reality.

This reality of the ‘I’

Does not enter into my earthly life.

I am but a picture of it.

But I shall find it again

When with good will for the Spirit

I shall have passed through the Gate of Death.

Entering ever and again into a meditative saying of this kind, we can confront the Darkness. We realize that here on Earth we are only a picture of our true Being—that our true Being never comes down into the earthly life. Yet in the midst of the Darkness, through our good will towards the Spirit, a Light can dawn upon us, of which we may in truth confess: This Light am I myself in my reality.

1924-03-02-GA235

pg 223 RSL003

In today's lecture—independently of what we have already been discussing—we shall therefore approach a different distinction of the members of the human being. Then we shall try to build a bridge between what we discuss today and that which is already known to us.

Observing the human being as he stands before us on the earth—simply according to his physical form—we can recognise in this physical form and configuration three clearly distinct members. If they are not generally distinguished, it is only because that which counts as science nowadays looks at the facts in a merely superficial way. It has no feeling for what reveals itself when these things are observed with a perception that is illumined from within. There, to begin with, is the head of man. Even outwardly considered, we can perceive that this human head appears quite different from the remainder of the human form. We need but observe the origin of man out of the embryo. The first thing we can see developing as human embryo is the head organisation. That is practically all that we can see to begin with. The whole human organisation takes its start from the head. All that afterwards flows into man's form and figure and configuration, is, in the embryo, a mere system of appendages. As physical form, man to begin with is head, and head alone. The other organs are there as mere appendages. In the first period of embryo existence, the functions these organs assume in later life—as breathing, circulation, nutrition and so on—are not undertaken as such from within the embryo. The corresponding functions are supplied from without inward, so to speak: provided for by the mother-organism, through organs that afterwards fall away—organs that are no longer attached to the human being later on.

Man, to begin with, is simply a head. He is altogether “head,” and the remaining organs are only appendages. It is no exaggeration to say that man, to begin with, is a head. The remainder is merely an appendage. Then, at a later stage, the organs which to begin with were mere appendages, grow and gain in importance. Therefore, in later life, the head is not strictly distinguished from the rest of the body. But that is only a superficial characterisation of the human being. For in reality, even as physical form, he is a threefold being. All that constitutes his original form—namely the head-remains throughout his earthly life as a more or less individual member. People only fail to recognise the fact,—but it is so.

You will say: Surely one ought not to divide the human being in this way—beheading him, so to speak, chopping his head off from the rest of his body. That such is the anthroposophical practice was only the fond belief of the Professor, who reproached us for dividing man into head-, chest-organs and limb-organs. But it is not so at all. The fact is rather this: that which appears outwardly as the formation of the head is only the main expression of the human head-formation. Man remains “head” throughout his whole earthly life. The most important sense-organs, it is true—the eyes and ears, the organs of smell and organs of taste—are in the actual head. But the sense of warmth, for example, the sense of pressure, the sense of touch, are spread over the whole human being. That is precisely because the three members cannot in fact be separated spatially. They can at most be separated in the sense that the head-formative principle is mainly apparent in the outward form of the head, while in reality it permeates the whole human being. And so it is too, for the other members. The “head” is also there in the big toe throughout man's earthly life, inasmuch as the big toe possesses a sense of touch or a sense of warmth.

Thus we have characterised, to begin with, the one member of the human being as he stands before us in the sense-world. In my books I have also described this one organisation as the system of nerves and senses; for that is to characterise it more inwardly. This, then, is the one member of the human being, the organisation of nerves and senses. The second member is all that lives and finds expression in rhythmical activity. You cannot say of the nerves-and-senses system that it finds expression in rhythmic activity. For if it did, in the perception of the eye, for instance, you would have to perceive one thing at one moment and then another, and a third and a fourth; and then return again to the first, and so on. In other words, there would have to be a rhythm in your sense-perceptions; and it is not so. Observe on the other hand the main features of your chest-organisation. There you will find the rhythm of the breathing, the rhythm of circulation, the rhythm of digestion and so forth ... There, everything is rhythmical.

This rhythm, with the corresponding organs of rhythm, is the second thing to develop in the human being; and it extends once more over the whole human being, though its chief external manifestation is in the organs of the chest. The whole human being is heart, is lung; yet lung and heart are localised, so to speak, in the organs, so-called. It is well known that the whole human being breathes; you breathe at every place in your organism. People speak of a skin-breathing. Only here, once more, the breathing function is mainly concentrated in the activity of the lung.

The third thing in man is the limb-organism. The limbs come to an end in the trunk or chest-organism. In the embryo-stage of existence they appear as mere appendages. They are the latest to develop. They however are the organs mainly concerned in our metabolism. For by their movement—and inasmuch as they do most of the work in the human being—the metabolic process finds its chief stimulus.

Therewith we have characterised the three members that appear to us in the human form. But these three members are intimately connected with the soul-life of man. The life of the human soul falls into Thinking, Feeling and Willing. Thinking finds its corresponding physical organisation chiefly in the organisation of the head. It has its physical organisation, it is true, throughout the human being; but that is only because the head itself, as I said just now, is there throughout the human being.

Feeling is connected with the rhythmic organisation. It is a prejudice—even a superstition on the part of modern science to suppose that the nervous system has anything directly to do with feeling. The nervous system has nothing directly to do with feeling at all. The true organs of feeling are the rhythms of the breathing, of the circulation ... All that the nerves do is to enable us to form the concept that we have our feelings. Feelings, once more, have their own proper organisation in the rhythmic organism. But we should know nothing of our feelings if the nerves did not provide for our having ideas about them. Because the nerves provide us with all the ideas of our own feelings, modern intellectualism conceives the superstitious notion that the nerves themselves are the organs of our feeling. That is not the case.

But when we consciously observe our feelings—such as they arise out of our rhythmic organism—and compare them with the thoughts which are bound to our head, our nerves-and-senses organisation, then, if we have the faculty to observe such things at all, we perceive just the same difference between our thoughts and our feelings as between the thoughts which we have in our day-waking life, and our dreams. Our feelings have no greater intensity in consciousness than dreams. They only have a different form; they only make their appearance in a different way. When you dream, in pictures, your consciousness is living in the pictures of the dream. These pictures, however, in their picture-form, have the same significance as in another form our feelings have. Thus we may say: We have the clearest and most light-filled consciousness in our ideas and thoughts. We have a kind of dream-consciousness in our feelings. We only imagine that we have a clear consciousness of our feelings; in reality we have no clearer consciousness of our feelings than of our dreams. When, on awaking from sleep, we recollect ourselves and form wide-awake ideas about our dreams, we do not by any means catch at the actual dream. The dream is far richer in content than what we afterwards conceive of it. Likewise is the world of feeling infinitely richer than the ideas, the mental pictures of it, which we make present to our conscious mind.

And when we come to our willing—that is completely immersed in sleep. Willing is bound to the limbs—and metabolic and motor organism. All that we really know of our willing are the thoughts. I form the idea: I will pick up this watch.

Think of it quite sincerely, and you will have to admit: You form the idea: “I will take hold of the watch.” Then you take hold of it. As to what takes place, starting from the idea and going right down into the muscles, until at length you have an idea once more (namely, that you are actually taking hold of the watch) following on your original idea—all this that goes on in your bodily nature between the mental picture of the intention and the mental picture of its realisation, remains utterly unconscious. So much so that you can only compare it with the unconsciousness of deep, dreamless sleep.

We do at least dream of our feelings, but of our impulses of will we have no more than we have from our sleep.

You may say: I have nothing at all from sleep. Needless to say, we are not speaking from the physical standpoint; from a physical standpoint it would of course be absurd to say that you had nothing from sleep. But in your soul too, in reality, you have a great deal from your sleep. If you never slept, you would never rise to the Ego-consciousness.

Here it is necessary to realise the following. When you remember the experiences you have had, you go backward—as along this line (see diagram). Beginning from now, you go backward. You generally imagine that it is so—that you go farther and farther backward along the line. But it is not so at all. In reality you only go back until the last time you awakened from sleep. Before that moment you were sleeping. All that lies in this intervening part of the line (see diagram) is blotted out; then from the last time you fell asleep until the last time but one when you awakened, memory follows once more. So it goes on. In reality, as you look back along the line, you must always interpose the periods of unconsciousness. For a whole third of our life, we must insert unconsciousness. We do not observe this fact. But it is just as though you had a white surface, with a black hole in the centre of it.

You see the black hole, in spite of the fact that none of the forces are there. Likewise it is when you remember. Although no reminiscences of life are there (for the intervals of sleep), nevertheless you see the black nothingness—that is, the nights you have slept through. Your consciousness impinges on them every time, and that is what really makes you call yourself: “I.” If it went on and on, and nowhere impinged on anything, you would never rise to a consciousness of “I.”

Thus we can certainly say that we have something from sleep. And just as we have something from our sleep in the ordinary sense of earthly life, so do we have something from that sleep which always prevails in our willing. We pass asleep through that which is really going on in us in every act of will. And just as we get our Ego-consciousness from the black void in this case (referring to the diagram), so likewise our Ego is inherent in that which is sleeping in us during the act of will. It is, however, that Ego which goes throughout our former lives on earth.

That is where karma holds sway, my dear friends. Karma holds sway in our willing. Therein are working and wielding all the impulses from our preceding life on earth; only they too, even in waking life, are veiled in sleep.

[Man as threefold being]

Once more, therefore: when we conceive Man as he stands before us in earthly life, he appears to us in a threefold form: the head-organisation, the rhythmic and the motor-organisation. The three are diagrammatically divided here, but we will always bear in mind that each of the members belongs in its turn to the whole Man. Moreover, Thought is bound to the head-organisation, feeling to the rhythmic organisation, willing to the motor-organisation. Waking consciousness is the condition in which our ideas, our mental presentations, are. Dreaming is the condition in which our feelings are. Deep sleep (even in waking life) is the condition in which our volition is. We are asleep in our impulses of will, even in waking life.

[nerve-sense subsystem - two areas of 'head']

Now we must learn to distinguish two things about the head, that is, about our life of ideation. We must divide the head, so to speak, more intimately. We shall thus be led to distinguish between

• what we have as momentary ideas or mental pictures in our intercourse with the world and
• what we have as memory.

As you go about in the world, you are constantly forming ideas according to the impressions you receive. But it also remains possible for you subsequently to draw the ideas forth again out of your memory. Moreover, the ideas you form in your intercourse with the world in the given moment are not inherently different from the ideas that are kindled in you when memory comes into play. The difference is that in the one case they come from outside, and in the other from within.

• It is indeed a naïve conception to imagine that memory works in this way: that I now confront a thing or event, and form an idea or mental presentation of it; that the idea goes, down into me somewhere or other, as if into some cupboard or chest, and that when I afterwards remember it, I fetch it out again. Why, there are whole philosophies describing how the ideas go down beneath the threshold of consciousness, to be fished out again in the act of recollection. These theories are utterly naïve. There is of course no such chest where the ideas are lying in wait. Nor is there anywhere in us where they are moving about, or whence they might walk out again into our head, when we remember them. All these things are utterly non-existent, nor is there any explanation in their favour.

The fact is rather as follows:

You need only think of this. When you want to memorise something, you generally work not merely with the activity of forming ideas. You help yourself by quite other means. I have sometimes seen people in the act of memorising; they formed ideas, they thought as little as possible. They performed outward movements of speech—pretty vehement movements, repeated again and again, like this (with the arms), “und es wallet und woget und brauset und zischt” (a line of Schiller's poem: The Diver). Many people memorise in this way, and in so doing, they think as little as possible. And to add a further stimulus, they sometimes hammer the forehead with their fist. That, too, is not unknown.

The fact is that the ideas we form as we go about the world are evanescent, like dreams. It is not the ideas which have gone down into us, but something quite different that emerges out of our memory. To give you an idea of it, I should have to draw it thus—

Of course it is only a kind of symbolic diagram. Imagine the human being in the act of sight. He sees something. (I will not describe the process in any greater detail; we might do so, but for the moment we do not need it.) He sees something. It goes in through his eye, through the optic nerve into the organs into which the optic nerve then merges.

We have two clearly distinct members of our brain—the more outer peripheric brain, the grey matter; and beneath it, the white matter. Then the white matter merges into the sense-organs. Here is the grey matter (see the diagram); it is far less evolved than the white. The terms “grey” and “white” are, of course, only approximate. Thus, even crudely, anatomically considered it is so: The objects make an impression on us, passing through the eye and on into the processes that take place in the white matter of the brain. Our ideas or mental presentations, on the other hand, have their organ in the grey matter, which, incidentally, has quite a different cell-structure, and there the ideas are lighting up and vanishing like dreams. There the ideas are flickering up, because beneath this region (compare the diagram once more) the process of the impressions is taking place.

If it depended on the ideas going down into you somewhere, and you then had to fetch them out again in memory, you would remember nothing at all. You would have no memory. It is really like this: In the present moment, let us say, I see something. The impression of it (whatever it may be) goes into me, mediated by the white matter of the brain. The grey matter works in its turn, dreaming of the impressions, making pictures of them. The mental pictures come and go; they are quite evanescent. As to what really remains, we do not conceive it at all in this moment, but it goes down into our organisation, and when we remember, we look within; down there the impression remains permanent.

Thus when you see something blue, an impression goes into you from the blue (below, in the diagram), while here (above, in the diagram) you yourself form an idea, a mental presentation of the blue. The idea is transient. Then, after three days perhaps, you observe in your brain the impression that has remained. Once more you form the idea of blue. This time, however, you do so as you look inward. The first time, when you saw the blue from without, you were stimulated from outside by a blue object. The second time—namely now, when you remember it—you are stimulated from within, because in effect the blueness has reproduced itself within you. In both cases it is the same process, namely a process of perception. Memory too is perception. In effect, our day-waking consciousness consists in ideation, in the forming of ideas; but there—beneath the ideation—certain processes are going on. They too, rise into our consciousness by an act of ideation, namely by our forming of ideas in the act of memory. Underneath this activity of ideation is the perceiving, the pure process of perception. And, underneath this in turn, is Feeling.

Thus we can distinguish more intimately, in our head-organisation or thought-organisation—the perceiving and the activity of ideation. What we have perceived, we can then remember. But it actually remains very largely unconscious; it is only in memory that it rises into consciousness. What really takes place in man is no longer experienced in consciousness by man himself. When he perceives, he experiences in consciousness the idea, the mental presentation of it. The real effect of the perception goes into him. Out of this real effect, he is then able to awaken the memory. But at this place the unconscious already begins.

In reality it is only here, in this region (see the diagram)—where, in our waking-day consciousness we form ideas—it is only here that we ourselves are, as Man. Only here do we really have ourselves as Man.

Where we do not reach down with our consciousness (for we do not even reach to the causes of our memories), where we do not reach down, there we do not have ourselves as Man, but are incorporated in the world.

It is just as it is in the physical life. You breathe in; the air you now have in yourself was outside you a short while ago, it was the-air-of-the-world; now it is your air. After a short time you give it back again to the world. You are one with the world. The air is now outside you, now within you. You would not be Man at all, if you were not so united with the world as to have not only that which is within your skin, but that with which you are connected in the whole surrounding atmosphere.

And as you are thus connected on the physical side, so it is as to your spiritual part: the moment you get down into the next subconscious region—the region out of which memory arises—you are connected with that which we call the Third Hierarchy: angeloi, archangeloi, archai. Just as you are connected through your breathing with the air, so are you connected with the Third Hierarchy through your head-organisation, namely the lower head-organisation.

• This, which is only covered over by the outermost lobes of the brain, belongs solely to the Earth.
• What is immediately beneath is connected with the Third Hierarchy: angeloi, archangeloi, archai.

[rhythmic subsystem]

Now let us go down into the region, psychologically speaking, of feeling: corporeally speaking, of the rhythmic organisation, out of which the dreams of our feeling life arise. There, less than ever do we have ourselves as Man. There we are connected with what constitutes the Second Hierarchy—spiritual beings who do not incarnate in any earthly body, for they remain in the spiritual world. But they are continually sending their currents, their impulses, the forces that go out from them., into the rhythmic organisation of Man. Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes—they are the beings whom we bear within our breast.

Just as we bear our own human I actually only in the outermost lobes of the brain, so do we bear the angeloi, archangeloi, etc. immediately beneath this region; yet still within the organisation of the head. There is the scene of their activities on Earth; there are the starting-points of their activity. And in our breast we carry the Second Hierarchy—Exusiai and the rest. In our breast are the starting points of their activity.

[metabolic-limb]

And as we now go down into our motor-organism, the organism of movement, in this the Beings of the First Hierarchy are active: Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones.

The transmuted food-stuffs, the food-stuffs we have eaten, circulate in our limbs. There in our limbs, they undergo a process. It is really a living process of combustion. For if we take only a single step, there arises in us a living process of combustion, a burning-up of that which is, or was, outside us. We ourselves, as Man, are connected with this combustion process. As physical human beings with our limbs and metabolic-organism, we are connected with the lowest. And yet it is precisely through the limb-organisation that we are connected with the highest. With the First Hierarchy—Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones—we are connected by virtue of what imbues us there with spirit.

[Activities of the hierarchies]

Now the great question arises (it may sound trivial when I clothe it in earthly words, but I can do no other), the question arises:

What are they doing—these Beings of the three successive Hierarchies, who are in us—what are they doing?

The answer is:

• the Third Hierarchy, angeloi, archangeloi, etc. concern themselves with that which has its physical organisation in the human head, i.e. with our thinking. If they were not concerning themselves with our thinking—with that which is going on in our head—we should have no memory in ordinary earthly life. For it is the Beings of this Hierarchy who preserve in us the impulses which we receive with our perceptions. They are underlying the activity which reveals itself in our memory; they lead us through our earthly life in this first sub-conscious, or unconscious, region.
• Now let us go on to the beings of the Second Hierarchy - Exusiai, etc. They are the beings we encounter when we have passed through the gate of death, that is, in the life between death and a new birth. There we encounter the souls of the departed, who lived with us on Earth; but we encounter, above all, the spiritual beings of this Second Hierarchy—the Third Hierarchy together with them, it is true, but the Second Hierarchy are the most important there. With them we work in our time between death and a new birth—we work upon all that we felt in our earthly life, all that we brought about in our organisation. Thus, in union with these beings of the Second Hierarchy, we elaborate our coming earthly life. When we stand here on the Earth, we have the feeling that the spiritual beings of the Divine World are above us. When we are in yonder sphere, between death and a new birth, we have the opposite idea—the angeloi, archangeloi, etc., who guide us through our earthly life, as above described, live, after our death, on the same level with us—so to speak. And immediately beneath us are the Beings of the Second Hierarchy. With them we work out the forming of our inner karma. All that I told you yesterday of the karma of health and illness—we work it out with these beings of the Second Hierarchy.
• And when, in that time between death and new birth, we look still further down—as it were, looking through the beings of the Second Hierarchy—then we discover, far below, the Beings of the First Hierarchy, Cherubim, Seraphim, and Thrones.
  • As earthly Man, we look for the highest Gods above us. As Man between death and a new birth, we look for the highest Divinity (attainable for us human beings, to begin with) in the farthest depths beneath us. We, all the time, are working with the Beings of the Second Hierarchy, elaborating our inner karma between death and a new birth: that inner karma which afterwards comes forth, imaged in the health or illness of our next life on Earth.
  • While we ourselves are engaged in this work—working alone, and with other human beings, upon the bodies that will come forth in our next life on earth—the beings of the First Hierarchy are active far below us, and in a strange way. That one beholds. For with respect to their activity—a portion, a small portion of their activity—they are actually involved in a Necessity. They, as the creators of the earthly realm, are obliged to follow and reproduce what the human being has fashioned and done during his life on Earth. They are obliged to reproduce it—though in a peculiar way. Think of a Man in his earthly life: in his Willing (which belongs to the First Hierarchy), he accomplishes certain deeds. The deeds are good or evil, wise or foolish. The beings of the First Hierarchy—Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones—are under necessity to form and mould the counter-images thereto in their own sphere.
  • You see, my dear friends, we live together. Whether the things we do with one another are good or evil; for all that is good, for all that is evil, the beings of the First Hierarchy must shape the corresponding counterparts. Among the First Hierarchy, all things are judged; yet not only judged, but shaped and fashioned. Thus between death and a new birth, while we ourselves are working at our inner karma with the Second Hierarchy and with other departed souls, meanwhile we behold what Seraphim, and Cherubim and Thrones have experienced through our deeds on Earth. Yes, here upon earth the blue vault of the sky arches over us, with its cloud-forms and sunshine and so forth; and in the night, the star-lit sky. Between death and a new birth the living activity of Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones extends like a vault beneath us. And we gaze down upon them—Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones—even as we here look up to the clouds, and the blue, and the star-strewn sky. Beneath us, there, we see the Heavens, formed of the activity of Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones. But what kind of activity? We behold among the Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, the activity which results as the just and compensating activity from our own deeds on Earth - our own, and the deeds through which we lived with other men. The Gods themselves are obliged to carry out the compensating action, and we behold them as our Heavens, only the Heavens are there beneath us. In the deeds of the Gods we see and recognise the consequences of our earthly deeds—whether this deed or that be good or evil, wise or foolish. And, as we thus look downward, between death and a new birth, we relate ourselves to the mirrored image of our deeds, just as in earthly life we relate ourselves to the vault of heaven above us.

[continuing on karma]

As to our own inner karma, we ourselves bring it into our inner organism. We bring it with us on to the Earth as our faculties and talents, our genius and our stupidity. Not so what the Gods are fashioning there beneath us; what they have to experience in consequence of our earthly lives comes to us in our next life on earth as the facts of Destiny which meet us from without. We may truly say, the very thing we pass through asleep carries us in our earthly life into our Fate. But in this is living what the corresponding Gods, those of the First Hierarchy, had to experience in their domain as the consequences of our deeds during the time between our death and a new birth.

One always feels a need to express these things in pictures. Suppose we are standing somewhere or other in the physical world. The sky is overcast; we see the clouded sky. Soon afterwards, fine rain begins to trickle down; the rain is falling. What hitherto was hovering above us, we see it now in the wet fields and the trees, sprinkled with fine rain. So it is when we look back with the eye of the Initiate, from human life on earth into the time we underwent, before we came down to this earth, that is to say, the time we underwent between our last death and our last birth. For there we see the forming of the deeds of the Gods in consequence of our own deeds in our last life on earth. And then we see it, spiritually raining down, so to become our destiny.

Do I meet a human being whose significance for me in this life enters essentially into my destiny? That which takes place in our meeting was lived in advance by the Gods as a result of what he and I had in common in a former earthly life. Am I transplanted during my earthly life into a district—or a vocation—which is important for me? All that approaches me there as outer destiny is the image of what was experienced by Gods—Gods of the First Hierarchy—in consequence of my former life on earth, during the time when I was myself between death and a new birth.

One who thinks abstractly will think: “There are the former lives on Earth; the deeds of the former lives work across into the present. Then they were the causes, now they are the effects.” But you cannot think far along these lines; you have little more than words when you enunciate this proposition. But behind what you thus describe as the Law of Karma, are deeds and experiences of the Gods; and only behind all that is the other ...

When we human beings confront our destiny only by way of feeling, then we look up, according to our faith, to the Divine Beings or to some Providence on which we feel the course of our earthly life depends. But the Gods—namely those Gods whom we know as belonging to the First Hierarchy, Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones—have, as it were, an inverse religious faith. They feel their Necessity among men on earth—men, whose creators they are. The aberrations human beings suffer, and the progressions they enjoy, must be balanced and compensated by the Gods. Whatever the Gods prepare for us as our destiny in a subsequent life, they have lived it before us.

These truths must be found again through Anthroposophy. Out of a consciousness not fully developed, they were perceived by mankind in a former, instinctive clairvoyance. The Ancient Wisdom did indeed contain such truths. Afterwards only a dim feeling remained of them. In many things that meet us in the spiritual history of mankind, the dim feeling of these things is still in evidence. You need but remember the verse by Angelus Silesius which you will also find quoted in my writings. To a narrow religious creed, it sounds impertinent:

I know that without me God can no moment live; If I come to naught, He needs must give up the Ghost.¹

Angelus Silesius went over to Roman Catholicism; it was as a Catholic that he wrote such verses. He was still aware that the Gods are dependent on the world, even as the world is dependent on them. He knew that the dependence is mutual; and that the Gods must direct their life according to the life of men. But the Divine Life works creatively, and works itself out in turn in the destinies of men. Angelus Silesius, dimly feeling the truth, though he knew it not in its exactitude, exclaimed:

I know that without me God can no moment live; If I come to naught, He needs must give up the Ghost.

The Universe and the Divine depend on one another, and work into one another. Today we have recognised this living interdependence in the example of human destiny or karma.

Related pages

• Man - the human being
• Man's bodily principles
• Man: an integrated view
• Overview of the spiritual hierarchies

Internal project notes and references

RSL 008 FMC section 4.7