Waking Consciousness

Waking consciousness refers to current humanity's predominant Condition of Consciousness (CoC) with perception of and thoughts about the mineral physical world during waking life. This in contrast with Man's state of sleep that goes hand in hand with this waking consciousness.

The current state of consciousness links and maps to the current evolutionary stage whereby Man develops from lower to higher CoC.

How does this Consciousness work in Man from a spiritual scientific perspective, and how does clairvoyant perception of the spiritual worlds differ from this mainstream waking consciousness?

How it works

We distinguish the Human 'I', which is a spiritual entity, from 'what call our I' with our current waking consciousness. The latter is a mirror reflection of our true spiritual I.

The 'I' we know and we call ourself, is not our true spiritual I but a reflected image in maya made up from the sum of all our experiences during an incarnation. Our true 'I' is an entity in the mental world, see also: the Human 'I' and Man's higher triad (eg Schemas FMC00.128 and FMC00.164).

Man’s waking consciousness today is through the I-organization in the lower bodies (sentient, intellectual and consciousness soul in astral, etheric and physical body), using the physical senses to experience the mineral-material reality, and the physical body and the Nerve-sense subsystem ('the head part in Man as a threefold being) as a reflector.

• Physical senses are used for our sensory perception. It is the I who has this perception, using the physical body as a reflecting apparatus. Consciousness can be regarded as a bandpass filter: we consciously perceive what our senses hold back, the rest streams into our organism just the same even though this happens in our subconscious (see 1910-03-GA119 and 1921-11-GA207 below). With the physical senses Man perceives the ahrimanic material imaginations (maya) that we know as our physical reality. The astral body creates images that are imprinted and stored in the physical body. As such humanity 'consumes' life and physical reality and creates images from it, these images are what Man adds to the cosmos. (see 1921-08-GA206 below)
• During sleep, the I and astral body 'disconnect' from the physical and etheric bodies, hence there are holes in the timeline of our conscious experience. During this time the I and astral body are involved in another process in the soul and spirit world (see Rhythm of a day).
• Through initiation and exercices of meditation and concentration, Man can develop astral senses that perceive the spiritual reality. In this case of incarnate clairvoyance, the astral senses (imagination, astral world) are used for inner reading of the cosmic wisdom of the solar system, using our own etheric and physical bodies as a reflector of the spiritual reality. In other words: during incarnation Man uses his etheric body as a gateway to read the cosmic knowledge of the lower mental world (as in the plant world), and the physical body to hear the higher mental world (as in the world of the minerals). (see 1914-10-GA156 below).
• Between death and a new birth, Man develops a different and direct connection with the spiritual world, see the chapter on Reincarnation. During the journey man slowly grows from the astral and planetary world into the spiritual world (just as a newborn baby grows into the world over many years and seven year periods, but on a longer timescale and totally different conditions). See also Structure of Man between death and a new birth.

Contextual frame

Man's current Waking Consciousness is to be seen in the framework of humanity's consciousness development and the process of individuation: from Group souls of humanity to Development of the I#Note 2 - The metaphoric image of the ocean, droplets and sponges in the Lemurian epoch and upto the refined threefold soul in the current Postatlantean epoch (see also: Development of the I and Group souls of humanity), and the future conscious spiritualization of Man's lower bodies and the development of Man as a true spiritual being (see: Man's transformation and spiritualization). This perspective shows how Man evolves his Condition of Consciousness from CoC level 1 to 7 throughout the planetary stages of evolution in the current solar system.

See also narrative: Development of the I#Note 1 - Narrative to the Development of the Human I

A world of reflections: the Man in the mirror

• our current sense perception and process of thinking creates an image of the physical world as a reflection of the spiritual reality. The image is generated by the cognitive process of thinking, and is the basis for our functioning in the world. Krishnamurti has pointed out extensively (as one of his key points) how this becomes the source of all problems for humanity (creating separation and the resulting conflicts, fears, wars). However as Rudolf Steiner pointed out this current state of human 'waking consciousness' is an unavoidable phase and integral part of natural evolution of mankind. Therefore it is important to have an awareness of this process described with the metaphor of the 'mirror' and how Man says 'I' to his physical image with sensory perception. Rudolf Steiner also uses the terminology of 'breaking the mirror' to break through this veil of maya and sensory perception to higher stages of cognition of reality.
• for illustration of the process of the 'mirror', see Schemas FMC00.226, FMC00.229, FMC00.230, FMC00.231. An accompanying quote, taken from Process of perception: Physiologically, the process of perception underlying conscious awareness is a filter system, holding back part of the spiritual streams. We sense-perceive only the part of the spiritual streams that we hold back by our bodily structure, the rest just streams into our body. (1910-03-28-GA119). Higher perception, see Stages of clairvoyance, consists of holding back 'more' (into conscious cognition).
• note: there are various youtube videos by David Bohm and Krishnamurti explaining this point also, in ways complementary to Rudolf Steiner. See below 'Note 1 - Bohm and Krishnamurti on the 'Man in the mirror' or bandpass filter'

Aspects

• with waking consciousness Man lives in a world of reflections also called 'maya'
  • our I-consciousness uses sensory perception with the physical body as a reflector and the astral body to make the presentations, with images stored in the physical body and memories stored in the ether body (1921-08-12-GA206, 1921-08-13-GA206, 1921-08-14-GA206)
  • Man's true 'I' is spiritual, lives in the spirit world, and hence our true 'I' is not confined within our physical body, but within all around all we see around us. See descriptions on Man's higher triad, eg 1914-10-03-GA156 and 1914-12-19-GA156.
  • The encounter between our true spiritual 'I' and the perceived reflection is symbolized in the 'ouroboros', or the 'snake biting its own tail', see Schema FMC00.327 and Schema FMC00.290 below, on the right
  • waking consciousness arises in the brain that acts as a reflector, as Man's astral streams are held back at the height of the brain and there meet with cosmic astrality to then combine with the etheric streams produced by Man that do stream into the brain.
    • 'Man in the mirror'
      • The brain works only as a reflecting apparatus, whereby it throws back the soul-activity and this becomes visible to itself. ... That the brain forms the thought ... is about as true as to say when one looks into a mirror that the mirror has 'made' the face. In fact, the face is outside the mirror; the mirror only reflects the face, throws it back. (1914-01-23-GA151)
    • See also Schema FMC00.257: Man develops an independent etheric life towards the head because they raise that part out of both the zodiac and the movements of the planets. Then the human astral body and human 'I' enter and are able to take part in the thought and idea activity of the ether body (1921-10-30-GA208)
    • See also Between heart and brain#Damming up between heart and brain

technical aspects

• waking consciousness arises out of dream consciousness as the astral body is drawn into the physical body (1922-05-05-GA212)
• sense perception is holding back
  • we sense-perceive only the part of the elementals we hold back, the rest streams in (1910-03-21-GA119 and 1910-03-28-GA119)
  • the rest as cosmic inspiration flows into our subconsciousness behind our conscious sensory perception (1921-11-04-GA208, see Schema FMC00.230)
• importance of physical body (as a mirror required for waking consciousness) - imagine eg dementia, drugs, ..
  • if through any damage to the reflecting apparatus, the soul-experience is no longer perceived by the consciousness, it is absolute nonsense to conclude that the soul-experience itself is bound up with the mirror. If someone breaks a mirror in which you see yourself, he does not break you. You merely disappear from your own field of vision. So it is when the reflecting apparatus for the soul-life, the brain, is disturbed. Perception ceases, but the soul-life itself, in so far as it goes on in the etheric body and the astral body, is not in the least disturbed. (1911-10-11-GA131)

various

• relation of self-consciousness and Man's mineral skeleton: "Man knows of himself because he has a solid skeletal support. How does one know of one-self? Because one has the skeleton inside oneself. It is because of this that one knows of oneself. " (1924-01-07-GA352, see Human skeleton#1924-01-07-GA316)
• borderline effects of current waking consciousness
  • remnants of ancient clairvoyance (1909-05-01-GA057 on stages of clairvoyance)
  • the subconscious (1912-02-27-GA143 on stages of clairvoyance) and references on Waking Consciousness#Coverage including the psychology of Freud and Jung
  • hypnosis:

Inspirational quotes

1911-10-11-GA131

A person has an experience .. but does not become conscious of it without a mirror. The mirror is the physical body. The perceptions, the thoughts, are thrown back by the sheath of the physical body ... thereby we become conscious of them.

...

without consciousness we could not be conscious of the I. In order to make I-consciousness our own during life on Earth, our physical body, with its brain organisation, has to be a reflecting apparatus. We learn to become conscious of ourselves through our own mirrored reflection. If we had no mirror apparatus, we could not be conscious of our own selves.

Illustrations

Principle

Schema FMC00.290: is assembled from scans of BlackBoard Drawings (BBD) from the GA206 lectures. It shows - on the left - Man's fourfold bodily principles, and how the human 'I' confronts itself in the physical world through the world of the human senses. This is symbolized on the right by the 'snake biting its own tail', the symbol of the ouroboros.

The lectures explain how the 'I' (in blue), confronts and receives the impressions from sensory physical world experience (in red). Link this to the study of Schema FMC00.289 and variants.

The key lecture for the 'snake symbol' is 1921-08-13-GA206: the fact that the 'I' has an inner recollection (of say a Man in the street), and now receives an sensory impression experience (of that Man we see in the street). The inner and outer experiences meet, and this experience is 'I-consciousness'.

See also Waking consciousness, Process of perception, Human 'I'.

For more on the ouroboros symbol, see Schema FMC00.328 and Lemniscatory time and space#physical reality as a projection

Physiological view illustrations

Schema FMC00.681A: shows the Lyre of Apollo and the human nerve-sense subsystem with balance of breathing and blood circulation underlying human consciousness.

"In every breath the cosmos enters into us, and this meets the blood, which is the expression of our inner forces" and "In breathing the outer world penetrates man; in circulation the inner world strives outward. Conscious life arises where the two streams meet.”

Lower left: Building on Schema FMC00.681, this Schema serves as an illustration to the references quotes in the lower right corner that are on the topic pages of the different inter-related elements to bring together various aspects: a) how the breathing causes or pushes against the blood circulation b) the 4:1 ratio between the two rhythms (see also The heart's two blood circuits) c) how the breathing process causes the rhythmic undulation of the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) - shown here with the dark blue vertical arros d) the whole considered along the spectrum of elements and ethers, so air processes related to the astral, the etheric working on the watery, the human I mediating warmth.

• 1918-06-01-GA271 and 1919-12-30-GA320 are on Nerve-sense subsystem#lyre of Apollo
• 1921-06-26-GA205 and 1923-03-29-GA281 are on Rhythmic subsystem#Hexameter
• 1921-12-28-GA303 and 1922-05-15-GA212 are on Human breathing#Conscious thinking and rhythm of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF)

The six references are given to initialize one's study of these subtopics (with other references on these pages) that have to be integrated in one's mind. Furthermore see also: The heart's two blood circuits (shown here in red) and Between heart and brain.

On the left: In breathing, the human being is entirely conjoined with the cosmos. The air which I have just breathed in was formerly an ingredient in the cosmos, and it will afterwards become an ingredient in the cosmos once more - and here not just coarse but also fine breathing is meant.

In our in-breathing the external world pulsates: we receive the moving waves of cosmic life into ourselves, and adjust them to our inner being. In our out-breathing our own blood pulsates: we impart to the rhythm of the breath something of the vibration of the pulse in the circulating blood (1922-09-22-GA216).

This interchange between Man and the world finds its inner formation in the rhythm of blood-circulation, closely bound up with the breathing-rhythm through a harmony expressed in the ratio one to four between respiration and pulse.

Upper right: The idea is that the Schema comes to life as an image and foundation to understand the process of human consciousness and what we call the human 'I' and threefold soul: the process of perception with the human senses, and thinking.

The image on the upper right (from 1919-12-30-GA320) points to the fact that with this lyre of Apollo, with the nerve-sense subsystem (nerves, senses) thus 'riding' on the rhythmic subsystem (breathing, blood circulation ..), Man is able to experience inner differentiations that relate to what enters the human senses as an air wavefront, or light .. and thus becomes a conscious soul experience of tone, music, speech, vision. See also the short description on the Music topic page.

In summary, from Schema FMC00.431, the human 'I' "plays on the instrument of the soul and the different strings of human soul life".

Soul spiritual view illustrations

Schema FMC00.229: illustrates the process of contemporary waking consciousness sketched with clairvoyant cognition, so focusing on the soul-spiritual process disregarding the physical, based on the lecture of 1918-08-18-GA183.

It explains how the process of perception and waking consciousness is a process of reflection against a impermeable 'dam' or mirror of Man's subconsciousness. We sense-perceive only the part of the spiritual streams that we hold back by our bodily structure, the rest streams into our body, and much that is happening in the other subsystems lies below this threshold in our subconsciousness.

See also Schema variants FMC00.229A and FMC00.229B.

Schema FMC00.229A: provides the original illustrations from the Steiner archive manuscripts and typoscripts of the lecture of 1918-08-19-GA183

Schema FMC00.229B: shows a simplified picture of Schema FMC00.229 focusing on the aspects of memory and love (based on 1918-08-18-GA183).

This is further elaborated end in the lectures of end 1922, see Memory and love.

In the process during death and a new birth these are experienced as a rhythm between inner reflection (memory connected with human egoism and human freedom) and outer connection (morality, the outcome of experiencing love, is a result of communion with higher hierarchies). Here on Earth these experiences come to expression, not as a rhythm, but as two co-existing human faculties: the faculty of love and the faculty of memory.

Schema FMC00.231 illustrates how we form inner experience of perception of the outer, and only perceive and store a small part in memory, see below for descriptive in lecture extract

Schema FMC00.230: shows the blackboard drawing (BBD) of lecture 1921-11-04-GA208 explaining how cosmic spiritual influences flow into our subconsciousness behind our conscious sensory perception and contemporary Waking consciousness.

See Schema FMC00.230B for a different and more complete representation.

Schema FMC00.230A: shows various drawings from people attending the lecture of 1921-11-04-GA208, complementing the blackboard drawing (BBD) of Schema FMC00.230.

Schema FMC00.230B: shows a more structured representation of the inflowing of spiritual influences from the astral world, lower spirit world and higher spirit world, called imaginations, inspirations, intuitions into the human being.

Parts of these are reflected and enter our conscious awareness, making up the contemporary waking consciousness and soul experience of thinking, feeling and willing. The majority however flows into the human organism and the three subsystems of Man as a threefold being. Hence the process of perception underlying conscious awareness is a filter system, holding back part of the spiritual streams: we sense-perceive only the part of the spiritual streams that we hold back by our bodily structure, the rest just streams into our body.

Another description: "it is only by the thought being reflected, being thrown back and not entering the brain, that consciousness arises." In contrast to thinking, willing is an activity of the soul which does enter the body ('deeper') but it is thrown back by the (glandular) abdominal nervous system in the same way as the thought is thrown back by the brain. (1915-05-01-GA161)

Schema FMC00.226: captures a few blackboard drawings by Rudolf Steiner from various lectures explaining the process of waking consciousness, with the most complete description given in the lectures of 1918-08-GA183.

In common is the blue backbone of the spinal column showing the chakras (see Development of the chakras).

Schema FMC00.033A: explains the principle of current contemporary Waking consciousness that takes place in the human brain that acts as a reflector. It shows the etheric streams that rise up between the human heart and brain, and the Damming up of the streams at the height of the heart and the brain.

Compare with the process of Human breathing and the flow of fine breathing: the etheric streams on Schema FMC00.463 and Schema FMC00.015 and Schema FMC00.015A, and contemplate how the higher ethers we take in work in and on Man.

Schema FMC00.685: illustrates the impact of natural evolutionary process of the loosening of the etheric body on human consciousness.

On the left: the contemporary predominant waking consciousness illustrated by the soul experience of thinking in the human head, using the physical body as a 'reflecting device'.

On the right: a sketch of the loosening of the etheric from the physical body, an effect also accomplished through meditation as part of initiation exercises. The faculty of cognition shifts to using the etheric body as a 'reflecting device' and leads to imaginative clairvoyance.

The two illustrations come from the first lectures quoted below each drawing.

Notes:

• the loosening of the etheric body is covered on Christ in the etheric#loosening of the etheric body
• for the traces neurology studies in the human brain, as referenced in 1915-05-01-GA161, see Schema FMC00.676

Other

Schema FMC00.576: bundles illustrations from various lectures where Rudolf Steiner uses the 'onions sheaths' depiction of Man's bodily principles to illustrate - in different contexts - how consciousness relates to the lower bodily sheaths.

For this type of presentation, see also Schema FMC00.575, Schema FMC00.356; and similarly for the development of the lower bodies themselves before, Schema FMC00.574.

Schema FMC00.474: depicts the fact that contemporary waking consciousness is related to our physical senses and bodily constitution, and acts as a bandpass filter only showing part of the complete (spiritual) reality. This results in a limited worldview (of mineral science), and waking consciousness triggers the feeling of separate-ness as we feel our self is enclosed and corresponding to our physical body.

However at the same time Man's structure includes higher components part of the astral world, lower and higher spirit world (see green or blue lines). Although Man is not aware, he is really part of a group soul and monad, and all actions towards another person are therefore in a way to one's self. This is depicted more structurally with Schema FMC00.661 and variants.

From the spiritual scientific worldview perspective of the Cosmic fractal, see also Schema FMC00.479A and Schema FMC00.632

Lecture coverage and references

Coverage

The lectures published the book Psychoanalysis in the Light of Anthroposophy lay the foundations for a truly spiritual psychology.

• 1917-11-10-GA178 and 1917-11-11-GA178: Anthroposophy and Psychoanalysis I and II ( examination of the principles of Freud and Jung)
• 1912-02-25-GA143 and 1912-02-27-GA143: on hidden soul powers, the subconscious
• 1921-07-02-GA205: Connections Between Organic Processes and the Mental Life of Man

Reference extracts

As background it is good to realize how sense perception is holding back: we sense-perceive only the part of the elementals we hold back, the rest streams in (and is sometimes also called ‘cosmic breathing’), refer to 1910-03-21-GA119 and 1910-03-28-GA119 (L1 and L8).

See more on Process of perception.

1800 - J. G. Fichte - The Vocation of Man

in 'Knowledge'

I: My consciousness of the object is only a yet unrecognised consciousness of my production of the representation of an object. Of this production I know no more than that it is I who produce, and thus is all consciousness no more than a consciousness of myself

...

Of what I am, I know no more than that I am, but here no tie is necessary between subject and object. My own being is this tie, I am at once the subject knowing, and the object known of; and this reflection or return of the knowledge on itself is what I designate by the term I

in 'Faith'

Who am I? Subject and object in one — contemplating and contemplated, thinking and thought of. As both must I have become what I am.

1910-03-28-GA119

(SWCC)

.. how does the I slips into the body? .. How is it that on waking we are suddenly surrounded with sense-perceptions, such as impressions of colour and light? For example, suppose the first sense-impression we have on waking is a blue surface, the colour blue. What is the explanation of this impression? Ordinary consciousness is completely at sea here.

The reason is that when the I is passing out of the Macrocosm into the Microcosm, a kind of barrier is created against the in-streaming spiritual forces, against everything we call the Elementary World. Something is held back with the result that only a portion of the Elementary World flows in. If we see a blue surface in front of us, then, through this blue surface all these forces are flowing in, with the exception of a part of the Elementary World. The part of the Elementary World that is held back comes into our consciousness as a mirror-image, a reflection, and this reflection is the blue colour. The elements of fire, air, water and earth (spiritually conceived as belonging to the Elementary World) stream through the eye with the exception of what we actually see. Sense-perception arises through the fact that our eye holds back part of the light from the Elementary World, our ear holds back part of the sound, our other organs hold back part of the fire or warmth; what is not held back, streams into us.

Now reconsider .. that the “eye is formed by the light for the light” .. the eye is not formed by what is reflected, but by what comes to us with the light, and that is part of the Elementary World. Moreover something also streams in from the World of Spirit, indeed from all the worlds of which we have spoken. Accordingly we may say: At this particular point certain forces are held back by the eye, and also by the other senses; what does not stream into us, what is held back, is the sum-total of our sense-impressions. Thus it is what we do not let through that we see or hear; but what we do let through is what has formed the physical organism of the eye, for example. We hold back certain forces and allow certain others to pass through — these latter being forces of the Elementary World. If we look at the eyeball in a mirror, then too we see only what it does not let through. Thus in the Elementary World there are forces which have formed our sense of sight and also our other senses. As sense-beings we are formed out of the Elementary World; the world we see when we are able to look into the Elementary World is the world which builds up our senses.

At the inner “wall” of our organ of sight there is a kind of second mirror, for there, from a further world, other forces flow in — with the exception of those that are reflected. There the elemental forces themselves are held back and reflected; they cease to function and it is only the forces of the World of Spirit that stream through and are not reflected. These are the forces that form, for example, the optic nerve. Just as the eye has its optic nerve, so has the ear its aural nerves from the forces streaming in from the World of Spirit. From there stream the forces of Beings who are the builders of the whole nervous system. Our nerves are ordered according to the laws of the planetary world outside, for the planetary world is the outer expression of spiritual realities and spiritual worlds.

1911-08-26-GA129

see in full on: Between heart and brain#1911-08-26-GA129

short extract

[basis for waking consciousness]

Etheric-astral substance in Man flows from below upwards. This etheric-astral substance expands in the brain in such a way as to fill it, but is held back there, just as a ray of light which falls upon a mirror is arrested and thrown back. Here we have the true mirroring-process. Because the astral stuff of the brain is held back, it reflects itself, and what in this way enters into you and is reflected, is your thought, your conscious feeling, what you normally experience as your soul-life.

And it is only because this astral part is so to speak tied together or sewn together by the etheric currents streaming through the brain, which thus effect a union between the inner astrality and the outer, that knowledge of the outer world comes about.

Everything that we know of the outer world we know because the outer astrality unites with the inner astrality by virtue of the strange astral cap or hood which everyone has.

1911-10-11-GA131

ut then he has to face another difficulty: he now has to answer the question why the human mind is not adapted to comprehend the greatest fact in human evolution. To answer this question we must go somewhat more closely into the real nature of human understanding. Here I should like to remind you of my Munich lectures, Wonders of the World, of which I will now give a resume as far as we need one.

The elements that go to make up our soul life, our thoughts, feelings and perceptions, are not to be found in our present-day physical body; they penetrate only as far as the etheric body. In order to be clear about this, let us imagine our human nature, in so far as it consists of Ego, astral body and etheric body, enclosed in an ellipse:

We will take this diagram to represent schematically what we call our inward life and can experience in our souls; the diagram shows it coming to expression only in the streams and forces of the etheric body. If we experience a thought or perception, it has three lines of action in our soul-nature, as indicated in the following diagram.

Within our soul-nature there is nothing that is not present in this way. Now if a Man's ordinary earthly consciousness were restricted to soul-experiences within the confines of the diagram, the experiences would occur, but he would not be conscious of them; they would remain unconscious. Our soul-experiences become conscious only through a process which an analogy will help us to understand.

Imagine you are going in a certain direction, looking straight ahead. Your name is Smith. While you are going straight ahead you do not see Smith, yet you are he, you experience him, you are the person ‘Smith’. Imagine that someone puts a mirror in front of you. Now ‘Smith’ stands before you. What you had previously experienced you now see; it meets you in the mirror. So it is with the soul-life of man. A person has an experience, but he does not become conscious of it without a mirror. The mirror is the physical body. The perceptions, the thoughts, are thrown back by the sheath of the physical body. Thereby we become conscious of them. Hence in the diagram we can represent the physical body as the enclosing sheath. For us, as earthly men, the physical body is in truth a reflecting apparatus.

[think dementia, Alzheimer ..]

If in this way you go more and more deeply into the nature of the human soul and of human consciousness, it will be impossible for you to consider as in any way dangerous or significant all those things which are brought forward again and again by materialism in opposition to the spiritual conception of the world. If through any damage to the reflecting apparatus, the soul-experience is no longer perceived by the consciousness, it is absolute nonsense to conclude that the soul-experience itself is bound up with the mirror. If someone breaks a mirror in which you see yourself, he does not break you. You merely disappear from your own field of vision. So it is when the reflecting apparatus for the soul-life, the brain, is disturbed.

Perception ceases, but the soul-life itself, in so far as it goes on in the etheric body and the astral body, is not in the least disturbed.

But have we not come to a point when we must consider closely the nature of the physical body? You will agree that without consciousness we could not be conscious of the I. In order to make I-consciousness our own during life on Earth, our physical body, with its brain organisation, has to be a reflecting apparatus. We learn to become conscious of ourselves through our own mirrored reflection. If we had no mirror apparatus, we could not be conscious of our own selves. What is this mirror?

1912-02-25-GA143 and 1912-02-27-GA143

on hidden soul powers, the subconscious

1913-03-25-GA145

considers threefold Man as made up of Eagle, Lion, Bull.

1914-01-23-GA151

[the Man in the mirror]

The uncompromising materialist of our day finds it suits his purpose to say that the brain forms the thought — more exactly, that the central nervous system forms the thought.

For anyone who sees through things, this is about as true as to say when one looks into a mirror that the mirror has “made” the face.

In fact, the face is outside the mirror; the mirror only reflects the face, throws it back.

The experience a Man has of his thoughts is quite similar.

(We will leave aside for the moment other aspects of the soul.) The experience of real, active thinking no more arises from the brain than the image of a face is created by the mirror. The brain, in fact, works only as a reflecting apparatus, whereby it throws back the soul-activity and this becomes visible to itself. The brain has as little to do with what a Man perceives as thoughts as a mirror has to do with your face when you see it in a glass. But there is something more than that. When someone thinks, he really perceives only the last phases of his thinking-activity, of his thinking experience.

And now, in order to make this clear, I want to take up once more the comparison with the mirror.

Imagine that you are standing there and want to see your face in a mirror. If you have no mirror, then you cannot see your face. You may look as long as you like, but you will not see your face. If you want to see it, you must work up some material so that is reflects your face. That is, you must first prepare the material so that it can produce the reflection. Then, when you gaze at the surface, you see your face. The soul has to do the same with the brain. The actual perceiving of a thought is preceded by a thinking activity that works upon the brain. For example, if you want to perceive the thought “lion”, your thinking activity first sets in motion certain parts of the brain, deep within it, so that they become the “mirror” for the perception of the thought “lion”. And the agent who thus makes the brain into a mirror is you yourself. What you finally perceive as thoughts are the reflections, the mirror-pictures; what you first have to prepare so that the right reflection may appear is some part or other of the brain. You, with your soul-activity, are the very thing that gives the brain the form and capacity for reflecting your thinking as thoughts. If you want to go back to the activity on which the thought is based, then it is the activity which, from out of the soul, takes hold of the brain and gets to work there. And when from out of your soul you set up a certain activity in your brain, this brings about a reflection such that you perceive the thought “lion”. You see, a soul-spiritual element has to be there first. Then, through its activity, the brain is made into a mirror-like apparatus for reflecting the thought. That is the real process, but such a muddled idea of it prevails that many people nowadays cannot grasp it at all.

A person who makes a little progress in occult perception can separate the two phases of his soul-activity.

He can trace how it is that when he wants to think something or other, he has first not simply to grasp the thought, but to prepare his brain for it. If he has prepared it so that it reflects, then he has the thought. When one wants to investigate occultly, so that one can picture things, one always has, first, the task of carrying through the activity which prepares the picturing. It is this that is so important for us to notice. For it is only when we keep these things well in mind that we have before us the real activity of human thinking. Now for the first time we know how human thinking-activity is carried out. First, this activity lays hold of the brain, in connection somewhere with the central nervous system. It sets in motion — let us say if we wish — the atomistic portions in some way, brings them into some sort of movement; by this means they become a mirror-apparatus; the thought is reflected, and the soul becomes conscious of the thought.

Thus we have to distinguish two phases: first the work on the brain from out of the psychic-spiritual in preparation for the external physical experience; then the perception takes place, after the work on the brain has prepared the ground for this act of perceiving by the soul. In the ordinary way this preparatory work on the brain remains entirely unconscious. But an occult researcher must start by actually experiencing it. He has to go through the experience of how the soul-activity is poured in, and the brain made ready to reflect the thought as an image.

What I have now explained happens continually to a person between waking up and going to sleep.

[see also Schema FMC00.391 on Stages of clairvoyance]

The thinking activity is always working on the brain, and so, throughout the waking state, it makes the brain into a mirror-apparatus for the thoughts. But it is not sufficient that the only thinking-activity worked up in us should be that worked up by ourselves. For one might say it is a narrowly limited activity that is here worked up in this way by means of the psychic-spiritual. When we wake up in the morning and are awake through the day, and in the evening fall asleep again, then the psychic-spiritual activity which belongs to the thinking is working all day long upon the brain, and thereby the brain becomes a reflecting-apparatus. But the brain must first be there; then, the soul-spiritual activity can make little furrows in the brain, or, one might say, its memoranda and engravings. The main substance and form of the brain must first be there. But that is not enough for our human life.

Our brain could not be worked upon by our daily life if our whole organism were not so prepared that it provides a basis for this daily work. And this work of preparation comes from the cosmos. Thus as we work daily at the “engraving” of the brain, which makes it into a mirror-apparatus for our daily thought, so, in so far as we cannot ourselves do this engraving, this giving form, form has to be given to us from the cosmos. As our little thoughts work and make their little engravings, so must our whole organism be built up from out of the cosmos, according to the same pattern of thought-activity. For example, that which appears to us finally in the sign of Idealism is present in the spiritual cosmos as the activity producing Idealism, and it can so work upon a man that it prepares his whole organism so that he inclines to Idealism. In like manner are the other varieties of moods and signs worked in upon men from out of the spiritual cosmos.

Man is built up according to the thoughts of the cosmos. The cosmos is the “great thinker” which down to our last finger-nail engraves our form in us, just as our little thought-work makes its little imprints on our brain every day. As our brain — I am referring only to the small portions where imprints can be made — stands under the influence of the work of thinking, so does the whole man stand under the influence of cosmic thinking.

1914-10-GA156

The lectures of 1914-10-03/4/5/6-GA156, and especially the last two, show how the etheric and physical bodies can used for inner reading and listening of the spiritual vowels and consonants. They explain incarnate clairvoyance whereby the astral senses (imagination, astral world) are used for inner reading of the cosmic wisdom of the solar system, using our own etheric and physical bodies as a reflector of the spiritual reality.

At the start of the first lecture of the series, Steiner mentions that due to the first world war, he can not bring the contents that was originally intended, but later he also mentions he will come back on this in later times.

See Schema FMC00.391 on Stages of clairvoyance

1917-11-10-GA178 and 1917-11-11-GA178

Anthroposophy and Psychoanalysis I and II ( examination of the principles of Freud and Jung)

1918-08-GA183

1918-08-18-GA183,1918-08-19-GA183 and 1918-08-25-GA183 (along with 1918-09-02-GA183) are about Memory and Love (see Schema FMC00.229)

1918-08-18-GA183

[what will be sketched]

Today I should like to start by giving a kind of sketch of the human soul, as this human soul stands in relation to the world and to itself.

I should like to give this sketch in such a way that it can be said: we are looking at the profile of man as a soul being. So that we understand ourselves just as if we were to look at the physical man—not the soul-being (see Head in diagram 1)—not perhaps seeing him full-face but, let us say, from the right in profile. Let us observe him thus.

If we try to sketch in outline anything like this we must naturally always keep in mind that we have to do with imaginative knowledge, that the reality behind the matter therefore is being given in picture form. The picture refers to the matter and is given, too, in such a way that it correctly indicates the matter. Naturally, however, we may not have the same idea of a drawing, a sketch, meant to represent something of a soul and spirit nature as we do of anything that in a naturalistic way is copied from an external perceptible reality. One must be conscious all the time of what I am now saying. I shall therefore omit all that concerns the physical and lower etheric organism of man and try to sketch only what is soul, soul-and-spirit (see diagram 2).

[influences from spirit world]

As you know from the various descriptions that have been given, the soul-and-spirit stands in a more direct connection with the world of soul-and-spirit than physical Man stands in connection with his physical environment.

• Towards his physical perceptible environment physical Man is rather an isolated being; one might even say that physical Man of the senses is really shut up within his actual skin.
• It is not so where what can be called the men of soul-and-spirit is concerned. There we have to think of a continual crossing of the currents pulsating in the inner depths of Man's soul-and-spirit - of all the movements and currents existing in the general, universal world of soul-and-spirit.

[sketch]

[environment - cosmic influences 'everywhere', so a surging blue sea filling space]

If I want first of all to describe from the one side the kind of relation the human soul-and-spirit has to what is of soul-and-spirit in the cosmic environment, I should have perhaps to do it in this way. I should, first of all, have to paint what enters in a soul-spiritual way from the universal, from the infinity of space, like this. Naturally I should have to paint the whole space in a way... but that is not really necessary. I shall only paint Man's immediate environment. Thus it is now what we may understand as the surrounding world. (see blue in diagram 2).

Now imagine in this picture form of the soul-spiritual that into which Man is placed. Man indeed is not yet there, but indicated in this blue is only the edge of the environment. Imagine this like a surging blue sea filling space. (When I say ‘blue’ sea this must naturally be taken as I have often described it in books available to you, namely, colours are to be grasped in the description of the aura, of the soul-spiritual.) Borne like a wave, swimming, I might say, or hovering, so nothing else is borne up which is of soul-and-spirit. This is what I should now have to represent perhaps in the following way.

[Man's spirit-and-soul in red, with upper part violet lilac]

Thus, if we pass from the cosmic environment to Man, we may be able to think of ourselves and what belongs to the human spirit-and-soul as perhaps hovering in this red.

There we should have first of all part of the soul-spiritual; and - if we would make the sketch in accordance with reality - it is only the upper part we should have to give in a kind of violet, in lilac graduating into red. This could only be given correctly by toning down the red into violet.

Thus, you see, with this I have given you first what might be called the one pole of man's spirit-and-soul nature.

[second part: aura of Man .. orange, yellow, green running into the blue - see also Human aura ... by passing over into blue-violet it leaves off being man and becomes the encircling cosmos]

We get the other pole when we can perhaps incorporate in the following way what, adjoining the universal soul-spiritual here, is swimming and hovering towards the human physical face: yellow, green, orange; green running into the blue.

Here you get from the right side what I might call the side view of the normal aura of Man. I say expressly a normal aura seen from the right side.

What is presented to the view in this figure shows how man is placed into his environment of soul-and-spirit. But it also describes where man, the soul-and-spirit in man, stands in relation to itself.

When everything represented by this figure is studied, it can clearly be seen how Man is a being bounded on two sides.

• These two sides where man has his limits are always observed in life; but they are not indicated correctly nor considered in the right way—at least they are not understood.
  • You know how in external science it is said that when man observes the world, when with his science he wishes to gain knowledge of the world, he comes to definite limits. We have often spoken of these limits, of the famous ignorabimus (“we shall never know”) which holds good with scientists and many philosophers. It is said that man comes indeed to certain limits in his cognition, in his conception, of the external world. I have certainly already quoted to you du Bois-Reymond's famous statement that in his seventieth year he made to the Scientific Congress in Leipzig; Human cognition will never penetrate into the regions haunted by matter—this is roughly what he said at the time.
  • Perhaps the more correct way of speaking about the limits to human knowledge would be the following. In observing the world it is necessary for man to hold fast certain concepts which he penetrates neither with his scientific cognition nor with his ordinary philosophical cognition, we need only consider such concepts as that of the atom. The atom, however naturally has meaning only when we cannot actually speak of it, when we cannot say what it is. For the moment we were to begin describing the atom, it would no—longer be an atom. It is simply something unapproachable. And it is thus already matter, actual substance. Certain concepts have to be maintained that can never be approached. It is the same with knowledge of the external world; inaccessible concepts like matter, force and so on, must be maintained. That they should have to be maintained, depends here simply upon the inner light of man's soul-and-spirit stretching out into the darkness. What is stated to be the limit of knowledge can, I might say, actually be seen clearly in the aura.

[boundary -> open lemniscate representing spiritual influence on Man ]

Here lies a boundary in front of Man. His being, what he himself is, is here represented in the aura, by what I have made run from bright green into blue violet (see diagram 2). But by passing over into blue-violet it leaves off being man and becomes the encircling cosmos. There with his being, which is the inner force of his world outlook, man comes to a boundary; there in a sense ... he reaches nothingness ... and he has to hold fast to concepts having no content—concepts such as matter, atom, substance, force.

This lies in the human organization, it lies in Man's connection with the whole cosmos. Man's connection with the whole cosmos actually stands out in front of him.

If we describe this boundary in accordance with the ideas of spiritual science, we can do so by saying (diagram 3): this boundary allows man with his soul to come into contact with the universe. If we indicate the direction of the universe in one loop of a lemniscate we can with the other loop show what belongs to man, only what proceeds from man goes out into the universe, into the infinite.

[see also lemniscate as symbol for astral body on Schema FMC00.679]

Therefore we must make the line of the loop, the lemniscate, open on one side, closed on the other, and draw it like this—here the line of the loop is closed and here it goes out into infinity. It is the same line that I drew there, only here the arm goes out at this end into infinity (see diagram 4 of lemniscate open to the outside). What I have here drawn as an open lemniscate, as an open loop, is not just something thought out, but something you can actually look upon as flashing in and out of a gentle, very slow movement as the expression of Man's relation to the universe. The currents of the universe continually approach Man; he draws them towards him, they become intermingled in his vicinity and proceed outward again. Thus this kind of thing streams towards Man, interweaves and then goes out again; Man is permeated by these currents belonging to the universe, which stop short in front of him.

[wave-like auric stream, like a saluting whirpool]

As you may imagine, through this Man is surrounded by a kind of wave-like aura; these currents enter from the universe, form a whirlpool here, and by making this whirlpool in front of him, as it were, salute man. So that here he is surrounded by a kind of auric stream.

This is essentially an expression of man's relation to the cosmos, to the surrounding world of soul-and-spirit.

[two fronts colliding]

You can, however, find all that you actually experience as lying in your consciousness represented here as a mixture of blue, green and yellow running into orange towards the inside.

But that pushes up against here: within the soul part of man this yellow-orange collides with what waves on the blue sea as the soul-and-spirit of the lower Man, of the Man below. What I have shown here in red passing into orange, belongs to the subconscious part of man, and corresponds to those processes in the physical that take place principally in the activity of the digestion and so forth, where consciousness plays no part.

What is connected with the consciousness would be described, where the aura is concerned, in the bright parts that I have applied here. (see diagram 2)

[chakras]

Just as here the soul-spiritual of man meets the soul-spiritual of the surrounding world, so what is within man as his soul and spirit meets his subconscious—that actually also belongs to the universe. I shall have to draw this meeting of the currents so that one of the streams goes out into the infinite; within man I must draw this meeting differently. Here I must also draw a loop line but this must be done so that it runs towards the inside. Now please notice that I am keeping entirely to a looped line but I take the under loop and turn it around so that it goes thus (diagram 6).

Thus, I turn the lower loop around. In contrast to the above diagram 5, where I have made one loop run out to infinity, widen out into the infinite, I now turn back the lower loop; with this I have shown diagrammatically the obstacles, dams, that arise where the spirit and soul here in the inside enter the subconscious spirit-and-soul and therefore also that of the cosmos.

I must therefore describe these obstacles if I draw them as corresponding to what arises in man, in the following way; seven lemniscates with turned back loops—those are the obstacles that correspond to an inner wave in man (diagram 7). If you wish actually to follow up this inner wave, its main direction—but only its main direction—would perhaps take the course of running along beside the junction of man's wrongly named but so-called sensory and motor nerves. This is only said by the way for today I am going to describe the matter chiefly in its soul-spiritual aspect.

By this you can see the strong contrast existing in man's relation to the spirit and soul environment and to himself, namely, to that bit he takes in out of the spirit-soul environment as his subconscious, and what I have had to sketch as the red wave swimming on the universal blue sea of the spirit-soul universe.

We said that this wave here (see right of diagram 2) corresponds to the barrier against which man pushes if he wishes to know about the external world.

[what we call the life of our I is essentially reflection in memory - what streams in does not go inside but is thrown back]

[note: in what follows, the term memory should be seen in context of the explanation given here, memory of spiritual influences instreaming, from our sensory experience in physical reality .. so it's not quite us remembering something in our memory .. this is low-level memory]

But there is a limit here too (see left of diagram 2); within men himself there is a barrier. Did this limit, this barrier, not exist you would always be looking down into what is within you, my dear friends. Everyone would look within himself. In the same way that man would look into the external world were the barrier (on the right) not there, if the boundary on the left were not present he would look into himself. If man looked into himself in this present cycle of evolution this would indeed give him little joy, because what he would see there would be a most imperfect, chaotic seething upheaval in man's inner nature—something that certainly could not arouse joy in him. It is, however, that into which imaginative mystics believe they are able to link when they speak of the mysticism that is full of fantasy. All that the mystics of fantasy very largely look upon as a goal worthy of their striving, what, particularly in the case of many such mystics who really believe that in looking within themselves they are able to learn about the universe, what figures with them as mysticism—all that is concealed, entirely concealed, from men by just this dam.¹

Man cannot look into himself. what is formed inside this region (left) is dammed up and reflected, it can be reflected back into itself; and the expression of this, reflection is memory, remembrance. Every time a thought or an impression that you have received comes back in memory it does so because this damming process begins to work. If you had not this stemming wave, every impression received from outside, every thought you grasp and which permeates you, would be unable to remain with you and would go out into the rest of the soul-spiritual universe. It is only because you have this obstructing wave that you can preserve the impressions you receive.

Through certain processes still to be described you are in a position to call back your impressions. And this is expressed in the functioning of recollection, of memory. You can therefore picture to yourself that you have in you something that here in this diagram is drawn in profile (for so it is drawn; there is in you just such a flat surface);

There we find thrown back what should not penetrate. When you are awake you remain united with the external world, otherwise in the waking condition everything would go through you. You would actually know nothing of impressions; you would nave impressions but be unable to keep them.

This is what memory signifies.

• And the surface of this dam that brings about our memory conceals what the imaginative mystic would like to look at, within himself. One could say of what is underneath that for those who really know these things, the saying holds good that man should never be curious to see what the beneficent Godhead has covered with night and obscurity, but the mystics are fantastic and wish to look down into it. All the same, they cannot do so, however, for they would so bore into and destroy the normal consciousness that the waves of memory would not be thrown back. All that produces our memory, all that is so necessary for external life, conceals from us what the fantastic mystic would like to see but men should not look upon. Beneath recollection, beneath what causes recollection, beneath the surface of recollection, lies an essential part of Man.

Just like the back of a mirror, the mercury being a mirror, what is in front, what is thus in your consciousness works; it does not go inside but is thrown back and is therefore able to continue there as memory. In this way our whole life is reflected as a memory. And what we call the life of our I is essentially reflection in memory.

[note the term 'damming up' is used several times in the above description, representing the subconscious or mirror that reflects experiences ... note that this terminology of 'damming up' is also used more physiologically in descriptions Between heart and brain#Damming up between heart and brain]

[recap taking a step back - link with love]

Thus you see that we actually live our conscious life between this wave (right of Diagram 2) and this other wave (left).

We should be mere funnels, therefore, letting everything flow through us; had we not this dam as the basis of memory, and we should see into the secrets beyond our boundary of knowledge were we not obliged to place ourselves outside the sphere of perceptible concepts for which we have no content. We should be funnels were we not so organised that we could not produce this dam, organised so that we should not be obliged to set up before us concepts as it were without a content, obscure concepts, we should become loveless beings, empty of love, with dry, stony natures. Nothing, in the world would please us and we should be so many Mephistopheles.

Because we are organised so that we are unable to approach what is of soul-and-spirit in our environment with our abstract concepts, with our intellectual powers, to this we owe our capacity to love.

For we are not meant to approach what we should love by analysing it in the ordinary sense of the term, nor by tearing it to pieces and treating it as chemicals are treated by the chemist in a laboratory. We do not love when we analyse like a chemist or synthesise chemically.

The power of memory, the capacity to love: these are two capacities that correspond at the same time to two boundaries of human nature.

• The boundary towards within, corresponds to the power of memory; what lies beyond the memory zone is the subconscious within man.
• The other zone corresponds to the power of love, and whet lies beyond this zone corresponds to what is of the nature of soul-and-spirit in the universe. The unconscious part of man's nature lies beyond this zone as far as what is within man reaches; the soul-spiritual of the universe goes out boundlessly from the other zone into the wide space.

We can therefore speak of the zone of love and the zone of memory and can include man's soul-and-spirit in these zones.

We must however seek beyond the one zone above (see right of diagram 2) what is unconscious, and because it remains unconscious is on that account very closely connected with the bodily nature of man, with his bodily organisation.

[things are not that simple]

Naturally things are not in reality so simple as they must be in any representation, because everything is interwoven. What is red here (diagram 2) runs into things and is changed; again, what is green and blue is also changed. Actually, things all intermix with one another: in spite of this, however, the sketch is correct in the main and corresponds with the facts.

But from this we see that for physical life here En earth, the spiritual is both strong and conscious.

• Here (left) the spiritual that actually merges into the universe is unconscious. These two parts of man are very clearly differentiated.
• The spiritual here (in the middle) is for this reason above all for earthly life a very finely woven spiritual element. Everything here (yellow) is what might be called finely woven light. Were I obliged to show where this finely woven light is in Man, I should have to go to what I have been so minutely describing—the human head.

What I have thus described, what I have sketched in yellow, yellow-green, yellow-orange, on the other side, is what I might cell the finely woven spirit light. This has no very strong connection with earthly matter; it has as little connection with earthly matter as is possible. And because it has so little connection it cannot well unite with matter, and thus, for the greater part, remains unconnected with it; to this part matter is given that actually always comes from time to time from man's previous incarnation, and there is but a loose connection between this finely woven soul-spiritual element and what belongs to the body, what has actually been held together out of the foregoing incarnation.

[physiognomy - see also ]

Your physiognomy, in its arrangement and characteristics, you carry over, my dear friends, from your previous incarnation. And those who are thoroughly able to explain man actually look through the physiognomy of the head; not through what has its origin in the luciferic within men, but more through the manner in which he adapts himself to the universe.

The physiognomy must be looked upon as though it were stamped into man, not to the extent of being the product of this stamping, but rather one has to see in it the negative of the soul; it is this that is seen in the negative of the face. If you were to make an impression of any face you would actually see there the physiognomy that relentlessly betrays what has been made of the last incarnation. On the other hand, all that I have sketched down there as being only connected with the surging sea of the world of soul and spirit, all that is to be understood as corresponding to man's subconscious or unconscious, is closely related to the bodily nature; it permeates the bodily nature. The bodily nature is united with the spiritual in such a way that the spiritual is wholly incapable of appearing as such.

[metamorphosis - see also Schema FMC00.123 on Metamorphosis]

For this reason were we to look down we should see this seething and merging of the spiritual and the bodily behind the threshold of memory. It is this that pares the head of the next incarnation and seeks to transform what will take definite material form only in the future and will not become head until the next incarnation.

For man's head is something that outstrips his stage of development. The head in its development therefore—as you may remember from lectures previously held here—has actually come to an end by man's twenty-seventh, twenty-eighth year.

In the form of the head there is already our development of man.

But, strange as it may seem, the rest of man is also a head only it is not so far advanced as the other head. If you picture to yourself a decapitated man, what remains is another head but at a more primitive stage. When further developed it become head, whereas what you have as the human head is the rest of the organism of a previous incarnation.

If you picture what in your present organism is discarnated, free of the body, if you think away the head of your present organism, the organism that will become head in the next incarnation (and this organism is but an image, everything physical being an image of something spiritual), if you imagine the spiritual element of what in its external form has not yet appeared in man, then you see this in the Group in our luciferic figure—there you have it!

Now imagine compressed into the human head all the soul-spiritual that is merged into man, and held back in you from the head, all that forms a barrier, that is to say, which man cannot penetrate (see right in diagram 2); then man will not have the old dignified head that he ordinarily has; he will have a bony head, and will be altogether bony, like the figure of Ahriman in our Group.

1918-08-19-GA183

Yesterday I was at pains to give you a picture of man as a being of soul. Vast in connection with this picture of man as soul we want particularly to deal with today is to be the two boundary zones we learned about yesterday.

• The one boundary zone is seen in how Man is obliged to come to a halt when he tries to look through the external world as it appears to him perceptibly. Scientists, philosophers, then speak of boundaries to knowledge. We know that these boundaries to knowledge do not in truth exist, but that in actual fact they are present for man's physical sense-perception.
• The other boundary is the result of everything found in our consciousness, or entering into consciousness, being mirrored back, reflected back, on to an inner zone and, by this reflection, being enabled to become memory. What we have in consciousness does not go right into the depths of the region that lies in man's subconsciousness.

We will draw these two boundaries the boundary of memory (left) and what we might at once refer to as the boundary of the capacity for love (right) which is at the same time the of our knowledge of nature.

We have indicated this in the lemniscates we drew which are open to the outside (see diagram 8) and we had here to draw lemniscates with the loop turned crack towards the inside.

• This is the external region therefore into which man can no longer look with his ordinary powers of sense-perception—this, it is imperceptible.
• And there underneath is the inwardly directed boundary of conscious life, into which man cannot descend with his consciousness. He remains with his consciousness above this limit. Should he dive down with his conscious conceptions he would have no memory.

[evolutionary perspective]

Now in connection with these two boundaries there is something quite definite to be said about this very life of the man of soul.

• If we go back in human evolution, go back perhaps farther than the eighth pre-Christian century (you remember that the year 747 begins the fourth post-Atlantean epoch), if we go back beyond this point of time into the earlier post-Atlantean ages [editor: before the fourth cultural age], then what lies beyond this boundary was to a certain degree accessible to the human consciousness into which it worked. The atavistic clairvoyance still existing at that time rested indeed upon this. Certain impulses from the cosmos came through in those days and made themselves felt as atavistic powers of vision. We could therefore say that what is here outside us first became increasingly impenetrable—I mean intellectually impenetrable—after the eighth century before Christ.
• We are living now in the fifth post-Atlantean age, and it is still impenetrable. And people are knocking at the boundary today, quite extraordinarily while continuing to maintain that no one is able to penetrate to the thing—call it how you will—lying beyond this boundary.

• It may be said on the other hand that another tendency makes itself increasingly felt, and will make itself still more felt as the sixth post-Atlantean age approaches—the zone here(left) will become penetrable. The time will come when out of the depths of human nature whet I described to you yesterday as something seething, into which man should not look (above all should not look in the sense of what the imaginative, the fantastic, mystic wants), out of this sphere from the sixth post-Atlantean age onwards all manner of things will seep through.

This time indeed will begin before the end of the fifth post-Atlantean age, our age; all kinds of things will want to leak through. This will show itself above all in far more people than we think today understanding from purely inner experience that there are repeated lives on earth, and things of that kind. One may say that already today these things are breaking through, though not very often.

... [continued]

1918-08-25-GA183

quote A - longer extract

[before this: Man as a threefold being, description of the three subsystems]

Now when man is living his ordinary life he has actually only his ordinary [waking] consciousness; but as we have seen this man is a highly complicated being.

When he is awake, when he has his head, his most recent spiritual member, in his physical head, he knows nothing of this head. You will be right in saying: Thank God we do not know anything of our head for knowing of our head means to have a headache. Men only know about their head when it aches; then they are conscious of having a head, otherwise they are unconscious of it—unconscious to a most remarkable degree, far more so than in the case of any other member of the human physical body. Man may count himself lucky when in normal consciousness he knows nothing of his head.

But beneath this consciousness of the head that ordinarily takes notice only of the outer world, that only gets as far as knowing what is around it—beneath this consciousness lies another, a kind of dream consciousness, dream-knowing. Your head, my dear friends, is always dreaming. And while you are conscious of the outer world in the way familiar to you, under the threshold of consciousness, in the subconscious, you are actually perpetually dreaming. And what you are dreaming, if you were able to bring this head dreaming into your consciousness and fully grasp it, would give you a picture, a correct comprehensive picture, of your previous incarnation. For in your head unconsciously, you are dreaming of your former incarnation. That is indeed so. There is always a slight consciousness of your previous incarnation going on, a dreaming consciousness, only it is overpowered by the strong light of of ordinary consciousness.

[see also: Past life memories]

[evolutionary]

By the year 747 before the Mystery of Golgotha, the external consciousness had become so strong that gradually this subconsciousness of the previous incarnation was completely extinguished. Before that year, however, man knew a great deal about this dream consciousness of the head. For this reason you find everywhere at the basis of the ancient cultures repeated lives on earth treated as a fact. This is due simply to the sub-consciousness of the head not then having receded so completely into the background as it did in the course of the fourth, but principally the fifth post-Atlantean age.

Even in ordinary consciousness very little is known of what is connected in a soul-spiritual way with the thorax and the middleman. It is in itself of a dream nature. This middle, thorax consciousness sometimes pushes up into man's dream consciousness, but only very chaotically and irregularly. If a man is able to breathe regularly, when his heart beat even is when in fact all the functions of man's thorax, his middle part, are in order, the consciousness of this part is not so clear as that of the head; it too in ordinary life runs its course dream fashion. We dream in our feeling, as I have stated here during past years, in feeling we dream of this middle man. But when we bring to light through consciousness, that becomes more clairvoyant, what lies in the feeling, what man experiences only in his feeling, or to put it differently, when man learns to look at what is going on in his thorax, as otherwise he can only look at what is in his head consciousness, then the consciousness of the thorax, the middle-body splits definitely into two parts.

One part dreams itself back into the whole time between the previous death and the most recent birth or conception.

Therefore while in your head consciousness in a dream way, in deep dreaming, you have unconsciously what was in your previous incarnation, in the dreams of your thorax you have what has meantime been passing since that incarnation up to your present birth.

And in the dreams that belong more to the lower part of the thorax you have a definite consciousness of what there will be between your coming death and next earth life. Thus the consciousness concentrated in the breast, which, however, for modern man remains more or less subconscious, is in reality a dream consciousness of both the time before this birth and the time after the next death. For this subconsciousness in the middle man the riddle is solved of what lies between our last earthly death and the following earthly conception, with the exception of or even including what we are now experiencing between birth and death.

Out of the third man, out of the subconsciousness of the extremities man, the tableau of the next incarnation on earth can be developed in what during the whole of life remains strictly subconscious. This can only be brought to the surface when a man is able to draw it up through ceaseless activity in the study and exercises of spiritual science, so that certain moments of sleep-life that otherwise would pass in unconscious sleep, are lifted to the surface and the man then becomes conscious during sleep. What today man has as waking consciousness is really a kind of collateral impulse of his which rays into the head from outside. Behind this consciousness, however, lies another that stretches itself over the former incarnation, over the life of that incarnation to this one, over the life of this incarnation to the next, and then over the next again. But man sleeps away this consciousness.

In the head it is the consciousness of the previous incarnation. In all the organs that principally serve the out-breathing there works a strong consciousness of the life between the previous incarnation and this one. In all the principle functions that serve the in-breathing works a consciousness of the present incarnation up to the next incarnation on earth. And in the limb-system, in all its most secret processes, works a consciousness of the next human incarnation, which remains pre-eminently subconscious.

These states of consciousness have become more less veiled since the beginning of the fourth post-Atlantean period, 747 years before the Mystery of Golgotha. And the cry of our age is for the definite consciousness of the concrete events of cosmic and human evolution to be brought back out of the general chaos of human consciousness.

We must meet all that I have just been developing with another aspect of what is part of the being of man.

• You see it is really necessary that we should enter into these difficult details, otherwise we cannot arrive at an exact understanding. I should very much welcome it if such knotty points were met not only by a certain passive acceptance, but—and this is so necessary for present day man—that even for these difficult matters a little enthusiasm were aroused, a little keen participation, which is exactly what is so hard in any society today.

Now, you turn your senses outward. There by means of your senses you find the external world spread out as something perceptible. I will draw diagrammatically what lies around us outside as something spread out for the senses.

[see Schema FMC00.231]

Allow this (see blue in diagram 2) to be what is lying outside. When you direct your eyes, your ears, your sense of smell, or whichever sense you like, to the external world, the inner side of this outside turns towards you, turns towards your senses. Thus this is the inner side of the outside (see left of diagram).

Suppose you turn your senses here to what I have drawn (see arrows). These are the senses directed towards the outer world and you see what here inside inclines within.

[start of 'crossing' description]

Now follows the difficult conception to which, however, I have to come.

Everything you look at there presents itself to you from inside. Imagine it must also have an outside.

So I will call it up diagrammatically before your souls saying: When you look out thus you see the permanent as the limit of your vision; that is approximately so, only I have drawn it small. But now imagine you could quickly fly out there, fly beyond there and take a peep through from the other side and from the other side see your sense impressions. You could look out thus (see upper arrows in diagram).

No, naturally you do not see this but, could you thus look at it, it would be the other aspect. You would have to go outside yourself, you would have to look from the other side at your whole perceptible world. You would see the reverse side of what meets you as color, what meets you as sound, and so on.

You would see the reverse of what comes to you as smell, you would receive the smell in your nose from behind.

Thus, imagine your view of the world from the other side; imagine the perceptible things spread out like a carpet, and now the carpet viewed from the other side. You see only a little bit of this reverse side, a very little bit indeed.

I can only represent this little bit by doing it like this. Imagine now that I am drawing in red what you would see from the other side, so that I can say, one sees the perceptible diagrammatically thus.

To one's ordinary view it appears blue; seen from the other side it appears red (but naturally one does not see it.)

In what you would see red, is hidden first that is experienced between death and a new birth; secondly, everything described in Esoteric Science as the evolutions of Old Saturn, Old Sun, Old Moon, Earth and so forth. Everything hidden from sense perception lies there stored up. There it is, on the other side of the sphere, but you see only a little bit. I can indicate this best by saying: take this small bit of red; this goes over (see below in diagram) and crosses the blue, so that the blue instead of being, as now, in front, is behind. (were I to draw in accordance with reality, I should have to do so in four dimensions, so I can only keep to what is quite diagrammatic.)

Thus the senses here are now turned to the blue (left); there they do not turn to the blue but to the red which moreover you do not see. Behind the red, however, there crosses what otherwise would be seen and that is now underneath. And this little bit that crosses the other there, you see continually with your ordinary consciousness. It is indeed your stored up memories.

What arises as memory does not arise in accordance with the laws of the outer world of the senses but according to laws suitable to this world that is behind. What is within as your memories is what is suited to the other side (right). As you look within on all your memories you are actually looking at a bit of the world on the other side; the other projects inwards a little and then you see the world from the other side. And if now you could slip through your memories thus received (I spoke of this a week ago [editor: probably lecture of 18 Aug]) if you could get underneath and see below your memories, look at them from the other aide from down there (see right in diagram), you would see them as your aura. There you would see man as a being with a soul-spiritual aura just as ordinarily you look at the external world of sense perceptions. But as I showed you a week ago this would be hardly pleasant because man on this other side is not yet beautiful.

[end of 'crossing' description]

Thus these are the interesting features of what must work across the other knowledge we have of threefold man. This crossing takes place here in the middle man, the breast-man.

[editor: the rhythmic subsystem of breathing and heart-blood circulation]

You remember the drawing I made a week ago where I had the lemniscates with one loop reversed, turned inside out; I must draw those here I must draw here the breast man with the lemniscates described. (see below on left of diagram.) That would coincide with the sphere of memory.

So that in his middle part the threefold man has this turnabout where the inner becomes outer and the outer inner. Here you now have in your own small microcosmic memory, a tableau, what otherwise you would see as the cosmic tableau—as the great cosmic memory. In your ordinary consciousness you see what you have been collecting since about your third year until now; this is an inner record, a little bit of what is of the same kind as the other record for the whole world-evolution and lies on the other side.

It was not without reason that I once told you that man actually has twelve senses. [cont'd]

quote B - extract from 1918-08-25-GA183 describing Schema FMC00.231 (SWCC) .. also in longer extract above

[human senses]

.. you turn your senses outward, and you find the external world spread out as something perceptible. I will draw diagrammatically what lies around us outside as something spread out for the senses.

Allow this (see blue in diagram) to be what is lying outside. When you direct your eyes, your ears, your sense of smell, or whichever sense you like, to the external world, the inner side of this outside turns towards you, turns towards your senses Thus this is the inner side of the outside (see left of diagram). Suppose you turn your senses here to what I have drawn (see arrows). These are the senses directed towards the outer world and you see what here inside inclines within.

Now follows the difficult conception to which I have to come. Everything you look at there presents itself to you from inside. Imagine it must also have an outside.

• So I will call it up diagrammatically before your souls saying: When you look out thus you see the permanent as the limit of your vision; that is approximately so, only I have drawn it small. But now imagine you could quickly fly out there, fly beyond there and take a peep through from the other side and from the other side see your sense impressions. You could look out thus (see upper arrows in diagram). No, naturally you do not see this but, could you thus look at it, it would be the other aspect. You would have to go outside yourself, you would have to look from the other side at your whole perceptible world. You would see the reverse side of what meets you as color, what meets you as sound, and so on. You would see the reverse of what comes to you as smell, you would receive the smell in your nose from behind. Thus, imagine your view of the world from the other side; imagine the perceptible things spread out like a carpet, and now the carpet viewed from the other side.

You see only a little bit of this reverse side, a very little bit indeed. I can only represent this little bit by doing it like this. Imagine now that I am drawing in red what you would see from the other side, so that I can say, one sees the perceptible diagrammatically thus. To one's ordinary view it appears blue; seen from the other side it appears red (but naturally one does not see it.) In what you would see red, is hidden first that is experienced between death and a new birth; secondly, everything described in Occult Science as the evolutions of Old Saturn, Old Sun, Old Moon, Earth and so forth. Everything hidden from sense perception lies there stored up. There it is, on the other side of the sphere, but you see only a little bit.

I can indicate this best by saying: take this small bit of red; this goes over (see below in diagram) and crosses the blue, so that the blue instead of being, as now, in front, is behind. (were I to draw in accordance with reality, I should have to do so in four dimensions, so I can only keep to what is quite diagrammatic.) Thus the senses here are now turned to the blue (left); there they do not turn to the blue but to the red which moreover you do not see. Behind the red, however, there crosses what otherwise would be seen and that is now underneath. And this little bit that crosses the other there, you see continually with your ordinary consciousness. It is indeed your stored up memories. What arises as memory does not arise in accordance with the laws of the outer world of the senses but according to laws suitable to this world that is behind. What is within as your memories is what is suited to the other side (right). As you look within on all your memories you are actually looking at a bit of the world on the other side; the other projects inwards a little and then you see the world from the other side. And if now you could slip through your memories thus received (I spoke of this a week ago - see 1918-08-18-GA183) if you could get underneath and see below your memories, look at them from the other aide from down there (see right in diagram), you would see them as your aura, There you would see man as a being with a soul-spiritual aura just as ordinarily you look at the external world of sense perceptions. But as I showed you a week ago this would be hardly pleasant because man on this other side is not yet beautiful.

1921-08-GA206

1921-08-12-GA206, 1921-08-13-GA206, 1921-08-14-GA206 describe how our I-consciousness uses sensory perception with the physical body as a reflector and the astral body to make the presentations, with images stored in the physical body and memories stored in the ether body.

It considers the four bodily principles of Man with meaning from concrete reality experience.

And also leads to the image of the dragon biting its tail as the symbol of consciousness that exists of the two streams meeting: sensory perception (and presentations) by the I (and the astral body) on the one hand, and continuous upstreaming of stored images (and memories ) from the physical body (and the ether body) on the other.

1921-11-04-GA208

see Schema FMC00.230

explains how the cosmic inspiration flows into our subconsciousness behind our conscious sensory perception.

1922-05-05-GA212

DLNB1 p 22

for context, see also at Lyre of Apollo, Nerve-sense subsystem#lyre of Apollo

this is the final part of the lecture

Here we already come upon something in which it is easier to understand that the spiritual can be active within it. Yet, it is still difficult.

[thinking in elements and ethers]

Once we come to the gaseous, the airy element, then we are in a physical material so fine that it is much easier to visualize the soul element to be within it, and easier still when we come to warmth. Just think how close a connection can come about between the warmth of the physical organism and the soul. You may at some time have had a terrible fright and grown quite hot. There you have an inner experience of the connection between the soul and the warmth in the physical organism. In fact, when we examine the solid, fluid, gaseous and warmth components of the whole organism, we gradually arrive at the soul.

It can be said that the 'I' takes hold of the inner warmth; the astral body of the gaseous; the ether body of the fluid and only the solid remains untouched; in the solid nothing enters.

[sketch image]

Picture to yourselves the way the human organism functions: You have the human brain (see drawing, page 46) that has fluid in it and also solid parts into which, as I said, the soul does not enter.

The solid parts are, in reality, salt deposits; whatever solid we have within us is always salt-like deposit. Our bones consist solely of such deposits.

In the brain very fine deposits continually occur and again dissolve. There is always a tendency in our brain to bone formation. The brain has a tendency to become quite bony. But it does not become bony because everything is in movement and is continually dissolved.

When we examine the organism, especially the brain, we first find within it

• a condition of warmth,
• and within the warmth the air which is the bearer of the astral body and is continually playing into the cerebral fluid while being breathed in and out.
• We then have the cerebral fluid in which the ether body lives.
• Then we come to the solid into which the soul cannot enter because it consists of deposited salt.

Because of this salt formation, which is less than ten percent of the total organism, we have within us something into which the soul cannot enter.

[mirror reflecting effect]

As human beings we have an organism; within this organism there are warmth, gaseous and fluid elements, all of which the soul can penetrate. But there is something which the soul cannot penetrate. This is comparable to having objects on which light falls but cannot penetrate and is therefore thrown back. Let us say we have a mirror; light cannot go through it and is therefore reflected. Similarly, the soul cannot penetrate the solid salt organism and is, therefore, continually reflected.

If this were not the case, there would be no consciousness at all. Your consciousness consists of soul experiences reflected from the salt organism.

• You are not aware of the soul life as it is absorbed by the warmth, gaseous and fluid organism;
• you experience it only because the soul life within the warmth, gaseous and fluid, is reflected everywhere by salt, just as sunbeams are reflected by a mirror. The outcome of this reflection is our mental pictures.

[see Schema FMC00.230 as an illustration of the above sentence]

[two extremes]

When someone deposits too much salt—salt always takes on forms—then he produces a lot of mental pictures; he becomes rich in thoughts. If too little salt is secreted the thoughts have vague outlines, like reflections from a faulty mirror. Or, said differently, when too much salt is secreted thoughts predominate and become very precise, and he who has them becomes pedantic. He is convinced of the rightness of his thoughts because they arise from so much solid, he becomes materialistic. When too little salt is secreted, or perhaps too much in the rest of the organism but too little in the head, then the thoughts become indefinite and the person becomes fanciful or perhaps he becomes a mystic. Our soul life is dependent on the material processes taking place within us.

It may be necessary, when someone is too prone to fanciful ideas, to administer some remedy that will enable him to deposit more salt or else give better form to the salt he does deposit. He will then escape from his fantasies. However, one should not make too great an effort to cure a human being by physical means of his fantasies or pedantry; not much can be done anyway. To do something different is more important and can be of great value—someone who knows how to observe human beings in regard to both soul and body will notice if there is too much sediment, whether in the head, or in the organs of the rhythmic or metabolic systems. He will notice it because the whole thought configuration becomes different. The manner in which a person alters his thoughts can contribute significantly to a diagnosis. But such delicate reactions are not often noticed. For example, someone may suddenly make mistakes repeatedly when speaking. He does not normally do so, but suddenly he makes mistakes again and again. It may last a few days and then cease. He has suffered a slight ailment, and the mistakes in speaking are merely a symptom. Such instances can often be described quite exactly.

[parenthesis, other example - gastric acid]

• For example, someone may for a few days secrete too much gastric acid. Now what occurs? This gastric acid dissolves certain substances in the stomach, which ought to pass on beyond the stomach. This means that the organism is deprived of these substances with the result that the person's inner mirror pictures lack the necessary sharpness. His thoughts become vague and he makes mistakes in speaking. You will have realized what must be done: One must provide a remedy that will ensure less acidity in the stomach, then the person's thoughts will again become ordered. His digestion is now in order and he ceases to make mistakes when speaking.
• Or take the example of someone who absorbs gastric acid too intensely. This can occur if the spleen is abnormally active. When this happens the gastric acid is distributed throughout the body; the body, as it were, becomes all stomach. Such acid sediments are, in fact, the cause of many illnesses. A specific pricking pain may be felt or, if the head is affected, a feeling of dullness. When you look at such a person with insight it will often be found that the absorption of all the acidity has created in him a certain greediness. When someone is permeated with acidity his eyes may lose their friendly expression. If someone is suffering from too much acidity his eyes will reveal it. It is sometimes possible to restore his friendly expression by administering an acid that can be digested in the stomach because it is of a kind that has no tendency to spread throughout the organism.

The reason I am saying all this is to show you that the science of the spirit meant here does not simply contemplate the human soul in a nebulous way. It recognizes the soul as the ruler and builder of the body, active within it everywhere.

[Role of the bones as reflector]

The human organism is described nowadays as if it were solid through and through; the solid alone is taken into account. It is impossible to arrive at any conception of how the soul actually exists within the body unless one also considers the fluid, gaseous and warmth elements of the organism. The soul does not live in the solid part of the organism; it does not enter the solid any more than light penetrates a mirror. Light is thrown back from the mirror, the soul retreats everywhere from the salt.

The peculiarity of the soul is that it is deflected from the bones (see drawing, red lines). We carry our bones within us empty of soul. The soul is not within them but is rayed back into the organism.

The bones in the skull are really ingeniously arranged. The soul rays out in all directions and is reflected into our inner being. We do exist within the skull bones but only as solid physical man. If we would make a comprehensive sketch of the head we would have to depict the soul as raying out within the head (see drawing, red lines). If nothing else happened, we would be in a dull unconscious condition. However, as the soul cannot enter the bones of the skull it is rayed back into our inner being (arrows, short red lines).

We experience the soul only when it is reflected into our inner being. So, you see how matters stand: The reality is that you have the soul within you rayed back from the mirror of the skull bones.

Spiritual science does not exclude what is material; on the contrary, recognition of how the soul controls matter makes it, at last, comprehensible. After all one does not come to know that someone is a baker by the fact that he makes certain movements, but from knowing that the movements he makes shape the rolls and croissants. Neither does one come to know the soul through abstract considerations but by knowing that a reflection of the soul's activity is to be found in the physical organism. It is a question of understanding the organism rightly and recognizing that it is an image of the soul. If we cannot make the effort to understand even man's physical nature we shall never learn to know the soul. We must have the goodwill to understand how human nature comes to expression through the physical. What is usually spoken of as soul, by those who will not approach the physical with spiritual insight, is something utterly unreal. It is as unreal as if you had a tasty meal before you and, instead of eating it, tried to eat its reflection in a mirror standing beside it. One can become knowledgeable about the soul only by observing her creative activity and not by persisting to regard it as a mere abstraction. And one should certainly not adopt the view that to be a conscientious spiritual scientist one must scorn the material. Rather should the material be understood spiritually; it will then reveal itself as spirit through and through. To do otherwise is to live in intellectual abstractions, and they obscure rather than enlighten.

Breaking the mirror

This section is an investigation of Rudolf Steiner's use of the metaphoric image of the mirror (of cognition, which is our physical body), and breaking through that mirror (to supersensible cognition)

1915-12-10-GA065

The spiritual researcher therefore needs to refer to nothing but what every person who practices thinking actually admits. For in what he admits, in the training of thought, the spiritual world is found. In thinking, man is already clairvoyantly immersed in the spiritual world, except that instead of living thinking, he receives thinking that is merely a reflection. Therefore, I can again express the comparison that has already been described many times. When one stands before a mirror image, one experiences oneself inwardly, but one experiences oneself in such a way that the mirror provides the image. Everything is in the mirror, except that it provides the dead image that is not experienced. It is as if one could conjure away the mirror image and now experience the whole pictorially within oneself. This is how it is when, in thinking, one departs from one's pictorial nature, which really relates to the experienced thinking like the reflection, and passes over to the experience of thinking itself. As I said, the spiritual worlds creep into thinking. The I, the deeper I, the spectator living within us, creeps into the inwardly formed world of the will in the manner described.

1916-02-26-GA065

Let us try to grasp this distinction more vividly. What exactly is it? With regard to external nature, our organs are already given. Our eyes have been given us. Goethe has said very beautifully, "Were not the eye sunlike, how could we behold the light?"¹⁸ Just as it is a fact that you would not hear me when I speak unless you met me half-way by listening in order to understand me so, in Goethe's view, it is a fact that the eye has been created out of the light of the sun by a devious path of hereditary and other complicated processes. And by this is meant, not merely that the eye creates light in Schopenhauer's sense, but that it is itself created by light. This must be firmly borne in mind. And those who are inclined to be materialists may, we suggest, thank God! They no longer need to create their eyes, for these eyes are created from the Spiritual. They already have them, and in taking in the world around them they are using these ready made eyes. They direct these eyes towards the outer impressions and the outer impressions mirror themselves, completely mirror themselves in the sense organs. Let us imagine that man could, with his present degree of consciousness, experience the coming into being of his eyes. Let us imagine him entering nature as a child with only a predisposition for eyes. His eyes would first reveal themselves to him through the action of the sunlight. What would happen in man's growth? What would happen would be that by means of the sun-rays, invisible as yet, the eyes would be called forth out of the organism. And when a man feels "I have eyes," he feels the light inside his eye; when he knows his eyes to be his own, he feels them as part of his own organisation, he feels his eyes living inside the light. And, fundamentally, sense-perception is as follows: Man experiences himself by experiencing light, by experiencing with his eyes what has been developed in sense-perception, where we already have eyes for which possession we, as was said above, may thank God!

And so it must also be with Spiritual Science. There, too, the organic must be called forth from the as yet unformed soul. Spiritual hearing, spiritual vision must be called forth, to use Goethe's expressions¹⁹ once again: the spiritual eye and the spiritual ear must be called into being from within. Through the development of the soul we actually feel our way into the spiritual world, and as we do this, the new organs will come into being. And with these organs we shall experience the spiritual world in exactly the same way as we experience the physical world of sense with the organs of the physical body. Thus we must first create something analogous to that which man already possesses, for the purpose of sense perception. We must have the strength to begin by creating new organs of perception in order to experience the spiritual world with them.

The obstacle to this—and there is no other—is what may be called the inner weakness of man, resulting from modern education. It is weakness that prevents man from so taking hold of his inner life (the expression is clumsy, but it will serve) that it becomes as active as it would if man had to create his own hands in order to touch the table before him. He creates his inner powers in order to touch that which is spiritual; with spirit he touches spirit. Thus it is weakness that holds man back from pressing forward in the pursuit of true Spiritual Investigation. And it is weakness that calls forth the misunderstanding which Spiritual Investigation is faced with, fundamental weakness of soul, the inability to see that we are still caught in the Faustian doom, powerlessness to transform the reality within into organs which will lay hold upon the spiritual world. That is the first point.²⁰

And there is a second point, which will also be understood by those who wish to understand it. Man, in the face of the unknown, always experiences a peculiar feeling, primarily a feeling of fear. People are afraid of the unknown. But their fear is of a peculiar sort: it is a fear that does not become conscious. For what is the source of the materialistic, mechanistic world-view, or, as the more scholarly would have us say, what is the source of the monistic world conception? (Though even under this name it is still materialistic.) It arises from the fact that the soul is afraid of breaking through sense-perception, afraid that if it breaks through the sensuous into the spiritual, it will come into the unknown, into "Nothing," as Mephistopheles says to Faust. But, "In the Nothing," answers Faust, "I hope to find the All."²¹ It is fear of that which can only be guessed at as Nothing. But it is a masked fear. For we must become familiar with the fact that there is a luxuriant growth of hidden or unconscious processes in the depths of the soul. It is remarkable how people deceive themselves over this. A frequent example of such self-deception is that of people who, while animated by the grossest selfishness, refuse to admit it and invent all sorts of subterfuges to show how selfless, how loving they are in what they do. Thus do they put on a mask to cover their selfishness. This is very frequently the case with societies that are formed with the object of exercising love in the right way. One often has occasion to make a study of this masking of selfishness. I knew a man who was always explaining that what he did, he did against his own aims and inclination; he did it only because he deemed it necessary for the welfare of humanity. Again and again I had to say, "Don't deceive yourself! Pursue your activities from selfish motives and because you like doing it." It is far better to face the truth. One stands on a foundation of truth if one simply owns to oneself that one likes the things one wishes to undertake and if one ceases to hold a mask before one's face. It is fear which leads nowadays to the rejection of Spiritual Knowledge. But people will not own to this fear. It is in their souls, but they will not let it come into their consciousness, and they invent proofs and arguments against Spiritual Knowledge. They try to prove, for instance, that to leave the firm ground of sense-perception is inevitably to indulge in fantasy, etc. They invent the most complicated proofs. They invent whole philosophical systems which may be logically incontestable but which for anyone who has any insight in such matters go to show no more than that every one of these inventions misses the mark when it comes to Reality—and this, whether it calls itself Transcendental Realism, Empirical Realism, more or less Speculative Realism, Metaphysical Realism, or any other kind of "ism." People invent these "isms," and a lot of hard thinking goes to their making. But at bottom they are nothing but the soul's fear of embarking upon that which I have often characterised as "Feeling the Unknown in its Concreteness." These, then, are the two chief reasons for the misunderstandings which arise in relation to Spiritual Knowledge—weakness of soul and fear of what is presumed to be the unknown. And whoever possesses some knowledge of the human soul can analyse the modern world conceptions in the following way: on the one hand, they arise from men's inability so to strengthen their thought that all the relevant examples will at once occur to them; on the other hand, there is the fear of the unknown. And it often happens that because people are afraid of venturing into the so-called Unknown, they prefer to leave it as such. We grant, they will say, that behind the world of sense there is another, spiritual world. But man cannot enter into it. We can prove this, prove it up to the hilt. And most of them, when they wish to adduce these proofs, begin by saying, "Kant said," on the assumption, of course, that the person whom they are addressing understands nothing about Kant. Thus people invent proofs to show that the human spirit cannot enter into the world that lies beyond what is given in sensation. But these are simply subterfuges—clever though they be, they are attempts to escape from fear. It is assumed that something exists behind the world of sensation. But they call it the Unknown and prefer to lay down a form of Agnosticism of the Spencerian,²² or any other type, rather than find the courage really to lead the soul into the spiritual world.

1917-03-31-GA066

It was precisely from such trains of thought, as I have cited them, and from a failure to pursue such trains of thought further, as I have followed them up, that Eduard von Hartmann reached his hypothesis of the unconscious. He says: From what takes place in the soul as thinking, feeling and willing, from what one has there as consciousness, one can actually gain no view of the real soul. But because one has only this, one must altogether renounce any view of the real soul-life and can only put forward a hypothesis. — Therefore Hartmann puts forward the hypothesis: Behind thinking, feeling and willing lies the unconscious, which can never be reached. And from this unconscious arise thoughts, feelings and impulses of the will. But what is down there in the unconscious can only be the subject of thoughts that have a greater or lesser degree of probability, but which are only hypotheses. It must be said that anyone who thinks in this way simply blocks their own access to the life of the soul, to that which is beyond the ordinary life of the soul. For Hartmann correctly recognized that everything that enters into ordinary consciousness is nothing more than a mere image. And it is precisely one of Hartmann's merits that he emphasized time and again in the most eminent sense: What falls into ordinary consciousness arises from the fact that the soul, as it were, receives its own content mirrored from the body, so that we only have mirror images in what we experience in thinking, feeling and willing. And to talk about the fact that these mirror images of consciousness contain a reality is quite similar to the assertion that the images we perceive from a mirror are reality. Hartmann emphasized this again and again. We will come back to this point today. But Hartmann, and with him countless thinkers, countless people in general in the last decades and the immediate present, they blocked their own possibility of penetrating into the soul because, I would say, they had an indescribable fear of the path that can penetrate into the soul. This fear remains in the subconscious; in ordinary consciousness it protrudes in such a way that one conjures up numerous reasons that tell one: one cannot go beyond certain limits of knowledge.

...

Let us keep this thought in mind and look at many other endeavors that have emerged in the scientific age from the same point of view.

Not only does the scientific world view, I might say, take such erroneous paths to the soul life as I have characterized it, but in a certain respect it also takes erroneous paths when it wants to explore what lies beyond the senses. In this respect, scientific research is indeed in a strange position at present when it forms a world view. It has actually come to the conclusion that everything that lives in consciousness is only an image of reality. It starts from an incorrect idea; but this incorrect idea, despite its incorrectness, gives a certain insight that is correct, namely that everything that lives in consciousness is an image. Scientific research starts from the idea that out there is a reality of vibrating, thoughtless ether atoms, completely without spirit or soul. We have found the ether to be a surging, thought-filled life; the scientific world view starts from the thoughtless, soulless ether. These vibrations impress our senses, effects arise in us, conjuring up the colorful, resounding world for us, while outside everything is dark and silent. Now, however, thinking, on which this world view is based, wants to get behind these images. What does it do? What it does there can be compared to someone -— well, let's say a child - looking into a mirror. Mirror images come towards him, his own and the images of his surroundings. And now the child wants to know what actually underlies these mirror images. What does it do? Yes, what is actually underlying them is behind the mirror, it says; so it will either want to look behind the mirror. But there it sees something quite different from what it was actually looking for. Or it may well smash the mirror to see what is behind the glass. The same is true of the scientific view of the world. It has the whole carpet of sense phenomena before it, and it wants to know what actually lives behind the sense phenomena. It goes so far as to approach the substance, the matter. Now it wants to know what is out there, apart from the senses. But that is merely as if it wanted to smash the carpet, which is like a mirror. She would not find what she was looking for behind it. And if someone were to say: “I have red through the eye, and behind it are certain vibrations in the ether,” he is talking just like someone who believes that the origin of what shines in the mirror is behind the mirror. Just as when you stand before a mirror you see the image of yourself in the mirror, and you are together with what is in the surroundings, and with what also reflects itself of yourself, so you are together in the soul with what is behind the sense phenomena. If I want to know why other things are reflected with me, I cannot look behind the mirror, but I have to look at those who are to my left and right, who are of the same nature as I am, who are also reflected. If I want to explore what is out there behind the sensory phenomena, I must explore that in which I myself am involved; not by breaking the mirror, but by exploring that in which I myself am involved.

...

The non-recognition of the observing consciousness does not lead to the knowledge of the origin and essence of man, just as the breaking of a mirror does not lead to the knowledge of those beings who are reflected in it. Renan felt this. He felt that where earlier times sought the spiritual origin of man, his world view posits a nothing. His mind protested against this by him declaring in old age that he would rather know that there is a hell than believe that nothingness is real. As long as only the mind protests in this way, as long as humanity will not get beyond the limitations of the world view that has so far blocked the paths to the beyond of the senses and the beyond of the soul. Only when humanity declares its willingness to develop such strong thinking and imagining that the soul can strengthen itself for what is, in the seeing consciousness, a living continuation of what Goethe suggested in his concept of the contemplating power of judgment, and which Kant regards as an adventure of reason, only when humanity decides to to advance to this realization of thoughts, to the whole soul world, in order to penetrate into spiritual reality with the seeing consciousness, then not only a mere protest of the mind, but a protest of knowledge will arise against the powers of compulsion of that so-called monism, which wants to split man off from a knowledge of his actual being. And I think that today we can already feel the inner nerve that lives in the spiritual-scientific debates in such a way that we are living at the starting point of those upheavals in human soul life that lead out of the realization of the already admired natural scientific world view into the beyond of the senses and the beyond of the soul, into the actual place of origin of the human being, into the spirit.

1917-12-11-GA179

Let us first form a conception of what is really contained in the life of our senses from an exterior aspect. We can picture the sense-impressions as if they were spread out before us—I might say, like a carpet. Of course, we must imagine that this carpet contains also the impressions of our hearing, the impressions of the twelve senses, such as we know them through Anthroposophy. You know that in reality there are twelve senses. This carpet of the sense impressions covers, as it were, a reality “lying behind”—if I may use this expression (but I am speaking in comparisons). This reality lying behind the sense perceptions must not be imagined as the scientist imagines the world of the atoms, or as a certain philosophical direction imagines the “thing in itself.” In my public lectures I have emphasized that when we look for the “thing in itself,” as it is done in modern philosophy and in the Kant-philosophy, this implies more or less the same as breaking the mirror to see what is behind it, in order to find the reality of beings that we see in a mirror. I do not speak in this sense of something behind the sense perceptions; what I mean is something spiritual behind the sense-perceptions, something spiritual in which we ourselves are embedded, but which cannot reach the usual consciousness of man between birth and death. If we could solve the riddle contained in the carpet of sense perceptions as a first step toward the attainment of the spiritual reality, so that we would see more than the manifold impressions of our sense-impulses—what would we see, in this first stage of solving the riddle, of solving spiritually the riddle of the carpet woven by our senses? Let us look into this question.

...

This is the other side that I wished to point out. But from this you will see the connection between the other life between death and new birth, and the present life. We might say that the world has two aspects; here, between birth and death we see one aspect, through our senses. Between death and a new birth we see it from the reversed side, with the soul's eye. And between death and a new birth, we learn to read the conditions here on earth in relationship with the spiritual world. Try to realize this, try to imagine these conditions. Then you will have to confess that it is, indeed, deeply significant to say that the world which we first learn to know through our senses and our understanding is an illusion, a Maya. As soon as we approach the real world, we find that the world that we know is related to this real world in the same way in which the reflection in the mirror is related to the living reality before the mirror, which is reflected in it. If you have a mirror, with several shapes reflected in it, this shows that there are shapes outside the mirror, which are reflected by the mirror. Suppose that you look into the mirror as a disinterested spectator. The three figures which I have drawn here [diagram not available] fight against each other; in the mirror you see them fighting. This shows that the mirrored figures do something, but you cannot say that the figure A, there in the mirror, beats the figure B in the mirror! What you see in the mirror is the image of the fight, because the figures outside the mirror are doing something.

If you believe that A, there in the mirror, or the reflected image of A, does something to B, there in the mirror, you are quite mistaken. You cannot set up comparisons and connections between the reflected images, but you can only say:—What is reflected in the mirrored images points to something in the world of reality, which is reflected. But the world given to man is a mirror, a Maya, and in this world man sees causes and effects. When you speak of this world of causes and effects, it is just as if you were to believe that the mirrored image A beats the mirrored image B. Something happens among the real beings reflected by the mirror, but the impulses leading to the fight are not to be found in the mirrored A and in the mirrored B. Investigate nature and its laws; you will find, at first, that such as it appears to your senses it is a Maya, a reflection or a mirrored picture. The reality lies beneath the threshold which I have indicated to you, the threshold between the life of thought and the life of feelings. Even your own reality is not contained at all in your waking consciousness; your own reality is contained in the spiritual reality; it is dipped into the dreaming and sleeping worlds of feeling and of will. Thus it is nonsense to speak of a causing necessity in the world of Maya—and it is also nonsense to speak of cause and effect in the course of history! It is real nonsense! To this I should like to add that it is nonsense to say that the events of 1914 are the result of events in 1913, 1912, etc. This is just as clever as saying:—This A in the mirror is a bad fellow; he beats the poor B, there in the mirror! What matters is to find the true reality. And this lies beneath the threshold, which must be crossed by going down into the world of feeling and of will—and does not enter our usual waking consciousness.

You see, we must interpret in another way the idea that “something had to happen” or “something was needed;” we cannot interpret it as the ordinary historians or scientists do this. We must ask:--Who are the real beings that produced the events of a later period, which followed an earlier one? The preceding historical events are merely the mirrored reflections—they cannot be the cause of what took place subsequently.

This, again, is one side of the question. The other side will be clear to you if you realize that only a Maya is contained in the waking reality embraced by our thoughts and by our sense perceptions. This Maya cannot be the cause of anything. It cannot be a real cause. But pure thoughts can determine man's actions. This is a fact taught by experience, if man is not led to deeds by passions, desires and instincts, but by clear thoughts. This is possible and can take place—pure ideals can be the impulses of human actions. But ideals alone cannot effect anything. I can carry out an action under the influence of a pure idea; but the idea cannot effect anything.

In order to understand this, compare once more the idea with the mirrored image. The reflection in the mirror cannot cause you to run away. If you run away it displeases you, or something is there which has nothing to do with the reflection in the mirror. The reflection in the mirror cannot take a whip and cause you to run away. This image cannot be the cause of anything. When a human being fulfills actions under the influence of his reflected image, i.e., his thoughts, he fulfills them out of the Maya; he carries out his actions out of the cosmic mirror. It is he who carries out the actions, and for this reason he acts freely. But when he is led by his passions, his actions are not free; he is not free, even if he is led by his feelings. He is free when he is led by his thoughts, that are mere reflections, or mirrored images. For this reason I have explained in my The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity that man can act freely and independently if he is guided by pure thoughts, pure thinking, because pure thoughts cannot cause or produce anything, so that the causing force must come from somewhere else. I have used the same image again in my book The Riddle of Man. We are free human beings because we carry out actions under the influence of Maya, and because this Maya, or the world immediately around us, cannot bring about or cause anything. Our freedom is based on the fact that the world that we perceive is Maya. The human being united himself in wedlock with Maya, and thus becomes a free being. If the world that we perceive were a reality, this reality would compel us, and we would not be free. We are free beings just because the world which we perceive is not a reality and for this reason it cannot force us to do anything, in the same way in which a mirrored reflection cannot force us to run away. The secret of the free human being consists in this—to realize the connection of the world perceived as Maya—the mere reflection of a reality—and the impulses coming from man himself The impulses must come from man himself, when he is not induced to an action by something that influences him.

1918-06-14-GA071B

What is the situation with these images? It is like a mirror. You stand in front of a mirror, dear ones, and see yourself in it. The mirror is necessary for you to see yourself in it. Certain images in our organization are necessary for us to arrive at other images. They are there like a mirror of the soul. If we want to penetrate into these ideas in the same way as we usually do into our external reality, it is as if we wanted to break the mirror to find out what we see in it. This is actually the case with all borderline ideas in the knowledge of nature.

If you wanted to continue in the same way, you would be in the same situation as if you wanted to break a mirror to find out what is behind it and what causes you to see yourself in it. This is also the experience that one has when reflecting on what is taken for granted in philosophy. If one wants to penetrate behind the surface of things through philosophy and speculation, it is like breaking a mirror to discover what one will not find behind it.

Now, for someone who sees something like this in the direct experience of the soul, the significant and important question arises: What is it about human nature that we must inevitably come up against such limits, that we must indeed place something in front of us that we can use as a counterweight, that we do not break, to put it figuratively, but simply have to leave in our everyday consciousness? Where does that come from? When one investigates this question, one arrives at a meaningful human soul experience, a secret of the soul; one arrives at recognizing how something in human life, in the whole human organization, is connected with this mirroring nature of our knowledge of nature. One can answer spiritually researched questions of the soul life to a certain extent.

What would human soul life be like if it were not like this, if we did not have this mirror in front of us? One would have to miss an element in this human soul life that is absolutely necessary for this human life, for human existence between birth or conception and death. If human knowledge were such that it could disappear into this borderline perception, then the human soul would have to do without the possibility of grasping in love that which it can only see in the mirror through its emotional life. The nature of the mirror, which is connected with our outer sensuality, is at the same time that which ensures that we do not face external reality in a coarse and unintimate way, but rather that our thoughts fail at the moment when they kill love in a dry and sober way. We must be organized in such a way that we cannot go further on the path of ordinary sensory knowledge or its dissection than we can, so that we do not lack the ability to love.

1922-07-21-GA213

(full lecture is about this)

There you have the situation at the starting point of our modern intellectual life fifty years ago. And now I want to present to you a work that was published recently and that is characteristic of our time, namely Werfel's “Mirror Man”. There you have something that has been born out of certain forces of our time, just as the “Children of the World” or the “Invincible Powers” were born out of the time of fifty years ago.

So what is the situation for people like Werfel today? In recent decades, this weak and anemic thinking has been at work. People have somehow sought something of a religious context, of a connection with a spiritual world, but nothing has emerged. But human nature cannot remain one-sided in the long run. It can do so in the development of world history for about fifty years, but then a reaction of human nature begins again. In a certain way, it wants to strive for something more powerful – if we stick with the last fifty years – than the powerless and insipid thinking was. Now, quite a few contemporary works already bear witness to this striving for a more powerful grasp of reality, but Werfel's 'Spiegelmensch' is particularly illustrative of this.

Werfel's “Mirror Man” compels us to speak about the present in this way: for long enough, people have sought their way in an indefinite, weak and impotent manner to something that makes man a full human being in the first place. Now an indefinite inner feeling asserts itself on the paths that have been taken in the last fifty years and which are actually not paths at all, but slippery passageways on which one continually slips. Nothing can really be achieved on these slippery passageways; one must get some iron into one's blood again. From such a striving for the times, something like this “mirror man” has emerged. Let us sketch with just a few lines what is depicted in this “mirror man”. It is not my intention to sin against the artistic by characterizing what is in this mirror man. But that is not the point at all; rather, we will see immediately afterwards that what I am about to say also touches on the artistic.

We see here a half-grown human being who has grown tired of the outer life as it can be led today. He takes leave of this outer life and now actually wants to become human. For he admits to himself that within the ordinary life, as we live it today, both in Asian and European and American civilization, one cannot really become human. You get up in the morning, have breakfast and do something to maintain yourself within the social order, you eat lunch or receive your guests and say things that perhaps need not be said, that ultimately do not aim to achieve much more than to make the lips move, that are not idle; you take your guests for a walk or whatever else you do today. You can't become a person in such company – I'm not quoting verbatim, I'm just characterizing. It is necessary to try a different path if you want to become a person. And so this “hero” – to use the old aesthetic style – tries to become a person by seeking admission to a monastery. But he is told that this is something extraordinarily difficult. I do not want to characterize the details, but only point out what is important to me today. He is therefore informed that it is something extraordinarily difficult and that, above all, he must be clear about the fact that he has to go through three stages of knowledge. In the first stage of knowledge, he would have to become clear about the human being's position in the world, insofar as this position is contained in the human ego itself. So this life in the ego and this striving to overcome the ego as the first level of knowledge. The second view of the world would consist in the fact that, after one begins to shed the ego in a certain sense, one no longer sees the world from one's prejudiced point of view, as one used to do before, when one had not even begun to shed the ego. And the third vision would be where man would truly penetrate into the world and its reality, not as seen by man living in his ego. He is told this. And he is admonished in the appropriate way not to want such an incarnation too urgently. He is made aware of the difficulties. But he does not back down.

So he is initiated in the appropriate way. The initiation takes place – I will mention only the essentials – by being led into solitude for the night, into a room where only a monk watches over him. And there, after he has initially abandoned himself to his thoughts, he falls into a brief sleep, from which he very soon believes he will wake up. And now he finds himself in the room whose one wall has a mirror on it. In this mirror he sees himself, and he is amazed at what is meant. It is meant that when one, after a collection of thoughts and after such a strong decision as this person has made, steps in front of his own reflection, one sees oneself in a different way. So it is actually pointed out that the person is only now beginning to see himself. The mirror image looks so similar to him, but yet again somewhat different. And by doing what must follow from such a surprising experience: by striking the mirror, believing that he has wounded himself, the mirror man steps out of the mirror towards him, that is, that of him which, in a certain respect, is himself and yet again not himself.

Now the person has arrived at the first step of knowledge. He must get used to not only going through the world as a person without ego consciousness, but also to having that which is himself and yet not completely himself, his mirror-person, accompany him. In the company of this mirror-man, who now tempts him to do all kinds of things in the outer world, lies a new encounter with world phenomena, with his own deeds, in that he finds himself precisely in the presence of his own ego.

Now, I do not want to go into the details. The person in question is actually lying in bed, but he goes through what he can go through according to his previous experiences of external world experiences and external actions. These are not always very nice. But how someone describes something like that depends on their own taste. You can see from the way the author describes things how he feels about such a case. People also experience the world according to their tastes. So we are led through the experiences of the world. Just as Mephisto in Faust has something of the driving force, this mirror man is now always the driving force, and he is led from event to event, being made to do many wrongs. Everything appears to him in a new light, because he has looked into the mirror and seen himself. He now sees one thing after another in the world. He sometimes sees things as they appear to him because he is an ego-person, and sometimes as they appear to him after he is already able to see his reflection. He becomes more and more familiar with the phenomena of the world. In the process, he comes out of his ego more and more. The mirror-man, who is rather slight at first, becomes fatter and fatter. This is a polar-parallel phenomenon, which is not uninteresting. And so this person now lives through the world by experiencing in a different way what he could have experienced earlier, now that he has seen his own self. And in the end he has become so entangled in the experiences of the world that he has to become his own judge, condemning himself to death, which is again very characteristic. He finds that he cannot really live in the world.

When he entered the monastery, he realized that it is impossible to live in today's society if you want to become a human being. This has increased to such an extent that now, when he has become his own judge, he condemns himself to death. And now he awakens. In a sense, he awakens from the execution of his own death sentence. He is again in the same room where he was. Now he looks at the mirror again. But by looking now, he notices, for example, that the mirror does not reflect a procession of monks passing by. Earlier, when he looked into the mirror, he saw himself and everything in front of the mirror. But now a procession of monks is passing by and is not reflected. He realizes from this that he is not standing in front of a mirror now, but that the mirror has become a window. He looks through it and sees out into the wide world, sees the landscape. He has attained the third vision. Now he sees the world, whereas at the beginning he saw only what the mirror gave. Because he had the mirror man at his side, he saw what he had seen before in a different way. But now, as it were, he sees through the surface of things - that is how it is presented - out into the free reality. It is, of course, implied that he now also sees out into the spiritual reality.

So we have a trilogy before us: the first is the mirror, the third is, let us say, the window. The mirror has become the window. So there we have the two polar opposite views of the world. At first, everyone sees in the other 'their own reflection', sees only what they already have within themselves in the other, where they are caught up in their own ego, and thus sees only their own reflection everywhere in their neighbor or in anything they see in nature. Finally, after breaking through the mirror, they no longer see the mirror, but through the surface of things into the spiritual. And in between

where the two merge into one another:

1. The mirror

2. One into the other

3. The window

Now, I would like to point out two characteristic features of this drama. The first is this: we see that there is a desire to depict a person in the process of rising to a certain religious connection with another world. That the first part, the mirror, is short, one can forgive, because it is very interesting to see how the person lives into an insight into his own ego, so that this ego becomes so concrete to him that it now accompanies him through his experiences in the world. The middle part is quite detailed, and a great many experiences are described. In order to find these appealing at all, one must have a taste, one could even say sometimes, distaste, for them. But as I said, everyone has to do it according to their own taste. In any case, this part, where one looks into the experiences of the world, is very long. But the third part is quite short, and what is seen out there is actually only hinted at, I would say symbolically, by looking through the window; nothing real comes into view. It is quite short, this third part. That is the one peculiarity I would like to emphasize. But the other peculiarity is this: one must recognize that here is the most beautiful expression of the striving to pour strength and energy into thinking. But one also sees that the modern man, of the kind that Werfel is, cannot do that at first. Why? Yes, it is very peculiar. When I had finished reading this drama – and I read with the greatest interest, I must say, because it is extremely significant for our present spiritual life as represented by individual personalities – I had to say the following to myself: the process is as follows: 1. Der Spiegel; 2. Eins ins andere; 3. Das Fenster. But one could also read the whole thing backwards from front to back. Of course, it would have to be rewritten, but one could also read the whole thing backwards from front to back. Because why? It is entirely possible to understand the matter in such a way that one says to oneself: the way a person initially relates to the world is how things appear to him. He is no different from the things. He has not awakened to his sense of self. He stands before the window, looks out into the world. Now we could say that the old monk, to whom he has now come and to whom he says that he can no longer bear it, that everything is always only inside, what he sees through the window, that he wants to find himself – that the old man now says to him: Yes, there are three views to go through. The first view shows us the world without our finding our ego in it. We lose ourselves to the world. The second view allows us to gain something of the ego, and then, gradually, a multitude of beings comes towards us from the world. The world is brought to life, spiritualized. We used to see it as spiritless, now the world is spiritualized. Everywhere, from every being, from plants, animals, clouds and so on, something spiritual comes towards us. Many spiritual beings come towards us in this second part. In the third part, we wake up. We step in front of the window, we look out. But we see everything anew, because now we see the real world for the first time. The window has been transformed into a mirror, the human being has come to himself. He unites all these mirror beings that have come to meet him in the world of plants, animals, clouds; they are in his only self, which has become cosmic to him. And now, by recognizing himself, he actually sees the cosmos for the first time. You could easily describe the whole thing backwards, the last part of the trilogy first, then the middle part, then the part with which it started. That is extremely interesting, because it is precisely this that makes this drama particularly characteristic of the present. What is the peculiarity of intellectualism?

1921-09-23-GA207

Note: three different translations on rsarchive (this is v02)

One must, however, recover the knowledge of the human being that lived in the mystery colonies of which I have spoken. The ordinary human being today is aware of the world around him by means of his outer, physical sense impressions. What he sees, he orders and arranges with his intellect. Then he looks also into his own inner being .Basically this is the world that man surveys and out of which he acts. The sense impressions received from outside, the mental images developed from these sense impressions, these mental images as they penetrate within, becoming trans-formed by impulses of feeling and of will, together with everything that is reflected back into consciousness as memories—here we have what forms the content of the soul, the content of life in which modern man weaves and out of which he acts. At most modern man is led by a kind of false mysticism to ask, “What is actually within my inner being? What does self-knowledge yield?” In raising such questions he wishes to find the answer in his ordinary consciousness. This ordinary consciousness, however, only emerges from what actually originated in outer sense impressions and has been transformed by feeling and will. One finds only the reflections, the mirror-images, of outer life when looking in to one's inner being with ordinary consciousness; and although the outer impressions are transformed by feeling and will,man still does not know how feeling and will actually work. For this reason he often fails to recognize what he sees in his inner being as a transformed mirror-image of the outer world and takes it, perhaps, as a special message from the divine, eternal world. This is not the case, however. What appears to the ordinary consciousness of modern man as self-knowledge is only the transformed outer world, which is reflected out of man's inner being into his consciousness.

If man really wished to look into his inner being, he would be obliged—I have often used this image—to break the inner mirror. Our inner being is indeed like a mirror.We gaze on the outer world. Here are the outer sense impressions. We link mental images to them. These mental images are then reflected by our inner being. By looking into our inner being we arrive only at this mirror (see drawing below, red). We see what is reflected in this memory mirror (red arrows). We are just as unable to gaze into man's inner being with ordinary consciousness as we are to look behind a mirror without breaking it. This, however, is precisely what was brought about in the preparatory stage of the ancient path of Oriental wisdom: the teachers and pupils of the mystery centers that came to the West could penetrate directly through the memories into the inner being of man.Out of what they discovered they afterward spoke those words that actually were meant to convey that one had to be well prepared—above all in those ancient times—if one wished to direct one's gaze to the inner being of man.

What, then, does one behold within the human being? There, one sees how something of the power of perceiving and thinking, which is developed in front of the memory-mirror, penetrates below this memory-mirror. Thoughts penetrate below this memory-mirror and work into the human etheric body, into that part of the etheric body that forms the basis of growth but is also the origin of the forces of will. In looking out into the sunlit-space and surveying all that we receive through our sense impressions, there radiates into our inner being something that on the one hand becomes memory images but that also trickles through the memory-mirror, permeating it just as the processes of growth, nutrition, and so on permeate us.

The thought-forces first permeate the etheric body, and the etheric body, permeated in this way by the thought-forces, works in quite a special way on the physical body. Thereupon a complete transformation arises of the material existence that is within the physical body of man. In the outer world, matter is nowhere completely destroyed. This is why modern philosophy and science speak of the conservation of matter, but this law of the conservation of matter is valid only for the outer world. Within the human being,matter is completely dissolved into nothingness. The very essence of matter is fully destroyed. It is precisely upon this fact that our human nature is based: upon being able to throw back matter into chaos, to destroy matter utterly,within that sphere that lies deeper than memory.

This is what was pointed out to the mystery pupils who were led from the East into the mystery colonies of the West, especially Ireland. “In your inner being, below the capacity for memory, you bear within you something that works destructively, and without it you could not have developed your thinking, for you must develop thinking by permeating the etheric body with thought-forces. An etheric body that is permeated with thought-forces, however, works on the physical body in such a way as to throw its matter back into chaos and to destroy it.” If, therefore, a person ventures into this inner being of man with the same attitude with which he penetrates as far as memory, he enters a realm where the being of man wants to destroy, to extinguish, what is there. For the purpose of developing the human, thought-filled “I” or ego, we all bear within us,below the memory-mirror, a fury of destruction, a fury of dissolution, in relation to matter. There is no self-knowledge that does not point with the greatest intensity toward this inner human fact.

For this reason, whoever has had to learn of the presence of this source of destruction² in the inner being of man must take an interest in the evolution of the spirit. With all intensity he must be able to say to himself: spirit must exist and, for the sake of the continuance of the spirit, matter should be extinguished.

It is only after humanity has been spoken to for many years about the interests connected with spiritual scientific investigation that attention can be drawn to what actually exists within the human being. Today we must do so, however, for otherwise man would consider himself to be something different from what he really is within Western civilization. Within Western civilization man is the sheath for a source of destruction, and actually the forces of decline can be trans-formed into forces of ascent only if man becomes conscious of this, that he is the sheath for a source of destruction.

What would happen if man were not to be led by spiritual science out of this consciousness? Already in the evolution of our time we can see what would happen. What is isolated, separated, as it were, in the human being, and should work only within him, at the single spot within where matter is thrown back into chaos, now breaks out and penetrates outer human instincts. That is what will happen to Western civilization, yes, and to the civilization of the whole earth. This is shown by all the destructive forces appearing today—in Eastern Europe, for instance. It is a fury of destruction thrust out of the inner being of man into the outer world, and in the future man will be able to find his bearings regarding what actually flows into his instincts only when a true knowledge of the human being once again prevails, when we become aware once more of the human source of destruction within, which must be there, however, for the sake of the evolution of human thinking. This strength of thinking that man must have in order that he may have a world conception in keeping with our time, this strength of thinking which must be there in front of the memory-mirror, brings about the continuation of thinking into the etheric body, and the etheric body thus permeated by thinking works destructively upon the physical body. This source of destruction within modern Western man is a fact, and knowledge merely draws attention to it. If the source of destruction is there without man being able to bring it to consciousness, it is much worse than if man takes full cognizance of this source of destruction and from this stand-point enters into the evolution of modern civilization.

When the pupils of these mystery colonies, of which I have spoken, first heard of these secrets, their immediate response was fear. This fear they learned to know thoroughly. They became thoroughly acquainted with the sensation that a penetration into man's inner being—not frivolously in the sense of a nebulous mysticism but undertaken in all sincerity—must instill fear. This fear felt by the ancient mystery pupils of the West was overcome only by disclosing to them the whole significance of the facts. Then they were able to conquer through consciousness what had to arise in them as fear.

When the age of intellectualism set in, this same fear became unconscious, and as unconscious fear it is still active. Under all kinds of masks it works into outer life. It is suited to the modern age, however, to penetrate into man's inner being. “Know thyself” has become a rightful demand. It was by a deliberate calling forth of fear, followed by an overcoming of this fear, that the mystery pupils were directed to self-knowlege in the right way.

The age of intellectualism dulled the sight of what lay in man's inner being, but it was unable to do away with the fear. It thus came about that man was and still is under the influence of this unconscious fear to the degree of saying, “There is nothing at all in the human being that transcends birth and death.” He is afraid of penetrating deeper than this life of memory, this ordinary life of thought, which maintains its legitimacy, after all, only between birth and death. He is afraid to look down into what is actually eternal in the human soul, and from this fear he postulates the doctrine that there is nothing at all outside this life between birth and death. Modern materialism has arisen out of fear, without having the least intimation of this. The modern materialistic world conception is a product of fear and anxiety.

This fear thus lives on in the outer actions of human beings, in the social structure, in the course of history since the middle of the fifteenth century, and especially in the nineteenth century materialistic world conception. Why did these people become materialists, that is, why would they admit only the outer, that which is given in material existence? Because they were afraid to descend into the depths of the human being.

This is what the ancient Oriental sage would have wished to express from his knowledge by saying, “You modern Westerners live entirely steeped in fear. You establish your social order upon fear; you create your arts out of fear; your materialistic world conception has been born from fear. You and the successors of those who in my time established the ancient Oriental world conception, although they have come into decadence now—you and these people of Asia will never understand one another, because with the Asiatic people, after all, everything sprang ultimately from love; with you everything originates in fear mixed with hate.”

This certainly sounds radical, so I prefer to try to bring the facts before you as an utterance from the lips of an ancient Oriental sage. It will perhaps be believed that such a one could speak in this way were he to return, whereas a modern person might be considered foolish if he put these things so radically! From such a radical characterization of these things, however, we can learn what we really must learn today for the healthy progress of civilization. Humanity will have to know again that rational thinking, which is the highest attainment of modern times, could not have come into existence if the life of ideas did not arise from a source of destruction. This source must be recognized, so that it may be kept safely within and not pass over into outer instincts and thence become a social impulse.

One can really penetrate deeply into the connections of modern life by looking at things in this way. The world that manifests as a source of destruction lies within, beyond the memory-mirror. The life of modern man, however, takes its course between the memory-mirror and the outer sense perceptions. Just as little as the human being, when he looks into his inner being, is able to see beyond the memory-mirror, so far is he from being able to penetrate through all that is spread out before him as sense perception; he cannot see beyond it. He adds to it a material, atomistic world,which is indeed a fantastic world, because he cannot penetrate through the sensory mental images.

Man is no stranger, however, to this world beyond the outer, sensory mental images. Every night between falling asleep and awakening he penetrates this world. When you sleep, you dwell within this world. What you experience there beyond the sensory mental images is not the atomistic world conjectured by the visionaries of natural science. What lies beyond the sphere of the senses was actually experienced by the ancient Oriental sage in his mysteries. One can experience it, however, only when one has devotion for the world, when one has the desire and the urge to surrender oneself entirely to the world. Love must hold sway in cognition if one wishes to penetrate beyond the sense impression. It was this love in cognition that prevailed especially in the ancient Oriental civilization.

Why must one have this devotion? One must have this devotion because, if one sought to enter the world beyond the senses with one's ordinary human I, one would be harmed. The I, as experienced in ordinary life, must be given up if one wishes to penetrate into the world beyond the senses. How does this I originate? This I is formed by the human being's capacity to plunge into the chaos of destruction. This I must be forged and hardened in that world lying within man as a source of destruction. With this I one cannot live beyond the sphere of the outer sense world. Let us picture to ourselves the source of destruction in whole human organism. What I am portraying is to be understood intensively, not extensively, but I would like to sketch it for you. Here is the source of destruction, here the human sheath. If what is inside were to spread out over the whole world, what would then live in the world through man? Evil! Evil is nothing but the chaos thrust outside, the chaos that is necessary in man's inner being. In this chaos,which must be within man, this necessary source of evil in man, the human I, the human egoity, must be forged. This human egoity cannot live beyond the sphere of the human senses in the outer world. That is why the I-consciousness disappears in sleep, and when it figures in dreams it often appears as though estranged or weakened.

The I, which is actually forged in the source of evil, cannot pass beyond the sphere of the sense phenomena. Hence to the perception of the ancient Oriental sage it was clear that one can go further only through devotion, through love, through a surrender of the I—and that on penetrating fully into this further region one is no longer in a world of Vana, of the weaving in the habitual, but rather in the world of Nirvana, where this habitual existence is dispersed.

1921-09-24-GA207

(this is v02, v01 lecture is called 'seeds for future worlds')

Yesterday I spoke of how we find within the human being a kind of source of destruction. I showed that as long as we remain within ordinary consciousness we retain memories only of the impressions of the world. We gain experience of the world, and we have our experiences through the senses, through the intellect, through the effects generally upon our life of soul. Later we are able to call up again our memory of the afterimage of what we have experienced. We carry as our inner life these afterimages of sense experiences.

It is indeed as though we had within us a mirror, but one that works differently from the ordinary spatial mirror. An ordinary mirror reflects what is in front of it, whereas the living mirror we carry within us reflects in quite another way. It reflects in the course of time the sense impressions we receive, causing one or another impression to be reflected back again into consciousness, and so we have a memory of a past experience.

If we break a spatial mirror, we see behind the mirror; we see into a realm we do not see when the mirror is intact. Correspondingly, if we carry out inner exercises of the soul, we come, as I have often suggested, to something like a breaking of the inner mirror. The memories can, as it were, cease for a brief time—for how long a time depends upon our free will—and we can see more deeply into our inner being. As we look more deeply into our inner being behind the memory-mirror, then what I characterized yesterday as a kind of source of destruction meets our gaze.

There must be such a source of destruction within us, for only in such a source can the I of man solidify itself. It is actually a source for the solidification and hardening of the I. As I said yesterday, if this hardening of the I, if this egoity, is carried out into social life, evil arises, evil in the life and actions of human beings.

You may see from this how truly complicated is the life into which man is placed. What within the human being has a good purpose, without which we could not cultivate our I, must never be allowed outside. The evil man carries it into the outer world; the good man keeps it inside him. If it miscarried outside, it becomes wrong, it becomes evil. If it is kept within, it is the very thing we need to give the human I its rightful strength.

There is really nothing in the world that would not, in its place, have a beneficial significance. We would be thoughtless and rash if we did not have this source within us, for this source manifests itself in such a way that we can experience in it something we would never be able to experience in the outer world. In the outer world we see things materially. Everything we see, we see materially, and following the custom of present-day science we speak of the conservation of matter, the indestructibility of actual matter. In this source of destruction about which I spoke yesterday matter is truly annihilated. Matter is thrown back into its nothingness, and then we can allow, within this nothingness, the good to arise. The good can arise if, instead of our instincts and impulses, which are bound to work toward the cultivation of egoity, we pour into this source of destruction, by means of a moral inclination of soul, all moral and ethical ideals.Then something new arises. Then in this very source of destruction the seeds of future worlds arise. Then we, as human beings, take part in the coming into being of worlds.

When we speak, as one can find in my Outline of Occult Science, of how our earth will one day face annihilation, and of how through all kinds of intermediate states of transformation the Jupiter existence will evolve, we must say the following. In the Jupiter existence there will be only the new creation that already is being formed today in the human being out of moral ideals, within this source of destruction. It is also formed out of his anti-moral impulses, out of what works as evil from his egoity. Hence the Jupiter existence will be a struggle between what man on earth is already bringing to birth by carrying his moral ideals into his inner chaos and what arises with the cultivation of egoity as the anti-moral. When we look into our deepest selves,therefore, we are gazing upon a region where matter is thrown back into its nothingness.

I went on to indicate how matters stand with the other side of human existence, with the side where sense phenomena are spread out around us. We behold these sense phenomena spread around us like a tapestry, and we apply our intellect to combine and relate them in order to discover within these sense phenomena laws that we then call the laws of nature. With ordinary consciousness, however, we never penetrate through this tapestry of the senses. With ordinary consciousness we penetrate the tapestry of sense impressions just as little as we penetrate with ordinary consciousness the memory-mirror within. With a developed consciousness, however, one does penetrate it, and the human beings of ancient Oriental wisdom penetrated it with a consciousness informed by instinctive vision. They beheld that world in which egoity cannot hold its own in consciousness.

We enter this world every time we go to sleep. There the egoity is dimmed, because beyond the tapestry of the senses lies the world where, to begin with, the I-power, as it develops for human existence, has no place at all. Hence the world conception of the ancient Oriental, who developed a peculiar longing to live behind the sense phenomena, used to speak of Nirvana, of the dispersing of the egoity.

Yesterday we drew attention to the great contrast between East and West. At one time the Oriental cultivated all that man longs to behold behind the sense phenomena, and he cultivated the vision into a spiritual world that is composed not of atoms and molecules but of spiritual beings. This world was present for the ancient Oriental world conception as visible reality. In our day the Oriental, particularly in Asia but also in other parts of the world, is living in the decadent stages of development of this inner yearning to reach the world behind the sense phenomena, while the human being of the West has cultivated his egoity, has cultivated all that we have characterized as the hardening and strengthening taking place within the source of destruction in man's inner being.

In saying this we are already on the way to suggesting what it is that must necessarily be absorbed into man's consciousness, now and in the near future. If the pure intellectualism that has been developing since the middle of the fifteenth century were to continue, humanity would fall entirely into decline, for with the help of intellectualism one will never penetrate beyond either the memory-mirror or the tapestry of the world of the senses spread out before us. Man must, however, acquire once more a consciousness of these worlds. He must acquire a consciousness of these worlds if Christianity is again to be able to become a truth for him, for Christianity actually is not a truth for him to-day. We can see this most clearly when we look at the modern development of the idea of Christ—if indeed modern times may be said to have any such development at all. The truth is that for modern man in the present stage of evolution it is impossible to arrive at an idea of Christ as long as he makes use only of the concepts and ideas that he has been cultivating as natural science since the fifteenth century. In the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries he has become incapable of forming a true idea of Christ.

These things must be regarded in the following way. The human being beholds the world all around and uses the combining faculty of his intellect, which he now has as his modern consciousness, to build up natural laws. Following a line of thought that is perfectly possible for the consciousness of the present day, he comes to the point at which it is possible for him to say, “This world is permeated with thought, for the laws of nature are apprehended in thoughts and are actually themselves the thoughts of the world.” If one follows the laws of nature to the stage at which one is bound to apply them to the coming into existence of man himself as physical being, one has to say, “Within that world which we survey with our ordinary consciousness, beginning with sense perception and going on as far as the memory-mirror, a spiritual element is living.” One must actually be ill, pathological, if, like the ordinary atheistic materialist, one is not willing to acknowledge this spiritual element. We live within this world that is given for ordinary consciousness; we emerge into it as physical man through physical conception and physical birth. What is observable within the physical world can only be contemplated inadequately if one fails to see as its foundation a universal spiritual element.

We are born as physical beings from physical stock. When we are born as little babies, we are actually, for outer, physical perception, quite similar to a creature of nature. Out of such a creature of nature, which is basically in a kind of sleeping condition, inner spiritual faculties gradually develop. These inner spiritual faculties will arise in the course of future evolution. If we learn to trace back these emerging spiritual faculties in the same way that we trace the gradual growth of the limbs, we find that we must look for their source beyond birth and conception. Then one comes to the point of thinking in a living and spiritual way about the world, whereas before, in one's consideration of outer nature, one built up only abstract laws. One comes, in other words, to an affirmation of what may be called the Father God.

It is very significant that scholasticism in the Middle Ages maintained that knowledge obtainable by ordinary observation of the world through ordinary human reason included knowledge of the Father God. One can even say, as I have often expressed it, that if anyone sets out to analyze this world as it is given for ordinary consciousness and does not arrive at gathering up all the natural laws in what is called the Father God, he must actually be ill, pathological in someway. To be an atheist means to be ill, as I have said here once before.

With this ordinary consciousness, however, one cannot go farther than this Father God. This far one can go with ordinary consciousness, but no further. It is characteristic of our times when such a significant theologian as Adolf von Harnack⁵ says that Christ the Son does not really belong in the Gospels, that the Gospels are the message of the Father, and that Christ Jesus actually has a place in the Gospels only insofar as He brought the message of the Father God. Here you may see quite clearly how with a certain inevitability this modern thinking leads people to recognize, even in theology, only the Father God and to understand the Gospels themselves as containing no more than the message of the Father God. In the sense of this theology, Christ has worth only insofar as He appeared in the world and brought to human beings the true teaching concerning the Father God.

Two things are implied in this. First, the belief that the message of the Father God cannot be found by an ordinary study of the world. The Scholastics still maintained that it could. They did not imagine that the Gospels were to speak of the Father God; they assumed that the Gospels were to speak of God the Son. That people can come forward with the opinion that the Gospels actually speak only of the Father God is proof that theology, too, has fallen into that way of thinking which has been cultivated as the peculiarly Western method.

In early Christian times until about the third or fourth century A.D., when there was still a good deal of Oriental wisdom in Christianity, human beings occupied themselves intently with the question of the distinction between the Father God and God the Son. One could say that these fine distinctions between the Father God and the Son God, which so engaged people's attention in the early Christian centuries, under the influence of Oriental wisdom, have long ceased to have meaning for modern man, who has been occupied in cultivating egoity under the influences I described yesterday.

A certain untruth has thus found its way into modern religious consciousness. What man experiences inwardly, through which he arrives at his analysis and synthesis of the world, is the Father God. From tradition, he has God the Son. The Gospels speak of Him, tradition speaks of Him. Man has the Christ; he wants to acknowledge Him but through inner experience no longer actually has the Christ. He therefore takes what he should apply actually only to the Father God and transfers it to the Christ God. Modern theology does not actually have the Christ at all; it has only the Father, but it calls the Father “Christ,” because at one time it received the tradition of the Christ being in history, and one wants to be Christian, of course. If one were honest, one would be unable to call oneself a Christian in modern times.

All this is altogether different when we go further East. Already in Eastern Europe it is different. Take the Russian philosopher of whom I have frequently spoken—Soloviev.⁶ You find in him an attitude of soul that has become a philosophy and speaks with full justification, with an inner justification, of a distinction between the Father and the Son. Soloviev is justified in speaking in this way, because for him both the Father and the Christ are experiences. The human being of the West makes no distinction between God the Father and Christ. If you are inwardly honest with yourselves, you will feel that the moment you wish to make a distinction between the Father God and Christ the two become confused. For Soloviev such a thing is impossible. Soloviev experiences each separately, and so he still has a sense for the battles, the spiritual battles, that were fought during the first Christian centuries in order to bring to human consciousness the distinction between the Father God and God the Son.

This, however, is the very thing to which modern man must come again. There must again be truth in calling ourselves Christians. One must not make a pretense of worshipping the Christ, attributing to Him only the qualities of the Father God. To avoid this, however, one must present truths such as I indicated yesterday. That is the only way we can come to the twofold experience, the experience of the Father and the experience of the Son.

It will be necessary to change the whole form of our consciousness. The abstract form of consciousness with which modern man is raised, and which actually does not permit the recognition of more than the Father God, will have to be replaced by a much more concrete life of consciousness. Needless to say, one cannot present such things before the world at large today in the way I have described them to you here, for people have not yet been prepared sufficiently by spiritual science and anthroposophy. There is always the possibility, however, of pointing out even to modern man how he carries in his inner being a source of destruction and how in the outer world there is something in which the I of man is, as it were, submerged, where it cannot hold itself fast—just as in earlier times people were told about the Fall of Man and similar things. One must only find the right form for these things, a form that would enable them to find their way into ordinary consciousness—even as the teaching of the Fall of Man used to give instruction concerning a spiritual foundation of the world, a form that would have a different authority from our teaching concerning the Father God.

Our modern science will have to become permeated with ways of looking such as those we have expounded here. Our science wishes to recognize in the inner being of man only the laws of nature. In this source of destruction, however, of which I have often spoken here, the laws of nature are united with the moral laws; there, natural law and moral law are one. Within our inner being matter, and with it all the laws of nature, is annihilated. Material life, together with all the laws of nature, is thrown back into chaos, and out of the chaos a new nature is able to arise, saturated with the moral impulses we ourselves lay into it. As we have said, this source of destruction is below our memory-mirror. If we let our gaze penetrate far below this memory-mirror, there at last we observe what actually is always within the human being. A human being is not changed by knowledge: he merely comes to know what he is like, what his normal condition is. Man must learn to reflect on what he is and how he lives.

When we are able to penetrate into this inner core of evil in the human being and are able also to become conscious of how into this inner evil, where matter is destroyed and thrown back into its chaos, moral impulses can find their way, then we have really found in ourselves the beginning of spiritual existence. Then we perceive the creating spirit within us, for when we behold moral laws working upon matter that has been thrown back into chaos, we are beholding a real activity of the spirit taking place within us in a natural way. We become conscious of the concrete, spiritual activity that is within us and that is the seed for future worlds.

What can we compare with what is announced in our inner being? We cannot compare it with what our senses at first convey to us of outer nature. We can compare it only with what another human being communicates when he speaks to us. Indeed, it is more than a metaphor when we say that what takes place in our inner being speaks to us when moral and anti-moral impulses unite themselves with the chaos inside us. There actually is within us something that speaks to us. There we have something that is not mere allegory or symbol but actual fact. What we can hear outwardly with our ears is a language toned down for the earthly world, but within our inner being a language is spoken that goes out beyond the earth, because it speaks out of what contains the seeds of future worlds. There we truly penetrate into what must be called “the inner word.” In the weakened words that we speak or hear in conversation with our fellow men, hearing and speaking are separate and distinct, whereas in our inner being, when we dive down below the memory-mirror into the inner chaos, we have a substantiality where speaking becomes at the same time hearing. Hearing and speaking are once more united. The inner word speaks in us, the inner word is heard in us.

1914-03-27-GA266/3

First, it was said how difficult it was that he [Rudolf Steiner] could no longer be with us this winter, but that we only had to feel more intensely at 8 o'clock that we were always united in spirit. Then it was pointed out that if one only did one's exercises seriously and intensively enough, one would also make progress on the esoteric path, even if one did not notice it. One only had to become more attentive to oneself and increasingly get the feeling: It is not I who think, but something thinks me, so that it is not the physical body that thinks, but the etheric body. The physical body is only a mirror or an echo. Just as when you stand in front of a mirror, you only pay attention to your reflection and forget your real form, so too with an echo, you do not pay attention to what you call out, but only to the echo. Thus, you do not notice that thinking takes place in the etheric body and is only reflected in the physical body. The more we make our etheric body independent, the more we experience two things: first, that our I expands into the vastness, and second, that we experience our inner being in isolation, and in the depths we find our other self. The human being in his skin is only like in a shell in which spiritual forces surge up and down stormily; It is as if our thoughts step out of us like figures and surround us. We then experience our good and our evil: our good in such a way that it points to the future and leads a sprouting, plant-like life there; our evil, which must not be allowed to become action, but remains purely thought, so that it may serve as nourishment for the good in the future. The nourishment for our three realms came into being only because the beings who went through their human stage on the old moon consciously experienced their evil in meditation without allowing it to become action. Evil arose on Earth because backward lunar beings, Luciferic beings, meditate on their evil not on the moon but now on Earth and inoculate it into human beings. On the other hand, we must feel our ego spreading more and more in space, not within our physical shell. Experience the environment of the sensory world in relation to the spiritual as air bubbles in water, as spherical nothingness. Experience this often and repeatedly in your thoughts. To this end, we are to be given the following aids: three formulas to meditate on in the morning, evening, and on Sundays. They will help us in the coming period to make the etheric body independent.

...

By striving in this way to detach himself from these shadow thoughts, the student will gradually succeed in concentrating his self in the etheric body. He will no longer feel himself to be a human being only in his physical body. He will also increasingly perceive the physical body as a shadow in which he must experience himself here on the physical plane. When a person suddenly steps in front of a mirror, it gives them the external impression of their physical form, but that is not the person themselves; it is only a reflection of the person. When they step back from the mirror, the image—themselves—is no longer there. But they are still there, even without the mirror. The mirror only gives a shadow image of their external form.

If the student has trained himself to recognize the shadow-like nature of our thoughts within ourselves—to recognize how these thought shadows exist in the outer, physical world, in science, in society, how we ourselves, as physical human beings, are only shadows of our own inner being—if he has cultivated this as a basic mood of his soul, then he grows into a spiritual world.

...

A very simple example can show us that where objects are perceptible to the senses in the physical world, they are pure nothingness in the spiritual world. Take a bottle of seltzer water: Just as you cannot see the water, even though it is denser, in front of the glowing balls of sparkling carbon dioxide, which are only air, a “nothing,” so you cannot see the spiritual in front of the dazzling things of the world of sensory perception.

Once the esotericist has become accustomed to this truth, that he is surrounded by pure nothingness in the physical-sensory world, a second truth will soon dawn on him, that of “It thinks me, not I think,” namely that all our thoughts are only shadows. We are accustomed to believing that thinking takes place in the physical body, but this is not the case. In truth, the etheric body is the originator of our thoughts. The physical body is only involved insofar as it is the mirror that reflects back the thoughts produced in the etheric body.

When a person looks into a mirror, they see their reflection: the mirror reflects the external impression of their physical form; without them, their person, there could be no reflection; it is therefore only a shadow image of their external form. Similarly, the thoughts that have their living seat in the etheric body are only mirror images, shadows, when we think them in our physical brain. Through meditation and concentration, we should strive to detach ourselves from these shadow thoughts by focusing our soul, our self, in the etheric body, so that we may penetrate to the true, actual source of our thoughts, which have their life in the etheric body.

Once we have trained ourselves to recognize the shadow-like nature of our thoughts and our external environment and to let them fall away more and more, we grow into the spiritual world. Then we will also recognize that everything we produce on earth in the form of thoughts of goodness, benevolence, and nobility is transformed into lasting, imperishable values of existence that will continue to exist. We see them before us in the distance, in the future, where they live for the good of humanity.

And everything evil, bad, and deceitful also lives, all base, selfish thoughts—we see them before us as if in the distance, but they have remained behind as waste products; they are nourishment for the good. Everything evil and bad becomes that which is inherently barren, but which becomes nourishment for that which is to develop from the seed of good.

Just as here on the physical plane the mineral soil provides nourishment for the plants and one always feeds on the other, so all evil thoughts and all bad knowledge become the sediment for the thoughts of good, noble, and true that are germinating in the elemental world. This is why the occultist can interpret evil and error so well; he should imagine it in his mind, but he knows that he must not go beyond this point, where it is still a thought; he does not allow it to pass into action, into reality, which is always Luciferic and Ahrimanic; he knows that it provides the soil in which the seed of good will one day grow.

1918-10-31-GA072

Thus, the spiritual researcher gets around to studying just that in the soul by which that what one has in the usual fully conscious reminiscent life is associated with all kinds of subconscious memories, transformed recollections et cetera. While the spiritual researcher advances with scientific disposition on this way, he gets to the answer of the second question: how is the mystic experience? Why does one get to something unsatisfactory only on the way of the usual mysticism?

There it becomes obvious that anything must be in the human being: as well as the force of loving must be there which delivers the scientific border, there must be something that prevents the human being from submerging in the undergrounds of his being, as the mystic wants it, with the usual consciousness. If the human being had the ability to descend completely, to pursue everything that is to be found on the way about which I have spoken, and what the mystic believes to be able to find in the human inside, then the human being would not need the other ability for life: the power of memory. The impressions, the mental pictures of life have to accumulate as it were. They are not allowed to penetrate into our core. We must have the veil before our inside which works like a mirror and from which our experiences are reflected as memories. As little as we see if we stand before a mirror what is behind the mirror, as little we see the human inside that is behind that mirror which gives rise, actually, to our memories. Thus, someone who has this second experience recognises at last that the spiritual researcher cannot use what one can attain with the usual mysticism because it proves to be transformed memories in any way if it is processed only in the usual consciousness.

Hence, there are two starting points, two experiences that must be gone through if one wants to be a spiritual researcher: the experience with the view of nature and the experience with the memories, with the transformed memories. From these experiences, one receives a certain way of knowledge. If these experiences are done seriously with all disappointments that are connected with both experiences, then such experience stands for the production of an inner force at the same time. Someone gets this force to pursue the path of knowledge in another way than one pursues it with the usual consciousness. What I have just explained is the base on which the spiritual researcher goes on working in order to develop another consciousness and to penetrate with it into the supersensible world.

I have just indicated here that it is necessary to get to another state of consciousness beyond the consciousness of the usual life and science. However, most people shrink from this demand. They prefer considering this demand as something fantastic, as something enthusiastic, and, hence, they reject the possibility of the knowledge of the higher truth or they want to approach it with the usual consciousness. It is clear from the said that one cannot arrive at any goal on both ways.

Now the nature of the way that one has to take will result from these experiences. What does one prevent from descending with the usual consciousness to the own inside? It is the memory; it is the power of memory. If one investigates everything that forms the basis of the ability to remember something, then one finds that the ability of memory is bound to the physical body.

...

Then you recognise only which nature the latter has. Then you get on to say to yourself, natural sciences use such mental pictures only which are organised by their own being towards memory; they never use those mental pictures which are developed in such a way in the human being as I have characterised it.

However, if you develop such vivid thinking, you also get to that experience which breaks through as it were the mirror of which I have comparatively spoken just now, which really penetrates behind the memory and can penetrate into the human inside.

However, there it becomes obvious: if you get to that region which the mirror of memory blankets, otherwise, then you face something that affects the unprepared consciousness strangely at first. You go through an experience that you can only compare with the experience of oversaturation. You recognise that in the human being something lives that you can find only on the intimated way, which gives him an unaware antipathy to himself. Repelling forces must be there as the reflecting mirror coating reflects light. You can compare the mirror coating as it were with that subconscious antipathy or sensation of oversaturation. You do not notice that with the usual consciousness because you experience that in memory that has been reflected.

With the new developed imagining life, you penetrate down, and you have to overcome that antipathy behind the mirror of memory. You overcome it only if you still add other experiences if you not only try to develop such imagining in yourself which does not use the memory, but if you try to develop that power in yourself which exists as something useless. I mean the dreams. The spiritual researcher has to study the dreams very intensely, because the soul lives also in dreams, in an unreality, of course. Dreams have always caused the human beings to put certain questions of life.

The spiritual researcher cannot investigate the dreams as one did once after the pattern of dream books or as the modern psychoanalysis does because both do not lead to the cognition of that force which is, actually, behind the dream. If you can pursue the dreams, it always becomes obvious that the inside of the human body is involved in every dream. Anyhow, these are always bodily processes that are associated with the dreams that in a way exceed the quiet sleeping life, and express themselves in any pictorial ambiguity.

The spiritual researcher does not at all regard these dreams as they present themselves in their pictures. A psychoanalyst said to me once after a talk, anthroposophy looks at the dreams with reference to their immediate contents. We psychoanalysts take the dreams, while we want to investigate from their pictures what rumbles about there in the subconscious.—Well, I do not want to explain the thing further, but one has to answer: as the psychoanalyst does not take the dreams immediately in their pictorial nature, but wants to investigate something behind them, the spiritual researcher does it all the more, but not with inadequate means. He is clear in his mind that the same what goes forward in the soul inside can dress in quite different visions. I want to say, one climbs up a mountain in a dream and falls down on the other side, the same could happen if you dream, you have a paper before yourself in which you make a hole. The pictures that appear in the dream are only an outer disguise. Someone who looks for the picture contents of the dream will never discover the secret of that force in the human soul, which is contained in the dream.

Only somebody can figure the force out which is in the dreams who can pursue the dream how tension and relaxation or persisting tensions appear in the soul life. Then they can dress in the most different pictures. Only such a thinking, as I have described it, can penetrate into those regions of the soul life from which the confused dreams enter into the usual consciousness. Since the dreams which are behind the mirror belong to that region in the human organisation.

One submerges in the area which is behind the mirror if one submerges with the developed imagining which does not appeal to memories in the human inside. Since there you encounter the force which is, otherwise, only embryonic or imperfect in dreams in its true figure. However, the subconscious nature of the human being is something that appears in the consciousness as unaware antipathy and just causes the reflection of the memory.

Now one submerges. Only that which I have described and not the mental pictures that are associated with memories can submerge in such a way that the antipathy is overcome. The antipathy weakens our consciousness towards our inside that prevents us from crushing the mirror and from penetrating into a region that turns out, otherwise, to be unaware antipathy.

Thereby we develop a force that exists in other ways as well in life. I have already called it the capacity for love today. We learn this ability to recognise in its rudiments how it expresses itself in the usual life. If we penetrate, however, on the intimated way down into our own inside, just the force of the capacity for love increases. This is the second side of the soul life that the spiritual researcher has to develop.

He gets to the first force while he develops an imagining which is not based on memory. The other is that he develops such an inner life—and it soon appears as a will life which increases the capacity for love. While one must almost exclude the memory in the area in which one wants to investigate the spirit, the capacity for love must be increased to such a degrees about which the usual consciousness does not have any idea because it only develops love to outer beings and things as a rule but not to the spiritual that is found on the way which leads into the human inside by breaking the human memory .

1918-07-01-GA071B

Those who are familiar with anthroposophical spiritual science are well aware of the numerous objections that our contemporaries have to what is to be presented here. Not only must an expansion of the type of knowledge be sought, but a completely different kind of knowledge, and it is against this kind that the objections arise.

You have the idea of free action, but this freedom does not arise from the organization. You have a sense of freedom that would be a lie, or we would have to go beyond our organization to get to the bottom of freedom. Where do you get with materialistic knowledge? To certain limits. There must be these limits, for example, the idea of matter and force. We need these limits, we need these ideas. But we must come to the point where, when we follow these concepts, we destroy the scientific concepts. We have to place these concepts like stakes, and reality is reflected in them. These concepts are mirrors. Those who want to get behind these concepts with scientific concepts would act like someone who would smash the mirror to find the thing-in-itself behind it.

Once you have experienced this, the question arises: why is it that we set ourselves limits? Man would have to be organized quite differently if he did not set himself these limits as he is between birth and death. A common power should be wrenched out of the soul, and that is the ability to love. Such a being could not love anything that lives in a physical body. The way we have to set limits for ourselves is closely related to our organization.

Because this has always been there, people have come to a different pole. They sought mystical knowledge within themselves. One thinks that one can find within oneself what cannot be found outside through the senses. But there, in one's own inner being, one also comes up against limits. What I have told you about self-awareness becomes denser and denser, but it is also only an image. So there too you reach limits. The futility of ordinary mysticism becomes apparent: you also reach limits. This is because man would not have to have a soul power to come to the image, to the limit, in ordinary mystical contemplation. This is the power of recollection, memory. If one were to break through this barrier, then the ability to remember would cease. One could not remember oneself in the right way, one loses the thread of memory of one's own self.

Outwardly: the ability to love; inwardly: the power of memory, which prevents us from breaking through the barriers to the outside world, to the inside.

...

It turns out, and I am not just saying something that can be logically deduced, but I am characterizing what is experienced by someone who is scientifically asking with his whole soul: Where do you end up with other scientific knowledge? It turns out that every scientific finding must come up against certain limits. These limits must be established through scientific knowledge. Now I could cite many such ideas that must be presented as limiting ideas of scientific knowledge, where one must simply remain at the mental level, one must present them like stakes, like boundary stakes, and say to oneself: Here you simply set these boundary stakes. You must not make the same as ordinary scientific knowledge. In this way, the idea can enter, as can thoughts, with a scientific error. I could certainly cite the atoms straight, other straight, but I need only refer to the most common scientific idea, the idea of substance and force. We need them if we want to recognize scientifically, but we have to put them there.

If we want to understand what we mean by substance and force in the same scientific way that we understand other natural laws, then we would immediately come to the feeling, by having to experience things, that we are destroying scientific knowledge itself. We can no longer maintain what we otherwise assert scientifically. We need this boundary. - Why? Yes, we realize that we put this boundary in front of us, just as we put a mirror in front of us in which we see ourselves, and only by putting this boundary in front of us does it reflect back to us what we have as a scientific idea. If we did not place it, we would have no mirror, and if we were to strive to get at what is called the thing in itself, then our endeavor would be like that of someone who says: My image in the mirror comes to meet me; I want to know what is behind the mirror and conveys the image to me, so I have to smash it so that I can see what is behind it. Thus, anyone who wants to cross the boundary of natural science removes themselves, using the example of the natural sciences themselves. The whole endeavor to get behind the essence of sensual things, with which one... [gap] itself, like the... [gap].

I have only given a brief description, but this is an experience that one must gain, that is gained by the one who again asks himself the question: What must you do scientifically to achieve that supersensible borderline... [illegible] comes to you, that forms the basis for this fruitful modern scientific knowledge? You have to set certain limits for yourself, you have to let them stand, so that the other is penetrable for you. If you have experienced this, dear audience, if you have gone through in your soul what I have just characterized, and I just want to describe and suggest today, that is, speak of experiences, if you have experienced this, then the question arises in the soul: Yes, do we want to, do we have to, if we want to understand the world scientifically, set ourselves limits? And then one comes to the conclusion that man would have to be organized quite differently if he did not set himself such limits. Man would have to be different, then he would no longer be this human being that he has to be for the period between [birth and death]. For it is connected with a very significant power of the soul that we have to set ourselves such limits by observing nature.

Once you understand what is actually going on, what arises in you is something tremendously significant. A certain strength would have to be torn out of our soul if a person were to be so constituted that the knowledge of nature offers him no limits. What would have to be torn out of the soul is the capacity for love. A being that does not come up against limits with knowledge of nature could not have within itself the ability to love anything while living in the physical body. Anyone who sees through the whole of the human being must say to themselves: the part of our being that is directed towards nature must set itself limits because this part of the human being is bound to another part that is able to love. We would not be able to love if we did not have a capacity for knowledge of this kind, which must set itself limits in our experience of nature. The same power in the soul that urges us to set such a mirror boundary, that urges us not to penetrate certain boundaries, is the same power that makes us capable of love. This part is connected to our whole being, to how we are here in the body as human beings, that we have a limited knowledge of nature.

What I have now explained to you is an experience that one can have in the knowledge of nature, but many of our contemporaries have already unconsciously had this experience, it lives in that part of consciousness, and what dawns in dark feelings is not only seen, but it is there, and because it is there in so many people, has always been there for many people, so many people seek to come to the sources of existence in a different way, to come to that which lies beyond the boundary, since supersensible knowledge must come to rest, and then they come to the other pole of human striving. They say to themselves: What we cannot find outside in the sense world, we seek through immersion in our own inner being. And there these people search with the ordinary power of consciousness, with the ordinary power of comprehension and imagination, in short, with the ordinary power of knowledge that they simply have when they are awake, to sink into their inner selves. This is called mystical insight and is understood to mean an immersion in the soul with the ordinary power of life. One thinks that one can find what cannot be found externally in the world of the senses.

And lo and behold, if one is only sincere and honest, which, of course, many mystics are not, then one comes up against a limit with this mystical insight as well. The direct experience [he] yields again: you have to descend into your own interior, but you will find nothing other than always your self, but your self in such a way that you can feel, by seeming to grasp your self, that you do not grasp yourself in your reality, /between the lines:] as I have [dis]cussed. The image becomes denser and denser, but it remains an image, it does not ascend to reality. And in the end you realize that by trying to ascend into the interior in the usual mystical way, you do not arrive at the supernatural, but at the inner sensual, and thus at a limit. And if you are honest, you realize that this comes from the fact that almost always something subjective, something that comes from within yourself, interferes with this contemplation of the inner self, and that you do not grasp something objective, but only flicker through yourself, penetrate into yourself once, so that the self becomes denser and denser. That is the second experience, the futility of ordinary mysticism dawns on you.

This in turn raises the question: where does this limit come from? This limit, you realize it little by little, by trying to gain psychic knowledge through the mystical path. It comes from the fact that man, as he is between birth and death, needs an inner soul strength that he could not have if he could simply dive down into his own self through mystical contemplation. If a person had unlimited knowledge of nature but lacked the ability to love, he would need an additional soul force if he wanted to achieve this through mystical contemplation. Why he wants to... [illegible]? What would have to be missing is something that is usually... [illegible], that is the ability to remember, the ability to remember. By immersing ourselves in our inner selves, we only reach the soul power that reflects back to us the knowledge, events and experiences of our life between birth and death. An inner mirror reflects these experiences back to us. If we were to break through this mirror inwardly, then we would enter the supersensible, but we must not break through it in the ordinary way, otherwise our ability to remember would have to be broken, and what does healthy human life depend on this ability for?

Let us just consider that in those people in whom this ability has been broken, their entire self-confidence does not work. Those who cannot remember the past in their lives more or less lose their way and go astray in life. The pathological [phenomena] in this direction are well known. Outwardly, the human being has to sit in front of himself, unable to transcend what he cannot transcend because of his ability to love. Inwardly, he has to be aware of a boundary to his inner contemplation, because the ability to remember must work within. Therefore, dear attendees, it is that one cannot gain any knowledge of the nature of the human soul through external research of that which is there... [illegible], in our time in the natural scientific observation has acquired such great merit, one has also tried to use memory, natural scientific observation to enter one's own interior.

1913-04-03-GA062

If we bear this in mind, we shall realize that one essential virtue, truthfulness, is one of the right preliminary means for a methodical training for the knowledge of the higher worlds. We shall not be in the least embarrassed to doubt that a proper training for the knowledge of higher worlds is morally beneficial, or at least must be. Indeed, the matter can be presented from yet another point of view. One can assume the case of someone who does not prepare himself for the higher worlds through the truthfulness just described. Then, if he only undergoes the appropriate soul training, the appropriate exercises, the slumbering powers of his soul can indeed be awakened, and in the end he can be brought before an imaginative world. But what is this world then? This world is then nothing other than the mirror image of his own being. And because the moment you look away from the sensory world, when you also look away from the mind that is tied to the brain, you have this imaginative world as something real in front of you, regardless of whether it expresses something real or whether it is only the mirror image of the nature of the person who has it, then anyone who is not properly prepared by truthfulness will also have an “imaginative world” in front of them, because it pretends to be a real one and yet is only the mirror image of one's own soul, of one's own inner being. This world is then a constant temptress of untruthfulness. Therefore, one can say that someone who does not penetrate the spiritual world through the practice of truthfulness puts himself in a situation where temptations to untruthfulness and lies are constantly present in his surroundings when he perceives in the supersensible world. From this the conclusion must be drawn that every ascent into the supersensible world must be connected with the cultivation of the virtue of truthfulness, with the cultivation of the sense of fact above all. For only when we have a sense of fact, a sense of the context of facts in the physical world outside us, can we educate ourselves to be truthful.

......

If we bear this in mind, we shall realize that one essential virtue, truthfulness, is one of the right preliminary means for a methodical training for the knowledge of the higher worlds. We shall not be in the least embarrassed to doubt that a proper training for the knowledge of higher worlds is morally beneficial, or at least must be. Indeed, the matter can be presented from yet another point of view. One can assume the case of someone who does not prepare himself for the higher worlds through the truthfulness just described. Then, if he only undergoes the appropriate soul training, the appropriate exercises, the slumbering powers of his soul can indeed be awakened, and in the end he can be brought before an imaginative world. But what is this world then? This world is then nothing other than the mirror image of his own being. And because the moment you look away from the sensory world, when you also look away from the mind that is tied to the brain, you have this imaginative world as something real in front of you, regardless of whether it expresses something real or whether it is only the mirror image of the nature of the person who has it, then anyone who is not properly prepared by truthfulness will also have an “imaginative world” in front of them, because it pretends to be a real one and yet is only the mirror image of one's own soul, of one's own inner being. This world is then a constant temptress of untruthfulness. Therefore, one can say that someone who does not penetrate the spiritual world through the practice of truthfulness puts himself in a situation where temptations to untruthfulness and lies are constantly present in his surroundings when he perceives in the supersensible world. From this the conclusion must be drawn that every ascent into the supersensible world must be connected with the cultivation of the virtue of truthfulness, with the cultivation of the sense of fact above all. For only when we have a sense of fact, a sense of the context of facts in the physical world outside us, can we educate ourselves to be truthful.

1924-06-25-GA317

Let us look right away from this life of soul, which emerges only by degrees and in which a part is often played by teachers—concerning whom perhaps the less said the better!—let us look away from this life of soul, and then we find, behind the bodily nature, another life of soul, a spirit soul, which makes its descent, between the time of conception and birth, from the spiritual worlds. For the first-mentioned life of soul is not that in man which descends from spiritual worlds. The life of soul which descends from the spiritual worlds is something quite different, and is not, in the ordinary way, perceptible to earthly consciousness. This whole life of soul that comes down from the spiritual worlds takes possession of the body which is being built up from the sequence of generations in accordance with heredity. And if this soul-life is of such a kind that it tends, when it lays hold of the liver-substance, to form a diseased liver, or if it finds in the physical and the etheric body some inherited tendency to disease, which gives rise to a feeling of illness, then disease will make its appearance. Similarly, any other organ or nexus of organs may be faultily inserted into what comes down from the world of soul-and-spirit. When the connection has been made, when the union has come about between what comes down and what is inherited, when this entity of soul-and-body has been formed, then there arises—but even then no more than as a reflection in a mirror—that which we know ordinarily as our life of soul, as it manifests in thinking, feeling and willing. This soul life that manifests in thinking, feeling and willing is, however, as we said, no more than a reflection, it is really just like a reflection in a mirror. It is all obliterated when we fall asleep. The really permanent soul-life is behind; it makes its descent and passes through repeated earth-lives. And if we ask where it is in man, the answer is: It has its seat in the organisation of the body. How is this to be understood?

Let us think first of the human being in his three systems: nervous system, rhythmical system and metabolism-limb system. You will understand me when I say that the nerves-and-senses system is localised principally in the head; we can therefore speak—although, of course, diagrammatically only—of the head system when we are referring to the nerves-and-senses system. This is more literally correct in the case of the very young child, where the upbuilding function of the nerves-and-senses system proceeds from the head and works thence into the whole organism. The nerves-and-senses system, then, is localised in the head. It is a synthetic system. What do I mean by that? It brings together all the activities of the organism. In the head is contained, in a sense, the whole human being. When we speak of hepatic activity—and we ought really to speak always of the activity of the liver, for what we see as liver is nothing but a liver process that has become fixed—this liver activity is, naturally, entirely in the lower body; but for each such nexus of functions there is a corresponding activity in the head. Here, shall we say, is the liver activity. And there is a correspondence to this liver activity in a particular activity in the human head or brain. Here in the lower body, the liver is relatively separated from the other organs, from kidneys, stomach and so on. But in the brain everything flows together, the hepatic activity flows together with the other activities; so that the head is the great synthesizer of everything that is going on in the organism. And the effect of all this synthesized activity is to set up a destructive process, a process of breaking down. Substance falls away.

Whilst we have thus in the head a synthesizing process, in the whole of the rest of the organism, and especially in the metabolism-and-limbs system, we have an analysing process; here, in contrast to the head, everything is kept separate. Whereas in the head, the renal activity takes place together with the intestinal activity, in the rest of the organism the several activities are held apart. In the head, however, everything flows together, it is all synthesized.

Now this flowing together—accompanied as it is by a continual falling away of substance, like rain—this synthetical activity of the head lies at the basis of all our thought activity. For what has to happen in order that man may be able to think? That which enters into man from out of the realm of soul and spirit, enabling him to come forth and be active in the world—this soul-and-spirit nature of his has to be endowed, in the region of the head, with the synthesizing function and so be capable of synthesizing in the right way the inherited substance; then this harmoniously synthesized hereditary substance can become a mirror. When, with the descent of soul and spirit, the synthesizing activity begins to take place in the head, the head becomes a mirror; the outer world is reflected in it, and this produces the thinking that we ordinarily observe.

We must therefore distinguish between two functions or activities of thinking:

• there is first the one which takes its course behind the realm of the perceptible, and builds the brain—this one is the permanent element in human thinking;
• and then there is the thinking function that is not real in itself but only a reflection. This latter function is obliterated every time we fall asleep; it subsides as soon as we stop thinking.

1921-07-28-GA077A

In a certain sense, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is juxtaposed to this. It wants to become a matter for the whole human being, for the fully human being, and wants to take hold of his feelings and will. On the one hand, as I explained yesterday, it draws from sources of knowledge that learn to look into the human interior. It draws from certain abilities that can be developed beyond the everyday through the method I mentioned yesterday. From these latent powers of knowledge, dormant in ordinary life and in ordinary science, it draws out something that looks down into human nature, into those regions that are covered in ordinary life by the so necessary power of remembrance, by memory, just as the space behind a mirror is covered by the mirror.

If we break through what our memory power faces, as I suggested yesterday, and develop powers of supersensible insight, then we will indeed, as I indicated yesterday, first of all gain insight into the human organs themselves in their vitality. We arrive at the point where a living medicine must search, where a living anthropology must search. But we then go beyond what we find in the present human being as the spiritual-material, to the prenatal human being, or rather to the human being as he was in the spiritual world before he entered this earthly life through conception. We arrive at a real expansion of those powers of the human soul life that would otherwise - filling the period of time that lies between a few years after our birth and our present moment - only extend to this life within our earthly existence. By breaking through memory, we attain a higher soul power, a higher power of knowledge; we attain the ability to behold the spiritual-soul essence of the human being as it was before the human being was conceived for this earthly life. And from there the current then flows, which is so difficult for today's man to think about: the current of penetrating from self-knowledge to world knowledge.

...

This means, however, that the other pole, which had to be characterized with reference to the signature of the present, will also take on a different character. In practical life, something will happen that is not an anti-social element, but a social element. This anti-social element, where does it actually come from? It comes from the fact that, precisely because head culture has reached a high point, the instincts of human nature prevail and take hold of feeling and will. What anthroposophical knowledge is shines into feeling and into will; it does not blunt the elemental power of feeling and will, as people so easily believe; it does not take away people's original naivety. No, when anything beautiful is illuminated, it does not lose its peculiarity, but it comes out even more. That which lies in the depths of human nature does not become duller when it is illuminated anthroposophically, but it is unfolded in just the right way, without the person having to suffer from today's disease, nervousness. Thought, in turn, shines into feeling; feeling takes hold of it, and by shining into feeling with thought, the “I think, therefore I am not”, the “I am only in the picture by thinking” — thinking is transformed into being. And only by immersing ourselves in the realm of the will, which is otherwise only experienced in sleep — for in ordinary cognition, what does man know of the relationship that exists between a thought that is to lead to the will and the raising of the hand? By means of this thinking, which delves spiritually into this volition, there develops what might be called the path leading from one human being to another in the clear light of spiritual knowledge. Humanity can only become a social whole if feelings and volitional impulses are illuminated, not by abstract, intellectualistic knowledge, but by higher vision. And it is through this infusion of higher vision that a true social science, a social ethics, will arise. It is precisely such a social ethics that my book The Philosophy of Freedom seeks to provide. There I showed that man can only feel free if he develops an impulse for action, for willing, out of purest thinking.

Man could never feel free if he had to draw impulses of the will from any other basis. If we stand before a mirror and merely have an image before us – the comparison is more than a mere comparison – then this image cannot force us.

If something pushes me, then I am forced by causality. If I look at the image, I cannot be forced; the image has no power in itself to force me. If I grasp my volitional impulses in the pure pictorial thought, then these pictorial thoughts have no causal power, no momentum. By recognizing the pictorial quality of thinking, one recognizes how, in pure thinking, free will is truly absorbed, so that the impulses for free action can only be found in the most individual part of the human being.

But it is precisely through the will entering into this pure thinking, which is initially an image for us, and the will entering in, as is the case with loving social action or with higher supersensible knowledge, as you can see in the explanations in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, that otherwise pure thinking is filled with what is man's very own eternal being. And the first clairvoyance, ladies and gentlemen, is already there when a free decision of the will flashes through the mind. And basically all that I then give as a method for ascending to the highest spiritual worlds is nothing other than a metamorphosed formulation of what I have described in my Philosophy of Freedom as underlying free will. When one recognizes how, in this pure thinking permeated by the will, there is something in which man can grasp world events as if at a corner, then one also gradually learns to see how one can expand this state of mind, which otherwise only exists in the free action of man, in the way described yesterday, and how one can thereby come to supersensible knowledge. If man wants to know himself as a free being, he must begin with this true supersensible vision, otherwise freedom will always be something impossible for him. Freedom is also irreconcilable with natural causality — not even for a Kantian or for someone who at least claims to be one. And there is no other way to harmonize natural causality and human freedom than to see things as I have just described.

1910-10-24-GA124

We may now ask:—What does the experiencing of the ego-point mean? This is not such a simple matter as you might suppose. One might easily think, for example, that one experiences the ego itself. But this is not the case at all. Man does not really experience his ego. What then does he experience? He really experiences a concept of the ego, a percept of it. If the experiencing of the ego was clearly understood by us, it would present something that reached to infinity, that spread out on all sides. If the ego were unable to confront itself, to see itself as an image is seen in a mirror—though this image is only experienced for a moment—man could not experience his own ego, he could form no conception of it. This is man's first experience of the ego, it has to suffice him, for it is precisely this conception that differs from all other conceptions. It differs from them in this, that other conceptions resemble their original, they cannot differ from their original; but when the ego forms a conception of itself it is concerned with itself alone, and the conception is but what remains behind of the ego-experience. It is like a checking or blocking of it, as if we would check it in order to turn it back on itself, and in this checking the ego is confronted by the reflected image of itself which resembles the original. This is what occurs at the experiencing of the ego.

We can therefore say:—We recognise the ego in the conception of it (Ich-vorstellung). But this ego conception differs considerably from all other conceptions, from all other experiences. It differs from them profoundly. For all other conceptions and all other experiences we require something of the nature of an organ. This is clearly seen in respect of sense-perception. In order to have the conception colour we require eyes and so on; it is clear to anyone that in the ordinary perception of the senses an organ is necessary. You might think that no organ was required to perceive what is intimate to your own inner Being, but even in this you can convince yourselves by simple means that organs are necessary. This is dealt with more particularly in my book “Anthroposophy”; here opportunity is given to approach by theosophical methods what there is stated in a manner more suited to the generality. Let us suppose the following—at some period of your lives you grasp a thought or idea. You understand the idea that comes to you. By what means do you understand it? Only through other ideas that you have previously accepted. You realise this because you observe that one man comprehends a new idea that comes to him in one way, another in another way. This is because one man has within him a greater, another a smaller sum of ideas which he has assimilated. The material of old ideas is within us and confronts the new as the eye confronts the light. Out of our own old ideas a kind of “idea-organ” is constructed, and what we have not constructed of this in our present incarnation must be sought in some former one. There it was built up, and we are able to confront the new ideas that come to us with an “organ of ideas.” We require an organ for all the experiences that come to us from the outer world, especially if these are of a spiritual nature. We never stand spiritually naked as it were before what comes to us from the outer world; but are ever dependant on what we have become. Only in a single case do we confront the outer world directly, namely, when we attain ego perception (Ich-wahrnehmung). The ego is present, even when we sleep, but perception of it must always be aroused anew, it must be roused anew each morning when we wake. Even supposing We journeyed in the night to Mars, where our surroundings would be quite different from what they are on earth, yet ego-perception would remain the same! This latter under all conditions take place in the same way because no external organ is required for it—not even an “organ of ideas.” What confronts us here is a direct conception (Vorstellung) of the ego; a conception or perception (Wahrnehmung) certainly, but in its true form. Everything else comes before as a picture seen in a mirror, and is restricted by the form of the mirror. Ego-perceptions come before us absolutely in their true form.

Put in another way one might say:—When realising things with the ego, we are ourselves within them; they cannot possibly be outside of us. We now ask our-selves:—How do individual ego-conceptions or ego-perceptions differ from all other perceptions by the ego? They are distinguished by the direct impression they make on the ego, no other perceptions make this direct impression. But we receive pictures of all that surrounds us; and these in a certain sense can be compared with ego-perceptions. Everything is changed by the ego into an inner experience. The outer world must become our conception if it is to have any meaning or value for us. We form true pictures of the surrounding world, which then continue to live in the ego no matter through which of the sense-organs they have come to us. We smell a substance when we pass it by, and though we do not come in direct contact with it we bear an image of it within us. In the same way we bear within us the image of colours we have seen, and retain pictures of them. The ego preserves such experiences. But if we wish to describe the characteristic feature of these images we must say—it is that they come to us from outside. All the pictures we have been able to unite with our ego, so long as we are in the world of the senses, are the relics of impressions we have received by means of the senses.

One thing the sense-world cannot give us—Ego-perception! This arises in us spontaneously. Thus in ego-perception we have a picture that rises of itself, however closely it may be confined to one point.

Think now of other pictures being added to these, pictures that do not rise through stimulation of the senses, but that rise freely in the ego (as ego-conceptions do), and are therefore formed in the same manner as the ego-conception. These arise in what we call the “Astral world.” There are picture-concepts which arise in the ego without our having received any impression from the outer world.

How do these inner experiences differ from those other pictures we received from the sense-world? We receive pictures of the sense-world by having come in contact with that world; these then become inner impressions, but impressions which have been stimulated from outside.

What are those experiences of the ego which are not directly stimulated by the outer world? We have these in our feelings, our wishes, impulses, instincts and the like. These are not stimulated by the outer world. Even if we do not stand within our feelings, wishes and impulses etc., by means of the senses as already described, yet we must allow an element does enter into our inner feelings, impulses, and desires. In what way do these differ from the sense-pictures we bear within us as a result of what our senses have perceived? You can feel this difference. Pictures received through the senses quietly rest within us, and we try to retain faithful reproductions of them once we have realised our connection with the outer world. But our impulses, desires and instincts are active in us, they represent a force. Though the outer world has no part in the rise of astral pictures, yet the fact of their appearing denotes a certain force. For what is not set going (getrieben) is not there, it cannot arise.

In sense-pictures the “initial force” is the impression received from the outer world. In astral-pictures this force is what lies at the root of desires, impulses, feelings, etc. Only, in life as it is to-day, man is shielded from developing a force in his feelings and desires sufficiently strong to evoke pictures—pictures that would be experienced in the same way as those of the “I” itself.

1920-01-30-GA196

Dream-like elements also intrude into human thinking from other sides. Today, one participates in the outer life. How does one participate in this outer life? One informs oneself about what is going on in the world; one informs oneself in such a way that one allows oneself to be carried into one's experience, so to speak, by what comes into life through this or that impulse. One surrenders to some popular agitation. Just examine how much of this devotion to a popular agitation arises from one's own will and how much can simply be attributed to being carried along by the surges of life! And I could tell you many, many things that rush into thinking and dominate it, without the will of the human being itself having a direct effect on this thinking.

The specific historical task in writing my book “The Philosophy of Freedom” was to point out how human freedom is only possible at all if this involuntary, dreamy thinking is not present, but rather impulses from the fully conscious will assert themselves. This thinking - what nature is it then? When is it real thinking? When it really comes from the fully conscious will, when we grasp the thought in such a way that it is we ourselves who grasp the thought. At the moment when the thought grasps us, we are no longer free. Only when we can grasp the thought out of our own power, out of our own being, are we free. But then the thought can be nothing but an image. If the thought were anything other than an image, it would be a reality, and then it could not leave us free. Everything that is a reality weaves us into the stream of the real. Only that which is an image leaves us free. Imagine how everything you see in a room has a real effect on you. You are only completely free in relation to the images that look back at you from the mirror. These cannot harm you on their own, you cannot be offended by these images. If you are to do something in response to these images, then it must be you who takes action. If a fly lands on your nose – it is, after all, an insignificant animal – you are not free, you make a reflexive movement. And so it is with everything that is there. You are only free in relation to what you can perceive as an image that is not reality, that is an image. Why are the contents of our thinking images? Well, we need only recall from my 'Occult Science in Outline' how man was connected with a previous embodiment of our earth planet, with the development of the moon. If you read everything that is said there about the development of the moon, you will say to yourself: During this development of the moon, man was connected with quite different entities and also with quite different natural forces than he is in his earthly existence. He has gone through this moon existence. The after-effect of it is in him. He has developed from this moon existence to the earthly existence. And if you read more carefully what I have discussed there, you will say to yourself: During the time on the moon, man did not yet think in the same way as he does as an earth human being. He lived in unconscious imaginations then, and these unconscious imaginations were not at his disposal, any more than the images in dreams are at his disposal today. Only the thoughts are at our discretion, to which we as human beings are only now gradually developing in the fifth post-Atlantic period. What we have today as thinking is a further development of what we had as pictorial experiences of the soul during our lunar existence.

...

And now I ask you: When man does this, when he changes nature, when he takes what he takes from nature and forms it into his machines, into his works of art, does he do this out of his thinking? — Let us consider it in so far as he does it out of his thinking: He does it out of the pictorial nature of thinking. To the earthly, it is absolutely unimportant what happens, just as the images that arise in the mirror make no particular impression on the objects in the room. But the human being gives reality to these things. That is the other side of things when the human being, after having developed out of the lunar existence, surrenders to thinking: When man forms something and places it into the world, just as the dreamlike plays into our thinking and, in the dreamlike, the old lunar state, the Luciferic, plays into all our mechanization, into all our reshaping of the world, that which is not yet connected with earthly existence, what we ourselves place into this earthly existence. What is that actually?

1922-01-17-GA297A

good to read in full

Anthroposophy must point out that, on the basis of its research, what lives in the human being, what, I might say, only appears to have become so rarefied as to emerge as our ordinary life of thought, but which in truth is the inner sphere of growth of our existence, can enter into human consciousness and be grasped through human consciousness. And on the other hand, when a person loses the main focus of their mental life and enters into a fearful undercurrent of this soul life, they can absorb the results of spiritual science anthroposophy through their mental life and can consolidate this mental life through the path of knowledge. Anthroposophy does not offer a solution to this soul riddle by putting forward a theory, but by putting a result in front of the human being that he can fully grasp with his common sense and that then - like giving weight - appears in the life of ideas for his consciousness, for his soul life, so that the soul mood, the soul constitution, can flow into it, solving riddles, which Anthroposophy seemingly asserts as mere knowledge about the life of ideas. On the one hand, we can see how the human being is a formed being, how he appears as a whole in a certain form, how his individual organs are formed out of the spirit and how we — so that we can be free beings, so that we do not act only through these inner forces, but can surrender to free mirror images until our merely pictorial representations develop into something vividly formed. I explained this at the beginning of the nineties of the last century in my 'Philosophy of Freedom', by showing that man is a free being precisely because he can live in pure thoughts that are not connected with any external reality for his consciousness, that he can form his moral impulses in these pure thoughts. In relation to mirror images, one will be in the position of having to do something oneself if the mirror image is to change; mirror images do not determine one causally. A human being would never be free if he were determined by a reality in his ordinary consciousness. In his ordinary consciousness, ideas live as images, but he is not determined by them, just as one is not determined by mirror images. He is free. In order for him to be free, his life must be distinguished from that which permeates it in a plastic way as a growth force, as a body of growth, one could say, as a body of formative forces. But this life in freedom must be paid for by the person with the characterized anxious undercurrent in his or her soul life, and therefore, in his or her ordinary consciousness, the person must come to fully experience his or her sense of freedom, but also, as a polar opposite, to be able to counter this experience of freedom with what anthroposophy can give as a way of strengthening the life of ideas in the way indicated.

hypnosis

1904-03-30-GA052

We can observe this in the phenomena of human life that are usually called abnormal. These phenomena seem far removed from the considerations to which the first part of my lecture was devoted. But considered in the true sense of the word, they are very close to these considerations. These are the phenomena that are usually called abnormal states of mind, such as hypnotism, somnambulism, and clairvoyance.

What does hypnosis mean in human life?

It cannot be my task today to describe the various procedures that must be carried out if we want to put a person into the sleep-like state we call hypnosis. Either this is done — I will only mention it briefly — by looking at a shiny object, which concentrates the attention in a very special way, or by simply addressing the person in an appropriate manner, saying: You are now falling asleep. In this way, we can induce this state of hypnosis, a kind of sleep in which ordinary daytime consciousness is extinguished. The person who has been put into hypnotic sleep in this way stands or sits motionless, in the ordinary sense of the word, unresponsive, in front of the person who has put them into this sleep as a hypnotist.

Such a hypnotized person can be pricked with needles, can be beaten, their limbs can be moved into different positions — they hear nothing of all this, they feel nothing of what would have caused them pain or perhaps a feeling of well-being, a tickling sensation, let's say, under other circumstances, when they were awake and conscious. In the usual, general sense, pleasure and pain are eliminated from the nature of such a hypnotized person. But pleasure and pain are what we described in our last lecture as the actual fundamental characteristics of the soul, the middle part of the human being.

What is eliminated in hypnotism?

Essentially, of the three fundamental parts, body, soul, and spirit, the soul is eliminated. What we have done is to eliminate the middle fundamental part of the human being from its essence. It is not active, it does not feel pleasure and pain in the usual sense; it does not feel pain that would hurt it if its soul were functioning normally.

How does the essence function in such a person when you address a hypnotized person and give them commands?

If you say to them, “Stand up, take three steps,” they will carry out these commands. You can give them even more complicated and varied commands, and they will carry them out. You can place sensual objects in front of him, for example a pear, and tell him that it is a glass ball. He will believe it. What lies sensually before him has no meaning for him. The fact that you tell him it is a glass ball is decisive for him. If you ask him, “What do you have in front of you?” he will answer, “A glass ball.”

Your mind, what is inside you when you are the hypnotist, what you think, what emanates from you as a thought, has a direct effect on this person's actions. His body automatically follows the commands of your mind.

Why does he follow these commands?

Because his soul is switched off, because his soul does not interpose itself between his body and your mind. The moment his soul becomes active with its desires and sufferings, the moment its ability to feel pain and make simple perceptions reappears, at that moment the soul decides whether these commands are to be carried out, whether it has to accept the thoughts of the other person.

When you face another person in a normal state, his mind has an effect on you. But their mind, what they think, what they want, initially affects your soul. This affects you as pleasure and pain, and you decide how to respond to the thoughts and volitional actions of the other person. If the soul is silent, if the soul is switched off, then it does not interpose itself between your body and the spirit of the other person, then the body follows the impressions of the hypnotist, the impressions of his spirit, without will, just as a mineral follows the laws of nature. Switching off the soul is the essential thing in hypnosis. Then the foreign thought, the thought outside of the person, acts on this person, who is in a sleep-like state, with the power of a law of nature. What intervenes between this spiritual force of nature and the body, namely the soul, acts itself like a law of nature. The soul intervenes between your own mind and your own body. And what we perceive as a thought, what we perceive intellectually, we carry out in everyday life only by transforming it into our personal desires, by accepting it and finding it right for our pleasures and pains, in other words, by our mind first speaking to our soul, and our soul carrying out the commands of our own mind.

Now the question may be raised: Why, when the soul is switched off, when the hypnotized person faces the hypnotist, does the third, the highest part of the human being, the spirit, not face the hypnotist? Why does it slumber, why is the spirit of the human being inactive?

We can understand this when we realize that during their earthly incarnation, the interaction of spirit, soul, and body is essential for human beings, that the human spirit can only understand the environment, understand sensory reality, when the soul conveys this understanding to it. When our eye receives an impression from the outside, the soul must act as a mediator so that this impression can reach our spirit. I perceive a color. The eye conveys the external impression to me through its structure. The spirit thinks about the color. It forms a thought. But between the thought and the external impression, the reagent of the soul intervenes, that which makes the impression become its own inner life, that which makes it an experience of its own soul. The spirit can only speak to its own soul, to the personal soul, in earthly human beings. If you switch off the soul through hypnosis, then the spirit can no longer express itself in the hypnotized person. In doing so, you have taken away the organ through which the spirit can express itself, through which it can act. You have not taken away the spirit, you have only switched off its soul and rendered it inactive. But because the spirit can only be active in the soul in human beings, the spirit cannot be active in the body itself. That is why we say that it is in an unconscious state, which means nothing other than that its spirit is inactive. Now we understand why hypnosis makes people so receptive to the spiritual impressions emanating from the hypnotist. He becomes receptive because nothing spiritual comes between him and the hypnotist. The other person's thoughts become an immediate force of nature; thoughts become creative. Thoughts are creative, and the spirit is creative throughout nature. It just does not appear immediately.

Now, in hypnotized people and other similar abnormal states, we have simultaneously rendered the consciousness, the actual spirit of the human being, inactive by switching off the soul. We have put the person into an unconscious state. We can get an idea of what is actually happening if we form a mental image, for example, of moving a sleeping person from one room to another and letting him sleep there for a while. There are impressions around him, but he does not perceive them. He knows nothing of his surroundings. If we bring him back to the room where he was sleeping before, without him waking up, then he has been in another room without knowing anything about it, then he has not perceived this other room. It depends on our perceiving our surroundings if we want to call these surroundings “real.” There may be many things around us that are real, that exist – but we know nothing about them because we do not perceive them. We do not orient ourselves towards them, our activities are unrelated to them because we do not perceive them.

In such a state, the hypnotized person is opposite the hypnotist. Forces emanate from the hypnotist; forces are at work that are imbued with the hypnotist's thoughts. They emanate from him and have an effect on the hypnotized person. But the hypnotized person knows nothing about this. He speaks, but he only speaks what is in the mind of the hypnotist and lives there. He is, so to speak, active without being his own observer, as is the case with people in ordinary life, without observing at the same time what is the object of his activity. He is, so to speak, in the environment in which he finds himself, facing the spirit of the hypnotist, just like a sleeping person who has been taken to another room and knows nothing of what is going on around him. In this way, a person can be brought again and again into environments where the spirit speaks to him. He can be in environments where the spirit speaks to him. Now and at every moment, you too are in environments where the spirit speaks to you, for everything around us is made by the spirit. The laws of nature are spirit, only that in the ordinary view, man perceives this spirit only in the shadowy reflection of thoughts. This spirit is spirit, just like the spirit that is active in the hypnotist when the hypnotist acts on the hypnotized person.

Now, in the normal, ordinary waking state, humans are not in the same state of mind as the hypnotized person, but in a sense they are also in a state in which their senses and their perception of the spirit are not open to their spiritual environment. If this perception of the spirit that is in the environment is open, if the things of the spiritual world that are around us speak to us in a loud, audible language, then this can only be the case when we are in a similar situation in normal life as the hypnotized person is in relation to the hypnotist. The hypnotized person is free of suffering and pain. They do not perceive pinpricks or blows. Pleasure and pain in the ordinary sense of the word are extinguished. If, in our ordinary life, in our waking consciousness, we reach the state I described in the first part of my lecture — for the theosophical worldview should consider a higher state of human development, which Plato demanded of his students and the mystery priests demanded of their pupils — if we strip away what touches us as everyday pleasure and everyday suffering, what immediately brings tears to our eyes, makes our ears sensitive, fills us with fear and hope, if we strip away what constitutes the object of our everyday life, free ourselves from this world, and undergo the transformation of the spirit that has been described, then we can — but now fully conscious — enter into a similar state in relation to the spiritual world as, in an abnormal sense, the hypnotized person does in relation to the hypnotist. Then we will have our eyes and ears in the same activity as we otherwise have them; we will have our waking daytime consciousness, but within this waking daytime consciousness we will not allow ourselves to be affected by everyday objects in the ordinary sense. This transformation must take place within the human being. He must perceive the spiritual environment, that which speaks in things, as indifferently and apathetically as the hypnotized person in an abnormal state perceives the thoughts and words of the hypnotist; through indifference and apathy he perceives what is the language of the spirit in his environment.

Only experience can be decisive in this area. When the monumental principles of theosophical ethics are fulfilled to a certain degree, when the human being has reached the state where he truly faces spiritual truths as the ordinary human being faces mathematical truths, objectively, free from pleasure and pain, then the spirit of the environment speaks to people, then the spirit is not bound to the impressions of its senses, just as little as the hypnotized person is bound to what affects his senses. The hypnotist only affects the hypnotized person who has become free from pain and pleasure, and so the spirit only affects the clairvoyant person who has become free from pain and pleasure. In order to have such sensitivity to the environment while awake and conscious, it is necessary to have undergone a development so that we can pass between things with a fully functioning mind and fully active reason, and yet still be able to let the spirit speak to us. That is it: clairvoyance means nothing other than having reached a stage of development of the human being through which the human being is able to perceive the world around them free of pleasure and pain. When a person has developed to the point where their passions and desires are silent within them, where what they call shadow-like thoughts are silent, and to which they cling with such devotion and attachment as a person clings to the sensory impressions of their immediate surroundings; when man can love this passionless, desireless state as much as the ordinary man loves the things around him, then he has become ripe to perceive the spirit around him. Then he no longer desires what is desired in everyday life, but desires in the realm of the spiritual world.

1906-04-07-GA068D

lecture title: Hypnotism and Spiritualism in the Light of Theosophy

We now come to hypnosis. Through some influence or other, a person's consciousness is so subdued that he can no longer control his actions; to varying degrees, the bright consciousness of day is subdued.

Suggestion has such an influence on people. The man to whom you say, “Here is a pear,” while a potato is put into his hand, has not lost the ability to see; he can hear and see, but he has lost the ability to control the perceptions through the ear and the eye. Consciousness is dulled to the extent that he is only receptive to what you tell him. As long as he is awake, he can say and do whatever he wants; then he can control his actions. Now that the waking daytime consciousness has faded away, the mental consciousness is still there.

Through various means, one can put a person into such a state, for example, by looking at a shiny object. When consciousness is tuned down to a certain degree, the person is a suitable subject for suggestion. He then does things that he would not do if he were awake, for example, he will crawl on all fours like a dog and bark. He hears what is being said but cannot make sense of it.

But suggestion can also be carried out without such means. This is called verbal suggestion or suggestive hypnosis, and many contemporary researchers believe that everything comes from such verbal suggestions. What seemed miraculous to us — the barking of the hypnotized person — no longer seems miraculous to us now that we have seen that when the physical-sensory consciousness is extinguished or dulled, the soul-spiritual rapport from soul to soul has been established.

If you go through life with an open mind, you can observe this soul-to-soul rapport in many aspects of daily life. Not only what we hear and see has an effect on us; souls have a direct effect on each other; this also explains the otherwise inexplicable sympathy and antipathy. However, much of it is based on suggestion. Anyone who observes the workings of the soul will also be able to explain the powerful influence that some speakers exert on the masses, even though they give no logical reasons for their convictions. These are subtle effects of suggestion. Interesting observations can be made in this area.

• The well-known theater director Laube had a subtle suggestive effect on the audience. He brought the great actor Sonnenthal and the actress Wolter to the top. At first the audience did not want to know anything about them; but Laube was sure of his cause. He said: “Not today, but they will eat them!” The Viennese laughed at first, then mocked, but finally they also recognized the greatness of the excellent actors. Through continued listening, the audience's opposition was lulled and they became receptive to the impression that the great actors made on them.

How does science view these phenomena of suggestion? Wilhelm Wundt, who is almost worshipped like a god by some scientists, could not deny the facts, but he did not seek or find a satisfactory explanation for them either. He realized that a part of the brain was switched off during hypnosis, but he could not give a scientific explanation for it and shrugged his shoulders because he did not believe in the existence of the soul. His students tried to track down the existence of the soul and its effects.

...

When we look at hypnosis, we see that the scientific world was quite dismissive, even mocking and hostile towards it. But gradually the scientists have been tamed by hypnosis to register the phenomena, and hypnotism has gained respect.

1919-11-06-GA329

Natural science, in its research, has already come to the conclusion that it no longer wants to be purely materialistic, at least in the case of some minds. But when the ordinary natural scientist wants to prove that something lives in man that is spiritual and soul-like, that is not merely an expression of the body, then he does not turn to such phenomena that he can prove, that he can present as one presents phenomena of the laboratory, the clinic and the like, but he turns precisely to the abnormal phenomena of human life. And I would like to say that it has become fashionable to examine the world of dreams, which awakens so mysteriously from its natural sleep, in order to point out how the human being also has a spiritual and a soul element within him. But that means examining everything that arises from the phenomena of suggestion, hypnosis, somnambulism, mediumship, and so on. Here too, it is tempting to confuse anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, which seeks to draw on a sound knowledge of nature and a sound experience of the human world, with that which would like to lean on such phenomena as hypnotism, somnambulism and the like for a real exploration of the human spiritual and soul nature.

We can start from the world of dreams to get a little closer to these phenomena. We can point out how this world of dreams conjures up images before people, into the human soul, in the time between falling asleep and waking up, when the human being is not fully connected to his spiritual and soul life to the resting body. But the one who can properly study this dream world will never answer the question, “What is this dream world?” “This world of dreams is something that takes people beyond their ordinary external daily lives.” – Then, for the unbiased person, it is quite clear that all sorts of things must interfere in this dream world that come only from the lower, animal-like instincts of human nature.

Consider Just consider what a person is capable of doing in a dream, how he tends towards the lower drives, how he often tends towards a life of crime in what he imagines in his dreams. Man must say to himself: he is not transported into some higher spiritual realm when he dreams, but on the contrary, he has descended into the subhuman. Truly, it is a dream itself when people today want to claim, want to claim quite willingly, that in their dreams they are transported into a higher world. No, in a dream we are brought into a lower world than the one we see through our senses.

And especially when a person is subjected to the influence of some suitable fellow human being, so that he is placed in the sleep-like state of hypnosis, one can even, I might say, exert irresponsible influences on the person by acting in a kind of sleep-like state. Then he regards a potato as a pear and eats it as a pear, purely because he is being suggested, this idea is being given to him: this potato is a pear. And still completely different things can be given to him! It is only the extreme state, which also otherwise exists as, I would like to say, not a completely permissible state, where one counts on the damping down of consciousness by the other person, and wants to persuade him, I would like to say, to rape ideas. For those who work in the sense of true spiritual science, the question arises: what is the state of mind in which a person is in a dream? What is the state of mind in which a person is when he is in such a hypnotic or mediumistic - which is also similar to a hypnotic state - when he is in such a hypnotic state and can experience such influences from any fellow human being or from other surroundings?

In a hypnotic state, it is indeed possible for thought transfers to occur over long distances; they can be demonstrated and proven experimentally. But the question arises as to what regions a person, with his entire human, physical, mental and spiritual being, is brought when one descends into these regions. One then brings him into a region that is subhuman, that represents the animalistic in man. In fact, Man is being hypnotized down, profaned down into that which plays in him as animalistic. And it is precisely through this that one gets to know the animal in man, which is nevertheless something quite different from the animal in the animal series; but one enters into the region of the subhuman.

1920-10-15-GA073A

What is anthroposophy's position on the use of hypnosis in medicine?

.... these things, hypnosis or suggestion and the like in therapy, always lead into an area that lies below that which we encompass with our ordinary day-consciousness. If I were to draw you a diagram quickly, it would look like this: (diagram missing)

• If ordinary consciousness is here, the anthroposophical science in question strives upwards into a higher consciousness, into imaginative, inspired, intuitive consciousness.
• But one can also bring consciousness down to a lower level.
  • This is already the case in ordinary dreaming; in deep sleep, in dreamless sleep, it is moved down even further.
  • Now there are all kinds of intermediate states, and such a tuning down of consciousness actually transforms the human being into an Untermensch, in that his soul and spirit are so elevated that they cannot fully engage with the physical body and also cannot be conscious of themselves and the world, because the human being is not yet developed enough to have consciousness outside of the body. In this case, we are dealing with a demotion of the spiritual-mental to the etheric-physical plane, and then all the effects that can be brought about, which you are indeed familiar with, actually take place in a subhuman sphere. You downgrade the whole constitution of the person, the spiritual-soul-physical constitution of the person. And that is why such things are only to be applied when it comes to therapeutic issues. But even in the therapeutic area it is a matter of ensuring that they may only be applied by the person who understands the things – by which I do not want to claim that modern medicine, as it is practised today, is a good guide to understanding these things. But once these things are understood, they can of course be applied to the human organization in the same way as other poisons – because they are poisons.

So, in all these things, we are dealing with the fact that, therapeutically, we can resort to anything that can improve a person's state of health in a desirable way. However, we should not imagine that we are leading people into a higher sphere when we convey something to them where their consciousness, their ordinary consciousness, is completely shut out. Instead, we lead them into the subhuman, into the etheric-animalistic, not into the physical-animalistic but into the etheric-animalistic, if we put him into a state like hypnosis and if he is receptive to such a state.

This lowering of consciousness is basically particularly loved today because the upward development into the spiritual worlds is perceived as something uncomfortable.

Discussion

Note 1 - The hard problem of consciousness

A reader contacted me years ago and said the thing most important to him, most dear to his heart, was to understand consciousness. He was and is not alone. This note addresses the question, using the study materials on this site.

The topic of this note is important, because it is like a crowbar in the 'crack' of the worldview of mineral science (see There's a crack in everything), directly followed by the related 'Man in the mirror' topic, see Discussion Note 2 below.

Introduction

The hard problem of consciousness is a term coined by philosopher David Chalmers in the 1990s. It refers to the question of why and how physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experience ... the “what it feels like” aspect of consciousness, often called qualia.

• note: David Chalmers first introduced this in a talk in 1994 at a conference 'Toward a Science of Consciousness, followed by an article in 1995 'Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness' in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, and finally the book in 1996: 'The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory'.

It is relatively easy for mineral science, through neuroscience and cognitive science, to explain functions of the brain and link to things like perception, attention, memory, behavior, and how information is integrated. These are “easy” not because they are simple, but because they can, in principle, be explained by neuroscience, cognitive science, and computation.

However, this does not answer the question: Why and how is there is self-awareness and conscious experience at all? .. and scientists have known this all along.

Many books were written, here's a few, there are hundreds or thousands more:

• Francis Crick: 'The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul' (1994)
• Roger Penrose: 'Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness' (1994)
• Daniel C. Dennett: 'Consciousness Explained' (1991), 'Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness' (2005)
• Antonio Damasio: 'Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain' (1994); 'The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness' (1999); 'Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain' (2010), 'Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious' (2021)
• Stanislas Dehaene: 'Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts' (2014)
• Anil Seth: 'Being You: A New Science of Consciousness' (2021)

Some common considerations

• contemporary mineral science takes as premise and hypothesis that consciousness arises in the human brain.
  • scientific research has made major progress in the study of neural activity (ions flowing through holes and membranes) and found neuronal correlates, that is patterns of zones and types of neuronal activity (edges, lines, frequency) corresponding to eg colour and motion perception (with confirmation that damage to such zones corresponds to loss of such aspect of perception)

Let's try a simple premise

As a start, read Music#1918-06-01-GA271 and Nerve-sense subsystem#1919-12-30-GA320

Here, Rudolf Steiner makes the distinction between the oscillating wavefront of air vibrations, and the physical ear ... and our soul experience of music. It's a good start, because understanding sound and tone is a key to understanding consciousness, it is the basis for human speech (and language transferring meaning) and music.

In the second lecture the explanations are expanded to vision of light with the eye. These are the different susceptibility of the human organism to different responses in the spectrum of elements and ethers, like sound/tone in the element air, or vision in the light ether.

They are below and above the element warmth, in which our human 'I' lives in the blood in that organism.

And, we know that it is the nervous system which 'inscribes' into the blood tablet (see oa Schema FMC00.032 on Blood and nerves), and that the process of perception is an astral process through the Nerve-sense subsystem.

Now the key idea that Rudolf Steiner puts forth here as the core of the explanation, is that

• the human bodily structure is a complex organism in all those elements and ethers, receptive to and itself actively resonating and functioning in these elements and ethers.
  • in other words: we should not take a one-dimensional view of the human body and what is happening, and only consider the mineral element 'earth' (as contemporary mineral science does), as consciousness does not play in that element, it is happening in other parts of that spectrum.
• our consciousness is related to the spectrum of elements and ethers, that waking consciousness lives in the element of warmth (o.a. Schema FMC00.245), and we have different levels of consciousness in the other bodily principles and ethers.

The first element is approached by what is called the lyre of Apollo. Here the nervous system is sketched as a lyre that is played by the gods, by Apollo, by cosmic influences .. to be specific by the etheric formative forces.

The description immediately looks at the source of life, human breathing - coarse and fine, and how it drives the blood circulation and drives the CSF up and down in the spine and in the human brain. So a very complex picture is put forth here, and that is key, that plays in all elements and ethers. This is what Schema FMC00.15 and Schema FMC00.15A point out. Breathing is not just air, our body is continuously taking in the higher ethers through pore breathing, so through our whole skin enclosure. Man is an open system. We are continously taking in from the cosmos, and giving back. And this is not just air through the lungs. See also Schema FMC00.463 on Human breathing#Illustrations.

Now then, once we have sufficiently contemplated this that we can imagine and 'see' this .. it becomes clear that additional sensory inputs are then the sum of the normal vibrating instrument and the extra impulse added, it's the sum of A+B.

Pause: rest point

At this point one can already see why mineral science will never 'crack' consciousness, because of the too limited view on the complex human being. There is a factor seven between considering one element 'earth', and considering the seven elements and ethers in the spectrum of force and substance.

Secondly, one needs to appreciate that the clear understanding of the complex human being across all elements and ethers is mind-boggling. We may appreciate it, 'get' the idea, but by studying all Rudolf Steiner lectures does not give the full picture, it approaches that subject but it seems to only scratch the surface. So we are to study the integrated views across fourfold Man (Man's bodily principles) and threefold Man, but we do need to include the invisible 'double' and the higher ethers working in and on Man.

Nevertheless, this in itself already is quite a 'big idea', because it provides the key, that is understandeable for our intellect, why consciousness is so complex, why it's a mix of feeling and sensations, why different senses are so different, etc.

Second pass: deepening the image

In 1918-08-GA183, Rudolf Steiner takes several lectures (18th, 19th, 25th of August, 2th Sep) to sketch the above more physical-physiological picture, complementing it with a perspective from clairvoyant perception. See Schema FMC00.229 and Schema FMC00.231.

This image or representation is also used in 1913-03-25-GA145 and later 1921-08-12-GA206 (and 1923-10-20-GA230), see Schema FMC00.226; and 1921-11-04-GA208 - see Schema FMC00.230.

So for our study process, we have

• first, the 1918-GA183 base picture,
• that then we can shed light on from the (always different angles of perspective) of the four other lectures.
  • in these, 1921-08-206 really makes up a third 'coverage' ... copied from above .... with 1921-08-12-GA206, 1921-08-13-GA206, 1921-08-14-GA206 describing how our I-consciousness uses sensory perception with the physical body as a reflector and the astral body to make the presentations, with images stored in the physical body and memories stored in the ether body. Also leads to the image of the dragon biting its tail as the symbol of consciousness that exists of two streams meeting: sensory perception (and presentations) by the I (and the astral body) on one hand, and continuous upstreaming of stored images (and memories ) from physical body (and ether body) on the other.

Note 2 - the 'Man in the mirror'

Rudolf Steiner often uses the metaphoric image of a mirror to describe our contemporary waking consciousness. The image is used from different angles or contexts, so it appears as the 'memory mirror', or the 'Man in the mirror', etc.

Introduction

This note is about what is described on top of this page as:

Our current sense perception and process of thinking creates an image of the physical world as a reflection of the spiritual reality. The image is generated by the cognitive process of thinking, and is the basis for our functioning in the world. Krishnamurti has pointed out extensively (as one of his key points) how this becomes the source of all problems for humanity (creating separation and the resulting conflicts, fears, wars). However as Rudolf Steiner pointed out this current state of human 'waking consciousness' is an unavoidable phase and integral part of natural evolution of mankind. Therefore it is important to have an awareness of this process described with the metaphor of the 'mirror' and how Man says 'I' to his physical image with sensory perception. Rudolf Steiner also uses the terminology of 'breaking the mirror' to break through this veil of maya and sensory perception to higher stages of cognition of reality.

This way the 'Man in the mirror' is another way of pointing to the fact that human cognition is a bandpass filter on reality.

Bohm and Krishnamurti

There are various/many youtube videos by David Bohm (1917-1992) and Krishnamurti (1895-1986) explaining this point also, in ways complementary to Rudolf Steiner.

• example: video called 'David Bohm speaks about Wholeness and Fragmentation (ENGL SUBS)' .. start at 10'40 but then between 11'25 and 12'00 he coins it quite well in 30", using the words delusion and incoherence. He is talking here about the limitations of waking consciousness based on sensory perception and the system of thinking that functions in the world created by those concepts, and how this bandpass filter of reality is the cause underlying much or all of the confusion and havoc.
• This is a theme recurrent in his talks, and there other talks where he explains it in more depth and better. Bohm (though his decades of science, philosophy and talks with Krishnamurti) explains quite well in different words what Rudolf Steiner explained as breaking the mirror, the mirror process being a metaphor for the Man we see in the physical world and say 'I' to, which is not our true (spiritual) I. It's a simple but fundamental point. The question of what people (each partially and subjectively) perceive or call 'truth' is a consequence following of this key point.

.

This is the underlying explanation of what Rudolf Steiner means and refers to with statements such as the below:

1921-05-13-GA204

When the Man of today thinks merely with his intellect and faculty of reason, his thoughts are not rooted in reality at all. More and more they move about in a shadowy existence which reached its climax during the nineteenth century. And today Man is altogether devoid of the sense for reality. He lives within a spiritual element, but is at the same time a materialist. His thoughts—which are spiritual but yet merely shadow-thoughts—are directed entirely to material existence.

Our thoughts and resulting worldview are based on the 'Man in the mirror', with separation and discord and fear. Humanity is no longer connected to the spiritual reality.

One can continue this line to its vantage point: this will ultimately lead to a crash with the War of all against all ending this Current Postatlantean epoch. Because even if part of humanity becomes re-connected with the spiritual reality and clairvoyant faculties of higher cognition, the majority may or will not in the millenia and two cultural ages left after the current fifth cultural age.

various WIP

from Memory#Aspects for a description of the 'memory-mirror', see 1921-09-23-GA207 and 1921-09-24-GA207 on Matter is destroyed in the brain.

• what is described in the 1921-09-GA207 is explained on Waking Consciousness, the schemas on that page illustrate this concept of the mirror (and what penetrates and what not). See also Schema FMC00.391 on Stages of clairvoyance.

Related pages

• Twelve Conditions of Consciousness
• Planes or Worlds of Consciousness
• Human 'I'
• Threefold Sun
• Between heart and brain
• Etherization of blood

References and further reading

Consciousness

• Owen Barfield, Norman O. Brown: 'Evolution of consciousness. Studies in polarity' (1976)

Jung and Freud

• Rudolf Steiner
  • 'Freud, Jung & Spiritual Psychology' (2001)
  • 'Over psychoanalyse : Freud en Jung, Adler en Breuer' (1989) in NL; original in DE as GA178: 'Über Psychoanalyse ; opgenomen in: Individuelle Geistwesen und ihr Wirken'
• Gerhard Wehr
  • 'Jung and Steiner' (2003) in DE 'C.G. Jung und Rudolf Steiner : Konfrontation und Synopse' (1972), in NL as ' Jung en Steiner: Confrontatie en synopsis' (1979)
  • 'Carl Gustav Jung : Leben, Werk, Wirkung' (1985)