Human Questions And Cosmic Answers E-Book

Rudolf Steiner

• Herausgeber: Rudolf Steiner Press
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 443

Beschreibung

'In the case of a solar eclipse, the evil that has spread over the earth can be carried out into the cosmos to wreak more havoc there, whereas in the case of a lunar eclipse, people who absolutely want to be possessed by evil thoughts can receive them from the cosmos.'In the first full translation of this lecture course, Rudolf Steiner implores his audience to recognize the connections between the material and spiritual worlds. Eclipses of the sun and moon, for example, are 'forces at work in the universe, just like those we study today in the clinic or in the chemistry or physics laboratory'. Even everyday thinking can have a strong impact on the outer world. Materialistic thought, he says, can quite literally atomize our surroundings: 'if all human beings start to think that everything has to be explained in terms of atoms… then the earth will actually turn into atoms… these false ideas create false realities…'Steiner speaks of the 'world of will' as being three-dimensional, the 'world of feeling' as two-dimensional, and the 'world of thinking' as one-dimensional. The ego itself is dimensionless, and only inner, living thinking can grasp the spiritual-mental. He discusses key cultural figures such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Herman Grimm and Julian the Apostate, and introduces multiple additional topics, including the effect of planetary forces on humans; the healing impacts of metals and other substances; the revitalization of thinking through meditation and concentration; the effects of the separation of science, art and religion; and the necessary transition from philosophy to anthroposophy.Thirteen lectures, Dornach, Jun.–Jul. 1922, GA 213

Leseprobe

HUMAN QUESTIONS ANDCOSMIC ANSWERS

Thirteen lectures given in Dornach between 24June and 22 July 1922

TRANSLATED AND INTRODUCED BYELIZABETH MARSHALL

RUDOLF STEINER

rudolf steiner press

CW 213

Rudolf Steiner Press

Hillside House, The Square

Forest Row, RH18 5ES

www.rudolfsteinerpress.com

Published by Rudolf Steiner Press 2024

Originally published in German under the title Menschenfragen und Weltenantworten (volume 213 in the Rudolf Steiner Gesamtausgabe or Collected Works) by Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach. Based on shorthand notes that were not reviewed or revised by the speaker. This authorized translation is based on the second revised German edition (1987), edited byW. Dettwyler und R. Friedenthal

Published by permission of the Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach

© Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach, Rudolf Steiner Verlag 1987

This translation © Rudolf Steiner Press 2024

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 85584 668 5

eISBN 978 1 85584 655 5

Cover by Morgan Creative

Typeset by Symbiosys Technologies, Visakhapatnam, India

Printed and bound by 4Edge Ltd., Essex

Contents

Introduction, by Elizabeth Marshall

First LectureDornach, 24 June 1922

Relationships between the spiritual-mental and the spatial-physical. Three-dimensional world of will, two-dimensional world of feeling, one-dimensional world of thinking. The I is dimensionless. Only inner, living thinking can grasp the spiritual-mental.

Second LectureDornach, 25 June 1922

Relationships between the human soul and the light of the sun and moon. Solar and lunar eclipses. Human questions and world answers in the ancient mysteries and in modern initiation.

Third LectureDornach, 30 June 1922

Human and cosmos. Will (sun) and thoughts (moon). Effect of planetary forces on humans. Healing effects of metals. Human knowledge and world knowledge.

Fourth LectureDornach, 1 July 1922

The planets and the soul life of man. Man and the world in life on earth and in life between death and new birth. On earth many people and one world, between death and new birth many worlds, but only one human nature.

Fifth LectureDornach, 2 July 1922

The earthly substances in nature and their healing effects. Slate, lime, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon.

Sixth LectureDornach, 7 July 1922

Franz Brentano, scholastic philosophy and modern natural science. Brentano’s life, his relationship to the doctrine of revelation and the dogma of infallibility. His ‘psychology’ and his ‘teaching of Jesus’.

Seventh LectureDornach, 8 July 1922

Franz Brentano. The ancient mysteries and the modern separation of science, art and religion. Knowledge and faith. Last attempt at unification in German idealism. Fichte, Schelling, Hegel. Brentano, Faust of the nineteenth century.

Eighth LectureDornach, 9 July 1922

Belief in revelation, scientific theory and the heritage of philosophy, presented by Franz Brentano, Adolf Fick and Richard Wahle. Necessity of the transition from philosophy to anthroposophy. Revitalization of concepts and ideas through meditation and concentration.

Ninth LectureDornach, 14 July 1922

Franz Brentano and Friedrich Nietzsche. The scientific attitude of the nineteenth century. To understand the human being it is necessary to understand the threefold nature of the human organism. The significance of doubt and conviction in external nature and in the cosmos. The task of spiritual science.

Tenth Lecturedornach, 15 July 1922

Franz Brentano, Friedrich Nietzsche and the scientific intellectual movement. Their connection with old world views. Revelation and reason-based knowledge in scholasticism. From these developed: dogmatic belief and mysticism (luciferian) as well as modern natural science (ahrimanic).

Eleventh LectureDornach, 16 July 1922

Origin of the Christian revelation content in the initiation knowledge of early Christianity. The downfall of the latter in the fourth century. Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Ammonius Saccas, Iamblichus, Julian the Apostate. Rome’s fight against the old initiation principle.

Twelfth LectureDornach, 21 July 1922

Symptomatological aspects of contemporary consciousness over the last fifty years. Paul Heyse’s Children of the World. Du Bois-Reymond’s Limits of Natural Knowledge. Herman Grimm’s Invincible Forces. Franz Werfel’s drama The Mirror Man.

Thirteenth LectureDornach, 22 July 1922

The spiritual and mental aspects of man in relation to his spiritual and mental environment. Cosmic view of the world through imagination, inspiration, intuition. Plants, animals, people in relation to the cosmos and the earth. Gregor Mendel as characteristic of the nineteenth century (on his 100th birthday).

Notes

Rudolf Steiner’s Collected Works

Significant Events in the Life of Rudolf Steiner

Index

Introduction

This volume consists of a number of lectures given by Rudolf Steiner between 24 June and 22 July 1922 in Dornach. The subject matter varies from a description of the dimensions as they relate to the various members of the human organization, the state of European culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the destruction by the Roman church of pagan and gnostic temples and rituals between the second and sixth centuries, and much, much more. Amongst all this is a strikingly compassionate look at the lives of Franz Brentano and Friedrich Nietzsche. Thus it is not possible to pick out an overarching theme to examine here in more detail. But there are several points which do rather present themselves for consideration and I will take a short look at them here, without however any claim to have even touched on all the possibilities offered in these lectures.

What particularly attracts the reader’s attention is Rudolf Steiner’s recurring appeal to us to open our hearts to the suffering of Franz Brentano and Friedrich Nietzsche. Both of these great men, as Rudolf Steiner himself calls them, foundered on their inability to reach the spiritual world. In Lecture Eight, Steiner says: ‘…the culture of the times had crushed the human soul, as we have seen in the example of Franz Brentano.’

Both Brentano and Nietzsche were great men in the sense that both were deep thinkers of great integrity, unable—as did other more superficial thinkers—to gloss over the abyss deepening between increasingly materialistic science and the need of their souls for the spiritual. Tragically they lived just before the advent of anthroposophy and the revealing and exploring of the wisdom of the Mysteries through Rudolf Steiner. So both were doomed to shipwreck on the rocks of nineteenth century materialism—the one suffering the constant agony of the soul hungering for the spiritual, the other descending into profound distress and ultimately madness.

In contrast we have the most blessed luck to live in times when the Mysteries have been and are being revealed and to actually have come into contact with this great work. I think we are inclined not to be sufficiently aware of the enormity of this situation, tending often to take for granted what has been offered us through Rudolf Steiner and his life’s work. I know I have this tendency and it is important for me to consider what my life would have been like had I been born a century earlier. This is what Steiner is urging us to do. When we wake up to this realization, then we will be on our way to developing that quality we most need for the spiritual path: the quality of gratitude.

Another theme touched on repeatedly in these pages is the development of consciousness since the earliest human era. Beginning with the ancient initiates, Rudolf Steiner shows us how we have descended in consciousness from the etheric and astral worlds into the material/physical, from the intuitive/imaginative to the intellectual. The ancient initiates knew first-hand the healing properties of the plants and minerals, their relationship to the heavens and the cosmos. They knew of the interdependency of all creation, how we cannot understand a plant without knowing of its roots in the earth and its striving for the sunlight. We cannot understand a human thigh bone without knowing of the forces of gravity and their direction in relation to the earth. We cannot understand the human being without understanding the cosmos, the planets, the constellations and the zodiac.

Again Steiner emphasizes the inner state of mind of the ancient initiates. They approached the cosmos with the most profound respect, preparing and cleansing themselves before they turned in deepest reverence towards the recipient of their petitions, whether the sun, Mars or Jupiter, for example. Having asked their questions they then waited, sometimes many, many years, all the while cultivating within themselves an attitude of receptiveness and devotion, ready to accept the answers the cosmos would give them. They did not expect an answer immediately or think they could find it on their own at their writing desk or in their laboratory. They knew they must immerse themselves with reverence in the cosmos, in the spirits of the cosmos, to be able to understand the world and to understand themselves.

A third important aspect in these lectures is the question of what we have achieved through the development of thinking. Rudolf Steiner says that we have learnt ‘to think like Ahriman’. The Scholastics, who developed Aristotelian thinking for the age of the intellectual soul, always recoiled in the last instance from Ahriman—as if burnt. Right up until Brentano, thinkers recoiled from Ahriman. Brentano himself recoiled from Ahriman. In the nineteenth century, rational thinking connected completely with Ahriman, especially in the theory of the atoms which was developed at that time. The danger, however, is that just as the attitude of the ancient initiates determined their ability to receive cosmic answers to their questions, so the attitude of thinking that the earth consists of atoms determines the actual existence of the earth. If we think the earth is made of atoms, there is the very real danger that it will actually end up consisting of atoms.

With these three examples I hope to have illustrated at least briefly how Steiner is pointing out to us that our own attitude, our own thinking, feeling and will affect reality, create reality. So too when we read these lectures, much depends on our attitude, our way of approaching what is said, as to whether we can really profit from them and how profoundly they can touch us. This is obviously true of all Steiner’s work. When we realize how deeply Brentano and Nietzsche suffered through their inability to realize the spiritual world, when we see how devotedly the ancients prepared themselves for receiving knowledge of the cosmos, and when we are aware of how our own consciousness and beliefs shape and influence reality, then we will be able to approach such a work with the necessary humility and respect, without forfeiting our autonomy. Then it is possible for true learning, true spiritual science to be conveyed from the heart of one human being to another.

Elizabeth Marshall

Berlin, 8 August 2024

First Lecture

DORNACH, 24 JUNE 1922

Today I will be dealing with some aspects which may seem quite remote from the practical considerations of anthroposophy, but which nevertheless must form the basis for many ideas which we can then elaborate in more intimate discussions.

When we speak of the physical human being on the one hand and the soul-spiritual on the other, then we are faced with a cognitive issue, a problem related to human intelligence. Human beings can conceptualize the physical with relative ease. We have as a template the physical body as revealed through the senses. It belongs to what confronts us on all sides as part of our environment, without us becoming active ourselves, at least with regard to our consciousness. However, it is a different matter when we speak of the soul-spiritual. The soul-spiritual is such that anyone who is sufficiently unprejudiced is clearly aware that it exists. Humanity has always included names, words, phrases, idioms for the soul-spiritual in the various languages and the fact alone that these names, words and phrases exist in language shows that for the unbiased consciousness there is something pointing the human being in the direction of the soul-spiritual.

However, difficulties immediately arise when we try to relate the physical world to the soul-spiritual world. This attempt to link the two is particularly problematic for those who think about such things in, let us say, a philosophical mode. They know that the physical is spread out in space. They can even make representations of the physical in space. And human beings can develop the relevant concepts comparatively easily, since we can use what space with its three dimensions offers us to conceptualize the physical. But we cannot find the spiritual itself anywhere in space.

People who see themselves as not at all materialistic, but who in reality are, want to see the soul-spiritual in space and end up with the usual spiritualistic fallacies.1 These spiritualistic fallacies are materialistic fallacies: they are attempts to bring the soul-spiritual into space. But apart from that human beings are aware of their own soul-spirit. They know how the soul-spiritual functions because they can say to themselves that, when for example they want to make a movement in space, the thought they have is transferred into action by the will. The movement is in space; but an unbiased person cannot say that the thought is in space. Thus, huge problems have developed for philosophical thinking. We can ask: How can a person’s soul-spirit, to which the I also belongs, act on the physical which is in space? How can something non-spatial affect space?

Various theories have been developed which all suffer more or less from the problem of bringing the non-spatial soul-spiritual into line with the spatial physical. They say the soul-spiritual acts through the will on the physical. But so far nobody has been able to explain with ordinary consciousness how the thought flows into the will and how the will, which is itself of the spirit, manages to appear in external movement, in outer activity.

On the other hand, the processes engendered in the physical body, in the senses, through the physical world, are spatial. By transforming into the soul-spiritual they become non-spatial. Through their ordinary consciousness human beings are not able to explain how the spatial, physical which takes place in the sense organs affects the non-spatial, namely the soul-spiritual.

Recently the term I have often remarked on has been used: psychophysical parallelism. Basically, this is just conceding that no one knows what to say about the relationship of the physical with the soul-spiritual. For example, they say: The human being walks, they move their legs, they change from one place to another in space. All this represents something spatial, something physical.

Simultaneously when something happens in the body, something happens in the soul-spiritual, something to do with thinking, feeling and willing. We only know, they say, that when something happens on the physical level in space, then something also happens on the soul-spiritual level. However, we cannot explain how the one affects the other. Psychophysical parallelism2 means that when a physical process occurs, a psychic or soul process also takes place. But they cannot get beyond this, one could almost say, most fascinating secret, that the two processes occur parallel to one another. There is no notion of how they act on each other. This is what happens when people try to develop a concept about the existence, the presence of the soul-spiritual.

In the nineteenth century, when peoples’ opinions were very much permeated by materialism, the following question arose among the materialists: Where in space are the souls who have left their bodies? And there were even people who attempted to refute spiritualism as an impossibility, since so many people are dying or have died already that the whole of space has not the capacity to provide room for all these souls of the dead. This ridiculous notion was often put forward in the nineteenth century. People said, human beings cannot be immortal as then all the space in the cosmos would be full of these immortal souls. All these ideas show us what difficulties arise when we consider the relationship between the physical which is clearly spread out in space and the soul-spiritual which we cannot locate spatially.

Gradually intellectual thinking began to put the physical and the soul-spiritual abruptly next to each other. For modern consciousness they are in juxtaposition, with no transition between the two. In fact, in the way people have come to think of the physical on the one hand and the soul-spiritual on the other there is no possibility of finding a connection. People think nowadays of the physical in such a way that it cannot accommodate the soul-spiritual and of the soul-spiritual as being so abruptly separated from the physical/spatial that the whole non-spatial soul-spiritual has no possibility of affecting it. However, this idea of antithetical states has only developed gradually. We have to base our ideas on a completely different approach, one which can only develop by listening to what anthroposophical spiritual science has to say. Anthroposophical spiritual science should first look at volition. Firstly, an unbiased view will show that a person’s will follows all their movements and that the movements that a person performs in space by moving themselves, but also the movements taking place inside them in the course of their bodily functions, all a person’s activity here in the physical world, is three-dimensional. An unbiased person cannot doubt this. All these movements are accompanied by volition; hence the will has to be able to go wherever there are three dimensions. There can be no doubt about this.

Therefore, when we speak of the will as soul-spiritual, there can be no question that this will, despite being soul-spiritual in nature, is also three-dimensional, it has a three-dimensional gestalt. We simply have to think as follows: when through our volition we move a hand, for example, the will moves closely with the arm and the hand into all those positions that they adopt in space. The will accompanies whatever movement a limb is making. Therefore we can refer to the will as that aspect of the soul which can take on a three-dimensional form.

A further question is whether all of the soul can adopt a three-dimensional gestalt. Here we go from the will to the world of feeling, so that initially when a person thinks about these things with their ordinary consciousness they would say: When for example a needle is stuck into the right side of my face, I can feel it; on the left side the same. With ordinary consciousness they could think that feeling extends over their whole body. And then they would speak of feeling as being three-dimensional in the same sense as the will.

However, here they have succumbed to an illusion. It is not as they think. In fact, they need to take into account how a person can experience themselves and then to continue from these experiences. What we are considering today will be quite subtle, but without such subtleties we cannot really understand spiritual science.

Now think about what happens when you touch your left hand with your right hand. You have a perception of yourself. Just as you would sense an external object, so now when you touch your right hand with your left, you sense yourself, let us say, through the medium of each finger.

This becomes even clearer when you think about the fact that you have two eyes and that when you look at an object with both eyes, you have to exert your will. Usually, we do not think about this exertion of the will. To illustrate: you have to look at an object very close to you, so that it emerges more strongly than usual, so you turn the left eye to the right and the right to the left, and you focus on the object by bringing the lines of sight into contact with one another in a way similar to what you did when you touched the right hand with the left, when you so to speak, touched yourself.

So, you can see that it is important for human beings, for their orientation in the world, to relate the left to the right, to bring left and right into line with each other.

Now ordinary consciousness does not usually go any further than to become aware of the importance of this basic fact through the touching of the hands or the intersection of the lines of vision; but we can pursue this chain of thought further.

Let us assume that we are being pricked by a pin on the right side of the body: we sense, we feel the sting. However, by pointing to the body’s surface we cannot really say where we feel the pinprick. This is because if all the separate parts of the organism were not in a vital interrelationship with one another, mutually affecting each other, then our human-physical-soul-being would not be what it is. This means that even when we are not touching the left hand with the right one so as to feel the left hand through the right one, or even when our organism is being pricked by a pin on the right side, there is always a conduit between the right-hand side and the symmetrical plane of the body and the left side of the body must relate to the right side in order to create a sensation or a feeling.

It is relatively easy to say that when I have here the symmetrical plane, seen from anterior to posterior, then the right hand touches the left and the feeling in both hands, in each hand through the other, takes place in the symmetrical plane.

This is quite obvious and it is relatively easy to speak of crossing the line of sight of the eyes. However, when we are being stung on the right side there is always a pathway [red] where the left side of the body crosses with the right side in these conduits; otherwise, no sensations would arise. The fact that we are built symmetrically, that we have a right side and a left one, plays an extremely important part in the pathways of our sensations and feelings. As a result, we always relate what is happening on the right side to the left, so that something always reaches over invisibly from the left so as to converge with what is flowing over from the right side.

Only in this way does feeling develop. Feeling never develops in three-dimensional space; it always takes place on a plane. In reality the realm of feeling is not spread out in three dimensions, but is in fact two-dimensional. We human beings experience feelings only on that level which, if we were to develop it into a sectional plane, would split a person into two symmetrical halves.

The life of feelings is actually like a painting done on canvas, which is, however, not just painted from the one side but also from the other. Imagine that I take a canvas and paint it from right to left and then from left to right, then I jumble up what I have painted from the front and from the back, meaning from right to left and left to right. And the resulting painting is only two dimensional. All that is three-dimensional has been so to speak projected onto two dimensions.

You could also develop this idea in another way. Imagine you were able to throw shadow images of objects from the right and others from the left on to a flat surface. Thus, you would have shadow images of objects from the right and others from the left on the flat surface of the wall. This is what our feeling realm is like. It is not three-dimensional, but two-dimensional. The human being is basically a painter working from two sides, not feeling out into space, but drafting all the feeling impressions that they encounter in space onto the flat surface of a painting in shadow images, in pictures, by means of their three-dimensional will, which is the painter. The feeling life of the human being is a painting drawn through their body in two-dimensions, but painted from both sides. This means that when we look for the transition in the human soul from feeling to willing, we have to go from the three-dimensional to the two-dimensional.

However, this means that the soul expressing itself in feeling has a different relationship to the spatial than if we just say it is non-spatial. The plane has two dimensions, but is not spatial. You could call the blackboard a plane, but in reality, it is a body, since it has depth. A plane is indeed in space, but is not itself spatial; space must always have three dimensions. And only the will can move into this three-dimensional space. Feeling does not go into the three dimensions of space. It is two-dimensional. However, it does have a relationship to space, just as a shadow image has a relationship to space.

I want to point out to you an extremely significant fact, which since people are not inclined to look at the peculiarities of their emotional life with their ordinary consciousness, is not so easy to comprehend. The realm of feeling is always permeated with that of the will. Just think that if you really have been stung on the right side of the body, as I spoke about before, you do not immediately separate the feeling from the will. Without a doubt you would not just accept the sting patiently, but would grasp the place on the body where you had been stung, meaning that with your will you move into three-dimensional space, and apart from that you would have a defensive reaction which does not reveal itself externally, but only in various small, intimate movements of the blood and of the breathing. What we do when we are stung by a mosquito and touch the place externally is only the crassest reaction. We usually take no notice of the finer defensive responses, which take place in the movement of the blood and the breathing and other internal reactions. So, we do not separate what the will does from the feeling content. The feeling content is too diffident. We can only manage this in very attentive meditation. However, if you could exclude from feeling everything belonging to the will, you would contract from left and from right and would become the plane in the middle. Then when you are the plane in the middle and as an artist, so to speak, you paint your experience on this plane, then you will begin to grasp why the realm of feeling is so very different from normal experience.

We can experience this two-dimensional aspect of feeling, but we have to experience it meditatively. We need to have the whole shadowy existence of feelings in comparison with more robust experiences in three-dimensional space. We have to prepare ourselves for this. But if we do so we can experience it. And then we come closer to this truth that feeling is a two-dimensional process. And then thinking can be quite simply characterized, if we admit to ourselves with an unbiased mind how impossible it is to assert that a thought exists in space. A thought is really nowhere in space. But it must have some relationship to space, since the brain is without doubt when not the tool, at least the basis of thinking. Without a brain we cannot think. However, if thinking is a process based on the activity of the brain, but has nothing to do with space, then we would have the curious fact that someone can think well at the age of twelve and then their head subsequently grows out of what it was when they were twelve; then they would also have grown out of thinking. This is not the case. By growing we do not leave thinking behind. This alone shows that when we grow, our thinking is also in space.

Now just as we can feel the emotional realm of experiencing feelings for ourselves, by coming into our symmetrical plane, we can experience thinking as having only the vertical dimension. Thinking is one-dimensional, a linear process in human beings. So, we have to say that the will proves to be three-dimensional, feeling two-dimensional and thinking one-dimensional.

So you see, when we differentiate space, we come to a less abrupt transition than does the intellect. We come to a gradual transition. Mere intellect says: the physical is spread out in three-dimensional space, the soul-spiritual is not spread out at all, so that it is impossible to find a relationship between what is spread out in space and what is not spread out at all. However, if we notice that the will is three-dimensional, then we can find the will everywhere in the three-dimensional world. If we know that feeling is two-dimensional, then in moving from three dimensions to two, we arrive at something which depicts relationships, but is no longer spatial, since the plane itself with only two dimensions is not spatial. Feelings are in space however and not completely beyond it.

Then when we move from feeling to thinking, we go from two dimensions to one dimension and hence not completely beyond space. We are moving slowly from the spatial to the non-spatial. I have often said that the tragedy of materialism lies in the fact that it is matter itself in its three-dimensionality which materialists are unable to understand. They think they have understood it, but it is just precisely matter which they do not understand. In the nineteenth century various significant phenomena appeared which nowadays we are unable to decipher with our ordinary consciousness. Think for instance of the deep impression Schopenhauer’s philosophical system made on the intellectuals of the time: ‘The world as will and idea’. According to this the idea is unreal, only the will is real. So how did Schopenhauer3 have the idea that the world consists only of will? This is because he was consumed by materialism! In the world in which matter spreads out in three dimensions, there is only the will. Whoever wants to find feelings in this world has to find the relationship between a three-dimensional object and a two-dimensional shadow image. In feelings we experience the shadow images of what the will lives in three dimensions. And what we experience in thinking are one-dimensional structures. So that it is only when we go beyond dimensions that we arrive at our I. This has no dimension, is just a point. So we can say: we go from the three-dimensional [white], to the two-dimensional [red], to the one-dimensional [yellow] and to the point [blue].

Staying with the three-dimensional, our will is in there. Feeling and thinking are also in there but not spread out in the three dimensions. When we leave out the third dimension and just have two dimensions, we have the shadow of external existence, where the soul-spiritual spreads out and lives in feelings. We are already leaving the spatial. When we come to thinking, we are leaving it further and with the I we go even further beyond the spatial. In a sense we are gradually being led beyond space. And we can see that it is meaningless to speak of the soul-spiritual and the physical merely as opposites. It makes no sense, because if we want to discover the relationship between the soul-spiritual and the physical we have to ask the following: How do things that are spread out in three-dimensional space, for example our bodies, relate to the soul as a will-being? How does the physical aspect of the human being relate to the soul as a feeling being? The physical relates to the soul as a will-being like a sponge soaking up water; it is steeped on all sides, in all dimensions, in the will.

The physical relates to feeling like an object casting its shadow on a wall. And when we want to go from feelings to thinking, then we have to become an idiosyncratic artist, who paints onto a line what otherwise exists as two dimensions in a painting.

Now ask yourself the following question—this is of course a quite demanding process for inner contemplation—but imagine you are standing in front of let us say The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci. What you are initially looking at is the surface. First you consider the two-dimensional. Obviously, we have to disregard the thickness of the paint, but what you see as the painting is two-dimensional. Now I imagine a line drawn in the middle from top to bottom and this line represents a one-dimensional being. This one-dimensional being has a certain quality, let us say that it is not indifferent to Judas over here [see diagram above]; this being has a certain relationship to the presence of Judas. It is as follows: where Judas’s head is bent down, they feel more, where Judas is turned away, they feel less. And for all the other figures the feelings of this one-dimensional being vary according to whether they are wearing blue robes or yellow. This one-dimensional being has feelings towards all that is going on to the left and to the right. This means that everything in this painting is being felt by this one-dimensional being.

This is how our thinking really is. Our thinking is such a one-dimensional being and only experiences the rest of our being as it does the painting, by dividing us into two, into a right-sided and a left-sided being, and through this detour through the painting it can relate to the three-dimensional world of the will.

Now if we want to get an idea of our soul-spiritual, insofar as it is a willing, feeling, thinking being without the I, we should not imagine it as a kind of cloud, but rather we have to go through an inner process. We want to get a schematic idea of the soul-spiritual. In a sense we have to look at it: it appears at first as a cloud. However, this is only the will-being. It constantly tends towards contraction: then it becomes a feeling being. At first, we see a cloud of light, then a cloud of light which creates a plane in its middle and through this it can feel itself. And this plane in turn tries to become a line. So, we have to imagine: cloud, plane, line as a living structure which constantly wants to be a cloud, but tries to contract itself into a plane and to become a line. If you imagine a line becoming a plane, then a plane becoming a three-dimensional cloud, cloud, plane, line—line, plane, cloud and so on, then you have a schematic idea of what your soul in its innermost being, in its innermost essence really is. You cannot get by with an idea which remains static. No static idea can express what the soul is. You need an idea which itself is creating an inner process, a process in which the soul is playing with the dimensions of space: it makes the third dimension disappear and loses the will, lets the second dimension disappear and loses feeling and it loses thinking when it lets the first dimension disappear. Then we have arrived at the point. Then we can go on to the I.

This is why it is so difficult. People want to see the soul, but they are only used to developing ideas rooted in space. They then develop ideas of the soul which are also spatial, however rarefied. But in space you only have the will. We should develop an idea of the soul by imagining a cloud, then constantly pressing the cloud together until we imagine it as one-dimensional. Without creating a thinking which is mobile in itself, we cannot have any idea of the soul-spiritual. Someone who wants to imagine the soul-spiritual and creates the same image in two consecutive moments, has only imagined the will. We should not imagine the soul-spiritual as the same idea (monomorphic) in two consecutive moments. We have to become flexible internally; not so that we go from one point in space to another, but from one dimension to another. This is what is so difficult for modern consciousness. This has even led to well-meaning people—well-meaning in relation to spiritual ideas—attempting to overcome the three dimensions. They arrive at a fourth dimension. This is quite cute, going from three to four dimensions. As long as we stick to mathematics, the ideas we can develop from there are all correct. However, when we come to reality it is no longer right, since in reality when we think of the fourth dimension, it cancels the third dimension out. The third dimension disappears through the fourth, the second through the fifth and the first through the sixth: then we are back at the point.

In fact, when we move from the third to the fourth dimension we enter into the spiritual and by leaving out a dimension, not by adding one, we come more and more into the spiritual. And through ideas such as this we gain insight into the human gestalt.

For an artistic sensibility is it not in a way brutal to regard human beings as we do when we look at them as beings standing in the world in all three dimensions? Obviously, we look at them like this, but it is not the only aspect. We have a general feeling of the left and right sides of the body as being essentially symmetrical. And by concentrating the human being in the midplane we go beyond the three dimensions. We have moved on to the midplane; and from here we have quite a clear idea of the one dimension in which human beings are growing. This transition from three to two to one dimension is often used by artists. If we cultivated this artistic view of human beings then we would be able to find the transition to the soul level more easily. We would never regard a being who is not symmetrically structured as capable of coherent feelings.

If you look at a starfish, which is not symmetrically formed, but five-pointed, you could of course have no feelings towards it; but if you put it to yourself on the emotional level, you could never say that it had a coherent feeling. The starfish is completely incapable of relating the right side to the left, of encompassing the right with the left, but must always relate the one arm to one other, or to two, or to three, or to all four other ones. This is why what we call feeling does not exist at all in a starfish.

Now I ask you to follow me carefully with this more intimate train of thought: what is this phenomenon we call feeling? What we call feeling comes from the right side, comes from the left side and rests in the middle. We go through the world by resting in the world with our feeling. The starfish cannot do this. It cannot relate what affects it from the world [red arrow] symmetrically to something else. It can relate it [red] to one or two or three or four of the other arms but it will always be something more powerful [yellow].

Thus, the starfish does not have this resting feeling, because when it focuses on the one side, then according to its structure, it will experience the following: you are sending out this ray [yellow arrow]. When it feels that part, it is as if there were something shooting out of it. It has no feeling at rest. It has the feeling of shooting something out. It feels as if it were radiating out into the world.

If you develop your feeling to a fine degree, you will be able to experience this when you look at a starfish. Take any one arm and relate it to the whole starfish, then you will see in your imagination that the whole starfish is beginning to move in the direction of this one arm as if it were moving, streaming light. This is the same with all animals that are not symmetrically structured, that have no real symmetry axis or centre line.

If, instead of giving themselves over to the mere intellectual by dint of having developed into an intellectual being, people would pay more attention to this finer way of feeling, then they could feel their way into the world on a much more subtle level.

This is true too of the plant world, true of all that surrounds us. Real self-awareness carries us more and more into the inner world of all phenomena.

I would like to elaborate further tomorrow and in the coming days based on what I have explained in a more obscure way today.

Second Lecture

DORNACH, 25 JUNE 1922

Yesterday I attempted to show in a rather obscure way how we can find the transition from the spatial-physical, including human corporeality, to what can be thought of as spiritual, in that three dimensions are reduced in a sense to two or one dimensions and to a point. Now today I want to contrast yesterday’s observations to some extent with a more cosmic point of view, which should show you how we can also develop ideas relating the world that forms our environment to the soul-spiritual. For modern consciousness it is completely impossible to view the material world surrounding us in a way that the soul-spiritual in human beings has a direct relationship to it. We have to explain this cognitively, if the modern person is not to say they cannot understand why anthroposophy alleges that the soul-spiritual, meaning the I and the astral body, leave the physical and ether bodies and are then outside of them. Where are they? asks that person, whose understanding is grounded in modern materialistic consciousness. A modern person is incapable of thinking that the soul is to be found somewhere in space. At most they are able to think that air is somewhere in space, that space is filled with light; but that the soul-spiritual is somewhere in space, this they cannot think. And from this impossibility it is but a short path to the other: that this modern person, who has grown up with a materialistic awareness, is incapable of imagining where the soul-spiritual goes when it leaves the human body at death.

Of course, the modern person claims to be able to believe these things. However, at that moment when they have to use their own faculty of thought they immediately get into various conflicts. These conflicts cease when we try to understand spiritual science. But the ideas we then have to absorb are so unfamiliar for contemporary human beings that they can only approach them slowly and gradually. Therefore, it is good to begin with the facts of soul-spiritual life, facts that nowadays are little known in the outside world.

As we all know, what humanity has today as venerable, old, traditional beliefs that have flowed into the various religions, can be traced back to an age-old knowledge; we know that in ancient times there were sacred mystery sites, which were churches, schools and centres for the arts in one and from where there originated all that has spread out among the mass of the people as knowledge, but also as impulses determining people’s actions.

In these mystery schools there were so-called initiates, who had achieved a higher awareness through having undergone specific processes. Through the trials they had experienced they had gained a certain relationship to the world through which they could learn about world processes, world developments in whichever area they were interested in.

In external history we only find a degenerate kind of notion of world processes. You have all read about how in Greek temples, oracle sites, they made use of certain personalities, a kind of medium, who through exposure to vapours arising from the earth would fall into what nowadays people, who have only a dilettantish idea of the spiritual, would call a trance; this sort of trance is a spurious kind of hocus pocus which does not reveal the truth or any aspect of reality. However, in those times when the ancient paths of relating to the world had already degenerated, people took refuge in these oracles. And they accepted what was revealed in these trance-like states as revelations, so as to understand what the intentions of the real spiritual powers were, those divine-spiritual powers which are really behind all that happens in the world. They then acted in accordance with the revelations of the oracles.

However, these oracles were not the originals. Those were something very different. At the time people sought refuge in the oracles, the old faculties that initiates had cultivated in the mysteries were lost and the oracles had resorted to external procedures. I would like to describe to you one of these procedures through which in very ancient times the initiates of the mysteries listened to the secrets of the world, the secrets of the intentions of the divine spiritual beings, which are behind all natural phenomena.

Such initiates prepared their whole person over a long period of time to pay careful attention to life processes and they could put themselves into a certain emotional state at the time of the rising sun. This was an exercise that the ancient initiates practised repeatedly: putting themselves into a very receptive, spiritually receptive state at dawn, towards the rising sun. Particularly the dawn, the rising sun should evoke in these old initiates a reverential soul state, permeated by feelings of devotion. We cannot imagine today what such a state these initiates achieved in the face of the rising sun was like—if they were properly prepared then it was part devotion, part thirst for knowledge. I think we can only catch a glimpse of such feelings towards the external world—and this is more than a century ago—when we read the beautiful descriptions that Johann Gottfried Herder,4 that fine poet and writer, gave of the dawn; not as a more modern, more trivial writer would have done, but from the dawn as a symbol for all awakenings, awakenings not just in nature but in the human soul. In a way this evokes in the human soul itself a kind of dawn, as if the sun is rising internally. Herder described this wonderfully as he attempted to show how the poetic mood had once made itself felt in human development and how this poetic mood could originate with what people could experience at dawn in the face of the rising sun.

The secrets of the dawn and of the rising sun were felt even more intensively by people like Jacob Boehme,5 whose first work, as you know, is Aurora or the Dawning of the Day in the East. And the words such as those in Goethe’s Faust6 are not unrelated to the mysteries of the dawn: ‘Disciple, up! Untiring, hasten. To bathe thy breast in morning red!’ The further we go back in the history of human development, the more wonderful we find the moods of the human soul at the first rays of the morning sun, which are in a sense carrying in on their waves the vital, active light of the world. The ancient initiates in the mystery schools had prepared themselves so that they could send out from their hearts into the expanses of the world their most serious, most holy questions to the world spirits during the dawn. They said to themselves: When the sun sends out the first ray of light to the earth, this offers the best way for human questions to flow out to the expanses of the cosmos. And so in a sense these initiates radiated their questions, the riddles of their hearts and of humanity, out in to the wide expanses of the world. And then they did not approach the answer in a trivial or banal way, as we would do today in our physical sciences, but put themselves into a mood in which they said: Now we have transmitted our riddles and questions to the cosmic expanses; now they rest in the bosom of the world, the gods will receive our riddles and questions.

I am only describing here. We can think what we like about these things, but once they existed and this was how things were done. Then the initiates waited and during the night hours they prepared their hearts to be receptive. This in turn was not a mood in which questions were raised, but a responsive one in which they opened their hearts to a receptive and devotional mood. And they brought their devotion to the full moon shining down upon them. And then they felt: now we are receiving the answers from the universe.

In the old mysteries this was a very common process. At a certain point in time, they offered their questions as a covenant with the world by sending them out and then they received the answers, which at the full moon, in the light of the full moon were sent to earth by the gods.

This is how people used to communicate with the world. They were not so arrogant as to pose a question in their heads and then to look for the answer immediately, as do philosophers today, or so arrogant as to think that they could sit down with a blank piece of paper and work out the great riddles of humanity on their own. In fact, these old initiates believed that they should communicate with the divine spiritual powers which flow in and through the world about the questions and answers relating to the riddles of the world. They did this because they knew that outside in the world are not only the content of physical, sense perceptions, but also flowing in and through everything is the spiritual. And when the ray of sun touches me, I can send out to it the substance of my will.

This secret is wholly lost in human research. It was once real knowledge, actual human insight. One of the last people in Europe to have a not really clear, but still lively tradition in these things and who was also prepared to fight was Julian the Apostate.7 He was incautious enough to still take these things seriously and thus succumbed to his opponents.

The modern human being would sketch—this is only a rough diagram, but it is just to show what the issue is—the earth and the sun (there would of course have to be a much greater distance between them) so that the sun sends its rays down to the earth. The old initiate would have said: This is just physical, the spiritual aspect is that people are living on the earth and there they develop their will [red] and while the sun’s rays come down to the earth, human beings can send their will in the direction of the sun, up into the universe [arrows].

The old initiates sent their questions out into the cosmos in a sense on the crest of these waves of will, which flowed out from the earth to the sun. And when a modern person says that on the other side is the moon which sends its light down onto the earth [yellow], the old initiate says that is just the physical; in truth thoughts come down to the earth on these waves of moonlight [orange]. So the old initiates consigned their questions to the waves of will flowing from the earth to the sun and received the answers from the waves of thought flowing from the moon to the earth. Modern scientists know only one side of this. They see only the physical aspect of the sun and the moon. However, the old initiates said: While the sun is constantly sending its light to the earth, the earth is constantly sending waves of will out into the universe, the will of all the people living on the earth. And when the human being stands in the moonlight, then waves of thought are being sent to them from the cosmos.

Human organization has changed. The seeker of supersensible knowledge could not do this today. Human understanding is coarser now than it was in those days. Of course, today too our waves of will flow out into the cosmos. However, human beings do not care about these questions passionately enough for the waves of will to take them out into the universe. Today we humans have become too intellectualistic and the intellect cools all these questions down. We have little idea of the huge thirst for knowledge which people had with regard to the most sacred riddles of existence. We are no longer so thirsty for knowledge; in fact, we are just curious and want to know everything immediately without having to engage with the world. And at most we have lovers romancing in the moonlight; scholars would think it a terrible superstition to receive the answers to the burning riddles of existence through the light of the moon.