LIFE OF THE HUMAN SOUL E-Book

Rudolf Steiner

• Herausgeber: Rudolf Steiner Press
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

How are we connected to the world around us? This question, says Rudolf Steiner, is one that lives subliminally, drawing us into the depths of the psyche. There, our candle of consciousness tends to flicker and go out. But spiritual schooling can relight it, so that we learn to perceive realms of our being beyond the restricted self.Whilst Steiner was undertaking major lecture tours of Germany and England, he took time to address his followers at the world centre of anthroposophy in Dornach, Switzerland. He speaks here on three major topics: 'The Life of the Human Soul', 'Spiritual Striving in Relation to Earth's Evolution' and 'The Contrast Between East and West'. The common theme, however, is our mutual responsibility for what the human being and the world will eventually become – which, according to Steiner, is far from a foregone conclusion. Even the way we think can change and affect the future: the degree, for example, to which we concentrate our picturing in meditation, infusing head thinking with warmth of heart.Rudolf Steiner reveals a hugely complex picture of interrelationships between humanity and the cosmos. Our head, heart, lungs and limbs all reveal subtly different qualities of connection with the invisible realities that continue to sustain us. Our eyes, for instance, only gradually evolved into organs of sight and were once vital organs, as our lungs are now. The lungs, in turn, will similarly evolve to provide us with another form of perception.As is usually the case, Steiner addresses a wide variety of topics in addition to those above. Included in this volume are thoughts on the significance of the cinema; the nature of the halo; technology as the 'true foundation' of the modern worldview; asceticism in the Middle Ages; the world of machines and the world of rite and worship; yoga and modern meditation exercises; pain as an awakener of knowledge; the emergence of the belief in ghosts; and the connection between stomach acid and soul qualities.

Leseprobe

LIFE OF THE HUMAN SOUL

and its Relation to World Evolution

Nine lectures given in Dornach between 29 April and 17 June 1922

TRANSLATED BY MATTHEW BARTON INTRODUCTION BY MATTHEW BARTON

INTRODUCTION BY PAUL KING

RUDOLF STEINER

RUDOLF STEINER PRESS

CW 212

The publishers gratefully acknowledge the generous funding of this publication by the estate of Dr Eva Frommer MD (1927–2004) and the Anthroposophical Society in Great Britain

Rudolf Steiner Press Hillside House, The Square Forest Row, RH18 5ES

www.rudolfsteinerpress.com

Published by Rudolf Steiner Press 2016

Originally published in German under the title Menschliches Seelenleben und Geistesstreben im Zusammenhange mit Welt- und Erdentwickelung (volume 212 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 latest available (second) edition (1998), edited by Hendrik Knobel

Published by permission of the Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach

© Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach, Rudolf Steiner Verlag 1998

This translation © Rudolf Steiner Press 2016

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 615 9

Cover by Mary Giddens Typeset by DP Photosetting, Neath, West Glamorgan Printed and bound by Gutenberg Press Ltd., Malta

CONTENTS

Editor’s Preface

Introduction, by Matthew Barton

Part OneLIFE OF THE HUMAN SOUL

LECTURE 1DORNACH, 29 APRIL 1922

The human being’s relationship to the world as soul question. Dissatisfaction with the self-contained nature of the soul. Thinking as wakeful picture consciousness. Will as impenetrable reality. The two aspects of feeling. Intimate and outward experience of the world of thinking and will. The autonomy of sense organs. The effect of light (eye) upon our soul life. The lung as vital organ and future sense organ. The nature of anthroposophic truths.

pages 3–17

LECTURE 2DORNACH, 30 APRIL 1922

The vital organs transform into sense organs. At death the physical becomes invisible and movements become visible. The future lung as sense organ. Sense organs as spiritual entities and their connection with memory pictures. Mistaken (Herbart) and correct views of the process of memory. The soul as active entity. The fate of supersensible experience in the soul. Difference between higher and ordinary soul life. Greek and modern drama. Thought as solely image and as living soul content. Living soul and world evolution.

pages 18–33

LECTURE 3DORNACH, 5 MAY 1922

Soul capacity and consciousness. The emergence of waking consciousness from dream consciousness when the astral body is sucked into the physical body. The connection between dream and feeling (anxiety dreams) through the breathing process. Etheric body and astral body as fluid and gaseous organism. The warmth organism. Physical nature as image of the whole human being. The breathing process. The brain as photograph of pre-birth life. The nature of breathing and heart. Fluid, air and warmth in the limbs as mediator between soul and physical. Salt deposits as mirror for the soul to become conscious. One-sided soul quality and illness. The connection between stomach acid and soul qualities. The solid organism (skeleton) as reflector to enable the soul to become conscious. The organism as picture of the soul.

pages 34–49

LECTURE 4DORNACH, 6 MAY 1922

Standing outside things in relation to outer and inner world. Experience of an external spiritual world in Imagination. Heart knowledge and Inspiration. Indifference of thought to personal nature. Sending feeling into thought life. The bubbling up of human drives and instincts. The heart as sense organ. Repulse of instincts and experience of pre-birth life. The brain as the corpse of the soul. Experience of the sun and going out beyond the solar realm in the life between death and rebirth. The body as hindrance to experiencing the universe. Moon quality in reproductive capacity. The moon as ‘under-sun’ works upon the body, while the ‘over-sun’ acts on the human soul. The nature of the halo. Contrast between physical inheritance and soul-spirit. Animal and soul-spiritual warmth in the context of the book Goethe’s World View.

pages 50–66

LECTURE 5DORNACH, 7 MAY 1922

Modern concepts and the lack of interest in an inner world. The cinema. Faith in authority in the modern world-view. Past experience of ideas and precise observation today as phenomenalism. Technology as the sole true foundation of the modern world-view. The ancient mysteries and their prophecy of the technical age.

The Philosophy of Freedom as consequence of the technical age. Pure thinking. The view of the external world’s ungodliness. Asceticism in the Middle Ages. The idea of the Fall. The redemption of the world through art in the view of the Greeks. The world of machines and the world of rite and worship. The nemesis of the ahrimanic world and the ascent of Christianity. Polarity in the anthroposophic world-view. Birth and death in the Middle Ages. The halo and the pregnant woman. Freedom and Ahriman, religion and Lucifer. The founding Christian mysteries. Promulgation of Christ as the god who suffered earthly death.

pages 67–84

Part TwoSPIRITUAL STRIVING IN RELATION TO THE EARTH’S EVOLUTION

LECTURE 6DORNACH, 26 MAY 1922

The stages of human life. The incarnation process. Contraction and configuring of the ether body before connecting with the physical body. The properties of the etheric body (stars, sun, moon and earth). The paling of the ether body in the second seven-year period as forces radiate inwards. The formation of the ether heart after puberty as coalescing of forces within which the physical heart is found. The ‘decaying’ of the inherited ether heart and its replacement with one’s own, cos-mically formed ether heart. The wealth of the astral body and its increasing lack of differentiation as it slips into the bodily organs. Redifferentiation through conscious human activity. Centralization of this activity and its integration into the cosmic ether heart as foundation for the reality of karma. Difference in karmic effect of dying before or after puberty.

pages 87–101

LECTURE 7DORNACH, 27 MAY 1922

The yoga path in ancient India. Clairvoyance in those days as spiritual life without autonomous sense of self. The nature of yoga breathing exercises; the emergence of a distinct sense of self as recall of a time before birth in the world of spirit. The Bhagvad Gita as fruit of this experience. The creation of mantric verses which later gave rise to the rhythms of poetry. Yoga and modern meditation exercises. Release of the latter from the breathing process and transition to an experience of the rhythm of the external world. The self as memory (yoga) and the self as direct spiritual experience. Yoga exercises involving bodily movements and their modern correlate in thought exercises relating to space. Asceticism and the great ancient religions. Modern sensibility and the path of will discipline. Pain as awakener of knowledge.

pages 102–116

LECTURE 8DORNACH, 28 MAY 1922

The demise and increasingly uncreative nature of reason. The intellect made fruitful by a spiritual stream. Self-awareness in the yogi and in modern human beings. Release of modern thinking from the breathing process and pouring it out into the external world. Perception of the elemental world. The world of gnomes and number. The watery beings and a feeling experience of the world. Air beings and will. The decline of the intellect, and air beings turning to serve Ahriman. The ‘downward slide’ of reason. Psychoanalysis. The higher elemental beings of light and life. The nature of the Old Testament. Lack of spirituality and the turning of higher elemental beings to Lucifer. The transitory nature of modern science.

pages 117–135

Part ThreeCONTRAST BETWEEN EAST AND WEST

LECTURE 9DORNACH, 17 JUNE 1922

Sleeping and waking life. Concepts in modern thinking and the thought life of ancient oriental culture. Inspired thinking and independent concept forming. Greek thinking (Socrates) as the beginning of modern thinking. The nature of human sleep in the Orient. How the Greeks saw colours. The sundering of modern humankind from the gods through a strong connection with the sense world. The emergence of the belief in ghosts. Human thoughts do not pulse through the will (Carlyle). Soloviev as eastern thinker. The nature of westerners and their view of ‘primitive’ peoples. Drive and instinct seen as sole reality factor. The eastern idea of ghosts and the western ghosts of drive and instinct. The actions of the gods in the head (East) and in the limbs (West). The development of spiritual thoughts as mission of the future.

pages 139–152

Notes and References

Rudolf Steiner’s Collected Works

Significant Events in the Life of Rudolf Steiner

Index

EDITOR’S PREFACE

In the first few months of 1922, Rudolf Steiner undertook a series of lecture tours in various countries. On two of these, organized by the concert agency Wolff & Sachs in various German cities, he gave public lectures on ‘The Nature of Anthroposophy’ and ‘Anthro-posophy and Spirit Knowledge’, lectured at School of Spiritual Science courses in Berlin and The Hague, and spoke in London as part of the ‘New Ideals in Education’ events. Between these trips he returned to Dornach for a few days, and gave lectures to members there. The lectures in the present volume belong to those, and were given over three weekends in Dornach.

INTRODUCTION

How are we connected to the world around us? This question, says Steiner, is one that lives subliminally in us, drawing us into deep realms of the psyche where, mostly, our little candle of consciousness flickers and goes out. Spiritual schooling can light it again, so that we learn to perceive and fathom realms of our being beyond the circumscribed and isolated self. In such enquiries, Steiner takes us by the hand, as it were, and reveals a hugely complex picture of interrelationship that cannot be summed up in easy tenets or intellectual principles, because we here meet the sway and surge of life itself. Following him—by reading this book for instance—feels like wrestling continually with our own fixed ideas and perceptions. We are not one thing but a unity of multiple qualities invested in the world in many different ways. Our head, heart, lungs and limbs, for instance, all reveal subtly different qualities of connection with both visible and invisible realities that sustain us. Apart from spiritual investigators, perhaps only poets sometimes manage to approach, intuitively, some of the insights which Steiner spells out so lucidly here. When he says, for instance, that our eyes only gradually evolved into organs of sight and were once vital organs as our lungs are now, and that the latter will evolve similarly to grant us another but different form of perception, we might think of a wonderful poem by Rilke—one of his Sonnets to Orpheus—that seems to comprehend something of this seemingly strange idea, and of the ineffable, active connection between ourselves and the cosmos.

Breathing, you invisible poem! Continually you trade pure space for my own being. Counterweight in which I live as rhythm.

Single wave whose gradual sea I am; you thriftiest of all oceans—swell of ever-growing room.

How many of those realms of space were once within me? Sometimes it seems a breeze might be my son.

Do you know me still, air, full of places once mine? You who were once the pure leaf of my words, their budding and rind.

Like the poet, Steiner is hard to understand. But we can sense something vivid, alive and profound in his thoughts: we have to deepen and broaden to grasp him, have to become more imaginative and intuitive to keep up with him. It is impossible here to summarize the range and complexity of his ideas, but let’s just take another pithy comment: that ultimately all that will remain of us, once we shed our body, is what we have done and thought. The same likewise applies, presumably, to the eventual disappearance and demise of all our culture’s material artefacts. Here’s Rilke again, in the seventh Duino Elegy:

Nowhere, my love, will world be but inside us. Our life goes hand in hand with transformation. Appearance dwindles more and more. Where once a house stood solid, now each created form spans across to all thought can possibly create, integral to it as though entirely of the mind.

In his poem ‘An Arundel Tomb’, Philip Larkin comes close to a similar perception. The stone figures of a couple lying hand-in-hand on a tomb containing their bones inspires him to suggest—though sceptic that he was, this statement is hedged round with the doubt and prevarication of a double ‘almost’—that ‘what will remain of us is love’.

‘Humanity needs a knowledge’, says Steiner, ‘that does not relate to this earthly transience, but is connected instead with what passes beyond it’. If in the end our thoughts and actions—both loving and otherwise—are the only reality, this lends a profoundly moral dimension to our connection with the universe, and elsewhere in this volume Steiner focuses as always on human responsibility for what both the human being and the world will eventually become, which is far from a foregone conclusion. He wants to enlist our active participation in evolution, which is not something that merely unfolds physically beyond our reach. Even the way we think can change and affect it, the degree to which we can concentrate our thinking and picturing in meditation, infusing head thinking with warmth of heart. The earth will ultimately go under, but what we ourselves create remains, with all its future consequences. The brain, complex and vital though it is, is the corpse of the living human soul, says Steiner, while the latter evolves hand-in-hand with the world, learning very gradually to live in reality and free itself from the limits and confines of subjective apprehension. The ‘workshop of the gods’ was once upon our time in our head during sleep, but we have already freed ourselves to some degree from their work there and can now think for ourselves. Today they have set up shop instead in our metabolism and will impulses, of which we are usually so deeply unconscious whether awake or not. The form of awareness that can encompass and comprehend the will is one by no means easy to access, is removed—as much in this volume is removed—from easy, rational logic. But that makes it all the more essential for us to learn to work with the gods by trying to penetrate the darkness that can start to reveal its secrets by such efforts, and to approach a deeper, more intuitive understanding than we normally have of ourselves and the world with which we are evolving. Orpheus in Greek myth descended into an underworld into which Steiner also leads us. Rilke’s last poem in his extraordinary sequence tells, firstly, of the pain of knowledge that Steiner likewise impresses on us in these pages, and of how, perhaps, to stand upright within it; then somehow, of a self-relinquishment that finds a truer unity with the world, the development of greater capacities that create paradoxical coherence in this deeper encounter:

[...] In this unfathomed night, at crossroads when your senses strangely congregate, become the power that makes their meeting meaningful. And then

when all earthly things forget your name whisper to the silent earth: I flow. Say to the flowing water: Here I am.

Matthew Barton, August 2016

Part One

LIFE OF THE HUMAN SOUL AND ITS RELATION TO WORLD EVOLUTION

LECTURE 1

29 APRIL 1922

THIS series of lectures was publicized under the title of ‘Human Soul Life and its Relationship with World Evolution’. In our immediate experience of human soul life we do not directly summon this question of the human soul’s relationship with the whole compass of world evolution. That is, it does not figure in us as a conscious question. But unconsciously the human soul does continually ask this precise question: How, as human being, do I relate or connect with the broad scope of world evolution in general? Basically, humanity’s religious life has always arisen from this unconscious question in the depths of the human soul. You see, our more or less apparent religious connection with the eternalis in fact the expression of this unconscious question in the depths of the human psyche.

In our conscious awareness, soulexperience involves, in a sense, feeling enclosed and shut off. Our feelings, experiences and memories arising inwardly in response to the outer world and its impressions are messages and recollections from that world in our feeling and sensibility, in our experience of its range of occurrences, our memories and so forth. When we look at our life of will and action, we can say that the impulses of our thinking, feeling and will spring from the deepest interiority of our being—from depths that are to begin with well beyond our conscious reach.

We regard our thinking capacity in relation to external sense perceptions, the thinking that lives also in memories, the will impulses that come to expression in outward actions as—all of it— something self-contained when we first consider our soul nature and try to practise what is ordinarily called ‘self-reflection’ or ‘self-observation’. But deeper insight into our own being will immediately show us that this self-observation fails to satisfy our deepest soul needs, and that in our own profoundest depths we inevitably ask what in us is connected with an intrinsic and given foundation— something eternal perhaps—that underlies the transient phenomena that I perceive before me in nature and human life.

Initially we seek within our feelings, our sensibility, for the deepest roots of our own being. And from this quest arises the question, with either a more philosophical, or religious, or other nuance: ‘What am I rooted in? This root that I feelwithin me, in what way is it embedded in something objective, something perhaps cosmic—in brief, in something outward that resembles my inner nature, in which my inner being is rooted in a fulfilling way?’ Basically, our mood of soul in life depends on whether we are able to find some kind of answer to this question, which is of the utmost and inmost importance for the soul’s life and destiny.

As you can see, this brief introduction shows there to be, in a sense, a contradictory element in human soul life. On the one hand we find a self-contained and enclosed quality in our thinking, feeling and will, but on the other hand this does not satisfy us since we also outwardly perceive how our bodily case or shell partakes of the destiny of other naturalobjects—arising, developing and decaying as they do. We discover that an outward mode of observation is completely inadequate for demonstrating any connection between our soul and the eternal, since this soul, as we initially perceive in outward ways, vanishes when life in the physical body ceases.

Our inmost need of soul initially contradicts, therefore, what the soulfirst discovers through ordinary, mundane forms of self-observation. But if we allow ourselves to dwell deeply and feelingly in this contradictoriness—which is connected with our destined inner experience of human nature per se—then we can look fully upon this surging, weaving life of soul and find that it bears two distinctive polarities within it: in one direction it develops thinking, and in the other, will. Between thinking and the will we find sensibility, feeling; and we become aware how the thoughts and pictures that we can say we draw from the outer world are accompanied by feelings and emotions, which give these thoughts and ideas the inner soulwarmth that the soulneeds. We become aware also, on the other hand, that the will impulses flowing from within us are connected for their part with a feeling and emotional quality, and that certain feelings and emotions cause us to form a resolve of will of some kind or other. Or that in other words we accompany with our feelings what arises from such resolves of will, so that we are either pleased and satisfied with what we will, or not. At one pole of soul life, therefore, we find thinking, and at the other, will life; and in the middle between these, connecting with both thought life and will life, we find our life of sensibility, feeling and emotion.

Turning our attention more towards thinking we will, if we are honest, have to admit that in ordinary experience our thinking is so fleeting in nature that initially it resembles what we experience outside us, all that our senses experience in the outer world. Certainly, soul life in a sense continues our sensory experiences, but endows them with a colouring, sometimes producing from within us memory pictures that have a quite different nuance and colour from the originating experience in the sense world outside us. Yet as long as we do not give ourselves up to fantasies and dreams but confront even imaginary things in a way that does not nurture illusions, we will find that all thought life is stimulated by our senses’ outward receptivity. If we shut ourselves off to some degree from this outward sensitivity and, without falling asleep, dwell within our own life of thinking without activating the will, then all kinds of memories of externalperceptions enter this thinking—transformed external perceptions. When in a sense we shut off all our senses and simply experience thinking within us, we gain a very clear experience of the pictorialcharacter of what we encompass there. We feelthat we have pictures of what these thoughts express. We even feelthe fleeting quality of these thoughts: they surface in our awareness and depart from it again. It is not so easy to tell whether they are a reality or merely pictures. Or if we assume that they are based on a reality, we cannot at first grasp this reality because our thoughts present themselves as pictures. But this we know very clearly: when we live in thoughts we live in a world of pictures.

But what we experience in our world of will is radically different from this picture world—it is something that our ordinary awareness cannot penetrate. Ordinary consciousness forms a thought or an undefined, instinctive impulse: I want this or that, I wish to move my arm; and after a relatively short span of time the arm moves. The arm’s movement is again apparent to us. We have two thoughts: that of raising our arm, and then that the arm has been raised. But we have no immediate idea of what has unfolded within us as will— it vanishes into the unconscious like states of sleep. As far as our will is concerned, we are asleep even when awake. Whereas ideas can exist in our ordinary awareness with bright clarity—bright and clear in our consciousness despite our lack of knowledge about how they relate to and are rooted in reality—the will lapses from our conscious awareness as it is enacted.

But in relation to this will we know something else instead. When the will becomes action, when therefore it is real will and not just wish, it expresses itself beyond all doubt in reality. First I have a thought or idea, and this is a picture: I will raise my arm. What then occurs is something ordinary consciousness cannot follow, and yet I do raise my arm. A real occurrence takes place in the outer world. What lives in the will becomes outward reality, in the same way that other naturalprocesses are outward reality.

In my thoughts I have the character of image. Initially I do not know how the pictures elaborated as thought connect or relate to reality. But I am perfectly aware that my will is connected with reality. And yet I cannot grasp this will in bright clarity as I can with thoughts.

Between these two poles we have feeling, emotion, which colours idea and will. It partakes of the brightness, the luminous clarity of picturing on the one hand, and of the darkness, the unconsciousness of will impulses on the other. We see a rose and bring it to mind inwardly as image. Then we look away from the rose. The image remains as thought picture. As human beings we are not pervaded by absolute inner cold. We feel pleasure in the rose, delight in it. We feelinner satisfaction at the rose’s existence. But at first we cannot say how this feeling of pleasure at the rose’s existence arises. The way it emerges within us remains at first vague and indiscernible for ordinary awareness, but it connects with the bright, luminous clarity ofthoughts. We can say that it tinges or colours our thoughts. When we have a clear picture of the rose, we also have a clear picture of what pleases us. The bright, luminous clarity of the picture of the rose within us is transferred to our feelings.

But when we have an impulse of will—we need only observe ourselves to discover this—it emerges from the depths of our being: I want or I will this or that. And how often we find ourselves instinctively driven towards something! Our thinking may often tell us that something really ought not to happen, and that what occurs displeases us. But when we contemplate our own life of soul, and enquire into our own feelings, we have to admit that the displeasing occurrence arose from a certain feeling, and was rooted in dark depths of the soul. We have to acknowledge that the origin of its quality and character remains hidden from us. This feeling quality plunges back into the same unconsciousness and darkness as the will. Our feeling therefore participates in very different ways in the bright clarity of thinking life on the one hand and the obscurity of will life on the other.

Thus our soul life appears threefold: as thinking and picturing, as feeling, and as will. But towards each of the two poles its inner nature is configured in an inwardly distinct and very different way.

Thinking points us intially towards the sensory world. It is true that we do not only admit simple sensory perceptions into our mind—such as red, blue, C sharp, C, G, warmth, cold, pleasant fragrances or unpleasant smells, sweet, sour and so forth. The ongoing flow of these sensory feelings can still be ascribed to the sense world itself. But what happens when we encounter more complex outer processes? Let us imagine for a moment standing in front of another human being: countless sense impressions are communicated to us from him. What we see in his face, and the rest of him, the things he utters, the way in which he moves—all the many simple sense impressions that reach us form themselves into a whole, into the way we then experience this other person. And so we can say that we experience the world through our sensory impressions and sensations.

Yet only sensations themselves are tied to us in a narrower sense: simple sensory impressions such as red, blue, C sharp, G, warm, cold and so forth stand closest to our soul life. More complex experi-ences—we could think of another person or also an entirely outward event—are also ultimately composed of sensory experience. We know that we are intimately connected with the red colour of the rose when it meets our gaze. But it is a more complex thing if, say, a mother gives her little boy a rose. This process detaches itselffrom us, we are not so intimately connected with it; and we only come closer to it when, perhaps through what we know of the Rose of Shiraz,1 we recall something more complex that we have not actually seen, that we have only heard of by different means—in which sensory impressions no longer have a direct relationship with outer reality. We may have read the story, and then our sensory impressions were those of black letters, the forms of the letters on paper; or we heard someone recounting it, but such sense impressions point us to something that is very much detached from us. We can therefore distinguish between the direct, intimate connection that sense impressions have with our soullife and something at a further remove from us that is only mediated by sense impressions.