Macrocosm and Microcosm E-Book

Rudolf Steiner

• Herausgeber: Rudolf Steiner Press
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Rudolf Steiner shows how deeply and intimately human beings, the microcosm, are related to the macrocosm. But for Steiner the macrocosm is more than just the physical universe. It includes many hidden realms – like the world of Elements and the world of Archetypes – which lie behind outer manifestations such as our physical body. The macrocosm works within us continuously – in the daily alternation between sleeping and waking and in the great cyclical interchange between incarnation on earth and our time between death and rebirth. Steiner discusses the various paths of self-development that lead across the threshold to spiritual dimensions, transforming human soul-forces into organs of higher perception. In future we will even have the capacity to evolve a form of thinking that is higher than the intellect – the thinking of the heart. In this classic series of lectures, now retranslated and featuring a previously-unavailable public address, Rudolf Steiner also discusses: the planets and their connection with our sleeping and waking life; the inner path of the mystic; the 'greater' and 'lesser' guardians of the threshold; the Egyptian mysteries of Osiris and Isis; initiation in the Northern mysteries; The four spheres of the higher worlds; mirror-images of the macrocosm in man; the strengthening powers of sleep; the symbol of the Rose Cross; reading the Akashic Record; four-dimensional space; the development of future human capacities, and much more. The volume includes an introduction, notes and index.

Leseprobe

MACROCOSM AND MICROCOSM

THE GREATER AND THE LESSER WORLD QUESTIONS CONCERNING THE SOUL, LIFE AND THE SPIRIT

Eleven lectures held in Vienna between 21 and 31 March 1910 with a preceding public lecture on 19 March 1910

TRANSLATED BY PAUL KING

INTRODUCTION BY PAUL KING

RUDOLF STEINER

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

www.rudolfsteinerpress.com

Published by Rudolf Steiner Press 2021

Originally published in German under the title Makrokosmos und Mikrokosmos. Die große und die kleine Welt. Seelenfragen, Lebensfragen, Geistesfragen (volume 119 in the Rudolf Steiner Gesamtausgabe or Collected Works) by Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach. Based on short-hand notes that were not reviewed or revised by the speaker. This authorized translation is based on the third German edition (1988) that was edited by Ulla Trapp

Published by permission of the Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach

© Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach, Rudolf Steiner Verlag 1988

This translation © Rudolf Steiner Press 2021

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, photo-copying 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 589 3 EISBN 978 1 85584 622 7

Cover by Andrew Morgan Typeset by Symbiosys Technologies, Vishakapatnam, India Printed and bound by 4Edge Ltd., Essex

CONTENTS

Translator’s Note

Introduction, by Paul King

PUBLIC LECTURE VIENNA, 19 MARCH 1910

The human being’s cycle through the sense-world, soul-world, and spirit-world. Experiences after death in the soul- and spirit-world. Formation of karma. Descent to a new birth. Verse: Riddle upon riddle.

MACROCOSM AND MICROCOSM The Greater and the Lesser World Questions concerning the Soul, Life and the Spirit

LECTURE 1 VIENNA, 21 MARCH 1910

Inner and outer frontiers of knowledge. Entry into the worlds behind these boundaries through ecstasy or mystical experience. Ecstasy and mystical experience as abnormal conditions. The normal alternation between waking and sleeping. Experiencing the inner and the outer world. Reflection of mystical and ecstatic experience in the various members-of-being.

LECTURE 2 VIENNA, 22 MARCH 1910

The planets and their connection with sleeping and waking life. Differentiation of sentient-soul, intellectual- or mind-soul, and consciousness-soul. The influences of the spiritual forces of Venus, Mercury, and Moon on the sentient-, intellectual- and consciousness-soul in waking, and of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn during sleep. The planetary system as a cosmic clock.

LECTURE 3 VIENNA, 23 MARCH 1910

The path of the mystic: perceiving the physical and etheric bodies from within. Experience of the cycle of the year. The sentient body as a boundary between inner and outer experience. It screens from everyday consciousness what would otherwise produce a burning sense of shame. The Lesser Guardian of the Threshold. The cycle of Nature. The Northern Mysteries. The sun at midnight. The ability to see through matter. The Greater Guardian of the Threshold.

LECTURE 4 VIENNA, 24 MARCH 1910

Faculties of the human soul and their development. The regions beyond the two frontiers within which normal human consciousness is enclosed. Passing the Lesser Guardian of the Threshold through conscious attention on waking. Experience of the three main forces of the soul as an incoming stream from the macrocosm. Feelings of gratitude and obligation towards the macrocosm. Cosmic Thinking, cosmic Feeling, cosmic Will. Cosmic forces must be replenished by the efforts of the individual to reach the higher worlds. The outcome of sins of omission. The ‘mystic vow’.

LECTURE 5 VIENNA, 25 MARCH 1910

Egyptian Mysteries of Osiris and Isis. Experiences of the candidates in the process of Initiation. Preparation of inherited characteristics. The ‘upper’ and the ‘lower’ man. Moving backward in the etheric body to the frontier of the mineral kingdom. The descent into the physical body. The priest of Hermes as guru. The Rosicrucian path. Mystics of the Middle Ages.

LECTURE 6 VIENNA, 26 MARCH 1910

Experiences of initiation in the Northern Mysteries. Danger on the ecstatic path of losing one’s Ego. Danger on the mystical path of over-inflating the egotistical Ego. Methods for strengthening the Ego during initiation in the Northern Mysteries. Experiences connected with the seasons of the year. Helpers in the process of initiation. Conscious ascent into the macrocosm. The revelation of spiritual beings in the elemental world (Fire, Water, Air, Earth). The Spiritual World: zodiac and planets. The World of Reason; the World of Archetypes.

LECTURE 7 VIENNA, 27 MARCH 1910

The four spheres of the higher worlds. Connection of the four temperaments with the four elements of the Elemental World. Adaptation to the World of Spirit after balancing the temperaments. At the threshold of the World of Spirit the objective perception of one’s own imperfection as an image composed of all the elements. Passing the Greater Guardian of the Threshold. Self-knowledge and self-perfection. Interaction with progressive spiritual Beings. Forces for developing clairvoyant consciousness in the World of Archetypes.

LECTURE 8 VIENNA, 28 MARCH 1910

Mirror-images of the macrocosm in man. Sense-impressions arise by a portion of the Elemental World being held back. The nervous system as an inner solar system. The basis for the human microcosm—the senses, nerves, and brain—formed by macrocosmic forces from the Elemental World, Spiritual World, and World of Reason. The formation of the higher spiritual organs through the forces of the World of Archetypes. The Rosicrucian path. The inner activity required to attain the capacities needed to rise to imaginative, inspirative, and intuitive knowledge.

LECTURE 9 VIENNA, 29 MARCH 1910

Spiritual organs of perception and the strengthening powers of sleep. Formulae and symbols. The thinking of the heart. Three stages of the faculty of judgement: the feeling for truth, critical thought of the intellect, heart-thinking. Learning how to deal with contradictions. Preparation for experience of the higher worlds. The Ego viewed from twelve different vantage-points. Surrender of personal opinions. Spiritual-scientific findings and the language of logical thought.

LECTURE 10 VIENNA, 30 MARCH 1910

Three evolutionary stages in human understanding: unconscious logic of the heart (past), intellectual logic (present), conscious logic of the heart (future). Memory. Changes in the spiritual researcher’s memory from ordinary memory in time to spiritual memory in space. Reading in the Akasha Chronicle. Transition from intellectual thinking to the thinking (or logic) of the heart. The fourth dimension. The formation and transformation of heart and brain in connection with macrocosmic development. Intellectual questions.

LECTURE 11 VIENNA, 31 MARCH 1910

Development of future human capacities. Adaptation to the various conditions of our planet. The spiritual researcher’s appeal to people’s sense of truth. The origin of the physical in the spiritual. Solar influences in plants and man. Physical organs that point to the past, and those that point to the future; heart and larynx. The future evolution of speech. Breath exercises. Wisdom and love. Verse: ‘God’s protecting, blessing ray...’.

Facsimiles

Notes

Rudolf Steiner’s Collected Works

Significant Events in the Life of Rudolf Steiner

Index

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

IHAVE tried in this work to make the translation as faithful as possible not only to the thought-content of the lectures but also to the ‘flavour’ and subtleties of Steiner’s language and wording. The content of this book was not originally written as prose but given in live speech to a live audience.

There is a point of view that holds that Steiner’s translated lectures should be tidied up, pruned, made more ‘accessible’ to the reader. Although I can understand this view, I can’t agree with it, particularly since in my work of revising older translations I have found so many bits cut out, other bits added (without letting the reader know that these are the translator’s or editor’s words and not Steiner’s), and sentences rearranged in the paragraph, that although the thought-content may still be fairly accurate, much of Steiner and his style and the nuances of his language are lost. Also there is greater room here for subjectivity: one translator (or editor) might cut out what another considers quite important.

In prose a reader can check back in the book to a point they have forgotten or need to clarify once more. In a live lecture this is not possible, so Steiner often repeats certain points to help his audience keep ‘on track’ or to emphasize something particularly important (and possibly for other reasons too). There is a temptation in the interests of ‘good prose’ to cut out these repetitions. However, I see them as an integral part of the lecture and more helpful than boring. Steiner also often uses a phrase like ‘that which we call...’, as for example in, ‘that which we call human blood’. The temptation here would be to prune down ‘that which we call human blood,’ to just the editorially more acceptable, more succinct and sharply defined, ‘human blood’. But Steiner used such phrases very consciously, and there is more than mere verbiage in them. There is a subtle difference between baldly naming a thing or alluding to it in a less defined way as ‘that which we call...’ The latter leaves an opening.

For the German text of the lectures a great deal of research and work, using a number of written notes from various members of the audience, went into getting the wording as close as possible to what Steiner actually said. I think it unlikely it would occur to anyone doing that work to cut out, add, or edit the wording just so as to produce better prose. Why, then, allow ourselves such liberties in English?

In working on Steiner’s lectures, the job of a translator is surely to translate as invisibly and inaudibly as possible so as to allow the full quality of the original to sound through. That way, even when reading in English, rather than being confronted with rather stiff, academic-sounding prose, we can hear something of the original: we can hear Steiner speaking and engaging with his audience in language that is in-the-moment, warm and lively.

Paul King January 2021

INTRODUCTION

LARGELY ignored and below the radar of public notice in mainstream media, there are signs of a revolutionary transition taking place in the current scientific worldview. It promises to have long-term consequences every bit as momentous as those following the Copernican revolution from a geocentric to a heliocentric cosmos.

Since the development of quantum physics, scientists have become aware of phenomena that are entirely inexplicable in terms of the established materialist, reductionist, Newtonian-Cartesian worldview, and are struggling to bring a new paradigm to birth. The new view looks at the world more holistically, in terms of self-organizing systems, of systems resonating within systems, and interrelationships. And in asking what it is that does the organizing or what lies behind the pattern of a system’s processes and structure (in a cell, for example, or a plant), scientists, I believe, are tapping at the door of the spiritual world, albeit largely unconsciously.

The old paradigm maintains that everything in the universe is the result of meaningless random events. The only consciousness with any kind of meaning or purpose is human consciousness, and even that is merely an epiphenomenon of physico-chemical processes in a computer-like brain, randomly evolved. The cosmos, which in previous ages was held to be pure consciousness, the repository of all divine wisdom and purpose, is said to have no consciousness at all.

This view is changing.

There are scientists now who are looking for an expanded, less limited, more meaningful view of the world. This has given rise to associations such as the Scientific and Medical Network, which is exploring open-mindedly the territory of new paradigms.

This push towards change is not without resistance. Just as in Copernicus’ time the powerful, established and recognized authorities of the day opposed the notion of a heliocentric cosmos, so the powerful, established and recognized scientific authorities of the present day often oppose any paradigm challenging their position. But in the Renaissance the heliocentric energy of the zeitgeist was in the air, and therefore unstoppable.

Work done by individuals such as Richard Tarnas and Keiron de Grice,* is endeavouring to establish a scientific basis for the relationship between archetypes in the human psyche and cosmic archetypes as expressed in astrology—the relationship between microcosm and macrocosm. They speak of archetypal energies. ‘Energy’, however, is a less challenging was of saying ‘spiritual force’. And spiritual force is a less challenging way of saying ‘the activity of a spiritual being’. And this, in turn, is a prolonged way of saying just Being, Mind, or Intelligence. All energy in the cosmos is spiritual energy, spiritual activity, and therefore spiritual being.

Anthroposophy, the study of the human being by means of a spiritualized science, was once defined by Steiner as a path that ‘wishes to lead the spiritual in the human being to the spiritual in the universe’. In the series of lectures in this book, Steiner shows how deeply we—the microcosm—are related to the macrocosm. The macrocosm is here understood not just as the physical universe. Beyond the physical level it includes many worlds which have had the most profound influence on human evolution. Beyond the physical lies the World of Elements, the World of Spirit, the World of Reason and the World of Archetypes, to name just those Steiner discusses. These lie, for example, behind the evolution in us of our nerves and senses, and the brain as the physical substrate for our intellectual thinking. These higher worlds will also be involved in the future evolution of a thinking higher than the intellect—the thinking of the heart. In this context, the macrocosm is continuously at work on the microcosm.

As Steiner discusses, it is also at work in the daily alternation between sleeping and waking. We wake up refreshed, with our forces replenished by the cosmos we have visited during sleep. And it works in us in the great cyclical alternation between incarnation and life-between-lives.

Many scientists, I suspect, are feeling their way towards opening themselves to findings such as this. Steiner is still way ahead of them. But despite opposition, the energy of the zeitgeist is in the air, and is therefore, I suspect, unstoppable.

Paul King March 2021

_________________________

* Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche; and Keiron le Grice, The Archetypal Cosmos.

THE HUMAN BEING’S CYCLE THROUGH THE SENSE-WORLD, SOUL-WORLD, AND SPIRIT-WORLD

PUBLIC LECTURE, VIENNA, 19 MARCH 1910

THE lecture last Thursday1 was intended to characterize the ways by which human beings can find access to the spiritual worlds. An attempt was made to show how even normal observation of the sequence of phenomena in the course of our life between birth and death, demonstrates laws, great laws, that point to a spiritual world lying behind the physical one. And an outline was given as to how human beings themselves can reach this spiritual world.

Today we will discuss in broad outline a chapter of the knowledge a spiritual researcher can attain by means of the methods described the day before yesterday. Even more than was the case for that lecture, everything that will be said today could be seen as some kind of fantastical nonsense. But following on from Thursday’s discussion, it can be assumed that what will be presented today in the form of a straightforward narrative can be regarded as a sum of research results that present themselves to perception of the higher worlds. So today I shall simply relate the experiences human beings have when, after death, they advance through the various worlds they are destined to pass through.

We will start at the point in the course of human life when we step through the portal of death, when, as described yesterday, we lay aside our physical body and ascend into a different, into a spiritual existence. The first thing we will focus on is what the human being experiences immediately after crossing the portal of death, after the laying aside of the physical body.

The first impression our astral body and Ego have once death has occurred is that we can look back over the life just passed, which took its course between birth and death, and see it in a comprehensive memory-tableau. The individual events of the life just lived which had vanished from our mind long ago, appear [again], as it were, before the soul in all their detail at this important turning point of life. And if we ask ourselves, how is this possible? We can begin to understand what is evident to the clairvoyant eye by recalling a well-known phenomenon in life which people relate who have been in danger of losing their life, who perhaps fell from a mountain or nearly drowned. They relate how, at such a moment, their whole life flashed before their eyes as though in a great painting. What they say can be fully confirmed by spiritual science.

So how does it happen that at such a moment the whole of their life up to that point appears to a person as though in a great painting? This happens because what we can see of the human being with physical eyes, can grasp with physical hands, in other words what we call the human physical body, is permeated and suffused by the etheric or life body. It is this second and already invisible member of the human being which, between birth and death, prevents the physical body from following [and succumbing to] the physical and chemical forces that are implanted in it. Our faithful warrior, so to speak, against the decomposition of the physical body is this etheric or life body, this second member of our being.

Now it is understandable that for physical sight, for physical science, when death sets in, our entire being appears to fall prey to it; for what passes through the portal of death and then has the impressions that are about to be described, only exists for spiritual knowledge, only for spiritual sight. But everything that is apparent only for spiritual knowledge must of necessity appear to physical sight as nothing.

You will see nothing in the eternally empty distance, You will not hear the step you take, Will find nothing solid where you stand!2

[literal translation]

This is what Mephistopheles says in Goethe’s Faust. This is how it will be eternally. Mephistopheles characterizes and represents the world-view that only accepts external, physical existence, and sees in everything that can be attained through spiritual knowledge beyond this physical existence as nothingness. And eternally the individual who has an inkling and knowledge of the fact that forces slumber in the human being which can be developed so that the spiritual worlds break into the human soul, just as light and colour break into the operated eye of one born blind—eternally the human soul that has some inkling of this higher knowledge will reply to materialism with the words that Faust uses in reply to Mephistopheles:

In your Nothing I hope to find the All.2

Just as Faust hopes to find the All in the Nothing, so we must go to what the materialist mindset and perception sees as ‘nothing’ if we want to understand what it is that passes through the portal of death and has experiences when there are no longer any physical instruments, no physical organs, by which an external world can be perceived. What for materialism is ‘nothing’, is for spiritual sight a fundamental aspect of the human being, and is the aspect that has before it the tremendous memory-tableau containing all the individual experiences of our last life in the same way, or indeed in a higher sense, as comes from the shock people experience when in imminent danger of death, when they almost drown, for example.

So, what actually happens when someone is in danger of sudden death? Through the shock they experience, their etheric or life body is loosened for a brief moment from the physical body. But this etheric or life body in the human being—please note, I say expressly: in the human being—is also the bearer of memory, and in ordinary life when this etheric or life body is integrated in the physical body, the physical body acts like a kind of obstruction, an obstruction to all our individual memories, all our memory images. But when, through shock, the etheric or life body is lifted for a brief moment out of the physical body, then the whole life appears as a memory-painting before the soul, and then, in someone who is about to drown, we get a definite analogy of what happens immediately after death when the etheric or life body and all its forces become free because the physical body has been laid aside.

This is one of the experiences we have after stepping through the portal of death. But it needs to be described in more detail. This is an experience of a very curious kind. The nature of this memory is not such that we experience the events of the life just passed in exactly the same way as we did during life. In life, events of the day make an impression on us of pleasure, an impression of joy, an impression of pain, an impression of suffering. The way they come to meet us means that we have sympathy and antipathy for them. In short, the events stimulate our world of feeling, and can also spur us on to activate our will, our desire, in one direction or another. All the pleasure and suffering, joy and pain, sympathy and antipathy, the interest in external phenomena—all this, for the time we are speaking about, is as though extinguished from the human soul, and the memory-picture is there before us really [just] as a picture. When we are looking at a picture, or imagine a scene in which we would suffer terribly, we bear it objectively, neutrally, when it is presented to us [just] as a picture. But this is how the memory-picture of our whole life comes before our soul: we experience it without the [emotional] involvement we otherwise had during life.

That’s the one thing. The other is that human beings now, immediately after stepping through the portal of death, experience something they would have very little acquaintance with between birth and death if they have not themselves become spiritual researchers. During life we are always outside of things, outside of the beings that are around us. Tables and chairs are outside us, the plant flora spread out over the field is outside us. Our impression immediately following death is that our being pours itself over everything that is outside us. We submerse ourselves, as it were, in things, we feel one with them. A feeling arises of our soul widening out, expanding, broadening, of melting into the things that are in the outer surroundings as pictures. This experience lasts—according to spiritual research with the methods we have spoken about—for a variable period; but in general it is a short experience after death. Today, now that more precise clairvoyant research on this subject is available, it is possible to say that the length of this period depends on the individual involved. You know that under normal conditions in life different people can stay awake for different lengths of time, when needs must, before they are overcome by sleep. One person can stay awake perhaps for three, four, five days, another person for only thirty-six hours, and so on. The memory-tableau lasts on average roughly for as long as the person, under general normal conditions, could stay awake before being forced to fall asleep. In other words, the period is to be reckoned in days and is different for different individuals.

Then, when this memory-tableau is over, when it has faded bit by bit into a gradual darkening, the human being begins to feel as though certain forces within him now withdraw, that something that was previously in his nature is ejected. What is ejected is now a second corpse of the human being, an invisible corpse; it is that part of the human etheric or life body that we cannot take with us through our subsequent experiences in the soul world. So, whereas the physical corpse was already ejected prior to this and returned to its physical substances and forces, it is now the etheric or life body that is pressed out, which disperses into the world we call the etheric world. [This etheric world] is again a ‘nothing’ for someone who can only see and think materialistically, but for someone whose spiritual eyes are open, it weaves through and imbues everything with life. Now, there is a bit of this squeezed-out etheric or life body that remains behind, which we can call an essence, an extract, of all our experiences. The experiences of the recent life between birth and death remain, as though concentrated into a seed, united from now on with what is our human being. In other words, the fruit of the last life, in concentrated form, endures.

So what does the human being consist of in the further course of our after-death life? We retain what we call the bearer of our Ego, or just the Ego; but this Ego is enveloped initially by what we have described as the third member of our human being after the physical and etheric or life body: this Ego is enveloped by the astral body. We could say that the human astral body is the bearer of pleasure and suffering, of joy and pain, of drives, desires and passions. All day long, for everything of the nature of pleasure and suffering, drives, desires and passions that flicker through the soul, the astral body is the bearer. And every night the Ego and astral body leave the physical and etheric or life bodies, which, while we sleep, remain in the bed. Now, after death, we have the Ego and astral body united together, along with that ‘life essence’ about which we have just said that it is extracted as a fruit or seed from the etheric or life body. With these members of their being, human beings embark on their further journey through the so-called soul world.

If we wish to understand what spiritual sight can reveal about this world, we must first be clear that it is the astral body that is the bearer of everything of the nature of enjoyment and pleasure, of interest in the things around us. Indeed, the astral body is the bearer of all pleasures, desires, all pain and suffering, and also of the lowest desires, desires for example associated with eating. The physical body is a structure of physical and chemical forces and laws. It is not the physical body that experiences pleasure and enjoyment with regards to any kind of food or other means of pleasure: it is the astral body. The physical body only provides us with the ‘tools’ that can give us the means to the enjoyments that [actually] play out in the astral body. Anyone realizing that this astral body in human beings is something very real and not just a function or result of interaction between physical and chemical processes, will also not be surprised to hear that, at the moment of death when the physical body is laid aside, the astral body does not immediately lose its longing for pleasures. For indeed, it doesn’t.

We can take an obvious example of, let’s say, a man who in life was a gourmet, who enjoyed delicious food. How are things for him now after death? He has lost the possibility—because the physical means have been laid aside—of getting the enjoyment in his astral body. But the desire for those pleasures is still there in the astral body. The result is that this individual, with regards to these pleasures, is in the same situation—although for different reasons—as he would be if in physical life he were in a region where he was suffering from a burning thirst but there was nothing far and wide that could quench this thirst. After death the astral body suffers from a burning thirst because it no longer has the physical organs by which it can satisfy the thirst. The ‘tools’ have been laid aside, but in the astral body the desire for these pleasures has remained. The result is that, with regard to these enjoyments, the human being is in the same situation—the astral body suffers from a burning thirst. In the astral body there are still all those drives, desires and passions which can only be satisfied by means of physical organs. Thus, simply from this logical consideration, what the spiritual researcher has to say concerning this subject is understandable: After human beings have laid aside their etheric or life body, they go through a period in which in their innermost being they must give up all the longings, all the desires, which can only be satisfied by the physical organs of the physical body. This is the period of purification, of cleansing, in which all longings for anything that can only be provided by the functioning of physical organs, must be stripped out of the astral body.

We can understand that, once again depending on the individual, the time it takes to pass through this purification, this stripping out of desires that are oriented towards the physical world, will vary. The human being is in this phase for a period that is not counted in days but, according to spiritual-scientific research, requires around a third of the time of the life between birth and death. It is understandable for someone who is able to look deeper into things that the period of purification lasts about as long as one third of the life just lived.

When we look at human life, we find that this life between birth and death is clearly divided into three thirds.

The first third is the period in which the predispositions and capacities of the human being, having entered existence through birth, work their way through the obstacles of the physical world. There is a kind of ascending life in this first third. The individual, as a spiritual being, gradual gains possession of their physical organs.

Then comes the next third of life which lasts on average from the age of 21 to 42. (The first third lasts up to 21.) This second third of life involves the development of all those forces human beings can unfold by engaging their inner being, their soul nature, with the outer world. By this time they have moulded the organs of their physical and etheric or life body so that these no longer present an obstacle. They are fully grown. Their soul nature engages directly with the external world. This lasts until we are obliged to begin consuming our physical and etheric or life bodies, which then continues for the rest of our lives. Human beings gradually reabsorb what they moulded during their youth. We were able to point out the wonderful connection that exists between youth and old age. If, during the period in which our inner human nature works sculpturally on our organs, we develop certain qualities, if [for example] we have overcome a tendency to lose our temper all the time, [or] if we have developed what we call a feeling of reverence, the effect comes to expression precisely in this last third of life. In the middle third it is as though it goes into a hidden river. And a temper that has been overcome emerges in old age as justified gentleness (gerechte Milde), so that the cause of gentleness lies in a temper overcome. And from the mood of devotion that we hold in our heart in our younger years comes a quality at the end of life that we see in those individuals who are able to walk into a group of people and, even without saying much, have an effect like a blessing.

Human life is clearly divided into three parts. In the first third human beings work on their physical body; in the last third they draw energy from the physical body; in the middle third the soul-nature is left to itself, so to speak. It is understandable that this middle period must have a correspondence with the period of purification after death. There the soul is free of the physical and etheric or life body, and relates to its spiritual surroundings in a way similar to the second third of life.

By looking at ordinary life we can understand logically what the spiritual researcher is able to see. We can understand that what has been mentioned as the duration of the [purification] period is an average; the length of time for purification will be longer for one individual, shorter for another. It will be longer for those whose passions are directed purely towards sense-existence, who scarcely know anything other than satisfaction through pleasures bound up with the organs of the physical body. But those who in ordinary life, through an interest in art, through knowledge, are already able to see something of the spiritual secrets of existence that reveal themselves through the veil of the physical, those who have just an inkling of comprehension for the revelations of spirit through the veil of the physical—for them the period of purification will be shorter, for they will go through the portal of death prepared, prepared for everything in the nature of satisfaction that can only come from the spiritual world.

So here we have a phase that human beings live through between death and a new birth that is significantly different from the phase we count in days, immediately after death. Whereas during the period we count in days we have a neutral memory-tableau before which all our interest and engagement fall silent, during the purification period we have precisely all those things in our soul which drew us to our experiences through a longing for enjoyment, through a longing for what we desire. During this period of purification it is precisely the life of feeling, the life of sensation, that plays out in the soul.

Now it must be said that spiritual research finds a remarkable peculiarity in this period of purification. As strange as it may sound, it is nevertheless true: the purification period runs backwards, so that we live through the impression of the last year of our physical life first, then the second to last, then the third to last. And so, as we purify and cleanse ourselves, we live through our life as though in mirror-image, we go through it in such a way that it appears to run from our death to our birth, and at the end of the purification period we are at the moment of our birth. We run through our life beginning with old age, then comes middle age, then right back to our childhood.

Now nobody need think that this is only a terrible time, a time in which we only experience burning thirst and cravings. That is all certainly there, but it is not all there is. We also relive the spiritual things we experienced between birth and death, we also relive the good events of our life as though we had them before us in a mirror-image. This will become clearer as we look at this period in more detail.

Let’s assume that someone dies aged 60. They first relive their 59th year, then their 58th, their 57th, and so on. They just relive everything backwards in a kind of mirror-image. The feeling that we are poured out over the things and beings of the world, that we are inside every being and thing, remains. Let’s suppose that in the 40th year of a life that lasted to the age of 60, we insulted someone. We relive the twenty [intervening] years three times as fast. When we get back to 40, we experience once more the pain we caused the other person, but we don’t experience what we felt at the time, but rather what the other person experienced. If, due to a feeling of vengeance or through a surge of rage, we caused pain to another, and when looking backwards after death we come to this moment, we do not feel the satisfaction we felt at the time but what the other person felt. We are transposed in our mind [or spirit] into that person. And so it is with everything we relive as we travel backwards. We relive all the benign actions, the good deeds that we did in life, in the beneficial effects they produced in our surroundings.

We experience this with the soul that feels itself poured out, as it were, into all its surroundings. This is not without consequences, for by reliving everything, human beings receive certain marks, certain imprints. We can describe this roughly as follows. (But I need to emphasize that we can only describe these things comparatively, for you will understand that our words are fashioned for the physical world and are applicable in the proper sense only to this physical world. If we nevertheless use these words—and without them we could not come to an understanding of the mysterious worlds that are open to the spiritual eye—we need to be aware that these words only have an approximate meaning.) So, what is relived here can only be described as follows.

When human beings perceive the pain they have caused another, when they experience this pain after death, they feel it to be an obstacle to their development. They sense something in their soul and say to themselves: What would I have become if I hadn’t inflicted pain on the other? This pain is something that holds back my whole being from a level of perfection it could otherwise have attained. And regarding all the error and lies, everything ugly that they have spread out into their surroundings, human beings say: These are all obstacles to my development, things that I myself have put in the way towards my perfection. And because of this, a force takes shape in the human soul with a tendency such that human beings in the circumstances in which they live between death and a new birth, conceive a longing, conceive a will-impulse, to clear this obstacle out of the way. This means that bit by bit during our backward journey we take up impulses to put right, to balance out in our coming life, the obstacles we ourselves have put in our way.

Therefore we should not espouse the belief that what we experience there is only suffering. There is certainly suffering and renunciation, and it is painful when we see everything we have burdened our soul with, that we ourselves have caused; but we experience it in a way that we are glad for the possibility of this experience, because only thus can we absorb the strength that enables us to clear the obstacles out of the way. And so all these impulses that we take in during the time of purification are added together and, when we get back to the beginning of our last life, have become a powerful totality that lives in us as a tremendous urge to balance out in a new life, in the subsequent stages of development, everything that needs to be balanced out in accordance with what we have just described. So, at the end of the purification period we are equipped with the energy to unfold our will in the future in such a way that all the unjust, ugly, and bad things we have done will be balanced out. We can have something of a presentiment of this energy when, through wise self-knowledge, we acquaint ourselves with the pricks of conscience that are caused when we think back to what we have done to one person or another. But in life this all remains merely as thought. In the purification period between death and a new birth it becomes a tremendously powerful urge to action. And with this urge to action human beings now enter into a new [phase of] life [after death]: into the actual spiritual world.

If we want to understand this spiritual life human beings enter after the period of purification, we can do so as follows. It is difficult to capture in words the completely different nature of the experiences the spiritual researcher has when he investigates life between death and a new birth, the completely different existential impressions that cannot be compared with anything the eye can see in the sense-world or the brain-bound intellect can think; but we can get a rough idea of what can open up like a new world to the spiritual researcher through his insight into the spiritual world, in the following way.

When you look around you and wish to understand the world, when you want to understand what surrounds you, you do this by thinking, by forming ideas about the things that are around you. Logically it would be an absurd notion for someone to think you could draw water out of a glass in which there wasn’t any. It would be exactly the same if you were to imagine that you could draw thoughts, laws, out of a world in which there were no thoughts or laws. All human knowledge, all human understanding, would be vain daydreaming, would be nothing but fantasy, if the thoughts that we form in our minds did not already exist at the foundation of things, if things hadn’t sprouted forth out of thoughts. All those who believe that thoughts are just something created by the human mind, that they are not behind all things as the actual forces of every thing’s activity and functioning, might just as well give up thinking altogether; for thoughts formed in that way, without any correspondence to an external thought-world, would be vain fantasy. The only people whose thinking is real are those who know that their thinking corresponds to the external world of thought and re-awakens this outer thought-world as though in a mirror within us; they know that all things sprouted forth originally from this thought-world.

For us human beings the thought is the last factor we grasp in connection with things, but for the things themselves it is the first factor and their foundation. Creative thought is the basis of things, but human thought, through which we finally gain understanding, differs very significantly in a certain respect from the creative thoughts out there. If you endeavour to look into the human soul, you will say to yourself: No matter how much human thoughts roam the horizon of thoughts and ideas, no matter how much people think, or how much they try to penetrate with their thoughts into the mysteries of things, their thoughts will always behave like something that is far from creative. This is the peculiar quality of human thoughts: that they have lost the productive, the creative element that is contained in the thoughts that weave through, and enliven, the external world. These thoughts that pervade the external world are permeated by an element which, for us, sprouts up in our internal being, and is like a mysterious underground realm of our existence. You are well aware that if your thoughts are to be transfused into will, they must dive down into the underground of your being, that the thought by itself is not yet permeated by will. But the thought at work out there in the world is permeated and pervaded by will. And so the specific attribute of the spirit objectively at work in external things is that it is creative. But because of this it is no longer just thought; because of this it is spirit. Human thought has come about by the will being pressed out of the spirit, so that thought arises out of the human being like a reflection. For spiritual sight, the thought in external things is never separated from the creative element.

Having passed through the period of purification after death, the human individual enters into this spirit that contains will and thought combined. And so, just as we live in this world that we pass through between birth and death, surrounded by the impressions of our senses, surrounded by everything that our intellect can think, just as we are surrounded and enclosed by the physical world, so after the time of purification we are enclosed everywhere by the creative, spiritual world. And we are inside this creative, spiritual world, we are right inside it and belong to it. When the period of purification is over, the first experience we have is that we don’t feel ourselves to be in a world that is arranged around us with a horizon of things we can perceive, but feel ourselves to be in a world where we are creative through and through.

Now everything, in so far as it has not yet been worked on, that we have absorbed during the last life and in earlier lives, particularly what is in the extract we described of our etheric or life body, everything that has remained in our astral body as the powerful impulse that wishes to balance out the obstacles we have noted—all this we now feel in ourselves in a productive and creative way.

Now, life in this creative productivity is something that can best be described with the term bliss or blessedness. Even in ordinary life, at a lower level, you can observe the feeling of bliss in a comparative way when you see a hen sitting on her eggs. There is a warming bliss in the process of productivity itself. In a higher sense we can observe the blessedness of productivity when an artist is able to transpose into the external material world what has matured in his soul, when he can create something. This feeling of bliss, which we can get an approximate idea of in this way, is what permeates our entire human being during our passage through the spiritual world.

What is it that human beings work into the spiritual world? They work into the spiritual world everything they have gained as fruits, as the extract of the last life and previous lives. The day before yesterday we saw that this does indeed approach us [during life] as an experience, but that, in life between birth and death, because we have a boundary in our physical and etheric or life body, we must initially just hold this in ourselves and not work it into our full being. But now the physical and etheric or life body are gone, we now work in pure spiritual substance, we now integrate into this [spiritual substance] everything that we did indeed experience during the last life but were not able to work into ourselves due to the limits of our physical and etheric or life bodies.

If we have questions concerning the duration of this period in which human beings take what they have gained in their last life and work it productively into the spiritual, we must ask ourselves above all: is there a point to the law we have spoken about of repeated earth lives? Yes, indeed, there is a point, and this is evident in the fact that, having passed through one incarnation, the individual does not reappear in a life that could only give them the same experiences once again, but returns only when the exterior of the earth has changed so much in the meantime that they can have completely new experiences. Someone who contemplates evolution a little bit will find that even with regards to its physical aspect, the physiognomy of the earth changes considerably from millennium to millennium. Just think how this area, where this city now stands, might have looked at the time of Christ, how different it was then, and how this part of the earth has changed since that time. And just think how much what we call the moral, intellectual or other mental development of humanity changes in the course of a few centuries. Consider what children absorbed in their early years of life just a few centuries ago, and what they have to process today in their early years. The earth changes its physiognomy, and after a certain time human beings can walk the earth once more and find everything so changed that they can experience new things. The human being only walks the earth again when there is something new to experience.

The period between death and a new birth is determined by the fact that when an individual has incarnated, let’s say, in a particular century, they grow through birth into very specific hereditary conditions. We are aware we should not picture the core of our being, the soul-spiritual aspect of the human being, as some kind of conglomeration of attributes from our parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and so on. We have stressed that a human soul can no more grow out of the physical than an earthworm can grow out of mud. Soul-element arises from soul-element, life-element from life-element. We have stressed that this human soul points back to a previous life and that, through birth, it comes into [earthly] existence by gathering hereditary attributes. As we consider this we must also be aware that when we look back at an earlier life, we bring with us through birth those qualities from that previous life that gradually unfold in the period between death and a new birth. Then [after this new life] we take with us through the portal of death the new things we have gained and which we could not have gathered in an earlier life. So—and this has also been stressed—we now bear with us through the portal of death everything we have gained bit by bit in the life just lived. Now, as we undergo life in the spirit between death and a new birth, we can only develop this [newly gained experience] into a new relationship [in the next life] if we do not have to rely in our next life on finding the same heritable characteristics again that we found in our previous life. In our earlier life we drew certain characteristics of our ancestors into our soul. We would find nothing new in a new life if the characteristics of the ancestors remained unchanged. So, if we incarnate into a particular century, and in order to be able to express ourselves in accordance [with that century] in a new life, we have [first] to pass through the spiritual world until we have lost all those inherited characteristics to which we previously felt ourselves drawn, and to which we would continue to feel ourselves drawn for as long as they were present. Our new incarnation depends on the disappearance of the attributes that pass through the generations. If we look at our ancestors, we find certain attributes in our parents, grandparents, great-grandparents and so on, that have been passed down by heredity to our present life. Then after death we enter into the spiritual world. We remain there until all the characteristics in the line of heredity to which we felt drawn in this life, have disappeared. But spiritual research shows that the period during which specific characteristics are inherited from generation to generation lasts for many centuries. It takes around seven-hundred years for the characteristics that pass from generation to generation to have disappeared sufficiently that we can say: what we found previously in the ancestors has dispersed. But now new characteristics must develop that likewise run for seven-hundred years. And from this we are able to give twice seven-hundred years—it is naturally only an average—as the time that spiritual research finds to pass between death and a new birth, until the soul enters [earthly] existence again through birth.

It is important for us to know that everything spiritual here on earth reaches up into this spiritual world. We have already highlighted that what we absorb into our mind [or spirit] is outwardly creative in the spiritual world. We have seen that, in a certain sense, we ourselves are inside this creative world with our creative aspect. This spiritual world which is externally creative is mirrored in a certain way in our own soul. In so far as our soul experiences things at a mental or spiritual level, has a mental life, these soul-spiritual experiences within us are citizens of the spiritual world. In the same way as the spiritual world reaches down into the physical, so our spiritual-mental aspect (unser Geistiges) reaches up into the general spiritual world. But because of this, something asserted by spiritual research becomes explicable: that with regard to the various members of our being, the outer sheaths are laid aside [at death] whereas the spiritual remains and grows upward into the productive spiritual world. We can also understand that spiritual relationships, everything of a soul nature that plays out here in the physical world, lays aside the outer sheaths and rises to life in the spiritual world.

[For example] we can take the love of a mother for her child. This grows out of the physical world. Initially it has an animal character. It consists of sympathies that connect mother and child, and are the working of a kind of physical energy. But what grows out of the physical world later becomes purified, the love between the two beings undergoes refinement, the love takes on more and more of a soul-spiritual quality. Everything that derives from the physical world is thrown off after death, just as the outer sheaths are. But what remains of this love is everything that developed in the physical sheaths but of a soul and spiritual nature, just as the human individual’s inner being itself lives into the spiritual world. So the love between mother and child lives on in the spiritual world. There they find each other again, no longer limited by the barriers of the physical world but in a spiritual environment in which things are not external to us, but where we live and weave and have our being in the things.

We therefore need to picture that how things are in the spiritual world is the result of the love and friendships founded in the physical world; we need to imagine how individuals who are connected in the spiritual world are far more closely and inwardly connected than is the case with the bonds of love and friendship in the physical world. And it is nonsensical to ask whether after death we will see the people we lived with in love and friendship. We don’t only see them but live within them; we are poured out, as it were, over them. And everything that is woven within the limits of the sense-world first gets its proper meaning, its proper significance, when we grow with its spiritual part into the spiritual world.

Thus in the spiritual land where human beings live between death and a new birth, we see the spiritualization not only of the human individual but of humanity in its most refined relationships.