text stringlengths 11.7k 32.2k |
|---|
---Rudolf Steiner's Spiritual Scientific Teachings: Mysterious Truths and Christmas Impulses---
In the Christian view, the beginning of the world, that is, the beginning of our immediate earthly existence, and the greatest event of earthly existence, that event which gives meaning to earthly evolution, are thus brought together. They are brought together for the reason that it is to be indicated through this how the way man's relationship to the spiritual universe has undergone such a significant change through the entrance of the Mystery of Golgotha that everything that preceded it, while important for the understanding of this mystery itself, can be left out of consideration for the time being for the immediate Christian consciousness with regard to the reception of the impulses of the will. We are aware that the greatest turning-point in the evolution of earthly existence occurred through the Mystery of Golgotha. It stands before the soul of him who understands that through his understanding the meaning of earthly evolution is revealed. One can say: If one looks at the way in which the ancients related to world wisdom as an impulse for man himself in the time before the Christ entered into the development of mankind on earth, and compares this behavior of the pre-Christian time with the attitude of the Christian consciousness towards world wisdom as an impulse for human activity, one is given, when one is then in a position to develop the corresponding thought, a deeply impressive meaning. One need only recall a figure--which one is reminded of when the feast occurs that is, so to speak, under the motto: "Et incarnatus est de spiritu sancto ex Maria virgine"--the image of the virgin Pallas Athena, the goddess of wisdom in ancient Greece, who is the daughter of Zeus herself, and the goddess who is considered the goddess of prudence. Zeus, the lord of lightning, of illuminating light, of the light that works in earthly existence, begets with Prudence the virgin Pallas Athena, the guardian of human wisdom before the mystery of Golgotha. There is a deep meaning in the poetic invention of this figure of the virgin Pallas Athena. As the goddess of wisdom, she herself is a virgin. What does this actually mean in the higher sense? What did the Greek mystery guides mean when they spoke of the virgin Pallas Athena? They meant the wisdom through which man works in the historical context of the world. This wisdom was born out of what is not the world itself, but a reflection of the world, in the fourth period of time into which the development of Greek culture had just entered. Let us grasp this well: a reflection of the world, Maya. In the previous periods, the wisdom of the mystery priests was not presented as a virgin power because, as human wisdom, it was always fertilized by the ancient atavistic power of clairvoyance in the first, second, and third post-Atlantic periods. It was only in the fourth post-Atlantean period that the possibility arose of also knowing something from mere observation of what is not driven by those forces that underlie atavistic clairvoyance, by the affects, by the passions, by all that glows as fire in the human being, but by the virgin, by atavistic clairvoyance unfertilized mirror image of the world. The wisdom that is meant when its representative is depicted comes from Maja: Pallas Athena. Pallas Athena is also a Maja, a Maria; but Pallas Athena is the Maja who still reflects the wisdom out of herself, who allows the wisdom to reveal itself to the human being out of herself. The great progress consists in the fact that this same Maja, this same Maria, is fertilized by the Cosmos, and a new wisdom is now born. Pallas Athene was the representative of wisdom. The Christ impulse is the son of Maja, of Maria, of the virgin representative of wisdom, and of the cosmic-divine, the cosmic-intelligent world power. Therefore, the ancient wisdom, as represented by Pallas Athena, was well suited to dissect and comprehend the mineral world up to the plant world, but not yet suited to grasp the human being himself, to comprehend the human being himself in his personality. If one wanted to understand the human being in his personality in those days, one could do so in the mysteries, but one then had to attain atavistic clairvoyance in the mysteries. What is meant by Pallas Athene, the virgin representative of wisdom, denotes a beginning that was suitable as such for understanding the periphery of the earthly world. But only through the entrance of the Mystery of Golgotha, only through the union of the power of divine, intelligent love with the power of Maya, with the reflection of the world, is the human evolution confronted with the God of Man, the God who is no longer attainable only by transcending the physical plane, but the God who, in His essential being, can be found on the physical plane itself. The progress in the evolution of humanity that is meant by the Christmas mystery presents itself to the human soul when one composes the right legend of Pallas Athena with all that can be grasped in true form about the nature of the virgin Maja, from whom the Christ impulse for the evolution of the earth emerges. In connection with such insights into human events, with such demands on human volition as we have discussed in order to grasp the Christmas mystery, it befits our very serious time--this time, for which it is so urgently needed--to gain insights that lie within the meaning of the thirty-three-year orbit of which one can speak. Just as the ancients tried to unravel the stars and determine from their constellations what they wanted to do here on earth, so man should realize that he must now enter an age that can only bring hardship and misery and misfortune to mankind on earth if they do not decide to read the constellations of the stars of time in the development of humanity. With the achievements of which the materialistic age is so proud, nothing more will be attained in earthly existence in the future than what has already been achieved in this catastrophic time. Humanity must find the courage to make such a vow to its own soul as a sacred Christmas vow: to turn its gaze to the spiritual truths that are emerging in our time. Our time must find the courage to look unflinchingly, undaunted by weakness, into what is. Our humanity must acquire a new sense of truth if it is to follow again in the footsteps of the One Whose birth it celebrates at Christmas, but Who is not understood if His words are not grasped in sufficient depth: "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life." In such a solemn time, it is not enough merely to desire to give soothing speeches about the festival of peace, as it is most certainly done in these times from many pulpits; in such a solemn time, it is necessary to grasp the thought of how little creativity there actually is in our time. For the great things that seek to enter it can only be served if people develop creativity in their own souls. Consider this: the Mystery of Golgotha has entered the development of humanity at the beginning of our era; but could it not have passed without a trace if the people of that time had not had the creative power in their own souls to grasp it, to conceptualize it, to imagine it, to talk about it at all? Externally, a personality was born in an unknown province of the Roman Empire, of whom the Gospels speak. The people of that time had the creative power to grasp what lived in this personality. That is what it takes when the greatest divine powers unite with human events: that people can muster the will to creative power within themselves. That is why the question should be raised: In what way was this 19th century, this haughty 19th, 20th century, able to develop creative power to understand what has now been recognized by humanity for centuries as the content of the idea of redemption? Let us add some voices from this nineteenth century, to show how they tried to speak about Jesus Christ. It is not so important to answer the question of what influence such people have, but rather to show how time affects the best. For these are the ideas that dominate the minds of even the most honest. The others talk about Christ Jesus, but without really coming close to the impulse of truth in their own intuitive perception. Let us add something more. In the 19th century, when people began to develop free-thinking ideas, one of those who tried to absorb these new ideas in a morbidly profound way included in his book more or less the ideas that occurred to him about Christ Jesus: "Jesus was a Jew. He did not think of founding a new religion. He did not speak of either a suspension or an extension of Judaism. ... There was not a single new teaching that Jesus brought. ... What, then, remained in the mouth of Jesus? A morality which admittedly has ennobling power, but never gives and wants to give more than: pure Judaism. The morality of Jesus always adheres closely to the customs of the ceremonial law and is only characteristic in that it demands inwardly corresponding attitudes for the external rite. Jesus taught: Love your neighbor as yourself! Moses taught that already; but the founder of a new religion had to say: love your neighbor more than yourself." Thus, some would correct the Christ! "From this one concludes that Jesus was a phenomenon that belonged solely to history, but in no way to religion or philosophy." An even more characteristic voice, because a voice that has emerged from the science of the soul in our time, is the following. It is a summary of the content of a certain book on the subject: "Neither the apostles nor the three synoptic gospels regarded Jesus as God. He himself considered himself to be the "Son of Man" (Daniel VII, 13) announced and, without ever claiming to be the Messiah, thought he was fulfilling a part of the prophecies that were particularly important to him. The Nazarene belongs to the category of prophets. The religious heroes or proclaimers, alias prophets, are aberrations from the normal type of the race. For their inner experiences or experiences can only be compared in degree and kind with the paroxysms of the epileptic or hystero-epileptic. The "men of God" present a picture of illness that the psychiatrist can diagnose precisely as epileptic mental illness; the stigmata are: hallucinations or visual illusions, fits of rage, convulsive merriment, absence of mind (absence), stupor, twilight state or dream-like subconscious, speech disorders, delirium, melancholy, sudden changes of mood, exaggerated religiosity, the idea of suffering for others and of having to reform the world, megalomania, obsessive ideas, the delusion of romantic family trees, vagabond-like restlessness, abnormal sex life, whether on the side of debauchery or asceticism. A series of outstanding religious seers, both ancient and modern, can be used to test the example, whereby common characteristics can be identified, such as the terrible threats and curses, the manifold forms and disguises of the sense of cruelty, the paroxysms of rage, the imagined suffering for humanity, asceticism, thoughts of resurrection and much more. All these symptoms observed in ancient and modern prophets are also displayed by Jesus: He has an unparalleled experience of fear, falls into a rage when exorcising the temple, suffers from hallucinations, reveals an excessive sense of self in his contradictory character and an abnormal life of the senses, indulges in the delusion that he is suffering for humanity and can atone for it, and through his violence, unsteadiness and the increasing narrowing of his mind, which no longer absorbs and processes new ideas, he provides new confirmation of his elective affinity with the prophetic type, which has remained the same at all times and under all skies. His ethics, which are based on hating one's family, living on charity and in the all-blissful faith, have not been accepted by humanity. If one understands genius to mean a creator, then one must also give up this position with regard to Jesus, since, as scientific research has established, he is only an imitator in the content and form of his teaching. His promise, namely his return, which earned him world domination, has failed completely. Jesus was a person worthy of deep sorrow, who, in his tragic, magnificent fate, deserves our heartfelt compassion." There could be hundreds, thousands of such voices, and the fact that they can be raised in this way is not the essential point. The essential point is something quite different, namely that people who speak in this way are speaking truly and correctly in terms of present-day science, and that from the point of view of present-day science, one cannot speak differently if one is honest and sincere. The question that arises is: Do you have enough courage and willpower to hold up this mirror to science, which only spiritual science can hold up? -- Those cowardly compromises, which are made over and over again and again every day a hundredfold between materialistic science and between religious traditions, these are the dishonest ones, these are the sins against what people claim to celebrate in the Christmas mystery and in the Easter mystery. That is what it is about. There is an either/or in the present: either a commitment to spiritual life or the continuation of the life that led to the events of recent catastrophic times. Each person must allow what underlies this to arise in their heart as their own realization of Christ, and also allow the will to want, the impulse for the courage not to seek some kind of salvation in partial compromises, but to go straight the way that must be gone: the way that must be shown through the realization of the spiritual life of humanity. Concrete impulses that can be linked to something like the Christmas mystery must be connected with this will. The realization of the thirty-three-year cycle of events--just as the realization that under certain conditions oxygen and hydrogen combine and that water cannot be recognized other than through electrolysis, which chemically examines the behavior of oxygen and hydrogen, so should the awareness come that one can only find social laws if one is able to see through such constellations in the course of time. To think into the day, to see only what is immediately around us, that is what humanity has gradually come to regard as salutary in the last four centuries. But to recognize the process of becoming in such a way that one says to oneself: What is happening now will arise again after thirty-three years, it is my responsibility to do the present thing under the responsibility that wells up out of this idea--that is what must be demanded in the future by those who want to intervene in life from any point of view of life. Our time should completely dispense with the old phrases of Christmas. The Romans, who had the courage to make a god of war--Janus--only close the Temple of Janus when there was peace. It was closed only twice in the time of Numa Pompilius, under whose reign it was completely closed, for the entire 724 years until the time of Emperor Augustus. But the Romans had the courage to distinguish between war and peace in their service for one of the most important gods. One wonders whether today's world would have the same courage to perhaps close the places of peace, the places that were supposed to serve peace when the whole world is engulfed in war? One would only be able to speak of courage if there were so much creativity in the present that one could see a real difference at the places where peace is talked about, if this happens in such times as the present ones. It is very instructive to look back in the sense of the thirty-three-year cycle: the catastrophic events that we are facing today began in 1914. Many events could be mentioned that are connected with the catastrophic events following the thirty-three-year cycle. One need only think that thirty-three years before 1914, that is, in 1881, a certain ruler came to power under whom persecutions began in certain provinces, a ruler who is the incarnation of so much European misfortune. One could also look at more internal events. If you study the political role that certain figures played in 1881, you will find in it the signature of what was preparing at the moment when these catastrophic events broke out. Much more could be said in this way. The question can be raised: How should a person, when he is in an important position, go about arriving at such conclusions that can bear fruit thirty-three years later? He should only try to understand the events of the past thirty-three years under the influence of such an idea, and out of the true understanding will arise what he has to do in the present: then it will be able to arise in a worthy way in thirty-three years. That such a thing is in vain should only be asserted when it has happened. But where has it happened? Where in the exoteric life of today is world evolution considered in accordance with its inner laws? Official representatives of what is often called Christianity today are always objecting, especially in contrast to spiritual science, that revelations from the spiritual world were possible in the time of Christ, but that the "fatal Gnosis' must not be allowed to resurface. Such things must not be interpreted with leniency. That these people mean well is something that unfortunately all too often crops up again and again as a fateful saying, even in certain spiritual circles. It is a matter of really facing up to the truth. And above all we must have the will and the courage to take a stand against everything that is asserted today out of weakness against spiritual science. There is one characteristic of spiritual science that is particularly not loved. It brings a concrete, real spiritual factual material, and speaks of the spiritual worlds as of real spiritual factual material. How often do we hear the words: Yes, that is difficult to understand, it is hard to find one's way into it. Such talk can still be understood by someone who, under the influence of the present school system, has not been able to learn how to think. However, such talk must be incomprehensible to those who claim to be taken seriously scientifically. Admittedly, something has gradually become scientific that makes the smallest possible demands on human thinking. Today, you can be a graduate with all kinds of diplomas and still be unable to grasp the simplest things with your mind, or tire quickly when you really need to think. People still prefer watered-down talk about all kinds of general spiritual things, pan-idealism and all that stuff. That relieves one of the effort of having to approach concrete spiritual facts. However, spiritual science must make demands on those who come to it. The good will must be there to use a little more of one's spirit than is necessary to further dilute general phrases about Panidealism and the like with one's watered-down heartfelt feelings. It is no longer time to revel in all kinds of "pan" and in all kinds of general, sentimental phrases. Today it is time to seriously face the concrete spiritual facts. Today it is time to muster the will to really think. Therefore, words must be spoken at the beginning of these Christmas celebrations that also sound serious in our time. For we will connect our souls all the more with what has entered into the evolution of the earth as the Christ impulse, the more we have the will to do so in a serious, dignified and urgent way. For thousands of years, mankind has regarded space as that which is to be worshipped, the content of space, not the space of the earth, the space of heaven. It directed its gaze up to the constellations of the stars, to read in the stars what was to happen here on earth. It knew, this humanity: the dead read and must read in the stars, the dead must participate in earthly events. -- So man must also learn to read that writing, which is the writing that the dead must read continuously. What happens here on earth, it was seen in these ancient times before the Mystery of Golgotha, that it was said: Up there, there are the Sun, Moon and Aries; or Sun, Moon and Taurus; or Sun, Moon and Gemini; or Gemini and Venus or the like, in such a constellation. It is a sign that certain impulses are coming in from the cosmos. When these impulses are present, then this or that must be done, because whatever happens here happens in time, and time delivers the Maya, time delivers the course of the great deception. In this sense, this deception only applied until the Mystery of Golgotha. Out of this Maja the Christ Impulse was born, as was explained at the beginning, out of the virgin Maja, that which is no longer fertilized by old atavistic clairvoyance, that which directly confronts the world powers untouched by the earth. The veneration of that which passes in time, the recognition of that which passes in time, becomes a duty, just as in ancient times it was considered a duty to see the constellations in space. The old magician, whose representative appeared before the babe in the manger, looked up at the gold of the heavens, at the stars, and he said to himself: "As the stars are arranged, so it is written, and therein is to be read what must come to pass here on earth; for what is written in the stars is the result of the past. In the gold of the stars rests what the Ancient of Days, with his hosts, has written throughout the past, that it may come to pass in the present. The present has to carry out what can be seen in the gold of the stars; the present, which passes away at the moment it arises. The present is the continually flaming fire, represented by the incense; the present in the imagination of the incense. And the future rests in the present, fertilized by the past, under the imagination of myrrh." The secrets of the ancient magicians were how the past, present and future are connected. But in this past, present and future they saw the veil of Maya, the veil of Pallas Athena herself, which only reflected the constellations of the stars. And the three magi who appeared before the manger understood that out of the content of time, out of that which is the mirror image of the constellation of space, out of the Maya of time, a new thing must develop, to which one must add past, present and future: gold, frankincense and myrrh. Insight into the Divine-Spiritual: gold; sacrificial service, human virtue: incense; the connection of the human soul with the Eternal, the immortal: myrrh. So enormous is the turning point that lies between the time before the Mystery of Golgotha and the time after it, that one can say that the Holiest of Holies, which lay before, descended, united in love with Maja and gave birth to the impulse that will continue to carry the evolution of the earth: the Christ Jesus. To understand Christ Jesus--how the divine-cosmic love conceived Christ in the womb of Maya--means to understand a world-God who abolishes all those differentiations that must necessarily arise from looking up at mere spatial constellations. The star constellation is different for one spot on earth than for another. The old legends also depict how the initiated heroes move around, how the most diverse regions of the earth have the most diverse views of the gods. Thus, what originates in space as worthy of worship passes into time. Then time is the same for all human children of the earth, then a universal God will arise, a God to whom no narrower community has the right to claim him for itself, no human community may say for its interests that it does so in his name, but only the community of all people. These are the thoughts with which we can turn our soul to grasp the meaning of the saying "Et incarnatus est de spiritu sancto ex Maria virgine": "And was incarnated by the Holy Spirit out of the Virgin Mary". The voices of those who live in the physical body are joined by the voices of those who, in these times, pass through the gate of death, who know how the constellations of time are connected in the modern sense, just as the constellations of space are connected in the ancient sense. In addition to the many things that could be said to build a bridge to the souls that live between death and a new birth, this too should be added, for in those thoughts that are linked to the Mystery of Golgotha, the so-called living and the so-called dead understand each other best. For the Christ has truly descended from heaven to earth and must be sought on earth ever since. Here man gets to know his secret in the fleshly body, just as the Christ Himself sought His mission on earth in the fleshly body. The dead person looks down from the spiritual realm on what he has experienced here as the basis for his impulses for the Mystery of Golgotha. Souls who live here on the physical plane and souls who live on the spiritual plane understand each other best in all that is connected with the Mystery of Golgotha. But it is not only what this mystery of Golgotha brings up at every opportunity that is linked to the mystery of Golgotha, but also everything that is researched in the sense of the word: "I am with you always, even to the end of the age." He, whose birth we celebrate in the splendor of Christmas candles, is truly He who should not reveal Himself only once, and then only to serve as a convenient basis for those who do not want to learn anything new and rejects everything new, but He who may be celebrated alone under the glow of the Christmas candles, is He who wanted to reveal Himself to people in the entire time that follows the Mystery of Golgotha. If, in this time, enough people make the decision to understand Christ Jesus under the signs that appear so meaningfully on the spiritual horizon today, then this is a Christmas thought, a thought that consecrates the night and will resurrect in a good way after thirty-three years, that will live as the power of humanity in the time from today until his resurrection. Let us take strong, courageous, and wisdom-filled Christmas thoughts and imbue ourselves with them for this Christmas, then we will live through it in a dignified way. This can be taken as a Christmas greeting, an impulse that one may truly and worthily celebrate only under the sign of the Christmas lights.
<|endoftext|>
---Rudolf Steiner's Spiritual Scientific Teachings: The Path from Ancient Wisdom to a New Spirituality(continuation)---
accessible to human beings but did flow out into these dogmas. This segment of the populace also has retained its living relationship to the cult, to the ceremonial ritual; it has retained its link to the sacraments. As depleted as all this is, the ancient spirituality--the spirituality to which there is still a connection through dogmas--did once dwell in what has become a skeleton, a shadow. Among the more recent Protestant confessions, where a compromise is being tried out, such a connection is no longer alive. And then we have those who call themselves quite enlightened and dwell only in the intellect, which is spiritual but does not wish to grasp the spirit. These are the three streams we confront. In regard to the future, we cannot count on the fruitfulness of those streams that only tried to make an external compromise; we cannot count on mere intellectuality that cannot arrive at any content and therefore can only lose itself since it does not want to understand itself. We can only count on the direction in which these streams are gradually heading, and they are more and more clearly heading there, namely, we can count on what has been poured into ancient doctrines and is represented in the surviving established Church. We can count on the attitude that takes the new intellectuality seriously and deepens it Imaginatively, Inspiratively, and Intuitively, thus arriving at a new spirituality. The modern world is becoming divided and estranged in these two contrasting directions. On the one hand stand people with their intellect. They are inwardly lazy and do not wish to utilize this intellect, but they need a content. So they refer to the dead dogmas. Particularly among intelligent people, who are, however, mentally indolent, who are in a certain respect intellectual and Dadaistic, a neo-traditionalist movement is making itself felt that is trying to take hold of the old traditions that have rigidified in dogmas and that is trying to receive a content from outside, through historical phenomena but that rigidifies in historical forms. Based on the intellect, this trend tries desperately to make some sense of the ancient content; thus we have intellectual battles that, by means of the old content, try to prepare their rigidified doctrines in a new way for the use of human beings.
To cite an example, on many pages in certain modern journals, we can observe an intellectual, cramped tendency towards rigidified doctrines. Some publishers do everything; they put everything into categories and on paper. Thus, one might dedicate a whole edition of a journal to the neo-traditionalist movement. It allows us to discern how cramped people's thoughts are today, how people are developing inwardly cramped thinking so that they can avoid having to rouse themselves and can remain mentally lazy in order to grasp with the intellect whatever moves forward most indolently.
People experiment with all this in order to be able to reject this life-filled striving out of modern intellectuality towards spirituality, a striving that can and must be grasped. More and more, things will come to a head in such a way that a powerful movement with a fascinating, suggestive, hypnotic effect on all those wishing to remain lazy within the intellect permeates the world. A traditionalist wave is even pervading the world of intelligent people who wish, however, to remain lazy within their intelligence. The drowsy souls just do not realize it. But it must remain unfruitful to strive for what a well-known philosopher of history described so vividly in his famous work. One can make the Occident traditional, but one will thereby slay its civilization. This Occident has to concern itself with waking up, with becoming inwardly active. Its intelligence must not remain lazy, for this intelligence can rouse itself; it can fill itself inwardly with an understanding for the new view of the spirit.
This battle is in preparation; in fact, it is here--and it is the main point. In the future, everything else concerning world views will become crushed between these two streams. We must turn our attention to this, for what is coming to expression conceals itself in any number of formulas and forms. Nobody is living fully in the present who believes that he can make progress with something that people were perhaps still dreaming about at the beginning of this century. He alone lives fully in the present who develops an eye for what dwells in the two streams described above. We have to be aware of this. For everything I have discussed a week ago when I said that nowadays a great number of people love evil and, purely due to their tendency towards evil, indulge in slander in the way I described--all this is what must come before our souls. We must bear in mind that inner untruthfulness, which expresses itself in the facts--as I told you--that people, who are supposed to be strengthened in their traditional faith, are sent to church to attend a lecture by a certain general, and that this general concludes with a hymn by a famous reformer! There, the two tendencies come together that care nothing about the confessions but only try to stream together in the proliferation of lies.
These things must be noticed today. If this is not done, then one is asleep and does not participate in what alone can make the human being today truly human. |
---Rudolf Steiner's Spiritual Scientific Teachings: The Tension Between East and West, Part II: Spirituality and Sociology---
When the conversation turns to what is lacking in society today, there is scarcely anyone who does not have something really significant to contribute, from his own particular position in life. The purpose here, however, is not to draw up a list of all the various deficiencies that a survey would reveal. It is rather to direct attention to some of the antecedents of a phenomenon that has, quite justifiably, attracted comment on many sides and has led a large part of mankind into a mood of extraordinary pessimism and hopelessness.
One of the most extreme expressions of this hopelessness came from an influential art-historian, who belonged to a period for which such an opinion cannot help striking us as something out of the ordinary. In one of his last books, he makes this surprising statement: "When we survey the international situation today, and observe, with the "mind's eye" I would say, how the various nations of the civilized world behave to one another, how they attack one another, and how they hold within them the seeds of further conflicts, then we feel ready to set a date for mass suicide, since we cannot envisage where all these things that bring men and nations into conflict, strife and combat, are to lead, if not to the utter collapse of civilization." This statement is striking precisely because its author's philosophy of life was in itself a joyous one; throughout his life, he kept his eyes fixed on all the things that can elevate mankind and that exist in man as creative and productive forces. It is striking, moreover, that he did not make this statement under the influence of the sense of gloom that was to be experienced in the years just before the outbreak of the Great War, or during it. His observation sprang entirely from the spirit of the nineteenth century, at the end of which it was made. Nothing that has happened since then seems likely in any way to cushion the impact on us of such a statement.
Yet at the same time it can never be the business of mankind to get bogged down in mere hopelessness; we must rather be on the look-out for anything that can lead to revival, to reconstruction, to a new dawn. This being so, it is necessary for us to look more deeply into the causes of the extraordinarily difficult situation that has gradually developed inside European civilization. Even if we believe that these causes can only be economic ones, we shall still have to look to the spiritual life of modern civilization for the main reason underlying this economic decline.
Our present temper of soul--together with all the soul-powers we can acquire at present--is affected by historical forces, and to understand these we have to go back a long way in human development. At the threshold of the spiritual life of the West, looked at historically, there stands a figure who still has one eye on Asia, whilst the other is already directed at the perspectives of Europe. This is Plato.
When we examine Plato's social theories, they appear to our modern consciousness extraordinarily alien in many respects. We find that he sees the ideal social system in the creation of a community, even at the expense of the development of individual human beings who have been born into this earthly life. Plato thinks it quite feasible that children who appear unfit for life should simply be abandoned, so that they may not occupy a place in the community and thus disturb the social organism. He also manages to regard as an ideal social organism one in which only members of a certain caste enjoy the full privileges of citizenship. Apart from the fact that slavery appears quite natural to him, he would also grant those responsible for trade and commerce only a precarious position within his social system. All those who are not fixed within this system by virtue of having been born--by right, as he sees it--into its fabric, are not in fact completely accepted into the organization. Much else might be said, too, on the question: How does Plato's ideal relate to the individual human being? And here, from the standpoint of modern consciousness, we must conclude that there is present as yet little understanding of this human individuality. Attention is still directed entirely to the community, which is seen as primary. The man who is to live in it is regarded as secondary. His life is accepted as justified only in so far as he can match the social ideal that exists outside his own personality.
To discover what led Plato to this concept of community, we must look once more at Oriental civilization. And when we do so, we realize how, in the last analysis, the historical development of Europe's spiritual life is like a small peninsula jutting out from a great continent.
When we look at Asia, we find that there the idea of community is the primary one, and that Plato simply took it over from the East. To what has been said already about this idea, one thing must be added, if the social situation throughout the world is to be illuminated.
When we come to examine the basic character of spiritual life in the Orient, we find that it embraced a humanity quite different in type from the Europeans of later civilization. In many psychic and spiritual matters, indeed, we can say that there prevailed in Asia a high level of civilization, one to which many Europeans, even, long to return. The oft-quoted expression is: Light comes from the East. What is most striking of all, however, is that these men of different type did not have the feature that has been typical of Europeans since they first began to play a civilized part in the world's development. What we observe there in Asia is a subdued sense of self, a sense of personality that is still quiescent in the depths of the soul. The European's awareness of personality is not as yet found in Asia. If on the other hand this high level of Asian civilization is adopted by an individual who still lacks this sense of personality--and it is a civilization suited for adoption by a human community--then he experiences it as in a dream, without sense of personality.
Obviously, in an age when human individuality had not yet attained its full development, communities were more receptive to and capable of a high level of culture than were individuals. In communal life, human capacities for absorbing this civilization increased not simply in an arithmetical but in a geometrical progression. Meanwhile, the particular ideal that Oriental civilization had set before itself, as it gradually passed over into Europe, was minted by European spirits in a simple formula--the Apolline dictum: "Know thyself!"
We can, in a sense, regard the entire Ancient East as developing towards the realization in Greece, as the ultimate intention of Oriental self-less civilization, of that sentence: "Know thyself!"--a sentence which has since survived as a spiritual and cultural motto to direct mankind. Yet we can also see, there in the East, that it is regarded as desirable, for the attainment of a higher stage of development in mankind, to penetrate to the self after all. On the spiritual side, this is evident in the character of yoga. On the social side, it reveals itself when we look at the theories current in the East with regard to leadership of the masses. Everywhere we find that the man who was the teacher and the leader was at the same time, in the spiritual sphere, the priest, but also at the same time the healer. We find in the East an intimate connection between all that mankind sought as knowledge and as higher spiritual life, on the one hand, and healing, on the other. For early Oriental civilization, the doctor cannot be separated from the teacher and the priest.
This is, of course, connected with the fact that Oriental civilization was dominated by a feeling of universal human guilt. This feeling introduces something pathological into human development, so that the cognitive process itself, and indeed every effort to reach a higher spirituality, is regarded as having the function of healing man as nature made him. Education to a higher spirituality was also healing, because man in his natural state and thus uneducated was regarded as a being who stood in need of healing. Connected with this were the early Oriental mysteries.
The cult of mysteries sought to achieve, in institutions that were, I would say, church and school and source of social impulses combined, the development of the individual to a higher spiritual life. They did this in such a way that religion, art and science were combined: in performing the ritual actions, men were religious beings; and here what mattered was not the articles of faith, still less the dogmas, that occupied the soul, but the fact that the individual was participating in a socially organized rite, so that man's approach to the divine was made principally through sacrifice and ritual act. Yet the ritual act and its foundations in turn involved an aesthetic element. And this combination of aesthetic and religious elements gave to knowledge its original form.
The man who was to attain this unified triad of religion, art and science, however, had not merely to accept something that represented a step forward in his development; he had also to undergo a complete transformation as a man, a kind of rebirth.
The description of the preparations that such a student of the higher spiritual life had to undertake makes it clear that he had consciously to undergo a kind of death. He experienced, that is, something that set him apart from life in the ordinary world, as death sets men apart from this life. Then, when he had left behind everything in his inner experience that appertained to earthly life, he would, after passing through death, experience the spiritual world in a complete rebirth. This is the old religious form of catharsis, the purification of man. A new man was to be born inside the old. Things that man can so experience in the world as to arouse in him passions and emotions, desires and appetites, notions that are of this world--all these he was to experience within the mysteries in such a manner that they were left behind and he emerged as one purified of these experiences. Only then, as a man reborn, was he credited with being capable of exerting any social influence on his fellow-men. Even academic scholarship has quite correctly observed that the surviving remnants of this cult have been of enormous importance for social life, and that the impulses aroused in those who have experienced such a catharsis in these very secret places have exerted the greatest conceivable influence on social life outside. This is not merely a pronouncement of spiritual science, it is something that even academic scholarship has arrived at. What we find is that, in Oriental civilization, the aim was to cure man by knowledge and by all the efforts to achieve a spiritual education.
What existed in the East passed over in another form to Greece and thus to Europe, and it has continued to affect Europe to the extent that Greek culture itself has influenced European spiritual life and civilization. In his study of Greek tragedy, from which the West has derived so much of artistic importance for its spiritual life, Aristotle produced a description that is usually taken far too much at its face value. People are always quoting the familiar sentence in which Aristotle says that the aim of tragedy is to arouse fear and pity, so that the excitation of these and other emotions shall bring about a purification, or catharsis, of them. In other words, Aristotle is pointing to something in the aesthetic sphere--the effect that tragedy should produce. Armed for the interpretation of Aristotle's dictum, not with academic philology, but with an understanding of Oriental spiritual life--with a knowledge, that is, of its roots in the past--we can interpret what Aristotle means by pity and fear more extensively than it is usually interpreted. He means in fact, as we come to perceive, that the spectator is brought by tragedy to mental participation in the sorrow, pain and joy of others, and that in this way the spectator in his mental life escapes from the narrow confines that he naturally occupies. Through the contemplation of the suffering of others, there is aroused in the spectator--for here man goes outside his physical existence, if only vicariously--that fear which always arises when a human being is confronted with something that takes him outside himself, and creates in him a transport of faintness and breathlessness. We can say, therefore: Aristotle really means that, in looking at tragedy, man enters a world of feeling that takes him out of himself; that he is overcome by fear; and that a purification or catharsis ensues. In this way he learns to bear what in the natural state he cannot bear; through purification he is strengthened for the sympathetic experience of alien sorrow and alien joy; he is no longer overcome by fear when he has to go outside himself and into social life. In ascribing a function of this kind to tragedy, Aristotle, we perceive quite clearly, is really demonstrating that tragedy also educates man towards a strengthening of his sense of self and his inner security of soul.
To introduce the aesthetic element into social life in this way strikes many people today as a devaluation of art, as if one were trying to attribute some kind of extrinsic purpose to it. Objections of this kind, however, often really betray a certain philistinism, resting as they do on the belief that any attempt to assimilate art into human life as a whole, into all that the human soul can experience, implies its subordination to a merely utilitarian existence. This is not what it meant for the Greeks; it meant rather the inclusion of art in the life that carries man above himself, not just beneath himself into mere utility.
If we can look beyond the mere utility that typifies our time, we shall be able to understand the precise significance of the Greek view of art: that the Greeks saw in tragedy, side by side with its purely artistic aspect, something that brought man face to face with himself, drawing him away from a dream, a half-conscious perception of the world, nearer and nearer to a complete awareness of himself. We may say: in the social sphere, tragedy was certainly intended to make its contribution to the all-important precept: "Man, know thyself!"
If, moreover, from this extension of art into the social sphere we pass on to a consideration of the position of the individual vis-à-vis society, and from this perspective look back at the Orient, we find that, in the mysteries too, what was sought through therapeutic treatment--the rebirth of man as a higher being--represented a strengthening of the sense of self. From an awareness that the soul was not then attuned to a sense of self, and that such a sense still remained to be developed, the mysteries attempted a rebirth in which man emerged to individuality. For this ancient society, therefore, experience of self was really something that had still to be attained. It was seen as a social duty to foster the birth of this sense of self in individuals who could become leaders in the social sphere. Only when we comprehend this can we gain an understanding of the strong sense of community persisting in Plato's ideal state, and of his belief that man is entitled to develop his individuality fully only if he does so through the rebirth that was accessible to the wisdom of the time. This shows that humanity at that time had no awareness of the claims of individuality in the fullest sense.
What grew out of this kind of society in Asia then established itself in Europe, combined with Christianity, passed over into the Middle Ages and even survived here for a long period. The manner of its survival, however, was determined by the fact that the hordes which, mainly from Northern and Central Europe, streamed into this civilization--South European now, but inherited from Asia--were endowed by nature with a strong sense of self. These tribes acquired the important historical task of carrying over what Oriental man had achieved with a still subdued sense of self, into complete self-consciousness and a full sense of self. For the brilliant civilization of the Greeks, "Know thyself!" was still an ideal of human cognition and society. The peoples who descended from the North during the Middle Ages brought with them, as the central feature of their being, this sense of self. It was theirs by nature. Though they lived in groups, they none the less strove to incorporate into their own personality what they absorbed in the cognitive and social sphere. It was in this way, then, that there came to be established the contrast between community life and individual life. The latter only appeared in the course of history, and did so, I would say, with the assistance of man-made institutions.
In thus making its appearance in human development, the sense of self was bound to link up with something else, with which it certainly has an organic connection. Looking back once more at the features of Oriental-Greek civilization even as it appeared to Plato, we are nowadays very much aware that this whole civilization was in fact built on slavery, on the subjugation of large numbers of people. A great deal has been said from various standpoints about the significance of slavery in earlier times, and if we are willing to sift this properly, we shall naturally find a great deal that is significant in it. But the point that above all others is still relevant for our life today is precisely the one that has actually received little attention. For community life--and also for the social life which sprang from the mysteries, and for the development of which the Greek regarded his art as providing an impetus--the full significance of human labour within the social order was quite unrealized. In consequence, they had to exclude human labour from their discussion of the ideal image of man.
When we describe Oriental-Greek man, with the dignity that gave him his authority, we are describing something that was in fact constructed over the heads of the masses, who were actually doing the work. The masses merely formed an appendage to the social system, which developed within a society that had not absorbed labour into its being, since it regarded labour and those who performed it as a natural datum. Human society really only began where labour left off. At a higher level, in a higher psychic sense, man experienced something that also finds expression in the world of animals. In their world, the food supply, which with us forms part of the social organization, is provided by nature. The animal does not calculate; it does what it does out of its inmost being; and specialization is unnecessary for animals. Where apparent exceptions occur, they must be regarded as proving the rule. We can therefore say: in transplanting itself to Europe and entering further and further into the demands of individuality, Oriental civilization also took on the task of integrating human labour into the social system. When man's awareness of self is fully wakened, it is quite impossible to exclude labour from that system.
This problem--which did not exist as yet in Greece--became the great social question round which countless battles were fought in Rome. It was felt instinctively that only by integrating labour into the social system can man experience to the full his personality. In this way, however, the entire social organization of humanity took on a different aspect. It has a different appearance in civilized Europe from what it had in civilized Asia. Only by looking back at the development of individuality in Europe shall we understand something of what has repeatedly, and rightly, been emphasized as significant when we come to describe the source of the deficiencies of our time.
It is rightly pointed out here that the specific shape of the social order in our time was actually only decided with the emergence of modern technology and division of labour. It is also pointed out that modern capitalism, for instance, is merely a result of the division of labour. What the traditional teaching of modern Western civilization has to say in this respect, in characterizing division of labour and its consequences in the social deficiencies of our time, is extraordinarily significant. But when something like this is said, and from one point of view rightly said, the unprejudiced observer cannot help looking at, say, ancient Egypt or Ancient Babylon, and observing that these states contained cities of an enormous size, and that these achievements too were only made possible by a division of labour. It was shown earlier that, as early as the eleventh century, a kind of Socialism existed in China, yet that similarity of surface features is not what really matters. In the same way, division of labour, too, which in modern times has rightly been seen as the central social problem, was also found in earlier epochs of human development; it was in fact what made the Oriental social systems possible, and these in turn have since affected Europe. In Europe, division of labour, after being less common at first, gradually evolved. Division of labour in itself is a repetition of something that also occurred in earlier times; but in the Oriental civilizations it bore the stamp of a society in which individuality was still dormant. The modern division of labour, which makes its appearance along with technology, on the other hand, impinges on a society of men who are now seeking to expand their individuality to the full. Once again, then, the same phenomenon turns out to have a quite different significance in different ages.
For the Oriental social order, the first consideration was thus to allow man to grow clear of social restrictions and of communal life. If he was to move up to a higher spiritual life, man really had to find his individuality. The European of a later age already had this sense of self, and needed to integrate it into the social order. He had to follow precisely the opposite path from that followed in the East.
Everywhere in Europe we find evidence of the difficulty men experience in accommodating their individuality to the social order, whereas at one time the social system had been such that men sought to rescue their individuality from it. This difficulty still faces us on every side today as an underlying social evil.
One sees a good deal of evidence that there does exist in men's souls this problem of articulating the ego into the general social order. Men are unable to find the way from a highly developed sense of self into the social order. And in attempting repeatedly to show proletarian audiences, for instance, what this way would need to be like--how it would have to be different from the ways that Socialist or Communist agitators commonly offer nowadays--one comes across very curious views in the ensuing discussions. They might appear trivial; but a thing is trivial no longer when it provides the motive power for innumerable people in life. For instance, in a discussion about social problems in a working men's club, a man came forward and introduced himself as a cobbler. What he was unable to think was much more revealing than what he did think. He set forth his conception of the social order, and then reiterated that he was a simple cobbler: in the social order that he had outlined, therefore, he could never rise to be a registrar of births, marriages and deaths. Underlying his outlook, however, was the quite definite assumption that he might perfectly well be a Cabinet Minister! This shows the kind of bewilderment that ensues when the question arises: How is the ego, strengthened within spiritual life, to articulate itself into a social order?
In another working men's association, someone said: "Oh, we don't really want to be foremen; we don't want to manage the factory; we want to remain what we are, simple workmen; but as such we want all our rights." Justified as such a statement may be from one point of view, it displays, in the last analysis, no interest in social organization, only an interest in the strongly developed self.
Many people today will not consciously admit that this particular discrepancy between the experience of self and the social order lies at the root of many, indeed almost all of our social deficiencies and shortcomings. But anyone who looks at life with unclouded vision cannot escape the conclusion: We have certainly managed to develop the feeling of self, but we cannot connect it with a real insight into man. We say the word "I;" but we do not know how to relate this "I" to a human personality that is fully comprehended and fully self-determining.
We can experience this once again when we come across views that are very much of the present. For example, during a discussion with a leading figure in present-day educational circles on educational methods and their social significance, it was pointed out that, with a sound educational method, education of the spirit and the soul must be linked with that of the body. Anyone wishing to teach and educate must first of all know the effect of this or that action on the forces of recovery or decline in the human organism, the human body; he must know how the exercise or neglect of memory expresses itself later in life in physical symptoms, and how, simply by treating the life of the soul, we can gradually bring about an improvement in physical ailments. The teacher, it was concluded, must certainly understand the body's association with the soul and the spirit in health and sickness. And the reply received was that, to do this, the teacher would have to be a doctor!
Well, up to a certain point it would indeed be desirable if this were the case. For when we look at our social system, with the difficulty of integrating the self into it, we are reminded once more of the civilization of two regions: the Orient, where the doctor was also the teacher and leader of the people; and Greece, where art had an educative influence. The art of medicine was associated with every aspiration of the spirit, because at that time man was regarded, if only instinctively, as a physical, mental and spiritual whole; in the treatment that was then applied to the soul, forces were brought into play which yielded knowledge for a general therapy of man.
The leaders at that time told themselves: I must attempt to cure man by leading him to true spirituality. To do this, I must bring healing forces to bear on a fairly normal life. Once I understand these forces thoroughly and can follow out their effects, this knowledge will tell me what to do when a man is ill.
From observation of the healthy man, one learns what forces to employ when confronted by the sick man. The sick man is simply one whose organism has deviated further in one direction or the other than it does in everyday life. Knowing how to bestow health on man in his normal state, one also knows how to cure him when sick. Knowing which drink, which cordial affords this or that insight into connections between man and nature--knowing, that is, the effect of a natural product in the sphere of knowledge--one will also know what effect it has on a sick man, if used in greater strength.
The intimate association of medical art with education and development towards spirituality in general, which was the goal of the Ancient Orient and had an important rôle there, appears once more as a spiritual residuum in the Greek experience of art. Here, the aim is that the soul should be healed through art. Armed with this knowledge, we can still perceive in the use of the word "catharsis" in connection with tragedy how--because the same word was used in connection with the early mysteries, for the complete purification of man on entry to a new life--something of this sense is taken over. We are, however, also reminded that, for Greek doctors in the early period, knowledge and medicine still went together, and that in education, but also in popular culture in general, people saw something on a more spiritual level that was related to medicine, something that in a sense sprang from medicine.
We need to examine these phenomena of a bygone age, if we are to gain a strength of soul such that, when we contemplate the social systems in our own age, we can keep in view the whole man, and also such that, when we meet our fellow-men, we not only unfold a strong sense of self, but also connect this with a perception of the whole man in body, soul and spirit. If by an advance in spiritual science we can do this, there will become available, simply through the temper of soul that ensues, ways and means of integrating this whole man, but also all men, into the social order, thus annexing labour for society in the way that historical evolution in any case makes necessary. For this is what we are still suffering from today: the need to fit labour properly into the social order.
It is true that people often regard labour as something that goes into the article produced, being crystallized in it, so to speak, and giving it its value. Those who look more closely, however, will observe that what matters is not simply that a man should work, devoting to society his physical strength. The important factor in determining price and value is rather how the work fits into social life as a whole. We can certainly conceive of a man doing a job of work that is fundamentally uneconomic in the social order. The man may work hard and may believe that he is entitled to payment for his work; but when his work exists in the context of an inadequate social system, it often does more harm than good. And one ought to examine in this light a great deal of labour within society which, though exhausting, is really worthless. Consider how our literature is constantly accumulating; it has to be printed; a tremendous amount of work is involved in the manufacture of paper, the printing, etc., and then, apart from the tiny proportion that survives, it all has to be pulped once more: work is being done here which, I would say, disappears into thin air. And if you consider how much work has disappeared into thin air during the butchery of the recent war, you will gradually come to see that labour as such cannot lay claim to any absolute value, but derives its value from its contribution to the life of society.
The disease that most affects our age, however, is precisely the lack of this basic capacity to integrate labour into the social organism, taking account of the fact that everything men do, they really do for others. We need to win through to this by learning to integrate our own individual selves into the community. Only by achieving a true understanding between man and man, so that what the other man needs becomes part of our own experience and we can transpose our self into the selves of others, shall we win through to those new social groupings that are not given us by nature, but must be derived from the personality of man.
All our social needs certainly spring from the self. People sense what is lacking in the social order. What we need to find, however, is a new understanding of what human fellowship in body, soul and spirit really means. This is what a social order ought really to be able to bring forth out of the self.
The great battle that is being fought over the division of labour--fought quite differently from the way such battles |
###Book by: Karl Heise, about freemasonry, written right after world war 1.###
The government--which, quite rightly, maintained its secret diplomacy just like any other government--should have found out how the Entente lodges had been working for three or more decades. Bismarck also opened his eyes to lodge matters, and his successors should have done the same. This was neglected by them, and thus the lodge materialism of England gained its full power. Colonel Repington was the military critic for the Masonic 'Times' until January 1918, when he had an open break with Br.. Northcliffe. He then joined the editorial staff of the conservative 'Morning Post'. Even according to Prince Lichnowsky ('My London Mission'), Grey's influence in the Foreign Office was 'almost unlimited'. The Lichnowskys belonged to French Masonry. Behind the 'strange Frenchman' Delaisi is the later ardent warmonger and German-hater Br.. Gustave Herve, who chameleon-like transformed from an opponent of the Mason Delcasse to his political co-religionist.
He attempted to break Italy away from the Triple Alliance, negotiated in St. Petersburg, intrigued in Constantinople, and then arranged for the isolated Germany to be destroyed by England with France's support. When one lodge brother can write such things about another Brother Mason, the truth of it can no longer be doubted, despite all the whitewashing attempts by Masons of the apron and those without regalia, among whom the Swiss rabble-rousing journalist Samuel Zurlinden is particularly to be counted.
From a memorable letter dated April 5, 1906, by the Belgian envoy Baron Greindl in Berlin, who died in early August 1917, we read: '... that the King of England (Edward VII.) ... had pushed Mr. Delcassé into a warlike policy and had given him the ... promise to land 100,000 English soldiers in Holstein...' Here England's intention was clearly shown, as our secret map confirms, to occupy northern Germany for itself at a suitable opportunity, at least in the sense of a British suzerainty.
More on the 'violation' of Belgian 'neutrality'.
Volumes of ink have been spilled to describe the terrible 'injustice' that Germany committed against Belgium by marching through this 'neutral' country and subsequently asserting itself there in its own way. On December 13, 1914, the Supreme Council of the 'Grand Orient de France' also took a position on this German invasion and condemned all German Brother Masons as perjurers and renegades against universal Masonry. One cannot speak of Belgium without touching on England's policy, which in turn affects the Belgian Grand Orient and the 'Supreme Council,' i.e., the high degrees of the Scottish Rite lodges of Belgium. Belgium's Grand Orient comprises 21 lodges; the Supreme Council has four Areopagi of the 30th degree Kadosh, seven Chapters of the 18th degree Prince Rose Croix, and five symbolic lodges. The Grand Orient and the Supreme Council share common premises, and the brothers of the High Council are also brothers in the Grand Orient. The politically well-known Br.. Fernand Coeq of Ixelles represents the Grand Lodge of Columbia. Br.. Delcassé was repeatedly the guest of the Scottish Rite King Edward VII, even after Germany had forced Delcassé's resignation because of his warmongering policies. Delcassé was then French Minister of Marine during the Morocco crises, and for a time Foreign Minister during the present war, but resigned again in October 1915 when Germany thwarted his hopes. In the 'Belgian Documents 1905/14, Reports of the Belgian Representatives, etc.,' another report by Baron Greindl dated December 6, 1911, states that England intended to come to the aid of the French against Germany with an expeditionary force of 150,000 men.
As early as 1842, according to G. v. Schulze-Gaevernitz, the Belgian Prime Minister Rogier expressed that the Germanic element in Belgium must be eradicated. Since October 21, 1854, Belgian Masonic lodges have been permitted to engage in politics within their workshops. This has not changed under the leadership of Grand Master Br.. Magnette of the Belgian Grand Orient and Scottish Rite. Already at the St. John's festival of the Belgian Grand Orient in 1854, the then-associate Grand Master Br.. Verhaegen had proclaimed the 'liberal-democratic conception of the vocation of Freemasonry.' This speech was then printed and published. It caused a stir, especially in Germany, and the 'Apollo' lodge in Leipzig, the Grand Lodge of Hamburg, the Grand National Lodge of Saxony, the National Mother Grand Lodge in Berlin, the three Old Prussian Grand Lodges, and the Grand Lodge zur Sonne raised a lively protest against the fusion of politics and lodge life, which was also joined by the Grand National Lodge of Sweden. For a time, all German-Masonic relations with Belgian Masonry were severed. In February 1913, the Belgian Minister de Broqueville again proved the political work of Belgian lodges in the Belgian Chamber, when in the same month the Brussels lodge had secured the support of the Brr.. officers for the implementation of the Belgian conscription law. Afterwards, on July 5, 1913, the Belgian socialist leader and Minister of State Br.. Vandervelde gave a lecture in the Rue Cadet in Paris before the assembled French Grand Orient on Belgian government policy and the military situation of Belgium. In this speech, Br.. Vandervelde pointed out that the Belgian government had been alerted to Belgium's military position by Br.. Sir Edward Grey and Br.. Poincaré, and that Belgium would be defended against Germany by English troops. Such behavior is entirely consistent with the discovery of secret Belgian documents reported in the 'Berliner Tageblatt' (foreign edition) of September 4, 1917. In the Belgian archives, among the papers of the Minister of State Baron Lambermort, a note was found about a conversation with the English envoy Lord Vivian on January 27, 1887. Even then, Lord Vivian declared that Belgium could count on English support in the event of war. That this would be directed solely against Germany (and not, for example, also against France) is evident from the fact that alongside Br.. Grey, Br.. Poincaré also prompted the Belgian government to take military measures. Finally, the Grand Master Br.. Count Eugène Goblet d'Alviella of the 33rd degree, now Vice President of the Belgian Senate, confirmed the Masonic policy in a letter to the late Florence Grand Master Br.. Fera with the words: 'We have the self-awareness of fighting for Masonic principles (in the present World War)...'
On July 15, 1915, according to reports in the English press, Br.. Lord Haldane gave a speech at the English National Liberal Club to point out that, as a former Secretary of State for War, he could claim the credit for having unobtrusively prepared England for the war with Germany several years before its outbreak. In addition, the 'Berliner Lokalanzeiger' reported in the spring of 1916--which was later confirmed--of indiscretions by the English General Townshend (who directed the surrender of Kut-el-Amara to the Turks and had commanded the British occupation troops in South Africa from 1909/12). According to Townshend's statements, secret war consultations took place in his presence before he himself went to the south, between British, Belgian, French, and Russian military delegates, with the aim of shattering the German Empire; in this, England undertook the obligation to land 150,000 men in Belgium within the first week of the war, to march into the Rhine province in conjunction with the Belgian troops, while the French would break through the Vosges and the Russians through East Prussia. At the same time, the English had promised German South-West Africa to the Boers for their assistance in the south.
As if in anticipation of Morel's accusations against England, the English Labour leader Macdonald, in the 'Labour Leader' shortly after the start of the war, accused Br.. Sir Edward Grey of having worked towards war with Germany since 1906, on the assumption that Belgium's neutrality would not be respected by the Triple Entente, and that Germany had received these plans through a Russian high dignitary. It can then be no wonder that the Wolffbureau announced on August 9, 1914, that the German Imperial Government had received reliable information that Triple Entente armies of French nationality were to advance against Germany on the Meuse along the Givet-Namur line through Belgian territory! (Germany naturally thwarted this agreement, which had been pre-arranged by the lodge).
In return, the Belgian Freemasons who had been staying in Paris since the first days of the World War could (according to the 'Petit Parisien,' as reported by 'Inf.' on February 11, 1917) launch 'a flaming protest against the German infamies' 'to the Freemasons of the whole world with the exception of the false German brothers.' And this despite the fact that the Frenchman Delaisi (Br.. Gustave Herve) had written in 1911: '... We French will be the ones who will have to be slaughtered on the Belgian battlefields, but not for the Prussian king, but for the king of England...' And this despite the fact that Lieutenant Colonel Driant, who fell at Verdun, had stated as early as 1907: '...Clemenceau is thinking of the fight... he cannot escape the commitment he has made to England... On a day fixed by the King of England, the fight will begin.' Clemenceau is a member of the 'Grand Orient de France'.
Moreover, the 'Soir' itself wrote in August 1914 that the Belgian government had had discussions 'to enhance its neutrality' with France before the outbreak of war; also, according to letters from Brussels, King Albert of Belgium had received a French military mission in Brussels immediately before Germany's advance into Belgium. Perhaps it is also noteworthy that 'Gil Blas' on February 25, 1913, thought it appropriate to inform its readers that the fortress of Maubeuge was already amply equipped with English and French ammunition at that time. This was probably to make Maubeuge a troop concentration point for the Entente--for as the 'Neue Zürcher Zeitung' wrote on August 5, 1914, 'Belgium itself had criminally neglected its military for decades'. The predecessor of the current Belgian king--Leopold II--secretly conspired for the French throne, and the French government pointed Prince Louis Napoleon to the Belgian army, in which he was to serve. The Belgian government, however, pursued an uninterrupted 'Frenchification policy' for eighty years, as stated by the respected Flemish leader Dr. August Borms. On the other hand, King Albert of Belgium was in a familiar relationship with King George of England, and furthermore, the French ambassador in Brussels subsidized the Belgian press with half a million francs annually for a number of years before the current war for the purpose of systematically inciting hatred against Germany. To this Belgian press, paid with French or rather World Lodge money, belonged the highly influential 'Etoile Belge,' edited by the Belgian deputy Madoux, whose editor in the spring of 1913 still stubbornly refused to do anything to promote good understanding between Belgium and Germany.
Since the English have the noble intention of permanently keeping Belgium as a British sphere of influence, Belgium had to be 'compensated' accordingly. Now it is once again all Entente Freemasons who form the 'peace conferences of the allied powers.' Belgium is represented there, among others, by the two Social Democrats, Minister of Justice Br.. Vandervelde and Foreign Minister Br.. Huysmans, who know well how to make imperialist policy. Huysmans, as a delegate to the peace conference on February 12 and 17, 1919, demanded the Prussian territory of Malmedy and Montjoie, furthermore a large part of Dutch Limburg (right of the Meuse), and the abolition of the state of Luxembourg in Belgium's favor, because the Luxembourg state 'represented only a contradiction in the new Europe.' To be able to permanently protect these Belgian annexations, Belgium now wants to maintain a standing army of 100,000 men (as many as the Entente is willing to allow Germany as a military 'police force'!) compared to a Belgian army of 42,000 before the war.
To add one more thing, let us finally not forget to appreciate the Belgians as a civilized nation. As a result of the unconditional withdrawal of the Germans and the subsequent armistice, the Belgians occupied the Rhenish-Prussian city of Jülich. They immediately issued an ordinance to the effect 'that any civilian who does not greet an Allied officer by taking off his hat and leaving the sidewalk will be shot.' Such a death penalty would then be aggravated by fines imposed not only on the offending civilians but also on the city of Jülich. For a people that boasts of taking up arms for humanity and good morals, a strange way to build a temple to humanity.
When Germany flooded the land of Belgium, it was also because a purely internal movement was going through the entire soul of the people, which cannot be combated with moral dogmas that may be valid for the individual. Under the emotional perspective of 'elbow room,' a national soul beset by the whole world strives purely instinctively for self-preservation and seeks to break iron walls that want to enclose it. The German people instinctively felt the immense pressure, of which it was not conscious, that emanated from the World Lodge, and sought to defend itself against it. The German people felt, purely from the unconscious within, what its army leaders wanted to prevent out of apparent knowledge: that the German army columns would have to shatter against the rock walls of the fortresses in the West--and so the German armies broke through where they believed they could escape the steel clamp forged for more than thirty years in the torture chamber of world Freemasonry.
It is advisable now to say something about the character of England as the leading Masonic power. All other Entente states, and even the neutral states, then prove themselves to be obligated provinces (satrapies) to the English World Lodge. Even the Secret Archivist Br.. Dr. Ludwig Keller had to come to this conclusion and call England the leading Masonic power. Dr. Heinz Brauweiler writes: 'It is well known today how much dark machinations in foreign countries are part of the working method of the English government and explain its successes; one can assume without further ado that Freemasonry is a willing and useful helper for it in this.' Bismarck already knew that 'threatening foreign states has been the business of England for a good number of years.' And 'the governments of France, Italy, and Portugal were completely in the hands of the Freemasons, so they were easy to win over, especially since their hoped-for political successes coincided with the goals pursued by their Lodge and, beyond that, promised a fulfillment of the most far-reaching Masonic aspirations.'
Dr. Hans Heiderich revealed tellingly in the March 1909 issue of 'Hammer' how this greatest Masonic power 'does it': 'There are a number of small and medium-sized states in Europe that have no real center of gravity within themselves. Although enviable in many respects and capable of rising to a high level of prosperity and culture, they suffer from a feeling of insecurity... and thus... provide a suitable field for foreign machinations. England has set its sights on these... it is the great banker, controls the economy, penetrates public opinion, wins over the press for itself... Who, on the other hand, forms the natural center of those who seek to escape the British embrace? The German Reich... And here the English press comes in. It is the one that... works most dangerously in an anti-German sense. It seeks to rob the German Reich... of the sympathies of other peoples and loosens their alliances. From this English press, the press of the United States derives by far the largest part of its news and thus the American people their knowledge of German conditions. The Romance states of Italy, Spain, Greece, and Romania receive their news from the 'Agence Havas' in Paris, while the (English) 'Reuters Bureau' supplies the rest of the world. Both have been closely allied for several years and work on pretty much the whole world in an anti-German sense. Through their many years of uninterrupted undermining work, they have incited almost the entire public opinion abroad against German policy, against the German people and its institutions... and made the German name hated and despised... The papers of the Harmsworth newspaper concern... portray Germany as warlike all over the world... and their 'Daily News' dared in January 1907 to describe the political creation of Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm as the most morally and culturally inferior in all of Europe! The Germanophobia of the (Harmsworth-Northcliffe) 'Times', the largest English (Freemason) newspaper, is known to all the world...'
Dr. Heiderich then goes into detail on the way England 'peacefully' annexes the small and medium-sized states of Europe: 'At the head (of the states falling under English influence) is Portugal. It is the model boy and the test case of English incorporation. (Hence the saying: 'England is portugalizing the world!') With its isolated location, long coast, distant colonies, indebtedness, the sale of its wines to England, and its (by the Lodge) shattered internal conditions, the country is completely in England's wake. The situation is more favorable... but still similar in Denmark, Norway, and Greece (so Heiderich wrote in 1909!), to which... Belgium and Holland are added. ... Of Portugal, Denmark, Norway, and Greece it can be said (already in 1909, note this well!) that they are already under a British protectorate, ... Belgium on the Congo, Holland in South Africa have felt the claw of the (English) leopard... All these states... with their colonies... have a dominion of 6.4 million square kilometers with 65 million inhabitants. ... That would be a handsome addition to the British economic area...'
The war with its entire economic policy of England only confirms what was presented here as a warning to the German people in broader terms as early as 1909--but was not heard. The method, however, by which Portugal was 'portugalized,' is indicated by Dr. Heinz Brauweiler with the words: 'The one fact speaks volumes, that England openly favored the Freemason revolution in Portugal, and that the Lusitanian (Portuguese) Grand Master Br... Magalhäes Lima 33.'. was distinguished with great honors by English Freemasonry.' Brauweiler then quotes the following sentence: 'Magalhäes Lima is the organizer of the regicide of 1908, the traveling salesman of the Portuguese revolution, who announced the upcoming upheaval in London and Paris and already had the recognition of the Portuguese Republic by England and France in his pocket when King Carlos and the 'dictator' Joao Franco undertook to clean out the parliamentary Augean stables.'
One could supplement what England's policy has been for years with the sentence of Admiral z. D. Kirchhoff of Kiel: '... As early as the middle of the first decade of the new (20th) century, England concentrated its strongest ships from all seas (against Germany) in the North Sea...' But that was only the continuation of a policy of the English minister Br.. Lord Palmerston, who 'dealt with' the founding of a German fleet in 1848 by declaring that all steamships sailing under the German flag in the North Sea were--'to be treated as pirates'... Lord Palmerston pursued the very strange policy of condemning the opium smuggling into China by British merchants in words, but favoring it in deeds, by promoting the cultivation of the opium poppy in the English colony of India and at the same time allowing the British merchants who engaged in opium smuggling in China to make the Chinese admiral and the Chinese state officials favorably disposed to opium smuggling through bribery. The same Lord Palmerston also supported the Italian revolutionary activities of the secret society 'Young Italy' of Br.. Giuseppe Mazzini, which earned him the mocking verse: 'If the devil has a son, it's surely Lord Palmerston.' The Italian Prime Minister Br.. Salandra, in his welcoming speech to Br.. Asquith on April 3, 1916, fully acknowledged these British sympathies of Br.. Palmerston for 'Young Italy.'
<|endoftext|>
-WHAT I WANT PEOPLE TO KNOW-
Within our normal waking life, we are simultaneously experiencing three different states of consciousness. Our thinking and cognition operate in a state of full wakefulness, like living in clear light. Our feeling exists in a dreaming state, where we experience things with the same inner quality as a dream, even though we are awake. Our willing, the part of us that acts and moves, is in a state of deep sleep, completely unconscious of its own processes.
When we think, we are not engaging with the world directly. Our ego, the center of our being, is shielded from the raw forces of the cosmos. Instead, our body produces images of the world, and our ego lives and operates within these images. This is a necessary protection, as the ego in its current stage of development cannot withstand direct exposure to the world's reality. The head, as the organ of thinking, is able to maintain this waking state because it rests upon the body, carried like a passenger, withdrawn from the direct act of willing.
Our will, in contrast, is entirely asleep. When you decide to walk, you are only conscious of the mental picture of walking. You have no awareness of the intricate muscular, nervous, and metabolic processes that actually execute the action. If we were to experience these processes consciously, it would result in an experience of unbearable, tormenting pain. The will is where our unconscious intuitions lie, submerged in this sleeping state.
Feeling stands between thinking and willing, and so its state of consciousness is dream-like. Through feeling, the ego enters the body more deeply than it does with thinking, but the experience is necessarily dulled. If we were to experience the bodily processes connected to feeling with the full clarity of our thinking consciousness, our soul would be overwhelmed, as if it were to burn up or suffocate. This dreaming state is the home of our unconscious inspirations.
So, while awake, we are a composite being: a thinker who is awake, a feeler who is dreaming, and a doer who is asleep. This understanding is key to knowing the human being. The phenomena people call "inspiration" in art, or "inklings," arise from this dream-life of feeling where world processes are experienced in a veiled way. They are real encounters, just not in a state of full consciousness.
Similarly, what people call "intuitions" are wellings-up from the even deeper, sleeping life of the will. It is remarkable that these intuitions from the deepest level of unconsciousness can sometimes surface into our waking, image-based thinking more readily than the inspirations from the nearer, dreaming realm of feeling. This is why people often speak of having a vague intuition about something.
This knowledge has direct implications for understanding children. A child who seems dreamy is living strongly in their feeling life. To help them, one must engage them with strong feelings, which will in time awaken and transform into clear thoughts. A child who seems dull or slow may possess a very strong will that is simply in a deep state of sleep. Judging them with standard intellectual tests is a mistake.
To help a will-oriented child, one must engage their will. You should not rely on their abstract understanding, but connect learning to physical action. Having them walk while speaking a sentence, for example, combines the sleeping will with the waking intellect, and over time can awaken the will into thought. The goal is to bring these different states of consciousness into a harmonious relationship.
The physical form of the human being is a direct expression of these truths. The head can be an organ of quiet contemplation and image-making precisely because it is separated from the limbs that carry out the sleeping will. If your head had to walk, your thinking would be plunged into sleep. The body is the vehicle that allows the head to remain at rest and, therefore, awake.
-COMMON MISCONCEPTIONS-
A common misunderstanding is that being 'awake' is a single, monolithic state of consciousness. This is incorrect. The state we call 'waking life' is a complex interplay of three distinct conditions happening at once: the genuine wakefulness of our thinking, the dream-like consciousness of our feeling, and the sleeping consciousness of our will.
People often believe their thoughts and perceptions grasp the world as it truly is. The reality is that our thinking consciousness only engages with images of the world, not the world itself. This is not a flaw, but a necessary shield for our ego, which is not yet developed enough to face the raw forces of existence directly. The idea that our senses provide a direct, unmediated view of reality is an illusion.
It is a frequent error to think of intuition as a type of fuzzy thinking or a lucky guess. Intuition does not belong to the realm of thinking at all. It is an upwelling of knowledge from the completely unconscious, sleeping domain of the will. It is a different mode of knowing, not a lesser version of intellectual cognition.
Many assume that feelings are merely subjective, personal reactions to external events. This view misses that feeling is a dream-like mode of perception. It is the way our soul experiences real, intense bodily and cosmic processes in a dulled state, which protects us from being overwhelmed. Feelings are not just reactions; they are perceptions in a different state of consciousness.
There is a tendency to label children who are dreamy or physically restless as being less intelligent or having a learning disability. This is a serious misjudgment that arises from only valuing the 'waking' consciousness of cognition. Such children may have great strengths in their feeling or will nature, which simply have not yet been awakened and integrated with their intellect.
Philosophical and psychological models that speak of a simple 'mind-body problem' or 'psycho-physical parallelism' fail to capture the truth of our constitution. The relationship is far more intricate. The body is not just a machine that the mind operates; it is the very instrument that generates the images our thinking mind lives in, and our state of consciousness depends entirely on how deeply our ego enters into the body's various sleeping, dreaming, and waking processes.
Willpower is often misconceived as a conscious, forceful mental effort. The actual activity of the will is profoundly unconscious. What we call 'making a decision' or 'exerting willpower' is merely the conscious mental image that sets in motion a vast, sleeping process of which we are entirely unaware. The force does not come from the conscious thought, but from the sleeping giant of the will.
Nightmares are frequently dismissed as random synaptic firings or meaningless psychological flotsam. This is not the case. A nightmare, such as one involving suffocation, represents an abnormal intrusion of a real bodily process--in this case, breathing--into a level of consciousness that is not meant to experience it directly. It is a tormenting, distorted perception of something real, not a mere fantasy.
Artistic inspiration is commonly seen as the clever recombination of existing ideas and experiences stored in memory. While memory plays a part, genuine inspiration comes from the dream-consciousness of the feeling life. It is here that the artist unconsciously experiences world-processes that are then brought into form. It is a genuine, if veiled, reception of content, not just a rearrangement of it.
-HOW TO APPLY-
The first step is to cultivate self-observation. Begin to notice these three states within yourself throughout the day. Recognize when you are engaged in clear, image-based thinking, and identify this as your 'waking' state. When you are overcome with a mood or a deep feeling, recognize that you are in a 'dreaming' state. When you act habitually, such as pacing while on the phone, see this as an expression of your 'sleeping' will. This awareness is the beginning of a true self-knowledge.
When you face a difficult problem and your thinking feels stuck, consciously engage your will. Stop thinking about it, and instead, go for a walk, tidy a room, or perform some rhythmic, physical task. As demonstrated by Goethe dictating 'Faust' while pacing, engaging the body in this 'sleeping' activity of the will can allow unconscious intuitions to rise to the surface of your 'waking' consciousness and provide the answer you were looking for.
This knowledge can transform how we handle emotions. Instead of being completely swept away by a strong feeling, you can recognize it as a 'dreaming' perception of an intense underlying process. This understanding creates a space for observation. You can acknowledge the reality the feeling is pointing to without being consumed by it, which prevents the soul from being damaged by an experience that is too intense for full, waking consciousness.
In parenting and education, these principles are invaluable. Cease to judge a child solely on their intellectual quickness. If a child is dreamy and lost in their own world, engage their feelings with art, music, and vivid storytelling. This will build a rich inner life from which clear thoughts will later awaken. Do not force abstract concepts onto them too early.
If a child is physically restless, fidgety, or seems 'dull,' recognize the power of their sleeping will. Integrate learning with movement. Use rhythmic clapping, walking, and hands-on activities. Connect the physical action of the will to the intellectual content. This will build a bridge that allows the child's sleeping strength to awaken and support their thinking, rather than disrupting it.
To cultivate creativity, one must learn to consciously enter the 'dreaming' state of feeling. This cannot be forced by the intellect. You must create conditions that nurture feeling: spend time in nature, listen to music without analyzing it, absorb art. This allows the soul to dip into the stream of unconscious inspiration, from which new and original forms can be brought into being.
To propagate this knowledge effectively, it must be shared not as a rigid doctrine, but as an invitation to observe one's own experience. Use metaphors and examples from life. Encourage people to notice the difference between their thinking, feeling, and acting. The goal is to awaken this understanding within them, not to drill it in intellectually. A lived experience of these truths is far more valuable than a memorized definition.
It is important to ensure this knowledge causes no harm. A key danger lies in trying to prematurely or forcefully awaken the sleeping and dreaming states. Warn against misguided attempts to become 'fully conscious' of one's will or feeling processes through sheer force. These states are veiled for a reason, and a safe path to higher consciousness requires specific, careful guidance, not a brute-force assault on the soul's natural protections.
This understanding also informs a healthier way of life. Recognizing that the will is asleep within us reinforces the importance of rhythm, rest, and healthy physical activity. We can learn to work with our body's natural states, allowing our will to recharge in its sleep and our feelings to process in their dream-like way, leading to a more balanced and integrated human being. |
---Rudolf Steiner's Spiritual Scientific Teachings: Reincarnation and Karma: Their Significance in Modern Culture---
People who have made some study of spiritual science, and particularly of the basic principles of reincarnation, karma and other truths connected with man and his evolution, may well ask: Why is it so difficult to gain a true, first-hand conception of that being in man which passes through repeated earth-lives--that being, which, if one could only acquire more intimate knowledge of it, would inevitably lead to an insight into the secrets of repeated earth-lives and even of karma? It is certainly true to say that as a rule man misinterprets everything connected with this question. At first he tries, as is only too natural, to explain it through his ordinary world of thought, through the ordinary intellect, and he asks himself: To what extent can we find, in the facts of life, proof that the conception of repeated earth-lives and karma is true? This endeavour, which is essentially of the nature of reflection, can, admittedly, lead man to a certain point, but no further. For our world of thought, as at present constituted, is entirely dependent on those qualities of our human organism which are limited to one incarnation; we possess them because, as men living between birth and death, we have been given this particular organism. And on this particular formation of the physical body, with the etheric body which is only one stage higher, everything that we can call our thought-world is dependent. The more penetrating these thoughts are, the better able they are to enter into abstract truths--so much the more are they dependent on the outer organism that is limited to one incarnation. From this we may conclude that when we pass into the life between death and a new birth--that is to say, into the spiritual life--we can least of all take with us what we experience in our souls--our thoughts! And our most penetrating thoughts are what we have most of all to leave behind. It may be asked: What is it that man more particularly discards when he passes through the Gate of Death? First of all, his physical body; and of all that constitutes his inner being he discards practically to the same extent all the abstract thoughts formulated in his soul. These two things--physical body, abstract thoughts, scientific thoughts as well--are what he can least of all take with him when he passes through the Gate of Death. It is in a certain sense easy for man to take with him his temperament, his impulses, his desires, as they have been formed in him, and especially his habits; he also takes with him the mode and nature of his impulses of will--but his thoughts least of all. Therefore, because our thoughts are so intimately bound up with the outer organism, we may conclude that they are instruments not very well adapted to penetrate the secrets of reincarnation and karma, which are truths extending beyond the single incarnation. All the same, man can reach a certain point, and indeed he must develop his thinking up to a certain point, if he wishes to gain insight into the theory of reincarnation and karma. Much has already been written about this from an intellectual standpoint, approaching it with logic. The question of what can be contributed by the intellect will not further concern us to-day, but rather the question of how man can acquire a certain conception of reincarnation and karma; that is to say, a conception of more value than a mere theoretical conviction, able to bring about a kind of inner certainty that the real soul-spiritual kernel of being within us comes over from earlier lives and passes on into later lives. Such a definite conception can be acquired by means of certain inner exercises which are by no means easy; indeed they are difficult, but they can nevertheless be carried out. The first step is in some degree to practise the normal kind of self-cognition, which consists in looking back over one's life and asking oneself: What kind of person have I been? Have I been a person with a strong inclination for reflection, for inner contemplation; or am I one who has always had more love for the sensations of the outer world, liking or disliking this or that in everyday life? Was I a child who at school liked reading but not arithmetic, one who liked to hit other children but did not like being hit? Or was I a child always bound to be bullied and not smart enough to bully others? It is well to look back on one's life in this way, and especially to ask oneself: Was I cut out for activities of the mind or of the will? What did I find easy or difficult? What happened to me that I would like to have avoided? What happenings made me say to myself: "I am glad this has come to pass "--and so on. It is good to look back on one's life in a certain way, and above all to envisage clearly those things that one did not like. All this leads to a more intimate knowledge of the inner kernel of our being. For example, a son who would have liked to become a poet was destined by his father to be a craftsman, and a craftsman he became, although he would sooner have been a poet. It is well to know clearly what we really wanted to be, and what we have become against our will, to visualise what would have suited us in the time of our youth but was not our lot, and then, again, what we would have liked to avoid. All that I am saying refers, of course, to life in the past, not in the future--that would be a false conception. We must therefore be quite clear as to what such a retrospect into the past means; it tells us what we did not want, what we would have liked to avoid. When we have made that clear to ourselves, we really have a picture of those things in our life which have pleased us least. That is the essential point. And we must now try to live into a very remarkable conception: we must desire and will everything that we have not desired or willed. We must imagine to ourselves: What should I actually have become if I had ardently desired everything that in fact I did not wish for and which really went against the grain in life? In a certain sense we must here rule out what we have succeeded in overcoming, for the most important thing is that we should ardently wish or picture ourselves wishing for the things we have not desired, or concerning which we have not been able to carry out our wishes, so that we create for ourselves, in feeling and thought, a being hitherto unfamiliar to us. We must picture ourselves as this being with great intensity. If we can do this, if we can identify ourselves with the being we have ourselves built up in this way, we have made some real progress towards becoming acquainted with the inner soul-kernel of our being; for in the picture we have thus been able to make of our own personality there will arise something that we have not been in this present incarnation but which we have introduced into it. Our deeper being will emerge from the picture built up in this way. You will see, therefore, that from those who wish to gain knowledge of this inner kernel of being, something is required for which people in our age have no inclination at all. They are not disposed to desire anything of the sort, for nowadays, if they reflect upon their own nature, they want to find themselves absolutely satisfied with it as it is. When we go back to earlier, more deeply religious epochs, we find there a feeling that man should feel himself overwhelmed because he so little resembled his Divine Archetype. This was not, of course, the idea of which we have spoken to-day, but it was an idea which led man away from what usually satisfies him, to something else, to that being which lives on beyond the organism existing between birth and death, even if it did not lead to the conviction of another incarnation. If you call up the counterpart of yourself, the following thought will dawn upon you. This counterpart--difficult as it may be to realise it as a picture of yourself in this life--is nevertheless connected with you, and you cannot disown it. Once it appears, it will follow you, hover before your soul and crystallise in such a way that you will realise that it has something to do with you, but certainly not with your present life. And then there develops the perception that this picture is derived from an earlier life. If we bring this clearly before our souls, we shall soon realise how erroneous are most of the current conceptions of reincarnation and karma. You have no doubt often heard spiritual people say when they meet a good arithmetician: "In his previous incarnation this man was a good arithmetician!" Unfortunately, many undeveloped spiritual people string together links of reincarnation in such a way that it is thought possible to find the earlier incarnation because the present gifts must have existed in the preceding incarnation or in many previous incarnations. This is the worst possible form of speculation and anything derived from it is usually false. True observation by means of spiritual science, discloses, as a rule, the exact opposite. For example, people who in a former incarnation were good arithmeticians, good mathematicians, often reappear with no gift for mathematics at all. If we wish to discover what gifts we may probably have possessed in a former incarnation (here I must remind you that we are speaking of probabilities!)--if we wish to know what intellectual or artistic faculties, say, we possessed in a former incarnation, it is well to reflect upon those things for which we have least talent in the present life. These are true indications, but they are very often interwoven with other facts. It may happen that a man had a special talent for mathematics in a former incarnation but died young, so that this talent never came to full expression; then he will be born again in his next incarnation with a talent for mathematics and this will represent a continuation of the previous incarnation. For instance, a great mathematician who died young, will certainly in his next incarnation be reborn with a strong mathematical talent. But when a mathematician has lived to a great age, so that his talent has spent itself--then in his next incarnation he will be stupid as regards mathematics. There was a man known to have so little gift for mathematics that as a schoolboy he simply hated figures, and although in other subjects he did well, he generally managed to get through his classes only because he obtained exceptionally good marks in other subjects. This was because in his former incarnation he had been an exceedingly good mathematician. If we go more deeply into this, the fact becomes apparent that the external career of a man in one incarnation, when it is not merely a career but also an inner vocation, passes over in his next incarnation into the inward shaping of his bodily organs. Thus, if a man has been an exceptionally good mathematician in one incarnation, the mastery he has obtained over numbers and figures remains with him and goes into a special development of his sense-organs, for instance, of the eyes. People with very good sight have it as a result of the fact that in their former incarnation they thought in forms; they took this thinking in forms with them and during the life between death and rebirth they worked specially on the shaping of their eyes. Here the mathematical talent has passed into the eyes and no longer exists as a gift for mathematics. Another case known to occultists is where an individuality in one incarnation lived with intensity in architectural forms; these experiences lived as forces in his inner soul-life and worked strongly upon the instrument of hearing, so that in his next incarnation he became a great musician. He did not appear as a great architect, because the perception of form necessary for architecture was transformed into an organ-building force, so that there was nothing left but a supreme sensitiveness for music. An external consideration of similarities is generally deceptive in reference to the characteristics of successive incarnations; and just as we must reflect upon whatever did not please us and conceive of ourselves as having had an intense desire for it, so we must also reflect upon those things for which we have the least talent, and about which we are stupid. If we discover the dullest sides of our nature, they may very probably point to those fields in which we were most brilliant in our previous incarnation. Thus we see how easy it is in these matters to begin at the wrong end. A little reflection will show us that it is the soul-kernel of our being which works over from one incarnation to another; this can be illustrated by the fact that it is no easier for a man to learn a language even if in his preceding incarnation he lived in the country associated with this particular language; otherwise our school-boys would not find it so difficult to learn Greek and Latin, for many of them in former incarnations will have lived in the regions where these were the languages of ordinary intercourse. You see, the outer capacities we acquire are so closely connected with earthly circumstances that we cannot speak of them reappearing in the same form in the next incarnation; they are transformed into forces and in that way pass over to a subsequent incarnation. For instance, people who have a special faculty for learning languages in one incarnation will not have this in the next; instead, they will have the faculty which enables them to form more unbiassed judgments than those who had less talent for languages; these latter will tend to form one-sided judgments. These matters are connected with the mysteries of reincarnation, and when we penetrate them we obtain a clear and vivid idea of what truly belongs to the inner being of man and what must in a certain sense be accounted external. For instance, language to-day is no longer part of man's inner being. We may love a language for the sake of what it expresses, for the sake of its Folk-Spirit; but it is something which passes over in transformed forms of force from one incarnation to another. If a man follows up these ideas, so that he says: "I will strongly desire and will to be what I have become against my will, and also that for which I have the least capacity"--he can know that the conceptions he thus obtains will build up the picture of his preceding incarnation. This picture will arise in great precision if he is earnest and serious about the things just described. He will observe that from the whole way in which the conceptions coalesce, he will either feel: "This picture is quite near to me"; or he will feel: "This picture is a long, long way off." If through the elaboration of these conceptions, such a picture of the previous incarnation arises before a man's soul, he will, as a rule, he able to estimate how faded the picture is. The following feeling will come as an experience: "I am standing here; but the picture before me could not be my father, my grandfather, or my great-grandfather." If however the student allows the picture to work upon him, his feeling and perception will lead him to the opinion: "Others are standing between me and this picture." Let us for a moment assume that the student has the following feeling. It becomes apparent to him that between him and the picture stand twelve persons; another may perhaps feel that between him and the picture stand seven persons; but in any event the feeling is there and is of the greatest significance. If, for instance, there are twelve persons between oneself and the picture, this number can be divided by three, and the result will be four, and this may represent the number of centuries that have elapsed since the last incarnation. Thus a man who felt that there were twelve people standing between him and the picture, would say: "My preceding incarnation took place four centuries ago."--This is given merely as an example; it will only actually be so in a very few cases, but it conveys the idea. Most people will find that they can in this way rightly estimate when they were incarnated before. Only the preparatory steps, of course, are rather difficult. Here we have touched upon matters which are as alien as they can possibly be from present-day consciousness, and it cannot be denied that if we spoke of these things to people unprepared for them, they would regard them as so much irresponsible fantasy. The spiritual world-picture is fated--more so than any of its predecessors--to oppose traditional, accepted ideas. For to a very great extent these are imbued with the crudest, the most desolate materialism; and those very world-pictures which appear to be most firmly established on a scientific basis have, in point of fact, grown out of the most devastating materialistic assumptions. And since spiritual science is condemned to be labelled as the outlook cultivated by the kind of person who wants to know about his previous incarnations, one can readily understand that people of the present day are very far from taking these views seriously. They are as far remote from the inclination to desire and to will what they have never desired or willed, as their habits of thought are remote from spiritual truths. The question might here be asked: Why, then, does spiritual truth come into the world just now? Why does it not leave humanity time to develop, to mature? The reason is that it is almost impossible to imagine a greater difference between two successive epochs than there will be between the present epoch and that into which humanity will have grown when the people now living are reborn in their next incarnation. The development of certain spiritual faculties does not depend upon man, but upon the whole purpose and meaning, the whole nature, of earth-evolution. Men of the present day could not be more remote than they are from any belief in reincarnation and karma. This does not apply to students of spiritual science, but they are still very few; neither does it apply to those who still adhere to certain old forms of religion; but it applies to those who are the bearers of external cultural life: it sets them far away from belief in reincarnation and karma. Now the fact that people of the present day are particularly disinclined to believe in reincarnation and karma is connected in a remarkable way with their pursuits and studies--that is, in so far as these concern their intellectual faculties--and this fact will produce the opposite effect in the future. In the next incarnation these people, whether their pursuits are spiritual or material, will have a strong predisposition to gain an impression of their previous incarnation. Quite irrespective of their pursuits in this age, they will be reborn with a strong predisposition, a strong yearning for their last incarnation, with a strong desire to experience and know something of it. We are standing at a turning-point in time; it will lead men from an incarnation in which they have no desire at all to know anything of reincarnation and karma, to one in which the most living feeling will be this: "The whole of the life I now lead has no foundation for me if I cannot know anything of my former incarnation." And the very people who now inveigh most bitterly against reincarnation and karma will writhe under the torment of the next life because they cannot explain to themselves how their life has come to be what it is. These teachings are not here for the purpose of cultivating in man a retrospective longing for former lives, but in order that there should be understanding of what will arise in connection with collective humanity when the people who are alive to-day will be here again. People who are spiritual seekers to-day will share with those who are not the desire to remember, but they will have understanding, and therefore an inner harmony in their soul-life. Those who reject these teachings to-day will wish to know something of them in the next life; they will really feel something like an inner torment concerning their previous incarnation but they will understand nothing of what it is that most distresses and torments them; they will be perplexed and will lack inner harmony. In their next incarnation they will have to be told: "You will understand the cause of this torment only if you can conceive that you have actually willed it into existence."--Naturally, nobody will desire this torment, but people who are materialists to-day will in their next incarnation begin to understand their inner demands and the advice of those who will be in a position to know and who may say to them: "Conceive to yourselves that you have willed into existence this life from which you would like to flee." If they begin to follow this advice and reflect: "How can I have willed this life?" they will say to themselves: "Yes, I did perhaps live in an incarnation where I said that it was absurdity and nonsense to speak of a following incarnation, and that this life was complete in itself, sending no forces on into a later one. And because at that time I felt a future life to be unreal, to be nonsense, my life now is so empty and desolate. It was I who actually implanted within myself the thought that is now the force making my life so meaningless and barren." That will be a right thought. Karmically it will outlive materialism. The next incarnation will be full of meaning for those who have acquired the conviction that their life, as it now is, is not only complete in itself but contains causes for the next. Meaningless and desolate will be the life of those who, because they believe reincarnation to be nonsense, have themselves rendered their own lives barren and void. So we see that the thoughts we cherish do not pass over into the next life in a somewhat intensified form, but arise there transformed into forces. In the spiritual world, thoughts such as we now form between birth and death have no significance except in so far as they are transformed. If, for instance, a man has a great thought, however great it may be, the thought as thought is gone when he passes through the gate of death, but the enthusiasm, the perception and the feeling called to life by the thought--these pass through the gate of death with him. Man does not even take with him the thoughts of spiritual science, but what he has experienced through them--even to the details, not the general fundamental feeling alone--that is taken with him. This in particular is the point to grasp: thoughts as such are of real significance for the physical plane, but when we are speaking of the activity of thoughts in the higher worlds we must at the same time speak of their transformation in conformity with those worlds. Thoughts which deny reincarnation are transformed in the next life into an inner unreality, an inner emptiness of life; this inner unreality and emptiness are experienced as torment, as disharmony. With the aid of a simile we may obtain an idea of this by thinking of something we like very much, and are always glad to see in a certain place--for instance, a particular flower blooming in a certain spot. If the flower is cut by a ruthless hand, we experience a certain pain. So it is with the whole organism of man. What causes man to feel pain? When the etheric and astral elements of an organ are embedded in a particular position in the physical body, then if the organ is injured so that the etheric and astral bodies cannot permeate it properly, pain is the result. It is just like the ruthless cutting of a rose from its accustomed place in a garden. When an organ has been injured, the etheric and astral bodies do not find what they seek, and this is then felt as bodily pain. And so a man's own thoughts, working on into the future, will meet him in the future. If he sends over into the next incarnation no forces of faith or of knowledge, his thoughts will fail him, and when he seeks for them he will find nothing. This lack will be experienced as pain and torment. These are matters which from one aspect make the karmic course of certain events clear to us. They must be made clear, for our aim is to penetrate still more deeply into the ways and means whereby a man can make yet further preparation for coming to know the real kernel of his being of spirit-and-soul.
<|endoftext|>
---Rudolf Steiner's Spiritual Scientific Teachings: Esoteric Lessons---
The most important thing in all esoteric activity and inner development is to create calm, inner quiet and to keep it after the actual meditation. After we've meditated on the verses or have done the other things that the masters have given us for our training, we should remain absolutely quiet for awhile. Nothing from everyday life, no memory of it and not even a feeling of our body should press in there. We must feel bodiless and as if empty; we must eliminate thoughts about our own existence and should only accept the fact of our existence. But one shouldn't fall asleep or get into a dream state.
Then one has a condition in which clairvoyance can begin. What arises before our inner gaze in such moments comes from the spiritual world. There are ways of telling whether the images that emerge there are purely spiritual or whether they're illusory.
What would happen if the etheric body would leave the physical body for even a moment? The physical body would contract, shrivel and become wrinkled; it tends to contract into a very small space and then to eventually dissolve into nothing. The etheric body tends to spread out into the widths of space; then it feels connected with all forces out in space. It fills the physical body and spreads it out to the size it has.
Old people get wrinkles through this tendency of the physical body to shrink. The physical body shrinks because the etheric body doesn't work in there anymore like it did when the man was young.
Something similar happens to our etheric body during meditation. The etheric body streams and spreads out in space and feels its way into everything. The same is true at the moment of death when the physical body releases the etheric body; this can also last for days.
It's a blissful sensation when the etheric body feels as if it's dissolved in space. And things would remain like this until rebirth if the astral body wasn't there to pull the etheric body back together again through its desires, drives and passions; thereby a man enters kamaloca.
During meditation one should try--and this can be done after years of effort--to get to the point where one's interior feels illuminated. A man becomes a light that illumines the objects in the spirit world that approach him. The things we perceive in such moments when the soul is very calm aren't like the ones in physical life where we see them from outside, like we see the sun rising on the horizon in the morning. Rather, to stick with the sun example, we feel as if we were in the sun that rises there on the horizon of our clairvoyant consciousness. We feel as if we were divided up in space. But illusory figures arise before us, then, if we bring personal feelings of sympathy and especially of antipathy, improper fondness for certain people, etc. into our meditation. In someone who lies and is dishonest in daily life, the lies stream into space with his etheric body. The dishonestly is rayed back by the things that a pupil sees there, just as a mirror reflects an image of our face and an echo throws back our voice. Then dissembling shapes such as beautiful angel figures appear there, caused by the dishonesty that streams out with the etheric body. Through the relation of these figures to our own dishonesty the latter is increasingly consolidated, and eventually we can't distinguish between truth and lies anymore.
It is true that there's no way to immediately dispel these illusory images and to prevent them from appearing. Only through very patient, steady work on oneself, through the overcoming of dishonesty in oneself, can one gradually get to the point where these illusory things don't appear anymore and lies don't become reflected because they aren't there anymore.
Someone who is proud, who begins esoteric training with false ambition, who feel a wild desire to experience all truths of the spiritual world as fast as possible produces errors in himself, thereby. He becomes receptive for all gossip out in the world He likes to stick his nose into men's everyday affairs as he listens eagerly to all sensational comments and phenomena. Then he cannot distinguish between true and false things anymore.
That's how ambition and error are connected. Each of us must combat unhealthy cravings for the highest truths, pride, lies and dishonesty in himself. We must raise ourselves to the highest morality in daily life if we want to arrive at the right clairvoyance, which can only emerge from mediations that are done properly.
To do these correctly, one must not bring feelings and thoughts about everyday life into them, otherwise one would pollute the etheric substance that should radiate out there.
The longer and more intensively the meditations are done, the more intensive their effect is, but one must be a little cautious here. One who notices that he doesn't feel well, gets dizzy or the like, shouldn't mediate too long, and he should think seriously about what he did wrong. One should feel the same after a mediation as before it. We should think about our esoteric life very often. We should know our defects and make it quite clear to ourselves how bad we are. But this knowledge of our badness shouldn't depress us. That would be crass egotism, for through this depression we would show that we thought we were better than we really are, whereas we do have the defects that we acquired ourselves through our previous life and that thereby became our karma. See the defects quite clearly and then start to get rid of them.
We must learn to think objectively. Those who say that they're already thinking objectively, are often making a big mistake, for this assumption is only subjective, it's a delusion.
Pride or ambition leads to error and superstition; we must not succumb to this. We should confront everything that comes to meet us from whatever side, with an alert, open intellect, clear thinking and sharp logic. We shouldn't swear by what seems right to us at first; investigate it critically, don't give in blindly to something. That's also the way it should be in our esoteric life; no belief in authority is demanded.
One should always maintain and use all of one's intellectual powers with respect to the wisdom that is given. One should approach what's said and advocated here with healthy human understanding, with sensibleness and with an open-minded thinking, if it is only opened far enough. You shouldn't swear by this or that but should judge for yourself.
In the spirit lay the germ of my body.
And the spirit has imprinted in my body
The eyes of sense,
That through them I may see
The lights of bodies.
And the spirit has imprinted in my body
Reason and sensation
And feeling and will,
That through them I may perceive bodies
And act upon them.
In the spirit lay the germ of my body.
In my body lies the germ of the spirit.
And I will incorporate into my spirit
The super-sensible eyes
That through them I may behold the light of spirits.
And I will imprint in my spirit
Wisdom and power and love,
So that through me the spirits may act
And I become a self-conscious organ
Of their deeds.
In my body lies the germ of the spirit.
Right after awakening in the morning if one tries to dive back down into the spiritual worlds one came from by emptying one's soul and immersing oneself in one's meditation, one can then attain a memory of one's experiences in spiritual worlds during the night. |
---Rudolf Steiner's Spiritual Scientific Teachings: Knowledge of Higher Worlds and its Attainment---
The training of thoughts and feelings introduces into the soul and spirit the same organic symmetry with which nature has constructed the physical body. Before this development, soul and spirit are undifferentiated masses. The clairvoyant perceives them as interlacing, rotating, cloud-like spirals, dully glimmering in reddish, reddish-brown, or reddish-yellow tones. After this training they begin to assume a brilliant yellowish-green, or greenish-blue color, and show a regular structure. This inner regularity leading to higher knowledge, is attained when the student introduces into his thoughts and feelings the same orderly system with which nature has endowed his bodily organs that enable him to see, hear, digest, breath, speak. Gradually he learns to breath and see with this soul, to speak and hear with the spirit. In the following pages some practical aspects of the higher education of soul and spirit will be treated in greater detail. They are such that anyone can put them into practice regardless of other rules, and thereby be led some distance further into spiritual science. A particular effort must be made to cultivate the quality of patience. Every symptom of impatience produces a paralyzing, even a destructive effect on the higher faculties that slumber in us. We must not expect an immeasurable view into the higher worlds from one day to the next, for we should assuredly be disappointed. Contentment with the smallest fragment attained, repose and tranquility, must more and more take possession of the soul. It is quite understandable that the student should await results with impatience; but he will achieve nothing so long as he fails to master this impatience. Nor is it of any use to combat this impatience merely in the ordinary sense, for it will become only that much stronger. We over-look it in self-deception while it plants itself all the more firmly in the depths of the soul. It is only when we ever and again surrender ourselves to a certain definite thought, making it absolutely our own, that any results can be attained. This thought is as follows: I must certainly do everything I can for the training and development of my soul and spirit; but I shall wait patiently until higher powers shall have found me worthy of definite enlightenment. If this thought becomes so powerful in the student that it grows into an actual feature of his character, he is treading the right path. This feature soon sets its mark on his exterior. The gaze of his eye becomes steady, the movement of his body becomes sure, his decisions definite, and all that goes under the name of nervousness gradually disappears. Rules that appear trifling and insignificant must be taken into account. For example, supposing someone affronts us. Before our training we should have directed our resentment against the offender; a wave of anger would have surged up within us. In a similar case, however, the thought is immediately present in the mind of the student that such an affront makes no difference to his intrinsic worth. And he does whatever must be done to meet the affront with calm and composure, and not in a spirit of anger. Of course it is not a case of simply accepting every affront, but of acting with the same calm composure when dealing with an affront against our own person as we would if the affront were directed against another person, in whose favor we had the right to intervene. It must always be remembered that this training is not carried out in crude outward processes, but in subtle, silent alterations in the life of thought and feeling. Patience has the effect of attraction, impatience the effect of repulsion on the treasures of higher knowledge. In the higher regions of existence nothing can be attained by haste and unrest. Above all things, desire and craving must be silenced, for these are qualities of the soul before which all higher knowledge shyly withdraws. However precious this knowledge is accounted, the student must not crave it if he wishes to attain it. If he wishes to have it for his own sake, he will never attain it. This requires him to be honest with himself in his innermost soul. He must in no case be under any illusion concerning his own self. With a feeling of inner truth he must look his own faults, weaknesses, and unfitness full in the face. The moment he tries to excuse to himself any of his weaknesses, he has placed a stone in his way on the path which is to lead him upward. Such obstacles can only be removed by self-enlightenment. There is only one way to get rid of faults and failings, and that is by a clear recognition of them. Everything slumbers in the human soul and can be awakened. A person can even improve his intellect and reason, if he quietly and calmly makes it clear to himself why he is weak in this respect. Such self- knowledge is, of course, difficult, for the temptation to self-deception is immeasurably great. Anyone making a habit of being truthful with himself opens the portal leading to a deeper insight. All curiosity must fall away from the student. He must rid himself as much as possible of the habit of asking questions merely for the sake of gratifying a selfish thirst for knowledge. He must only ask when knowledge can serve to perfect his own being in the service of evolution. Nevertheless, his delight in knowledge and his devotion to it should in no way be hampered. He should listen devoutly to all that contributes to such an end, and should seek every opportunity for such devotional attention. Special attention must be paid in esoteric training to the education of the life of desires. This does not mean that we are to become free of desire, for if we are to attain something we must also desire it, and desire will always tend to fulfillment if backed by a particular force. This force is derived from a right knowledge. Do not desire at all until you know what is right in any one sphere. That is one of the golden rules for the student. The wise man first ascertains the laws of the world, and then his desires become powers which realize themselves. The following example brings this out clearly. There are certainly many people who would like to learn from their own observation something about their life before birth. Such a desire is altogether useless and leads to no result so long as the person in question has not acquired a knowledge of the laws that govern the nature of the eternal, a knowledge of these laws in their subtlest and most intimate character, through the study of spiritual science. But if, having really acquired this knowledge, he wishes to proceed further, his desire, now ennobled and purified, will enable him to do so. It is also no use saying: I particularly wish to examine my previous life, and shall study only for this purpose. We must rather be capable of abandoning this desire, of eliminating it altogether, and of studying, at first, with no such intention. We should cultivate a feeling of joy and devotion for what we learn, with no thought of the above end in view. We should learn to cherish and foster a particular desire in such a way that it brings with it its own fulfillment. If we become angered, vexed or annoyed, we erect a wall around ourselves in the soul-world, and the forces which are to develop the eyes of the soul cannot approach. For instance, if a person angers me he sends forth a psychic current into the soul-world. I cannot see this current as long as I am myself capable of anger. My own anger conceals it from me. We must not, however, suppose that when we are free from anger we shall immediately have a psychic (astral) vision. For this purpose an organ of vision must have been developed in the soul. The beginnings of such an organ are latent in every human being, but remain ineffective as long as he is capable of anger. Yet this organ is not immediately present the moment anger has been combated to a small extent. We must rather persevere in this combating of anger and proceed patiently on our way; then some day we shall find that this eye of the soul has become developed. Of course, anger is not the only failing to be combated for the attainment of this end. Many grow impatient or skeptical, because they have for years combated certain qualities, and yet clairvoyance has not ensued. In that case they have just trained some qualities and allowed others to run riot. The gift of clairvoyance only manifests itself when all those qualities which stunt the growth of the latent faculties are suppressed. Undoubtedly, the beginnings of such seeing and hearing may appear at an earlier period, but these are only young and tender shoots which are subjected to all possible error, and which, if not carefully tended and guarded, may quickly die. Other qualities which, like anger and vexation, have to be combated, are timidity, superstition, prejudice, vanity and ambition, curiosity, the mania for imparting information, and the making of distinctions in human beings according to the outward characteristics of rank, sex, race, and so forth. In our time it is difficult for people to understand how the combating of such qualities can have anything to do with the heightening of the faculty of cognition. But those experienced in spiritual matters know that much more depends upon such matters than upon the increase of intelligence and employment of artificial exercises. Especially can misunderstanding arise if we believe that we must become foolhardy in order to be fearless; that we must close our eyes to the differences between people, because we must combat the prejudices of rank, race, and so forth. Rather is it true that a correct estimate of all things is to be attained only when we are no longer entangled in prejudice. Even in the ordinary sense it is true that the fear of some phenomenon prevents us from estimating it rightly; that a racial prejudice prevents us from seeing into a man's soul. It is this ordinary sense that the student must develop in all its delicacy and subtlety. Every word spoken without having been thoroughly purged in thought is a stone thrown in the way of esoteric training. And here something must be considered which can only be explained by giving an example. If anything be said to which we must reply, we must be careful to consider the speaker's opinion, feeling, and even his prejudice, rather than what we ourselves have to say at the moment on the subject under discussion. In this example a refined quality of tact is indicated, to the cultivation of which the student must devote his care. He must learn to judge what importance it may have for the other person if he opposes the latter's opinion with his own. This does not mean that he must withhold his opinion. There can be no question of that. But he must listen to the speaker as carefully and as attentively as he possibly can and let his reply derive its form from what he has just heard. In such cases one particular thought recurs ever and again to the student, and he is treading the right path if this thought lives with him to the extent of becoming a trait of his character. This thought is as follows : The importance lies not in the difference of our opinions but in his discovering through his own effort what is right if I contribute something toward it . Thoughts of this and of a similar nature cause the character and the behavior of the student to be permeated with a quality of gentleness, which is one of the chief means used in all esoteric training. Harshness scares away the soul-pictures that should open the eye of the soul; gentleness clears the obstacles away and unseals the inner organs. Along with gentleness, another quality will presently be developed in the soul of the student: that of quietly paying attention to all the subtleties in the soul-life of his environment, while reducing to absolute silence any activity within his own soul. The soul-life of his environment will impress itself on him in such a way that his own soul will grow, and as it grows, become regular in its structure, as a plant expanding in the sunlight. Gentleness and patient reserve open the soul to the soul-world and the spirit to the spirit-world. Persevere in silent inner seclusion; close the senses to all that they brought you before your training; reduce to absolute immobility all the thoughts which, according to your previous habits, surged within you; become quite still and silent within, wait in patience, and then the higher worlds will begin to fashion and perfect the organs of sights and hearing in your soul and spirit. Do not expect immediately to see and hear in the world of soul and spirit, for all that you are doing does but contribute to the development of your higher senses, and you will only be able to hear with soul and spirit when you possess these higher senses. Having persevered for a time in silent inner seclusion, go about your customary daily affairs, imprinting deeply upon your mind this thought: "Some day, when I have grown sufficiently, I shall attain that which I am destined to attain ," and make no attempt to attract forcefully any of these higher powers to yourself. Every student receives these instructions at the outset. By observing them he perfects himself. If he neglects them, all his labor is in vain. But they are only difficult of achievement for the impatient and the unpersevering. No other obstacles exist save those which we ourselves place in our own path, and which can be avoided by all who really will. This point must be continually emphasized, because many people form an altogether wrong conception of the difficulties that beset the path to higher knowledge. It is easier, in a certain sense, to accomplish the first steps along this path than to get the better of the commonest every-day difficulties without this training. Apart from this, only such things are here imparted as are attended by no danger whatsoever to the health of soul and body. There are other ways which lead more quickly to the goal, but what is here explained has nothing to do with them, because they have certain effects which no experienced spiritual scientist considers desirable. Since fragmentary information concerning these ways is continually finding its way into publicity, express warning must be given against entering upon them. For reasons which only the initiated can understand, these ways can never be made public in their true form. The fragments appearing here and there can never lead to profitable results, but may easily undermine health, happiness, and peace of mind. It would be far better for people to avoid having anything to do with such things than to risk entrusting themselves to wholly dark forces, of whose nature and origin they can know nothing. Something may here be said concerning the environment in which this training should be undertaken, for this is not without some importance. And yet the case differs for almost every person. Anyone practicing in an environment filled only with self-seeking interests, as for example, the modern struggle for existence, must be conscious of the fact that these interests are not without their effect on the development of his spiritual organs. It is true that the inner laws of these organs are so powerful that this influence cannot be fatally injurious. Just as a lily can never grow into a thistle, however inappropriate its environment, so, too, the eye of the soul can never grow to anything but its destined shape even though it be subjected to the self-seeking interests of modern cities. But under all circumstances it is well if the student seeks, now and again, his environment in the restful peace, the inner dignity and sweetness of nature. Especially fortunate is the student who can carry out his esoteric training surrounded by the green world of plants, or among the sunny hills, where nature weaves her web of sweet simplicity. This environment develops the inner organs in a harmony which can never ensue in a modern city. More favorably situated than the townsman is the person who, during his childhood at least, had been able to breathe the fragrance of pines, to gaze on snowy peaks, and observe the silent activity of woodland creatures and insects. Yet no city-dweller should fail to give to the organs of his soul and spirit, as they develop, the nurture that comes from the inspired teachings of spiritual research. If our eyes cannot follow the woods in their mantel of green every spring, day by day, we should instead open our soul to the glorious teachings of the Bhagavad Gita, or of St. John's Gospel, or of St. Thomas à Kempis, and to the descriptions resulting from spiritual science. There are many ways to the summit of insight, but much depends on the right choice. The spiritually experienced could say much concerning these paths, much that might seem strange to the uninitiated. Someone, for instance, might be very far advanced on the path; he might be standing, so to speak, at the very entrance of sight and hearing with soul and spirit; he is then fortunate enough to make a journey over the calm or maybe tempestuous ocean, and a veil falls away from the eyes of his soul; suddenly he becomes a seer. Another is also so far advanced that this veil only needs to be loosened; this occurs through some stroke of destiny. On another this stroke might well have had the effect of paralyzing his powers and undermining his energy; for the esoteric student it becomes the occasion of his enlightenment . A third perseveres patiently for years without any marked result. Suddenly, while silently seated in his quiet chamber, spiritual light envelops him; the walls disappear, become transparent for his soul, and a new world expands before his eyes that have become seeing, or resounds in his ears that have become spiritually hearing.
<|endoftext|>
-WHAT I WANT PEOPLE TO KNOW-
The way the West has recently taken an interest in Eastern ideas like Buddhism is a new development. A figure like Goethe shows no trace of it, but it enters European thought with Schopenhauer and grows from there. It is a mistake to think Buddhism is mainly about the teaching of reincarnation. The entire aim of Buddhist thought is actually to find release from the cycle of recurring earth lives. It sees the necessity of rebirth as a given fact, but one to be overcome, not celebrated. The goal is redemption from this cycle.
This is very different from how the idea of reincarnation appears in Western thought, for example, with Lessing. Lessing saw repeated lives as a promise that our earthly efforts are meaningful and that we have an eternity to bring the fruits of our labors to maturity. His view was one of hopeful, continuous progress through lifetimes, whereas the Buddhist view is centered on liberation from them. The understanding of reincarnation in spiritual science does not come from borrowing traditions like Buddhism; it arises on its own from direct, independent observation of life through spiritual investigation.
To understand this difference, one must know that human consciousness itself has changed. Prehistoric humanity had a kind of dream-like, old clairvoyance, a state between waking and sleeping where they could directly perceive the spiritual worlds behind physical reality. Our modern, intellectual consciousness is a later development out of that older state. This ancient clairvoyance gave people a feeling of bliss and a direct certainty that their soul and spirit came from those supersensible worlds they could perceive.
Many myths and legends are remnants of this ancient visionary wisdom. It's becoming clearer that the oldest races had lofty conceptions of the spiritual world, and that today's so-called primitive peoples are actually in a state of decadence from a much higher spiritual condition that was once common to all. As this old clairvoyance faded and the modern, intellectual way of seeing the world arose, two different spiritual paths emerged in humanity.
One path, which took root in India, looked back with sadness at the loss of this connection to the spirit worlds. This feeling led to the view that the physical world of the senses is an illusion, or Maya. The entire direction of Indian spiritual life, including the practices of Yoga, has been to withdraw from the external world to re-establish that lost union with the divine. The other path, noticeable in the Zarathustran culture, did not look back with sorrow. Instead, it embraced the physical world as a new field of action, with the task of finding the divine spirit hidden within matter and working to further the evolution of creation. It was a resolute turning towards the future and engaging with the world.
The impulse of the Buddha must be seen as arising from the soil of the first path, the Indian spiritual mood. It sees humanity as having fallen from a spiritual state into the great deception of Maya. Indian philosophy views this fall as happening in stages, and after each decline, a great personality known as a Buddha appears to renew the primal wisdom and help humanity. Gautama Buddha was the most recent of these figures.
Before a being can become a Buddha, they must first pass through many lives and attain the exalted rank of a Bodhisattva. Gautama was a Bodhisattva until his twenty-ninth year. The famous legend of him seeing sickness, old age, and death for the first time reveals a key insight. Possessing the Bodhisattva-consciousness, which is filled with the wisdom of previous lives, he realized that these elements of destruction and suffering cannot be explained by that wisdom alone. The wisdom gained from life to life speaks of development and progress, but the reality of existence is riddled with decay.
His great illumination under the Bodhi tree was the realization that the source of all this misery is not a lack of wisdom but an entirely different factor: the "Thirst for Existence." This is the deep longing to be born again into the world of Maya, the world of the senses. This thirst is interwoven with all of existence, and it is what brings misery and destruction into life. Because of this, freedom cannot be won by gaining more earthly knowledge. The only path to liberation is to overcome this thirst and thereby free oneself from the need for further reincarnation.
This leads to the state of Nirvana. It is a world of bliss and redemption that cannot be described with any words or concepts taken from our material world. It is not nothingness; it is a state so complete and full that earthly language fails. The term is negative only because it points to a reality beyond all physical predication. This entire outlook, born from a mood of world-weariness and a focus on escaping Maya, naturally isolates the individual. It frames existence as a personal problem of the soul's entanglement, which must be solved through individual effort and, ultimately, isolation from the world that causes the suffering.
-COMMON MISCONCEPTIONS-
It is not correct to say that Buddhism is the teaching of reincarnation; rather, it is a teaching about how to achieve liberation from reincarnation, which it takes as a given, sorrowful fact. It is not a path that glorifies earthly existence as a school for the soul in the way that Western figures like Lessing did. For Lessing, rebirth was a field of positive opportunity; for the Buddha, it was a cycle of suffering to be broken.
It is not right to imagine ancient clairvoyance as a fanciful or uncontrolled dream state like we experience today. It was the normal, albeit picture-based, form of consciousness for early humanity, providing a direct, though less individualized, perception of spiritual realities. Our modern dreams are merely chaotic, atavistic remnants of this once-meaningful faculty. The development of our current intellectual consciousness was a necessary step in human evolution, not a mistake.
The doctrine of Maya does not mean the physical world is literally unreal or non-existent. It means that the world as perceived through the senses is an illusion because it veils the true spiritual reality behind it and ensnares the soul in a cycle of suffering propelled by the "Thirst for Existence." It is a statement about the world's spiritual transparency, not its physical existence.
It is not the case that the Zarathustran path of engaging with the world is unspiritual. It is a different spiritual stream that sees the divine not as something to be reached by turning away from the earth, but as an essence hidden within the material world that must be sought out, worked with, and redeemed. This path is one of active transformation of the world, not abstraction from it.
It is a grotesque error to think that Nirvana means annihilation or a void. The teaching is explicit that this state is beyond any earthly description precisely because it is a condition of such complete and unimaginable bliss. The use of negative terms is a way of protecting its sanctity from the limitations of human concepts derived from the world of suffering. It is not nothingness; it is everything that the world of Maya is not.
The Buddhist teaching on suffering is not a call to pessimism or a statement that life is meaningless. It is a specific diagnosis of the condition of a soul caught in the cycle of rebirth driven by craving. The diagnosis is presented as the first step on a path to a cure. The focus is not on the hopelessness of suffering, but on the very specific path that leads to its cessation.
Becoming a Buddha is not a singular event in history. It is a recurring office in the spiritual guidance of humanity. Gautama Buddha was the most recent in a line of Buddhas, and the Indian philosophy he inherited speaks of a future Buddha, the Maitreya, who is yet to come. It is a stage of development achieved by an exalted being, a Bodhisattva, at a specific point in evolution when humanity requires a renewal of ancient wisdom.
The "Thirst for Existence" should not be understood as a simple intellectual desire for life. It is the deep, pre-rational, almost cosmic craving for sensory experience and individual being that binds the soul to matter. Overcoming it is not a matter of philosophical debate or changing one's opinion, but a profound inner transformation that extinguishes the very engine of reincarnation.
It is not correct to believe that a Bodhisattva is simply a very wise human teacher. This is a being who has evolved to a point where they are inspired by a higher, archangelic being. Their consciousness extends into the spiritual world even while they are incarnated, and they serve as mediators of wisdom from the divine realms to humanity. The Bodhisattva who became Gautama Buddha was such a being, whose task was to translate a portion of this divine wisdom into a form humanity could receive at that time.
-HOW TO APPLY-
To know these things alters one's relationship to the world. Understanding that our current mode of consciousness is just one phase in a long evolution helps to place our struggles in a larger context. It gives meaning to the intellectual work of our time, seeing it not as the end-all of human capacity, but as the basis from which a new, fully conscious clairvoyance must be developed. Recognizing the two streams--the inward path of India and the outward-looking path of Zarathustra--allows us to understand different cultural impulses and our own personal inclinations with greater clarity. We can ask ourselves: is my tendency to withdraw from the world's challenges, or to engage with them as a field for spiritual work?
When we encounter suffering, such as illness or loss, we can look within to see the workings of the "Thirst for Existence." This does not mean we should negate life, but rather observe how our own attachments and cravings are the source of our misery. This observation is the first step toward freedom. By consciously choosing to walk a path of engagement, we can treat our daily work, our relationships, and our challenges not as burdens, but as the very material through which we can find and express the spirit. A difficult conversation becomes a chance to overcome ego; a mundane task becomes an opportunity to imbue matter with intention and care.
This knowledge propagates not through aggressive preaching, but by being lived. A person who meets life with an understanding of its spiritual underpinnings, who faces hardship without being consumed by bitterness, and who works in the world with a sense of purpose beyond personal gain, becomes a source of quiet strength. Others will see this and become curious. The teaching spreads through the quality of one's being and the genuine conversations that arise from it. It's about demonstrating a healthier, more resilient way of living within the world of Maya, not by lecturing about it.
To ensure this knowledge does no harm, it is crucial to avoid two main pitfalls: spiritual pride and nihilistic despair. One must never use this understanding to feel superior to others who are still fully enmeshed in the "Thirst for Existence." The goal is compassion, born from the recognition that this thirst is a universal human condition. Likewise, understanding Maya should not lead to a cynical rejection of the world or a passive waiting for its end. The task for our current age is precisely the Zarathustran one: to work with dedication within the material world to spiritualize it from the inside out.
Propagating this knowledge positively means emphasizing responsibility, not escape. We are here, in this time of intellectual consciousness, to build the faculties for the future. We are not meant to regress to an ancient, dream-like state, nor are we to adopt the world-fleeing methods of a past cultural age. The aim is to transform our thinking into a living organ of perception, to find the spirit in science, in art, and in our social interactions. This requires courage and a firm commitment to the earth and to humanity's future evolution.
We must learn to see the story of the Buddha not as the final word on human destiny, but as a diagnosis of a specific phase of our journey. It describes the illness of being trapped in the cycle of rebirth. Another impulse provides the means to heal the patient, not by removing him from the world, but by transforming both the patient and the world. The positive propagation of this knowledge involves understanding both the diagnosis and the cure, and applying oneself with diligence to the latter.
One can practice this by consciously observing one's own desires. When a strong craving arises, instead of blindly following it or suppressing it, one can ask: from where does this "thirst" come? What part of me is it feeding? This simple act of detached observation weakens the compulsive power of the desire and begins the process of inner liberation, not through flight, but through self-knowledge.
Another application is in our relationship to knowledge itself. Instead of accumulating facts as possessions, we can treat knowledge as a path to greater responsibility. The more we understand about the spiritual workings of the world, the more we are called to act in a way that aligns with its progressive evolution. This turns learning from a selfish act into an act of service.
Ultimately, this knowledge is meant to create a new form of community, one based not on shared background or belief, but on a shared commitment to conscious evolution. It is about individuals working on themselves in order to better serve the whole. By understanding the true nature of suffering and its source, we can strive to build social forms that do not cater to the "Thirst for Existence" but instead provide a space for the cultivation of the higher, eternal aspect of the human being. |
---Rudolf Steiner's Spiritual Scientific Teachings: Christ and the Human Soul---
One of the concepts which must occur to us when we speak of the relation of Christ to the human soul is undoubtedly that of sin and guilt. We know what an incisive significance it had in the Christianity of St. Paul. Our present age, however, is not well adapted for gaining a really deep inner understanding of the wider connections between the concepts "death and sin" and "death and immortality" which are to be found in Paul's writings. That cannot be expected in our materialistic times. Let us recall what I said in the first lecture of this course, that there can be no true immortality of the human soul without a continuation of consciousness after death. An ending of consciousness with death would be equivalent to the fact, which would then have to be accepted, that man is not immortal. An unconscious continuance of man's being after death would mean that the most important part of him, that which makes him a man, would not exist after death. An unconscious human soul surviving after death would not mean much more than the sum of atoms which, as materialism recognizes, remain even when the human body is destroyed.
For Paul, it was an unshakable conviction that it is possible to speak of immortality only if individual consciousness is maintained. And since he had to regard the individual consciousness as subject to sin and guilt, he would naturally think: If a man's consciousness is obscured or disturbed after death by sin and guilt, or by their results, this signifies that sin and guilt really kill man--they kill him as soul, as spirit. The materialistic consciousness of our time of course is remote from that. Many modern philosophical thinkers are content to speak of a continuance of the life of the human soul, whereas the immortality of man can be identified only with a continuing conscious existence of the human soul after death.
Here, certainly, a difficulty may easily arise, especially for the world-view of spiritual science. To approach this difficulty we need only look at the opposition between the concept of guilt and sin and the concept of Karma. Many students of spiritual science get over this simply by saying: "We believe in Karma, meaning a debt which a man contracts in any one of his incarnations; he bears this debt with him, as part of his Karma, and discharges it later; so, in the course of incarnations, a compensation is brought about." Here the difficulty begins. These people then easily say: "How can this be reconciled with the Christian acceptance of the forgiveness of sins through Christ?" and yet the idea of the forgiveness of sins is intimately bound up with true Christianity. We need think of one example: Christ on the Cross between the two malefactors. The malefactor on the left hand mocks at Christ: "If thou wilt be God, help thyself and us!" The malefactor on the right says that the other ought not to speak thus, for both had merited their fate of crucifixion, the just award of their deeds; whereas He was innocent and yet had to experience the same fate. And the malefactor on the right went on to say: "Think of me when thou art in thy kingdom." And Christ answered him: "Verily I say unto thee, today thou shalt be with me in Paradise."
It is not permissible merely to gainsay these words or to omit them from the Gospel, for they are very significant. The difficulty for students of spiritual science arises from the question: If this malefactor on the right has to wash away the Karma he has incurred, what does it mean when Christ, as though pardoning and forgiving him, says: "Today thou shalt be with me in Paradise"? An objector may say that the malefactor on the right will have to wash away his Karmic debt, even as the one on the left. Why is a difference made by Christ between the malefactor on the right and the one on the left? There is no doubt at all that here the conception of Karma meets a difficulty that is not easy to solve. It can be solved, however, when we try to probe more deeply into Christianity by means of spiritual science. And now I shall approach the subject from quite another side, a side already known to you, but it can bring certain remarkable circumstances to light.
We often speak of Lucifer and Ahriman. If one begins to consider the matter in a human-anthropomorphic sense and simply makes of Lucifer a kind of inner and Ahriman a kind of outer criminal, there will be difficulty in getting on; for we must not forget that Lucifer, besides being the bringer of evil into the world, the inner evil that arises through the passions, is also the bringer of freedom. Lucifer plays an important role in the universe, and so does Ahriman.
When one speaks more of Lucifer and Ahriman, it can be seen that many people become uneasy; they still have a feeling of what people have always thought of Lucifer--that he is a fearful criminal to the world, against whom one must defend oneself. Naturally, a student of spiritual science cannot go all the way with this feeling, for he has to assign to Lucifer an important role in the universe; and yet again, Lucifer must be regarded as an opponent of the progressive gods, as an enemy who crosses the creative plan of those gods to whom reverence is rightly due. Thus, when we speak of Lucifer in this way, we are ascribing an important role in the universe to an enemy of the gods. And we must do the same for Ahriman.
From this point of view it is easy to understand the human feeling that leads a person to ask: "What is the right attitude to adopt towards Lucifer and Ahriman; am I to love them or to hate them? I really don't know what to do about them." How does all this come about? It should be quite clear from the way in which one speaks of Lucifer and Ahriman that they are Beings who by their whole nature do not belong to the physical plane but have their mission and task in the Cosmos outside the physical plane, in the spiritual worlds. It must be emphasized that the progressive gods have assigned to Lucifer and Ahriman roles in the spiritual world; and that discrepancy and disharmony appear only when they bring down their activities into the physical plane and arrogate to themselves rights which are not allotted to them. But we must submit to one fact which the human soul does not readily accept when these matters are under consideration, and it is this: Our human judgment holds good only for the physical plane, and--right as it may be for the physical plane--it cannot be simply transferred to the higher worlds. We must therefore gradually accustom ourselves in spiritual science to widen our judgments and our world of concepts and ideas. It is because materialistically minded men of the present day do not want to widen their judgment, but instead prefer to keep to judgments which hold good for the physical plane, that they have such difficulty in understanding spiritual science, although it is all perfectly intelligible.
If we say, "one power is hostile to another", then on the physical plane it is quite right to say, "enmity is improper, it ought not to exist". But the same thing does not hold good for the higher planes. There, judgment must be widened. Just as in the realm of electricity positive and negative electricity are necessary, so is spiritual hostility necessary in order that the universe may exist in its entirety; it is necessary that the spirits should oppose one another. Here is the truth in the saying of Heracleitos, that strife as well as love constitutes the universe. It is only when Lucifer works upon the human soul, and when through the human soul strife is brought into the physical world, that strife is wrong. But this does not hold good for the higher worlds; there, the hostility of the spirits is an element that belongs to the whole structure, the whole evolution, of the universe. This implies that as soon as we come into the higher worlds we must adopt other standards, other colorings for our judgments. That is why there is often a feeling of shock when we speak of Lucifer and Ahriman on the one hand as the opponents of the gods, and on the other hand as being necessary for the whole course of the cosmic order. Hence we must, above all things, hold firmly in our minds that a man comes into collision with the cosmic order if he allows a judgment which holds good for the physical plane to hold good for the higher worlds also.
Now the root of the whole matter, which must again and again be emphasized, is that the Christ, as Christ, does not belong with the other beings of the physical plane. From the moment of the Baptism in the Jordan, a Being who had not previously existed on Earth, a Being who does not belong to the order of Earth-beings, entered into the corporeality of Jesus of Nazareth. Thus in Christ we are concerned with a Being who could truly say to the disciples: "I am from above, but ye are from below", which means: "I am a Being of the kingdom of Heaven, ye are of the kingdom of Earth."
And now let us consider the consequences of this. Must an earthly judgment that is entirely justifiable as such, and that everyone on Earth must maintain, be also the judgment of that Cosmic Being who, as Christ, entered the Jesus body? That Being who passed into the body of Jesus at the Baptism in the Jordan applies not an earthly but a heavenly judgment. He must judge differently from men.
And now let us consider the whole import of the words spoken on Golgotha. The malefactor on the left believes that in the Christ merely an earthly being is present, not a Being whose realm is beyond the earthly kingdom. But just before death there comes to the consciousness of the malefactor on the right: "Thy kingdom, O Christ, is another; think of me when thou art in Thy kingdom." At this moment the malefactor on the right shows that he has a dim idea of the fact that Christ belongs to another kingdom, where a power of judgment quite different from that obtaining on the Earth holds sway. Then, out of the consciousness that He stands in His kingdom, Christ can answer: "Verily, because thou hast some dim foreboding of my kingdom, this day (that is, with death) thou shalt be with me in my kingdom." This indicates the super-earthly Christ power that draws up the human individuality into a spiritual kingdom. Earthly judgment, human judgment, must of course say: "As regards the Karma, the right-hand malefactor will have to make compensation for his guilt, even as the one on the left." For heavenly judgment, however, something else holds good. But that is only the beginning of the matter, for of course it might now be said: "Yes, then the judgment of Heaven contradicts that of the Earth. How can Christ forgive where earthly judgment demands karmic justice?"
This is indeed a difficult question, but we will try to approach it more closely in the course of this lecture. I lay special emphasis on the fact that we are touching here on one of the most difficult questions of occult science. We must make a distinction which the human soul does not willingly make, because it does not like following out the matter to its ultimate consequences, and there are indeed some difficulties in so doing. We shall find it, as I have said, a difficult subject, and you will perhaps have to turn the question over in your minds many times in order to get at its real essence.
To start with, we must make a distinction. We must first consider how, through Karma, objective justice is fulfilled. Here we must clearly understand that a man is certainly subject to his Karma; he has to make karmic compensation for unjust deeds, and if we think more deeply about it, we can see that he will not really wish it otherwise. For suppose a man has done another person wrong; in the moment of doing so he is further from fulfillment than he was before, and he can recover the lost ground only by making compensation for his unjust act. He must wish to make compensation, for only by so doing can he bring himself back to the stage he had reached before committing the act. Thus for the sake of our own progress we are bound to wish that Karma should be there as objective justice. When we grasp the true meaning of human freedom, we can have no wish that a sin should be so forgiven us that we would no longer need to pay it off in our Karma. For example, a man who puts out the eyes of another is more imperfect that one who does not, and in his later Karma it must come to pass that he does a correspondingly good deed, for only then will he be inwardly again the man he was before he committed the sin. So if we rightly consider the nature of man, we cannot suppose that when a man has put out the eyes of another it will be forgiven him, and that Karma will be in some way adjusted. Hence there is rightness in the fact that we are not excused a farthing of our Karma, but must pay our debts in full.
But something else comes in. The guilt, the sins, with which we are laden are not merely our own affair; they are an objective cosmic fact which means something for the universe also. That is where the distinction must be made. The crimes we have committed are compensated through our Karma, but the act of putting out another person's eyes is an accomplished fact. If we have, let us say, put out someone's eyes in a present incarnation, and then in the next incarnation we do something that makes compensation for this act, yet for the objective course of the universe the fact will remain that so many hundred years ago we put out someone's eyes. That is an objective fact in the universe. As far as we are concerned, we make compensation for it later. The stain that we have personally contracted is adjusted in our Karma, but the objective fact remains--we cannot efface that by removing our own imperfection. We must discriminate between the consequences of a sin for ourselves, and the consequences of a sin for the objective course of the world. It is highly important that we should make this distinction. And I may now perhaps introduce an occult observation that will make the matter clearer.
If one surveys the course of human evolution since the Mystery of Golgotha and approaches the Akashic Record without being permeated with the Christ Being, it is easy, very easy indeed, to be led into error, for one will find records which very often do not coincide with the karmic evolution of the individuals concerned. For example, let us suppose that in, say, the year 733 some man lived and incurred heavy guilt. The person now examining the Akashic Record may at first have no connection with the Christ Being. And behold--the man's guilt cannot be found in the Akashic Record. Examination of the Karma of this man in a later incarnation reveals that there is something still in his Karma which he has to wipe out. That must have existed in the Akashic Record at a certain point of time, but it is no longer there. A strange contradiction! This is an objective fact which may occur in many cases. I may meet a man today, and if through grace I am permitted to know something about his Karma, I may perhaps find that some misfortune or stroke of fate that has fallen on him stands in his Karma, that it is an adjustment of earlier guilt. If I turn to his earlier incarnations and examine what he did then, I do not find his guilty deed registered in the Akashic Record. How does this come about?
The reason is that Christ has taken upon Himself the objective debt. In the moment that I permeate myself with Christ, I discover the deed when I examine the Akashic Record. Christ has taken it into His kingdom and He bears it further, so that when I look away from Christ I cannot find it in the Akashic Record. This distinction must be kept clearly in mind: karmic justice remains, but Christ intervenes in the effects of the guilt in the spiritual world. He takes over the debt into His kingdom and bears it further. Christ is that Being who, because He is of another kingdom, is able to blot out in the world our debts and our sins, taking them upon Himself.
What is it that Christ on the Cross of Golgotha really conveys to the malefactor on the left? He does not utter it, but in the fact that He does not utter it, lies its essence. He conveys to the malefactor on the left: What thou has done will continue to work in the spiritual world, and not merely in the physical world. To the malefactor on the right He says: "Today thou shalt be with me in Paradise." This means: "I am beside thine act; through thy Karma thou wilt have later on to do for thyself all that the act signifies for thee, but what the act signifies for the universe, that"--if I may use a trivial expression--"is my concern." That is what Christ says. The distinction made here is certainly an important one, and significant not only for the time after the Mystery of Golgotha, but also for the time before the Mystery of Golgotha.
Some of our friends will remember that in earlier lectures I have called attention to the fact that Christ really did descend to the dead after His death; this is not a mere legend. He thereby accomplished something also for the souls who in previous ages had laden themselves with guilt and sins. Error now comes in if a man, without being permeated with Christ, investigates in the Akashic Record the time before the Mystery of Golgotha. He will continually make errors in his reading of the Akashic Record. Hence, for example, it is not at all surprising that some investigators, who in reality know nothing about Christ, have made the most abstruse statements concerning the evolution of the Earth. For only through permeation with the Christ Impulse is the soul capable of really seeing things as they are, and how they have been regulated in the evolution of the Earth on the basis of the Mystery of Golgotha, though they occurred before it.
Karma is an affair of the successive incarnations of man. The significance of karmic justice must be looked at with our earthly judgment. That which Christ does for humanity must be measured by a judgment that belongs to worlds other than this Earth-world. And suppose that were not so? Let us think of the end of the Earth, of the time when men will have passed through their earthly incarnations. Most certainly it will come to pass that all debts will have to be paid to the last farthing. Human souls will have had to balance their Karma in a certain way. But let us imagine that all guilt had continued to exist in the Earth-world, that all guilt would go on working there. Then at the end of the Earth period human beings would be there with their Karma balanced, but the Earth would not be ready to develop into the Jupiter condition; the whole of Earth humanity would be there without a dwelling place, without the possibility of developing onwards to Jupiter. The fact that the whole Earth develops along with man is a result of the Deed of Christ. All the guilt and debt that would otherwise have piled up would cast the Earth into darkness, and we should have no planet for our further evolution. In our Karma we can take care of ourselves, but not of humanity as a whole, and not of that which in Earth-evolution is connected with the whole evolution of humanity.
So let us realize that Karma will not be taken from us, but that our debts and sins will be wiped out from the Earth-evolution through what has come in with the Mystery of Golgotha. Now we must, of course, realize clearly that all this cannot be bestowed on man without his cooperation--i.e., cannot be his unless he does something. And that is clearly brought before us in the utterance from the Cross of Golgotha which I have quoted. It is very definitely shown to us how the soul of the malefactor on the right received a dim idea of a super-sensible kingdom wherein things proceed otherwise than in the mere earthly kingdom. Man must fill his soul with the substance of the Christ Being; he must, as it were, have taken something of the Christ into his soul, so that Christ is active in him and bears him into a kingdom where man has, indeed, no power to make his Karma ineffective, but where it comes to pass through Christ that our debts and sins are blotted out from our external world.
This has been wonderfully represented in painting. There is no one upon whom a picture such as "Christ as Judge at the Last Judgment", by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel, can fail to make a deep impression. What really underlies such a picture? Let us take, not the deep esoteric fact, but the picture that is here presented to our souls. We see the righteous and the sinners. It would have been possible to present this picture differently from the way in which Michelangelo, as a Christian, has painted it. There was the possibility that at the end of the Earth, men, seeing their Karma, might have said to themselves: "Yes, I have indeed wiped off my Karma, but everywhere in the spiritual, written on tablets of brass, are my guilt and my sins, and they weigh heavily on the Earth; they will destroy the Earth. As far as I am concerned I have made compensation, but there the guilt stands, everywhere." That would not, however, be the truth. For through the fact of Christ's death upon Golgotha, men will not see the tablets of their guilt and sin, but they will see Him who has taken them upon himself; they will see, united with the Being of Christ, all that would otherwise be spread out in the Akashic Record. In place of the Akashic Record, the Christ stands before them, having taken all upon Himself.
We are looking into deep secrets of the Earth's existence. But what is necessary in order to fathom the true state of things in this domain? It is this: that men, no matter whether they are righteous or sinful, should have the possibility of looking upon Christ, that they should not look upon an empty place where the Christ should stand. The connection with Christ is necessary, and the malefactor on the right shows us his connection with Christ by what he says. And although the Christ has given to those who work in His spirit the behest to forgive sins, this never means encroaching upon Karma. What it does mean is that the earthly kingdom will be rescued for those who stand in relationship to Christ, rescued from the spiritual consequences of guilt and sin, which are objective facts even when a later Karma has made compensation for them.
What does it signify for the human soul when one who may so speak says in the name of Christ: "Thy sins are forgiven thee?" It means that he is able to assert: "Thou hast indeed to await thy karmic settlement; but Christ has transformed thy guilt and sin so that later thou mayest not have the terrible sorrow of looking back upon thy guilt and seeing that through it thou hast destroyed a part of the Earth's existence." Christ blots it out. But a certain consciousness is necessary, and those who would forgive sins may rightly demand it--a consciousness of the guilt, and consciousness that Christ has the power to take it upon Himself. For the saying: "Thy sins are forgiven thee" denotes a cosmic fact and not a karmic fact.
Christ shows His relation to this so wonderfully in a certain passage--so wonderfully that it penetrates deep, deep into our hearts. Let us call up in our souls the scene where the woman taken in adultery comes before Him, with those who were condemning her. They bring the woman before Him and in two different ways Christ meets them. He writes in the Earth; and He forgives, He does not judge; He does not condemn. Why does He write in the Earth? Because Karma works, because Karma is objective justice. For the adulteress, her act cannot be obliterated. Christ writes it in the Earth.
But with the spiritual, the not-earthly consequence, it is otherwise. Christ takes upon Himself the spiritual consequence. "He forgives' does not mean that He blots out in the absolute sense, but that He takes upon Himself the consequences of the objective act.
Now let us think of all that it signifies when the human soul is able to say to itself: "Yes, I have done this or that in the world. It does not impair my evolution, for I do not remain as imperfect as I was when I committed the deed; I am permitted to overcome that imperfection in the further course of my Karma by making compensation for the deed. But I cannot undo it for the Earth-evolution." Man would have to bear unspeakable suffering if a Being had not united Himself with the Earth, a Being who undoes for the Earth that which we cannot change. This Being is the Christ. He takes away from us, not subjective Karma, but the objective spiritual effects of the acts, the guilt. That is what we must follow up in our hearts, and then for the first time we shall understand that Christ is in truth that Being who is bound up with the whole of Earth-humanity. For the Earth is there for the sake of mankind, and so Christ is connected also with the whole Earth. It is a weakness of man, as a consequence of the Luciferic temptation, that although he is indeed able to redeem himself subjectively through Karma, he cannot redeem the Earth at the same time. That is accomplished by the Cosmic Being, the Christ.
And now we understand why many students of spiritual science cannot realize that Christianity is in full accord with the idea of Karma. They are people who bring into their study of spiritual science the most intense egoism, a super-egoism; certainly they do not put it into words, but still they really think and feel: "If I can only redeem myself through my Karma, what does the world matter to me? Let it do what it will!" These students of spiritual science are quite satisfied if they can speak of karmic adjustment. But there is a great deal more to be done. Man would be a purely Luciferic being if he were to think only of himself. Man is a member of the whole world, and he must think about it in the sense that he can indeed be egotistically redeemed through his Karma, but is not able to redeem the whole Earth-existence. Here the Christ enters. At the moment when we decide not to think only of our ego, we must think about something other than our ego. Of what must we think? Of the "Christ in me", as Paul says; then indeed we are united with Him in the whole Earth-existence. We do not then think of our self-redemption, but we say: "Not I and my own redemption--not I, but the Christ in me and the redemption of the Earth."
Many believe they may call themselves true Christians, and yet they speak of others--for instance, those who approach Christianity through spiritual science--as heretics. There is very little true Christian feeling here. The question may perhaps be permitted: "Is it really Christian to think that I may do whatever I like and that Christ came into the world in order to take it all away from me and to forgive my sins, so that I need have nothing more to do with my Karma, with my sins?" I think there is another word more applicable to such a way of thinking than the word "Christian"; perhaps the word "convenient" would be better. "Convenient" it would certainly be if a man had only to repent, and then all the sins he had committed in the world were obliterated from the whole of his later Karma. The sin is not blotted out from Karma; but it can be blotted out from the Earth-evolution, and this it is that man cannot do because of the human weakness that results from the Luciferic temptation. Christ accomplishes this. With the remission of sins we are saved from the pain of having added an objective debt to the Earth-evolution for all eternity. Only, of course, we must have a serious interest in this. When we have this true understanding of Christ, a greater earnestness will manifest itself in many other ways as well. Many elements will fall away from those conceptions of Christ which may well seem full of triviality and cynicism to the man whose soul has absorbed the Christ-conception in all seriousness. For all that has been said today, and it can be proved point by point from the most significant passages of the New Testament, tells us that everything Christ is for us derives from the fact that He is not a Being like other men, but a Being who, from above--that is, from out of the Cosmos--entered into Earth-evolution at the baptism by John in Jordan. Everything speaks for the cosmic nature of Christ. And he who deeply grasps Christ's attitude towards sin and debt may speak thus: "Because man in the course of the Earth's existence could not blot out his guilt for the whole Earth, a Cosmic Being had to descend in order that the Earth's debt might be discharged."
True Christianity must needs regard Christ as a Cosmic Being. It cannot do otherwise. Then, however, our soul will be deeply permeated by what is meant in the words, "Not I, but Christ in me." For then from this knowledge there radiates into our soul something that I can express only in these words: "When I am able to say, "Not I, but Christ in me", in that moment I acknowledge that I shall be raised from the Earth-sphere, that in me there lives something that has significance to the Cosmos, and that I am counted worthy, as man, to bear a super-earthly element in my soul, just as I bear within me a super-earthly being in all that has entered into me from Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions."
The consciousness of being permeated with Christ will become of immense importance. And with St. Paul's saying, "Not I, but Christ in me", a man will connect the feeling that his inner responsibility to Christ must be taken in deep, deep earnestness. Spiritual science will bring into the Christ-consciousness this feeling of responsibility in such a way that we shall not presume on every occasion to say: "I thought so, and because I thought so, I had a right to say it." Our materialistic age is carrying this further and further. "I was convinced of this, and therefore I had a right to say it." But is it not a profanation of the Christ in us, a fresh crucifixion of the Christ in us, that at any moment when we believe something or other, we cry it out to the world, or send it out into the world in writing, without having investigated it?
When the full significance of Christ comes home to mankind, the individual will feel that he must be more and more conscientious, must prove himself worthy of Christ, this Cosmic Principle, within him.
It may be readily believed that those who do not want to receive Christ as a Cosmic Principle, but are ready at every opportunity to repent an offence, will first tell all kinds of lies about their fellow men and will then want to wipe out the lies. Anyone who wishes to give worthy proof of the Christ in his soul will first ask himself whether he ought to say a certain thing, even though he may for the moment be convinced of it.
Many things will be changed when a true conception of Christ comes into the world. All those countless people today who write, or disfigure paper with printer's ink, because they briskly write down things of which they have no knowledge, will come to realize that by so doing they are putting the Christ in the human soul to shame. And then the excuse will cease: "Well, I thought it was so, I said it in good faith." Christ wants more than "good faith"; Christ would fain lead men to the truth. He Himself has said, "The truth will make you free." But where has Christ ever said that it is possible for anyone who is thinking in His sense to shout out or put forth in writing something or other of which he really knows nothing? Much indeed will be changed! A great deal of modern writing will be ruled out when people proceed from the principle of proving themselves worthy of the saying: |
"---Rudolf Steiner's Spiritual Scientific Teachings: The Gospel of St. Matthew---\n\nWhen we think o(...TRUNCATED) |
"---Rudolf Steiner's Spiritual Scientific Teachings: Life Between Death and Rebirth---\n\nIn materia(...TRUNCATED) |
"---Rudolf Steiner's Spiritual Scientific Teachings: Easter as a Chapter in the Mystery Wisdom of Ma(...TRUNCATED) |
"-WHAT I WANT PEOPLE TO KNOW-\n\nThe ancestral line of Christ in the Gospel of Matthew is not about (...TRUNCATED) |
End of preview. Expand in Data Studio
YAML Metadata Warning:empty or missing yaml metadata in repo card
Check out the documentation for more information.
Replaced special characters where it makes a difference:
what was:
10
2
16
19 §
2 ©
327 «
10 ¬
1 ®
85 °
3 ´
16 ¶
323 »
31 ×
13 ÷
2 ˚
1 ‑
10683 –
88952 —
2409 ‘
5967 ’
4663 “
4223 ”
9 †
81 •
355 …
18 ′
19 ‹
19 ›
12 →
15 −
1 √
5 ∞
101 ∴
2 ≥
2 ⊣
1 □
5 △
4 ▽
1 ◒
5 ☉
2 ☋
1 ☥
3 ☽
1 ☾
1 ☿
1 ♀
1 ♂
1 ♃
2 ♄
10 ♈
6 ♉
11 ♊
6 ♋
12 ♌
10 ♍
5 ♎
9 ♏
7 ♐
6 ♑
8 ♒
12 ♓
4 ⧖
2 （
2 ）
1 ；
4 ？
30 ̆
62 ̄
3 ֶ
2 ֹ
1 ּ
1 ¢
27 £
9 €
2 ¹
26 ½
25 ⅓
11 ¼
9 ²
2 ₂
7 ⅔
6 ³
4 ¾
2 ⁴
71 á
87 à
1 ă
107 â
12 Â
109 Å
678 ä
10 Ä
6 ã
1203 ā
2 Ā
135 æ
26 Æ
13 ć
1 Č
68 ç
4 ð
1271 é
58 É
167 è
21 È
26 ê
3 ě
24 ë
1 ę
70 ē
1 ȇ
1 𝑓
1 ƒ
38 í
2 ì
17 î
90 ï
481 ī
25 ı
2 ł
4 ń
2 ñ
1 º
49 ó
50 ô
1063 ö
19 Ö
2 ő
4 õ
5 ø
47 ō
8 Ō
28 œ
10 Œ
1 ś
22 š
202 ß
35 ú
6 ù
14 û
1201 ü
36 Ü
133 ū
1 ý
35 ʿ
61 α
1 Α
1 ἀ
1 ἁ
1 ά
4 β
3 Β
7 γ
1 Γ
5 δ
8 ε
4 ἐ
1 ἕ
1 έ
1 ζ
1 ή
1 ὴ
1 ῆ
1 ῇ
5 θ
12 ι
4 ί
3 ὶ
2 ῑ
2 κ
1 λ
10 μ
11 µ
17 ν
3 ξ
13 ο
4 ό
2 ὸ
24 π
9 ρ
2 Ρ
10 σ
4 ς
11 τ
1 Τ
6 υ
4 ὐ
1 ύ
1 φ
6 χ
1 Χ
4 ω
1 Ω
2 ώ
3 ῶ
2 ῳ
6 ї
1 ӧ
2 ב
1 ו
1 י
1 ם
1 ע
1 ק
2 ר
1 इ
1 न
1 म
1 स
1 ा
4 の
2 危
2 好
4 島
2 日
2 本
4 機
10 武
10 漢
4 福
2 運
is now:
1 ©
327 «
88 °
323 »
9 †
81 •
19 ‹
19 ›
12 →
1 √
5 ∞
2 ≥
2 ⊣
1 □
5 △
4 ▽
1 ◒
4 ⧖
27 £
9 €
69 á
87 à
107 â
12 Â
109 Å
678 ä
10 Ä
6 ã
1203 ā
2 Ā
135 æ
26 Æ
68 ç
1271 é
58 É
167 è
21 È
26 ê
24 ë
70 ē
38 í
17 î
90 ï
481 ī
25 ı
49 ó
50 ô
1063 ö
19 Ö
47 ō
8 Ō
28 œ
10 Œ
202 ß
35 ú
6 ù
14 û
1201 ü
36 Ü
133 ū
61 α
1 Α
4 β
3 Β
7 γ
1 Γ
5 δ
8 ε
4 ἐ
1 ἕ
1 έ
1 ζ
1 ή
1 ὴ
1 ῆ
1 ῇ
5 θ
12 ι
4 ί
3 ὶ
2 ῑ
2 κ
1 λ
10 μ
11 µ
17 ν
3 ξ
13 ο
4 ό
2 ὸ
24 π
9 ρ
2 Ρ
10 σ
4 ς
11 τ
1 Τ
6 υ
4 ὐ
1 ύ
1 φ
6 χ
1 Χ
4 ω
1 Ω
2 ώ
3 ῶ
2 ῳ
6 ї
1 ӧ
2 ב
1 ו
1 י
1 ם
1 ע
1 ק
2 ר
10 武
10 漢
- Downloads last month
- 14