The Human Being as Body and Soul in relation to the Cosmos E-Book

Rudolf Steiner

• Herausgeber: Rudolf Steiner Press
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Serie: The Collected Works of Rudolf Steiner
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 477

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

'That is the ideal towards which Ahriman is striving: to destroy the individuality of human beings in order, with the power of human thinking, to transform the earth into a web of gigantic thought spiders – but real spiders. That is the ahrimanic goal from which we must escape by really imbuing ourselves with the spirit Word: "Not I, but the Christ in me".' – Rudolf Steiner These majestic lectures speak of the threefold human being – of body (head, heart and hands), soul (thinking, feeling and will), and spirit (waking, dreaming and sleeping). Such holistic concepts challenge the acute dangers of polarisation, of twofoldness – being bound to the earth through dead thought on the one hand (the ahrimanic) and taken up into states of fantasy on the other (the luciferic). The challenge, says Rudolf Steiner, is always to see the intermediary or balancing force, the Christ being, in every context. Steiner refers to the conclusions of the Ecumenical Council of 869 AD, that human beings consist only of body and soul. Now, he says, we are entering a period where even the soul is denied in favour of the physical brain. In contrast, he presents a vision of evolving humanity in the broader context of a cosmos that reaches to realms of existence beyond even space and time. This previously-unpublished course of lectures ­– released in tandem with the twin course in CW 206 – features an introduction by William Forward, notes and an index. Thirteen lectures, Stuttgart, Bern & Dornach; June–July 1921, GA 205

Leseprobe

THE HUMAN BEING AS BODY AND SOUL IN RELATION TO THE COSMOS

HUMAN EVOLUTION AND THE SOUL AND SPIRIT OF THE UNIVERSE, PART I

Thirteen lectures given in Stuttgart, Bern and Dornach, 16 June to 17 July 1921

TRANSLATED AND INTRODUCED BY WILLIAM FORWARD

RUDOLF STEINER

Rudolf Steiner Press

Hillside House, The Square

Forest Row, RH18 5ES

www.rudolfsteinerpress.com

Published by Rudolf Steiner Press 2025

Originally published in German under the title Der Mensch in Zusammenhang mit dem Kosmos 5: Menschenwerden, Weltenseele und Weltengeist—Erster Teil: Der Mensch als leiblich-seelische Wesenheit in seinem Verhältnis zur Welt (volume 205 in the Rudolf Steiner Gesamtausgabe or Collected Works) by Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach. Based on shorthand notes that were not reviewed or revised by the speaker. This authorized translation is based on the third German edition (2016), edited by Johann Waeger und Hendrik Knobel

Published by permission of the Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach

© Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach, Rudolf Steiner Verlag 2016

This translation © Rudolf Steiner Press 2025

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

ISBN 978 1 85584 707 1

Cover by Morgan Creative

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Printed and bound by 4Edge Ltd., Essex

CONTENTS

Introduction by William Forward

LECTURE 1

STUTTGART, 16 JUNE 1921

Our human soul and spirit in relation to the phenomena of the cosmos. Three levels of our soul life: hallucination as a delusion with no basis in reality; fantasy as the creative source of artistry; Imagination as the image of a spiritual reality. Our physical body as an image of our pre-birthly life in the spirit. Preparation in the second half of life for returning to a spiritual existence after death. Our soul as mediator. The power of our thought life as an echo of our pre-birth experience; developed to a higher stage it becomes Imagination; inappropriately applied, it produces hallucination. A hallmark of our time: the inclination towards untruth. Opposition to anthroposophy.

LECTURE 2

BERN, 28 JUNE 1921

The human being as a moral being in the cosmos. Successes and unjustified hypotheses of natural science. The dichotomy of thinking and feeling. Our chemical elements. The four elements in pre-Socratic Greek culture: earth, water, air and fire which encompass matter, life, soul and spirit. The power of abstraction, a spirit of unreality The bridge between the moral and the natural worlds. Einstein. Divine spiritual beings as the concrete foundations of the natural world around us. The risk we face of losing our eternal nature as a result of brain-bound thinking. The Christ spirit overcoming the ahrimanization of the earth.

LECTURE 3

Our dependence and independence of the world around us as human beings. The laws at work within the earthly world, the cosmos, the cosmic soul and the cosmic spirit. The worlds of minerals, plants, animals and human beings. Our surroundings within space and beyond space. The educated Greek and the living element of water. Today’s natural science and its dead elements. Materialism as a necessary phase in human development towards freedom. Our journey back through Imagination to the element of water, through Inspiration to the element of air and through Intuition to the element of fire.

LECTURE 4

DORNACH, 26 JUNE 1921

The complete human being: composed of solid, fluid, aeriform elements and the element of warmth. The unconscious sleeping human being beyond the earth and the cosmos. The laws governing cosmic soul and cosmic spirit. Rhythm appears in space, but its origin lies beyond the world of the senses. The relationship of the airy element to time. Hexameter. The rhythms in our breathing and pulse. The consciously sleeping human being. Images arising outside our body out of which the forms of animals take shape in space. The logic of the outer forms of animals, spiritualized in the human being. The interplay of our thought activity and the experience of our senses. The essential, eternal human being in the element of warmth or fire. Overcoming time. Body-free consciousness delving into other beings. Pre-birthly existence and an egotistic attitude to immortality; knowledge imbued with morality and free of egotism.

LECTURE 5

DORNACH, 1 JULY 1921

The true nature of hallucination out of which we are born into this world as physical beings. How hallucination occurs normally between birth and death in the form of unconscious Imaginations whose forces build up and renew our organism each day. Its abnormal occurrence in the form of subjective soul experiences squeezed into consciousness out of our organs. Mystical poetry; Mechthild von Magdeburg; Saint Teresa. The forming of our organs. How our physical nature is connected with the cosmos. The chaos of living matter. The embryo, an earthly substance withdrawn from crystallizing forces and devoted to cosmic forces, giving form to our etheric and astral bodies in the ovum. The hen’s egg as an imprint of the cosmos; the three dimensions of space. The power of our intellect as an image of our pre-birth existence in the spirit; today’s culture of abstract images depends on it. Shutting out the sense impressions in our thinking while living in our image culture can lead us to Imagination; thoughts rising out of our body bringing hallucinations into our consciousness; thinking with our feelings, generating fantasy. The question of freedom.

LECTURE 6

DORNACH, 2 JULY 1921

The formative forces of our physical body metamorphose as they reach across from one life into the next. Spiritual beings at work behind the experiences of our senses. Contemplating the material substance within us. The surfaces of our organs as reflective instruments for our soul life, appearing in our consciousness as memories. Latent forces stored within our organs and working as formative forces in life between death and rebirth. How our liver, lungs, kidneys and heart work towards the formation of our head and its future capacities: memory, habit, temperament, pangs of conscience, moral strength. Premature manifestations: obsessive thoughts, visions, hallucinations, emotional disturbances, depression. Our mother determines the configuration of our astral and etheric bodies in the next incarnation, our father determines our physical body and I. The interrelationship of our organs and our surroundings. Illnesses, symptoms, diagnosis and therapy. Therapeutic insights by means of genuine mysticism. The law of conservation of energy contrasted with ‘Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my word shall not pass away’.

LECTURE 7

DORNACH, 3 JULY 1921

Two riddles for everyday consciousness: the outer world hidden behind the veil of the senses and the inner world of our human organs. Normal and abnormal discontinuity of consciousness. Occult vision, free of memory. Our capacity for remembering and for loving between birth and death. Transformation of our thoughts into images after death. Growth of our soul from Imagination via Inspiration to Intuition. Then its return after the world Midnight Hour to Imagination saturated with will before rebirth. The activity of our will in the metabolic and limb system hidden from consciousness. Judgement and logical conclusions. Thinking, perceiving and remembering are all conscious. Our will and our disposition work their way up from the unconscious. Lucifer targets our will, Ahriman targets our thinking. Ahriman’s goal: heaven and earth must not pass away! The fixed nature of materialistic thoughts. Atomism as an obsessive thought. Atrophy of the brain. Countermeasures: bringing abstract concepts into image form, individualizing our thoughts by means of our will. Cultural perspectives: having lost consciousness of the spirit, the awareness of our soul will also be lost. Future tendencies: raising children not by education but by the injection of equivalent substances. Edison’s business practices. Anthroposophy as a cultivation of the whole human being.

LECTURE 8

DORNACH, 8 JULY 1921

Two streams in our waking life of thought: the conscious stream with its logical connections and the unconscious undercurrent with its chaotic images. Waking dreams as a source of artistic creations. Defined thoughts during sleep which can’t be retained. Inspirations, inventions, moral Intuitions. During our sleep the outer world is unveiled for our I and astral body. Our normal world of thought between super logic outside us and illogicality within us. As thinking beings we are temporal, as cosmic beings eternal. The role of cosmic forces within the human organism. The human form differentiates our will, our will organizes our thoughts. The cosmic dimension in our mathematical capabilities. Einstein. Reality in the region of pure thinking; thinking and willing become one.

LECTURE 9

DORNACH, 9 JULY 1921

How human beings and animals are oriented socially within the cosmos as a whole. Cosmic streams travel along the spinal column which is radial to the earth in the case of humans, parallel to the earth’s surface in the case of animals. During sleep our astral body and I are immersed in world thoughts; on awakening our will takes hold of the chaotic web of thought within our organs. Adjustment to normal memory, possibility of freely creative fantasy, thinking attuned to the laws of logic. In the physical and etheric bodies a stream of will opposes one from the cosmos, the first tied to the alternation of waking and sleeping, the second to the blood circulation. They work together in outer activity; movement of the limbs. Breathing and pulse rhythms attuned to each other in time. Metre and the art of recitation. Irregularities: rage as an expression of pulse rate being too high, fainting an outcome of breathing rhythm being too slow. Our place within the rhythms of the cosmos. Humanity evolving in the context of the cosmos. Passage of the spring rising point of the sun through the 12 signs of the zodiac since the end of the Lemurian epoch; 12 cultural eras. Return to the sign of Pisces around 1413 or 1415.

LECTURE 10

DORNACH, 10 JULY 1921

Further development of humanity during the last cycle of the sun’s spring rising point. Problematic attitude of soul in relation to both the Ptolemaic and Copernican worldviews. The world of illusion. Changeability of reality and sense impressions. Our saturation with a sense of self during life after death. Hunger for non-existence prior to birth. Being born into Maya, into the world of phenomena as images. Possibility of freedom. Loss of sense of gravity. Risks to immortality. New education towards a sense of self. Exertion required to grasp weighty concepts from spiritual science. Imbuing ourselves with forces that can overcome death. Working towards the power of Christ.

LECTURE 11

DORNACH, 15 JULY 1921

Two poles in our soul life: the element of thinking and the element of willing. Thinking relates to the past, willing to the future. Origin of our thinking forces in our pre-birth life and its loss; development of our will forces and their transition into life after death. The reality of our senses and the illusion of atomism. The veil of the senses can be grasped by the logic of thinking because it originates in the past. Natural science. The present can be experienced as fluctuating images by means of Imaginations. Self-created images leading to higher Imagination. Insight into life before birth. Desire as the foundation of will, in contrast with ‘satiation’ as the foundation of thinking. Matter: spiritualized by Lucifer, hardened by Ahriman. Perception by means of the senses, reflection by means of thinking. Duality of good and evil, God and the devil as an error. An earlier view: Ormuzd and Ahriman. The Muspilli poem. Task of our time: recovery of the Trinity with Christ in the middle.

LECTURE 12

DORNACH, 16 JULY 1921

Polarity of the luciferic and ahrimanic principles; impulses within the development process in the cosmos. The bird kingdom within the cosmic order; the egg shape. Opposing forces inside and outside the egg. The calcareous shell, the coat of feathers. Mammals tied to the earth. The human being: luciferic and ahrimanic influences in our development and formation. The I in outer perception and movement of our limbs. Determination and freedom within the threefold human being; illness arising from wrong behaviour. Clouds of insects as an Imaginative picture of how our I experiences the world around us. The opposite: our I living within forms which it has created out of itself.

LECTURE 13

DORNACH, 17 JULY 1921

The living human being contradicts physical/natural laws. The human form constructed according to cosmic laws as a deed of the primal forces, the archai. Their work at transforming us from the Lemurian epoch to the end of the earth. The spirits of the age. All-encompassing cosmic laws as the realm of the spirits of form, the exusiai. Emergence of all that belongs to the earth. The epochs of Polaris, Hyperborea, and Lemuria as echoes of Old Saturn, Old Sun, and Old Moon evolution. Our etheric body belongs to the realm of the archangels, our astral body to the realm of the angels. During sleep our physical body is in the care of the archai and the archangels. Our angel normally accompanies our astral body in sleep. This is hindered by a materialistic mindset. Instinctive primal wisdom: devotion to what our angel thought, to what our archangel felt and to what our archai willed. The awakening I, leading us out of the realms of the hierarchies; the next step into the realm of Ahriman’s Maya. The 333 years before and after the Mystery of Golgotha. It lies within our freedom to strive upwards, back into the realms of the spirits. How the angels help us. Ahriman’s temptations: paralysis of human consciousness during critical historical events. Dressing up mendacity with reference to ‘the best of our knowledge and belief’, instead of feeling duty-bound to determine the objective facts. To counter this it would be necessary to have a passion for the truth, for the progress of humanity, and an enthusiastic commitment to realizing the aims of anthroposophy.

Notes

Rudolf Steiner’s Collected Works

Significant Events in the Life of Rudolf Steiner

Index

INTRODUCTION

WHEN Rudolf Steiner gave this course of thirteen lectures in the summer of 1921 he was continuing his intensive work on cultural renewal, including the uphill battle for a threefold social order. This had started towards the end of the First World War when in March 1917 he gave a public lecture entitled ‘The threefold nature of the human being’ and later in the summer of that year wrote two documents titled Memoranda which spoke of the threefold nature of the social organism. The thrust of his argument was that if our social order was to be adequate for us it would have to reflect our threefold nature. This would translate as freedom in our cultural life, equality in our political life and fraternity in our economic relations. These three areas would be integrated, interdependent, but also organized independently.

Despite every effort being made, addressing leadership and grassroots representatives of society, the initiative did not succeed. However, it bore fruit in another initiative, namely the founding of the first Waldorf School in Stuttgart in the autumn of 1919. A century later, it has become the largest independent school movement in the world, with more than 1200 independent schools and nearly 2000 kindergartens in 75 countries, as well as more than 500 centres for special education in more than 40 countries. A salient characteristic of this educational impulse is its recognition of the whole human being, addressing head, heart and hands with equal emphasis. In the social context of each class and the school as a whole, each child is seen as a unique individual manifesting in body, soul and spirit; again each element cared for equally.

In these lectures, Rudolf Steiner speaks of humanity in the much larger context of the cosmos as a whole, encompassing aeons of time in the phases of our development, and space extending beyond our earth to the planets, the fixed stars and finally to realms of existence and development beyond even time and space. In the second lecture Steiner asks us to imagine a dialogue between an educated person of our own time and a representative of pre-Socratic Greece. Their worldviews are contrasted: the modern person speaking of 70+ elements (now over a hundred) and the Greek speaking of the four elements. It transpires that the Greek sees the four elements not just as constituent parts of the world around us but as four different stages of consciousness. The earth relates to dead matter which is, it seems to the Greek, all that our modern consciousness is prepared to take seriously. Water, however, as the element of life, relates to Imaginative consciousness and extends well beyond the earth out into the cosmos. The element of air takes us beyond the cosmos we are familiar with into the world of rhythm and the consciousness of Inspiration, the world into which we pass when going to sleep. Finally, the element of fire or warmth is the uniting element which also encompasses our spiritual essence in the highest stage of consciousness described in Steiner’s Knowledge of the Higher Worlds as Intuition. Air and fire relate to our experience of soul and spirit, which disappear without trace each night as we fall asleep and return to us on awakening. Neither can be located anywhere in the known cosmos.

This exposes the limitations of modern natural-scientific methods which focus exclusively on physical phenomena in our bodies and in the world around us and seek the manifestations we describe as soul and spirit in electric-chemical phenomena in our brains. Steiner goes on to suggest in lecture 7 that—having lost our conscious awareness of each human being having a unique individual spirit following the Ecumenical Council of Constantinople in 869 AD, deciding that we are not beings of body, soul and spirit but consist of body and a soul with certain spiritual qualities—we are now entering a period in our development where even the notion that we have a soul as such will be denied in favour of the equivalent sentient qualities being attributed to the activity of our brains. However, whilst there are frequent criticisms of contemporary natural science in these lectures, and in particular its tendency to rely, even insist, on abstract thinking, the main thrust of each lecture is to encourage us to make the considerable effort of will necessary to see ourselves within this holistic organism of threefoldness in body (head, heart and hands) soul (thinking, feeling and willing) and spirit (waking, dreaming and sleeping).

We are also challenged to bring greater attentiveness to our daily experiences of breathing and pulse rate (in a ratio of roughly 4:1), falling asleep and awakening, concurrent states of consciousness in our waking state (clear, rational thinking, dreamy subconscious undercurrents, and unconscious impulses) and then to see them in the much wider context of cosmic rhythms (25,920 breaths in the average day, days in the average life, years in the sun’s passage from the vernal equinox in one sign of the zodiac and through the entire zodiac back to the same place). Similarly the daily process of coming into bodily awareness and leaving it as part of the unfolding of each human life can be seen in the wider context of a series of earth lives, or incarnations as part of a longer term evolutionary journey, both for the individual and for humanity as a whole.

Far from speculative theories based on hypothetical questions such as: ‘What would happen to time if a clock were to travel at the speed of light?’, Steiner’s spiritual science invites us to examine the boundaries of our everyday consciousness in the experience of our senses on the one hand and the experience of our memory and inner life on the other. We are shown opposing tendencies in what we might call the extrusion of calcareous matter to form the hen’s egg, isolated from its surroundings, and the ‘intrusion’ of its coat of feathers, very closely connected to its outer environment. The same tendencies are at work as polar opposites in our own lives at all three levels mentioned above (away from the earth, or luciferic, and bound permanently to the earth, or ahrimanic). The challenge is always to see the intermediary, or balancing force in each context as the Christ being, transforming the problematic effects of polarity.

At the beginning and the end of the series of lectures, Steiner is at pains to highlight the now particularly acute dangers of untruthfulness in developing our own view of the world and our relation to the wider context in which we live, encapsulated in the title of the broader series: ‘Human development, Cosmic soul and Cosmic spirit’.

William Forward

LECTURE 1

STUTTGART, 16 JUNE 1921

IFELT, despite my stay in Stuttgart being devoted to other matters, that I needed to speak to you this evening on an anthroposophical topic. Today I want to tell you something about the relationship of human beings to their context in the world, to the extent that this plays into their nature. I would like to frame this topic in such a way that its content can be particularly relevant to the decline of civilization in our time.

If we take stock of various aspects of the human being that we have come to know over the years from anthroposophical spiritual science, a great deal of it can be summarized under the heading of the threefold nature of man as spirit, soul and body; a concept that we have frequently dwelt on. Looking at what is increasingly evident in today’s intellectual culture from the point of view of spiritual science, it becomes clear that the development of humanity has gradually reached the point where the focus is only on our physical aspect. This study of our physical nature has, it is true, resulted in a comprehensive body of knowledge. Moreover, it aims to know more of how this physical body relates to the other phenomena of the world. We have, however, reached a point now, where we must look more in the direction of our soul and our spirit. Precisely because the physical body is being as carefully studied as it is today, we ought really to devote more attention to the nature of our soul and spirit.

I would like to start with phenomena which cannot be understood today because only their physical aspect is taken into account. They nevertheless pose great questions for humanity. Looking at the physical body of the human being, we see that it is integrated into the whole natural order. Our contemporary way of thinking has gradually attempted to piece together the whole natural order out of indissolubly connected causes and effects. The underlying thought is that the physical human being is integrated into this chain of causes and effects and so can be explained by them. Generally speaking, it is down to the materialistic approach of our present-day thinking that we only refer to natural causes and effects and the way our physical body emerges from them as if by a kind of mechanical necessity.

If we are limited to explanations based purely on cause and effect we are suddenly confronted by phenomena which admittedly seem to be abnormal and yet stand there as great riddles, like a question mark. We see how human physicality unfolds. The natural scientist comes along and looks for the same laws at work in the human body that apply to the rest of the natural world. Sure enough, we then see certain laws at work, which give rise, admittedly in an abnormal way, to phenomena which cannot possibly be attributed to the natural course of events. The materialist thinker tries—so far unsuccessfully, but nevertheless as an ideal to strive towards—to explain our common expressions of will-impulses, feelings and thinking as the effects of physical processes, in the way that flames can be explained as the result of the combustion of fuel. But what then, for example, would be our approach to human thinking, if this concept were correct in every detail?

In the course of life we distinguish between thoughts which we accept, because we can identify them as right and those which we reject because we consider them to be wrong. We say they are mistaken. But according to the laws of nature surely everything can only follow from causes and be the appropriate effect of these causes. So according to the natural order we can say: error and illusion derive just as much from natural causes as do correct, justified thoughts. This then presents us with a riddle: why then do the phenomena of nature which are all supposed to be the product of necessity, produce in us on the one hand what is true, and on the other what is false?

It is even more of a riddle if we see illusory visions arising in the human being, or what we might call hallucinations, which we know conjure up appearances which have no connection to reality. What enables us to say then that something is an unfounded hallucination, when everything that goes on in a human being is a necessary consequence of the laws of nature, to which we are also subject? We would have to say that hallucinations are just as entitled to be considered as true impressions, true thoughts. And yet (we may feel and sense this) we are quite rightly convinced that hallucinations as such must be rejected. Why must they be rejected? Why are they not allowed to be recognized as a justifiable content of human consciousness? And how can we even recognize them as hallucinations?

We will only be able to solve these riddles when we turn our attention to something else, which might at first remind us of hallucinations, but which we feel is not to be rejected to the same extent as hallucinations, namely the products of our imagination. These products of our imagination arise from the unfathomable depths of the human soul life, take shape as images which appear magically before the human soul and are the source of much that gives beauty to life, that is uplifting. All forms of art would be inconceivable without these products of our imagination. Nevertheless, we are still conscious that they are not firmly based in reality, that we would have to see them as illusory if we wanted to attribute reality to them in the usual sense of the word. Then we come to something else.

We are familiar through our spiritual science with the first stage of spiritual knowledge. We are talking about Imagination, about imaginative cognition, and have shown how the soul can by means of certain exercises attain a pictorial content in its contemplation which the spiritual researcher identifies, despite its appearing as an image, not as a dream but as something that relates to a reality, that represents a reality.

So we can say that we have three stages of our soul life before us: hallucinations, which we recognize to be complete delusions; the products of our imagination, which we know we have somehow drawn up from reality, even though in the form in which they appear to us they are not directly connected to reality, and thirdly Imaginations, which also appear before our soul as images, and which we do relate to reality. The spiritual researcher is able in the course of life to relate this Imagination to reality just as he could relate a sure perception of a colour or a sound to reality. One could object that a real Imagination cannot be shown to be real; it could after all just be an illusion. Then someone who has experience in these aspects of soul life would have to reply: ‘Similarly you cannot know that a piece of hot steel really is a piece of hot steel and not an imaginary one, a mere mental construct. It cannot be proved by thinking about it, but it certainly can by direct experience in real life.’ The way in which we come into contact with external physical reality enables everyone to tell the difference between an imaginary hot iron that does not burn and a real one. In the same way in the course of life the spiritual researcher is able to distinguish, through the contact with the spiritual world which the Imagination enables him to have, between the purely imaginary spiritual world and a real phenomenon of the spiritual world to which the Imagination points.

Now one can only understand this threefold system of hallucination, imaginative picture and Imagination if one is able to penetrate into our relationship with our entire world context by means of spiritual science. We really are differentiated into body, soul and spirit. When we look at human beings initially in the way they present between birth, or let’s say conception, and death, what appears to us most directly is their physical body. This physical aspect of the human being is very little understood, even by contemporary science. It is very, very complicated. The more one is able to delve into its details, the more it appears as a wonderful structure. But the answer to the question: ‘How are we to understand this physical nature?’ must come from a different quarter and can only come from the source that spiritual science offers, when it directs our attention to the spirit.

If you take stock of much that has been said over the years, you will be in a position to say: ‘Just as between the birth and death of a human individual we are faced with a physical manifestation, so in the life that the individual spends between death and a new birth we are dealing with spirituality, a spiritual manifestation. And if we look at this in the way that I did in the lecture cycle I gave in Vienna in the Spring of 1914 on our life between death and a new birth, we shall be looking at the growth and development of the human spirit just as we are looking at the growth and development of the human body if we follow the human being between birth and death.1 When we focus our attention on the newly born child and then follow its development, emerging from childhood, becoming ever more mature, then passing into decline and eventually death, we are doing this with our bodily senses, and combining our outer impressions with our understanding and thus following our human body in its process of development. Similarly we are following the human spirit in its development when we contemplate its growth and maturing and come to what in my Occult Science I described as the ‘Midnight Hour’ of existence between death and a new birth, the beginning of our approach to physical life; having looked at the spirit, which appears to us in its primal form between death and a new birth, we must turn to how it relates to what appears to us here in the physical world as its body and its development in that context.

Thus spiritual science has led us to the significant fact that what we experience as body here, is actually an image, an outer image, a faithful image of what we observe as spirit between death and a new birth. Likewise what we observe in the spirit as just described is a template for what we can observe as our body here in physical life. We must think quite concretely about the relationship of spirit to matter in this way. If you know nothing about life between death and a new birth, you actually know nothing about the human spirit.

When we now contemplate the human being, manifesting itself physically between birth and death and then carry into our awareness the thought that it is an image of the spirit pre-birth, we can ask ourselves: What mediates between the spiritual template and the earthly image? What brings it about that the template (which after all precedes the image), then reveals itself in the image? We might perhaps do without the idea of a mediator if the human being were to appear before us quite complete, so that its spiritual template immediately appeared as a complete human being and no longer needed to grow and develop into perfection. Then we could say: ‘The human spirit is in a world of the spirit. Its physical image is here in the physical world.’ But it isn’t like that, as we know. In fact we enter the world of the senses as an incomplete creature and only gradually, slowly, come to resemble our spiritual counterpart. The spirit on the other hand can only work through to the moment of conception, or a little beyond that into the life of the embryo, let’s say until birth, and then in a sense leaves us. There must therefore be some kind of mediator at work which for example at the age of twenty is still perfecting the being which until then did not fully correspond to its spiritual archetype. This mediator, forming the physical after its spiritual archetype, is the soul.

That is how we find ourselves as human beings in our whole context. We can then follow our spiritual existence between death and a new birth, our physical existence between birth and death and our soul nature can be viewed as the part of us that works the archetype step by step into our physical body, its physical counterpart. Then comes the midpoint so to speak of our earthly development, around the thirty-fifth year. That is when the process of decline begins. Our physical nature then becomes increasingly hardened. What has been at work forming it, now prepares to dissolve into its purely spiritual nature, so that we can then in turn live on in our spiritual form between death and our next birth. What is at work there, preparing our physical body step by step, so that it can become spiritual in death? Once more it is the soul. Thus our soul shapes us into an image of our spirit in the first half of our life. In the second half it prepares us to become spirit again. That is how we come to the trinity of spirit, soul and body in our human nature. And we can also form a concrete picture of the relationship between spirit, soul and body. In addition, we then have a conception of our physical body that is perfectly clear in itself, which holds no contradictions in terms of its role. For if our physical body is to be a true image of our spirit, then every spiritual attainment must be reflected in its physical counterpart. It must be possible to trace everything that is of a spiritual nature in our physical body. No wonder then that materialism has appeared in more recent times, claiming that our physical body is the source of our spirit. If we only take into account what happens in us between birth and death, and in particular what develops as mental pictures, we shall find everything that lives in these mental pictures contained in the images of our physical body. Our spiritual individuality can be traced in our physical body right down into the mental pictures it forms. We can thus come to the illusion of the materialistic point of view, because we are in fact bound to discover those fine ramifications which appear in our thinking process, in the forming of mental pictures.

That is how one can become a materialist. One can do so because the physical body is a true image of the spiritual. And if one has no idea about the spirit, one can content oneself with the physical, confine oneself to the physical body, and so believe that the whole human being is contained in it. However, this physical body comes into being in the life of the embryo and dissolves after death. What is physical is transient and everything that we develop in the way of mental pictures, bound to this physicality, is transient. Nevertheless, it remains a true image of the spirit. This physical body is indeed a true copy of the spirit if we look at how it works. An activity takes place in the fine ramifications of our nerve-sense system, and this fine activity is a genuine copy of a spiritual activity that took place in us between death and a new birth.

So when we look at this fine activity and, as I have suggested, see it as mediated by our soul, we must conclude that this physical manifestation is an image, a copy, and its spiritual archetype can only be found in the spiritual world. Here in the physical world, to the extent that we human beings inhabit it, the human being is indeed material and this materiality is organized so as to be a faithful copy of its spiritual archetype. What happens is that the soul is a medium for what works its way into the body right into the life of the embryo and which transforms into what we then mutate into after death: the spirit. Thus spirit, soul and body belong together.

Now if we can really grasp that—try to really grasp what I have set before you—then we must conclude: when we as human beings exercise our power of thinking, an echo of what preceded it even before life in the embryo must play into it, mediated by the soul. In other words, when I have my thoughts a certain power is at work in my thinking life which does not emerge purely from my body; my body is only its replica. This power echoes on, as it were; it is a resonance of the life I lived between death and my reappearance in the embryo. That is what plays into my experience of the present. When we as ordinary human beings of the present-day think, then in fact an echo, a resonance of our pre-birth life lives on in our thinking.

Now how do we human beings know we exist? We do so because we have the unconscious experience: ‘When I think, it is my pre-birth existence that lives on in me, that resonates in me, and my body is a replica of this pre-birth existence.’ If one were to reproduce this activity oneself, which should normally only take place as a result of the resonance from a pre-birth existence, what would happen? Then our physical body, a replica as described above, would be carrying out something similar to thinking in an inappropriate way. And this can indeed happen. When in ordinary life we think and have our ideas, our pre-birth existence echoes on in us. Since we are threefold in nature, the nerve-sense aspect can be disconnected and any other part of us can begin to imitate this activity on a purely physical basis, though it should normally echo on from our pre-birth existence. If the rhythmical human being or the metabolic/limb human being begins to do this on its own, which it normally should not do, then hallucination results. If you look at this from a spiritual-scientific perspective you can quite clearly distinguish an appropriate thought from a hallucination. The former is a living proof of pre-birth life the moment it is recognized as an appropriate thought, the latter, though a half-baked imitation from out of our purely physical nature, also proves the appropriateness of the original by virtue of the fact that it is an only an imitation of its spiritual origin. Our body in its physical existence is not justified in imitating the thought processes which should emerge from the spiritual life of the pre-birth human being.

These are the kind of considerations one has to take into account if one wants to get beyond the silly concepts that are in use today to define hallucinations and the like. We really have to look into the whole framework of the human being to be able to distinguish hallucinations from real thoughts and ideas. And when this real life of ideas is developed to a higher level, when it is taken up consciously and progresses to the realization that in thinking one is not merely experiencing the echo of a pre-birth existence but is able to transform this echo and in doing so see through it to the underlying reality, then we have an Imagination.

In this way a real spiritual scientist is able to distinguish between a hallucination, which is something conjured up by the physical body, and an Imagination, which points to the spirit and retraces its steps back into the spirit. So we could say: someone hallucinating links up with the body, someone having an Imagination, who retraces the echo back into the world of pre-birth links up with the spirit; he stretches out his life beyond physical existence and allows the spirit to link up with him. The spirit makes a connection within him. There are those who, for reasons of prejudice or malice, as can happen these days, keep saying that the Imagination described by spiritual science could just as easily be a hallucination. They wilfully ignore the fact that the spiritual scientist is well able to distinguish clearly between the two, whereas what is said about hallucinations in conventional science today is completely unfounded and amounts to arbitrary definitions. The fact that contemporary science does not know what hallucinations are is demonstrated by its inability to distinguish what manifests as an Imagination from a hallucination.

The insinuations that are made in this area are of a nature, it has to be said, that suggests deliberate slander. It is only down to the laziness of our scientists in respect of spiritual-scientific research that such things are put about. If they were not too lazy to engage with spiritual science, they would see how clearly the distinctions between hallucinations and Imaginations are drawn.

If we wish in all honesty to stand up for our movement, we will have to be conscious that there is animosity among our contemporaries which stems from laziness, and we will have to expose this laziness that can lead to untruthfulness in the culture of our time, right into its most hidden corners. There is no other way for spiritual science. So we can say: it is the body that is involved in producing hallucinations and the spirit in producing Imaginations and that the human being feels completely drawn beyond life between birth and death when fully experiencing Imaginative life.

The soul is placed between the two. The soul is the mediator, as it were, the fluid spiritual substance that links the spiritual template with its bodily image. This must not be sharply contoured in any direction, but must have fluid outlines; one should not be able to say of it that it is or is not based in reality. One can say of hallucinations that they are not rooted in reality, since they are produced by the body, which can’t actually produce anything real, since it has no access to the resonances of pre-birth life. Imaginations on the other hand and our thoughts, their abstract replicas, do.

The forms that emerge from the engagement of our soul, our imaginative capacities, have something blurry about them; they are both real and unreal. They are drawn from reality; the clear outlines of reality are damped down, made paler and more blurry. We feel lifted out of reality but at the same time we feel that there is nevertheless something there that means something for our inner life, for our whole life. We feel a middle ground between illusory hallucinations and real Imaginations in the intermediary fabric of our imagination or fantasy. We could say that our body is involved with hallucinations, our soul with the fabric of our imagination and our spirit with Imaginations, whose replicas are to be found in the abstractions of everyday life. Here you see the threefold nature of the human being at work and in its relation to the surrounding world. We can say that in the realm of the spirit, whether in the shadowy replicas of thoughts or in Imaginations, by means of which we can raise ourselves to higher levels of cognition, we are connected with reality; in the realm of the soul and its fabric of imagination and fantasy we are connected with something that hovers between reality and unreality; in the realm of the body, hallucinations are conjured up which in fact represent something unreal.

If you accept what I have now presented, you will agree: ‘Yes, an unprejudiced view of the human being reveals this trinity of spirit, soul and body. Likewise we can see that what is active in it may also be distinguished in a threefold way as hallucination, the exercise of native imagination and Imagination and can then be related to body, soul and spirit.’ You see, with anthroposophy one has to delve deeper and deeper into its being to see how it can support every detail out of its entirety.

We can start by setting out the differentiation of the human being into body, soul and spirit in a more abstract way and then fill out the picture with more and more concrete detail. By looking at something one has placed there like this and seeing how it relates to other things, more and more evidence emerges. This is necessary in anthroposophical life, to constantly delve deeper. People of today however, who consider themselves so clever, are reluctant to do this. They would prefer not to say for example: ‘Now I have read an anthroposophical essay, or heard an anthroposophical lecture, and though it is not yet clear to me what it means, I’ll wait and see what comes of it.’ If they were prepared to wait, they would see the progression from one thing to another and that eventually everything holds together, one piece of evidence supporting the other. If anyone responded by saying: ‘Well if one thing is the proof of another then the whole universe has no foundation, everything is supporting everything else.’ One might then reply, ‘In that case there is no basis for what astronomy has to say about the earth. There too we are told that one bit of the earth supports the other and there too the whole thing has no foundation.’ Anyone wanting further proof of one thing supporting the other is ignoring the fact that when we are speaking of a totality that is its characteristic, that one thing supports another.

What is necessary in order to place an idea before our souls as we have today, is not merely to go on talking about the spirit (someone talking about the spirit could quite easily be fooling you) but rather to talk about the spirit in a spiritual way, inhabited by the spirit, and able to link one thing in the world to another so that the working of the spirit is revealed. A purely materialistic approach would be unable to distinguish hallucinations from Imaginations or from creative imagination if they were juxtaposed. But someone who can see the living spirit at work in presenting the three can make connections between one and the other. This person is filled with living spiritual content in contemplating the world; the spirit is speaking through the words used. Science should not merely speak about the spirit, but should allow the spirit to speak in spiritual science. Please reflect on this sentence, which is actually very important if the essence of spiritual science is to be understood: We should not simply talk about the spirit but rather in a spiritual way allow the spirit to speak in spiritual science. That is when we become free, for the spirit gives us access in freedom and allows us to express its being through our own. Speaking about the spirit has to be done in a spiritual way, that is with fluid thinking, not with the hardened thoughts of our materialistic science.

Taking this up can lead to the core of the most essential task of our time which alone can deliver us from the decay that is such a strong tendency in the whole of our present-day civilization. We could say: ‘If we feel able to live into the process of acquiring knowledge of the world today, without prejudice and with genuine devotion, then as if by a universal act of grace pouring out over us, we shall be enabled to think spiritually about the world.’

This capacity only entered the stream of earthly evolution at the end of the nineteenth century. Anyone who is able to follow the development of humanity with an open mind will see that before the last third of the nineteenth century we had a different goal. Now, however, the doors to the spiritual world have opened and it is our task, since the materialistic view of nature has achieved such triumphs, to look at the world spiritually again. The evolving of the human being is also a process of rhythmical movement, in which the individual takes part through repeated earth lives. Our life is rhythmical. In rhythmical succession, we live through phases of spiritual striving such as the one that culminated in the middle of the nineteenth century, with our attention directed only at what is material and what can be explained in material terms, and now in our own time we are in a phase in which we need to return to a spiritual perspective. If we can open our minds and allow them to be filled by what is coming towards us from the world, we shall feel the urge to see the world from a spiritual perspective.

That is the secret of the time we are living in. Anyone who has a sense for the spirit today must feel: the gate between the supersensible world and the world of the senses is open. Just as the world we can experience with our senses speaks to us through colours and sounds, so in our time the spiritual world is also speaking quite clearly to us. But people are still used to being spoken to in the language of the old, purely representational material world, and so have opened hostilities in every form against the spiritual way of looking at the world that is streaming in. This battle appears in the materialistic worldview of natural science; it appears in the terrible materialistic wars that shook us at the beginning of the twentieth century. But just as in a former epoch of human evolution, people reached up too high towards the spirit and fell prey to illusions and raptures which tried to find expression in their bodies, so now anyone who takes up arms against the spirit (like the majority of civilization today), will be trapped in the clutches of the power that seeks to oppose the descent of the spirit into the physical world.2 That is why we have seen the emergence of what must necessarily appear in the souls of those who seek to oppose the influx of the spirit, which is the lie. This was horribly apparent during the World War. It had indeed already been prepared in advance and we are now living in a time when the world not only opposes knowledge but is even in a horrible way developing the inclination to tell untruth. Essentially most of what is spoken by its opponents against anthroposophy and everything that has to do with anthroposophy is just that. What profound insincerity there is in just those who pride themselves in being the bearers of truth, who call themselves the proclaimers of truth!

Here is an example—I always use topical examples, much as it pains me to do so: a paper is published in Stuttgart which styles itself Stuttgarter Evangelisches Sonntagsblatt [the Stuttgart Evangelical Sunday paper, SES]. In Number 19 on page 149 it published a few sentences which among other things contained what follows. An urban pastor by the name of Jehle wrote something about the opponents of the Church in our time. There was a good deal of valuable material on understanding monism and free thinkers and then this town pastor Jehle set out the deeper reasons for the bitter war waged by A. Drews against the historical tradition of Jesus, following which he focused on Christian Science, which in stark contrast to the materialistic worldview declared everything material to be unreal, finally stating: ‘the Theosophy of Rudolf Steiner which by way of thanks to pastor Rittelmeyer for his discipleship, declares him to be the reincarnation of Bernard of Clairvaux’.3

Now my dear friends, one of our friends tried to get this corrected. It then came to the attention of pastor Rittelmeyer who wrote the following letter to those who publish this kind of thing:

In No.19 of the Stuttgarter Evangelisches Sonntagsblatt dated the 8th May I have just read a report of the AGM of the Association of Evangelical Churches at which pastor Jehle stated in his lecture on contemporary movements hostile to the church that Dr Steiner ‘by way of thanks to pastor Rittelmeyer for his discipleship, declares him to be the reincarnation of Bernard of Clairvaux’. This sentence is completely untrue in every detail. Dr Steiner has neither directly nor by implication declared me to be the reincarnation of Bernard of Clairvaux or anything like that—neither to me nor quite certainly to anyone else—neither have I myself said or thought anything like that. I request that in accordance with press protocol you publish this correction in full. Please permit me also to express my dismay at the low-point in church polemics that is evidenced here again. Any foolish gossip is welcome so long as it puts down an assumed opponent. Not even the common decency of prior checking of content is observed. I sincerely hope you can see what a base character is imputed to Dr Steiner and to me and how a message such as this appeals to the most primitive instincts of both listeners and readers, simply on the basis of gossip that can easily be disproved.

Now these last few words about the base character etc. were not quoted in the paper at all, but only the first words, to which were added: ‘In response to this declaration [which was only partially reproduced!] we can only comment: The speaker’s personal comments (which then also reached the ears of the person being referred to) and his tried and tested character which is well known and appreciated among so many of our readers, completely rule out even the slightest doubt that he quoted this remark to the best of his knowledge and belief.’

So the editors hear that the person quoted above says first of all that the whole thing is a lie, and secondly that it comes from base motives. Then they wriggle out of the whole thing, adding: ‘Further to your wording and representation of the report in our paper which was made without the knowledge or consent of the speaker and without a final proofing by our editor in chief who has meanwhile gone on holiday’—so the speaker did in fact say this, but the report is excused on the grounds that the speaker was not informed of the report, and the person who published it is excused from the resultant criticism on the grounds that he was on holiday—‘the reporter, the speaker and the editor regret that without any intention on our part’—so they do not regret that they published a lie, but rather the following—‘that without any intention on our part, various readers (as we are informed by Dr Rittelmeyer) could have misunderstood them to be imputing to him vanity that would have given him pleasure at such a claim and to Dr Steiner the idea that he was counting on this’.

So they do not admit to publishing a lie, but rather that readers may have understood Dr Steiner to be counting on vanity. And it goes on:

Much as for objective reasons we regret the promotion of Dr Steiner’s views by a representative of the church, we had no thought of discrediting him personally.

Equally we are in no doubt that Dr Rittelmeyer will have been surprised and embarrassed by such a claim.

Thus the impression is created that Dr Rittelmeyer is surprised and embarrassed by my statement, whereas he expressly states that he was shocked and embarrassed that such a lie could be spread abroad by the SES.

Moreover, our regular readers know us too well to believe that we would deliberately engage in personal defamation or slander. They also know that we have plenty of better and more beautiful work to do. I shall leave it to the readers of the SES to decide on the merits of that statement.

This is how people work today, who profess to be the representatives of the truth, the official representatives of the truth and who many people believe have a duty to represent the truth. One only has to point out things like this to make people aware of the tendency towards untruth today. But too few people are sufficiently disgusted, and the disgust is not yet strong enough in the face of such immorality, such anti-religion as calls itself Christian Sunday service.