Rudolf Steiner, Dornach, Switzerland
July 9, 1921
The task that has been set here in these reflections over the past few weeks has been to place the human being in the universe in an understanding way. Yesterday I tried to indicate how, on the one hand, the human being is part of the cosmic world of thought, from which he is also formed in terms of his entire organization, so that, on the one hand, by looking at that which is not grasped by ordinary consciousness in his sensory perception, his ordinary experience of himself, the human being in relation to this organization of his, he must think of himself as belonging to the cosmos and only in relation to the ordinary life of thinking, which, as I have shown, is situated between, on the one hand, cosmic thinking and, on the other hand, thinking that can be perceived as an undercurrent of ordinary consciousness, must he think of himself as belonging to himself in the sense of his own self. The latter would now also belong to what man, as it were, has to regard as belonging to his own self. Yesterday we tried to throw some light on man in so far as he has a thought experience or is placed in the world of thought.
The more one rises to this view, the more one will learn to place the human being in all world-becoming, in all that makes him appear as a piece of cosmic becoming. And when we become so attentive to that part of the human being that is composed of the ordinary life of thought and of the undercurrent that I characterized yesterday, then we will also understand how the human being, through the possession of this part that has been so to speak set apart from the cosmos, is a free, self-reliant entity.
This consideration of the human being can be taken even further, and today we want to try to place the human being in the context of the other kingdoms of nature. I need only point out that I have said many times how wrong it is to consider the relationship of the human being to the animal kingdom, for example, merely in terms of today's anatomy and physiology. Of course, if we first consider the human being in terms of his overall form, and how this overall form is composed of the individual organs, then we will notice that the human being has roughly the same number of bones, muscles and so on as the higher animals, and that these organs or organ systems have been transformed, metamorphosed. We will be able to include the human being in the animal series. But something quite different arises – and I have often discussed this – when one considers what places the human being in a very special way in the cosmos. It must be noted that the column of the animal's back, the backbone, lies essentially horizontally, parallel to the earth's surface; the human backbone stands upright on the earth's surface. If one does not believe that everything is based on the coarse material, but if one comes to the view that what exists is based in its essence on the whole being placed in a coherent world system, then one will attach a corresponding importance to this special position of the human backbone. As a result, the human head is placed in a completely different position to the entire organization. And if one has only once risen to the view: The cosmos is interwoven and interwoven by thoughts - then, insofar as the cosmos is to be regarded as spatial, one will see in the currents of thought that go through the cosmos, an essential and one will be able to see that it makes a difference whether the current that runs along the spine in humans is aligned with the radial direction of the earth or whether, as in animals, it runs parallel to the surface of the earth.
This being placed of the human being in a certain way in the cosmos must then be looked at with regard to the overall organization, and thus also for the individual organs. Each organ and each organ system is located differently in relation to the cosmos in humans than in animals. This is not affected by the fact that someone might say that the human backbone is horizontal when sleeping. It does not depend on the individual position, but on how the whole growth is assessed, how an organ system is integrated into the whole organism. And if we bear in mind that we have the animal backbone parallel to the earth's surface and the human backbone perpendicular to it, then we shall be able to appreciate in the right way other processes that can be observed in man. And here I would first like to draw your attention to a different system of the soul than the one we looked at yesterday. Yesterday we looked at the thought system; today we want to look at the will system.
We can also look at this will system by becoming aware that the human being's life rhythmically breaks down into the states of sleeping and waking. During waking hours, the human being is completely devoted to his physicality; during sleep, the I and the astral body are outside of physicality, both the physical and the etheric physicality. When we wake up in the morning, I told you yesterday, we bring with us at most a faint memory from the thoughts of the universe. So that we can become aware: In the whole time from falling asleep to waking up, we were immersed in a surging sea of cosmic thoughts. But what we bring with us when we wake up and what then determines us throughout the day while we are awake is the will, that is, emerging from this nocturnal, or let us say, during our sleep, our element-forming thought-sea of the cosmos. We emerge with the will, which, as I have characterized it, introduces logic into our inner soul life. We may still notice, when we wake up, in the dreams that crowd in, what our soul life would be like if this will, which we bring with us when we wake up, did not penetrate it logically.
In a sense, then, this will strikes into what is surging and swirling in the human organism. Let us take a very close look at this impact of the will. Let us become aware of where the will is striking into: It is precisely the chaotic swirling of dream images and also of those dream textures that we have as undercurrents of our ordinary consciousness. So that we can say: While we sleep, this web of thoughts is released from the organic mechanism within us, completely drowned out by the web of thoughts interwoven with logic in the waking state, from waking to falling asleep. It is this chaotic jumble of dream images and dream ideas that the will strikes, which we bring into our organism from the cosmos when we wake up. Let us see what this will initially brings with it.
This will that strikes in initially has the effect that thoughts do not arise as they are in this dreamy chaos. We would get off badly in life if thoughts arose as they do in this dreamy chaos. What must thoughts be like when they arise in normal mental life? They must somehow be connected with our life. They must be able to remember in some way. That is, in a sense, the first thing that the will, which has made an impact, does with our thoughts. It organizes them in such a way that we carry the right memory image within us. We can therefore say: we have, as it were, the chaotic web of thoughts swirling up out of our organism (see drawing, red). It is something that is particularly strong in dreamy natures, who are often not satisfied with indulging in the normal memories of life, who take pleasure and delight when thoughts come together and separate again after allusions and similarities. Dreamy natures are overwhelmed by this chaotic web of thoughts. But even a person who is well aware of himself will always notice, if he lets himself go just a little during waking life, I would say, that this confusion of thoughts is present in the main, underlying current. The will, which strikes there when one wakes up, it strikes this web of thoughts. Where does it come from?
Now, in bed lay the physical body (blue) and the etheric body (yellow). What I have drawn schematically on the board here is basically what we leave in bed when we fall asleep and what we encounter again in the morning. We allow our will to be woven into it. I will characterize this will that is woven into it through these lines here (see drawing, arrows from above). So the first thing that the will has to do is to reshape this chaotic web of thoughts into our normal memory. We can therefore say that, initially, this will that is woven into it shapes the web of thoughts into normal memory. One might say: the etheric body, the physical body, that is what we encounter in the morning, is still very powerful in our memory. These thoughts are reflected back to us. But it is the will that strikes and really has something to do by striking. You can see that. Just try to remember how, when you wake up in the morning, everything swirls up like currents from the soul like an event you experienced at the age of five, at the age of seven, again at the age of six year, again in the fifteenth year, in the sixty-fifth year for all I care, then in the twenty-first, seventeenth year, again in the eighth year, how it all swirls and tumbles in a colorful mess. The will has to strike into this. Then, in a sense, it organizes it all again so that it is a proper memory, so that an event that took place in the ninth year does not get mixed up with what happened in the eighth year and the like. So the will strikes into it, and it forms memory out of this chaotic web of dreams. In memory, you still notice little of the will. Most people will not want to see the will at all in memory. But it is there, it is just that the impact of the will, in so far as it forms memory, is much more unconscious.
The second is something that a person can already recognize as their will. This is what this will, which we bring with us when we wake up, makes out of this surge of thoughts: this is the imagination, this is the fantasy (see drawing). That is the second element. There you can already see that you can move in it with your arbitrariness. While the memory is being formed, you still have to be constrained by your organism; the physical body and etheric body are very influential. In the imagination, this is less so, and you can move about in it with your will. But there is an enormous difference between a person who is imaginative and a person who dreams, who simply surrenders to the surge of arbitrary thought. A person who lets his imagination run wild knows how his will rules in these interweaving images, and he shapes them according to his will.
But now for the third. The third is something that, on the one hand, is really completely given over to the will and, on the other hand, is such that the will does not move as freely as in imagination. It is logical thinking, on which we depend in life and in science. There, in this logical thinking, our will is certainly active; but it surrenders its own freedom and submits to the laws of logic. Yet it is its doing that it submits to the law of logic. So that is the third thing: logical thinking.
Why is logical thinking, on the one hand, absolutely subject to the will? If we did not form our logical thinking out of our own will, it would be obsessive thoughts. We must form our logical thoughts out of our own will. But we form them in such a way that we orient ourselves to the external world, which, after all, is essentially the great teacher of logic in the first place. We imbue the chaotic world of images with the laws of logic. We thus surrender to these laws of logic through our will; in a sense, we surrender to the arbitrary workings of logic. On the one hand, the will is free in thought; on the other hand, it surrenders its freedom in favor of logic. But in these three stages – memory, imagination, logical thinking – the will is active; that will that from falling asleep to waking up does not work in the human physical and etheric organism and that in the morning when waking up into the physical and etheric organism, and which this, I would like to say, indeterminate fire of the etheric and physical body, kindled in the surge of thought, is divided into memory, imagination, logical thinking.
It is already the case in logical thinking that we are no longer completely in control with our will. We are not. When we let our imagination run free, in which we clearly notice our will, then we know how we are within ourselves; when we let our logical thinking run free, we are no longer completely within ourselves. We know that we adapt ourselves completely to the cosmos, but not only to the extra-human cosmos, but to the whole cosmos, which includes the human being. For it is self-evident that logic applies not only to the extra-human cosmos, but also to the cosmos plus the human being. Logic is neither subjective nor objective, but logic is both at the same time.
In a sense, we can see the part that what we bring with us from the world of sleep into our soul life in the morning plays. And we can also know approximately: when what has entered as will withdraws back into the cosmic world of thought, only what rises up from the physical body and etheric body rules in us again.
Now this is one aspect of the will that rules in us. It is, so to speak, the cosmic side of the will, the side that we take out of us in the evening and bring back into us again in the morning. But self-reflection will indeed teach people that not only this will is present in him, of which I have just spoken, because this will expresses itself essentially in the so-called soul life, in memory, in imagination, in logical thinking. But when we walk, when we grasp, when we somehow use an instrument, the will is also active. In these activities, the will is not only active in the soul, as I have just described it; in these activities, the will takes hold of our physical organization and our etheric organization. Therefore, I cannot characterize the will only in these arrows here, but I must also depict the will permeating the physical and etheric bodies (see drawing on page 157, arrows from below). So I have to say: The will is also present in that which remains in the bed during sleep. The will, which must be characterized in this latter sense, comes, as it were, towards the other will, which is not in the physical body of the person during sleep. And this latter will basically becomes an external activity. So this will, which lives in the organs, which lives in the physical and etheric organization, is called upon by the other will coming to meet it. But when we are active as an awake person, we can clearly distinguish these two spheres of will.
Please note that on the one hand there is a will that counteracts the will coming from the other side. We have, so to speak, the interaction of two currents of will. One of these currents of will swirls through the human organism and the whole context shows you that you have to look at it as swirling from bottom to top. The other current swirls from top to bottom. Here the directions in the cosmos come into play, and we notice that it must be different in animals, in that the main direction of their bodily organization is precisely perpendicular to the main direction of the bodily organization of humans. The directions of will are differently integrated into the cosmos. So, too, when we, I would like to say, go into the differentiations of the human being, when we realize how this human being is composed of individual currents, then we notice the importance of the human being's being placed in the cosmos.
Now let us take a closer look at these two currents of will. As with many things in spiritual science, you will not be able to proceed in such a way that you, I might say, derive one from the other as in mathematical derivation, but in spiritual science the way to arrive at the truths is as follows: one truth is juxtaposed with the other and one must then seek the connection. With superficial simpletons this very easily leads to the objection that one does not “prove”. It is just as if someone, when he sees a horse and a cow standing side by side in a field, and they are certainly standing side by side for some reason, were to demand that someone should prove to him from the horse that the cow is standing beside it. Of course, one cannot prove from the essence of the horse that the cow is standing next to it. This is roughly the content of the objection that many people raise with regard to proof in spiritual science.
I would now like to present you with another fact, in addition to the one I have just mentioned, which you must gradually try to put into the appropriate context, based on what I have just discussed.
Everything that is in the soul of a person is also expressed in the physical body, and is imprinted in the physical body. The human being is organized in such a way that he awakens memory, imagination, and logical thinking by waking up, and that he allows them to rest within him, so to speak, while sleeping. This is a kind of rhythm. This rhythm is juxtaposed with another: the stream of will, which I have indicated here as being located in the organs. What confronts each other as two currents, you can, I would like to say, find it depicted in the human being: you can find it by looking at the system that is given by the human breathing rhythm. A few days ago, I already pointed out how the breathing rhythm can really be thought of in connection with falling asleep and waking up. Even if breathing naturally outlasts sleep, one still recognizes the connection in everything that somehow impairs calm breathing during sleep, for example. This connection between breathing and the rhythm of waking up, falling asleep, waking up, falling asleep is not so obvious, but this connection, this relationship is there nevertheless. And when we consider the human being in relation to his upward striving, we have to consider the breathing rhythm as something essential that is connected with this upward striving, the whole respiratory system, also insofar as it is expressed in the speech system. We breathe, we speak as human beings essentially upwards, even if this is transformed by the position of our throat into speaking forwards. There we have one rhythm, a unified rhythm.
We have another rhythm, we have the rhythm of circulation, the rhythm that is given to us in the pulse, and we know that the pulse rhythm is roughly related to the respiratory rhythm as four to one. You need only reflect a little on the anatomical and physiological aspects to realize that the pulse rhythm, the rhythm of circulation, is intimately connected with the metabolic-limb system of the human being. The actual rhythmic system is, I would say, separated out in the respiratory system. The more one engages with a characteristic of the respiratory system on the one hand and a characteristic of the pulse system on the other, the more one notices that everything that is present as an organ for the formation of memory, imagination, logical and that everything else that is connected with the will that flows through the organs can be related to the pulse rhythm by expressing itself upwards. Just as the will that is in our organs coincides with the will that we bring with us from the cosmos when we wake up, so the respiratory rhythm coincides with the pulse rhythm, with the circulation rhythm. And there we have in the interaction of the respiratory rhythm and the pulse rhythm, in a very physical way, what comes up from below and what strikes down from above, but in such a way that what strikes down from above is four times slower than what comes up from below. If I were to take this stroke as the time consideration for the breathing rhythm, I would have to take four for the pulse rhythm.
In fact, everything that man develops in the way of art, of rhythmic art, is based on this relationship between the pulse rhythm and the respiratory rhythm. I have already said this on the occasion of the discussion about the art of recitation. You can go into more detail. You can think that if you base it more on the pulse rhythm, you get: short syllable, long syllable. If you combine the breathing rhythm with the pulse rhythm, you get, for example, the meter of the hexameter, and so on. All meters are based on these relationships of rhythms that are within the human being itself.
Now, when you look at the blood rhythm, you look, so to speak, more at the physical; when you look more at the breathing rhythm, you look at the soul. The breathing rhythm is much more closely related to the soul than the blood rhythm. The breathing rhythm also opens outwards, just as logic and logical thinking open outwards. Now, irregularities in these rhythms are the cause of irregularities in human life. You can well imagine that if there really is such a ratio of four to one or one to four, then it must mean something if, let us say, the breathing rhythm becomes too long or the pulse rhythm too short. And yet this can be the case with humans. It can even be the case in a very insignificant way; then it manifests itself immediately.
Now I will present the radical cases. Imagine a person gets excited. He begins to become passionate. He starts ranting about something. This can go as far as raving. Or a person gets into the state that is described as follows: the thoughts do not want to, they stand still; one cannot think properly, they stay away. Just as the raving was the most radical expression of the process, from becoming passionate through ranting to becoming raving, it is the same with thoughts standing still, gradually leading to a kind of unconsciousness. The former, becoming passionate, becoming emotional, is based on the pulse rhythm becoming too fast. The stopping of thought and the fainting are due to a slowing of the respiratory rhythm.
So you see, the human being is interwoven with the rhythms of the whole world. And how we are within this world rhythm determines how we appear to us physically and mentally. The emotional life also expresses itself physically: the current that flows through the organism from bottom to top becomes too fast, it shakes the organs, and when it comes to raging, you can see how the organs are shaken. The current that flows from top to bottom becomes too slow; thoughts do not want to go from top to bottom. Here again we see how important it is that we can form a picture of man's place in the whole cosmic context, how he fits into it, and how it is mere childishness to count the bones, muscles, etc., and say: Man is only a higher animal formation — and not to take into account that what matters is this placing in the whole cosmic context.
Now I will tell you something that seems very far removed from what I have just explained, but which, in tomorrow's lecture, will nevertheless be linked to what I have just explained to form a whole. Let us now move from human existence to human development. You know that we are now living in the so-called fifth post-Atlantic period, which began around 1415 or 1413 and will continue. It is preceded by the fourth, which began around 747 BC before the Mystery of Golgotha, and this in turn is preceded by the third, which goes back to the 4th millennium.
Now, if we consider these periods, we can form the following schematic picture of their succession. Please imagine that the Atlantean period was preceded by what I called the Lemurian period in my “Occult Science”. I will assume here only the last phases of this Lemurian period, and now draw the seven successive cultural conditions of the Atlantean period: and now we have, in succession, the primeval Indian, primeval Persian, Egyptian-Chaldean, Greek-Latin, and now our fifth period; that would be the last period. I have schematically presented the successive periods to you.
You now also know from my “Secret Science” and from other presentations that I have given that such a period lasts approximately until the vernal point of the sun has completed the entire passage through the zodiac. It is only approximate, but for what we want to consider now, this approximation will have its good meaning. In 747 BC, before the event of Golgotha, the vernal point entered the zodiacal sign of Aries. It remained in this zodiacal sign until the 15th century. Then it passed over and is now in the zodiacal picture of Pisces. Before 747 the vernal point was in the sign of Taurus, so throughout the entire Egyptian-Chaldean cultural period the sun rose in spring in the constellation of Taurus; hence the bull service. Then came the ancient Persian period; the sun rose in the constellation of Gemini. During the time of ancient India, the sun rose in the constellation of Cancer. Then we come back to the Atlantean time and have the seven cultural periods in the Atlantean time. Now I ask you to consider the following and to visualize it as a question that we are initially presenting today.
Let us draw the sequence of the zodiacal constellations. So we have: Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, Pisces. We will now schematically draw here how it stands with the successive cultural periods. We know that we are now in the Pisces sign at the vernal equinox, and have the fifth post-Atlantic cultural period. We go back (see drawing, page 165, dark hatched): Aries fourth post-Atlantic cultural period, Taurus third post-Atlantic cultural period, Gemini second post-Atlantic cultural period, Cancer first post-Atlantic cultural period. We are now returning to the Atlantean period. The seven periods of the Atlantean period (light shading): Leo the seventh, Virgo the sixth, Libra the fifth, Scorpio the fourth, Sagittarius the third, Capricorn the second, Aquarius the first; and now we are returning to the Lemurian period and we are back to Pisces.
You see, when you consider the important time of the last culture, the last cultural epoch of the Lemurian period, and when you read about this important period of the development of the earth and humanity in my book “Occult Science”, you will be faced with a big question. If you take what I have presented in my “Occult Science in Outline”, especially in the presentations that appeared separately as “Our Atlantean Ancestors”, then you will see how one can actually speak of humanity, insofar as it is humanity today, only from this period onwards, and this period is the one in which the vernal point was in the same zodiacal constellation as it is now. We have, as humanity, gone through a complete cycle around the heavens and, in a certain sense, have arrived back at the starting point.
What I have just said relates to human becoming. We have often tried to show how the human soul life has changed in the time since the Atlantean period. We know how different this entire human soul life was in the time of the ancient Indians, and how it was still different in the Atlantean period. But if you read my writing about the Atlantean ancestors, you will see that we go back to a time in the Atlantean period when the human configuration manifests itself physically in the same way as the human soul was at that time. While in the post-Atlantean period the soul life works essentially differently, during the Atlantean period the whole body is metamorphosed. We thus come back more and more, I would say, from the region which I characterized above as the soul region, to what is here below the bodily region, which is permeated by the other stream of will. And as we go further back in Atlantis, we come back to the metamorphoses that relate to the shaping of the body. So that we can say that during the passage of the vernal point through Pisces, human beings were scarcely present in the bodily form as it is (light shading). Here it is taking on more and more of a bodily form. And here it is only just beginning to take on a soul form, in order to return to the point from which it once emerged in terms of its bodily form. So that you can say, the zodiac signs of Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn, Sagittarius, Scorpio, Libra, up to Virgo (light shading) correspond to the transformation of the human physical form; and only these upper zodiac signs correspond to the transformation of the human soul for us.
These things must first be considered from the point of view of spiritual science, and it will be seen that only then can concepts and ideas be formed about the essence of the human being. On the other hand, however, it may at least cast a light on what I have often said here, that we live in an important age. For while we have developed as humanity on Earth, the vernal point of the Sun has gone around the whole universe and has returned again in our era. We must therefore fulfill tasks that are, so to speak, guided by the fact that humanity has returned to its starting point, that it must undertake something in its soul life that corresponds to this return to the starting point. Today I only wanted to hint at what can be derived from such a consideration of the importance of the present human period of time. What I have said applies to the most advanced members of civilized humanity; but in the end it is they who are actually important for the development of humanity.
We will continue our discussion tomorrow, and focus on how these things relate to the latter.
Source: The Rudolf Steiner Archive
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