Sattva, Rajas, Tamas: The Occult Significance of the Bhagavad Gita — lecture 8 of 9

 

Rudolf Steiner, June 4, 1913:

If we want to approach such a creation as the sublime Bhagavad Gita with full understanding it is necessary for us to attune our souls to it, so to say; bring them into that manner of thought and feeling that really lies at the basis of such a work. This is especially true for people who, through their situation and circumstances, are as far removed from this great poem as are the people of the West. It is natural for us to make a contemporary work our own without much difficulty. It is also natural that those who belong to a certain nation should always have an immediate feeling for a work that has sprung directly out of the substance of that nation, even though it might belong to a previous age. The population of the West (not those of southern Asia), however, is altogether remote in sentiment and feeling from the Bhagavad Gita.

If we would approach it then with understanding we must prepare ourselves for the very different mood of soul, the different spirit, that pervades it. Such appalling misunderstandings can arise when people imagine they can approach this poem without first working on their own souls. A creation coming over to us from a strange race, from the ninth or tenth century before the foundation of Christianity, cannot be understood as directly by the people of the West as, say, the Kalevala by the Finnish people, or the Homeric poems by the Greeks. If we would enter into the matter further we must once more bring together different materials that can show us the way to enter into the spirit of this wonderful poem.

Here I would above all draw attention to one thing. The summits of spiritual life have at all times been concealed from the wide plain of human intelligence. So it has remained, in a certain sense, right up to our present age. It is true that one of the characteristics of our age, which is only now dawning and which we have somewhat described, will be that certain things hitherto kept secret and really known to but very few will be spread abroad into large circles. That is the reason why you are present here, because our movement is the beginning of this spreading abroad of facts that until now have remained secret from the masses. Perhaps some subconscious reason that brought you to the anthroposophical view of the world and into this spiritual movement came precisely from the feeling that certain secrets must today be poured out into all people. Until our time, however, these facts remained secret not because they were deliberately kept so, but because it lay in the natural course of man's development that they had to remain secret. It is said that the secrets of the old Mysteries were protected from the profane by certain definite, strictly observed rules. Far more than by rule, these secrets were protected by a fundamental characteristic of mankind in olden times, namely, that they simply could not have understood these secrets. This fact was a much more powerful protection than any external rule could be.

This has been, for certain facts, especially the case during the materialistic age. What I am about to say is extreme heresy from the point of view of our time. For example, there is nothing better protected in the regions of Central Europe than Fichte's philosophy. Not that it is kept secret, for his teachings are printed and are read. But they are not understood. They remain secrets. In this way much that will have to enter the general development of mankind will remain occult knowledge though it is published and revealed in the light of day.

Not only in this sense but in a rather different one too, there is a peculiarity of human evolution that is important concerning those ideas we must have in order to understand the Bhagavad Gita. Everything we may call the mood, the mode of feeling, the mental habit of ancient India from which the Gita sprang, was also in its full spirituality accessible to the understanding of only a few. What one age has produced by the activity of a few, remains secret in regard to its real depth, even afterward when it passes over and becomes the property of a whole people. Again, this is a peculiar trait in the evolution of man, which is full of wisdom though it may at first seem paradoxical. Even for the contemporaries of the Bhagavad Gita and for their followers, for the whole race to which this summit of spiritual achievement belongs, and for its posterity, its teaching remained a secret. The people who came later did not know the real depth of this spiritual current. It is true that in the centuries following there grew up a certain religious belief in its teachings, combined with great fervor of feeling, but with this there was no deepening of perception. Neither the contemporaries nor those who followed developed a really penetrating understanding of this poem. In the time between then and now there were only a few who really understood it.

Thus it comes about that in the judgment of posterity what was once present as a strong and special spiritual movement is greatly distorted and falsified. As a rule we cannot find the way to come near to an understanding of some reality by studying the judgments of the descendants of the race that produced it. So, in the deep sentiments and feelings of the people of India today we will not find real understanding for the spiritual tendency that in the deepest sense permeates the Bhagavad Gita. We will find enthusiasm, strong feeling, and fervent belief in abundance, but not a deep perception of its meaning. This is especially true of the age just passed, from the fourteenth and fifteenth to the nineteenth century. As a matter of fact, it is most especially true for the people who confess that religion. There is one anecdote that like many others reveals a deep truth — how a great European thinker said on his deathbed, “Only one person understood me, and he misunderstood me.”

It can also be said of this age that has just run its course, that it contained some spiritual substance that represents a great height of achievement but in the widest circles has remained unknown as to its real nature, even to its contemporaries. Here is something to which I would like to draw your attention. Without doubt, among the present people of the East, and of India, some exceptionally clever people can be found. By the whole configuration of their mind and soul, however, they are already far from understanding those feelings poured out in the Bhagavad Gita. Consider how these people receive from Western civilization a way of thought that does not reach to the depths but is merely superficial understanding. This has a twofold result. For one, it is easy for the Eastern peoples, particularly for the descendants of the Bhagavad Gita people, to develop something that may easily make them feel how far behind a superficial Western culture is in relation to what has already been given by their great poem. In effect they still have more ways of approach to the meaning of that poem than to the deeper contents of Western spiritual and intellectual life. Then there are others in India who would gladly be ready to receive such spiritual substance as is contained, let us say, in the works of Solovieff, Hegel, and Fichte, to mention a few of many spiritualized thinkers. Many Indian thinkers would like to make these ideas their own.

I once experienced something of this kind. At the beginning of our founding of the German Section in our movement an Indian thinker sent me a dissertation. He sent it to many other Europeans besides. In this he tried to combine what Indian philosophy can give with important European concepts, such as might be gained in real truth — so he implied — if one entered deeply into Hegel and Fichte. In spite of the person's honest effort the whole essay was of no use whatever. I do not mean to say anything against it, rather I would praise his effort, but the fact is, what this man produced could only appear utter dilettantism to anyone who had access to the real concepts of Fichte and Hegel. There was nothing to be done with the whole thing.

Here we have a person who honestly endeavors to penetrate a later spiritual stream altogether different from his own point of view, but he cannot get through the hindrances that time and evolution put in his way. Nevertheless, when he attempts to penetrate them, untrue and impossible stuff is the result. Later I heard a lecture by another person, who does not know what European spiritual evolution really is, and what its depths contain. He lectured in support of the same Indian thinker. He was a European who had learned the arguments of the Indian thinker and was bringing them forward as spiritual wisdom before his followers. They too of course were ignorant of the fact that they were listening to something which rested on a wrong kind of intellectual basis. For one who could look keenly into what the European gave out, it was simply terrible. If you will forgive the expression, it was enough to give one the creeps. It was one misunderstanding grafted onto another misunderstanding. So difficult is it to comprehend all that the human soul can produce. We must make it our ideal to truly understand all the masterpieces of the human spirit. If we feel this ideal through and through and consider what has just been said, we shall gain a ray of light to show us how difficult of access the Bhagavad Gita really is. Also, we shall realize how untold misunderstandings are possible, and how harmful they can be.

We in the West can well understand how the people of the East can look up to the old creative spirits of earlier times, whose activity flows through the Vedantic philosophy and permeates the Sankhya philosophy with its deep meaning. We can understand how the Eastern man looks up with reverence to that climax of spiritual achievement that appears in Shankaracharya seven or eight centuries after the foundation of Christianity. All this we can realize, but we must think of it in another way also if we want to attain a really deep understanding. To do so we must set up something as a kind of hypothesis, for it has not yet been realized in evolution.

Let us imagine that those who were the creators of that sublime spirituality that permeates the Vedas, the Vedantic literature, and the philosophy of Shankaracharya were to appear again in our time with the same spiritual faculty, the same keenness of perception they had when they were in the world in that ancient epoch. They would have come in touch with spiritual creations like those of Solovieff, Hegel, and Fichte. What would they have said? We are supposing it does not concern us what the adherents of those ancient philosophies say, but what those spirits themselves would say. I am aware that I am going to say something paradoxical, but we must think of what Schopenhauer once said. “There is no getting away from it, it is the sad fate of truth that it must always become paradoxical in the world. Truth is not able to sit on the throne of error, therefore it sits on the throne of time, and appeals to the guardian angel of time. So great, however, is the spread of that angel's mighty wings that the individual dies within a single beat.” So we must not shrink from the fact that truth must needs appear paradoxical. The following does also, but it is true.

If the poets of the Vedas, the founders of Sankhya philosophy, even Shankaracharya himself, had come again in the nineteenth century and had seen the creations of Solovieff, Hegel, and Fichte, all those great men would have said, “What we were striving for back in that era, what we hoped our gift of spiritual vision would reveal to us, these three men have achieved by the very quality and tenor of their minds. We thought we must rise into heights of clairvoyant vision, then on these heights there would appear before us what permeates the souls of these nineteenth century men quite naturally, almost as a matter of course!”

This sounds paradoxical to those Western people who in childlike unconsciousness look to the people of the East, comparing themselves with them, and all the while quite misunderstanding what the West actually contains. A peculiarly grotesque picture. We imagine those founders of Indian philosophy looking up fervently to Fichte and other Western thinkers; and along with them we see a number of people today who do not value the spiritual substance of Europe but grovel in the dust before Shankaracharya and those before him while they themselves are not concerned with the achievements of such as Hegel, Fichte. and Solovieff. Why is this so? Only by such a hypothesis can we understand all the facts history presents to us.

We shall understand this if we look up into those times from which the spiritual substance of the Bhagavad Gita flowed. Let us imagine the man of that period somewhat as follows. What appears to a person today in varied ways in his dream-consciousness — the pictorial imagination of dream-life — was in that ancient time the normal content of man's soul, his everyday consciousness. His was a dreamlike picture consciousness, by no means the same as it was in the Old Moon epoch but much more evolved. This was the condition out of which men's souls were passing on in the descending line of evolution. Still earlier was what we call sleep-consciousness, a state wholly closed to us today, from which a kind of inspiration, dream-like, came to men. It was the state closed to us today during our sleep. As dream-consciousness is for us, so was this sleep-consciousness for those ancient men. It found its way into their normal picture-consciousness much as dream-consciousness does for us, but more rarely. In another respect also it was somewhat different in those times. Our dream-consciousness today generally brings up recollections of our ordinary life. Then, when sleep-consciousness could still penetrate the higher worlds, it gave men recollections of those spiritual worlds. Then gradually this consciousness descended lower and lower.

Anyone who at that time was striving as we do today in our occult education, aimed for something quite different. When we today go through our occult development we are aware that we have gone downhill to our everyday consciousness and are now striving upward. Those seekers were also striving upward, from their everyday dream-consciousness. What was it then that they attained? With all their pains it was something altogether different from what we are trying to attain. If someone had offered those men my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds they would have had no use for it at all. What it contains would have been foolishness for that ancient time; it has sense only for mankind today. Then, everything those men did with their Yoga and Sankhya was a striving toward a height that we have reached in the most profound works of our time, in those of the three European thinkers I have mentioned. They were striving to grasp the world in ideas and concepts. Therefore, one who really penetrates the matter finds no difference — apart from differences of time, mood, form, and quality of feeling — between our three thinkers and the Vedantic philosophy. At that time the Vedantic philosophy was that to which men were striving upward; today it has come down and is accessible to everyday consciousness.

If we would describe the condition of our souls in this connection we may say to begin with that we have a sleep-consciousness that for us is closed but for the ancient people of India was still permeated by the light of spiritual vision. What we are now striving for lay hidden in the depths of the future for them. I mean what we call Imaginative Knowledge, fully conscious picture-consciousness, permeated by the sense of the ego; fully conscious Imagination as it is described in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. So much for the technical point that should be inserted here. In these abstract technicalities lies something far more important: that if the man of today will only vigorously make use of the forces present in his soul, what the men of the Bhagavad Gita era strove for with all their might lies right at his hand. It really does, even if only for a Solovieff, a Fichte, or a Hegel. There is something more. What today can be found right at hand was in those ancient times attained by application of all the keenness of vision of Sankhya, and the deep penetration of Yoga. It was attained by effort and pain, by sublime effort to lift the mind.

Now imagine how different the situation is for a man who, for example, lives at the top of a mountain, has his house there and is continually enjoying the magnificent view, from that of a man who has never once seen the view but has to toil upward with trouble and pain from the valley. If you have the view every day you get accustomed to it. It is not in the concepts, in their content, that the achievements of Shankaracharya, of the Vedic poets, and of their successors are different from those of Hegel and Fichte. The difference lies in the fact that Shankaracharya's predecessors were striving upward from the valley to the summit; that it was their keenness of mind in Sankhya philosophy, their deepening of soul in Yoga, that led them there. It was in this work, this overcoming of the soul, that the experience lay. It is the experience, not the content of thought, that is important here.

This is the immensely significant thing, something from which we may in a certain sense derive comfort because the European does not value what we can find right at hand. Europeans prefer the form in which it meets them in Vedantic and Sankhya philosophies, because there, without knowing it, they value the great efforts that achieved it. That is the personal side of the matter. It makes a difference whether you find a certain content of thought here or there, or whether you attain it by the severest effort of the soul. It is the soul's work that gives a thing its life. This we must take into account. What was once attained alone by Shankaracharya and by the deep training of Yoga can be found today right at hand, even if only by men like those we have named.

This is not a matter for abstract commentaries. We only need the power to transplant ourselves into the living feelings of that time. Then we begin to understand that the external expressions themselves, the outer forms of the ideas, were experienced quite differently by the men of that era from the way we can experience them. We must study those forms of expression that belong to the feeling, the mood, the mental habit of a human soul in the time of the Gita, who might live through what that great poem contains. We must study it not in an external philological sense, not in order to give academic commentaries, but to show how different is the whole configuration of feeling and idea in that poem from what we have now. Although the conceptual explanation of the world — which today, to use a graphic term, lies below and then lay above — though the content of thought is the same, the form of expression is different. Whoever would stop with the abstract contents of these thoughts may find them easy to understand, but whoever would work his way through to the real, living experience will not find it easy. It will cost him some pains to go this way again and feel with the ancient man of India because it was by this way that such concepts first arose as those that flowed out into the words sattwa, rajas, tamas. I do not attach importance to the ideal concepts these words imply in the Bhagavad Gita, but indeed we today are inclined to take them much too easily, thinking we understand them.

What is it that actually lies in these words? Without a living sympathy with what was felt in them we cannot follow a single line of the poem with the right quality of feeling, particularly in its later sections. At a higher stage, our inability to feel our way into these concepts is something like trying to read a book in a language that is not understood. For such a person there would be no question of seeking out the meaning of concepts in commentaries. He would just set to work to learn the language. So here it is not a matter of interpreting and commenting on the words sattwa, rajas, tamas in an academic way. In them lies the feeling of the whole period of the Gita, something of immense significance because it led men to an understanding of the world and its phenomena. If we would describe the way they were led we must first free ourselves from many things that are not to be found in such men as Solovieff, Hegel, and Fichte yet lie in the widespread, fossilized thinking of the West. By sattwa, rajas, tamas is meant a certain kind of living one's way into the different conditions of universal life, in its most varied kingdoms. It would be abstract and wrong to interpret these words simply on the basis of the ancient Indian quality of thought and feeling. It is easier to take them in the true sense of the life of that time but to interpret them as much as possible through our own life. It is better to choose the external contour and coloring of these conceptions freely out of our own experience.

Let us consider the way man experiences nature when he enters intelligently into the three kingdoms that surround him. His mode and quality of knowledge is different in the case of each. I am not trying to make you understand sattwa, rajas, and tamas exhaustively. I only want to help you to come a little nearer to an idea of their meaning. When man today approaches the mineral kingdom he feels he can penetrate it and its laws with his thinking, can in a certain sense live together with it. This kind of understanding at the time of the Gita would have been called a sattwa understanding of the mineral kingdom. In the plant kingdom we always encounter an obstacle: namely, that with our present intelligence we cannot penetrate life. The ideal now is to investigate and analyze nature from a physical-chemical standpoint, and to comprehend it in this manner. In fact some scientists spin their threads of thought so far as to imagine they have come nearer to the idea of life by producing external forms that imitate as closely as possible the appearance of the generative process. This is idle fantasy. In his pursuit of knowledge man does not penetrate the plant kingdom as far as he does the mineral. All he can do is to observe plant life. Now what one can only observe, not enter with intellectual understanding, is rajas-understanding. When we come to the animal kingdom, its form of consciousness escapes our everyday intelligence far more than does the life of a plant. We do not perceive what the animal actually lives and experiences. What man with his science today can understand about the animal kingdom is a tamas-understanding.

We may add something further. We shall never reach an understanding beyond the limits of abstract concepts if we consider only the concepts of science regarding the activity of living beings. Sleep, for example, is not the same for man and animal. Simply to define sleep would be like defining a knife as the same thing whether used for shaving or cutting meat. If we would keep an open mind and approach the concepts of tamas, rajas, and sattwa once more from a different aspect we can add something else taken from our present-day life.

Man today nourishes himself with various substances: animal, plant, and mineral. These foods of course have different effects on his constitution. When he eats plants he permeates himself with sattwa conditions. When he tries to understand them they are for him a rajas condition. Nourishment from the assimilation of mineral substance — salts and the like — represents a condition of rajas; that brought about by eating meat represents tamas. Notice that we cannot keep the same order of sequence as if we were starting from an abstract definition. We have to keep our concepts mobile. I have not told you this to inspire horror in those who feel bound to eating meat. In a moment I shall mention another matter where the connection is again different.

Let us imagine that a man is trying to assimilate the outer world not through ordinary science but by that kind of clairvoyance that is legitimate for our age. Suppose that he now brings the facts and phenomena of the surrounding world into his clairvoyant consciousness. All this will call forth a certain condition in him, just as for ordinary understanding the three kingdoms of nature call forth conditions of sattwa, rajas, and tamas. In effect what can enter the purest form of clairvoyant perception corresponding to purified clairvoyance calls forth the condition of tamas. (I use the word “purified” not in the moral sense.) A man who would truly see spiritual facts objectively with that clairvoyance that we can attain today must by this activity bring about in himself the condition of tamas. Then when he returns into the ordinary world where he immediately forgets his clairvoyant knowledge, he feels that with his ordinary mode of knowledge he enters a new condition, a new relation to knowledge, namely, the sattwa condition. Thus, in our present age everyday knowledge is the sattwa condition. In the intermediate stage of belief, of faith that builds on authority, we are in the rajas condition.

Knowledge in the higher worlds brings about the condition of tamas in the souls of men. Knowledge in our everyday environment is the condition of sattwa; while faith, religious belief resting on authority, brings about the condition of rajas. So you see, those whose constitution compels them to eat meat need not be horrified because meat puts them in a condition of tamas because the same condition is brought about by purified clairvoyance. It is that condition of an external thing when by some natural process it is most detached from the spiritual. If we call the spirit “light” then the tamas condition is devoid of light. It is “darkness.” So long as our organism is permeated by the spirit in the normal way we are in the sattwa condition, that of our ordinary perception of the external world. When we are asleep we are in tamas. We have to bring about this condition in sleep in order that our spirit may leave our body and enter the higher spirituality around us. If we would reach the higher worlds — and the Evangelist already tells us what man's darkness is — our human nature must be in the condition of tamas. Since man is in the condition of sattwa, not of tamas, which is darkness, the words of the Evangelist, “The light shineth in darkness and the darkness comprehendeth it not,” can be rendered somewhat as follows, “The higher light penetrated as far as man, but he was filled by a natural sattwa that he would not give up.” Thus the higher light could not find entrance because it can only shine in darkness.

If we are seeking knowledge of such living concepts as sattwa, rajas, and tamas we must get accustomed to not taking them in an absolute sense. They are always, so to say, turning this way and that. For a right concept of the world there is no absolute higher or lower, only in a relative sense. A European professor took objection to this. He translated sattwa as “goodness” and objected to another man who translated it as “light,” though he translated tamas as “darkness.” Such things truly express the source of all misunderstanding. When man is in the condition of tamas — whether by sleep or clairvoyant perception, to take only these two cases — then in effect he is in darkness as far as external man is concerned. So ancient Indian thought was right, yet it could not use a word like “light” in place of the word sattwa. Tamas may always be translated “darkness” but for the external world the sattwa condition could not always be simply interpreted as “light.”

Suppose we are describing light. It is entirely correct to call the light colors — red, orange, yellow — in the sense of Sankhya philosophy the sattwa colors. In this sense too green must be called a rajas color; blue, indigo, violet, tamas colors. One may say effects of light and of clairvoyance in general fall under the concept of sattwa. Under the same concept we must also place, for example, goodness, kindness, loving behavior by man. It is true that light falls under the concept of sattwa, but this concept is broader; light is not really identical with it. Therefore it is wrong to translate sattwa as “light” though it is quite possible to translate tamas as “darkness.” Nor is it correct to say that “light” does not convey the idea of sattwa.

The criticism that the professor made of a man who may have been well aware of this is also not quite justified, for the simple reason that if someone said “Here is a lion” nobody would attempt to correct him by saying “No, here is a beast of prey.” Both are correct. This comparison hits the nail right on the head. As regards external appearance it is correct to associate sattwa with what is full of light, but it is wrong to say sattwa is only of light. It is a more general concept than light, just as beast of prey is more general than lion.

A similar thing is not true of darkness for the reason that in tamas things that in rajas and sattwa are different and specific merge into something more general. After all, a lamb and a lion are two very different creatures. If I would describe them as to their sattwa characters — the form that the natural element of life and force and spirit takes in lambs and lions — I would describe them very differently. But if I would describe them in the condition of tamas the differences do not come into consideration because we have the tamas condition when the lamb or lion is simply lying lazily on the ground. In the sattwa condition lambs and lions are very different, but for cosmic understanding the indolence of both is after all one and the same.

Our power of truly looking into such concepts must therefore adapt to much differentiation. As a matter of fact, these three concepts with the qualities of feeling in them are among the most illuminating things in the whole of Sankhya. In all that Krishna puts before Arjuna when he presents himself as the founder of the age of self-consciousness, he has to speak in words altogether permeated by those shades of feeling derived from the concepts sattwa, rajas, and tamas. About these three concepts, and what at length leads to a climax in the Bhagavad Gita, we shall speak more fully in the last lecture of this course.

Source: http://www.webcitation.org/5v16IMrPV

Krishna: the future Jesus: the pure, innocent, unfallen human soul

 

The Occult Significance of the Bhagavad Gita. Lecture 7 of 9.

Rudolf Steiner, June 3, 1913:

It is natural, though it is usually ignored by science, that man as he is simply cannot know one part of his being. As he looks out upon the world it shows itself, roughly expressed, as an ascending scale from the mineral kingdom through the plant and animal kingdoms up to man. It goes without saying that man must assume some creative force behind all the forms he perceives around him in the kingdoms of nature. The point is, however, that man gains knowledge of the world he lives in just because the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms are outside him and he can observe them. As to all man has within himself, however, he can only gain knowledge of that insofar as the same forces are at work in him as are active in the three kingdoms of nature outside him. The forces active within him which transcend those three kingdoms he cannot know by the usual methods of knowing nature — not in the least. It is just what man has within himself over and above the kingdoms of nature that enables him to build up systematically a knowledge of those kingdoms outside him. Just as little as the eye, whose purpose it is to see outwardly, can see itself, just so little can man gain knowledge of what in himself is there in order that he may acquire knowledge. This is a very simple idea, but sound.

It is impossible for the eye to see itself because it is there to see out, and it is impossible for those forces in man that are there to acquire outer knowledge, to acquire knowledge of themselves. Further, it is these very forces that represent what it is in man that makes him something more than an animal. Materialistic Darwinism disposes of this fact easily by simply leaving out of account the fact that this special human power of acquiring knowledge itself cannot be known by man's usual instrument for knowledge. Recognizing that this power is unknowable, science denies its existence and accordingly considers man only insofar as he is still animal. You see on what the peculiar fallacy, the illusion, of materialistic Darwinism rests. Man cannot know in himself those forces that are the actual means of knowledge. But the eye can see another eye, and for this reason, other things being equal, it can believe in itself. With the faculty of knowledge this is not the case. It would be logically possible for a man to confront another man and perceive in him the knowing faculty that raises him above animals. Logically, that is. But even that is actually impossible, for the very reasons implied in what we have described previously about the effects of thinking.

What does ordinary knowledge involve in the external world? We saw that it involves a perpetual destruction of the nerve structures in the brain. This is an actual external process. The creative forces on the other hand — those that really distinguish man from the animal — cannot develop at all in our waking life when we normally acquire knowledge. In this life they must behave so as not to interfere with the wearing away of the nerve structures. Therefore in waking life these forces are at rest. They sleep.

We have recognized a great truth if we can thoroughly enter into the thought that all that would have to be known to realize the full fallacy of materialistic Darwinism, even on the physical plane, is actually asleep in our waking life; that what raises man above the animal is at rest and a destructive process is taking place. The creative forces that bring forth the animal organism are not so far perfected as those at work in the organism of man. In our waking life the latter are inactive, and the process that takes their place is perpetually destroying just what in man transcends the animal. These very creative forces are destroyed during waking life. They are not present at all, but during sleep they appear and begin building up again what has been destroyed. These creative forces that raise man above the animal can really be perceived in a sleeping man.

So we should have to say that whatever it is that repairs in sleeping man the forces he spends in his waking life must be the forces that raise him above the animals.These forces are still unknown to external natural science, which is only beginning to surmise them. Science, however, is on the way and one day will reveal these forces by purely external methods. Indeed, there are already exceptions to the statement that the forces leading man out beyond the animal nature are ordinarily unobservable in him. When science once learns to distinguish these forces in man it will discover in the sleeping human body the physical evidence of man's transcending the animal kingdom. When it distinguishes the regenerative forces in man from what is present in the animal kingdom also, it will recognize how the creative forces active in the Earth's life to raise man beyond the animal are awake only when man sleeps. From all this we can gather that in self-knowledge man's creative forces, the real human forces, can only be perceived by man when he becomes clairvoyant during sleep; that is, when in a condition otherwise like sleep he awakes clairvoyantly. In the fifth lecture we already indicated this fact.

Today I have said that to some extent, from the processes observable in sleeping man, science will after a time find indications of the forces whereby man transcends the animal, but they will only be indications. These forces, when they appear to clairvoyant consciousness today, are seen to be of such a nature that they cannot be revealed externally to the senses in their true form. It will be possible to indicate their existence by deductions from scientific facts. Apart from their not being perceptible in their essence there is quite another reason why it will become possible to discover them if not to perceive them. These human creative forces have a very special relation to all the other forces of nature. We are here approaching a difficult subject, but it may be possible to make it clear in the following way.

Let us imagine we have here the receiver of an air-pump, say a glass bell-jar, and suppose we succeed in making a really perfect vacuum inside it. That is very nearly possible ordinarily. Everyone whose intellect is bound to the world of sense will now say, “Inside there is no air, only an empty space; we cannot go any farther, there cannot be less than no air inside.” Actually that is not true. We can pump until no air at all is left, then go on pumping until we get a space still more empty of air than a vacuum. People dependent on the material will find it difficult to imagine this “less than nothing.” Or, suppose you have ten shillings in your pocket. You can gradually spend them until you have nothing left. In this domain of life there is a real “less than nothing.” It is often one of the strongest realities — you can go into debt for a few shillings. In practical life less-than-nothing is often more intensely real than the reality of possession.

It is remarkable what things are sometimes accepted as axioms, as obvious truths. Thus, you can read in many Western philosophic books that there can nowhere be less than nothing, that there is no such thing. Even more, it is sometimes said that nothing itself cannot exist. Yet, what exists in our illustration about debt exists also in the universe. All philosophic dicta about “nothing,” however pretentious the form they take, are really rubbish. They are themselves a kind of ill-defined nothingness. It is true that the physical something that surrounds us can be reduced to nothing, and then still further to less than nothing. This “nothing” actually is a real factor on all sides. We must imagine the world that surrounds us, which we know in the forces of nature throughout the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms, reduced down to nothing, then down to below nothing. Then it is that those forces arise that are creatively active in man when he sleeps. Natural science knows only the external side of these forces. In fact, it holds fast to a mere abstraction about them and therefore cannot enter into or appreciate them because ordinary science is to the reality in the forces of nature as the abstract number ten, for example, is to ten beans or ten apples. If we eliminate quality and say that all these are “ten” and nothing else, we are doing what natural science does, making no distinctions, touching only the surface of things. Suppose it gains the idea that regenerative forces must be present building up the organism again in sleep; then it will treat these forces as does a man who, when someone meets him saying “I have fifteen shillings in my pocket,” replies “Not so; you have fifteen.” The man leaves out of account the very thing that matters. Consequently science will confuse these forces with the ordinary natural laws, and will fail to recognize that higher laws are at work in them.

I mention all this to show what difficulties external science has and must have in getting to know the truth. It will draw certain conclusions and thus come near the truth. For some persons this will not be necessary, because science will gradually be supplemented by clairvoyant perception that does experience the difference between these forces and those active out in the three kingdoms of nature. At present I cannot deal fully with the superficial objection that animals also sleep. Such objections have little logical value but people do not notice it, nor their superficiality, for they judge according to concepts instead of the real nature of things. By introducing animal sleep into the argument one would speak the same fallacy as if someone were to say “I sharpen my pencil with a knife and I also shave with a knife,” and another person replied “That is impossible; knives are there to cut meat.” People are always making that kind of judgment. They think that a given thing must have the same function in different realms of nature. Sleep is an altogether different function in man from what it is in the animals.

I wanted to call your attention to forces at work in man's nature that we find at first in the regeneration of his organism as he sleeps. Now, these forces are closely related to other forces, those that also develop in man with a certain unconsciousness. I mean the forces having to do with the propagation of the race. We know that up to a certain age man's consciousness is filled with a pure and straightforward unconsciousness of these forces: the innocence of childhood. Then at a certain age this consciousness awakens. From that time onward the human organism is permeated by an awareness of the forces afterward known as sensual sex-love.

What in earlier life lives as a sleeping force and only wakens with puberty, seen in its original and essential form is the very same as those forces that in sleep regenerate the outworn forces in man. Only they are hidden by the other parts of human nature in which they are mingled. Invisibly in man there are at work forces that can become capable of either good or evil only when they awaken, but that sleep, or at most dream, until the time of puberty. Since the forces that manifest themselves afterward must first be prepared, they are intermingled, though not yet awake, with the remaining forces in man even from birth onward. All this time his nature is permeated by these sleeping forces. This is what meets us in the child as such a wonderful mystery. It is the sleeping generative forces that only waken later on. One who is sensitive to these things feels something like a gentle breath of God in the activity of these forces withdrawn into reticence in childhood, whatever the naughtiness, obstinacy, and other more or less unpleasant characteristics a child may have. These innocent qualities of the child are those of the grown-up person, but in childlike form. One who recognizes them as among the generative forces feels the breath of divine powers. While in later life they appear in man's lower nature, they are so wonderful because they really breathe the pure breath of God so long as they work in unconscious innocence. We must feel these things and be sensitive to them, then we shall perceive how wonderfully human nature is composed. The generative forces, sleeping during the most tender age of childhood, waken around the time of puberty, and from then on are still active in innocence when at night man sinks back into sleep.

Thus man's nature falls into two parts. In every human being two persons confront us — the one that we are from the time we waken until we go to sleep, the other, from going to sleep to waking again. In our waking state we are continually at pains to wear and worry our nature down to the animal level with all that is not pure knowledge, pure spiritual activity. What raises us above humanity holds sway like a pure, sublime force within the generative powers as they were during innocent childhood, and then in sleep it is awakened in the regeneration of what is worn away in waking life. So we have in ourselves one person who is related to the creative forces in man, and another who destroys them.

The deeply significant thing in the double nature of man is, that behind all that the senses perceive we have to surmise another man, one in whom the creative forces dwell. This second man is really never there in a pure, unmixed form; not during waking life nor even in sleep, because in sleep the physical and etheric bodies still remain permeated by the after-effects of waking life, by the disturbing and destructive forces. When at last the latter have been removed altogether, we wake up again.

So it has been since what we call the Lemurian Age, the beginning, strictly speaking, of present-day mankind's evolution. At that time, as is described in greater detail in my Occult Science, the Luciferic influence on man set in; and from this influence there came, among other things, what today compels man continually to wear and tear himself down to the animal nature. The other element that exists in human nature, which man as he is now does not yet know — the creative forces in him — all this came into play in the early Lemurian time before the Luciferic impulses entered. Thus we rise in thought from man ‘become’ to man ‘becoming’; from man created to man being re-created. In so doing we have to look out into that distant Lemurian time when man was as yet wholly permeated by the creating forces. At that time man came into being as he is today. If we follow the human race from that epoch onward, we have this double nature of man continually before us in all that has happened since. Man then entered a kind of lower nature.

At the same time, as we can see clairvoyantly by looking back into the Akashic record, there appeared beside ordinary people, who themselves were permeated by the human creative forces, something like a brother- or sister-soul; a definite soul. It was as though this sister-soul was held back, not thrown into the current of human evolution. It remained permeated through and through by human creative forces only, and by nothing else. Thus, a brother- or sister-soul (in that ancient time there was no difference) — Adam's brother-soul — remained behind. It could not enter the physical process of mankind's development. It lived on, invisible to the physical world of man. It was not born as men are born, in the flowing stream of this life, because if it had entered into birth and death it would have been in the processes of physical human life. It could only be perceived by those who rose to the heights of clairvoyance, who developed those forces that awaken in the state we otherwise know as sleep. In that state man is near to the forces that live and work in purity in the sister-soul.

Man entered his evolution, but holding sway above this life there lived, in sacrifice, a soul that throughout all the processes of human life never came down in bodily form. It did not strive like ordinary human souls for birth and death in successive incarnations, and it could only show itself to them when in their sleep they attained clairvoyant vision. Yet it worked on mankind wherever they could meet it with special clairvoyant gifts. There were men who either by nature or special training in schools of initiation had this power and were able to recognize the creative forces. Wherever such schools are mentioned in history we can always find evidence that they were aware of a soul accompanying mankind. In most instances it was only recognizable in those special conditions of clairvoyance that expand man's spiritual vision into sleep consciousness.

When Arjuna stood on the battlefield with the Kurus and Pandus arrayed against each other, when he felt all that was going on around him and deeply realized the unique situation in which he was placed, it came about that this soul we have mentioned spoke to him through the soul of his charioteer. The manifestation of this special soul, speaking through a human soul, is none other than Krishna. For what soul was it that could instill into man the impulse to consciousness of self? It was the soul that had remained behind in the old Lemurian age when men entered his actual earthly evolution.

This soul had often been visible in manifestations before, but in a far more spiritual form. At the moment, however, of which the Bhagavad Gita tells us, we have to imagine a kind of embodiment, though much concealed in maya, of this soul of Krishna. Later on in history a definite incarnation takes place. This soul actually incarnated in the body of a child. Those of our friends to whom I have spoken of this before know that at the time when Christianity was founded two children were born in different families, both from the house of David. The one child is mentioned in St. Matthew's Gospel, the other in St. Luke's. This is the true reason for the external discrepancies between the two Gospels. Now this very Jesus child of St. Luke's Gospel is an incarnation of that same soul that had never before lived in a human body but is nevertheless a human soul, having been one in the ancient Lemurian age. This is the same that revealed itself as Krishna.

Thus we have all that the Krishna impulse signifies incarnated in the body of the Luke Jesus child. What was there embodied is related to the forces that are asleep in every child in their sublime purity and innocence, until they awaken as the sex-forces. In this child they can manifest themselves and be active until the age of puberty when man ordinarily becomes sexually mature. But the body of this child that had been taken from common humanity would no longer have been adapted to the forces related to the innocent sex-forces in the child. Thus the soul in the other Jesus child, which was the soul of Zarathustra, that had passed through many incarnations and reached its eminence by hard work and special striving, passed over into the body of the Luke Jesus child, and from then on dwelt in that body.

We touch here upon a wonderful mystery. We see how into the body of the Luke Jesus child there enters the soul of man as he was before he descended into the course of earthly incarnations. We understand that this soul could hold sway in the human body only until the twelfth year of its life. After that another soul must take possession, the Zarathustra soul that had gone through all the transformations of mankind. This wonderful mystery is enacted, that the innermost essence and self of man, which we have seen hailed as Krishna, permeates the Jesus child of the Luke Gospel. In this child are the innermost forces of humanity, the Krishna forces, for indeed we know their origin. This Krishna root takes us back into the Lemurian time, the very primeval age of man. At that time it was one with humanity, before ever the physical evolution of mankind began. In later time this root, these Krishna forces, flowing together and uniting in the unknown and unseen, worked to bring about the unfolding of man's inner being from within. Concretely embodied, this root is present within a single being, the Luke Jesus child, and as the child grows up it remains active beneath the surface of life in this special body after the Zarathustra soul has entered it.

In the thirtieth year, in the moment the Bible describes as the Baptism in the Jordan, there comes toward this special human body what now belongs to all mankind. This is the moment indicated in the words “This is my well-beloved Son; this day have I begotten Him.” Christ now comes toward the physical body from the other side. In the body that stands before us there, we have in concrete form what yesterday we thought of abstractly. What belongs to all mankind comes to the body that contains what, through another impulse, has brought the inner being of man to the highest ideal of individual strength, and will carry it to yet greater heights.

I think when you consider all that has been said today, leading up as it does to a certain understanding of that great moment pictorially represented as the baptism by St. John, you will have to admit that our anthroposophical outlook takes nothing away from the sublime majesty of the Christ-Idea. On the contrary, by shedding the light of understanding upon it much is added to all that can be given to mankind exoterically. Today I have endeavored to present the matter in such a way as to give it sense and meaning for those who can consider it with an open mind, in the light of external human history.

That is not the way, however, by which this secret was found. Someone might ask, in view of the lectures about St. Luke's Gospel I delivered years ago in Basel, when for the first time I drew attention to the different genealogies of the two Jesus children, “Why did you not explain then all you have added to it now?” That depends on the whole way these things were discovered. Actually, this truth has never yet been found in one single and complete whole by the human understanding. It was not discovered in the form I have tried to convey it today. The truth itself was there first, as I indicated in a lecture a few days ago, and the rest followed of its own accord, adding itself to the main body of this piece of knowledge about the two Jesus children.

From this you may gather that in the Anthroposophical Movement for which I am permitted to stand before you, there is nothing of the nature of intellectual or logical construction. I do not mean to lay this down as a general rule for everybody, but I do regard it as my own personal task to say nothing that is given by the intellect as such but to take things in the way they are directly and immediately given to occult vision. Only afterward are they permeated with the power of understanding, The truth about the two Jesus children was not discovered by external historical research, but from the beginning it was an occult fact. Afterward the connection with the Krishna mystery was revealed.

You see in this how the science of man will have to work into the occult realm in the age we are entering; how the fundamental impulses of earthly evolution will gradually be understood and realized by individual persons, and how this will throw more and more light on all that has happened in the past. True science will not only speak to the intellect, but will fill the whole soul of man. It is just when we make ourselves acquainted with occult facts that we have a feeling for the real majesty, the greatness and wonder of these facts. Truly, the more deeply we penetrate the world of reality the more we have this feeling of wonder. Not only our intellect and reason but our whole soul is illumined when we let the truth come to us in this way. Especially at such a point as this: that wondrous event when the whole inwardness of humanity lived in a human body; when a soul that had developed upward to this point through the whole course of earthly life took possession of this body; then from outside there came into this body during three years of its life something that was vouchsafed to all mankind from the great universe beyond. Truly this can stir our souls to their depths. The spiritual age that is dawning will in time make it possible to deepen points like this still more.

One thing is essential to the coming spiritual age: we must learn to take a different attitude toward the great riddles and secrets of the cosmos, to approach them not as in the past with reason and intellect alone, but with all the faculties of our soul. Then we shall ourselves become partakers in the whole of human evolution. It will be for us like a fountain of sublime, all-human consciousness. We shall have fullness of soul. We shall feel that we may belong to that humanity that over all the Earth is to develop such impulses as have been the subject of our thoughts today.



Source: http://www.webcitation.org/5uzZfLkjX

The diametrically opposing influences of Krishna and Christ

 

"He must increase; I must decrease." — John 3:30

The Occult Significance of the Bhagavad Gita. Lecture 6 of 9.

Rudolf Steiner, June 2, 1913:

It really is exceedingly difficult in our Western civilization to speak intelligently and intelligibly about such a work as the Bhagavad Gita. This is so because at present there is a dominating tendency to interpret any spiritual work of this kind as a kind of doctrine, an abstract teaching, or a philosophy, that makes it hard for people to come to a sound judgment in such matters. They like to approach such spiritual creations from the ideal or conceptual point of view. Here we touch upon something that makes it most difficult in our time to gain a true judgment about the great historical impulses in mankind's evolution. How often, for instance, it is pointed out that this or that saying occurring in the Gospels as the teaching of Christ Jesus is to be found in some earlier work no less profoundly expressed. Then it is said, “You see, it is the same teaching after all.” Certainly, that is not incorrect because in countless instances it can be shown that the teachings of the Gospels occur in earlier spiritual works. Yet, though such a statement is not incorrect, it may be nonsense from the standpoint of a truly fundamental knowledge of human evolution. People's thinking will have to get accustomed to this and realize that a statement can be perfectly correct and yet nonsense. Not until this is no longer regarded as a contradiction will it be possible to judge certain matters in a really unbiased way.

Suppose, for instance, someone says that he sees in the Bhagavad Gita one of the greatest creations of the human spirit, a creation that has never been surpassed in later times. Suppose further, having said this, he adds, “Nevertheless, what entered the world with the revelation inherent in the Christ Impulse is something altogether different, something to which the Bhagavad Gita could not attain even if its beauty and greatness were increased a hundred times.” These two statements do not contradict each other. According to the habits of modern abstract thinking, however, we may have a contradiction here. Yet, in no sense is it in truth a contradiction. Indeed one might go further and ask, “When was that mightiest word spoken that may be regarded as giving the impulse to the human ego, so that it may take its place in the evolution of man?” That significant word was uttered at the moment Krishna spoke to Arjuna; when he poured into Arjuna’s ears the most powerful, incisive, burning words to quicken the consciousness of self in man. In the whole range of the world’s life there is nothing to be found that kindled the self of man more mightily than the living force of Krishna’s words to Arjuna. Of course, we must not take those words in the way words are so often taken in Western countries, where the noblest words are given merely an abstract, philosophic interpretation. In any such we would certainly miss the essence of the Bhagavad Gita. In this way Western scholars today have so outrageously misused and tortured the Bhagavad Gita. They have even gone so far as to dispute whether it is more representative of the Sankhya philosophy or of some other school of thought. In fact, a distinguished scholar, in his edition of this poem, has actually printed certain lines in small type because in his view they ought to be expunged altogether, having crept in by mistake. He thinks nothing is really a part of the Gita except what accords with the Sankhya, or at the most with the Yoga philosophy.

It may be said though that no trace is to be found in this great poem of philosophy as we speak of it today. At most one could say that in ancient India certain basic dispositions of soul developed into certain philosophic tendencies. These really have nothing to do with the Bhagavad Gita, at least not in the sense of being an interpretation or exposition of it. It is altogether unfair to the intellectual and spiritual life of the East to set it side by side with what the West knows as philosophy, because there was no philosophy in the East in the same sense there is philosophy in the West. In this respect the spirit of our age, just beginning, is as yet imperfectly understood.

In the last lecture we spoke of things that men still have to learn. Above all we must firmly realize how the human soul, under certain conditions, can actually meet the being whom we tried to describe from a certain aspect, calling him Krishna. We must realize how Arjuna meets that spirit who prepared the age of self-consciousness. This knowledge is far more important than any dispute as to whether it is Sankhya or Vedic philosophy that is contained in the Bhagavad Gita. To understand it as a real description of world history — of history and of the color and temper of a particular age in which living, individual beings are placed before us — is the important point. We have tried to describe their natures, speaking of Arjuna’s thoughts and feelings as characteristic of that time, trying to throw light on the new age of self-consciousness, and showing how a creative spiritual being preparing for a new age appeared before Arjuna. Now, if we seek a living picture of spiritual beings in their relation to each other, we need an all-around point of view to know this Krishna being more exactly. The following may therefore help us complete our picture of him.

To really penetrate into the region where we can perceive such a mighty being as Krishna one must have progressed far enough to be able to have real perceptions and real experiences in the spiritual world. That may seem obvious. Yet when we consider what people generally expect of the higher worlds the matter is by no means so self-evident. I have often indicated that misunderstandings without number arise from the fact that people wish to lift their lives into the supersensible world carrying a mass of prejudices with them. They desire to be led along the path into the supersensible toward something already familiar to them in the sense world. In that higher realm one perceives, for instance, forms, not indeed of gross matter, but forms that appear as forms of light. One finds that he hears sounds like the sounds of the physical world. He does not realize that by expecting such things, by entering the higher world with such preconceived ideas, he is wanting a spiritual world just like the sense world though in a refined form. In our world here man is accustomed to color and brightness, so he imagines he will only reach the higher realities if the beings there appear to him in the same way. It ought not to be necessary to say all this since the supersensible beings are far above all attributes of the senses and in their true form do not appear at all with sense qualities because the latter presuppose eyes and ears, that is, sense organs. In the higher worlds, however, we do not perceive by means of sense organs but by soul organs.

What can happen in this connection I can illustrate by a childish comparison. Suppose I am describing something to you verbally. Then I feel impelled to represent it with a few strokes on the blackboard, thereby materializing what I have expressed in words. No one would dream of taking the diagram for the reality. It is the same when we express what we have experienced supersensibly by giving it form and color and stamping it in words borrowed from the sense world. Only that in doing so we do not use our ordinary intellect, but a higher faculty of feeling that thus translates the supersensible into sense terms. In such a way our soul lives into invisible worlds, for instance into that of the Krishna being. Then it feels the need of representing to itself that being. What it represents, however, is not the being himself but a kind of sketch, a supersensible diagram. Such sketches, supersensible illustrations so to say, are Imaginations. The misunderstanding that so often arises amounts to this, that we sensualize what the higher forces of the soul sketch out before us. By thus interpreting it sensually we lose its real essence. The essence is not contained in these pictures, but through them it must be dimly felt at first, until by slow degrees we actually begin to see it.

I have mentioned among other things the wonderful dramatic composition of the Bhagavad Gita. I tried to give an idea of the form of the first four discourses. This same dramatic impulse increases from one discourse to the next as we penetrate on and on into the realms of occult vision. A sound idea of the artistic composition of this poem may be suggested by looking to see if there is not a central point, a climax to this increase of force and feeling. There are eighteen discourses, therefore we might look for the climax in the ninth. In fact, in the ninth one, that is in the very middle, we read these striking words, “And now, having told thee everything, I will declare to thee the profoundest secret for the human soul.” Here indeed is a strange saying that seems to sound abstract yet has deep significance. Then there follows this most profound mystery. “Understand me well. I am in all beings, yet they are not in me.”

How often men ask today, “What is the judgment of true mystic wisdom about this or that?” They want absolute truths, but actually there are no such truths. There are only truths that hold good in certain contexts, that are true in definite circumstances and under definite conditions. Then they are true. This statement, “I am in all beings but they are not in me,” cannot be taken as an abstractly, absolutely true statement. Yet this was spoken out of the deepest wisdom of Krishna at the time when he stood before Arjuna, and its truth is real and immediate, referring to Him Who is the creator of man’s inmost being, of his consciousness of self.

Thus, through a wonderful approach we are carried on to the central point of the Gita, to the ninth discourse where these words are poured out to Arjuna. Then in the eleventh discourse another element enters. What may we expect here, realizing the artistic form of the poem and the deep occult truths contained in it? When we take up the ninth and tenth discourses, the very middle of the poem, we notice a remarkable thing — a peculiar difficulty in imagining and bringing to life in our souls the ideas presented to us in this part of the song.

As you begin with the first discourse your soul is borne along by the continually increasing current of feeling and idea. First, immortality is the subject. Then you are uplifted and inspired by the concepts awakened through Yoga. All the time your feeling is being borne along by something in which it can feel at home, one may say. We go still further and the poem works up in a wonderful way to the concept of Him Who inspired the age of self-consciousness. Our enthusiasm is kindled as we approach this being. All this time we are living in definite, familiar feelings. Then comes a still greater climax. We are told how the soul can become ever more free of the outer bodily life. We are led on to the idea, so familiar to the man of India, of how the soul can retire into itself, realizing inaction in the actions the body experiences. The soul can become a complete whole, independent of outer things as it gradually attains Yoga and becomes one with Brahma. In the succeeding discourses we see how our certainty of feeling — the feeling that can still gain nourishment from daily life — gradually vanishes. Then as we approach the ninth discourse our soul seems to rise into giddy heights of unknown experience. If now in these ninth and tenth discourses we try to make the ideas borrowed from ordinary life suffice, we fail. As we reach this part of the song we feel as if we were standing on a summit of mankind’s attainment, born directly out of the occult depths of life. If we are to understand it, we must bring to it something our soul in its development has first to attain by its own effort.

It is remarkable how fine and unerring the composition of the Bhagavad Gita is in this respect. We can get as far as the fifth, sixth, or seventh discourse by developing the concepts given us at the very beginning, in the first discourse. In the second our soul is awakened to realize the presence of the eternal in the ever-changing flow of appearance. Then follows all that passes into the depths of Yoga, from the third song onward. After that an altogether new mood begins to appear. Whereas the first discourses still have an intellectual quality, reminding us at times of the Western philosophic mode of thinking, something enters now that requires Yoga, the devotional mood, for its understanding. As we continue purifying more and more this mood of devotion, our soul rises higher in reverence. The Yoga of the first discourses no longer carries us. It ceases, and an altogether new mood of soul bears us up into the ninth and tenth discourses because the words here spoken are no more than a dry, empty sound echoing in our ear if we approach them intellectually. But they radiate warmth to us if we approach them devotionally. One who would understand this sublime poem may start with intellectual understanding and so follow the opening discourses, but as the song proceeds toward the ninth a deep devotional mood must be awakened in him. Then the words of the mighty Krishna will be like wonderful music echoing and re-echoing in his soul. Whoever reaches this ninth song may feel this devotional mood as if he must take off his shoes before treading on holy ground; there he feels he must walk with reverence. Then follows the eleventh discourse. What can come next, now that we have reached the climax of this devotional mood?

When man has risen to the summit where Krishna has led Arjuna — a height that cannot be attained except in occult vision or in reverent devotion — it can only be the holy and formless, the supersensible, that appears before him. Then the supersensible can be poured out into Imagination. Then the uplifted and strengthened soul-force that belongs not to the realm of the intellect but to imaginative perception can cast into living pictures what in its essential being is without form or likeness. This is what happens at the beginning of the second half of the sublime song — that is to say, about the eleventh discourse. Here, after due preparation, the Krishna being to whom Arjuna has been led step by step is conjured up before his soul in Imaginations. This is where the majesty of description in this Eastern poem appears in its fullness, where Krishna finally appears in a picture, in an Imagination.

We may truly say that experiences such as this, which only the innermost power of the human soul can undergo, have almost nowhere else been described in such a wonderful way, so filled with meaning. For those who are able to realize it the Imagination of Krishna as Arjuna now describes it will always be of most profound significance. Up to the tenth discourse we are led on by Krishna as by an inspiring being. Now the radiant bliss of Arjuna’s opened vision comes before us. Arjuna becomes the narrator, and describes his Imagination in words so wonderful that one fears to reproduce them.

“The Gods do I behold in all thy Frame, O God. Also the hosts of creatures; Brahma the Lord upon His lotus throne; the Rishis all; the Serpent of Heaven. With many arms and with many bodies, with many mouths and many eyes I see Thee, on every side endless in Thy Form. No end, no center, no beginning see I in Thee, O Lord of All! Thou, Whom I behold in every form, I see Thee with diadem, with club and sword, a mountain flaming fire, streaming forth on every side — thus do I behold Thee. Dazzled is my vision. As fire streaming from the radiance of the Sun, immeasurably great art Thou! Lost beyond all thought, unperishing, greatest of all Good, thus dost Thou appear to me in the Heaven’s expanse. Eternal Dharma’s changeless guardian, Thou! Spirit primeval and Eternal, Thou standest before my soul. Neither source, nor midst, nor end; infinite in power, infinite in realms of space. Great are Thine eyes like to the Moon; yea, like to the Sun itself. And what streams forth from Thy mouth is as the Fire of Sacrifice. I look upon Thee in Thy glowing Fire; Thy splendor, warming all worlds. All that I can dream of between floor of Earth and fields of Heaven, Thy power fills it all. Alone with Thee I stand. And that heavenly universe wherein the three worlds live, that too doth in Thee dwell, when to my gaze is shown Thy wondrous, awesome Form. I see whole hosts of Gods approaching Thee, hymning Thy praise. Stricken with fear I stand before Thee, folding my hands in prayer. ‘Hail to Thee!’ cry all the companies of holy seers and saints, chanting Thy praises with resounding songs. Filled with wonder stand multitudes beholding Thee. Thy Form stupendous with many mouths, arms, limbs, feet, many bodies, many jaws full of teeth — before it all the universe doth quake, and I with dread am filled. Radiant, Thou shakest Heaven. With many arms I see Thee, and mouth like to vast-flaming eyes. My soul trembles. Nothing firm I find, nor rest, O Mighty Krishna, Who art as Vishnu unto me. I see within Thine awful form, like unto fire itself. I see how Being works, the end of all the ages. Nought know I anywhere; no shelter I find. O be Thou merciful to me, Thou Lord of all the Gods, refuge of all the worlds!”

Such is the Imagination that Arjuna beholds when his soul has been raised to that height where an Imagination of Krishna is possible. Then we hear what Krishna is echoing across to Arjuna once more as a mighty inspiration. In reality it is as if it were not merely sounding for the spiritual ear of Arjuna, but echoing down through all the ages that followed. At this point we begin dimly to perceive what it really means when a new impulse is given for a new epoch in the world’s history, and when the author of this impulse appears to the clairvoyant gaze of Arjuna. We feel with Arjuna. We remind ourselves that he is in the midst of the turmoil of battle where brother-blood is pitted against its like. We know that what Krishna has to give depends above all upon the old clairvoyant epoch ceasing, together with all that was holy in it, and a new epoch to begin. When we reflect on the impulse of this new epoch that was to begin with fratricide; when we rightly understand the impulse that forced its way in through all the swaying concepts and institutions of the preceding epoch; then we get a correct concept of what Krishna lets Arjuna hear.

“I am time primeval, bringing all worlds to naught, made manifest on Earth to slay mankind! And even though thou wilt bring them unto death in battle, without thee hath death taken all the warriors who stand there in their ranks. Therefore arise; arise without fear. Renown shalt thou win, and shalt conquer the foe. Rejoice in thy mastery, and in the victory awaiting thee. It is not thou who wilt have slain them when they fall in battle. By Me already are they slain, e’er thou lay them low. The instrument art thou, nought else than he who fighteth with his arm. Drona, Jayandana, Bhishma, Karna and the other heroes of the strife I have slain. Already they are slain, now do thou slay, that My work burst forth externally apparent. When they fall dead in maya, slain by Me, do thou slay them. And what I have done will through thee become perceptible. Tremble not! Thou canst not do what I have not already done. Fight! They whom I have slain will fall beneath thy sword!”

It was not in order to bring to mankind’s ears the voice that should speak of slaying that these words were uttered, but to make them hear the voice that tells that there is a center in man’s being that has to develop in the age to come; that into this center there were focused the highest impulses realizable by man at that time, and that there is nothing in human evolution with which the human ego is not connected. Here we find in the Bhagavad Gita something that lifts us up and sets us on the horizon of the whole of human evolution.

If we let the changing moods of this great poem work upon us we shall gain much more than those who try to read into it pedantic doctrines of Sankhya or Yoga philosophies. If we can only dimly feel the dazzling heights that can be reached through Yoga,we shall begin to lay hold on the meaning and spirit of such a mighty Imagination as that of Arjuna presented to us here. Even as an image it is so sublime and forceful that we are able to form some lofty conception of the creative spirit which in Krishna is grafted onto the world. The highest impulse that can speak to the individual man speaks through Krishna to Arjuna. The highest to which the individual man can lift himself by raising to their full pitch all the powers that reside within his being — that is Krishna. The highest to which he can soar by training himself and working on himself with wisdom — that is Krishna.

When we think of the evolution of humanity all over the Earth, and trace it through as we are able to do by means of what is given, for example, in our occult science; when in this sense we see the Earth as the place where man has first been brought to the ego through many different stages following one another and developing from age to age; when we thus follow the course of evolution through the epochs of time; then we may say to ourselves that here then on Earth these souls have been planted; the highest they can attain is to become free souls. Free — that is what men will become if they bring to full development all the forces latent within them as individual souls. In order to make this possible Krishna was active, indirectly and almost imperceptibly at first, then ever more definitely, and at last quite directly in the period we have been describing. In all of earthly evolution there is no being who could give the individual human soul so much as Krishna.

I say expressly the individual soul because — and I say this deliberately — on Earth there exists not only the individual human soul but also mankind. Consider this in connection with all I have tried to give about Krishna, because on Earth there are all those concerns that do not belong to the individual alone. Imagine a person feeling the inner impulse to perfect himself as far as ever a human soul can. Such might be. Then, each person separately and by himself might go on developing indefinitely. But there is mankind. For this earthly planet there are matters that bring it into connection with the whole universe. With the Krishna Impulse coming into each individual soul, let us assume every soul would have developed in itself a higher impulse; not immediately, nor even up to the present time, but sometime in the future. So that from the age of self-consciousness onward the stream of mankind’s collective evolution would have split up. Individual souls would have progressed and unfolded to the highest point, but separately, dispersed, broken apart from each other. Their paths would have gone further and further apart as the Krishna Impulse worked in each one. Human existence would have been uplifted in the sense that souls individualized themselves and so lifted themselves out of the common current, developing their self-life to the utmost. In this way the ancient time would have shone into the future like many, many rays from a single star. Every one of these rays would have proclaimed the glory of Krishna far into future cosmic eras. This is the path on which mankind was traveling in the sixth or eighth centuries before the foundation of Christianity.

Then from the opposite side something else came in. The Krishna Impulse comes into man’s soul when from the depths of his own inner being he works, creates, and draws forth his powers more and more until he may rise into those realms where he may reach Krishna. But something came toward humanity from outside, which men could never have reached through the forces that lived within themselves; something bending down to each individual one. Thus the souls that were separating and isolating themselves encountered the same being who came down out of the Cosmic Universe into the age of self-consciousness from outside. It came in such a way that it belonged to the whole of humanity, to all the Earth. This other impulse came from the opposite side. It was the Christ.

Though put rather abstractly for the present, we see how a continually increasing individualization was prepared and brought about in mankind, and how then those souls who had the impulse to individualize themselves more and more were met by the Christ Impulse, leading them once more together into a common humanity. What I have tried to indicate has been a rather preliminary description of the two impulses from the Christ and Krishna. I have tried to show how closely the two impulses come together in the age of the mid-point of evolution, even though they come from diametrically opposite directions. We can make very great mistakes by confusing these two revelations. What I have developed today in a rather general way we will make more concrete in the succeeding lectures. But I would close today with a few words that may simply and clearly summarize what these two impulses are — truly the most important in human evolution.

If we look back to all that happened between the tenth century before Christ and the tenth century afterward, we may say that into the universe the Krishna Impulse flowed for every individual human soul, and into the Earth the Christ Impulse came for all mankind.

Observe that for those who can think specifically, “all mankind” by no means signifies the same as the mere sum total of all individual human souls.



Source: http://www.webcitation.org/5uyls03M9

Lead me from the unreal to the real

 

Rudolf Steiner:  "Religious life must be something direct, it must be something elementary, entirely connected to human nature, which lives out of the elementary, most inward foundation of human nature. All philosophic thinking is a reflection, and is distanced from this direct, elementary experience. If I might express a personal impression, it would be this: When someone philosophizes about the religious life and believes that a philosophical foundation is necessary for religious life, then it always seems to me to be similar to when one wants to turn to the physiology of nutrition in order to attain nourishment oneself. Isn't it true, one can determine the exact foundations of nutritional science but that means nothing for nutrition itself. Nutritional science elucidates nutrition, but nutrition must surely have a sound foundation, it must grow roots in reality; only then can one philosophize about nutrition. So also, the religious life must have roots in reality. It must come to existence out of reality; only when it is there can one philosophize about it. It is certainly not possible at all to substantiate or justify the religious life with some or other philosophic consideration."

Lead me from the unreal to the real.

Lead me from darkness to the light.

Lead me from mortality to immortality.

Source: September 26, 1921. GA 343. Foundation Course, p. 3

Krishna and the development of self-consciousness

 

The Occult Significance of the Bhagavad Gita. Lecture 5 of 9.

Rudolf Steiner, June 1, 1913:

If we would penetrate into the mysteries of human life we must fix our attention on a great law of existence — I mean what is called the cyclic law. As a rule it is better to explain and describe than to define. In this case also I prefer to explain by definite concepts what is meant by the cyclic course of life, for alongside the actual reality a definition must always appear scanty and lacking in substance. A philosophic school in Greece, wishing to gain insight into the nature of definitions, once set out to give a definition of man. As you know, definitions are intended to provide concepts corresponding to the phenomena of experience, but those having logical insight cannot help feeling the poverty and unfruitfulness of this process. The members of the Greek school eventually agreed to define man as a featherless biped. While this particular definition sounds rather like a silly epigram, it does represent the nature of man in certain respects. The next day one of the members of this school brought in a plucked hen and said to the company, “According to your definition this is a man.” A silly way to show the unreality of attempts to define things. Being concerned with realities, we will proceed then to describe things in their essential characteristics.

To begin, we will consider a cycle familiar in everyday life, that of our waking and sleeping. What does it really signify? We can only understand the nature of sleep if we realize that in the present epoch the soul activity of man's waking life brings about a continual destruction of delicate structures in the nervous system. With our every thought and with every impulse of will that arises in us under the stimulus of the outside world, we are destroying delicate forms in our brain. In the near future it will more and more be realized how sleep has to supplement our waking day life. We are approaching the point where natural science will join with spiritual science in these matters. Natural science has already produced more than one theory to the effect that our waking life brings a kind of destructive process to nerves and brain. Owing to this fact we have to allow the corresponding reverse process, the compensation, to take place during sleep.

While we are asleep forces are at work in us that do not otherwise manifest themselves, of which we remain unconscious. They are busy reconstructing the finer nerve structures of our brain. Now, it is this very destruction that enables us to have processes of thought, and to acquire knowledge. Ordinary knowledge would not be possible if processes of disintegration did not take place in us during our waking hours. Thus, two opposite processes are at work in our nervous system — while we are awake a process of destruction, during sleep a repairing process. Since it is to the destructive process that we owe our consciousness, it is that process we perceive. Our waking life consists in perceiving disintegrating processes. During sleep we are not conscious because no destructive process is at work in us. The force which at other times creates our consciousness is in sleep used up in constructive work. There you have a cycle.

Let us now consider what happens during sleep. Because of this alternating cycle of build-up and break-down processes, we see why it is so dangerous to health to go without proper sleep. Certainly man's life is so arranged that the danger is not immediately apparent, because what is present in him at any one time has been built up in him for a considerable time before. Thus, the abnormal processes cannot affect his nature as deeply as we might imagine. We could expect people who suffer from sleeplessness to go to pieces quickly, but they do not collapse nearly so quickly. The reason for this is the same as that which holds for people both blind and deaf, like the famous Helen Keller, whose intellect can nevertheless be developed. In the present age this should theoretically be impossible, for what constitutes the greater part of our intelligence enters the brain through eyes and ears. The reason for Miss Keller's intellectual development is that, though the portals of her senses are closed, she has inherited a brain that has the potentiality for development. If man were not a hereditary being such a case as hers would not be possible. Which is to say, if man did not have a much healthier brain through heredity than we generally give him credit for, sleeplessness would in a very short time completely undermine his health. But people mostly have so much inherited strength that insomnia can persist for a long time without seriously injuring them. It remains true, however, that the cycle of construction with its resulting unconsciousness in sleep, and destruction with its consciousness in waking life, fundamentally takes place.

In the totality of human life we perceive not only these smaller cycles but larger ones as well. Here I will call your attention to a cycle I have often mentioned before. Anyone who follows the course of life in the Western world will observe a quite definite configuration of the spiritual life of mankind in the period from the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries to the last third of the nineteenth. In ordinary life these developments are observed much too vaguely and inaccurately, but if we look into them deeply enough we shall see how in all directions since the last third of the nineteenth century there have been signs of an altogether different form of Western spiritual life. Of course, we are at the beginning of this new trend so people do not notice it in its full significance. Just imagine someone trying to speak before such an audience as this, say for instance in the 40's or 50's of the nineteenth century, about the same things I am putting before you here. It is quite unthinkable. It would be absurd. It would have been out of the question to speak of these things as we do now at any time from the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries to the last third of the nineteenth. This was the period when the natural scientific mode of thought, the way of thinking that produced the great materialistic achievements, reached its height. The stragglers of scientific intellectualism will go on adhering to it for some time to come, but the actual epoch of materialism is past.

Just as the era of scientific thought began about the fifteenth century, so the era of spiritual thought is now beginning. These two sharply differentiated epochs meet in the very time in which we are living. It will more and more become evident how the new mode of thought has to come in touch with the reality of things. Thought will become very different from the thought of the last four centuries, though the latter had to be so in its time. During this period man's gaze had to be directed outward into the far spaces of the universe. I have often spoken of the great significance for Western spiritual evolution of that moment when Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Giordano Bruno together burst open the blue vault of heaven. Until their time it was believed that the blue cup of the heavens was suspended over our Earth. These great thinkers declared that this hollow cup did not really exist. They taught mankind to look out into the infinite distances of cosmic space.

Now what was it that was so significant about Bruno's deed in explaining to men how the blue sphere they had set as the boundary of their power of sight was not really there; when he said, “You have only to realize that it is you yourselves who project it out into space?” The important point was that it marked the beginning of an epoch, which came to an end with the discovery that by means of the spectroscope one could investigate the material composition of the farthest heavenly bodies. A marvelous epoch, this epoch of materialism! Now we are at the starting point of another epoch, one that has its origin in the same laws of growth as the preceding one but that nevertheless is to be the epoch of spirituality. Just as the epoch of natural science was prepared by Bruno's work in breaking through the limits of space, so will the firmament of time be broken through in the age now beginning. Mankind, imagining life to be enclosed between birth and death, or conception and death, will learn that these are only boundaries set by the human soul itself. Just as in earlier times men had themselves set as the boundary of their senses a blue sphere above them, and then of a sudden their vision expanded into the infinite spheres of space, so will the boundaries of time be broken through, those of birth and death. Set free of these there will lie before man's gaze in the infinite sea of time all the changes in the kernel of man's being as he follows it through its repeated incarnations. Thus a new age is beginning, the age of spiritual thought.

Now if we can recognize the occult basis of these transitions from one age to another, where shall we see the cause of this change in human thought? It is not anything that philosophy or external physiology or anatomy can find of their own accord. Yet it is true that forces that have entered the active souls of men and are being used today to gather spiritual knowledge — these same forces, during the last four centuries, have been working at man's organism as constructive forces. Throughout the period from Copernicus to the last third of the nineteenth century mysterious forces were at work in man's bodily organism just as constructive forces work in his nervous system during sleep. These forces were building up a definite structure in certain parts of the brain. The brains of Western people are different from what they were five centuries ago. What is under man's skull today does not have the same appearance as it had then, for a delicate organ has been formed which was not there before. Even though this cannot be proved externally, it is true. Under the human forehead a delicate organ has developed, and the forces building it have now fulfilled their task. In the coming cycle of history we are now approaching it will become evident in more and more people. Now that it is there, the forces that built it are liberated. With these very forces Western humanity will be gaining spiritual knowledge. Here we have the occult physiological foundation of the matter. Already we are beginning to work with these forces that men could not use during the last four hundred years because they were spent in building up the organ needed to allow spiritual knowledge to take its place in the world.

Let us imagine a man of the seventeenth or eighteenth century. As he stands there before us we know that certain occult forces are at work behind his forehead, transforming his brain. These forces were perpetually at work in all the people of the West. Now let us assume that this man had managed to suspend these forces for a moment, made them cease their work. The same thing would have happened to him — and it did happen in certain cases — as takes place when in the middle of his sleep a man suspends the forces that ordinarily work at building up the nerve structures of the brain; he lets them run loose. It is possible to experience moments when we seem to waken in sleep, and yet do not waken, for we remain motionless, we cannot move our limbs, we have no external perception. But we are awake. In the moments of free play of those regenerating forces we can use them for clairvoyant vision; we can see into the spiritual worlds. A similar thing happened if a man two hundred years ago suspended the constructive activity on his brain. From the fifteenth to the nineteenth century he saw what was working into his brain from the spiritual worlds, so that from the twentieth century onward men might raise themselves to spiritual vision.

There were always isolated persons who had such experiences; experiences of truly catastrophic force, indescribably impressive. There were always people who for moments lived in what was working in from the supersensible to bring forth in the sense world what did not exist in former cycles of evolution, the finer organ in the frontal cavity. Such men saw the gods: spiritual beings at work in the building process of the human organism. In this we see clairvoyance described from a fresh aspect. We can bring about such moments during sleep by practicing the exercises I have given in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment and thereby gain glimpses of spiritual life such as are described in my book A Road to Self-Knowledge. Thus it is possible during a given cycle of evolution for the forces at work preparing the future to become free for a moment and become clairvoyantly visible.

We may give a name to these forces — for what are names? We can call them the forces of Gabriel. But the point is to gain a moment's insight into the supersensible where we perceive a spiritual being working from those worlds into the human organism. A sum of forces, in fact, directed by a being, Gabriel, of the hierarchy of the archangels. From the fifteenth to the last third of the nineteenth century the Gabriel force was at work on man's organism, and because of this the power to understand the spiritual slept for a while. It was this sleep of spiritual understanding that brought forth the great triumphs of natural science. Now this force is awakened. The spiritual has done its work; the Gabriel forces have been liberated. We can now use them, for they have become forces of the soul. Here we have a cycle of somewhat greater significance than that of waking and sleeping.

There are, however, even mightier cycles in human evolution. We may note how self-consciousness, the pride of mankind in this era of our post-Atlantean age, was not always there but had to be developed gradually. Today the word "evolution" is often heard, but people seldom take it in real earnest. We can sometimes have strange experiences of people's naïveté in regard to what surrounds them, so simply do they allow many things to play up from their subconsciousness into their conscious life and do not easily reach the point of attributing a supersensible origin to what enters their known world from the unknown. In the last few days I have again come across a curious instance of the logic that stops halfway. We can well understand why the anthroposophical outlook meets with so much resistance when we bear in mind that a certain special habit of thought is needed to understand anthroposophy. I mean the habit of never stopping halfway along any line of thinking. I have here a "Freethinker's Calendar," published in Germany. The first edition came out last year. In it a perfectly sincere person attacks the custom of teaching children religious ideas. He points out that this is contrary to the child's nature, since he himself has observed that when children are allowed to grow up on their own they develop no religious ideas. Therefore it is unnatural to inculcate these ideas into children. Now we can be certain that this Calendar will reach hundreds of people who will imagine that they understand how senseless it is to teach children religion. There are many such arguments today, and people never notice their complete lack of logic. In reply we need only ask, “If children for some reason have lived all their lives on an island alone and have not learned to speak, ought we therefore to refrain from teaching them to speak?” That would be the same kind of logic. Of course, people will not admit it is the same since they found it so profound in the first instance. It is curious to observe things like this on the broad horizon of external life today; things that represent some after-play from the materialist age that is passing.

I have here another example, some remarkable essays recently published by Woodrow Wilson, president of the United States of America. There is one on the laws of human progress. He points out how men are influenced by the dominant thought of their age; how in Newton's time, when everything was permeated with the idea of gravity, the effects of Newton's theories could be felt in social concepts, even in political terminology, though actually these theories are only applicable to the heavenly bodies. The idea of gravity was especially extended in its influence. All this is true. We need only read the literature of Newton's time to find everywhere words like “attraction” and “repulsion.” Wilson develops this point very ingeniously. He says how unsatisfactory it is to apply purely mechanical concepts, as of celestial mechanism, to human life and conditions. He shows how human life at that time was completely imbedded in these ideas and how widely they influenced political and social affairs, and he rightly denounces this application of purely mechanical laws in an age when Newtonism drew all thought under its yoke. “We must think along different lines,” says Wilson, and then proceeds to construct his own concept of the state. Now he does it in such a way that, after all he has said about Newtonism, he himself allows Darwinism to speak through every page of his writing. In fact, he is naive enough to admit it. He says the Newtonian concepts were not sufficient, we must apply the Darwinian laws of the organism. Here we have a living instance of the way people march through the world today with half-thought-out logic because in reality the laws derived purely from the living organism are also insufficient. We need laws of the soul and spirit. Thus we understand how objections are piled up against anthroposophical thought, for this requires an all-pervading thinking, a logic that penetrates to the core and does not stop halfway. This is just the virtue of the anthroposophical outlook. It forces its devotees to think in an orderly manner.

So we must think of evolution in the spiritual sense, not in Wilson's Darwinistic sense. We must realize that the self-consciousness that today is the essential characteristic of mankind, this firm rooting in the ego, has only gradually developed. This too had to be prepared, just as our spiritual thinking was being prepared in the last four centuries. Spiritual forces had to work down from the supersensible worlds in order to develop what afterward found expression in the self-conscious life of men. In this connection we can speak of a break in evolution, with a preceding and a succeeding epoch. We will call the latter the age of self-consciousness.

This period is preceded in the cyclic interchange by one in which the organ of self-consciousness was being built into man from the supersensible worlds. What now works as a soul force in self-consciousness was then working unrecognizably in the depths of human nature. The junction of these two great epochs is an important point in evolution. Before this time most people had no self-consciousness at all. Even in the most advanced it was comparatively weak. People then did not think as they do today, with the awareness, “I am thinking this thought.” Their thoughts rose up like living dreams. Nor did their impulses of will and feeling enter their consciousness as they do today. They lived more of an instinctive life in their souls. From the spiritual worlds, however, beings were working into man's organism, preparing it for a later time when it would be capable of self-consciousness. Meanwhile people had to live quite differently then, even as external experience is quite different between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries A.D. from what it will become later on. So we must say that until the period when self-consciousness entered the human soul everything that could prepare the way for it had been flowing into the life of man.

Thus, for example, in the region where self-consciousness was first to make its appearance, men were strictly divided into castes. They respected this division. A man born in a lower caste felt it as his highest endeavor so to order his life within that caste that he might raise himself in later incarnations into higher ones. It was a mighty driving force in the evolution of the human soul. Men knew that by developing their soul forces they were making themselves fit to rise into a higher caste in their next life. So too they looked up to their ancestors and saw in them what is not bound to the physical body. They revered their ancestors, feeling that although they had died their spiritual part remained, working on spiritually after death. This ancestor worship was a good preparation for the mighty goal of human nature because in it they could see what is now living already in us — the self-conscious soul, which is not bound to the physical body and passes through the gates of death into the spiritual worlds.

Just as during four centuries the kind of education that forced men to think out natural science was the best education toward spirituality, so in that ancient time mankind was best educated by the inspiration of great reverence for their castes and their ancestors. Men developed a strong liking for the system of castes. In that pious reverence they had something that worked into their lives with great power and deeply affected them. Spiritual beings were working into it, preparing for the future possibility for a man to say with every thought, “I think,” with every feeling, “I feel,” with every impulse of will, “I will.”

Now let us imagine that toward the end of that ancient epoch some mighty shock or upheaval in a man's life caused all the forces active then to suddenly cease binding him, suspending their action for a moment. Then he would experience what we can experience in sleep when for a moment we withdraw the constructive forces and become clairvoyant. Or what men of the eighteenth century could experience by suspending the forces then at work on their brain structure. If in that ancient time a man withdrew his understanding and feeling for the fires of sacrifice and reverence for his ancestors, if he experienced such a shock, he could for a moment use those forces to gaze into the supersensible worlds. He could then see how the self-consciousness of man was being prepared from the spiritual world. This is what Arjuna did when at the moment of battle he experienced such a shock. The usually constructive forces stood still in him, and he could look upward to the divine being who was preparing the way for self-consciousness. This divinity was Krishna.

Krishna then is that being who has worked through centuries and centuries on the human organism, to make man capable — from the seventh and eighth centuries B.C. onward — of entering gradually the epoch of self-consciousness. What kind of impression does he make, this master-builder of the human ego-nature? He has to speak to Arjuna in words saturated through and through with self-consciousness.

Thus from another side we understand Krishna as the divine architect of what prepared and brought about self-consciousness in man. The Bhagavad Gita tells us how under special circumstances a man could come into the presence of this divine builder of his nature. There we have one aspect of Krishna's nature. In the succeeding lectures we shall learn to know yet another aspect.



Source: http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/Dates/19130601p01.html