The Advent of Christ in the Ethereal World
GA 118 — 12 April 1910, Rome
V. Higher Worlds and Their Connection with Ours
Notes from the lecture
Yesterday, two methods of initiation were mentioned: the mystical path and the path of ecstasy. However, both were appropriate for the state of development in ancient times. Today, the inner states in man are different and a new kind of initiation is necessary. The Rosicrucian initiation, rightly understood, is the one that fully corresponds to today's conditions. In order to get an approximately correct idea of what takes place in the human soul in this process, it is better to first become acquainted with the processes that are associated with the states of waking and sleeping, of life and death. We will therefore go into these states in more detail in our discussion today.
People usually do not understand the change between waking and sleeping deeply enough. It is such an everyday occurrence that it hardly deserves attention. As a result, the mystery that these processes hold is completely lost on them. When asked what happens to a person when they fall asleep, one would receive the answer: Consciousness extinguishes, the tired brain falls into a state of stupor and no longer absorbs sensory impressions from the outside world. This is correct insofar as it refers to what can be perceived with the physical eye. However, if we ask the clairvoyant what he perceives, he will tell us that something very significant is taking place. He sees how the inner, astral man rises out of the resting physical body and pours into the astral world body, the macrocosm. And in the morning, upon awakening, he sees how that which has flowed into the universe contracts again and is absorbed by the physical body, the microcosm. He beholds the changing life that man leads in the world at large and in the world of small things.
What, then, is the significance of sleep for man? What happens to him? Why does he leave his body? And how can the latter live without him? - The real, inner man, whose material expression and tool is the outer, physical body, notices when he falls asleep, how the whole outside world fades from his perception, how he gradually becomes insensitive to all the sense impressions he has received during the day, and how all mental sensations, joy and pain, completely fade. We must realize that the inner man, who perceives by means of the physical senses, is at the same time the bearer of pleasure and pain, of hate and love, and not the physical body. We might now object: If that is the case, how is it that this inner man, when leaving the body, does not retain the sensations of pain or joy in the astral world? The reason for this is that it must be in the physical body to perceive the facts of its inner life, which, like a mirror, reflects its emotions and brings them to consciousness. When the mirror is left, the image of the impressions fades and the person does not become aware of them again until he has retreated back into the body. There is thus a constant interaction between the inner and outer man.
It is interesting to compare what exact science has to say on this point; it is quite similar. When we fall asleep, we notice how the expenditure of energy during the day results in the fatigue of the whole organism, how the limbs gradually fail to move, how voice, smell, taste and sight cease, and finally hearing, the most spiritual of the senses. When we wake up, we feel that new strength and freshness has been given to all our limbs and senses. But whence come these forces that during the day reflect the inner man to the outer? We draw them at night from our spiritual home, the Macrocosm, and bring them in the morning into the physical world, in which we could not exist without this nightly immersion in the inner life of the world. Sleep is necessary because without it disturbances of the soul life would occur. It is sleep that gives us spiritual strength.
We have seen what we gain in the spiritual realm for the physical, and can now ask the second question: What do we bring over from the state of waking to that of sleeping in the evening? The answer to this is given to us by human life between birth and death. We see how it experiences an increase through the ever-growing sum of external experiences that have to be processed individually. Each of us assimilates individually. Take, for example, a historical event: each person judges it according to the maturity of his soul. Some remain uninfluenced and know no lessons to be learned from it, while another lets it fully affect him and becomes wise. In such a person, the experience has been transformed into spiritual forces.
This process can be illustrated even more clearly by the following example. Let us think of a child learning to write. How many unsuccessful attempts did he have to make before he managed to write his first characters, how much paper and how many pens did he have to use, how many punishments did he have to endure for blots and bad handwriting: and this for years until he was finally able to write well. Everything this child has gone through has, so to speak, been concentrated in him in the ability to write.
In this way, experiences are woven into soul forces, which we take with us into the astral world every evening. Sleep now adds something else and brings about the transformation of these forces. Most of us know from our own experience that a poem learned by heart emerges more firmly after sleep. This truth has almost become a common saying: Bisogna dormirci sopra. - From what has been said, it is clear that we transfer the experiences we have processed during the day into our spiritual home and from there, transformed into spiritual forces, we bring them back into the physical world in the morning. We now understand more clearly the purpose and necessity of the transition between the two planes of existence and the importance of sleep, without which life here would not be possible.
However, there is a limit to this transformation of forces, and every morning when we return to our physical body, we become more and more aware of it. It is the limit that our physical body sets to the abilities we have acquired. We can transform some things into the physical plane, but not everything. Take, for example, a person who has absorbed real knowledge of the external and hidden world for ten years. With what he has acquired externally and scientifically, he has only enriched his intellect and mind, but the secret experiences, the insights that have come to him from joy and suffering, are expressed in his physicality and have changed his physiognomy and gestures.
The following example explains the limit that the body sets to the assimilation of abilities: someone may have been born with an unmusical ear. - To be a performing musician, a fine structure of this organ is necessary, so fine that it escapes scientific observation. If such a person studies a lot in the field of music, what he absorbs during the day is transformed into spiritual musical power at night, but cannot be expressed when it enters the imperfect physical organ. This example shows one of the cases in which the inability to transform the physical organ poses an insurmountable barrier to the utilization of spiritual powers. In such cases man must resign himself and quietly suffer the disharmony between his body and the fettered powers. He who is able to look more deeply knows that everyone has many experiences that would completely transform him if he could incorporate them into the physical man. All these abilities that cannot manifest themselves, all this longing that rebounds from the inflexible body, now accumulates in the course of life and forms a whole that is clearly visible to the clairvoyant gaze.
The seer sees three things: the abilities that a person has brought with them at birth, then the new abilities that they have acquired and incorporated during their life, and finally the sum of those forces that have not been able to penetrate the physical body and are waiting to unfold. These latter forces form something like an opposition to the external physical body and act as a counterforce to it. This is the most important power, and it is not in harmony with our life in the physical body. It gradually dissolves it and causes the body to waste away. It seeks to cast it off like a cumbersome fetter; it seeks to discard it like an instrument that is no longer suitable for fulfilling the growing demands made upon it. It is the cause of our body withering like a flower that loses leaf after leaf and in which nothing remains alive but a new seed. In man, the clairvoyant sees something similar: it is as if, towards the second half of life, everything acquired in the human inner being contracts, unable to unfold, like a seed that holds a small germ for the next spring. Thus the clairvoyant sees a germinating seed in every dying person. In each of us, hidden deep within, the seed of a new life is forming.
With all the power of our feelings, we then have to grasp the meaning of death. With what other feelings will we then approach the deathbed of a loved one? This does not mean that we should suppress our grief at the separation, for the soul would wither away if it no longer felt pain. But we should look at life from the higher point of view that spiritual science presents to us and say to ourselves: Death appears sorrowful and cruel when viewed from below, from our earthly world, but it presents itself quite differently when viewed spiritually from above. In the long years of arduous earthly life, the soul has gained a wealth of abilities that it could not utilize if it had remained bound to the same body. Death makes it possible for it to ascend to a higher level. Just as man, in the short night's sleep, makes the spiritual gain of the day his own, so death enables him to develop and transform the entire gain of the life's work in the spiritual world. However, there is an enormous difference between sleep and death. During sleep, while the body is still alive, the normal person is unconscious because of the body's spell. In death, however, the person awakens because the body is freed from the spell.
In full consciousness, he reaps the fruits of his past life and works out on the spiritual plane what he could not utilize on the physical. And so he then lives into a new incarnation, for which he seeks a suitable body that will enable him to bring his acquired abilities to bear. For example: A person who has acquired musical knowledge will seek out a pair of parents who have a musically favorable ear structure. As a result, his life experiences in the new incarnation increase in a way that could not have taken place in the old body. And so the increase continues from embodiment to embodiment, depending on the extent of the newly acquired abilities, until complete spiritualization. Then the human being will no longer be bound to a physical shell and the chain of incarnations will have come to an end. If we have grasped what has been said in its full significance, we must conclude that, despite all its painfulness, death is a beneficent necessity and that the ego would have to wish for the creation of death if it did not exist. That there is nothing hostile to life in this view, no asceticism and no fear of life, is clearly evident from the fact that we strive to elevate this life and to ennoble and spiritualize both the outer and the inner man more and more. The question: How do we escape from life? - can only arise from an incomplete and false understanding of the doctrine of death and reincarnation. Everything here on the physical plane, and likewise after death on the spiritual plane, is only work and preparation for a new embodiment on earth. We thus see the same interrelations on a large scale as we could observe on a small scale in the life of day and night.
Yesterday two ways were indicated to reach the spiritual worlds: the mystical way and the way of ecstasy. It was emphasized that the old methods of initiation no longer fit into our time and that the present stage of development requires new means, which in the future will have to give way to still other means. From about the twelfth to the fourteenth century, the Rosicrucian method became necessary, and in the near future it will gain even more importance. He who lives in the spiritual life and follows its upward trend from incarnation to incarnation knows that today's spiritual science is adapted to our conditions, and that after thousands of years men will again look back on it as something outdated. One will reckon even more with fully conscious powers than in our days. Today's man, as we have seen, receives the powers during sleep, when he is in an unconscious state. Gradually, in the course of evolution, this process will increasingly enter his consciousness and come under his will.
The old forms of initiation required a descent into one's own inner being, which resulted in a strengthening of all egoistic forces and was a real temptation for the disciple. Everything that was still alive in him and all the instincts he had already overcome were brought up in the process. If, for example, we were to shut out all external impressions and withdraw into ourselves as soon as we woke up, our true inner self would not reveal itself to us at that moment. However, if we remained conscious, our sense of self would intensify into boundless egotism. During ecstasy, on the other hand, as we have seen, when the person consciously dissolves into the macrocosm, his ego becomes weaker and weaker and the disciple needs the help of a guru to prevent him from falling into complete powerlessness.
The Rose Cross initiation unites the two paths and gives the aspirant the right balance, which protects him from the above-mentioned dangers and at the same time gives him so much independence that he no longer needs the supervision of an initiator. It first leads him into the inner world, the access to which it opens for him through the outer world, which the disciple must observe faithfully in all its forms. Everywhere he must learn to discover the symbolic, until he realizes that the whole physical world is a parable. This is not to say that the botanist, the poet, or the painter see wrongly; they too see aright, but it is essential for the Rosicrucian disciple to fix his attention on the symbolism of form, since his purpose lies deeper than that of the other observers.
If he sees a rose, for example, he recognizes in it a symbol of life and says to himself: clear green sap rises in the stem, flowing from leaf to leaf, but at the top, in the flower crowning the plant, it transforms into the red juice of the rose. Then he turns his gaze from the flower to the human being and says to himself: “When I look at the plant next to the human being, it appears to me at first glance to be much lower than he is. It has neither movement nor feelings nor consciousness. Man, too, is permeated by the red nutrient juice, but he moves freely wherever he wants, he sees the outside world and feels its impressions as pleasure and pain and is aware of his existence. However, the plant has one advantage: it cannot err like man; chaste and pure, it does no harm to anyone and lives from one moment to the next. The red blood is the expression of higher spirituality and stands above the green sap of the plant, which is symbolically colored red in the flower. The rose is indeed a subordinate being, but it is like an ideal for man. One day he will become master of himself, and his ego will rise above the everyday ego. He will ennoble and purify himself, and his blood will become chaste and pure like the green sap of plants. And it is this purified blood of the spiritualized man that I see symbolized in the red rose-blood.
The lower nature in us must come under our control. We must master everything that opposes our ascent and transform it into pure forces. In the symbol of the Rose Cross, the dead black wood of the cross, on which the living roses bloom, we see ourselves. The dark wood is our lower nature, which is subject to death and must be overcome; the red roses are our higher nature, dedicated to life, which springs victoriously from the dying dishonesty.
The Rosicrucian should allow such symbols to have their full effect on him; he should seek them out everywhere in nature, imagine them and meditate on them. In this presentation, it is not so much the truth as the correctness, the symbolically correct, that is important. Particularly when meditating on the Rose Cross, the whole feeling, the whole heart's blood should be included; we should live and glow through before the image of the transformation of our nature. The disciple has the impression of increasing to such a strength and then repeating it constantly, so that it no longer fades from him and is taken over into the spiritual world by his astral body in the evening. The Rosicrucian disciple then feels how the unconsciousness into which he used to fall during sleep gradually disappears. It is as if a slow fire of the soul has been kindled within him. He carries it within him like a lamp that shines into the darkness of night and makes visible to him what was previously shrouded in darkness. He has become giving in the beyond. A light-giving, active eye has been opened in him, in contrast to the physical, passive eye, which has no source of light within itself, but only perceives with extraneous light.
The Rosicrucian, when he has trained himself in this way, sees external reality only where he can shape it into symbols that transform his inner abilities and the results of his meditation work into light.
In this way, the student's ego is protected from becoming hardened in selfishness, as well as from powerlessness, and he can enter the higher worlds without danger. He acquires the strength of mysticism in the right measure and uses it in ecstasy. With serious practice, he finally reaches the point of seeing the sun at midnight, as it was called in the old occult schools, that is, he sees behind the physical form and simultaneously sees the spirit.
In our brief discussion, this could only be briefly mentioned in principle. More details can be found in my book “How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds.” This subject cannot be treated in more detail in public, because the majority do not yet have the ability to develop occultly. Also, little is publicly known about the old paths of initiation, and what little there is has not been personally experienced by those who have written about it. Every epoch has to show its corresponding changes, because the guides always had to incorporate something new into human life.
Tomorrow we will see what the work of one of their greatest, Gautama Buddha, was. He was a forerunner of the one for whom humanity has been prepared for thousands of years and from whom it was to receive the greatest impulse: Christ Jesus. We shall also see that only in our time has his mighty impulse begun to make itself felt, and that it will extend more and more to all mankind in the future. And there will be talk of a follower, the Maitreya Buddha, who will take up the Christ impulse in a new form.
Let us now survey what has been said and bear in mind that our life here is fertilized by the spirit in sleep and in death, and that all our striving, all the gain of our earthly existence would be in vain and unused if we always remained bound to this physical body. Only the transitional state of death makes it possible for us to reap the fruits of life and then return to this world richer, one step higher on the path to perfection. Let us allow spiritual science to enter into our lives and we will partake of the treasures of comfort, hope and strength that it contains.
What spiritual science brings to our attention today was already known to the greatest minds of the past. As a poet said:
How on the day you were given to the world
The sun stood to greet the planets,
You have flourished and flourished
According to the law by which you came into being.
You must be like this, you cannot escape yourself!
So said the Sibyls and the prophets,
And no time and no power dismembered
The form that was stamped, which develops itself alive!