Paths and Goals of Spiritual Man

GA 125 — 5 June 1910, Copenhagen

V. Ways and Goals of the Spiritual Human Being

If you ask people outside of their everyday consciousness: What is it that can be called the self? — the answer would be that you have to look for this self-awareness within the boundaries that the skin encloses. Our view can be proven by the fact that the seat of the soul is to be found in the head and heart. But in the sense of spiritual science, it is different, only this is not easy to recognize.

One comes closer to spiritual reality when one tries to make the supersensible facts clear. With the concepts and words that man uses without these researches, he does not come closer to the truth. One will get a good concept if one ties into a unified picture.

Let us think of a sailor navigating the seas. All external factors form the essentials, the determining factors; for the purpose of navigating the ship, it is important to know whether the sea is calm or agitated, whether islands are emerging in the sea, whether the sky is clouding over, and much more. The captain and the sailors take action based on all these external facts; all external facts are the essential ones for them. Now some might think that when the ship has entered the harbor, it is at rest and all work is over for a while. But that is not the case. Another kind of work begins. The ship no longer performs work, but work is done on the ship. What has suffered during the voyage is repaired. The hold is filled with a new cargo and so on. In this way, the voyage and the ship's layover in port can be compared to human life, to life during the day and to life during the night. There is only one major difference, and that is that people do not care about the night work. During the work in port, the ship must be made useful for the onward journey by workers and sailors. But everything that drives man to act through the senses during the day, ceases to work at night. Our senses, which have carried out the work in our body during the day, rest during the night. The work of the day rests like the ship in the harbor. And yet a work is going on in man that enables him to start a new day's work.

This brings us closer to the concept of what the actual spiritual part of a person is. It is not enclosed by the skin of the person, but extends beyond the physical person. The actual spiritual part extends its feelers into the person; it sends the essential, the spiritual part into the person.

Where is the actual I located in the human being? Outside of the human being, around the physical human being, one finds the spiritual human being, the supersensible I-human being. And if we look at the human aura, which is shaped like an egg, then the I-consciousness will be most effective in the shell, in the auric egg. This fact leads to the correct solution of the problem.

I have pointed out twelve points on the horizon. The occultist must know them. They exist there even if they are not recognized by everyone. These twelve points continuously send their forces into man; he is attacked by these twelve points in the various points of his aura. Only by surrounding himself with his ego is he able to make the cosmic forces one with himself. Man must feel that he belongs to the universe. Through this he enters into the faculty of perception, and through this it becomes possible for him to acquire the abilities to perceive that correspond to the points mentioned. He is embedded in these twelve points. The divine spiritual forces work through these points on man. If you can bear this in mind, you will understand the ways and aims of the spiritual man.

Man must be able to integrate this feeling into his life. Through spiritual science he will become acquainted with a sum of forces through which he can accomplish these transformations in himself. Let us think for a moment about everyday life. People rush through the world, and many things come their way that they could reflect on, that they could process in their minds, but they make no effort whatsoever to put their experiences into practice or even to reflect on them more deeply. They just want to experience and chase from one sensation to the next.

There are other people who go through life without paying the slightest attention to the external world. They brood and speculate about their own thoughts. They do not notice what is going on around them; they brood over and over again. Neither of these extremes is good for a person. But there is a middle way, and that is to interweave everything you experience with your own thoughts. This middle state is the most beneficial for the human being of the external world.

Suppose a young man is preparing for an exam. He has been working hard, the exam time is approaching and with it the exam anxiety. Again and again, the young person realizes that on the day of the exam, the questions could be about the things he is least sure about, the things he does not know for sure. This works in his thoughts. The exam went well, it is crucial for the whole of life. It is the gateway to his future life. Now it may happen that he is haunted by an 'I' space in the further course of his existence, and in this dream the exam anxiety of his youth emerges in him, everything that he did not believe he knew at the time. The soul is intimately connected with it, and the occult observer sees the fabric that is woven in the dream. What is woven into it did not contribute to the life that has passed. But the occultist knows that it can become a useful force in the next life.

It can also happen differently. From the age of forty-five, dreams cease. The one who observes himself finds that completely new character traits emerge. For example, it may be experienced that in advanced years he has far more courage than he ever possessed in his youth. The states of fear in his youth and the will to conquer them have done their quiet work in the inner man; after forty-five years these forces have been transformed into reverse forces. Something is always weaving and working within the human being, and what works there is the astral body. It works in the etheric body until the experience has spun itself into the etheric body and really become a quality. Under ordinary circumstances, it only appears as a quality in the next life, but there may also be quite abnormal cases, such as the one just mentioned.

This is how a person processes his external experiences, and it is the same with the extrasensory circumstances of life, which demand that we process them with the ego. How does the spiritual person work in relation to his external circumstances? The external circumstances approach us, but the fabric that transforms our abilities is spun from within. We weave into the person what comes from the eternal spiritual. We must go to the external, but the spiritual comes to us.

Let us assume that a person, for one reason or another, takes an interest in something, for example, that he wants to take a closer look at a tree. He must then approach the tree, he must go to the tree to get a result. But it is different with spiritual results. These come to us, we have to wait for them to come.

The essential thing about external experiences is that they are of a transitory nature. But those that come to us through the path of 'Theosophy are grounded in spirituality. We weave them into our inner being as something imperishable. We must go to the external, but the spiritual must approach us, and the more we make ourselves capable of receiving the spiritual within us, the more it comes to us from the spiritual worlds and becomes our property. Those people who live among us as poets and have created and produced something are always those who in times gone by have allowed the supersensible to flow into them. We must learn to reflect more. We must be able to think logically and reasonably and then keep our soul completely still. Then we will not have to wait in vain. The corresponding spiritual substance will flow into our soul, for which we ourselves have paved the way. We must learn to maintain the expectant mood. Not what we brood over is best. We should want to attain everything through our thought work, not through ourselves. Only through sharp thinking and subsequent waiting can we fertilize our spirit. It must flow to us when we have learned to observe the right processes, and these processes must work together with thinking, feeling and willing.

There are three aspects to our soul life: thinking, feeling and willing. A person sees a rose. Through his thought life, he recognizes it as such. He admires the shape and the color; this awakens certain feelings in him. He stretches out his hand to grasp the rose, thereby expressing an act of will. However, important results, which can be decisive for a person's entire life, depend on how he or she treats these qualities.

For example: A person meets another who instills a pronounced antipathy in him. He sees that he cannot free himself from the person who arouses antipathy in him, and the feeling that is caused him by the compulsion makes him angry. Thinking, feeling and willing are involved in this process.

In our daily lives, we can often observe how differently these processes unfold. The anger of one person quickly disappears; they may not dwell on such feelings for long, and the better feelings gain the upper hand in them. Another person, on the other hand, carries their anger around with them all day long; they cannot find the resilience to shake it off. The first person, who quickly fights his emotions, will remain mentally healthy and may reach a ripe old age. The other person, who flies into a rage over every trifle and carries this rage around with him for a long time, will age prematurely. The constant emotions will take their toll on his body.

A proverb says: “Don't take anger to bed with you.” This is where the affects begin to weave in the soul, and we weave the passions into the human being. What we experience from the spirit will have an effect on our soul, and it makes a significant difference whether our experiences remain only in theory or whether they pass over into feeling.

Let us assume that a person absorbs much that is spiritual, and that what is absorbed penetrates into the person. It will only bear fruit for the spiritual person when he embraces what he has absorbed with enthusiasm and love. Only then does the work also become a work of the inner man, only then does he extract the spiritual and make it part of his spiritual self. It is feeling that helps us to make the spiritually acquired our own.

Man lives in his aura, and when the theosophical truths are absorbed by the spiritual man, the aura is strongly agitated. The I is the motor of this movement. How does this process present itself to the clairvoyant eye? When love and enthusiasm for great spiritual thoughts take hold of man, everything in the aura comes to life, and the result of this higher thought life is that it has a purifying effect on the aura. All material desires and thoughts, which are expressed in the human aura, clump together into balls, and with increasing spiritual work these balls condense more and more, becoming smaller and smaller, until the purifying light of spiritual thinking has dissolved and driven them away.

When the clairvoyant eye observes a person watching a sunrise, similar phenomena can be observed. The devout joy that a person can feel at the natural spectacle causes a similar process to take place in the aura of the person watching. As long as such a person allows beauty to affect his inner being, the effect of this process is a dissolving one in the aura, and much that is bad is transformed into good. The ability to rejoice and to immerse oneself has a purifying effect on the soul, and in such moments the soul is capable of absorbing new spiritual things because the stream of higher forces has found an entrance.

But the opposite can also take place. If a person does not dwell on a great natural spectacle that has affected him in his thoughts, if none of the beauty remains within him and he turns to other things after a fleeting enjoyment, the following can occur: everything in the aura of such a person becomes concentrated. A spiritual-soul task that came his way has been carelessly set aside and is now working itself out in the dark. It may happen that lies find their way into his inner being. To develop the ability to let something resonate and to empathize is the work of a spiritual person.

If we all learned this, spiritual science would lead to paths and goals that would create widespread blessings. If only intellectual work were done, if quarrels and discord prevailed among the theosophists, little would be transformed from bad to good. The law of karma will show man how to work in the right way.

For those who can feel Theosophy with enthusiasm and know how to draw comfort from it, the higher spiritual sciences are beneficial, for they bring comfort and strength in all circumstances. No one leaves these sciences without consolation. The greater our aims, the more our striving will be imbued with ideals, and man carries them out into the world. We pursue spiritual science and interweave it with our inner being. It permeates us, and we can carry it out to others.

We must work towards these goals as much as we are able. We have no right to ignore the paths and goals of the spiritual human being. It is our duty to weave the soul into the physical world. The human being is the gateway, the only gateway of spirit into the physical-material world, into which heaven is to flow. We can loosen the lead of materialism by allowing spiritual truths to penetrate it. Only by working on the development of humanity does man contribute to life and not to death. To walk in the ways and to strive for the goals of the spiritual man means to pursue the task of making the supersensible soul-like.