Human Consciousness and Angelic Perception of Speech

GA 162 — 17 July 1915, Dornach

Sixth Lecture

When human beings gradually ascend in their spiritual development to the perception of the higher worlds, they must—as I have often mentioned—form new mental images about their entire attitude toward these higher worlds. We are accustomed to judging our entire attitude toward the world by how we perceive our attitude toward the world here on the physical plane. Here on the physical plane, we as human beings clearly feel that we stand in opposition to the other creatures of the various realms of this world, in such a way that we look down, as it were, on the beings of these other realms. We perceive them; we feel ourselves as human beings to be the highest link in this physical world and perceive the other beings. We then form concepts and ideas, mental images of these entities.

I would like to say that we stand there, the world is outside of us; we perceive this world, we take in, as it were, what it gives us, and we then carry it with us in our soul through the world. The objects are outside, the beings are outside of us, and what they communicate to us through our perception of them, we then carry with us in our soul.

If we wanted to speak from the point of view of the earth's other creatures, we would have to say: we can perceive the beings of the different realms, the plant, animal and mineral realms; we perceive them.

Now it is so obvious for a person, who has become so accustomed to seeing his relationship to the world, to apply this directly when dealing with entities of the higher orders, of the higher hierarchies, for example. Man imagines: when he moves up into the higher worlds, then the angels, archangels, spirits of personality and so on are spread around him just as minerals, plants and animals are spread around him in the physical world. But that is not exactly how it is, I would say. We have to get used to imagining our relationship to the other, the spiritual world in a different way the moment we cross the threshold into the spiritual world. We must take completely seriously what has been said more than once: that the moment we take just one step into the spiritual world, that is, expand our ability to perceive, we grow together in a certain way with the beings around us, that we spread ourselves over them with our own being. And I have often used the trivial, not very beautiful, but apt expression: we creep into the beings, we grow together with them. Towards the beings of the physical plane we always feel as if we were outside them, and what we perceive of them goes into us. Towards the beings of the higher worlds we must feel that we go into them. And just as the beings of the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms allow themselves to be perceived by us, so we must allow ourselves to be perceived by the beings of the higher hierarchies; that is, we become objective objects of perception, beings of perception, for the beings of the higher hierarchies. I would like to say: just as the various animals are spread out for us out there in space so that we can look at them, we are looked at by the beings of the higher hierarchies. They look down on us. And that they look at us, we experience that; that is actually the perception of the higher beings. So one should not always say: I perceive an angel — because that does not correspond exactly to the experience — but instead one should say: I feel, I perceive that I am perceived by an angel.

This experience is what we must consider carefully when we speak of the worlds that lie beyond the threshold of the spiritual world. Everyday language often has apt expressions for this, expressions that, I would say, are right in the middle of everyday life. When folk language draws our attention to the fact that, whatever we do, we are being observed – either, as we say in our modern consciousness, by God Himself, or, as we would have said in the past, by a being from the next higher hierarchy – as expressed, for example, in the beautiful folk saying:

Where I am and what I do,
God, my Father, is watching me.

This is indeed an apt expression for the facts discovered by spiritual science. And so, if one were to search the vernacular, especially for older expressions, one could draw the irrefutable conclusion from the very existence of such expressions that in earlier times, from an naive from a naive, original elementary observation of what is really the case with regard to the observation of man by the beings of the higher worlds, than man knows of this fact today in our materialistic age.

Now it seems obvious to ask how this is actually done when beings from the higher hierarchies observe us. It is quite interesting to reflect on this subject, even if it is perhaps a little out of the way. You will see tomorrow that we will ascend from this somewhat remote consideration to a very obvious subject, and so you will have to forgive me if today a somewhat remote consideration is adopted.

In addition to what I have just said, I would like to recall something else that has been discussed many times before. We human beings have, as an important soul ability during our life between birth and death, the memory within us, and I have often pointed out what all depends on the memory. At the moment when the memory of our recollections is broken, our entire coherent self would be disturbed. The continuing thread of our self would break. Such people - I have often pointed this out - who experience this, end up in very unfortunate life situations. So it can happen that someone suddenly has the thread of their memory broken by some elemental influences. This can happen without the mind or judgment suffering in the slightest; they can be preserved entirely. And so it may happen that such a person, no longer knowing who he was yesterday, no longer has the context of his experiences of yesterday, the day before yesterday and so on, but mind, goes to Basel, gets another ticket there, gets on the train and – well, now it would be difficult, but things have happened before – suddenly rediscovers who he actually is in Bombay. In between, he had done everything necessary to accomplish the journey from one place to the next, even to the place of a distant part of the world, quite cleverly. It was not his reason or his judgment that was lacking, but only the context of his memory. Such cases of illness have occurred many, many times. I myself have experienced it with a man I knew, how his memory was wiped one day and he traveled far around the world, then found himself in a Central European city after registering there, still with his memory wiped, in an asylum for homeless people. It took three weeks before he came to again, after his memory had returned.

This power of memory, this possibility of holding our experiences together, is one of the most important things we have on the physical plane. This power of memory is transformed at the moment when we either pass through the gate of initiation or when we pass through physical death. I will speak only of the latter case.

When we pass through physical death, we no longer need the kind of memory we had in the physical world, because we see there what has remained of events, what has been written in the Akasha Chronicle of the world. We need only look at something in the past; we do not need to remember. But the power of remembrance is there; it is only transformed into another, more active power of the inner soul life. The power is there.

It is very important that we have developed memory for our life on the physical plane in just the way we have it in the time between birth and death. It is of essential importance that our memory for the ordinary circumstances of life does not reach back into conditions that we have gone through between the last death and this time's birth. For only in this way can certain forces become condensed and, through this condensation, become the powers of memory, which function in just the same way as our memory between birth and death.

It is a purely human characteristic that we have such a memory, which essentially extends to the life between birth and death. No other being in the world has such a memory, has precisely such a memory, which works in such a way that when this being proceeds to its embodiment or - as we would have to say with angels - to its etherization, the memory lights up and then remains until another state, which with us humans is death. Other entities of other world orders have these same powers, which in us lie in the memory, developed in a completely different way.

Now it is extremely interesting to observe how, firstly, in relation to their ability to perceive, and secondly, in relation to their memory, we are very different from the entities of the next higher hierarchy, the entities of the hierarchy of the Angeloi. These angels perceive something different from what we humans accomplish, and certainly also from what underlies our deeds and actions on the physical plane; they look at us, they perceive us. We are objects of perception for them. But among other things, there is something particularly important that they perceive about us: that is the whole essence of our speech.

Our speaking is, after all, something more or less unconscious compared to what we regard as the process of our thinking, as the process of our ideas. Thinking in us humans occurs to a certain high degree consciously; speaking is not conscious to the same degree. It requires only a very slight self-observation to realize that we do not speak consciously to the same extent as we think consciously. If one wanted to speak as consciously as one thinks consciously - believe it or not - one would stutter something quite proper in the world. It is only because we do not always have to think about how to form one letter or another that we speak as fluently as we do. If we had to think first – I am not even talking about thinking in the physical body, but only in the astral body – if we had to think about what we have to do in our astral body when we form a t or a d or an h, then we would truly not be able to have the fluent speech that we have. It is precisely because we use language as something habitual that our consciousness does not pour over our speech in the same way that it pours over our thinking, over which it extends at least to a certain degree. To a certain degree, because consciousness does not extend completely over our thinking either.

Now, however, we actually represent something in the world precisely through our language. We humans just do not notice this. But just imagine you could withdraw to some cottage where you would have an apparatus through which you could perceive everything that is spoken by people on earth in one day; and to help you do that, let's assume the cottage would be set up so that you would not be disturbed by perceptions of anything else. So you would have some kind of apparatus that would only convey to you everything that is spoken on earth. So you would live entirely in what is spoken on earth.

Compare this with your environment as a human being. There you have the beings of the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms: that is your real world. If you were to sit in your little house as I said, everything that is spoken there would be your world; that would be the kingdom that extends around you.

It does not actually take much to feel at home in this realm through occult development, which is then, however, not a little house but a spiritual state of development. You then feel so at home in it that you know: you are now in a region where – I would say, excluding what people on the physical plane put into their words through their often quite convoluted concepts, thus excluding the world of concepts – the angels listen to how people speak. So you are in a world where you know: now the angels are listening to everything that people say.

This is definitely a real experience; it is just not properly noticed by those who undergo occult development, because very soon, at first, the state occurs in which one is stunned by the confused chatter. This causes, I might say, a kind of paralysis; as a result it is not observed enough. But it depends on whether one strengthens oneself inwardly again accordingly, and then one becomes aware of something quite different. One does not hear all the chatter and perceives something quite different. One is then in the region in which speech lives as lawfully as, let us say, minerals live lawfully in their natural laws here on the physical plane. One no longer perceives the useless talk, but one perceives the laws according to which speech is spoken.

Now, however, one has to overcome certain difficulties, because these perceptions break off every few moments, because one – and now I come to the other – would have to have the memory of the beings from the hierarchy of the angeloi if one wanted to perceive the lawfulness that reigns in the world, of which I have just spoken. If we were to descend into the world above which we stand and which we know as the mineral world, where we only have the law of order, if we were to enter it, we would at first be just as stunned in the mineral world as we are when we hear all the confused talking of mankind on earth. But we have already gone beyond this state of stupor through our human development; we only perceive the laws of the mineral world. We would also perceive the laws of speech, but the memory of the beings from the hierarchy of the Angeloi is needed for this. And so one can now experience in a very vivid way what the relationship is, I would say, between one layer of the world and another.

That is actually the essential thing in perceiving higher worlds, that when one comes from one world layer into another world layer, one feels transported into completely different circumstances, into completely different inner laws. That is the essential thing, that when one passes from one world into another, one says to oneself: it is not just that one comes into different regions of one and the same world, but one comes into another world in such a way that one is transported to the region where the angels observe the laws of human language on earth. One enters a region where, I might say, quite different concepts of time prevail than in our physical world, a region in which a longer memory thread is therefore also necessary.

And so it happens that I want to discover something from the other side of life, which became clear to some people from the physical side in the course of the 19th century, for example Jakob Grimm: namely, certain laws in the development of human language. In this way, one comes to extraordinarily interesting insights into the inner laws of the universe.

You see, when one speaks as a human being, one does not pay attention to the unconscious character of speaking - to the inner power of a letter, of a sound. This inner power, the play of the inner forces of the letter, of the sound, takes place in the subconscious, and as a human being, with our consciousness, we are outside this region, in which what is subconscious for us is conscious when we speak. But for the region of the angels, it is conscious. Let us assume, for example, that we pronounce a word in which the sound (s), or the English (th), which is phonetically equivalent to our (s), plays an important role. When we pronounce such a word in which the (s) or a (th) plays an important role, we, with our human consciousness, do not think of the cosmic forces that lie in the (s) or (th ) lies, but we think of the concept that expresses itself in this context, in which the sound is contained, because our consciousness is not in the region where the sound (s) develops an inner essence. For us, the sound lies outside of our consciousness and is not an immediate experience; for the consciousness of the angels, however, the sound is an immediate experience. The angel experiences something very special in the power of the sound.

Now, we with our physical consciousness have before us such a word, which, I want to say, has as an important component this sound (s), (ss) or (th); the being from the hierarchy of the angeloi, by perceives this sound uttered by a human being, remembers with his higher memory earlier states of human speech, in far-off times, and he must bring together this sound, which is in this word, with the sound from which it has become. And there, with an (s) or (th), such a consciousness of this being from the hierarchy of the angels immediately remembers a (t); that is to say, there was once a time when the (th) or the (s) was a (t) and there was an even earlier time when the (t) was a (d).

Now imagine such a memory. So I said: an angel hears a word in which there is an (s) or an (th); now he immediately remembers the form of the word that was there once, in which there was a (t) in the place where the (s) or (th) is now; and furthermore, he remembers that in even earlier times there was a (d) in the same place.

This arises from a very definite fact, namely, that such transformations of sounds take place according to a very definite law, that the sound progresses, and in fact progresses in such a way that it first develops its power mainly out of the astral.

Now it has the following tendency: when it has lived for some time in the word in such a way that it has developed out of the astral, that is to say, when man has mainly used or uses his astral to produce a sound, then in later times there are people who no longer strain the astral but mainly the etheric in the same place, so that the sound is deposited in the etheric. And when a time has passed in which the person has lived in the ethereal, he comes to place the sound more and more in the physical, to place it in the physical.

This is very regular: if, for example, we look at any word that is spoken in such a way that a sound, a main sound in the word, is deposited in the etheric, then we can find in later times find – quite apart from the meaning, for the word itself can change its meaning – that in the same word the sound is later deposited in the physical, and still later again in the astral; still later it would be deposited again in the etheric.

The sounds have a tendency to progress in the course of development. And just as we observe the progression of the plant world from the greening leaf in spring to the emergence of the flower, to the development of the fruit, and again to the decay, so the being from the hierarchy of the Angeloi observes the progression of the sounds in the kingdom that I have characterized as the kingdom of language. They are, I might say, variously stationed in speech, in the kingdom of speech. Before any sound that is once stationed in the astral, the being from the hierarchy of the angels finds after some time that this sound appears entirely in the etheric, and after some time again in the physical. When it observes a sound at any time in the physical, after some time it is in the astral. So that there is really a rhythmic movement to be observed in the development of sounds, if one considers the realm of language; a rhythmic movement goes around like this (see drawing). This is the underlying basis for the law of sound change, which some of you may well know, which Jacob Grimm characterized in the 19th century in his own way, from a more materialistic point of view.

If we take this example—the transformation of (d) into (t), then into (s), which has the same value as (th) —, if we take this example, we see that the (d) is produced by the whole human being, with all four limbs, creating a center of gravity, as it were, in the astral body: this is how he produces the (d). He produces the (t) by creating a center of gravity in the etheric body. He produces the (s) or (th) by creating a center of gravity for himself in the physical realm.

You see the interesting basis for such a progression, such a transformation of a word through the ages. I would like to show this with an example that is close at hand. Take, for example, the word: (ϑήρ), dius, animal. That is the same word, only at different times. Here (Greek) we have the word with a (th) ((ϑήρ)); that would be the same ((ϑ)) as our (s), the same as the English (th). The development would take place in such a way that it tends to go over here (Gothic): the (th) would become a (d) and, as it develops further, the (d) would become a (t): it becomes more ethereal. Now we have here in fact (ϑήρ) (Greek); 'here we have “dius” (Gothic) and here we have “Tier” (German). So the word in Greek is ((ϑήρ)), the word in Gothic is (dius), the word in German is (Tier). It is the same word, exactly the same word. In Greek, it was centered in the physical. It tended to pass over into the astral in the next language, in Gothic; it tended to pass over into the etheric, becoming the word for “animal” in German.

Take another word, another example. Let us take Greek, which is equivalent to Latin here – let us take the word 'decem', for example. Here in Latin we have the word in the astral. If the word had the tendency to go over to the ethereal up to Gothic, the d would have to change into a t; and “taihun” it is also in Gothic. As it developed from Gothic into German, from the ethereal into the physical, the t would change into z, so it would be “zehn” in German.

Another word, which is very interesting, by the way: take the Greek word “ϑάνατος”. Since it has the (th), it would emphasize the physical aspect. It would tend to move into the astral and would then have to have the tendency in Gothic to have an (d) because it is astral. It is also called “dauthus”. And now it should, by developing into German, tend towards the ethereal and have a (t). It has that too! It is called “Tod” (death).

Let us now start from a word that is ethereal up here and has a τ in Greek: “(τρεις)” (treis). In Gothic it should have a th or an s. And it has that, because it is called “threis”. Here it is in the physical, now it goes into the astral, and there it should have a d in German. It has that too, it is called: “drei”.

From this you can see that, if you disregard everything that lives in language, all the meanings that live in language, there is something else special in language: a triad that emerges, I would say, much like a melody stretched out in time, a triad that can be found. If you have the starting point somewhere, then the other sounds that stood in the same place in the word at a different time resound.

Now I have chosen the simplest transformation here. But that is perfectly sufficient, because otherwise it would only become a little too complicated. Such laws of transformation underlie all language development; regulated down to the last detail, they underlie all language development; only that in the actual development, the most diverse developmental impulses cross each other. It is interesting to observe how progress in the development of language combines, in that certain languages progress faster or even make any progress at all, and certain languages do not make this progress.

Take, for example, the Greek word «(ϑάνατος)» (thanatos), «death». The regular progression is from th to d to t. At the d stands the Gothic: «dauthus. The English «death» is at the d, it has remained in the Gothic and has not undergone the further progression. But in German the word is found with (T): “Tod”. And so it is in general; if we pay attention, we find everywhere that the English, in the development of certain letters, has retained the nature of the Gothic, only it has thrown off the inner vitality, the inner soul of the Gothic. This law has been so observed that it has remained everywhere at the level of the Gothic. So when we write our “Tod” (death), we have to find the backward step of the Gothic in English; we have to go back one step. In German, we have a (T) in the etheric here at “Tod” (death). For English, we have to go back to the astral, and there we have to have a (d). In English, we have a (th) at the end of the noun “death”. We have to go back to the physical. If we were to take the adjective “dead”, we would have a dam at the end. If we continue the (d), as is correct in German, we would write it correctly by continuing it one stage further around (see drawing): then we would have a (t) at the end here, instead of a (d). That is also how it is written, the adjective in German is 'tot', dead.

There you see into a realm that is just as much spread around us as the three natural kingdoms: the mineral, the vegetable and the animal; that also has laws, also has laws of development, like the mineral, the plant and the animal kingdom; only that the time periods in which the rhythm is fulfilled – which is precisely expressed by a triangle – are just that: long. And in order to always hear the previous step resonate with the sound, the memory of a being from the hierarchy of the Angeloi is needed.

But there is something else connected with this. When you consider this law, you will have to say to yourself: If we turn our gaze back to the ancient Greek and Latin language forms and look at them in relation to today's German, insofar as the words have approximately retained their meaning, we see everywhere that the Greek and Latin language forms are two steps behind today's German, and that the Gothic language form is one step behind.

Much in the development of the world is based on the fact that what develops over time also develops in such a way that it remains in space alongside what develops in the various stages of time. Just as in the animal kingdom, the lower animals stand beside those that have developed to a higher level, so the older forms of language remain alongside the newer ones, or, one could also say, like a wild population that exists for a while alongside a more developed population. Thus, that which develops apart remains in the space alongside that which develops further. But then such a state of being combined with many other impulses, which have an effect on it.

The impulse illustrated by this triangle applies in particular to the development of the sounds (d), (t), (th) ((s), (ss)). A similar triangle also applies to the sounds (b), (p), and (g), (k), (ch). On the other hand, a triangle that would have to be drawn much larger applies to (l) and (r), for example. And for the vowels, if you want to follow the course of their development, completely different figures apply. But laws apply to all of them.

Let us assume, then, that what is temporal remains spatially juxtaposed; then it does not remain the case that in the newer simply the older lives on, because then we would still have the old Greco-Latin words alongside the newer ones that developed from them. For example, German developed in a straight line from Greek, at least in terms of most of its vocabulary. Did the Latin languages simply remain as they were? They did remain as they were, but not just as they were. They also underwent very extensive and significant changes: they rearranged the words, they did not leave the words as they were. While, for example, the word “(ϑάνατος)”, “death”, is simply the word that has developed further, this word is not as it was in Greek, it has not remained in Latin, but another word has because the original meaning that remained in the word “death” was not developed at all in the Latin languages; so that the word that one then has in the other language is not the same word at all. “Mort” is not the same word as ‘death’, but rather a very poor translation. But for what is actually contained in the word ‘death’, which has developed from ‘$advarog’, the Romance languages have no corresponding word at all. The word ‘death’ expresses something in which the corresponding ethereal really resonates. In the Romance languages, on the other hand, the same word has a completely different, non-ethereal resonance. It is very important to know that very significant transformations have taken place. From this you can see the ambiguity that lies in all lexicographic and grammatical translations, and the ambiguity that exists in the so-called exact understanding when translating from one language into another.

The underlying developmental laws here are extraordinarily profound and are connected to a different layer of consciousness than the one in which we usually live with our thinking, feeling and willing. But we do live to varying degrees in a different layer of consciousness with our thinking, feeling and willing. For example, we live almost entirely outside the layer of speech with our thinking. Our thinking has very little to do with our speaking. However strange it may sound, it is usually the case that when we have thoughts and utter a word, it has little more to do with the thought than the letters we write on paper have to do with the thought itself. Likewise, the spoken word is not much more connected to our thinking than a sign is to the thought.

The spoken word is much more closely connected with our feelings than with our thinking, and even more so with our intentions, because feeling belongs to a far more subconscious part of our soul than thinking, and intention belongs to an even more subconscious part of our soul life than feeling. When a person utters a word, it stands in relation to the thought, one might say, in such a way that it is not much more than a sign. It stands in a much more intimate relationship to feeling; it is much more closely connected with feeling; and it is especially connected with the will.

If people today were to develop the relationship between thinking and speaking, then, as speakers of different languages, they would not be able to experience the collisions they do today, because the relationship between language and thinking does not have the same intimate character as it has with feeling and willing. This is because feeling and willing will only develop in the same way in the future in humans what thinking has already developed today. Wherever feeling and willing come into consideration, this close connection with speech also comes into consideration to a very great extent.

We are now in the process of developing thinking to a certain extent as something objectively living for us through the evolution of the consciousness soul. And by the end of our time frame, people will have progressed to the point where they will no longer perceive the relationship between thinking and speaking as something particularly intimate. But it will take much longer before the relationship between speaking and feeling, and especially between speaking and willing, can be felt as something objective. For a much longer time people will persuade themselves that they have to identify themselves in their humanity with their language, with their speech character through their feeling and willing than through their thinking.

If we really visualize how a word has its own inner life, a life so regulated by laws, as the word “(ϑάνατος)”, which becomes “death” and later “Tod”, if we imagine that it lives on like that, then you really have the possibility to form an idea of how an organism lives from Greek through Gothic up to German, an organism lives as we otherwise find an organism living from its childhood stage through a later youth stage to the stage of old age. When such an organism in language has passed through the three stages and returns, it does not continue in the same way, but the whole thing spiritualizes. Mind you, when d in t, t in th (s, ss) passes over, it does not return to its original stage, but now makes a lateral ascent. So you must not imagine the triangle in the plane (drawing). As it comes across, the d, t, th continues in this way and now advances in the spiral, thus always entering into other layers. So you must not imagine that a word that has advanced to th returns to d, but then the word dies and hands over its transformative powers to another realm. The word is born in the physical, in the etheric or in the astral, makes its circuit, dies and then reappears at a higher level as a different force, transformed. So that a word that we can trace from the Greek, from “(ϑάνατος)” to “death”, to the German “Tod”, now has the potential to die as a word. The word “Tod” will die. At the end of the period we call our fifth post-Atlantic cultural period, it will no longer be there, it will have died. But the power that formed it will pass over to the power of the human soul at a higher level and help people to understand the nature of death in the sense of our spiritual science. In order that the power to understand the nature of death in the sense of our spiritual science may arise in our soul, the word had to be born in Greek, then had to undergo development into a youth in Gothic, in English 'death', had to undergo development in German to the later age: 'Tod', and will come to the point where it will die. It will die and give up its strength to more spiritual powers of the soul.

And so, just as we direct our gaze to the emergence of a lamb, or let us say, a cow, an ox or a bull, and see how they gradually develop, reach a climax and die again, so the angel looks at the emergence of a word, at the life of a word, at the dying of a word. That belongs to his world, to his observation, just as the observation of, say, the plant, mineral or animal kingdom belongs to our world.

These are aspects through which I wanted to draw your attention to a life that is unconscious to us, only touches our consciousness, but which, at its higher levels, immediately develops a real life of its own, immediately becoming a being. A window or a door opens for us, as it were, to look in on how beings develop, elemental beings that are then reflected in our world in the form of our words. The angel turns his spiritual eye to ancient Greece, where he sees an elemental being being born out of the physical, he sees it etheralize, astralize, and he will see it die as our fifth post-Atlantean developmental period draws to a close. He sees this being in its development, and the fact that this being develops has an effect in the physical world. And this effect consists in the fact that the ancient Greeks said “(ϑάνατος)”, the Goths said “dauthus”, the English say “death”, and we in German say “Tod”. The transformation of this word is the imprint of an evolving being that progresses in its development in the physical world, etheric world, astral world. What we perceive in language is the reflection of the life of higher beings from a higher world, the reflection of their inner development in the world in which we find ourselves in the time between birth and death.

This will be the starting point for our remarks tomorrow.