Supplements to Member Lectures

GA 246 — 2 December 1910, Kassel

33. On Reading, Envy and Mendacity

It will prove to be correct if we discuss some practical life questions and expressions in the development of the human being today. What we learn about the physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego should not remain a mere theory like collected notes, but should become alive in our souls. It is best if we see what we learn first as a plan, as a charcoal drawing. Joy of life, health and happiness in both the moral and physical sense depend on the connection between these four limbs. - Much is being sinned against here today.

We really are living in a transitional age; that is not just a phrase. Not so long ago, people still knew something of the workings of the astral body. In education, the workings of the etheric body, the astral body, were still considered instinctively. And what must now come is a correct knowledge to replace these instincts; for this, theosophical knowledge must be disseminated. In the time of our fathers and grandfathers, people still knew instinctively about the workings of the astral body.

Aristotle characterized the essence of drama back then. Lessing was still struggling to understand this explanation of drama. Aristotle says how the events in a tragedy take place, how they should arouse fear and pity in us, how they should trigger them in us; catharsis, that is, purification, should result in this feeling in the listener. Lessing struggled to understand the word catharsis. A whole library has been written about it since then. The ancient Greeks assumed that dramas were not only performed for the entertainment of the audience, but that the listener should experience fear, for example: How will we fare, this one or that one?

The drama was intended to heal people, to cure them, so that the soul was in a certain harmony with fear and compassion, so that people could also find the right relationship to fear and compassion in life. This was the case in ancient Greece, not the way plays are performed today.

The “stupid August” used to be the one who only does stupid things in the traveling circuses. This is a last reflection of what was intended in Greek tragedy. This stupidity then triggered in the soul what man could use in life: a healthy laugh. At a certain age and at a certain level of education, it works very well if, for example, someone sprinkles flour on the newspaper for stupid August, who is reading it, and then stupid August sneezes and all the flour flies into his face. That works extraordinarily well. It has an effect on the astral. Everything we experience has an effect on the etheric body and the astral body. The clairvoyant observer can see - and this is very interesting - how this or that works as a favorite activity or as a compulsory activity. If you knew this, you would do some things quite differently, for example: reading. For example, someone reads an exciting novel as quickly as possible; he reads in such a way that he skips as much as possible. The astral body is constantly moving, while the etheric body is completely still. The astral body lies down over the book, as it were, while the etheric body remains completely behind.

Another immerses himself with great love in the individual persons, thinking: How do I know such people? How should their destiny be? How would I shape it? And so on. - The same applies to reading that is not narrative, but instructive and so on. Here the astral body is less fluctuating, while the etheric body follows the individual movements of the astral body. This has quite different effects. This way is not temporary, but it becomes a habit.

Most people forget people; it is already so today: Life observation is something very rare. People are even happy if they can forget. Theosophists should not be like that.

Even in one lifetime you can observe how karma works, you can follow how karma works in 15, 20, 50 years.

We see a person who is not exactly inclined to absorb deeper feelings; this is the result of karma. But such people do not find their way in life. The result of reading like this, upwards, quickly, is that such a reader is not inclined to absorb deeper ideas. It also has physical effects. Such a person is never really satisfied, is ill or is only imaginatively ill. So you do a young person a great favor if you lead him to linger on details, to look at them lovingly while reading.

You meet people in life who have a certain skill, but others who never quite know what to do. If they have written a letter, they want to tear it up again; if they have bought a hat, they don't like it straight away.

A person who finds his way in life for himself and for others can be seen to behave very differently from other children even as a schoolchild. This is what happened to me when children listened to history lessons, for example when Caesar was mentioned. Then they would gather together everything about this topic by adding everything they could contribute themselves.

Those who let everything come to them, who don't look for anything themselves, later tear up their profession and have different intentions today than tomorrow. You will know all this later on. This is much more important than curriculum and so on. That's why theosophy is so important.

You should learn to think meaningfully about reading. What is reading? The theosophist has the duty to think about how deeply important such a question is for life, and how deeply important something like reading is.

In the course of twenty-four hours we all return once to where we came from - to the spiritual. Without sleep we could not live. Waking life is a work of destruction, sleeping is an immersion in the sources of life. During sleep, the astral body and the ego are spread far, far out into the macrocosm. From this alone, man could learn that he is not just what his physical body is.

In the Babylonian school, emphasis was placed on the fact that a person with a healthy constitution, not walking too fast, not too slow, could walk around the earth in 365.5 days. If a person lived a healthy, normal life, he would walk and live at the same speed as the sun. The astral body really reaches up to the sun when sleeping.

Forgetting oneself, being surrendered to the spiritual world, that is sleeping. Reading, listening to a drama, a work of music, is in a small way the same as self-forgetful surrender in sleep. In the same way, we don't think much about ourselves when we read. If we were to think about ourselves while sleeping, the workings of the spiritual would be lost. Every time we listen to a piece of music and so on, we bring something into our astral body and thus into our etheric body, and we remain connected to it, connected to it for life, so to speak. A whole world lies in every human soul through all the impressions in life. That is why reading is so incredibly important.

Suppose we do nothing to overcome our lack of sympathy or even our feelings of hatred towards a person. Unkindness, disinterestedness appears in the other life in the form of a certain anxiety, fear.

Being willingly given means standing securely in life and also hoping that everything will go well. Hopelessness will not come to those who have been taught to be loving in childhood.

Even the simplest person has a feeling for envy and deceitfulness. We can observe a lot of karma in envy and mendacity. Goethe says that he does not know envy, no matter how much he observes himself. And Benvenuto Cellini says that he was never a liar, no matter how much else he did.

Envy and deceitfulness are the things that break through the empathy and compassion of the entire human race. When we envy a person, we face him, we no longer feel with him. And it is all the more so with mendacity. When envy and deceitfulness are deeply rooted in the soul, it is not easy to overcome them.

We were once embodied for the first time, and then - the second time - Lucifer and Ahriman worked on us. Envy - Lucifer; Ahriman - lies; envy - Lucifer - astral body; deceitfulness - Ahriman - etheric body.

Every soul that is not completely corrupted fights against envy and mendacity. Lucifer and Ahriman are good friends with each other. They hand over the reigns to each other. When someone fights envy, Lucifer says: "He's fighting envy, there's nothing I can do. You take him, he says to Ahriman. - And then envy is transformed; envy then appears under a mask. Then the person who thinks he has overcome envy says: He or she has this bad quality and so on. Envy then appears in the mask of censure. He thinks he is right to blame, but he does not know that it is masked envy, that qualities are seen and criticized that are not as they appear to this person.

Whether this quality appears as envy or as censure, it has the same karmic consequence. These people then become such that they cannot relate to other people. They cannot start anything, but they cannot finish anything either. - And with mendacity comes a certain shyness; they cannot look people straight in the eye.

In a lifetime, these effects occur in such a way that they appear as psychological effects. But when we have passed through death and move on to a new birth, these qualities manifest themselves physically. The soul is the architect of the physical body. A mentally weak, unstable person becomes a helpless child in the next incarnation who cannot help himself and so on.

A person who has been a liar is later shy, in the next incarnation he would be a person who cannot find a connection. This is physically based, he is already weak according to his physical constitution, which means he cannot get along well with other people.

A person is born into a very specific environment; edelweiss does not grow on the plain, but on the mountain. It is the same with people. The very people we have lied to, envied, blamed and so on, we are born into their environment. It is not [just] a matter of knowing this, but of living accordingly.

What is right in the higher moral sense when you know: someone envies me, gossips about me and so on? - The right thing is not to take revenge, but to help others. You do the other person the best by forgiving them, really forgiving them! Don't allow yourself to be challenged, don't say: I don't want to forgive. That would be entering into the person's karma. No, insofar as we can help to turn the karma to the good, we should do so. That is the right thing to do, to shame the other person by being particularly good to them. This is shown by the fact that we have benefited him immensely. He will then not be helpless in later life. We can only achieve this through forgiveness. If a weak person is born into our midst, then we try to surround them with a positive feeling of forgiveness.

Not to say in theory: Yes, I forgive you. - But rather direct the feeling towards the weak child every day, for example, and then we will see that the child will thrive, that the pale skin will become healthy skin and so on. We help to change and promote its physical condition. - Only when we put theosophy into practice in this way does it actually become what it should be. For example, if someone makes a certain statement on the train, we should think about whether this does not create a duty for us. Directing the powers of the soul towards the spiritual source - that is the task.

Four to five thousand years ago, people could still be told: You come from the spiritual! - This knowledge, this feeling, was increasingly lost. It was least present in the time of Christ. But since then it can be directed towards the future, towards that which makes man similar to what happened in the event of Golgotha. In the past one went back into the spiritual; after Christ it is said: You must absorb more and more of the Christ being in every life. When the earth falls away from the spiritual, then you will go with the spiritual. With the Christ-impulse we absorb something that enables us to have an effect on those who surround us with envy, to have an effect on them in such a way that the Christ-impulse can enter into others. This makes the words true: “Inasmuch as you did it to the least of my brothers, you did it to me.” This is possible through the Christ-Jesus.

Buddha, 600 before Christ, still pointed to the old spiritual origin when he said: "Beams are falling, pillars are cracking, the temple of the body is collapsing, I no longer need to return to this earthly life. - Christ, on the other hand, says: “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it up again in three days.”

We must become more and more like Christ, and to do this we must come back to earth again and again. This is how the Christ impulse continues to inspire us into the distant future.