Supplements to Member Lectures

GA 246 — 6 June 1911, Copenhagen

42. The Spiritual Guidance of Man and Humanity II

In the next lectures I would like to speak to you about a subject which is important to man both in relation to ordinary, everyday life, important also for those exceptional cases of life where fate seems to impose very special tests on us, important also for everything that we call the “higher life”, the development of the human soul into the spiritual worlds. For everything - the regular and the abnormal life of the day and the higher life into the spiritual worlds - ultimately points us towards something that we can call in the most comprehensive sense: the spiritual guidance of man and also of the whole of humanity.

It is not exactly easy in our time to make ourselves fully understood when talking about this spiritual guidance of man. After all, we live in an age in which people do not even like to hear that they are “led” and that it is part of the nature of man to submit to “guidance”, to a higher power as it were. Today, people would love to be a “leader” with regard to this or that, a guide - but a “led”? That seems to go against everything that people today think about their dignity, their independence and their freedom. Nevertheless, there is a very simple self-experiment for the human soul, from which it can first emerge with complete clarity how man is subject to what we must initially call “unknown” leadership.

This simple experiment consists of looking back a little more often in your life, as you grow older and older, on what you have experienced and done, thinking back a little on what you perhaps did in your youth, what you did, did or said at a later age, how you perceived this or that event that affected you, and so on. If you think about it once, think about it more often, think about it every time a few years have passed, then you can make a strange discovery. This discovery is not only made by the person who is in the midst of ordinary life, but to an even greater extent by the person who has already undergone a little spiritual development. And to an even greater extent even the initiate makes the same experience. We make a curious discovery here. When we ask ourselves: What did you do or say at this or that time of your life? - Then it very often turns out that you have done a whole lot of things - you come up with things like that - that you only really understand now. You did things seven or eight years ago, or perhaps twenty or twenty-one years ago, that you now know for sure: your mind is only now reaching the point where you can understand the things you did back then!

Many people don't make such self-discoveries because they don't set out to do so. But it is extremely important for people to make this kind of reflection more often. Because of such a moment when a person comes to the realization: you actually did things in earlier years that you are only now beginning to understand; at that time your mind was not yet mature enough to understand things; at that time you did them, even spoke of them.

From such a moment, when you make such discoveries, something like the sensation in the human soul emanates: you feel as if you are sheltered by a good power that is working through you. You begin to gain more and more confidence in the fact that you are actually not alone in the world in the highest sense of the word and that what you understand, what you can do, is basically only a small part of what you have to accomplish in the world.

If you make this observation often, you can elevate something that is theoretically very easy to understand into a full life practice. Theoretically, it is easy to see that if everything that man has to do in order to live were left to his own intellect, his own intelligence, he would not get very far - really not very far at all. Because we only need to answer this question theoretically in the following way: When does man actually do the most artistic deeds in himself? When does he act most wisely towards himself? He does this approximately up to the point in time up to which he can still remember when he looks back in later life on the years that have passed. If you look back on what happened three, four, five years ago and so on, your memory will take you to a certain point; that's as far as it goes. Then your parents or those who were present in your earlier life can tell you what you accomplished as a child, but your own memory only goes back to a certain point. This is also the point at which a person has learned to feel like a self. For people who remember back in normal life, this is the case at the age of three or three and a half. Before this time, however, the human soul has done the wisest things to man himself, and never later, when he comes to consciousness, can man do such great and mighty things to himself as he accomplishes in the unconscious in the very first years of his childhood. For we know that through our birth we carry into the physical plan what we have brought with us as the fruits of previous incarnations. And when we are born, our external brain, for example, is still a very imperfect instrument. The human soul must now work the finer structures into it. But during these times, not only do we have to work out our brain in fine detail, but we also learn three of the most important things before we become conscious. Firstly, we learn to orientate our own physicality in space. What this means is something that modern man does not pay much attention to, for therein lies one of the most important differences between man and animal, in that the animal is destined from the outset to develop its equilibrium in space. One animal is a climber, the other a swimmer and so on. The animal is organized from the outset in such a way that it places itself correctly in space, and this is the case right up to the most human-like mammals.

If zoologists were to think about this fact, they would emphasize less that, for example, humans and animals have so and so many similar muscles and so on, because something like that is much less important than the fact that humans do not have their equilibrium position from the outset, because they first have to create it for themselves. It is tremendously significant that man must work on himself in order to transform himself from a creature that crawls on the ground into one that can walk upright. It is man himself who gives himself his vertical position, his equilibrium position in space, who brings himself into a relationship with gravity.

I can only hint at this here and I am well aware that some zoologists object to such things, and this is also happening today. But in the future, zoologists will also find that it is correct that man [himself] organizes his equilibrium in relation to gravity in the course of his first childhood.

The second thing that man teaches himself - really out of that individuality that goes from incarnation to incarnation, from embodiment to embodiment - is the language through which he learns the truth from his fellow human beings and can express it himself. Those pedagogues who look deeper into the human gears know very well that a person who would be transferred to a desert island and would not be together with other people would not learn the language. What we inherit, what is implanted for later years so that it is subject to the principles of heredity, does not depend on people being together with their fellow human beings. For example, we are predisposed by heredity to change our teeth in our seventh year. We can be out on a desert island; if we only have the opportunity to grow up, we will change our teeth. But we only learn to speak when our soul being as such is stimulated; when that which we carry from life to life is stimulated. We have to form the germ for our laryngeal development at a time when we do not yet have our ego-consciousness. Before the time up to which we remember back, we must lay the seed for the formation of our laryngeal development so that our larynx can become a speech organism.

And then there is a third thing that is less well known, which man learns through himself, through that which lives within him from incarnation to incarnation: this is life in thought itself. We set about working on the brain because the brain is the tool of thought. The brain is initially so unplastic because man first forms it and because it is the instrument of his thinking, that is, of that life which can be the life of man on earth; for man must live with his fellow men in thought, then he lives first in truth. And if his thought life were to be stunted, human life would not be complete on earth.

Why can we learn so much in the very first years of our lives? If it depended on our intelligence, we really could not accomplish what we accomplish without our intelligence in our first years of life, what we accomplish out of the unconscious - but no less out of our soul, out of our individuality - in the very first years. Why can we do all this? Well, we can do it for the reason that in the first years of our life we are much more connected with our soul, with our whole individuality, to the spiritual worlds of the higher hierarchies than later. For the clairvoyant who has undergone a spiritual development, so that he can follow the real spiritual processes, something tremendously significant occurs at the time when the human being has attained his ego-consciousness. While what we call the “childlike aura” surrounds the child in the first years of life like a wonderfully golden, human-superhuman intelligence, [and indeed] surrounds it in such a way that this childlike aura, the actual higher part of the human being, has its continuation everywhere into the spiritual world, at the time when the child learns to say “I” to itself, this aura penetrates more into the interior.

The human being learns to perceive himself as an ego, to recognize himself as an ego, in that what was previously connected to the higher worlds enters into his ego. From then on, he learns everything through his consciousness, learns to connect himself everywhere with the outside world. He didn't do that before. Things used to be as if they hovered above him like a wonderful dream world. But he also worked from the spirit, worked so deeply into his physicality that he was able to shape his brain from the spirit. I have already pointed out that it is not wrong to say: “Even the wisest man can still learn from a child.” - The greatest masters can learn from children. Why? Because - if I may use the trivial expression - what surrounds the child as an aura provides something like a “telephone connection” to the spiritual hierarchies, to the spiritual world. Something flows from the spiritual worlds into the child's aura, into the human being, and the human being is directly subject to the guidance of the whole spiritual world as an individual being. The spiritual forces from the whole spiritual world flow into the human being. It is they who raise him up, who bring him so far that he overcomes gravity; it is they who form his larynx, who shape his brain so that it becomes a living link for thoughts, feelings and morality. There the whole spiritual world works into the human being.

This is the same world from which comes that which we also feel later when we stand before the fact: Sometimes you say better things than you can actually say according to your intellect, according to your wisdom, you say something that you can hardly understand yourself!

Then you really feel: When you entered the physical world at birth, you had not yet completely escaped the world that you left when you entered physical existence, [you] were still connected to it. Then that which one has as a piece of spirituality enters our physical form and follows us. But it is often the case that we feel: What is placed within us is not just a higher self that is to be gradually formed, but that is something that is already there and often causes us to outgrow ourselves.

We will see in the course of these lectures that what surrounds us in our first childhood and then enters into the human being, later still stands in a very strange relationship to our body and our whole outer human being. All that man can bring forth in ideals, in artistic things, but also all that he can bring forth in natural healing powers in his own body, does not come from the ordinary intellect, but from the deeper forces that work in the first years on our constitution, on the imprinting of the larynx; for these are the same forces that are still in us later, for example, when we say: External forces can no longer help us now; our own body must bring forth the deeper healing forces that lie dormant down in the depths of our organization.

And this is also where the best powers come from if we want to go up into the spiritual world and turn our soul into a clairvoyant organ.

Now there is a very obvious question: Why then does this, what we have shining into our body in terms of higher forces, remain for a maximum of three to three and a half years, why then does it want otherwise?

You can easily give yourself one half of the answer, because it lies in the following. If those higher forces continued to work in the same way, we would always remain children, we would not come to ego-consciousness. What previously worked from outside must go in. But there is a more significant reason that can enlighten us even more than what has just been said about the secrets of human life, and that is the following. Through the theosophical means which you have become acquainted with from the previous lectures or otherwise, we learn that the human body as it is today is something that has become, that it has been subject to evolution in earlier times. We also know that it has undergone this evolution in such a way that various forces have worked on it, have worked on the physical body, on the etheric body and on the astral body, which have not shaped the human physical body and also the etheric body as it would have become if the forces of such entities, which we call the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic, had not worked on it. The human body has emerged from forces that have shaped it in a certain way worse than it would have become if only the one kind of forces had been active that came from the good divine entities that bring humanity forward. This is the cause of suffering and illness - and also of death - that those other forces, the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic, were also at work. What we bring into existence through birth is better than everything else about us; it does, however, contain forces of the highest spirituality.

And if it wanted to work longer than three to three and a half years, taken as an average number, in the physical body of man, the latter would not be able to endure such work. For the physical human body is organized in such a way that, in the form in which the human being works in from the spiritual world, it can only tolerate such activity for three to three and a half years. The human body would break if those forces that shape the organism in the first years of childhood, when it is still soft, in such a way that it becomes a walking and standing being, were to work in this way for any longer. These forces are so powerful that if they were still at work later, our organism would have to break under the holiness of these forces. After three to three and a half years, the time has come when these forces, which work into the human being in the first years of childhood, would basically have to have a destructive effect.

But from this emerges a thought that can have great practical importance, a thought that you know is expressed in the [New] Testament, in the Gospel; the words take on a very concrete form: “Unless you become like little children, you cannot enter the kingdoms of heaven!” For what would be the highest ideal for man if what has now been said were true? To come closer and closer to consciously learning to master what one has unconsciously mastered in the first years of childhood! This is indeed something supreme that man prescribes for himself as an ideal: To bring over into conscious life and to let work in a conscious way that which works in the first years of childhood. This is a great ideal, an ideal so great that man can say the following to himself if he thinks seriously about himself.

There must be a purpose in passing through successive incarnations. We have passed through successive incarnations in the past; we will continue to pass through successive incarnations as the earth moves forward in its development. Then the time will come when the earth will have reached the end of its course, when the rest of the earth planet will fall away from all human souls, just as the human body falls away with death, when the human soul, in order to live on, enters a spiritual realm to lead the life between death and a new birth. And then it can appear to us as the highest ideal that we have then brought it so far through all the teachings and through the work of our incarnations that we become aware of that which has taught us to control the whole body and our whole human being, that which works into the body in the first years of childhood, so that we only become human through it. That is our highest ideal, that we learn to make ourselves into whole human beings in the way that we can unconsciously do in the first years of life with the help and power of the spiritual hierarchies. Then a thought comes before our soul that fills us with humility - but also with a true awareness of human dignity, the thought that we are not alone. Something lives within us that can always provide us with proof: We can rise above ourselves as human beings, rise to something that is already growing beyond us now and that will grow with us from incarnation to incarnation; that lives in us, as true as we are human beings! - This is the ideal that is becoming real in us, which will raise us above ourselves. This thought can take on more and more specific forms and then provides us with something tremendously reassuring and uplifting - but also with a corresponding humility and modesty. - What do we have within us? Truly a higher, a more divine person, of whom we can feel alive: He is in us!

Then the moment may easily come when we say to ourselves in life: The best thing we can do is to give ourselves to the better person, to sacrifice ourselves to this better person with everything that is in us, everything that is our wisdom, everything that is even our already achieved morality - and to wipe away and dampen all pride and all the arrogance we have in us in the face of what is in us! - Then we feel that there is something in us that really lives in the first three years of childhood and makes us human. And we are aware, when we consider what has now been said, that the human being as he is today is imperfect and cannot consciously carry within him that which works in him in the first years of life; he must first make himself more perfect so that he can consciously carry within him that which now works unconsciously in him in the first three years of childhood.

If a person were standing before us and it could be brought about by some world powers that the ordinary ego would be removed from the person - we would therefore have to assume: It could be achieved to remove this ordinary ego, which has gone through the incarnations with the person, from [the] physical body, [the] etheric body and [the] astral body, and we could bring into him such an ego that works in connection with the spiritual worlds - what would happen to such a person? After three years his body would have to break! Something would have to happen through world karma so that he could not live longer than three years in this body! Only at the end of his earthly career will a person be able to feel that within himself which allows him to live longer than three years. But then the person will also say to himself: "It is not me, but this higher being in me, which has always been there, that is now working in me. - For the time being, he cannot say that yet, but at most he could say: He feels it, but he has not yet come there with his real, actual human self.

I ask you now - and each of you answer the question for yourselves: If at some time in the future, when the time on earth has not yet expired, a human organism is placed in the world and in some year it would be caused by certain world powers that the ego would be removed as it has developed, and that ego, which works in the first three years of childhood, would later work in such a way that it would be connected with the spiritual worlds, with the hierarchies, would thus work in the same way as the divine ego itself: How long could such a person live? Three years! Because then something would have to happen that would destroy the world karma of this body.

That was there - was there when a human organism stood at the Jordan at John's baptism, when the I of Jesus of Nazareth - of whom it can truly be said that it must become like the little children so that it can enter the kingdoms of heaven - when this old I departed and when the higher I sank into the three bodies. But this made it necessary, since such an ego can only live for three years, that all the events had to take place in such a way that after three years this earthly life was over.

There you have the whole deep connection between that which is the leader in man, which shines into our childhood as if in twilight, which always works, works beneath the surface of our consciousness as that which is our best, and between that which once entered into the whole evolution of mankind, so that it could remain in a human shell for three years.

What did this I teach, which is connected with the spiritual hierarchies, which entered the human body of Jesus of Nazareth at that time, that his entry is symbolically represented under the signature of the descending spirit in the form of the dove with the words: “This is my beloved Son, today I have begotten him!” - for that was the original meaning of the words - that is, the true Son of Man sinks into a human body, who otherwise only appears as a shadowy twilight image in the first three years of childhood?

When we place this image before us, we have at the same time placed before us the highest human ideal. For it means nothing other than that we are told: The Christ is recognizable in every human being! - And if no gospels or holy scriptures were to say: At one time a Christ lived - we would recognize by our own nature that the Christ lives in us. Even if all documents had perished and nothing of them had been handed down, we would still recognize that the Christ was there because we correctly assess what lives in us in the first three years of our childhood. We do not need certificates and documents, because the Christ can be recognized from the laws of nature.

What do we recognize from the laws of nature when we now remember what the Christ then also said? I want to be such an ideal for you men that there in the spirit you fulfill what you otherwise fulfill in the physical. - What do we fulfill in the physical in the first three years of our lives? We learn to walk, to walk physically out of the spirit; that is, man shows himself the way out of the spirit. We learn to speak, that is, to shape the truth out of the spirit - or in other words: man develops the essence of truth out of the sound in the first three years of his life. And the life that a person lives on earth as an ego-being receives its vital organ through what is formed in the first three years of childhood. This is how we learn to walk physically with our legs. We learn the “way”, learn the ‘truth’ and learn to live the “life” in the spirit. There could be no better interpretation of the words “Unless you become like little children, you cannot enter the kingdoms of heaven”. No more profound words could characterize the I-entity of Christ - the same I that spent three years in life as: “I am the way, the truth and the life!”

Such words, which are spoken as if [through the] doors of eternity, from the spirit, to humanity, in order to admonish people about what is real and how they should live their lives as human beings, they place the whole evolution of humanity before our souls. And if we also want to feel the way of that spiritual guidance which we can feel when we think in truth of the Christ, we need only let our thoughts wander to the grandiose, majestic fact - for that is what it is! -that the work of the Hierarchies works through the childlike I to teach us to walk, speak and think, that is, to give us a goal, to let the truth flow through us and to show us the right way to live. We can measure the greatness of this fact by what the Christ ideal makes of us when we live according to it. Then the words thunder in from eternity itself, from the eternal purpose of being human, into our whole being: “I am the way, the truth and the life!” Then we feel that it is unjustified to ask: Why, if we have already gone through so many incarnations, do we keep coming back into existence as children? Because we know that this imperfection is a perpetual reminder of the highest that lives within us. And we cannot be reminded often enough - at least every time at the beginning of each life - of this great fact.

It is not good in spiritual science or theosophy, or in occultism in general, to define much, to speak much in terms. It is better to characterize and try to evoke a sensation of what is. That is why I tried today to evoke a sense of what is, what is in the first three years of our life, of every human life, and what emerges when we allow our lives to be illuminated by the light that radiates from the light of the cross on Golgotha. For then we get a feeling, a sense of how an impulse goes through human evolution, of which one can rightly say that the Pauline word “Not I, but the Christ in me!” must become truth. must become truth. Do we need to swear on some “positive” document? Do we need any external document to come to this Christ-power? No! You only need to know what man is in truth. Therefore, there is nothing “positively” Christian in this idea of Christ as presented by Theosophy.

But if one has come to this idea of Christ through the true contemplation of humanity and knows: If you want to discover the Christ, you best discover him in yourself - and if one then goes back to the biblical documents, then the Bible regains its great value for such a person. And there is no greater, but also more conscious appreciator of the Bible than a person who has found this. But that is also what we see in it.

And if someone knew nothing about the Bible and thought about man in this way, the idea of Christ would live in him. For sure! And it would be conceivable that beings like those now inhabiting Mars would come down to earth who had never heard of Christ and his work. Such a Martian would not understand much of what has taken place here on Earth; much of what interests people today would not interest him. But he would be interested in that which is the central impulse of the earth's evolution: the Christ idea as it expresses the essence of man himself! - Anyone who has understood this now understands the Bible all the more; for he finds what is written in the Bible expressed in a wonderful way in the individual Gospels, and he then says to himself: I need not at all be educated to a special appreciation of the Gospels, but stand before them as a fully conscious man, and through what I have recognized through Theosophy, they appear to me in all their greatness.

I believe there will come a time when people will say: Those who have learned through Theosophy to appreciate the content of the Gospels in the right way, know how to appreciate the content of the Gospels in such a way that they place it higher than any pope or church father has ever placed it - even though they have placed it very high. Humanity will only learn what lies in these profound documents by recognizing the nature of man. But what will we then recognize? Again, this is easy to find through mere contemplation. One will say to oneself: If we find the essence of man in the Gospels, it must have come into them through those who wrote them on earth, so that what we must say on humble reflection - the older we get, the more - must apply to them in particular: We have done so many things that have moved us beyond ourselves, where the higher man has announced himself. And those who wrote the Gospels were only able to write these documents because of the coming of the higher man! This is where the concept of inspiration regains its meaning. Just as higher powers work into the brain in the first three years of childhood, so powers from the spiritual worlds were imprinted into the souls of the Gospel writers so that the Gospels were written. - Now we sense something else besides guidance. Humanity must be truly guided if it is to realize that those who wrote the Gospels were not on the same level with what they produced - and this will become more understandable the further humanity progresses. There we learn to feel: Impulses from the spiritual world are at work in what has been brought forth in the course of time; and just as man feels a guidance within himself, so impulses of a spiritual guidance are at work in the whole development of mankind. And when people are placed under spiritual guidance, the best they can do happens under spiritual guidance.

What will someone say now who has found some disciples, some people who profess their faith in him, and if he lets what we have now emphasized have an effect on him? Let us assume that he finds confessors, disciples in the world who listen to him, perhaps worship him to a certain extent. If he is not a man, as there are many in a materialistic age, but a man who can let all this pass through his heart in its majestic greatness, he will say: I have found what I cannot give to a disciple, what I cannot pass on through the ordinary ego that goes around with these disciples. I don't really know what to say at this moment about what the confessor can find. I feel that something completely undefined, something completely unconscious is at work in me! - This is what such a person will say. He will feel as if he were a tool of a higher individuality that shines in from the dim twilight, so that the thought comes close: When I was a child, I did everything on myself that works in from the spiritual world; and what I can now do as my best also works in from higher worlds; I must not touch it at all with my ordinary consciousness! - Yes, he may say: something demonic, something like a demon - but the word “demon” taken in the best sense - that is working in.

Socrates, of whom Plato tells us that he spoke of his “demon”, of that which guides and directs him, felt something like this. Many attempts have been made to explain this “demon” of Socrates. But it can only be explained if we can surrender to the idea that Socrates could feel something like this, as it emerges from the kind of contemplation we have practiced today. Then we can also understand again that during the three to four centuries that the Socratic principle was at work in Greece, such a mood, which entered the Greek world through Socrates, could have a preparatory effect for another great event. The mood that man, as he stands, is not the whole of that which projects from higher worlds - this mood went away.

The best with whom this mood remained were those who later also best understood the word: “Not I, but the Christ in me!” - For now they could say to themselves: Socrates still spoke as if from a demonic agent, from the twilight world of the spiritual agent; the Christ ideal makes clear to us what Socrates himself was still talking about.

There again we feel something of the spiritual guidance of humanity: nothing can be placed in the world without preparation. Why did Paul find the best followers in Greece? Because the ground was prepared there through Socratism by the mood that we have now characterized. In other words, what is happening now takes us back to events that had an effect there in the past and made people ready to accept what would come later. Do we not feel how far the impulse reaches that goes through human evolution and places the right people at the right moment where they are needed for evolution, but which also lifts us beyond ourselves in some moments of life, where we come to a true self-knowledge, where we try to make an effort to go beyond the ordinary person to see higher worlds, to come to powers that the ordinary person does not have. In ordinary life we often make ourselves ill and so on. Within us are the forces that make us foolish and ill and unwise; within us are the forces that lead us beyond ourselves in the world. Such are the forces that are at work in historical development, that are at work in the individual. So in the workings of the whole of humanity - so in the single individuality. Let us learn to feel this. Let us feel what goes through people as a force and impulse from epoch to epoch, but also from age to age.

The task of the next two lectures will be to show this in more detail, how it intervenes in the life of the individual human being - in the most diverse relationships.