Supplements to Member Lectures

GA 246 — 12 April 1923, St. Gallen

81. On the Formation of Destiny

My dear friends!

I am very pleased that we can discuss some things here that are better suited to a more intimate circle. Today we want to discuss some things that relate to the formation of human destiny.

We will start with the beginning of human life on earth. Man must first form his body out of himself. The child's consciousness is dreamlike. Three things emerge from the twilight of the child's dreamlike consciousness that are of particular importance for life. The child learns more during this time than in later years. During this time, the child learns to walk, speak and think. But walking, for example, is only a one-sided expression of what the child is learning. It must first learn to balance itself. But it must also learn to adapt to earthly conditions in other ways. For example, they must first learn that hot objects burn and the like.

Learning to speak is based on the instinct of imitation. Thinking develops out of speaking. Thinking is developed the latest. What about thinking anyway? The child descends from pre-earthly existence. Quite shortly before it incarnates, it first forms its etheric body. The ego and the astral body come down, draw the etheric body from all parts of the world, and then the incarnation takes place. The child learns to think through the etheric body, the physical body is only the ground. At first this etheric body is only very dully active. But thinking is based on a more external handling of the etheric body. What underlies these processes? Thoughts are actually contained in the world ether, they are not formed in the head. Anyone who would say that would be just as clever as someone who says: I drink water, therefore the water forms on my tongue.

In the very young child, the world ether is still involved in thinking, it is not yet separated from the personal etheric body. Only when it is separated is personal thinking present. If this were not the case, the human being would always feel like a member of the cosmos.

Speech is a function of the astral body. However, this is not yet fully present in the child. We gradually develop the astral body between death and rebirth over the course of many, many years. We owe it to the astral body that we can develop our physical organization. As we learn to speak outwardly, the inner worldly astrality is dampened. The words we speak outwardly echo what is constantly speaking within us between death and rebirth.

The ego that passed through the whole world between death and new birth integrates itself into the human being when we learn to walk and move. Therefore, learning to walk is something extraordinarily meaningful. The whole way in which the child behaves when learning to walk is extremely characteristic of each individuality.

While learning to walk, the ego takes over everything in the child. At the same time as the ego, karma slips into the person. This is also expressed in the way the child learns to walk and grasp. For example, we say: A child stands up straight on its feet. Then we say: The child learns to walk in a choleric way. - In its previous incarnation, such a child was a person after whom a great many others took their cue. This is then expressed in the way the child learns to walk. You can see it in every movement, how the child turns its head and so on. A child who learns to walk in this choleric way will also choose its fate in this life in a choleric way. Our freedom is not affected by this, any more than our blonde hair or blue eyes, which we also inherited, affect our freedom.

When we just stand up as a child, many things happen. The position of the blood cells in relation to the body changes. It makes a big difference internally how the blood cells are positioned (drawing missing). The same applies to the nerves. You have to be clear: When we look at a flower, there is nothing moral in it. It is quite different when I learn to walk. It contains the moral impulses that I bring with me from my previous life. So you notice that the physical organization can contain something of how a person will behave later in life. Their health disposition also comes to light.

What will be in the later incarnation, however, is what we are preparing now. So not everything we do now is conditioned by the past. The human being only gradually learns to distinguish between what he is actually in and what he is not in. That is why there is no fatalism like the Turks. The question of destiny must not only affect us theoretically, but we must understand it from the heart.

Fate must be perceived in such a way that we can say to ourselves: Compensation is there, [no matter] whether what strikes us is from earlier 'or later. Compensation is there. This does not make misfortune and suffering any less intense. But the feeling: Balance and world justice are there - this feeling is the most important thing.

When you see the child walking and learning to grasp like this, when you have this image quite vividly before you, then you really see the previous earthly life reaching into this one. Out of this dim consciousness of the child, the first karmic system shoots into this life.

But now comes the time when a clear difference occurs between sleeping and waking. For in the first years the child never quite wakes up. Sleeping is just as important as waking. Because if we only describe waking in a biography, then we are only describing two thirds of the course of life. But much more significant things happen at night than when we are awake. The spiritual forces of the day are woven during sleep. When, in later life, waking and sleeping are clearly differentiated, the ego and the astral body weave the beginning of later karma into it, just as it used to happen during learning to walk.

As children we are the wisest, but we do not know it. We build on ourselves, on the inside of our body with the wisdom of the gods. Even the wisdom we have only needs to be digested, we have to acquire it during sleep. We should actually look at our sleeping time with the greatest reverence.

We work on what we need during the day between waking and sleeping. Above all, we then weave karma.

But there is something that really shows us how we have to learn during our life on earth. Between death and birth we have to learn from the gods how to build our bodies. We have to get to know the whole of life fully and vividly, not a dead anatomy. To do this, we need a long time between death and birth. But we get to know it.

But the karma that we now have to weave into it is what we acquire here. Between death and birth we learn how to build the physical body. Here and there, however, it becomes apparent how unskilled we are at weaving in karma, for example when we have fantastic dreams. The dream is all the more fantastic the less skillful we are at entering or leaving the physical body. Everything that is fantastic in a dream has to be polished here in earthly life. The dream is the expression of the inability to find harmony between the ego and the astral body on the one hand and the etheric body and the physical body on the other. Just as one can observe the continuing effects of karma in the clumsy child, one can see in dreams how clumsily a person works at preparing his destiny for the future life. For example, if someone has anxiety dreams, you will be able to see from them approximately how the person is preparing himself for a life in which he must always be very careful. If someone has flying dreams, if he dreams of flying and storming, you will observe that he is preparing himself for a life in which he will be quite superficial; for example, someone who goes to the movies a lot.

In deep sleep we make no effort at all to enter the physical body. When we awaken from a dreamless deep sleep, life on earth pulls us back into the body. Wisdom becomes less and less in life. I don't know if I'm allowed to say that here. During life on earth, we become an ever bigger donkey on the inside. It's strange about the progress of human culture: people used to be less clever on the outside than they are today, but they were all the more clever on the inside. Outwardly, people have acquired a tremendous amount, but inwardly we have become terrible fools. It is time to realize that culture and civilization must take a different direction. Anthroposophy is there to illuminate people from within. Man must absorb within himself the power to return to wisdom. Otherwise we would no longer be able to acquire our wisdom between death and rebirth. We would then be born in the future as people who could not learn to walk. If you sincerely practise anthroposophy, if your whole being takes hold of this thought, then you will see how everything changes, even in your dreams. Anthroposophy teaches you a great deal for life, but even more for sleep.

That is why it is necessary for the Michael age to arrive today. Michael is a being who now wants to become a kind of zeitgeist. Michael is to intervene in the earth's destiny; but he can only do so if man learns to use his powers.

How can you understand Michael? Let me show you with an example. When an age has a certain character, there are always certain extremes of that character at the end of that age. When our age began, people were dreaming up utopias. They imagined how people could become quite happy without their intervention. A time will come, however, which will not make utopias, but will describe people who have achieved something through their own strength and through education (see article in the “Goetheanum” on education and morality).

People will be portrayed who really create the conditions themselves. In future we will not have to imagine what a paradise might be like, but the poets will create figures. For example, poets will describe how a child comes into the world burdened with difficulties and how its powers are then released through skillful upbringing. This means looking at the power of Michael. Looking from utopias to one's own human powers is one way in which the power of Michael will work.

In the religious ideas this Michael power will have such an effect that one will no longer only look at the Gospels, but one will remember the word:

Look, I am with you always, to the end of the earth.

Man will then no longer learn to write mechanically, but out of form.

Michael now descends and helps people when they come to meet him. We would celebrate the annual festivals more correctly if we celebrated the Michaelmas at the end of September. This would enable people to understand the death of the outer world. From this festival we could find the occasion for the awakening of the inner forces. Today we would even be able to work best of all there.