Supplements to Member Lectures

GA 246 — 7 November 1923, Zurich

83. Human Understanding and Hatred

The anchoring of moral impulses in the spiritual world must interest us just as much as the working of the forces of nature. This is the most important thing that can make us earthlings into beings imbued with morality. It is difficult to justify morality because we have to point to what forms and strengthens morality in people. What a person can do that is morally good must arise from two sources: firstly, from an understanding of other people, and secondly, from love of humanity. Where there is no understanding, there can be no love. All moral and ethical behavior arises from these two sources. The social question cannot be solved until we have this insight.

How do the moral impulses of human love and understanding live out in the supersensible? Every human being accumulates a tremendous amount of hatred and contempt for humanity in their subconscious. After death, these soul traits, attached to the astral body and the ego, disappear. This is hardly noticeable as long as the person is still in the physical body and the etheric body. But after death the astral body is completely interspersed with brownish-grey patches from which a spiritual coldness emanates. If the physical coldness is translated into the spiritual, this is the atmosphere that surrounds the human being after death. The Beings of the Third Hierarchy (Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai) have the task of relieving man of these terrible forces and helping to carry them. These beings must restore order to the disorder that man brings into the spiritual world through this coldness.

What these beings cannot take from us, however, is the hatred of man. If the astral body is already free from the coldness of human misunderstanding, this coldness, which stems from human hatred, still clings to it. To transform this, it needs stronger forces, namely the beings of the second hierarchy (Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes). They take from humans what has to do with human antipathy.

In the midnight of the world man must be irradiated by the light of the beings of the first Hierarchy; this grace must be bestowed upon him. When this irradiation begins, the first plant for a future body can be prepared. This world of seraphim, cherubim and thrones cannot be compared with our world. It is both; the creating spirit works in the physical world and both are one. But the spiritual does not appear in the physical heaviness. It is all radiant and pervasive, of immense mobility, a perpetual life and weaving.

After death you see the human being in the picture. He is woven from light, color and darkness and is melodious. In the first half between death and rebirth, he still reminds us of what he was in his earthly life. Through the centuries, his image bears his features. The forms are still there, but behind them the forces of form are at work; these remain the longest. First of all, the head disappears. As man continues to develop in his spiritual shadow image, he becomes increasingly headless. But he is also a color image, a sound image and a heat image, and you know: It is this or that person. It also tells you its spiritual name. When he enters the sphere of the cherubim, seraphim and thrones, everything about him appears as moral qualities. Hatred is transformed into love, coldness into warmth, and thus the person can complete his further path. There is little that is moral about the head. The head is a comedian; it intellectualizes everything. If you look at the metabolic system of the limbs, you have the whole moral being in it. This carries its karma with it into the sphere of the first hierarchy. A strange transformation is now taking place. The legs, for example, are transformed into the jaw system. The cheekbones develop from the arms.

The new limbs come from the physical earth, and when these begin to move, the head parts can also be used for speaking and singing. If a person can sing, he has acquired this through his previous incarnation. In the second half, between death and rebirth, the human being is given back what he has brought up in terms of misunderstanding and hatred of human beings. The beings of the second and third hierarchy give it back to man. They had only taken it from him so that he would be protected in the highest sphere. After he has been awakened by cherubim, seraphim and thrones, he can take his karma back upon himself. As a head being, he first forms as an image of the world sphere. Only then do his chest and limb systems form, which are attached and formed from his hatred and lack of understanding of humanity. Just as the limbs have expressed themselves in the heart (?), so in the next incarnation they form the visual mound, pineal gland and so on. What develops from the limbs gives rise to the deeper parts of the head organism. In this way, a biography can be written for each person of their cosmic experiences after death.

Humans have suffered a weakness to go through this after the midnight hour of the world. This has created a special sphere from which unspent human hatred and misunderstanding have descended upon us. Hatred and coldness cast from the heavens live in these three decades of the twentieth century. This has a particular consequence for life on earth. It has the effect that man's civilization has gradually become a parasite. We can all write so much these days, for example, but it does not come out of full humanity. It is something that we have forced into ourselves. This is how spiritual life can become poison in people. It is not civilization that becomes poison, but it becomes poison in people.

This parasitic civilization poisons the ether from which man must be recreated. The antidote has been created in the etheric appearance of the Christ. This event, which is imminent, replaces the etheric disease with etheric health. In the last third of the [nineteenth] century, the apparition of Michael was the harbinger.

We describe reality when we describe the poisoning of the ether by our civilization on the one hand and the etheric appearance of the Christ on the other. It is not a question of merely absorbing a new worldview; we must take a spiritual drink from anthroposophy in order to choose the right path.