1. On Man’s Life Of Soul

GA 259 — 23 November 1923, Dornach

[Before the lecture Rudolf Steiner spoke to the audience regarding the Founding of the Dutch National Society. See GA 259]

We will use the time that is available for lectures at the Goetheanum between now and Christmas in such a way that those who are here in anticipation of the Christmas Meeting may absorb as much as possible of what the Anthroposophical Movement can convey to the hearts of men. Those who will be here until Christmas will therefore be able to bring their thoughts to bear upon what can still be given. I shall not deal with matters concerning the international Anthroposophical Society—that will be done at the meeting to be held shortly—but I shall try to formulate our studies in a way that will help to prepare the right mood of soul for the forthcoming Christmas Gathering. I shall therefore speak from a different point of view of a subject with which I have been dealing in recent weeks and I will begin by saying something about man’s life of soul, leading on from there to a survey of cosmic secrets.

Let us start from something quite straightforward and consider what happens in man’s life of soul if he practises self-mindfulness beyond the point I actually had in mind when I was writing the articles in the Goetheanum Weekly. These four articles can serve as an introduction to what we are now to study.

If we practise self-mindfulness thoroughly and comprehensively we shall realise how the life of soul can be enhanced and intensified. What happens in the first place is that we let the external world work upon us—as we have done from childhood onwards—and then we have thoughts which are the product of our inner world. Indeed, what makes us human beings in the real sense is that we allow the effects produced in us by the external world to live on further in our thoughts and are able to experience ourselves inwardly in these thoughts. We create a world of mental pictures which in a certain way reflects the impressions made upon us from outside. It is probably not very helpful to our inner life to ponder a great deal upon how the external world is reflected in our soul. By doing that we simply acquire a shadowy picture of the world of ideas within us. A better form of self-mindfulness is to concentrate on the activity itself, endeavouring to experience ourselves in tire actual element of thought without regard to the external world, pursuing in thought what came to us as impressions of the external world.

It will depend on a man’s particular nature whether he is then led more in the direction of abstract thoughts; he may or may not devise philosophical world-systems or make schedules of everything in existence. Another man who has reflected about things that have made an impression upon him and then goes on spinning thoughts, may be following certain fantasies. We will not go further into how this inner thinking without any external impressions takes its course according to a man’s temperament, character or other traits. We will rather make ourselves conscious of the fact that it is important, as far as our senses are concerned, to withdraw from the external world and live in our thoughts and mental pictures, developing them to further stages, often perhaps merely as possibilities.

Some people, of course, consider this unnecessary. Even in difficult times like the present you will often find people who are occupied with their business the whole day in order to provide all kinds of things required by the world, afterwards getting together in little groups to play cards, dominoes or similar games, in order—as is frequently said—to ‘pass the time away’. But it will not often happen that people come together in groups in order to exchange thoughts, for example, about what might have happened in connection with the day’s business if things had gone differently in one way or another. They would not find that as entertaining as playing cards, but they would at least have been carrying their thoughts to further stages. And if on such an occasion they also retained a healthy feeling for reality there is no reason why such thinking should end in fantasy.

This living in thoughts leads finally to what you will experience if you read The Philosophy of Freedom properly. If you read that book as it is meant to be read you will understand what it means to live in thoughts. The Philosophy of Freedom is based upon experience of reality; but at the same time it was entirely the product of thinking. Hence you will find a fundamental tone in the book. I conceived it in the 1880’s and wrote it in the early 1890’s; but from men who at that time ought at least to have taken notice of the book, I was faced with misunderstanding everywhere. There is a particular reason for this: even those who are called thinkers today are unable to experience their thinking otherwise than as a picture of the outer physical world.

And then they say: perhaps something belonging to a superphysical world might arise in a man’s thinking but then this thinking which is acknowledged to be within him would have to be able to experience something supersensible outside him, in the sense that a table or chair are outside him. This was approximately Eduard von Hartmann’s conception of the function of thinking.

Then he comes across The Philosophy of Freedom. In that book the argument is that to experience thinking in the real sense means that a man can come to no other realisation than this: If you live in thinking in the real sense, you are living in the Cosmos even if, to begin with, somewhat diffusely. This connection in the most intimate experience of thinking with the secrets of the world-process is the root-nerve of The Philosophy of Freedom. Hence the statement is made in the book that in thinking we grasp one corner of the whole world-mystery.¹

This may be putting it simply, but what is meant is that when a man experiences thinking in the real sense he no longer feels outside the mystery of world-existence but within it; he no longer feels outside the Divine but within the Divine. If he comprehends the reality of thinking within himself, he comprehends the Divine within himself.

This was the point that people could not grasp. For if a man really comprehends it, if he has made efforts to achieve this kind of thinking, he finds himself no longer within the world that was previously his, but he is now within the etheric world. It is a world of which he knows that it is not conditioned by any part of the physical Earth but by the whole cosmic sphere. He is within the etheric Cosmos, and he can no longer have any doubts about the law and order of this cosmic sphere if he has grasped thinking as it is understood in The Philosophy of Freedom. Etheric experience, as it may be called, has now been achieved and a notable step forward in life has been taken.

Let me characterise this step as follows.—Our thinking in ordinary consciousness is concerned with tables, chairs, human beings, of course, and so forth; we may think of other things too in the outside world. With our thinking we comprehend these things from the centre of our being. Everyone is aware that with his thinking he wants to comprehend the things of the world. But once you achieve the experience of thinking I described just now, you are not grasping the world; nor are you riveted in your ego. Something quite different happens. You get the feeling—and quite rightly—that with your thinking which is not localised in any particular place, you grasp everything inwardly. You feel you are making contact with the inner man. Just as in ordinary thinking you stretch your spiritual ‘feelers’ outwards, so with this thinking which experiences itself in itself, you are continually stretching inwards, into your own being. You become object, object to yourself.

It is a very significant experience to realise that whereas hitherto it was always the world that you grasped, now, having this experience of thinking it is your own self you have to grasp. In the course of this firm grasp of your own self you come to realise that you have broken through your skin. You grasp yourself inwardly and in the same way you begin to grasp the whole world-ether from within, not of course in all its details but you know with certainty that this ether spreads over the whole cosmic sphere with which you are living together with stars, sun, moon, and so forth.

There is a second way in which a man can develop his life of soul. Instead of being wholly occupied with thoughts that are prompted from outside, he gives himself up to his memories. If he does this and makes the process an inner reality he will again have a quite definite experience. The experience of thinking I have just described to you does actually lead a man to his own self; he grasps his own self and this process gives him a certain satisfaction. But when he passes on to the experiencing of memories he will find, if he is inwardly active in the real sense, that the most striking feeling is not that of approaching his own self. That is what happens in the experience of thinking; and for that reason man will find freedom in the course of this thinking, a freedom which depends entirely upon the personal element in him. That is why a ‘philosophy of freedom’ must take its start from the experience of thinking, for it is through this experience that a man finds his own self, finds his bearings as a free personality. This does not happen in the case of the memory experience. If a man proceeds with real earnestness, and is able to immerse himself entirely in the experience, he will have the feeling of being liberated from himself, of getting away from himself. That is why memories which enable the present to be forgotten are the most satisfying—I do not say they are always the best, but in many cases they are the most satisfying.

You can certainly get an idea of the value of memory if your memories can carry you out into the world, no matter how utterly dissatisfied you may be with the present and wish you could get right away from it. If you can waken memories which, as you give yourselves up to them, give you an enhanced feeling of life, this will be a preparation for what memory can ultimately become.

Memory can become more real if you recall with the greatest possible intensity something you actually experienced years or even decades ago. Suppose, for instance, you turn to a collection of old papers and take out letters you wrote on some particular occasion. You put these letters in front of you and let them carry you back into the past. Or it would be preferable not to take letters which you wrote yourself or which others wrote to you, because the subjective element would be too strong there. Try, rather, to get hold of your old schoolbooks, and peep into them as you did when you first went to school. In this way you can actually call back the past into your life. The effect is remarkable. If you do what I suggest you will entirely transform your present state of mind. You must exercise a little ingenuity here although almost anything will serve. For instance, a lady might come across a dress she has not worn for twenty years; she puts it on and is transported back into the conditions prevailing at that time. You must choose something that will bring the past with the greatest possible reality into the present. In this way you can separate yourself radically from your present experience.

With ordinary-level consciousness we are too close to ourselves in our actual experience to be able to make it into anything valuable. We must be able to stand at a distance from ourselves. Now a man is farther away from himself when he is asleep than when he is awake, for during sleep his astral body and ego are outside his physical and etheric bodies. You will be able to approach this astral body, which as I have said, is outside the physical body during sleep, if you summon up some past experience as vividly as possible into the present. You will probably not believe what I am telling you because you will be reluctant to attribute such significance to something as comparatively trivial as the awakening of past experiences by looking at an old dress. But just put it to the test, and if you succeed in conjuring up some past experience into the present so vividly that you are wholly engrossed in it and can be entirely oblivious of the present, you will find that you are drawing near to your astral body as it is in sleep.

But you will be mistaken if you think that all you have to do is to look right or left, and that you will see a shadowy form that is your astral body; that is not how things work. You must pay attention to what actually happens, which may for instance be that after such experiences you see the dawn and the sunrise very differently from hitherto. On this path you will gradually begin to feel the warmth of the dawn as something prophetic, having a kind of natural prophetic power. You will begin to feel the dawn as something spiritually forceful and that there is some connection between that power and an inner sense within yourself; and although at first you may regard it as an illusion, you will eventually feel that there is some relationship between the dawn and your own being. Through the experience I have described you will gradually come to feel, as you look at the dawn: this dawn does not leave me alone. There is an inner connection between my own being and the dawn. The dawn is a quality of my own soul. At this moment I am myself the dawn—If you have been able to unite yourself with the dawn in such a way that you experience its coloured radiance out of which the sun rises, in your very heart as a living feeling—then you will also feel that you are actually travelling across the heavens with the sun, that as I put it just now, the sun will not leave you alone, that it is not a case of you being here and the sun there, but that in a sense your existence stretches right up to that of the sun—in fact that you journey through the day in company with the fight.

If you develop this feeling, not out of thinking but out of memory in the way I described, if you can develop these experiences out of the power of memory, then you will find that things which you have perceived with your physical senses begin to look different, enabling spirit-and-soul to become manifest; when you have acquired the feeling of travelling with the sun, all the flowers in the field will look different to you. The flowers do not merely display the red or yellow colours on their surface; they begin to speak spiritually to your soul. The flower becomes transparent; a spiritual element in the flower begins to stir and the blossoming becomes a sort of speaking. In this way you are actually uniting your soul with external Nature. In this way you get the impression that there is something behind this Nature, that the light with which you are connected is borne by spiritual Beings. And in those spiritual Beings you gradually recognise the characteristics described by Anthroposophy.

Let us look at the two stages of feelings which I have just been describing. The first feeling which can be brought by thinking inwardly experienced, is one of expansion. The feeling of being in a confined space ceases altogether. Your experience widens and you have a definite feeling that within your inner being there is a kernel which extends into the Cosmos and is of the same substance as the Cosmos. You feel at one with the etheric substance of the Cosmos. But when you are standing on the Earth you feel that your feet and legs are drawn down by the Earth’s force of gravity; you feel that your whole being is bound firmly to the Earth. At the moment when you have the experience of thinking you no longer feel bound to the Earth; you feel dependent upon the wide expanse of the cosmic sphere. You feel that everything comes inwards, not from below, as it were from the centre of the Earth upwards but from the cosmic expanse, the Universe. And you feel that to understand Man, this sense that something is streaming in from the cosmic expanse must be present.

This applies even to a true understanding of the human form. If I want to give expression to the human form in sculpture or in painting, I must picture to myself that only the lower part of the head proceeds from the inner bodily and spatial nature of man. I shall not be able to get the right spirit into the work unless I am able to convey the impression that the upper part of the head has been brought from outside. The lower part of the head must seem to have come from within outwards, but the upper from outside inwards.

If you looked with artistic understanding at the paintings in the small cupola of the now destroyed Goetheanum, you will have seen that this principle was everywhere observed: the lower part of the face was always represented as having grown from within the human being and the upper part of the head as something given him from the Cosmos. This was particularly evident in times when these things were known. You will never understand the form of the head in a genuine Greek sculpture unless you associate this feeling with it, for it was out of similar feelings that the Greeks created their works of art.

And so in the Thinking experience you will feel yourself united with the surrounding Universe.

Now it might be imagined that this process would simply continue further outwards as you pass from the Thinking experience to the Memory experience. But it is not so. If you succeed in developing within yourself the Thinking experience you will finally have the impression of the Third Hierarchy: Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai. Just as you can picture man’s bodily experience here on Earth in the working of gravity or in the process of the digestion of foodstuffs, you can picture the conditions under which the Beings of the Third Hierarchy live if, through this Thinking experience, instead of trudging around the confines of Earth you feel yourself borne by forces coming to you from the ultimate boundary of the Cosmos.

Thinking Experience: Third Hierarchy

Now if you pass from the Thinking experience to the Memory experience it is not a matter of being able to reach this ultimate boundary of the cosmic spheres. You can, it is true, reach this boundary if you know the reality of the Thinking experience. But the Memory experience leads to a different result. Suppose, for example, you have here some object—a crystal or a flower or an animal. What happens when you pass from the Thinking experience to all that the Memory experience can offer, is that you can see right into the object.

The gaze which had extended to the ultimate boundary of the cosmic expanse, supplemented by the Memory experience, penetrates into the essence of things. You do not in that case press on into indefinite abstractions but this extended gaze perceives the spiritual quality in all things. For instance, it perceives the spiritual Beings who are active in the light, or the spiritual Beings who are active in the darkness. So we can say: the Memory experience leads us to the Second Hierarchy.

Memory Experience: Second Hierarchy

Now there is something in man’s life of soul which is not subject to the limitations of memory. Let us be clear about what it is. Memory gives our soul its special colouring. Suppose we come across a man who criticises everything adversely, who diffuses his own bitterness over everything we talk about, who whenever we tell him about something really beautiful, at once speaks of something unpleasant. In such a case we may know with certainty that this characteristic is connected with his memory. Memory gives the soul its colouring.

But there is still something else. We may meet a man who faces us with an ironic sneer particularly when we say something to him, or he wrinkles his forehead or puts on a tragic expression. Or he may give us a friendly look so that we are cheered not only by what he says but by his look. When something important is said during a lecture it is interesting to give a momentary glance at the faces of the audience and see the ironic expressions on some lips, the foreheads with or without wrinkles, the blank or lively expressions on the faces. What is being expressed there is not merely memory that has persisted in the soul and gives the soul its colouring but something that has gone over from memory into a man’s physiognomy, into his different gestures, into his whole bearing. If a man takes in nothing, if his countenance betrays the fact that all the sufferings, sorrow and joy in his life have left him unimpressed, that too is characteristic. A face that has remained smooth and unlined, or one that is deeply furrowed by the tragedy or seriousness of life is as characteristic as one that expresses much happiness. In such cases, what otherwise remains part of the life of soul-and-spirit as the outcome of the power of memory has passed over into actual physical form. The effect is so strong that it is expressed outwardly in later life in a man’s gestures and physiognomy independently of his temperament which remains inward. For in old age we have not always the same temperament as we had in childhood. Our temperament in old age is often a result of what we have undergone in life and has become memory in the inner life of soul.

What enters into a man inwardly in this way, may again—though this is more difficult—become reality. It is comparatively easy to bring before the eyes of our soul something we experienced in childhood or perhaps many years ago, and so make the memory of it a fact. It is more difficult to transpose oneself into the temperament we had in childhood or in our earlier years. But the practice of such an exercise can bring results of immense significance. And even more is achieved if we can deepen this experience inwardly than if it is merely an external act.

Something can certainly be achieved in a man if, say at the age of forty or fifty—naturally within the obvious limits in such circumstances—he plays the games he played in childhood, if he jumps as he did then, or even if he tries to make the same kind of face he made when, as an eight-year-old, his aunt gave him a sweet! If he can transpose himself back into the actual gesture or posture of that moment, again he will find that something is brought into his life whereby he is led to the conviction that the outer world is the inner world and the inner world is the outer world.

We can then penetrate with our whole being into a flower, for instance, and then, in addition to the Thinking experience and the Memory experience we have what I will call, in the truest sense, a Gesture experience. In this way we acquire an idea of how the spiritual is directly at work within the physical.

You cannot, with full consciousness, inwardly apprehend the gesture you made, perhaps twenty years ago in response to some outer provocation, without realising the union of the physical and the spiritual in all things. But then you will have arrived at the experience of the First Hierarchy.

Gesture Experience: First Hierarchy

The Memory experience enables us to identify ourselves with the dawn when we confront it, and to feel and inwardly experience its glowing warmth. But with the Gesture experience, what confronts us in the dawn will unite with everything that can be experienced as colour or tone in the objective world.

When we simply look at the objects around us that are illumined by the sun, we see them as they can reveal themselves to the light. But the dawn changes when we pass gradually from the Memory experience to the Gesture experience.

The colour experience detaches itself entirely from materiality in any form; it becomes a living reality of soul-and-spirit, abandons the space in which the outer, physical dawn appears to us and the dawn begins to speak to us of the mystery of the connection of the Sun with the Earth. We experience how the Beings of the First Hierarchy work. If we still direct our gaze to the dawn and it still appears almost as it did during the Memory experience, we learn to recognise the Thrones. Then the dawn dissolves away; the colour becomes living being, becomes soul, becomes spirit, speaks to us of the relation of the Sun to the Earth as it was in the ancient Sun period, speaks to us in such a way that we experience the Cherubim. Finally, if with the enthusiasm and reverence aroused in us by this twofold revelation of the dawn, by the revelation of Thrones and Cherubim, we live onwards, there penetrates into us from the dawn, transformed now into living being, experience of the nature of the Seraphim.

Thinking Experience: Third Hierarchy
Memory Experience: Second Hierarchy
Gesture Experience: First Hierarchy

In all that I have been describing to you today, my aim has been to indicate how, by simply passing in the life of soul from Thinking to Gesture man can develop feelings in himself—to begin with no more than feelings—of the spiritual foundations of the Cosmos right up to the sphere of the Seraphim.