Elemental Beings, Sleep, and the Spiritual Organization of Humanity

GA 266III — 25 April 1914, Berlin

Esoteric Lesson

Recording A

In our last esoteric reflection, we spoke about how the soul should expand more and more and pour out into space; how it should then draw itself together in order to see what is weaving and flowing within its own soul. To this end, dear sisters and brothers, you have been given formulas that you can use as you wish and also pass on to others who have not listened to this esoteric lesson.

Today, another consideration is to be presented to your soul, something concrete, a mood that can help you enter the spiritual world.

Let us consider what happens during sleep. The etheric body and physical body remain in bed, while the astral body and I am outside in the spiritual world. Why is it that during sleep, human beings do not consciously experience the world in which they find themselves, as they experience the physical world in their daytime consciousness?

Because during the time when human beings are outside their bodies, there is a longing within them, a strong urge to return to their physical bodies. This urge acts like a darkening against the brightness of the spiritual world, so that human beings perceive nothing of it. The astral forces at work within him are so strong that he would not leave his physical body at all if it were not so tired and worn out by life in the sensory world that it urgently needed the strengthening and refreshment provided by sleep. It is this urge, this longing for his physical body, that prevents man from consciously experiencing the spiritual worlds during sleep. If he were clairvoyant, he would see bright rays emanating from his astral body and ego toward his physical and etheric bodies; these rays express this longing for reunification.

Let us suppose that someone suddenly becomes clairvoyant in their sleep; how will they see themselves? When we meet someone here on the physical plane, we encounter their physical form, in which an ego lives. This is not the case in the spiritual world; we must not think that we see people there in the same form as on the physical plane. Here in the physical world, we see individual things separated from one another with sharp contours; it is different in the spiritual world. What weaves and flows there are moving images, and we recognize these moving images as beings, as the spirits of the higher hierarchies who send out their messengers, their helpers, to give the human form its proper expression. These emissaries, these messengers of the spirits of form, are still, so to speak, at the stage of childhood; but they will continue to work their way up as they cultivate the human ego. And another host of elemental beings, the guardians of the ego, surround the human head. They work on its thinking and are sent forth by the spirits of form and movement. And yet other elemental beings, emissaries of the spirits of wisdom, work on the human heart and bring about the circulation of the blood.

Furthermore, there are elemental beings who work on the human sense of warmth. We must not imagine this physically, as if warmth comes from a specific source, but rather that warmth arises in the spiritual realm from the relationship between two beings.

Still other elemental beings work on the meaning of words, that is, not on the spoken word as one hears it from others, but these beings stand behind the individual consonants and vowels that form a word; they work on the composition of letters and syllables. Those who are outside their bodies cannot understand the words that are spoken; they lack the physical organ for this. However, they can follow the elemental beings as they work, gathering the individual letters to form a word.

Human beings have twelve senses, not just five, as external science would have us believe: the sense of light [sight], the sense of thought, the sense of warmth, the sense of balance, the sense of words, the sense of life, smell, taste, hearing, feeling, the sense of movement, and the sense of self.

And behind these twelve senses are elemental beings, the servants and helpers of the spirits of form, movement, and wisdom. At present, these elemental beings are still in a kind of childhood stage, but as human beings progress and evolve toward Jupiter, these elemental beings, the messengers of the higher hierarchies, will also evolve; they will one day form the zodiac of Jupiter; they will be the signs of the zodiac of Jupiter after the earth has completed its seven cycles and everything emerges again in a new configuration in the Jupiter state from the Pralaya. Just as what used to work on us on the moon and now stands behind our senses has become the zodiac of the earth.

Jupiter will also have a sun; behind it will stand the beings who today work in our blood system.

Only with the utmost reverence and admiration can we look upon how whole hosts of elemental beings are working on the wonderful temple of the human body.

Put yourselves, my dear sisters and brothers, in serious meditation into this mood, how countless elemental beings are building the magnificent temple that is to form the dwelling place of the human ego!

Let us now ask ourselves: How is it that we do not see these elemental beings at work? Because the moment we wake up from sleep, the guardian of the threshold hides the spiritual worlds from us. Waking up means nothing other than chasing these elemental beings away from their field of work. And as soon as we are in our daytime consciousness, Ahriman ensures that the spiritual world is covered up from us. He paints the picture of the sensory world, and as we surrender ourselves to it, the great deceiver, Maya, the souls and beings who are working on the spiritual organization of human beings become invisible to our gaze.

What we recognize as the physical body is entirely the product of Ahriman; on the other hand, we must recognize the work of Lucifer in what we experience as soul life in the physical body. He fills our soul life with such pride and delusion that it receives false mental images and feelings in relation to the spiritual world.

Ex Deo nascimur
In --- morimur
Per Spiritum Sanctum reviviscimus.

Record B

The last esoteric lesson dealt with the efforts we must make in order to advance esoterically, and ended with the threefold meditation material. Today we want to discuss more esoteric facts and deal with a topic that we are all familiar with: sleep. Why are we not conscious during sleep? Because the astral forces do not allow us to be, because they are so strong that they numb us; for astral forces express themselves in what completely fills us during sleep, namely the burning desire to be in our body, and it is this desire that obscures our consciousness.

If we could be conscious during sleep, we could look at the marvelous structure of our physical body and etheric body and notice how legions of spiritual beings, elemental beings, work in this physical body, who are the servants and messengers, partly of the spirits of form, partly of the spirits of movement.

If we really want to see the spiritual world correctly, we must think away everything in the physical world from the spiritual world, and space as well. In the spiritual world there are no things and facts as in the physical world, but only beings and relationships between beings, deeds of beings. If, for example, one feels warmth in the spiritual world, this does not emanate from a thing, but radiates from a being, and it signifies a relationship between one spiritual being and another; the same is true of a flow of light. Why do we not really perceive this physical and etheric body, why are we not aware of the weaving and creating and living of countless elemental beings around us? Because the desire to be an I, to live in our physical body, fills us so passionately in our sleep (through Lucifer) that we perceive nothing else; otherwise we would see the physical and etheric bodies as a marvelous work created by legions of elemental spirits. What are they working on? On our senses; and we can distinguish twelve groups of elemental beings who work on our twelve senses. For man has twelve senses: the sense of self, the sense of life, the sense of self-movement, the sense of balance, the sense of sight, the sense of hearing, the sense of feeling (touch), the sense of smell, the sense of taste, the sense of speech, the sense of thinking, and the sense of warmth. In order to live in his ego, man represses every morning when he wakes up, that is, when he returns to his body, the beings that work on him during the night. In order to feel ourselves completely in our ego, we repress the hierarchies from our physical and etheric bodies.

Who are you, O human being, that legions of spirits work on your physical and etheric bodies? Messengers and servants, some of the spirits of movement and some of the spirits of form, swarm around our heads; they are the guardians and nurturers of our ego. In our brain, the elemental beings work that enable human beings to think. Yet another group of elemental spirits works on the organs that enable us to understand language, mind you, not to speak. It is the elemental beings who, as spiritual entities, stand behind the sounds, behind the individual vowels and consonants. Thus, these twelve groups of servants of the hierarchies work out the forms in which the I can dwell.

If we now look at these working beings themselves in the spiritual world, we have the impression that they are, so to speak, young spirits who, in their childhood, have the task of being caretakers of the human ego. Later, when they themselves have advanced further in their development, they will be assigned to other evolutionary work. On Jupiter, they will be the servants of the zodiacal forces and beings of Jupiter. They will one day work down from the zodiac of Jupiter. The beings who, as the twelve groups of elemental spirits now form our senses on Earth, formed our senses on the old moon, are today the beings of our zodiac. Just as a sun shines on our Earth, so, when we as human beings evolve to the Jupiter existence, a sun will shine on Jupiter; and the beings who will then live out their powers in this sun are the beings who are now servants of the spirits of wisdom and live in our blood circulation. The spiritual beings who today regulate our blood circulation will one day regulate the solar cycle of Jupiter!

But we are also in the spiritual world when we are awake during the day, but we do not know it because we do not see the miracle of our body, the world of spiritual beings who fill space with their weaving and being. Why do we not see this spiritual world around us when we are awake during the day? Because Ahriman places the painting of the sensory world in front of it. He is a great artist, for this world is beautiful, great, and magnificent, but it is not the true world. We do not see Ahriman himself in the physical world; we see him only in the spiritual world. Here we see only his work, his deeds.

Lucifer is the one who prevents us from becoming conscious of the spiritual world at night. He dulls our sense of the spiritual world by striving to create a sense of the physical world. This is why, instead of the work of the beings on our senses, we see the physical body; this is Lucifer's deed. Sensory experience is Lucifer's deed, world experience is Ahriman's deed. During the day we are completely in our senses, filling them completely, at night we work on them and are within them the servants of the hierarchies, the divine-spiritual elemental beings. A wise world government has allowed the interventions of Lucifer and Ahriman so that we may correctly attain our goal as human beings. Effective meditation is particularly effective for correct, gradual esoteric perception if, before falling asleep, one permeates oneself with the feeling: You are now entering a spiritual world, a wonderful world of gods, in which the divine-spiritual beings of the higher hierarchies live and weave, and they care for and nurture you and send out their powers and carry you on their wings, and through them you are a power of the spiritual world, and they care for you as a soul. E.D.N.

When we are asleep outside our physical and etheric bodies and can suppress the desire to be in the body for a few moments, so that it does not completely fill us, so that it is not we but Christ within us, Christ who is the power of all hierarchies, — when he is in our body and not only we want to be there and drive away the servants of the hierarchies who are working on our sense organs — then we get an inkling of the 1st C.M. If the two feelings are experienced correctly, then the third feeling comes automatically: P.S.S.R.; for on the path of the first two, the spirit is born that is called the Holy Spirit. In this way, we can penetrate ever more deeply into our Rosicrucian formula, which the Master of Wisdom and Harmony of Feelings explains to us when he says:

In the spirit lay the seed of my body ...

Record C

My dear sisters and brothers,

One can know a great deal about anthroposophy, be able to answer all kinds of questions promptly and quickly, and yet still have to admit: Actually, if I am honest with myself, I have to say: I am not really making any progress in my meditations! What can I do to make better progress?

Very often, the reason why the student has to say something like this is that he fails to immerse his soul completely in the element of devoted piety toward the spiritual beings. Deepest reverence must reign in his soul if it wants to rise up to them; no thought, no feeling of everyday life must remain in it; it must be completely still within itself!

In this mood, let us consider today the sleep of human beings from a certain point of view. We know that while a person sleeps, their astral body and their I leave the physical body and the etheric body. But the I knows nothing of this; it remains unconscious. The consciousness of the I and the astral body is only awake on the physical plane. Why is this? Because as soon as the I and the astral body are outside, they have a burning longing to be reunited with the physical body and the etheric body.

This is the reason why consciousness does not awaken in the spiritual world. As soon as the ego is back in the physical body, it awakens to the things that present themselves to the senses. If human beings did not have this burning longing in the spiritual world, they would immediately become conscious in the spiritual world. And then he would see a world around him full of life, but completely different from the physical world. He would then perceive a world of spiritual beings and forces. And he would see that all these beings and forces direct their forces toward a single center, and as this center, the human being would recognize his own physical and etheric bodies.

If the human being were to go further, if he could make observations outside his body in the spiritual world, if he could then observe his own I or even another I, he would see how the human I is also the goal of the work of spiritual beings. And he would recognize these beings as messengers and servants of the spirits of form and, in part, of the spirits of movement. And they would know that these beings working on the human ego are themselves in a process of progress, of their own development, and that by nurturing the human ego, they are also developing themselves. Behind every human being, the clairvoyant would see a host of such beings caring for the human ego. And if the clairvoyant were to look at the physical body and the etheric body, he would again see hosts of elemental beings, whom he would recognize as servants of the spirits of movement and wisdom and the spirits of form.

And the human being would recognize with reverence and devotion: All these elemental beings are working on the temple of the physical and etheric bodies while the human being is outside his body temple. And awakening means nothing other than displacing these beings from their field of work and taking their place again with his egoistic earthly ego.

There are twelve categories of such beings. For man has twelve senses, and they work on them.

Man has the sense of warmth; the sense of ego, the sense of thought, the sense of balance, the sense of words, the sense of life, the senses of smell, taste, sight, hearing, touch, and the sense of movement. The sense of words, for example, works in such a way that when you listen to another person, you do not hear the words, but the individual vowels and consonants that make up the words.

Human beings recognize how these entities work in what is recognized as the temple of humanity given by the Godhead to the human ego, and they recognize that the human ego continually destroys this temple by allowing itself to be seduced by Ahriman and Lucifer. However, it becomes clear to the clairvoyant person that what we consider to be the physical body, what we can feel and touch, is not the temple of which we speak, but rather they recognize this temple as the spiritual organization that stands behind the physical body. And it is on this spiritual organization that these beings work.

What we call our physical body, that which is placed as such into the physical environment, is entirely the product of Ahriman. His products confront us in everything physical. And when we come to experience ourselves consciously outside the physical and etheric bodies, we also recognize that our entire soul life, which we carry within us only through the medium of the physical body, all our thinking, feeling, and willing, which is only stimulated by the emotions that the sensory world provides us, is ruled by Lucifer. The clairvoyant person recognizes that these elemental beings strive to remove the effects of Ahriman and Lucifer, effects that manifest themselves both physically as illnesses and psychically as soul suffering, fear, anxiety, and mental illness, to remove them from human beings and to have a healing effect. They are servants of the high spiritual beings who now radiate down upon our Earth and the human world from the forces of the zodiac. They are the spiritual messengers of our zodiacal forces, and from this sphere they all work inward toward the center: our Earth.

And every human being may feel himself to be a center of the activity of these elemental beings and of the spiritual beings working upon his ego. When our Earth has passed through the seven stages of development assigned to it, it will enter a spiritual state: the Pralaya. Then it will reappear in a new configuration: as Jupiter. And the elemental beings, who are now messengers of the zodiac, will then become the zodiac of Jupiter; that is their development. Now they are working on what lies spiritually behind our senses.

Record D

Last time, our esoteric consideration dealt with expansion in the etheric atmosphere and ended with the three formulas given; this time we will start from the life of sleep. When we sleep, our ego and astral body are in the spiritual world, and yet we cannot perceive anything there. And this can almost lead us to the anxious question of whether this will also be the case after death, whether we will be in the spiritual world but unable to perceive anything. The spiritual researcher, however, knows that in every human being there is an impulse, a desire, which is not conscious to us, but which asserts itself as soon as we are out of the body, namely the desire to descend back into the body and experience ourselves in it. If we were clairvoyant while asleep, we would notice how we look back at our body and then see the body as a wonderfully beautiful world. The more we are human beings who have an open eye for all the beauty in nature, the more we can admire the beauty of the physical world in which divine beings work and which is a temple for these divine beings.

And we would see how twelve different classes of elemental beings work on the twelve senses of the physical body as servants of the Elohim who gave us our form on earth. These spirits are now still in their childhood, so to speak; but their work on our twelve bodily senses will develop them in such a way that, in the course of Earth's evolution, these beings can become the zodiacal forces for Jupiter, as direct mediators of the zodiacal gods for the Jupiter state. Presumably, the transcriber wrote down the symbol for Jupiter, which was then read as “four.” And there will also be a sun, and the beings who will work in the forces of the sun are the elemental beings who now work in our blood circulation. This can give us a sense of the sanctity of our body temple, and it is good to feel this way, knowing about the cosmic forces that are at work within it. But now, as soon as we become aware of this through clairvoyance, the desire arises in us to penetrate there with our own ego, to displace the elemental beings and enter ourselves. And when we then stand on earth in our ordinary consciousness, how is it that everything is different and we seem to be something completely different from this divine, luminous temple? This is Ahriman, who throws the veil of sensory perception over our eyes and thus obscures our view of the divine world weaving in the physical realm. And what we then experience in our ordinary ego consciousness is Lucifer, who gives us the feeling of a personal self. Then there is only one thing we can do, namely meditate; and thus we ... [here the record breaks off].

Record E

The last esoteric consideration was devoted to the description of the processes of the etheric body, which expands more and more in meditation, and on the other hand to the inner concentration of the I within itself. Today's reflection will be devoted to more concrete matters. In sleeping human beings, we see the astral body and the ego lifted out of the physical and etheric bodies and living in the spiritual world. Why can human beings not consciously perceive this? Because the ego and the astral body constantly long for the physical body and strive for reunion with it. This is also the case after death. If a person suddenly became clairvoyant during sleep, they would see how spiritual beings work on their physical body. These are elemental spirits, servants of the hierarchies. Certain spiritual beings work on one particular sense of the human being, others on another sense. The human being has twelve senses, and so twelve different groups of elemental beings, who are servants of the higher hierarchies, work on them.

When the Earth later progresses to Jupiter existence, the sky will not be spread out above it as it is today with the stars, the moon, and the sun. There will still be a sun, but it will be audible. The forces that now work on our senses from the elemental spirits will then form the zodiac of Jupiter, just as in the lunar existence the forces of beings worked on our senses, which in our present earthly existence work down upon the earth from the twelve signs of the zodiac.

We should look up with gratitude to the gods who have set the miracle of our body as their goal.

Record F

Twelve types of elemental spirits nurture and care for human beings, working on their twelve senses and sharpening them anew during our sleep. They serve the spirits of form and the spirits of movement. During the Jupiter existence, these will be the spirits of the twelve signs of the zodiac. The spirits of the twelve signs of the zodiac on Earth thus worked on the microcosm on the old moon.

Sun spirits of Jupiter now work as elemental spirits delegated by the spirits of wisdom on the human blood circulation. During sleep, humans do not perceive the spiritual world because astral forces give them a longing for the physical body. As soon as the physical body lets the ego and the astral body back in, they go out.

Ahriman paints the picture of the sensory world as a veil before the spiritual world.

Lucifer darkens the spiritual world itself before human beings.