The Circular Flow of Man's Life within the World Of Sense, Soul And Spirit

GA 68b — 18 November 1905, Hamburg

29. On the Future of Man

It might seem presumptuous to talk about the future of man. But if we consider that man is a self-conscious being, called upon to stride ever onward, we must realize that he cannot be called upon to live dulled into the future. If we realize the sacred meaning of the word “self-conscious,” we come closer to the possibility that a self-conscious being is destined to gain foresight into the future. But where do we find this foresight? We find it in the theosophical world and life view, which deals with the inner core of the human being. The word “theosophy” is often translated incorrectly. It is said that theosophy is the knowledge of the divine essence. This is not correct. No one would be so presumptuous as to believe that they could fathom the divine essence.

Last time we talked about the origin and the past of man; today we will deal with the development in the future. If we believe in the development of man, it is clear that man must acquire ever higher and higher abilities in order to learn to understand God and the universe better and better with these abilities. After millions of years, our concepts will be quite different from today, and so it will continue. Our knowledge of God can never be complete. Theosophy is not “knowledge of God”; but it does show us the perspective that leads to knowledge of God.

The question now is: How does man acquire knowledge at all? He acquires knowledge in everyday life through his senses. If man had no senses, he could not get to know the world around him. What man perceives with the eye through the effects of light, the sounds that his ear conveys to him, what he feels, senses, tastes and smells, he absorbs and combines with the intellect. Now, everything he perceives is transient, everything has an end. Even intellectual thinking is fleeting. Eye, ear, brain will fade away, scatter. What the senses have perceived will one day be a thing of the past. Everything that disperses will one day no longer be there; all knowledge that comes from the senses will have to perish; it will also prove to be transitory because it was based on the transitory. Man, animal and plant are transitory, everything is transitory.

But in addition to this transitory nature, human beings also have an immortal core. Within them lie dormant powers that are to be developed, organs of life; just as eyes, ears, brain, organs of the physical body exist, so too there are organs of the spiritual man of an imperishable nature. In short, Theosophy teaches us that we carry within us a higher being that directs its imperishable senses to everything that surrounds it and allows it to recognize the essence of all things.

Theosophy is based on this. Like natural scientists, it directs its research to plants, animals and minerals, but it does not just seek to recognize the transient, but rather that which is imperishable in things; it does not examine anything else, but it does examine things differently from the way science does. It is not only about the past and the present, but also about the future.

What do we know about the future of man? What is this essence that man carries over from the present into the future? What is the new link in the chain of development that establishes the connection between the temporal and the eternal?

Let us try to visualize this in our minds. When earthly life, with all that man has enjoyed, all that has given him joy and caused him sorrow, has vanished away, what remains? — To make this clear to ourselves, let us place ourselves at three points in the life of our Earth. Let us go back a million years, to the present and to the future after another million years. If we go back to the distant past, we see man in a very different form than he is now. He was still untouched by all human activity and activity. Through the forces of nature, he has become what he was; divine forces in the universe have worked together so that man could come into existence.

After man appeared on earth, he has the task of transforming and reworking the earth in turn. A glance at the pyramids, these magnificent giant structures, may serve to illustrate this to us as a small example. If we consider the transformation that Egypt underwent through the work and creation of the pyramids, in which the colossal masses of stone were moved from one place to another so that these structures could be built, and which withstood the floods and inundations, it can give us a small glimpse of the transformation that the whole earth has undergone and will yet undergo through the work of man.

Another image: Take Cologne Cathedral, for example; how much work was needed, human work, to create it! The transportation and cutting of the stones and so on, and so on; just imagine the forces needed to create such a work of art. In the distant future, man will have even more power at his disposal; he will force many more forces of nature into his service and achieve much more than he does today. Today he has learned to use natural forces such as electricity, magnetism and so on; with the gentle push of a button, he can conjure up light. In short, he can do things that were unheard of a hundred or two hundred years ago. Today's man can see that even without theosophy.

Later, the electrical forces of the great rivers will be exploited, as will the sun's rays. That sounds fantastic – but these are perspectives. Man will harness the power of fire and the forces of volcanoes. Man is increasingly forcing north and south magnetic forces to serve him. Just as the earth now looks very different from what it looked like millions of years ago, so after millions of years it will look very different from what it looks like now. Man is always working on the earth.

The creatures are created with the planet to then remodel it into an image of what man will become.

Now you ask, can we get a real picture from this fantasy?

Theosophy does not give a utopian picture; it shows us a very real picture of the future. It can speak of the future in a very real sense. Let us take a comparison: [two people are standing next to each other, one of them is a “savage”, the other is Goethe]. A third person standing in front of them would point to the “savage” and say: What you are now, Goethe was once too, and in the future you will be like Goethe. Thus we point to the individuality of the human being, which develops little by little to the highest perfection. Among us there are people who have already developed within themselves what the average person will only develop in the future. They are no different from us; it is all natural, it is not based on magic. All this will be explained to us if we believe in an ascent.

To show you that it is not necessary to imagine this as something completely incomprehensible, let us clarify the matter by means of a comparison. Two naturalists observed a clumsy Moluccan crab that had fallen on its back and was now trying in vain to turn itself over again. Two of the crab's brothers intervened violently to help him, but they did not succeed; he was too heavy for them. So they left the crab and fetched two more colleagues; now the four of them managed to turn their colleague over. Let us now assume that the two naturalists had turned the crab over while the companions went to get help, and [these] would have found the crab on its legs when they returned; they would certainly have believed that a miracle had occurred; but some of their fellow crab monists would have rebelled against this belief and would claim that everything had happened naturally.

Transferred to humanity, we realize that our knowledge and abilities cannot be concluded with what we have achieved today. As far as Goethe stands above the “Hottentot,” so far will the future race stand above the present one. The present race is gradually producing a race of the future.

Let us assume that we have people before us who have reached the level of development that the race will only reach in later ages. If we were to ask them, what would they show us? It would be about birth and death, about what it will be like in the hereafter, and so on. First of all, we would learn that the beyond is not something future at all. Jesus says, “The kingdom of heaven is in the midst of you” (Luke 17:21) - not “in you”.

How are we to understand this?

The things that surround us appear spiritual when the dormant forces within us are awakened. Two people love each other, live together; death comes, she leaves him, he leaves her. But what is above it, the result of life, the essence, remains from one embodiment to another; it will often come back to Earth.

What is the purpose and meaning of this? — The purpose is that life should teach people ever higher lessons.

Let us imagine ourselves in the time of the Odyssey. People at that time did not know how to read or write; they had not learned that. It was quite different from what people took out of the world at that time. It will not be useless for him to live on earth again now. From earliest childhood, he is surrounded by very different things than in Odysseus' time. He is always collecting new things, and the fruits of his experiences benefit him and the Earth.

What the soul has experienced remains with it. Not only has it become purer and stronger, but it has also learned.

In the time between death and a new birth, the human being processes what he has learned between birth and death. When he is then reborn, he brings with him new things that he can use to learn more. When we have learned everything, the earth will fall away. What has emerged from the human soul then remains; as new souls, they will live for a new stage of existence.

Now it will be clear that there are people who know more than the average person. They are people who have learned more and faster than their brothers.

What is the point of living in other worlds if we leave with death? We want to try to understand the whole of life. Here in this life, our senses are the tools through which we perceive the world around us. Without senses, we could not experience anything. We need eyes to see the beauty of the world, ears to hear sounds, tongue and palate to taste, the brain and tongue to think and speak.

What happens when the cover falls off us? The soul, the carrier of desires and instincts, is now free. Its life continues in the astral, uninfluenced and uninhibited by the earthly shells. If it was attached to a tasty food, it still feels the desire for such a tasty food; it would like to enjoy it, but it lacks the senses. It would like to enjoy it and cannot; this causes it agony. The soul has to unlearn desires and cravings. This happens on the plane or level of consciousness called Kamaloka; Kama - desire; Loka - place: the place of desires.

When the soul has stripped away all desires and cravings that can only be satisfied by the senses, what remains?

These are the experiences that we have absorbed through the senses, but they do not cling to the senses. The senses are the gates through which all experiences flow into us; but the senses tell us nothing about the essence of things themselves; nothing about the unity of all things, about numbers, about beauty, about all artistic activity, about good, about ideals. All this comes from the essence of man; this is how something arises that goes beyond the senses. The essence of man does not come to light brightly and clearly in Kamaloka if the soul still looks back at what it has left behind; but if it has broken the habit, the fruit of the whole life experience shines out of the soul. We live out what we have formed in blissful rapture. We lead a divine existence between our life on earth and our next birth. Devachan, or heaven, is the place where we will dwell when we have worked on earth beyond the call of earthly things. There we will feel kinship with the supermundane forces.

We will recognize the inner essence of plants and see the other, now invisible, side of nature. If your mind lives in the spiritual, you will be among those forces there that bring things into being, the forces that build the plants, that build the animals. If you look at a plant closely through the microscope, you will see a structure of wisdom with which the largest and most ingenious bridge construction of a master builder cannot compare. Or look at the marvel of the brain! Is it not condensed wisdom? We can only try to absorb it from the world around us by searching and intuiting; and we try to deduce the cause of things from what we intuit. In Devachan, we live among the creative powers and forces. The soul marries the spirit there. It rises higher and higher because it has lived among the creative spirits.

What we learn here can be compared to what the student learns on the map, for example, about Asia Minor. How completely different the country appears to him when he sees it with his own eyes than when he sees the names, points and lines on the map. The knowledge of the everyday person is also different from the knowledge of life in Devachan, the life among the things themselves. Here are the foundations of our being. A genius soul did not arise from swirling atoms. Those who have genius today have experienced it in many lives on earth. In one life we gain experience that we apply in the next. First we build the tools, then comes the application. What I can do today, I have acquired earlier.

A person can also tell himself all this from his own mind. But there are people who recognize it from their own experience because they are able to consciously put themselves in these states while they are surrounded by the shell of the flesh. We call them “chela” or disciple. They have learned to see into spiritual development; the spiritual world lies open before them. The chela can develop to the point of becoming a master.

How does a person become a chela? The preparations necessary to become a disciple can be read about in many scriptures. To become a disciple, a certain degree of development is necessary. There have always been people who have crossed the threshold of death, from which, supposedly, no one returns. But the chela and the master really do return. They can consciously pass through the gate and come back. The preparation requires only that the person learn to truly live within themselves. We can achieve this if we are completely within ourselves at least once a day. The true Christian attains this state in prayer, others through meditation and contemplation. If we are able to meditate and work on ourselves in meditation, we can gradually be accepted into the spiritual world.

Disciples are required to be strict and earnest. First, they must be able to distinguish the essential from the inessential. It does not matter whether it is a mineral, a plant, an animal or a human being; whether it is a wild animal, a criminal or a noble person; they must be able to separate the essential from the inessential at a glance. This first quality, which leads to fellowship, does not, as some might believe, exist in some kind of cloud-cuckoo-land, so that those who possess it would have no sense of everyday things and would not recognize them as essential either; that would be a false view. The way you bring a spoonful of soup to your mouth can be more essential than the whole plate of soup you eat. What is essential is what reveals the essence of the thing or the person, not what the senses perceive externally. To achieve this quality, one must start from the right place. If, for example, one believes that enriching the world with printed paper is better than drawing wire, then one is mistaken.

The second virtue is – Vairagya – not to cling to the ephemeral, but to the fruit of the ephemeral. One must familiarize oneself with the eternal core of things.

Third: Shatsampat – six virtues or qualities that are necessary to prepare for the future.

First: control of thoughts – Shama. You should not let your thoughts stray. A person who wants to become a chela must achieve complete control of his thoughts. This is still an ideal, but you have to take time to strive for this ideal. I have to get to the point where my soul does not harbor any thoughts that I have not presented to it. The more mastery I gain over my thoughts, the closer I come to my core being.

The second thing that arises from the mastery of thoughts is the mastery of actions - Dama. You should not just let yourself be driven by circumstances. It is not the outside world that should drive us, but our own inner world. In a sense, we should take our own destiny into our own hands. We should seek to achieve what we want to achieve according to our own well-thought-out plan. This control over our actions gives us a previously unknown calmness of mind. There will be a transformation of our whole life. Not that you have to do something extraordinary now that you have set out and neglected your duty to your neighbor. But man becomes master of every destiny. He remains the master and rules over fate; fate no longer rules him. In every situation in life, he will see at a glance what is needed at that moment. This is the ideal to strive for.

Thirdly: The third quality – Uparati – is best translated as fruitfulness. To face everything that comes our way with a certain equanimity. Not to be sky-high and then sad to death, but to be fruitful. To greet happiness with joy, but without excitement, and to endure misfortune, albeit seriously, but calmly. Always keep the same temperature.

Fourth: General, loving understanding of people, understanding of all beings, tolerance – Titiksha. Do not condemn or detest the criminal, but try to ennoble him; do not say “I do not like him,” but try to bring him to a higher level, look for the essence everywhere. We say to ourselves: This criminal was no worse than I; circumstances may have made him a criminal. Can I help him? I do not want to judge him, but to try to understand him. And so the disciple must be tolerant towards all beings.

Fifth: Unbiasedness towards all events - Shraddha. When we are told or told something new, we are inclined to exclaim or think: Oh, I don't believe that. - If we do that, we take the unbiased view of something new. The chela never says: I cannot believe that. He believes that he can always experience something new and higher. Impartiality leads to faith and trust.

The sixth virtue, inner harmony – samadhana – arises from the five previous qualities.

From all this it follows: Fourth: The will to freedom - mumuksha. Man usually has more will to be unfree than to be free. He feels dependent on the outside world and inwardly unfree because his passions dominate him. But if he has realized the aforementioned virtues in himself, then the will to freedom is there, which enables him to become completely free, which is what makes it possible for him to become established in the life of the spirit. When this has been achieved to a certain degree, chelaship begins. This comprises four stages.

First stage: The homeless person. He no longer clings to the external world, does not look back longingly at the world of the senses. He is not unloving towards the world of the senses, but he does not allow himself to be captured by it. He himself gives equal love to all the world. He now begins to look consciously into the spiritual world, into those regions which are otherwise open to the average person only after death. Then all superstition and doubt disappear forever, because he sees how things are. But then all illusion of the self also disappears.

We can already realize this in the physical. Our existence depends entirely on the context we have with the globe. If we were to rise above it, we would perish, because the living conditions we need are not available up there. We can only live in the environment we were born into because it is in the right proportion to the temperature of our own blood. If the temperature were only 30 degrees higher or lower, our existence would be endangered.

The personal self will be overcome, the “Tat twam asi” - “That art thou”, fully awakened, that is, the human being feels at one with the universe.

[The] second stage of chelaship is referred to as “building huts”. He sees the kundalini light. This is presented to us in the account of the Transfiguration, where the Lord Jesus introduces his three disciples to chelaship. Then they want to build huts.

Third degree of chelaschaft: Then the light shines out of the disciple. “Every thing says its own name to him.” He sees things from the other side through the rays of the spirit,

Fourth degree of chelaschaft: cannot be described; it cannot be explained in ordinary words; it can only be spoken of in secret schools.

Only a hint can be given of the higher stages.

What only a few individuals attain now, the whole human race will possess in the future. New powers will be revealed, and people will consciously work from the realm of the spirit.

Theosophy is not utopian, not a figment of the imagination. What is now only realized in individual instances will be the future of the human race. It is not idle talk about interesting problems, but active work into the future. Whoever begins to immerse themselves in it is working for the future. Theosophy points out the seeds; it indicates means and ways in which we can work into the future. It is not an abstract teaching method. It shows what man will become if he lives in such and such a way.

Someone might ask: Is it certain that what is proclaimed here will come to pass? This cannot be answered simply with yes or no. The means have been given to man, but whether he will use them, no one can know. It depends on whether people will be willing to work together. The Theosophical Society has been founded for the purpose of educating people who want to work towards this goal. The deification of humanity depends on whether some of them will come together to tackle the work.

In this they must be completely free, they must make their own decision completely uninfluenced. From what we have heard here, we can see that

only Theosophy reveals the true meaning of life to us.

[ Note from the stenographer] At Mr. Hubo's request, Dr. Steiner said a few more words about the Theosophical Society's position on Christianity:

Our second principle and goal is to cultivate knowledge of the core of truth in all religions and religious life. There is no intention of transplanting the Buddhist religion to our West. We have no need to do so. Christianity contains the purest form of theosophy. It is only just beginning. It is the religion of the future. The earlier religions contained the same essence, but their form was calculated for earlier times. However, we have lost the key to Christianity, the origin of all religions.

A small scene from North America should make this clear to us. The so-called culture had driven the Indians out of their hunting grounds. They were promised certain areas in which to settle. But the promises had not been kept. It was in 1847 when a great Indian chief faced a senior official and said something like the following: You white people promised us land, but you did not keep your word. You are one who gets the teachings of the great spirit from books, from leaves on which all kinds of signs are written. But the great spirit did not teach you the truth, otherwise you would not have betrayed us. Our ancestors taught us to seek the great spirit Tao in everything around us. We feel it in the wind, in the sunshine, in the rustling of the leaves, in the flowing water, everywhere it speaks to us, we are one with it. And Tao has taught us truth that you do not know. — 'Tao is the concept for God, who is thought of as half concrete and half spiritual. In Tao, man does not yet feel separate from God, inside and outside.

Religion seeks to reconnect what has been separated from Tao. One seeks now what one has felt before. The Brahmans say of Tao: It is what it is.

Orpheus has wisely developed this thought and described the laws by which man can regain this conscious feeling of unity with Tao: You are created and you will create. The son has given himself and thus brought back light and

life and communion with the Father.