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

GA 68b — 24 November 1907, Vienna

47. The Essence of Man as the Key to the Secrets of the World

Dear attendees! At the beginning of today's lecture, I would like to present two images to your minds: one that you may know from the course of your life and the other that may arise on the basis of the lecture held here the day before yesterday. One of the images that I would like to evoke in your minds is Raphael's Sistine Madonna, which you all know well. We see this wonderful picture, the Madonna with the Christ Child, and we first try to intuitively place ourselves in what this picture wants, namely by looking at this picture more closely, we see how figures rise out of the mysterious mysterious cloudy sky that extends over the Madonna and Child, figures arise, let us say angelic figures, which appear to us as spiritual companions of the child, who is held by the mother.

And then the feeling can arise in our soul: the painter mysteriously wanted to depict something as a background from which the human riddle stands out, and not just this human riddle, insofar as the human being is placed in the universe, but also, through the fact that the child is added to the mother, insofar as the human being reaches out to create from within himself.

Let us first place this picture objectively before our soul and see if today's lecture, which is supposed to deal with the human riddle and the riddles of the world, could provide anything like a point of contact with what the artist has undoubtedly created here out of a deep feeling about the riddle of the world. And we realize that Raphael is picking up on something that has always occupied people like a riddle of the world when we consider that the whole configuration of this picture, everything that lives in this picture, is like a re-emergence reappearance on a higher artistic and religious level of what already confronts us in the ancient Egyptian land, born out of Egyptian feeling and thinking about the human riddle, in the form of Isis holding the child Horus in her arms.

And so we could cite many more examples of similar symbolisms, showing how the riddle of the world, the riddle of the connection between the human being and the world, is symbolized in the human mother with the child at different times. This is the first image that we want to paint for our souls to prepare us for today's lecture.

The other image should emerge from what we looked at the day before yesterday. Let us imagine a clairvoyant person who has developed his soul to such an extent by developing the powers and abilities that lie dormant within the inner being of today's normal person that he can produce those images, those thoughts within himself that make it possible for the higher worlds to appear to him in their facts, in their essences, so that out of the twilight darkness, out of the bosom of the world's existence, a completely new world steps forth before his soul, new in relation to the outer physical world, a world that shows people that behind our physical things there are entities and forces that are the very foundations of this physical existence, and entities and forces that step out of this bosom of world existence and that truly have no less concrete, real existence than that which we can hear with our ears and see with our eyes. This is how we imagine the clairvoyant in relation to the world, stepping out of the twilight of spiritual existence into a new world of forms, of higher realities, created in knowledge through him, as it were, as a document of what the human soul is capable of in terms of establishing its relationship with the world.

Is it not something that we can describe in the clairvoyant as a spiritual birth, as something on a higher level, on a more spiritualized level, which we find so wonderfully symbolized on the physical level in the Madonna with the Child? For that is what we want to contemplate today, my dearest audience, how man enters into this world around him.

The most diverse minds in the development of humanity have always reflected on this, have examined how man's relationship to the surrounding world actually is. Today, because older ideas in this direction are rather far removed from contemporary human thinking and it is difficult to bring to life not only the concept of such older ideas but also the right nuance of feeling that these old ideas conjure up before us, I do not want to tie in with older ideas, for example, only with the idea that a man often misunderstood today, Paracelsus, had about the relationship between man and the world. Like many others, he regarded the human being as a microcosm, as a small world, in contrast to the great world, the macrocosm. But we only want to recall with a few words what all those who regarded the human being as a small world, as a microcosm, in relation to the great world, the macrocosm, actually thought.

They had the idea that all laws, all the various chains of facts that spread out into the world, not only in the physical world but also in the spiritual world, that all these chains of facts and laws are contained in man as if in an extract, as if in another form on a small scale, that man himself is, as it were, such an extract, such an essence of the existence of the world in all its individual forms. Everything that can be found in the world can be rediscovered in man. As I said, we don't have to go that far if we want to present this idea of the small world of man, of the microcosm in relation to the macrocosm, as one that the best minds have had.

We need only recall a personality who was close to us in relatively recent times, whom we were able to mention here the day before yesterday in a different context. We need only pick up where Goethe left off and that wonderful friendship between Schiller and Goethe. When this began, Schiller felt an intense need to rise to the peculiar way in which Goethe viewed the world, how he had shaped the relationship between man and the world for himself. So Schiller writes at the beginning of the beautiful, great friendship, so significant for intellectual history:

For a long time now, I have been observing, albeit from a considerable distance, the course of your intellectual life and looking up to it with ever-renewed admiration. What you saw in the face of a great nature is this: you endeavor to get to know all the details of nature, of the surrounding world, in order to build up spiritually, through the combination of these details from the totality of phenomena, the most complicated being that stands before us, man. Schiller calls this a truly heroic idea, as it had emerged from his contemplation of Goethe's genius.

What is Schiller thinking of? He is thinking of the fact that Goethe studies the whole world around him, finding the same law everywhere in this thing and a different law in that thing. And then, when you create a harmony in your mind, where these laws, which are distributed among the most diverse beings and things in the world, work together, then you can roughly have an idea, an idea, of what really lives spiritually in a human being. And Goethe himself sensed so rightly that in man, more or less externally and internally, the whole universe has created something like a mirror image of itself.

We see this when Goethe, for example, points it out in his beautiful book about Winckelmann: When man lives in all of nature and becomes aware of healthy nature as a whole, when harmonious pleasure gives him pure, free delight, then the universe itself, if it could contemplate itself through man, would exult as having reached its pinnacle and would admire its own becoming and essence. And in another passage, Goethe says: When man looks at the nature around him and takes everything around him, in terms of measure and number and order and harmony, he is able to create within himself a higher nature in nature, something that transcends nature and yet is the meaning of this world, of this nature. That is what Goethe had in mind.

Thus we see that even a spirit of the modern world, even if it expresses this only in such general ideas, is thoroughly imbued with the fact that everything that is scattered around in the world works together in man, and that out of man a new world is born, which, when we come to think of it, must appear to us as an essence, an excerpt, a small world compared to the great world.

In the most real conceivable way, the theosophical or spiritual scientific world view shows us the world of the supersensible, as explored by the methods mentioned the day before yesterday, in connection with the sensible that spreads out perceptibly before our sense organs. In the most real sense, this research shows us that everything that seems to answer the great riddles posed by the universe is indeed present in man. Man himself can be regarded as the magic key by which we can unlock the most intimate secrets of the world around us. To gain an insight into what has just been said, we must first consider some aspects of the human soul, as we have already discussed in another lecture.

Since we are always dealing with new listeners, we must first say a few words about the nature of man, and then show how this nature of man, when viewed so completely, in all its parts and members, as is possible through theosophy or spiritual science, appears to us as a true extract, as an extract of the whole development of the world according to physical and spiritual facts and entities.

If we look at the human being in the theosophical sense, in spiritual science, we see that he is not the single-membered being that external, sensory observation shows us, that only adheres to the outer organs of perception and to the mind, the intellect, which links the outer perceptions together.

For the spiritual-scientific view, the human being is not this one-parted being. What external science and the ordinary view of the day can give of man is, for theosophy and spiritual science, only one part of the human being, namely, the physical body. This physical body contains the same substances and the same forces as the surrounding inorganic, mineral and lifeless nature.

But if we now ask ourselves: how does the physical body of man differ from the rest of physical nature? How does it differ from the mineral world, when we consider that this physical body of man, which in all its parts as a physical body contains nothing other than what the rest of physical nature contains outside? If we look at even the most beautiful form of a mineral, at some particularly wonderfully shaped mineral as a crystal, if we look at this mineral form! It exists as a form, as a whole, as it presents itself to us, through the physical and chemical substances and forces, and does not perish through these physical and chemical substances and forces. This form must be destroyed from the outside, whether by external intervention of some kind or other, or by the intervention of the world around it; the form of the mineral, held together by its own forces and laws of a physical nature, must be destroyed from the outside.

This is not the case with the human form, nor is it the case with the form of any living being. The human form of the physical body – we will not consider the other living beings, which concern us little today – does not follow at all the way man lives, between birth and death, these physical and chemical substances and forces that are in him. When does the physical human body follow the physical substances and forces? When? Then it follows the physical substances and forces when the human being departs at death, when the physical body is a corpse. Then they stir and emerge in their full validity – these physical substances and forces within him. According to the spiritual scientific view, between birth and death man has within him at every moment a fighter against the disintegration of the physical body.

Therefore, from the point of view of spiritual science, we speak of a second part of the human being that permeates this physical body and is a fighter against the disintegration of the physical body in each of us. The fact that the physical substances and forces between birth and death or between conception and death do not follow their own laws, but as it were contradict themselves, is because the etheric or life body, as the second link of the human being, is this constant fighter against decay. In terms of spiritual science, we have to imagine that at death the physical body is abandoned by the etheric or life body. As a result, the physical substances and forces become active and dynamic. But the etheric body enters its world.

For someone who relies solely on their intellect, this etheric body is, at best, a mere speculation, at most something that can be achieved through thinking. Today there are already many people who, based on pure scientific knowledge, have long since abandoned the view that one is dealing only with a conglomeration of physical substances and forces in a human being. These people speculate and think their way to something that is behind physical substances and forces, and instruct them in their particular organization in every living being. So for such thinking it remains speculation.

For the development of the human being that was unveiled here the day before yesterday, for what we can call the developed consciousness of the seer, this etheric or life body is a reality, something that belongs to him, that confronts him when, for example, he has developed imaginative thinking. Then he can perceive how a truly real being emerges from the physical human body in death. But no one should form an idea of this etheric or life body as if it were actually a kind of physical body, only very thin, very nebulous. No, in no way can it be perceived physically; it can only be perceived by the open eye of the seer, it is only visible and perceptible to spiritual eyes. This is therefore the second link of the human being, and it is of great importance that this double of the human physical body be regarded as a special real entity.

From the point of view of spiritual science, the objection may not be raised: One can indeed recognize that these life phenomena that occur in man are something special; but they are precisely functions, activities of the physical body, its complicated interaction. No! For spiritual science, the opposite is the case; that which occurs physically, which appears as a physical activity of the organism, is an emanation of the spiritual. Everything that occurs in the physical body, be it blood circulation, the regular activity of the respiratory system, or the activity of the digestive system, is the result of the forces that have developed out of this etheric body or life body. It is the higher part, and we will have to explain in more detail how we think of the next link in the human being, how we have to regard the higher links as the active, the doing part, so to speak.

Even in terms of the material, for spiritual science, the physical body is something that has crystallized out of the etheric body in the course of development, just as a piece of ice crystallizes out of water . It is thus, as it were, a condensation of the etheric body, and all the forces that keep the blood circulating, all the forces that are active in the physical body, are born out of the etheric body. This etheric body or life body – and I ask you not to confuse the term “ether” with what physicists call “ether”, because the hypothetical ether of physics has at most the name in common with it – is shared by humans and plants. Plants and every living being also has such a life body or etheric body.

But now we rise to the third link of the human being. We get an immediate idea of this when we imagine a person standing before us and ask ourselves: Is this person standing before us really nothing more than what the outer eyes can see and the ears can hear in his voice, what the hands can feel? Is there nothing else within these skin? Well, this person's soul can tell us that there is something quite different within these skin: a creature, a sum of desires, instincts and passions, a sum of pleasure and suffering, of ideas, of moral ideals, of intellectual ideas – all of this lives there before us.

And for primitive man, what has just been mentioned is truly a higher, more direct reality than what lives as muscles or bones or blood in his body, of which he may have only a very vague idea as a primitive man. Much closer to his soul, much more real to him is what has just been mentioned, as a sum of pleasure and pain, of instinct, desire and passion. We describe this sum as the third element of the human being, and we now want to use this third element to clarify how spiritual science must relate to what we are citing here as real elements of the human being.

The materialistic thinker or even the merely realistic thinker will say: Instinct, desire and so on are produced by the interaction of forces in the human body. What we call the third link would only appear as a result of physical activity, just as the advancing of the hand of a clock appears as a result of the mechanical arrangement of the movement. For someone endowed with clairvoyant consciousness, in the sense mentioned the day before yesterday, this third aspect of the human being is what is called – please do not be put off by the term – the astral body. This is a fact. For while in death the etheric body is clairvoyantly seen to separate from the physical body, thereby leaving the physical body to the physical substances and forces, the developed consciousness of the observer sees the astral body of the evening when the person falls asleep, moving out of the physical body and the etheric body, which remain connected during ordinary sleep, and this astral body, this third link of the human being, this sum of drives, desires, passions, instincts and pleasure and suffering, passes into a world in which the person cannot perceive, but in which he lives between the moment of falling asleep and the moment of waking up.

Now, of course, someone who only wants to rely on his senses may ask: Can you imagine that mere passions, mere desires, mere instincts are floating somewhere? Yes, that is precisely what humanity will gradually have to incorporate more and more into its thought habits if it wants to advance to a real knowledge of the supersensible world, that an existence of this soul-like being for itself is quite possible, just as just as we have seen earlier that the physical body appears as a kind of condensation of the etheric body, so too the etheric body appears as a condensation of this soul-spiritual structure, which we now address as the astral body.

You can form an idea from ordinary life, when you decide to think impartially and confidently, of how the soul and spirit affect the physical. We take two well-known inner soul experiences, we take what is called the sense of shame and what is called the sense of fear. Shame — the person blushes; fear — the person turns pale. What do these sensations mean in the first instance, in physical terms? The blood of someone who, as we say, blushes, has a very specific movement to fulfill; it is driven, so to speak, from the inside of the body to the surface; the opposite occurs when someone turns pale with fear.

Only those who engage in errant speculation could seek the causes of mental states in the physical. The unbiased and clear-thinking person will ask: What is happening in the soul? A sense of shame is a soul experience, something purely of the soul; a sense of fear is something purely of the soul. What do they do? They produce a physical activity, they produce an activity in the movement of the blood, it is a physical process, brought about by something of the soul. That is the natural way of thinking in this field, that is, so to speak, the last remnant of how we have to think about the soul in its effect on the material. Just as the movement of the blood and its location are truly changed under the influence of the soul, so we must now only imagine that basically all material events are caused and conditioned by their soul-spiritual causes, which lie behind them and which the human being only does not perceive as easily everywhere as in this primitive case, but which can serve as an example.

Now spiritual science shows, when you become more and more involved in it, that not only external activities and processes are caused by spiritual and soul forces, but that matter itself crystallizes out of the spirit, so that everything that physically confronts us in terms of substance and force appears to us, roughly speaking, as a condensation of the spiritual and soul. And so this astral body of man is that which we must hold fast in its independence, which we have to address as an independent link that creates means of expression in the physical and etheric bodies.

And within this astral body we then see the fourth link of the human being. When we look at the astral body, we can say that although it is not as developed in animals as it is in humans, the human being shares this body with the animal. Just as the human being shares their physical body with the mineral world and their etheric body with plants, they share their astral body with animals. But then there is a fourth element of the human being, through which man is the crown of earthly creation, whereby he differs from all the creatures and entities that are closest to him in the physical world. This is what we call the actual “Ichträger” in spiritual science.

I have already mentioned this here before; today it is only to be [referred to] so that we can treat the subject as we have posed it. There is a name in our language that differs from all other names. You can say “bell” to every bell, “desk” to every desk, “clock” to every clock - everything can be given a name from the outside. There is only one thing that cannot be named, and in our language this one thing bears for every human being the name, the simple name 'I'. The name 'I', if it is to describe the innermost part of your own being, can never reach your ear from the outside; no one can ever call out 'I' and mean you.

Here, in the very naming, you have something that can lead you to the character of this most human link of the human being, the fourth link, through which man is the crown of earthly creation. Those who have felt that the human inner being announces itself, that it must be experienced from within, through spiritual perception, have always seen in this I-being something like a drop from the ocean of divine substance. That is why this “I” or “I am” was designated by certain religions, which had an insight into these things, as the ineffable name of God in the human breast, ineffable to the outer world; it can only resound when the divine in man becomes aware of itself. What carries this “I” in man, this I, which, for example, is elevated to the divine by the God of the Old Testament in the famous word [Jehovah], we therefore also call the “I-bearer”, the innermost part of man, by which he differs from the entities and forces around him.

Thus, we imagine the human being as he stands before us today, as a four-part creature, as the Pythagorean school already imagined him, as a being that consists first of all of the physical body, which we can see with our eyes and touch with our hands, which physical science investigates. This physical body should not be belittled in any way by the great and admirable results of theosophy or spiritual science, but fully recognized. We then have as the second link of the human being the etheric or life body, as the third link of the human being the astral body and as the fourth link the I-bearer.

During sleep, the I-bearer leaves the physical body and the etheric body with the astral body, the physical body and the etheric body remain in bed, the astral body and the I live in the world of the spiritual, gathering strengths to bring the phenomena of human life, which are expressed in fatigue, back into balance and to descend again into the physical or etheric body in the morning, in order to make use of the physical organs and to connect with the physical world outside through them.

In death, however, we see again how the physical body remains behind and the I, the astral body and the etheric body leave the human being. Later — this can only be told today — a large part of the etheric body detaches like a second corpse, so that the person only lives on with something like an essence of the etheric body, a spiritual existence, in which certain members of the astral body later detach themselves as a third, invisible corpse. This would now lead to a description of human life after death; today it should only be hinted at.

Thus, when we consider the human being in its entirety from a theosophical or spiritual scientific point of view, we have these four members before us. Now we want to weigh these four members of the human being a little in their mutual relationship, according to their values.

From a certain point of view, someone might say: The physical body is the lowest link in the human being, it is the external physical, the etheric body is already more spiritual and finer, the astral body even more spiritual, the I is the most spiritual. So we could say: the I is the most spiritual and perfect, the physical body is the most imperfect. But this is only true in one respect. In another respect – and this is what matters when we want to consider the human being in relation to the universe – the physical human body is precisely the most perfect link in human nature. If only we really look at it not with our mere intellect, but with our whole soul, immersing ourselves in its wonderful complexity, then we will see how this physical body is essentially more perfect in its way than the astral body.

Consider the astral body, the bearer of lust and suffering, of desire and passion, in its relation to the physical body only – one might say – in broad strokes, then you have to say to yourself: What a miracle this human heart is, what a miracle this human brain is, and the way all the individual physical organs of the human being strive together! What the human being's astral body, the seat of instinct, desire and passion, often does in the face of these wonderful harmonious voices of the individual physical human organs and their harmony! It is often the troublemaker, it is the thing that brings disorder and disharmony into the physical human body. Pleasure, desire - none of that adheres to the physical body, all of that adheres to the astral body.

And now consider what pleasures and passions the astral body urges people towards, how people actually perpetually attack their physical body through their passions, pleasures and desires, how many of the things people consume for pleasure are true poisons for the heart! How wonderful it is that this physical body has an organ in its heart that is so marvelously constructed that it can often withstand the attacks of the astral body for decades!

In its way, the physical body is the most perfect link that man has today, even if it is the lowest. Then comes the etheric body – it is one degree less perfect than the physical human body; the astral body is much less perfect, and the actual ego – oh, that is the baby among the links of human nature, is still the most imperfect part of human nature today, this ego, which man can hardly grasp, which for many is considered so incomprehensible that what was said the day before yesterday by the great philosopher Fichte applies: Most people would rather consider themselves a piece of lava on the moon than an ego; it takes something to grasp this ego, to consider it real, it is actually a point - one might say.

Consider how much you can think when you see a person in their physical form, how much you can think when anatomy, physiology and so on present the person to you! How much content the physical build of a person has, how little content the I has for most people! In the distant future, these higher, supersensible aspects of the human being will certainly become richer and richer, and the time will come when the ego will be just as real as the physical body is today. But the ego is now in the very beginning of its development. It is, so to speak, only a baby and must become more and more substantial as the human being develops from the present into the distant future. The astral body is more developed, but it is still imperfect in some respects. The good and evil of human nature rests in the astral body, and only when evil is completely overcome by good will the astral body have the perfection that the physical body already has today.

Therefore, in the sense of spiritual science, we regard the physical human body as the oldest link in human nature, as the link in human nature that existed before the other human links were present, in a very, very distant past. But now comes the essential part. Back then, in the very distant past, it was not physical, it was spiritual. And just as, in the comparison made the day before yesterday, ice gradually crystallizes out of water as a solid, so the original spiritual, which was as spiritual as today's I, the human spiritual I, gradually became the present physical human body, the complicated body, differentiating itself more and more and structuring itself more and more.

Thus we go back to a very distant past, when man actually had only the physical body of what he now has, but this in a spiritual sense. And so we are originally in a completely spiritual world, there is still nothing of what we today call material and physical. The human physical body, as it is visible to our eyes and tangible to our sense of touch today, is a condensation of an originally spiritual substance that rested in a spiritual environment, just as today our physical human body rests in its physical environment, in the physical external world. Yes, spiritual science also leads us back to a spiritual origin in relation to the physical human body; this physical human body has undergone transformations, metamorphoses, to its present stage.

The human existence in which the physical human body was spiritual in the most distant past, in its first stage, before an etheric body or an astral body had been added to it, not to mention an I, is called, however strange it may sound to you, because you immediately think of an external world body, the Saturn body of man. Spiritual science gave this name to that most ancient past of man when the physical human body developed out of the spiritual womb of the world. In this first stage of human existence, man's Saturn existence, the physical human body was still simple and primitive.

And now comes the second stage: the etheric or life body is integrated into the physical human body. For this, the physical human body must already have been raised to a higher level; it must be able to permeate the etheric or life body, so that we can say: At this second stage of human existence, the human being consists of a physical body and an etheric body. He is roughly on a par with today's plants, but he is not a plant. The human being never passed through the plant existence as it is today. Rather, even when he consisted only of the physical and etheric bodies and when he was at the level of the plant existence, he was quite different. This stage of existence is called in spiritual science the solar existence. These are expressions that have to be accepted because the heavenly bodies do indeed have something to do with what we call Saturn, solar existence and so on.

Then there is a third stage of human existence, the astral body joins the physical body and the etheric body, and the human being rises to the level of animality. In spiritual science we call it the moon existence. So now we have the human being before us at the level of animality, consisting of the physical body, the etheric body and the astral body.

But now something very peculiar occurs at each stage of this human existence. Originally, in the sense of spiritual science, only the human being actually existed. In the distant past, the human being, who has the most perfect physical body among the beings that surround us, developed this physical body, often transformed itself, and by transforming itself when it incorporated the etheric body, and again when it incorporated the astral body, it has reached ever higher perfection.

At each such stage, certain beings are left behind that cannot keep up with the development. At the time when man incorporated the etheric body into his physical body, certain human beings who previously had only a physical body remained at the stage where they had only a physical body. They did not acquire the ability to incorporate an etheric body, and so they remain, as it were, stuck in the cosmic evolution of the world. It is true that not only do young people in grammar school or secondary school have to repeat a year, but this concept of not keeping up applies to the whole of cosmic existence.

Those beings who remained at the first stage of human development, when the human being integrated his etheric body, are humans who are one step behind, they have been thrown out of human development, as it were, and have fallen into decadence. These beings are the ancestors of our present-day animals. Thus, at the beginning of evolution, of development, we have man as the firstborn of our creation and we have the animal world as the second-born creation, as that which did not come along and therefore always remained behind.

We must visualize very precisely how this lagging behind occurs in the course of development. The world view that adheres to the external substance will see the imperfect next to the perfect and, if it thinks correctly in a Darwinian-materialistic way, it will come to the conclusion that the perfect humans have gradually developed from the imperfect animal.

This conclusion is logically on the same level as if someone – it is only a comparison, but logically it is quite true – saw two people next to each other, one of whom is ragged and down-and-out, but the other is talented and applies this talent to the benefit of his fellow human beings, so that he has become a useful member of human society. He sees an imperfect and a perfect human being side by side and concludes: Since the perfect comes from the imperfect, the perfect man comes from the imperfect or at least from something similar. Facts can very soon refute him, can show him that the two people are brothers, that they perhaps have a common pair of parents, that one has risen by developing the abilities within him, while the other has descended.

This is how it is in all of creation. We have, so to speak, endowed the human being with the ability to integrate higher and higher members of his being in the very first, most original world design. He first received his physical body spiritually, in pure spirituality. This physical body became able, after some time, to integrate the ether body if it remained within the line of development. Those human ancestors, if I may use the term, of course in a different sense than in ordinary cultural history, who did not keep up, were still at the stage of the mere physical body at the time when man had already incorporated his ether body had already incorporated its etheric body, and always remained one step behind, so during the stage of the moon-being, the next stage, they first incorporated the etheric body when man was already incorporating the astral body. So they always remained one step behind. Those beings, then, who during the third stage of human existence, when man incorporated the astral body, still remained on the first stage, who therefore could not even take up an etheric body, were thrown out of the development and were later placed alongside humans as the plant kingdom.

Thus, when we look at the animal kingdom, we see, as it were, degraded humans who have not reached their developmental goal, humans who have fallen into decadence. Not does the present man descend from some animal creatures, but on the contrary, the animal creatures have descended in this way, in that they have not kept up with evolution, they have retained certain forms that man has progressed beyond, they have descended brothers of man. The entire plant kingdom contains within itself beings that are nothing other than what man has secreted from himself. So we see the animals as human beings and say: We have progressed beyond this stage, they have retained the stages by depriving themselves of the possibility of advancing to an ever higher stage, and in the same way we overlook the plant kingdom and say: It has been secreted from the human kingdom and descended. The fourth stage of human existence is when the physical body, after four transformations, the etheric body, after three transformations, and the astral body, after two transformations, has taken up the actual I. This is our present earthly existence. It is carefully prepared by four stages of the development of the physical body, which has become more and more perfect, so that it could become the carrier of the etheric body and the astral body, and these themselves have gradually become so perfect that they could become the carrier of that which now appears as the baby of human nature, as the spiritual that must be protected, so to speak, by its covers. It was only during this last pause that the I incorporated itself, although this also happened in the most distant past, to which no geology can lead today; only clairvoyant hindsight, achieved in the way described the day before yesterday, leads us back to where the other bodies, through transformation, could become protective covers for the I. It was at this same moment that the last supply, so to speak, arrived, which had remained at the very first stage of human existence; there the mineral kingdom appeared as the last of the realms. This was a tremendous moment in the ongoing development of humanity. When, within himself, man first saw his ego light up in a dull, dim consciousness, the mineral kingdom arose around him in its present form.

If we look at it spiritually, we must therefore imagine that the development was exactly the opposite of how it is usually imagined. Today it is of course easy to say from the point of view of a purely material world view: the plants need the mineral kingdom as a basis, the animals need the plant kingdom as a basis. Certainly, in their present physical forms they need this basis. But they did not need it in their spiritual stages of existence. When man was still spiritual, he did not need to eat and drink, nor did he need to breathe. When he began to breathe, the possibility of breathing already existed, even if it was different from today. When the plant kingdom was in its first stage, it did not yet need the soil of the mineral kingdom. It was only when the mineral kingdom was there that it formed the solid foundation, and then the other kingdoms also became more and more physical.

In their physical form, these realms emerged last. Our entire world was formed out of the spiritual, and now we see a wonderful affinity between the fourfold human nature and everything around us. We look at our physical body and then look out at the surrounding world of the mineral kingdom. We look at all crystals, at all minerals, regardless of whether they look back at us from the atmosphere above the earth, in cloud formations and air currents, regardless of whether these inanimate formations look back at us in the water waves of the stream or whether they come to meet us as a trickling spring, whether they face us as formed minerals or as plants and so on.

We see the whole physical world around us and ask ourselves: What are we related to? We are related in that what lives around us in the physical world is, in a certain sense, the stuff and substance of our organism when we look at it spiritually. What is around us outside has come about, so to speak, in such a way that it has separated out as the most incapable and coarse, which has not gone through all these stages of development from the physical body to the reception of the ether body and the astral body and so on. We can visualize this as if we have a substance in which some salt, for example a colored salt, is dissolved, and we bring the substance to cool. The salt falls down and covers the ground and is stored at the bottom as the coarsest. So we see how the mineral kingdom separates out from what, as spirit, forms the origin of all existence, as the coarsest - and this is related to our physical body. Then we see the plant body and look inside ourselves and know that we carry an etheric body within us; we know that the plant kingdom is the remaining etheric nature of man. We feel related to everything that is outside. We know from the animals: these are the remaining astral bodies, they are set aside from human nature. Finally, after this unusable material has been separated out, we have, as the beings who must be called the highest on the physical plane, rearranged and reshaped all these three ancestral stages of human development in such a way that, in the end, the I could be taken up into the protective sheaths as the actual spiritual being of the human being.

Thus we look around us and find everything that we have in our human existence in the realms of the world, the sensual and the supersensible, except for that which is our I, which we can only find in the spiritual itself. Thus, we see how, through this complete examination of humanity, we come to understand our relationship with the whole surrounding world in a way that, one might say, does not belittle but rather elevates the human being. Yes, we can even give a reason why this had to be so, why the other realms had to be singled out. Since time does not allow otherwise, we can only take a cursory look at our future.

We can ask: Why? Is there a reason why man has to separate the other kingdoms from himself in the course of development, and what is the significance of this? There is a significance that we can understand by making a comparison. Imagine that something coarse is mixed into a substance that has dissolved. If we want to have the substance in its pure form, we have to allow it to cool down. Thus, man had to bring himself up by separating out everything that was unusable to absorb an ego in the other realms; he had to create a foundation on which he could develop. In the future, of course, he will have the task of redeeming these other realms, he will have to gradually raise them to his own spirituality. This can only be mentioned today, because what should particularly come to our minds today is that in the human being before us, the whole physical and spiritual world, insofar as we can reach it at first, is not only reflected, but that he has this whole world around him because, basically, the other realms have been separated out of him, because, figuratively speaking, they are flesh of his flesh and blood of his blood, even if this is meant in a spiritual sense.

And so man feels his way into the whole of his environment, and on a higher level he regards everything that lives in him as born out of the spiritual womb of the world, and just as the bark around the living core of the tree is structured and protects it, so the spiritual in man has protected itself through the coarser natural kingdoms, as it were, as the bark of human existence, and just as the bark is only the lignified soft parts of the tree, the other kingdoms, that which surrounds man, that which has developed out of the original human nature in the sense described today. Thus man learns that he is born out of the bosom of the whole existence of the world. It is not surprising that at the stage of clairvoyant consciousness he feels like a begetter of new worlds, for the worlds that surround us and on which we walk have developed out of us in the distant past.

The future world that will be around man will also be born out of man. Clairvoyant consciousness gives birth to it spiritually and has it before it, and then it is as if, out of the twilight darkness of the spiritual womb of the world, figures emerge before the clairvoyant consciousness, which are still spiritual today and will only descend into the physical world in the future. We see the spiritual that is around us populating itself with spiritual forms, and this spiritual will appear to us as a higher realm compared to what is already mysteriously hinted at on a lower level in human creativity today, and there the image is put together in a wonderful way from the artist's intuition. Raphael also did this partly out of tradition: what emerges as a feeling is what Raphael has secretly incorporated into his painting about human destiny; the twilight of the womb of the world – the spiritual figures are born above, and as the sensual embodiment, as the most important physical embodiment of what dawn of the universe and becomes more and more perfect in his physical form, appears to us in the mother with the child, who has the strength to shape within herself the mysterious laws that have come into being through all human evolution, so that he brings forth his repetition from within himself.

Anyone who can feel something like this will understand how the spiritual in the clouds and the physical in the Madonna with the child, as a great symbol of human destiny in this mysterious child, comes to us, and then one learns in front of this picture that, even if it is unconscious in the artist, it is born out of the feeling and sense of how man is a world in itself, but one that is intimately related to the greater environment, a small world, a microcosm, in relation to the greater world. One feels how the artist has incorporated this into his painting, and one then feels how what man receives through his position in relation to the surrounding nature can come to us again in human creations, as for example in true art, man brings us something like a solution to the riddle of the world in his own way. And when this riddle of the world speaks to us symbolically through Raphael's Sistine Madonna, we feel very strongly the words of Goethe, which we have already quoted and which lead us so well into the microcosmic human being and into the macrocosmic wholeness of the world. We feel what Goethe felt when he presented this human being as the actual solution to the whole mystery of the world, in that he said that when a person perceives the healthy world in its entirety around them, takes measure and number and order and harmony together and generates a new, higher world from this world, they thus give meaning to the outside world. And in all its details, down to the deepest feeling, theosophy or spiritual science shows us that in fact man contains within himself in a certain respect everything that we find outside in the world, that man himself is the solution to the riddle of the world, that man is the answer when we ask about the actual riddle of the world.

In the highest sense, my esteemed audience, the question can be put like this: let us look out into the world! It appears wonderful to us in all its fields, in all its realms, it presents us with nothing but questions. Where is the answer? Everything asks us – where should we look if we want the answer? The answer is always before us. We only need to be able to interpret this answer in the right way, through spiritual science. This answer to the riddle of the world is “man”. This was also in the mind of the ancient poet when, beholding the world around him, he spoke the beautiful words:

Many mighty things live here on our earth; but nothing is mightier than man.