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

GA 68b — 8 March 1909, Berlin

50. Clairvoyance: the Subconscious and the Superconscious

From a soul struggling for knowledge of the world, Goethe spoke the sentence:

Mysterious in the clear light of day
Nature cannot be robbed of her veil.
And what she may not reveal to your spirit,
You cannot force from her with levers and screws.

And much of what has taken place in the field of science since his time would have prompted him to say:... you cannot force that from her with microscopes and telescopes. — The saying does not arise from a lack of knowledge, but from an attitude that does not want to accept only the material. From his youth to his old age, he held fast to what he says in Faust:

The spiritual world is not closed;
Your mind is closed, your heart is dead!
Up! Bathe, disciple, undeterred
The earthly breast in the morning dawn!

And so he has here, as also expressed in the sentence mentioned earlier, not that man could not penetrate the mystery of existence, but to draw attention to the fact that the human spirit itself, in its development, can do what instruments cannot, that the human spirit is able to ascend from level to level.

What the human spirit can do can only be answered from an understanding of the secrets of our consciousness. Consciousness as it is experienced by people today relates to the other consciousnesses that exist and relate to today's normal consciousness in such a way that they, so to speak, plunge the human being into dark depths, and on the other hand lead him up to the summit of knowledge.

Let us ask ourselves today: Is there only the “normal” consciousness or are there other consciousnesses and thus the possibility of penetrating into the causes of our existence? Today, we will deal with the relationship between consciousnesses from a particular point of view. What the word “clairvoyance” encompasses is something that is unpopular and contested in our present time. People who only recognize normal consciousness will consider everything that has to be said as folly and fantasy.

It is based on nothing more than a lack of knowledge of the nature of human consciousness; it must be said that the common inner ignorance of facts speaks in this way. And it should not go unmentioned that one would wish that what is called 'clairvoyance' in the spiritual sense be known to those who speak of it and who know very little about it and crave it. They imagine something quite wrong under clairvoyance. Therefore, it must be spoken of that clairvoyance, which lies below our normal consciousness and also brings out the human being below normal consciousness. And in comparison, it must be spoken of what clairvoyance is in the spiritual-scientific sense and how it leads beyond normal consciousness. It can only be understood by placing oneself before the soul, which has often been said about the nature of man, about the visible and invisible man.

Spiritual science does not have it as easy as recognizing man as an external science that is tied to sensual matter. It regards only the outer physical part, and then speaks of the physical human body. Within this physical human body, the consciousness of which we will speak in a moment sees the invisible, the supersensible human bodies. Isn't it the case that the ordinary mind could form enough reasons for the existence of these bodies if it would only say the following to itself: I wake up every morning; during the night my normal consciousness is immersed in darkness and gloom. In the morning, entities from the most diverse realms of nature penetrate into the field of vision of consciousness; everything that was there yesterday penetrates back into consciousness.

Now everyone should continue by saying to themselves: If it were not too absurd, what fills the field of consciousness would have to disappear in the evening and arise again in the morning. They should say to themselves: Its existence would have to have disappeared during the night. Spiritual science tells us that the human being still has an astral body, which is the carrier of lust and joy, of urges and desires, etc. For clairvoyant consciousness, the astral body descends when we fall asleep. Why do we have no impressions during the night? Because it is in the spiritual world and because we have no organs for it. Imagine what would happen in the physical body. The eyes disappear; the ears stop hearing; you would have no sound, no color around you. Likewise, you could imagine that the other senses gradually fade away. This is what the astral body is like at night because it has not formed any organs in the course of human development; in the morning it uses the organs of the physical body. Thus we recognize in it one of the invisible links.

Between the astral body and the physical body lies a second link: the etheric body. During the time between birth and death, this is a fighter against the decay of the physical body. And then, when the human physical body is a corpse, it only follows the physical and chemical forces, because the etheric body moves out at death with the astral body. Sleep is separation from the astral body; physical body and etheric body remain in bed at night.

Then we distinguish a fourth element: the “I”, with which the human being can come to self-awareness. Thus, we see the human being as a composite of the physical body and three invisible elements: the etheric body, the astral body and the I.

Only when we consider the human being in its entirety can we form an idea of the stages of consciousness. There is only one thing we must be clear about: how do we look at the limbs? Once the physical body was of a spiritual nature; it has disintegrated, like ice separates from water. And the ether body is, as it were, a little denser spirit, and the astral body is still a little denser, and the I-bearing body is still a little denser spirit. Therefore, we also call the “I” that which is a “divine spark” or “drop”. It is only through the fact that man has gradually developed that he has become an “I-bearer” and awakened to his self-awareness.

If we go back, we find the first formation of the physical body. Then, as it were, as the physical body became denser, the etheric body was set apart. Even later, the astral body was added, and even later the I. Only through this did he - the human being - receive his normal consciousness, through which we perceive external objects.

This consciousness was not always there; it is a product of development. We could go back into the past and we would find that the human being was a being consisting of a physical body, an etheric body and an astral body. In this very distant past, man did not have today's consciousness; he had a completely different one, a consciousness that is one step lower. We can call this consciousness, in relation to today's, an “image consciousness”. The only way we can study this consciousness is to restore consciousness to a higher degree. In those days, people could not perceive objects in outer space. Imagine that there is some object lying nearby that has a certain taste. Today, a person has to become aware of it through the taste, through the tongue; he perceives from the outside what the object is. The image consciousness cannot perceive such an external object; an image arises, and this image is a symbol of what taste the external object has. Or one approaches an object that would shine for today's consciousness; the image consciousness does not see that; but through a mysterious bond between the soul and the body, an image arises again.

And so we may say that such a consciousness has images that surge up and down, images that are closely related to our present-day ideas, except that they are symbols; our present-day ideas are only photographic images. What the astral body experiences is an awareness of images. Indeed, if today's human being could erase his “self-awareness”, he would disappear into the sea of astral images. He would experience the surging images in the astral body. We can characterize our present-day consciousness by means of a comparison. Imagine a creature that lives in the sea for a certain period of time, so that it only stays at certain depths. It knows the animals and plants that are embedded in the sea, but it never looks at the sky. This is roughly how we have to imagine human consciousness. Man emerges from a sea of astral images, and self-awareness is ignited by the outside world. This could never have developed if he had remained in the sea of the astral; but only by having objects in the external world does self-consciousness ignite.

Thus we have pointed to a certain level of consciousness that lies below our present, ordinary sense of self, from which humanity has developed. If we go further, we would find a person who did not yet have the astral body. And so we could say that image consciousness has developed out of an “ether image consciousness”. If we were to descend further, we would perceive a consciousness that differs essentially from what the modern human being knows as consciousness. But you can get an idea from what has been said today: the ether consciousness is contained in what remains in bed during the night. And our astral consciousness has submerged in the sea of the astral.

Now we do not have to imagine extreme contrasts here, but differences in degree. We do not have to think that the consciousness during sleep is the opposite of our own today; imagine that you also know something similar in our daytime consciousness. When you walk down the street, it may happen that you say to yourself: Didn't I see something just now? — You did not pay attention to it. There you have a lower consciousness. There is only a duller consciousness in what remains in bed. The plant has the consciousness of sleep continually - they are sleeping beings.

And we can descend even further, we can enter the physical body and come to the mineral consciousness. This is the consciousness in which the whole mineral world lives. So we have listed four levels: mineral, plant, animal and human consciousness. Three levels of consciousness therefore lie below our everyday, normal consciousness. These three levels were completed by man in prehistoric times.

Today, people are occasionally able to revive the last remnants of ancient levels of consciousness within themselves. There are also such heirlooms in the physical world, such as the auricles, which are an atavistic remnant; likewise, certain states of consciousness, which are usually called clairvoyant states, are heirlooms from ancient developmental states. However, they are not the true ones in the sense of spiritual science; they are only old heirlooms that sometimes live into our present-day consciousness.

People have two very different types of such inherited traits, which express themselves in very different ways. One is what encompasses the dream world. What a person experiences in a dream are not perceptions that are made in the same way as those experienced by daytime consciousness. They are images of external events. You only need to imagine characteristic dreams. Let us take one as an example: a young man dreams that the vault of heaven has opened up in front of him and a number of shining beings have emerged. He wakes up and sees that the morning sun has shone on the wall through the window. The dream has symbolically expressed this shining of the morning sun in such a way that it allowed the experience to arise in the soul as an image. Here you have an image experience. That is why the dream is an heirloom from the time when man had inner soul experiences that were linked in their form to external objects. For example, if you see a symbol with an ugly color in your astral consciousness, you know that there is a harmful object nearby. The not yet awakened object consciousness does not see the object, but only an image, so that one could arrange one's actions accordingly.

The dream images are only a remnant, but since they have different degrees of approximation, the “dream can sometimes light up that it really corresponds to a real fact that appears symbolically. Let us take the case of a person who dreams of the colony of Kiau-tschau, how he sits in a meeting and is constantly confronted with the name Kiau-tschau. He wakes up and sees that a cat has crept into his room and is meowing. In fact, the dream is such an arbitrarily drawn conception.

If you study the dream in this way, you will see that it is lines of life that have been preserved, but that it mixes lines with the greatest arbitrariness, mixing in certain interests of the day. Such a mixing of interests is, for example, when an important philosopher dreams the following. In his soul lived the poem:

Do you want to roam into the distance,
when the good is so close,
just learn to grasp luck,
because luck is always there.

And he dreams:

Do you want to roam afar?
See, the money is so close.
Just learn to grasp the money,
Because the money is always there.

You see how the dream from the source of the inner imagination deals arbitrarily with what it has experienced – the structure of Goethe's poem, for example.

If we were to follow this, we would have an immersion in an earlier state of consciousness. All our ideas can be symbolized in this way. Imagine you are lying in bed, you press your feet against the lower edge of the bed and release them again. The dream symbolizes: the feet become free and a flight arises. What causes the dream? The fact that what happens does not happen completely when a person sinks into dreamless sleep.

It is now possible that the astral body has already left the physical body and not yet the etheric body; this is particularly the case when waking up and falling asleep. Then the astral experiences are reflected and the dream experiences arise. The dream stands on its own; it is really a last remnant of old, overcome states of consciousness.

It is different with other states of “abnormal consciousness”, which can develop in certain respects in humans. Because they submerge in the astral, so that they give up their full self-awareness in certain respects, completely different states of the subconscious arise than in a normal dream. What must be tuned down is what man calls his 'I', his healthy thinking, to distinguish it precisely from what is in the environment. Every time the actual 'I' of the human being is tuned down, when the human being does not feel: Here I stand —, then it is as if the human being were diving below the surface of the astral sea. Then what can be called the subconscious comes to him.

There are three forms of the subconscious: what is called presentiment, what is called vision and then second sight. These are three different forms of the subconscious. It is natural that when man muffles his ego, he enters into a closer relationship with all the threads that nature connects than he would otherwise. When we raise our usual ego consciousness, then man must be content to see only part of the space; there he is always in such a restricted area, and what effort it costs to pull the connecting threads of nature. In a limited consciousness – that is the work of our 'ego' itself, when we dampen it down, when we dampen down our abilities, when we let our reason fall silent, then we descend into our astral body and this is connected with many intimate threads to what lives in the astral. There the ordinary connections of space and time come to an end. There we dampen down all these concepts.

Because of the completely different concepts of space and time, it can happen, as it does in presentiment, that time is overcome. At the slightest immersion, what might be called “dark feeling” arises; this comes from the currents that run beneath the surface, which one senses gently when one descends into the astral world. If you dive deeper, then, just as it was with the astral consciousness, the experiences form into very specific images and the vision occurs. We are then in the world of causes, in the world of the primal reasons. Then those beings emerge that are invisible to the physical eye. We get to know such entities, and the visions are often the physical expression of beings that are behind the sense world.

Thus we can actually encounter those entities that are there and can also be human souls. This enters our consciousness when we descend. And the actions of these spiritual beings, what they undertake unbound by space and time, we experience in second sight. When we see things far away in second sight, it is a descent into the depths of consciousness.

Today's man cannot dive into the depths of consciousness without taking with him what he has experienced up here. Man has acquired the habit of seeing animals and plants, etcetera, in a very specific way. He takes the way with him and with it he covers, as it were, the beings that come to meet him. They are true beings that appear to him, but they are false images. The fact is that he submerges, that he sees a being that does not appear in its true form, and he covers that with the images he is accustomed to. For example, someone submerges and he thinks he sees the Christ himself. Nevertheless, it is a real being from the spiritual world, but he has endowed it with the image of the Christ himself. And so what he sees is an illusion of a real being. And because people who are not trained clairvoyants cannot know whether they are seeing what they are taking with them or what is the truth, such people can be very sure that they are indulging in the greatest deceptions. Descending is therefore always accompanied by deception after deception.

You can dive even deeper, into the sea of ether, and you also take with you the way of seeing things very definitely. You can perceive powers in this way, but they will be blurred. If you saw them clearly, you would see what could be described as an all-encompassing life. For example, you would see our earth as an all-encompassing living being. But in this world man perceives the images to which he has become accustomed, and sees all kinds of things that have indeed been caused by spiritual entities; but the forms that the lower clairvoyant perceives are in deceptive form. These clairvoyants are what are called the dream walker, for example, where the person in the dream performs actions with the physical body in the dullness of the etheric body.

Likewise, what is called “magnetic sleep consciousness” is to be sought in this sphere, because usually causes of illness underlie it; suppose you have an organ that is diseased, you do not need to know it, something is abnormal about the person, which steers the person towards becoming conscious in the etheric body, especially when another person strokes them, etc., accelerates this process. All kinds of events in the spiritual world appear to him in all kinds of illusions. So we see that one can descend into different states of consciousness. In occult science, they are called the “subconscious”.

All these states of consciousness are not relevant to what is said in esoteric science. Many people are eager to switch off their ordinary daily consciousness and descend. They only want to experience something strange, they want to experience spirits. That human beings are spirits is not proof enough for them; they want to have spirits without physical expression. This is not to say anything against the truth and reality of these spheres; but what would come from such states could never be decisive for spiritual science.

Just as there is a subconscious, there is also a superconscious. This can only be achieved through training in the occult sciences. This includes learning to manage one's ordinary consciousness in the most precise way. It is therefore always emphasized that what spiritual science hears from the spheres can only be grasped with ordinary human understanding. It cannot be expressed strongly enough that Theosophy can be grasped with ordinary human understanding. Only those who are trained clairvoyants can see the true shape of the spiritual world. But when it is related after he has seen it, those who absorb these facts, when they are presented in a sensible, comprehensive way, can understand everything and they can say to themselves: If I do this, I can then check whether all this can be applied to life. One must keep common sense as one's own possession. You have to keep telling people who come to you: Approach the physical world first, apply our minds to these facts and try to understand them.

But who has an unimpaired mind, unclouded by the suggestion of so-called scientific facts! You have to realize that this is no easy task! Never before has the human mind been so limited as it is today. Everyone is satisfied when they can construct a whole edifice of the world from a few pegged-out concepts, and when someone comes along who wants to build the edifice from the sum of spiritual truths, they say that this is folly, fantasy or something even worse.

This must be taken into account. Only unprejudiced thinking can approach the physical world, not judgment clouded by all sorts of suggestions. Today people talk a lot about the “independence of judgment”; they want to be free of authority. They do not accept what they have not examined themselves; but they do not ask themselves whether they are capable of examining everything. What matters is that they want to be independent of any authority and yet are dependent on a great authority: “They say.” This intangible authority has a tyrannical effect on people. Humanity languishes under it, believing itself to be free from all authority. It absorbs everything that is a matter of contemporary judgment; one believes everything that science has established, as if no one cared.

He who stands face to face with the facts of the spiritual world must free himself from this. There he has to use his usual healthy judgment to progress to superconsciousness. Many a person comes and says: I used to see all kinds of things, but now everything has disappeared. Those who understand will say: That is good. You should ascend to the superconscious; to do that, the best transition is to go through a sphere of spiritual darkness. You can expose yourself to danger if you don't want to. When [the person] descends into the subconscious and all the confusing impressions of the astral world come, then perhaps in a certain respect he will come to have premonitions, visions, etc.; he may still see so many black poodles that only pretend to be something. That is not the point of seeing this. He who is not yet mature enough not to have respect for these scraps of the spiritual world is also not mature enough to penetrate into the superconscious. To do this, he must undergo catharsis or purification. Man must be cleansed of all subconsciousness if he wants to ascend into the first sphere of the superconscious. There he also experiences a consciousness of images, but in the same way as he lives in everyday life. To do this, it is necessary to strengthen one's consciousness and throw out everything that is subconscious. And that is a lot! You can see this if you remember that in early childhood, a lot of things penetrate you; you have forgotten them in your sense of self, but they are inscribed in your etheric and astral bodies. Certain childhood impressions would come up and disturb a person every time he or she tries to penetrate into a higher consciousness. In a sense, diving into the spheres of the subconscious is a dressing up of the real facts with images from the real world. Try to register the images of such “clairvoyants”, follow them back to a time when there were no railways or telegraphs, wait and you will not be surprised that railways and telegraphs will play major roles in the “spirit realm”. This is only because the seer takes with him what has been imprinted in the etheric body. Therefore, if you want to penetrate unclouded, it is necessary to throw everything out of your subconscious. You can only acquire it by going through it with complete consciousness, which is provided by the spiritual scientific method. There is what the student has to practice, what he has to experience, absorbed in imagination, and that is pictorial representation, which proceeds according to the rule:

All that is transitory is but a parable.

Thus you will find that in every training session symbols are given such as the rose cross, the serpent staff of Hermes, etc. They have something tremendously significant when a person has to experience certain facts of the outer world inwardly. One forms a symbol that one does not use in the same way as a photographic image of the outer world.

Let me mention here once more, in the form of a dialogue between teacher and student – this dialogue did not take place, but the facts do take place –: Look at a plant; it takes root in the ground and lets stems, leaves and flowers emerge. And now compare the plant with the human being. You call him a higher being. You know that the red blood that makes man a higher being also enables him to develop passions, instincts and desires, but also the soul world, the higher consciousness. The plant has no desires and instincts; it stands there in pure, high chastity. But you see the human being with a higher consciousness; however, he pays for that which is connected with the red blood through passion and desire. And then imagine the high ideal that the human being will become like the plant; he has subdued the desires and purified his red blood.

For man the plant is a model; he forms a picture of how, in time, everything degrading will have died out in man, and his blood will be pure, like the sap in the red rose. Think of this as a symbol in the red rose and apply to it Goethe's saying:

Before you do not have this,
this: Die and become!
Are you only a gloomy guest
On the dark earth!

And when we feel the burgeoning and sprouting in the soul, like the reddened sap in the red rose, we feel that and let the image work on us in inner meditation! And the image has a certain effect: it pushes out everything that fills the subconscious, and we have taken the first step towards the superconscious.

There are countless symbols just as I have described the Rose Cross. The disciple must immerse himself in these and then put them together in the “occult writing”, and in this way he comes, purified and cleansed, to an ether consciousness. Through what we gain from the occult writing, we receive the so-called inspired consciousness in that which is not tied to space and time; but we do not see it clouded by the images of everyday life.

And then there is a higher link of the superconscious: intuition. — In all these spheres of the superconscious, man takes his full “self-awareness” with him. If someone says: You are describing a consciousness in vain, that does not reflect a true world, then let someone who understands it tell them: These things are there so that the forces develop in us that free the astral body, the etheric body, from the physical body, and by doing so, we learn to see into the spiritual world while being fully aware of our ego.

There is no danger associated with this path, nothing can happen to us on it, it is safe if we follow it with patience and perseverance. If you submerge yourself, if you dampen the I, there is a danger; we fall prey to the passions that reside in the astral, and eventually we can lose our minds, while we become more and more understanding as we ascend in superconsciousness. Hence the insistence that the road to superconsciousness lies through day-consciousness. Those who find it too dull and uncomfortable to go through the study of the physical often pay for it with the loss of their reason, which they have sought through their greed.

Thus we see that there are stages that lead up and stages that lead down. The former lead to true clairvoyant states, where the ego is among the actions of spiritual beings [in inspiration] and finally where it is spirit among spirits [in intuition]. Nothing less is achieved than the cleansing of the physical body, the etheric body and the astral body. There are some things you have to accept; for example, when a person frees his etheric body, he may experience a temporary loss of memory because it is attached to his etheric body. If a person partially draws it out so that he can use it, his memory fades. But it will be amply restored to him later, albeit in a different way. And the qualities and abilities of consciousness are lost for a time; even self-awareness takes on a different form. Like a wanderer who feels lonely, the person walks along. As he penetrates further, the common memory disappears and a certain insight into past things arises.

Those who undertake the right training must have composure and perseverance. They must enter the path with courage and boldness, but it will be rewarded with the great reward of insight into the spiritual world, where the powers lie to become master of the physical world. A time will come when only those who recognize the spiritual forces behind the physical and can make them fruitful will be considered practical people. This leads us into the spiritual world while fully maintaining self-awareness. Not instruments, telescopes and microscopes, which only explain the veil of nature, only the spirit leads into nature.

Mysterious in the bright day Nature cannot be robbed of the veil. And what it may not reveal to your mind, You do not force it out with levers and with screws.

If we want nature to come to meet us, we must go to meet it by developing our consciousness into superconsciousness. Then man will live his way into what Goethe described with the words he put into the mouth of the wise man:

The spirit world is not closed; your mind is closed, your heart is dead! Arise, student, arise,

The earthly breast in the morning dawn!