The Nature of Man in the Light of Spiritual Science
GA 68d — 18 November 1908, Prague
25. Man, Woman and Child from the Point of View of the Occult
Theosophy or spiritual science approaches man primarily by giving him messages about a transcendent world, certain knowledge of what has existed in the invisible world since primeval times, since the first beginnings of being, hidden behind our world of the senses.
At first, Theosophy seems to be just a theory, like many others. But if we immerse ourselves in it, even if only for a short time, it is no longer just a theory; it becomes an act, a reality for those who deal with it, it becomes truth, wisdom and wealth through life.
It becomes all this not only because it brings great ideals of the future development of man before the soul, but also because it is possible right from the beginning, before the great ideals have been realized, to mean something for the soul, to give our whole life a turn.
A great, all-encompassing ideal that Theosophy develops before man is that everyone is able to develop the powers and abilities that lie dormant in them, so that - even if only in the distant future - it will be possible for them to see into the spiritual world that Theosophy speaks of, just as they look into our sensual world today. Yes, the moment will come, perhaps in the distant future, when the spiritual world will no longer be something hidden, unknown, mysterious to man, but will shine and radiate before his soul's gaze like the world of color and light for someone who was blind from birth and suddenly sees after an operation.
This awakening to spiritual life, the inclusion of the spiritual world in the field of human experience, that lofty ideal of which Theosophy speaks, gives man hope, indeed certainty, that he will achieve it one day. There is already something in it that is of great wealth for the human soul, something that gives man strength and certainty for his whole life. For many, however, for most people, it is still a distant ideal.
Nevertheless, regardless of this distant ideal, Theosophy can offer people something else, even if they feel far from this ideal.
The great truths about the supersensible worlds, which are offered to humanity by advanced individuals to whom these worlds are already open today, are different from other theories in that they show man the way to understand everyday phenomena and experiences in our lives. These are messages that explain the most important manifestations of life and give us the solution to the darkest secrets of nature and man.
To acquire such knowledge is to gain strength for life. For not understanding what is mysterious in human life means restlessness, weakness, inability to live; on the other hand, every understanding of the essence and purpose of life gives man strength, confidence and hope that will not leave him even in the most difficult moments, when he needs them most.
This eminently practical significance of Theosophy appears most clearly to us when we turn to the question that today's lecture is specifically about, namely the mystery of man and woman and their connection with the child. Indeed, this is a vital topic because we cannot take a step in our lives without encountering this question.
It is true that modern science, which is worthy of all admiration, provides a large number of answers to this question. However, this science, based on the observation of what the physical eye sees, what the physical apparatus shows and what reason combines into a logical whole, relies only on external observation and the conclusions derived from it – science inevitably fails precisely where we encounter such questions and mysteries of daily life.
It is enough to look at contemporary literature: we find here that today's literature, which knows nothing of spiritual science, takes a twofold view of such an important problem as today's.
On the one hand, we see a materialistic view flashing through some of these remarks, expressing a wide range of assumptions about the nature of man and woman. On the other hand, however, we see a whole series of serious and thinking people who are not at all satisfied with the vague assumptions, who sense a deeper nature of the contradiction between man and woman; these people find nothing but a one-sided and chaotic view in modern science and literature; but they are not yet able to penetrate to spiritual science and there to the right enlightenment of this mystery. Let us take a look at some of the views on this subject. How confused human knowledge is precisely here!
The writer Rosa Mayreder, who dealt with this question but did not yet penetrate into spiritual science, has collected some opinions that are common today in all cultural countries, especially about women.
An overview of these different opinions casts a sharp light on the utter confusion of the present day. Let's look at how the writer compares different views. The book by the aforementioned author, “On the Problem of Women”, also deserves to be read for other reasons, because it leads to theosophy, as it were, and to the gate of theosophy, although she herself has not yet entered it. Here we can see how a great naturalist, who is often mentioned, tries to grasp and summarize the nature of women in that he ascribes tenderness to them. Another scientist – his name is not important – summarizes all of a woman's qualities in the concept of devotion. Elsewhere, we see again the human being who has grown out of the present day, who hopes to express the essence of a woman best with the word 'temperance in the face of anger'.
So one person comes up with the idea of tenderness, another just as sincerely and honestly with the concept of devotion, and yet another, based on his observations, with the term “anger-bearing”. Another judgment, again based on a man who often dealt with psychopathology, calls woman “embodied conservatism”. A conservative element in social life, that is what woman is supposed to be. We don't have to go far to find the opposite view: “The real revolutionary element lies in the nature of woman”.
We have a whole range of such views. Their enormous diversity, indeed their contradictions, are proof of how little people understand these things if they stick to superficial observation.
A profound philosophical thinker, on the other hand, tries to divide humanity into, on the one hand, analytically thinking people who analyze, break down, classify and penetrate into the details of everything they see, and, on the other hand, people who, in turn, understand the whole universe synthetically – and then calls the woman an analytical being and man a synthetic being; but immediately we come across the statement of another philosopher who explains that woman is always ready for synthesis, but only man is supposedly capable of the strict analytical knowledge that leads to science.
All these thinkers, whose views have been cited here, simply stopped at superficial, superficial observation; hence the confusion and contradictions in these various statements.
Nevertheless, it can be said that there is something in the way this question is approached that drives modern science along the path that it must follow in the course of time to the recognition of spiritual life, to the recognition of that which lies beyond the visible world of modern science.
In a particularly remarkable way, the young, unhappy doctor Dr. Otto Weininger summarized his views in his book “Sex and Character”, a book that shows on one hand how modern materialistic science is driven by inner necessity to higher knowledge, but on the other hand how this science is not able to find a final solution to this question because of its prejudices and the nature of its methods.
Weininger builds on the ground of serious and exact science, on the methods of modern research, that there is a kind of polarity in the male and female sex, a kind of ideal male and female type, but that we never encounter it in practice, because in fact one always finds in the individual, both in the man a hidden female and in the woman a hidden male part. Weininger, however, puts this whole thing on a materialistic basis. He almost gives the impression that a part of male substance is mixed into the female organic substance and vice versa.
In other cases, too, we find in Weininger, alongside ideas that lead to true knowledge, a wide range of completely false ideas and conclusions. In general, this book shows a wondrous mixture of deep ideas and, again, the most extreme prejudices against the nature of women. This can be seen best in the conclusions, where Weininger comes to the final view that a woman has neither freedom nor individuality nor intellect nor reason.
These different views about women, full of contradictions, are able to evoke a sympathetic response in the human heart, in the sense that one recognizes the need to look not only at the observation of life through the external senses , but also on the inner, spiritual events; only if we see man and woman not only as they appear to our eyes, but if we delve into the inner being of man, can we recognize the true nature, origin and laws of the two sexes of man.
Other lectures have shown that we can become aware of the invisible parts of the human being on the basis of the great problems of waking and sleeping, life and death.
It was shown how the whole world accessible to our senses, which extends around us during the daytime while we are awake, and all of our waking consciousness sinks into an indeterminate darkness in the evening as we fall asleep; and that then, in the morning when we wake up, everything that was spread out before our consciousness the previous evening emerges again from the darkness of the unconscious. It is a common phenomenon, and yet – perhaps for that very reason – this principle has not been sufficiently investigated, although it is one of the deepest, most enigmatic questions of life, one that, when seriously confronted with it, can lead a person to a deep realization.
According to the experiences of those who have developed higher abilities, it can be observed that, in the evening, when falling asleep, a person leaves part of their being in bed, while the other part leaves the physical body and then lives with it during the time of sleep in the other, transcendent world.
But why can't the person, with that part that is drawn out of the physical body at night, perceive the phenomena of this higher, transcendental world with full consciousness?
Because it is only possible to perceive where there are sensory organs. Only the world for which there are senses can be perceived. In this soul-spiritual part of the human being, which emerges from the physical body during sleep, no organs have yet developed in the ordinary person today.
For this reason, from the moment of falling asleep until waking up, man is [deaf and] blind to everything that happens in this higher world, in which he would live if he were not relegated today to the purely sensual world, in which alone he has a developed perceptual apparatus and to which his soul-spiritual part always returns in the morning when he is reintegrated into his physical body.
We can go further and point out another circumstance that leads us to a real observation of spiritual science. In what lies on the bed during sleep, we can observe two things; the one part, the physical body, can be perceived through the sense of touch in the sleeping person; it consists of the same forces as a stone, and is therefore of a mineral nature.
This physical body would disintegrate into its own forces and substances if it were not permeated by a principle that saturates it with life force, the so-called life body or etheric body.
Everything that is alive must constantly conquer life. The stone is sustained by its mineral forces; only from outside can the disturbing forces come that destroy it. But the living body only persists if it is maintained by the power of life; left to itself, it decomposes under the influence of mineral forces into the individual substances of which it is composed, and becomes a corpse.
Between birth and death, the physical body of man is intertwined with the etheric body. At death, however, this etheric body emerges with the astral body, leaving the physical body dead. This is the difference between sleep and death. In sleep, the physical and etheric bodies remain together, but at death, the etheric body also withdraws with the astral body and the higher principles of the human being, while the physical body, left to itself, becomes a corpse. What interests us most about this matter today is that at night, when a person is in the spiritual world, they are almost purely spiritual, or, to put it another way, a soul-spiritual being that consists of the astral body and the human “I”.
The organs that a person uses during the day when they are awake, when they are in their physical shell, are in the physical and etheric body for the purpose of contact with the outside world. Thus, we only understand the essence of a person correctly if we observe their changing states during the day and night.
The human being is in a similar situation with regard to gender. The conditions that we summarize under the concept of man and woman are only found in the part of the human being that remains on the bed at night as a physical and etheric body. That which withdraws from them during sleep – the astral body and the human being's “I” – and returns to them in the morning, has no gender. What flows out of the body at night is the human being elevated beyond gender.
So when the human being leaves the body, they leave the entire realm of gender; then in the morning, when they awaken, they return and enter gender again.
Only the physical and etheric bodies appear to be sexual to us and show us this in a wonderful way.
Theosophy gives us this special knowledge, wonderful and incredible, but true! Only on the outside is a person a member of the sex that can be observed through the senses. But if we observe the supersensible part of what remains on the bed during sleep, namely the life body or etheric body, this body shows us something surprising compared to the physical body. The etheric body is actually endowed with the opposite sex as the physical body; the etheric body of a man is of the female sex and the etheric body of a woman is of the male sex.
Here is the key to the mystery of sex! The human being consists of a physical, etheric and astral body and the I (ego); the ego and the astral body are trans-sexual and therefore do not participate in the sexual, except that they surround themselves with the etheric and physical body.
Of the physical and etheric body, we see with the ordinary senses alone the physical body; but if we turn our attention inwards to the supersensible side, the etheric body, we find the opposite sex. When a person observes life from the perspective of the sexes, when a man or a woman experiences life and tries to understand it from that point of view, but spiritual science then provides him with such insights as the opposite natures of the sexes of the physical and etheric bodies, then the scales fall from the eyes of man; only then does it become clear to him when he looks at life as a man, that although external nature stimulates him to male deeds, he harmonizes these male qualities, balances them with other, almost female qualities. Likewise, women show us a whole range of male traits. We then find that there is nothing that we could ascribe to only the man or only the woman, whether as a virtue or a defect, that is tied only to one sex.
If we look at Weininger's opinion from this point of view, we see a certain similarity, but it is certainly not material things in men and women of the opposite sex, but this has its seat in the etheric body.
Why are those people who rely on external impressions so wrong in their opinions about women and men? Precisely because they judge spiritual life by external signs of gender and forget that there is something feminine in every man and something masculine in every woman and therefore there is always something of the opposite sex in each sex that complements it.
In all the above characterizations of woman, where the concept of “tenderness”, “fidelity”, “poisonousness”, “conservatism” or “the revolutionary element in man” was attributed to woman, we see everywhere that only what was found from the outer senses was judged.
Let us look deeper! Theosophy sheds light on these things, teaching us to understand the sphere in which masculinity and femininity meet. There, where man is elevated above material life, as for example in sleep, there is no gender in its meaning. But it would be wrong to judge that the contradiction that arises in both sexes has only a meaning for the physical world. On the contrary, we must become fully and earnestly aware of the nature of the physical world, according to Goethe's saying: “Everything transitory is only a parable”: everything physical is only a parable of the spiritual!
When we reflect on this sexual difference, we shall understand the true nature of it. We know this difference only in the physical world, as the polarity between man and woman. However, the difference is only the expression of a much deeper antagonism in the spiritual world. Two manifestations go hand in hand with life, two extremes that we commonly call life and death.
In outer life, the picture of this contradiction can be beautifully observed in the growing tree. On the surface, we see the bark that has imprisoned the inner life, which has stepped back from the surface. Inside, however, we see abundant life, streams of sap rising from the trunk to all the branches, strengthening them and nourishing the leaves, flowers and fruits. Inside, a tree is full of life, but it is covered by a solid shell. And yet this tree needs to be trapped in the solid bark, for how could a tree that was deprived of the bark that seemingly imprisons its life survive the winter, survive storms and tempests? A tree whose trunk is wounded, whose bark is stripped, dies.
Similarly, all of life is permeated by the opposition between life and form.
What is inside the tree wants to grow and flourish, but it is held back by the fact that it is enclosed in the form, which constantly opposes life as something oppressive and life-threatening; life itself would overflow and rush if it were not for death. Only form, which restrains and binds, creates the harmony and balance that life, progressing rapidly, strives for. The bark of a tree is precisely the image of that which limits, restrains, and kills.
Death and life, as the two opposites, intervene in all of life, in all events. We find life everywhere – and the form that life simultaneously retains and holds back, so that it does not rush, but also does not immediately disappear.
We can observe this phenomenon in artistic creation: in the beautiful products of Greek sculpture, where the knowing artist shows us the hidden secrets of the spiritual world in the image of the statue.
This is particularly evident in two works of Greek sculpture: the Head of Zeus, which shows us in a typical way how Zeus was viewed (original in the National Museum in Rome), and that of Juno (the so-called Juno Ludovisi). Two wonderful works of human creativity; anyone who looks at them, not thoughtlessly but more deeply, will notice the broad and flat forehead of Juno, which then suddenly falls back, and in contrast to it the narrow forehead of Zeus, rounded at the sides, whose arch slowly recedes at the temples.
If you look at the entire face of Zeus and Juno, and if you compare them, you will find that the face of Zeus awakens in you a feeling that if there were life in this statue, would change its entire expression in a short time, transform itself; in this face, an enormous life force develops, strong and abundant, which would be able to reshape the whole face within a short time.
It is different with Juno. The soul that resides in this being, captured by the artist in the expression of this statue, has embodied itself entirely in the form, becoming a beautiful and complete form. Here we feel the calm after creation, and we cannot imagine this face any differently; on the contrary, we feel that if this face lived before us for all eternity, it would not change its expression. In Zeus, only a moment of what is happening in this soul is captured in the face, while in Juno we feel the calm of the soul, which has fully achieved its expression in the finished, completed form.
Here we see the complete contrast again: the life that would have brought death with it if it had been left to itself, because it would constantly have wiped out one form after another, it would not have tolerated a moment of consolidation in the form; this life on the one hand, on the other hand, the encapsulation of life, the crystallization, the preservation of the same in the frame, in the form.
As soon as you ascend from the physical world into the spiritual world, the difference between the sexes disappears, but we find there the contrast between the flowing, swirling life and that power that wants to hold back, crystallize the rushing life. And the manifestation of these two opposites of the spiritual world and their correspondence in physical life is precisely masculinity and femininity.
However, it should be noted here that the male and female cannot be determined by the external characteristics by which gender is determined in ordinary life, since part of the feminine is also contained in man, and vice versa.
The male pole is a manifestation of that which rushes forward and would soon develop too quickly; the manifestation of that abundant life which, left to itself, would not cease for a moment. By contrast, the female manifestation is that force in nature which holds back life, forcing it to pause, thus enabling its manifestation by allowing form to arise. Thus masculinity and femininity work together in nature, complementing each other.
The woman – the principle of form, the man – the principle of life.
If we can also bring what has been said here into our feelings, if it is not just a lifeless presentation of the dry intellect, then we will also understand the task of the sexes in nature and thus find the way to mutual understanding and to the understanding of the two sexes in human life.
This is precisely the great advantage of Theosophy: it provides practical solutions to the great questions of the human mind, and it points the way to a deeper understanding of these questions.
In a similar way, we also arrive at a solution to the relationship between man, woman and child...
It will not be difficult for us to understand the child's relationship to man and woman if we remember that even in sleep, what emerges from the physical principle as a spiritual part of the human being is sexless.
If we compare death to sleep, we come to understand the nature of the child.
What happens at death? — The etheric and astral bodies and the ego emerge from the physical body, which is handed over to the forces of the physical world.
The I is connected to the etheric body only for a short time, a few days at most; then the etheric body, especially that part of it that is the carrier of gender, is also separated, and a second, ethereal corpse is formed.
However, what is not sexual in the ethereal body continues with the other principles as an independent principle.
When the human being then enters into a new existence, the human germ descends from the supersensible worlds and leans down again in order to be reborn through man and woman.
Three are necessary if man is to enter physical life again: man and woman in the physical world and the human germ that leans towards them, which spent some time in the purely spiritual world, matured there and prepared for a new incarnation for a long time.
How does a person enter physical life?
Much thought has been given to what we in ordinary life call the love between man and woman. What a master of life one would have to be to fully understand the meaning of this word, which contains so many secrets! From the highest bliss to the most miserable humiliation, from the highest exaltation to the most terrible destruction of all life, all this is contained in the word 'love'.
All the profound thinkers who have reflected on love and its essence agree that there is something very intimate and delicate about it that lies beyond direct observation; in Schopenhauer we come across the direct statement that every action, every ignition of love between man and woman, has a special, individual character, so that a married couple can be together for many years, and yet every act of love, every conjugal approach is something special, new, individual.
Schopenhauer is right. What does this act of love mean, what happens in the love between man and woman? It is not only what lives in the “physical life” between the male and female individuals that plays a role, but something third also comes into play. There is always a human being in the higher world who enters into physical incarnation, and for this purpose love flares up between the two beings.
What we call love between hearts and hearts, this glowing feeling that connects two souls, is a reflection of that spiritual glowing cloud of love with which the ego, descending to birth, surrounds two beings, is this call to the man and the woman who can make it possible for this human being to enter into physical life.
The love itself that brings the sexes together does not come only from them, it is a shadow, a projection of a being that wants to embody itself.
This is how one must look at the individuality, the peculiarity of each act of love, because in each such union a human individuality wants to emerge through those whom it has chosen as its parents and educators.
In this way of looking at things, we learn to distinguish between what is individual and what is inherited. Since the father and mother are involved in reproduction, the male and female of the father and mother – their physical and etheric bodies – interbreed in various ways. However, what the human ego, which wants to embody itself, brings with it from the higher worlds and from its previous lives, appears to us as an individual aspect.
So you have to distinguish between what is individual and what is inherited from father and mother. We see this well in families where there are many children: What they have inherited from their father and mother appears in all children, but above all, we can observe something special and individual in each child, something that the spirit itself has brought with it, which is not in the father or mother, but which was already there in the human being before birth.
Then we can also correctly assess what has really been inherited from the nature of a parent and in what a wonderful way it happens. We learn why daughters so often take after their fathers and sons after their mothers, and why when reading biographies of great men we also study the characteristics and nature of their parents. On the other hand, we learn how that which is original in man plunges into the inherited shell and partially merges with it.
Nevertheless, we see how today's materialistic science repeatedly points out how often characteristics of parents and even spiritual qualities are inherited. We are often reminded how genius inherits its characteristics from parents and family. Here, too, only inherited characteristics are mentioned. A person's talent, it is said, the whole soul of a person consists of what has been accumulated over several generations. The highest peak, it is said, always comes at the end, because then we have a kind of accumulation. — That is a peculiar logic! A logically correct argument would have to lead here to the gates of spiritual science. This is where genius should begin. The fact that genius often stands at the end of many generations is unmistakable proof that this is not mere inheritance. That genius appears tinged with inheritance is no more surprising than that, to use a rather trivial comparison, if someone has fallen into water, they come out wet. But there is something that has accumulated over generations, but these are only the outer qualities, those shells that develop from generation to generation. These things must be considered in the right way, then the internally coherent, closed individuality presents itself to us, which finds its first expression in the feeling of love between the future parents as a foreshadowed shadow and is embodied in complete diversity and difference from what will be inherited.
Many people are afraid when they hear these teachings that the feeling of love for the children and parents could suffer in this way, could grow cold. But that is not right. On the contrary, this spiritual connection between parents and children would be further strengthened and intensified. Why should certain parents have this child in particular? Because it is this child that wants to go to these parents and be born with and from them.
Hence the individuality in the feelings of love, this dawn of love that precedes the birth of a child: love even precedes, even before birth the child loves the parents, even before sexual intercourse and conception by the mother, expressing to the parents that it wants to be born.
From this, we also see the necessity of the parents' love for their children, which is actually only the repayment of the love that the child already had for the parents before birth.
And so it is with many concepts that we encounter in everyday life and on which Theosophy, when we delve deeper into it, sheds an [ever] brighter light.
Here we see a wonderful harmony of this trinity in father, mother and child, which is the basis of life everywhere in nature and in humans. Here we encounter it in an extremely vivid and understandable form.
Man is the ever-flowing life, woman is the symbol of the form that receives and encloses this life and allows it to crystallize in beauty; these two principles then unite within each other, man and woman unite in love, to enable the descent of the spiritual being from the sexually neutral worlds to the form of the physical world, and thus to open with all their love this gate between the higher world, the spiritual world and the world of matter.
If, as already mentioned, such concepts do not remain dry abstractions for us, but we transform them into powerful impressions and feelings and then go out into life enriched by them, then we see how Theosophy explains and solves all the riddles and mysteries of life that we encounter at every turn.
Thus we also come to an understanding of numerous phenomena of social life, to the solution of the contradictions between conservatism and progress; we see how, on the one hand, the forces of life work, hurrying forward, and on the other hand, the forces of form, maintaining and preserving.
On deeper study, we learn that even progress can be harmful if it does not give to the second pole of life what belongs to it, if it does not do justice to the form that life cultivates and strengthens through resistance.
If we approach life from the standpoint of spiritual science, we find that life will not burden us, but will fill us with understanding and reverence, making us free and ; correctly understood, Theosophy shows us guidelines that we can take up, opens up the depths of life to us and, as a worldview, shows us ways to transform our views and ideas into certainty, strength and hope. Then we will not lose ourselves in difficult moments, nor drown in our grief in dark moments, if we were once privileged to look deeper into the foundations of life and the world.
But for such an acceptance of the theosophical teaching, no other proofs are needed than those which life itself gives us step by step. Those who saturate themselves with these teachings and then approach all questions of life understand that Theosophy is not only a theory, but also practical wisdom for life and ultimately a precious wealth of life of inestimable value.