Lecture II

However, before man can attain this level he must be able to identify himself with the soul of his planet, earth. We shall see that this is possible. We know that man not only experiences the rhythm of sleeping and waking but other rhythms of the earth as well—of summer and winter. When one follows the path of Yoga or goes through a modern occult training, he can lift himself above the ordinary consciousness that experiences the cycles of sleeping and waking, summer and winter. He can learn to look at himself from outside. He becomes aware of being able to look back at himself just as he ordinarily looks at things outside himself. Now he observes the things, the cycles in external life. He sees alternating conditions. He realizes how his body, so long as he is outside himself, takes on a form similar to that of the earth in summer with all its vegetation. What material science discovers and calls nerves he begins to perceive as a sprouting forth of something plant-like at the time of going to sleep, and when he returns again into everyday consciousness he feels how this plant-like life shrinks together again and becomes the instrument for thinking, feeling and willing in his waking consciousness. He feels his going out from the body and returning into it analogous to the alternation of summer and winter on the earth. In effect he feels something summer-like in going to sleep and something winter-like in waking up—not as one might imagine, the opposite way round. From this moment onward he learns to understand what the spirit of the earth is, and how it is asleep in summer and awake in winter, not vice versa. He realizes the wonderful experience of identifying himself with the spirit of the earth. From this moment he says to himself, “I live not only inside my skin, but as a cell lives in my bodily organism so do I live in the organism of the earth. The earth is asleep in summer and awake in winter as I am asleep and awake in the alternation of night and day. And as the cell is to my consciousness, so am I to the consciousness of the earth.”