II. Inner Experience of Language II

This feeling, for example, that existed in the second post-Atlantean period when everyone in the old Persian civilization felt when he ate anything how much light he took into himself along with it—son was ready to give up its light and in eating food light was also eaten—everyone felt how much light he was taking in: this feeling was an experience in ancient times which must return at a higher stage of consciousness. You see, these ideals naturally appear to be distant; but really they are not so far as people think from what man today holds to be most essential. For on looking into these things one approaches nearer and nearer and more concretely what is common to all mankind. It is just where there is veneration and penetration of nature that there will increasingly arise what sets up even the economic life that seems to us today so material, this dumb economic life, as a member of the divine world order. We shall then realized that the social organism, if it is to be sound must be threefold. It must have the spiritual organization because it is into this, above all, that we carry what we bring with us from the life before birth; it must have the economic organization because in it there must mutely developed what we bear with us through the gate of death, and what will be our impulses after death; and separate from both these, it must have the life of the rights-state because in this sphere above all is imprinted what is valid for this earthly life. Illustrated diagrammatically—here is earthly life, and raying into it, as it were, what we bring with us out of pre-earthly life (yellow arrows); and again we develop in this life what we bear out again (yellow). Here where I have drawn a red line the spiritual is within from the outset, it comes chiefly through language or the like. And here, where I have drawn a blue line, after death the spiritual rays out through the impulses we have absorbed in the economic life (yellow arrows). This in the middle, drawn in brown, is rayed through, as it were, laterally by the spiritual (yellow). The life of rights as such is entirely earthly, but is rayed through laterally. So that Inspiration, which should restrain Ahriman, should be active in the life of rights. We must advance to conceptions of rights, which are really taken from the life of the spirit, and which are really initiation conceptions.