Lecture III

We look out into the space of the Cosmos at the “tout ensemble” of the Stars;—what is their appearance? Why have they this appearance?—We only have that special vision of the Stars, of the Milky Way, of the Heavens bedecked with the Stars, because it is the revelation of the Luciferic nature of the Cosmos. That which shines down to us, which surrounds us so radiantly, is the revelation of the Luciferic nature of the Cosmos. It is that which is as it now is because it has remained behind at an earlier stage of its being, and when we turn away from the Cosmos to the earthly soil upon which we walk, this soil is rigid and hard because, rolled up together within it, as it were—are the Ahrimanic beings, those beings who now reveal artificially the stage which they ought only to show at a later stage of their development. Hence, we are confronted with the possibility, that whenever we give ourselves to the sense world, then, through our vision of the heavens, we make ourselves more and more Luciferic. Thus if, in the life between birth and death, we have a special inclination to give ourselves up to the vision of the heavens that signifies nothing immediate or direct, but simply something which remains to us as an instinct belonging to the time we pass before our physical birth or conception. It is an instinct remaining to us from the time we passed through in the Spiritual world, when we lived with the Stars between death and rebirth. We then entered into too close a cosmic relationship with cosmic worlds, we became too similar to them, and from those worlds there has remained to us that inclination which indeed does not express itself as any very strong inclination in humanity, but simply as a desire which has remained, to give ourselves utterly up to that sense-vision of the starry world. We develop that inclination if, through our karma which we fulfil here between birth and death, we develop such a tendency that between death and rebirth we sleep too strongly, if, in the Spiritual world we develop too little inclination to have a full consciousness there.