Steiner Founding a Science of the Spirit

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-85584-710-1
Verlag: Rudolf Steiner Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 95, 200 Seiten

Reihe: The Collected Works of Rudolf Steiner

'Everyone can derive joy and hope from the communications of another, for what we are told about the higher worlds is not mere theory, unrelated to life. As its fruits, it brings us two things we must have if we are to lay hold of life in the right way - strength and security - and both are given in the highest measure.' - Rudolf Steiner Rudolf Steiner speaks with great clarity and precision on the fundamental nature of the human being in relation to the cosmos, the evolution of the Earth, the journey of the soul after death, reincarnation and karma, good and evil, and the modern path of meditative training. Throughout, his emphasis is on a scientific exposition of spiritual phenomena. As he says in the final lecture: 'the highest knowledge of mundane things is thoroughly compatible with the highest knowledge of spiritual truths'. This popular course of lectures offers a fine introduction to the whole of Steiner's teaching, and is an excellent complement to his fundamental texts. At the same time, it features valuable material that cannot be found elsewhere, such as two rare question-and-answer sessions, where the lecturer offers immediate and often surprising responses to audience members' queries. This new edition features an introduction by Brien Masters, notes and an index. Fourteen lectures, Stuttgart; Aug.-Sept. 1906, GA 95

Autoren/Hrsg.

Steiner, Rudolf

Weitere Mitwirkende

Barton, M.

Leseproben

LECTURE 1

STUTTGART, 22 AUGUST 1906

THESE lectures are intended to give a general survey of the whole field of theosophical thought. Theosophy has not always been taught as it is today, in lectures and books that are accessible to everyone. It used to be taught only in small, intimate groups, and knowledge of it was confined to circles of initiates, to occult brotherhoods; ordinary people were meant to have only the fruits of this knowledge. Not much was known about the knowledge or the activities of these initiates, or about the places where they worked. Those whom the world recognizes as the great men of history were not really the greatest; the greatest, the initiates, kept in the background.

In the course of the eighteenth century, on a quite unnoticed occasion, an initiate made brief acquaintance with a writer, and spoke words to which the writer paid no special attention at the time. But they worked on in him and later gave rise to potent ideas, the fruits of which are in countless hands today. The writer was Jean-Jacques Rousseau.1 He was not an initiate, but his knowledge derived from one.

Here is another example. Jacob Boehme,2 a shoemaker’s apprentice, was sitting alone one day in the shop, where he was not allowed to sell anything himself. A person came in, made a deep impression upon him, spoke a few words, and went away. Immediately afterwards, Boehme heard his name being called: ‘Jacob, Jacob, today you are small, but one day you will be great. Take heed of what you have seen today!’ A secret attraction remained between Boehme and his visitor, who was a great initiate and the source of Boehme’s powerful inspirations.

There were still other means by which an initiate could work in those times. For instance, someone might receive a letter intended to bring about action of some kind. The recipient might perhaps be a minister, who had the power but not the ideas to carry out a particular project. The letter might be about something, a request, which had nothing to do with its real purpose. But it could, perhaps, be read in a different way. For example, if four words out of five were deleted and the last word left, these fifth words would make a new sequence conveying what was to be done, although the recipient, of course, was not aware of it. If the words were the right ones, they achieved their object, even though the reader had not consciously taken in their meaning. Trithemius of Sponheim,3 a German scholar who was also an initiate and the teacher of Agrippa von Nettesheim, used this method. Given the right key, you will find in his works much that is taught today in theosophy.

In those days only a few who had undergone adequate preparation could be initiated. Why was this secrecy necessary? In order to ensure the right attitude towards knowledge, it had to be restricted to those who were adequately prepared; the others received its blessings only. This knowledge was not intended to satisfy idle curiosity or inquisitiveness; it was meant to be put to work, to have a practical influence on political and social institutions in the world. In this way all the great advances in the development of humanity owe their origin to impulses issuing from occultism. For this reason, too, all those who were to be instructed in theosophical teachings were obliged to undergo severe tests and trials to prove their worthiness; and then they were initiated step by step, and led very slowly from lower to higher levels.

This method has been abandoned in modern times; the more elementary teachings are now given out publicly. This became necessary because the earlier methods—of letting spiritual seeds silently and unobtrusively bear fruit for humanity—would not have continued to be effective. Among these earlier methods we must include religions, and this wisdom was a constituent part of all of them. Nowadays, however, people experience a conflict between knowledge and faith. What we need today is to attain to higher knowledge through a conscious process of learning.

The decisive event which led to secret knowledge becoming public, however, was the invention of printing. Previously, theosophical teaching had been passed on orally from one person to another, and nobody who was unripe or unworthy would hear of it. But knowledge of the material world was spread abroad and made popular through books; hence arose the conflict between knowledge and faith. Issues such as this have made it necessary for much of the great treasure of occult knowledge of all ages to be made accessible to the public. Whence does man originate? What is his goal? What lies hidden behind his visible form? What happens after death? All these questions have to be answered, and answered not by theories, hypotheses and surmises, but by the facts themselves.

The purpose of occult science has always been to unravel the riddle of man. Everything said in these lectures will be from the standpoint of practical occultism; they will contain nothing that is mere theory and cannot be put into practice. Such theories have found their way into theosophical literature because in the beginning the people who wrote the books did not understand clearly what they were writing about. This kind of writing may indeed be useful fodder for curiosity-mongers; but theosophy must be carried into real life.

Let us first consider the nature and being of man. When someone comes into our presence, we first of all see through our sense-organs what theosophy calls the physical body. Man has this body in common with the whole world around him; and although the physical body is only a small part of what man really is, it is the only part of which ordinary science takes account. But we must go deeper. Even superficial observation will make it clear that this physical body has very special qualities. There are plenty of other things which you can see and touch; every stone is after all a physical body. But man can move, feel and think; he grows, takes nourishment, propagates his kind. None of this is true of a stone, but some of it is certainly true of plants and animals. Man has in common with the plants his capacity to nourish himself, to grow and propagate; if he were like a stone, with only a physical body, none of this would be possible. He must therefore possess something which enables him to use substances and their forces in such a way that they become for him the means of growth and so forth. This is the etheric body.

Man has a physical body in common with the mineral kingdom, and an etheric body in common with the plant and animal kingdoms. Ordinary observation can confirm that. But there is another way in which we can prove to ourselves the existence of an etheric body, although only those who have developed their higher senses have this faculty. These higher senses are no more than a higher development of what is dormant in every human being. It is rather like someone born blind being operated on so that he can see. The difference is that not everyone born blind can be successfully operated on, whereas everyone can develop the spiritual senses if he has the necessary patience and goes through the proper preliminary training. A very definite form of higher perception is needed to understand this principle of life, growth, nutrition and propagation. The example of hypnotism can help us to show what this means.

Hypnotism, which has always been known to the initiates, implies a condition of consciousness different from that of ordinary sleep. There must be a close rapport between the hypnotizer and his subject. Two types of suggestion are involved—positive and negative. The first makes a person see what is not there, while the second diverts his attention from something that is present and is thus only an intensification of a condition familiar enough in everyday life when our attention is diverted from an object so that we do not see it, although our eyes are open. This happens to us involuntarily every day when we are wholly absorbed in something. Theosophy wishes to have nothing to do with conditions where consciousness is dimmed and dulled. To grasp theosophical truths a person must be quite as much in control of his senses when investigating higher worlds as he is when investigating ordinary matters. The serious dangers inherent in initiation can affect him only if his consciousness is dimmed.

Anyone who wants to know the nature of the etheric body by direct vision must be able to maintain his ordinary consciousness intact and ‘suggest away’ the physical body by the strength of his own will. He will not, however, be left with an empty space, but will see before him the etheric body glowing with a reddish-blue light like a phantom, whose radiance is a little darker than peach blossom. We never see an etheric body if we ‘suggest away’ a crystal; but in the case of a plant or animal we do, for it is the etheric body that is responsible for nutrition, growth and reproduction.

Man, of course, has other faculties as well. He can feel pleasure and pain, which the plant cannot do. The initiate can discover this by his own experience, for he can identify himself with the plant. Animals can feel pleasure and pain, and thus have a further principle in common with man: the astral body. The astral body is the seat of everything we know as desire, passion, and so forth. This is clear to straightforward observation as an inner experience, but for the initiate the astral body can become an outer reality. The initiate sees this third member of man as an egg-shaped cloud which not only surrounds the body, but permeates it. If we ‘suggest away’ the physical body and also the etheric body, what we shall see will be a...