Metamorphosis

The process of metamorphosis of form is to be found everywhere in nature. The most obvious examples are the change from caterpillar to butterfly in the animal kingdom, and the change from bud to flower or metamorphosis of leaves in the plant kingdom. Also the human being knows a transformation in the process between death and a new birth when passing through the spirit world.

Metamorphosis is therefore a beautiful example of the astral and etheric formative forces working on the kingdoms of nature, which explains why mineral science and the physics of dead mineral matter can not describe the phenomenon of growth.

At a larger scale also cosmic evolution goes through metamorphosis in the changes between the various Conditions of Form, Conditions of Life, and Conditions of Consciousness as related to the planetary stages of evolution.

The most eminent example is our living Earth itself, going through the Conditions of Life and Form.

That is why the kingdoms of nature, or say the structure and form of the human being, is so different. This is already the case if we just look at Man in the Lemurian and Atlantean epoch, the Current Postatlantean epoch, and how the human being will again be very different in the Sixth epoch. We can also

Aspects

plant

animal

human being

see also coverage on: Midnight hour
Turning inside-out like a glove: "when our bodily organisation is remodeled in the next incarnation .. is turned inside out; as a glove is turned from a left-hand to a right-hand glove by turning it inside out so too what is now inside: liver, heart, kidneys .. becomes the outer sense-organs, eye, ear and so on. It is all turned inside out." (1920-05-02-GA201)
a metamorphosis, an interchange, takes place between the three members of the human being in passing over from one incarnation to another (1924-03-15-GA235)
- the nature of will in the head, works especially into the limbs in the next incarnation (slowness of limb in the present incarnation comes to expression in sluggish, lazy thinking in the next) (1924-03-15-GA235)
the threefold human being
- considering formative forces of the physical body, the human head of a present life was created through metamorphosis of the rest of our body organisation in the previous life. One losses the head from the previous life. It is the action of torso and limbs in a life N that becomes destiny or karma in the head in life N+1 (1920-02-15-GA196)
- Our body, apart from our head, metamorphoses itself into our head in our next incarnation, while our next body is growing towards us; whereas our present head is the metamorphosed body of our previous incarnation, the rest of our body has grown towards us more or less - there are varying degrees - out of what we have inherited. (1917-01-21-GA174)
- Transformation of human forms from soul-spiritual existence into their earthly human counterparts:
  - of the head as a result of ahrimanic influences,
  - of the limbs through luciferic influences.
  - In the region of the chest: influence of normally evolved divine beings through the living breath. (1918-09-02-GA183)
the form of the human skeleton as result of metamorphosis
- the I was in incarnation N-1 determines the form of the skull in incarnation N; the structure of the skull is an external plastic expression of the life in the preceding incarnation (Human skeleton#1911-03-26-GA128)
- see also: eg L.F.C. Mees in 'Further reading' section below
physiology as result of metamorphosis
- Proof for reincarnation .. a human's face – see DLNB p 19, GA201 L9

Inspirational quotes

1923-10-26-GA230

the plant is the earthbound butterfly ... the butterfly is the plant released by the cosmos

Illustrations

Schema FMC00.598: shows metamorphosis in the plant and animal kingdoms, and the amazing transformation of form due to the workings of the laws of the astral and etheric on the mineral in the physical world. The butterfly represents a universal symbol for metamorphosis.

The comparative baseline (terms in blue below) is taken from Grohmann's book 'The Plant'. He describes in comparative way the pre-dominant forces in the threefold process: how in the root, a salt process with centripetal forces is mostly active (corresponding to the head-nerve subsystem in Man); whereas in the flower a warmth process with expansive centrifugal forces is mostly active (corresponding to the metabolic-limb and digestive in Man). In the leaf, a light process is active (corresponding to the rhythmic subsystem in Man).

shows metamorphosis in the plant and animal kingdoms, and the amazing transformation of form due to the workings of the laws of the astral and etheric on the mineral in the physical world. The butterfly represents a universal symbol for metamorphosis. The comparative baseline (terms in blue below) is taken from Grohmann's book 'The Plant'. He describes in comparative way the pre-dominant forces in the threefold process: how in the root, a salt process with centripetal forces is mostly active (corresponding to the head-nerve subsystem in Man); whereas in the flower a warmth process with expansive centrifugal forces is mostly active (corresponding to the metabolic-limb and digestive in Man). In the leaf, a light process is active (corresponding to the rhythmic subsystem in Man).

Schema FMC00.596: provides an overview and selection of statements related to the metamorphosis of the human being between two incarnations in the spirit world during the process between death and a new birth. This provides a synthetic summary for reference, the lectures on the right should be read to get context and full description.

Note: see also more in 1906-03-14-GA097.

provides an overview and selection of statements related to the metamorphosis of the human being between two incarnations in the spirit world during the process between death and a new birth. This provides a synthetic summary for reference, the lectures on the right should be read to get context and full description. Note: see also more in 1906-03-14-GA097.

Schema FMC00.123 shows the structural transformation of the human being between planetary stages of evolution.

A similar metamorphosis takes place at a different level currently between physical incarnations on Earth.

Schema FMC00.554: depicts, on the lower left, an illustration of 1905-06-27-GA091 titled 'the evolutionary laws of inner karma'. It shows how our Earthly life and impressions influence the human being over multiple incarnations. When Man is able to actively work upon and use his intellectual soul, it has meaning for the third-following incarnation, and so on.

This picture also 'explains' the importance of meditation and initiation, as the most valuable work carrying across into future incarnations.

On the right, underneath the time bar of epochs and cultural ages, are some statements illustrating this for our current fifth cultural age.

Below right is an addition (by the author), connecting to various statements by Rudolf Steiner about the fact that the fifth and sixth cultural ages are the decisive ones, and also about the spiritualization or ascent of humanity in the Sixth epoch (see Schema FMC00.505) and the Father impulse).

See also Schema FMC00.607 for the link with how the spiritual guidance of mankind used the principle below to managing the development of castes of souls with segments of the population at different levels of spiritual maturity.

depicts, on the lower left, an illustration of 1905-06-27-GA091 titled 'the evolutionary laws of inner karma'. It shows how our Earthly life and impressions influence the human being over multiple incarnations. When Man is able to actively work upon and use his intellectual soul, it has meaning for the third-following incarnation, and so on. This picture also 'explains' the importance of meditation and initiation, as the most valuable work carrying across into future incarnations. On the right, underneath the time bar of epochs and cultural ages, are some statements illustrating this for our current fifth cultural age. Below right is an addition (by the author), connecting to various statements by Rudolf Steiner about the fact that the fifth and sixth cultural ages are the decisive ones, and also about the spiritualization or ascent of humanity in the Sixth epoch (see Schema FMC00.505) and the Father impulse). See also Schema FMC00.607 for the link with how the spiritual guidance of mankind used the principle below to managing the development of castes of souls with segments of the population at different levels of spiritual maturity.

Schema FMC00.278: visualizes the description in 1905-10-16-GA093A and the situation in the Lemurian epoch before the impuls of the Spirits of Form, see also Schema FMC00.137, and how the upper and lower parts of Man merged into a new dual structure with a higher spiritual and a lower physical part, with the resulting dual nature of the human astral body, see Schema FMC00.134. The dual nature is referred to as the human Centaur.

visualizes the description in 1905-10-16-GA093A and the situation in the Lemurian epoch before the impuls of the Spirits of Form, see also Schema FMC00.137, and how the upper and lower parts of Man merged into a new dual structure with a higher spiritual and a lower physical part, with the resulting dual nature of the human astral body, see Schema FMC00.134. The dual nature is referred to as the human Centaur.

Lecture coverage and references

Overview coverage

Introductory lecture references:

o Thé lecture here is 1918-08-26-GA183 already in FMC in full

o Other example: 1922-12-09-GA218 - Lecture 16 (example of the ear)

Reference extracts

1883-GA001 - Goethean science

In a comprehensive sense, the idea of the animal typus is contained in the poem “Metamorphosis of the Animals,” which first appeared in 1820 in the second of the morphological notebooks. During the years 1790–95, Goethe's primary natural-scientific work was with his colour theory. At the beginning of 1795, Goethe was in Jena, where the brothers von Humboldt, Max Jacobi, and Schiller were also present. In this company, Goethe brought forward his ideas about comparative anatomy. His friends found his presentations so significant that they urged him to put his ideas down on paper. It is evident from a letter of Goethe to the elder Jacobi that Goethe complied with this urging right away, while still in Jena, by dictating to Max Jacobi the outline of a comparative osteology which is printed in the first volume of Goethe's natural-scientific writings in Kürschner's National Literature. In 1796, the introductory chapters were further elaborated.

These treatises contain Goethe's basic views about animal development, just as his writing, “An Attempt to Explain the Metamorphosis of the Plant,” ³⁰ contains his basic views on plant development. Through communication with Schiller — since 1794 Goethe came to a turning point in his views, in that from now on, with respect to his own way of proceeding and of doing research, he began to observe himself, so that his way of viewing things became for him an object of study. After these historical reflections, let us now turn to the nature and significance of Goethe's views on the development of organisms.

1906-03-14-GA097

1906-08-29-GA095

Another interesting karmic relationship is between an habitually selfish attitude and a loving sympathy with others.
Some people are hardened egoists — not only in their acquisitiveness — and others are unselfish and sympathetic.
Both attitudes depend on the etheric body and may even find expression in the physical body.
People who in one life have been habitually selfish will age quickly in their next life; they seem to shrivel up.
On the other hand, if in one life you have been ready to make sacrifices and have loved others, you will remain young and hale. In this way you can prepare even the physical body for the next life.
But what is the effect of any illnesses it may have had in this life?
The valuable pearl derives from an illness: it is a secretion of the oyster, so that in this case life has to fall sick in order to produce something precious.
In the same way, physical illnesses in one life reappear in the next life as physical beauty.
Either the physical body becomes more beautiful as a result of the illness it endured; or it may be that an illness a man has caught from infection in his environment is compensated by the beauty of his new environment.

1908-10-21-GA107

title: 'Some characteristics of the astral world'

Introduction – anthroposophy
This lecture is meant as still introductory to our astral “General Meeting Campaign”, and it will have a particular purpose. It is to show that spiritual science — or rather the special way of observing the world, which underlies it — stands in fullest harmony with certain results of the specifically scientific method. It is not quite easy for the anthroposophist (as can be seen particularly in public lectures) to find complete understanding in a totally unprepared public. When spiritual science meets with an unprepared public, the anthroposophist must be aware that with regard to many things, he speaks quite a different language from those who so far have either heard nothing at all, or only superficially, of the knowledge that underlies the movement of spiritual science.
A certain deeper penetration is needed to find the harmony between what is so easily given today in ordinary science, the experiences of physical research, and what is given to us through the knowledge of the spiritual, the higher, the supersensible consciousness. One must gradually grow accustomed to see deeper into this harmony, and then one will find what a beautiful harmony exists between what is maintained by the spiritual researcher and the statements or enumeration of facts that can be brought forward by physical research. One must not, on this account, be too unjust towards those who cannot understand anthroposophists; they lack all the preparation that is definitely required in order to be able to grasp the results of spiritual research. And so in the majority of cases, they cannot help but think something quite different from what is intended — both in the words and in the ideas.
Therefore, in wider circles a greater understanding for spiritual science can be achieved only if one speaks quite openly and frankly from the spiritual standpoint, even before an unprepared public.
Among these unprepared people, there will then be a great number who say, “That is all stupidity — fantastic things, puzzled-out nonsense.” But there will always be a few who, from inmost need of their soul, will get an inkling that there is, nevertheless, something behind it. They will go further and gradually familiarize themselves with it. And it is on such patient study that anthroposophy must depend, and at which we can aim. It will be very natural for a large part of those who come to a lecture on spiritual science from pure curiosity to give vent afterwards to the opinion: “That is a sect that only spreads its own particular gibberish!” But when one knows the difficulties, one will also wait patiently for the selection that must arise. Persons among the public will themselves find their way and form a nucleus through whom spiritual science will then gradually flow into our whole life.
A special example shall be given today to show how easy it is for prepared students of spiritual science, who have already grown accustomed to think and live in the conceptions aroused by spiritual science, to come to terms with the apparently most difficult reports given out by physical-sensible research. The learner will gradually become aware that the farther we advance, the more we will realize what a good foundation spiritual research is for universal knowledge. And that will give the seeker the necessary calmness to meet the storms pouring out against spiritual science, because it speaks quite a foreign language. If we have the patience to accustom ourselves to this harmony, we shall gain more and more assurance. Then when people say, “What you tell me does not agree with the most elementary researches of science,” the anthroposophist will answer, “I know that through what spiritual science can give, full harmony can be found with all these facts, although it is perhaps impossible to come to an understanding in a moment.”
We will now let something pass before our souls as a particular chapter, in order further to strengthen the consciousness.
After living for some time with the spiritual conception of the world, students of spiritual science have become accustomed to speaking of physical body, etheric body, and astral body as ideas, which they can then apply as guides when they are seeking to understand external things from a universal standpoint. They must gradually become used to seeing the difference in the physical nature of the objects around them.
They look at the stone and do not say, “The stone consists of such and such materials, the human body consists of the same, and therefore, I can treat the human body just like the stone.”
For even the plant body is quite different, though it consists of the same physical materials as the stone. It has the etheric body within it, and the plant's physical body would fall to pieces if the etheric body were not to permeate it in every part. Hence, the spiritual scientist says, “The physical body of the plant would dry away unless the etheric body kept it alive and fought against this dissolution. In regarding the plant, we find that it is a combination of the principles of the physical and etheric bodies.”
[Recapitulation as principle etheric body]
Now, it has often been emphasized that the most elementary principle of the etheric body is recapitulation. A being, standing solely under its etheric and physical principles, would express in itself the principle of recapitulation.
[Plant]
We see evidence of this in the plant in a very marked degree: We see how leaf after leaf develops, since the plant's physical body is permeated by the recapitulation principle of the etheric. A leaf is formed, then a second and a third; leaf is added to leaf in continuous repetition. And even when the plant comes to a certain conclusion above, recapitulation is still there. There is a kind of wreath of leaves forming the calyx of the flower, though they have a different form from the other leaves. Yet, you feel that it is still a recapitulation of the same leaves in altered form. We may therefore say that the green calyx-leaves up above where the plant ends are a kind of recapitulation. And even the flower petals are a recapitulation. It is true that they have a different color, but in essentials, they are still leaves — greatly transformed leaves.
It was in Goethe's great work in the plant-kingdom that he showed how not only the calyx-leaves and flower petals are transformed leaves, but also how one must see in pistils and stamens just such a metamorphosed repetition.
However, it is not a mere repetition that meets us in the plant. If the purely elemental etheric principle were alone active, the plant would come to no termination. The etheric body would press through the plant from below upwards, leaf upon leaf would be developed, and there would never be an end.
Then, what makes the flower come to a conclusion, makes it end its existence, begin to be fruitful in order to produce another flower?
It is the fact that in the same degree as the plant grows upward, there comes to meet it from above, enclosed in itself, the plant's astral body. The plant possesses in itself no astral body of its own, but as it grows upwards, the plant-like astral body meets it from above. It brings to a conclusion what the etheric body would continue in eternal recapitulation; it causes the transformation of the green leaves into the calyx, flower petals, stamens and pistil.
For occult sight, we can say that the plant grows towards its soul-like part, its astral part, which causes the metamorphosis.
[Animal]
Now the fact that the plant remains plant and does not go over to voluntary movement and sensation is because the astral body, which meets the plant there above, does not take inner possession of the organs; it touches them only outwards from above. To the degree that the astral body seizes the organs inwardly, the plant goes over to the animal. That is the great difference. If you take a leaf of the plant, you can say: “Even in the leaf of the plant the etheric body and the astral body are working together, but the etheric body has, so to say, the upper hand. The astral body is not in a position to extend its feelers towards the interior; it works from outside.”
If we want to express that from the spiritual standpoint, we can say:
“What is within, in the case of the animal, what it experiences inwardly as pleasure and sorrow, joy and pain, impulse, desire, and instinct, is not within in the plant; it sinks down, however, continuously towards the plant from above.”
That is entirely something of a soul-nature. And whereas the animal directs its eyes outwards, has its pleasure in the surroundings, directs its perception of taste outwards and regales itself on some approaching enjoyment, i.e., experiences pleasure inwardly, one who can really regard these things spiritually can affirm that the astral being of the plant also feels joy and pain, pleasure and sadness through looking down upon that which it has brought about. It rejoices over the rose color and over all that comes towards it. And when the plants form leaves and flowers, then the plant-soul permeates and tastes all that as it looks down, and there is an exchange between the soul-part sinking down and the plant itself. The plant-world is there for the happiness — and at times also for the pain — of its soul-part. We can really see an exchange of feeling between the plant-covering of the earth and the earth's astrality, which enfolds the plants and represents their soul nature.
[Comparing astrality plant and animal]
That which works on the plants from without seizes the soul-nature of the animal inwardly and first makes it animal. But there is an important difference between the active soul-nature in the astrality of the plant-world and that in the astrality of animal-life. If you test clairvoyantly what works as astrality on the plant-covering, you find in the soul-nature of the plants a certain sum of forces, and these all have a certain peculiarity. When I speak of plant soul-nature and of the earth's astrality that permeates it and in which the soul nature of the plants plays its part, you must be clear that these plant-souls do not live in their astrality as, for instance, physical beings on our earth.
Plant-souls can interpenetrate each other so that they flow along as in a fluid element. But one thing is characteristic of them; namely, they develop certain forces, and all these forces stream to the central point of the planet. A force works in every plant, which goes from above downwards and strives towards the center of the earth. That is what regulates the direction of the plant's growth. If you lengthen their axes, you come to the earth's center, which is the direction given to the plants by the soul-nature coming from above. If we investigate the soul-nature of the plant, we find that its most important characteristic is that it is rayed through by forces, which all strive towards the center of the earth.
It is different when we consider the astrality around our earth, which belongs to the animal nature. The plant-nature as such would not be able to call forth animal life. To produce the animal nature, it is necessary for still other forces to pass through the astral element. Thus, the occult investigator can distinguish purely from the astrality whether some will produce plant or animal growth. That can be distinguished in the astral sphere, for all astrality, showing only forces that strive towards the center of the earth or of some other planet, will give rise to plant growth.
If, on the other hand, forces appear, which in fact stand at right angles to these, but which go round the whole planet as continuous circular movements with extraordinary mobility in every direction, then that is a different astrality, which gives rise to animal life. At any point where you set up observations, you find that the earth in every situation and direction and altitude is surrounded by currents, which, if lengthened, would form circles flowing round the earth. This astrality harmonizes quite well with the plant astrality. They interpenetrate each other and yet are inwardly separate, differing through their inner qualities.
Thus, on one and the same spot of the earth's surface, both sorts of astrality can positively stream through each other. If a clairvoyant tests a definite portion of space, forces are found that strive only to the earth's center with others interpenetrating them that are only circular, and of which the clairvoyant knows that they give rise to animal life.
When you consider a physical body, no matter whether plant or animal, you have to look at it as a spatial enclosure and have no right to count something else as belonging to it that is separated from it in space. Where there is spatial separation, you must speak of different bodies; it is a single body when there is spatial connection.
This is not so in the astral world, and particularly not so in the astrality that can give rise to the animal kingdom. There, it is a fact that astral structures, widely separated, can make up a single whole. Here in some part of space, there can be an astral structure, and in quite another part of space, there can be another enclosed astral structure; yet, in spite of having not the slightest thread of space in common, these two astral structures can make up a single being. Yes — three, four, five such spatially separated structures can be connected. Even the following can happen.
Suppose you have an astral being that has not embodied itself physically anywhere at all, and you then find another that belongs to this one. Now you observe the former and find something going on in it, which you can call intake of food, consumption of something, since certain substances are taken in and others thrust out. And while you perceive this in the one structure, you can perceive in the second being, spatially separated from the first, other processes going on that correspond to what occurred in the first as absorption of food. On the one hand, the being eats — on the other hand, it experiences the taste, and although there is no spatial connection, the process in the one structure entirely corresponds to the process in the other structure. Thus, astral structures quite separated in space can, nevertheless, belong inwardly to one another.
Note DL: see experiments of Rupert Sheldrake

In fact, a hundred widely separated astral structures may be so interdependent that no process can take place in one without a corresponding process in the others. When the beings take physical embodiment, you can still find echoes of this astral peculiarity.
Examples, eg twins

- You will have heard of the remarkable parallelism shown by twins. This is because they remain related in their astral bodies, although they are separated spatially through their physical embodiment. So that, when something goes on in the astral body of the one, it cannot take place alone but is expressed in the astral part of the other.

- Even where it is a case of plant astrality, this peculiarity is shown: the interdependence in things quite separated in space. You will perhaps have already heard of this peculiarity in the plant-nature — how the wine in vessels shows a quite remarkable activity when the grape season comes. What causes the grapes to ripen is to be remarked again even in the wine containers.
I wished only to bring forward the fact that in what is manifested, the hidden is always betrayed and can be brought to light with the methods of occult research. You will acknowledge from this that it does not seem at all unnatural that our whole organism is put together astrally out of quite differentiated members.
[Example 1 – animal: sea creatures : siphonophore]
There are very singular sea-creatures, which you will understand if you remember what we have now described to some extent of the mysteries of the astral world. It is not at all necessary for the astral forces that bring about the intake of nourishment to be connected with those that regulate movement or reproduction. When the clairvoyant investigator examines astral space for such structures as can give rise to animal life, he finds something very remarkable. He finds a certain astral substantiality, of which he must say that if it worked in an animal body through the forces prevailing in it, it would be particularly fitted to transform the physical and make it an organ for taking nourishment. Now somewhere or other, there can be quite different members of astral being through which, when they submerge into a body, not organs of food-intake are formed but organs of movement or perception.
You can conceive that, when on the one hand you have an apparatus for taking in food and again an apparatus for moving hands and feet, forces from the astral world are sunk into you, yet these forces can stream together from quite different sides. The one astral mass of forces has given you the one, the other has given you the other, and they find themselves together in your physical body, because your physical body has to be a connected object in space. That depends on the laws of the physical world. The different force-masses that come together there from outside must form a unity. They did not do so right from the beginning.
What we have just gone into as the result of occult research in the astral field can be definitely confirmed in its effect on the physical world.
For there are certain creatures that have a remarkable life as marine creatures. We see in them something like a common stem or trunk, a kind of hollow tube. Above this, on the top, there is a formation that has, actually, no other ability than to fill itself with air and empty itself again. This achievement causes the whole structure to stand upright. If this bell-formed part were not there, then the whole thing that hangs on it could not keep itself upright. It is a kind of balance-being which gives equilibrium to the whole. This may not seem to us so very peculiar.
But it is peculiar when we realize that the structure, which is up above and gives balance to the whole being, cannot exist without nourishment. It is of an animal nature and must therefore receive nourishment. Yet, it has no instrument at all for taking in food.
But in order that this structure can be fed, there are placed on the hollow stem certain outgrowths — genuine polyps, distributed in all sorts of places; they would continually tumble about and not be able to keep in balance if they had not grown on a common stem. They can absorb nourishment from outside and give it to the whole stem, which they permeate. In that way, the air-balance-being is also nourished. In that way, the air-balance-being is also nourished. Thus, on the one hand, there is a being that can only keep the balance, and on the other hand one that can only provide nourishment for the whole. But now we have a structure that can be very much held up in the matter of food; when the nourishment is taken in, nothing more is there, and the creature must seek other spots where it can find new food. For this, it must have organs of movement. Care has been taken for this, too, for there are still other structures that have grown on this stem and that have other capacities. They cannot keep the balance or provide nourishment, but instead, they possess certain muscular formations. These structures can draw themselves together and so press out the water. This causes a counter-thrust in the water, so that when the water is pressed out, the whole structure must move towards the other side and so be enabled to reach other creatures for food. The “medusae” move forward by pressing out water and in this way causing a counter-thrust. And such medusae, which are genuine movement-creatures, have now also grown on there. So here you have a conglomeration of differing animal formations, one kind that only keeps balance, another that only nourishes, and then other beings that provide movement.
If such a being, however, were no more than this, it would lie out entirely; it could not reproduce itself. But even this is provided for. Again, on other places of the stem, there grow ball-shaped forms that have no other capacity than reproduction. In a hollow space inside these beings, male and female fertilization substances are developed; they mutually fructify each other and beings of their own kind are brought forth. Thus the reproductive process in these beings is delegated to quite distinct formations that have no other capacity at all. In addition, you still find certain outgrowths on this common stem; these are beings in which everything is stunted; they are only there as a protection, so that what lies beneath has a certain protection. They have sacrificed themselves, have surrendered all else and become only protective polyps.
Still to be remarked are certain long threads called “tentacles”, which again are metamorphosed organs. These have none of the faculties of the other structures, but if the creature is attacked by some hostile creature, the “tentacles” repulse the attack; they are defensive organs. And still another kind of organ is there, which one calls “touchers”, “feelers”. These are fine, mobile, and very sensitive organs of feeling and touch — a kind of sense-organ. The sense of feeling, which in a human being is spread over the whole body, exists here in a special member.
Now what does this siphonophore — the name of this creature that you see swimming about in the water — mean to one who can look at things with the sight of an occultist?
Here are the most varied structures astrally crowded together, creatures of nourishment, of movement, of reproduction, etc. And since these various good qualities of astral substance wish to incorporate physically, they had to string themselves on a common substantiality. So, here you see a being that predicts the human being to us in an extremely remarkable way!
Imagine that all the organs, appearing here as independent entities, were in an inward contact with each other, had developed together: then you have the human being and the higher animals in a physical respect. Here, through plain facts of the physical world, you see the confirmation of what is shown by occult research: namely, that in the human being, too, the most diverse astral forces stream together. These, we each hold together through our ego, and when they no longer work together as a being, feeling itself a unity, they make an individual strive apart in different directions. It is related in the Gospel, how so and so many demonic beings are in the man, which have streamed together in order to form a unity. And you also remember how in certain abnormal conditions, when there is mental illness, the person loses the inner connection. There are cases of insanity, where people can no longer hold fast to their ego and feel that they are split up into different parts; they confuse themselves with the original partial structures that have streamed together in them.
Note DL: see psycho-analyseis, borderline but also voice dialogue
[Occult principle – important quote]
There is a certain occult principle, which asserts that everything present in the spiritual world ultimately betrays itself somewhere in the world of the senses.
So you see what is interconnected in the human astral body embodied physically in such a siphonophore. The hidden world spies through a peep-hole into the physical. If human beings had not been able to delay their incorporation until they could achieve the suitable physical density, then they would be—not physically but spiritually — beings put together out of such a piece-work. Size has nothing at all to do with it.
This type of creature — which belongs to the species of hollow creatures, described today by every natural history, and which, in a certain respect, form a kind of fascination for the material-science researcher — becomes inwardly comprehensible when we can understand it out of the occult principles of animal astrality. This is such an example, and you can listen calmly to one who speaks quite a different language and says that physical research contradicts the statements of anthroposophy. For you can reply that, if one patiently allows time to show the agreement, then harmony will certainly be displayed, even in most complicated things. The concept of "evolution" held by most people is a very simple one. Evolution has, however, taken place by no means so simply.
[Example 2: fish]
In conclusion, I should like to raise a kind of problem, which shall stand as a task for us to seek to solve from the occult standpoint. We have seen an important occult truth demonstrated externally in a relatively lower animal. Let us now pass to a somewhat higher animal species — the fish — which can give us still more riddles. I will put before you only a few characteristics.
When you observe fish in aquariums, you can again and again be amazed at the wonderful life of the water. But do not imagine that any occult insight will disturb these reflections. When you shed light there with the facts of occult research and see what still other hidden beings swim about just in order to form these creatures as they are, then the understanding will not lessen your wonder but only increase it.
Let me, however, take an ordinary fish — it presents us with quite potent riddles. The average fish has, in the first place, remarkable stripes running along the sides, which appear also on the scales in another form. They run along both sides like two lines of longitude. If you were to deaden these two lines, the fish would behave as if it were mad. For then, it would have lost the power of finding the differences of pressure in the water — where the water gives greater support or less; where it is thinner and denser; the fish would no longer be able to move according to the pressure differences in the water. Water differs in density at different places, so that an uneven pressure is exercised. The fish moves at the surface of the water differently from below, and through these lines of longitude, it perceives the different pressures and all the movements produced by the fact that the water is in movement.
But now, through fine organs, which you find described in every natural-history book, the separate points of these lines of longitude are connected with the fish's quite primitive organ of hearing. The way in which the fish is aware of the movements and inner life of the water is just the same as the way in which we humans perceive the pressure of air — only that the conditions of pressure are felt first in the lines of longitude and are then transmitted to the hearing organ. The fish hears that; however, things are still more complicated.
The fish has a swimming-bladder that enables it in the first place to make use of the pressure of the water and to move just in definite conditions of pressure. The pressure on the swimming-bladder gives it the art of swimming, but because the different movements and vibrations touch upon the bladder and affect it like a membrane, this reacts on the hearing organ, and with the help of the hearing organ, the fish orientates itself in all its movements. The swimming-bladder is thus actually a kind of membrane, which is stretched out and which comes into vibrations that the fish hears. Where the fish's head ends towards the back, there are the gills, and these enable the fish to use the air of the water in order to breathe.
If you follow up all these things in the ordinary biological theories on evolution, you always find evolution presented somewhat primitively. The head of the fish is thought to evolve somewhat higher, and then the head of a more highly-organized animal arises; the fins evolve further, and then the organs of movement of the higher animals arise, and so on. But the matter is not so simple when one follows the processes with spiritual observation.
[Example metamorphosis]
For in order that a spiritual structure that has embodied itself to form the fish may evolve higher, something much more complicated must happen. A great part of the organs must be transformed and turned inside out.

The same forces that work in the fish's swimming-bladder conceal in themselves — in a mother-substance, as it were — the forces that the human being has in the lungs. But they are not lost. Tiny pieces remain behind — only turned inside out — everything material vanishes, and they then form our human ear drumskin. The eardrum, spatially considered, stands at a distance in man; it is, in fact, a portion of that membrane, and forces work within it that have functioned in the swimming-bladder of the fish.

And further: the gills are transformed into the little bones of the ear, at least in part, so that in the human organ of hearing you have, for instance, transformed gills.

Now you see that it is somewhat as if the fish's swimming-bladder, were turned over the gills. In human beings, therefore, you have the eardrum outside, the hearing organs inside. And what is quite outside in the fish — the remarkable lines of longitude' through which the fish orientates itself—form in human beings the three semi-circular canals through which we keep our balance. If you destroyed these three semi-circular canals we would become giddy and could no longer keep our balance.
So you do not have just a simple process from natural history, but instead, a marvelous astral work, where things are indeed continually turned inside out. Imagine that you had a glove on this hand with patterns on it that were elastic. If you now reverse it, turn it inside out, it would become a quite tiny picture. So do the organs that were outside become small and tiny, and the organs that were inside will form a broad surface. We understand evolution only when we know that in the most mysterious way, such a reversal takes place in the astral and how, in this way, the progress of the spiritual takes place

1914-07-14-GA266/3

1914-12-20-GA156

It is a fact that what has become the human head during the Old Moon-stage is on the way to becoming the whole human being during the Earth-stage.
When the coming Future Jupiter evolution is complete, this whole organism of today's human being will have become the head.
What you are today as a whole human being will become the brain, the head, of the Future Jupiter human, just as the whole Old Moon human has become the head of the Earth human.
The task of true spiritual development consists in truly anticipating the future.
Therefore, we must become aware that there is a head culture around us and that it is our responsibility to create a human culture.
Our head could not think, could not reflect any ideas or concepts if it behaved like the rest of our organism; it could never truly fulfill its task.
Our head reflects the world, which then becomes our world of perception, only because it can forget itself in its perception, can truly forget itself.
In its feeling, the human being is - thank God - always headless. If you try to feel your way through and ask yourself: What do I feel least in my organism? - it is really the head that forgets itself most in normal life.
And when it does not forget itself, then it hurts, and then it also prefers not to perceive anything, but to be left in peace and without perception. That is where it asserts its egoism.
Otherwise, however, it extinguishes itself, and because it extinguishes itself, we can perceive the whole surrounding world. It is organized to extinguish itself.
…To the same extent and at the same moment that a person succeeds in completely switching off their organism – which, as is well known, is achieved through meditation and in initiation – to that same extent and in that same moment, this organism becomes a real mirror of the world, only that we then see not the organism but the cosmos.
Just as the head does not see itself either, but what is around it, so the whole human being, when it becomes an organ of perception, sees the cosmos.
…If you make that an attitude, then you will feel something of how the whole person can truly become brain, how he as a whole person can thus come into communication with his surroundings, as otherwise only the head can.
Then you will feel what is actually meant by this: to perceive the world as a whole human being.

1916-GA170 - 'Inside-out lectures'

waar hij de 12 in 12 doet hoofd en lichaam en metamorphose hoofd weg lichaam wordt hoofd in next zelfs met schets en al ..

1916-08-07-GA170

Merk op al in hele cyclus, ook al in lecture 3 die staat in life cycle ch 11 vanwege teeth/pubering forces

http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA170/English/RSP1990/19160731p01.html

When one is speaking of the being of man and of mankind's relation to the cosmos, some of what has to be said may seem complicated. When it comes to the human being — you may well say — is there anything that is not included! We are confronted, however, with the fact that a human being is formed in an intricate way from the entire cosmos, and we have to come to terms with it. It is especially important that people of our time begin to come to terms with these things, as otherwise it will be too late. Today men are living in an incarnation in which it is just possible to get by without knowing much about the complicated nature of the human being; but the time is coming — a time when these souls will again incarnate — when this will not be possible. Then souls will finally have to begin to know how humanity is related to the cosmos. You could say that we are still just within a period when the responsibility for holding together the different members of which a human being is composed has not yet been turned over to mankind itself. We are still living in an epoch when these various members hold together without our having to do anything, when the easy-going fellow can come to us and say, ‘Really! This so-called anthroposophical wisdom is so complicated! But truth is simple, and anything that is not simple cannot really be true!’ Today, this speech is frequently heard. Those who are misled by Lucifer into speaking in such a fashion do not have the faintest inkling of how they befog their heads with this talk about the so-called simplicity of truth. They are unaware of how they are deceiving themselves. For the time will come when people will experience how complicated they are, a time when people will require knowledge in order to hold themselves together. But everything in the future has to be prepared, and the stream that carries a spiritual-scientific world view has the task of preparing the development of earthly culture for the age when a person will have to know how to hold together the various parts of his being.
Let us remind ourselves of the fundamental truths that have been described in some detail over these last few days — of man's essentially dual nature, and of how his external body already reveals this dual nature. The body divides into two parts which are built according to quite different principles — the head and the rest of the body. If we examine a human head as it is today, what we have is essentially the result of what became of the body in the previous incarnation. And, after we have passed through the period between death and a new birth, our present body, except for the head, will become the head of the next incarnation.
Thus, the passage of a person through successive incarnations could be drawn as follows: Man has his head, and he has the rest of his body. What is now his head is essentially lost. When he once more receives a body from the earth, what is now the rest of his body appears, transformed, as the head of that next incarnation. Then this body, in turn, becomes the head of the following incarnation and he receives another body from his forebears, from the earth. The head is always lost.
Naturally, we are talking about forces. Of course, the material of the rest of the body is also lost. But this material is not the essential thing-in the truest sense of the word it is maya-all the forces that reside in the body, exclusive of the head, are the essential thing. These forces are transformed into the forces of the head during our passage through the period between death and a new birth. And the forces that were bound up in our bodies during our previous incarnation really are present now in our heads. That was the basic concept whose particular details we were elaborating.
Now, in order to understand these things better and better, we want to call on the help of some other ideas that we have acquired. To begin with, we will ask: How will our present body become the head of our next incarnation? How are the forces of our present body transformed so that they can become the head of the next incarnation?
The transformation of our body into a head is hard to imagine at first. We need to ask ourselves: How is this transformation possible?
In order to answer that question we must review in our souls the things we have been saying about the part of the human soul that is concerned with knowledge and concepts. This is the part that is dependent on the head, and is concerned with truth and wisdom. Today, people usually believe that the knowledge we acquire is only there to give us pictures of the external world and to enable us to learn something about the external world. There are philosophical epistemologists who theorise endlessly about the interconnections, between concepts and ideas, and about the mysterious connection between the nature of a concept and the thing that the concept represents. All such theories are afflicted by a common error. Initially, I can only explain this error by speaking pictorially. Imagine there is a botanist, a gardener, who wants to investigate the nature of a grain of wheat. As he sets about it, he says: ‘I will investigate it chemically to see what substances it contains. I will see if its constituents include all the things man needs in his grain and flour, and such, for nourishment.’ And the botanist then proceeds to seek for the nature of the grain of wheat in its relationship to human nourishment in order to explain why the grain of wheat contains what it does. A man who believed that he was discovering something essential about the nature of a grain of wheat by investigating its suitability as human nourishment would be making a curious mistake. The grain of wheat occurs as a part of the whole wheat plant, as its fruit. A person who wants to discover why it corresponds to the nature of a grain of wheat to be as it is, must investigate die manner in which a new wheat plant can develop from it. Whether or not it contains substances for human nourishment is a secondary matter. It has nothing to do with the inner nature of a grain of wheat. A person who investigates the utility of everything and wants to turn utilitarian knowledge into the true science would investigate the grain of wheat chemically. He would discover that here nature provides something good for human nourishment. But that has nothing to do with the inner nature of a grain of wheat, or with the fact that a new wheat plant can grow from it.
To someone who approaches matters with clear ideas and in the spirit of knowledge, the philosophers of knowledge, the epistemologists, often resemble people investigating a grain of wheat by considering its value as food for human beings. For if one were to question a grain of wheat as to its original task, it would not say that it is originally here for the nourishment of mankind; rather would it say that its original task is to allow a new wheat plant to develop. When someone with clear ideas and a feeling for knowledge considers the epistemologists, he is confronted by mistakes such as the one I have just described. For building up a picture of the things around us is not the original purpose of what we call knowledge — of what lives in us as ideas, truth and wisdom. Building up a picture of the things outside us is just as inessential to knowledge as nourishing human beings is inessential to a grain of wheat. Knowledge does not exist for the purpose of making pictures of external things; it exists for another reason. Its purpose lies in the way it lives and works and weaves in man. As we pass through our existence between birth and death, we gradually accumulate wisdom. We employ it to form a picture of the external world, just as we use a grain of wheat as nourishment. But we withdraw all the wheat that we use in this way from its original purpose of establishing new plants. We similarly withdraw from its original purpose all the knowledge that we use for taking hold of the external world. That is not the original purpose of the realm of truth and ideas. Why, then, does the realm of truth exist — why, I mean, in the sense that the grain of wheat is here to bring about a new wheat plant? Our involvement with knowledge and our efforts to achieve truth exist so that we can develop certain powers. These powers we develop during the period between birth and death are the very powers that transform our organism after death. That is to say, they transform its forces into the forces of the head! This extraordinary connection is what one discovers when one looks at man's passage between birth and death on the one hand, and between death and a new birth on the other. The primary purpose of the knowledge a person acquires is the transformation of the organism, exclusive of the head, into the head of the next incarnation. But there are so many people who acquire no knowledge at all, you will say, and so remain frightfully ignorant; only a few become clever — one usually counts oneself among these latter! But there is more than a little justification for those who say — and many, quite independently of one another, have said this — that a human being acquires more wisdom in his first three or four years than ... well, at the very least, than in his three academic years. In our first three years we really do learn a great deal that can only be learned on earth with the use of our head. We acquire the knowledge necessary for speaking, for understanding what is said, and much, much more. We really do learn a great deal. And that is included in the wisdom we accumulate.
People are actually not so different as regards the wisdom they acquire. In it surge and weave the forces that will transform our organism into a head during the passage from death to a new birth. The picture that we take into ourselves through ideas and knowledge is by its nature quite a complicated one. And it is only in dreams such as those of the Polish poet I cited yesterday that people are given a glimpse of what surges and weaves in among our fully-conscious ideas. But it is there, surging and weaving in us, in order that it can be led over after death to become the power that actually transforms our organism. With the exception of what we use to take hold of the external world, all that we acquire through knowledge accumulates and becomes the power that will transform our organism. In a certain sense, what we use for normal understanding of the external world is lost to our development, it is withdrawn from our development. All the grains of wheat we use for nourishment are withdrawn from the plant's whole, ongoing process of development — and these are much more numerous than the grains that are strewn back over the earth. And this is how things are during our present phase of development. We connect ourselves with external things: we also withdraw very much more from the ongoing stream of human development than we retain. Think back to earlier times when human knowledge was obtained through atavistic clairvoyance. Men's attention was not so dissipated by the external world. The knowledge of such ancient peoples as the old Egyptians and Chaldeans was obtained through atavistic clairvoyance. It depended very little on external development. In this respect, our age is the opposite of that one. Today, much is taken in from what is outside, and, inwardly, very little is added to development. The Greek culture occupies a wonderful middle position, and this is not solely due to their special talents. These they certainly had, but with these alone nothing could have been accomplished. The relatively small patch of earth inhabited by the Greeks and their relatively slight knowledge of the rest of the world, also contributed to the unity of their whole culture. They knew of little else beyond what lay in the direction of Asia Minor and Asia. They knew little about Africa, and nothing at all about America or most of Europe. The fact that Plato still possessed knowledge of morality, of sophrosyne and of dikaiosyne, is in many respects thanks to the fact that the external scope of Greek knowledge was so small. For that reason it was still possible to retain many of the spiritual forces of wisdom for developing the inner life. Nevertheless, the Greeks used less of these forces than the ancient Egyptians or Chaldeans had used, not to mention the ancient Persians and Indians. In our day, when the whole earth has gradually been explored and has become accessible, men seek to acquire as much external knowledge as they possibly can. How that has increased! If that were as intensive as it is extensive, then men would have infinitesimally little to take with them for the transformation of the physical body into the head of the next incarnation. They would have much, much less than a peasant has, particularly in the case of the most educated people. But, thanks be to God, most people have travelled without looking at very much. They have followed their Baedeker or other travel books closely. But, in spite of the great extent of their travels, they have not acquainted themselves with very much, so they have not withdrawn everything. Otherwise, those who rush about everywhere in search of sensations and who want everything they learn to come from outside themselves would be in danger. They would be in danger of arriving in the world in their next incarnation with a head formed from a body that had undergone very little transformation. It would have an animal-like appearance, for that would be the fate of someone who had not accumulated many formative forces.
Now, imaginative comparisons can be expanded. We have said that everything we use externally to develop knowledge and to learn about the external world is separated from its own true inner being — just as the grain of wheat that is used for food is separated from the inner nature of wheat. We can go on to ask: What are the further similarities between external knowledge, or what becomes outer knowledge, and the grain of wheat that is used as food? There are similarities, but they have to be elicited.
Let us once more consider the curious fact that a great number of grains of wheat are used as food for human beings instead of for the generation of new wheat plants! So we can say that the grains of wheat are removed from the direct line of their own ongoing development. Otherwise, a new wheat plant is generated from the grain, and this bears further grains of wheat, and so on. But countless grains are split away from this procession; they are transferred into an entirely different realm, that of human nourishment, and this has nothing to do with the ongoing stream.
Here nature gives you an opportunity to build a concept that must be carefully heeded if you want to achieve a realistic view of the world.
Our external science has gradually brought us to the terrible pass where everything has to be explained by cause and effect, so that a later event must always be explained as following from what came before. There is nothing more foolish than this undifferentiated picture of the world in which all effects can be traced back to a cause and every cause leads on to its effects. There are effects which have no causal connection to anything that preceded them. How could a grain of wheat contain the causes for its being used as human nourishment? Only in the context of a simple-minded teleology such as the one that was taken for granted in some quarters in the eighteenth century. According to this point of view, the presence of cork-like substances in nature was explained as the work of mysterious spirits who put them there so that they could be used to produce champagne corks! But on the contrary, the grains of wheat really do pass over into another sphere.
It is similar when we go about acquiring knowledge of external nature and of outer things. This transfers the things to another sphere. We human beings are able to extract a substantial portion of what is in us, in the form of matters concerned with truth, for the purpose of enabling the body of our present incarnation to be transformed into the head of the next incarnation. We can extract much for the sake of present knowledge, but we must take care that this knowledge is put to a different use. In a certain sense, the grains of wheat are ennobled by being used as human nourishment, so they receive a recompense for being separated from their own original nature. Something similar should come about in the case of external human knowledge, which is developed in a way that runs totally contrary to the nature of ideas and truth. In his heart, man should make a gift to the gods of all the truths acquired in the form of pictures of the external world. Man should always say to himself: When you obtain knowledge, you remove it from the progressive stream. Be clear that the acquisition of knowledge must be in the service of the gods. There is other knowledge, knowledge untouched by any awareness of the holy service that knowledge renders to developing humanity. Such knowledge is taken away from the external world, but it is not given to the gods, who would be nourished by what they thus would receive. The knowledge that is not gathered in this spirit, but is taken, instead, without thanks, is like grains of wheat that fall to earth and rot. In other words, it serves no goal at all — neither its own nor that of becoming nourishment for human beings.
Here we arrive at a point where you will feel how important it is that our spiritual-scientific efforts lead to some very definite practical results. For in our hearts we should cultivate a fundamental mood when we receive spiritual-science. It must not become a thing we merely learn, or just a thing to be known. Therefore, we must unite knowing with the feeling that knowledge should be in the service of the gods, and that it is a fundamental sin against the divine meaning of evolution to profane knowledge by removing it from that for which the gods intended it.
I said that acquiring much external knowledge has only become possible in more recent times. For the ancient Egyptians, most knowing was an inward matter; external knowledge was comprised of only the most immediate things. During the Greco-Roman epoch it became possible for men to acquire more and more external knowledge. That is not very long ago. But at the same time there arose the possibility of discovering the path by which knowing becomes a holy service, for at this time the Christ brought his message to the Earth.
Here you have another relationship, which history makes clear to us. At the very moment in human development when knowing becomes predominantly a knowledge of the external world, the Christ appears from out of the spiritual world. And so does it becomes possible for a person who experiences the guidance of Christ to transform knowing into a holy service — by connecting it with the Christ. Today, mankind has not yet developed much feeling for knowledge as a divine service. But as mankind comes more and more to understand how Christ has brought the life of the gods into earthly life, it will also learn how to put knowledge at the service of the gods.
Thus we can live with everything of which our head is the outer sign. We can establish there a little plot that prepares for the transformation of our body into a head. As for the rest of knowledge, if we use it with the proper feeling, as I have just characterised it, the higher spiritual beings will receive nourishment from the concepts we use. In this way we strive for a knowing that serves the gods, in order that wheat may also be grown for the nourishment of mankind. This is already happening, but mankind still has to learn the measure of this mood. Through our feeling, knowledge will acquire the measure of the mood I have been describing. It is very, very important for the healthy development of humanity that such feelings be developed.
In the ancient Mysteries and Mystery schools it was simply taken for granted that those who acquired knowledge would treat it with holy regard. Indeed, that was one of the main reasons why not everyone was admitted to the mysteries. Those who were admitted had to provide a guarantee that they would regard the knowledge as holy and would treat it as a service to the gods. The attitude was also engendered by atavistic feelings. Today, it is necessary for mankind to achieve this attitude once more. Humanity has passed through an age when it developed in accordance with materialism-and we know there are good reasons for this. Now, it needs to heal itself of materialism, and this will only happen when mankind is reunited with the feeling of holy service that was once a part of knowing. But in the future this will have to be brought about consciously. And that will only be possible if spiritual science spreads to more and more of humanity. Knowledge should not be like the seed that rots on the ground. Everything that is used for external convenience and arranging things mechanically is like the seed that rots. What is not placed in the service of the gods is lost. It is neither used to help us in our next incarnation, nor is it used to nourish the gods. Something really happens when the seed rots; this is a real process. When knowledge is wasted without being incorporated into the service of the gods and without becoming part of a divine process, a real process takes place. It would take us too far today if I were to speak about what the rotten grain of wheat signifies, but it is senseless for it to rot. Nothing can come of it — it simply dies. But Ahriman is able to do something with knowledge that is not acquired in the context of the service of the gods. This knowledge is taken over into the service of Ahriman and establishes his power. His servants introduce it into the world process and thereby create more obstacles for the world process than rightfully ought to be there or would otherwise have to be there. For, after all, Ahriman is the god of hindrance.
This will give you a glimpse of how far the significance of what lives in us in the form of ideas and truth extends. The next two lectures will be concerned with beauty and morality so that we can then bring all three things together. That will furnish us with another opportunity to deepen our understanding of the human being

1916-08-28-GA170

Extract (fractal cosmic law on twelve fold order)

1917-01-21-GA174

The 'incarnate' human being's parts in relation to the universe
I have already pointed out that the right way to look at the human being in relation to the universe is to consider the individual parts of his being separately. From the spiritual point of view, what exists here on the physical plane is more a kind of image, a manifestation. Thus we may regard as fourfold the physical human being we see before us.
First we see the head. As you know from earlier discussions, the head as it appears in a particular incarnation is supposed to have reached its final stage in that incarnation. The head is the part most strongly exposed to death.
For the way our head is formed is, for the most part, the consequence of our life in our previous incarnation. On the other hand, the formation of our next head in our next incarnation is the consequence of the life of our present body. A while ago I expressed this briefly by saying: Our body, apart from our head, metamorphoses itself into our head in our next incarnation, while our next body is growing towards us; whereas our present head is the metamorphosed body of our previous incarnation, the rest of our body has grown towards us more or less - there are varying degrees - out of what we have inherited.
This is how the metamorphosis takes place. Our head, as it were, falls away in one incarnation, having been the outcome of our body in our previous incarnation. And our body transforms itself, metamorphoses itself — as does leaf to petal in Goethe's theory of metamorphosis — into our head in our next incarnation. Now because our head is formed from the earthly body of our previous incarnation, the spiritual world has a great amount of work to do on this head between death and our new birth, for its archetypal form must be fashioned by the spiritual world in accordance with karma. That is why, even in the embryo, the head appears before anything else in its complete form, for more than any other part it has been influenced by the cosmos. The body, on the other hand, is influenced for the most part by the human organism. So this appears later than the head in the embryo. Apart from its physical substance, which has of course been gathered through heredity, our head, in its form, its archetypal form, is indeed shaped by the cosmos, by the sphere of the cosmos. It is not for nothing that your head is more or less spherical in shape, for it is an image of the sphere of the universe; the whole sphere of the universe works to form your head. Thus we can say that our head is formed from the sphere.

1918-02-10-GA182

title: Death as Metamorphosis of Life

1918-08-26-GA183 (important)

Certain questions will increasingly obtrude themselves upon those who really think, even though in these times of overwhelming materialism these thinkers would prefer to keep them more or leas at a distance. There are many such questions, and today I should like, out of all of them, to pick a few that arise from man, in spite of resisting it, becoming aware of the spiritual world.
[Why do some people die so young, others old]
To such questions belong those, for instance, raised in the course of everyday life; certain men die young, others in old age, others again in middle life. Concerning the fact that on the one hand young children die and on the other hand people grow to old age and then die — concerning this fact questions arise in man to which by the means today called scientific the answer can never be found. Everyone has to own this after inner reflection. Yet in human life these are burning questions; and surely anyone can feel that infinitely much in life must receive enlightenment when we can really get down to these questions: why do some human beings die early, some as children, some as adolescents, some in the middle of the normal period of life? Why do other die old? What significance has this in the whole cosmos?
Men still had ideas, concepts, with which to answer these questions up to that point of time described in these lectures, the time at the beginning of the fourth post-Atlantean period, that is, up to approximately the middle of the eighth pre-Christian century. Men had concepts that came down out of ancient wisdom. In those olden times before the eighth pre-Christian century, ideas were in fact circulating everywhere in the cultural life of the earth giving men, in conformity with the mind of those times, the solution to such questions as are here mentioned. What today we call science cannot connect the right meaning with these questions and has no idea that there is something in them for which men should be seeking a possible answer. All this arises because since the point of time indicated, all conceptions related to spiritual and therefore to immortal man have actually been lost. Only these conceptions remain that are connected with man's transitory nature, man between his birth and his death. I have drawn attention to how in all the old world-conceptions they spoke of the Sun as being threefold;

the same sun that is perceived out there by the physical senses as a shining sphere in cosmic space.

But behind this sun the wise men of old saw the soul-sun, according to the Greeks Helios,

and behind this soul-Sun again, the spiritual-Sun, still identified by Plato, for example, with the Good.

Modern men do not see any real sense in speaking of Helios, the soul-Sun, or for that matter of the spiritual-Sun, the Good. But as the physical sun shines upon us here between birth and death, there shines into our ego, if I may say so, during the time we pass between death and a new birth, the spiritual sun identified by Plato with the Good. And during this time between death and a new birth, to speak of a shining sphere in the way it is spoken of in our modern materialistic world-conception has no meaning. Between death and a new birth there is only meaning when we speak of the spiritual-Sun Plato still referred to as the Good. A concept of this kind is just what should show us something. It should lead us to reflect how the matter really stands with regard to the physical representation we form of the world. It is not taken seriously in its full sense, at any rate not so seriously that our outlook on life is actually permeated by it, that in all our physical representations of the world, in what is spread out perceptibly before us, we have to see a kind of illusion, Maya.
[Physicists view of the Sun vs Negative Space]
It is indeed fundamentally this kind of representation of the Sun that anyone accepts when taking as his authority modern physics, astrophysics, whatever you like to call it.
If he were able to travel to the place where the physicist places the sun, on approaching it he would — now let us turn from the conditions of human life and assume that absolute conditions of life could prevail — he would become aware of overpowering heat, this is how he would picture it. And when he had arrived inside the space that the physicist considers to be filled by the sun, he would find in this space red hot gas or something of the kind. This is what the physicist considers to be filled by the sun, he would find in this space red hot gas or something of the kind. This is what the physicist actually pictures — a ball of glowing gas or something like it.
But it is not so, my dear friends, that is definitely maya, complete illusion. This representation cannot hold water in face of true physical perception that is possible, let alone what can actually be perceived spiritually.
Were it possible to get near the sun, to reach where the sun is, we should find yes, indeed, an getting near, we should find something that would have the same effect as going through floods of light. But when we came right inside, where the physicist supposes the sun to be, we should find first what we could only call empty space. Where the physical sun is supposed to be there is nothing at all, absolutely nothing.
I will draw it diagrammatically (blue centre in yellow circle, diagram not available) but in reality nothing is there; there is nothing, there is empty space. But it is a strange kind of empty space: When I say there is nothing there I am not speaking quite accurately — there is less than nothing there. It is not only empty space for there is less than nothing there. And that is something that is an extraordinarily difficult idea for the modern western man to picture. Even today men of the east take this as a matter of course; for them there is absolutely nothing strange or difficult to understand when they are told that less than nothing is there. The man of the west thinks to himself — especially when he is a hard and fast follower of Kant, and there are far more followers of Kant today than those who are consciously so — he thinks to himself that if there is nothing in space then it is just empty space! However this is not the case, there can also be exhausted space. And if indeed you were to look right through this corona of the sun, you would feel the empty space into which you would then enter most uncomfortable — that is to say it would tear you asunder. By that it would show its nature, that it is more — or it is less, however we can best express it, than empty space. You need only seek the help of the simplest mathematical concept and when I say empty space is less than just emptiness you will no longer find my meaning so puzzling.
[The head as Sun space]
Now let us assume you possess some kind of property. It can also happen that you have given away what you possess and have nothing. But we can have less than nothing, we can have debts. Then we do actually have less than nothing. If we pass from fullness of space to its ever diminishing fullness, we can come to empty space; and we can still go an beyond mere emptiness just as we can go beyond having nothing to having debts. It is a great weakness of the modern world outlook that it does not know this particular kind of — if I may so express it — negative materiality, that it only knows emptiness or fullness and not what is less than emptiness. For because knowledge today, the world outlook today is ignorant of what is less than emptiness, this world outlook is more or less held in the bonds of materialism, strictly confined by materialism — I should like to say, under the ban of materialism. For in man also there is a place that is emptier than empty, not in the whole of him but where there are layers of what is emptier than empty. As a whole, man, physical man, is a being who materially fills a certain space; but there is a certain member of man's nature, of the three I have referred to, that actually has something in it like the sun, emptier than empty. That is — yet, my dear friends, you'll have to put up with it — it is the head. And it is just because man is so organised that his head can become empty and in certain parts more than empty, that this head has the power to make room for the spiritual. Now just picture the matter as it actually is.
Naturally we have to picture things diagrammatically, but use your imagination and picture that everything materially filling your head I am going to draw in the following way.
This is the diagram of your head (see red in diagram 5). but now, if I want to draw it properly, I shall have to leave empty places in this head, these naturally are not very big; but there inside are empty places. And into these empty places can enter what I have recently been calling the young spirit. In these spaces the young spirit with its rays, as it were, is drawn (see yellow in diagram 5).
Diagram 5
[The Brain –Mirror]
Now, my dear friends, the materialists say that the brain is the instrument of the soul-life, of the thinking. The reverse is the truth. The holes in the brain, what indeed is more than holes, or one could just say as well less than holes, what therefore is emptier than empty, that is the instrument of the soul-life. And here where the soul-life is not, into which the soul-life is continually pushing, where the space in our skull is filled with brain substance here nothing is thought, here is no soul-experience.
We do not need our physical brain for our life of soul; we need it only to lay hold of our soul-life, physically to lay hold of it. And if the soul-life were not actually alive in the holes of the brain, pushing up everywhere, it would vanish, it would never reach our consciousness. But it lives in the holes of our brain that are emptier than empty.
Thus we have gradually to correct our concepts. When we stand in front of a mirror we do not perceive ourselves but only our reflected image. We could forget ourselves ... We see ourselves in the mirror. In the same way man does not experience himself by putting together with his brain what is lying in the holes in that brain. He experiences the way in which his soul-life is everywhere reflected by pushing up against the brain substance. It is reflected everywhere, and man experiences it; what he experiences is actually its reflected image. All that has slipped into the holes, however, because it is then permeated by consciousness in the contrary sense is what makes man conscious when without the resistance of the brain he goes through the gate of death.
Now I should like to draw another diagram. Take the following: forgive me if I am rather drastic in portraying the brain and how the holes are left (blue in diagram 6). Here is the brain substance and here the brain leaves its holes and into these holes goes the life of the soul. (yellow)
Diagram 6
This soul-life, however, continues, just outside the holes. There come to what naturally is only seen near man but projects indefinitely — man's aura. Now let us think away the brain and imagine we are looking at the soul-life of an ordinary man between birth and death. We should then have to say that seen in this way the condition of the real man between birth and death is such that actually his face is turned to his body thus (see lilac). It is true I shall have to draw this diagram differently. He turns his soul-life to the corporeal. And when we look at the brain the soul-life stretches out like a feeler that creeps into the holes of the brain. What there I made yellow here I make lilac, because that is more appropriate for the view into the living man. Thus, that would be what runs into the brain of the living man.
If after this I want to draw, let us say, physical man, I could best indicate that by perhaps here drawing in for you the boundary set to the faculty of memory. You would go outside there and there you would have the outer boundary, the boundary of cognition, of which I have also spoken to you. For that you will just have to remember diagram 5 and diagram 3 drawn yesterday).
But now this is the reality — when man is looked at spiritually from without, his soul-life stretches into him thus... so I will draw the single elongation only where the brain is concerned (diagram 7). But this soul-life in itself is also differentiated. So to follow up this soul-life further I should have to draw... another region here (red under the lilac), here another region blue); thus all this would belong to what constitutes man's aura. Then another region (green). You see how this part I am now drawing lies beyond the boundary of man's cognition. Then the region (yellow) — in reality all this belongs to man — and this region (orange.)
Diagram 7
When man is asleep this moves more or less out of the body, as it was drawn yesterday (diagram 2), but when man is awake it is more or lass within the body. So that actually, perceived with the soul, the aura is in the immediate vicinity of the body. And if the physical man is described this is done by saying that this physical man consists of lungs, heart, liver, gall and so on; This is done in physical anatomy, this is done in physiology. But you can do the same when describing the man of soul and spirit who in this way actually stretches out into the holes in man, in what is more than empty in man. You can describe this in the same way — only then you must mention of what this soul-and spirit man consists. just as in physical man the organs are differentiated, here the different currents must be separated. It can be said: in here where it is red, physical man would stand thus in profile, the face turned in this direction, for example, the eyes here (diagram 7), and here would be the region of burning desire (red). That would be part of the man of soul-and-spirit who has taken his substance from the region known in my book Theosophy as the region of burning desire. Thus something taken from burning desire and introduced into man gives this part of him.
If I am describing this in detail what I have here colored lilac I should have to call soul-life. As you know, a certain part of the soul-sphere, of the soul-land, has been given the name soul-life. This substance of it would have this violet color,this lilac, and forms in man a part of his soul-spiritual being.
And if we continue in this way the orange here would have to be called active soul-force. So that you have to remember that your soul-life is what during your life between birth and death enters you with most intensity by way of your senses. And behind, checking itself, not so well able to enter, held up by the soul-life, there is the active soul-force.
Still further behind there is what is called soul-light (yellow in diagram 8). To a certain extent attached to this soul-light, pressing itself through, there would be what is taken from the region of liking and disliking which I should have to give to the green area. Wishes, we should ascribe to the sphere of what is approximately blue. And now pushing up here, the real blue, that is approaching blue red, this would be the region of mobile susceptibility. These are auric currents that I here call burning desire, mobile susceptibility, and wishes. As you know, these auric currents, these auric streams, constitute the world of soul, they also constitute the man of soul and spirit who may be said to be built out of the ingredients of this soul world.
Then when death comes the physical body falls away, and man withdraws what has projected into the holes in the body. He takes it away and by so doing (we can now think away physical man) he comes into a certain relation with the soul-world and then with the spirit-land as you will find it described in Theosophy. He has this relationship by having in him its ingredients, but during physical life these are bound up with the physical body and then they become free. Becoming free, however, as a whole it is gradually changed. During physical life — if I leave out the differentiations and draw the soul-life thus — the feelers (lilac in diagram 8) reach out into our holes; after death these feelers are drawn back. By their being drawn back, however, the soul-life itself becomes hollowed out and the life of the spirit coming from the other side rises into the life of soul (yellow).
Diagram 8
In the same degree as man ceases to dive into the physical, the soul-spiritual lights up and, from the other side, penetrates his aura with light. And just as man is able to acquires a consciousness through the reflection caused by the continual pushing of the soul-spiritual against the physical body, he now acquires a consciousness by drawing himself back against the light. This light is that of the Sun, the original light that is the Good. Thus, whereas during his physical life as man of soul and spirit he pushes against what is related to the Sun, namely, against the more than empty holes in the brain, after death when he withdraws himself he pushes against the other Sun, the Good-Sun, the original sun.
You see, my dear friends, how the possibility of receiving concepts of life between death and a new birth is bound up with the basic ideas of primeval mysteries. For we are placed into this whole cosmic life in true way I have been picturing during these last few days. It is true, however, that we have to go more deeply into the framework of actual human evolution throughout earthly time to come to correct concepts of these matters. I think you will agree it might be possible that someone through a special stroke of luck — if one might so call it — were able to see clairvoyantly, the whole of what I have been describing. This stroke of luck, however, could only bring him to the point of seeing ever changing images. It is something like this — a man through some kind of miracle — but nowadays it would not happen through a miracle — or let us say through clairvoyant vision, super-sensible vision, a man might see something of the nature of what I have been trying to picture, namely man's life of soul and spirit. You will find it obvious that this should look rather different from what a short time ago I was describing as the normal aura, if you understand what I was describing only a few days ago as the aura revealed when the whole man is seen, that is, physical man with his encircling aura. But now I have taken out the man of soul und spirit, so that this man of soul and spirit has been abstracted from the physical man.
From this you recognise that in one case the colors have to be arranged in one way, in another case in another way; you recognise also that for super-sensible consciousness things look very different. Try simply to see man's aura — as it is while man is in the physical body — then look at this aura. Turn your attention that is, from the man of soul and spirit, and try to see the man why stretches out his organs into physical man. But when you see the man during the time between death and a new birth, then you also see how the whole changes. Above all, the region that is red here (Diagram 7) goes away, goes here, and the yellow goes below, the whole gradually gets into disorder. These things can be perceived but the percept has something confusing about it. Therefore it will not be easily possible for modern man to bring meaning and significance into this confusion if he does not turn to other expedients.
[Polarities – head=past, extremities=future]
Now we have shown that man's head points to the past whereas the extremities man points to the future. This is entirely a polaric contrast, both the head and the extremities of man (remember what was said yesterday) are actually one and the same, only the head is a very old formation, it is overformed. That is why it has the holes; so far the extremities man has not these holes; on the surface he is still full of matter. To have these holes is a sign of over development. Development in a backward sense can be seen in the head and much hangs on that. Much depends too on man being able to understand that extremities man is a recent metamorphosis — the head an old metamorphosis. And because extremities man is a recent metamorphosis he has not so far developed the capacity to think in physical life but his consciousness remains unconscious; he does not open up to the man of soul and spirit such holes as are in the brain.
You see it is infinitely important for spiritual culture, and will in future become more and more so, for us to perceive that these two things that outwardly, physically, are as totally different from one another as the head man and extremities man, are according to soul and spirit, one and the same, and only differ because they are at different stages of development in time. Many mysteries lie in this particular fact that two equal physical things at different stages of their development in time, can be really one and the same that, though outwardly physically different, this is only due to the conditions of their change, of their metamorphosis.
[Metamorphosis – principle of reversal?]
Goethe with his theory of metamorphosis began in an elementary way to form concepts by which all this can be understood. Whereas otherwise since ancient times there has been a deadlock in the formation of concepts, with Goethe the faculty of forming concepts once more arose. And these concepts are those of living metamorphoses. Goethe, it is true, always began with the most simple. He said: when we look at a plant we have its green leaf; but the green leaf changes into the flower petal, into the colorsome petal of the flower. Both are the same, only one is the metamorphosis of the other. And as the green leaf of the plant and the red petal of the rose are different metamorphoses, the same thing at a different stage, man's head and his extremities organism too are simply metamorphoses of one another. When we take Goethe's thought on the metamorphosis of the plant we have something primitive, simple; but this thought can blossom into something of the greatest and can serve to describe man's passing from one incarnation to the next. We see the plant with its green leaf and its blossom, and say: this blossom, this red blossom of the rose is the metamorphosis of the green leaf of the plant.
We see a man standing before us and say: that head you are carrying is the metamorphosis of arms, hands, legs, feet of your previous incarnation, and what you now have as arms, hands, legs and feet will be changed into your head of the next incarnation.
Now, however, will come an objection that evidently sits heavily on your souls. You will say: good gracious but I leave my legs and feet behind, my arms and hands too; I do not take them into my next incarnation ... how then should my head be made out of them? It is true, this objection can be made. But once again you are coming here up against Maya. It is not true that you actually leave behind your legs, feet, hands, arms. It is indeed untrue. You say that because you still cling to Maya, the great illusion.
What indeed with the ordinary consciousness you refer to as your arms, hands, legs and feet, are not your arms, hands, legs and feet at all, but what as blood and other juices fills out the real arms, hands, feet and legs. This again is a difficult idea but it is true. Suppose that here you have arms, hands, feet and legs, but that what is here is spiritual, spiritual forces. Now please to think that your arms, hands, legs and feet are forces — super-sensible forces. Had you these alone you would not see them with your eyes; they are filled out, these forces, with juices, with the blood, and you see what as mineral substance, fluid or partly solid — the smallest part solid — fills out what is invisible (hatching in diagram 9). What you leave in the grave or what is burnt is only what might be called the mineral enclosure. Your arms and hands, legs and feet are not visible, they are forces and you take them with you, you take the forms with you. You say: I have hands and feet. Anyone who sees into the spiritual world does not say: I have hands and feet, he says; there are spirits of form, Elohim, they think cosmic thoughts, and their thoughts are my arms and hands, my legs and feet; and their thoughts are filled out with blood and other fluids. But neither are blood and the other fluids what they appear physically; these again are the ideas of spirits of wisdom, and what the physicist calls matter is only outer semblance. The physicist ought to say when he comes to matter: here I come to the thoughts of the spirits of wisdom, the Kyriotetes. And where you see arms, hands, feet, legs, you cannot touch them but should say: here the spirits of form are building into these shapes their cosmic thoughts.
Diagram 9
In short, my dear friends, strange as it sounds, there are no such things as your bodies, but where your body is in space there intermingled with one another live the cosmic thoughts of the higher hierarchies. And were you able to see correctly and not in accordance with Maya, you would say: into here there project the cosmic thoughts of the Exusiai, the spirits of form, the Elohim. These cosmic thoughts make themselves visible to me by being filled out with the cosmic thoughts of the spirits of wisdom. That gives us arms and hands, legs and feet. Nothing, absolutely nothing, as it appears in Maya is there before the spiritual vision, out there stand the cosmic thoughts. And these cosmic thoughts crowd together, are condensed, pushed into one another; for this reason they appear to us as these shadow figures of ours that go around, which we believe to have reality. Thus, as far as the physical man is concerned, he does not exist at all.
With certain justification we can say that in the hour of death the spirits of form separate their cosmic thoughts from those of the spirits of wisdom. The spirits of form take their thoughts up into the air, the spirits of wisdom sink their material thoughts into the earth. This brings it about that in the corpse an aftershadow of the thoughts of the spirits of wisdom still exists when the spirits of form have taken back their thoughts into the air. That is physical death — that is its reality.
In short, when we begin to think about the reality we come to the dissolution of what is commonly called the physical world. For this physical world derives its existence from the spirits of the higher hierarchies pushing in their intermingled thoughts, and I beg you to imagine that finely distributed quantities of water are introduced in some way which form a thick mist. That is why your body appears as a kind of shadow-form, because the thoughts of the spirits of form penetrate those of the spirits of wisdom, the formative thoughts enter the thoughts of substance. In face of this conception the whole world dissolve into the spiritual. We must, however, have the possibility of imagining the world to be really spiritual, of knowing that it is only apparent that my arms and hands, my feet and legs are given over to the earth. That is what it seems; in reality the metamorphosis of my arms and legs, hands and feet begins there and comes to completion in the life between death and a new birth, when my arms and legs, hands and feet become the head of my next incarnation.
I have been here telling you many things that perhaps at least in their form may have struck you as something strange. But what is all this ultimately of which we have been speaking but an ascending from man as he appears, to man as he really is, ascending from what lives externally in Maya to the successive ranks of the hierarchies.
It is only when we do this, my dear friends, that we are able to speak in a form that is ripe today of how man is permitted to know a so-called higher self. When we simply rant about a higher self, when we simply say: I feel a higher self within me . . . then this higher self is a mere empty abstraction with no content; for the ordinary self is in the hands of Maya, is itself Maya. The higher self has only one meaning when we speak of it in connection with the world of the higher hierarchies. To talk of the higher self without paying heed to the world that consists of the spirits of form and the angels, archangels and so on, to speak of the higher self without reference to this world, means that we are speaking of empty abstractions, and at the same time signifies that we are not talking of what lives in man between death and a new birth. For as here we live with animals, plants and minerals, between death and a new birth we live with the kingdoms of the higher hierarchies of whom we have so often spoken. Only when we gradually come nearer to these ideas and concepts (in a week, perhaps, we shall be speaking of them) shall we approach what can answer the question: why do many human beings die as mere children, many in old age, others in middle age?
Now, my dear friends, what I have just given you in outline are concrete concepts of what is real in the world. Truly they are not abstract concepts I have been describing, they are concrete concepts of world reality. These concrete concepts were given, for a more atavistic perception, it is true, in the ancient mysteries. Since the eighth pre-Christian century they have been lost to human perception, but through a deepening of our comprehension of the Christ-Being they must be found again. And this can only be realised on the path of spiritual science.
[Human evolution]
Let us make ourselves from a certain point of view another kind of picture of human evolution. We will here keep before us exceedingly important concepts.
Now it can be said that when we go back in the evolution of man we discover — and I have often described this — that in ancient days men had more of the group-soul, and that the individual souls were membered into what was group-soul. You can read about this in various cycles: [For example: Universe, Earth and Man, and Egyptian Myths and Mysteries.] we can then diagrammatically represent human evolution and say: in olden days there were group-souls and each of these split up (it would appear thus to soul perception but different for the perception of the spirit). But each of these souls clothed itself with a body that here in this figure I indicate with red strokes. (Diagram 10).
Up to the time of the Pythagorean school this drawing, or something like it, was always made and it was said: look at your body, so far as that is concerned men are separated, each having his own body (that is why the red strokes are isolated). Where the souls are concerned however, mankind is a unity, since we go back — it is true a long way back — to the group-soul. There we have a unity. If you think away the red, the white will form a unified figure (see diagram.)
Diagram 10
There is sense in speaking of this figure only if we have first spoken of the spiritual as has been done here today; for then we know everything that is working together in these souls, how the higher hierarchies are working together on these souls. There is no sense in speaking of this figure if our gaze is not fixed on the hierarchies. It was thus that they spoke up to the time of the Pythagorean School; and it was from the Pythagorean School that Apollonius learned what I spoke about yesterday and about which I shall be talking further in these next weeks. But then after the eighth pre-Christian century, when the Pythagorean Schools were in their decadence, the possibility of thus speaking was lost. And gradually the concepts that are concrete, that have reality by being related to the higher hierarchies — these concepts have become confused and hazy to people. Thus there has come to them in the place of Angels, Archangels, Archai, Spirits of Form, Spirits of Movement, Spirits of Wisdom, Thrones, instead of all this concrete weaving of the spirit, they arrived at a concept that now played a certain part in the perception of the Greeks — the concept of the pneuma. Everything became hazily confused: Pneuma, universal spirit, this indistinct concept still so loved today by the Pantheists ... spirit, spirit, spirit ... I have often spoken of how the Pantheists place spirit everywhere; that goes back to Greek life. Again this figure is portrayed ... but you can now see how what was once concrete, the fullness of the Godhead, now became an abstract concept — Pneuma. The white is Pneuma, the red physical matter (see diagram 10) if we are considering the evolution of man. The Greeks, however, at least still preserved some perception of this Pneuma, for they always saw something of the aura. Thus, for them, what you can picture in these white branches was always of an auric nature, something really perceptible. There is the great significance of the transition from that constituted Greece to all that was Roman — that the Greeks still in their perception experienced Pneuma as something actual and spiritual, but that the Romans did so no longer. Everything now becomes quite abstract with the Romans, completely abstract; concepts and nothing more. The Romans are the people of abstract concepts.
My dear friends, in our days you find in science the same diagram! You can come upon it today in materialistic books on science. You will find the same diagram, exactly the same, as you would have found in the old Mysteries, in the Pythagorean Schools, where everything was still related to the hierarchies. You have it with the Greeks where everything is related to the Pneuma; again today you find it drawn, and we shall see what it has now become. Today the scientist says as he makes this same drawing on the blackboard for his students: in the propagation of the human race the substance of the parents' germ cells passes over to the children; but part of this substance remains so that it can again pass over to the children and and again there remains some of this to pass over anew to the children. And another part of the germ cell substance develops so that it can form the cells of the physical body. You have exactly the same diagram, only the modern scientist sees in the white (see diagram) the continuity of the substance of the germ cell. He says; if we go back to our old human ancestors and take this germ cell substance of both male and female, and then go to present day man and take his, it is still the same stream, the substance is continuous. There always remains in this germ substance something eternal — so the scientist imagines — and only half of the germ plasma goes over into the new body. The scientist has still the same figure but no longer has the pneuma; the white is now for him the material germ substance — nothing is left of soul and spirit, it is just material substance. You can read this today in scientific books, and it is taken as a great and significant discovery. That is the materialising of a higher spiritual perception that has passed through the process of abstraction; in the midst stands the abstract concept. And it is really amusing that a modern scientist has written a book (for those whose thinking is sound, it is amusing) in which he says right out: what the Greeks still represented as Pneuma is today the continuity of the germ substance. Yes, it is foolish, but today it counts for great wisdom.
From this you can, however, see one thing, it is not the drawing that does it! And you will therefore understand why to a certain extent I have always been against drawing diagrams so long as we were still trying to run our Anthroposophy within the Theosophical Society. One had only to enter any theosophical branch and the walls as a rule would be plastered with all manner of diagrams; there were drawings of every possible thing with words attached; there ware whole genealogical trees and every possible kind of sketch. However, my dear friends, these drawings are not important. What matters is that we should really be able to have living conceptions; for the same drawing can represent the soul-spiritual in the flowing of hierarchies, the purely material in the continuous germ-plasm. These things are seen very hazily by modern man. Therefore it is so important to be clear that the Greeks still knew something of the real self in man, of the real spiritual and that it was the Romans who made the transition to the abstract concept. You can see all this in what is external. When the Greek talked about his Gods, he did so in a way that made it quite evident that he was still picturing concrete figures behind these Gods. For the Romans the Gods, in reality, ware only names, only expressions, abstractions and they became abstractions more and more. For Greek a certain idea was ever present that in the man before him the hierarchies were living, that in each man the hierarchies were living a different life. Thus the hierarchies were living differently in every man. The Greek knew the reality of man, and when he said, that is Alcibiades, that is Socrates, or that is Plato, he still had the concept that there in Alcibiades, Socrates or Plato ware rising up, within each in a different way, the cosmic thoughts of the hierarchies. And because the cosmic thoughts arose differently these figures appeared different.
All this was entirely lacking in the Roman. For this reason he formed for himself a system of concepts that reached its climax when from the time of Augustus on and actually from an earlier date, the Roman Caesar was held to be God. The Godhead gradually became an abstraction and the Roman Caesar was himself a God because the concept of God had become completely abstract. This applies to the rest of their concepts; and it was particularly the case with the concepts that lived deeply in the Roman nature as concepts of rights, moral concepts. Thus, in place of all that in olden days was a living reality, there arose a number of abstractions. And all these abstractions lasted on as a heritage throughout the middle ages and descended to modern times, remaining as heritage down to the nineteenth century — abstract concepts carried into every sphere.
In the nineteenth century there came something startling. Man himself was entirely lost sight of among all these abstract concepts! The Greeks still had a presentiment of the real man who descends here after being formed and fashioned out of the cosmos; in the time of the Roman empire all knowledge of him was lost. The nineteenth century was needed to rediscover him through all the connections I have been showing you and will go on showing you even more exactly. The discovery of man took place now from the opposite pole. Greece wanted to see man as descending from the hierarchies, divine man; in place of this the Romans set up a series of abstract concepts; the nineteenth century — the eighteenth century too but particularly the nineteenth — was needed to rediscover man from the other side, from his animal side. And he could not be grasped with abstract concepts; this was the great shock. This was the great shock and the deep cleft that arose; what is this actually that stands there on two legs and fidgets with its hands, and eats and drinks all manner of things; what is it? The Greeks still knew, then a change took place when concepts became abstract. Now it comes as something startling to men of the nineteenth century; it stands there and there are no concepts with which to grasp it. It is taken for simply a higher form of animal. On the one hand, in science it produces Darwinism, on the other hand, in the spiritual it brings about socialism which would place man into society as a mere animal. Here is man standing transfixed before himself — what is this thing? And he is powerless to answer the question.
That is the situation today; that is the situation that will produce not only concepts that are right or wrong according as men will them, but is called upon to create facts either catastrophic or beneficial. And the situation is — the shock men have when seeing themselves. We must find the elements once more for te understanding of spiritual man. These elements will not be found unless we turn to the theory of metamorphosis. There lies the essential point. Goethe's concepts of metamorphosis are alone able to grasp the ever changing phenomena which offer themselves to the perception of the reality.
Now one might say that spiritual evolution has always moved in this direction. Even at the time when the Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz in the seventeenth century was being published in so wonderful a way — other writings too — the endeavour was already there to provide for the arising of a social structure for man compatible with his true nature. (In Das Reich I have referred to this in a series of articles concerning The Chemical Wedding). In this way the Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz by the so-called Valentin Andreae arose. On the other hand, however, there also arose the book he called Reformation des Ganzer Menschengeschlectes (Reformation of the whole Human Race), where he gives a great political survey of how social conditions ought to be. Then, it was the thirty years war that swept the thing away! Today, there is the possibility that the ordering of the world either sweep things away once more ... or carry them right into human evolution. With this we are touching an the great fundamental questions of the day, with which men should be occupying themselves instead of with all the secondary matters that engross them. If only men concerned themselves about basic questions they would find means and ways of bringing fruitful concepts into modern reality — then we could get away from abstract concepts.
It is not very easy to distinguish reality from illusion. For that, we must have the will to go right into life with all seriousness and all good will, and not be bound down by programmes and prejudices. I could tell many tales about this but now I will refer to one fact only. In the beginning of the nineties of the last century a number of people foregathered in various towns of Europe and brought about something of an American nature, namely, the Movement for Ethical Culture. At that time it was the intellectuals who were connected with founding these societies for Ethical Culture. These people produced very beautiful things, and if today you read the articles written at that time by the promoters of Societies for Ethical Culture ... if you have a taste for butter, you will probably even today be enchanted by all the beautiful, wonderfully beautiful ideals, in which these people indulged. And indeed it was no pleasant task to go against this reveling in butter: However, I wrote an article at the time in one of the first numbers of Die Zunkunft (The Future), against all this oiliness in “ethical culture,” and denounced it in awful words. Naturally it was a shameful deed — how should it not have been when these people had set out to make the whole world ethical, moral — how should it not have been disgraceful to turn upon anything so good: At that time I was living in Weimar but on paying a visit to Berlin I had a conversation with Herman Grimm who said:
“What is the matter with ‘ethical culture'? Go and see the people themselves. You will find that here in Berlin those who hold meetings about ethics are really thoroughly nice kind people — one could not have any objection to them. They can even be congenial and very pleasant.” This was not to be denied and at the moment Herman Grimm had just as much right on his side as I had. Outwardly and momentarily, one of us was as right as the other, one could be proved right just as well as the other. And I am not for maintaining that from the point of view of pure logic my grounds for opposing these ethical philosophers were any more sound than those brought forward by them — I wouldn't be sure. But, my dear friends, from all this highfalutin idealism the present catastrophe has arisen! And only those people were right, and have been justified by events, who said at the time; with all your talking and luxuriating in buttery ideals, by means of which you would bring universal peace and universal morals to man, you have produced nothing but what I then called social carcinoma that had to end in this catastrophic present. Time has shown who was working with concrete concepts, who with merely those that are abstract. When they are simply abstract in character, there is no distinguishing who is right and who is wrong. The only thing that decides is whether a concept finds its right setting in the course of actual events. A professor teaching science in a university can naturally prove everything he says to be right in a most beautiful and logical way. And all this goes into the holes in the head (and this today I naturally may be allowed to say with the very best intention). But you see it is not a question of bringing forward apparently good logical grounds; for when these thoughts sink into a head such as Lenin's they become Bolshevism. What matters is what a thought is in reality, not what can be thought about it or felt about it in an abstract way, but what force goes to the forming of it in its reality. And if we test the world-conception that is chiefly talked of today — for the others, specified yesterday, were more in picture form — when one brings socialism to the test, it is not a question today of sitting oneself down to cram (as we say for ‘study') Karl Marx, or Lassalle, or Bernstein, to study their books, to study these authors. No! It is a question of having a feeling, a living experience for what will become of human progress if a number of men — the sort of men who stand at a machine — have these thoughts. That is what matters, and not to have thoughts about the social structure in the near future that are learnt in the customary course of modern diplomatic schooling, Now is the time when it is important to weigh thoughts so as to be able to answer the question: what are the times wanting for the coming decades? Today the time has already come when it is not allowed to sit in comfort in the various magisterial seats and to go on cherishing what is old. The time has come when men must bear the shock of seeing themselves, and when the thought must rise up in those responsible anywhere for anything:

How is this question to be solved out of the spiritual life?

1918-09-02-GA183

Synopsis

Time and Space. The Perspectivity of Time. The Influence of Ahriman and Lucifer upon Man
The nature of time by analogy with space. Man experiences only the image of real time.
Earlier periods of time relate to the present in a perspective-like way. The similarity of time to space and its constant link with all that is.
In nature Ahriman works from the past. Man follows the course of time and does not notice the perspective of time; the consequence is that ahrimanic powers are able to work within him as a present reality; by this means man separates his present existence from the spiritual domain. That he cherishes ideals is the consequence of the luciferic powers that he bears within him, powers that endeavour to tear him away from nature and spiritualize him.
The balance lies in the unconscious regions of man's being; at present it is created through the early death of children and young people. The death of old people makes the physical Earth more spiritual than it would be otherwise.
Transformation of human forms from soul-spiritual existence into their earthly human counterparts:

of the head as a result of ahrimanic influences,

of the limbs through luciferic influences.

In the region of the chest: influence of normally evolved divine beings through the living breath.
Here is also the dividing wall, our memory, through which in this threefold picture the ahrimanic powers of the head are kept separate from the luciferic powers of the extremities, and prevent a connection between the natural order and the spiritual order from taking place within us.

Lecture – still to be checked with book - from OCR

The studies in which we have been currently engaged concern matters that many of those people who know something about them in one form or another regard as mysteries. There are specific reasons why knowledge of these things is withheld from the world on a very broad scale, since the opinion is held that those particular things that are being considered are aspects of an extensive knowledge of supersensible affairs that should not yet be imparted to humanity today. I consider this view in so far as it pertains to certain matters that are being spoken about here to be mistaken, on the grounds that it appears to me to be necessary for mankind to make the courageous resolve to engage in a real study of the supersensible worlds. And the only way of achieving this is that one directly takes hold of what addresses the question under consideration in a specific way.
Today I should first of all like to deal with a sort of preliminary question. We spoke yesterday about the members of man's being between death and a new birth. A very widespread objection to the discussing of these matters—not on the part of initiates but from the uninitiated—is that one simply says: well now, why is it necessary to know anything about such things? It would be better to wait until one has passed through the gate of death, and one will see perfectly well what it is really like in the spiritual world. This is something that is often said. Now the fact of the matter is that we can never answer such questions from a hard and fast standpoint where we are speaking of realities, for in a spiritual-scientific context we always have to respond to
them from the standpoint of the times in which we are living. We live in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, which began in the fifteenth century AD. It was then, as we know, that the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, which began in the eighth century BC, came to an end. Seven such cultural epochs may be distinguished. One can discern from this that we have passed beyond the middle of the cultural development of the Earth, which had its focal point in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, and that by virtue of this fact—and we are, moreover, in the fifth great period of the Earth—we have entered the time in which the Earth is in a descending phase of evolution.
The studies in which we have been engaged in the course of these days may make you aware that we are dealing with a descending phase of evolution, with a process which is not so much one of evolution as of devolution, an evolution that has a retrogressive aspect. Our entire earthly evolution is in a retrogressive phase. Certain faculties and forces which were present in the previous period of an ascending evolution have now ceased their activity, and others now have to take their place. This is especially the case with regard to certain of man's inner faculties of soul. One can say that until the fourth post-Atlantean epoch and roughly until the time of the Mystery of Golgotha human beings still had the faculties that enabled them to have a certain connection with the supersensible world. As we know, these faculties have disappeared in all manner of different ways. They are no longer present as elemental capacities—they have simply ceased to exist. Not only has man's life on Earth between birth and death changed with respect to such faculties but there has even—and more radically—been a change in his life between death and a new birth. With respect to this period between death and a new birth it has to be said that in the present cycle of human
evolution, which is already in a descending phase, human beings will on passing through the gate of death need to have specific memories of what they have acquired here in the physical body, if they are to find a right attitude and a right relationship to the events to which they are exposed between death and a new birth. Indeed, one of the necessary
prerequisites for a life after death that is as it should be is that human individuals should before death increasingly acquire certain conceptions about the life after death; for only if they remember these ideas which they have acquired here on Earth will they be able to orientate themselves in the time between death and a new birth. It is objectively untrue
to assert that it would be possible to wait until death to concern oneself with such notions about life between death and a new birth. If people continue to cling to these prejudices, if they firmly refuse to try to explore such ideas about life between death and a new birth, this life—this disembodied existence—would become dark and disorientating for them; in the absence of everything that I described to you yesterday, they would be unable to enter in the right way into their spiritual surroundings. Until close to the time of the Mystery of Golgotha it was the case that people brought faculties into physical life which derived from the spiritual world; and this was the source of their atavistic clairvoyance. As you are well aware, the existence of this atavistic clairvoyance arose from the fact that certain spiritual faculties radiated into this life from the pre-natal condition. But instead of this the reverse now needs to happen: human beings increasingly need to acquire here on the Earth some conception of life in the post-mortem state, life after death, in order that they may be able to carry something of what they remember of this through the gate of death.
This is what I particularly want to say concerning this preliminary question. Thus the flippant talk of being able to wait until death before acquiring such thoughts is of no account if one clearly bears in mind the period of earthly evolution in which we are living. One must always keep an eye on specific details. For standpoints that are valid in the absolute sense, that are valid for all time, do not exist; there are only perceptions which can give man orientation for a certain period of time. This is a spiritual-scientific truth that one simply has to assimilate.
And now I should like to embark upon something that can bring our studies to a provisional conclusion. We started out by saying that people today are aware of a gulf between what they refer to as ideals, whether of a moral kind or from other source, and ideas, on the one hand, and what they perceive to be their views about the natural world order. The concepts and views that people have about the natural world order do not permit them to accept that the ideals that they bear within their hearts have any real power or can become realities as is possible for forces of nature.
The important point to be considered here is as follows. We now have an awareness of the way that man's being is ordered here on the physical Earth. We also have some knowledge of the organization of man's being in the spiritual world between death and a new birth. Some while ago I posed a question which confronts anyone who takes life seriously in a very real way but is the precise kind of question that one cannot even remotely address if one is aware of the aforesaid gulf between idealism and realism. The question is: why is it that in our world order many people die young, either already as children or as young people or in the prime of life, whereas others die when they are old? What connection does this have with the ordering of the world? Neither idealism, on the one hand, nor realism, which is unable to regard ideals as real forces, on the other can properly address such questions, which are nonetheless vital questions. One can, in fact, approach such questions only if one takes something quite specific into consideration. One needs to bear in mind that man as he is constituted today as an earthly human being relates fairly readily to space but not with equal facility to time. Modern philosophical viewpoints as a whole do not offer any conclusion that is worth mentioning, and the question of the essential nature of time has hitherto been addressed only amongst very limited circles of people. It is, moreover, not so easy to speak in a layman's language about time and its essential nature, but it may perhaps be possible to give you an idea of what I actually mean if I speak of time by making an analogy with space. I will have to make a claim on your patience, because the brief elucidation that I want to make appears to have a somewhat abstract character (although it really is only apparently so).
If you simply view a portion of the world of space you know that what you can see manifests itself to you in accordance with the laws of perspective. You have to take perspective into account if you are viewing a portion of the spatial world. If you now transpose the portion of the spatial world that you are looking at, and to which you instinctively ascribe the quality of perspective, to a flat surface, you take perspective into account. Thus when, for instance, you look down an avenue, you see its more distant trees smaller and closer together. You can express this in perspective by bringing what you see in space to expression on a surface in this sort of way
Diagram 1
It is obviously the case that what you see in space is adjacent on a flat surface. In space the objects are not next to one another; here you have two trees in the foreground, while two others are in the far distance [see Diagram 1]. But by bringing the portion of space that is being observed onto a surface, you place objects that are actually behind one another side by side. By contrast, you have the instinctive capacity to translate what you see painted or drawn on a surface into a spatial dimension. The reason why you have this capacity is that man as he is now as an earthly human being has to a considerable extent liberated himself from space as such.
Man has not freed himself from time in the same way. This is a fact of immense and far-reaching importance, but it is unfortunately hardly noticed—at any rate by science. Because they evolve in time, people think that they have an overview of time, that they know all about time; but as a matter of fact they do not know about real time. What they experience as time is not real time at all; its relationship to real time is something that one might call a reflection. What they generally refer to as time is related to real time in the same way that this picture [see drawing] on a flat surface is related to space. Generally speaking, people do not experience real time; rather do they experience a reflection of time, a mere image of its real nature. This can be very difficult to imagine.
It is, for example, extraordinarily difficult to envisage that something that is exerting an influence today does not need to belong to the present but has its real existence in a much earlier period of time and is not a reality in the present. You can see what was present in a very early period working as though in perspective into your own time.
What I have just said has a very significant consequence, namely that everything that we call nature has an altogether different character from all that we must regard as being a certain part of man himself. Ahriman, for example, is active in nature—and one can say the same of ahrimanic forces. But ahrimanic forces are never an active force in nature in a present context. If you look at nature as a whole, Ahriman is indeed to be found working there; but his activity derives from a far distant time. Ahriman works from the past. And whether you are surveying the mineral, the plant or the animal kingdom you should never be saying that Ahriman is active in anything that is spread out before your eyes at the present time. Nevertheless, Ahriman is active in all of this—but from the past. So if I were to present what I am saying in the form of a diagram, I would have to say: here is the line of evolution from the past to the future, and here you are surveying the natural world.

Diagram 2

Yes, you must imagine that you are looking at the world of nature from this point. There is no trace of ahrimanic forces in what you are surveying as a present reality, but the influence of Ahriman is exerted upon nature from the past, from a specific period in the past.
When, moreover, you become aware of Ahriman in nature, he appears to you in a kind of temporal perspective. If you were to say that Ahriman is active in the present, you would be making the same mis-

Diagram 3

take with regard to nature as if you were to say: When I look at a scene in space, the trees in the far distance are beside those in the foreground (on the grounds that they can be placed in perspective on a flat surface). {See Diagram 13
A fundamental requirement for a true perception of the spiritual world is that one learns to see in perspective in a temporal sense, that one learns to place every being in the point of time where it belongs.
When I told you yesterday that the I after death is in a certain sense transmuted from a condition of mobility into one that is more fixed, that is not all that is to be said on this subject and something more needs to be added. Let us suppose that you had been living here on Earth with your I from 1850 until 1920, and in 1920 you became aware of your I. What I mean is this: you will probably have been aware of it before, but now you look back, you look back upon your egoI with the Spirit Self through the hierarchies, and you see that your I has been at a constant standstill from 1850 until 1920. The I is present, but it does not progress. This means that your experiences do not accompany you shortly after your death but instead you look back at them, you look back on them from a perspective that is distant in a temporal sense; and you perceive a sequence of time just as you perceive spatial distance here in the physical world.
I can also express it as follows. If, shall we say, you die in 1920, you go on living with all that I have described to you yesterday as the members of your being; but you look back at the stretch of time when you have been living here on Earth with your I. This stretch of time remains as it is, and you continue to see it where it belongs in the time sequence, inasmuch as you are living with a sense of perspective. It is in such a way that you must picture Ahriman involved in external nature, though from a former point in time.

This is very important, and it is something that is barely considered. If one is wanting to understand the world, if one wants to speak about time in a spiritual-scientific way, one must conceive of time in a spatial-like way and take this on-going connection of reality with time into account. This is very important.

Now what I have said with regard to the ahrimanic powers, namely that they work from out of the past, is correct as far as nature is concerned. But the situation with man is different. In the course of man's life between birth and death, everything that takes place in time becomes maya or illusion for him. While he lives here on Earth he himself lives in the course of time, and by living a certain number of years he lives through this temporal sequence along with them. As time passes, so does he himself accompany it. This is not the case with space. If you walk down an avenue, the trees remain behind as you move forwards, and you do not take the trees that have remained behind—thus also your impressions of them—along with you in such a way that as you take a step you had the idea that your image of the trees is accompanying you. This is what you do in the case of a temporal image. Because you are yourself evolving in time, what you actually do in the physical body is that over time you surrender to an illusion with regard to your perspective. You do not notice the perspective of time, and the subconscious part of our human nature is particularly unaware of it. Man's subconsciousness is really blind to this aspect of living with time and has a totally illusory relationship to the perspective of time. This does, however, have a quite specific consequence, which is that ahri-manic forces are enabled to work within man as forces belonging to the present. Ahrimanic forces exert an influence upon man's inner life as forces of the present. So this is how man relates to nature. As he looks out upon nature, there is nothing ahrimanic in the present, but it works in fact as maya, as an illusion. But man has surrendered himself to this illusion with regard to what I have been explaining to you, with the result that the ahrimanic powers gain through man the possibility of creeping into the present, of migrating into our present time. We can say that the ahrimanic powers—and the same also applies to the luci-feric powers, although from a somewhat different aspect of which we shall speak shortly—are active in nature in such a way that they do not actually have anything to do with the present but are extending their influence into it from an earlier period of time; whereas within man these ahrimanic powers are working as a present reality.
What is the consequence? The consequence of this is that, because of the point that I have just been making, man is unable to feel any relationship to nature in his deepest inner being. He observes his own being and is aware of his feelings, while sensing the working of nature's laws. Because ahrimanic forces are present-day realities within him whereas in nature they are forces from the past, everything that is in accordance with nature appears to him to be different from what is evolving within his own being. He does not understand the difference that he observes between himself and nature in the right way. Were he to resolve it in the right way it would be as I have just explained. He would say: Out there in nature Ahriman's influence extends from out of the past; in me Ahriman is active as a force belonging to the present. What happens as a result is that, while he may not be conscious of the difference, he acts in accordance with it; and he experiences nature as devoid of spirit. He may no doubt feel that the ahrimanic forces are not working directly within nature at the present time, but he experiences nature as devoid of spirit because, rather than say to himself that Ahriman is working from out of the past, he sees nature only as it is now; and Ahriman is no longer active there.
Now however strange it may sound, Ahriman is nonetheless that power which is used by the creative powers of the world to bring nature into being. When one speaks of the spirit of nature, of the true spirit of nature, one should actually be speaking of the spirit of Ahriman. Here Ahriman is fully justified. The beings of the normal hierarchies make use of the ahrimanic spirit to bring about the nature that is spread everywhere around us. The reason why we do not experience nature as permeated with spirit is that the spirit is not included in the present life of nature but its influence extends from out of the past. This, I may say, is the secret of the creative powers of the world, that they make use of a spirit whom they have allowed to remain at an earlier stage to exert his influence at a later stage, while enabling him to work from out of the past.
When we are speaking of nature, we should be speaking neither of matter nor of forces but, rather, of ahrimanic beings; but we should be speaking in such a way that we place these ahrimanic beings in the past. Thus a strange thing emerges from this. Imagine some philosopher of nature who is speculating about what lies behind all the phenomena of nature. Well, he forms all kinds of theories and hypotheses about atomic relationships and the like. But this is not the point. Behind what is spread out around us and visible to our senses is not what the philosophers of nature generally suppose to be there, because behind all this is the totality of ahrimanic forces, though not as present realities. If, therefore, the philosopher of nature feels obliged to postulate the existence of atomic structures of some sort behind the chemical elements, he would be mistaken; behind the chemical elements are ahrimanic forces. Were you to be able to unveil and look behind what you see of the chemical elements, you would not see anything there at present. Where people look for atoms it would be hollow, and what is active there is working into this hollow space from out of the past. This is how it is in reality. Hence these numerous unfortunate theories regarding what the 'thing in itself' is; for this 'thing in itself' is not there at all at present. In the place where people look for the 'thing in itself, there is nothing; but the influence there derives from the past. So one could say that when Kant' was searching for his 'thing in itself', he should have said: I cannot approach what I am wanting to reach as the `thing in itself'. This is what he did also say. But he did not realize that he had not found anything at all belonging to the present, and that if he had gone behind the veil of phenomena and had gone far back into the past he would have found the ahrimanic powers.
With man himself the situation is different. Through the very fact that man participates in time as a living being, it has been possible for the ahrimanic powers to gain entry to our world through the portal of humanity and to work in a corresponding way within man. The consequence of this activity of the ahrimanic powers in man is that he disconnects what he sees in the present from the spirit, that he separates his present existence from the spiritual domain. This is the result of the fact that we bear ahrimanic forces in the state of maya within us. Thus one can say that our perception of the world as a material entity bereft of spirit, as a mere natural order whose culmination is thought to be found in the law of the conservation of energy and matter (which is an illusion), that this is what we regard to be the natural order is entirely due to the circumstance that we bear ahrimanic forces within us and not that they exist in nature as forces of the present. Our conception of nature as something conceived of in a purely material way does not, therefore, correspond with nature as such but only with nature as it is at present. But this present reality of nature is an abstraction, because Ahriman's influence upon it is always exerted from out of the past.
However, not only is an ahrimanic influence active within man but also one emanating from Lucifer. This luciferic influence has in a certain sense a different tendency in the universe from that of Ahriman, which we can visualize in the way that we have been describing. Ahriman's influence within us tends towards a materialistic conception of the world. That we conceive of the world in a materialistic way and think only in terms of a natural order is the result of the ahrimanic influence that we bear within us; whereas our propensity to cherish ideals that are disconnected from the world of nature, ideals in accordance with which we would wish to govern our mutual relationships but which in the context of our present world-conception necessarily have the quality of mere dreams that will vanish into oblivion when the Earth has reached the end-point determined for it by natural law, is the consequence of the constant striving of the luciferic forces, which live in us as do the ahrimanic forces, to wrench that part of us that is accessible to them wholly out of the natural order and to spiritualize it in its entirety. The main tendency of the luciferic forces, in so far as they dwell within us, is to make us as spiritual as possible, to tear us wherever possible away from material life of any kind. They therefore lead us to believe in ideals that have no validity in the natural world and are powerless in the present world order. If in the course of future earthly periods man were wholly to succumb to the luciferic influence, so that he believed that ideals are mere intellectual formulations to which feelings must be subordinate, he would be following the powers of Lucifer. The material Earth to which we belong would disintegrate, would disappear without trace in the cosmic expanses and would fail to fulfil its purpose, and the luciferic powers would lead man to another spiritual world to which he does not belong. To this end they need to employ the stratagem of leading us to believe in ideals that are actually mere dreams. Just as Ahriman, on the one hand, deceives us with a world that is nothing but a natural order, so does Lucifer, on the other hand, present us with a world that consists only of fabricated ideals.
This is something that is highly significant; and at present some kind of adjustment can only be made in those regions that lie in the unconscious areas of man's being. Human beings, must, however, become increasingly conscious of these matters, otherwise they will not extricate themselves from this dilemma or succeed in building the necessary bridge between idealism and realism.
What creates some kind of adjustment in our time is the following. When at present young people die, for example children, these children (and it is similar with all young people) have only glimpsed at the world; they have not fully lived out their lives on the physical plane. They arrive in the other world—the world between death and a new birth, which unfolds in the way I described yesterday—with a life that has not been fulfilled on the physical plane. By living only a part of their earthly life, they bring something into the spiritual world from the earthly life that one cannot bring when one has become old. One enters the spiritual world differently when one has grown old from if one dies young. If one dies young, one has lived one's life in such a way that one still has many of the forces that one had before birth in the spiritual world. Because of this one has established an intimate connection between the spiritual forces that one has brought with one and the physical existence that one has experienced here; and through this intimate connection it is possible to take into the spiritual world something of what has been acquired on the Earth. Children and others who have died young take into the spiritual world something from the earthly life that cannot by any means be carried over by someone who dies as an older person. What is carried over in this way is then in the spiritual world; and what children and young people bring with them gives the spiritual world a certain gravity which it would not otherwise have, thus giving this same spiritual world in which people are living together a quality that prevents the luciferic powers from completely severing the connection between the spiritual and physical worlds.
Just think what a tremendous mystery we are beholding here! When children and young people die, they take something with them from here by means of which they impede the luciferic powers in their efforts to separate us completely from earthly life. It is of the greatest importance that one keeps this in mind.
If one lives longer here on the Earth, one cannot upset the calculations of the luciferic powers in the same way; for from a certain age one no longer has that intimate connection between what one brought with one at birth and physical earthly life. Once a person has become old this inner connection is dissolved, and the exact opposite now occurs. From a certain age onwards we gradually imbue the spiritual aspect of the physical Earth with our own being. We make the physical Earth more spiritual than it would have been otherwise. Thus from a certain age we spiritualize the physical Earth in a certain way that is imperceptible to the senses. We bring a spiritual quality to the physical Earth, just as we endow the spiritual world with a physical quality when we die young; when we grow old we exude a certain spirituality—I cannot express it in any other way. From a spiritual point of view growing old consists in a sense of exuding a spiritual quality here on the Earth. In this way the calculations of Ahriman are upset. It is because of this that Ahriman cannot in the long run have so intense an influence on human beings today that their conviction that ideals have a certain significance can be completely extinguished. Nevertheless, we are at present very close to a situation where people will fall prey to the most dreadful errors with regard to these very things. Even well-meaning people will easily succumb to such errors in this particular area. These errors will grow to an ever greater magnitude, and as earthly evolution advances they may well assume gigantic proportions.
To give you an example, there is a really intelligent philosopher called Robert Zimmermann2 who in 1882 wrote a book called Anthroposophy. I have already mentioned this in a certain context. This 'anthroposophy' is not what we now call anthroposophy, it is more or less a tangle of different concepts; but this is because Robert Zimmermann could not see into the spiritual world and was merely a Herbartian philosopher. Nevertheless, he has written this Anthroposophy. But in this Anthroposophy Robert Zimmermann concerns himself from his own standpoint with the question that in the course of these days I have placed on the top of our agenda. On the one hand he sees ideas, logical ideas, aesthetic ideas, ethical ideas; on the other he sees the natural order. And he is completely unable to find a bridge from these logical, aesthetic and ethical ideas to the natural order but instead holds firmly to the thought that on the one hand there is the natural world and on the other the world of ideas. His conclusion is, in fact, extraordinarily interesting, for it is thoroughly typical of someone today. He ends up by saying that it is inherently impossible for man to furnish nature with ideas and to endow ideas with a force of nature. The two worlds can actually only be brought together in people's heads. This is what he says. Hence in one context where he is summing up everything that he is saying and thinking he makes the following statement: 'The realization of ideas belongs neither to the past nor to the present but is a task whose fulfilment lies in the future and in the hands of human beings. The dream of a "golden age" regarding which a sober rationalist like Kant (in the form of his notion of "everlasting peace") and an extreme positivist like Comte3 (in his itat positif) went into such raptures, will be fulfilled when the whole world of ideas becomes real and the whole of reality is imbued with ideas. That is to say, when what Schiller`' called "the secret art of the master", the "extermination of matter through form" is made manifest or, in the words of Schleiermacher,5 "when ethics have become physics and physics ethics".'
Yes—but this can never be! The only way that this can happen is for human beings to bring ideas to fulfilment in their social organization. But when the Earth has come to an end the whole dream-world of ideas will have vanished. No other outcome is possible according to such a philosophy. Hence a philosophy of this nature always remains abstract and must ultimately arrive at the following position:6 'A philosophy such as this is not, like theosophy, based on a theosophical standpoint inaccessible to human knowledge and which considers the "dream of reason" to be something long since realized, nor does it, like anthropology, rest upon the admittedly anthropocentric but nevertheless uncritical standpoint of common experience, which regards a reality penetrated with ideas as a mere "dream of reason"; it is at once anthropocentric, that is, it emanates from human experience, and yet also philosophy, because it seeks to reach out beyond experience by way of logical thought. I therefore call it anthroposophy.' So 'anthroposophy' is here the admission that one can never bridge the gulf between unreal ideas and a reality bereft of ideas.
Now there is in man himself a being of nature which therefore belongs to the natural order, while having a connection with a spiritual being who can receive spiritual substance. An anthroposophist such as Robert Zimmermann does not deny this. But the way that man is regarded by modern science is such that the riddle cannot be solved by man, by the microcosm.
Let us now recall something that we have already mentioned during these days. We said that we must actually divide man into three parts—not, of course, so simply as with the skeleton, as I have already explained. However, I have also spoken about this in the concluding notes of my book The Riddles of the Soul.' We can divide man into three parts: the head, the trunk and the extremities; the latter term encompasses everything that relates internally to the extremities, including the sexual organs. If we divide man's being in such a way and now turn to something that we already know—that the form or shape of the head is indicative of forces from the previous incarnation and actually only the middle region of the trunk belongs to the present—then after what I have explained today you will no longer find it so incredible if I tell you this about the head. The head that a person bears goes back to the previous incarnation, to the past. Forces from the past, ahrimanic forces, exert their influence upon the head, and what applies to ahrimanic forces in general is of particular validity for the human head. Everything relating to the form of the human head does not really belong to the present, for the head is a receptive vessel for the forces of the previous incarnation; and the creative powers make use of the ahrimanic powers in order to form our head, in order to give our head the form that it has. If the creative powers were not to avail themselves of the ahrimanic spirits to form our head, we would—forgive me, but this is how it is—in addition to having a much softer head all have the head of an animal: one person who is like a bull in his character would have a bull's head, another person who has the nature of a lamb would have a lamb's head, and so on. It is due to the influence of the ahrimanic forces that are made use of by the creative powers to give us our form that this animal head which we would otherwise have to bear does not actually crown our bodies, as the Egyptians depicted many of their figures; that we are spared from going about looking like these Egyptian figures (which had good reason to look as they did, because such things were also taught in the Egyptian mysteries, albeit from an atavistic standpoint, and are sometimes also taught today); and that, moreover, we do not go around as they did in Rosicrucian pictures,8 where every woman is painted with a lion's head and every man with that of an ox. This was how the Rosicrucians painted human beings. They chose a more average kind of animal and therefore gave women a lion's head, which for the most part had a greater resemblance to women, while the men were given the head of an ox or bull, because of its greater resemblance to them. So when you see Rosicrucian figures of a man and a woman placed next to one another, the woman with her beautiful leonine head and the man with that of a bull, this is perfectly correct. That the metamorphosis—I mean this now in a Goethean sense—is able to take its course, that our head which in its form has a tendency towards the animal nature is formed in accordance with its human shape, we owe to the influence of the ahrimanic powers. If the Gods had not availed themselves of Ahriman's services in forming our bony head, we would be walking around with animal heads.
The divine powers also, however, make use of the luciferic spirits. If they did not do so, the extremities, or our limb system, would not be able to undergo a transformation from our present incarnation to the one that follows. For this the luciferic beings are necessary. We owe it to the luciferic beings that when we die the present form of our limbs is gradually transformed into the further form that belongs to the next incarnation. In the middle of the path between death and a new birth Ahriman then has to intervene in order to undertake the other task of re-moulding our head in the appropriate way. Just as we would be going about with animal heads if we did not have Ahriman to thank for providing us with human ones, our limb nature would not be metamorphosed into its human aspect by the next incarnation but would instead take on a demonic aspect. We do in any event lose the head that we have now when we die, not merely as material substance which is united with the Earth but also in terms of its form; and we do indeed bring into our next incarnation what becomes head out of what is carried over from our limb system. But what is thus carried over would become demonic if we did not have the luciferic powers that are connected with us to thank that the transformation can take place from a demon of a purely soul-spiritual nature to the human form of the next incarnation.
So both ahrimanic and luciferic powers must cooperate in order for us to become human beings, and the essentially human aspect cannot be
understood without taking into account the help given by both Ahriman and Lucifer. As regards its future, mankind cannot dispense with really understanding the influences of Ahriman and Lucifer. The Bible tells us with absolute justice that the God spoken of at the beginning of the biblical story breathed into man the living breath. But the living breath works within the trunk, or the middle system of man's being. Thus in so far as our concern is with those divine beings who work in a normal way, we are dealing only with this middle system. To the extent that we have to do with the human head, we are dealing with an opponent of the powers of Jehovah and, hence, also with an adversary of Christ; and to the extent that our concern is with man's limb system, we are dealing with the luciferic adversary.
So one will only understand man if one conceives of him in these three aspects. In the Group that is to stand at the focal point of our building you therefore have this trinity of aspects: the Representative of Humanity, who is fashioned in such a way that here the forces of breathing, of the trunk, are given prominence, the activity of the heart and so forth. This is the central figure. Then there is that figure in which is active everything of a headlike nature, Ahriman, and that figure in which there works everything connected with the extremities or limbs, Lucifer.
One has to divide the being of man in this way if one is wanting to understand him, for in the individual human being man as such is united with Ahriman and Lucifer. At the same time this is indicative of the fact that everything that is more or less associated with human thinking, which is of course with respect to its physical context bound up with the head (human thinking is enacted on the basis of perceptions as a process associated with the outward senses), has an ahrimanic character. We perceive nature mainly through the senses of the head, and we form for ourselves a picture of nature with the ahrimanic character just described because we ourselves bear the ahrimanic principle in the way that our head has been formed.
Ideals, on the other hand, from the inner, psychological standpoint (I shall return to this on a subsequent occasion '°) have a great deal to do with love, with everything that belongs to the extremities or the limb system. Because of this the luciferic power has a ready access to ideals. Ahriman takes hold of us through our head, Lucifer through our extremities. It is through our head that Ahriman deludes us into conceiving of nature as devoid of spirit; while through our limbs Lucifer misleads us into conceiving of ideals that lack any connection with the forces of the natural world.
The task of man today is to arrive at a true overview by seeing such things as a whole. You will then see that there is in us a certain barrier that divides us, and that this barrier is in the middle of our trunk, thus separating the head forces, which are ahrimanic in nature, from the luciferic forces, which belong to the limb system. If, through a mystical insight into our own being, we were able to look right through ourselves, we would indeed understand the natural order by means of our head but we would also gain insight into ourselves by means of the natural order. And if the luciferic powers in us were to have things their own way, they would also enlighten us about the ahrimanic powers, and we would in this way arrive at a connection between the natural order and the domain of spirit. But there is a particular reason why we cannot do this, and this is that we have a memory. Everything that we receive from nature by way of ideas, concepts and impressions we store up in our memory. And if this here [see Diagram 41 is a diagrammatic representation of the head region, if this represents the chest region and trunk and this the extremities or limbs, it is the dividing wall in the trunk region that leads to what we take in of the natural order by way of our head to return to us as the substance of memory. This is why we do not reach down in our perception to where the luciferic influence is active, and why we do not observe the ahrimanic influence, just as we do not see what is behind a mirror but only what is being reflected. Here the natural order is reflected in what separates the ahrimanic from the luciferic in us and is at the same time the basis for our memory, for the power of recollection that is thereby being formed. If we were unable to remember the things that we have experienced, if this dividing wall were not there, if in looking into ourselves we were to see right through, we would look right down to the luciferic influence in us, and we would also perceive the ahrimanic influence.
But now consider for a moment. What we are shown in this mirror is precisely that which we live through in the course of life, and it is this that we look back upon after death, it is from out of this that a mobile or fluid ego becomes one that is firmly fixed. This is what we look back upon, this is what accompanies our life. And Ahriman and Lucifer work along with us, and in such a way that Ahriman enables us to bear a human head and Lucifer enables us to avoid becoming a demon, thus giving us the possibility of attaining a further incarnation.
I have been somewhat trying your patience with matters that are perhaps rather more difficult to understand, but I wanted to evoke at least a sense for the actual reason why the gulf between idealism and realism has arisen. It has arisen through the fact that Lucifer inspires us with idealism that is powerless in nature and that Ahriman calls forth within us a picture of the natural order which appears to us as utterly devoid of spirit. So the idealists, the abstract idealists, are under a luciferic influence, and materialists are under an ahrimanic influence. It is necessary that one should concern oneself with such things, that instead of adhering rigidly to a system in the name of theosophy one considers these matters in greater detail; for it is necessary that man becomes aware that he needs to put some energy into ensuring that he will be able to remain united with the spirit for the rest of earthly evolution. This is an uncomfortable truth, one might even say a hateful truth—hateful, because it runs counter to so much that people like, that they like because it suits them to do so. There could be no greater challenge for people today than to be told that if they want to retain their connection with the spirit they need to do something about it. Most people would prefer the Mystery of Golgotha to have occurred in order that they should not have to do anything about their situation, that their sins have been redeemed by Christ and they can go to heaven without any effort of their own. This is why most theologians are so incensed by anthroposophy, because of course from an anthroposophical standpoint it will never be acknowledged that there is nothing that man has to do in order to maintain his connection with the spirit, that in the future of earthly evolution this will simply proceed without any contribution on his part. The connection between the physical and the spiritual domains, between the members of man's being as they are between birth and death and between death and a new birth, is one that will be put into question in the course of future earthly evolution, and it will only avoid entering into a state of disorder if human beings are really able to concern themselves with the spirit with the future in mind. There is spiritual-scientific evidence for this today. This evidence contains highly uncomfortable truths, but they shed light on matters that are of the greatest importance and significance.
The connection between man's soul and spirit and his physical and etheric nature in the present has, I would say, already become very loose, and people today need to be increasingly awake lest something happens with respect to the connection between their physical and etheric bodies and the soul-spiritual aspects of their being that could lead to these latter aspects being as it were sucked out of them. For if prejudices such as that there is no need during life to know anything about how things will be after one's death become more and more pronounced, or if the gulf between so-called idealism and the purely natural order becomes ever wider, there is the danger of an increasing possibility of losing one's soul. There is today still a safeguard against this happening, in that when young people die the spiritual world is endowed with a certain gravity and Lucifer's calculations are upset, and when old people die so much spirituality is exuded into the physical world that Ahriman's calculations are put into disarray. But one should not forget that as human beings renounce their connection with the spiritual domain the ahrimanic and luciferic powers will become ever mightier and that gradually, as the Earth descends ever further into a state of devolution, this wall of defence will no longer be able to be fully effective.
What I should like to see is that a sort of basic theme should result from our studies in the form of a feeling—and feelings are always the most important aspect of what can arise from spiritual-scientific activity—for the need to give proper attention to spiritual matters from the present cycle of Earth evolution onwards. I have emphasized from a variety of different viewpoints that from our present time onwards human beings need to focus their attention on spiritual concerns. And the only way in which this can be achieved in times to come is that people really make the effort to understand and assimilate—as opposed to resist—even such difficult matters as we have been preoccupied with in the course of these days and especially today. There needs to be an understanding for the perspectivity of time. When people have arrived at an understanding of the perspectivity of time, they will no longer say: here is idealism, but it is only a dream which has no power to influence the natural world, and on the other hand is the natural order, but they will have come to recognize that the ideals that live within us are seeds for the future, and the natural order is the fruit of the past.
This sentence expresses a golden rule: every ideal is a seed for a future event in nature; every natural event is the fruit of a spiritual event in the past. Only by means of this rule can one find the bridge between idealism and realism. But something else is necessary if this is to happen. No ideal has ever existed or could ever be the seed for a future event in nature if this future event were to be prevented by what is happening in the natural world now. We can look at some such hypothesis. Let us consider the possibility, which indeed applies today, that through the so-called law of entropy earthly evolution enters into a state of general warming and that all other natural forces cease. In such an ultimate state such as this all ideals would of course fade into oblivion. Such an ultimate state is a natural consequence of the supposition that present physical conditions will continue purely in accordance with the law of causality. If one thinks on the lines of present-day physics that—according to the law of the conservation of energy and matter11—such an ultimate state will indeed arise, there is no place for an ideal to be absorbed into a natural event in the future, for any future event will simply be the consequence of a present event in nature. But this is not the case. Things are not what they appear to be according to the present conception of nature but can be viewed quite differently. Everything existing today as matter and energy will at a certain point in the future no longer be there. There is no such thing as a law of conservation of matter and energy. Where one seeks matter there is nothing other than the influence of a previous ahrimanic activity, and what surrounds us by way of the sense-perceptible world will after a certain time no longer exist. And if everything that is now of a physical nature is no longer there, if everything has been completely dissolved, the time will have come when present ideals in the form of natural occurrences will have been added to what is now being destroyed.
This is how it is in the wider universe. The situation for the human individual is that he will incarnate again in the next period of cosmic evolution, when the conditions in which he has lived during the present incarnation have to some extent been overcome, thus when an environment can be created for him that is different from the present one, when all that binds him now to the Earth has disappeared from the present environment. When everything has changed in such a way that he can experience something new, this is when he will reincarnate. The present ideals that can be formed in man will be nature once everything that is nature at present no longer exists and something new has arisen. But the new that arises is none other than the spirit that has become nature.
We must find the bridge over the abyss behind the natural phenomena and the ideals. This is what we need to discover. We can
reach it today if we do not shrink from developing our concepts so forcefully that they are themselves able to become realities. Thus the need in our modern times is to enter fully into everything that can be learnt of a spiritual nature. But allow me to add that it will be most important for there to be an ever greater degree of open-mindedness with regard to spiritual matters. The day before yesterday I referred to what is hindering the growth of spiritual science specifically from within the Anthroposophical Society. Above all else a genuine open-mindedness needs ever and again to be cultivated in this realm. Time and again we experience that the disintegrative tendency that brought about materialism and led to the destruction of the old spirituality has also, by way of human thinking, pervaded the spiritual domain and specifically where spiritual aims are being pursued. I have already drawn attention to how materialistic a lot of theosophical conceptions can be. It is of course not easy when one is discussing matters of a spiritual-scientific nature to find the right words, because our language today is no longer suited to spiritual concepts and because we must once again seek a connection between language and what we want to convey that is appropriate for spiritual things. But it is necessary that we avoid damaging the anthroposophical movement by what is so especially harmful. We need to characterize matters of a spiritual nature in an open-minded way. Again and again I find myself being asked about people who, it is said, are having spiritual experiences. The essence of the questions that are frequently asked is: should one blindly accept the truth of what this or that person sees? If one responds affirmatively to the question, this gives rise to blind devotion; if one replies in the negative, what happens is that the person in question is immediately branded as a heretic and is told that his clairvoyance is atavistic and is therefore of no account. Well, this either-or way of dealing with these matters must really be transformed. We must approach statements about spiritual phenomena with a thoroughly healthy intelligence. But if we want to be dogmatic, we cannot be spiritual scientists. If we either idolize people or condemn them for heresy, we cannot become spiritual scientists. There will be infinite numbers of worthy contributions towards characterizing the spiritual world from quarters that one might not regard as absolutely reliable.
It may also happen that people start singing the praises of an individual with clairvoyant faculties. It may then transpire that this person has been glossing over a few things or even maybe quite a lot, and this individual is then strongly repudiated. The same people who formerly idolized him now reject him altogether.
Well, one cannot make any progress as human beings in this fashion. No progress is possible with this 'either-or' of adulating people or condemning them for heresy but only by approaching things with one's healthy human understanding. It may, for example, also happen that something wholly true, important and essential emerges from the spiritual world through someone whom one knows to be perfectly capable of telling outrageous lies.
One would not arrive at this 'either-or' situation to which I am referring if instead of introducing dogmatic ideas one endeavoured to work within this anthroposophical movement with one's healthy powers of reason. That is the one thing. The other is this, that because of the way that things are frequently dealt with in our circles it is extraordinarily difficult for the Anthroposophical Society to find its place in the cultural life of the present time. If this is to happen a certain discernment is required from those people who are involved with the Society; and those who are involved in it have a growing obligation to exercise such powers of discrimination. For the Anthroposophical Society will have completely lost its way if we do not try to form a connection with the wider cultural movements of our time, if we again and again fall into the error of practising sectarianism. It will be the death of our movement if we become sectarian. You need only think that the kind of things that we have been discussing in the course of these days would not be considered particularly strange by someone who is in the midst of the scientific and cultural life of the present time, provided that he were to approach them in a sufficiently unprejudiced way. But in order to accomplish anything of this sort the will to discriminate needs to be present. It easily happens that the question as to whether someone or other should be allowed to listen to anthro-posophical lectures or be given one of the cycles to read is asked in a somewhat theoretical way, without taking into account the level of education or general circumstances of the person concerned. This theoretical approach does us a great deal of harm. It is responsible for the fact that a person such as the one in Holland around whom all manner of mischief has been crystallizing is able to drift into the Anthroposophical Society and find there people who protect him, whereas others who possess good judgement are often repelled by such conduct.
I shall now give you a specific instance. Some time ago Herr von Bernus12 joined the Anthroposophical Society with the clear intention—the evaluation of which is open to anyone with a healthy human intelligence—of building a bridge between the wider cultural environment, the literary and scientific life of the present, and our anthroposophical life. Now, Herr von Bernus has, for example, in his own way recast a number of things that I have said both in my books and in my lectures in his own poetic style and published the result. He has himself shown me the pile of letters of complaint that he has received for having made what was for once a timely effort to carry out his intention! One can hardly be surprised if someone for whom I dare say much is at stake could well be repelled by such behaviour to which he was subjected then by the Anthroposophical Society. Nevertheless, the journal that he founded13 will be of immense service to the anthroposophical movement. He also enabled the anthroposophical movement in Munich to be represented in his art gallery.14 But one could observe a certain resistance to something that was both justified and possible! If one considers von Bernus's experiences as a whole, one has a true picture of what both the anthroposophical movement and the Anthroposophical Society need to learn in order to be a real Society.
To the extent that the building in Dornach has come into being, it is a Society. But much else has not been achieved, which plainly shows that the Anthroposophical Society does not regard itself as a Society but as a collection of separate little sectarian circles. We must really emerge from this stage of sectarianism; but we shall not be able to do so unless we give some serious thought to what we are trying to achieve.
It is so very difficult to say such things, and indeed one says them with great reluctance, but there is nevertheless much that is necessary for me to say because I am personally so strongly involved with this anthroposophical movement of ours. If the Anthroposophical Society is increasingly developing towards the point where it is becoming a Society with the explicit tendency of reducing me to silence—a tendency that is actually growing, and one that has always existed—it is not a matter of personal vanity if I emphasize this. I am most reluctant to have to say this, but the tendency towards reducing me to silence is one that is becoming a common feature in the Anthroposophical Society, and so the personal element is interconnected with our practical concerns. Because the Society has not been behaving as a Society should, what has been rising to the surface like poisonous scum are the derogatory comments that lapsed members have been putting out into the world.
These are indeed matters that I sometimes have to point out and which cannot remain unspoken. I have alluded to them in places where I have been able to speak recently, because I firmly believe that in these tragic times much depends on anthroposophy being presented to the world in the right way. But it is so difficult to bring about some deeper reflection regarding the question: what can be done within the domain of anthroposophy to enable the Anthroposophical Society to become a real Society? Initial efforts are indeed being made by certain individuals, but generally speaking nothing gets beyond these early beginnings. But now that I have drawn attention once more to these matters, I would hope that some further thought can be given to them. I say this not for personal reasons but out of the necessities of the times, just as from what I have presented in the course of these days you will be able to derive some fruitful ideas which can help you to understand the catastrophic times in which we are living.
[Words written on the blackboard)
Every ideal is a seed for a future event in nature.
Every natural event is the fruit of a spiritual event in the past.
important for there to be an ever greater degree of open-mindedness with regard to spiritual matters. The day before yesterday I referred to what is hindering the growth of spiritual science specifically from within the Anthroposophical Society. Above all else a genuine open-mindedness needs ever and again to be cultivated in this realm. Time and again we experience that the disintegrative tendency that brought about materialism and led to the destruction of the old spirituality has also, by way of human thinking, pervaded the spiritual domain and specifically where spiritual aims are being pursued. I have already drawn attention to how materialistic a lot of theosophical conceptions can be. It is of course not easy when one is discussing matters of a spiritual-scientific nature to find the right words, because our language today is no longer suited to spiritual concepts and because we must once again seek a connection between language and what we want to convey that is appropriate for spiritual things. But it is necessary that we avoid damaging the anthroposophical movement by what is so especially harmful. We need to characterize matters of a spiritual nature in an open-minded way. Again and again I find myself being asked about people who, it is said, are having spiritual experiences. The essence of the questions that are frequently asked is: should one blindly accept the truth of what this or that person sees? If one responds affirmatively to the question, this gives rise to blind devotion; if one replies in the negative, what happens is that the person in question is immediately branded as a heretic and is told that his clairvoyance is atavistic and is therefore of no account. Well, this either-or way of dealing with these matters must really be transformed. We must approach statements about spiritual phenomena with a thoroughly healthy intelligence. But if we want to be dogmatic, we cannot be spiritual scientists. If we either idolize people or condemn them for heresy, we cannot become spiritual scientists. There will be infinite numbers of worthy contributions towards characterizing the spiritual world from quarters that one might not regard as absolutely reliable.
It may also happen that people start singing the praises of an individual with clairvoyant faculties. It may then transpire that this person has been glossing over a few things or even maybe quite a lot, and this individual is then strongly repudiated. The same people who formerly idolized him now reject him altogether.
Well, one cannot make any progress as human beings in this fashion. No progress is possible with this 'either-or' of adulating people or condemning them for heresy but only by approaching things with one's healthy human understanding. It may, for example, also happen that something wholly true, important and essential emerges from the spiritual world through someone whom one knows to be perfectly capable of telling outrageous lies.
One would not arrive at this 'either-or' situation to which I am referring if instead of introducing dogmatic ideas one endeavoured to work within this anthroposophical movement with one's healthy powers of reason. That is the one thing. The other is this, that because of the way that things are frequently dealt with in our circles it is extraordinarily difficult for the Anthroposophical Society to find its place in the cultural life of the present time. If this is to happen a certain discernment is required from those people who are involved with the Society; and those who are involved in it have a growing obligation to exercise such powers of discrimination. For the Anthroposophical Society will have completely lost its way if we do not try to form a connection with the wider cultural movements of our time, if we again and again fall into the error of practising sectarianism. It will be the death of our movement if we become sectarian. You need only think that the kind of things that we have been discussing in the course of these days would not be considered particularly strange by someone who is in the midst of the scientific and cultural life of the present time, provided that he were to approach them in a sufficiently unprejudiced way. But in order to accomplish anything of this sort the will to discriminate needs to be present. It easily happens that the question as to whether someone or other should be allowed to listen to anthro-posophical lectures or be given one of the cycles to read is asked in a somewhat theoretical way, without taking into account the level of education or general circumstances of the person concerned. This theoretical approach does us a great deal of harm. It is responsible for the fact that a person such as the one in Holland around whom all manner of mischief has been crystallizing is able to drift into the Anthroposophical Society and find there people who protect him, whereas others who possess good judgement are often repelled by such conduct.

1920-02-15-GA196 (important, see paper copy)

See paper

machine translation

Man, as we have him before us according to his main physical organisation, points to the previous life on Earth.
Just as our intelligence points to the distant, very distant past solar life, so our present physical main organisation with the earthly nature of the cognitive faculties, that is, for the organisation of the cognitive faculties towards the I-consciousness, points back to our earlier earthly course. I have already pointed out earlier what the human head actually is.
Schematically you can say the following: The human being consists of the head and the rest of the organisation. Let us say (see drawing) that this is the present course of life (centre), this is the previous course of life (left), this is the following course of life (right).
So we can say:
The head of our present life course was created through metamorphosis of the rest of our body organisation in the previous life course, and we have lost our head from the previous life course. Of course, I do not mean the physical organisation - that is tangible - but the forces, the formative forces that the physical organisation really has.
That which, apart from the main organisation, the carrier of the cognitive faculties for the I, we now carry in us as the remaining human organisation, torso with limbs, that will become the main organisation of our future life on earth. You all already carry within you the forces that will be concentrated in the head in your later life on Earth. What you accomplish today with your arms, what you accomplish with your legs, will enter into the inner organisation of the head in your next earthly life, and what forces flow out from your head in the next earthly life will be your karma, your destiny for the next earthly life. But that which will be your destiny in the next life on Earth will travel in a roundabout way through the rest of your organisation, through which you place yourself in human life today, into your future life as a head.

1920-05-02-GA201

When our bodily organisation is remodeled in the next incarnation, it not only goes through a change, but is turned inside out; as a glove is turned from a left-hand to a right-hand glove by turning it inside out so too what is now inside: liver, heart, kidneys .. becomes the outer sense-organs, eye, ear and so on. It is all turned inside out.

1921-10-21-GA208

1922-04-09-GA082

in the context of a description of Eurythmy

We need only remind ourselves of the inner character of Goethe's doctrine of metamorphosis, which is not yet sufficiently appreciated. Goethe sees, correctly, the whole plant in the single leaf. The whole plant is contained in the leaf in a primitive form; and the whole plant is only a more complicated leaf. In every single organ he sees a whole organic being metamorphosed in some way or other, and the whole organic being is a metamorphosis of its individual members (Glieder).
The whole human being is a more complicated metamorphosis of one single organic system: the glottal system.
If one understands how the whole human being is a metamorphosis of the glottal system, one is able to develop from the whole man a visible speech and visible song by movements of his limbs and by groups of performers in motion. And this development can be as genuine, and can proceed with as much inner, natural necessity as the development of song and speech from one specialised organ. One is within the creative forces of nature; one immerses oneself in the way in which our forces act in speaking or singing. When one has grasped these forces, one can transfer them to the forms of motion of the whole human being, as one transfers, in plastic art, the forces of the cosmos to the human form at rest. And as one gives expression to what lives within a man — emerging from his soul in poetry or song, or in some other art — as one expresses what can be expressed through speech, song or the art of recitation, so, too, can one express through the whole human being, in visible speech and song, what lives within him.

Note DL: the glottal system

The glottis is defined as the opening between the vocal folds

(illustration in RSL009 p 497)

1922-08-22-GA214

1922-12-09-GA218 (the ear)

1923-10-26-GA230

The earthly plant is the firmly rooted butterfly. The butterfly is the flying plant.

1923-10-28-GA230

Butterfly and bird as forms for ‘winged’ Hierarchies (moved to RSL011 SpirHier)

In this way we get a true picture of the evolution of the earth with its creatures. And in accordance with this evolution these creatures have developed in such a way that they present themselves to us as they are today. When you look at the butterflies and the birds you certainly have earthly forms; but you know from previous descriptions that the butterfly is really a light-being and the earthly substance has, as it were, only alighted upon it. If the butterfly itself could tell you what it is, it would announce to you that it has a body formed of light, and that, as I have already said, it carries about what has alighted upon it in the way of earthly matter like luggage, like something external to itself.

Similarly one can say that the bird is a creature of warm air, for the true bird is the warm air which is diffused throughout its body; all else is its luggage which it carries with it through the world. These creatures, which even today have still preserved their nature of light and warmth, and are really only clothed with a terrestrial, an earthly, a watery vesture — these beings were the very earliest to arise in the whole of earth-evolution. The very forms, too, possessed by these beings can remind one, who is able to survey the time which man passes through in the spiritual world before his descent into earthly life, of what is experienced in the spiritual world. Certainly they are earthly forms, for earthly matter has alighted upon them.

But if we conceive rightly the fluttering, weaving being of light which is the real butter-fly, thinking away everything of an earthly nature which has alighted upon it; if we think away from the bird everything of earth which has alighted upon it; if we picture the assembly of forces which makes of the bird a being of warm air, taking account also of the nature of its plumage — in reality just shining rays; if we imagine all this, then these creatures (which only look as they do because of their outer vestment, and of their size appropriate to this outer vestment) remind us of the beings which man knew before his descent to the earth, and of the fact that the human being has made this descent to the earth. Then one who can thus gaze into the spiritual world says to himself: In the butterflies, in the birds, we have something reminiscent of those spirit-forms among which man dwelt before he descended to the earth, of the beings of the higher hierarchies. Looked at with understanding, butterflies and birds are a memory — transformed into miniature and metamorphosed — of those forms which man had around him as spirit-forms before he descended into Earth-evolution. Because earth-substance is heavy and must be overcome, the butterflies contract into miniature the gigantic form which is in reality theirs. If you could separate from a butterfly everything of the nature of earth-substance, it would be able, as spirit-being, as a being of light, to expand to archangelic form. In those creatures which inhabit the air we have the earthly images of what exists in higher regions in a spiritual way. This is why, in the time of instinctive clairvoyance, it was the natural thing in artistic creation to derive from the forms of the winged creatures the symbolic form, the pictorial form, of the beings of the higher hierarchies. This has its inner justification. And looked at fundamentally the physical forms of the butterflies and the birds are really the physical metamorphoses of spiritual beings. It is not the spiritual beings themselves which have undergone metamorphosis, but these forms are their metamorphosed image-picture; naturally, the beings themselves are different.

Butterfly corona and bird-corona as forces between death and new birth (moved to FMC reinc metamorph)

You will, therefore, also find it comprehensible if, returning to something which I have already discussed, I again draw what follows in a diagram. [* earlier diagram of Cosmic memory & thinking with butterfly, bird and bat] I told you that the butterfly, which is essentially a being of light, continually sends spiritualized earth-matter out into the cosmos during its life-time. I should now like to call this spiritualized earth-substance, which is sent forth into the cosmos — borrowing a term customary in solar physics — the butterfly corona. Thus the butterfly corona continually streams forth into the cosmos. But into this butterfly corona there rays what the bird-kingdom yields up to the cosmos every time a bird dies, so that the spiritualized matter from the bird-kingdom is rayed into the corona and out into the cosmos. Thus in spiritual perception one beholds a shimmering corona emanating from the butterfly kingdom — in accordance with certain laws this is maintained in winter also — and in a more ray-like form, introduced into it, one beholds what streams out from the birds.

You see, when the human being has the impulse to descend from the spiritual world to the physical world, it is the butterfly corona, this remarkable out-streaming of spiritualized earth-substance, which first calls him into earthly existence. And the rays of the bird-corona, these are experienced more as forces which draw him.

Now you perceive an even higher significance in what has its life in the encircling air. In what lives and weaves in physical reality one must everywhere seek for the spiritual. And it is only when one seeks for the spiritual that one first comes upon the significance of the individual categories of beings. The earth entices man back into incarnation by sending forth into world-space the shining radiance of the butterfly-corona and the rays of the bird-corona. It is these things which once again call man back into a new earthly existence after he has spent a certain period of time between death and re-birth in the purely spiritual world. It is, therefore, not to be wondered at if man finds it difficult to unravel the complicated feelings which he rightly experiences when beholding the world of the butterflies and the birds. For the true reality of these feelings dwells deep in the unconsciousness. What really works in them is the remembrance of a longing for a new earthly existence.

Metamorphosis

This again is connected with something I have often explained to you, namely that the human being, when he has departed from the earth through the portal of death, actually

- disperses his head, and that then

- the remainder of his organism — naturally in regard to its forces, not in regard to its matter — becomes metamorphosed into the head of the next earthly existence.

Thus man is striving towards his head when he is striving towards his descent. And it is the head which is the first part of the human embryo to develop in a form which already resembles the later human form. That all this is so is due to the fact that this directing of the formative element towards the head is intimately connected with what works and weaves in the world of the flying creatures, by means of which man is drawn out of super-sensible into sensible existence.

When the human being, during the embryonic period, has first acquired his head organization, he then forms out of earthly existence, moulding it within the mother's body, what is connected with the digestive organization, and so on.

- Just as the upper part, the head-formation, is connected with what is of the nature of warmth and air, with the warmth-light element,

- so what is now added during the embryonic period is connected with the earthly-fluid element and is a reflection of what man acquired later in evolution. This earthly-fluid element must, however, be prepared in a quite special way, within the mother's body. If it took its form only from what is distributed outside in the tellurian, in the earthly world, it would develop only the lower animal-forms of the amphibians and reptiles, or of the fishes and even lower creatures. The butterfly rightly regards itself as a being of light, the bird as a being of warm air, but this is impossible for the lower animals — amphibians, reptiles, fishes.

1923-11-14-GA231

Synopsis

Man's journey through the spiritual worlds after death. His whole form becomes a physiognomy, expressing his moral and spiritual character. He meets those who are connected with him by destiny; he “grows together” with them, and on reaching the Sun sphere their common destinies shine forth into the Cosmos. After the “Midnight Hour of Existence,” the return journey begins. The four kinds of world, — physical and perceptible by the senses, neither physical nor perceptible, perceptible but not physical, physical but not perceptible.

quote

Metamorphosis worked collaboratively in Spirit-Land
This is what human souls bound together by destiny experience during their spiritual Sun existence in the period which I have called in my Mystery Plays the “Midnight Hour of Existence.” Here, in accordance with the degree in which they belong together, souls unite in working at the transformation of what they were in the preceding earthly life. The eye of the spirit can perceive what is happening in detail.
For example, what is contained in the legs is changed and worked upon, that it may form the lower jaws for the next earthly life. Arms and hands are transformed to become the upper jaws with the nerves belonging to this region. You must, of course, understand that all this is perceived spiritually. For spiritual perception, the whole of the lower man is transformed into the upper man.
This change is not brought about by the individual human being alone, but by all those human beings who belong together. The degree in which they are joined by destiny determines the extent to which they work upon each other.
↵And through this working together, spiritual kinships are formed which later on lead human beings to find one another in earthly life, to come together in life. Thus, the spiritual kinships which bring us together with other human beings in a more or less intimate manner, originate in the life between death and birth. It is actually so that the spirit-form of the head as it will be in the next incarnation comes into being as a result of the working together of human beings who belong together by destiny. This is a work that is done in spirit-land, and it is far greater in content and in significance than any work that is done on Earth.
So you see, just as we can describe in pictures what happens to man between birth and death, just as we can draw pictures of physical earth-life, so can we describe in all definiteness and detail what happens to him between death and a new birth.
The process of transformation that goes on in the limb system and in the system of metabolism of the blood is a marvellous and awe-inspiring process. You must, however, always remember that this transformation, which takes place in the phase of spiritual existence lying midway between death and a new birth, is a transformation of man's moral and spiritual qualities.
Of that which emerges from the process — we must say of it now that it resounds as Cosmic Music. This form of man that is shaped in the likeness of the Sun, and is a mirror wherein the whole Universe is reflected, expresses in cosmic tone man's outer form and figure. It is not now — to use a comparison — as if one had a visual idea of man; we receive in cosmic sound the idea of the transformed being of man's lower organism.
Cosmic Word
As time goes on, man becomes a part of the Cosmic Word itself. What at first was all a blending of melodies, of harmonies, forms itself now into articulate parts of the Cosmic Word. Man “speaks forth” his own being — speaks it forth from the Cosmos. There is thus a period between death and the next birth when man's being is veritably a spiritual “word” — no paltry word consisting of few syllables, but an infinitely expressive word, comprising in its utterance the whole being of man as man, as well as the individual being of the man in question. When this point of time has been reached between death and a new birth, man is possessed of a deeply mysterious knowledge, and he sends out into the Cosmos the revelation — perceptible to divine and spiritual Beings — of what he himself is.
When one human being works in this way upon another, helping to bring it about that the lower man is transformed into what will be the upper man (for that which was formerly the upper man has by now faded right away), when there is this working together, dependent always on the degree to which, the one human being was already connected with the other and itself determining the connection there will be between them in the future, then this work of metamorphosis is verily a kind of moulding and sculpting in the spirit.

1923-11-17-A-GA231

Metamorphosis
There below him lies another world — the Earth he has left behind but which he must tread again. In the Sun sphere, as you have heard, the metamorphosis of man's being takes place; here is wrought out the great change of which I have told you, when man's lower being is transformed into the upper being in preparation for the next earthly life. The legs are wrought into the spirit-form of the lower jaw, the arms into the spirit-form of the upper jaw and cheek-bones, and so on. This is a wonderful work which proceeds in the spiritual world, and in comparison with it any work that is done on earth in whatsoever domain is utterly insignificant. Great and majestic is the work that is accomplished by man in the spiritual world in union with higher spiritual Beings! There, in the sphere of the Sun (using the word in its wider sense) the secret of man's being is worked out. But now comes another experience.
The Earth is now the ‘world beyond’ just as the spiritual worlds are the beyond on Earth
If we are healthy in soul and spirit during our life on Earth, we are bound to realise that there is another world, a spiritual world, even if we cannot pierce through to it with actual knowledge. We take the existence of the spiritual world for granted; we say that beyond the material world there is a super-sensible world. This is how it is in earthly life. But during existence in the Sun sphere between death and a new birth, it is the other way round. In his Sun existence, an experience befalls man that teaches him to speak of a world beyond — but this “world beyond” is the Earth! It is an intensely living experience, not so much now of one's own destiny, but of the whole intrinsic character of Earth existence.

1924-03-15-GA235

Metamorphosis (good dense essence entry statement)
And then in regard to the whole constitution of life, we come to realise that on the journey through births and deaths, what we are accustomed to consider in earthly life as the most important part of man, namely the head, becomes of comparatively little importance shortly after death. The head that in the physical world is the most essentially human part of man, really expends itself in physical existence; whereas the rest of the organism — which, physically speaking, is subordinate — is of higher importance in the spiritual world. In his head, man is most of all physical and least of all spiritual. In the other members of his organism, in the rhythmic organisation and in the limbs-organisation, he is more spiritual. He is most spiritual of all in his motor organisation, in the activity of his limbs.
Now gifts and talents belonging to the head are lost comparatively soon after death.
On the other hand, the soul-and-spirit which, in the realm of the unconscious, belongs to the lower part of the human organism, assumes great importance between death and a new birth. But whereas, speaking generally, the organism of man apart from the head becomes, in respect of its spiritual form, its spiritual content, the head of the next incarnation, it is also true that what is of the nature of will in the head, works especially into the limbs in the next incarnation.
A man who is lazy in his thinking in one incarnation will most certainly be no fast runner in the next: the laziness of thinking becomes slowness of limb; and, vice versa, slowness of limb in the present incarnation comes to expression in sluggish, lazy thinking in the next.
Thus a metamorphosis, an interchange, takes place between the three members of the human being in passing over from one incarnation to another.
What I am telling you here is not put forward as a theory; it is based on the very facts of life. And in the case of Eduard von Hartmann, as soon as I turned my attention to the affliction of the knee, I was guided to his earlier incarnation, during which at a certain moment in his life he had a kind of sunstroke. In respect of destiny, this sunstroke was the cause that led in the next earthly life, through metamorphosis, to an infirmity of the knee — the sunstroke being, as you will realise, an affliction of the head. One day he was no longer able to think. He had a kind of paralysis of the brain, and this came to expression in the next incarnation as an affliction of one of the limbs. Now the destiny that led to paralysis of the brain was due to the following circumstances. — This individuality was one of those who went to the East with the Crusades and fought over in Asia against the Turks and Asiatic peoples, acquiring, however, a tremendous admiration for the latter. The Crusaders encountered very much that was great and sublime in the East, and the individuality of whom we are speaking absorbed it all with deep admiration. And now he came across a man concerning whom he felt instinctively that he had had something to do with him in a still earlier life. The account, so to speak, that had now to be settled between this and the still earlier incarnation, was a moral account. The metamorphosis of the sunstroke in one incarnation into the affliction of the knee in the next appears at first to be a purely physical matter, but when it is a question of destiny we are invariably led back to something that appertains to the moral life. This individuality bore with him from a still earlier incarnation the impulse to wage a fierce battle with the man whom he now encountered and in the heat of the blazing sun he set about persecuting his opponent. The persecution was unjust, and it recoiled upon the persecutor himself inasmuch as his brain was paralysed by the heat of the sun. What was to be brought to an issue in this fight originated in a still earlier incarnation when this individuality had been brilliantly, outstandingly clever. The opponent whom he encountered during the Crusades had suffered injury and embarrassment in an earlier incarnation at the hands of this brilliant individuality. As you see, it all leads back to the moral life, for the forces in play originated in the earlier incarnation.
Thus we have three consecutive incarnations of an individuality. A remarkably clever and able personality in very ancient times — that is one incarnation. Following that, a Crusader, who at a certain time in his life gets paralysis of the brain, brought about as the result of a wrong committed by his cleverness which had, however, in the next incarnation, caused him to acquire tremendous admiration for oriental civilisation. Third incarnation: a Prussian officer who is obliged to retire owing to an affliction of the knee, does not know what to do with his time, goes in for philosophy and writes a most impressive book, a perfect product of the civilisation of the second half of the 19th century: The Philosophy of the Unconscious.

1924-09-13-GA318

For the human being is built like this (see drawing): metabolic-limb system, rhythmic system, nerve-sense system.

What comes from an earlier earth-life works over into the nerve-sense system of the new life;

what comes from the time between death and a new birth works over into the rhythmic system; and what comes from the new earth-life works alone in the metabolic-limb sytem.

So all that this individual who is now Ferdinand Raimund experienced of bitter remorse, of deeply crushing insight was working continually after that earlier incarnation, in his life between death and a new birth, affecting his coming rhythmic system. It worked right into the physical body. For in the physical organization of the head we have the after-effect of the previous earth-life; in the physical organization of the rhythmic system we have the after-effect of the life between death and a new birth. These facts are obvious when one studies embryology even externally.
In Raimund's case, in his breathing system, the upper rhythmic system, we see working in him all the bitter remorse and insight he had experienced when he went through the gate of death from that previous earth-life. This experience led inevitably to breathing irregularities in this life, to a meager intake of oxygen and a strong saturation of carbon dioxide. Breathing irregularities — from a physical point of view — bring on a variety of states of anxiety; they can be the carriers of elemental beings of anxiety. The breathing irregularities do not allow the proper balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the breathing process, and this draws in anxiety elementals. You can see all this in The King of the Alps and the Misanthrope. It was well developed in Raimund; he was predisposed to a breathing system that would be a carrier for anxiety elementals.
Such elemental beings are not simply anxiety elementals. If at the same time there is something such as Raimund had in his head system from earlier earth-lives, namely, soul-spiritual ideas — which make his dramas so interesting — one sees that the presence of these anxiety demons causes karma to develop in a very definite direction. One sees clearly how they push in an unhealthy way to bring about karmic effects. They stream into fanciful imaginations that even achieve visionary content — and Raimund's dramas are built on such content. They stream into his visionary activity; they also impel him to develop a fantastic element in his daily life. In this way a karmic stream pushes through his life, a tremendous gift of genius that has to come to expression. One branch of the stream flows in a special kind of spiritual creation. The other branch flows parallel in a kind of life-fantasy that is not expressed externally but is directed inward. For it lies in the rhythmic system, which is of course half inward, but which also works in the lower organs in such a way that it affects a person's external life, and then in turn influences the inner life again. So Raimund's genius is accompanied by a truly pathological tendency. And this pathological tendency, which expresses itself through the anxiety demons, is the vehicle for the fulfillment of his karma.

1923-11-14-GA231

Lecture 2

Synopsis

Man's journey through the spiritual worlds after death. His whole form becomes a physiognomy, expressing his moral and spiritual character. He meets those who are connected with him by destiny; he “grows together” with them, and on reaching the Sun sphere their common destinies shine forth into the Cosmos. After the “Midnight Hour of Existence,” the return journey begins. The four kinds of world, — physical and perceptible by the senses, neither physical nor perceptible, perceptible but not physical, physical but not perceptible.

quote

Metamorphosis worked collaboratively in Spirit-Land
This is what human souls bound together by destiny experience during their spiritual Sun existence in the period which I have called in my Mystery Plays the “Midnight Hour of Existence.” Here, in accordance with the degree in which they belong together, souls unite in working at the transformation of what they were in the preceding earthly life. The eye of the spirit can perceive what is happening in detail.
For example, what is contained in the legs is changed and worked upon, that it may form the lower jaws for the next earthly life. Arms and hands are transformed to become the upper jaws with the nerves belonging to this region. You must, of course, understand that all this is perceived spiritually. For spiritual perception, the whole of the lower man is transformed into the upper man.
This change is not brought about by the individual human being alone, but by all those human beings who belong together. The degree in which they are joined by destiny determines the extent to which they work upon each other.

And through this working together, spiritual kinships are formed which later on lead human beings to find one another in earthly life, to come together in life. Thus, the spiritual kinships which bring us together with other human beings in a more or less intimate manner, originate in the life between death and birth. It is actually so that the spirit-form of the head as it will be in the next incarnation comes into being as a result of the working together of human beings who belong together by destiny. This is a work that is done in spirit-land, and it is far greater in content and in significance than any work that is done on Earth.
So you see, just as we can describe in pictures what happens to man between birth and death, just as we can draw pictures of physical earth-life, so can we describe in all definiteness and detail what happens to him between death and a new birth.
The process of transformation that goes on in the limb system and in the system of metabolism of the blood is a marvellous and awe-inspiring process. You must, however, always remember that this transformation, which takes place in the phase of spiritual existence lying midway between death and a new birth, is a transformation of man's moral and spiritual qualities.
Of that which emerges from the process — we must say of it now that it resounds as Cosmic Music. This form of man that is shaped in the likeness of the Sun, and is a mirror wherein the whole Universe is reflected, expresses in cosmic tone man's outer form and figure. It is not now — to use a comparison — as if one had a visual idea of man; we receive in cosmic sound the idea of the transformed being of man's lower organism.
Cosmic Word
As time goes on, man becomes a part of the Cosmic Word itself. What at first was all a blending of melodies, of harmonies, forms itself now into articulate parts of the Cosmic Word. Man “speaks forth” his own being — speaks it forth from the Cosmos. There is thus a period between death and the next birth when man's being is veritably a spiritual “word” — no paltry word consisting of few syllables, but an infinitely expressive word, comprising in its utterance the whole being of man as man, as well as the individual being of the man in question. When this point of time has been reached between death and a new birth, man is possessed of a deeply mysterious knowledge, and he sends out into the Cosmos the revelation — perceptible to divine and spiritual Beings — of what he himself is.
When one human being works in this way upon another, helping to bring it about that the lower man is transformed into what will be the upper man (for that which was formerly the upper man has by now faded right away), when there is this working together, dependent always on the degree to which, the one human being was already connected with the other and itself determining the connection there will be between them in the future, then this work of metamorphosis is verily a kind of moulding and sculpting in the spirit.

1923-11-17-A-GA231

PM - Lecture 3

Metamorphosis
There below him lies another world — the Earth he has left behind but which he must tread again. In the Sun sphere, as you have heard, the metamorphosis of man's being takes place; here is wrought out the great change of which I have told you, when man's lower being is transformed into the upper being in preparation for the next earthly life. The legs are wrought into the spirit-form of the lower jaw, the arms into the spirit-form of the upper jaw and cheek-bones, and so on. This is a wonderful work which proceeds in the spiritual world, and in comparison with it any work that is done on earth in whatsoever domain is utterly insignificant. Great and majestic is the work that is accomplished by man in the spiritual world in union with higher spiritual Beings! There, in the sphere of the Sun (using the word in its wider sense) the secret of man's being is worked out. But now comes another experience.
[The Earth is now the ‘world beyond’ just as the spiritual worlds are the beyond on Earth]
If we are healthy in soul and spirit during our life on Earth, we are bound to realise that there is another world, a spiritual world, even if we cannot pierce through to it with actual knowledge. We take the existence of the spiritual world for granted; we say that beyond the material world there is a super-sensible world. This is how it is in earthly life. But during existence in the Sun sphere between death and a new birth, it is the other way round. In his Sun existence, an experience befalls man that teaches him to speak of a world beyond — but this “world beyond” is the Earth! It is an intensely living experience, not so much now of one's own destiny, but of the whole intrinsic character of Earth existence.

1924-04-09-GA240

covers ao: Metamorphosis of forces from one incarnation to the next: forces of limb-system to forces of head-system.

1924-05-10-GA236

title: Karmic Connections in Relation to the Physical

synopsis

Karmic connections in relation to the physical. Studies that approach the study of karma from the side of the bodily form, the physiognomy and the external manifestations of the human being in the physical world. Certain types of character point back to definite behaviour in the previously earthly life. Matter is the outer revelation of the spiritual. The human form and its possibilities of movement are an image of the spiritual world. Head, rhythmic system, metabolic-limb system, in the stream of karmic development.

also under physiognomy in physical body chapter

quote

extract : relation trunk with passing between death and new birth

You can glean from the “Leading Thoughts” which have lately appeared in the News Sheet issued with the periodical Das Goetheanum, that the head of man is observed in the proper way only when Imaginative cognition is applied even to its external appearance. For the human head in its formation, in the formation of the ears, particularly also in the formation of the nose and eyes, is actually according to the pattern of Imagination. It consists of outwardly visible Imaginations.
This is also connected with the life of the human being.

There are human beings in whom the lower part of the trunk is longer than the upper part; that is to say, the part from the lowest point of the trunk up to the breast is longer than the part from the centre of the chest up to the neck.

If the part from the centre of the chest to the neck is shorter than the lower part of the trunk, then we have to do with a human being who, in the life between death and a new birth, has made the ascent to the mid-point very quickly. He passed through this period very quickly. Then he descended slowly and comfortably to the new earthly life.

Where, on the other hand, the upper part from the neck to the middle of the chest is longer than the lower part from the middle of the chest to the end of the trunk, we have to do with a human being who passed slowly and sedately as far as the middle of his life between death and new birth, and then descended more quickly into earthly life.

In the physiognomy, indeed, in the proportions of the trunk, we find the after-effect of the way in which the human being passed through the first period of his existence between death and a new birth, in comparison with the latter period.
Truly, what is physical in the human being is through and through a copy of the underlying spiritual. This has a consequence in life. For those who have the long lower trunk and short upper trunk are of a type showing from the outset that they need a great deal of sleep; they like to have long sleep. (The diagram is, of course, rather exaggerated). With the other type, who have the short lower trunk and long upper trunk, this is not so; they do not need so much sleep.
Thus, according to whether a human being needs sleep or not, which again expresses itself in the proportions of his trunk, you can see whether he has gone through the first part of the life between death and a new birth quickly or slowly, and also whether he has gone quickly or slowly through the second part of this life.

Lecture

Today we shall begin a series of studies which will throw light on the unfolding of human karma from the side of the external bodily form as we encounter it in the physiognomy, the play of gestures, in all the external manifestations of the human being in the physical world. For in considering individual karmic connections, I have already drawn attention to the fact that it is precisely by observing apparently insignificant trifles in the human being that karmic connections may be perceived. It is also a fact that the external appearance of the human being gives in many respects a picture of his moral and spiritual tenor in his previous earthly life, or in a series of previous lives.
Along these lines certain types of human beings can be observed, and it will be found that a certain type leads back to a definite attitude and behaviour in one of the previous earthly lives. In order to avoid vague abstractions, let us consider examples.
[Interested and attentive]
Suppose, for instance, some human being's life on earth has been spent in occupying himself very closely with the things which confronted him in life; he has had intimate and real interest for many things, not passing by or missing anything about men, things or phenomena of the world. You will certainly have opportunity to observe this in human beings in the present life.
We may meet people who have a better knowledge — let us say — of the statesmen of ancient Greece than of the statesmen of our own time. If they are asked about somebody such as Pericles, Alcibiades or Miltiades, they know all about them, because they learnt it at school. If they are questioned about a person of the same kind belonging to the present day, they can hardly give any information. But the same thing exists in the sphere of the ordinary observation of life. In this connection I have often mentioned details which have certainly seemed strange to those who imagine that they are standing at the highest peak of idealism. There are men, for instance, who, in talking to you in the afternoon, will tell you that they saw a lady in the street in the morning. When you ask them what sort of dress she was wearing, they do not know! It is really incredible, but it is a fact — there are such people.
Now of course, such a thing can be interpreted in all sorts of different ways. It can be said: This is a case of such lofty spirituality that a man who happens to find himself in these circumstances considers it much too trifling to take notice of such things. But this is not a sign of a really penetrating spirituality. It may be lofty spirituality, but loftiness alone is not the point; what really matters is whether the spirituality is penetrating or superficial. There is not, in this case, any penetrating spirituality, because, after all, what a human being needs in the way of clothing is quite significant, and in a certain sense it is just as significant as, for instance, the type of nose or mouth he has. Again, there are human beings who are attentive to everything in life. They judge the world according to what they experience from it. Others go through the world as if nothing in it were of the slightest interest to them. They have taken in everything only as a kind of dream which quickly flows away again.
These are — I might say — two polar opposite types of human beings. But however you may judge of it, my dear friends, whatever opinion you may have about whether a man is at a high or low level because he does not remember the dress worn by the lady he saw in the morning — that is not the point. Today we want to discuss what influence this has on the karma of the human being. It actually makes a great difference whether a man pays attention to things in life, whether he takes interest in every detail, or whether he does not pay attention to things. Details are of enormous importance for the whole structure of spiritual life — not because they are details, but because a detail like the one mentioned points to a very definite constitution of soul.
There was a professor who always lectured extremely well and who, all the time he was lecturing, stared at one point — the upper part of the chest of someone in the audience; his eyes were riveted on this particular point. He never lost the thread of his lectures, which were always admirable. But one day he did lose the thread; he kept on looking and then turning away. Afterwards he went to the person in the audience and asked: “Why did you sew on the button that had always been missing? It has made me lose my head!” He had always been looking at the place of the missing button and this gave him concentration. Always to be looking at the place where a button is torn off or not, seems trifling, but as a matter of fact, so far as the inner attitude of soul is concerned it is significant whether such a thing is done or not. And when it is a question of observing the lines of karma, it is of extraordinarily great importance.
Let us therefore look a little more closely at these two types of human beings of whom I have been speaking. You need only remember what I have frequently told you about the passing over of the human being from one incarnation into the other. In earthly life man has his head, and he has, as well, the rest of his body. This part of his body, outside the head, contains a certain concatenation of forces. The physical body of the human being is finally given over to the elements. The physical substance, of course, is not carried over from one earthly life into the other. But the concatenation of forces which a man has in his organism, apart from his head, is carried through the life between death and a new birth and becomes the head of the next earthly life, whereas the head of the present incarnation has been formed out of the limb-system and the rest of the organism of the previous earthly life. Thus the non-head nature — if I may coin this expression — of the one earthly life transforms itself into the head of the following earthly life. The head is always the product of the non-head nature of the preceding earthly life. This holds good for the whole concatenation of forces in the constitution of the human being.
When somebody goes through life with great attentiveness to everything, he must, in the nature of things, move about a great deal. Human beings who lead an entirely sedentary life are very difficult to study to-day from the point of view of karma, because there was no such mode of life in earlier times. It remains to be seen what men with an exclusively sedentary mode of life will be like in the next earthly life, for sedentary existences have become customary only in this age. But when, in earlier times, a man was attentive to the things in his environment, he always had to go to them; he had to make his limbs mobile, to bring his limbs into activity. The whole body was active, not only the senses which belong to the head-system. Everything in which the whole body takes part, when the human being is attentive and observant, passes over into the structure of the head of the next earthly life, and has a definite effect. The head of the human being in the next earthly life is so constituted that he has then a very strong urge to send into the rest of his organism such forces as cause the forces of the earth to work very strongly into his organism. In the first seven years of life, everything contained in the organism, muscles, bones, etc., is formed from out of the head. The head sends out these forces. Every bone is shaped as it must be shaped, by means of the head. If, because of the type of incarnation which I have described to you, the head has the tendency to develop a strong relationship to the forces of the earth, what happens then? Then by the grace of the head — if I may put it so — the earth-forces are very much favoured during the formation of the human being in the embryonic period, but also, especially, in the life up to the change of teeth. The forces of the earth are very strongly propagated by the head. The result is that in such a human being there is a special development of everything that depends upon the forces of the earth. He gets big bones, strong bones, extremely broad shoulder-blades, for instance, and the ribs are well developed. Everything bears the stamp of good development.
But now, all that is connected with the carrying over of the faculty of attention from the past into the present earthly life, with the way the organism is formed — all this, it is true, proceeds spatially from the head, but nevertheless, in reality, from the soul and spirit. For in all these formative forces the soul and spirit participate; from such forces we can always look to the soul and spirit. In such human beings the head has become related to the earth as the result of the conditions in the previous earthly life which I have described. We can see this in the brow, which is not particularly lofty — for lofty brows are not allied to the earth — but it has definition, strength, and similar characteristics.
So we see that the human being develops in such a way that his bones are strongly formed. And the strange thing is: when these forces that are allied to the earth work forcefully over from the previous earthly life, the hair grows very quickly. In observing children whose hair grows very quickly we must always connect this with their powers of attention in the previous earthly life. It is a fact that out of his moral and spiritual attitude in any one incarnation the human being forms his body in the next earthly life.
Now we shall always find confirmation of how the forces of the soul and spirit participate in this shaping of the human being. A man whose karma it is, in the next earthly life, to have strong bones, well developed muscles, as the result of attentiveness to life — such a man, we shall see, goes through life with courage. Through this attentiveness he has also acquired the natural force belonging to a courageous life.
In times when men ceased to describe successive earthly lives, they still had the knowledge that really exists only when repeated earthly lives are taken into account. This was still so in the days of Aristotle. Aristotle has described this beautifully in his Physiognomics. He was still able to show how the external countenance is connected with the moral attitude, the moral tenor of a man.
And now let us think of cowards, faint-hearted men. They are those who took no interest in anything during the previous earthly life. You see, the study of karma has a certain significance for taking one's place in life in connection with the future. After all, it is only a craving for knowledge that we satisfy — though not only this craving — when we trace back a present earthly life to earlier lives. But if we go through our present earthly life with a certain amount of self-knowledge, then we can prepare for the next earthly life. If we drift superficially through life, without taking interest in anything, then we can be sure that we shall be a coward in the next earthly life. This is because a detached, inattentive character forms few links with its environment, and consequently the head-organisation in the next life has no relation with the forces of the earth. The bones remain undeveloped, the hair grows slowly: very often such a person has bow-legs or knock-knees.
These are things which in a very intimate way reveal the connection between the spirit and soul on the one side and the natural-physical on the other. Yes, my dear friends, from the very details of the shape of the head and of the whole structure of the human being, we can as it were look over into the previous earthly life.
These things are not said, however, in order that the observation itself shall be made through them. All the observations of which I have told you here, as a preparation for studies of karma, have not been made in an external, but in an entirely inner way, through spiritual-scientific methods. But precisely these spiritual-scientific methods show that the human being in his external form cannot be studied as is done in modern physiology and anatomy. There is really no sense in simply becoming familiar with the organs and their interconnections. For the human being is a picture. In part he is the picture of the forces holding sway between death and a new birth, and in part a picture of his previous earthly life. There is no sense in working at physiology and anatomy as they exist to-day, where the human being is taken and one organ after another in him is studied. The head, for instance, is much more closely connected with the previous earthly life than with the body which the human being receives in his present earthly life.
[Hair]
We can therefore say: certain physical processes are to be understood only when we look back to previous earthly lives. A man who learnt to know the world in a previous earthly life has quick-growing hair. A man who learnt to know little of the world in a previous life, has slow-growing hair. The hair grows very slowly; it lies along the surface of the body; whereas those who interested themselves intensely in life during a previous earthly life, who interested themselves all too intensely and poked their noses into everything, have loose, straggly hair. This is an absolutely correct connection. The most manifold bodily configurations can be referred back to experiences in one of the preceding earthly lives. This holds good into the very details of the constitution.
[Thinking – slim/fat, skin quality]
Take for instance, a man who ponders much in one incarnation — who thinks and ponders a great deal. In his next incarnation he will be a thin, delicately made man. A man who ponders little in one earthly life, but lives a life more concerned with grasping the outer world, tends, in the next life, to accumulate a good deal of fat. This, too, has a significance for the future.
Spiritual “slimming cures” cannot well be managed in one earthly life; for this one must resort to physical cures — if indeed they are of any help! But for the next earthly life it is certainly possible to undergo a “slimming cure” if one ponders and thinks a great deal, especially if one thinks about something that calls for effort, of the kind I described yesterday. It need not be meditated, but simply pondered about a great deal, with the willingness to make many inner decisions.
There is an actual connection of this kind between the spiritual and moral way in which a man lives during one earthly life, and his physical constitution in the next earthly life. This cannot be emphasised sufficiently.
Take another case. Suppose, for instance, that in one earthly life a man is a thinker. I do not mean a professor — (this is not a joke!) — but a man who, possibly, walks behind a plough and who yet can think a great deal. It does not matter at all in what circumstances of life a man thinks, for he can be a real thinker when he follows a plough or is engaged in a handicraft of some sort. But because in his thinking the forces which fall away when earthly life comes to an end are mainly engaged, and he leaves unused those which are carried over into his next incarnation and take part in the building up of his head, such a man will appear again in a new earthly life with soft flesh, with delicate soft flesh.
The peculiar point, however, is this. — When a man thinks a great deal, then, in his next earthly life, he will have a good skin; the whole surface of the body, the skin of the body, will be very well constituted. Again, when you see people whose skin has spots, for instance, then you can always infer from this that they did little thinking in their past life. (Of course, one needs other grounds for this inference as well; it is not possible to deduce with absolute certainty from one symptom. Nevertheless, in general, the indications which I have given to-day about the inter-connection of the soul and spirit with the physical are correct). When you see people with some impurity in their skin, you can always conclude that they did little thinking in their past earthly life. People with many freckles have certainly not been thinkers in a previous earthly life.
These are the things which show at once that Spiritual Science does not pay attention merely to spiritual abstractions, but also to the working of the spiritual in the physical. I have often emphasised that what is harmful about materialism is not that it pays attention only to matter; the harmful element, the tragedy of materialism, is that it cannot really know anything about matter, because it does not recognise the spiritual workings within matter.
It is precisely in the study of the human being that attention must be paid to matter, for in matter, above all in the human form, in the whole human being, the working of the spiritual is expressing itself. Matter is the outer revelation of the spiritual.
You can glean from the “Leading Thoughts” which have lately appeared in the News Sheet issued with the periodical Das Goetheanum, that the head of man is observed in the proper way only when Imaginative cognition is applied even to its external appearance. For the human head in its formation, in the formation of the ears, particularly also in the formation of the nose and eyes, is actually according to the pattern of Imagination. It consists of outwardly visible Imaginations.
[Relationships trunk <-> speed ascent/descent <-> need of sleep]
This is also connected with the life of the human being. There are human beings in whom the lower part of the trunk is longer than the upper part; that is to say, the part from the lowest point of the trunk up to the breast is longer than the part from the centre of the chest up to the neck. If the part from the centre of the chest to the neck is shorter than the lower part of the trunk, then we have to do with a human being who, in the life between death and a new birth, has made the ascent to the mid-point very quickly. He passed through this period very quickly. Then he descended slowly and comfortably to the new earthly life.

Diagram 1
Click image for large view

Where, on the other hand, the upper part from the neck to the middle of the chest is longer than the lower part from the middle of the chest to the end of the trunk, we have to do with a human being who passed slowly and sedately as far as the middle of his life between death and new birth, and then descended more quickly into earthly life.
In the physiognomy, indeed, in the proportions of the trunk, we find the after-effect of the way in which the human being passed through the first period of his existence between death and a new birth, in comparison with the latter period.
Truly, what is physical in the human being is through and through a copy of the underlying spiritual. This has a consequence in life. For those who have the long lower trunk and short upper trunk are of a type showing from the outset that they need a great deal of sleep; they like to have long sleep. (The diagram is, of course, rather exaggerated). With the other type, who have the short lower trunk and long upper trunk, this is not so; they do not need so much sleep.
Thus, according to whether a human being needs sleep or not, which again expresses itself in the proportions of his trunk, you can see whether he has gone through the first part of the life between death and a new birth quickly or slowly, and also whether he has gone quickly or slowly through the second part of this life.
[Dull vs interested]
But this again is connected with the previous incarnation. Take the case of a man who was dull — not so much in disposition as because of his education and his mode of life. I do not mean that he was altogether lacking in interest, but he was dull; he could not really do anything properly, he never set about getting a real grip of things; he may have been attentive enough to poke his nose into everything, but it did not go beyond curiosity and a superficial understanding. He remained dull. Such a man has no interest for the first part of his life between death and a new birth. He develops an interest only when he has left behind the midnight summit of this life and begins his descent.
On the other hand, a man who is accustomed to penetrate everything both with his mind and with his feeling — he takes great interest in the first half, in the ascent, and then quickly completes the descent.
Thus again it can be said: When you meet a man who is a sleepy-head, then this is to be traced to a dull life, such as I have described, in the previous incarnation. A man who is not a sleepy-head, who may even have to do something in order to go to sleep — we know there are books which can be used for the purpose of sending one to sleep! — a man who needs these things has not been dull, but attentive; he has been active with his mind and his feeling.
[Foodies]
We can go further. There are men ... how shall I speak of them? Let us say they are ready eaters; they are fond of eating. Others are not so fond of eating. I do not want to say gluttonous people and non-gluttonous people for this would hardly be in place in a serious study. But I will say: there are people who are fond of eating and there are others who are less fond of it. This too is connected in a certain sense with what the human being experiences in his passage between death and a new birth, before and after the midnight summit of existence. The middle point here is the midnight summit of existence.
There are human beings who, as I will put it, ascend very high into the spiritual, and there are others who do not rise so high. Those who ascend very high will eat in order to live. Those who do not rise so high will live in order to eat.
These are certainly differences in life, and if we look at the way in which a man behaves in such actions as are connected with the fostering or non-fostering of his physical existence, we can say that here is something which enables us to perceive how his karmic life is flowing over from a previous existence.
Those who have acquired powers of observation in this direction perceive, for instance, in the way a man takes something at table, in the way he helps himself, a gesture which points very strongly indeed to the way in which the past earthly life is shining over into the present.
Today I am speaking of the physical. Tomorrow I shall speak more about the moral sides, but the physical must certainly be kept in mind, otherwise the opposite will become less intelligible.
[Movements]
Men who help themselves vehemently, who when they so much as take a pear into their hands at table do it — well, with enthusiasm — are those who clung more to the trivialities of life in the previous incarnations who could not rise above trivialities; who were stuck in habit, convention, etc., unable to get a moral grasp of life. This, too, has great practical significance. As we are not used to such considerations, these things will often seem curious and we laugh about them. But they are to be taken. with the deepest seriousness, for you see, there are in society to-day certain classes of people who spend their time and energy in the trivial customs of life; they do not willingly make anything their own which goes beyond the ordinary, habitual customs of life.
[Languages]
Nor must these things be applied merely to modes of behaviour. They can likewise be applied, for instance, to speech. There are languages in which you cannot say anything arbitrarily because everything is strictly prescribed in the construction of the sentence; the subject cannot be put in another place, and so on. There are other languages where the subject may be placed wherever you like, and the predicate too. These languages are of such a character that they help human beings to individual development.
This is only an example of how trivial habits are acquired, and how the human being cannot get out of triviality. An earthly life spent in such triviality leads to one in which the human being is gluttonous. He does not rise high enough in the life between death and a new birth — he becomes gluttonous.
In our day the time should dawn when men no longer reckon only with one earthly life, as was the case in the materialistic epoch of evolution, but take into account the whole of earthly evolution, in the knowledge that what is done and achieved by a man in one earthly life is carried over into the next earthly life; that what happens in one epoch is carried over into another by human beings themselves. As this awareness has to come, it is necessary that such knowledge should find a place in the education of growing children as well as of adults.
[Serious vs light-hearted laughing]
I should like to speak of two more types. There is a type of human being who can take everything seriously, and here I do not mean merely the external kind of seriousness. There may quite well be thoroughly serious people, who may even have a strongly tragic vein in their souls, but who all the same can laugh. For if a man is not able to laugh, if everything goes by him — and there are countless things in life to make one laugh — if he lets everything go by and cannot laugh at anything, then he must be dull. After all, there are things to laugh at! But a man may be able to laugh heartily at something that is funny, and still be, fundamentally, a serious man.
Then there is another type of person who does nothing but laugh, whom everything incites to laughter, who laughs when he is telling anything, whether or not it happens to be funny. There are people whose faces distort into laughter the moment they begin to relate anything, and who speak of even the gravest matter with a kind of grin, with a kind of laughter. I am describing extremes here, but these extremes exist.
This is a fundamental trait of the soul. We shall see to-morrow how it has its moral side. To-day I shall deal mainly with the physical side. This trait, in its turn, leads back to the karmic stream of evolution.
A man who has a trait of gravity in his life, even if he can laugh too, has strong, steady forces working out of his previous incarnation into his present earthly life. In meeting a serious man of this kind, a man who has an understanding for the grave side of life, who stops to observe the grave side of life, we can say: one can feel in this man that he is bearing in his being and nature his past earthly life. A serious conception of life arises when the past earthly lives continue working, working on in the proper way.
On the other hand, a man becomes an incessant chatterbox, laughing even when he is talking of the gravest matters, when past earthly lives are not working on in him. When a man has gone through a series of earthly lives — or at least through one — in which he has lived as if half asleep, then, in his next earthly life, he becomes a person who is never serious, who is unable to approach the things of life with the necessary seriousness. Thus from a man's attitude it can be seen whether he has spent his past earthly lives to good purpose, or whether he has more or less slept through them.
[Threefold Man]
All this leads us to realise how false it is to take a mechanical view of a human being when he comes before us in his human guise, or even to see no further than the stereotyped pattern of his organism. This is quite wrong. The human being in his form, and right down into his possibilities of movement, must be regarded as an image of the spiritual world.
First of all there is the head-organisation. This is essentially determined by the previous earthly lives. We observe a human head in the right way when we learn to know all there is to be learnt about Imaginative ideation. Here, in connection with the human head, and nowhere else, we can apply, in the sense-world, Imaginative ideation, which is otherwise used for gazing into the spiritual world. We must begin with Imagination if we wish to look into the spiritual world. Then, first of all, the spiritual-etheric pictures of the spiritual beings appear before us. In the physical world, with the exception of the human head, there is nothing that is reminiscent of Imagination. But in the human head, right into its inner organisation, right into the marvellous structure of the brain, everything is really a physical mirror-image of the Imaginative.
Then, proceeding further, you may begin to study in the human being something that is really much more difficult to observe, although it is generally thought to be easy — that is, to gain an understanding of how the human being takes breath, how he sets his rhythmic system in movement, and how the breath leads over into the blood circulation. This tremendously living play, which penetrates the whole body, is far more complicated than it is thought to be. The human being takes in the breath, the breath transforms itself into blood circulation, but on the other side the breath again passes over into the head and is related in a definite way to the whole activity of the brain. Thinking is simply a refined, delicate breathing. The blood circulation, again, passes over into the impulses of the movements of the limbs.
This rhythmic system of the human being does not express itself in a static condition but in a continuous mobility, and this difference must be clearly observed. The head of man is best studied by considering it as a self-contained formation at rest; by studying its interior, the various parts of the brain, for instance, and how one part lies alongside another. Nothing can be known about the head if, say, the blood circulation in the head is studied by means of anatomy or physiology; for what the blood circulation achieves in the head is not connected with the head itself; it is connected merely with what the head needs from the rhythmic system. What can be seen when a portion of the cranial bone is raised, and the circulation exposed, is not really connected with the head. The head must be studied as an organ which is at rest, and where one part lies alongside another.
This method is not applicable to the rhythmic system, which has its seat in the breast. Everything there must be studied in its mobility, in the mobility of the blood circulation, of breathing, of thinking, of self-movement. This process can even be traced much farther into the physical.
Consider the breathing process as it passes over into the blood-process, and thence works over also into the brain. Carbonic acid is formed in the first place: that is to say, an acid is formed in the human organism. But when the breathing process passes over into the brain and into the nervous system, salt substances are formed out of the acids; salt substances are deposited.
Thus we may say: when the human being thinks, solids are precipitated. In the circulation, we find fluidity. In the breath, the gaseous. And in the principle of mobility when this passes over into movements, we find the fiery. The material elements are contained in all this, but the elements in mobility, in a constant state of arising and passing away. This process cannot really be grasped by sense-observation. Those who set out to grasp it, anatomically, by means of sense-observation, never really understand it; much must be added out of the inner creative force of the spirit if this process is to be understood. If we listen to explanatory discourses on the rhythmic process, as they are given in ordinary lectures on anatomy and physiology, we feel that it is all very remote from reality. (Those of you who have had this experience will be able to substantiate what I am saying). Yes, whoever listens to all this with an unbiased mind, and then watches the audience, actually feels as if the barrenness offered to the listeners must cause their very death; as if they must remain fixed to the desks, unable to move, unable even to crawl away! For this system of circulation ought to be described with such living vitality that the hearers, being continually carried from the sensible into the super-sensible, from the super-sensible back again into the sensible, enter into a kind of musical mood during the description.
When this is done, the human being develops inner habits of soul through which karma can be understood. We shall speak of that to-morrow. But what we have here is a sense-picture of Inspiration. Whereas in the study of the head we have a sense-picture of Imagination, so we have a picture of Inspiration in a study of the rhythmic system of the human being, if this study has the right character.
We pass now to the metabolic-limb system. In what modern anatomy and physiology have to say of the metabolic-limb system, we do not come to the forces of this system, but only to what falls away and is discarded by it. Everything that in the modern view is the content of the metabolic-limb system does not belong at all to the real human structure and organisation, but is expelled. The content of the bowels is only the extreme instance. Whatever else is physically perceptible in the metabolic-limb system does not belong to the human being but is deposited by him; some of it remains within him for a longer time, some for a shorter time. The content of the bowels remains a short time; what is deposited by the muscles, nerves, etc. remains longer. Any physical substance that can be found in the metabolic-limb system does not belong to the human being; it is excretion, deposit. Everything that belongs to the metabolic-limb system is of a super-sensible nature. So that in studying the metabolic-limb system of man we have to pass over to what has a purely super-sensible existence within the physical.
We must therefore picture the metabolic-limb system in such a way that physical arms, etc., are in reality spiritual, and within this spiritual the Ego unfolds. — When I move my arms or my legs, deposits are continually taking place, and these deposits are observed. But they are not the essential. You cannot refer to the physical when you want to explain how the arm or the hand grasps something; you must refer to the spiritual. The spiritual that runs all along the arm — that is the essential in the human being. What you perceive is merely a deposit of the metabolic-limb system.

Diagram 2

How, then, can we even start on a study of karma if we believe that what we see in the metabolic-limb system is the human being? The human being is not this at all. We can only start on a study of karma when we know what the human being really is. We must include something that is to be found, certainly, in the sense-world, but which is, nevertheless, a super-sensible picture of Intuition.
And so, my dear friends, you can say: A study of the head is an Imaginative process, projected into the sense-world; a study of the rhythmic system must be truly Inspired, though active in the realm of sense-observation, within the sense-world; a study of the metabolic-limb system must be Intuitive, a super-sensible activity in the sense-world.
It is very interesting to find that in the study of the human being we have images for Intuition, Inspiration and Imagination. In a proper study of the metabolic-limb man we can learn what Intuition really is in the super-sensible. In a proper study of the rhythmic man we can learn what Inspiration really is in the super-sensible. In a proper study of the head we can learn what Imaginative observation is in the super-sensible.
Study of the Head: Imaginative, projected into the sense-world.
Study of the Rhythmic System: Inspired, working in the sense-world.
Study of the Metabolic-Limb System: Intuitive, supersensibly in the sense-world.
This is what is indicated in the latest ‘Leading Thoughts’, and it is something which everyone who carefully studies the existing Lecture-Courses can indeed find for himself.
To-day, my dear friends, we have tried to consider karmic connections in relation to the physical. To-morrow we will pass on to a closer study of karmic connections in relation to the moral and spiritual nature of man

physiognomy

1904-11-11-GA093

Life as such overcomes every Form. It propagates itself through Christianity and lives in all forms and confessions. Whoever seeks the Christian Life will find it. It creates Forms and shatters Forms. But, in addition, a form for the Christian Life of the Sixth Root Race must be prepared. A number of human beings must be formed into an organization, a Form, in which the Christianity of the Sixth Root Race can find its place. This Form, this external Form of Society must spring from a handful of men whom Manes prepares. This is the community that Manes prepares. Therefore the first endeavor of Manicheanism is to shape external life in its pure form. That is why Manicheanism laid such great stress on purity. The Cathari were a sect which appeared like a meteor. They gave themselves this name, Cathari, because Cathari means ‘the Pure Ones.’ They were human beings who had to keep themselves pure in their mode of life and in their moral relationships. In Manicheanism, it was less a question of the cultivation of Life but rather of the cultivation of the external Form of Life for the Sixth Root Race. In this Sixth Root Race, Good and Evil will form a far greater contrast than they do today. What will appear in the Fifth Round for the whole of humanity, i.e., that the physiognomy will be a direct expression for that which karma has created in man, so, in the Sixth Root Race, Evil will appear, especially in the Spiritual. There will be men who are mighty in Love and Goodness. But Evil will also be there as a mood and a disposition (Gesinnung) without any covering, within a large number of human beings. They will extol Evil. Some inkling in regard to the Evil in the Sixth Root Race glimmers in many men of genius. (Nietzsche's Blond Beast is a portent of this Evil in the Sixth Root Race.) The task of the Sixth Root Race is to draw Evil again into itself through gentleness (Milde). In those who are the followers of the Sons of the Widow there will live the inviolable principle that Evil must be overcome through gentleness. That is the task of the Manichean spiritual stream. It appears in forms which many can call to mind, and need not be mentioned. It must express itself in the forming of a community which has to spread above all things: Peace, Love, and Non-resistance to Evil. It must create a Form for the Life that is to come later.

1908-06-21-GA104

We must distinguish between soul-development and race-development. No soul is undeservedly obliged to remain in an old body, no soul will undeservedly remain in a body belonging to our age. Those who hear the voice which calls them to progress will survive the great period of destruction — the War of All against All — and appear in new bodies which will be quite different from those of the present day. For it is very short-sighted if one thinks of the Atlantean bodies of men as being like the present bodies. In the course of thousands of years the external physiognomy changes and after the great War of All against All man will have quite a different form. To-day he is so formed that in a certain sense he can conceal the good and evil in his nature. The human physiognomy already betrays a good deal, it is true, and one who understands this will be able to read much from the features. But it is still possible to-day for a scoundrel to smile most graciously with the must innocent man and or taken for an honest man; the reverse is also possible; the good impulses in the soul may remain unrecognized. It is possible for all that exists in the soul as cleverness and stupidity, as beauty and ugliness, to hide itself behind the general physiognomy possessed by this or that rare. This will no longer be the case un the epoch following the great War of All against All. Upon the forehead and in the whole physiognomy it will be written whether the person is good or evil. He will show in his face what is contained in his inmost soul. What a roan has developed within himself, whether he has exercised good or evil impulses, will be written on his forehead. After the great War of All against All there will be two kinds of human beings. Those who had previously tried to follow the call to the spiritual life, who cultivated the spiritualizing and ennobling of their inner spiritual life, will show this inward life on their faces and express it in their gestures and the movements of their hands. And those who have turned away from the spiritual life, represented by the community of Laodicea, who were lukewarm, neither warm nor cold, will pass into the following epoch as those who retard human evolution, who preserve the backward forces of evolution which have been left behind. They will show the evil passions, impulses and instincts hostile to the spiritual in an ugly, unintelligent, evil-looking countenance. In their gestures and hand-movements, in every-thing they do, they will present an outer image of the ugliness un their soul. Just as humanity has separated into races and communities, in the future it will divide into two great streams, the good and the evil. And what is in their souls will be outwardly manifest, they will no longer be able to hide it.

1915-10-31-GA254

Let us take the case of a woman of to-day — or, in order not to be one-sided, of a man of to-day who grows angry, really angry, and has evil thoughts in respect to another person. This will not be so strongly visible upon his face as a change of its form; there will be a change to some extent, but not a very marked one. At the present time, a man may be extremely evil-minded, yet this will not appear in a very marked way upon his physiognomy.
In the remote past, this was quite different. If someone harboured evil thoughts, his face completely assumed the expression of his inner being; his countenance changed completely. At that time, it would therefore not have been incorrect to say: That man resembles a cat. If he was a hypocrite, he really resembled a cat, or a hyaena. In that remote past, man's countenance and his outward shape were altogether the expression of his inner life. The human being was at that time able to transform his outward form and he possessed this capacity in a high degree.
In the animals, this capacity of transformation was far less conspicuous, although they also possessed it. Their physical body was far more hardened than that of man and they could only transform it gradually. The animals could transform themselves particularly as a species and the various qualities were not transmitted hereditarily in the stereotyped manner of to-day.
Since the Atlantean epoch, everything has therefore grown more and more hardened as far as man's physical body is concerned, and it has, I might say, been cast into solid forms. To-day, we are still able to move our hands and our face can still change expression, but in a certain way the bodily form has grown firm and hard. The animal forms are however quite hardened, so that their physiognomies are rigid. But in the Atlantean age this was not the case in such a marked degree, even among the animals.
Generally speaking, we may therefore say, if we wish to characterize the human being: At the present time, man's physical body is extremely rigid, but his etheric body is still mobile to some extent, so that the etheric body still assumes forms in accordance with man's inner nature. In the case of an evil-minded person, it is therefore significant — indeed, it is to some extent a reality — that outwardly his face may only have a slight resemblance with a hyaena, whereas his etheric body will have a far greater resemblance with a hyaena. The etheric body is still changeable; it still possesses something which allows it to be transformed. But even the etheric body is on the way of growing rigid, like the physical body.
Just as the physical body has taken on rigid forms from the Atlantean epoch onwards, up to our fifth post-Atlantean epoch, so will also the etheric body take on more rigid, solid forms from the fifth post-Atlantean epoch onwards, into the sixth epoch and on into the second post-Atlantean age. As a result — and I have pointed this out in many lectures — in the etheric body, whose forms penetrate into the physical body, will assert itself very strongly. We are now living in the fifth epoch of the first post-Atlantean age; then come into the sixth and seventh epochs. During the sixth and seventh epochs, the rigidity of the etheric body will have a great influence upon the physical body and the physical body will become a faithful copy of the etheric.
This will give rise to serious and important results. During the sixth epoch of the post-Atlantean evolution of the earth, the human beings will therefore be born with specially marked bodies, which will express their inner moral qualities. We shall then be meeting someone and we shall know what his moral constitution is like, for his outward appearance shall reveal it. In future, the MORAL physiognomy will be particularly conspicuous, whereas all those marks which now characterize the human physiognomy will be far less conspicuous. The human physiognomy is now strongly dependent upon heredity: we resemble our parents, our ancestors and bear the characteristics of our race. But these things will have no meaning whatever during the sixth epoch, our bodily form will then obtain its expression from the series of our incarnations. The human beings will differ very much from one another and their features will be strongly marked. When we encounter somebody, we shall then know exactly: This is a good person and that is an evil one. Just as to-day we know that this is an Italian and that a Frenchman etc., so we shall know in future that this is a good person and that a bad one ... Of course, there will be many intermediary stages of good and evil. The human countenance will thus more and more express the moral qualities.
During the sixth epoch, even the outward physiognomy of our environment will have a very changed aspect. Particularly those animals which now supply meat for human consumption, shall then have died out. In future, a great hymn of praise will be sung to vegetarianism, and people will tell one another, as if they were speaking of some ancient memory, that their ancestors used to eat meat. Not all the animals shall then have died out, but only certain species; particularly those animals shall have disappeared from the earth that have taken on the most rigid forms. Thus, even the earth and its outward physiognomy will undergo certain changes.
You see, the fact that in future we shall be so firmly bound to a rigid physiognomy, will constitute an almost fatal destiny, a real fate, which will be impressed upon our whole being. And we shall be unable to do anything whatever against this fate, against this destiny. Imagine the tragedy of such a situation!
We shall then really be obliged to admit: During the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, a few materialists believed that a man is a criminal if his posterior occipital lobe does not cover his cerebellum. This is merely a materialistic theory in our present fifth post-Atlantean epoch, but it will become a reality in future, and that part (the etheric body) which can still be shaped and moulded at the present time, shall then have grown rigid. The tendency that the materialistic world-conception shall one day assume real shape really exists. At present, the materialistic theories are not yet realities, but they have the tendency to become realities.
World-conception and its mysteries has now brought us to a very strange point. The materialists of to-day would surely protest, if they were to be looked upon as prophets. Nevertheless they are prophets. The materialists declare: A man is a criminal, if his occipital lobe does not cover his cerebellum. Those who now declare such things, will prove that they are prophesying the truth, for one day this will be true. The materialists of to-day are real prophets. At the present time, that peculiar formation of the physical body which shows an insufficiently developed occipital lobe, may be paralyzed and counter-balanced with the aid of a suitable education, but during the sixth post-Atlantean epoch this will no longer be possible, for the etheric body will then no longer be transformable. Strong measures, quite different and far stronger measures are needed in order to counter-balance this. If no preventive measures are taken, then the conditions which the materialists describe will really arise; these will then be reality.
We may find a description of these conditions in the poems of Marie Eugenie delle Grazie, poems which contain so much suffering. They describe a time, the coming of which may be felt in advance, a time which will really exist during the sixth post-Atlantean epoch. Her poems easily enable us to feel: Here is a soul that feels that the knowledge which can be gained at present, only submerges it into a void, into nothingness. Marie Eugenie delle Grazie would like to proceed, but she lacks the means enabling her to do so ... and so she sees an image: She sees what the world and the conditions of life will be like, if the materialistic direction is followed also in the future! Unless the human beings of to-day take steps to prevent that the course of evolution should follow the direction which it would be obliged to follow in accordance with the forces which now live in mankind, unless these preventive measures are taken, the human beings of the sixth post-Atlantean epoch will only be able to concern themselves with the things which Marie Eugenie delle Grazie describes.
All the religious systems of the world which have existed up to the present time would be unable to prevent the terrible fate which will befall mankind during the sixth post-Atlantean epoch; namely, that their moral qualities will be written upon their countenances, upon the physiognomy of their bodies. It will then be impossible to do anything against this fate; nothing can be done, if everything is left to follow the tendencies of that world-conception which now holds sway.
These are earnest thoughts, tremendously earnest thoughts.

1912-12-15-GA140

appears already extract on ‘secret of the brain’ .. in Ch 6

1921-07-02-GA205

Below in 10.40 mapping of organs metamorphosis

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Reference links in

1921-11-04-GA208

Cosmosophy II – Lecture 7

Skull

Karl Langer gave a lecture on three truly important human heads, namely, the skulls of Schubert, Haydn, and Beethoven

https://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA169/English/AP1990/19160627p01.html

also in occult physiology

+ check Olive Whicher

Various DL notes

How about?

- Dwarfs, saw one on the beach today during my walk, seems head is normal size?

- Club foot – see KR lectures Lord Byron and geometry teacher

Discussion

Related pages

References and further reading

Louis Locher-Ernst: 'Geometrische Metamorphosen : zu einer geisteswissenschaftlichen Metamorphosenlehre' (1970)
Antonie Gerrit Degenaar: 'Metamorphose' (typoscript)
Christa Lichtenstern: 'Die Wirkungsgeschichte der Metamorphosenlehre Goethes : von Philip Otto Runge bis Joseph Beuys (1990)
Andreas Suchantke : 'Metamorphose : Kunstgriff der Evolution' (2002)

Man - the human being

Günther Wachsmuth: 'Die Reinkarnation des Menschen als Phänomen der Metamorphose' (1934)
Leendert F. C. Mees:
- 'Metamorfosen in het menselijk skelet' (article in NL 1968)
- 'Secrets of the Skeleton: Form in Metamorphosis' (1995 in EN, original in NL1980 as 'Geheimen van het Skelet - Vorm en metamorfose' link to online book; in DE as 'Das menschliche Skelett. Form und Metamorphose' (1981 and 1990 in DE)
Rudolf Treichler: 'Metamorfosen in de levensloop : Ziekte en ontwikkeling in het leven van Goethe' (1990), original in DE 1984 as 'Metamorphosen im Lebenslauf'

Animals

see: Animal kingdom#Metamorphosis

Plants

see: Plant kingdom#Metamorphosis

Minerals

Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Dankmar Bosse: 'Die Metamorphose des Granits : Substanz- und Gestaltbildung des Erdorganismus (1994)

Metamorphosis

Aspects

plant

animal

human being

Inspirational quotes

Illustrations

Lecture coverage and references

Overview coverage

Reference extracts

1906-08-29-GA095

1908-10-21-GA107

1914-07-14-GA266/3

1917-01-21-GA174

1918-02-10-GA182

1918-08-26-GA183 (important)

1918-09-02-GA183

1920-02-15-GA196 (important, see paper copy)

1920-05-02-GA201

1922-08-22-GA214

1922-12-09-GA218 (the ear)

1923-10-28-GA230

1923-11-14-GA231

1923-11-17-A-GA231

1924-03-15-GA235

1923-11-14-GA231

1923-11-17-A-GA231

1924-04-09-GA240

physiognomy

1908-06-21-GA104

1921-07-02-GA205

More

1921-11-04-GA208

Discussion

Related pages

References and further reading

Man - the human being

Animals

Plants

Minerals

Various other