What takes place as we sleep

From Free Man Creator

The human being is quite different and functions very differently during the day and the night. During daytime, the human being is structurally made up of four bodily principles that are closely connected and in their joint functioning give rise to Man's waking consciousness. During the process of sleep however, the human astral body and human 'I' are loosed from their connection of the physical and etheric bodies that stay in bed.

During sleep, Man looses his daytime waking consciousness and therefore is not consciously aware of what is going on, so his life experiences consist of daytime experiences with waking consciousness, separated by 'blanks' of the nighttime periods.

The process during sleep has two aspects:

  • [1] - Man's own activities with astral body and I separating and changing from their usual functioning in the physical and etheric bodies, to have different experiences in the astral and spirit world - of which Man is not aware with waking consciousness. This depends on the depth of the sleep, see Schema FMC00.248 and more info on Three levels of sleep.
  • [2] - what goes on in the lower physical and etheric bodies during sleep: how these are maintained by spiritual entities in absence of the own astral body and human I, and have a rejuvenating effect on the human etheric body. See also The elementary kingdoms and Schema FMC00.285

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Whereas the second aspect is more of one of sustenance, supporting the continued physically incarnate life of Man on Earth, the first aspect is crucial for the overall process of Man's evolution:

Aspects

  • three levels of sleep
  • our moral and religious feelings are left behind in sleep in the physical and ether-body (1922-11-19-GA218)
  • talking and sleeping in sleep
    • sleepwalking - a level of consciousness that Rudolf Steiner calls 'Moon men' (see 1923-09-15-GA228)
  • the ether body at night
    • When Man is in a sleeping condition, any being having the power to send out thoughts, can gain an influence over him. He can therefore be influenced by higher individualities .. who can send thoughts into the etheric body of the sleeper .. this way someone can receive into his etheric body pure and lofty thoughts from the Masters. (1905-10-18-GA093A)
    • if we think about something in the vicinity of a sleeping person, we exercise an influence on his/her etheric body; only nothing of this will be experienced by the sleeper (1905-10-18-GA093A)
    • the etheric body during sleep, and the work of the hierarchies is described in the beautiful 1923-05-02-GA224 (see below)
      • during sleep, the I and astral body of Man experience the etheric body .. as individualised Logos. Our speech is transformed and turned inwards etherically and repeated in the opposite order in a way that reveals the nature of the soul in a resounding individualized logos. This resounding brings to expression and writes into the time-sequence of the etheric, the spiritualized transformed version of what is spoken during the day.
    • exposure to Ahrimanic influences during sleep: The moral order on Earth is bound up with the human etheric body. Man is only conscious and ‘armed with his moral qualities’ while awake, while asleep is he open to Ahrimanic influences on his etheric body. See more on: Ahrimanic influence on Man
    • the process at night with the instreaming etheric flows, with different flows for different moral characters, is described at the end of the 1911-10-01-GA130 lecture, see Etherization of blood
  • integration of soul experiences
    • like the tape archive metaphor - the image of a ‘record to tape’ at night of the daily experiences. In is described how the human heart (not physical, but etheric and astral) is this ‘karma recorder’ as of the age of puberty, see The human heart#etheric heart and astral recorder.

process of falling asleep (and waking up)

the spiritual hierarchies at work

  • the work of the third hierarchy at night during Man's sleep, see 1924-06-27-GA236 below. See also Three meetings - eg Schema FMC00.023.
    • we sink into sleep so the gods come to our aid to acquire greater moral strength .. so that we plunge into the divine will where divine forces transform into the power of will the moral principles we receive (1911-10-01-GA130)
    • human speech about ideals and true selfless love while awake connects us (astral body) with archangels and (I) with archai during sleep (1923-04-06-GA224)
    • every night, a meeting or connection of Man's I with the angel, as part of the development of the spirit-self, see Three Meetings
    • Man has foresight at night on the happenings of the next day, but such that he doesn't have full consciousness of it. Man's angel though has full consciousness of this, and this encompasses the nightly communion with one's angel (1919-09-13-GA193)
    • the work of the angels in Man's astral body, and what is required for the development of Man: if Man does not pick up the spiritual activity as required by the age and as enabled by the Christ Impulse (see also Christ in the etheric, on Christ Module 19 - experiencing the Christ), then the angels could have to perform this work during sleep when Man is unconscious, but this would have major consequences for humanity at large (see the lecture 'The work of the angel in our astral body' on What takes place as we sleep#1918-10-09-GA182)
  • other
    • role of backwards archai of Old Sun working on our physical and etheric bodies during the night (1910-08-21-GA122), see also The elementary kingdoms
    • spiritual beings of The elementary kingdoms (re the higher ethers) maintain Man's blood during the time when Man is asleep, and replace the I and astral body in this function while Man is asleep (see FMC00.285 below, see also Blood is a special fluid)
    • during sleep, an archangel replaces our astral body, and an archai our 'I'. "We now meet these beings when we have developed our astral organs, and this powerful event is so sacred to us is called in spiritual science the 'encounter with the higher self' " (1909-12-07-GA266/1 and see also Schema FMC00.132 below)
  • penetration of Man's higher triad by the Christ Impulse takes place during the state of sleep, see Christ Module 16 - During sleep

dreaming

  • technical explanation of dreaming
  • two kinds of dreams (1905-10-18-GA093A)
    • those arising directly from the experiences of the astral world: both echoes of daytime experiences as certain things from the astral world. As a rule the I at night in the astral world mainly experiences things connected with daily life. When the I returns, it (i) may or (ii) may not bring with it into waking life the experiences of the astral world. Certain things are however already present in the etheric body. What is found there is (also) taken up by the astral body and then manifests itself to us as dreams. Now what took place during the night in the etheric body is a different experience, and in the morning one finds in the etheric body both (a) thoughts that approached it from the environment and (b) thoughts which others Individualities have implanted into it (and that can come forth when the person is meditating).
  • interpretation of dreams
    • presentient warning dreams
    • symbolism and emotional dynamic in dream experience
  • people create elementals constantly, both consciously or subconsciously. "Bear in mind that human beings create such elementals even while asleep, while dreaming." (Daskalos; HTS)
  • temple sleep in previous cultural ages as an advanced art of healing through dreams, see Medicine aspects and Mystery School tradition#Temple sleep)

Inspirational quotes

1914-04-25-GA266/3

During the night the elemental beings, servants of the hierarchies, are within us and work on our senses.

Illustrations

Schema FMC00.387 illustrates how the human aura is different in waking state versus during sleep.

FMC00.387.jpg

FMC00.285 describes the blood not just as a physical mineral fluid, but also its other dimensions. The Human 'I' lives with consciously in the warmth .. the other components are physical due to the Luciferic infection. In both drawings, the blue rectangle highlights what happens during sleep: spiritual beings of The elementary kingdoms (re the higher ethers) maintain Man's blood during the time when Man is asleep, and replace the I and astral body in this function while Man is asleep.

FMC00.285.jpg

Schema FMC00.245 illustrates how the soul and spirit live in Man's bodily principles and I-organization. How the threefold soul activity and thinking feeling willing relates to the bodily organisms, and our contemporary waking consciousness is just a part of this. Man is actually asleep in part of his bodily constitution and functioning.

See also Schema FMC00.132A

Lecture coverage and references

1905-10-18-GA093A

see: Man's higher triad#1905-10-18-GA093A

1908-05-19-GA103

At night, while sleeping, the human creature is entirely different from the same creature during the day

We need but briefly call to mind how the human being appears to us between the time of waking in the morning and the evening, when he again sinks into sleep. We know that he is composed of a physical body, an ether or life body, an astral body, and an I.

These four members of the human being are in close relationship only during the waking state. ... during the night, while sleeping, the human creature is, in reality, entirely different from the same creature during the day, during waking day consciousness, for then his four members are assembled in a very different manner.

When he sleeps, the physical and ether bodies lie in bed. The astral body and I, in a certain sense, are loosened from their connections with the physical and ether bodies and are in fact 'outside of them' - we must understand the word outside in a spiritual, not in a purely spatial sense. Therefore during the night the human being is a creature consisting of two parts, one that remains lying in bed and another part which separates from the physical and ether bodies.

1908-09-11-GA106

Let us imagine that we lie down to sleep, that the astral body removes itself from the physical, and that all this happens in the full moon. We have the physical and etheric bodies lying in bed, the astral body hovering above, and all of this in the full moonlight. Now the situation is not so that an astral cloud simply becomes visible there for the clairvoyant.

  • On the contrary, what he actually sees is streams from the astral body into the physical, and these streams are the forces that remove fatigue in the night. They bring to the physical body replenishment for the wear and tear of the day, so that it feels refreshed and quickened.
  • At the same time one would see spiritual streams proceeding from the moon, and these streams are permeated by astral powers. One would see how there actually proceed from the moon spiritual effects that permeate and strengthen the astral body and influence its working on the physical body.
1910-03-22-GA119
1910-03-26-GA119

sleep and the elemental world

The process of going to sleep is in very truth an ascent into the macrocosm. Even in normal human consciousness it is sometimes possible, through particularly abnormal conditions, to become conscious to a certain extent of the processes connected with going to sleep. This happens in the following way.

  • The Man feels a kind of bliss and can distinguish this consciousness of bliss quite clearly from the ordinary waking consciousness. It is as though he became lighter, as though he were growing out beyond himself.
  • Then this experience is connected with a certain feeling of being tortured by remembrance of the personal faults inhering in the character during life. What arises here as a painful remembrance of personal faults is a very faint reflection of the feeling a Man has when he passes the Lesser Guardian of the Threshold and can perceive how imperfect he is and how trivial in face of the great realities and beings of the macrocosm.
  • This experience is followed by a kind of convulsion — indicating that the inner Man is passing out into the macrocosm.

Such experiences are unusual but known to many people when they were more or less conscious at the moment of going to sleep. But a person who has only the ordinary, normal consciousness loses it at the moment of going to sleep.

All the impressions of the day — colours, light, sounds, and so on — vanish, and the Man is surrounded by dense darkness instead of the colours and other impressions of daily life. If he were able to maintain his consciousness — as the trained initiate can do — at the moment when the impressions of the day vanish, he would perceive what is called in spiritual science the elemental world, the world of the elements.

This world of the elements is, to begin with, hidden from Man while he is in process of going to sleep. Just as Man's inner being is hidden on waking through his attention being diverted to the impressions of the outer world, so, when he goes to sleep, the nearest world to which he belongs, the first stage of the macrocosm, the elemental world, is hidden from his perception. He can learn to gaze into it when he actually ascends into the macrocosm in the way indicated.

To begin with, this elemental world makes him conscious that everything in his environment, all sense-perceptions and impressions, are an emanation, a manifestation of the spiritual, that the spiritual lies behind everything material. When a Man on the way to Initiation — not, therefore, losing consciousness while passing into sleep — perceives this world, no doubt any longer exists for him that spiritual beings and spiritual realities lie behind the physical world. Only as long as he is aware of nothing except the physical world does he imagine that behind this world there exist all kinds of conjectured material phenomena — such as atoms and the like. For the Man who penetrates into the elemental world there can no longer be any question of whirling, clustering atoms of matter. He knows that what lies behind colours, sounds and so forth is not material but the spiritual. Certainly, at this first stage of the world of the elements the spiritual does not yet reveal itself in its true form as spirit. Man has before him impressions which, although in a different form from those known in waking consciousness, are not yet the spiritual facts themselves. It is not yet anything that could be called a true spiritual manifestation but to a considerable degree it is something that might be described as a kind of new veil over the spiritual beings and facts.

1910-08-21-GA122

.. in the cycle on Genesis, describes how the backward Old Saturn beings played during the Old Sun evolutionary stage, especially the backwards Archai.

But something else is also necessary as well as light. To understand what this is, we have to consider the rhythmic alternation of sleeping and waking. What does it really mean to be awake? All the activity of our souls, all that we develop in our thinking and feeling, all the ebb and flow of our passions — in short, all that happens through the fluctuating energies of our astral bodies and our egos, constitutes a continual using up of our physical bodies during day life. That is a very ancient occult truth, a truth to which even modern physiology comes if it knows how to interpret its own findings properly. What the soul unfolds as its inner life in the waking state continuously uses up the forces of the external physical body, the first rudiments of which were bestowed during the Saturn existence. The life of the physical body is quite different in sleep, when the astral body with its fluctuant inner life is outside it. Whereas in waking life there is a continuous consumption, or even a continuous destruction, of the forces of the physical body, in sleep these forces are being restored, being renewed and built up again all the time. So that in our physical and etheric bodies we have to distinguish destructive processes and processes of renewal — destructive processes which take place during waking life, processes of renewal which take place during sleep. But nothing which happens anywhere in space is isolated, it is always related to existence as a whole. And we must not think of those processes of destruction, which take place in our physical bodies from the time we awaken to the time we go to sleep again, as being confined within the limits of our skin. They are closely bound up with cosmic processes. They are merely a continuation of what flows into us from outside, so that during the waking life of day we are connected with the destructive forces of the universe, and during sleep with the forces of renewal.

This destruction of our physical bodies which goes on during the waking life of day could not have happened during the Saturn evolution, otherwise the first rudiments of our physical body could never have been formed. For obviously one can build up nothing if one starts to destroy it. The Saturnian operation on our bodies had to be a constructive one. The destructive process takes place in the daytime under the influence of light, but on Saturn there was no light. Therefore the Saturn activity on our physical bodies was an up-building one, and had to be maintained at least for a time, even into the later period, when on the Sun light appeared. Then the up-building activity could only be maintained through Saturn Beings remaining behind to care for it.

It was necessary for the Saturn Beings to be kept back in cosmic evolution, so that they could undertake the rebuilding of the physical body during sleep, while there was no light. Thus the backward Saturn Beings have their part to play in our existence; without them we should be exposed to nothing but destruction. There has to be an alternation, a co-operation, of Sun Beings and Saturn Beings, of light and darkness. Thus if the activity of the light Beings is to be rightly guided by the Elohim, they must inweave into their own work in an orderly fashion the work of the Beings of darkness. There can be no stability in cosmic activity unless the force of darkness is everywhere interwoven with the force of light. And in this complication of the forces of light and darkness lies one of the secrets of cosmic existence, of cosmic alchemy. This secret is touched upon in the seventh scene of my first Mystery Play, where Johannes Thomasius enters Devachan, and where one of Maria's companions, Astrid, is given the task of weaving the dark into the light. Throughout the conversation between Maria and her three companions you will find many cosmic mysteries concealed, which can well be pondered for a long, long time.

Thus we must never forget that the interplay between the forces of sun-light and Saturn-darkness is a necessity of our existence. When therefore the Elohim placed the Spirits of Personality as their deputies in charge of the weaving of the light forces, of the work which is performed upon us men and upon other earthly beings while the light is affecting us, they had also to appoint the backward Saturn Beings as fellow-workers; they had to see that the whole work of the universe was carried on by the normally advanced and the backward Archai together. The backward Archai are active in the darkness. Hence the Elohim employ not only the Beings designated by yom, day, but they set in opposition to them Beings who weave in the darkness. And the Bible says with a wonderfully realistic description of the facts: And God called the light Day (yom), and the darkness He called Night (lay'lah). [ 2 ] And lay'lah does not mean our abstract night, but lay'lah are the Saturn Archai, who at that time had not advanced to the Sun stage.

And to this day it is they who are active in us during sleep, when they work upon our physical and etheric bodies, building them up. This mysterious expression lay'lah, which has given rise to all kinds of myths, is neither our abstract “night” nor is it anything which need lead to myth-making. It is simply the name of the backward Archai, who unite their activity with that of the advanced Archai.

1910-11-24-GA060

lecture called: 'The Nature of Sleep'

It lies in the nature of current scientific observations that the phenomena we want to dedicate today’s lecture to are basically not much talked about by current natural science. Yet every human being should feel that sleep is something how is placed among the phenomena of our life as if life’s greatest riddles are presented to us through it. Surely people always must have felt the mysteriousness and significance of sleep when they spoke of sleep as the ‘brother of death.’ Today, we have to limit ourselves to speaking of sleep as such, because the coming lectures will repeatedly lead us back to the contemplation of death in many ways.

All that man in a direct sense counts as belonging to his soul experiences, all imaginations that from morning to evening surge up and down, all emotions and feelings which constitute man’s soul drama, all pain and suffering, and the will impulses as well—all of it sinks down, as it were, into an indeterminate darkness when the human being falls asleep.

Some philosophers might doubt themselves, so to speak, when they talk about the nature of the soul, about the nature of the spirit that reveals itself in human nature. Yet, they have to admit that even if it had been firmly nailed down by definitions and ideas and showed itself to be well researched, it basically seems to disappear into nothing within the course of each day.

If we look at the manifestations of our soul life in the way one usually does so scientifically and also amateurishly, then we basically must say that these are extinguished during the state of sleep; they are gone. For someone who only wants to observe the physical expressions of the soul, the human being becomes on deeper reflection, so to say, all the more a riddle. Because the actual bodily functions, the bodily activities, continue during sleep. Only what we usually call the ‘soul’ discontinues.

The question then arises as to whether one is speaking about bodily and soul matters in the right sense when one includes what appears to be extinguished on falling asleep, when actually the soul aspect is included to the full extent. Or, if already the ordinary observation of life, apart from Spiritual Science or anthroposophical observations, could show us that the soul is active and proves to be effective even when it is enveloped by sleep. However, if one wants to gain some clarity about those concepts, or one could say, if one wants to observe the manifestations of life in this field in the right sense, one must place exact terms before one’s soul.

By way of introduction, I would like to mention in advance that on this topic as well, Spiritual Science or Anthroposophy is not in a position to make generalisations of the kind that people love to make today. If today we talk about the nature of sleep, then we will only talk about the nature of human sleep. In the last lecture, with regard to other fields, we have touched on this many times - spiritual science knows very well that which outwardly manifests itself in the same way, as this or that other appearance by different beings, can have quite different causes in the respective beings. We have indicated that this applies to death, to the whole spiritual life and to the formation of the spiritual life of animals and human beings. Today, it would go too far to also talk about the sleep of animals. Therefore, we want to say in advance that all we talk about today applies only to the sleep of human beings.

Through our consciousness, we can speak about soul manifestations within ourselves—anyone can feel this—because we are conscious of what we imagine, want, and feel. Now the question must arise—and this is extremely important particularly for today’s observations—whether we may readily combine the definition of consciousness as we use it for the ordinary consciousness of a human being in the present with the concept of the soul or the spirit in a human being?

[comparison image]

First, to express myself more clearly about these concepts, I like to draw a comparison. A man might walk around in a room and cannot see his own face in any spot in that room. The only place he can see his face is where he can look into a mirror. His own face appears as an image in front of him. Isn’t there an enormous difference for man whether he just walks around in a room and lives within himself or whether he sees what he expresses of this living also in a mirror image? It could probably be so with human consciousness in a somewhat extended way. The human being could, so to speak, experience his soul life—and he would only become knowledgeable or conscious of this soul-life itself, the way he lives it, when it confronts him like a mirror. This could very well be. Thus, we could say, for example, that it is quite possible that the human soul life continues regardless of whether the human being is awake or asleep. But that the waking state consists of the fact that the human being perceives his soul life through a mirroring, let’s say first of all, through a mirroring within his physicality and that he cannot perceive it in the state of sleep because it cannot be mirrored in his physical body.

Although we have not yet proven anything with this, at least we would have gained two concepts. We could differentiate between the soul life as such and becoming conscious of the soul life. We can think that for our consciousness, for our knowledge of the soul life, as we currently stand in our everyday human life, everything depends on us receiving the mirror image of our soul life through our physicality because if we do not receive this, we cannot know anything about it. We would then be wholly in a sleeping state. Now that we have gained these concepts, let us try to place the phenomena of waking and sleeping life a little before our soul.

[phenomena of waking and sleeping]

Someone who is really able to observe life, will feel very clearly, and one would like to say, will ‘behold’ how the moment of falling asleep truly proceeds.

(1) He can perceive how the imaginations, the feelings weaken in their brightness, diminish in their intensity. But this is not the most essential. When a human being is awake, he lives in such a way that he creates order through his self-conscious I in his whole imaginative life, whereby he summarises, as it were, all ideas with his I. For at the moment when we in our waking life would not summarise all our ideas with our I, we would not be able to lead a normal soul life. We would have one group of ideas that we would relate to ourselves and call our concepts and another group we would look at as something foreign, like an external world. Only people who experience a split in their I, which for people today would be a state of sickness, could have such a tearing apart of their imaginative lives into different areas. For a normal person it is essential that all his ideas are in perspective related to a single point: the self-conscious I.

The moment we fall asleep, we feel distinctly that, at first, the I will be, so to speak, overwhelmed by imaginations despite these growing dimmer. The ideas assert their independence; they live an independent life. Single clouds of ideas, as it were, form within the horizon of consciousness, and the I loses itself in imaginations. Then Man feels how the sense perceptions like seeing and hearing and so on become blunter and blunter, and finally, he feels how the will impulses are paralysed.

(2) Now, we must point out something clearly observed by just a few people. The human being feels furthermore, as he sees things with defined borders in his daily life, that at the moment of falling asleep, something asserts itself like a feeling of being locked up in a vague fog, which occasionally makes itself felt as cooling, or with other sensations in certain parts of the body: on the hands, on the joints, on the temples, on the spine etc. These are feelings that someone falling asleep can very well observe. They are, one would like to say, the kind of trivial experiences that one can have every evening when falling asleep if one wants to.

(3) Better experiences are had by people who, through a finer developed soul life, more precisely observe the moment of falling asleep. They can then feel something like an awakening despite falling asleep. What I am about to tell you now, can be told by anyone who has acquired certain methods of really observing these things, because it is a common human phenomenon. The moment people feel like an awakening when they are slipping into sleep can really be described as follows: something like an expanding conscience, like morality, wakes up in the soul. This is indeed the case. This is particularly shown when people observe their soul concerning what they have experienced the previous day and with which they are satisfied in their conscience. In the moment of moral awakening, they feel this especially clearly. At the same time, this feeling is quite the opposite of the feeling during the day. While the feeling during the day shows itself by things approaching us, one who falls asleep feels as if his soul is pouring itself out over a world that is now awakening. This mainly includes a relaxation, a pouring out of feeling over that which the soul, through itself can experience in relation to its moral inner being as if through an expanding conscience. Then it is a moment of inner bliss, which appears to be much longer for the one falling asleep, when it is about dwelling on things with which the soul can agree. There is often a deep conflict when the soul has to reproach itself. In short, the moral human being who, during the day, is repressed through the strong sensory impressions, relaxes and feels himself very distinctly when falling asleep.

(4) Everyone who has acquired a particular method, or maybe even only a feeling concerning such observations, knows that at this moment a certain longing awakens, which we could describe like this: One really wants this moment to extend into the indefinite, that it would never end. But then comes something like a ‘jolt’, a kind of inner movement. For most people, this is very difficult to describe.

Of course, spiritual science can describe this inner movement quite precisely. It is, as it were, like a demand that the soul makes on itself: You must now relax even further; you must pour yourself out further. But by making this demand of itself, the soul loses itself for the moral life in its surroundings. This is like throwing a small drop of colour into water and dissolving it: the colour can still be seen at first. But once the drop distributes itself throughout the water, it pales more and more and finally, the colour display as such stops. So it is when the soul is just beginning to swell and live in its moral mirror image where it can still feel itself, but the feeling stops once the jolt, the inner movement, occurs, as the drop of colour loses itself in the water.

This is not a theory; it can be observed and is accessible to everyone, just like a natural scientific observation is exactly accessible to everyone. If we thus observe the process of falling asleep, we can certainly say that the human being intercepts, as it were, something when falling asleep that, afterwards, he somehow can no longer be conscious of.

If I may be allowed to use both of my earlier constructed ideas—the human being has, as it were, a moment of parting from the mirror of the body in which the manifestations of life appear to him as mirror images and because he has no other means to mirror what otherwise is mirrored by the body, the possibility to perceive himself, ceases.

Again, it is possible to perceive in a certain sense the day’s happenings—if one does not want to be altogether stubborn and obstinate regarding what relates to the soul and the effect of what moves into an vague darkness. I have already pointed out in another context that someone forced to memorise this or that, i.e., learn things by heart, can do this much more easily if he sleeps on it more often, and that depriving oneself of sleep is the greatest enemy of memorisation. The possibility and the ability to memorise more easily even returns once we have slept on an issue and not want to learn something by heart in one go. This is also the case with other activities of the soul. However, we could convince ourselves very easily that it would be impossible to learn anything at all, to acquire anything when the soul is involved, if it weren’t for the inclusion of sleep states among our life states. The natural conclusion that has to be drawn from such phenomena is that our soul needs to withdraw from time to time from our physical body, in order to gain strength from an area that is not within our body, because the respective strengths within the body are being worn out. We must imagine that when we wake up in the morning from sleep, that from the state in which we were then, we have brought along strength to develop abilities, that we could not develop if we were constantly shackled to our bodies. This is how the effect of sleep shows itself in our ordinary nature, when one wants to think straight and not be obstinate.

What shows itself in general when one pauses in ordinary life, and for which one needs some good will to hold one’s life phenomena together, is shown very clearly and precisely when Man goes through developments that are able to lead him to a real beholding of the spiritual life.

[initiation exercises]

Here I would like to elaborate on what occurs when a human being has developed the forces that lie dormant within his soul in order to reach a state in which he can neither perceive with the senses nor comprehend with the mind. This will be followed up in more detail in the lecture How does one Attain Knowledge of the Spiritual World,1 where the methods will be quite comprehensively covered. Right now though, we will highlight some of the experiences that a person, truly practising such exercises is able to have that endow his soul, as it were, with spiritual eyes and spiritual ears, and through which he can look into the spiritual world, which is not an object of speculation, but for someone who perceives with his senses, it is just as much an object as colours and forms, warmth and coldness, and sounds. How to attain true clairvoyance has already come to light in previous lectures. This spiritual development, these exercises, actually consist of a person bringing out of himself something that he has within himself, gains other organs of perception, jolting upwards, as it were, over the soul, as it is in its ordinary state, and thus perceives a world that is always around him but which cannot be perceived in the normal state. When a person undergoes such exercises, the first thing that changes is his sleep life. Anyone, who has done their own real spiritual research knows this. I would now like to talk about the very first stage of change in the sleep life of a person who is actually clairvoyant and engaged in spiritual research. The first beginnings of this possibility of spiritual research do not make the person appear very different from the normal ordinary state of consciousness because a person who performs these exercises, as we shall discuss later, will at first sleep like any other human being and is just as unconscious as anyone else. But the moment of waking up will show something very special to the one who has performed spiritual exercises. I will now describe to you some very concrete phenomena that are based on facts.

[description A]

Let’s assume that a person who is practising these exercises is thinking very hard about something that another person could also be thinking about. He tries, maybe because he has a very difficult problem in front of him, to exert all his mental power to get to the bottom of it. Perhaps he’ll be like a schoolboy: his mental power just isn’t sufficient to solve the problem. This could definitely happen. If he has now already obtained through his exercises more possibilities to experience the inner states of the soul in connection with the physical state, he will certainly feel something quite peculiar when he finds himself incapable to do something. Unlike usual, he perceives a resistance in his physical organs, for example in his brain. He properly senses that the brain puts up resistance against him, just as we feel resistance when we try to drive in a nail with a hammer that is too heavy. The brain then begins to gain a reality. The way Man normally uses his brain, he would not feel it as if he were using an instrument, as is the case with a hammer, for example. A spiritual researcher feels his brain, he feels himself independent in relation to his thinking. That is an experience. But if he can’t solve a task, he feels that he is no longer able to carry out certain activities that he must perform when thinking. He feels very clearly that he is losing power over the instrument. This fact can be experienced very precisely.

If the spiritual researcher sleeps on the problem and then awakens, it will often happen that he feels up to the task without any further ado. But at the same time he also feels precisely that prior to waking up he has done something, that he has worked on something. He feels that he had been able to set something within him in motion during his sleep, that he had caused an activity. During the waking state he was forced to use his brain. He knows that. He can do nothing but use his brain when he is awake. But he was no longer able to use it properly, because—as I have described—it resisted him. During sleep, he feels, he is not dependent on using his brain. He was able to create a degree of flexibility without using the brain that was too tired or otherwise too heavily occupied. Now he feels something very peculiar: he perceives the activity that he has performed during sleep, albeit not directly. The Lord gives to his own, but not in their sleep. The spiritual researcher is not saved from having to solve his problem now in the waking state. It may come easily to him, but normally it is not so, and particularly not with things that simply must be solved by the brain.

Hence, the human being feels something that he has not known before in the sensory world—he senses his own activity, which presents itself to him in vivid pictures, in strange pictures that are in motion. It is just as if the thoughts he needs were living beings who would enter into all kinds of relationships with each other. Thus he senses his own, let’s call it, ‘mental activity’ that he undertook during sleep, like a series of pictures. This feeling is difficult to describe, as one is stuck in it in a quite peculiar way and has to tell oneself, ‘This is you yourself!’ But, on the other hand, one can distinguish this feeling very clearly from oneself, in the same way as one is able to distinguish a physical movement one makes from oneself. Thus one has pictures, imaginations of an activity performed before waking up. And now one can notice, if one has learned to watch oneself, that these pictures of an activity that was performed prior to waking up, connect themselves with our brain and turn it into a more flexible, more useful instrument, so that one will be able to complete something, which one could not do before because of a resistance, for example, to think certain thoughts. These are subtle things, but without them one won’t really get behind the secret of sleep. Thus, one feels that one has not performed an activity as in the awake state, but one that served the restoration of certain things in the brain which were worn out. The instrument has been restored in a way that was not possible before. One feels like a master builder of his own instruments.

The feeling during such an activity is significantly different from that during a daytime activity. The feeling one has about the day activities is comparable to copying something from a template or a model. There I am forced to follow the picture in front of me with every stroke or dot of colour. In regard to the things that appear as pictures at the moment of waking and that are, as it were, an illustration of an activity during sleep, one has the feeling of inventing the strokes, of creating the figures out of oneself, without being tied to a model. With such an occurrence one will have, as it were, intercepted what the soul did prior to waking up: one has intercepted the activity of brain regeneration. Because sooner or later one realises that what feels like a kind of coating the brain organs with what one remembers as figures is nothing other than a restoration of what has been damaged in the course of the day. One really has the feeling of being a master builder working on oneself.

Basically the difference between a spiritual researcher who perceives such things and an ordinary person is only that a spiritual researcher just perceives these things, whereas an ordinary person cannot pay attention to them and does not perceive them. The same activity that the spiritual researcher undertakes is performed by every human being, but the normal person doesn’t catch the moment when the organs are restored by the activity that takes place during sleep.

Let’s take such an experience and compare it to what was previously said about an increase in bluntness and dullness, and a reduction in brightness of the daily imaginative life at the moment of falling asleep. This latter phenomenon can only be viewed in the right light if one either frees oneself from today’s highly suggestive concepts of the world view that believes itself to be firmly based on natural science, or by actually accepting the available results of contemporary natural research. For example, in brain research, and according to the results of natural research, people who think more precisely can do nothing but acknowledge the independence of the spiritual from the physical. And it is very interesting that recently a popular book was published in which basically everything that has to do with spiritual life and the sources of spiritual life was presented wrongly and completely without any insight. But in this book, The Brain and the Human Being, by William Hanna Thomson,2 a lot of smart things are said. It deals in particular with modern brain research and with many other things that are presented—for example, as I also have more often pointed out—with symptoms of fatigue, which are quite instructive. But I have already explained that muscles and nerves cannot get tired in any other way than through conscious activity. As long as our muscles only serve an organic activity they cannot become tired. It would be bad if, for example, the heart muscle and other muscles needed rest. We only become fatigued when we perform an activity that is not innate to the organism—such as an activity that belongs to the conscious life of the soul. Thus one has to say; if the soul life was born out of the human being like the heart activity, then the immense difference between fatigue and non-fatigue could not be explained. The author of the book therefore feels compelled to acknowledge that the soul relates to the physical no differently than a rider relates to his horse, i.e., that it is completely independent from the physical. This is an enormous concession from a person who thinks like a natural scientist. One could get very strange feelings if, forced by contemporary natural research, one has to confess to oneself that the relationship between the soul life and the body life must be imagined as being roughly the same as that of a rider to a horse. That is, according to the image that people had of a centaur in earlier times, when they still looked deeper into the spiritual realm.

It is not apparent that the author of the book would have thought of this, but again this thought comes to mind from the natural scientific conception, and one gets the feeling that such ideas stem from times when a certain clairvoyance still existed for many people. Today, however, certain imaginations about centaurs seem to be more compatible with what a gentleman once told me: He said:

‘The Greeks watched the Scythes, who came from the North, and other rider clans, perhaps when they emerged from a fog. They could not distinguish the shapes clearly, and so they thought that these had grown out of the horse.’ A materialist might be satisfied with such an explanation. But it is just contemporary natural scientific research that pushes for an acknowledgment of the independence of the soul from the physical.

One thing we can hereby definitely notice, and we can follow such things best if we recall certain occurrences before our soul that are not commonplace, but still exist and cannot be denied. The spiritual researcher knows how that common man in the country, at the hour of his death, suddenly began to speak in Latin, a language he had never really used and which one could prove he had only heard once in Church when he was a little boy. This is not a fable, but a reality. Of course he did not understand anything of it, when he had heard or recited it. And yet it is true. From this, the idea should be formed in every human being that what affects us in our environment contains something in addition to what we absorb into our normal consciousness. Because what we absorb into our ordinary consciousness is often dependent on our education, on what we comprehend and the like. But not only what we can comprehend unites itself with us, but we have in us the possibility to absorb endlessly more than what we take up consciously. We can even observe in every human being how at certain times he has ideas, that were not strongly noticed at the time he experienced them here or there, so that he may not remember them at all. But through certain things they re-appear, and may even place themselves into the centre of his soul life. We really have to acknowledge that what constitutes the extent of our soul life is endlessly more than what we can receive and embrace with our day consciousness. This is extraordinarily important. Because in this way our attention is steered towards something inside of us that can really only make a slight impression on our corporeality because it has hardly been noticed, and then again it lives on in us. In this way, we are pointed to the foundations of our soul life, which should actually exist for every reasonable person. Every rational person should tell himself that, what is in the world around him for his consciousness while he is consciously looking at the world, is basically dependent on the organisation of his sensory organs and on what he can understand. And no one is entitled to want to limit reality by what they can perceive. It would be completely illogical to want to deny the spiritual researcher that behind the physical world a spiritual world exists, simply for the reason that man is only allowed to speak about what he sees and hears and what he can think about, and he is never allowed to judge what he cannot perceive. Because the world of reality is not the world of the perceptible. The world of the perceptible is limited by the sensory organs. For this reason one should never —in the Kantian sense—speak of the limits of knowledge; or about what a human being may or may not know, but only about that what he has before of him in accordance with his organs of perception. Considering this, one must say to oneself: Behind the colourful carpet of the sensory world, behind that which the warmth sense perceives as warmth or cold and so on, lies an infinite reality. Should therefore only what we perceive, or only the reality we perceive exert an influence on us? If we think that we are only shown a part or a section of the entire reality through our perception, then it is only logically tenable that there lies an infinite reality behind what can be given to us through our perception. However, this is also real for us, as we have been placed in it, so that what surges and lives outside and influences us, lives on for us. But what is our actual waking life like during the day? There really is no other way than to imagine the waking day life in this way, and to say; ‘We open our senses, our capacity to realise something immense and confront this immensity. Because each person has particular eyes, particular ears, and a certain sense of warmth, and so on, we are placing a particular section of reality in front of us. Anything else we reject, almost, as it were, fend it off, exclude it from us. So what does our conscious activity consist of? It consists of a defence against, or an exclusion of something different. And by straining our sensory organs, we are holding back something that we have not perceived. What we perceive is the remainder, are the remains of what is spreading itself around us, and what we, for the most part reject. In this way, we feel actively placed in this world, feel connected with it. Likewise, we defend ourselves through our sensory activity against a multitude of impressions, because, figuratively speaking, we are not able to bear the entire immeasurable infinity and take in only a section of it. If we think like this, then we must imagine quite different relationships between our whole organism, our entire bodily nature and between the external world, than those which we can perceive or comprehend with our intellect. Then it will not seem so unusual to think that the relationships, which we have with the outside world, live in us and that also the invisible, super-sensible or extra-sensible is active within us—and that the extra-sensible by being active in us, uses our senses to fabricate a section out of the entire immeasurable reality. Then our relationship to reality is completely different from how we are able to perceive it through our senses. Then there lies something of relationships with the outside world in our soul that does not exhaust itself through sensory perception, that eludes our waking daytime consciousness. Then it is with us as if we are stepping in front of a mirror with our inner being and have to say to ourselves:

‘Basically you are something completely different. The mirror only shows you the forms, maybe also the colours; but within you you are thinking. You are feeling within you. All of this the mirror cannot show you. It only shows you what is dependent on its laws. As a soul facing its organism, you are something completely different from what your senses show you; they limit you to what is according to their laws. When you face the world, as with a mirror—you are actually facing a world that is only made possible by the organisation of your senses!’

If you think this idea through to the end, then you will not be surprised to find that basically all life of our awake day consciousness depends very much on the organisation of our sensory organs and on our brain, just as what we see in a mirror depends on the quality of the mirror. Anyone who looks into a garden mirror and sees a caricature of their face looking towards them, will happily agree that the picture in the mirror is not dependent on them, but on the mirror. In the same way, what we perceive depends on the set-up of our mirroring apparatus, and our soul activity is limited, as it were, reflected back into itself by mirroring itself in our body life. Then it is no longer astonishing that the detail—and this can also be physiologically proven—is dependent on the physical body, whereby this or that happens one way or another in our consciousness. Because everything that the soul does in order for something to become conscious, to become knowledge for us, depends on the organisation of our body. Observation shows us that the concepts that we initially only constructed, actually correspond to the facts. The only difference is that our corporeality is a living mirror. We let the mirror in which we look be as it is. However, there is one way in which we can influence the reflection: if we breathe on the mirror, then it can no longer reflect properly. But the reflection in our physicality, which experiences the activity of our soul, is connected with the fact that when we reflect ourselves in our corporeality, the reflection itself is an activity, a process within our bodily nature, and that which appears as a reflection, we place as an activity before ourselves.

Thus the bodily life actually presents itself as if, in a certain sense, we would write down what we think and then would have the characters in front of us. This is how we write the activity of our soul into our physicality. What an anatomist can verify are only the characters, the external apparatus, because we do not completely observe our soul life if we only observe it within our physical life. We only observe it completely, if we do this independently from our physical life. This, however, can only be done by the spiritual researcher who observes the soul life as it shows itself mirrored into the waking day life at the moment of awakening. It shows that the soul life is like an architect, who builds something during the night, and acts as a dismantler during the day.

Now we have the soul life in the waking state and in the state of sleep before us. In the state of sleep we have to imagine it as independent from body life, like a rider is independent from the horse. But just like the rider uses the horse and uses up its strength, the soul consumes the activity of the body so that chemical processes run like letters of the soul’s life. With this we reach a point where the physical life, as it is limited in the senses, in the brain, is so diminished by us that we have exhausted it for the time being. Then we must begin the other activity, initiate the reverse process and again build up what has declined. This is the life during sleep—so that we, starting from the soul, perform two opposite activities on our body. So, during the awake state we have around us our world of flowing and ebbing concepts, joy and sorrow, feelings and so on. But while we have them in front of us, we wear out our physical life, we basically destroy it constantly. During sleep, we are the architects, we can restore what we have destroyed during our waking life.

So what does a spiritual researcher perceive? He perceives the architectural activity of rebuilding in curious pictures like a circular movement twisting around itself: a real process, that is the reverse of normal awake day life. It is really no fantasy when one speaks about recognising in these self-entwining movements the mysterious activity that the soul performs during sleep, which consists of reconstituting what we have destroyed during our day life—hence the recuperation through and necessity of the sleep life. So why is the sleep life such that it doesn’t enter into our consciousness? Yes, and why is it that we become conscious of our waking life? The reason for this is that for the processes we perform in our waking day life, we have got something like mirror images. However, when we are performing the other activity of rebuilding what has been worn out, we have nothing wherein this could be reflected. We are lacking a mirror for this. Only a spiritual researcher is able to show the underlying reasons for this. From a certain point onwards, the spiritual researcher experiences not only the soul activity, as I have described it, like a dream memory from sleep, but as if he was not dependent on the instrument of the body, so that he then can perceive an activity which only happens in the spirit. He can then tell himself: ‘Now you are not thinking with your brain, but you are now thinking in a completely different manner; now you are thinking in pictures, independent of your brain.’

The spiritual researcher can only experience something like what has been described earlier, when he experiences that everything that envelops him as something nebulous when he falls asleep does not disappear. Instead, if he is able to limit and withdraw his inner activity, then the mist that is perceptible at his temples, at his joints, at his spine, becomes something that reflects what he is doing—similar to the reflection of what we experience during our physical life.

The whole difference between true clairvoyance and ordinary waking day life consciousness is that the waking day life requires a different mirror for the soul activity to come to consciousness and uses our bodily nature for this purpose. However, the activity of the clairvoyant, when it radiates as an activity of the soul, is so strong that the emitted ray will be withdrawn into itself. In this way, as it were, a mirroring on one’s own inner experience, on a spirit organism, takes place. Basically, our soul is within this spirit organism during the night, even if we are not spiritual researchers. It pours itself into it. And we will not be able to cope with our whole sleep life, when it is not clear to us that indeed our physical processes—all that anatomy, physiology is able to research—cannot bring about anything but a reflection of our soul processes; and that these soul processes always, from falling asleep until waking up, live a spiritual existence. If we think differently we won’t be able to cope at all. We must therefore speak, as it were, of a secret soul life that cannot enter at all into the consciousness conveyed through our body. Thus, when one notices in a person that ideas appear in his consciousness that he has ignored for a long time, one has to say: There is something else in a human being, apart from the conceptions of his conscious soul life, to which he has paid attention when he took them in.

I have already suggested once, that it is child’s play to refute things that are a reality for a spiritual researcher. And yet they are true. Spiritual research has to say that in regard to the human being we have to deal with a human physical body that we can see with eyes, grasp with hands, and that is also known to anatomy and physiology. In addition, we have an inner member of the human being, the astral body, the carrier of everything that the human being consciously absorbs, what he really experiences during the day life, so that he can receive it reflected by the body. Between the astral body and the physical body lies the carrier of ideas that remain ignored for years, and are then brought up into the astral body to be realised. In short, between the astral body, the carrier of consciousness, and the physical body, the etheric body of man is active. This etheric body is not only the carrier of conceptions that have gone unnoticed, but in general the builder of the entire physical body.

What actually happens during sleep? The astral body, the carrier of consciousness, lifts itself together with the Ego out of the physical body and the etheric body, so that a split in the human nature occurs. During day life when man is awake, the astral body and the Ego are within the physical body and the etheric body. And the processes of the physical body work like mirroring processes, through which all that happens in the astral body comes to consciousness. Consciousness is a reflection of the experiences through the physical body, and we should not confuse consciousness with the experiences themselves. When, during sleep, the astral body of an ordinary human being leaves, it is at first not able to perceive anything in the world of the astral. The human being is unconscious there.

What ability does the spiritual researcher now acquire when things during sleep become conscious to him, even though he does not rely on his brain? He attains the ability to perceive and to mirror his soul activity in something that for him weaves and lives between things, so that during the awake day consciousness this something can be perceived in the same way as his own etheric body. The human etheric body is woven from that through which the clairvoyant person perceives; so that for a clairvoyant person the outer world becomes reflective, just as for the soul life of a normal person the physical body becomes reflective.

Now there are intermediate states between waking and sleeping. One such intermediate state is the dream. With regard to its origin, spiritual research shows that indeed dreaming is based on something similar to clairvoyance, whereby the latter is something trained, while dreaming is always imaginary. When a person leaves with the astral body, he loses the ability to obtain a reflection of his soul life through the physical body. However, under certain abnormal circumstances, which occur for everyone, he can obtain the capability to receive his soul experiences reflected through the etheric body. Indeed we must consider not only the physical body as a mirroring device, but also the etheric body. As long as the outer world makes an impression on us, it is indeed the physical body which acts as mirroring device. However, if we become still within ourselves and digest the impressions the outer world has made on us, then we work within ourselves and yet our thoughts are still real. We live our thoughts, and also feel that we are dependent on something more subtle than our physical body, namely on the etheric body. Then the etheric body is that what reflects itself in us in solitary pondering, which is not initially based on external impressions. But we are within our etheric body during our awake day consciousness; we perceive what is mirrored, but we do not perceive directly the activity of the astral body. In the intermediate state between waking and sleeping, we do not have the ability to receive external sensory impressions. But because we can still receive something that is connected to our etheric body in some way, the etheric body can mirror what we experience in our soul with our astral body. This then are the dreams that show irregularity because the human being is in a completely unusual situation during this process.

If we contemplate this, then much in our dream-world will become clear that would otherwise remain mysterious about it. We must therefore imagine the foundations of the soul life as being closely connected with the dream life. While the physical body is the mirror of the soul life and our daily interests have an impact on this, we are often connected in the remotest way through the etheric body to experiences, which we have long since left behind, and of which we become only dimly aware because the day life has a strong impact on us. Thus they remain something extremely unknown to us. However, if we are examine dreams that are based on really good observation, many peculiar things can be shown to us. For example, a good composer experiences an image, where a somewhat diabolical figure plays a sonata to him. He wakes up and is able to write down the sonata. Something became active in him that has worked like something foreign. And this was possible, because there was something in him for which the composer’s soul was ready, but which could not become effective during the awake day life, because physical life was only an obstruction and not suited as a mirror. Here we can see that the bodily life is an inhibitor and in this lies its significance. In our daily life we are only able to experience that for which the bodily life, figuratively speaking, is ‘oiled like a machine.’

The physical life is always a hindrance to us, but we manage to use it to a certain extent. After all, one does need ‘inhibitions’ everywhere. When a locomotive rides over the tracks, it is the hampering, the friction, through which it can drive, because the wheels could not turn without friction. In reality, our bodily processes are what confronts our soul life in a hampering way, and these frictional processes are at the same time mirroring processes. When we are ready in our soul for something but have not yet managed to oil our machine well, then the awake day life is a good ‘brake shoe’. But when we leave our physical body, then our etheric body is able to bring what lives in our soul life to expression—and this will appear to us as something quite foreign as it is of a more subtle nature. Then, once it is strong enough, it forces itself into the dream life, as was the case with the composer. This has less to do with the daily interests than with the hidden interests, that lie more remote in the subtle foundations. For example, in the following—note, that I am just telling you something that has actually been observed—A woman dreams, and although she has children whom she loves very much, and a husband, who loves her extraordinarily, she experiences with great joy that she gets engaged for a second time and all related events she goes through. What does she dream? She dreams experiences that are very far from her current life, that she has once gone through but cannot recognise, because the normal interests of the day are only connected with the physical body. And, what has continued to live on in her etheric body will now, perhaps because a joyful emotion has triggered the dream, be mirrored by the etheric body through another event.

A man dreams that he goes through childhood experiences, and these childhood experiences are wonderfully mirrored. One of these, especially important to him because it went close to his heart, causes him to wake up. At first the dream is very dear to him, but soon he falls asleep again and dreams on. A whole sum of unpleasant experiences now pass through his soul, and a particularly painful event wakes him up. All of this is extremely far from his present experiences. He gets up, and because he feels very shaken by the dream, walks around in the room for a while, but then he lies down again and now he has dream experiences, which he has not yet had. All events that he went through get muddled up, and he now experiences something completely new. The whole turns into a poem, which he can even write down and set to music afterwards. That is a very real fact. Now it shouldn’t be too difficult, with the concepts we have already gained, to imagine what has happened there. For a spiritual researcher it is thus; at a very specific moment in his life the man suffered a kind of break in his development—he had to give up something that lay in his soul. But even if he had to give it up, it did not disappear from his etheric body as a result of that. It was just that his ordinary interests were so strong that they pushed it back. And, where it was strong enough through inner elasticity, it forced itself out through the dream, because there the human being is freed from the hindrances of the awake day life. This means, that the respective man was truly once very close to reach what was expressed in the poem; but then it had been deadened.

Thus we can see illustrated in our dreams the independence of our soul life from our outer bodily life. We must realise that this is proof that the idea of the mirroring of the soul life in the physical life is entirely justified. In particular, the circumstance that the interests in which we are involved do not engrave themselves in a straight line in our direct experience, shows us that apart from the life, as it is lived on a daily basis, there is another life running alongside, that I have called, for a more conscious, finer observation, a kind of awakening. In it lives everything that for our spiritual life is already abstract, immaterial like our conscience that is independent of physical life—everyone can feel this. Yet during our day life this other life turns out to be very limited by our daily interests. During sleep, our soul also reveals itself as being completely filled with its moral quality. There is a real living into the spiritual, what we can describe as a jolt, as an inner movement. What we call Spiritual Science research will result in something for us through which we can consciously settle into the world that the normal human being unconsciously settles into every time he falls asleep.

People must gradually familiarise themselves with the fact that the world is far wider than what we can grasp with our senses and follow with our intellect; and that the sleep life is an area that we need because just our noblest organs, which serve our imaginative life, are worn out by our daily life. During sleep we restore them, so that they can face the world strong and vigorously and are able to mirror our soul life for us in the waking day life. Everything that is characteristic of the soul life could become clear to us through this. Who wouldn’t know that one feels wearied and tired after a good, deep sleep? People often complain about this; but it is not a symptom of an illness at all and is actually quite understandable. After all, the complete recovery through sleep only occurs an hour or an hour and a half later. Why? Because we have worked well on our organs, so that they are not only able to cope for a few more hours but for the whole day. And immediately after waking up we are not yet ready to use them, we first have to “grind them in.” Only after a while we can use them well. One should speak about a particular type of weariness in a certain way, saying that one could be happy that one can settle back into the reconditioned organs in an hour and a half. Because from sleep comes to us what we need—the architectural forces for the organs that have been worn out and used up during the day.

So we may now say that our soul life is a life of independence, a life of which we have something like a reflection through our consciousness during our waking day life. Consciousness is a reflection of the interactions of the soul with its environment. During the waking day life we are lost to our surroundings, to something foreign, are devoted to something that is not ourselves. But during sleep—and this is the nature of sleep—we withdraw from all outer activity to work on ourselves. The comparison is apt; the ship which has served shipping while it was at sea will be rebuilt and repaired when it arrives in port.

Someone who believes that during sleep nothing happens to us, could also think, that nothing needs to be done to the ship when it returns to port from a voyage. But when the ship sails again, he will see what happens, if it has not been repaired. This is how it would be if our soul did not work on us during sleep. We are brought back to ourselves when we sleep, while during the day life we are lost to the outside world. A normal human being is just not able to perceive what the soul is doing during sleep in the same way as he perceives the outside world during the day.

In the lecture How to attain Knowledge of the Higher World? we will see that also in the spirit a mirror image can be attained as a realisation, through which man can then come to perception in the higher worlds. All this illustrates that the soul, just when it is not conscious of itself and knows nothing of its own activity, but is busy with itself, works on itself, and independently of the physicality, obtains those forces which serve precisely to build up the body.

Thus we may summarise what we have said, and characterise the nature of the soul with words that from the knowledge of the nature of sleep can build a kind of foundation for many things in spiritual science:

The soul itself restores Enveloped still in sleep Flees into spirit worlds When senses constrictions

Oppress it!

1911-10-01-GA130

Man needs the life of sleep in order that the moral impulses he absorbs through the life of thought can come into effective activity. In his ordinary life today,Man is capable of accomplishing what is right only on the plane of intellect; he is less able to accomplish anything on the moral plane, for there he is dependent upon help coming from the macrocosm. What is already within us can bring about the further development of intellectuality, but the gods must come to our aid if we are to acquire greater moral strength. We sink into sleep in order that we may plunge into the divine will where the intellect does not intervene and where divine forces transform into the power of will the moral principles we receive, where they instill into our will what we could otherwise receive only into our thoughts.

1912-12-10-GA141
1917-03-06-GA175

Quote A

If we were now able to develop as strong a consciousness of what happens to us during sleep as, under certain circumstances, men of bye-gone times could do, we should never think of doubting the existence of the spirit. We should then be able to remember not only subconsciously, but in full consciousness, what we encounter during our sleep. If a Man were to experience in full consciousness what he passes through in sleep, it would be just as absurd for him to deny the existence of spirit as it would be for a waking Man to deny the fact that there were tables and chairs.

nearly full lecture extract

I have told you of the three meetings which the soul must go through in its life between birth and death, and which even while still in that life, bring it into touch with the spiritual worlds.

[see: Three meetings]

Today let us return to this subject, which on the last occasion was touched on in a preparatory way, as an episode, so to speak. We shall now go into it more minutely.

We noted that man in the middle of the intermediary state between sleeping and waking, has, as a rule, his meeting with the world which is related to our spirit-self. (I say as a rule, because I am alluding to the normal sleep, at night.) He then meets with the world in which we place the beings of that hierarchy which we designate as that of the angels. Thus every time we pass through sleep, we pass in a sense, through that world in which these beings dwell; through the world which is nearest to our own physical world, reckoning upwards. Through this meeting we refresh and strengthen our whole spiritual being.

Because this is so, because in the state of sleep Man is in relation with the spiritual world, no merely materialistic explanation of sleep, such as is put forward by external science, can ever be satisfactory. Much of what goes on in Man can be explained by the changes that take place in the body between waking up and going to sleep; we may try to explain sleep itself by means of these same changes; yet any such explanation must always prove unsatisfactory, for the reason that in sleep the afore-mentioned meeting takes place, and Man enters into relation with the spiritual world; that makes the whole difference.

[reasons for sleep - half truths worse than false ones]

Thus it is just when we consider the state of sleep that we can see that Man, unless he consciously seeks a relation to the spiritual world, only arrives at half-true concepts and ideas, which indeed, because they change into life-falsify it, and at last actually bring about great catastrophe. These half-true concepts are indeed in some respects even worse than those which are quite false ones, for those who form the partly-true concepts and ideas rely upon them; they are able to prove them, for, being partly true they can be proved. An attempt to disprove them would bring no further illumination, for these ideas are, after all, partly true! Such concepts really falsify life even more than do the entirely wrong ones, which we can immediately recognise as false.

One of these half-true concepts which external science today is to some extent giving up, though it is in a great measure still believed, is the idea I have often alluded to before, that we sleep because we are tired. We may say that this concept is only half-true, and is the result of a half-true observation. People think that the day's life tires out the body and because we are tired we must sleep! I have often, in former lectures, called attention to the fact that this concept does not explain how it is that people of independent means, who do no work at all, often fall asleep when the most stirring things relating to the outer world, are being discussed. It cannot be proved that these persons are tired out and therefore in need of sleep. It is absolutely incorrect. If we believe that we are compelled to sleep by fatigue, we are only half-observing. We only notice that this is so when we compare the observations made on the one side, with what can be observed on the other, when we come in contact with the other half of the truth. You will presently see what I mean.

Sleeping and waking in individual human life follow each other in rhythmic succession, yet Man is a free being, and can consequently interfere with this rhythm (this he does more by reason of circumstance than from what may be called freewill; but the circumstances are the bases of free life).

Another rhythm which we have often placed in the same order as sleeping and waking, is that of the seasons of the year; the alternation of summer and winter (leaving the intermediate seasons out of account), but the ordinary consciousness does not connect them aright. It will occur to no one to say that because the Earth is hard at work during the summer, unfolding the forces leading to the growth of plants and to much else besides, that thereby it grows tired and needs the rest of winter. Everyone would consider such an idea absurd and would say that the setting in of winter has nothing whatever to do with the summer-work of the Earth, but is caused by the changed position of the sun in relation to the Earth.

In this case everything is supposed to be brought about from without; in sleeping and waking it all comes from fatigue, from within. Now the one is just as incorrect as the other, or rather the one is only partly true and so is the other—for the rhythm of sleeping and waking is just the same kind of rhythm as that of winter and summer. There is just as little truth in saying that we only sleep because we are tired, as in saying that winter comes because the earth has exhausted herself in summer. Both these statements rest on the independent working of a rhythm, brought about by certain circumstances. The rhythm between sleeping and waking comes about because the human soul has need of the continually recurring meeting with the spiritual world. If we were to say we want to sleep and consequently feel tired, if we were to say that we enter the state in which we have need of one part of the rhythm, that of sleep, and consequently feel tired, we should be speaking more correctly than when we say that because we are tired, we must sleep.

This whole question will become still clearer to us, if we simply ask: ‘What then does the soul do when it sleeps?’

The non-spiritual science of today has not the requisite understanding and cannot reply properly to such a question. You see, while we are awake, we enjoy the external world and the enjoyment of this lasts our whole life through. We do not merely enjoy the outer world when we convey good food to our palate, which is the sense in which we generally speak of ‘enjoyment’ because it is here directly applicable, but the whole time we are awake we enjoy the outer world; all life is enjoyment. Although there is much that is unpleasant in the world, much that is apparently no enjoyment, this is only an illusion, of which we shall speak in the subsequent lectures in other connections. In our waking state we enjoy the external world; in sleep we enjoy ourselves. Just as when we with our souls are in the body and through the latter enjoy the external world, so when we with our souls are outside our body, for in the life between birth and death we are still connected with the body: even when outside it—we then enjoy our body. The condition of sleep, of normal sleep, consists essentially in our having a deeper experience of our body, so that we enjoy it. We enjoy our body from outside. The right interpretation of dreams, of the ordinary chaotic dreams, is that they are the reflection of the enjoyment of his body which a Man has in dreamless sleep.

You see this explanation of sleep is approximately that of the need of sleep felt by the Man of independent means, of which I have already spoken. We cannot easily believe that he is really tired; but we can very readily believe that he may be so fond of his body that he would rather enjoy that than what often comes to him from the external world. He really loves it so much and is so fond of enjoying it, that he may even prefer that to listening to a lecture, let us say, which he is perhaps ashamed not to attend. Or perhaps a better example would be to say he would rather enjoy his body than listen to a difficult piece of classical music which sends him to sleep at once, if he is compelled to listen to it—sleep is self-enjoyment.

Now, as in sleep, in normal sleep, we have the meeting with the spiritual world, our sleep does not therefore consist merely of self-enjoyment, it is also self-understanding, to a certain degree self-understanding, a sizing-up of oneself. In this respect our spiritual training is really needed, so that people may learn to realise that in normal sleep they actually plunge down into the spirit and emerge from it when they wake up; it is necessary that they should learn to feel reverence for this meeting with the spirit.

Now, in order that we may not fail to understand completely, I will return once more to the so-called enigma of fatigue; for the commonplace consciousness may very likely lay hold of this point. It may say: Well, but we do really feel tired, and when we are tired we feel sleepy. This is a point which demands that a really clear distinction should be made. Certainly we do get tired with the day's work and while we sleep we are able to get over our fatigue. This part of the question is true: we are able to drive away fatigue by going to sleep. Yet sleep is not a result of the fatigue, but consists in the enjoyment we feel in ourselves. In this self-enjoyment, man acquires the forces through which he is able to drive away fatigue, but it does not follow that all sleep can do so; for while it is true that all sleep is enjoyment of self, yet it is not true that all sleep drives away fatigue. For a Man who sleeps unnecessarily, who goes to sleep at every opportunity without any need for it, may just as well bring about a sleep in which there is no fatigue to be driven away, in which there is nothing but the enjoyment of self. In this kind of sleep, a man will certainly strive the whole time to drive away fatigue, because he is accustomed to do so while asleep; but if there is no fatigue, as in the case of the well-to-do man who falls asleep at a concert, he will simply keep on sweeping out his body, as he would do if the fatigue were there. If there is no fatigue, he goes on sweeping out unnecessarily, with the consequence that he sets up all kinds of bad conditions in his body. That is why these well-to-do men who sleep so much are the most troubled with all those fine things known as neurasthenia, and the like.

Through connection with spiritual knowledge, one may conceive a condition in which a man will be conscious of the following: ‘I am living in a state of rhythm, in which I am alternately in the physical world and in the spiritual world. In the physical world I meet with the external physical nature; in the spiritual world I meet with the beings who inhabit that world.’

We shall be able fully to understand this matter if we enter somewhat more deeply into the whole nature of Man, from a particular point of view. You know that it is customary to consider the external science known as biology as a unity, necessarily divided into the head, breast, and lower part with the members attached thereto. In the olden times when Man still possessed an atavistic knowledge, he connected other ideas with this division of the human being. The great Greek philosopher, Plato, attributes wisdom to the head, courage to the breast; and the lower emotions of human nature to the lower part of the body. What pertains to the breast-part of man can be ennobled when wisdom is added to courage, becoming a wise courage, a wise activity; and that which is considered the lower part of man, which belongs to the lower parts of his body, if it be rayed through with wisdom, that Plato calls ‘clothed with the sun.’

Thus we see how the soul is divided and attributed to the different parts of the body. Today, we, who have spiritual science, which to Plato was not attainable in like manner, speak of these things in much fuller detail. In speaking of the four-fold division of Man, we begin at the top by speaking of his ‘I,’ his ego. All that a Man can call his own in the soul and spirit sense in his physical life between birth and death, works through the instrument of the physical body; and we can ask concerning each of the four principles of man: with which part of his body is each physically connected A real and sufficiently penetrating spiritual observation shows us that what we call the ego of man—strange as it may seem, for the truth is often very different from what the superficial consciousness supposes—strange as it may seem, the ego of man is between birth and death, physically connected with what we call the lower part of the body. For the I, as I have often said, is really a baby as compared to the other parts of man's nature; the germ of the physical body was already laid down in the Old Saturn stage, the germ of the etheric body during the Old Sun, and that of the astral body during the Old Moon; but the I was only laid down in our own Earth-stage; it is the youngest member of Man's being. It will only attain the stage at which our physical body now stands, in the far-distant era of Vulcan.

[consciousness of I]

The I is attached to the lowest bodily part of Man, and this part is really always asleep. It is not so organised that it can bring to consciousness what takes place within it; what takes place there is, even in the normal waking periods, ceaselessly asleep. We are just as little conscious of our I as such, in its reality, in its true being, as we are of the processes of our digestion.

The I of which we are conscious is but a reflex conception, the image of which is reflected into our head. We never really see or realise our I, whether in sleep, when in normal conditions we are quite without consciousness, or in our waking state; for the I is then also asleep. The true I does not itself enter our consciousness, nothing but t a the concept of the I is reflected therein.

On the other hand, between sleeping and waking, the I really comes to itself; only a Man in normal deep sleep knows nothing of it, being himself still unconscious in this his deep sleep during the Earth-stage. Thus the I is in reality connected with the lowest bodily part of Man; during the day, in the waking time, it is connected therewith from within; and during sleep from without.

[astral body]

If we now pass on to the second principle in Man's nature, to what we call the astral body, we find that as regards the instrument through which it works, it is, from a certain point of view, connected with the breast-part of man. Of all that goes on in this astral body working through the breast-part, we can, in reality, only dream. As Earth-Man we can only know something of the I when we are asleep, consciously we know nothing.

Of all that the astral body works in us, we can only dream. This is really why we dream constantly of our feelings, of the sentiments that live within us. They actually live a sort of dream-life within us. The Iof man is actually outside the region which we human beings, with our ordinary sense-consciousness, can grasp; for it is continuously asleep. The astral body is also in a certain respect outside that region too, for it can only dream. With respect to both these we are, in reality, whether asleep or awake, within the spiritual world; we are really and truly within that world.

[etheric body]

What we know as the etheric body, is, however, as far as the body is concerned, connected with the head. Through the peculiar organisation of the head, the etheric body is able to be constantly awake when in the human body, when connected with the physical head. We may therefore say: The ego is connected with the lowest parts of our body; and the astral body with our breast-part. The heart—as to the workings of which we have no full consciousness, nothing but a dream-consciousness—beats and pulsates under the influence of the astral body. When the head thinks, it does so under the influence of the etheric body. We can then further differentiate our physical body, for in its entirety, it is connected with the whole external world.

We now see a remarkable connection:

  • the I is connected with the lowest parts of the body,
  • the astral body with the heart;
  • the etheric body with the head,
  • the physical body with the whole outer world, with the environment.

The whole physical body is really during the waking condition in constant connection with the outer environment. Just as we, with our whole body are in relation to the outer environment, so is our etheric body to our head, the astral body to the heart and so on. This will show you how really mysterious are the connections in which Man lives in the world. In reality things are generally just the opposite to what the superficial consciousness may lightly suppose.

The lowest parts of Man's nature are at present the least perfected forms of his being; hence these parts of the body, as such, correspond to what we have called the baby—our I. Innumerable secrets of human-life lie concealed in what I am here referring to, secrets without number.

If you go thoroughly into this subject you will understand above all, that the whole Man is formed out of spirit, but at different stages. The head of man is formed out of spirit, but is more fully moulded, it belongs to a later stage of formation than the breast, of which indeed one might say, that it is just as much a metamorphosis of the head, as, in the sense of Goethe's theory of the metamorphoses of plants, the leaf is a metamorphosis of the flower.

[I in waking and sleeping]

  • If we consider the rhythm between sleeping and waking from this point of view, we may say that the I actually dwells during the waking time in all the activities in the human body, in all the lowest activities, which finally culminate in the formation of the blood. The I is present in all these activities during the waking hours. These activities are those which are in a sense at the lowest stage of spirituality; for of course, everything connected with the body is spiritual.
  • Now it must be carefully noted that while during the waking hours the I stands at the lowest stage of spirituality, during the hours of sleep it stands with respect to Man, at the highest stage.

[more or less spirit in Man]

For consider the following: When we look at the head which we as human beings have today, that head is, as regards its outer form, the strongest manifestation of the spirit. It is the most representative of the spirit, its greatest manifestation; here the spirit has entered most deeply into matter. For that very reason there is here less left behind in the spirit itself. So much work has been spent by Man on his head, to make its outer form a manifestation of the spiritual, that but little is left behind in the spirit.

Whereas the lower members of the human bodily nature as regards their outer formation are the least spiritualised, have least been worked upon in a spiritual sense, there is on that account more of—what pertains to them left behind in the spiritual. The head, as head, least corresponds to the spiritual, for the reason that it has more spirit within it; the lower part of the body corresponds the most, because it has the least spirit within it. But in this greater portion of spirit which does not dwell within the bodily nature, the I dwells during the hours of sleep.

Just reflect on this wonderful equalising process: while, as regards his body, Man possesses a lower nature into which the I immerses itself during the waking hours, this lower nature is only lower because the spirit has worked less upon it, because it kept back more of the spirit in the spiritual region. Yet in what it thus kept back, dwells the I during sleep. During sleep, the I is even now already present in that which Man will only develop at a later epoch, which he will only then be able to develop and unfold. This at the present day is merely indicated and but little developed as yet in the bodily nature of man. Hence when the I becomes conscious of the conditions in which it finds itself during sleep, when it really becomes conscious of this, it will be able to say to itself: ‘During sleep I am within that which is my holiest human predisposition; and when I come forth from sleep, I pass over from this holiest part of me, into that which gives but a faint indication of it.'

Through spiritual science such things as these must find their way into our feelings and inner sentiments, and live in them. Life itself will then become spiritualised by a magical breath of holiness. We shall then have a definite and positive idea of what is called the Grace of the Spirit, of the Holy Ghost. For we shall connect the realisation of this collective existence which runs its course in the rhythm between sleeping and waking, with the idea: ‘I am allowed to take part in the spiritual world, I am allowed to dwell in it.’ When we have once realised and felt this idea, this conception: ‘I am allowed to be within the spiritual world; grace is given me whereby I am permeated with the spiritual world, which is inaccessible to my ordinary earth-consciousness,’—when we have thoroughly filled ourselves with that thought, we shall have also learnt to look up to the Spirit which reveals itself just as clearly, I might say, between the lines of life, as the outer world of nature reveals itself to our external eyes and ears. But the age of materialism has led man far from the consciousness of being rayed into and permeated in his whole collective existence by the Grace of the Spirit. It is of immense importance that this consciousness should be re-acquired: for the depths of our souls are more affected than we suppose by the general materialism prevalent in this age of ours. Yet the human soul is now as a rule too weak to be able to realise in itself those conceptions which could lift it out of and above materialism. One such conception is that of the holiness of sleep, which if once understood, we should then ascribe all those thoughts and conceptions in our waking life which do not connect us with matter, to that inward working of the spirit which follows upon sleep. We should not then look upon our waking state, which unites us with matter, as the only important thing to man, which would be like considering the winter as the important time for the earth; we should contemplate the whole. As regards the earth we contemplate it as a whole when we take the winter in connection with the summer; and as regards man, we contemplate him as a whole when we take the day, i.e., man in relation to matter—in connection with sleep, i.e., his relation to the spirit.

Now a superficial observation might lead one to say: ‘As man in his waking state is bound up with matter, he can know nothing of the spirit; yet he does know something of the spirit, even while awake.’ Now, man has a memory; and this memory does not only work in his consciousness, it also works subconsciously. If we had no memory, sleep could not help us at all. I want you to fix this fact very firmly in your minds, for it is very important. No matter how much we slept, if we had no memory it would not help us. For if we had no memory we should of necessity be led to believe that there was naught else but material existence. It is only because we preserve in our subconscious memory what we experience during sleep—although we may know nothing of it in our outer consciousness—only because we have a subconscious recollection of what we then go through, that we are not entirely given over to a materialistic mode of thinking. If man does not think merely materialistic thoughts, if he has any sort of spiritual ideas during the day, he owes it to the fact that his memory acts. For man, as he now is, as earth-man,—only comes into touch with the spirit during sleep.

The point is that if, on the other hand, we were now able to develop as strong a consciousness of what happens to us during sleep as, under certain circumstances, men of bye-gone times could do, we should never think of doubting the existence of the spirit. We should then be able to remember not only subconsciously, but in full consciousness, what we encounter during our sleep. If a man were to experience in full consciousness what he passes through in sleep, it would be just as absurd for him to deny the existence of spirit as it would be for a waking man to deny the fact that there were tables and chairs. The crucial point now is that mankind should once more become capable of properly appreciating the meeting with the spirit in sleep. This can only be done by making the pictures of the days experiences sufficiently vivid; it can only be done by entering deeply into spiritual science. In this study we occupy ourselves strongly with ideas drawn from the spiritual world. We compel our head—the etheric body of our head—to picture things which are in nowise connected with outer matter, but only have reality in the world of the spirit. This requires more application than it does to picture the things which are real in the world of matter. Indeed that is the true reason why many people do not go in for spiritual science. They find all kinds of reasons against it. They say it is not logical. If they were driven to prove in what it is illogical, they would be embarrassed: for it could never be proved that Spiritual Science is illogical. The real reason they turn away from spiritual science comes from something very different! In a scientific refutation it is perhaps allowable not to be quite polite, and we may, therefore, say that the non-recognition of spiritual science comes solely from laziness of soul. However industrious certain learned people may be as regards all the concepts relating to outer matter, yet when it comes to the force necessary for understanding the things of the spirit, they are idle and lazy; and it is because they will not arouse in themselves this necessary force, that they refuse to recognise spiritual science. For it requires more effort for thinking the ideas of Spiritual Science, than it does for thinking the ordinary thoughts connected with the things of sense. The latter really come of themselves; but the ideas not connected with material things, must be thought; one must wrestle with them and make a big effort. It is this shrinking from the necessary effort which is at the bottom of the non-acceptance of spiritual science; and this is what we have to realise. When however, the effort really is made to accept such concepts and ideas as are not connected with the material, and to think them out, such activity is aroused in the soul that it is gradually able to develop the consciousness of what goes on between falling asleep and waking, to realise that a meeting with the Spirit takes place then. It will certainly be necessary to unlearn certain ideas. Just think how little some of the leaders of spiritual life are capable of developing such ideas. What I am about to relate is of less frequent occurrence now, but those who are the present leaders were in many cases, in the days of their youth, so deeply immersed in the life of their day, that they drank themselves into the state called in German ‘Bettschwere.’ They drank so much that the necessary gravitation was established. Well, in such cases a man's ideas as well as his feelings as to what goes on in sleep, are certainly not adapted to elucidate the whole significance of sleep. A man may be extremely learned as regards everything connected with matter, but he is naturally not then able to gain an insight into what happens to him between his falling asleep and awaking.

When people make the necessary effort to think out to their conclusion ideas not connected with material things, they will be able to develop understanding of what I have called the first meeting, the meeting with the spirit during sleep. Unless the world is to fall into a state of decadence, this understanding must before very long illuminate life, and fill it with sunshine. For if men do not take up these ideas, on what are their concepts to be based? They will only be able to form them by observing external conditions, by studying the external world. Ideas formed in this way alone, leave the inner part of the human being, his soul-part, in a state of inertia; that part of man which must under other circumstances be strongly exercised in spiritual concepts and ideas is left inert, unused: it dies. What is the result of this? The result is that man becomes blind, spiritually blind in his whole relation to the world. If he develops no ideas or concepts except such as he forms under the influence of outer impressions, he becomes spiritually blind; and spiritual blindness does indeed prevail to a great extent, in this materialistic age. In science this is only injurious up to a point, but in practical life this blindness to the real world is extremely harmful. You see, the further we descend into matter, the more things correct themselves in this materialistic age. For if a man builds a bridge, he is forced by circumstances to learn the proper rules of construction, otherwise when the first wagon crosses it, that bridge will collapse. It is easier to apply wrong conceptions in trying to cure anyone, for it can never be proved what a man dies of, or what makes him well. It does not at all follow that the ideas put into practice are necessarily the right ones. If one wishes to work in the realm of the spiritual, it is a much more serious matter; and it is, therefore, particularly serious that things are in a bad way in what are generally known as the practical sciences, Political or National Economy and the like. In this materialistic age people have become accustomed to be guided by the impressions and ideas formed in the outer world and to apply these to their doctrines of national or political economy, and in this way their ideas have become blind. Almost all that has hitherto been developed along these lines is but a blind idea. It must, therefore, follow as a natural consequence, that people with these blind notions are led along in leading strings by events, they yield themselves blindly to the course of events. If in this state they then intervene in them, well, what can we expect?

One possibility formed as a result of not taking up Spiritual Science is these blind ideas. Another possibility is that instead of being stimulated to form ideas by outer circumstances people may let themselves be stimulated from within; that is to say, that nothing but what lives in the emotions and passions is, in a sense, allowed to arise in the soul. In this way a man certainly does not acquire blind ideas, but rather what we might call intoxicated ideas. People of the present day who are acknowledged materialists constantly swing backwards and forwards between blind ideas and intoxicated ideas. Blind ideas, in which they allow themselves to be blindfolded to what is going on, so that when they intervene they do so in the clumsiest way possible! Intoxicated ideas, in which they only give way to their emotions and passions, and confront the world in such a way that they do not really understand things, but either love or hate everything; and judge everything according to their love or hatred, their sympathy or antipathy. For it is only when, on the one hand, a man makes efforts in his soul to acquire spiritual ideas, and on the other develops his feelings for the great concerns of the world, that he can attain to clear-sighted ideas and conceptions. When we lift ourselves up to the thoughts given us in Spiritual Science of the great connections concerning which the materialistic view of the world merely laughs: of the ages of Saturn, Sun and Moon and of our connection with the Universe, when we fructify our moral feelings with the great goals of humanity, we can then rise above all the emotions displayed in sympathy or antipathy for anything in the world around us. And these emotions can be overcome in no other way.

It is undoubtedly necessary, that through Spiritual Science, a great deal that lives in our age, should be purified. For man, after all, does not allow himself to be entirely cut off from the spiritual world. He does not really allow himself to be cut off at all, he only allows himself to be apparently cut off. I have already called your attention to the way this is apparently done. When man, on the one hand swears only by the material and the impressions of the external world, the forces which are intended for the spirit still remain within him, but he then directs them to a false region and gives himself up to all kinds of illusions. That is why it is chiefly the most practical and materialistic people who are subject to the strongest illusions and give way to them. We see people going through life denying the existence of spirit and laughing heartily if they are told of anyone having had spiritual experiences. ‘He sees ghosts!’ they exclaim. Having said that, they consider they have broken the back of the matter. They themselves certainly do not see ghosts, in their sense of the word. But they only believe they see no ghosts; in reality they are incessantly seeing ghosts, they see them the whole time. One can put a man who is thus rooted in his materialistic view of the world to the test, and it will be evident that as regards what the next day may bring forth, he gives way to the worst illusions. This giving way to illusions, is nothing but a substitute for the spiritual, which he denies. If he denies the spiritual, he must then necessarily fall into illusion. As has been said, it is not easy to prove the illusions, existing in the many different departments of life, but they are everywhere prevalent, really everywhere. People are really fond of giving way to illusion. For instance, the following is a very frequent experience. Some one may say: ‘If I invest my money in this or that undertaking, it may be used for the brewing of beer. I refuse to use my money in that way, I will take no part in that.’ So he takes his money to the bank. The bank, without his knowledge, invests the money in a brewery. It makes no difference at all to the objective fact, but he is under the illusion that his money is not used for such base purposes as beer!

Of course, it may be objected that this is far-fetched, but it is not, it is really a thing that rules all life. People do not take the trouble today to become really acquainted with life, to be able to see through it. This, however, is of great significance. It is immensely important that we should learn to know what we ourselves are in the midst of. This is not easy today, because life has become complicated; nevertheless, what I have drawn attention to, is true. For, you know, under certain circumstances one might easily conceive an absurd situation. I will give you an example. There was once an incendiary, (this is a true story,) who ran out of a house which he had set on fire, having so arranged things that he allowed himself time to do so. He was caught and brought before the magistrates. On being questioned, he answered that he considered he had done a good piece of work, that he was not the one to be blamed, but the workmen, who had left a lighted candle in the house when they left it in the evening. If the candle had burnt out at night, it would have set the house on fire. He, therefore, set it on fire himself, before it was quite dark. In either case the house would have been on fire; he only set it on fire so that the fire might be speedily extinguished: for if a house is on fire in the daytime it may be saved, but at night it is a more complicated matter, and the whole house would then have been burnt to the ground. He was then asked why he did not put the candle out; to which he replied ‘I am a teacher of humanity; if I had blown out the candle, the workers, who were the ones to blame in the matter, would have gone on being careless, whereas now they can see for themselves what happens when they forget to blow out their lights.’

We may laugh at such an example as this, for we do not observe that we are continually doing the like. People are constantly acting in the same way as the man who did not put out the lighted candle, but set fire to the house. Only we do not notice this when we are disturbed by our emotions and passions, which cause an intoxication of ideas, and when the whole thing relates to the spiritual world. If we accustom the soul to that elasticity and flexibility, which is necessary for the forming of spiritual ideas, we shall so mould our thought that it will really find its way into life and be properly adapted to it. If we do not do this, our thought will never be fit to deal with life; it will not even be affected by it, except on the surface. That is why-to turn now to the deeper side of the question—the materialistic age really leads one away from an connection with the spiritual world. Just as we undermine our bodily health if we do not get our proper sleep, so do we undermine our soul-life if we do not spend our waking-time in the right way. If we only give way to outer impressions and live without being conscious of our connection with the spiritual world, we are not awake in the right way. Just as a man may by reason of certain conditions sleep restlessly, turning and twisting about, and thus undermine his physical health, so does a man undermine his spiritual health if he only yields to the external impressions of the world, if he is only subject to physical matter. This will prevent his experiencing in the right way that first meeting with the spiritual world, of which I have spoken. In this way he loses all possibility of rightly connecting himself with the spiritual world, during his physical existence. The connection with that world in which we spend our time when not in incarnation, into which we ourselves pass when we go through the Gates of Death, is thereby cut off.

1918-10-09-GA182

.. is the famous lecture called 'The work of the angels in Man's astral body' (please read in full)

And what if this should happen after all? What if humanity on earth should persist in sleeping through the momentous spiritual revelation of the future?

If this were to happen in respect of the freedom of the religious life, for example, if men were to sleep through the repetition of the Mystery of Golgotha on the etheric plane, the reappearance of the etheric Christ, or other matters as well,

then the angels would have to try different means of achieving what the pictures they weave in the astral body of Man are intended to achieve.

If men do not allow this to be achieved in the astral body while they are awake, the angels would, in this case, endeavour to fulfill their aims through their sleeping bodies. Therefore what the angels could not achieve, because in their waking life men slept through it, would be achieved with the help of the physical and etheric bodies of men during actual sleep. It is there that the angels would seek forces required for the fulfillment of what could not be achieved through men in their wideawake consciousness when the souls were within the etheric and physical bodies in the waking state. It would be achieved by means of the etheric and physical bodies in the sleeping state, when human beings who ought to be awake to what is going on were outside these bodies with their I and astral body.

Here lies the great danger for the age of the consciousness soul. This is what might still happen if, before the beginning of the third millennium, men were to refuse to turn to the spiritual life. The third millennium begins with the year 2000, so it is only a short time ahead of us.

It might still happen that the aim of the angels in their work would have to be achieved by means of the sleeping bodies of men — instead of through men wideawake. The angels might still be compelled to withdraw their whole work from the astral body and to submerge it in the etheric body in order to bring it to fulfillment. But then, in his real being, Man would have no part in it. It would have to be performed in the etheric body while Man himself was not there, just because if he were there in the waking state, he would obstruct it.

But what would be the outcome if the angels were obliged to perform this work without Man himself participating, to carry it out in his etheric and physical bodies during sleep?

The outcome in the evolution of humanity would unquestionably be threefold.

  • 1 - Firstly, something would be engendered in the sleeping human bodies — while the I and astral body were not within them — and Man would meet with it on waking in the morning ... but then it would become instinct instead of conscious spiritual activity and therefore baleful. It is so indeed: certain instinctive knowledge that will arise in human nature, instinctive knowledge connected with the mystery of birth and conception, with sexual life as a whole, threatens to become baleful if the danger of which I have spoken takes effect. Certain angels would then themselves undergo a change; a change of which I cannot speak, because this is a subject belonging to the higher secrets of initiation science which may not yet be disclosed. But this much can certainly be said: The effect in the evolution of humanity would be that certain instincts connected with the sexual life would arise in a pernicious form instead of wholesomely, in clear waking consciousness. These instincts would not be mere aberrations but would pass over into and configure the social life, would above all prevent men — through what would then enter their blood as the effect of the sexual life — from unfolding brotherhood in any form whatever on the earth, and would rather induce them to rebel against it. This would be a matter of instinct.

So the crucial point lies ahead when either the path to the right can be taken — but that demands wakefulness — or the path to the left, which permits of sleep. But in that case instincts come on the scene — instincts of a fearful kind.

And what do you suppose the scientific experts will say when such instincts come into evidence? They will say that it is a natural and inevitable development in the evolution of humanity. Light cannot be shed on such matters by natural science, for whether men become angels or devils would be equally capable of explanation by scientific reasoning. Science will say the same in both cases: the later is the outcome of the earlier ... so grand and wise is the interpretation of nature in terms of causality! Natural science will be totally blind to the event of which I have told you, for if men become half devils through their sexual instincts, science will as a matter of course regard this as a natural necessity. Scientifically, then, the matter is simply not capable of explanation, for whatever happens, everything can be explained by science. The fact is that such things can be understood only by spiritual, super-sensible cognition. That is the one aspect.

  • 2 - The second aspect is that from this work which involves changes affecting the angels themselves, still another result accrues for humanity: instinctive knowledge of certain medicaments — but knowledge of a baleful kind! Everything connected with medicine will make a great advance in the materialistic sense. Men will acquire instinctive insights into the medicinal properties of certain substances and certain treatments — and thereby do terrible harm. But the harm will be called useful. A sick man will be called healthy, for it will be perceived that the particular treatment applied leads to something pleasing. People will actually like things that make the human being — in a certain direction — unhealthy. Knowledge of the medicinal effects of certain processes and treatments will be enhanced, but this will lead into very baleful channels. For Man will come to know through certain instincts, what kind of illnesses can be induced by particular substances and treatments. And it will then be possible for him either to bring about or not to bring about illnesses, entirely as suits his egotistical purposes.
  • 3 - The third result will be this. Man will get to know of definite forces which, simply by means of quite easy manipulations — by bringing into accord certain vibrations — will enable him to unleash tremendous mechanical forces in the world. Instinctively he will come to realise in this way the possibility of exercising a certain spiritual guidance and control of the mechanistic principle — and the whole of technical science will sail into desolate waters. But human egoism will find these desolate waters of tremendous use and benefit.
1921-07-17-GA205

During sleep, connection between physical body with archai and archangelic principles. The angel goes along in the sleep state of the astral body.

1923-04-06-GA224

human speech about ideals and true selfless love while awake connects us with archangels and archai during sleep

see Third Hierarchy#1923-04-06-GA224

1923-05-02-GA224

... gives a beautiful clairvoyant description of flowing streams of thoughts in the etheric body during sleep, describing this in the language of the hierarchies. Below is just a limited extract, it is advised to read the lecture in full.

See also the lecture summary below, under this extract.

We know that when, under earthly conditions, the human being goes to sleep, the etheric body remains within the physical body, and that — as we have always described it — the astral body and the I leave this physical body and etheric body. The life of the astral body and I is still so weak, at the present stage of their cosmic development, that they are not capable of conscious experience between falling asleep and awakening. We have often discussed, up to a point, the subconscious experiences through which the astral body and the I pass during this time.

But today we shall look back at what is left behind in bed when a human being is asleep, and in particular at the etheric body. In this way we shall treat the term “etheric body” so as to draw out the Spirit from it, by that art of which I said just now that it was cultivated in the ancient Mysteries. Looking at this etheric body, we shall consider its real nature, as it is beheld super-sensibly, when the human being is asleep.

  • We see the physical body grow still. We see the human being unable to move his limbs — unable also to pour his will through his bodily form, so as to make use of his senses. The relation of the external world to his senses does not change. But the relation of the senses to the external world changes, inasmuch as the human being becomes inwardly still. Just as externally his arms and legs are still, in his organs of perception his will is not active in the delicate movements of response to the external world which are necessary for sense-perception.
  • But it is a complete mistake to believe that the sense-organs themselves, or more exactly the sites of the sense-organs, are not filled by any activity during sleep. Over its whole extent, the physical body rests — but the human etheric body becomes all the more active and inwardly mobile between falling asleep and awakening. This is a characteristic fact: in the same measure as the functions of the physical body come to rest, at and after the moment of falling asleep, a more and more lively activity of the etheric body begins. This lively activity of the etheric body streams out, in particular, from the senses. If the super-sensible gaze is directed upon the sleeping human being — that is to say upon the part of the human being present in the physical frame — then it is found that from those places where the sense-organs are located, a continual lively activity streams inwards. This is the life of the etheric body, or vital body during sleep.
  • For example, from the moment of falling asleep there is a particular process which originates from the region of the human eyes. It is as if, through the influence of light during the waking period, the eye had stored up forces for an activity that develops only after sleep begins. And this is in fact an etheric activity.

In the same measure as the influence of light and colour from outside upon the eye is darkened, the eyes themselves begin, like two phosphorescent suns, to irradiate the interior of the physical part of the sleeping human being. The interior space of the human being is illumined by a phosphorescent, glimmering light. It is not surprising that this light, which streams into the interior of the human being, cannot be seen in the ordinary way. External, physical eyes do not see what goes on in the interior of man; there is no organ within the physical body which could immediately perceive this phosphorescent glow.

Now the inner activities of the etheric body in the human being during sleep can be described as follows.

  • Into this there flows a further process. What a man can still observe while he is going to sleep — a kind of humming and singing, a changing murmur within his organism — continues during sleep itself as a music, extraordinarily rich in melody and harmony, which also fills the whole interior of man during sleep. From falling asleep to awakening, this musical activity continues. And the I and astral body, which are outside the physical and etheric body, receive strong impressions from this — from what they have left behind, the resounding music in the etheric body. And while it resounds in music, the etheric body is at the same time radiant with light. But the impression made upon the I and the astral body remains unconscious.
  • In the same way, etheric streams of warmth flow into the interior of man from the whole surface of the skin. The result — with much else that is more remote from what we perceive in the external world as warmth, light, and sound, and is thus difficult to describe — is an immensely beautiful and impressive living and streaming activity of the human etheric body.
  • Distinct, like an island, there stand out from the general etheric life of the cosmos this particular music, and radiance, and flooding stream of warmth. They stand out for inner reasons — which are rooted in the very existence and being of man himself. They belong to man's individual etheric body. And this flooding warmth, this phosphorescent glow, this resounding music — it is these that detach themselves, a few days after man's death, as etheric body from the astral body and Ego, and flow out into the general cosmic ether.

... [parethesis note] ...

You see what complex processes are embraced in the human etheric body. And if the attempt is made to penetrate further — using the methods with which penetration into such realms is possible — then it can be observed that in reality this flowing warmth, this gentle phosphorescent glow, this living music, are an outer revelation of cosmic beings.

-         All that I have described is the external clothing, the revelation, the glory of mighty cosmic beings.

And these beings disclose themselves as those we know from anthroposophical writings as the SoF

I have often named these SoF Revelations, because they live, in accordance with their inner nature, in the shining stream which during earthly sleep flows from the human sense-organs towards the interior of man. In this stream the weaving life of those beings we name Exusiai is revealed.

And now, with the same methods with which one observes these revelations of the human senses, so active in their etheric substance during sleep, these streams can be followed further along their course into the interior of Man's organism.

  • If one is looking at some shining object, one can follow the line from the eye towards this object. It is to be found somewhere on this visual line that leads outwards from the eye.
  • In the same way you can follow inwards from the senses the streaming, flooding etheric radiance.  There is not so far to go; very soon something different is reached. The mild phosphorescent glow, proceeding from the eyes; the living music, which comes from the region of the organs of hearing; the streaming warmth, which goes inward from the whole surface of the skin — all these become an organically coherent etheric system.

(When one observes the waking human being, one sees the etheric body in activity — the physical body of course as well — and this activity is somewhat different from that I have described for sleep; the activity then extends a little outside the physical body.)

  • Now one sees how all that streams and flows and shines inwards, from the senses and from the whole skin, is formed into a shell-like copy of man, but within him, extending to a certain depth. From the eyes, one sees this phosphorescent glow, inwards, changing into something I will describe in a moment.

The streaming warmth goes inwards from the skin, attains a certain thickness like a shell, and then forms a kind of etheric organism which is compounded of the living music, the glowing light, the streaming warmth, intermingled with one another.

All these, and much else, flow through one another, influence one another mutually, and form an organism — the etheric organism of Man. If one contemplates this etheric organism with spiritual vision, and begins to understand its phenomena, one is bound to describe it as consisting simply of the forms of thoughts, of flowing thoughts. What is flowing within it is everywhere Thought.

If one were to follow this inner activity of the etheric body during sleep, in its continual fluctuation, and then draw it at a particular moment, one would draw of course lines, or coloured forms. But to describe the substance of these lines or coloured forms one could only say: it is as if thoughts were starting to flow. What lives otherwise in the activity of thought becomes an ever-changing flood and flow.

It is the thought-process of the Universe individualised. This individualised thought-process of the Universe reveals itself as individualised Logos.

Lecture summary notes re H2:

This lecture describes the activity of the hierarchies in the human etheric body during sleep.

Consider the real nature of the etheric or vital body, not in abstract terms but by describing what we find with supersensible perception.

  • During sleep:
  • Internal flows in the human being during sleep, etheric activity:
    • As  a person falls asleep and the functions of the physical body come to rest, the human etheric body becomes more active between falling asleep and awakening. When asleep, the etheric body becomes inwardly mobile and filled with lively activity. From the places where the sense-organs are located, a continuous lively activity streams inwards.
      • For example, the eyes darkened and closed, begin to glow and irradiate the interior of the physical sleeping human being like two phosphorent suns. As a result, the inner human being becomes a mild glowing phosoporescent light (which however cannot be seen with the physical senses), the etheric body is radiant with light.
      • From the region of the organs of hearing he interior of man becomes filled with a humming murmur, like a resounding music in the etheric body, coming.  
      • From the whole surface from the skin, etheric streams of warmth flow into the interior of Man. The result is a beautiful living and streaming activity of the human etheric body.
    • The I and astral body, outside of the physical and etheric bodies during sleep, receive stronge impressions from this (although all this happens unconsciously).
    • And note it is this streaming (phosophorent glow, humming music, flooding  warmth) that detaches itself  a few days after Man's death, as etheric body from the astral body and Io, and flows out into the general cosmic ether.
    • What was described above is external revelation, manifestation or emanation of spiritual beings; in reality this flowing warmth, this gentle phosphorescent glow, this living music, are an outer revelation of cosmic beings called SoF (Excusiai or Revelations).  In accordance with their inner nature they live in the shining stream which, during earthly sleep, flows from the human sense-organs towards the interior of Man.
  • The etheric organism of man consisting of flowing thoughts:
    • Let us follow these streams of flooding etheric radiance inwards along their course into the interior of man's organism. The mild phosphorescent glow, proceeding from the eyes; the living music, which comes from the region of the organs of hearing; the streaming warmth, which goes inward from the whole surface of the skin — all these become an organically coherent etheric system. (When one observes the waking human being, one sees the etheric body in activity — the physical body of course as well — and this activity is somewhat different from that I have described for sleep; the activity then extends a little outside the physical body.)
    • All that streams and flows and shines inwards, from the senses and from the whole skin, is formed into a shell-like copy of man within him, extending to a certain depth. The streaming warmth goes inwards from the skin, attains a certain thickness like a shell, and forms the etheric organism of man which is compounded of the living music, the glowing light, the streaming warmth, intermingled with one another, flowing through one another, influencing one another mutually.
    • This etheric organism consists of the forms of thoughts, of flowing thoughts. If one were to draw this continuous inner flow activity of the etheric body during sleep at a particular moment, one would draw coulored lines and forms that would represent flowing thoughts. It is the thought-process of the Universe individualised. This individualised thought-process of the Universe reveals itself as individualised Logos.
    • This forming of thoughts streaming and weaving within man, connected with these movements shining in from the senses, is not just thought but it speaks. It speaks a human speech that is directed inwards, a silent language belonging to the interior of man. It speaks in an individual form, expressing in an inner Word, that can be perceived spiritually, the essential being of Man.
  • During sleep, the I and astral body of Man (outside the physical and etheric bodies, and unconscious as far as the ordinary consciousness is concerned), experience what is happening. They experience the etheric body .. as individualised Logos. Speech, which otherwise is directed outwards to the ears of our fellow men, is as if transformed, turned inwards etherically. It is as if we were to repeat inwards everything which we have said during the day, from waking to falling asleep — but in the opposite order, beginning with the evening and ending with the morning. In a silent language we repeat all that we have said from morning to evening — but in a way that reveals the whole nature of our soul. In so far as man's essential being is experienced in what is spoken, from morning to evening, this experience is manifested inwardly, from evening to morning, in the resounding, speaking, individualised Logos.
  • And this resounding, speaking, individualised Logos brings to expression at the same time — writing, as it were, into the time-sequence of the etheric, in that gleaming, gently phosphorescent light — the occult script corresponding to everything that works inwardly during the night, as the other side of what is spoken during the day.

(The same thing happens during every sleep, even during a daytime nap, but in a more fragmentary way.)

Looking at this still more closely, using the same methods through which the individualised Logos that weaves within Man is revealed — seeking the ultimate reality, behind what is fundamentally only appearance — one finds all those hierarchical beings called in the anthroposophical writings the SoM or Dynamis, who are above the Exusiai.

(3) Thirdly — in this attempt to exercise the art of seeking the real being behind the words — we find the ultimate reality of what I once described as a kind of opposite vertebral column.

  • Perhaps some of you remember how I described the human etheric body many years ago. In the periodical, Luzifer Gnosis, it is described how the streams that compose the etheric body as a whole work together to form a structure that lies towards the front of Man, just as in the physical body the bony structure of the vertebral column, and the vertebral canal, lie towards the back.
    • In the physical body we have this vertebral column and vertebral canal, running vertically.
    • And in the etheric body we have a confluence, a radiating together of what I have just described, into a kind of opposite vertebral column — lying in relation to the physical body towards the front.
    • And just as the nerves proceed from the physical vertebral column, and also the rib-bones, for example — in the same way the rays and the streams in the etheric body flow together into this other column. They do not proceed from it, but flow together and work together, with all that they contain, here in the front of the human etheric body.
  • The result is an exceptionally beautiful and impressive etheric organ. Particularly during sleep, it is revealed in its gleaming and glowing, its resounding and its manifold effects of warmth, its inner language. And beholding it more closely, one can see that this organ permeates what I once described (because these things must be described in vivid pictures) as the various Lotus-flowers. Thus you can realize how through this organ — which develops in this confluence of the etheric body, and connects with the streams of the astral body, forming the Lotus-flowers — Man finds his connection with the external astral and cosmic universe.

This, too, is a manifestation. This, too, can be described as an appearance, and its true inner reality must be sought. This reality is found in the Hierarchy which in anthroposophical writings I have called the SoW or Kyriotetes.

and then, continuing with extract from lecture, concluding:

You have now drawn out from the word “etheric body” its ultimate reality. It is a working and flowing and weaving together of H2 who individualize their streaming, flowing, resounding, speaking activity, and form the human etheric body.

When we contemplate all that SoF, SoM, SoW have formed and made individual, which shines and warms and sounds and speaks into the human physical body as the individual human etheric body — we have also reached Man's astral body. For in this living activity of the Second Hierarchy, which streams from the Cosmos and is individualized in the human being, there is really contained the human astral body itself.

This activity shows itself in the etheric body — it exists in the astral body.

second part continuation of this lecture

Think of this whole activity, in which Man is interwoven during sleep. For during sleep he is interwoven, unconsciously, with the activity of the Second Hierarchy.

When he has gone through the gate of death, Man needs this whole activity. For he must live on within it, when he has laid aside the etheric body as such; when after some days this sounding, this living music, this gently phosphorescent glow, these streams of warmth, have flowed away. When all this has flowed into the cosmic universe, when one has observed the glow extending more and more widely, but growing fainter and fainter, and the music growing softer.... Really this should be described differently. When these regions are described it becomes natural to explain a thing by its polar opposite. It would correspond better to the perceptions of one who has died if I were to say: what is at first like a silent resounding—but one that is perceptible within Man—becomes louder and louder, spreading outwards. But just because it grows louder this is perceived as a fading away of the inner etheric music; it can no more be perceived by the being of soul and spirit, who for the Earth has died. For this being no longer has physical ears—and physical ears would be needed.

[H2 after death]

It is similar with the other experiences of Man in the first days after death. Then he feels himself in his astral body. But again it is only the external side, a word, if one says: Man is now in the Soul-World. I have described it in this way in my book Theosophy, in accordance with the perceptions of the soul-organ most immediately accessible by man. But for the universal, cosmic intelligence, developed in cosmic realms, this region reveals itself as an interwoven activity of the beings of the Second Hierarchy.

Observe what sort of existence it is, at first, within the activity of the Second Hierarchy after death. Between birth and death the human being lives on Earth, alternating between waking and sleeping.

  • During waking, although his soul is woven into the activity of Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes, he is compelled to plunge down continually into the forms of the physical body.
  • During sleep he lives with the etheric body, but this, too, imposes an individual quality on the activity of the spiritual beings, in accordance with the forms of the physical body.

Thus the work of the Second Hierarchy has to absorb what the human being is, morally—whether he is good or evil, devoted to error or to truth. The activities appropriate to the beings of the Second Hierarchy are individualised according to what Man is, as good or evil earthly Man, as earthly Man living in truth or in error. But account must be taken of what these beings of the Second Hierarchy, according to their own essential nature, purpose to do for the being of Man.

[SoM-archangel / example of speech]

Let us assume that a human being has a relation to a particular being belonging to the hierarchy of the SoM (Dynamis). Through this is developed, with the help of an archangel as intermediary, the faculty of speech in Man's organism. But in the development of this faculty the work of the Dynamis is in a sense dislocated, and distorted into triviality. And when a human being uses his words to say something evil, something filled with hatred, this work of the Second Hierarchy is violently dislocated. And it must be restored again. The human being must not live on after death in those forms which he has given to all I have described through his moral or immoral being. He must strip them off, and find his way into the living work of the Second Hierarchy. This stripping off of the dislocations, of the trivializations—this stripping off of those uses of the work of the Second Hierarchy which distort it into its opposite—this is accomplished by all that I have described as the passage of Man through the Soul-World. And then Man has ascended to what I spoke of in Theosophy as the World of Spirits, when he can follow with his own I-being, with his innermost being of soul and spirit, those activities which correspond to the Being of the Dynamis and Kyriotetes.

[Cosmic fractal]

[this is described further with extract on Cosmic fractal#1923-05-02-GA224]

You see—in this way, through the art that seeks out the reality in words, the Being of Man can be described once again. We get nearer and nearer to a real picture of this Being. Just as one might indicate on the blackboard the distribution of the figures in a picture by Raphael, say the Sistine Madonna, with a few characteristic strokes—the words physical body, etheric body, astral body and I are only an indication. The reality is living activity, inwardly full and rich; and in this activity the deings of the Cosmos, in realm's of body, soul, and spirit, are revealed. In the end one comes always to Beings.

If anything is described as if it were vaguely extended in Space or swimming in Time, or as a physical world, etheric world, and so on—it is the manifestation which is being described. It is like describing a swarm of gnats seen in the distance, so that the particular gnats cannot be distinguished, only a grey patch in the air. In the real world, what are at first called etheric body, astral body, are such grey patches. If one looks closely at these grey patches in the physical air, one discovers the particular existing gnats. If one looks closely at these spiritual grey patches, “etheric body”, “astral body”, one always discovers Beings.

To Beings one must come at last in all understanding of the world. For Beings alone are real. Anything comes into existence only through the co-operation of Beings—presenting then an unreal appearance to unclear vision. Just as in the unreal grey cloud the gnats are the real, particular beings—everywhere in the world it is particular Beings that are at work, and the rest is illusion, arising from the co-existence of Beings. Physical matter, too, is an illusion of this kind—something of the nature of a Being underlies everything. Men must understand this again, in order not to speak of something that is not really there: of Matter—or (which is no better) of Spirit in general—in order to learn to speak about beings, individual Beings of the universe.

[continued after this extract .. ]

We must understand the connection of these things. Then the particular Beings can be described spiritually—how they shine, with gentle phosphorescence, and resound: how they spread streaming warmth, how they speak out their own essence. For each particular Being a full spiritual Form can be found in this way. And these full spiritual Forms are the only real things in the universe. In the old dreamy consciousness they knew a great deal about these realities. But this knowledge has shrunk more and more. Once it was known: Form shines out in this way from a certain Being who is reckoned among the Kyriotetes, in this way from human Egos, in this way from Angels, and so on. All this shrank, and contracted at last into a point, because the realities were seen less and less.

Originally they knew very well how the manifestations of the Exusiai, for example, differ from the manifestations of the human I's, or these from the manifestations of the group-souls of the animals or of the plant Earth-soul. The differences were known, but gradually they fell into unconsciousness.

A time came, when there was only the feeling: Yes, there are such realities, everything else is not real ... Space is not real, Time is not real, Matter is not real, Spirit in vague generality is not real—but cosmic individualities are real. But they could no longer be distinguished. And so they were described with the uniform word Monad. Leibnitz and Giordano Bruno spoke of Monads in this way. These Monads were the Realities I have spoken of, shrivelled up small. And no distinction was made between one Monad and another—or at most by tacking on an attribute to the word: the Monads of the Exusiai, the Monads of men, the Monads of animals, and so on.

And at last men lost the power even to speak about the Monads—to which the great German thinker ascribed a conceptual faculty, because he felt that spirit did indeed live in what had shrunk to the Monad. We have not only to remember that the Monad is something living; if human civilization is not to fall into decay, but develop further, we must not only remember the Monads, but we must understand once more, and now with a clear, enhanced consciousness, that all true reality consists in living, ensouled spirit-beings. And what is sketched first with a few lines—physical body, etheric body, astral body—must be brought to life, in the way we have done today.

And so one reaches the point of seeing Man's soul and spirit-nature interwoven with the beings of the Second Hierarchy. One observes how Man goes from earthly life to earthly life, and how from life to life a compensating cosmic Justice, a Karma, is at work. And here, too, considering this power at work in the Cosmos, one need not stop at the abstractions “Karma”, or “universal Justice”, or “moral world order”—but can go on to the realities.

Beginning with the etheric body, a description can ascend to the second Hierarchy, and therewith describe the human astral body as well.

[activity of H3]

Just in the same way, one can begin with the astral body, and take hold of Thinking, Feeling, and Willing in the astral body, as they fade away at the moment of falling asleep, and go out with the astral body. If one begins there, and looks for the realities, one finds the following.

  • In our human thinking there lives the activity of the angels.
  • In our human speech, which springs from feeling, there lives for Man as he sleeps during the night the activity of the archangels.
  • And in what is revealed in waking life through human movement of the limbs, through all that is imbued with Willing - and which also goes on in the astral body - there lives during the night, when the astral body is outside, the world of the archai.

[activity of H1]

But what lives outside in this way, these super-sensible activities of archai, archangels, and angels, which are reflected in the waking human being in Willing, Feeling, and Thinking, these must be harmonized with the etheric and physical bodies.

The physical body must be formed in such a way that it can become the organ of thought, of speech, and of movement. One sees then how the activity of the Kyriotetes, Dynamis, and Exusiai passes over into a still higher activity: that of

  • the Thrones, who bring human Willing into accord with the physical human organism, the human metabolism and limbs. Then we come to
  • the hierarchy of Cherubim, who bring the human faculty of speech into accord with its physical basis. In all that serves speech or song in the organism, or anything similar to speech—the Cherubim bring the human life of Feeling into accord with the organs of speech. And now the faculty of Thought must also have its physical organ in the human nerves and senses. It is
  • the Seraphim who bring Thinking into accord with the nerves and senses of man. Speech, and all that is connected with it, is brought into accord with Thinking and Feeling by the Cherubim.

Thus we see, when we have threefold Man before us:

  • In the organism of nerves and senses, in the basis of Thinking, the creating Seraphim.
  • In all that is the rhythmic man, which must as physical organism be brought into harmony with the faculty of speech—in all this we see the creating Cherubim.
  • In all that is expressed in the movement of the human limbs, in all activities of Will, for which the inner structure of metabolism and limbs must be present in man, harmony is accomplished by the Thrones.

From this we see how the physical human form dissolves into appearance, and behind it there stand as realities: Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones. We are always looking into the activity of the Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones, when the human Ego is interwoven with its inner activity, when man in waking life moves, speaks, feels, and thinks.

[concluding]

In this way we can find again a renewed Mystery wisdom for men; a Mystery wisdom which once more exercises the art of releasing Spirit from the word—of finding real Being in what is at first only sketched in a few lines as physical Man, etheric Man, astral Man. Real Being consists always in individual Spirits, who bear in experience within them what is of the nature of Soul, and who create what is outwardly manifest, the physical. Only existent Spirit-individualities are real. Their expression as Soul comes about because these individual Spirits experience themselves inwardly, and each other in mutual stimulus. That a physical world exists is because these Spirits (who have been rendered abstract as Monads and then have disappeared altogether from human observation) reveal themselves in creation, according to their various stages of existence. We can go back from the created world, which is really nothing but the outer Glory of creating Beings, to the world of experience, of Soul—which is the self-experience of the world of individual Spirits. And when we go on to the true reality, we come to the individual Spirits themselves, of whom the Universe is the revelation and the life.

As long as man stands upon Earth, he lives among the revelations of the individual Spirits. Between death and a new birth he must behold and pass through in full reality the individual Spirits in their own immediate forms. And in order to complete his development he must achieve the passage from the beholding of the spiritual realities in their true form to the order of Earth, in which he does not behold the individual Spirits, but in which they show themselves as it were only from outside, in their outer garments.

But if earthly life is not to fall into complete decay, man must learn once more to behold, and to know, and to understand, through the outer garment, the individual Spirits belonging to a higher world. Then man will see how his whole life consists in a struggle and effort among all that is outer garment of the Divine, and in a life within the Being of the Divine. But he can achieve a right existence within the Being of the Divine only if he develops himself more and more in the true beholding of the outer garment. He must learn to penetrate to the Being through the outer garment. He must not stop at the outer description, but press on to the inner life.

When once this is attempted by a considerable number of human beings, there will be the dawn of a future Earth-evolution, and of the metamorphosis of earthly being into the forms of Future Jupiter, Future Venus, and Vulcan. The Anthroposophical Society must unite human beings who feel themselves today as the nucleus of what must spread to wider and wider circles in human civilisation, that progress in the evolution of mankind may really come about, and that earthly life may not fall into decay.

1923-08-22-GA227

is called 'dream life'

1924-06-27-GA236

... (SWCC) covers the three hierarchies H2, H3 and H1 during our sleep, the 'rising and descending'

Now there is another and different condition of our earthly existence: the condition of sleep.

How does this condition of sleep present itself in its cosmic counterpart?

When our physical and etheric bodies are there in the bed, and our astral body and I outside, then out in the cosmos we have to think of the sun at a position where the earth must first let the rays of the sun pass through it before they reach us. Now in all the ancient Mysteries a certain teaching was given which, if fully understood, produced a profoundly moving impression in those who become pupils in the Mysteries and gradually mastered the Science of Initiation. They reached a certain stage of inner development which they might have described in the following way. — I am now telling you what might have been said by one of these ancient Initiates when he had attained to a certain degree of Initiation. — He would have spoken somewhat as follows:

“When I stand in the open fields in the daytime, when I direct my gaze upwards and give myself up to the impressions of the senses, then I behold the sun; I see it in its dazzling strength at noontide and behind the dazzling strength of the noontide sun I behold the working of the spiritual beings of the second hierarchy in the substance of the sun. Before my Initiation the substance of the sun vanished from me at the moment of its setting. The shining radiance of the sun vanished in the purples of sunset. Before my Initiation I went through the dark path of night, and in the morning, when the dawn came, I remembered this darkness. Out of the dawn the sun shone forth again and took its course onward towards the dazzling brightness of noon. But now, having attained to Initiation, when I experience the dawn and behold the sun as it passes from dawn on through its daily course, a memory of my life during the night-time awakens within me. I know what I have experienced in this night life, I remember clearly how I beheld a blue, glimmering light arise from the evening twilight and gradually spread, travelling from west to east. And I remember how I beheld the sun at the midnight hour, at the opposite point in the firmament to where it had stood in its noontide, dazzling strength; I saw it gleaming there behind the earth, full of deep and solemn meaning. I beheld the Midnight Sun!”

Such has actually been the monologue of Initiates in their meditation, and it faithfully expresses their experience. The Initiate is conscious of these things. And when we read Jacob Boehme's book entitled Aurora then we cannot help being deeply moved by the realisation that the words which are written in this book are echoes of a wonderful teaching of the ancient Mysteries.

What is the “Dawn” to Initiates?

  • It is an instigation to cosmic remembrance, to remembrance of the vision of the Midnight Sun behind the Earth. With our ordinary sight we see the radiant yellow-white disc of the sun at noon, but with the vision of Initiation we see the bluish-violet sun at the opposite point of the heavens. The earth appears as a transparent body, with the sun gleaming on the other side of it with a bluish-red light. But this bluish-red sheen is not what it seems. I must utter the paradox: it is not what it seems. When we are gazing at the Midnight Sun it seems at first that we are looking at something hazy in the distance. And when we learn with the help of Initiation more and more clearly to see what at first appears as a blur in the distance, then the bluish-red light will begin to take shape and form; it will spread itself over the whole of the sky but still on the other side of the earth and covered by the Earth. It becomes peopled. Arid just as when we go out of our house on a starlit night and look up at the majestic spectacle of the starry heavens with its sparkling points of light, perhaps with the moon in the centre, so to the gaze of Initiation a whole world becomes visible on the farther side of the Earth which is now transparent.
    • It is a world that emerges, as it were, out of the clouds, becoming a world of living forms. It is the world of the Second Hierarchy, of the SoW, SoM, SoF . There they appear, these beings of the second hierarchy. And as we watch more and more closely, if we can attain the stillness of soul that is required, then something else happens. All this reveals itself after preparation and meditation and only becomes a conscious experience at dawn, as an after-memory, when it is immediately present with us, when we know we have actually beheld it during the night. What appears on yonder side of the Earth is in reality the weaving world of the beings of the second hierarchy.
      • And from out of this weaving, living world of the second hierarchy there now radiates a world of other beings — raying to us through the Earth. It is a truly wonderful world of beings that works thus through the Earth at night, hovering there in the firmament, now approaching Man, now drawing away, now approaching him again. We see how the line of the weaving beings of the second hierarchy ever and again fades out, while another Hierarchy approaches man, now hovering towards him and now drawing away from him again.
      • And by-and-by we learn to know what all this really means. We have been conscious the whole day long and now we lie down in sleep. This means that the physical and etheric bodies are left to themselves, working in sleep as a plant and mineral world. But by day we have thoughts; all day long, ideas have been passing through our being. They have left their traces in our physical and etheric bodies. We should not be able to remember the experiences of our earthly existence at all if these traces which we subsequently use in our memories did not remain. There they remain, these traces, in what is left of Man as he lies asleep at night — in that part of his being which he has left behind. A mysterious process takes place there, above all in the etheric body. All that Man has thought during his waking life from morning till evening begins to move and, ring on waves of sound. If you think of a certain region of the earth where men are sleeping, and think of all that weaves and works in the etheric bodies as an echo of all that these sleeping men have been thinking during the hours of their waking life, this will give you a picture of what has happened through the hours of the day. And those beings who hover over us, rising and descending, busy themselves through our hours of sleep with the traces that have remained in our etheric bodies. This becomes their field of action. It is an immediate experience in them and absorbs their attention. When this is revealed to us, we say with a sense of deep reverence: “Thou, 0 Man, hast left thy body. And as it lies there it bears within it the traces of the day's experiences. It is the field where live the fruits of thy thoughts and ideas during the day.
    • The beings of the third hierarchy (H3), the angels, archangels and archai, now enter this field. While thou hast left thy physical and etheric bodies, these beings experience what thou hast thyself experienced from the thoughts and ideas of thy waking hours.” — Deep reverence fills us at the sight of some region of the earth where human bodies are left in sleep and whither the angels, archangels and archai wend their way to all that unfolds as an echo of the life of day. And we here behold a wonderful life, born of all that is unfolded between the beings of the third hierarchy and the traces of the thoughts we have left behind. As we gaze at this field, we become aware how, as human beings, we have our place within the spiritual cosmos, and how, when we wake, we create work for the angels during our hours of sleep. It is so indeed: during our waking hours we create work for the angels during the time of sleep. And now we learn to understand something about our world of thought. We realise that the thoughts which pass through our heads contain the fruits of what we lay into our own physical and etheric bodies — fruits which angels gather at night. For angels gather these fruits and bear them out into the cosmos in order that they may find there their place in the cosmic Order.
    • One thing more we see as we behold these beings of the third hierarchy coming forth from the beings of the second hierarchy and their activity. We behold how behind this weaving, again beings of sublime majesty and grandeur take part in the activity of the second hierarchy. We gaze at the second hierarchy, and we see how into this weaving life of the second hierarchy something else works from behind; and we soon become aware how this not only strikes, lightning-like, into the weaving and working of the second hierarchy, but striking right to the other side of the earth, it has to do, not with the part of man that is left on the Earth, but with that other part of his being that has gone out, namely, the I-organisation and astral body. And as we gaze at what has been left behind and behold it as a field where the fruits of thoughts throughout the day are being gathered by the angels, archangels and archai for the purposes of cosmic activity, so too we see how the beings of the second hierarchy, uniting their activity with that of the first hierarchy (H1): the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones — concern themselves with the astral body and I.

Discussion

Note 1 - Temporary work section WIP

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Related pages

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References and further reading


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