Supersensible Impulses (eBook)

LECTURE 1

DORNACH, 16 SEPTEMBER 1922

THINGS to do with the spiritual world can be expressed in different ways and elucidated from different angles. They then sometimes sound disparate. But it is precisely through these varied elucidations that facts about the spiritual world can be presented in a complete form to the soul. And so this evening I will bring in a somewhat different language and different elucidation, certain things that I discussed in the last two lectures1 given in the Goetheanum concerning human experience between death and a new birth.

We have heard that, when our physical body falls away, the human being goes over into a condition of cosmic experience. After separating from the physical body we still carry our etheric organism with us, but we no longer feel ourselves to be inside this etheric organism; we feel our soul spread out into the widths of the cosmos. However, we cannot yet distinguish with any clarity the beings and processes from each other in these widths of the cosmos, over which our consciousness now begins to expand. We have a cosmic consciousness, but this consciousness still lacks inner clarity. And in addition, this consciousness is initially absorbed during the first few days after death in the etheric body which is still present. The first thing to be lost is what in the human being is tied to our head-system (Kopforganisation). I’m not being ironic, but completely serious when I say that the very first thing we lose, also in a soul sense, when we pass through the portal of death, is our head. The head-system ceases to function.

Now, it is precisely the head-system that facilitates our thinking in earthly existence. It is by means of the head-system that people form their thoughts in a certain activity during earthly existence. The head-system is lost when we step through the portal of death, but our thoughts are not; our thoughts remain. But they are permeated by a certain inner ‘aliveness’. They become dim, indistinct spiritual entities that direct us out into the widths of the cosmos. It is as though the thoughts had separated away from the human head, as though they still cast a backward light on the life just lived which we experience as our etheric organism, but as though at the same time they were pointing us towards the widths of the cosmos. We do not yet know what they want to tell us, these human ideas, that were yoked and penned up in the head-system, but are now freed and pointing to the widths of the cosmos.

When, for the reasons and in the way I described yesterday in the [Goetheanum] building, the etheric body has dispersed, when our cosmic consciousness is no longer tied by it to our last earthly life (in the other way which I described, it initially remains tied), when the etheric body has now also separated from the human being, then the thoughts which have torn free from the head-system become brighter, as it were, and we now notice how these ideas are pointing us into the cosmos, into the universe.

The way it works initially is that we go out into the universe through the mediation of the plant world. Please do not misunderstand me here: I am not saying that it is the plants covering the earth at the place where we die that prepare the way for us, but when we look at the earth’s plant world, how it presents itself to our spiritual gaze is such that what our physical eyes see is only a part of the plant world. I will draw what happens in a diagram on the board [see drawing]. Assume that this is the surface of the earth, and plants are growing out of this surface [grün = green]. Of course, it’s not drawn in proportion, but you will understand what I mean. We can follow these plants with our senses up to when they flower [rot = red]. But spiritual perception of plants shows that this is only part of the plant world and that from the flower upwards there begins a weaving of processes of an astral nature. There is an astral element that is as though poured out over the earth, and spiral-shaped structures arise from this astrality [gelb = yellow].

Wherever the earth makes it possible for plants to grow, the plants evoke a streaming out of these astral spirals.

These cosmic spirals surround the earth everywhere, so that we mustn’t think that this streaming down, this glittering and gleaming of the cosmic astral spirals only occurs in places where plants grow. It is present in various ways everywhere. So someone might die in the desert and yet, as they flow out into the universe, still be able to meet these plant spirals.

The plant spirals are the path along which we move from the earth to the planetary sphere. Thus, by means of the spiritual extensions of the earth’s plant world, we slip, as it were, out of the earthly realm. These become wider and wider. The spirals broaden out more and more, their circles becoming ever more expansive. They are our route out into the spiritual world. But we would not be able to go there, we would always have to remain stationary, as it were, if we did not receive the possibility of having ‘negative’ weights of a sort, weights that don’t pull downwards but push us upwards. And these weights are the spiritual content, the ideas, of the mineral structures in the earth, particularly the metals. So we move along the courses of the plants into the widths of the cosmos, and are supported by the force of the earth’s metals that carries us towards the planets. The quality of each mineral structure is such that its intrinsic idea always carries us to a particular planet. So we would say, for example, that minerals related to tin—that is, their ideas—carry us to a specific planet; that what is in the earth as iron—that is, the idea of iron— carries us to another specific planet. Thus, in their spiritual counter-images, the mineral and plant worlds that play a role for human beings in their environment during earthly existence, undertake after death to conduct human beings into the widths of the cosmos. And we are truly carried into the movements of the planets, into the whole rhythm of planetary movement, by the mineral and plant kingdoms of the earth.

By our consciousness gradually expanding over the whole planetary system, so that we are aware of this planetary life in the inner world of our own soul, we float through the entire planetary system. Were nothing else there but what pours forth into the widths from plant and mineral existence, we would experience in it everything that can be experienced in the mysteries of the plant and mineral kingdoms. And these mysteries are extraordinarily varied; they are great and stupendous, rich in content, and no one need believe that the life that now begins for the soul-spiritual person once they have left their physical organism is poorer than day-to-day life on earth. It is manifold, but it is also majestic. We can experience more in the mysteries of a single mineral than we experience in earthly life in all the kingdoms of nature put together.

But there is something else in this planetary sphere that we wander through. There are moon-forces, the spiritual moon-forces that we described a few days ago. The moon-sphere is there. But the more we live into existence beyond the earth, the weaker its influence becomes. Its influence is strong in the early period after death— which is to be reckoned in years. It becomes ever weaker the more our cosmic consciousness expands. If this moon-sphere were not present, there are two things we would not be able to experience after death.

The first is the entity I referred to recently. We have constructed this ourselves in the life just lived out of the forces comprising the moral and spiritual evaluation of our earthly life. We have constructed a spiritual entity, a kind of spiritual elemental being, whose limbs, whose tentacle-like structures are a reflection of our human moral-spiritual worth. If I may put it like this: the soul is accompanied by a living photograph, formed by the substance of the astral cosmos, but which is real and ‘alive’, a photograph in which we see what sort of person we actually were in our last life on earth. We have this photograph before us for as long as we are in the moon sphere.

But apart from this we also experience in the moon-sphere all kinds of elemental beings. We soon notice that these beings have a kind of dream consciousness—but a very bright dream consciousness—which alternates with a brighter state of consciousness, even brighter than human consciousness on earth. These beings alternate, as it were, between a dull, dreamlike state of consciousness and a consciousness that is brighter than that of people on earth. We become acquainted with these beings. They are very numerous and differ considerably from each other in shape. In the condition of life [after death] I am describing, we see these beings as floating down to earth when they enter their dull, dreamlike consciousness; how they are pushed down to earth, as it were, by the spirituality of the moon, and how they float back again.

We meet a rich life of these forms, floating down to earth and then back again, as I have described. We come to recognize that there is a relationship between these forms and the animal kingdom on earth. We come to recognize that these figures are the so-called group-souls of the animals. These animal group-souls come down; [when this happens] it means that a particular animal species wakes up down on earth. When the animal species enters a condition of sleep, the group-soul rises into the heights. In short, we notice that the animal kingdom stands in relationship with the cosmos such that the moon-sphere is the...