Part 8 (2/2)
the universe to birth. Then in later years he loses connection with them. You will realize from what has been said that it is the head which is chiefly concerned with this instreaming substance. But the human head is a hard globe. It is indeed a hard globe, and among all the organs it is the most ossified. And thus, relatively early - not in childhood, but relatively early - it loses connection with the instreaming forces. Hence its formation and development are finished early.
Man continues in his childhood his union with these instreaming forces and then they cease to influence him, at least this is so in our time-cycle.
It was not always so on earth - I will speak of this presently - but it is so in our time. Now while man lives here on earth, the rest of his organism, apart from the head, takes possession of the out-streaming substances and their forces. This remaining organism imbues itself with them, and it is these forces which can rejuvenate the organism from without, as I indicated yesterday. They are the rejuvenating forces which act upon the etheric body, and which, while we are growing old physically, make it more and more chubby-faced.
Thus the human being, as etheric man becomes chubby. In this process undergone by the etheric body that is connected with the remaining organism there work the forces streaming out of the earth. And it is these too which we use when we go through the portal of death to return to the cosmos, to the spiritual world.
The earth, as you see, has a share in our life, is inwardly interested in it. And something is connected with what I have now said that can very easily be brought into a formula, into an essentially important formula. For a long time we live as souls between death and rebirth before we enter physical life through birth, and again we live as souls when we have pa.s.sed through the gate of death, even up to our next incarnation. The dead live a spiritual life, and this life is connected with the stars as here on earth we are connected with physical matter. Since our head has been formed and shaped by the forces which we have lived through between death and a new birth, since we build up our head, as it were, out of cosmic forces, our own real being of soul and spirit fairly early
finds its spiritual grave in our head. We possess the head-forces that we have here on earth because our head is actually the grave of our soul-life as we led it before birth, or before conception. Our head is the grave of our spiritual existence. But inasmuch as we have come down to the earth, the rest of our organism is adapted to make us resurrect, for it takes up the forces which stream from the earth into universal s.p.a.ce, in order to form its spiritual element. And whilst our physical organism falls away from us, our spiritual part with our forces that stream out from the earth pa.s.ses through cosmic s.p.a.ce into spirit existence.
This is the wonderful polarity that prevails in the universe in regard to man. We become physical out of the spirit, burying our spirit nature in the head, in the head is the end of our spiritual existence before birth. Here upon earth it is reversed. We leave the physical behind; the physical goes to pieces gradually during our life and the spiritual arises. We can say therefore: Birth denotes the resurrection of the physical, the spiritual being changed into the physical; death
denotes the birth of the spiritual, the physical being given over to the earth, just as the spiritual is given over to the universe through our birth. We give our spiritual element to the universe by reason of our being born, and by reason of our dying we give over to the universe our physical element. By giving our spiritual part to the universe through our birth, we are physical human beings. By giving our physical part to the earth through death we are spiritual human beings in the period between death and a new birth. That is the polarity. [See: 'Prayers for mothers and children'
- and 'Earthly Death & Cosmic Life'.] And our life here consists in developing our spirit organism. But we can only develop it in the right way for our present earthly cycle when what I said yesterday is taken into consideration. That is to say, when one reaches the point where both members of human nature enter into a real correspondence, when head-life and heart-life enter into correspondence with one another, and the shorter head-life really lives itself into the whole man. Thus the whole man can then be rejuvenated during the lifetime to be lived through,
when in fact the head has long since lost its mobility, its power of inner development.
It will be the special task of a future educational science to make anthroposophical spiritual science so fruitful that the human being comes to feel how he is built up out of the cosmos, how he actually 'sh.e.l.ls himself' from the cosmos and how he gives back to the cosmos what he has won for himself upon earth. This education must be given through all sorts of narratives, all sorts of things which are adapted moreover to youth - but so adapted that one can keep one's interest in them through every age of life. I only beg of you, my dear friends - I will not say to think-through something, for that is not of much use - to feel-through, thoroughly to feel-through something. Here too, you see, is a point where modern natural science is already concerning itself with what can be investigated through spiritual science. I have mentioned how intelligent geologists have expressed their view that the earth is already in a dying-out condition.
The earth has overstepped the point where as earth-being she was actually in the middle of her
life. In the excellent book by Eduard Suess, The Countenance of the Earth, you can read how the purely materialistic geologist Suess states that when one walks over fields today and looks at the clods of earth, one has to do with something dying out that once was different. It is dying out. The earth is dying. We know this from Spiritual- Science, since we know that the Earth will be transformed into another planetary existence which we call the Jupiter existence. Thus the earth as such is dying away. But man, that is the human- race as sum of spiritual beings, does not die with the earth; humanity lives beyond the earth, as it lived before the earth was Earth, in the way I have described in my Occult Science. And so one can permeate oneself - not in thought as I said, but in feeling and experience - with the conception: 'I stand here on this earthly soil, but this ground on which I stand, in which I shall find my grave, has but a transitory appearance in the cosmos.' How then does a next earth, a new planet, arise out of this earth, on which the humanity of the future can dwell? Through what does it arise? It arises through the fact that we ourselves carry piece by
piece what is to form this new planetary existence.
We human beings - the animal kingdom is also to some extent involved - inasmuch as we always carry within us something belonging to the next life, are already here during our physical life preparing the next planet that will follow the earth's existence. In the forces that go back again lies what is to be the future of the earth. We do not live merely in the present, we live in the future of the earth, but we have to keep returning into incarnation since we have many things still to fulfil on earth as long as earth exists. But we are involved in the future life of the earth. We have said that the earth breathes spirit-substance in and out. In the in-breathed substance we carry the past and the laws of the past, the forces of the past. In what is breathed out, given back again by the earth we bear in us what belongs to the future. In the human race itself rests the future of the earth's existence.
Think of all this made really fruitful with feeling and warmth, instead of all the stupid things that are imparted to the young nowadays: think of this
made alive in hundreds and hundreds of vivid narrations and parables and brought to youth!
Then think what a feeling towards the universe would be aroused - what there is to do! What there is to be done if our civilization is to go forwards - what there is to do concretely! This is very important to consider. And it can be considered all the more since it is connected with what I have called the rejuvenation of man. That present-day humanity has come to such calamities is connected with the fact that it has lost the secret of changing head-life into heart-life. We have hardly any real heart-life. What people generally speak of is the life of instincts and desires, merely that, not the spiritual element of which we have spoken. Today men let what streams out into the universe just peacefully stream out, and they do not bother themselves about it. They pay no attention to it.
Some individuals instinctively take it into account.
I have recently given an example of how individuals take it into account, in which case however they differ very much from others. I have
related the difference between Zeller and Michelet, the two Berlin Professors. I have said that I spoke with Eduard von Hartmann about the two men, just when Zeller had obtained his pension, since at seventy-two he no longer felt able to hold his lectures at the University. But Michelet was ninety-three years old. And Hartmann related how Michelet had just been there and had said to him 'I don't understand Zeller, who is only seventy-two years old saying he cannot go on lecturing. I am ready to lecture for another ten years!' And with that he skipped about the room and rejoiced over what he would lecture upon next year and could not imagine how that lad Zeller, the seventy-two- year-old Zeller, put in a claim to be pensioned off - no more to address the students!
This keeping young is connected with a proper mutual action taking place between head and heart. This can of course happen in the case of single individuals, but on the whole it can only occur rightly even in single individuals, when it pa.s.ses over into our civilization, when our whole cultural life becomes imbued with the principle
that it should not have mere head-life but heart-life as well. But you see, to acquire heart-life needs more patience. In spite of the fact that it is more fruitful, more youth-giving to life, yet for heart-life more patience is required than for head-life. Head- life ... well, you see, one sits down and crams.
When we are young we prefer to stick to our cramming in spite of all the talk of the pedagogues. For, my dear friends, certain customs have remained from earlier times, when things were still known atavistically, but people no longer attach a right meaning to such customs. I will remind you of one.
Everything that has been preserved from relatively not very early times, before materialism had become general, has a deeper meaning. In recent decades the habit has already been lost, but when I was young - it is some time since - there was an arrangement in the Grammar School - in the Lower School in the second Cla.s.s - to have Ancient History, and then in the fifth Cla.s.s one had Ancient History again. Those who planned such regulations at that time no longer knew why
it was so, and the teachers who dealt with these matters did not act as if they were aware of the reason. For anyone who had been aware of it, would have said to himself. 'When I give history to a boy in the second Cla.s.s, he crams it, but what he takes in needs a few years for it to become at home in his organism. Therefore it is a good thing to give the same again in the fifth Cla.s.s, for only then does the knowledge that entered this poor head three or four years ago, bear its good fruits.'
The whole structure of the old grammar school was really built up on these things. The monastic schools of the Middle Ages had still many traditions derived from ancient wisdom, a wisdom that is not ours, but one that - preserved atavistically from olden times - arranged such things logically.
In fact it needs the principle of patience if life of the head is to pa.s.s over into life of the heart. For the head-life quickly unites with us, the heart-life goes more slowly, it is less active - so that we must wait. And today people want to understand everything all at once. Just imagine if a modern
man had the idea of learning something and then had to wait a few years in order fully to understand it. Such a principle is scarcely to be a.s.sociated with the frame of mind of modern men. The feelings of modern men lie along very different lines.
One can find examples of this and it is well to point them out. Two plays have lately been produced in Zurich by people connected with The Anthroposophical Society, in fact it has been widely pointed out that the two people are connected with the building in Dornach, with Spiritual Science and so on. In this case, to be quite just, it must be owned that these two Zurich performances by Pulver and Reinhart have really been very well received in Switzerland. But one can find remarkable things in the correspondence that has gone out from Switzerland. The foreign correspondents have shown themselves, well, less interested, shall we say, than in this case the Swiss audience themselves. Thus I have had a newspaper given me in which these two Swiss first performances by Pulver and Reinhart were
discussed, where the correspondent cannot forego pointing out that the two authors are connected with our Movement and have drawn a good deal from it. Today people are not only afraid of the wrong teaching of the Gnosis, as I related yesterday, but they are afraid of anything concerning the life of spirit. If something about world-conception creeps into anything - Oh, that is dreadful! And this actually rests on the fact that there is no feeling for this relation of head-life and heart-life. All life to be found in mankind today outside the head is purely life of instinct and desire; it is not spiritual. And so the life of instinct and desire is irritated with the mere head-life.
Head-life is very spiritual, very intellectual today, but more and more will it become - can one say - 'un-purified' by the instinct and desire life.
Hence thoughts come forth in a very curious way.
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