The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Aphorisms from a Lecture Given by Members in London on August 24

[ 1 ] Human consciousness develops three forms in the present world stage of its evolution, the waking, the dreaming and the dreamless sleeping consciousness.

[ 2 ] The waking consciousness experiences the sensory external world, forms ideas about it and can create from these ideas those that depict a purely spiritual world. The dreaming consciousness develops images that reshape the external world, for example linking the dream experience of a conflagration with many details to the sun shining into the bed. Or it presents the human inner world to the soul in symbolic images, for example the strongly pounding heart in the image of an overheated oven. Memories are also reshaped in the dream consciousness. In addition, there are contents of such images that are not taken from the sensory world, but from the spiritual world, but which do not offer the possibility of penetrating the spiritual world in a recognizing way, because their dimness cannot be completely lifted into the waking consciousness, and because what plays over into this cannot be truly grasped.

[ 3 ] But it is possible to grasp so much of the dream world immediately upon waking that one becomes aware of how it is the imperfect imprint of a spiritual experience that fills sleep but eludes waking consciousness for the most part. In order to see through this, it is only necessary to shape the moment of awakening in such a way that it does not suddenly conjure up the outside world before the soul, but that the soul, without looking outwards, feels devoted to what is experienced within.

[ 4 ] The dreamless sleep consciousness allows the soul to undergo experiences that appear in memory only as an indiscriminate monotony of time fulfillment. One will be able to speak of these experiences as something that does not exist as long as one does not penetrate them through spiritual scientific research. But if this happens, if one develops the imagined and inspired consciousness in the way given in the anthroposophical literature, then the images and inspirations of experiences of earlier earthly existence emerge from the darkness of sleep. And then one can also survey the content of dream consciousness. It consists of a content that cannot be grasped by the waking consciousness, which refers to the world in which the human being dwells between two earthly lives as an unembodied soul.

[ 5 ] If one learns what the dream and sleep consciousness conceal for the present world phase, then the path is opened to the developmental forms of human consciousness in the pre-world. However, one cannot arrive at this through external research. For the external testimonies that have been preserved only bring the after-effects of prehistoric experiences of human consciousness. The anthroposophical literature provides information on how one can arrive at an understanding of such experiences through spiritual research.

[ 6 ] In ancient Egypt, this research finds a dream consciousness that is much closer to the waking consciousness than is the case with humans today. The dream experiences radiated through memory into the waking consciousness; and this not only provided the sensory impressions that could be grasped in sharply contoured thoughts, but connected with these the spiritual that works in the sensory world. Thus man stood with his consciousness instinctively in the world which he left during his incarnation on earth and which he will enter again when he has passed through the gate of death.

[ 7 ] The surviving scriptural monuments and other things give those who penetrate their contents impartially clear afterimages of such a consciousness, which belongs to a time from which there are no external monuments.

[ 8 ] The sleep-consciousness of Egyptian prehistoric times contained dreams of the spiritual world in a similar way as the present one contains dreams from the physical world.

[ 9 ] A different kind of consciousness is found among different peoples. Sleep radiated its experiences into waking life in such a way that in this radiation there was an instinctive perception of repeated earthly lives. The traditions of the recognition of repeated earth lives by primitive man originate from these forms of consciousness.

[ 10 ] The dream consciousness that was dimly and instinctively present in ancient times is found again in developed imaginative cognition. Only with this it is fully conscious like waking life.

[ 11 ] And through inspired cognition one also becomes aware of the premortal instinctive insight, which still saw something of the repeated earth lives. Today's human history does not address this transformation of human forms of consciousness. It would like to believe that essentially the present forms of consciousness have always been present as long as there has been an earthly humanity.

[ 12 ] And what nevertheless points to such other forms of consciousness, the myths and fairy tales, one would like to regard as the outflow of the poetic imagination of primitive man.

Further guiding principles sent out by the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society

[ 13 ] 88. In the waking day-consciousness man experiences himself in the present world-age as standing within the physical world. This experience conceals from him that the effects of a life between death and birth are present within his own being.

[ 14 ] 89. In dream consciousness man experiences his own being united in a chaotic way with the spiritual being of the world. The waking consciousness cannot grasp the actual content of this dream consciousness. It reveals itself to the imaginative and inspired consciousness that the spirit world, which man experiences between death and birth, is involved in the construction of his inner being.

[ 15 ] 90. In dreamless sleep consciousness, man experiences his own being as permeated with the results of past earthly lives without his own consciousness. The inspired and intuitive consciousness penetrates to the contemplation of these results and sees the work of previous earth lives in the course of destiny (karma) of the present one.