The Rudolf Steiner Archive

7. On the Relationship between Humans and the World around them

[ 1 ] Today I will talk to you about many different things, which can easily be linked together, and you will easily find a certain connection between them.

[ 2 ] First of all, I would like to say a few words to you about the relationship between humans and the world around us, about human perceptions and feelings toward the world, and how these perceptions and feelings can be deepened through a theosophical worldview. In doing so, I would like above all to evoke the feeling that it is not the same thing to look at the world as a person with the ordinary education and worldview of today, and to look at the world as a theosophist.

[ 3 ] If we want to elevate theosophy from what many people know it to be, from a theory, from a collection of teachings, to something that has a soul, that fills the soul, that purifies and ennobles all our feelings and emotions, if we want to elevate it to a purpose in life, we must what we can experience through it, and be able to apply it to our everyday lives. Only then will we have truly taken theosophy into ourselves, when we are able, for example, to look at a plant or a field or a mountain or an animal differently, to feel differently than we were able to before we became theosophists. And we will be able to delve deeper into what this means once we have delved deeper into the essence of what is called self-consciousness.

[ 4 ] You are all familiar with self-consciousness in human beings. You know that we distinguish four members in the human being: the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body, and the I, and that when the human being becomes conscious of this I, what we call self-consciousness arises. This means that we not only have the ability to know about the world around us, but also to know about ourselves: that we are beings of an independent nature. If you really think this through to its conclusion, you will arrive at an understanding of how to conceive of self-consciousness in human beings. The question now arises: How is this with animals, plants, and minerals? Can we speak of self-consciousness in a certain sense in animals, plants, and minerals? — People who simply say, “Why shouldn't every stone have an I in the same sense as humans, only that humans do not perceive it?” — are speaking without knowledge of the matter. For on what we call the physical plane, only humans have self-consciousness, an I, not animals, not plants, not minerals. This is what distinguishes humans from animals, plants, and minerals: that they have this I here on the physical plane, in the ordinary world.

[ 5 ] Now, you must not take the words I am about to say in such a way that you immediately think in terms of either/or. You must be clearly aware that certain higher animals, especially those that live closely with humans, such as domestic animals, have a kind of self-awareness that in a certain way already resembles that of primitive humans today. There are degrees of difference everywhere. We are not talking about transitions, but about the main characteristics as they are, so to speak, in intermediate states. Here on the physical plane, we generally do not find self-consciousness in animals. What, then, is this self-consciousness of animals? You can easily understand it if you ask yourself: Where is the self-consciousness of each of my fingers? You must say to yourself: Your own consciousness is the self-consciousness of your finger. It is inconceivable without your common consciousness. In your ego, your ten fingers have their common consciousness, their common ego, just as your other limbs do. That is their self-consciousness.

[ 6 ] Apply this concept in a certain way to the concept of an animal species. You must say to yourself: everything in the animal kingdom that is similarly structured, all lions, bears, frogs, fish that are similarly structured, these lions that belong together, and so on, really behave like your ten fingers. Distance is irrelevant here. If you were to ask the individual fingers about their ego, they would have to say: that is the ego of the human being to whom we belong. So if you were to ask a lion in a menagerie and another in Africa and so on, they would all point to the communal species ego, the genus ego, the group ego. All similarly formed animals have a communal ego. This is what distinguishes humans from animals: every human being has an individual self, but animals have a species self, a group self. You cannot find these selves of animals in our physical world, but they exist where we speak of the astral plane. There you will find a single entity for all lions. Just as you can encounter a human being here on the physical plane who shows you a complete entity within his skin, so, if you were clairvoyant, you could encounter entities on the astral plane, the lion ego, the bear ego, as complete entities like human beings here. These are highly intelligent beings that are in no way inferior to humans. The individual lion is inferior to him, but his ego is a very high entity and has the task of comprehending and carrying out the entire task of lions on earth with penetrating wisdom. So the animal egos are very intelligent beings.

[ 7 ] If you could now follow these beings, which make up all the egos of animals, as a seer, you would see that these beings are engaged in a strange activity. What animals have as their task is administered and governed by these beings, which we call animal egos. These animal egos surround the earth continuously. As an example, I will mention one of the tasks of these animal egos among many others. If you observe a phenomenon that is very well known and much thought about, namely the flight of birds, you will find that the birds that live in northern regions gather in the fall. They fly from the northeastern regions toward the southwestern regions, then toward the south. In the spring, they gather again and migrate northward in the opposite direction. The underlying reason for these migrations is essentially breeding, the birth of young, and so on. The spring flight is a kind of wedding flight. The regularity inherent in this is ensured by the group souls. They arrange all this. And you can follow the lines in the flight of birds; one species of bird flies this way, another that way, one low to the ground, another high in the air. Everywhere you will find a deep wisdom within. It is said that all animal souls circle our planet, circle the earth. This is an example of how the wisdom of the group soul works in the flight of birds.p>

[ 8 ] How is it with plants? They only have a physical body and an etheric body. They have no independent astral body and no independent ego here on the physical plane. Now, if you could observe yourself while you are asleep at night, you would see how the physical and etheric bodies lie in bed. What lies in bed has the value of a plant; this is what the plant consists of continuously. That which dwells within you during the day, while you are awake, which is contained within your physical body, is outside your physical and etheric bodies at night. In plants, what you take out at night is always outside. This going out is connected with something else. Let us suppose that you all fell asleep here—which is not exactly desirable—then all your egos and astral bodies would lie outside. You would not be as separate as you are now in your physical bodies. You would mix more, forming a more uniform mass, as if you were flowing into one another. You would dissolve in a certain way into a common astral body of the earth and draw from this common astral body of the earth, which is mixed with that of the sun, the strength to remove fatigue. This is how it is with plants all the time.

[ 9 ] What you see in the plant is the physical and etheric bodies. But the plant has an astral body outside itself. The whole earth has a communal astral body, and that is the astral body of the plants. And the earth has a collective ego, and that is the ego of the plants, so that you must seek the ego of the plants in the collective ego of the whole earth. And now all the plants on earth appear to you as your finger joints appear to you. They are an organism, and your fingers grow out of it. The whole earth is an organism, and plants are literally members of the earth and belong with it to a collective consciousness.

[ 10 ] And what follows from this is literally true: if you are hurt, if your flesh is cut, you feel pain. In a similar way, under certain circumstances, the whole earth can feel pain. But the earth cannot feel pain if, for example, you cut off a plant or a flower. That would not cause the earth any pain. What causes pain to the earth can be understood if you know one thing: you must imagine the whole earth as a unified organism and all plants as members of this communal organism. Now, what is above the earth in the form of plants is to the earth roughly what milk is to humans and animals. When a calf suckles from an animal, from a cow, this gives the cow a certain feeling of well-being. The whole earth has this same feeling when you cut off a flower or a plant. For what the earth sends to the sun, what it drives out, is in another form the same thing that lives in milk. But if you pull a plant out by its roots, it is exactly the same as if you were to tear off a limb of a human being or cut into their flesh. It is something completely different that our earth feels when you cut off a plant that is still firmly rooted in the earth—the earth feels a sense of well-being—and something completely different when you pull a plant out by its roots. You should not judge this morally, but according to the facts; and that is how they are.

[ 11 ] Now try not just to think such a truth, but to feel it! You see, it is felt like this: when you go outside in autumn and see the farmer mowing the grain with his scythe, someone who knows what is happening in the astral body of the earth feels something like feelings of pleasure, joy, and delight spreading over the earth as the grain is mowed. In fact, it is a feeling of joy for the whole earth when the reaper cuts away the grain at harvest time. This is how one feels when one knows what is happening in the animal group soul, in the plant earth soul, in the group ego and the earth ego. In the migrating flock of birds, one senses the wisdom, the wise arrangement of the astral beings who bring about these arrangements. One feels the wind of wisdom blowing through the air. And when one knows that the plant is the earth soul, one feels sensation and feeling in everything that happens to the plant. One says that one feels the world spirit in the vicinity of the earth when one pays attention to the animal ego; the world soul, the feeling of nature, when one pays attention to the plant ego.

[ 12 ] And so it is indeed. When we do not merely consider the teachings of theosophy theoretically, but when they fill our whole soul, then we feel that God who is always moving through nature. And if that is the case, is it not true that when one person stands before another, they know that a feeling heart beats in their breast, that feelings similar to their own are hidden within the other's skin, that they not only think about the other but also feel with them, so that we gradually learn to feel something like the pulse, the warm feeling of nature. Nature becomes a living being with spirit and soul! Now let us imagine what it means for nature to become spiritualized according to the teachings, and we will experience it as if we were learning to relate to everything in a completely different way through theosophy, as if our feelings were purified and ennobled. How indifferent the ordinary person is to whether the scythe cuts the seed! And how different it is for the theosophist who follows with his heart the scythe that cuts, knowing that where the scythe touches, there is a living being beneath it, that the astral body of the earth feels pleasure! In this way, nature gradually becomes truly alive for us. This means that seemingly abstract teachings are transformed into living feelings and sensations. In everyday life, every step changes when one allows the teaching to become feeling.

[ 13 ] And now, having understood this, let us turn to something else that we may have already touched upon from another angle, something that will appear to us in a new light.

[ 14 ] You turn your eyes to the moon, to the sun. You have now seen how, out of theosophical wisdom, we can kindle the feeling that we are learning to empathize with our surroundings. This also extends to dead objects, to stones. It is very peculiar how we learn to judge some things in our environment differently. People often imagine things wrongly. We think we go out as knowledgeable beings, wanting to see what is happening when something is going on outside. Let us approach a quarry. The workers are hammering and chiseling the stones. Then we come to the stone-I. This is no longer connected only to our planet Earth, but the stone is connected to our entire planetary system. The stone has its center where the planetary system has its center. The stone also has its own feelings. But you must not believe that when you break a stone, destroy it, it hurts. No! When you break or destroy a stone, it means a feeling of well-being. You can see infinite well-being pulsating out of the quarry as the men work. Pain is necessary to put the stones together. It is interesting to know this. The earth was a molten object. You could not live in it; it had to cool down. Everything was dissolved in the heat. It had to come together. This causes pain; separation brings joy and pleasure. All of lifeless nature suffers so that you can build homes for yourselves. It sighs for those who can see through it, it sighs! It will be dissolved again into its elements. In order for man to be able to undergo his development, this lifeless nature had to be brought together through pain. When humans have become so spiritualized that they no longer need the solid earth as a foundation, the earth will be redeemed with them. This is what lifeless nature longs for. It is true what Paul says: “All creation groans and suffers in pain.” It will be redeemed by approaching that spiritualized state of humanity.

[ 15 ] One can even observe that children, who are still constructed differently from adults, have certain feelings for the astral and still feel something of what an inanimate object feels when it is destroyed. Not always—it often happens out of mischief—but this is often a reason why children have such compassion and destroy things. It does not always happen out of mischief. You can even see it. Things sometimes have a completely different face from a spiritual point of view.

[ 16 ] So you see that the whole earth is animated, spiritualized, permeated with feelings. That is the wonderful thing about theosophy: it leads us into living nature. Now you will easily understand that those who look into it as occultists must think of things, including the sun and the moon, as being just as imbued with soul and spirit as the natural kingdoms. It is really so. What we see of the sun when we look at it with our physical eyes is to the whole sun what what we see of the human being with our physical eyes is to the whole human being. The body of the sun is the body of the sun spirit, and the body of the moon is the body of the moon spirit. And the sun, moon, and earth belong together in a spiritual relationship, and the matter is very complicated. A whole series of spiritual beings are united with the sun, which have their body in the sun, not just one spiritual being. So when the occultist looks at the sun and sees the sunbeams, this is not merely a physical phenomenon for him, but something else as well. You can imagine what he sees if you see, for example, a woman on the street raising her hand in a gesture of giving to a child. You see the movement of the hand and perhaps a coin falling into the child's hand. But that is only the physical aspect. If you could look into what is only an expression here, you would see compassion, you would see how this is the cause of the movement of the hand. The same applies to the child: you would see and follow the external process as the expression of a spiritual process, perhaps as the expression of gratitude. Those who perceive the sun's rays with their physical eyes alone are to those who see spiritually as those who see only the physical movement of the woman and the child are to those who also observe the inner processes. Those who see the processes of the sun's rays coming to us with occult training see how spiritual beings overflow with feelings in the sun and how these feelings become action. And their action is what they send down in the sun's rays. And when you observe the astral body of the earth, you see something like gratitude from the entire plant soul that receives the sun's rays. And that is just one whole year! When the plants open, it is a soulful expression of the inner spiritual processes of the earth and of what the creative spirits of the sun feel.

[ 17 ] Now there is a certain contrast, which should not be understood as an opposition, between the spiritual beings in the sun and those in the moon. Earth, sun, and moon belong together. In a distant past, they were one body. Then the sun separated from the earth, that is, from the union of today's earth and today's moon. Why did this happen? We can cite many different reasons. But today we will mention only one of the many reasons. At that time, when the sun separated from the earth, all the beings that were of a higher nature than those that remained behind went with the sun. For the sun can be the scene of much higher spiritual beings than man. Beings far, far above human beings went with the sun as sun spirits, and their scene became the sun, so that when we look at the sun with occult eyes, we see the physical sun as the body, the scene and dwelling place of exalted spirits, the sun spirits, who were able to continue their development for a while on the same body on which we live today, but which had to separate by removing the finest substances in order to continue their development in a corresponding manner. One separated itself from these sun spirits and was given a special task. It remained connected to the earth. And later, the moon also left; the earth became independent. And this one, who was, so to speak, a sun spirit, but who had initially been given a different task, not one from the sun, this one spirit is Yahweh or Jehovah as cosmic intelligence. This one individuality went with the moon, so that when the earth split off, we have a kind of high sun spirits in the sun and Jehovah in the moon. With the light that comes from the sun and moon, the soul and spirit forces of these beings also shine down on the earth at the same time. And human beings could not have developed as they have under the influence of only one of these beings. It had to happen as it did.

[ 18 ] If the Earth had not had the moon, but only the sun, then human beings would have changed in an enormously rapid succession and developed very quickly. This could not have happened to them; they would have been too hasty and would have skipped steps. The sun combines the best forces necessary for human development, but the rapid pace could not be adopted. Therefore, Jehovah was separated, so that the entire course of human development was delayed. Thus, the forces of the sun and moon work together and bring about the right balance in human development. If only the forces of the moon had been at work, human beings would have withered away. Instead of living human beings, there would have been only withered, lifeless natures, mere forms. When you walk among the statues in a museum, you have a picture of what the moon would have made of you: soulless forms, beautiful indeed, but soulless nonetheless. The forces of the sun bring life and movement into these forms, into this rigidity; but with the forces of the sun alone, human beings would have become spiritualized too quickly. The course of our earth's development is wisely arranged in this way. That is why the sun and moon had to separate from the earth with their forces and essences.

[ 19 ] If a clairvoyant person had observed the development of the Earth from another planet, if he had been able to watch how the Earth unfolded, he would have seen a strange spectacle. Let us assume that someone were to observe the development of our Earth from a distant celestial body. He would see not only the physical body of the Earth, but also its astral body. If he were to observe this astral body, he would see it displaying all kinds of light phenomena. He would observe this for thousands of years. Then a point in time would come when this astral body would change completely, displaying new colors and entirely new processes. There is such a turning point in the Earth's development, namely when we view the Earth as an organism. Before this point, its astral body displays certain colors, and after this point, it displays other colors. These two periods of the Earth's astral body are completely different. And if the person concerned were to investigate what that moment was when the astral body of the earth underwent this radical change, he would find that it was the moment when Christ died on Golgotha. When the blood flowed from the wounds of Christ Jesus, the entire astral body of the earth changed. That is the cosmic mystery of the significance of Christ's death.

[ 20 ] This cannot be measured by the intellect alone. No occult training would be sufficient to enable us to feel the full significance of this event. What happened in our world system at that moment? How did the astral body of the earth change? It was because, from that moment on, one of the sun spirits united its astral body with that of the earth. We said that there are several sun spirits, six in number. The one we call the Christ Spirit united his astral body with that of the Earth at the moment when the blood flowed from the wounds of the physical body. Since that moment, the Earth has undergone a fundamental change, because the Earth has since become one with the body of Christ. The Christ principle descended from the heights of heaven. It lived in the sun body until the crucifixion of Christ Jesus. In death, it united with the earth body. Since that time, the earth has been the body of Christ as a planetary body. He has been united with the earth since that time. And we now understand in a deeper sense what it means: “He who eats my bread treads me underfoot.” Imagine that the earth is the body of Christ, and take this expression literally. People walk on the earthly body, and they eat the bread of the earthly body. And when the spirit of the earth speaks, it can only describe this process with the words: “He who eats my bread tramples my body underfoot,” and it does so without resentment.

[ 21 ] And the Last Supper itself! What infinite depth it takes on when we understand that the earthly body is the body of Christ! What is the bread that is baked from the grains of corn? How must the spirit of the earth speak to this bread? “This is my body!” This must be taken literally. How must the spirit of the earth speak to the forces of the plants? How must it speak, after it has united with the earth's I, to the juices flowing in the plants? “This is my blood!” Just as the blood flows through your veins in your body, so the blood of Christ literally flows in the plant juices in the body of Christ, in the earth's body. And who would say that this does not give something like the Last Supper infinite depth? What does one feel when one senses how the astral body of Christ unites with that of the earth, and at that moment one becomes aware of the meaning of the statements just quoted? What does a person feel when they immerse themselves completely in this? How profound does something like the mystery of the Last Supper become to them!

[ 22 ] Thus, especially through an occult observation of these processes, we learn to perceive all life around us differently. We learn to understand religious documents literally. And we realize that when we learn this, all external interpretations of religious texts must disappear. For religious texts are written from the deepest truths and reflect them. You will find nothing in the authentic texts that does not agree with such great truths as the merging of the Christ Spirit with the earth when the blood flowed on Golgotha. And how infinitely deepened will the life of feeling become when one looks into this mystery!

[ 23 ] It is the task of theosophy to work toward enabling human beings to learn anew how to revive in their souls those deep feelings and emotions that lived, truly lived, in their ancestors. For just as we now try through theosophical teachings to conjure up before the soul what the soul can feel through them, so it was in ancient times when the first Christians felt in this way. They felt it deeply! They continued to feel this way for a long time, until materialism came with its intellectual judgments. Then the spirits withdrew, so to speak, for nothing has such an alienating effect on spiritual beings as the intellect. When the intellect dishevels things and envelops them in its caustic criticism, it causes the spiritual beings in the human soul to flee. The myth of the brownies has a profound meaning. They were there when the light of the intellect did not yet shine in human beings. The light of the intellect drove away the brownies. Those feelings were there when the critical intellect had not yet penetrated the human soul. Theosophy is there to bring back to human beings, despite the intellect, warm, living empathy with the whole of nature. The development of the intellect could not be prevented. The spiritual essence had to recede for a time. The spirit will return. We will retain our intellect and conquer the warmth, the fire of feelings, enthusiasm, and compassion. Knowledge and feeling will be united when we penetrate to the sources of life.

[ 24 ] And a new life will spring forth for us from the religious documents when the event that Goethe wished for occurs. Long, long centuries ago, the majority of humanity was not yet able to read the Bible; however, people had heard some of what it contained. It was only with the advent of printing that people were able to read the Bible. Today, however, they no longer read the profound, mysterious documents themselves, but rather what critical minds say about the Bible. Goethe longed for an age when people would once again be able to read the Bible, but not the Bible itself. Today, people read about the Bible. For a few pennies, one can buy writings that show how the Bible is supposed to be composed of individual pieces, how the Old Testament came into being piece by piece. One has even constructed a book in which sentences have been compiled with letters of different colors to indicate what came earlier and what came later, what is an addition, and so on, the so-called Rainbow Bible. These things come from the critical mind, which can only see how these things were written on the material plane by one person or another, which cannot see that all the authors of the biblical writings were disciples of the great initiates who had direct insight into the spiritual world. But what matters is that we recognize the real spirit in the words, that we penetrate what lies behind them, that we understand how the religious documents were written from the depths of spiritual, true knowledge.

[ 25 ] We have thus seen how we are to understand things. This is how human beings learn what is important. Then they rise to the right feeling, that is, to the right life.