1 – GA 60 — Berlin, Nov. 24, 1910
The Secrets of Sleep
Summary by Michael Holdrege
Sleep presents us with the greatest riddles. It is sometimes called the brother of death.” Although the soul functions seem to cease during sleep, the self-aware life of the soul while awake is possible because we perceive it through a kind of mirroring within our bodies. Those who can observe the moment of falling asleep more exactly can observe a kind of waking up at the same time. It is as if their conscience expands, awakening the morality of the soul. They feel the soul pouring itself out in a world of ever-expanding conscience and inwardness, there is a feeling of inner blessedness. (But if the I has something to reproach in itself, it feels itself torn asunder.) Thereafter comes a kind of jolt as the soul begins to lose itself in the spreading out, like a colored droplet dissolves in water. It is a moment of leaving the mirror, and since we have not yet developed other kinds of mirrors, we stop perceiving what we are. That we are. We withdraw from the body for a period to draw strength from a region outside the body.
If through exercises we grow more aware of the inner connection between our inner state and our bodies, then we feel something special when we are unable to do something. We feel a kind of resistance in our physical organs, for example in our brain. The brain starts to become a reality for us. But if we sleep on the problem, we often wake up and feel equal to it. We feel that just before waking we did something, we worked on something—we feel that while asleep we could bring something within us into motion, into activity. When awake the brain gave resistance, now we feel ourselves not involved in the use of the brain, we feel ourselves in a certain motion without the brain. We feel our own activity—the activity of thinking—as a sequence of images. And then we notice how these images of an activity begin to unite themselves with the brain, making it into a more moveable, adaptable instrument. We feel ourselves like a craftsman working on our instrument—we begin to feel like our own architect.
Rudolf Steiner then goes on to describe how our bodily perception provides us only with a portion of reality. The rest we ward off, exclude it from ourselves. Our body allows us to only experience what corresponds to the characteristics of the mirror. During sleep everything of our spiritual nature that is independent of the body unfolds: our conscience, our moral qualities.
He ends with a summary that characterizes the essence of the soul in regard to sleep:
Wrapped around by sleep, the soul returns to itself—fleeing to the spirit’s distances when the narrowness of the senses becomes oppressive.
2 – GA 154 – Berlin, April 18, 1914
Dreaming and the Etheric Body
Summary by Michael Holdrege
When we sleep, we are outside our physical and etheric bodies. When we dream, we look back and see only our etheric body. What appears in our dreams are processes in our etheric body that have lifted their veil at this or that spot: some part of the etheric body’s incredibly complex processes comes to awareness and makes up a dream. The whole of our life in this incarnation is contained in the etheric body. Etheric substance surrounds us everywhere. We are in it, move through it. In normal life we do not perceive it. To really perceive this realm—to receive imaginations clairvoyantly—requires a much stronger inner force of soul than we normally possess. This holds for after death too, otherwise we are blind and deaf in that world. Clairvoyance requires a stronger more powerful force of soul, so that, for example, we are in control of our dreams in the way we are in control when we make a table or a shoe. We must be actively present. We must have a stronger power of thought that activates itself within us, that represents nothing from the external world. From the world of dreams, Rudolf Steiner isolates out one in particular: the kind of dream where we—to some extent—meet ourselves. Whereas in other dreams our etheric body floats toward us, in dreams where we confront ourselves a piece of the astral body reveals itself to us. Our astral body contains not only what we have in us now, but also things we have yet to learn! Our astral body is much smarter than we are. Much of what we receive as intuitions consists of revelations from our astral body. However, these are only healthy to immerse ourselves in if we master them through the exercise of our own judgment. Otherwise, Lucifer gives them a certain direction according to his own tendencies. Healthy clairvoyance in the astral body requires strengthening our inner forces so that we are fully conscious and see ourselves; requires that we are present in self-awareness, beholding ourselves in whatever we do. Our own being must be the center of gravity around which everything is organized. The acquisition of clairvoyance through spiritual science is not so easy and agreeable as people today would like it to be. In every moment it requires presence, in contrast to than letting things simply come over us like a dream does. It requires a capacity to take oneself in hand and to observe oneself as soon as one enters the spiritual world.
3 – Summaries of two lectures from “Inner Aspects of the Social Question”
GA 193
Summaries by Linda Williams
Context: “In 1919, a year marked by strong social and political upheavals, Rudolf Steiner was deeply concerned with questions about society and gave four lectures in Zurich in February of that year that formed the basis for his book, Towards Social Renewal (GA 23) which was published in April of that year. The idea of the threefold social organism, and thoughts about realizing it in practice, were publicized widely.
“Besides the public lectures on threefolding, Rudolf Steiner gave more in-depth lectures on this subject for members of the Anthroposophical Society in various cities. Marie Steiner later gave the title, The Inner Aspect of the Social Question to the first edition of the members’ lectures in Zurich that form part of this compilation. . . “ –From Editor’s Preface, Problems of Society, An Esoteric View, From Luciferic Past to Ahrimanic Future, by Rudolf Steiner. Translated and introduced by Matthew Barton, Rudolf Steiner Press, 2015.
Lecture V
Heidenheim, 12 June 1919
Souls born in Europe the previous six or seven years carry a melancholic, wary countenance as they meet souls carrying the effects of all they have experienced in the physical world. This was a new phenomenon in Steiner’s time, very unlike how souls entered previously.
Steiner points to humanity’s plunge into materialism as the cause of the cataclysmic events of recent years (including World War I and the subsequent Russian (1917) and German (1918) Revolutions). He calls for a true revolution where human beings are receptive to the spirit in thinking, feeling, and willing. Steiner points to the fact that while the spiritual world is seeking to “reveal itself to humankind in the strongest way,” humankind is arriving at the point when the body is seen as the “tool for all spiritual and mental activity.” In previous times, the spirit could reveal itself in “all kinds of subconscious and unconscious processes.” Now to receive the light of spirit, we must do so “in our own free, inward deed.”
To do this, we must begin to lift our brain-bound thinking into more etheric forms of thinking; to grasp the world through our etheric body. Steiner suggests two ways to do this. The first is studying anthroposophic literature whose content gradually “schools a kind of thinking, feeling, and will that is equal to today’s tumultuous events.” The second way is through the imaginative powers evoked by experiencing art. “What people otherwise accept in their enjoyment of art has to consolidate, grow brighter and become serious vision: Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition.”
Steiner then describes the conditions under which soul development must happen. “We must cultivate a strong, inner resolve if we are to be equal to what the times are asking of us.” He calls attention to the soul which is more spiritual than the etheric body, and thus, something human beings are more distant from in this materialistic age. While the etheric body has kind of a shape and form in continuous motion, the astral body is formless. It is only possible to speak metaphorically of the astral body since it has no form. Over the past 300-400 years, the astral body has changed substantially. In the past, spiritual forces permeated the astral body and spiritual feelings and impulses originated in this rich environment. “Now, by contrast, human astral bodies have really become empty, since the power of the world of spirit is seeking in a sense to approach from without and reveal itself, and so we must absorb this outer, spiritual world into us. And therefore our astral body has gradually become empty, and must now begin to fill again with the revelations approaching it from without. This has a very specific effect on people.”
When we sleep, the astral body is together with spirit, freed from the physical and etheric body. These interactions with the world of spirit come as dialogues with the dead, those known when they were alive and those who have died before. It is this experience from which we need to draw our “most important impulses from the world of spirit.”
“This is why the moment of awakening should be sacred to modern people.” As we emerge from the world of spirit and enter the physical world, we bring with us everything good, that enables us to be a reasonable person. We make decisions that we may not be aware of when we awaken, but in our subconscious, we undergo something in the night that we can experience the next morning. A feeling of sacredness of the moment of awakening creates an underlying feeling that will help us with a spiritual impulse or not – and then must wait until a new dawn to resolve it.
Rather than the “cleverness” of our present age, Steiner calls on his listeners to live with a spiritual orientation, “really counting on spiritual factors.” He points to the path between Western materialism and Eastern spirituality as appropriate to the central European and calls on a free spiritual and cultural life in which the world of spirit can reveal itself. This spiritual, cultural life must be freed from the shackles of state and economy. He acknowledges that the current moment in history is a vital one, calling on new, invigorated sense of responsibility towards the spirit.
“The only thing that can give true health back to humanity is the will to lead a spiritual life, to allow spiritual resolves, spiritual impulses to inform what we do in the physical realm.”
Lecture VII
Berlin, 13 September 1919
Since the mid-fifteenth century, the human soul’s relationship to the hierarchies, the Angeloi, Archangeloi, and Archai, will become complete different to what it used to be. The work of the hierarchies on the development of the human being has concluded and they are only interested in humankind if people engage with the world of spirit out of free will, free intention.[1]
There is a secret of life intimately connected with our present evolutionary moment and it is now necessary to pay attention to this:
As we are presently constituted, in body, soul, and spirit, we perceive each night in a certain way the events of the coming day. These events do not come to full consciousness, for it is our angel who has this preview or prevision. What we experience at night in community with our angel is a preview of the coming day. As we become pervaded by this knowledge, we will make decisions in the right way. Our thoughts will be drawn from the night and we should be “pervaded by a sense that we discuss with our angel in the preceding night should be made fruitful by us during the following days. Steiner asserts that so much of what had happened the previous four or five years would have happened differently if people had been imbued with the sense of acting in harmony with the speech they had had with their angel the previous night.
Steiner’s key point related to sleep:
People need to realize that this life between birth and death is a continuation of the life of soul and spirit we experienced before birth. We must speak of the importance of people experiencing the revelations of the divine in their being throughout their lives, and of bearing through waking life a strong sense that what they do from morning to evening is something that has been discussed during sleep with their angel.
[1] A more recent expression from Leonard Cohen, from So Long Marianne, “Well you know that I love to live with you/But you make me forget so very much/I forget to pray for the angels/And then the angels forget to pray for us.”
5 – Rudolf Steiner, Cosmosophy, vol. 2, GA 208, Lectures 10, 11
Dornach, November 12-13, 1921
Summaries by James Pewtherer
Completion Press, Gympie, Australia 1997
While the astral body (AB) and the “I” are not perceptible during sleep, the moral element, our moral impulses, come from the spiritual world during sleep. Here, the AB and “I” gain moral form, just as the etheric body (EB) and physical body (PB) forms come from nature. The I with its will element meet spiritual entities during sleep in such a way that evil deeds waste it away while good deeds allow it to develop freedom. For the AB during sleep, our feelings directly enter the astral world outside us. The image put out by I and AB into the spiritual world will incarnate into the powers of the human head in the next life while also affecting the ideas in our moral constitution in this life.
Each night we put a question to the spiritual world through the appearance of our moral constitution. This is answered the following morning, thus providing a continuous response from the spiritual world to our moral state. Thus, it is the sleep state which provides us with a measure of our moral attitude. This, in turn, provides the form for our conscience which is borne by our EB and PB in our waking hours.
We become tired in our PB and want to sleep (unless exhausted by physical exertion) because we long for the spiritual world when the sense-perceptible world offers nothing of deeper interest. Because it rejects reality of the spiritual world, the modern scientific attitude relegates spiritually founded moral impulses to the realm of beliefs, not observable phenomena. This mindset cannot perceive that the will-related-I and the feeling-related-AB dwell in this spiritual realm during sleep and have spiritually grounded experiences and perceptions to relate. These perceptions provide a proper image of the form of the I and the coloring of the AB when they are outside the PB.
Awakening from sleep creates a mood of fall and winter for I and AB, while freeing these elements in falling asleep is akin to a mood of spring and summer. So waking and sleeping can be seen as progress in time in the cosmos as well as in relation to the celestial bodies in space. In learning to perceive and cultivate spiritual influences, the moral/ethical in us is raised to the religious sphere as it becomes an expression of divine will.
6 – Lecture 11
The will-endowed I is formed by its relationship to spirit beings during sleep. At this time, the I and AB can connect with the limb-metabolic (LM) system but not with the head. Yet the head structures the LM during sleep, re-creating it every night. Nonetheless, while the LM only relates to the earthly world when we are awake, it is then that the LM is continually re-building the human organization, while the head is continually breaking it down because of its ties to the past. So a deep, religious appreciation for the inner qualities of the human body depend upon our pursuing the right activities in earth life.
The EB receives what comes from the universe during sleep when the AB and I do not dominate it. From birth, cosmic powers inscribe dream images from earthly life on the EB, even while the destructive activities of the AB and I wither it. At the same time, all that the EB has received from the spiritual world before birth radiates and contributes to the earth evolution. The PB receives radiation from above downward but the EB radiates from within outward.
When the AB and I leave the EB and PB, powers of soul in the universe stream into the AB, bringing beauty to it when it acts with goodness and withering it away when it tends towards evil. The AB therefore becomes the judge of the soul, of good and evil, during sleep. In turn, the I structures itself in light of universal entities, and could see itself not only in terms of judgments but in images of what human beings are becoming as seeds for future lives.
At the level of Spirit Man/Human, the I sacrifices itself to become something more. Nonetheless, it may be rejected as unworthy based on its experiences in waking life as inscribed in the EB and PB. This phenomenon can be seen in medieval religious images which spoke to the human heart on an instinctual level. Human beings instinctually understood that the “Lamb of God” sacrificed himself for the greater good by entering into human existence as the universal I. Today, human beings must consciously understand and experience what is called for from them. This image can be seen by us today when the I enters into sleep and gives up its selfhood.
7 – GA 79: Foundations of Anthroposophy November 28, 1921, Christiana (Oslo)
Summarized by Vernon Dewey, January 2023
Sleep is one example of an ordinary life occurrence that poses to human beings a great enigma, and we can come to truly understand sleep through meditation and other exercises upon our thinking, feeling, and willing. Meditation evolves thinking from mere memory pictures to imaginative sense-free pictures, becoming morphological thinking. Memory originates in the physical body. Imagination originates in the soul, free of the physical body. Similarly, we can transform the will from being body-bound (desire, rooted in our temperament and constitution) to body-free, seeing will-impulses objectively. Only after attaining this necessary objectivity in thinking and willing can we rightly understand the act of falling asleep.
When we go to sleep, our independent soul life (feeling and willing) slips out of our body, leaving our thoughts behind in our physical-etheric body. These thoughts act upon our physical and etheric bodies. Normally, a person needs the body and the soul to be united to remain conscious. But if you attain imaginative thinking, you may experience two related conditions consciously: one, falling asleep; two, perceiving feeling and willing free of the body, objectively. Likewise, we can experience two more conditions consciously: one, waking up; two, perceiving sense experiences through our feeling and our will, which is when our soul is stimulated by something external. Waking up is two-fold: when the soul is stimulated by perception of the body, and when the will takes hold of the body.
If we are able to perceive the alternating conditions of sleeping and waking, then we are able to perceive our own physical body objectively, which is unconsciously permeated by our thoughts. Therefore, when we look back upon our physical body, we are really looking back upon our thoughts. By looking back upon our thoughts represented by our physical body, we then also perceive the world. This practice of alternating consciously between freeing ourselves from our physical body and uniting ourselves with our physical body guards against hallucinations and visions, which are really born out of unconscious desires and physical-etheric forces. Furthermore, this alternating between being united with the body (and being apart from the soul-spiritual world) and being united with the soul-spiritual world (and being apart from the body) teaches us to know birth and death.
8 – GA 210
January 19, 1922, in Mannheim
Summary by Holly Koteen-Soulé
Realm of knowledge which anthroposophical view wants to penetrate can only be reached if the human being steps over the threshold of consciousness. This happens unconsciously every time that we go to sleep and wake up. The Guardian of the Threshold is there at this time in human development because of our need to be protected from crossing unprepared. The human beings have to work at crossing the threshold as a part of achieving their true humanity. Unearned grace will not serve our development. True human beings needs to be instigators of their own worth.
The dream world is mysterious and enigmatic. It is the result of a lowered consciousness, out of which a picture world emerges. There are no thoughts, only pictures. The order in this world is not coherent with the waking world of space and time. What is missing in the dream world is the power of thought. When we wake up, our body sends thinking to bring order to the jumble created in our dreams. In ordinary life thoughts and ideas are bound to the physical body. When consciousness is dimmed, it leaves behind the power of thinking. The soul crosses the threshold into sleep retaining feeling and will.
While the forms differ, the world of feeling attached to thoughts and ideas are no clearer than the pictures in our dreams. What lives in feelings remains in a kind of darkness similar to our dream pictures. When we sleep, it is our feelings that light up in dream pictures. The feeling and willing elements of our soul carry us over the threshold belonging to sleep consciousness. The life of thoughts and part of the world of feeling belong on this side of the threshold.
With sufficient preparation we can experience what exists on the other side of the threshold. What we experience there are forces and beings. At first, we meet the world of destructive forces, like a burning, scalding fire that seeks to destroy everything of the sense-perceptible world. When a human being dies, the physical body is dissolved by the forces of nature. Something that lives in the body during earthly life prevents the body from being destroyed. As soon as we die, we are surrounded by a world which destroys our physical body. We also encounter the world of destructive forces when we go to sleep. Because we are in the spiritual world, world of sense perceptions cannot also be there. If we cross the threshold and meet these destructive forces without proper preparation, we are in danger of becoming their unwitting allies.
“We have to learn to love this physical world as one filled with wisdom in order to be well prepared to enter the spiritual world. Before taking our place at the side of the creators, we have to learn to love their creation and understand that the world has not been brought forth meaninglessly by divine creative power.”
Otherwise, we would return upon waking up every morning hating the sense world and wanting to destroy it. Dreams are filled with destructive forces in order to destroy every shred of logic. What belongs to our middle region, to the etheric rhythmic activity of the heart and lungs, the destroying forces are only able to “caress” our brains and are not able to submerge themselves into the whole of our physical bodies. What belongs to the middle region continues in a subdued form while we are sleeping. At our current stage of development, we have to remain unaware of our spiritual origins when we sink down into sleep, but we are prevented from following in full consciousness what takes place between sleeping and waking.
Human beings have an unconscious wish to return to their bodies in the morning. Wishes live in a kind of twilight consciousness. Thinking life only returns upon awaking, upon returning to the body. In death, however, wishes also die, and the human being enters world-thought. The human being who is aware of the spiritual world experiences the destroying flames after death that take over the body as the spiritual birth of soul and spirit arising with new creativity.
Materialism is a lazy world view. With a spiritual view of the world, we can see sleeping as giving us time to take in something that enables us to discern spirit within the forces of destruction. The “imperishable will be seen within everything that is perishable.” What the human being does not pursue egotistically pushes toward eternity.
Our language indicates only a half-knowledge of immortality, eternity. We also need the word, “unborness.” Only then can the human being grasp the eternal aspect of a human life. Without this understanding, civilization will fall into absolute decline. In the Waldorf School, we do not speak about fatigue, because our education is based on the rhythmic system ad cultivation of the artistic element. Does our heart tire?
Incarnation of the Christ was significant for human development. Through intellectualism and materialism, we have lost an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha and the reality of the human soul reaching for Christ consciousness. “The questions of the present time must be illuminated by the light of eternity.”
9 – The Other Side of Human Existence
GA 214, 30 August 2022, Oxford
Lecture Summary by Elan Leibner
Most of what the spirit effects through human beings, both for the earth and for the development of the soul itself, is achieved during sleep.
During waking hours, we have two types of relationships with the surrounding world: conscious perceiving with the senses and thinking, on the one hand, and unconscious taking in of substances in highly dispersed states through breathing on the other. During sleep, we similarly take in the surrounding world, except that it is the spiritual world that enters into us. The movements of the planets and the world of the fixed stars enter our soul-spiritual organization during sleep. This relationship unfolds in phases.
The first sphere we enter upon falling asleep, and the last one we pass through before waking, is the planetary sphere. The movements of the planets are “seen” with the part of the astral body that permeates the heart during waking hours. The I and astral body leave the physical and ether body in bed, and then this heart eye sees the movements of the planets reflected to them by the (abandoned) etheric body as though the latter were a mirror. In the flexibility of the dreams that we have before waking there is a dim echo of the planetary movements we experienced during sleep. For example, if your karma is connected to a current relationship between Jupiter and Venus, this relationship might weave a dream out of memories from your distant past that, during life, had no connection with one another. The memories are woven together to “clothe” a cosmic event.
This first sphere of experience after sleep often provokes anxiety in us. The soul feels itself spread like a fine mist drifting in the cosmos, as though within a large cloud of cosmic mist. Then, a second feeling arises: a yearning to rest in the bosom of the divine as protection from dissolution into this mist. These two feelings must be carried into waking life or else all the substances we take into our physical body during the day, in metabolism for example, would cause disorder within the entire organism. At present, these experiences and feelings are carried unconsciously into the day, because human beings are not yet strong enough to do so consciously. The heart-eye continues to perceive the planetary sphere even as the next phase of sleep unfolds.
In the next sphere, the part of the astral body that permeates the solar plexus and the limbs during the day perceives what originates in the zodiac. The zodiacal influences are both from the constellation radiating directly on us and those that radiate through the earth, and they are again reflected by the ether and physical body left behind. The perceiving part of the astral body in this sphere can be designated the “sun-eye,” and it enters a relationship with all twelve constellations and the planetary movements. This organ’s experiences are extraordinarily complicated. A single constellation bestows more experiences in a single night that extensive traveling throughout the earth could possibly offer. The only way form a relationship with what the sun-eye experiences in the second sphere is to take into ourselves what Christ wanted to become for the earth through the Mystery of Golgotha. Such contemplation can allow Christ to become our leader through the zodiac during sleep, overcoming a second wave of anxiety in the soul, this time about losing itself in the multitude of stars and their activities.
When we observe what happens in this second sphere, the full significance of what Christ has meant and must yet mean for earth evolution becomes comprehensible. People who have not yet been touched by the Christ in their waking lives bring the confusion and anxiety they experienced at night back into their waking consciousness. That anxiety and confusion are overcome when Christ becomes our leader as the spiritual sun at night. He leads us from constellation to constellation, bringing order to the confusing experiences there and helping us see our karma in the complicated movements we behold. Our feeling life during waking hours is touched by these experiences like an after-image.
The soul has a strong tendency to move beyond the realm of the zodiac, but it cannot do so while it has an earthly body because of the influence of the moon. The moon forces hold us within the realm of the zodiac. We perceive them through an astral organ that is not localized like the heart-eye and the sun-eye but is spread throughout the body. We see into the mysteries of birth and death, and at the same time experience our connection with the rest of humanity. Out total life destiny appears before us including every relationship we have ever had, whether the persons involved are currently living on the earth or not.
The moon is keeping us from expanding beyond the sphere of the zodiac while we are asleep, and this constitutes the difference between sleeping and dying. During sleep, the ether body remaining behind is reflecting the cosmic experiences back to us, while at death the ether body is pulled out and becomes one with the cosmic mists mentioned earlier, and then we see our entire (just ended) life as a tableau for a few days.
Once the ether body has dissolved, the spheres of the planets and the zodiac become our inner organism. Everything described in the book Theosophy as the worlds of soul and spirit (which we experience after death) is only perceptible to us because the planets and the constellations of the zodiac become our sense organs, so to speak. We continue to look at the earth intently for a time and then feel ourselves expanded into the spirit beyond the realm of the zodiac. What we experience there can hardly be expressed in human language, but an attempt will be made.
Plant life on the earth is supported by helical streams that flow towards the earth from the cosmos, even in desert areas that have no plant life and even during the winter. Those streams act like a ladder or scaffold on which the plants are supported in their push away from the earth upwards. These helical forces are the very forces that the human soul uses to lift from the body towards the planetary sphere after falling asleep, and when it experiences the anxiety mentioned earlier and wishes to rest in the bosom of God, it says to itself: I rest in that which lays like a cosmic blessing over a field of grain when it blossoms.
The moon leads us back towards our animal nature, while the plants strive to send us further into the cosmos. It is the plants, or rather their forces, that reveal to us our relationships with other human beings, so that the entire earth becomes a kind of “book of life” that enlightens us about the world of human souls.
[Rudolf Steiner proceeds to talk about the different ways in which ancient cultures approached initiation: the Indian Initiates were only interested in what comes towards the earth from the constellations above the horizon (hence the lotus sitting position that blocks what comes through the earth) while the Greek Myths describe heroes descending into the underworld as well. It is an interesting discussion of aspects of evolution, that, however, goes beyond the topic of sleep we are exploring. In the interest of keeping the summary manageable in length, I will leave interested readers to find the whole lecture and read the rest.]
10 – GA 218, Stuttgart, Oct. 9, 1922
Understanding Sleep through Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition
Summary by Michael Holdrege
All day long we carry with us the effects of the previous night. In this lecture, Rudolf Steiner describes the stages we go through unconsciously in sleep. But he does so as if we were conscious of them—for the soul does experience them, even though it has no awareness thereof. After our sense impressions and will impulses become stilled, we experience at first an undifferentiated state of soul: an indistinct condition where our sense of space is almost completely extinguished. It can be compared to a kind of swimming in an indistinct universal substance. The soul experiences itself like a wave in a great ocean, but with no definite sense of location in space, although our sense of time is still present in a general way. Without any preparation this experience of being enveloped in an indistinct sea of vague impressions—to lose almost all sense of space—would be unbearable.
Arising out this phase of sleep comes the incredible need for contact with the spirit. The soul has lost all feeling of certainty and has a deep longing for connection to the spirit. [Again, what is being described here is what the soul would experience if it were conscious, which it is not. It takes Imaginative cognition to lift this phase of sleep into consciousness.]
What goes on in the soul at night has a significant effect on our waking-life the next day. As an aftereffect of the first stage of sleep, we have in our waking life a need—emerging from the depths of our will—to relate all that we find around us to something universal, to relate the world of the senses to God. We owe this extraordinarily significant aspect of our human nature to sleep.
As we go deeper into sleep we come to further stages, ones that can only be perceived by Inspired consciousness. We find the soul splintering into an enormous number of separate entities. This splintering leads (when experienced consciously) to a kind of anxiety. This anxiety must be overcome, and this must come from the day before, by gathering strength from religious, spiritual experiences that are then poured into the anxiety. In this way, day and night are connected to one another. Since the Mystery of Golgotha, Christ has become a strong guide at the moment the soul enters the realm of anxiety during sleep. (In earlier times, Mystery Schools provided guidance in this respect.)
In this way, we can move beyond anxiety and disintegration to the planetary spheres, which bring new impulses into the breathing and circulation processes that are connected to our inner life. This allows our inner life to transcend the subjective and personal—it allows cosmic forces to stream into us when we awaken in the morning. Everything we carry in the way of wisdom, even cleverness, is a result of these planetary experiences.
In the third stage of sleep, we enter the realm of the fixed stars. We live into the cosmos in an even more intensive way than in the previous stage, and from these experiences we receive still deeper, more meaningful impulses for the next day. Everything we carry into the next day in the way of forces of initiative in our mental and feeling life is an aftereffect of our fixed-star experiences during the night.
During the day our cosmic awareness is muted to enable us to develop an individual consciousness. During the night it is the reverse: our experience is cosmic. Our future evolution will consist in awakening more and more to the cosmic realms that are unconscious in us today. Spiritual Science is there to point us in that direction.
11, 12 – The Driving Force of Spiritual Powers in World History
GA 222
Dornach, 11-23 March 1923
[North Vancouver: Steiner Book Centre, 1972]
Lectures I, II (V)
Concerning the theme of sleep
Summaries by Douglas Gerwin
________________________________________
Context and Big Picture of this Lecture Cycle
Rudolf Steiner gave these lectures in 1923, a year bookmarked by two major events in the life of anthroposophy: the burning of the first Goetheanum on the eve of the New Year and the re-founding of the Anthroposophical Society at the very end of this turbulent year.
In Lecture V, Steiner describes how during the period of the 4th through 15th century, the Exsousiai handed over regency of cosmic thoughts to the Archai. During the regency of the Exsousiai, human beings did not think so much as receive thoughts “from outside”. With the advent of the Archai, humans have begun to think thoughts for themselves “from inside”. Early examples of these thinkers were Augustine, later Copernicus, Galileo [we could also say Vesalius, the “Copernicus” of the physiological body]. Certain Exsousiai, however, resisted letting go of their role, and their continued influence led to the uprising of national chauvinism, on the one hand, and materialist science, on the other.
The chief players in our speaking are our etheric and astral bodies, rather than the “I” and physical body. [Elsewhere, for instance in his lectures about the seven arts, Steiner relates speech more directly to the development of the “I”.] Hence we carry something of our speech into sleep; it “echoes on”, specifically “the undulation of feeling in the words” as well as the impulses of will embedded in our speech, albeit in reverse order from the way they were experienced during the day.
Children carry into sleep the feeling tone of the speech of adults around them. However, with the onset of puberty, adolescents attempt to establish their own relationship with the archangels, who take pleasure in these speech “echoes”. Thus, human beings “during sleep would feel unhappy if these echoes did not harmonize with the sounds ringing out from the other side, from the speech of the Archangeloi.” [p.5]
Since the last third of the 1800s, a “tormenting condition of misunderstanding” between human souls and spiritual beings has insinuated itself into the state of our sleep, to the degree that our words express only what is physical. Today we grow up with a language “whose words have no wings to carry them away from earthly conditions”. As a result, in sleep the teenager [the adult too, I suppose] is “chained” to the physical during sleep and these echoes are confined to the physical world. Then “the world of the Archangeloi opens out before him; he senses it but no threads of thought pass from that world into his soul, of from his soul into that world.” [p.7] In consequence, the teenager wakes up feeling cheated, having suffered “this tragic deprivation”. Then teenagers project this feeling onto the adults around them, feeling the older generations have deprived them of idealistic language. “The materialism of civilization is the cause of the cleavage between the young and the old. And the real source of the lack of understanding lies in the fact that the corruption of speech by materialism brings about an unhealthy condition of the soul-life of young people during sleep.” [p.8]
Language today is reduced to a medium for understanding on the physical plain, divested of descriptive power, rhythm, measure, melody, or dramatic effect. It “fetters the soul during sleep to the purely physical murmurings of the mineral [i.e. physical] world” and, in his blood, to “the rustling thudding sounds of the physical part of the plant world.” In this way speech becomes a means of chaining human beings to the earth, shutting them off from the spiritual world.
Now, in physical life we can deny the spirit, but during sleep we cannot deny the spirit. If we repudiate the spirit, then we wake up each morning as adults who no longer understand life.
In sleep “I” and astral body experience the elemental world of nature, and from there look up into the super-elemental world, becoming conscious of Angeloi, Archangeloi, and Archai. As of the 15th century, our intellectuality has made it harder for us to establish a right relationship to this Third Hierarchy. Up to the time of puberty, children bring with them sufficient forces to connect in sleep with the elementals, but as adults we no longer have enough strength to do this – unless during the day we have spent time absorbing spiritual knowledge.
The Archai are needed in order for us to re-enter our etheric bodies with sufficient intensity as we awaken. Goethe was very capable of doing this. As for the rest of us, “a man becomes a materialist precisely because he does not reach the physical and etheric bodies, because the spirit is too weak to lay hold of the body in the right way.” [p.20] In order to sleep well, you need to connect with the elemental kingdom, which is to say that “on Earth, man must seek for the spiritual through his own strength in order to establish relationship again to the Primal Powers.” [p.21]
Turning to the healing powers of medicine, Steiner goes on to say that it’s not the substance that promotes health but rather “the condition into which the individual has been brought by means of the substance, because the substance has its relationship to the elemental world and this relationship is transferred to the individual concerned.” [pp.24-25]
At the end of this lecture, Steiner declares that the study of spiritual science requires will [italics are given in the text!]. But today people prefer seeing a film to hearing a lecture, since they give themselves over to the former without stirring any inner activity. In this way they become “a “spiritual automaton”. [p.26] The youth of today demand of the older generations: Give us something that stirs us into activity to create a relationship to the Archangeloi and the Archai. Instead, today’s education “leads to mental inactivity, to film-watching.” [p.26]
13 – GA 224, Stuttgart, June 21, 1923
Preparing or a New Birth
Summary by Michael Holdrege
We spend about a third of our life on earth asleep. During those periods we are extremely active. Our central activity in sleep is a backward self-review of the day. Whether our sleep is long or short, from the time we go to sleep until we awaken, we go backward through everything we just experienced between our last waking and the current moment of falling asleep.
But we live through this process in a different form than before, we experience it in terms of its moral nuances. We indulge in no illusions; we evaluate everything in terms of our fundamental humanity.
Following this description, Rudolf Steiner describes how after death we go backward through our sleep experiences. This takes about 1/3 of a lifetime. This time, however, we do not only pass through these events in images, we now experience them in a very real way, as real as our experiences of earthly life in a physical body.
From there Rudolf Steiner mentions how these experiences are the basis for our further existence among higher beings and spiritual facts, before a new phase begins when we begin the long process of preparing for our return to earthly life once more.
14 – MAN AS A PICTURE OF THE LIVING SPIRIT
GA 228
Summary by Frances Vig
This lecture was given in London on the day of the foundation of the Anthroposophical Society in Great Britain.
2 September 1923, London
As I studied this lecture, I noted that it fell into three sections. Section one addresses the human being’s relationship to the sustaining activities of the Hierarchies and the Trinity in us during sleep, and in some aspects even during waking life. Section two turns to the activities of the planets, their gifts to us and their interweaving. The third section speaks of the Mystery of Golgotha and a call to the conscious awakening of the human being in the spiritual world.
The I
The human being works on the earth and is connected with all earthly life through the gift of the physical body.
We view our life as a unified whole through the memory that focuses only on experiences of our waking life, excluding the time we are asleep.
The daily sleep experienced in childhood has good spiritual effects throughout our lives, to which we only add.
If we were born wide awake we would not recognize that the effects of what we do are our responsibility, we would act automatically, unconsciously.
The time we are asleep is seen as darkness in the midst of life but our ability to say ‘I’ is due to the night.
The Ego as we know it, begins as darkness, emptiness, and it is to the night that we owe our consciousness of self, otherwise we would function automatically.
Earlier in human evolution human beings were aware of their sleep life but their actions were more automatic than today.
In truth our ego remains in the spiritual world. Our true being is in the spiritual world and what is here of us on earth is but an image of that reality.
The phenomena of sleep when the Ego and astral body leave the physical and etheric bodies.
The Ego works into the pulsating forces of the blood and, during sleep when the Ego has departed, Angels, Archangels and Archai continue that activity, indwelling those organs where the Ego is active during the day.
In waking life the astral body works in our breathing organs, at night the Exusiai, Dynamis and Kyriotetes are living there.
And, since we are not able to fulfil the needs of our ether body even during the day, the beings of the highest hierarchy, the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones indwell the ether body even while we are awake; they are always present.
Finally, the physical body. In the extraordinarily complex processes of the physical body indwell the Powers of the Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Here RS reviews in reverse.
Our physical body is not our own, it is the dwelling place of the Divine threefold Being.
To review, our ether body is the dwelling place of the Cherubim, Seraphim and Thrones, caring for the organs assigned to that ether body.
The organs assigned to the physical and etheric organs, deserted by the astral body, are cared for the Kyriotetes, Dynamis and Exusiai.
Those organs, sustained by the human Ego are cared for by the Angeloi, Archangeloi, and Archai.
The human being is a temple, a dwelling place of the Beings of the Hierarchies. During waking life we are tenants.” The outer form of the human being is a picture of the working together of all the Hierarchies. They are within it.”
“The knowledge of the higher world can only be applied in practice if one is able to point out in detail how it is working in the outer picture, maya, or reflection, which is its physical, sense-perceptible manifestation.”
The human being is related to the physical world and the spiritual world.
Both the lower spiritual realm of the kingdoms of nature and the high spiritual realm of the stars are pictures of the Beings of the Hierarchies, the underlying spiritual reality.
The human being experiences the light of the stars which is a raying down, a symbol of the presence of the Hierarchies, so that in earthly life we can become aware of the living Spirit filling the universe.
We should feel a longing to get to know this starry realm in its true spiritual being.
Rudolf Steiner now directs our attention to the Beings of the planets beginning with the spiritual nature of the Moon and Saturn.
There are high guiding beings in the interior of the Moon that we never see. We never experience what lives within the Moon itself. It reflects all the physical and spiritual impulses from the Universe to us on earth.
The Moon forces remaining on the Earth from the earlier activity of these lofty beings are the physical forces of reproduction in the human being and the animal.
The Saturn beings are at the opposite pole and these sublime beings, near in relation to the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones, are holders of the cosmic memory. They preserve facts and events, both spiritual and physical that all the Beings on the planetary system have ever experienced.
We experience this when sleeping at night and, more fully, between death and a new birth when we traverse the stars on our spiritual journey.
The Saturn forces are at work in us at night in picture form. Just as our I lives in memory, Saturn is like the cosmic “I” of the universe.
These forces affect us unconsciously in waking life and can be experienced when looking back on and discerning the unconscious thread running through decisive events. These forces are the highest cosmic moral forces emanating from Saturn.
While the Moon forces, on earth, are active in heredity and reproduction, those of Saturn are the restorer of balance for all that happens on Earth and enter into human life through all that lives in Karma, from life to life.
The other planets, Jupiter, Mars and so on, are mediators between the Moon forces and the Saturn forces, weaving their activity between the extremes of the physical and the highest ethical. The working together of the planets and their influence on us show how the human being is connected with the Earth itself and with the universe beyond.
Memory is vital both to the human being and in the working of the cosmos. The forces streaming down from Saturn immerse human beings in a living spiritual reality of causes and effects leading from earthly life to earthly life.
On earth we work in terrestrial space and are more confined in our human relationships, but between death and a new birth we are in the planetary spheres of the universe and the mutual relations between human beings are no longer so confined but interweave.
We live in the everlasting interplay of the different planetary forces related to us.
The spiritual interaction of Mars and Venus is related to what appears on earth as human speech and song just as the Saturn memory is related to human karma and the physical Lunar forces are left behind as the external force of reproduction.
In our daily life we are under the influence of the spiritual forces of the cosmos that live within us and of which we are an image.
This vision of the human being, clear to an instinctive atavistic clairvoyance long ago, became obscured. To this we owe our possibility of freedom.
The appearance of the Christ Being
The Mystery of Golgotha gives human beings the opportunity to work with the forces of the Christ Being to develop a consciousness capable of awakening the human being to their conscious spiritual reality and relationship to the spiritual world.
It is necessary that inherited instinctive wisdom becomes conscious. The true inwardness of Christ can only be understood in the light of the spirit.
It is essential that human beings experience themselves as a picture of the activity of the cosmos. To support this endeavour the following meditation is given.
Ich schaue in die Finsternis:
In ihr ersteht Licht —
Lebendes Licht.
Wer ist dies Licht in der Finsternis?
Ich bin es selbst in meiner Wirklichkeit!
Diese Wirklichkeit des Ich
Tritt nicht ein in mein Erdendasein.
Ich bin nur Bild davon.
Ich werde es aber wieder finden,
Wenn ich,
Guten Willens fur den Geist,
Durch des Todes Pforte gegangen.
I gaze into the Darkness.
In it there arises Light —
Living Light!
Who is this Light in the Darkness?
It is I myself in my reality.
This reality of the ‘I’
Does not enter into my earthly life.
I am but a picture of it.
But I shall find it again
When with good will for the Spirit
I shall have passed through the Gate of Death.
“Entering ever and again into a meditative saying of this kind, we can confront the Darkness. We realize that here on Earth we are only a picture of our true Being — that our true Being never comes down into the earthly life. Yet in the midst of the Darkness, through our good will towards the Spirit, a Light can dawn upon us, of which we may in truth confess: This Light am I myself in my reality.”
© 2023 |The Pedagogical Section Council of North America
