Future Jupiter and its Beings GA 275
Source: RSArchive
3 January 1915, Dornach
If you recall the talks we had in connection with the evolution of
the Earth through the Saturn, Sun and Moon periods, you will know that
at each of these evolutionary stages, one particular kind of being from
among what we would now call the higher hierarchies, attained their
human level, as it were. We know that during the ancient Saturn period
the Spirits of Personality, the Primal Beginnings, the Archai reached
their human level, during the Sun period the Archangels, during the Moon
period the Angels and during the Earth period, mankind.
You will also have seen from our talks on evolution, that each level
of beings that reaches a certain stage of development, received
preparation in advance. We know that the human being was being prepared
throughout the Saturn, Sun and Moon periods, and that what we nowadays
call man's completed physical body has been evolving since the Saturn
period, the etheric body since the Sun period, the astral body since the
Moon period, and that the ego was only added to these during the Earth
period; that is, all the beings that are at a certain level are prepared
as a whole.
Now you may be anxious to know whether, in our present period of
evolution, beings are being prepared to attain their human level in the
Jupiter period. Another thing you know is that during the Saturn, Sun
and Moon periods — you can look it up in my book Occult Science
— the spirits of the higher hierarchies took part in the
preparation of humanity. There is a description of how the Angels,
Archangels and Archai were involved in the development of human beings,
and therefore an obvious question is whether human beings, during their
Earth existence, are possibly involved in preparing the beings who will
reach their human level during the Jupiter period?
This question is certainly a vital one for every feeling person, if
his feelings have been inspired by spiritual science, as we have been
describing. For it could be the case that human behaviour in general
during the course of Earth evolution could either help, or omit to help,
the beings who might attain their human level on Jupiter. We might say,
'What could be worse than behaving in such a way during Earth
evolution as to make it impossible for proper Jupiter beings to arise
through our deeds?' We must of course take it for granted, if we
want to talk about these things, that there is a certain goodwill, for
these are truly important secrets of initiation, the kind of initiation
secrets that modern science detests as a matter of course. One certainly
has to prepare one's feeling to be able to look at the attitude modern
science is bound to have to the real truths of life.
In the previous lectures I have already tried to say a little about
the way modern science necessarily relates to life. It cannot make
direct contact with the secrets of life. It cannot even want to; it must
not even pretend to want to reach these secrets of life. It is surely a
good thing to make hard-boiled eggs for the people who like eating eggs
when they are hard-boiled, and hard-boiled eggs are useful for those who
like them. But if someone wanted to go and say that he takes the eggs
away from the hens to hard-boil them, and then lets them hatch them
after that, he would be doing something absurd. A person does exactly
the same thing as far as the cosmos is concerned, if he sets out to
solve the secrets of the cosmos and wants to use modern science for it;
this is the same attitude as wanting to hatch hard-boiled eggs that have
nothing left in them to be hatched out.
I will show you by means of a comparison just how misleading this
science is that is bound up with the whole way of modern thinking,
particularly when it approaches the real riddles of life. If somebody
wants to hold forth about whether science is helpful or harmful he will
usually start off by asking, 'Is science right about this or
that?' And if he can prove that it is right in one or another
instance, he will swear by it as a matter of course.
But this is just what we have to get away from, this attaching so
much importance to the question of whether what science says is right or
not. We must reach the point of seeing that this is not the main thing
when it comes to the solving of riddles of life. If someone sees a
horse-drawn cart with a man in it, he will be quite right in saying that
the horses are pulling this person in the cart, and drawing him along
behind them. This is correct, of course. And anyone who wanted to say
that the horses were not drawing the cart and the man sitting in it,
would obviously be wrong. But it is also true that the man sitting in
the cart, through the way he guides the horses, is controlling the
direction in which they should pull him; and that is surely the more
important aspect from the point of view of the destination. Modern
science can be compared to the statement of the person who denies that
the man in the cart is guiding the horses, and insists that the horses
are drawing the man in the cart.
If you think the comparison through in detail, you will get the right
idea about the relation of modern science to modern research into truth.
I have to say these things over and over again, because a person who
bases himself on our world outlook, must come more and more into the
position where he can defend and protect our spiritual-scientific
outlook against the attacks of the modern world outlook. But you will be
able to do this only if you enlighten yourself as to the relation of
modern external science to a genuine research into truth. You must
always approach spiritual-scientific questions with a certain attitude
and a certain kind of feeling, otherwise you will not make the proper
connection with them.
Now our question concerning the beings who will reach the human level
on Jupiter is connected in very truth with the deepest questions of
man's Earth evolution. There is something in our Earth evolution that
has always been a philosophical problem, namely the relation between
man's moral behaviour and his natural existence. As an earthly being,
man has to decide to what extent he is the kind of being who is ruled by
his instincts, has to obey and satisfy them, and is at the mercy of his
instincts and their satisfaction, because the laws of nature simply
insist on their being satisfied. That is one side of human nature. In
this respect we say, 'We do these things because we have to. We
have to eat and we have to sleep.' But there is another realm of
human conduct on this earth, a realm in which we cannot say
'must', for it would lose its whole significance if we were
to say 'must' here. This is the wide realm of
'shall', a realm where we feel that we have to follow a
purely spiritual impulse as distinct from instinct and everything
arising out of ourselves on a natural level. 'You shall'
never speaks to us from out of our instincts but directs us in a purely
spiritual way. 'You shall' comprises the realm of our moral
obligations.
There are some philosophers who cannot find any connection between
what is implied by the 'you shall' and 'you
must'. And our present age that is almost bogged down in
materialism, especially where moral life is concerned, and will get more
and more bogged down, would like to turn all the 'you
shalls' into 'you musts'. We are heading for times
where, in this respect, the turning of 'you shall' into
'you must' will be blazoned forth with a certain amount of
pride, and actually called psychology. Terrible aspects present
themselves if we look at what has begun to develop in the field of
criminal psychology. It is already evident that the human being is
being conceived of in such a way that people do not ask whether he has
overstepped a 'you shall', but try to prove that he was
driven to one or another destructive act out of the necessity of his
nature. Strange experiments are on the increase to define crime merely
as a particular case of illness. All these things arise out of a certain
materialistic lack of clarity in our times, regarding the relation of
'you shall' to 'you must'.
What does this 'you shall', or in other words the
categorical imperative, actually signify within the whole framework of
human existence? Whoever obeys the 'you shall' is known to
carry out a moral action. Whoever does not obey the 'you
shall' commits an immoral action. This is of course a trivial
truth. But now let us attempt to look at 'moral' and
'immoral', not only with regard to the external maya of the
physical plane, but with regard to the truth and what is actually behind
physical maya. Here the moral element corresponding to the 'you
shall' appears to initiation science as something that hits you in
the eye, spiritually, to put it rather crudely. If you look at a person
— these truths which the materialistic outlook detests have to be
told sometime — if you look at someone in certain temperature and
weather conditions — you see this even better in horses, but we
are not speaking about horses now — you will see him breathing
out, and the breath becoming visible as vapour in the air. Obviously
as far as materialistic science is concerned, this breath a person
exhales, disperses and dissolves and has no further significance. But it
has significance for a person who follows up the phenomena of life with
initiation science, for he sees in the patterns of the breath the exact
traces of the moral or immoral conduct of the person. A person's moral
or immoral behaviour can be seen in the steamy breath, and the breath of
a person who is morally inclined is quite different from the breath of a
person who is inclined to immorality. You know, with regard to various
things in the human being, the more delicate qualities can only be seen
in the more delicate parts of the etheric and astral aura. But man's
moral and immoral nature in the ordinary sense of the word is actually
visible in the etheric-astral content of the steamy breath. The physical
part of it dissolves. But what is incorporated in it does not dissolve;
for it contains a genie, which, in the case of steamy breath, has a
physical, an etheric and an astral part, only the physical is not
earthly, just watery. Something that has an extremely differentiated
form can be seen in this breath.
Deeds which arise out of love show something quite different from
deeds which are done out of enthusiasm, a creative urge or the urge
for perfection, for instance. But in every case the form in the breath
reminds one of beings that do not exist on earth at all as yet. These
beings are a preparation for the ones that will reach their human stage
on Jupiter. Their forms are very changeable and will pass through
further changes in the future, for these beings are the first advance
shadow images of the beings who will reach the human level on
Jupiter.
In a certain way we also owe our existence to the exhalation of the
Angeloi on the Moon, and it is one of the moving experiences of
spiritual life to know that Jupiter human beings of the future will
evolve out of what we breathe out in present ages. If we turn to the
Bible with such knowledge in mind, and read the opening words, we can
tell ourselves, 'Now we begin to understand what is meant when it
says that the Elohim formed earthly man by breathing into
him.'
I will confess that I would never have understood the part about the
Elohim breathing the living being of man into his mouth and nose, if I
had not known beforehand that the breath of earthly human beings also
contains the first germinal beginnings of the beings who will become
human on Jupiter. But Jupiter human beings can only arise from the kind
of breath that owes its existence to deeds that obey the 'you
shall', and which are therefore moral actions.
Thus we see that through our earthly morality we take a creative part
in the whole cosmic order. It is indeed a creative power, and we can see
that spiritual science gives us a strong impulse for moral action by
telling us that we are working against the creation of Jupiter human
beings, if we do not act in a moral way on earth. This gives morality a
very real value and makes its existence worthwhile. Our human conduct is
very strongly formed by what we acquire through spiritual science,
especially as we become acquainted with real secrets regarding the
cosmos.
I have already made references to similar things and mentioned at
various times that language also symbolises man's own future creativity.
I do not wish to dwell on this today though, but just wanted to show
you, to begin with, what significance moral behaviour has in the whole
of the cosmos.
You could now ask, 'What about immoral behaviour?'
Immoral behaviour also comes to expression in the formation of the
breath. But immoral behaviour imprints a demonic form on it. Demons are
born through man's immoral conduct. Let us look at the difference
between the demons that arise through immoral behaviour and the
spiritual beings — spiritual in so far as they only have a watery
existence on earth — the spiritual forms that are created by moral
actions.
These beings that incarnate as far as a transitory watery existence
and arise from moral conduct, are the kind of beings that have an
astral, an etheric and finally a physical body condensed to the level of
wateriness, just as, in the Moon period, we had an etheric, an astral
and a physical body, and this physical body was also only condensed to a
wateriness. We were more or less like that, even if not exactly the
same. And this creature, with a physical body, etheric body and astral
body that arises out of moral actions, is predestined to receive an ego,
just as in the Moon period our physical, etheric and astral body were
predestined to receive an ego. They have the basis for receiving an ego,
and beings of this kind are qualified to undergo a regular progressive
evolution in the cosmos. The other beings, the demons created out of
immoral actions, also have an astral body, an etheric body and a
physical body, at the watery stage, of course, but they do not have the
basis for developing an ego. They are born without heads, as it were.
Instead of taking up the basis for progressing along a regular
evolutionary path to the Jupiter existence, they reject this basis. By
doing so they fall victim to the fate of dropping out of evolution. But
this only increases the hordes of luciferic beings, for they come under
their power. As they cannot progress in a regular way they have to
become parasites. This is what happens to all the beings that reject
their normal path; they have to attach themselves to others in order to
move on. These beings that arise through immoral actions have the
particular inclination to be parasites in human evolution on earth under
Lucifer's leadership, and to seize hold of the evolution of the human
being before he makes his physical entry into the world. They attack man
during the embryonic period and share his existence between conception
and birth. Some of these beings, if they are strong enough, can continue
to accompany the human being after birth, as seen in the phenomena of
children who are possessed.
What is brought about by the criminal demon parasites attached to
unborn children is the cause of the deterioration of the generation
succession, which are not as they would be if these demons did not
exist. There are various reasons for the decline of families, tribes,
peoples and nations, but one of them is the existence of these criminal
demon parasites during man's embryonic period.
These things play a great part in Earth evolution as a whole, and
they bring us into contact with deep secrets of human existence. This is
often the cause of people acquiring certain prejudices and points of
view before they are born into earth existence. And people are tormented
by doubts and uncertainties in life and all kinds of other things,
because of these demonic parasites.
There is not much more these beings can do with the human being once
his ego has entered and made itself felt, but they prey on him all the
more before he is born or during his earliest years. Thus we see that
evil actions have a significant effect in the cosmos, too, and work
creatively, but their creativity works in the direction of the ancient
Moon existence. For what man passes through in the embryonic period when
these demonic beings can prey on him, is basically the heritage of
the old Moon period, which makes its appearance in subconscious,
instinctive behaviour. Something that even physical science preserves an
instinct for is that, in older and better times, man's embryonic period
was not calculated according to ordinary months but lunar months,
therefore it speaks of ten lunar months, and knows certain other things,
too, concerning the connection of embryonic development with the phases
of the moon.
So we see that our Earth evolution contains two tendencies: good
deeds that contain the impulse to work creatively on Earth in
preparation for Jupiter, so that man's successor on the human level can
come into being. But evil deeds have also brought into our evolution the
tendency to drag the Earth back again to the ancient Moon period and
make it dependent on everything to do with the subconscious. If you
think about it, you will find a great number of things that are
connected with these subconscious impulses; in fact, there are far more
of these subconscious impulses in materialistic humanity of modern
times, than there were in bygone ages when people were less
materialistic.
I believe that the kind of things I have been telling you about again
today will make you feel what a deep impression spiritual science can
make on your outlook on life, and that it really and truly will not only
give you theoretical knowledge but will be capable of giving human life
a new direction. A time will come when life will become quite chaotic if
people do not use the chance of giving it a new direction out of
spiritual-scientific knowledge. Man must get beyond a knowledge that is
restricted to the physical body. Our materialistic age does not want
knowledge of any other sort than the kind that is restricted to the
physical body. But man has to lift his knowledge out of the physical
body. And what we know today as the first exercises in Knowledge of
the Higher Worlds will gradually — though
'gradually' will be quite a long time — they will
gradually turn into something he does naturally, something he will feel
to be second nature. Particularly what we call thought concentration
will come naturally to people.
People will more and more feel the need really to concentrate their
thoughts, to focus their whole soul activity on sharply defined thoughts
which they place in front of their consciousness. Whilst they would
otherwise let their senses roam from one thing or fact to another, they
will more and more often direct their thought life to certain things of
their own choosing; even if only for a short time, they will concentrate
on a definite thought, so as to focus their soul activity on this
thought. They will then discover something that a lot of you know very
well. Everyone makes a certain discovery in the course of concentrating.
If we place a thought in the centre of our consciousness and focus all
our soul activity on it, we shall notice the thought growing stronger
and stronger. Certainly it does. But then there comes a point where it
does not get stronger any more but gets weaker and fades away. This is
an experience lots of you will have had. The thought has to fade away,
it has, as it were, to die away inside. For the kind of thoughts we have
to begin with and the way we think, are through the instrument of the
physical body, and we concentrate the kind of thinking we do by means of
the instrument of the physical body until the moment the thought dies,
then we slip out of the physical body.
We would go into the unconscious altogether if, parallel with this
concentration exercise, we did not attempt to do something else to
maintain our consciousness when we have slipped out of our physical
body. What we have to do to maintain our consciousness when we are
outside, is what we call leading a calm and composed life and accepting
the things of the world calmly. We can do even more than accept things
calmly. We can take seriously a theory we know so well, namely the
concept of karma. What do I mean?
A person is not at all inclined, to start with, to take the idea of
karma really seriously. If he has only a small mishap that hurts him, or
anything at all happens to him, he sometimes gets furious, but at any
rate he has antipathy for it. We encounter what we call our destiny with
sympathy or antipathy. It cannot be any different in ordinary life, as
it is absolutely essential that we feel sympathy for some of the
occurrences of destiny and antipathy for others. To us, destiny is
something that meets us from outside.
If we take the idea of karma seriously, we must really recognise our
ego in our destiny and realise we ourselves are active in what happens
to us through destiny; that we are the actual agents. When someone
offends us it is certainly difficult to believe we are hidden behind the
offender. For it may be necessary in physical life to punish the
offence. But we must always keep a corner within us where we admit to
ourselves, 'Even when someone offends you it is you offending
yourself, when someone hits you it is you hitting yourself, when
unpleasant blows of destiny hit you, it is you, yourself, dealing
yourself these blows.' We forget that we are not only within our
skin but are in our destiny; we forget we are within all the so-called
chance happenings of our destiny.
It is very difficult really to acquire the attitude that one's own
ego brings one one's destiny. But it is true that with our own ego we
bring ourselves our destiny, and we get the impulses for this in the
life between death and a new birth according to our earlier
incarnations, so that we can bring ourselves our destiny. We have to
unite with our destiny and, instead of warding off hard blows of destiny
with antipathy, tell ourselves more and more often, 'Through
having this blow of destiny, that is, through meeting yourself in this
blow of destiny, you are making yourself stronger, more vigorous and
robust.' It is more difficult to form a union with your destiny in
this way than to resist it, but what we lose when our thought passes
away can only be regained by drawing into ourselves, like this, what is
outside us. We cannot stay in what is within our skin if the thought
fades when we concentrate on it, but it will carry us out of ourselves
if we have taken hold of our destiny, our karma, in the true sense. We
thus awaken ourselves again. The thought dies, but we carry forth the
identification we have grasped between our ego and our destiny, and it
carries us about the world.
This composure with respect to our destiny, this sincere acceptance
of destiny, is what gives us existence when we are outside our body.
Obviously this does not need to alter our life on the physical plane. We
cannot always do that. But the attitude we have to acquire in a corner
of our soul must be there, for the moments when we really want to be
able to live consciously outside our body.
Two maxims can be our guiding principles and can mean a very great
deal to us. The first of these to impress upon our minds is:
Strive for the dying away of the thought in the universe.
For the thought becomes a living force outside, only when it dies
away in the universe. Yet we cannot unite ourselves with this living
force unless we work at the content of the second maxim:
Strive for the resurrection of destiny in the
'I'.
If you achieve this, you unite what has been reborn in the thought
with the resurrected ego outside you.
There is a great deal in human nature, though, which makes it
difficult to progress in the spirit of these maxims. It is particularly
hard to look at the relationship between inner and outer in the right
way. The more ethics we can learn from spiritual science in this
connection, the better. And we can learn ethics from it in so far as
certain ethical concepts acquire life and blood for the first time
through what spiritual science can bring to them.
For instance, there are people who are perpetually complaining about
other people and the awful things they do to them. They go as far as to
say that other people persecute them. Everything of this kind is always
connected with the other pole of human nature, you only have to observe
life in the right way, which means according to spiritual science as
properly understood. Of course there is good reason to complain about
unkindness, but in spite of this you will always find, if you go through
life with vision that has been made somewhat clairvoyant by spiritual
science, that most of these complaints come from egoists, and that the
suspicion that everyone wants to be nasty to them arises most often in
egoistic natures, whereas a loving disposition will not readily suspect
persecution, nor that people are trying to harm them in all kinds of
ways, and so on.
When it is put into words like this it is easy to agree with it in
theory. I am actually convinced that most people will admit to it
theoretically, if they stop to think about it. But to live accordingly
is what matters.
Now you may ask, 'How do we live accordingly?' And again
the answer must be, 'You must actually live with the spiritual
science you are striving for, live with it as much as you can.'
That is the point. That is why spiritual science is not given in
compendiums or short sketches, but we are trying to make spiritual
science a force of life in which we can live, and from which we can
constantly draw stimulating impulses.
This was the main reason that led us to make the Goetheanum building
a kind of focal point for this living anthroposophical striving, for as
I mentioned yesterday, the Goetheanum building, in its form, and in the
whole way it has been built, has a bodily, a soul and a spiritual nature
in a spiritual-scientific sense. It is itself a token of the fact that
we are striving according to impulses from the spiritual world to bring
into human evolution what it so badly needs, if the immediate future is
to go the way it should. The very fact that you can perceive the being
of spiritual science in the forms of the Goetheanum building makes it a
sort of centre, a focal point around which the kind of anthroposophical
striving can crystallise, that has to become an essential part of the
evolution of humanity.
We probably often say that we live in troubled times and that many
things exist today which stand out in stark contrast to spiritual
science. Yet our karma has allowed us to come so far as to overcome, as
it were, the material basis out of which our Goetheanum is built, so
that it can be a token of spiritual science even in its external
form.
Each one of us can acknowledge this to himself, as I often do,
especially in the difficult times we are going through in face of the
strong attacks being made on anthroposophy at present. Some people can
question how much personal progress we have made on our part towards
what ought to be crystallising around the Goetheanum. Even if one or
another individual cannot be physically present any more in the work
being done on the physical plane, the fact that the building is there,
and that our karma has brought it to us, is an important step forward.
And if we bear in mind that people with as deep an understanding of
spiritual science as Christian Morgenstern, for example, remain united,
even after physical death, with what the Goetheanum is intended to be,
then our building can also be a token in our time of the kind of
activity within our spiritual movement that is not concerned with
boundaries between what is usually called life and death.
We can really feel united with this building, and therefore it can
stimulate us to think the kind of serious thoughts which it is quite
natural for us to think at a time like ours, when materialism is at its
peak. Even if this building finds one or another individual co-operating
only as a spiritual being, the building will be important for the
continuation of our movement. This, you will understand, is said only to
show you that our movement has a seriousness that goes beyond life and
death.
We have encountered this seriousness to a special degree this week.
And if one thing happens, why should not other things be able to happen
soon, too? It is extraordinarily difficult to achieve what I have spoken
about and mentioned again this time. I have stressed that I give the
strictest attention to choosing and finding exactly the right words for
which I can be fully answerable to the spiritual worlds. So it is to be
desired that these words shall be heard and received in the same
spirit.
Times will certainly come when people will be able to be more
light-hearted with regard to the anthroposophical movement. But now,
right at the beginning, we must get used to taking things very, very
seriously. A while ago I talked here about occult research, among other
things, because I thought it would be of use to some of you. I was
mainly describing facts. I thought these would be of help to one or
another of you in understanding our present difficult times. But that
which I presented with this intention has not been treated with
sufficient caution — there are one or two exceptions, of course,
but I am right in saying that not everyone has treated it with the
necessary discretion and regard, and it has transpired that it was
repeated here and there in a form that conveyed exactly the opposite of
what I said here.
If I just think of what has been made out of something that cannot
have been misunderstood because it is already in print, regarding the
classification of the peoples of Europe according to sentient soul,
intellectual or mind soul, consciousness soul and the ego, which was
truly not meant to express a superiority; if I think of the statements
that have gone out into the world and the opposition and bad feeling
they have aroused, it is easy to see that the principle of taking things
quite exactly, even in such difficult cases, has not been given due
consideration. If, for instance, I have ever said that the ego activity
which is there among the European peoples ought to be effective in
organising the European population, I would have been talking nonsense.
Yet this is one of the things that has been made public, and it creates
the most fearful misunderstandings and bad feelings.
So I am duty-bound not to say a word about these things in my
lectures for the time being. I must desist from any mention of them, and
whereas everybody else is free to speak about it, it has become
impossible for me to do so because of the way people have misconstrued
what I said.
All these things go to show that we should look at ourselves and see
if we cannot take the anthroposophical movement absolutely seriously.
For sometimes we completely fail to notice how much feeling of
responsibility there is for each sentence of the communications of
genuine spiritual research, when the matter is taken seriously. To stir
up emotions is certainly not what spiritual science is for, nor to
oppose or pacify them. And if anyone says these things are communicated
in order to oppose somebody, he ought to ask himself whether the right
or wrong use has been made of that which has been communicated with the
utmost objectivity and reverent love of truth. These are things which
add even more pain to my occult experiences, which are already painful
enough. Even if I cannot mention certain important things, and a lot has
to be omitted which I thought we could investigate soon, there are
still some important and substantial matters left for us to discuss
during our time together.
