1. The Esotericism of the Mathematical Method of Thinking

The character of the world as a system requires that one take hold of it in a many-sided way; of fundamental importance in this connection are the macro and the microcosmic aspects: the cosmological-theistic and the anthropocentric. In the process of developing these aspects, movement from the one to the other that is free of contradiction, a transition conditioned by the unity of the world, serves as a yardstick for the logical rigour of research.

The evolutionary totality of the world is likewise a system-object, and the connections between its elements determine the structural connections between all the objects subordinate to it, on a universal scale. Our evolutionary cycle has seven elements (aeons) and six connecting links between them (Pralayas). Such is the basic structure of everything that is in a process of becoming. The unity of the evolutionary cycle of the universe is constituted by the absolute ‘I’, or the unitary God – the All-Ruler. God reveals Himself as a tri-unity: this is the enduring reality in the world. For the microcosm it is the revelation and the plan of the world, the trans-temporal, eternal. As He brings about the process of becoming, the triune God calls into being the triune relationship of past, future and present. Of these, both the past and the future are triune. The present is unitary; it is the expression only of becoming, of the transformation of the past into the future. Thus arises the system of the seven aeons. Concerning the place of man within this, Rudolf Steiner says the following: “With regard to the great number-relationships, the future, as created by the human being, will be the same as in the past of the cosmos, only on a higher level. Human beings will therefore have to give birth to the future from within themselves out of the element of number, as the Gods formed the cosmos out of number” (GA 107, 12.1.1909).

Thinking with the help of numbers enables one to recognize the supersensible in the sensible world. It was not by chance that the Gnostics followed the principle: Understand mathesis and you will understand God. This means that the thinking of the esotericist, basing itself upon the principles of mathematics, on its method, develops the ability to calculate the sensible, and also the abstract, as something that is rooted in the supersensible. The fact that we can count is – so we are told by Rudolf Steiner – intimately bound up with the fact that we ourselves are counted, are organized in accordance with number. “Outside us, numbers become gradually a matter of indifference. Inside us they are not indifferent, within us each number has its own particular quality” (GA 204, 23.4.1921). The ancients always took unity as their starting-point. Two was obtained by dividing the number one into two parts, etc. When they had before them a ‘two’ they experienced how each ‘one’ within this number was not firmly fixed and that they could separate off from one another in different directions. But the number three can draw together into a unity. Let us take an example from life itself: man and woman – that is 1 and 2; the relation is open to the outside. Now a child comes into the world, and the number is closed (ibid.). The principle of the three was experienced by the Greeks in the syllogism, which served as a step preparatory to dialectics:

            All rational beings are men (1);
            This is a rational being (2);
            Therefore this is a man (3).

The first and the second premise are open, they can go their separate ways; a conclusion leads them into a tri-unity. In dialectics thesis and antithesis constitute a battle, mutual rejection which can be continued ad infinitum. The synthesis provides a positive outcome: the birth of the new.

Other possibilities for an esoteric way of thinking are opened up by geometric conceptions. We know, for example, that two parallel lines meet in infinity, whether they travel to the left or the right. From this it follows that space is both infinite and, at the same time, self-contained. Rudolf Steiner explains this conception as follows: “A sphere is an entity that rests enclosed within itself. Space is a sphere. The limits of space are a point that has been expanded on all sides, i.e. a point that has become a spherical surface.... Just reflect how point and spherical surface are one and the same – the one is entirely within itself, the other entirely outside itself; the one is entirely subjective, the other entirely objective; the one only creating, the other only created; the one only spirit, the other only sheath or covering. Everything else is a mixture of the two” (B. 114/115, p.43 f.).

All the laws of development underlying Anthroposophy – polarity, enhancement, metamorphosis (inversion) etc. – are in their essential nature connected with mathematical conceptions and share with them a common source. These conceptions represent an essential part of their methodology. But in using them there is a risk of falling into an abstract nominalism, which exposes the esotericist to the possibility of losing the, albeit mediated, but nevertheless real connection with the spirit which they provide. There exist entire occult societies where for centuries the interpretation of symbols and manipulation of numbers has been cultivated, yet on account of the abstract way of dealing with these things no results worthy of mention have been achieved. Nothing in methodology works by itself, without the human being’s living participation in it. In his book ‘Theosophy’ (GA 9) Rudolf Steiner enumerated, so to speak, the ninefold human being. The latter emerges as such as an outcome of the working of the law of tri-unity in evolution – in other words this human being is an entirely real phenomenon; nevertheless, Rudolf Steiner remarked later in one of his lectures that he had presented this in the book in question in an altogether abstract fashion, and that in the book sevenfold man had been derived from threefold man in a far more organic way (see GA 204, 23.4.1921).

Sevenfoldness can only be derived from threefoldness. It has been determined thus at the fundamental level, where the sevenfoldness of the aeons develops out of the Divine Trinity, and was determined in two different ways: “Sevenfoldness without this reference back to threefoldness can only lead one astray” (GA 262, p.51). In his book ‘Aurora’, Jakob Boehme derives the world from seven nature pictures which arise from the absolute Divine unity; the unity itself is viewed by him in the spirit of the Christian Trinity. Boehme is thinking in accordance with the principle we have described, but expresses himself in the language of alchemy.

In evolutionist methodology the importance of the symbol of number cannot be emphasized enough. Rudolf Steiner says in this regard: “The connections in world evolution will never be found if one does not apply the principle of number as a method in one’s investigations (emphasis G.A.B.); if you bring number into connection with what is happening, you find your way into apocalyptic*  thinking, you learn, so to speak, to read the universe apocalyptically...” (GA 346, p.193/4).

* One describes as apocalyptic, thinking about the future, not merely in the sense of catastrophes that await the human being.
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We have already mentioned that the main principle of methodological work with number is based on a series of natural numbers from 1 to 13. Used in this way they can be compared to philosophical categories. They can also be expressed geometrically (the Platonic bodies, Cassini curves) whereby the method of ‘beholding’ thinking receives greater effectiveness and clarity of vision. Particularly for the transformation of consciousness, for the realizing of its highest potential, the penetration of thinking consciousness behind the veil of the sense-world, operation with numbers and with geometric figures and constructions proves to be extremely helpful. They came into being before philosophy, developed into a whole system of knowledge and played their part in the preparation of conceptual thinking.

Through meditative concentration on the ‘one’ or on a point, the human being can attain to experience of the All-unity, but he can also direct his thoughts to the beginning of all things, the all-encompassing unity, by contemplating its symbol, and rise in this way to ‘beholding’, for, as Rudolf Steiner says: “The one is the revelation of the absolute, of Divine being!” (GA 266/1, p.500). Out of the One develops the Two – “the number of revelation” (ibid., p.539) – In the Three the absolute returns to itself. The higher tri-unity is reflected in the lower, in creation, in the tri-unity of measure, number and weight. God created the world according to measure, number and weight, “... according to the creative, qualitative, analytical order of the numbers” (GA 343, p.527). We could call the number Four the system-forming principle of the triad; it leads this beyond its limits and metamorphoses it to a triad of a higher order. The Four, which is the unity of the Three, cancels and preserves it, just as the antithesis cancels and preserves (aufhebt) the thesis. One can therefore regard the Seven as a more complicated dialectic of development; in the Seven there arises on the way from one triad to the other an opposition between the Five and the Four. In the Mysteries of antiquity the view prevailed that wherever in the universe the number five rises up against the number four, “mighty decisions follow, which have to do with the ascent to the Six, in either a good or an evil sense” (GA 346, p.99). Geometrically, the number five is ex- pressed in the form of a pentagram. It is the symbol of the human being as microcosm, of the Third Logos in the human ‘I’. Turned upside-down, it expresses the principle of the Fall from Paradise, original sin, evil and even black magic.

Seven is the number of development and thus “the sacred symbolic number” (GA 8, p.131). In the ancient Mysteries the candidate for initiation had, as one of his first tasks, to achieve an experience whereby his spirit, his entire soul constitution, was imbued with the “significance of the sevenfold cycle of the development of the world cultures” (GA 346, p.88). Such an experience is fundamental also for one who wishes to unite with the essential being of Anthroposophy, in which one recognizes the sevenfold principle as the prevailing element in the en- tire structure of the evolutionary cycle – i.e. not only in culture but also in organic life and in all forms of being. “For all occultists,” says Rudolf Steiner, “seven is always the most perfect number ...; it is actually an axiom of occultism: Seven is the most perfect number ... this revela- tion of the number seven is extraordinarily complex. Everything imaginable in the universe is ordered according to the number seven, less so to the number twelve, and less so again to other numbers ...” (ibid., p.181 f.).

Throughout the further course of our research we will be mainly concerned with the search for this “everything imaginable” (or possible) which is organized out of the number seven and out of which the central core of spiritual-scientific methodology receives its structure. Once recognized in its many sevenfoldnesses, this central core is then assimilated organically into the principle of twelvefoldness which in this case – i.e. after the necessary preparation for it – reveals itself as the “sacred number which lies at the foundation of all things”, and sevenfoldness is then recognized as that which underlies ‘action’ (cf. B. 67/68, p.24). For example, the physical planets with their manifold workings constitute a seven, but in a higher sense they are subordinate to the number twelve.

The number thirteen is the system-forming principle of twelvefoldness. In the system of the aeon there work not seven but twelve leading spiritual beings (five of them have ‘the other’ tasks). The thirteenth “brings the whole planet (aeon – G.A.B.) into a condition like that at the beginning, only a higher one” (B. 67/68, p.23). The relation of the thirteenth to the twelve can be compared to that of the eight to the seven; it is as it were an ‘octave’, but that of another principle; and of course the spiritual content within it is also different.

That the principle of number in Anthroposophical methodology is no abstract symbol but reveals through itself the supersensible reality, has been shown by Rudolf Steiner with the help of many examples. One of these will suffice for our purposes. In one of his esoteric lessons he explains that the astral body that is enclosed in its sheath is referred to in esotericism as nil (zero). For no strange being can then enter it, and for this reason for the rest of the world it becomes a nothing, a nil. But “through the fact that the astral body had separated itself from the totality of astral material and enveloped itself in a skin, it had become a ‘one’ (and also oneness in itself – G.A.B.), and this is referred to through the placing of the one before the zero: 10 (The Pythagoreans regarded the ten as an especially important number; they arrived at it through the addition of the number series 1+2+3+4 – G.A.B.). Then come the numbers which indicate the future stages of development on Jupiter and Venus (aeons): six and five, and thus arises the mystical number 1065 – Dzyan – which is referred to in the ‘Secret Doctrine’ of H.P.B. (Helena Blavatsky)”*  (GA 266/1, p.464).

* Rudolf Steiner does not explain why the numbers 5 and 6 are switched in this figure.
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2. ‘Counting’ Man as an Evolutionary Being

The definitions we have given of the character of the numbers in esotericism enable us to move on to practical work with them and thus get to know their new qualities and meanings.

The Anthroposophical evolutionary teaching derives its sevenfold cycle from the triune primal act of positing, the revelation of the Divine. As within the universe everything is personified, God’s unity and His revelations are also parts of the world-individual, which is unitary, threefold, sevenfold, ninefold and twelvefold. In its ninefoldness it has as system-forming principle the tenth: The absolute world-I at a certain stage of its manifestation. In the image and likeness of the ten-membered world individual, tenfold man is also structured. In his essential being he differs from the Creator by virtue of his structure and also the level of his consciousness. As to the Creator, the Absolute, all the members of His being are creative, substantial ‘I’-beings. But, high as the sphere of their being and consciousness may reach, they are, as co-creators with the Divine Will, primal phenomena and regents of the many-membered being of Man. The foundation which they share in common with the human being is the world-consciousness as such; and it is this which, already in the forms of its manifestation, also determines the differences between the ‘I’-beings.

The answers Rudolf Steiner gave in a letter, to questions put to him in 1906 by the French playwright Édouard Schuré, have been passed down to us. In them he gives a classification of the stages of consciousness through which development takes place within the entire evolutionary cycle, and which the human being bears in him, in the members of his being, though for the most part unconsciously. The world-individual posits these stages through his triune, primal revelation. On these stages the world and its beings are structured, and in the human being they are manifested in the tri-unity of: his subconscious nature, his waking, object-oriented consciousness, and his superconsciousness. Since tri-unity pervades the universe as a fundamental law, each of these forms of consciousness is also, in its turn, threefold. This gives rise, overall, to nine states, or stages, of consciousness, which then give rise to the ninefold being of Man. His system-building principle is the ‘I’ – the lower, initially, which nevertheless stands potentially in a reciprocal relation to the World-‘I’.

The World-‘I’ is, as we have seen, the system-building principle of the world individual which manifests itself on different levels in the course of evolution. One of these revelations embraces the entire many-membered being of man, his evolution in its totality. Within the structure of this individual the human being knows no contradiction between himself and the world (Fig. 18).

Fig. 18: (left half corresponds to B.14, p.2.)

In his answers to Édouard Schuré’s questions Rudolf Steiner gives the nine stages of consciousness presented here, without connecting them with the many-membered being of Man. But this connection exists, and if we find it, we are led to an aspect of this overall view of things, which is the opposite of the one Rudolf Steiner has in mind. Both aspects are correct. It all depends upon one’s standpoint: are we looking at the descent of world-consciousness as the stages of the aeons, or are we seeing its entire structure in relation to earthly manifold man? In the second case, universal super-consciousness is present in the triune body of the human being, which he is not aware of in its spiritual reality. It remains within his subconscious. The human being involuted the first stage of world-consciousness and it became his body. In the course of his individual evolution, at some stage he rises with his higher ‘I’ into the sphere of super-consciousness, which in the present phase weaves around him as higher spirit.

Forming a connecting link between the highest and the lowest stage of consciousness, is its second level, which the human being can experience in his triune soul. This consciousness works in the course of cultural-historical phylogenesis. Through bringing it to realization as triune soul, the human being leads the evolutive and the involutive principles to a unity within himself. The soul became that place where the human being developed the lower ‘I’ and, using it already, now tries to accomplish deeds of creation out of nothing, i.e. to reunite himself individually with the higher ‘I’. In this sense, the second level of consciousness became the central member of the threefold metamorphosis, the focal point of becoming, which takes it course between the being of superconsciousness and the non-being of the subconscious. The middle member of the threefoldness of the second consciousness became in addition the system-building principle of world-consciousness, that is emerging within the otherness-of-being. This phenomenon can be illustrated in the form of a hexagram in which the direction of the forces of conscious working within it is oriented in the way shown in Fig. 19. The hexagram has in its centre a seventh element, which differs qualitatively from the other six, and is therefore not drawn in, but only thought. This is the system-building principle we described – the individual ‘I’ which

begins to germinate in the intellectual soul. Thus the human being, through the fact of individualization, transforms the world-principle of tri-unity into a sevenfold structure, whose final expression is the sevenfoldness of ‘beholding’ in thinking. But for this to emerge, the indispensable conditions had to be crystallized out in the objective evolution of the world.

In the more recent phase of earthly evolution, already in the period of cultural-historical development, the third stage of consciousness appeared in man in his mythological, semi-clairvoyant consciousness, the picture-consciousness of the sentient soul. The second stage of consciousness unfolded in conceptual thinking and in the intellectual soul. And to the first stage of consciousness there corresponds the development of the power of judgement in ‘be- holding’ and of the consciousness-soul (cf. Fig. 5). ‘Beholding’ in thinking takes on again a pictorial, half imaginative character, but compared with mythological thinking it appears, so to speak, from the other side. And so we can say the following: If the one consciousness was half dreaming (as a result of the partial withdrawal of the astral body from the physical body), then the second is more-than-waking; it results in a conscious, partial withdrawal even of the ether-body.

This, so one could say, is the human side (nature) of world-unity. From the Divine aspect it is revealed that behind the first stage of world-consciousness there stands originally the principle of the Father-God; behind the second, that of the Son-God or the World-Soul; and behind the third, that of the Spirit of God, through whom the being of consciousness is endowed with forms.

At the beginning of the evolution of the individual human spirit an inversion of the highest principles takes place. The universally descending development of the world gives way to an ascending development (Fig. 20). World-consciousness becomes the consciousness of reflective thinking (in conceptual, logical form). With the transition to ‘beholding’, the human being brings life into conceptual thinking. And this begins to give birth to real forms.

It need scarcely be said that this entire metamorphosis was prepared within objective world evolution. From the very beginning, world-consciousness is creating the form of the human body as bearer of the individual consciousness. The human being involuted this activity, whose substance stems from the First Logos. In the course of time individual life appeared germinally within the human corporeality, and finally a self-consciousness, but then the life began to withdraw from the body. A highly complicated world-collision begins to take place, a contradiction between consciousness and life. The reason for this lies in the change in the general direction of world development (cf. Fig. 20).

This contradiction cannot be resolved until the human being has developed the capacity to give birth, from within himself, from his own number, to the number of the cosmos. He begins to do this by taking as his point of departure the form of individual thinking consciousness. But this is devoid of substance and essential being. According to the words of Rudolf Steiner, the law of this form, like any other form in the world, shows itself to be “birth and death” (B. 78, p.31). A thought-form is born, and the body through which it is born dies. It is therefore necessary to change the law of thinking: “The law of life is rebirth” (ibid.). It becomes necessary to be restored to life, to resurrect, in thinking, and ‘beholding’ helps to make this possible. It leads us from the forms of thinking to experience of the thought-beings. Then the conscious human being becomes an integral member of world-consciousness. In him the tri-unity of consciousness, life and form undergoes metamorphosis. This metamorphosis takes place in him continually in accordance with the laws of rhythm, polarization, enhancement, inversion etc; in short – according to the laws of life itself.

Before they began to work in the material world, these laws unfolded in the spiritual world and worked there (but in a different way than in the physical); in the spiritual world there took place the development of the beings of the third Hierarchy, who form the connecting link between our own evolutionary cycle and that which went before it. Substantially, they came into being before the aeon of Old Saturn, but they developed the individual ‘I’ in our own cycle. At the beginning of the Earthly aeon the being of the Divine Hierarchies became ninefold. The Divine Trinity is the system-forming principle of the entire universe, the absolute ‘I’, and at the same time it reveals itself in three hypostases. This very highest level of the world is repeated by the human being within himself when he develops his microcosmic ‘I’ in the triune soul. In this process, as we have described above, he makes the transition to sevenfoldness, and the world-individual to twelvefoldness. In the macrocosm the World-‘I’ is revealed as the thirteenth. The human being as ‘I’ experiences himself within the twelvefold Zodiac, in the first place thanks to the directions of his thinking, the world-views and religious orientation. But in the sphere of the first and also the third stage of consciousness he is likewise structured in a twelvefold manner: in the system of the twelve sense-organs which he has mastered only to a partial degree, and in the twelvefoldness of his physical body.

The development determined by the twelvefoldness is that of the Mysteries. When human beings wish to enter into a relation with them consciously, and place themselves in their service, they form twelve-fold communities. The Knights of King Arthur, the Grail Knights, formed a community of this kind. The Mystery circle founded by Christian Rosencreutz also consisted of twelve members. Jesus Christ gathered around him twelve disciples. In order to be able to take upon himself so holy a service, the human being must become a more highly developed being. The “mystery of the all-pervading number seven” assists such a development (GA 266/7, p.63).

If one wishes to serve the highest aims of the spirit in the external world and be active in all its spheres, then one must orient oneself according to the number seven. The Divine Tri-unity, who posited the new universe as an activity external to Himself, unfolded His sevenfold archetypal phenomenon. For the sake of this, the three stages of consciousness we have referred to assumed, already within the Trinity itself, both a predetermining and also an active character. And one can say that, at the very beginning of the world, the Father sent the Son into the world, for “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him [i.e. takes upon himself the task of higher development – G.A.B.] should ... have everlasting life” (John 3, 16).

The process of mutual mirroring – of sacrifice within the three hypostases – took on a permanent character (cf. Figs. 9a and b), because the hypostasis of the Son created the basis for a relation between the Father and the Holy Spirit. Within the three levels of world- consciousness this came to expression in the fact that its second stage overlapped the first and the third (Fig. 21). In this way there arose within the world-consciousness the seven-membered archetypal phenomenon whose symbol we have shown in Fig. 19.

The transformation of the ninefoldness of world-consciousness to a sevenfoldness had the consequence within the human being that the combined working of all three bodies developed into a distinct phenomenon. Its bearer became the soul-body, in which the quintessence of the physical and etheric bodies became manifest in the substance of the astral body, whereby the conditions were created for the development of the sentient soul. To the present day the latter forms a unity with this complicated astral structure, with the result that the life of sensations, of sense-perceptions, remains in close connection with the organic processes and the structure of the physical body. The second unity came about – like the first, on a half-conscious level – between the consciousness-soul and Manas, thereby enabling the lower ‘I’ to grow upwards towards the higher ‘I’. In the seven-membered structure of the human being the conditions were created for his transition from involution to individual evolution. In his new constellation the human being has the following structure:

    1. The physical body.
    2. The etheric or life-body
    3. The sentient soul-body (and the sentient soul – G.A.B.)
    4. The intellectual soul
    5. The spirit-filled consciousness-soul [Manas]
    6. The life spirit [Buddhi]
    7. The spirit-man [Atma].”

                (GA 9, p.57)

In this structure of the human being the subconscious nature of his astral body is illumined by a conscious experience of the sense-perceptions and sensations. On the other hand, superconsciousness begins to shine into the consciousness-soul of the human being. The path leading through the connecting links (3 and 5 – see Fig. 21) of the threefold stages of consciousness is the path to freedom.

In future times the human being will permeate all three bodies with his individual ‘I’, he will be fully conscious of them and transform them into the substance of the triune spirit. Thus he gives birth from out of himself to the future cosmos. In this sense the seven-membered being of man is integrated into the cycle of evolution in the following way:

3. The Three Logoi and their Interrelations

If the entire nature of the human being is connected in so thorough and precise a way with the stages of the evolutionary cycle, it is hard to avoid the question: Is freedom at all possible in this case? Yes, it is possible, because on the level of world development the human being is predestined to become a free spirit; this is what he is intended to be since the beginning of the world. In order to understand why this answer contains within it no contradiction we must move on to a detailed study of the whole structure, the overall development of the thoughts in the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’ and prepare ourselves in a fitting way for this work, as we have actually been doing from the very first lines written in this book.

We have already spoken of the fact that all seven aeons are simultaneously present (‘ur’-phenomenally) in the universe, while at the same time their development is taking place within it in successive stages. We have seen that, as an outcome of the development which took place through the first three-and-a-half aeons, the mirroring on the level of essential being which is characteristic of the Hierarchies metamorphosed to the shadow-like reflection of the human intellect. The true ‘I’ of man was mirrored in its threefold corporeality. This originated in the processes whereby: the first Logos revealed himself ‘ur’-phenomenally to the second Logos and was mirrored in him; the second Logos revealed himself to the third, and the third Logos gave back to the first his primal revelation or is giving it back to him, if we turn our attention away from the sphere of the eternal to the sphere of development.

In one of the notebooks of Rudolf Steiner to which we have already referred (cf. Figs. 9a, 9b), seven kinds of mutual relationships between the three Logoi are described which, as real personified forces, are ‘ur’-phenomena of the seven aeons of our evolutionary cycle. For the sake of simplicity, Rudolf Steiner uses abbreviations in the form of letters of the alphabet; in our study of them it should not be forgotten that, in such cases, mathematics appears in its original, sacred nature.

These mutual relations are as follows: ab, bc, ca, ac, ba, cb, aa (cf. B. 67/68, p.13). Here it is crucial to bear in mind that the direct working of each one of the Logoi also takes place in each of the aeons; moreover, they remain fundamental: a, b, c. It is from this that all sevenfold structures arise, and they all return to it again. Thus in the totality of the entire evolutionary cycle there work on the macro-level 3 x 7 forces: the three hypostases of the Divine Trinity and the seven modes of their creative reciprocal relationships which, within development, are mediated by the Divine Hierarchies. Rudolf Steiner gives a description of these relationships that is rich in content. It is an esoteric unveiling of what is succinctly expressed in the opening sentences of the St. John’s Gospel. This is the Christian esotericism of evolutionary theory. First Relation (ab): “The Father reveals Himself to the Word.” Such is the omnipotence, the Divine Will – the essential nature of the aeon of Old Saturn.

“Omnipotence consists in the fact that the Father reveals Himself to the Word. This is referred to as the first creation, or chaos” (B. 67/68, p.21). It arises also from the Divine resolve (decision), which the human being, only on his own level, learns to master; and then he makes the choice between the path to God and the path that leads into matter.

Second Relation (bc): “The Word reveals Himself to the Spirit.” “After omnipotence has accomplished its task, universal wisdom rules, orders everything according to measure and number.” This is the aeon of the Old Sun.

Third Relation (ca): “The Holy Spirit reveals Himself to the Father.” Such is universal Love. “After universal wisdom has accomplished its task, universal Love rules, brings into the whole of creation the principle of sympathy and antipathy.” Such is the aeon of Old Moon, where the monads are endowed with sensation of their own.

Fourth Relation (we will represent it as: ab → c): “The Father veils Himself in the Word and reveals Himself to the Spirit.” Universal Justice arises, “it holds sway, bringing in Karma, that is to say – birth and death.” This is the aeon of the Earth. It is precisely because the Father has veiled Himself in the Son and reveals Himself to the Holy Spirit, that knowledge of the Christ impulse becomes possible and necessary – a central concern of Anthroposophy. In this connection one should read Ch. 10-17 of the St. John’s Gospel with renewed understanding.

Fifth Relation (bc → a): “The Word veils Himself in the Spirit and reveals Himself to the Father.” This is the universal redemption from original sin. Everything is taken hold of by the redemptive process. Such is the “last judgement” (the ‘Day of Judgement’). It takes place (but is not completed) on the future Jupiter.

Sixth Relation (ca → b): “The Holy Spirit veils Himself in the Fa- ther and reveals Himself to the Word.” Universal consecration will pervade the creation in the aeon of the future Venus, when the ‘Day of Judgement’ has been fulfilled.

Seventh Relation (abc → a): “The Father veils Himself in Word and Spirit and becomes manifested to Himself.” Such is the character of the aeon of Vulcan, the aeon of All-Blessedness for the creation, which has attained the stage of Universal Consecration.

Thus is described in Anthroposophy our evolutionary cycle as it exists within the Divine plan and in Divine revelation. Practically the entire labour of human thinking, from its very first beginnings, was oriented towards an understanding of this mystery of the world in which, with full justification, human beings hoped to attain knowledge of the meaning of their existence. Anthroposophy brought this quest to its completion, by rejecting the absolute claims of reflective thinking, and recognizing, thanks to other qualities of consciousness, the ‘ur’- phenomenal plan of what philosophy inquires into only indirectly, with the help of categories, of the ‘Organon’ of Aristotle.

Someone may well ask: Why has this only been done by Rudolf Steiner? He was himself asked this question, and his answer was that there are others who consciously experienced the supersensible worlds, but they did not want to clothe what they saw in concepts which could later have been communicated to other human beings who do not see the supersensible. “Because this requires that what has been perceived spiritually must be brought down into the brain, and this is a sacrifice which no-one else was able to make.”105)

Rudolf Steiner made this sacrifice and it is our task, after we have travelled the path of his thinking, to raise ourselves to what he beheld and recognized supersensibly. This requires of us, too, the sacrifice of a number of things: First of all our attachment to the abstract, and then also our entire conceptual thinking, after which, in the emptied but fully waking consciousness the perception of ideas can arise. Through this act one can say that the fulfilment of the third sacrifice begins, which the Holy Spirit makes to the Father through the human being.

The main definitions passed down to us by Rudolf Steiner, of the seven relationships with the Divine Triunity, belong to the category of quality and are at the same time supersensible realities. In their totality as a system of the seven cosmic Intelligences they embody the World-Soul – the Christ. The Father-principle works in this case as a force which draws them together into a unity; the hypostasis of the Holy Spirit leads them to manifestation in the macro-forms of the aeons of evolution.

Whoever wishes to think about the supersensible must continually bear in mind that every phenomenon, every relationship, within it is personified. This is the world of the cosmic Intelligences. They embody the reality of everything that the human being develops through conceptual work, be it in the field of philosophy, ethics, aesthetics, natural science or religion. For this reason, it is possible to build up a system of knowledge if the conditions in which it exists within the universal system are understood.

The unity of the world is held together through the universally con- ditioning activity of the first Logos, which is personified within creation by the beings of the nine Hierarchies. They also personify the activity of the second Logos, who is revealed by the first Logos as the World-Soul. The boundlessness of the first Logos is given limits, through being endowed with form, by the third Logos, who is also mediated in his activity by the Hierarchies, and forms, through them, the ‘chalice’ of the seven aeons. The
second Logos continually overcomes this limit by way of meta-morphosis, as he fills with life what has become, what has assumed a fixed form. The first Logos endows everything with substance (see Fig. 22).

Rudolf Steiner says: The working of the first and second Logos “has come down to us from earlier world-developments”. The third Logos “began His development with our Saturn (the aeon of Saturn – G.A.B.), and it will be completed with the Vulcan incarnation....” (GA 266/7, p.187, 190). It is evident from what has been said that it was only in the development of our world-cycle that the unitary Godhead revealed Himself as a tri-une being, this representing the chief peculiarity and structural law underlying this cycle. From it arose other basic structural laws: that of the number seven, and of mirror-reflection, which was apparently also unknown to the universe that went before.

The working of the other two Logoi is broader in character – they condition one another in freedom and self-sacrifice through the specific quality of our cycle.

In order to overcome the conditioning that is not intrinsic to them, the first and the second Logos must mirror themselves in the third and permit an unfolding of the entire seven-membered cycle to take place. They could also have begun the creation in some other way, but having begun it in the way they did, they must also bring it to completion in a way that corresponds to this beginning. At the same time, they are also present beyond the bounds of the cycle, in the realm of the unbounded. Christ therefore descends from a world that is still higher than that of the fixed stars, into the planetary system of the earthly aeon. From the realm of the ineffable he enters that of sevenfoldness, passing through the world of the twelvefold. He has His throne in our Sun, which is both planet and star.

The role of the third Logos, which sets up the boundary, is in a fashion also universal, as one may not think of this boundary in spatial terms. What we have shown in Fig. 22 can be represented differently, in the form of a circle from whose centre radiate the emanations of the first Logos (Fig. 23). The third Logos created the boundary in the form of a circle which in our imagination can be a straight line stretching into infinity in one direction and returning from the other, or also the Mőbius strip. This boundary is the limit of the mirror-reflection of the primal revelation of the first Logos to the second, which returns from the third Logos. The second Logos, the Son, acts as the foundation for the relationship between the Father and the Spirit. He mediates their interrelation. But the third Logos sets a limit to the primal revelation in yet another way: He gives it a beginning and an end. If in Fig. 23 we see represented the primary phenomenon of space, Fig. 22 gives us a picture of the phenomenon of time with its three components: past, present and future. In the primary phenomenon they remain a unity and for this reason time actually flows in two directions: from the past into the future and vice-versa. Thus Rudolf Steiner says that on the highest level all seven aeons exist unchanged, though periodically now the one, now the other of them dominates.

What we see in Fig. 23 also represents a combination of the three fundamental categories of Anthroposophy: consciousness, life and form, which can also be spoken of as eternity, life and boundary. At the beginning of each aeon creation, proceeding from the Pralaya, begins as it were anew. In the aeon of the earth this beginning is described in the Book of Genesis as follows: “And the earth was without form, and void.” The Ancient Hebrew for “without form, and void” is tohu-wa-bohu. Rudolf Steiner explains these words as follows: “The sound here which may be compared to our T evokes a picture of a force bursting forth from a central point in all directions of space.” And then we can imagine all these forces being held back by the surface of a great, hollow sphere and being reflected back into themselves, from all directions of space inwards. That is ‘bohu’ (GA 122, 18.8.1910). In the realm of being, this found its expression in the elements of warmth, air, water. The archaic memory of man, his subconsciousness preserves within itself these processes, through which the human being himself was created. It comes to expression in the age of materialism through the hatching of astronomical theories of the ‘Big Bang’, the ‘primal explosion’ of the universe, which periodically expands and then contracts again. Ultimately, this is all pure esotericism which is turned, by way of materialistic interpretations, into an unsustainable metaphysics.

In the esotericism of the New Testament the boundary is a symbol for the ‘Kingdom’, for the kingdom always occupies a territory, a space. And it is a certain life-condition. It can come into being if it has force, power. The force must be located at the centre of the kingdom and pervade it entirely. “The force that radiates out from the centre ... and controls the kingdom, is Power” – says Rudolf Steiner (GA 342, p.193).

In order that all of this should not remain ‘being in and for itself’, but should also reveal itself to other creatures, the forces radiating from the centre of the world, after they have reached its limits, the boundary of the kingdom, must shine on further. They then become ‘Glory’, grandeur – the world of created beings (forms) of our visible universe, which reveals God’s majesty through forming the outer sheath of the kingdom. Thus we can rightly assert that in the sense-perceptible universe no true life exists; here, everything is gleam, appearance, maya and also reflection. One must be able to penetrate beyond the veil of appearance and recognize, through the revelation of form, the ‘ur’- phenomenal – the being of the true spirit (Fig. 24).

If we consider all that has been described here, which can be thought in the ideas of the kingdom, the power and the glory, it is possible to lead it over “into mathesis, into visual thought-pictures” (ibid., p.194). And this became the “mathesis” of the most important Christian prayer, the Lord’s Prayer, which was given to man by God to enable him to penetrate behind the veil of Maya. (The exact nature of the mathesis of this prayer is described by Rudolf Steiner in another lecture. We will return to this in later chapters.)

All that radiates out into the world of otherness-of-being becomes the multiplicity of forms which arise in the course of each aeon. The spirit interiorizes itself within them; they are its involution. As the world-system they constitute a twelvefold circle, within which is interiorized the glory of the world, right through to the centre of the Father, the focal point of power, where the forms of human consciousness arise. They reach through to the boundaries of the visible universe, but their radiant appearance (Schein) is not the true glory of the world, but its illusion, its untruth; and as such it is generally and wholly – evil. The evil of reflection consists also in its separation from the Kingdom. But man’s thinking unites himself in his ‘I’ with the kingdom. It says in the Gospel: “Fear not, little flock; for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom” (Luke 12, 32). The strength to attain this can be drawn by the human being from the word of the apostle Paul: “Not I, but Christ in me”. If he follows this path, he begins sooner or later to spiritualize the forms, and then there rays out from them the glory of God. The Divine revelation begins then to return to itself – through the human ‘I’. The glory of God was extinguished as it descended into the lower ‘I’ of man, the being of which is reflective thinking. All this began in the aeon of Old Saturn. At that stage, it was necessary for the emergent glory of the new world, the new revelation, to enter into a connection with time. And for this reason the Spirits of personality acquired the individual ‘I’. The non-materialized Divine Glory entered into them, and they became an integral part of the world Individual. But its highest members, the beings of the first Hierarchy, in conformity with the plan of the highest Trinity to create a boundary for itself, sought first of all “a spherical form in universal space, and said: Here let us begin. And now the Seraphim receive into themselves the aims of the world-system, the Cherubim elaborate this aim, and the Thrones let flow out of their own being the primal fire into this spherical space” (GA 110, 14.4.1909). This was the beginning of our world-system. To understand the nature of this space in which it emerged, we must attend to another statement of Rudolf Steiner’s, where he says: “For space is not emptiness without end, space is original spirit. And we ourselves are condensed space, we are born out of space” (GA 284, p.83).

But before this happens to the human being, time, personified in the Spirits of personality, is condensed out of space-spirit: time as an intelligible being. It arose in the middle of the Saturn aeon, whose earlier periods one must try to imagine as spiritual-spatial and eternal in nature. The first period is described by Rudolf Steiner as a manifestation of essential spiritual being, which is complete and perfect in itself and needs no external mirroring in order to become self-conscious. Then followed the manifestation of pure spiritual light, which outwardly is darkness, and this was followed by soul-warmth (see GA 13, p.169). And it was only after this that outer warmth and time came into being. The latter arose as an independent entity thanks to a special ‘environment’ which was created by the sacrifice offered up by the Thrones to the Cherubim. Rudolf Steiner compares its birth to a process whereby a word is uttered in the air and becomes time as a being (see GA 132, 31.10.1911). It is interesting to compare this explanation with Kant’s characterization of time: It is “the true form of inner ‘beholding’. Thus it has subjective reality with respect to inner experience.... It is not attached to the objects themselves, but only to the subject who beholds them”.106) From this Kantian definition it is only a small step to the determination of time as personality. Only it is necessary to accept personality in its sensible-supersensible, and even its purely hierarchical, reality, and ‘beholding’ as a form of thinking which stands higher than reflection.

But let us see what happens to the world individual upon his contact with time. When one says that the Seraphim “receive into themselves the aims of the world-system”, this must be understood to mean that they identify with the third Divine hypostasis. In addition, the Spirits of wisdom – the highest beings of the second Hierarchy – identify with the lower beings of the first Hierarchy – the Thrones. As a result of these deeds of mediation, a union arose in the warmth monads of Saturn between the Divine will and life, and this gave rise to the first quality in otherness-of-being. This quality was a mirror-reflection: “The will which had hitherto been entirely without characteristics.... gradually receives the quality of radiating life back into celestial space” (GA 13, p.161). This was without doubt the decisive moment, the first act of the Mystery of evolution, in which otherness-of-being revealed the glory of God for the first time; the fulfilment of the final act will be the task of the human being after he has acquired the faculty of ‘beholding’ in thinking. Thereafter begins the great Mystery of the reuniting of the human being with God.

We have shown in Figs. 14 and 17 in what way the human being is led towards the fulfilment of this task through the objective evolution of the world within the unity of man and world. We would like to take these considerations further by illustrating a few of the developmental stages of the world individual through which the Divinity passes as it returns to itself from the outer revelation within which the human being has become a necessary and integral part.

We emphasized earlier that the significance of the human being in our evolutionary cycle is in a certain sense decisive. But it is subject to change and also to the general laws of development within the cycle. The principle of mirror-reflection became the decisive factor in this cycle for the development by the various beings of an ‘I’ of their own. Its forms of manifestation, however, differ no less in, let us say, the aeons of Old Saturn and of Earth than the real human being differs from his mirror-image. When in the aeon of Saturn the Spirits of personality were developing their ‘I’ with the help of human monads, these constituted overall no more than the inert principle of the otherness-of-being of a mirror. One can say that the human being at that time did not yet belong to the structure of the world individual, who then extended, on the side of otherness-of-being, as far as the ‘I’ of the Spirits of personality, through whom time was personified (Fig. 25a).

In the aeon of the Earth the world individual became ninefold (we are not discussing here its connection with the Divine Trinity). The ‘I’ through which it acquires a relation to ‘this side of the world’ is now human. It differs from the ‘I’ of the Spirits of personality (on Old Saturn) in that it has immersed itself totally in sense-reality and undergoes its development within the materiality of the world, whereas all the beings of the third Hierarchy have not descended lower than the imaginative plane (Fig. 25b).

In the human being the world individual attains the farthest stage of materialization that is necessary for development. And therefore the restoration, through the human being, of its twelvefoldness, with the inclusion in it of the entire structure of otherness-of-being, is posited by the absolute. This goal will only be attained completely at the end of the evolutionary cycle. The human being will then acquire the individual triune spirit: Manas, Buddhi and Atma will become members of his being. The animal kingdom will then ascend to the Life-spirit, and the plant kingdom to Manas. The mineral kingdom of today, whose group ‘I’ rests within the womb of the first Hierarchy, unites with this ‘I’, just as is now happening with the human being. It becomes, within this ‘I’, object-oriented consciousness, but under entirely different conditions.

It is probable that the first Logos will become the World-I (of whose personification we can, at the present time, only form a figurative conception in the form of the ‘all-seeing eye’ within a triangle), since everything in the universe is engaged in development and ascent. It is quite clear that, by virtue of this fact alone, the structure of the universe in its entirety will undergo a radical change. Time will merge with the space of the spirit. But it would appear that something of otherness-of-being will persist beyond the limits of our cycle. This follows from the logic of the ascent of the natural kingdoms. By the end of the cycle the mineral kingdom can only be personified to the stage of the consciousness-soul. But the principle of mirror-reflection will then come to an end. In what will this last realm in the sequence of creations be mirrored? We have no answer to this question (Fig. 25c).

4. Manvantara and Pralaya

The evolution of the seven aeons progresses through the course of time and remains continually within the twelvefoldness of the ‘everlasting’. It pulsates, as it were, between the everlasting and the temporal. The spatio-temporal conditions of development proceed along the ‘horizontal’ axis of evolution. The impulses of the creative spirit stream into it ‘along the vertical’. The line of real development emerges as the combined result of the spatio-temporal metamorphoses and the impulses of the individualizing spirit which fructifies them. The ‘vertical’ of development arose on the ‘ur’-phenomenal level through the revelations within the Divine tri-unity. In all its working it is not spatially conditioned and it remains connected only with the moment of the present. In this ‘triangle’ of relationships which is enclosed within eternity (we spoke of it in Ch. II), the basis for the emergence into the realm of time, of becoming, arose as between the hypostases of the Spirit and the Father, and that, if one may express it thus, from both sides simultaneously. It is thanks to this fact that the ‘horizontal’ of development came into being, and as a result of its interaction with the world- ’vertical’, real evolution assumed the form of a chalice (Fig. 26).

Through the hypostasis of the Holy Spirit there arose the self- revelation of the Tri-unity outwards, and its glory shone forth. There extended from the Father to the Son the building up of the new Kingdom of God – the universe of our cycle –, which is filled with the life of the Divine Son. All three hypostases together create according to the following principles: “1st Logos: Revealer; 2nd Logos: revelation, activity; 3rd Logos: revealed mirror-image” (B. 67/68, p.20). The Spirit ‘reflects back’, carries the fruits of evolution from the future, or rather from every point of the present, back to the beginning of the world where, for the first time, the Father revealed the Son.

The idea conceived within the spirit of the world individual moved him to the act of self-revelation. The triune Logos imbued the Hierarchies with the consciousness of the new creation. Their orientation within, towards their own being, was transformed into orientation outwards, a process comparable to an awakening. The Seraphim were the first to receive the plan of the world. They became the foundation for a relationship between the Trinity and the beings of the Hierarchies. The relation of the hypostasis of the Son to the world was at first only mediated by Seraphim and Cherubim, and thus did not unite with materiality. Only in the aeon of the Earth did Christ descend through all the levels of the Hierarchies down into matter. In this way He was the last of the souls to be incarnated on Earth, and this was the soul of the entire world. The connection of the Holy Spirit with the world was mediated by the Seraphim alone; for this reason, He bears out of the future and out of eternity the plan of the entire world, but only mirrors back to the beginning of the world that which is accessible to self-consciousness, to the ‘I’ – the reflected image within it of the Glory of God (Fig. 27).

The creative activity of the three Logoi is simultaneously intelligible, ethical and aesthetic. It endows all religions with content. What Rudolf Steiner says in this connection, taking into account the conditions of the Earthly aeon, is shown in Fig. 28. The preceding diagram explains to us why the second Logos reveals Himself in the aspect of eternity: He is the Regent of the ‘vertical’ of the spirit, and in this sense He is the unitary God. He carries over the moment into eternity; therefore if he ‘tarries’*  in the moment, the human being risks, as Goethe so impressively describes in ‘Faust’, losing his connection with eternity.

* “If to the moment I can say: Oh stay, thou art so wondrous fair!"
______

But the Father carries eternity into the moment, the boundless into the bounded. The bounding, limiting activity of the Holy Spirit is expressed in the blessing of what the Creator has created: “Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God” (Matth.5, 9). Through the Holy Spirit the human being acquires self-consciousness, becomes an ‘I’- being, an integral part of the world individual, a son of God. But he must first go through the separation from God, through doubt (Ger. Zweifel), through dualism. Rudolf Steiner characterizes the working of the Holy Spirit with a word that is not found in a German dictionary – ‘Zweitlosigkeit’, which means the absence of division. For in the Holy Spirit all antitheses in the world reach a synthesis. This is why Rudolf Steiner wrote a philosophy and not a religion or an aesthetics of freedom. The problem of freedom, like that of dualism, arises within consciousness and demands a rational demonstration (Be-gründung) of monism.

Through the working of the Holy Spirit in the human being, the sense-impressions, perceptions and feelings were individualized and, thanks to them, conceptual thinking developed. In the aeon of the Old Moon, whose Regent was the Holy Spirit, the etheric-physical human monads were endowed with an astral body and established within otherness-of-being as autonomous entities gifted with the capacity of sensation. This occurred through the acquisition by the monads of a psychic life of their own. Such are the evolutionary consequences of the revelations of the tri-hypostatic God. Regarding what is shown in Fig. 27, we are fully justified in saying that God remains transcendent with respect to his Creation. His immanence in the world begins at that stage in development where no more than one single quality possessed by the real spirit crosses over to the side of otherness-of-being. The first sensations awakened in the human monads in the earthly aeon were also the beginning of the development of such qualities. From that moment onwards, the human being began to be the centre of attraction on the earthly plane, for many forces and phenomena of development, above all for the natural kingdoms, whereby their existence was radically transformed, and the world began, as a result of development, to undergo a transition to unity, in such a way that otherness-of-being and the laws of evolution merged together into a unitary system.

* * *

Two concepts have brought us closer to an understanding of the world as a system. They are 1. the world individual and 2. the main organizing principle of development: namely, the world cross, which – as we will express it from now onwards – is formed by the horizontal of being and the vertical of consciousness. If we bring the two concepts together, we are attempting to fill with richer content our idea of the unitary picture of the world which is simultaneously in process of becoming and in universal stasis.

The Divine Tri-unity, in the course of the aeons, provides the creation of nature not only with impulses, but also with laws. In that higher world we can recognize indirectly, thanks to our knowledge of its manifestations in the structural laws of development, a certain fivefoldness. It is called the world of the Great Pralaya. Each aeon (Manvantara) does not emerge from the past, but from above, from the Pralaya, descends into otherness-of-being, and then returns to Pralaya. Since, between the descent and the ascent, there lies a period of development which has to do with materialization, with space and time, that which descends acquires new qualities, with which it later begins the ascent. We have already tried to characterize the process as a whole by using the picture of the chalice. But ultimately we have here to do with a circle, of which the chalice of the Manvantara is a constituent part.

The Manvantara descends and ascends through four stages. Together with the Pralaya it forms a circle. The Pralaya descends and rises again through three stages. The universal totality of the world can be expressed as a twelvefold system. The world of the Pralaya stands higher than all the aeons; it is the domain of eternity. It exists both before the aeon of Saturn and after the aeon of Vulcan. Its spheres stand outside the spiritual Zodiac and are known in esotericism as the ‘Crystal Heaven’. Already in ancient times human beings clothed their knowledge of it in three concepts, with which three of its spheres are defined. The first, on the lowest level, is called Nirvana; the second, lying in the middle, is called Paranirvana; the third and highest, Mahaparanirvana. There, the Divine Trinity is revealed directly. In these three spheres something of a decisive nature happens for the formation and transformation of the laws of development, and this comes to expression in the Manvantara in the reciprocal positions, interactions and relations of the Hierarchies. The world individual dwells, when the Manvantara comes to an end, as pure, triune spirit in the Crystal Heaven. When it inclines towards development, it descends as a personified impulse from the one universal source of the world, traverses the two lower spheres of the Pralaya, realizes its aims in the Manvantara and then returns to its origin. Thus arise the seven conditions of Manvantara and the five conditions of Pralaya (Fig. 29).

In the world of the Manvantara the first three and the last three conditions form a mirror-like reflection of each other. Here too one can justifiably speak of a symmetry of world development. The middle, lowest condition (which corresponds to the fourth stage of the Manvantara) is our space-time continuum. For the spheres of the spirit this represents a point-like object (atom) and the extreme antithesis to the point-like nature of the Mahaparanirvana, whose reality one may imagine as the presence of the entire universe in each one of its points. The point-like structure of being in the world of the senses is its moment in time. Reality here lies only in the moments of transformation. Their fruits, as pure spirit, leave the physical-material plane once they have come into being, and exist further in the human spirit or in higher spiritual beings. Apart from these fruits, everything in our world is Maya. Its three-dimensionality within which the three natural kingdoms develop has a meaning and a purpose only to the extent that it serves the manifestation and the becoming of the individual human spirit. It is this which gives value to otherness-of-being, to the earthly Manvantara.

Above the physical-etheric plane there extends the astral plane, the world of play and of the existence of the desires, sympathies and antipathies; these build up its forces, which are at the same time its ‘substance’. It is also known as the plane of imaginative consciousness. The world conditions on this plane differ in the descent and the ascent of the higher impulse of development, but, as we have said, they are also symmetrical. And it is thanks to these two characteristics, similarity in the one respect and difference in the other, that the astral and the two other planes which lie above it acquire a relation to time and have both a past and a future.

Above the astral plane – the ‘soul-world’ – there extends Devachan or ‘spirit-land’, the world of archetypes which are creative beings. They are the creators of all that comes into being in the physical and also in the soul (astral) world. There is a lower and an upper Devachan. Lower Devachan is the world of inspirative consciousness, of the ‘harmony of the spheres’, for here everything sounds, but not with earthly tones. The flowing, continually changing life on this plane is made of the ‘material’, the substance, of thought. In upper Devachan, the world of intuitions, there dwell the creative forces of the archetypes themselves. Here the ‘intentions’ are manifest, which underlie our world. The thoughts of the physical plane are mirror-reflections of these seed-thought beings. In upper Devachan there is revealed to the initiate the ‘spiritual word’ through which things and creatures communicate their nature ‘in words’, make known their ‘eternal names’ (see GA 9, p.83-113). This is the sphere to which one turns in one’s practice of the mastery of ‘beholding’ thinking, and in it there unfolds for the human being a unique opportunity to enter into contact on the earthly plane with so lofty a sphere of the spirit.

When all four stages of the Manvantara are completed (in the fourth globe), an activity occurs which pervades them all in the vertical dimension. It creates the conditions for the ascent, of all that is created and is undergoing development, through the stages of individualization, and within the realm of spatio-temporal becoming it manifests in the form of the developmental laws of nature. The four stages represent different form-conditions and are called globes. Three of them exist and work in the aspect of the past, and three in that of the future. The fourth globe lies in the middle; through it the three globes of the past are metamorphosed into those of the future.

The full cycle of development of the seven form-conditions embodies as a totality the life-condition of an aeon, or a Round. The seven Rounds form a unity, the system of the planetary incarnation, of the aeon, of the Manvantara. If we imagine this picture in its entirety, we see that an aeon attains its greatest densification or materialization at its mid-point, and this is the fourth globe of the fourth life-condition, where world-evolution is at present. Here the most essential thing is taking place – the creation out of nothing in the world of otherness-of-being, a process which will have the greatest influence on all future conditions of the earthly Manvantaras and of those to come.

In its ascent into upper Devachan, the world loses all modes and at- tributes of manifested being; for this reason, the series of seven globes (the Rounds) are separated from one another by the smaller Pralayas. After completion of the seven Rounds, the Great Pralaya occurs. Then everything of which the human being can form any conception disap- pears. The world enters the hidden condition of non-manifestation. It once left this condition for the first time for our evolutionary cycle, and thus the Pralaya of Saturn does not belong to this cycle. The future Vulcan also has its Pralaya, which takes leave of our cycle. Thanks to this fact, the cycle can be transformed into something new (see Fig. 29).

In Fig. 29 we have given a kind of overall scheme of the entire evolutionary cycle. The reader can ‘open it out’ chronologically and thereby gain an overview of its individual stages. What must be borne in mind, however, is the principle of the number seven which is repeated on different levels, and the system-forming principle which ascends on the levels of the Hierarchies.

With regard to the universal system as a whole, its system-forming principle must be sought at the centre of the circle. In each aeon one of the Divine hypostases fulfils the role of such a universally organizing centre. It is then the Regent of the entire aeon, as the combined totality of the Manvantara and the Great Pralaya. Christ is the Regent of the earthly aeon. He is for us the unitary God. He speaks always of the Father and of the Holy Spirit. He indicates in this way the great, all-embracing connection of the world, and the sequence connecting its parts, the aeons. With the completion of the evolutionary cycle the centre of the universe changes its character.

The Regency of the three hypostases in the seven aeons is shown in Fig. 30. In the 13th century A.D. it was reflected in the Rosicrucian formula, which expresses the fundamental esoteric core of Christianity. This is also contained in the diagram.

This diagram helps us to understand in what sense God the Father is the Alpha and Omega of the world – namely, as the beginning and the end of the entire evolutionary cycle. Christ proceeded from the Father and returns to the Father. In the sense of the Apocalypse of St. John He is the Alpha and Omega of the earthly aeon. But high above the aeon, on the level of the Mahaparanirvana, all three hypostases are one in their essential being. Especially significant is the fact that Christ is the Regent of three of the seven aeons, namely of those which have special importance in evolution – thanks to their connection with the ether-substance of the world and also with the human ‘I’.

5. The Macro-Anthropos

The human being, viewed as a totality, is ‘counted’ in such a way that, through the course of aeons, he must develop seven conditions of consciousness. Each of these conditions unfolds in the course of seven life-conditions (rounds); while the life-condition passes through seven form-conditions (globes). Thus we arrive at a total of (7 x 7 x 7 =) 343 evolutionary conditions of the world and man. Our present point in time has already passed beyond the first half of this total number. During this first phase the human being was a passive element of development; during the second half of the conditions, development will depend to an increasing degree on the actions of human beings, who will become free and at the same time correspond entirely to universal harmony. The human being will know how he must ‘number’ the world, as he will have perfect knowledge of how he himself was ‘numbered’. The striving of the human being for absolute knowledge is therefore natural and an inherent part of his being. It is not for the sake of a ‘globalization’ of knowledge that we now turn our attention to the macrocosmic phenomena. In order to attain a complete understanding of the everyday, one must rise to the greatest height accessible to knowledge. Human freedom arises and develops in the everyday affairs of man, and is at the same time the absolute which has been ‘pressed down’ within the framework of this everyday existence.

Law, and causal necessity are conditioning factors behind even the most insignificant human action, whether it be on the level of memory, emotion, thought, deed. And a long and painstaking search must be undertaken, in order to find a sphere within the human being where the free deed can arise. This sphere must correspond to the highest levels of being and consciousness, where world necessity can begin to germinate. The universe is a highly conscious super-being whose constituent members all work upon one another in the Manvantara in accordance with the law of cause and effect. But this being is conditioned within himself, is self-conditioning, and therefore engenders the motives of his activity himself; he is free. And one must comprehend how in the being of the universe freedom and necessity weave together, then one will also see how this takes place in the human being.

Behind every phenomenon of the sense-world there stands a super- sensible ‘ur’-phenomenon. This consists of one or more intelligible beings – their position and their mutual relationships, which come to expression in the phenomenal world in the form of the laws of nature and of the spirit. It is therefore the striving of Anthroposophy to join together into a single wholeness knowledge of sense-perceptible reality and the knowledge of both the great and also the very smallest processes and changes in the world of the spiritual beings, though it does this in the sense of an extended natural science and not of transcendentalism or mysticism. The changes in the highest spheres of the spirit can be compared with a flywheel in a complicated mechanism, whose half-rotation causes the rapid turning of the small cogwheels. A further analogy can be found in the genetic structures which are microscopically small in the form in which they manifest materially, but whose modifications, taking place almost invisibly on the molecular level, bring about radical changes in the whole physical, soul and spiritual organism of the human being.

Thus the human being succumbs to relativism and everyday existentialism, because he is unable to make the connection between the minor events in the world and their spiritual archetypes. In the existence of the world the elements do not form a system. Therefore an element can only be known once one has found the system to which it belongs. Therein lies the principle by which the element is conditioned. It is, in the first place, triune, since all true phenomena and objects in the world are triune. This is a very lofty principle, and yet its phenomenology excludes freedom. All that is subject to it is real, but in it the higher ‘Bedingtheit’ (state of being conditioned) is dominant. More supple, more mobile than this is the sevenfoldness. Thanks to it, the higher unconscious, the superconscious is metamorphosed into the self- conditioned nature (Selbstbedingtheit) of the organic and soul-being of man, whose consciousness ascends to introspection. But this is not yet the sphere of freedom.

The spirit in the world individual is free; it dwells in the realm of Pralaya. The true spirit of the human being can only be understood in its relation to the world-spirit. The sevenfold nature of man – the fruit of development in the Manvantaras – merely provided the foundation for the repetition or the creation anew within it of that which directs all sevenfoldnesses in the world: namely, the fivefold Great Pralaya, which within itself is also threefold (see Fig. 31).

Rudolf Steiner tells us that it is the mission of the human being to become, in time, the tenth and entirely special Hierarchy. It will be called the Hierarchy of free – that is to say, purely spiritual – love, which is not conditioned by inheritance or physiology. In nothing that is conditioned by the laws prevailing within the limits of the Manvantara do we find a sufficient basis for the emergence of such a Hierarchy. Here it is only possible to create the necessary preconditions for it. The union of freedom and love belongs only to the world of the Great Pralaya, of the Divine Tri-unity, which conditions everything (according to His ‘image and likeness’) and is, Himself, conditioned by nothing. But within this Divine Tri-unity a development is planned, through which new beings are to arise. They stand lower than all the Hierarchies, and yet are endowed with the attribute of the highest Tri-unity. In this way the highest Divine glory is present in ‘the other’. It begins to shine forth towards the universal wellspring of forms from the moment when a free action is performed, done out of pure love for the deed itself. This must not lead us to the false conclusion that the Divine Hierarchies exist in a state of slavish subjection. No, so grandiose are their experiences that it is not given to the human being even in the moments of highest spiritualization, of pure ecstasy, to share in the least significant of them. Many of these beings reached long ages ago what the human being will only attain in the aeon of Vulcan, and have even progressed beyond this. For us, they are all Gods, Creators. They experience the highest will as their own. But, as Rudolf Steiner says, what we call freedom of choice, above all freedom of choice between good and evil, is foreign to them.

Ultimately, the reason why evil arose was that the highest God, in order to begin a new cycle of creation, had to bring about a phenomenon of mirror-reflection, of duality, which in time became an antithesis, a polarity of two worlds: that of matter and that of spirit. Its appearance became the precondition for the emergence of the human Hierarchy, which has the capacity to unite within itself freedom and love. This it can do, because the antithesis of two worlds exists only in and for the human being, and is finally resolved only in acts of creation out of nothing, in an activity that is carried out purely out of love for the deed, which from the beginning of the world is a characteristic of the Divine. The stupendous nature of the task that is fulfilled by the human being also bears eloquent witness to the grandeur of the ‘ur’-phenomenon by which it is conditioned. In the eastern tradition it was given the names which we have indicated above (see Fig. 29), and which do not reflect the essential character of its personification. Christ, in His Gospel, gave them other names: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We can say nothing of the Divinity in Himself until the moment of His primal revelation; from this point, however, when the evolutionary cycle was inaugurated, the processes of descent and ascent began. They revealed the relation be- tween the three hypostases, the dynamic of the Absolute. Movement within the unconditioned remains a unity; then it takes on a triune character, and finally a unity within the fivefoldness. The fivefoldness within the womb of the unitary Divinity is the ‘ur’-phenomenon of human freedom. In esotericism this is expressed in the form of a penta- gram and is called Microcosm, or the Third Logos; meaning that the human being in this form is a small reflection of the macrocosm, a reflection of the higher Divine plan brought to the creation by the Holy Spirit. This plan is represented to the ‘beholding’ faculty in the fivefold symbol of the human being. The Holy Spirit is therefore the ‘ur’- phenomenon of the human ‘I’-consciousness; he unites the individually thinking human being, particularly when he thinks in ‘beholding’, with his great ‘ur’-phenomenon, the macro-anthropos, who is preserved within the world of the Great Pralaya and, working from there as a ‘plan’, fructifies (fertilizes) being, which justifies us in speaking of the anthropocentrism of world-development (Fig. 31).

The movements of the forces in the pentagram are of many different kinds, and each has its own significance. Through their activity the pentagram is oriented in space: it has an ‘above’ and a ‘below’, though in a spiritual, evolutionary and ethical sense. It is the five-membered principle of unity ‘made visible as an object’ (because of the human being) in the aeon of the Earth, through the solar system. In this sense, the pentagram expresses the planetary unity, borne within himself by the human being, and is a symbol of the system-building principle of the planetary system (see the figures of Agrippa von Nettesheim). The pentagram in the human being is an expression of the repetition within him of the entire planetary system in miniature.

Before it became the system-building principle of earthly man, the pentagram, as his highest ‘ur’-phenomenon, underwent a series of mediatory processes, which led it to embodiment within the human being. The first stage in such a process in the aeon of the earth was the planetary system. This was condensed out of the universal astrality during the transition of evolution from the third to the fourth etheric-physical globe. This system was at first an indivisible unity. It is the system referred to when we speak of the primal nebula of Kant and Laplace. Within the unity a structure was potentially contained – the sevenfold structure of our cycle of evolution. This gave rise to the sevenfoldness of the planets: Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon. The Earth forms the octave within the planetary cycle.*

* Uranus, Neptune and Pluto did not develop within the solar system, but were incorporated into it (as visitors) from the outer cosmos.
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The human being can be beheld imaginatively in the form of the pentagram. This is the form of his ether-body, which only received this form with the earthly aeon, as the human being was then endowed with an individual ‘I’. Through the ‘I’, the archetype of man – preserved hitherto in the Great Pralaya – received the possibility of incarnation. (It was thanks to the laws at work here, which were respected and not bypassed, that Christ became Man).

So long as the human being is in the involutive stage of development, his life between two incarnations fulfills the role of the Pralaya, as we have already seen. But the entire world-constellation of the human being is fundamentally changed when he begins the evolution of his own ‘I’. From this moment onwards, the Great Pralaya descends into earthly man, and from now on he has his Manvantara in the life after death – i.e. in the spiritual planetary system. The beginning of this transformation is a significant moment in the evolution of the world as a whole. It is not an easy thing, even for one accustomed to spiritual thought, to conceive that the earthly human being is able to become the lawgiver as to the existence of the solar system. But precisely this is the case. And it can be grasped, once one has understood the principle of freedom. Why is it, actually, that the human being can become free? Because in his individual higher ‘I’ he unites with his great ‘ur’- phenomenon, which was planned by God from the beginning of the world. The conditioning to which this ‘ur’-phenomenon is subject is on a higher level than anything that can be imagined within this evolutionary cycle. This conditioning (Bedingtheit) is, therefore, in reality universal self-conditioning (Selbstbedingtheit) – i.e. freedom.

Thus the World Pralaya begins to harmonize with the earthly life of the human being. He emerges within this earthly life as a seven-membered being in harmony with the fundamental law of the Manvantara (in which development takes place via sevenfold metamorphoses). But of greatest importance for the individual evolution of man is the five-membered nature of his being. In fact, the sevenfoldness of the planetary system is subordinate to this, as can be seen in the figures of Agrippa.

On the earth the human being unites the sevenfoldness of his involutive being with the fivefoldness of his evolutive being, through progressing on the path to freedom. This connection will remain long into the future, but the moment when it enters consciousness is of extreme importance, for this is when the human being begins, through the power of the ‘I’, to bring about, himself, all the changes in his fivefold nature. And he gains mastery of his sevenfoldness, of its unfolding on all levels, from the material to the spiritual. In this case, he begins, also after death when he ascends into the planetary spheres, out of his ‘I’ to posit his own being within them, consciously. And in the future it will become ever more decisive for the existence of the human being after death, what he makes of himself upon the Earth, and to what extent he becomes a free spirit here. The five-membered being of man began its development before the emergence of the planetary system. It was not yet connected with the number seven, and represented the real revela- tion of its higher ‘ur’-phenomenon. It can always be beheld in sufficiently high spheres of the spirit. St. John describes in the Apocalypse how, after he had received from Christ Himself – the Alpha and Omega of our aeon – the messages from seven Churches, in which the human being is given the task of developing in his spirit the sevenfoldness – or, to express it in figurative terms, of uniting the glory of God with His Kingdom, i.e. consciousness with being (the symbol for this is the hexagram with a point in the centre) – he was raised up into a higher sphere, and there the ‘ur’-phenomenon of the human being was revealed to him in supersensible experience. He saw the ‘Throne’, i.e. the primal substance of the Spirits of will, which forms in all aeons the Di- vine foundation of being (which appears from above) and on it sat the Christ as almighty God – i.e. in unity with the Father and the Holy Spirit. Christ says of Himself that he is the Alpha and Omega, and this means that, on that spiritual height, past and future are not separated by time; there, the past can also appear in the form of what is to come. John beholds the Throne of God at that boundary where the Pralaya passes over into the Manvantara. The Earthly aeon will at some time in the future ascend to that boundary, and then descend as the aeon of Jupiter, the ‘New Jerusalem’.

One can say that, at any given moment of the Earthly aeon, the great ‘ur’-phenomenon of man is revealed to supersensible vision at that boundary. John describes this revelation as follows: He saw “in the midst of the throne, and round about the throne” four beasts, and the first beast was “like a lion, the second beast was like a calf, and the third beast had a face as a man, and the fourth beast was like a flying eagle” (Rev. 4; 6-7).

It is in this form that the ‘ur’-phenomenon of the human being en- ters the earthly Manvantara. In its descent from the Great Pralaya (and also in the ascent into it), it is led by Christ Himself. John says that in the midst of these four beasts he saw a lamb. Thanks to the Christ, the human being unites his earthly phenomenon with his ‘ur’-phenomenon and attains his Pralaya during earthly life – the Pralaya being the world of the Divine Tri-unity. So long as the human being has not overcome, has not lived out his Manvantara (his inherited nature, the lower ‘I’, and finally his karma), his participation in the Pralaya remains potential only. In order to be able to ‘partake of the Christ’ we must attain the strength to offer up in sacrifice the fruits of involution, pass through the Goethean ‘dying and becoming’, or follow the advice of the Apostle Paul: Do the same as the Hierarchies and sacrifice that which stands at our full and free disposal: the lower ‘I’.

John uses the puzzling expression “in the midst of the throne and round about the throne”. He wishes in this way to indicate the dual as- pect of the ‘ur’-phenomenon, which is on the one hand within the womb of the Divine, and, on the other, enters into evolution. As we recall, the Seraphim receive the plan of evolution from the Divine Tri-unity and transmit it to the Hierarchies below them. In this plan it is supersensibly revealed that Christ leads the ‘ur’-phenomenon into evolution ‘from above’, whereby he takes upon Himself the task of reuniting with it in the human being on the earthly plane. John experiences the Seraphim in the form of ‘beasts’ (i.e. in the Zodiac) with six (twice three) wings. Their ‘six-winged’ nature is the idea, or the law of creation, to which we have already referred in connection with Fig. 19. The Seraphim are the personification of this law. They were “full of eyes”, John says, because all the members of these beings possess the higher ‘I’. This is the entire scale of the Hierarchies.

The Seraphim do not reveal themselves to John in their essential being, but in the way they approach the creation – i.e. not in an intuitive but in the inspirative state of consciousness. The Crystal Heaven*  also shows him its ‘outer side’ as the Zodiac. This circle of constellations is the projection of the Divine Tri-unity onto the sphere of being. Within it are revealed the ‘World Cross’ – the ‘horizontal’ of being and the ‘vertical’ of consciousness, but also the twelvefold unity of the world, and much more besides. Through this circle, it can be said, is revealed the way in which the world and man are ordered according to the principle of number.*

* This symbol has many meanings.

** In the far distant past, the constellation of Scorpio was called the constellation of the Eagle. At that time man’s thinking was imaginative. The faculty of understanding (Verstand) was in a certain sense the reason for the ‘fall’ of this sphere of the Zodiac.
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The Cherubim are given the task of ‘working on’ the universal aim, which comes to expression in the world cross. Hence they are four-winged. Their mission places them in the ‘four corners’ of the world and of the human ‘ur’-phenomenon, the Macro-Anthropos, who bears within himself the three future systems: the nerve-sense system, the rhythmic system and the system of the limbs and metabolism. As the fourth appears the ‘I’-being with human countenance, in the Apocalyptic seal of St. John.*** This fourfoldness is formed by the principal signs in the four zones of the Zodiac; the others merely give them support.

*** This ur-phenomenon, as it is described in Anthroposophy, has been known of in esoteric Christianity for many centuries, as we see, for example, from its depiction in icons.
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6. The Aesthetics and Ethics of Evolution

As a pupil in the upper classes of the grammar school, Rudolf Steiner was already studying Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason’ intensively. He said later, in his doctoral thesis, that if one approaches the study of epistemology not from the standpoint of the history of philosophy, but on a purely factual level, “one will hardly miss any phenomenon of importance if one takes into consideration no more than the time since Kant brought out his ‘Critique of Pure Reason’. All that had previously been achieved in this field is repeated during this period” (GA 3, p.25). There is no doubt whatever that Kant must be acknowledged as a key figure in European philosophy, with respect both to its strengths and to its weaknesses. In him there came to expression not only the inability of philosophy to attain knowledge of objective being (das Seiende), but also the foundations that had come to maturity towards the end of the 18th century, which enable Goethe to achieve the breakthrough to his ‘power of judgement in beholding’.

Kant was convinced that he had created a transcendental philosophy of the fundamental principle of human cognition, wherein was con- cealed the possibility of attaining pure knowledge a priori. It is tran- scendental also because it builds up a system of concepts that is not based on any sense-experience. He thereby admits that human knowledge has two sources – the sense-perceptible and the intellect – which perhaps “spring from a root that is common to both, but remains unknown to us”.107) Anyone who has studied Rudolf Steiner’s theory of knowledge with sufficient seriousness can give the appreciation that is due to the quality of genius contained in this intimation of Kant and also to his attempts to develop it on the level of content. These attempts on Kant’s part are twofold (he is, after all, a born dualist). On the one hand, one can discover in them a correct intimation of the true nature of cognition as it was brought to light by Rudolf Steiner, while on the other we observe how the mind of the philosopher, working with its usual subtlety and finesse, acknowledges the existence of two main stems (Ger. tree-trunks) of knowledge but, instead of seeking their synthesis, simply hews one of them down.

In the cognizing human mind (Geist) Kant finds two original characteristics: the ability to receive impressions, and the spontaneous appearance of concepts. The first of these two characteristics arises through the fact that all knowing begins with an effect of a certain kind exerted upon our soul by the objects (i.e. experience is the beginning of cognition), and as a result of this the soul develops inner representations of (Ger. about) them. The ability to acquire inner representations of the objects is called by Kant ‘Sinnlichkeit’ (operating with the sense-world). It is our own capacity, but at the same time it is produced (de- termined) by the objects. ‘Sinnlichkeit’ allows us to have perception of the objects. But the intellect has the ability to generate concepts (by) itself. And here (in agreement with Fichte) Kant asserts: “Thoughts without content are empty; perceptions without concepts are blind.... Only through their joining together can knowledge arise.”108) This is, so to speak, the Goetheanistic end result of the Kantian theory of knowledge, but Kant did not draw the conclusions to which it unavoidably leads. He took a further step which brought him close to Goetheanism, but unfortunately this also remained an isolated peculiarity of his view of things.

When he spoke about representation (Vorstellung) as it arises in the process of perception, he was not thinking of that real structural entity which emerges as a result of the union of the observation with the concept which is, indeed, spontaneously called forth by the observation. No, Kant inquires into the possibility of ‘pure perceptions’ – i.e. the possibility of an experience before experience – in other words, a priori perceptions. Pure perception contains, so he says, “no more than the form within which (Ger. under which) a thing is perceived...”.109) The science of the principles of sense-experience of this kind is called by Kant transcendental aesthetics – not to be confused with what is known as the critique of (artistic) taste, which is full of psychologism and has nothing in common with the setting up of the a priori laws of knowledge.

Kant goes on to explain with the help of examples what he means by such an aesthetics. Let us, he says, remove from the object every- thing that the intellect thinks about it: substance, force, divisibility into parts etc., and also everything that is given us by sense-perception (sensation): hardness, colour etc. Now, all we are left with is extension and image. These belong to pure perception. But this is the nature of space and time – “two pure forms of sense-perception as principles of knowledge a priori”.110)

If we try, from the standpoint of spiritual science, to solve the riddle of the Kantian aesthetic of pure perception, we discover in it a relic of ancient imaginative perceptions. These provided nourishment and support for the entire aesthetics and ethics* of the approach to art and life in antiquity, and they did so in the form in which they manifested directly, which, before Socrates, had never come to expression cognitively in the world of ancient Greek culture. Still more: when conceptual thinking arises, one banishes from the ideal State that has been established with its help (we are thinking here of Plato’s ‘Republic’) the poets, because one can no longer find a place in it for them.

* At that time aesthetics was inseparably bound up with ethics. Only with the coming of Christianity did the two strive to become independent of one another.
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A thousand years later, the imaginative aesthetic, which had already died out in Roman times, re-emerged in the Christian art of icon painting in indissoluble unity with transcendental ethics (to borrow the terminology of Kant). The pure, a priori quality of the visions represented in the icons is accounted for by the phenomenon of the direct contact of the human spirit or soul with intelligible beings.

Just such a contact is spoken of by spiritual science, which understands it in terms of the pure a posteriori – i.e. under the aspect of the individual ‘I’, which the Greeks did not yet possess. It is exactly in this sense that one should take the statements made by Rudolf Steiner concerning Figs. 28 and 32. The human being of today finds it difficult to relate to the thought that one can perceive ideas directly, but it is precisely in this form that they reveal themselves to his ‘beholding’ in the guise of aesthetic and ethical experiences. There is no doubt whatever that these experiences are significantly extended, enriched and even brought to completion when we see the world of ideas in the ‘I’. We then reach through to spiritual science, which shows us that art, science and religion have, in reality, one and the same origin – share a common root. Their primal source was concealed by the coarseness of sense-perceptions. These, however, are affected by supersensible contact with real spirit. And the entire world of perceptions is nothing other than condensed imaginations. It is for this reason that they now reach us along the path of perceptions and also along that of thinking. If we draw both together into a higher unity, we find an individualized relation to the revelation of this unity in pure ethical and aesthetic ‘beholding’.

The aesthetic of pure ‘beholding’ in philosophy begins with the de- velopment of the sense of thought. It is precisely this that Kant was describing, in foreknowledge of the fact that the foundation of thinking is of a sensible, perceptible nature. Hegel possessed a highly developed sense of thought. He made the attempt to let science or knowledge (Wissenschaft) begin with pure being; he characterized the latter as “the unmediated, simple and indeterminate”.111) It is “indeterminate” in its relation to reflection and in this sense it is a priori; and it is perceptible, it is pure ‘beholding’, the transcendentally aesthetic, but since the coming of Christ and the development of ‘I’-consciousness it is also the immanently ethical. If we are acting in the spirit of Hegel, so Rudolf Steiner says, we would do best to interpret all that he said from a different standpoint (see GA 192, 29.6.1919), namely in the spirit of the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’. (We would add here that, without doubt, the same is partly true of Kant.)

The possibility of attaining pure ‘beholding’ really exists. Reflection, too, is ultimately a form of ‘beholding’ – one form only, of course. When he spoke of transcendental aesthetics, Kant had a foreboding of that turning-point in the form-condition (the globe), where the glory of the thinking spirit must unite with the kingdom. Such is, beginning with philosophy, the path of the human being to God. And there is no path to Him that is more perfect and more in keeping with the spirit of our time. Kant was alarmed at the fact that the path of philosophy becomes, by way of ‘beholding’, the path to God. He set limits to knowledge. If we overcome these, we rise from formal logic to the logic of thinking as ‘beholding’, which is just as knowable as the first. In the history of culture the human being followed the opposite path: from ‘beholding’ to the logic of intellectual thinking. This enabled him to attain a free relation to the world of intelligible beings and to develop within himself the picture of the true ‘I’. And now the time has come to go the opposite way, the way that leads to insight into the intelligible world as an organism, to a becoming conscious of one’s own ether-body, the actual bearer of thinking: of world-thinking in an individual form. The world of intelligible beings is also the source of all our aesthetic and ethical experiences, but the immediate supersensible reality of the latter is so great that they can only be revealed to the feeling. The concepts ‘ethics’ and ‘aesthetics’ actually only point to a certain reality, but do not really express it.

The situation is different with the world of thinking that is revealed in beholding. Here, the moral principle is inseparably connected with the thinking principle, and they can be made directly accessible to the beholding spirit. At present an ethic of this kind is unknown to the human being, and he cannot delight in its beauty because the life has been lost from his thinking. In the Addition to Chapter 8 of the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’ Rudolf Steiner says the following: “Whoever turns towards thinking in its essential being, will find within it feeling and will, and both of these in the depths of their reality....” (GA 4, p.143). In these objective cosmic ‘depths’ the human being must learn, in devotion to thinking “in its essential being”, to draw forth for himself the moral goals of action. This is why Rudolf Steiner, in the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’, lays the foundation of transcendental ethics as a possibility of attaining ethical judgements of an a priori synthetic nature – i.e. containing new knowledge – : moral intuitions. His position in this question is diametrically opposed to Kant’s and culminates in the thesis that “monism... in the sphere of truly moral action (is) freedom philosophy” (ibid., p.179). A considerable effort is necessary if we are to grasp this central nerve of the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’. But the Book of Genesis also speaks of the reality of the existence of world unity on the level of ethics, aesthetics and thought: “And God saw everything that He had made, and, behold, it was very good.” “Good” means in this case both beautiful and moral: The Creation was beautiful and good. For the Greeks this was an axiom.

We have already seen what the Creation was like at its very beginning. The Divine Tri-unity inaugurated it in seven absolute qualities. Through the course of time, these were transformed into the seven creative qualities of man, the a priori, God-given ethics and aesthetics of his becoming. They themselves remain as the esoteric foundation of the categories: seven creative living (i.e. endowed with Buddhi) spirits who lead the human being periodically down into an incarnation and, when this is ended, lead him up to the higher Devachan. On the lower levels of being, where the forms of conceptual thinking arise, they merely touch the ether-body of the human being, whereby they are at the same time reflected back by his physical body, to be taken up by the astral body in the form of the concepts before experience, in experience and after experience. These concepts have both an abstract and a universal character. In the first case, when the nature of the astral body is revealed in them, their universal aspect – the higher Tri-unity and the triune structure of the world arising from it – descends to the dialectical, autonomous movement of the ideas. In the second case, they assume, by virtue of the character of the ether-body, the form of a seven-membered structure. Research into this structure shows that it is, in its own way, the special case of a macro-phenomenon of the seven aeons.

Thus, within the fourth (the etheric-physical) globe, the universals were reflected already in the three stages of the forming of human speech. Hans Erhard Lauer presents these relationships in the following way:

* The fourth globe consists of seven periods, which are called the root-races.
** A root-race consists of seven sub-races. In the fifth root-race they are called culture-epochs.
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At a later stage, during the fourth and the fifth culture-epoch of the fifth – the post-Atlantean – root-race, the universals are experienced by human beings on the levels of mythological, conceptual and beholding thinking (see Fig. 5). In the course of the seven aeons, seven conditions of consciousness are developed. These are acquired by the beings of the third and in part also of the second Hierarchy, and then by the human being. Viewed as a whole, the development of the conditions of consciousness takes place by way of metamorphosis within universal All-consciousness. For the world-totality, which includes within it the human being and the kingdoms of nature, the conditions of consciousness of the first three aeons undergo metamorphosis through the consciousness of the Earthly aeon into the consciousness of the three future aeons. This is the full reality of the world evolution and of man. The seven-membered system of the conditions of consciousness which belong to the aeons, and the seven-membered nature of the human being form an inseparable unity in evolution, and as we have to do here with world-conditions, this is unavoidably permeated through and through with the ethical principle (Fig. 33).

For the sake of simplicity the types of metamorphosis which are undergone by the aeons are shown in a separate diagram (Fig. 33b, c). They are all taking place continuously and simultaneously, as there are beings who possess all seven conditions of consciousness. The earthly aeon is therefore present simultaneously on four levels of consciousness: the object-oriented level, where only the human consciousness is undergoing metamorphosis (33c 1); the imaginative, the inspirative (33c 3); and the intuitive (33c 4).

The wisdom of the ether-body that is imbued with individual con- sciousness is transformed into the sanctity of the Buddhi of the future aeon of Venus. Saturn and Vulcan are the Alpha and Omega of our cycle of evolution. Strength (or force) as a will-impulse, arises in us unconsciously; on the level of the world as a whole it is universal, as the will of God. Through the Thrones it gave birth to our physical body. When he attains immortality in the physical (not the material!) body, in the resurrection body of Christ, the human being also attains blessedness in God. In this sense, conscious All-consciousness and blessedness in God are two expressions with one and the same meaning. We must now ask ourselves: Why does righteousness (or justice) have such a decisive part to play in the metamorphosis of the qualities of consciousness? The reason for this lies in the fact that we are looking at the cycle of evolution from the standpoint of the Earthly aeon which does, indeed, play a decisive role within it, as it is the centre of global metamorphoses. There are other standpoints from which one can view evolution. In them the relationships upon which our present discussion is based assume another aspect. In the past when, on the earth, life began to develop in matter, the emergence of the first cell was perhaps its central manifestation. The central manifestation of life at the present time is the conscious human being.

It must be said that the world, from its very first beginning, is created through virtue, and virtue is also the fundamental instrument in the self-creation of the human being. When conceptual thinking arose, Socrates and Plato came forward with the idea that virtue can be learnt. Its former way of working through the blood connection and through religion and mythology has come to an end, and from now on one can find an individualized relation to it, as also to thinking.

Plato speaks in his works of the four virtues. They served as an instrument for the Gods in their creation of our fourfold being, the fruit of four aeons. The connections are as follows:

            ‘I’ – Wisdom
            Astral body – Courage
            Ether body – Prudence
            Physical body – Justice

                            (GA 170, 6.8.1916)

Universal justice (righteousness) has a special relation to the primal substance of the world, the sacrifice of the Spirits of will.

There are, therefore, the four virtues which, in the course of the earthly aeon, formed the human being in such a way that an individual ‘I’ could dwell within a triune body. Further light is thrown on these relationships by Rudolf Steiner when he says that, through the sphere of morality, the aesthetic sphere and the sphere of wisdom (religion – art – science), we are connected with the forces of the spiritual world in such a way that in the physical body, through the brain, spiritual beings of a lower order, which are born of the Hierarchies, exert an influence on us and serve them in their workings on the earthly plane. They are known as elemental beings; they fall into four main groups, which are graphically described in Greek mythology, but in reality there stands behind every soul-expression of a human being, every soul-quality, a spiritual elemental being of a good or evil nature. When we have aes- thetic experiences a swarm of elves gathers about us. We are constantly surrounded by the beings of morality and by others (see GA 170, 6.8.1916).

The elemental beings are mediators between the human being and the Hierarchies. Many of them are conjured into existence by the human being himself. Higher elemental beings pervade the kingdoms of nature; thus man is not only bound up organically with the nature cycle of the year. At different times of the year he experiences now an intensification, now a weakening of his own soul-qualities, tendencies, capacities of thinking and feeling, as there are different elemental spirits who exert an influence on the human being in connection with the rhythm of nature, which, in addition to this, strongly influences the relation of man’s sheaths to one another. Thus at Midsummer, around the time of the St. John’s Festival (24th June), the human ‘I’, so Rudolf Steiner tells us, departs from the Earth and perceives the cosmic wis- dom in spiritual heights. Justice (righteousness) is experienced by the human being with particular intensity in the springtime, in connection with the Easter Festival. He ‘transports’ himself at this time into the sphere of (the restoration of) ‘balance’. There works here the first Hier- archy, the impulse of the Mystery of Golgotha, the Mystery of the physical body, of death and of resurrection. In Rudolf Steiner’s notebook there is the following remark: “Sun of righteousness = the phys. body” (B. 19, p.2).

Since it is connected with the physical body, the virtue of justice (righteousness) acquires fundamental importance for us; it determines the constellation of the human being within the entire evolutionary cycle and has a decisive effect on our karma. Rudolf Steiner explains that the forces which underlie our transition to the upright gait in childhood continue working in later life. They are still there, but they are active in the virtue of all-embracing justice. “Whoever really practises the virtue of justice puts every thing, every being, in its rightful place .... It is justice that we practise when we develop the forces through which we are connected with the entire cosmos, but on a spiritual level. Justice is the measure of a human being’s connection with the Divine. In practi- cal terms injustice amounts to godlessness, it is the human being who has forfeited his Divine origin” (GA 159/160, 31.1.1915).

The virtue of justice is closely bound up with the middle, rhythmic system of man, with the breath and the blood circulation. Through the system of the metabolism he is more connected with the All-might of the Divine. This is the constellation of Christmas. In the depths of winter a consolidation of the intellect takes place, the temptation of evil approaches us. Agnosticism, relativism, the antinomies of the intellect and the contradictory, dialectical character of thinking are experienced with particular intensity at this time of year. Working out from the ‘I’, we must put everything in the right place. Whoever devotes himself to a task of this kind at Christmas receives, when he experiences righteousness (justice) at Easter, the healing forces for both soul and body. Such a person will then not lose himself in the welter of sense-impressions at the time of Midsummer. And in the autumn, at the feast of the Archangel Michael, he will draw a step closer, with the growing strength of his ‘I’, to the cosmic intelligence. His consciousness becomes more spiritual; it is imbued with the forces of movement, of will (GA 223/229, 1.4.1923). Under the guidance of Michael, the ‘Countenance of Christ’, the conscious (not instinctive) forces of love are strengthened. Justice transforms them into forces of salvation, of redemption from original sin, on account of which we sank into abstract cleverness, fell away from God, and thus became burdened with the sin of injustice (unrighteousness). The power of atonement for this sin was brought to the Earth by the Christ. When he suffered the Mystery of Golgotha, he reinstated world justice and restored everything to its rightful place. He set limits to the power of the Adversary and gave the human being his new task: the transforming of involution into individual evolution. Because of the imperfect character of the translation the call of John in the Gospel is to “Repent!” But what John really wants to say to us is: Change the way you perceive and understand the world! (Metanoeite!) – change your attitude of mind!

7. The Dialectic of the Macrocosm

We have viewed, if only in bare outline, the whole panorama of world evolution in its ‘ur’-phenomenology of number. Using this method of thinking, it is possible to solve the greatest riddles of the human spirit. One of them, unquestionably the most important, is the riddle of Christian monotheism with its belief in the tri-hypostatic God. As we have already mentioned, a great deal was done towards the solving of this riddle by the Russian religious philosophy of the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century and by Sophiology, of which Nikolai Loski was the last prominent representative. Loski came forward with a solution to the riddle which is very close to Anthroposophical gnoseology.

Perhaps more in this thought-complex – of the intellectualized mysticism of Russian Sophiology, and spiritual-scientific gnoseology – than anywhere else, one can feel the logical necessity to complement the speculative method of research into the key question of the Christian faith, with the Pythagorean method of number. We must therefore imagine the absolute, which is the unitary God of the world, in the form of a circle. Everything that exists in the world is a constituent part of it.

This is, of course, not some concrete circular line, but simply the idea of a circle whose limits are at infinity. But there is a relation between the centre and the periphery. This is the first Logos. Then one can conceive the second Logos as a duality within the unity. It arises through the fact that the possibility of relation was already contained in the original unity. The third Logos arises within the unity as a further potentizing of the principle of relation.

If we again abbreviate with the help of letters of the alphabet, the statement above can be represented in the form of a diagram which we find in Rudolf Steiner (see B. 78, p.33), but we will give it a somewhat different interpretation (Fig. 34).

In each of the three cases represented in the diagram we have before us a unitary God, who reveals Himself, however, in three different hypostases. Within His unity, He reveals Himself in three different ways.

If, for once, we do not allow a departure from the basic conception of Hegel’s Logic to disturb us, we must say here that the absolute principle is the first Logos, which reveals itself as absolute consciousness in-and-for-itself. This has intentionality, and on the grounds of this characteristic alone one can affirm that neither the concept nor the meaning was at all significant – all this came later – only the sound. Sounding speech, which at that time still had the power of natural magic – a survival of the creative power of the Logos, of the sounding, Divine Word – expresses in this way the all-pervading universal ‘before the things’ (ante res). After God had become man it became the universal ‘in the things’ of the human spirit (or mind), and after His resurrection it was both ‘in the things’ and ‘after the things’ – i.e. in the ‘I’-spirit of the human being who frees himself from his earthly dependency. What we see represented in Fig. 34 united itself first with the world and then with the human being on the path of individualization, after it had become the tri-hypostatic God of his religious faith.

The second Logos ‘in the things’ (again those of the human spirit) is the essential unity of concept and percept – i.e. reality. The third Logos ‘after the things’ is the ideal ‘I am’, born of the experience of thinking and of perceptions, yet in its existence already independent of them – i.e. it is also reality. The surrogate ‘I’, the lower ‘I’, remains in its position between the ‘in the things’ and the ‘after the things’; for this reason it contains within itself neither substance nor reality. Rudolf Steiner says of Descartes that he only had the right to say ‘I think’. To infer from this – ‘I exist’ is not at all permissible, as we have here to do with the lower ‘I’.

We will be considering at a later stage the key question regarding the evolution of the world and man. In the middle of the Earthly aeon or, to be more exact, in the last two to two-and-and-half centuries there arises within this process of becoming, with increasing intensity, a colossal contradiction which is entirely concentrated upon the relation between the lower and the higher ‘I’ of the human being. Basically speaking, the human being is enclosed within a triangle consisting of three ‘I’s: the lower, the higher group-‘I’, and the higher individual ‘I’. The higher group-‘I’ was imprinted upon humanity in the Earth aeon by the Spirits of form. Like the three bodies it is a fruit of evolution and therefore, just as they are, a gift of God to humanity. Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that nothing further had happened: then the higher ‘I’ of humanity would, in the course of the next three aeons, have transformed the three bodies into Manas, Buddhi and Atma – i.e. it would have reunited them with their great archetypes, which had already come into being on higher levels during the first three aeons. Mankind with its ‘I’ would have united with that higher unity, but a single, individual human being would not have emerged at all. This would have robbed the entire evolutionary cycle of its meaning, as the human being would have had no value in himself, remaining no more than a mere consequence of higher activity.

But this did not happen, and it cannot happen, because the activity of the ‘I’ is always of an individualizing nature and also gives rise to an ‘I’, sooner or later, in the object that it influences. When the three bod- ies of the human being, which were already bound up, through their evolution, in a reciprocal relation with the world of otherness-of-being, became an object of this kind, the activity of the group-‘I’ of humanity oriented itself in the same direction: from above downwards. The three bodies stood in the way of the ‘I’ – in the form of a ‘densification’, through which it was destined to return to itself ‘from the other side’. In the course of this remarkable process, the ‘I’ began to transform the triune body. The more direct its working grew, the deeper the body was ‘driven down’ into matter. The working of the ‘I’ assumed, as time went on, a cultural-historical character, thereby engendering in the hu- man being, in joint activity with the evolutionary process, the lower ‘I’, which thought in concepts, but had no true existence. The ‘I’ of humanity was pressing forward towards the spirit, but in the (lower) ‘I’ it fell out of the realm of being and even grew hostile towards it. On the traditional path of evolution there was nothing further that could happen. There is no single Hierarchy that is able to bring its ‘I’ into a space-time continuum, just as an ideal cause cannot be brought sense-perceptibly into a material effect. In order to fill the lower ‘I’ with be- ing and with life and thereby raise it to a higher, hierarchical level it was necessary to reverse cause and effect. The evolutionary process, which is driven forward by the Hierarchies, is not able to do this. Here it is necessary, as it were, to begin the evolutionary cycle anew and in a different way. This only the Divine Trinity can do.

And this is exactly what Christ did when He passed through the Mystery of Golgotha. Through identifying with the ‘I’ of humanity on the path of His evolutionary incarnation, He brought down to the Earth the life of the ‘I’, which knows no limits and has the capacity to identify with the ‘I’ of the universe. And he brought it to the individual earthly human being who possessed a lower ‘I’. Thus a remarkable possibility arose for earthly man: in his lower ‘I’ to merge with the life of the higher ‘I’, and to make the group-‘I’ of humanity into his individual ‘I’. The metamorphosis which has here to be accomplished is expressed in the words of the Apostle Paul: “Not I, but Christ in me”. And for the human being there is no other path into the future. However deeply the group-‘I’ may work into him, thanks to which he bears intellectuality as a genetic inheritance, in his lower ‘I’ he will increasingly stand in opposition to God, to the world and to other human beings, and fall out of the life of the world. But a direct appeal to the group-‘I’ (“the collective is higher than the individuality” etc.) will reverse evolution and thereby abolish the human being as a monad altogether. This is the greatest contradiction into which evolution has come, and only Christianity has the key to its solution.

The first Logos is that which dwells in absolute Being, and in which all that is determined and finite is lacking. Absolute Being comes, through reflection into itself, to revelation – as life of the world- consciousness (ab), as consciousness which works from the centre to the periphery of the Absolute. In the third Logos the creative life of consciousness inwardizes itself (abc). The consequences of this are twofold. Firstly, on the higher level, in the realm of duration, the first Logos returns to itself through the third Logos (this happens instantaneously, with no passage of time), coming to knowledge of itself as it were from within in the form of identity: absolute ‘I’ = mediated ‘I’. Thus arises in the world the relation between the outer and the inner, which is also an anticipation of the relation between subject and object. Secondly, there appears in the evolution of the world, where the first Logos returns to itself, after it has undergone objectification in the course of time, inwardization in the guise of the multiplicity of the forms of existence, as the being of consciousness in the manifoldness of created beings, in which an inversion of the world-subject takes place.

In the second Logos the first Logos ‘shows itself’ to be, reveals itself as, a single unity with its manifestation. And in its return to itself in the third Logos, the first Logos becomes the being of the world, all that exists, whether or not it possesses the attribute of life (e.g. the mineral kingdom, thought), whether it be reality or illusion (e.g. hallucination); in the end it becomes the concept a posteriori. Together with this fact the problem arises, how such a concept can acquire real being – i.e. life. Descartes’ “I am, when I think” is only correct from the standpoint of being as form. But the ‘I am’ means real life of the ‘I’: of “the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father” (John 1,18), who became Man – that is to say, united himself forever with human destiny. The thinking ‘I’ is the reflection of the ‘I am’ (in feeling, the relation between them is more real but it has the quality of dream), which is mediated through the process of development, whose final result was the higher nerve activity; in the trans-temporal sphere ‘I am’ is mediated continually by intelligible beings.

The concept in the (lower) ‘I’ is form and limit. But out of being- for-the-other (mirror-reflection) the concept is able to pass over into being-in-and-for-itself, and thus attain essential being. This fact leads one to conclude that thinking possesses an identity of its own (Selbstidentität). Precisely this is revealed by logic, which can only in a conditional sense be separated from ontology. The ontology of the Tri-unity is the ultimate truth of the dialectic of thinking. However, reflection must be understood as the becoming of being, as well as the existence of thinking consciousness. In reflection being and thinking are identical: it is the unity of form and content and at the same time – nothingness. Thus we arrive at the Hegelian identity ‘being = non-being’ at the outermost limits of the phenomenology of spirit (mind). The right-hand part of this identity is at the same time the world in its manifestation as a sense-perceptible or simply material universe. In the human being it is represented by the threefoldness of physical body, ether body and astral body, since for the physical body alone there does not exist a sense-perceptible universe. All three bodies together correspond to the unconscious (subconscious) All-consciousness, which is identical to the conscious human being. In the ‘ur’-phenomenal realm the non-being of his reflection is identical with the All-consciousness of the world. Indeed, the triune body also represents with its evolutionary aspect the life of the world, which the second Logos received as a sacrifice from the first Logos. He gives it back to the first Logos through a further sacrifice, in which the relation between the second Logos and the first Logos is reflected to the third Logos. In the first relation there is as yet no inwardization; it is absolute identity. But an identity-relation arises: by this means, the first and the third Logos are united. It gives rise to inwardization, becoming the being of conscious- ness in man.

The superseding of the dialectical form is the inversion of the subject into himself, whereby the being of reflection is transformed into real being (life) of the absolute being (Wesen), whose constituent members are intelligible beings (Wesenheiten). In other words, the overcoming of dialectic means the birth of thought-beings in the human spirit, who fill the picture of the ‘I’ in man with real content. In this way we overcome the closed circle of abstract thought. It is absolute, like the circle of the first Logos of which we spoke above and, like this, a mere idea. It can therefore only be overcome through the superseding of the conceptually-thinking subject. Mirror-reflection then becomes life in pure beholding. We move across from the first hypostasis, whose mirror-reflection in us is brought about by the third hypostasis, to the second hypostasis. In fact we tread a path that is the opposite of the one followed by Kant, after we have gone through the school of his dualism and the school of dialectics in the broadest sense of the word. For without them our emptied consciousness, instead of attaining pure actuality, will simply sink into unconsciousness.

It must be stressed again that the highest laws of world development are effective on all levels of being, from the primal Divine revelation right down to thinking consciousness. The character and criteria of their working changes, but they themselves remain. Therefore the inductive method of cognition allows us to infer their highest nature from their manifestation in the realm of the thinkable. If we think in accordance with this method, we do not wish to maintain, of course, that in the world of the Great Pralaya, too, the relationships are built up according to the laws of dialectics. We are merely assuming, since it is permitted to us to think through in concepts everything to which they have access,*113) that on the level of Mahaparanirvana the first Logos will contain within itself, as cancelled and preserved (aufgehobene), both the second and third Logos. When God reveals Himself out of the world of the ineffable, His hypostases are seen to be not created for the first time. The unity of the primal revelation contained them already, in some way, within itself. For the plane of Paranirvana it is characteristic that something is present there that can be compared to the duality of the worlds which stand below it. This primal duality is the relation between Father and Son, All-consciousness and its manifested life, Atma and Buddhi.

* Hegel: “Since to define God metaphysically means to express His nature in thoughts as such.”113)
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If we go on to say that the Father reveals Himself to the Son, the Son to the Spirit, and the Spirit to the Father, then this is, to express it in the language of Hegel’s philosophy, “the return from differentiation to the simple relation to itself”.114) It is with these words that Hegel begins the first paragraph of his ‘Science of Logic’, entitled ‘The Doctrine of Being’. Esoterically, we have to do here with the plane of Nirvana.

The metamorphoses of the Tri-unity preserve their wholeness through the absolute character of the unity. And since every act brings about both a relationship and a mediation, the return to a relation to oneself can no longer be the same original unity. The principle of absolute unity (All-unity) in each cycle of “return to oneself” acquires a new existence (Dasein). This is of necessity present in the ‘positing of oneself’ through unity at the beginning of the following cycle. Thus the principle of unity in development becomes the principle (the power, the law) of transformation; hence it is not simply the being of the Absolute, but the ‘I’.

In the real evolution of the world the first three revelations (ab, bc, ca) gave birth, three times, to the principle of unity in the other – though this other was not of the sense-world, but that of the Spirits of personality, the Archangels and the Angels. At the beginning of the Earthly aeon the sequence of the Hierarchies becomes ninefold (3 x 3). But the World-Individual acquires a twelvefold fullness. It becomes four times threefold. And this signifies a turning-point in evolution. It gave expression to the fact that earthly man was, from the beginning, created as a fourfold being; that is to say, into the eternal laws that reach back beyond the aeon of Saturn, there was incorporated a macro-law which came into being in the course of our evolutionary cycle. And this is the law of the human ‘I’ – of the Hierarchical principle in the realm of the sense-world on this side of the threshold. Through it, the principle of the tri-unities is grounded in the ‘Other’, the world of the senses. And the principle of the higher Tri-unity is obliged to follow it into this ‘Other’ realm of sense-perceptible being. Thus the Mystery of Golgotha was predestined to take place.

The higher ‘I’ of the human being (initially the universally human group-‘I’), which functions as a unity, led the human race through the evolution of species in a different way to the animal kingdom, which also has a group-‘I’, though this is not destined to incarnate during the Earth aeon. It guided the development of the triune body of man in such a way that, from a certain moment onwards, its threefold cancellation and preservation (Aufhebung) made possible the emergence of the triune soul. The cancelling and preserving (Aufhebung) of the bodies means in this case their being raised, in part, to consciousness, a process that draws them out of organic activity and subconsciousness. The fact that they become conscious to the lower ‘I’ robs them of their existence in the structure of the higher world, the first level of consciousness – in other words: of their being in the consciousness of the first Logos.

There arises within the triune soul the picture (image) of the higher ‘I’, and it becomes the principle of unity of the conceptually thinking consciousness. Such a mode of thinking can, of necessity, only be tri-une, because it is subject to the law which brought it into being. In its three elements or structural parts – thesis, antithesis, synthesis – the following are contained in a cancelled and preserved (aufgehoben) form: 1. the first three aeons; 2. the three bodies; 3. the three souls (sentient, intellectual, consciousness-soul). We have no reason to question the conclusion that the Divine Trinity is immanent to these parts.

On all levels of the universe the triads repeat its very highest plane. On each one of them there is a positing that is, in its own special way, not conditioned, and which cancels (aufhebt) and negates itself by virtue of the higher system-building principle. The positing returns to itself as the synthesis of the object that has come into being. In the dialectic of life, synthesis means, as we have seen, the birth of the ‘I’- endowed beings.

The unity of the higher world, says Rudolf Steiner, appears in the lower as a trinity (GA 343, p. 252). Triads form, if they are not abstract in character, sequences of inversions, metamorphoses, in which convex becomes concave, inner becomes outer, centrifugal becomes centripetal, winding inwards becomes winding outwards etc. And at the points where these polarities are connected the conditions arise for new formations – syntheses. The soul-life of man is also pervaded by inversions of this kind. As they move in both directions, forwards and back again – this being a creative process and not a single, isolated transformation – the soul begins, thanks to them, to free itself from its immersion in the temporal. Its present is formed out of both its past and its future in their constant mutual transformations. Thus the dialectical principle reveals itself beyond the limits of the merely thinkable.

In the ancient Greek school of the Eleatics (Parmenides, Zeon of Elea), the awakened experience of thought was formed into a special art which was given the name dialectics. In this art, says Rudolf Steiner, “the soul learns to know itself in its independence and self- contained inner nature. The reality of the soul is thereby experienced as that which it is in its own essential being and as what it feels itself to be by virtue of the fact that it no longer lives, as it did in earlier times, together with universal world-experience, but unfolds within itself a life – the living experience of thought – that is rooted within it, and through which the soul can feel itself planted within a purely spiritual ground of the world” (‘The Riddles of Philosophy’, Vol. 1). And the Greeks hoped that the human being would be able, with the help of the art of dialectics, to have a real existence in the spiritual sphere. But it was not long before, in their midst, opinions on this question began to diverge and sceptics started to speak out. This hope was finally shattered by the German classical philosophy of the 18th and 19th centuries, but on the other hand it was realized in the same period. Goethe realized it through pointing to the fourth element of human nature (the true ‘I’), which can not only reflect, but also behold. The fact that he was a poet helped Goethe as a philosopher. His science was poetic, and this ‘transcendental aesthetics’ was his element. This protected him from the, now entirely meaningless, marching on the spot at the periphery of the world, where mirror-reflections are the only thing that exists. These had a meaning, so long as they were able to fill the soul with self-existence. This is a fact of tremendous significance, of course, because, as we have already pointed out, within the dialectical triad the three previous macro-stages of evolution are actually present, though in a cancelled and preserved form (als aufgehobene). This triad is the final, limiting mirror-reflection of the highest Tri-unity in the Other. Its abstract personification in the human being represents the ‘moment’ of the turning of the Absolute towards itself. This is not a spatial, but a qualitative boundary. And it was to this quality that Goethe was pointing when he proved that the time for a change of consciousness was approaching. Actually, Goethe was renewing the call of John the Baptist for our cultural epoch. For this reason, the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’, which shows how this is done, is a profoundly Christian book. These are the two sides of dialectics: the macro and the microcosmic. Through them, the present constellation of the human ‘I’-consciousness in the structure of world-evolution is defined. No-one, therefore, should miss the opportunity to understand this constellation, in order to come into a harmonious relation with it. It is our task to make it more easily understandable, and so we return now to Figs. 7 and 23. In accordance with what is shown in Fig. 7, we can view the process which takes place within the Divine Tri-unity as that which forms the lemniscate of development. At the very beginning (in eternity) its second loop is turned into the interior of the first (see fig. 36 below).

Then it turns outwards, thereby bring- ing to birth the Time spirits or the Spirits of personality (Fig. 36). And then a sequence of further, descending lemniscates arises, in the last of which the human being acquires ‘I’-consciousness. It is in these (lemniscatory movements) that development actually consists. When it begins to appear as a mirror-reflection in thinking consciousness, it is reflected there together with the laws that govern it, and which also constitute the science of logic. The chain of evolutionary lemniscates, the principle of whose first emergence is represented in Fig. 36, is repeated (becomes conscious) in the movement of thought in the form of the polysyllogism, and the principle of the lemniscate itself – as the dialectical triad.

Two loops of the lemniscate express ‘becoming’, the two parts of which negate one another, thereby forming at their point of transition the force (power) centre of continuous transformation. In all cases, this centre is an intelligible being – the ‘I’. In the natural kingdoms they (the multiplicity of ‘I’-forms) work indirectly by way of the laws of nature; in the human being this ‘I’-centre descends directly to the physical plane. Through the spiritual working of the biogenetic law it arises within the ‘lemniscate’ of the human spirit. There emerge within it as opposites: consciousness and form in the one case, and spirit and matter in the other. A dialectic of the human spirit such as this, is in perfect harmony with the Goethean teaching of metamorphosis if we give emphasis to the dominant role within it, of the personified vertical of the spirit, of the life of the ‘I’.

The horizontal of ‘being’ is, if we imagine it as part of the structure of the world-cross, at right-angles to the vertical of the spirit, and, as we described earlier, it descends through three-and-a-half aeons, moving downwards from spirit to matter. After it has given rise to the form of thinking-consciousness, it begins to ascend along this vertical. This brings with it a decisive change in the character of the becoming of the human ‘I’ at the point of intersection of the upper and the lower loop of the lemniscate of the human spirit. From its ‘involvement’ in the manifold workings which determine the development of the many-membered human being, the ‘I’ turns to an increasing opposition towards all forms of what has come into being in man, of non-individualized soul-spiritual nature, and also (more especially) towards the material support of the spirit, the human nervous system. Once the ‘I’ has begun to think, it is obliged, for the sake of its realization, to negate matter. God Himself bears witness to the fact that this process is objective, on the scale of the entire macrocosm. After He had revealed Himself in a human body, He rose in opposition towards everything in the human being that has a group character and does not wish to metamorphose itself in an upward direction. He said that the lower ‘I’ would become a hindrance to evolution if it were not willing to change its way of perceiving and knowing the world – for the sake of which it would need to metamorphose itself into a higher ‘I’. The following quotes from the Gospel bear witness to this: “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross (the cross of evolution – G.A.B.) and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it” (Matth. 16, 24-25). “Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees!” (Matth. 16, 11). “But many that are first shall be last; and the last shall be first” (Matth. 19, 30). “And from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force” (Matth. 11, 12). Thus speaks the Christ – even more decisively: “I came not to send peace, but a sword” (Matth. 11, 12) – the “sword” of evolution, not of revolution, under the conditions of an unprecedented shift of priorities in development.

From the standpoint of tasks of development already indicated in the New Testament a fundamental contradiction arises in it within the realm of otherness-of-being, between the ‘I’ and the world. And therein lies the essential core of dualism. From now on, all that individualizes itself will come into an unavoidable and growing contradiction with all the forms of being that have arisen, in order to transform them into living spirit – into pure consciousness. This is also what the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’ is telling us. The individual ‘I’ experiences itself on the path to freedom as an antithesis to the world that has arisen – ultimately, indeed, to the entire Manvantara. It attains synthesis in the deeds of the higher consciousness, in beholding, in new imaginations. Thanks to these it returns to the Father-ground of the world; this is why Christ is so insistent in his attempt to explain to the people that he “goes to the Father”. Thus we come to an understanding of what is meant in spiritual science when it says that the concept of development itself is changing.

In Fig. 37 we have tried to reflect both of the aspects of dialectic we have discovered, which are conditioned by the change in the main direction of development. Each stage in the descent of the Logos into being gives rise in it to a continually increasing polarity within the unity. First of all, unity comes into contradiction with ‘becoming’; then a contradiction arises within ‘becoming’ itself. Every idea in the human being is a certain original unity. It stands in contradiction to the ‘thesis’ of the triune body of man. Thereupon, the idea-thesis begins to negate itself. The synthesis-judgement strives to overcome the shadow-existence and to become real being within the essential thought-nature of the ‘I’ (in der Ich-Gedankenwesenheit). These are the special features of the evolution of the individual spirit, which are conditioned by the transformation of the tendencies in the development of the universe which are centrifugal relative to the spiritual centre of the world, into those with a centripetal tendency.

8. The Structure of Seven-Membered Thinking

In the course of the present considerations we have used the concept of ‘being’ in a double sense. In the first place, we mean by ‘being’ the entire manifoldness of form-conditions. And, secondly, it is the life with which ‘being’ fills its own forms. On a higher level that ‘being’ is consciousness, which determines the being of the forms. Life is the revelation of consciousness. In this way, the structure of the world-edifice stands before us as 1. ‘being’ of the forms; 2. being of being – i.e. life; and 3. consciousness of the life of the forms. When we say of thinking consciousness that it is void of ‘being’, then we are referring to its forms which possess no life (corresponding to the mineral realm in nature); that is to say, the abstract forms of thinking, which are dead, but, logically speaking, can be traced out with ‘crystallographic’ rigour. This is, in the language of the Gospels, ‘the last’ which, in losing the life in its forms, becomes the ‘first’, because it stands closest to pure consciousness, to pure spirit. The ‘becoming’ of the forms, including those of consciousness, is an evolutionary process. The forms of pure consciousness in the individual spirit represent a synthesis of evolution and primal revelation. The past evolution in them is cancelled and preserved (aufgehoben), and this made possible the phenomenon of the ‘I’. The personification of revelation in the pure consciousness of the ‘I’ confronts the thinking subject with the necessity to overcome (aufhe- ben) the lower, involutive ‘I’. Then the higher ‘I’ can begin its evolution in the individual. This kind of overcoming or cancellation (Aufhe-bung) is the new element of individualization to which we are led by dialectics when we overcome (aufheben) its triads together with the thinking – and also the perceiving – subject. This is the fourth element (following upon the three dialectical elements) of the metamorphosis of the individual spirit. It is in this element that the capacity emerges of ontologized gnoseology (epistemology) to approach the threshold of the spirit world.

The overcoming (Aufhebung) of the thinking subject is the beginning of ideal beholding. It can only be achieved if there is sufficient strength of pure thinking in the ‘I’, which in this case is no longer a lower, but nor is it yet a higher, ‘I’. The lower ‘I’ is filled with thoughts whose ‘facets’ and forms are created by the laws of logic. The process of pure thinking is grounded in the will-principle of the ‘I’. The overcoming of the subject, of the ‘I’, in the fourth element of the metamorphosis of the spirit is conditional upon the capacity of the thinking subject to maintain him/itself within the pure element of the will. This shows itself to be the higher consciousness, the consciousness before the forms. But as it is revealed, not before the beginning of the world, but in the Manvantara, it is identical with life. This is the true meaning of the word of Christ: “I and the Father are one.” It means that the human being in this stage of consciousness comes close to the World-‘I’. If it is greatly intensified it is able to lead the human being up to the level of Nirvana, the first stage of the great Pralaya. Admittedly, the way to this goal is extremely long, but already of value for the human being is the first contact with it, the contact with a world that conditions itself and everything else, a world in which being can tread this path in full harmony with the new task of world-development. On the path that leads from the spirit into matter, the human being moved from the perceiving consciousness with a pictorial, group character, to self-consciousness. In the pictorial (mythological) conscious there was much of a supersensible, imaginative nature. It is the task of the human being to return to this anew, but to maintain his individual ‘I’-consciousness and raise it to a beholding of the ideas.

When we turn towards the ideal beholding of the idea*, this means the ascent to a new stage of evolution in which liberation begins from the fourth globe of being. In order to fulfill this task we must first grasp it in knowledge; but to know in the spiritual-scientific sense means to discover the seven-membered character of the object of knowledge. What we have found as the four elements of the new technique of thinking is the last individualized expression of the first four aeons and of the first four elements of the sevenfold human being. This question has already been dealt with in our book. It is quite clear that the holistic structure of the new way of thinking must anticipate the three future aeons and the three elements of the individual spirit – Manas, Buddhi and Atma. In this way the human being, through thinking not in a tri-une but in a seven-membered wholeness, begins to realize within himself the totality of the evolutionary cycle. This is the new path to Nirvana.

*Here one can speak of pure sense-activity, in which everything is set aside (aufgehoben) that fills sense-perception with content.
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We bring the three bodies with us from the past. The triune spirit wafts towards and around us from the future. Between the body and the spirit there takes place the becoming of the ‘I’. This is the principle of transformation through which in the course of time the three bodies are metamorphosed into the three spirits. As an intermediary stage or connecting link in this process the triune soul is developed. It builds itself up in the form of a triune sheath of the ‘I’. The process of transformation of the bodies has, in the soul, an ethical and aesthetic character. Thinking consciousness strengthens and, most importantly, individualizes this process, removing its phylogenetic group character, and this is of course bound up with a risk, connected with the freedom of choice between good and evil, which arises unavoidably in this case.

In his transition from reflection to beholding, the human being eliminates the processes in the brain and begins to experience his thoughts in the etheric body. Then thinking identifies in an essential way with ethics and aesthetics. The ideas now bring to the human being moral motives. These ideas are the same as those which revealed themselves to us in the form of mirror-reflections, but now they reveal their imaginative and even intuitive nature. It is only the method of our thinking that must change – not its object. Rudolf Steiner says: “No-one could think abstractly and have real thoughts and ideas if he were not clairvoyant, for, from the very beginning, there lies within ordinary thoughts and ideas the pearl of clairvoyance ... one must only grasp the supersensible nature of concepts and ideas.... O man! – have the courage to regard your concepts and ideas as the first beginnings of your clairvoyance” (GA 146, 29.5.1913). We would add to this the following: And you will lay the foundation-stone of the transformation of your way (method) of thinking and, what is more, the transformation of the meaning, of the way you perceive and understand the world; you will change the very character of your consciousness. You will become a Christian in the true sense of the word and will, as Christ foretold, worship God in spirit and in truth.

What Rudolf Steiner advises us to do, this, the classicists of philosophy tried to realize. But they had no idea of how it is possible to change one’s way of thinking. Goethe, however, was aware of this possibility. He brought his consciousness, which was directed towards knowledge of the plant-world, to silence, and made it empty. This silence lasted for a number of years, thereby making it possible for Goethe’s instrument of thinking to metamorphose into the instrument for ideal perception. This brought him to direct cognition of the idea of the archetypal plant. In ‘The Riddles of Philosophy’ Rudolf Steiner says: “In the archetypal plant (Urpflanze), Goethe had taken hold of an idea which enables one ‘to invent plants ad infinitum’ .... He is therefore on the way to finding within his self-conscious ‘I’, not just the idea that can be perceived, that can be thought, but the living idea. The self-conscious ‘I’ experiences within itself a realm which can be recognized as belonging both to itself and to the outer world, because the forms that it contains show themselves to be reflected images (Abbilder) of the creative powers. Thus, for the self-conscious ‘I’, that element has been found which allows its character as a real being to shine forth. Goethe has developed a pictorial conception (Vorstellung) through which the self-conscious ‘I’ can feel itself filled with life, because it feels as one with the creative beings of nature. The world-views of more recent times attempted to come to terms with the riddle of the self-conscious ‘I’; Goethe places into this ‘I’ the living idea; and with this life-force weaving and working within it, this ‘I’ itself is seen to be a living reality” (GA 18, p.107, 1924 edition).

In the power of ‘beholding’ within Goethe’s consciousness the pure percept was transformed into pure concept. They discovered their identity, and thus the abyss that lies between perceiving and thinking, between the ‘I’ and the world, was overcome. The universal ‘shift’ (Wendung) in world-development means the transition in the human being from reflection to beholding. As we showed in Fig. 37, reflective thinking is centrifugal in relation to matter, and centripetal in relation to the spiritual centre of the world. Thus, at the periphery of being there is nothing to hold reflection fast, apart from the thinking ‘I’. One needs only to set aside the ‘I’ (aufheben), and straight away the higher ‘I’ of the human being begins to reveal itself and unfold its activity. And if the question is asked: What in this case is the position of the natural kingdoms? – then the answer is, that they are still on the way to the periphery. So far as concerns their group-‘I’s, these stand higher than the human being, but in order to attain self-consciousness in otherness-of-being, they too must descend into its nothingness. They follow the human being; but he it is, who opens the gateway for otherness-of-being into the second half of the evolutionary cycle. We have already spoken of the fact that the ‘Fall’ into sin in Paradise was a radical transformation of the evolutive-involutive process in man. The possibility opened up for him, to unfold an activity of his own in his own soul-spiritual world, to live through an individual evolution and thereby create a new, fifth realm of being – the ‘kingdom’ of human relationships, culture, civilization. As he travels this path, he begins (still by virtue of the lower ‘I’) to subjectivize the universal human ‘I’, to become ‘a species in his own right’, and he begins to show, in the phenomenon of his individual spirit, features of the universal man (Allmensch), of the new Adam who is able, from within himself, to determine the course of further evolution. This view of the calling of the human being should not be regarded as an exaggeration, if only for the reason that the abstract-conceptual boundary of the universe which passes through his spirit is ultimately a form of manifestation of the Holy Spirit, the aim of which it is to return to the Father His first revelation, to reflect it back to Him. At least at the periphery of the universal edifice, the human being becomes the most important active helper of the Gods. Not in a spirit of pride, but of humility and insight, Angelus Silesius writes in his ‘Cherubinischer Wandersmann’: “God cannot without me create one tiny worm: it would fall apart at once, if I did not help Him to sustain it.” To sustain it together with God can, however, only be done in the way we have described, of which the Apostle Paul was the first to speak: and Angelus Silesius continues as follows: “The more my ‘I’ in me declines and wilts away, the more the ‘I’ of God grows stronger and prevails.” This means nothing other than the setting aside (Aufhebung) of the subject in the ascent to beholding. It is achieved on the basis of love for the object of cognition, a love that is so strong that the cognizing subject (the ‘I’) renounces itself and is joined together with it to form a single, unitary being. Angelus Silesius knew of this, too, and he expressed it in poetical form (for this is, as with Goethe, a poetical, but also a profoundly religious, science) in the amazing words: “More than He loves Himself, God loveth me: if I love Him more than I love myself: then I give Him as much, as from Himself He gives to me.” One is forced to admit that the boldness of thought of this German mystic outstrips that of many a religious believer today, just as the boldness of Rudolf Steiner exceeds that of contemporary scholars. But what stands before us is simply an objective process of world culture, of the phenomenology of the world-spirit in the human spirit and of the human spirit in the world-spirit. Anthroposophy lent to it an all-embracing, synthetic expression. In it, the Aristotelian entelechy reveals itself as the ‘ur’-phenomenon of the human being, and the fruits of the combined work of the intellect and the heart accomplished by the medieval mystics are organically assimilated into its doctrine of evolution, in which there is also room for the theories of Darwin and Haeckel, etc. But all this is merely one side of Anthroposophy. Its absolute novelty consists in the fact that it has, figuratively speaking, brought about a ‘mutation of species’ in the principles of cognition.

In Fig. 33 we showed, and explained with the help of statements of Rudolf Steiner, that the Earth aeon constitutes the central element of the all-embracing world metamorphosis, in the course of which the tri- une body of the human being is transformed by the ‘I’ into the triune spirit. This is a spiritual and a life process. According to the laws of its sevenfold structure, human consciousness also undergoes metamorphosis. In organic nature, the law of metamorphosis is rooted in the seven-membered structure of world-consciousness. In the new thinking of man, which Rudolf Steiner speaks of as ‘morphological’, the law re- ferred to attains its purely spiritual expression, in that it leads the life-principle onto a higher level. While in the process of transformation into beholding, this thinking remains at first conceptual, but nevertheless moves in accordance with the developmental laws of organic nature. This is why it, too, can be called morphological. Its first three stages are dialectical. At the fourth the superseding of reflection or, to be more precise, of the reflecting subject takes place (see Fig. 38). For the ordinary human being this stage is both new and difficult to attain. When it has been achieved, we do not think, but we still remain within the thought-element. We renounce all thoughts, judgements, logical conclusions. All that remains within us is an effort of thought, which was developed in the crystallizing-out of the dialectical triad, and a certain disposedness to behold that content which was contained in the thesis, passed through the process of negation and was resurrected in a new form in the synthesis. As it is far from simple to enter deeply into true beholding, let us, for the present, carry out an exercise which involves leading the content of the triad through a thinking process, which is nevertheless passive, and in the course of which we will endeavour to unite ourselves, to identify, with the world of ideas which belongs to and is related to it. Here one can take as one’s material the history of this question, for example, or parallels, analogies, opinions of whatever kind. And thus we are learning how to pass through a fourth stage by working with the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’. When Goethe was applying his method of beholding to the plants, he did not at the same time look at the minerals, for example, and besides, he was very well aware of all that was known to the botanists of that time. When he was looking at different species and forms of plants he refrained from making any thought-judgement about them. We must do the same when we are considering a thought-content. We remain intellectually passive, dispassionate, and wait to see what can come towards us from a certain ‘other’ side. When we work in this way, the idea must come like a flash of illumination. And by virtue of one’s original disposedness, this ‘illumination’ must bring, again, an element of synthesis, though on a higher level. The process gone through on the fourth level is identical with the experience of observation. It consists in the act of ideal perception, to which the ideal, essential core of the object under examination must reveal itself on a higher level than its manifestation as concept in the element of synthesis. This is an a posteriori, not, however of the analytical, but of the pure judgement that is given to that pure sense-faculty of which Kant speaks and which bears no relation to our perception with the senses.

We set up conditions under which we will ‘behold’ the content of the synthesis. Like the object of a laboratory experiment, we subject this content to conditions under which it can reveal its secret more readily and quickly than is the case with analytical, logical thinking. And when the idea appears, this is already the fifth stage, the fifth element of that new logical cycle in which we are striving to ascend from reflection to the supersensible perception of the ideas. The five-membered structure that emerges is a wholeness in itself, within which the dialectical elements have a new character and are differently determined. It represents a holistic, though not complete, manifestation of the ‘ur’-phenomenon, which meets the criterion of the task we have set ourselves (Fig. 32). At the fourth stage we refrain from bringing into movement the will which we have developed in the three previous stages. It is already in us: the will in the thinking – and it frees itself. Then a new orientation of its activity begins. In pure activity that is, initially, in thinking, but which becomes, in time, an exertion of the intellect that is free of all content, the will begins to transform the organ of thinking into an organ of ideal perception.*  Quick results, we repeat, can be expected by no-one, since the process that unfolds within us in this way is of an evolutionary nature. And this process is – as the first in the history of our development – brought about solely through our own efforts. Here, nature can no longer help us.

 * This alters the course of all deeper processes in the many-membered being of man, but this will be discussed later on.
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It is important to realize that the metamorphosis in question (one can justifiably call it a mutation of the whole human being) does not take place in the course of special occult practice – meditation etc. We remain within the sphere of the object-oriented consciousness and we fulfil a gnoseological (epistemological) task, but within the structure of the whole human being. In this way, we make accessible to many people the principle of initiation which used invariably to be secret; that is to say, we make it into a contemporary principle of cultural life, and we show also the decisive significance that it has for any future development. This step became possible thanks to the fact that over the course of the last two to three centuries self-consciousness has grown to an unusual degree in the civilized part of humanity. For the latter, the metamorphosis of thinking consciousness described by Anthroposophy became an inevitable factor of development – one that will, if we begin to realize it, lead civilization harmoniously across the threshold of the supersensible world. Many symptoms indicate that it has already come close to this threshold. For example, it would be mistaken to think that the present spiritual crisis has called forth the unheard-of growth of parapsychology that could be observed in the second half of the 20th century, but that this crisis will pass and everything will return to good old materialism. No, such a return will never happen. In all spheres of science the question that will continue to dominate increasingly, will be that concerning the possibility of the transformation of consciousness which leads us beyond the limits of the reality given to us by means of the five senses. But disaster awaits civilization if it answers this question materialistically and not by way of the theory of knowledge and the methodology of science. This would threaten it with a more dangerous decline than the one it has suffered through the propaganda of immorality and anti-aestheticism. The degradation that is likely to follow will resemble the sickness of a person who has renounced logic and turned to hallucinations.

The transformation of consciousness is only possible if one has qualitatively altered thinking in the sole permissible way: through bringing into it, from the strengthened ‘I’, the element of will. This will endows our spirit with the highest accomplishments of the soul, which consist in the ennobling of the lower sense-perceptions and the development of the higher sense-perceptions, right up to ideal perception. This involves extinguishing in one’s thinking everything of a sensual, passionate nature that excites the reflection in a way that cannot be controlled by the ‘I’. In the depths of the organism the process in the blood which accompanies the thought-process must be separated from the process in the nerve. Then beholding arises. It need hardly be said that it is easier for a morally and spiritually strong person to carry out this procedure than for one burdened with cravings and desires.

When the ‘I’ turns to the activity of beholding, the brain continues to reflect, but stops actively thinking-through, and the will of the ‘I’ which works in the blood is not aroused. It begins in a certain way to reunite with the being of thinking, which also has a will-nature, but merely casts its shadow in our conceptual field. In its new relation to the ‘I’, this being shows itself within the element of pure will, as it does in the case of strokes of genius, where we say that ‘intuition’ has been at work.

The thought-being revealed in this way is not simply a judgement a posteriori. It is also an idea ‘before the things’, which has made its appearance ‘after the things’, and this is why the disposing of beholding towards a definite content was necessary. Even in its appearance this idea is real for the reasoning faculty, and it strives, therefore, in this new condition, to acquire individualized being. This is the sixth element of the seven-membered cycle of morphological thinking, or of the logic of thinking in beholding: the individualizing of the idea. The cycle is completed with the return of the idea with which it began, to all- unity, to the extent that the given framework will allow. This is the concluding, seventh element, or the seventh stage* (Fig. 38).

* A more detailed discussion of this theme can be found in Chaps. II-IV of ‘Das Mysterium Anthroposophie’ by G.A.B. (not yet translated).
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As can be seen in the diagram, the system of seven-membered thinking is inwardly organized with great exactness. It is considerably reinforced by the principle of tri-unity which pervades it; from this it proceeds, and to this it returns. The dialectical triad within it shows itself to be a threefold triune metamorphosis. In a certain sense this is the world’s past: the world that has become, and is given in mirror-reflected form. With abstract thought one can only think-through what has become, and this is why Kant came to the cardinal question: Are synthetic judgements a priori possible? The three-membered metamorphosis which has its centre in the fourth element (elements 3-4-5) reflects the moment of the present, in which past and future, mirror-reflection and ideal perception impinge upon one another in the manner of a contradiction. If we have to do in the first lemniscate (elements 1- 2-3) with the picture of the ‘I’, with ‘I’-consciousness, then in the second (elements 3-4-5) we have to do with the pure actuality of the higher ‘I’, which is so powerful in its effect that it can even change the structure of the brain and bring its etheric body into a freer relation to it. Finally, the third lemniscate (elements 5-6-7) leads to a unity the triad of our future thinking, in which consciousness acquires real life.*

Thus the whole seven-membered cycle of thinking (the large lemniscate drawn with a dotted line in Fig. 38b) forms a great triad (its parts: I, II, III), in which the ‘I’ which thinks according to the new law, experiences itself within the (similarly dialectical) unity of the gnoseological and ontological principle of consciousness.

One day the human being will think in a sevenfold way just as naturally as he thinks today in a threefold way – dialectically. In this thinking the ‘ur’-phenomenal foundations of the world will reveal themselves to him directly. And he himself will begin in cognition to create new laws of being. But before he reaches such a stage of development, he must practise in the way described here: to remain fully and entirely in the ‘here and now’, in the conceptual and logical element and merely to extend the limits of the latter. In this case the thesis, which has passed through negation and has been resurrected in the synthesis, undergoes cancellation and preservation (Aufhebung) once more, after which it shows itself in its ‘ur’-phenomenal form in the fifth stage of the cycle. This is an enormously important moment for the unfolding of new, free imaginations, in which the human being will think in a super-individual way. The old imaginations came to him of themselves, just like the percepts of today. They were not guided and they were immanent to the group-consciousness.

The thinking that moves according to the laws of seven-membered logic transforms the temporal process into a two-dimensional space, which is normally a quality of the imaginative world. The activity of the ‘I’ in metamorphosing the thought-process forms, on the one hand, a certain ‘reflective surface’ in which the being of thought only reveals its shadow.*  On the other hand, this surface has a threshold character; it divides sense-perceptible from supersensible reality. On the ‘other’ side the thinking process follows the laws of the existence and development of living organisms. The spatial conditions of the three-dimensional world play no part here. As we see from Fig. 38, the completed thought-cycle extends from the element of beholding (the threshold surface) in both directions: into both its past and its future. Seen from a higher standpoint, they are only a momentary reality (in them the ‘melody’ has been changed into a ‘harmony’). But in the coming-into-being of this reality we have moved consciously from element 1 to element 7; on a super-conscious level, in the imaginative space, another series of metamorphoses unfolded: that of the 1st element to the 7th, of the 2nd to the 6th; of the 3rd to the 5th. Here, the movements on these lemniscates can be imagined travelling from left to right and also in the opposite direction.

* Interesting here is the reference to the picture of Plato’s ‘cave’, which 2000 years later becomes the ‘cave’ of Francis Bacon.
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These are the new phenomena which appear in the thinking-process when we penetrate behind the ‘mirror’ of reflective consciousness, though for the present we are still within the conceptual element and yet at the same time within the ‘I’, which brings to realization within itself world-monism, pan-monism. Thanks to this work of the ‘I’ (which is being done in the period of thinking-activity and of spiritual ontogenesis), the unity of the world stands before the human being in the form of the stages of his spiritual ascent, the stages of consciousness-being. This ascent is not without consequences for the manifested forms of the world.

The same can be said of the two dimensions of the new thinking. They correspond to the directions of the world cross and constitute jointly with it a single system. In it the lower levels are overlaid by the higher, the micro-elements by the macro-elements. The same applies to the connections between the elements. In the seven-membered system of the thought-cycle, the connections between its elements are the laws of their transformation, of their metamorphosis.

We said earlier that the higher spiritual activity moves, as the idea of the creation, from the future into the past. Conditional upon (condi- tioned by) this activity is the striving of the ideas, as they free themselves from the things, upwards towards self-existence within absolute truth. But as the idea is bound up with sense-reality, it is compelled to move from the past into the future, on the path of the evolution of species in order, in the human being, finally to free itself from this evolution and acquire self-existence.

Through the uniting of the two movements of the idea, there is also built up the whole sequence of stages of the thought-activity, which repeats on the micro-level the entire evolutionary cycle. The seven thought-forms of the cycle constitute a phenomenology of the spirit, which one can compare, in one’s own experience, with the seven Manvantaras. The connections between the elements of the thought-cycle bear in this case the character of micro-Pralayas, since the metamorphosis of the elements means their exit onto the astral plane, after which they return to the world of phenomena. On the astral plane there merely takes place an exchange of the laws working between the ele- ments, but no alteration of them. Subject to the working of a new law, the element changes. Philosophers with a highly-developed ‘sense of thought’ (Gedankensinn) perceive this process of transformation within the limits of the dialectical triads. Hegel makes this quite clear in the following words: “When I think, I give up the particular nature of my subjective being, I enter deeply into the matter in hand, let thinking follow its own course; and I am thinking badly if I add to it anything of my own.”115)

The laws which call forth the dialectical metamorphosis of the idea are well-known. The thesis is united with the antithesis by negation; the antithesis is united with the synthesis by negation of the negation. Thus in the plant world the soil negates the seed, and when its negation is negated, a shoot is formed together with a root: the synthesis of the seed and the soil. But the reason for the rejection of the seed is that, contained within it in a cancelled and preserved state (aufgehoben), there is the ‘heaven’ of the past growth and ripening.

In order to be able to move on further, from reflection to beholding, it is absolutely necessary to develop, in addition to the sense of thought, the sense of the higher ‘I’. This is what preserves the subject of thinking when it carries out yet another negation: the negation of itself as an ‘I’ that thinks in concepts. Then, in pure sense activity, the higher ‘I’ appears. It provides lawful structure to the thinking process on the other side, when continuous creative activity is taking place. The Goethean ‘dying and becoming’ describes, in its extremely laconic form, the relations between elements 3, 4 and 5. Moved by the force of identification, synthesis, love, the thinking subject rises up from the fourth to the seventh element (Fig. 39).

If we think according to the laws of seven-membered logic, we create in each cycle on an astral level elementary thought-beings, and not shadows. These beings take on, if they are set firmly in the ether- substance, lasting existence and mediate our connection with the beings of the Cosmic Intelligence – i.e. the Hierarchies. The value for us of these elementary beings consists in the fact that, with them, the form- ing, the creation of our micro-universe begins, in whose centre we ourselves stand; we are its creators when we think according to the laws of imaginative logic, even if, of course, the world of our thought-beings will, for a long time to come, remain subject to the process of coming into being and passing away, as the strength of our working can scarcely reach the astral level of the fifth globe, to which at some point in the future, through a process of spiritualization, all sense-perceptible being will rise. But the time will come when, through our thinking, we will even be able to enter into communion with the higher Devachan. The great Initiates already have this capacity.

The thought-being created by us is seven-membered. As it is unitary in nature, it can be expressed with the help of the symbol of a heptagram. This is also the nature of the evolving human being. When he thinks according to the laws of imaginative logic (of ‘beholding’ thinking), the human being attains in its sevenfoldness an intermediate stage of being, in which he can grasp everything in consciousness, but does not yet realize within himself the stages of supersensible consciousness. They form above the sevenfoldness of thinking their fivefoldness (because the human being between death and a new birth and also in initiation ascends and descends on three levels of the higher world, maintaining his macrocosmic self-identity as he does so. Thus we arrive at the twelvefoldness of spiritual man, who is a true micro-anthropos – a lesser image of the great world, and at the same time a kind of “‘ur’- phenomenon in reverse”, as we can see from Fig. 40. The introduction of such a concept into the methodology of spiritual science accords fully with law and is indispensable if we wish to understand what constitutes the individual evolution of the human spirit.

Manifested evolution in its entirety has its ‘ur’-phenomenology. The same is true of the human being. His ‘ur’-phenomenal twelvefoldness, represented in Fig. 40, has absorbed into itself the totality of the three stages of world-consciousness, of which we already spoke in connection with Fig. 18. Out of them unfolds the development, as we know, of all the conditions of life (rounds) and form (globes). In the human being and through him the twelvefoldness of the three stages of world-consciousness returns to its purely spiritual forms in that it makes up the stages of the spiritual ascent of the human ‘I’. A time will come when this ‘I’ will begin to create its life and form conditions independently. They will be simultaneously those of the world and those of the ‘I’ itself. But at the present time the human being has reached a point where, directly and individually, he has entered into a connection with his ‘ur’-phenomenon. His consciousness on a conscious-superconscious level is structured by the three stages of world-consciousness in the way represented in Fig. 41, where the upper hemisphere of Fig. 40 projects itself, by virtue of spiritual ontogenesis, onto the lower. Then it is so, that behind elements 4 to 6 (as shown in Fig. 40), which the individual human being experiences in the second stage of world-consciousness (as shown in Fig. 18), there are working ‘ur’-phenomenally three sub-stages of the third stage of world-consciousness (subconsciousness). Their interrelation is objectified in world-evolution in the form of its descent to the etheric-physical plane through the first three globes (Fig. 41). Behind elements 8 to 10 (see Fig. 40) these sub-stages are arranged in the reverse order: 11, 12, 1, which corresponds to the ascent of evolution on the three future stages of the form-conditions (Fig. 41).

All of the mutual connections shown in Figs. 40 and 41 are present as realities within the human being and create the conditions for the regular (i.e. in harmony with objective law) ascent of his ‘I’- consciousness to higher states. Here the universe imprints its most sublime laws upon all its lower levels and stages of development. The individual spiritual ascent through these stages can be known in advance, because it repeats, albeit in a different form, the past descent of the all-encompassing process of world evolution. The path of the human being to the higher spirit is not simple – here, both time and the will to develop are needed. But in order to have this will, one must first know the web of world-embracing connections and laws into which man’s being is woven. And he is woven into them not merely through the conceptual weaving of his intellect, but also in reality, so that already at the present stage of development all his soul-spiritual movements and processes find their echo in the being of the very highest levels of the edifice of the universe. Hence, there are very strong reasons why the human being should be self-conscious and moral.

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Only if we turn to the great universal relationships are we able to understand the essential nature of the human spirit. Such an understanding has now become a precondition for its further development. If the human being can summon the strength to master a new spiritual faculty – the power of judgement in beholding – he brings renewal to himself, and also to culture as a whole. Rudolf Steiner wrote the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’ as a collection of those exercises through which the reader, in carrying them out, can succeed on his evolutionary path in the sense of the task that lies before him, and can become the creator of a new culture. The investigations conducted above have the aim of laying the ground for the necessary understanding of the nature and character of work with the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’. Decisive in this work is the ability to stand entirely on one’s own ground, which is not possible without mastery of the methodology of spiritual science. And one can only master it if one combines the knowledge (science) of freedom with its realization in practice.

If we work with the seven-membered cycles of thinking in which the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’ is written, and if we try to experience them as we go along, then, as it were according to the principle of induction, we transform our thinking spirit into one that ‘beholds’. So far as is possible, a perfect grasp of all the elements, connections and nuances of the present work should lie at the basis of this experiential approach. We will therefore continue our research into methodology, parallel to the analysis of the structure of the thinking-process whose fruit was the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’. The three chapters which the reader has already gone through are no more than a preparation for practical work with the text of the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’. From this point onwards we will present our further chapters alternately with the analy- sis of the structure of the thought-cycles of the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’. This will enable the methodological considerations to fulfil their practical purpose, and it will make understandable the essential aim of the practical exercises in which, together with the reader, we wish not merely to take note intellectually of the thought-cycles, but work through them in living experience.

The methodology of Anthroposophy can only become a living content of the human spirit if it is taken up into his purely individual spiritual ‘inheritance’ – that is to say, into his karma and into the sequence of his further earthly incarnations. Rudolf Steiner says: “Pure law is the law of the cosmos, and pure human law, pure human spirit, is one day to become the destiny of the human being” (GA 88, 21.12.1903).