Bondarev-Philosophy_Freedom_Vol_2

1. From Natural Man to Rational Man

In his movement from the centre of the world to its periphery, the human being undergoes a great number of metamorphoses. From the standpoint of the complex of problems resolved in our book, these metamorphoses can be divided into two groups. The first group consists of those in which the human monad develops as the object of Divine creation or of a purely natural process, and the second, of those that are directly bound up with the evolution of ‘I’-consciousness. This second group must be of special interest to us, for only here is the human being as such crystallized out – i.e. as a personality and as an object of interpersonal relationships. Within this group there are primary and secondary metamorphoses. The three most important are those to which we owe the development of our individual life of soul and spirit. Before they occurred the human being existed in a semi-animal stage of development and led an instinctive life, albeit one that was illumined by mighty supersensible experiences. Of decisive importance for the evolution of man into a rational being was the upright posture. Thanks to this he was able to develop organs of speech and thus lay the foundation for the emergence of thinking.

Less noticeable externally was the second metamorphosis, thanks to which, at the beginning of our (Christian) era, the human being acquired the ability to think conceptually. Still less tangibly there has been taking place in the course of the last two centuries the third metamorphosis, which is changing the human being as a species. This enables him to move from thinking in concepts, an activity in which the physical brain is involved, to thinking with the etheric brain, whereby he is brought into a conscious connection with the spiritual world. We have already studied the last two metamorphoses provisionally, from the standpoint of the cultural-historical process (see chapter III, Fig.5). Let us now try to extend, so to speak, the “scope” of our discussion, as this will enable us to recognize within the system of the great world-periods and relationships the stages that are decisive for the development of the human race, and in this way to grasp the macrocosmic significance of the tasks confronting the human being in our time.

In the course of the entire foregoing period evolution proceeded in such a way that one could say of it: There was in it a multiplicity contained within the unitary being of the universe. But this situation began to change from the moment when the individual ‘I’ arose in the human being. Through the fact of its emergence the unity of the world was, so one could say, thrown into question – not in an absolute, but in a quite real sense. Because the human being did not understand this fact, he began to act irresponsibly in relation to development, thereby unleashing a colossal crisis. And the reason why he does not understand it is that he narrowed down his view of the world to the primary qualities.

From Rudolf Steiner’s ‘Outline of Occult Science’ one learns that the fourth, etheric-physical form condition (Globe), the stage now reached by the world evolutionary process, consists of seven periods, known in esotericism as the seven root-races. In the third of these – called the Lemurian root-race – a division took place for the first time in the development of the human kingdom. At that time the development of the triune bodily nature of the human being remained closely connected with all the world-processes, but parallel to this the individualizing life of soul and spirit began to crystallize out of it on a substantial level. This occurred through a series of metamorphoses, the laws of which represented a particular modification of universal law. And development proceeded in such a way that these two kinds of lawful structure came to form an opposition to one another. What had once been a relation between the objects gave way to opposition and negation.

The beginning of division in the world came about through what we call the expulsion of man from Paradise. Behind this Biblical myth there stand real processes of evolution, in which the factor of predestination is replaced by that of natural development. Before the Earthly aeon acquired material density, predestination came to expression in the purely spiritual working of the Hierarchical beings (cosmic Intelligences). After the descent of being into the etheric-physical Globe the spiritual workings of Hierarchies become immanent within nature; here, predestination takes on the form of the immutable working of natural law. The modifications (sub-species, species etc.), the new forms in nature arise thanks to the overlapping operation of different laws, each one of which remains, for itself, a constant of development.

When the human being learns to control the laws of his own soul-spiritual development, the original relation between the Creator and his creation is gradually restored, but in such a way that the creation takes upon itself some of the prerogatives of the Creator. In this phenomenon is contained the central riddle of man, which culminates in the question: By what factors is he conditioned in his ‘I’, and how is it possible for him to condition himself?

A spiritual-scientific, evolutionary consideration of this question leads us back to the middle of the Lemurian epoch, when the human monads were “driven” down from the astral to the etheric-physical plane. All that, in this process, was unable to keep pace with the rightful development of the creative spiritual impulses densified prematurely, calcified, came to a standstill on this or that level of development, formed an ever-growing antithesis to what was continuing to move forwards, served nevertheless as its basis and foundation; from which we may conclude that the fact of remaining behind also represents a form of sacrifice. And yet, in spite of this, the increasing antithesis finally assumed the character of an evolutionary crisis. This became especially acute towards the middle of the Atlantean root-race or epoch. At this time the life-condition (Round) and the form-condition (Globe) came into particularly sharp opposition to one an- other. The middle of the Atlantean epoch coincides with the middle of our entire evolutionary cycle. It is here that the descent of the spirit into matter, lasting three and a half aeons, comes to an end, and a re-ascent begins. This is the moment at which the general resurrection of the world begins, but also its dying. From this point onwards, inert mineral substance, which had separated itself off into an independent natural kingdom, begins to burden the etheric forces of the Earth through the formation of lifeless deposits. Two alternatives arise in the development of the world. One of them manifests in the tendency towards ever stronger mineralization and a fall away from the Divine, and the other in a tendency towards spiritualization. From then onwards both of these are working together in the world. That which unites them and leads them to a fruitful synthesis, is the human being. And, what is more, it is in this antithesis that the phenomenon of the self-conscious human being finds its first beginnings.

Before the world-encompassing crisis arose in the Atlantean epoch – it had already begun to emerge in the Lemurian epoch – we have before us a stream of development in which three kinds of substance are being formed: the physical, the etheric and the astral. Between them there arise extremely complex systems of reciprocal relations and influences, which lead to the formation of the kingdoms of being, of different kinds of beings. Amongst these, a dominant role is played by the human monads, which bring all three kinds of substance to a unity within themselves and lead the principle of their unity over from the supersensible realm to that side of being which is revealed to the senses.

Let us now picture to ourselves how this entire world-content in a colossal, unitary stream descends at an ever-growing tempo through a period of three and a half aeons, “slides downwards” as though on an inclined plane from the heights of the spirit to the nether regions of solid, materializing being. All the laws of the universe favour the unfolding of this process. One can imagine in the form of a gigantic panorama of the denial of spirit by the spirit, that which occurred in the past evolution of the world. To begin with, this process bore the character of enormous cosmic sacrifices, but little by little, with increasing densification, spirit assumes the qualities that contradict its nature: it becomes matter. The other part of the spirit, which merely determines the process in accordance with law, loses the ability to spiritualize physical-etheric being from within, so that this becomes lifeless in one of its parts. Moreover, physical-material being begins to subjugate a portion of the etheric forces; there emerge the “fallen” ethers so-called, which call forth in matter the phenomena of electricity, magnetism, radioactivity. There are signs that a portion of being will depart from the main path of evolution forever.

Parallel to the descending tendency and through the working of other laws there begins, at the lowest point reached by world-development in the middle of the Earthly aeon, a process of dissolution, of spiritualization of the coarse forms of being to fine, etheric-astral forms. Our thought is illustrated with the help of a diagram (Fig.75). The two spirals shown in it express the two alternatives of development described above. The two loops can, through following different paths, at the same time form a single, unitary lemniscate. They form this within the human spirit when it treads the path of individual development.

The whole of the future spiritualization of Earthly being comes, therefore, to depend upon this development: this, however, is defined by the human being’s transition to ‘beholding’ in thinking. The lemniscate shown in Fig.75 and the lemniscate of our cycle of thought are two sides – the macro and micro-cosmic – of one and the same phenomenon.

In the upper loop of the lemniscate there works that higher spiritual power which spiritualizes the aeons themselves, through leading the Manvantaras over into Pralaya. It comes to life also in the power of judgment in beholding. The lower loop of the lemniscate has its final expression in dialectical thinking. A certain kind of – Ahrimanic-Luciferic – negative spirituality surrounds it and underlines the tendency towards the passing over of the universe entirely onto the side of otherness-of-being.

Corresponding in real evolution to what is shown pictorially in Fig.75, are the processes which, in the course of the previous aeons, brought about a kind of “turning inside-out” of being onto the “other” side. This consisted in the fact that the physical substance, as it materialized, made the etheric and the astral substance subordinate to it, “drove” them into itself, so to speak, which is what still happens now in the kingdoms of nature. These bring to expression the levels of “inwardization” of the world-Spirit.

All that had happened through the course of the aeons was repeated in the first four root-races of the fourth Globe of the Earthly aeon. With the transition from the Lemurian to the Atlantean epoch, the world did, in fact, turn itself “inwards”. What in it was external became internal. Thus, with the help of pictures, one can imagine what is known in Sophiology as the immanence of God in the world.

From the Atlantean epoch onwards world-evolution can be divided into three streams. In one of them the tendency of a higher predestination of development is preserved, whereby the conservatism of the past comes to expression, the Luciferic principle; in another stream works the Ahrimanic principle, which leads the spirit down into matter and world thought down into abstraction. Essentially bound up with the third stream is the human being, who has the task of spiritualizing nature through individualization. He receives help from the Christ impulse in the fulfillment of this task.

The abstractly thinking human being subdues the life-forces, in that he exhausts them. In so doing, he lifts himself above matter in his astral body, but non-substantially. Nature also acts reflectively, through repelling the spirit and filling itself to the point of saturation with mineral substances. The “reflection” of the mineral kingdom comes to expression in radioactivity, which reduces various elements to the state of lead – the most inert of materials. It is not by chance that lead is associated in astrology with the planet Saturn which, within the Earthly aeon, represents in a certain sense the aeon of Old Saturn.

When, by means of ‘beholding’ in thinking, the human being leaves the physical body, he restores the mastery of it by the etheric and astral forces, leading not to the decay of matter, but to its spiritualization. To achieve this, the human being must make the laws of etheric (morphological) thinking immanent to logical thinking, and even to the whole of his triune bodily nature. The task is truly Divine in its scope, but from the “opposite side” it can be accomplished. God has made Himself immanent to the creation, in love and freedom, and in his All-consciousness and omnipotence; the human being ascends from the nothingness of being and consciousness to immanence in world-being – to immanence within ‘I’-consciousness. This is – we would stress yet again – the reason why Rudolf Steiner says: “To grow to awareness of the idea within reality is the true communion of man” (GA 1). Realization of this is an evolutionary task for the human being, which requires of him a new metamorphosis of his nature as a species.

If we evaluate the results arrived at in the previous chapter, we can form a more concrete idea of the way our new task in the cosmos can be fulfilled. The human being needs to bring about in himself a kind of circulation of his soul-spiritual life, which begins with perception. As a self-conscious being, man finds himself within two kinds of percept. One of them, sense-perceptions, come from outside (self-perception is in this sense also outward in nature), while the other comes from within, as thoughts, ideas which can be stirred to life thanks to the sense-perceptions. The activity of cognition consists in the uniting of the percepts with the concepts, which is carried out by the ‘I’. The ‘I’ forms the inner representations; they vary with respect to their scope, their depth, and the power of their synthesis. Percepts can be more direct or less so; they can have the character of conclusions, they can be metaphysical (the phenomena in the Wilsonian cloud chamber, molecular weights etc.). Correspondingly, the conceptual apparatus becomes infinitely complex (the physical phenomena of the micro-world, which exist only in the form of mathematical calculations). Nevertheless, only the lower level of consciousness is developed in this way (Fig. 76).

At the next, higher, stage thinking distances itself from the percepts, and takes on a purely conceptual character. It comes gradually to be determined by its own laws – logic. In this thinking, the thought also shows itself as a percept. At the next stage upwards the element of pure will begins to manifest in thinking – pure actuality. It acquires the faculty of ideal perception. Finally, the thinking subject moves across completely to activity of thinking with the etheric brain; the pictorial nature of supersensible ‘beholding’ is restored to it. Thinking becomes pure perception; its objects are now the beings of the intelligible world, who in a certain sense have the same substance as thinking itself.

The character of the imaginations received in this way is given via the world of sense-perceptions and of the thoughts about them. They also assume, as it were, an object-like character and represent – though qualitatively on a different level – the continuation of individual thinking activity; the role of the individual ‘I’ in its operation with them is not set aside, but enhanced. Thanks to the human being they unite, as ideal correspondences of the things, with that part of them which has, in the course of evolution, consolidated itself in the world of otherness-of-being. Thus there begins, thanks to the human being, that universal act whereby His primal revelation and the emanations of the will are directly mirrored back to the Father by the Holy Spirit. The human being attains, in this way, to the practical monism in which he experiences himself and the world as a unity and, through Christ, ascends to the experience of the principle “I and the Father are one”. One can picture the naïve monism of group-consciousness in the form of a circle. As he individualizes himself, the human being bends the circle into a lemniscate (Fig. 76). Thus one can imagine the burgeoning of the individual human within the universal, which takes place parallel to the descent of the spirit into matter, when an objective world-lemniscate is formed. As he is born in the monism of the higher ‘I’, man restores to his being a universal “circular” form – i.e. he leads the Manvantara over into the Great Pralaya.

2. Homa Erectus

We have described the positive results of the world crisis that occurred in the epoch of Old Lemuria. Its influence on man had, in this ancient period, the character of an evolution of species, then of soul phylogenesis, and finally of spiritual ontogenesis; these are shown in Figs. 75 and 76.

The descent of man into earthly being took place initially in the warmth-air atmosphere to which the Earth had been condensed; after this, water was formed. The thought-impulses of the hierarchical beings reaching the human being from without oriented the formation of the head in the direction from the Sun to the centre of the Earth. What later became the human organs of reproduction was at that time oriented towards the spiritual working of the Sun; fertilization took place in the highest purity and sanctity through the light, the cosmic harmonies. Something similar happens, still today, in the plant world.

In proportion as the working of the higher spirit in nature became more immanent, the human being acquired ever greater harmony and closed himself off from direct spiritual influence. The dipole of his head formation and sex organs took on a horizontal position; the spinal column with its “lotus flowers” began to form. Finally, the human being assumed again an upright posture, but this was the opposite of the one where he had descended to the Earth and been “cast out” of Paradise, and his autonomy grew even greater.

We read in Rudolf Steiner: “The three kingdoms of nature are represented pictorially by means of a cross. Plato says: The world-soul is crucified on the world-body” (GA 97, 16.2.1907). This is what we have shown in Fig. 75, namely, that man has passed through all three stages embodied in the natural kingdoms. They were all once in him, but little by little they have separated off from his macrocosmic being and remained behind, while he became a “living soul”. Up until the Lemurian epoch he was developing in the etheric-astral substance of the partially differentiated planetary system of that time, and as he did so he cast off all that had remained behind in the previous aeons and whose lot it was to materialize sooner than the human being. When man was driven out of Paradise, he was “cast down” “head first”, we are told, into the fine materiality of the Earth and became a plant-like being, thereby repeating the development that took place in the aeon of the Old Sun. He then repeated his Moon development, passed through the man-animal stage, and only entered the actual human stage when he turned his head-formation away from the Earth. Thus the working of the biogenetic law in its spiritual-scientific interpretation extended across the grandiose time-period of entire aeons.

In this way, the transformation of man to a being with upright gait (Homo erectus) was his first metamorphosis as a species, which laid the foundation for the evolution of actual earthly man. His head-formation was oriented in the direction of higher spiritual impulses, through whose special working the higher nervous system unfolded. In his Earth-oriented extremities was concentrated the working of the world-will, which had led to the emergence of the metabolic system, but also of the senses of life, of movement and of balance. In the middle, between the head structure and the metabolic-limb system, the rhythmic system of heart and lung began to develop, but also the soul-life of sensations, of the other sense-perceptions and of the feelings.

In esotericism the human being raising himself into an upright position out of the natural kingdoms is represented in the form of a pentagram. This is the form of his individualizing ether-body, the principle of life in man, which gives rise to his human physical form. As Rudolf Steiner explains, the pentagram – which is a symbol of the spiritual reality – also contains within it (or expresses) the three natural kingdoms, in the following way: The mineral kingdom (this stage was recapitulated by man in the warmth-air environment) is represented in the pentagram by one line \ ; the plant kingdom is represented by two lines X , as it has two bodies (a physical and an etheric body); the animal kingdom has a third, an astral body, and is represented in the pentagram by the figure. All the lines of the pentagram produce in their mutual relation a symbol of the developmental process, in which the principle of growth is characteristic of the ether body. This principle “would always add leaf to leaf in the plant form if it were not closed off by the astral coming towards it from above, which produces the blossom. The etheric principle has ... in the animals partially transformed itself, so that it exerts its forces more inwardly as a receiver of the astral body. The straight line of the etheric is closed off and bent downwards by a new line which represents symbolically the astral principle, and this new line bends down the physical principle on the other side. Therefore, the physical form, which is represented in the case of the plants by a vertical line, is in that of the animals bent around and has become horizontal. The animal can thus be, symbolically, indicated with the three lines; with the human being the ‘I’ is added to the three principles. One can represent this ‘I’ symbolically as a point above the three lines , which pours its forces into the etheric and physical bodies, through two lines that pass through the astral, working on the one hand by means of light and on the other by means of warmth. Through this working-in of the ‘I’ the human form is raised again into an upright line, and thus arises the symbol of the pentagram” (GA 265, p.414 f.).

In the supersensibly-beheld pentagram is revealed the stream of etheric world-forces that work in man. This stream enters the human being via the head and flows into the right leg, from there into the left hand, across into the right hand, into the left leg and back again to the head; or it joins the whole movement into a circle when the human being, through the development of certain qualities, brings the stream partially under conscious control.* This stream, which worked unconsciously from primeval times, enclosed through one of its parts the human being in the desire body (called ‘kama’ in the Indian terminology), through the second part it brought about the upright gait, through the third part it developed the larynx, through the fourth the centre in the forehead (the ‘I’-point) and self-consciousness. These four streams represent the four ethers (warmth, light-ether, etc.) which work in all etheric formations. A fifth, the thought-ether, is still in that stage of becoming which is determined by the work of the human being at the metamorphosis of his consciousness. The differentiation of the etheric stream in man has its source in the working of the ether-forces of the planets. The human being of the earthly aeon (Adam-Kadmon) emerged as a unitary planetary being. As he descended to Earth, he turned, as it were, “outside-in” and enclosed the working of the planetary system within himself, which comes to expression in the holistic nature of the forces that work in him in a pentagram form (the spatial position of the physical body is not relevant here).

* There are six such qualities. They are developed with the help of a complex of subsidiary exercises which are described by Rudolf Steiner. Cf. GA 42/245, p.15-21; GA 266/3, p.249-259; GA 266/1, p.102, 203, 406; GA 94, 30.5.1906.
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The working of the planets in man changes in the different epochs of his development. What is shown in Fig.77 corresponds to the present stage of development, which is oriented towards the future. Here, the spiritual working of the Sun is concentrated in the solar plexus; the reproductive forces, governed by Mars, work in the sphere of the life-processes. In the future, when man has acquired the capacity to create new life through the word, Mars will begin to work in the region of the larynx; then the thinking will become solar in nature etc. But in whatever way the planets may combine in their working in man, they always remain macro-principles, under which Saturn forms the physical foundation in the human being and engenders the life of the sense-perceptions in the lesser ‘I’; the Sun gives rise to unending growth, and to progress; the Moon the holding fast, delay, fixity; Mars, courage and aggressive entry into the life of the sense-organs (through its influence the red blood is formed); Mercury, liberation (salvation) of the soul, withdrawal from the sensuous life; Jupiter, liberation of the ‘I’; Venus, surrender in love, love for the deed (cf. GA 264, p.189 ff.). In this way, the reciprocal influence of organic and soul principles in man is brought about by the cosmos and has its root in the sphere of his life-forces.

In the man of today, when he is acting out of the lesser ‘I’, the forces of the Moon work in abstract thinking and imbue it with form. They embody there a modification of the forces of Old Saturn in the Earthly aeon, which comes to expression in the development of the physical brain. The brain is pervaded, through their working in the iron of the blood, by the forces of Mars, which gave their impulse to the development of the first half of the Earthly aeon. The situation here is that, through the working of the forces of Moon, Mars, and Saturn, man’s reflective thinking is brought about. These three planets express the working of the three preceding aeons, modified in the new aeon (Mars represents the Sun aeon).

When he rises to ‘beholding’ thinking, the human being provides room in his head for the working of Venus, but also of the Sun. This is why the Goetheanistic path of knowledge begins with love for the object of cognition, just as love for the deed is the precondition of freedom. With its working, Venus anticipates the coming-into-being of the individual life-spirit (Buddhi) in man. The Sun forms the centre of the planetary system in the sense that, through it, the etheric influences of the planets reach the human being. The cosmic stream emanating from it must encounter, at the least, an ordered thought-life that is subject to the control of the ‘I’. In addition, thinking must stop reflecting, in order not to weaken the etheric working of the planets on the human being. Thus we arrive at an understanding of a further aspect of the question why thinking can become the all-determining factor in the individual development of man, in its upward orientation towards the spirit.

3. The ‘Ur’-phenomenon of Man in Different Globes

We have already, in our earlier discussions, touched upon the subject of the pentagram. We spoke of it as a great ‘ur’-phenomenon of man, revealed in the sphere of the Divine Trinity, the Great Pralaya, as a kind of plan of the new world-system, which moves in its various parts from aeon to aeon (cf. Figs. 31, 40). The previous discussion allowed us to make more concrete this exalted conception, whereby we had to extend our understanding of the symbol as a definite supersensible reality, a form-principle that presents itself to man’s intellectual ‘beholding’. A relation to it based on the mere understanding faculty is not sufficient, because its quantitative side is, like any abstraction, no more than a shadow of its qualitative nature and existence. If we penetrate into the latter, we come into direct contact with the living reality of the spirit. For this reason in occult societies, before everything in them degenerated into empty abstractions, a reverential relation to symbols was cultivated. In the religious life of the Church the attempt is made, still today, to maintain a relation of this kind. When Anthroposophy interprets an esoteric content of symbols, it revives a true relation to them – on a purely individual basis, as it raises its cognition to the level of spiritual communion. To this end it must, of course, employ a complex methodology in which not only a widening of one’s mental horizon, but also an ennobling of the personality is demanded. A person who does not wish to grasp this will be inclined to accuse Rudolf Steiner of inconsistency, self-contradiction etc. Very often these accusations resemble the reproaches levelled by teenagers at their parents because they supposedly deceived them in their early childhood by telling them all kinds of ‘fairy tales’ about the mysteries of birth. And is not the Darwinist doing the same when, proud of his scientific knowledge, he ridicules the Biblical myth of the origin of man?

As a teaching for human beings who have become adult in every respect, Anthroposophy regards the secret of the origin of man as a Mystery. In it the use of pictures and symbols is a way of approaching Divine wisdom in order, at a later stage, to be able to enter fully into it. Viewed Anthroposophically, myth and symbol have manifold aspects and combine within them many different meanings. A critical relation to them can only consist in an uncovering of the absence of contradiction between all these meanings and aspects.

Anthroposophy contains a gigantic teaching of evolution, knowledge of which could in the past, for the purpose of education of the human race, only be expressed in mythological form for the broad masses of people. In the period of evolution that lies behind us (three-and-a-half aeons) only the foundation was prepared for the emergence of the human personality. The latter began to tread a path of its own from the moment when man assumed an upright posture. Thereby the foundation was already laid for the return of the human being to the spheres of spiritual being – or Paradise, to express it pictorially.

Anthroposophy recognizes the evolutionary theory advocated by Darwin and Haeckel, but only as a fragment, and a rather one-sided one at that, within the system of a universal doctrine of the evolution of the world and man, developed by it on a spiritual-scientific basis. The true story of the emergence of the human being is that told by Anthroposophy of the descent of the higher ‘ur’-phenomenon of man from the spirit into earthly being. Every single human being bears this “story” (history) in his super-conscious nature; it is written into the structure of his four-membered being, and into the structure of his physical organism. Through it are determined the laws of his spiritual growth, the laws of karma, reincarnation, among many others. At the present stage of development, human beings have matured to the point where they can grasp in concepts the (hi)story of their origin.

On its journey from the world of the Great Pralaya into the earthly aeon the human ‘ur’-phenomenon underwent numerous metamorphoses. Their beginning reaches back to that moment in development, when the hierarchy of the Cherubim received the “plan” of the world from the Seraphim – who can behold the Divine directly and had received this plan from the Divine Tri-unity –, whereupon they formed in the higher astral sphere the world-cross, the basis of the Zodiac.

Let us look somewhat more concretely at this initial period of evolution. The foundation of our evolutionary cycle is formed by two constellations of the Divine Tri-unity. They are both reflected in the Lord’s Prayer, the esoteric meaning of which is revealed by Rudolf Steiner (cf. GA 96, p.207). The absolute unity of the world, the unitary God, the ‘I’ of the world is expressed there in the words: “Our Father, which art in heaven” (Matth. 6, 9). Then follows the revelation of the unitary God in the three hypostases: “Hallowed be thy name; Thy kingdom come; Thy will be done.” Thus, God reveals Himself – as form, life, consciousness. Their sequence in the Lord’s Prayer is the opposite to that of evolution, because it is experienced by the human being who is ascending from Manas to Buddhi and Atma. The entire reciprocal relationship is shown in Fig.78. It corresponds to the revelation of the Trinity within itself, before the beginning of the evolutionary process, and was described by us in an earlier chapter. In this constellation the Father principle stands at the apex of the Tri-unity, which corresponds to the world of the enduring, of eternity.

In the second constellation the Trinity is shown in movement: the categories “relation”, “sacrifice”, “mirror-reflection” are joined by another: “movement”. This constellation occurs at the end of the Lord’s Prayer, where it leads the one who prays, on into his own individual evolution: “For thine is the kingdom (the Son), the power (the Father) and the glory (the Holy Spirit)” (cf. Figs. 24, 53). Here, it is the Son who appears at the apex of the Tri-unity, the second Logos. From the Father and the Spirit emanate two fundamental impulses of development. On their path into development they are mediated by the first Hierarchy. The Seraphim “enjoy the privilege of beholding God” through the Holy Spirit. He communicates to them the “plan” of the world, in which the will of God the Father works as the all-determining principle. This is the centre, the “point”, the “All in All” of the world in its duration, and the “circle” in its development – i.e. a precondition for the emergence of a multiplicity of new ‘I’-forms.

The Cherubim mediate within the “bounds” of the Divine will (power) – as we now have to do with the category of “limitation” of a non-spatial nature – the revelation of the Son and of the Spirit. As relation arose in the primal revelation thanks to these two hypostases, intrinsic to them is, to express it in terms of esoteric mathesis, a “linearity” in their working, a one-dimensional extension on the level of essential being. In the Son this has the character of life, and in the Spirit, that of form. In the human being, life and form become alive as feeling and the conceptual form of thinking. Through the power of form-creation which proceeds from the third Logos, there comes about within the circle of the Divine will a crossing – which later becomes a law of development – of the principles of the Son and the Spirit. A fourth principle emerges – the centre of the circle of will. Into them descends the universal world-‘I’. In the aeon of Earth this totality is given the form of the spiritual Zodiac (Fig.78).

The Zodiac is formed in Higher Devachan in the first globe, and from there it descends to the fourth, etheric-physical globe. In the spheres of the spirit it was beheld by John, the author of the Apocalypse. It was revealed to him as the ‘ur’-phenomenon of man, who is borne by four Seraphim and shows in the centre the Lamb of God and the book (see Fig.32). On the level of imagination, this ‘ur’- phenomenon is revealed to John in the third globe; in its picture form it has the following appearance: “And round about the throne, were four beasts full of eyes before and behind. And the first beast was like a lion, and the second beast like a calf, and the third beast had a face as a man, and the fourth beast was like a flying eagle.... And I beheld, and, lo, in the midst of the throne and of the four beasts... stood a Lamb.... And he came and took the book out of the right hand of him that sat upon the throne” (Rev. 4, 6-7; 5, 6-7).

What is shown in Fig.78 enables us to deepen our understanding of the driving forces of evolution. The change of “position” through the Divine Tri-unity acted as the condition for the movement of the all- determining forces of development. In its relation to evolution the Father principle, mediated by the hierarchy of the Seraphim, extends into the infinitude of development, but as it is modified by the working of the other hierarchies it forms a narrowing, descending spiral of development. Counter to this spiral a similar one arises, extending from the future into the past and also moving from above downwards – the creative power of formative activity emanating from the Holy Spirit (represented in the diagram by a dotted line). Both of these force-impulses (of the Father and the Spirit) constitute in the beginning the “circle” of creation, set boundaries to it (the seven aeons) and then strive, through being taken up by the working of the hierarchies, towards the boundary between two worlds. They intersect at every point of development where the spiritual substantial form assumes the tendency of moving across to the sensory side of being. To prevent these forms from rigidifying for ever, the impulse of the Son enters the crossing-point of the impulses of the Father and the Spirit. He it is, also, who is seen by John at the boundary between two worlds. But the activity of the Father and the Spirit manifests in the fourfold phenomenon of man. Its unity is the fourth member, the Pauline “not I, but Christ in me”. In the cycle of thinking we experience it in the element of beholding.

Thus at the beginning of the earthly aeon, but also at the beginning of each round – as these are also separated by (albeit lesser) Pralaya – in Higher Devachan and emanating from the Divine Tri-unity, the ‘ur’- phenomenon of man is revealed as the totality of the Divine will, Divine Feeling, Divine thinking and the revelation of the world-‘I’. The Seraphim receive it from God, the Cherubim endow it with a fourfold character. This is why the Seraphim are “six-winged” and the Cherubim “four-winged”. With the formation of otherness-of-being emerges the dualism of creator and creation. Standing over against the higher Tri-unity, as it were, is the lower tri-unity (this is yet another category – that of “contrast”, which is derived from “relation” and “position”). This lower tri-unity consists of body, soul and spirit or, in another sense, of the three bodies, or also of thought, feeling and will. The union of the tri-unities takes place in the “chalice” of evolution. They themselves form the hexagram, described by Rudolf Steiner as the symbol of the Grail. This is present within the chalice of evolution as the sanctissimus of evolution, as its principle. The cup of the Last Supper is a reminiscence of it. We would not be mistaken to say that the symbol of the Grail is a unitary image: the chalice of evolution and the twofold triad by which it is conditioned (Fig.79).

The higher Divine power of this principle is the Trinity; “the power in human beings” begins with the tri-unity of thinking, feeling and willing, which can reach into the sphere of the first Hierarchy, as was

shown in Fig.78. Another expression of the tri-une power of the human being is the 3 axes (surfaces) of the system of Cartesian coordinates. It consists of seven elements (centre, left-right etc.) and is nothing other than the spatial embodiment of sevenfold man.*

* This is discussed in more detail in our book “Der dreieinige Mensch des Leibes, der Seele und des Geistes”.
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The Grail symbol, as described by Rudolf Steiner, is also seven-membered. When the two triangles composing it meet at their apices, they form jointly a seven-membered lemniscate. This symbol is very ancient indeed. For example, we know of two Celtic runes with the fol- lowing shapes:

In the language of philosophy they express nothing other than the unity of the opposites which, as it becomes dynamic, assumes the form of a lemniscate. (The sixfoldness of the hexagram has its centre of unity and is therefore also sevenfold.)

This is, in some of its most essential manifestations, the “six-winged” character of the Seraphim. It brings forth the sevenfoldness of development from the threefoldness of the universal Divine principle. Another transition from this principle to sevenfoldness is made by the Cherubim with their “four-winged” nature. Fourfoldness arises thanks to the world-laws of relation and crossing. It finds its extreme, materialized expression in evolution in the fourth globe; its highest expression is the world-cross. Sevenfoldness and fourfoldness encompass together the long-drawn-out process whereby the macro-anthropos becomes the micro-anthropos, the descent of Adam-Kadmon to the level of material being. A remarkable picture of this descent and simultaneous emergence is found in Rudolf Steiner’s drawings, which are unfortunately not preserved in the original, but only in the form of a typewritten report; various elements have been lost, and we must do our best to reconstruct them by way of analysis and comparison with other statements of Rudolf Steiner. Of these, the most important are those made in the commentary to the Lord’s Prayer (cf. Fig.52). We have placed the two sketches in juxtaposition to one another, incorporating a few elements that we have developed in the course of our discussions (Fig.80).

In the Figure we have before us two earthly cosmic constellations which express the descent and ascent of the higher ‘ur’-phenomenon of man. We said: The human being ascends on the same path as that on which he descended. Of this we have clear evidence if we look at the diagram. We see that fourfoldness also springs from threefoldness, and is shown to be the projection of threefoldness onto the cross of the Zodiac. Together, however, they form not a lemniscate but a pentagram of the microcosm, which “clothes” itself in substance (here already the Thrones are working and also the beings of the second Hierarchy) and matter, and acquires an individualized soul-spiritual life. Sevenfoldness emerges here as the sum of the earthly and the cosmic. It can only be endowed with organic unity by the earthly human being who brings to realization his planetary essential nature.

In man the world-cross became the evolution of the species, which grew into a cultural-historical process. On the other hand the Lamb of God, by way of the world-cross which had become the cross of Golgotha, took “the book” with seven seals out of the hands of him “who sat on the throne”, and through this act took into His hands the entire development of earthly man (the human being of the fourth aeon) and became the immanent regent of the Earth (He was the transcendent regent of the aeon of the Old Sun). His path to the Earth was long. He came from heights beyond the Zodiac. When in the Hyperborean epoch the sun withdrew from the cosmic “primal nebula”, He descended into the planetary system. When in the Lemurian epoch the Moon withdrew from the Earth, one of the spirits of Form took upon himself the sacrifice of descending to dwell there, and began to mediate, reflect, the spiritual working of the Sun upon the inner development of man. This activity of mirror-reflection was then developed within himself also by the human being, as reflective thinking. This is of a wholly Jahveistic nature and is conditioned by the forces of heredity which we carry within us as original sin. When we reflect, we draw knowledge from the book of materialistic science. But the Lamb took the book of knowledge and of life. It contains the original and universal plan of world evolution. This one can only know if one lives with the Spirit within it, and this requires that one free oneself from earthly group inheritance.

Man has already freed himself in part from the burden of descending evolution, by objectifying the three Beasts of the Apocalypse and separating them from him in the form of the three natural kingdoms – mineral, plant and animal. But what he was unable to objectivize he subjectivized, and placed it (although unconsciously to begin with) under the control of his higher ‘I’ (of Aquarius, the Angel), as the system of metabolism and limbs (Taurus), the system of breathing and blood circulation (Leo) and the nerve-senses system (Scorpio, formerly Eagle).

Under the sign of Aquarius stands the “highest” of human beings (but not angelic): John the Baptist. He leads us from the baptism of water to that of fire, to the Lamb, when we etherize thinking. The Lord’s Prayer, which was given to us by God Himself, shows us the way. We can, with its help, enter into a relation, on the level of essential being, with the elements and the ethers and move on the astral stream from the future into the past, while maintaining self-consciousness (through raising it onto a higher plane). And when we reach with it the moment of our Fall into sin, we find redemption from original sin: In ‘I’- consciousness we ascend into the third, but at the same time into the fifth, globe.

* * *

A number of statements of Rudolf Steiner which we have investigated and brought into a synthesis in Figs. 78 and 79, unveil the mystery of the Biblical myth of the creation of man. But we penetrate a stage deeper into this mystery if we interpret the myth in connection with what is known as the ‘Golden Legend’, which stems from Christian Rosenkreuz. Here, the creation of the earthly aeon is described somewhat differently than in ‘Genesis’ – more esoterically, and therefore not intended for a human being who lives predominantly in the sentient soul. Its images possess that great spiritual formative power which is so desperately needed by the seeking human being of our time.

The ‘Golden Legend’ describes the creation of the human being of the fourth globe consisting of seven root-races, in the course of which the most important event in the whole of human evolution takes place.

In legends and myths, names often refer, not to concrete individualities (unless they are of a purely spiritual nature), but to forces, principles, substances and their various mutual relationships. This is also true of the ‘Golden Legend’. Without naming them, it is speaking of ethers and elements out of which the hierarchical beings created the earthly aeon in the fourth globe of the fourth round. The manifestation of the globe on a physical-sensory level unfolded in the sequence of the working of the ethers, which brought about the condensation of spirit into the elements, which then became substance. This sequence corresponded to that of the emergence of sevenfold man. In this sense, we also have to do here with the creation of man (Fig.81).

According to the ‘Golden Legend’ it was Eve, not Adam, who was first created. Eve embodies the whole of humanity at the stage of development of the Earth aeon when the “dust of Earth” from which Adam was created did not yet exist. Working at that time was the chemical or tone-ether, which brought about a condensation of the “primal nebula” in which was contained the entire future solar system.

Eve was the first substance with which the Elohim came into contact; the latter was working at that time from the spiritual centre of the emerging planetary system. To form some idea of this “Eve condition” we should, Rudolf Steiner suggests, picture to ourselves the system of blood circulation which pervades the whole human being, and then focus only on the image of the warmth that pulses on the paths of the blood circulation. Precisely this was the nature of Eve, who was created by the spirit of Form: she consisted of warmth with no material bearer. Outwardly the Earth had no light at that time. The Sun-spirit imbued this “dark” Eve with spiritual light.

Later, in the fourth round, when the Hyperborean epoch began and the sun separated off from the single planetary body, its light now started to reach Eve from without, as spiritual nourishment.* As all events in the spiritual world are, in their essential nature, personified, the relation between the spirit of Form and Eve also found its expression. It is called “Cain”. Cain arose as a consequence of the fact that a part of the nourishing light was used for the purpose of propagation. Such was the ‘ur’-phenomenon of earthly reproduction. It represents a first synthesis in the triad of the elements of light-warmth-air.

* All these stages are gone through by the human being in the ontogenesis of the embryonic phase and also in the following phases of life.
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In the third, Lemurian, epoch or moon epoch (this was the time when the Moon became an independent celestial body), the Elohim Jahve was sent to direct the Moon development. This means that humanity was divided into two sexes and the reproductive process no longer had the character of purely spiritual reproduction: “When we are told that Adam was wedded to Eve, this means that the two sexes united for the purpose of reproduction, and out of this union arose Abel. The Sun-forces and reproductive forces, originally one, had separated and brought forth two classes of human beings. Cain and Abel fight day after day within our bodies, indeed they even fight together hour by hour as Abel is embodied in the blood of the arteries ... while Cain by contrast is embodied in the venous blood which is filled with the poisonous, death bringing carbonic acid.... But Abel lives on in Seth (in the new in-breath – G.A.B.) ... the Abel-Seth race became the bearer of Divine wisdom and intuition; those belonging to it were priests and kings ‘by the grace of God’. ... The race of Cain possesses the power of reproduction (not necessarily sexual) instead of intuitive wisdom. They are ... the world workmen, the scientific researchers etc.” (GA 265, p.394 f.)

To clarify what he was saying, Rudolf Steiner gave a diagram which we reproduce here, with some additional aspects arising from our earlier discussions (Fig.82). Like many others, it reveals to us the evolutionary and macrocosmic meaning of the Apocalyptic seal which we are investigating.

4. The Structure of the Universe – and the Human Being.

The universe is a totality in which the enduring (eternal), the descent and ascent on the various stages of perfection, and also development in time, are joined together on the level of essential being. The unity of all these qualities inherent in it is a function of the conscious All- consciousness which is revealed in the Earth aeon in 7 x 7 form conditions. Each of these forms has its own interplay of consciousness and life. Expressed differently, the life modifies the revelation of the All- consciousness, and thus arise the forms of being: from the pure, ideal, super-sensible to the sense-perceptible, and including those in which the life-principle is absent. Rudolf Steiner conveys to us an overall picture (a general structure) of the universe in its form-conditions. We reproduce it here, adding to it some of the connections that are indispensable for our research (Fig.83).

The higher of the spheres shown in the diagram are, looked at in isolation, formless or “beyond form”. We can only speak of their form as it appears to our understanding capacity. And this appearance constitutes a negative form: we determine it by denying its similarity to any of the forms known to us. Thus, the upper spheres of being are all-determining without, themselves, being determined by anything at all.

Of the two sevenfoldnesses of the world structure, the upper one has the character of essential being, and the lower is its mirror-reflection. They stand vis-à-vis one another as world thesis and world antithesis. The metamorphoses take place between their elements. Through them the foundation stone of development is laid which always remains within the boundaries of the single unit(y) of units (unities) (circles, see Fig.83). The unity of the world is (in the absolute) a constant and (in the system objects) a variable. We have represented the temporal development of the world spheres with the help of semicircles that meet (this subject would need to be discussed in greater depth). It unfolds both in the world of essential being and in that of the mirror-reflection of essential being. Inherent in the universe in its sensory-supersensory unity are threefoldness (this has already been discussed) and also twelvefoldness, whereby the latter is repeated in both parts, so that we have to do with a double twelvefoldness.

The structure shown in Fig.83 should make easier a general orientation in our inquiry so that, despite its many-sided character, we will not lose sight of its wholeness. As we see in the diagram, the higher ‘ur’- phenomenon of man descends through four stages: that of the Great Pralaya, of the spiritual form-conditions, the ethers and the elements. This descent has the character of the life-processes, the higher and the lower, and for this reason its movement in stages is always holistic in nature.

On the lowest level of the world-whole the ‘ur’-phenomenon is incorporated in the individual man, whereby it forms within him a unity of consciousness, life and form, which the human being also experiences as his ‘I’. The ‘ur’-phenomenon in man, and hence also his ‘I’, maintains within itself, in a “cancelled and preserved” (aufgehoben) state, all the world-spheres that the ‘ur’-phenomenon has passed through on its way to incarnation. The law at work here is as follows: The deeper the level of descent, the higher the sphere with which it is connected and the more strongly it acquires the character of mirror-reflection and lack of essential being – with the aim that, at the final stage of the form of consciousness, a void should arise, a place for the beginning of human freedom. But once the idea of it has been grasped, work at the etherizing of the abstract form of consciousness begins. This can be achieved thanks to the fact that any differentiation whatever, any subjectivization, and even a loss of the life-principle, takes place within a world-totality whose macrocosmic laws pervade every single isolated element, and that which has been cancelled and preserved (aufgehoben) within this (singularity) is the impulse working in it of development towards the higher.

What we have just said applies also to the nature of the life-forces, the ethers, that are active in the world. Thus, for example, the warmth-ether, which acts as a connecting link between spirit and matter, stands in relation to the Higher Devachan. And in this connection it is a cosmic, morally active substance. In its orientation towards the material world it is that which causes the condensation of the warmth-element (its higher nature comes to manifestation in soul-warmth) – above all, in the warmth of the blood. Together with the other three ethers it forms the etheric aura of the earth, its life-body, in which are active the throngs of elementary spirits in nature, who bring about the processes of growth and dying away. There is yet another form of existence of the ethers: in the composition of the human etheric body. Here, they are the conditioning factors underlying the life-processes and, depending on how conscious they become for the ‘I’, the soul-processes – for example, the element of “burning desire” which, although its root lies ultimately in the astral body, is closely bound up with the life-processes. Finally the ethers begin, with the dying of the mineral Earth, partially to decay and sink into sub-nature, whereby they give rise to the phenomena of magnetism, radioactivity etc.

It is absolutely essential to grasp this many-layered complexity of the existence and working of the ethers if one is to lift oneself up “from the ground” of non-substantial being.

Working within the higher human ‘ur’-phenomenon, which has descended into the etheric-physical form of being, is the power of the Logos, the creator of the human being through the course of all previous aeons. In the etheric world His working, as it is described by Rudolf Steiner, comes to expression in the following way: The higher ether-substance “permeates, pervades the tone-etheric element, just as in us the sound uttered from our mouth is permeated by the meaning of the thought, which makes the sound into a word.... And this word, which weaves and surges through space and pours itself into the tone-ether, this is at the same time the origin of life, it is really weaving, surging life” (GA 122, 18.8.1910).

In the Eastern tradition this higher ether is called Prana. It is nothing other than cosmic life and cosmic consciousness revealing themselves in a unity: “I and the Father are one.” When development, the creation of form begins, they separate from one another. In man they form the organs of the body, thanks to which the life-processes, the sense-perceptions arise and subsequently the foundation is laid for the emancipation of the intellect from bodily processes, which manifests finally in the loss of being via the thinking.

The formation of the organs of the body began with the process of breathing-nutrition, which has two aspects: a higher, purely spiritual one oriented toward the head (through thinking and perception), and a lower, organic aspect. Bound up with the higher is the development of the nervous system and of man’s acquisition of its individualized, nature-emancipated causal connections. The lower aspect of breathing- nutrition divided into the breathing of air and feeding on coarse material substances. This led to the formation of the circulatory system of the blood. Under the influence of the developmental processes taking place in the nerves the system of blood circulation divides into the arterial and venous systems. The circulatory system of the blood constitutes in the form of two “pillars” the etheric-physical support for the individual ‘I’, which (initially as lower ‘I’) develops the life of perception and thinking (Fig.84), where we also have to do with a kind of fine breathing. From its other side the organic process of the formation of red and blue blood reaches across with its influence to the spiritual, supersensible side of the existence of the glandular system, which is especially closely connected to higher development.

Such is the structure of the human being of today. Rooted in him is a deep dichotomy: That which constitutes his individual life – the lower ‘I’ – is void of essential being, has no life in the true sense, is based on negation and calls forth death. The red blood is continually infected with death by the blue. And this is not all. “When the human being breathes,” says Rudolf Steiner, “he brings death to the air with every breath he takes.... In our eye the ray of light is killed” (GA 155, 16.7.1914). For this reason, the chemical and life-ethers are, for the present, removed from the sphere where the human being thinks and perceives with his senses. “If we were in a position to kill the chemical ether, the waves of the harmony of the spheres would continually sound into our physical body and we would in ourselves with our physical bodies continually kill the harmony of the spheres. And if we could also kill the life-ether, we would in ourselves continually kill the cosmic life which streams to the Earth” (ibid.).

In the Old Lemurian epoch, says Rudolf Steiner, the life and tone ethers were withheld from arbitrary human will. It also says in the Bible that it was not permitted to man to eat of the Tree of Life, when in him the development of perception and thinking had begun. But what had been preserved in spiritual heights later descended to Earth in the form of the ether-body of Jesus of Nazareth (see GA 114, 21.9.1909).

5. The Biblical Creation Myth in the Light of Anthroposophy

Through the metamorphosis of consciousness it is given to the human being to reunite the Tree of Knowledge with the Tree of Life. The work that this implies has the character of a Mystery. It is not enough to grasp it with one’s rational intellect alone. Therefore the methodology of spiritual science resorts to the language of myth, which clothes its statements in metaphor. The intellect finds mythology naïve, unscientific, contradictory, random in nature, and all this because in it the eternal and temporal, the hierarchical-supersensible and the earthly-human often overlap: the image appeals to “knowledge at one stroke”. Understanding of the mythological image consists in the distinguishing of its different levels, whereby its unity for cognition is nevertheless preserved.

Christian mythology is in its essential nature evolutionistic. In it man’s present configuration is led back to the beginning of the Earthly aeon, where everything that had developed in the course of the three preceding aeons emerges in the form of an immense astral-etheric wholeness. This is nothing but man or, more precisely, humanity. In this condition all that has remained behind is mixed together in one cosmic being with what has developed in the past as it should. When such a universal man begins a new stage in its development its normally-developed parts mature for a long time in the spirit before they materialize. The retarded element, however, craves for a new incarnation to occur as soon as possible (because it becomes “heavy” more quickly) and therefore obtains it and materializes, whereby it does not yet have the capacity to develop an individual spirit in “otherness-of-being”. That which separates off frees the unitary cosmic humanity from its burden, though even as it descends to Earth it remains a part of humanity – even when it develops into independent natural kingdoms. This is the basis of the unity of man and nature. Thus Goethe, who knew about this (though not so concretely as was made possible by Anthroposophy), wrote the following: “Nature! We are surrounded and embraced by her – unable to depart from her, and unable to enter into her more deeply.... All human beings are within her, and she is within all of them.”

Man descends to the Earth, above all in the sense that he guides his spirit earthwards. All other aspects of human incarnation are secondary to this. The next peculiarity of man that is of fundamental importance lies in the fact that, while he incarnates on the Earth as an individual spirit, he remains connected with his higher spirituality, which does not descend to Earth. This also shows his affinity with the natural kingdoms, as their spirituality (the group-‘I’) remains in the spheres of the spirit.

The mythology of the ‘Golden Legend’ deepens and makes more concrete the Biblical myth of the creation of man and the world. It describes that condition of the earthly aeon where the Logos, from the centre of the cosmic Adam-Kadmon, which still contains within it the future planetary system, illumines that part of the human ‘ur’- phenomenon which is destined to enter into a relation with the emerging material realm. The breathing-nutrition system is then formed from this part. But to begin with it is not subject to the formative process; it embodies a kind of unity of cosmic life and wisdom. This is how one should understand the Biblical point of view according to which first Adam was created, and then Eve. It is simply that this stage was not yet in contact with the earthly “dust”, the creation of form in otherness-of- being. The Logos-Buddhi was then illumining the apex of the pentagram-‘ur’-phenomenon, leading to manifestation the Manas – the working of the Holy Spirit in otherness, Eve, the primal mother of that living element, which is able to develop self-consciousness and to undergo spiritual “conception” and “birth”. In this way, the Son revealed Himself through the Holy Spirit (cf. Figs. 9a, 9b, 34). In the following stage, the cosmic, united power of life and consciousness which strives towards form-creation, is subject to the evolutionary working of the Father, who endows the Elohim with His impulses. Thus arises “Cain”, the transitional phase from the supersensory to the sensory: viz. warmth (fire). At this stage of creation there is as yet no dichotomy and no evil. It expresses merely the orientation of the Tri-unity towards the creation, the activity that works from above downwards.

The changed orientation of the Higher affects at a later stage the parts of universal man that have remained behind, and at a certain level of materialization the division of mankind itself already begins – the forming of the races. But even within each human monad the dichotomy between the earthward and the spirit-directed striving is maintained. As a result, the human astral body assumes the form of a hexagram, two triangles. The hexagram develops in evolutionary stages from the pentagram.

In the Lemurian epoch the spirits of Form led man into earthly incarnations. As they worked upon his ‘ur’-phenomenon they turned the pentagram round, so that its apex pointed downwards; this resulted in a decisive influence of the earthly forces on the head formation of the human being. To the present day he experiences the consequences of this stage of development. Rudolf Steiner speaks of this as follows: “The human being grows upwards but, growing towards him there is a kind of invisible plant formation, developing its roots upwards towards the head and its blossoms downwards ... this supersensible man-plant grows out of a universal space from the Sun towards the centre of the Earth” (GA 323, 17.1.1923). (For this reason, the movement of the ethers in the pentagram flows in both directions.)

At the beginning of the Lemurian epoch the human being was permeated only by this “plant-like” etheric stream that came from the sun and flowed into the formation in the plant-man which later became his limbs. The surface of the Earth was composed at that time of the fire- air element, which was gradually condensing to the watery state. With his head-formation the human being held fast, as though with “roots”, to what was condensing more rapidly below. The future metabolic-limb system, in which the unconscious will is rooted, developed in him the higher forces; hence it was oriented towards the sun, as is the case with the plants today. With the progressive entry of the astral body into the physical body, man began to assume a horizontal position, pass through his human-animal stage and develop the system of the seven life- processes. Thus he recapitulated the developmental phases from the aeons of Sun and Moon. At this stage of evolution it was decisive from what direction the working of the formative forces flowed. (This influence showed itself later in the migration of the peoples*, and in the present day in the contrast between the civilizations of East and West.) When the working of the soul-element began – i.e. when the group-‘I’ started to find a relation to the individual human monads – these assumed a vertical posture.

** When someone travels northwards, his etheric body expands; if he goes southwards it contracts; it also grows smaller if one travels eastwards (see GA 266/3, pp. 174, 180).
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In these first stages of man’s development under earthly conditions, he did not merely repeat his earlier state, but unfolded forces for the development of new forms. His ‘ur’-phenomenon began to transform itself into fourfoldness plus three-foldness – i.e. sevenfoldness. Basing oneself on what has already been discussed, one can picture this in the form shown in Fig.85.

The forces which determined man’s development in the period referred to were cosmic life and also chemism – the creative, vibrating word. They brought about the densification of spirit to the airy condition. Prior to this the warmth-ether became the warmth of the external world. There entered into the elements of the emerging microcosm the creative power of the spirit of Form, who unites all the monads in the centre of the ‘I’ with which they have been endowed. The power of the Elohim reaches the human being, filled with the life of the Solar Logos. But with the emergence of the individual principle, which is unable to transform the elements, life departs from the human being. There arise in him the beginnings of the skeleton – the mineral scaffolding of bone. He receives within himself a coarse, physical-material body, a mineralized fortress or fastness. A division into two sexes takes place, whereby a part of the reproductive capacity is liberated for the development of the intellect. Parallel to this the evolution of species unfolds in the substances discarded by Adam-Kadmon because they had remained behind.

Thus the “Golden Legend” can be deciphered with the help of spiritual science. There it tells how Adam, when he was still in Paradise, beheld an angel who had the form of a pentagram supported on two columns. One of them bore the letter J (Jakim) and the other, the letter B (Boaz). Rudolf Steiner, when he relates the Legend, tells further: “Thus the angel appeared to Adam in Paradise under the fig-tree (Buddhi symbol – G.A.B.). Adam saw this sign as a picture of the angel, and vowed that he would never err from the power that is documented in J.B. And Adam always found strength and blessedness when he sought out the place where the vision was possible.

In the Lemurian time he had done so nevertheless, and had erred from the power of J.B. through Lucifer, who had brought temptation. And when Adam sought out once more the place of the angel’s appearance, he experienced nothing but horror at his own being. The fallen (upside-down) pentagram, open at one side (the upper left angle – G.A.B.); in this sign the angel now appeared to Adam, brandishing his fiery sword, and Adam fled” (GA 265, p.349).

His ‘ur’-phenomenon, revealed within the hierarchy of the angels, was beheld by Adam in Paradise. Manas was opened up to him on its path from Buddhi to Atma – the triangle of the Trinity in evolution, which bore within it the ‘ur’-phenomenon of man; this was oriented towards development in the sphere of Earth where it had the task of bringing into being the seven-membered phenomenon of man.

But there was another possibility of development open to Adam before the Fall. World-life and world-chemism provided him with two supports. They were two streams of force (one in their essential nature) which emanate from the creative Logos as two beings of light. Thanks to their working, Adam could become a sublime image of God through transforming himself into a triangle of the higher forces, while avoiding development of the triune soul and of the lower ‘I’. If he did so he would, so to speak, place himself as the “crossbeam” of Manas upon the two supports on which the pentagram stood and would lead it in this form over into the next aeon. But if this happened, he would never acquire an individual higher ‘I’; the unity of his three-membered spirit would be held together, not by his own, but by higher forces and he would, of course, never become free. He would then become in world creation a completely superfluous phenomenon.

But from above there were quite other intentions for the human being: it was conceived as his destiny that he should become the tenth Hierarchy, uniting within itself love and freedom. Therefore his ‘ur’- phenomenon was guided into the material sphere and his supports became “Abel” and “Cain”, between whom arose enmity, opposition; these provide, in the end, the support for the lesser ‘I’ (Fig.86).

Outer cosmic warmth encroached upon the inner being of man; his ‘ur’- phenomenon “tipped over”: it fell head first or, rather, downwards “in search of a head”, in order to be given a head down there. His etheric blood circulatory system became astralized through entering into relation with the breathing of air. It says in the Bible: “... and he breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul” (Genesis 2, 7). These were the “air” and the “life” of the primordial Eve, the world-Mother, which had come from the other side to the human being (as his “sons”), from the sense-world. The soul of man at this time acquired a form, it was clothed with the garment of the soul-body and the body as such grew materially denser, whereby, as Rudolf Steiner describes in his book ‘From the Akasha Chronicle’, “the soul had to adapt to the laws that had been imprinted into this substance by external, earthly nature. .... Through the outer forces of Earth ... the body had assumed a definite form, which made it impossible for the soul thereafter to pour its full inner strength into this body” (GA 11, p.75).

This was the price paid by man when he laid the foundation stone for the forming of a soul of his own; he had hitherto led a unitary cosmic soul-life of universal Man, in which the human monads themselves had one shared astral body.

With the germinating of an individual soul-life in man, a division takes place into two sexes. This is where Adam and Eve appear, of whom the Bible speaks. They became earthly projections of their spiritual archetypes. As we said, there is nothing spiritual that is without an image in sensory reality.

With the division of the human being into two sexes a moment of extreme importance entered evolution. “Before this,” Rudolf Steiner continues, “there was no room in the human being for what we call spirit, the capacity to think. This capacity would not have found an organ that would make its activity possible. The soul had expended all its forces on building up the body.... When human beings fertilize each other, and no longer themselves, they can turn a portion of their productive energy inwards and become thinking creatures” (ibid. p.76 f.). This expressed itself outwardly in the fact that a vertebral column formed, which shifted the thought-centre away from the reproductive centre. Between them arose the system of the seven lotus flowers.

The “male/masculine” and the “female/feminine” in the human being separate not just physically but also on the soul-spiritual level. From this point onwards two kinds of thinking unfold. The formative power of Adam brings about a thinking that is characteristically “masculine”, while Eve’s plasticizing power produces one that is “feminine”. Just as there are two different kinds of blood – arterial and venous – so have there developed since then in each of us two kinds of thinking whose representatives, figuratively speaking, are Cain and Abel and which are brought to a unity in himself by each human being. But they do not unite in him on the level of essential being. There even develop in man two kinds of brain, between which – as between the blue and the red blood – a battle is fought. The physical-material brain, with which we reflect, strives to kill in us the physical-etheric brain, which works in the ‘beholding’ that comes close to clairvoyance. Rudolf Steiner explains both aspects of this problem with the help of a diagram (Fig.87).

If we compare this diagram with Fig.78, we will come to a deeper understanding of the problem of cognition in our time, as having its roots in the first beginnings of the earthly aeon (and thus finding its reflection in the Biblical myth of the Creation of Man).

6. A Holistic Image of the Human Being

When we were discussing the myths of creation of the world and man, we made the observation that only with considerable difficulty can they be brought together into a consistent and cohesive temporal sequence. This is explained by the fact that their beginning reaches back into the spheres of an as yet trans-temporal being, into the spheres of the primal grounds, whose effects are shown to be in accordance with numerous – not merely temporal – principles. “In the sense- world,” says Rudolf Steiner, “there are no causes; these live only in the super-sensible world. Here, there are only signs” (GA 265, p.287). The researcher into the super-sensible who does not let himself be guided by his personal experience of existence in higher worlds strives to ascend with the help of “signs” to the primal grounds. For this reason, a corresponding methodology is absolutely indispensable to him for the organization of the cognitive process.

When Adam in Paradise sees the reversed pentagram, his new fate is revealed in it to him. The ‘Golden Legend’ also speaks of a Cherub with a fiery sword who appears to Adam. This is the same Cherub thanks to whom the world-cross arises in the circle of the Divine will. Into its centre there poured itself as an impulse the highest ‘I’ of the world, which represents the unity of the Divine Trinity. This is offered to Adam as a fiery sword of immeasurable spiritual power which shows him the way downwards, to the earthly ‘I’. The reversed pentagram gave to evolution a new law, by virtue of which breathing developed, and with this also the division of the higher unity of life and consciousness. The two pillars standing in Paradise become the “tree” of the blood and the “tree” of the nerves in the human being. Their rootedness in the evolution of the species to which man is subject is expressed in two pictures, or “signs”: “Cain” and “Abel”. It was their function, as thesis and antithesis of phylogenesis, to engender the becoming that leads to the ontogenesis of thinking consciousness. An expression of the latter is Seth, who was “born” in Abel’s stead. “Abel,” Rudolf Steiner continues in the lecture referred to, “means wisdom, Cain strength.... Seth means piety, which has the task of uniting wisdom with strength” (ibid. p.350). Through Seth the highest triangle of the spirit descends into otherness-of-being, after man’s ‘ur’-phenomenon. The cosmic unites with earthly man. And we receive a unitary picture of the human being who “is born” on the Earth out of spiritual heights. Every single human being now bears it within him (Fig.88).

The primary condition for its development was physical uprightness, which is followed by a soul and spiritual raising into the upright. These make possible an individual and conscious experience of the moral force of the world-ether. But these last two forms of “raising into the upright” are not yet completed, as is shown with particular clarity in the 9th Chapter of the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’.

Knowledge of morality germinated in humanity in the epoch of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. The conditions for this were already created in the epoch of Seth. Seth must unquestionably be regarded as the first homo erectus in the full sense of the world – i.e. in all three sheaths.

Among the many references of Rudolf Steiner to the physical raising of man into the upright, there is one that can, undoubtedly, be viewed as central. It appears in a lecture-cycle entitled “Stages Leading to the Mystery of Golgotha”. Rudolf Steiner describes here in a series of lectures the working of Christ before the descent to Earth, and stresses the fact that the human monads already assumed a horizontal posture in the aeon of the Old Moon; and on the Earth, in the Lemurian epoch, the human being “learnt how to change the Moon direction into the Earth direction” and brought this process to the stage of raising himself into the vertical position. He was helped in this by the spirits of Form, who had begun to pour the strength of the ‘I’ into man. “And the first manifestation of this inpouring of the ‘I’ is that inner force through which the human being raises himself into the upright.” Thus, through changing his position man frees himself from the forces of the Earth. “The Earth itself has within it spiritual forces which can stream through the spinal column when it remains horizontal in natural growth, as in the body of the animal. But the Earth has no forces with which it can, of itself, serve the human being... who, through the ‘I’, ... can be raised into the vertical” (GA 152, 7.3.1914).

When he received forces from outside the Earth enabling him to raise himself upright; the human being of ancient times was compelled to loosen his connection to the forces of Earth; he could no longer let himself be determined by them in his development, though he still lacked the capacity to take this development into his own hands. Therefore, so Rudolf Steiner tells us further, in the Old Lemurian period help came to man in the form of the cosmic etheric forces which, as the “Tree of Life”, had remained unaffected by the Fall into sin. They were a part of the Universal man, and in them the ‘ur’-phenomenon had never lost its vertical posture. These forces were the means used by the Christ, enabling Him, from out of the cosmos, to permeate man with His being and thereby to prevent him from sinking into chaos during the process of rising into the upright posture.* In other words, on an etheric level the human ‘I’ from its first beginning was permeated with the macrocosmic ‘I’ of Christ. This fact can be regarded as underlying the legend of Seth.

* That etheric force which is personified in the cosmos as a being of Angelic nature is called the Nathan soul, as it had incarnated through the line of Na- than in the Jesus child spoken of in the St. Luke’s Gospel.
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The process of being raised into the upright lasted until the third, Ancient Egyptian, cultural epoch; the human being stood upright before this, but did not experience it consciously. The Egyptian priests began to build pyramids and obelisks as visible pictures of the idea of horizontal and vertical, illustrating the upright posture. These exerted a highly significant educative and individualizing influence on all who looked at them. In soul and spirit the human being raises himself into the upright in cultural activity and in the course of the development of social relations, whereby he moves with his lower ‘I’ from below upwards – from the Sentient to the Intellectual to the Consciousness-soul. But if he becomes caught up in the lower spheres of the soul, the old chaos surges up in him again. The ‘I’ grows weaker, culture falls into decay, anomalous theories of the psychoanalytic kind run rampant etc.

7. The Spiritual-Material Evolution of Man as a Species, and the Ontology of the ‘I’.

Rudolf Steiner tells us that, up until the middle of the Lemurian epoch, the Earth consisted of a warmth-imbued substance something midway between water and air, and related to the albumen of today. The chemical elements were at that time only just coming into being. “The whole Earth was enveloped in hot vapours. ... the vaporous atmosphere was pervaded by etheric currents as, today, by currents of air” (GA 266/1, p.173).

Physical and etheric bodies of the human monads “grew”, initially, in a plant-like fashion, on this Earth. With their future head they clung fast to the considerably harder “ground” of the world-ocean, consisting of air-vapour. When the working of the Sun, which was outwardly weakened by this dense, ocean-like atmosphere, penetrated the monads, astral bodies formed in them. They constituted, as it were, “offshoots”, which had retained the connection – formed in the manner of an umbilical cord – with the general astrality of the human race. Individual entities of this kind gradually evolved into a being outwardly resembling a kind of bird-fish and swam or flew in that atmosphere, which was far denser than our air today, but more fluid than today’s water. Through the working of certain etheric streams the human monad acquired a skin which closed it off from its surroundings. Later, through the influence of the ‘I’, there followed the raising into the upright posture, development of the lungs and larynx. Finally, man acquired the power of speech. To begin with, this was limited to single sounds, which had a strong magical effect on the nature around him.

Then the human being received into his astral body the ‘I’, which worked from out of the cosmos. This process unfolded in a similar way to the earlier provision of the monads with an astral body. The ‘I’ that had entered into every human being remained a part of the unitary ‘I’ of mankind as a whole; it was connected with this through a kind of “umbilical cord” and stood under the guardianship of the spirits of Form. Perception of the outer world now began to dawn in man; his sense-organs began to open outwards. “Now there develop in man pleasure and displeasure in reaction to what comes to meet him from outside: the ‘I’ works upon the astral body; the glands ... bring about the feeling of sympathy and antipathy” (ibid. p.351). Thus was laid the foundation- stone for the individual soul-life of man. He became the citizen of two worlds, as there was retained within him supersensible perception in addition to sense-perception. In the former was revealed to him what later became his world of ideas.

The descent of man from supersensible to sensory reality went hand in hand with a strong inworking upon him of Luciferic forces – the Angels who had remained behind in the aeon of the Moon. They ought to have passed through their human stage in the Moon aeon, making use of the Moon monads. But they did not succeed in completing this development, and they began to make up for what had been missed, by using the support of earthly human beings. The retardation of their development corresponded, of course, to a world-necessity, and this means that they play a dual role in the evolution of earthly man. Thanks to them, there emerged in the astral bodies of the earthly monads desires which worked upon the nervous system of these monads – leading to the development of the nerves into outer sense-organs – and also upon their etheric bodies, as a result of which the sense-organs opened outwards.

A second form of Luciferic influence on human development led to man’s acquiring the capacity of thinking. This influence proceeded from beings a special kind who were in advance of the general development of man in the aeons of both Old Sun and Old Moon. On the Earth, in the Hyperborean epoch, when the Earth consisted only of fire and air, they already possessed a vertically oriented form. In esotericism they are called Solar pitris (Sun-fathers). They intervened actively in man’s development in the Lemurian epoch, when the Moon separated from the Earth and Jahve brought about the division of humanity into two sexes. As half human and half Divine beings – they are also referred to as “Moon adepts”, whereby emphasis is given to their advance in development in the aeon of the Moon – they lived among the human monads at that time, and worked counter to the intentions of the Moon God, Jahve. They saw that Jahve limited his working in man to the forces of procreation and was striving to transform human beings into “beautiful statues”, rigid forms, eternal monuments to “the intention of his development” (GA 93a, 25.10.1905). They said to the human being: “You do not need to follow Jehovah, he will not let you partake of knowledge; but you are meant to attain knowledge. – This is the serpent. The serpent confronts the woman, as the woman had the power to reproduce herself from within. Now Jehovah says: Man is become as one of us – and brings death into the world...” (ibid.). As a reaction to this came reincarnation, and then Christ brought the resurrection of the flesh.

Such a dialectic of archetypal being has been at work since the earliest stages of the earthly becoming of the human race. Therefore Rudolf Steiner says, as we have already pointed out, that everything on the physical plane works in accordance with the “law of antithesis” (GA 165, 9.1.1916).

Anyone who dislikes contradiction and wishes to avoid all polarization risks, quite simply, falling away from rightful development. True polarity – i.e. of the kind that serves evolution – leads unavoidably to synthesis, in which everything is shifted to its proper place. Through engaging in this activity, the human being develops justice – the principal virtue of the earthly aeon. Rudolf Steiner says the following: “The very forces that we use in earliest childhood are not lost in the course of our later life. They remain with us, only they are connected with a virtue... the virtue of all-embracing justice...” (GA 159/160, 31.1.1915). In his exercise of justice the human being comes into an ever closer relation to the world-spirit, to God. Injustice, however, removes man from the spiritual world of his origin, from his connection with the Divine.*

* Here one could bring forward a huge number of examples from social life which confirm the truth of the spiritual-scientific interpretation of justice.
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We believe that, with what has been said, we have shown convincingly that it is necessary and right to extend the understanding and the sphere of application of the fundamental biogenetic law. Anthroposophy provides conclusive evidence for this. The process of being raised into the upright posture is rooted in the deep biological and ethical phylogenetic nature of man. Its correct practical realization with the help of education and self-education creates the most essential conditions for the ascent from the lower to the higher ‘I’. But humanity today, especially in the form of its worst representatives, sins most flagrantly, above all against the virtue of justice.

* * *

The earthly aura lives within a multi-polarity recognizable even in the geographical form of the Earth. Thanks to Rudolf Steiner we know that the principle of physical formation on the Earth works most strongly in the direction from North to South, while the principle of etheric formation works from South to North. Thus, in the northern hemisphere the continents predominate and in the southern hemisphere the oceans. From East to West and from West to East the astral forces are particularly strong. At the place where all these forces collide various kinds of “blockage” arise, which come to expression physically – both in the Earth’s configuration and in its natural kingdoms, as also in the human being. For example, the heart with its four chambers built up its structure as a result of a “blockage” of this kind, a collision of the physical forces with the etheric and of the astral with the ‘I’ (cf. GA 115, 26.10.1909).

The human being as a whole, formed within the Earth’s aura, is an image of it in miniature. In a meditative exercise Rudolf Steiner presents an image of the pentagram oriented towards the four cardinal points (see GA 265, p.229), and in the lecture just mentioned he goes on to show the structure of sixfold man (the seventh member arises here in the centre; it is the lesser ‘I’) as an expression of three-dimensional space. Combining the one with the other, we are given a picture of the way the human being raised himself into the upright in the transition from the Lemurian to the Atlantean epoch. In addition, says Rudolf Steiner, he began to migrate from East to West. At that time he had to let these astral forces of the Earth work upon him more powerfully. Their effect was such that, through them, man entered into a new evolutionary situation. Under the influence of astral forces flowing from East to West, there unfolded on the path of evolution in the human being in that period the soul-body. That is to say, the three sheaths came into a closer, more individualized relation to one another, whereby they built up the foundation, the additional sheath for development of the three-membered soul. In a process of involution there worked into the human being at that time, from West to East, the group Sentient-soul, the basis for which was created, by virtue of Manas, in the aeon of the Old Moon. In all these global processes of development of man as a species, the “Moon adepts” also had a part to play. For example, they worked counter to the forces of the evolutionary stream, whereby the “blockage” in the physical-etheric forces oriented from North to South served to develop the form of the human countenance.

Through his westward migration onto the newly emerging Atlantean continent (this migration lasted for a long time), man oriented himself with his face towards the East, the source of the spiritual influence of the Sun reaching him. This continued until the 19th century A.D., when the Ex Oriente Lux principle – from the East, the light – came to an end. Knowledge of this stream must have been the reason why altars were built at the eastern end of churches.

When the human being stood upright, there was a change in the in- fluence upon him of the astral aura of the Earth. From then on it was no longer merely of a group nature, but also individual, whereby it streamed through the astral body from below upwards; and from above downwards the individual ‘I’ began to incarnate in him, thus bringing about a development of the threefold soul and the birth of the lower ‘I’. Let us try to represent this pictorially (Fig.89).

Out of the totality of substances, elements, materiality and working of spiritual forces was formed the conscious human being. As such, he has a seven-membered structure, whereby its seven-membered principle is of significance, although its elements can be the different members of the human being (for example, one could take instead of the three bodies the three souls). As it is the principle that is important here, this can find objective realization all the way to the ontological categories. As a sevenfoldness whose moving principle is the metamorphosis of opposites, these categories are divided into three pairs whose connecting link can be nothing other than the category “relation”; this is in sevenfold man the lower and the higher ‘I’ (all of this comes to expression in Fig.89).

When the centre of evolution shifted to the Atlantean continent, man emerged for the first time from his environment of water and air onto dry land and began to develop the organs of speech which enabled him to give utterance to the word. His physical corporeality completed a kind of “turning inside out”, consisting in the fact that the rarefied materiality of the physical body, which in the Lemurian epoch was still entirely subject to the laws of the etheric and astral bodies, now subjected these to its own external, natural laws; as a result of this, man’s connection with the spirit grew essentially weaker, and a process of decline began in the physical. This is where (in the middle of the earthly aeon) the whole Earth entered the stage of dying away.

Relation
Substance – Sacrifice
Mirror-reflection – Raising into the Upright
Consciousness – Speech

The middle of the Atlantean epoch is the absolute middle of the whole evolutionary cycle, whose axis of symmetry passes through it. In this period a complete break occurs in world development. The process of descent, the materializing of the spirit, gives way to a process of ascent, of spiritualization. With the dying away of matter, the etheric-astral forces gradually gain the upper hand over it and bring the dying away to metamorphosis (Fig.90). In the process of reincarnation the human being shapes his own destiny or karma.

From the middle of the Atlantean epoch onwards, all that opposes the transformation of matter to spirit – from the mineral to human thinking and its soul qualities – stands at risk of falling away from the normal course of development. In the mineral kingdom this comes to expression in radioactive decay. Humanity can only avoid this decline by fulfilling the tasks of development confronting it at the present time. And humanity consists of individualities whose obligation it is to fulfil these tasks.

At the close of the Atlantean epoch the centre of human civilization began to shift eastwards. There arose what was later referred to as the “great migration of peoples”. The influences emanating from the Earth’s aura helped man in the course of this migration to develop the mirroring apparatus for conceptual thinking. The advanced section of Atlantean humanity settled – under the guidance of the great initiate Manu – in the region adjacent to the Himalaya (the Gobi Desert), and from there began the development of the fifth, post-Atlantean, epoch. This consists of seven cultural epochs, five of which migrate again from East to West, while the remaining two will embark on a migration eastwards. Seen as a totality, the evolution of humanity on Earth has the form of a gigantic spiral, unfolding in time and space between four poles of force (the cardinal points).

Before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, that part of the life-ether in the human being which had been harmed by man’s connection with the earthly realm had been ennobled through an activity flowing from above. This was the activity of Christ, mediated by the Nathan soul. Before the fifth, post-Atlantean, epoch began, man’s gift of speech, his emerging feelings, experiences of thought, and expressions of will were, thanks to this activity, safeguarded from chaos. This meant at the same time that lofty spiritual beings thought in man and that he was merely granted a certain Divine substance of thinking which pervades the universe (the Pan-Sophia). The hierarchical beings endowed groups of human beings with languages which – as a result of earthly conditions – had separated off from the universal, primordial language of the Atlanteans. Individual thinking, personal experience of speech had still to be gained through human effort, and this required a more direct union of the ‘I’ with the higher (i.e. individualized) part of its own etheric body.

Fulfilment of this task was, in fact, only possible in the recent past, by way of the transition from reflection to “beholding” thinking. In the past only those human beings were equal to this task who had either trodden the path of initiation or were creative natures. In any case, we have to do here with a renewed triumph of the etheric over the physical body. This means for man the undergoing of a further metamorphosis as a species, no less significant than that which made him into a being with upright gait. Lying between these two metamorphoses there is another. It also transformed man as a species, leading him in the fourth cultural epoch from pictorial, mythological to conceptual thinking.

Towards the 5th-4th centuries B.C. the physical, material world had declined to such an extent that the human being began to radically emancipate himself from the spiritual world and to think independently. This was accompanied by a kind of “excarnation” of the ‘ur’- phenomenon from the human being. What had hitherto – proceeding from the spiritual world – oppressed him from within and without, gradually withdrew and emptiness appeared in its place. This, however, filled man with purely sensory impressions, given to him through perception, together with the conceptual counterparts. There developed in him gradually a completely individual Sentient-soul. In the next phase, with a growing individualization of the etheric body, which took place under the influence of the individualized astral body and of the lower ‘I’ emerging within the Sentient-soul, the human being went on to develop the Intellectual soul. The concepts of ethics, of rights, became accessible to him and there awoke in him an individual conscience. At the same time, man was diving ever deeper into the earthly world. Finally, he stood before the choice of either becoming free or falling away from the normal course of development. In the first case, he faces the task of bringing about in himself the third of the above-mentioned metamorphoses as a species. To use the expression “bring about” is entirely justified here, because this time he is helped neither by nature nor by the Gods. Freedom can be won only by individual effort.

Thus the human being, by withdrawing from his ‘ur’-phenomenon, emancipated himself in his soul and in his ‘I’ from the universal condi- tioning to which he was subject, and developed in this way the world of his own thoughts, inner representations, feelings, expressions of will; he developed the tri-une soul. He thereby began, however, to ascend to the spirit. He merely needs to grasp this fact. He will then find within himself the strength and the means to realize a new “turning inside out” of his bodily nature – from the etheric outwards, so to speak. In this way he fulfils not only his own task, but one that affects the world as a whole.

It should be noted that the physical-material “turning inside out”, at a time when the physical began to dominate the etheric, only occurred in the human being (in the mineral kingdom a separation took place of the physical from the etheric). Because of this, everything in nature had the possibility of coming to a meaningful fulfilment. But the universal harmony had been disturbed. It had thrown man out of balance. In the age of the predominance of the materialistic way of thinking, it is hard to come to terms with the idea that the “skeleton” of the Earth – its mountains, continents – died and were divested of their life because man began in the middle of the Atlantean epoch to acquire the power of understanding; that everything in the world around us is the expression of inner, spiritual processes taking place in the human being. But this conception is indispensable for anyone wishing to grasp the essential nature and meaning of development – especially in view of the fact that the idea can be proven if one makes use of the indications and the methodology of spiritual science.

The process of ossification, of dying away of the mineral kingdom which began in the middle of the Atlantean epoch gave rise, in the middle of the following root-race, at the time of the Greco-Roman culture, to a crisis in the connection of man’s physical body with his etheric body. The latter lost the ability to metamorphose the former at a sufficiently fast rate. The danger arose, that the human being would lose altogether his connection with his bodily nature and no longer be able to develop his self-consciousness within it. The Christ, again, came to man’s help. The innocent part of the soul of humanity which had re- mained behind in the heights descended to Earth and received the macrocosmic ‘I’ – Christ. Christ, who identified with the three sheaths of Jesus of Nazareth – an event that took place through the Baptism in the Jordan – awakened after His death on Golgotha the physical body of man to new life, whereby He brought about the most global possible metamorphosis of man as a species; this now takes place in individual human beings. The Mystery of Golgotha took up into itself the three other decisive metamorphoses of man: raising into the upright, the transition to conceptual thinking and acquisition of the power of judgement in beholding. It became the centre, the principle of their unity. Thus the higher ‘ur’-phenomenal four-membered nature of man (cf. Fig.78) became the four-membered, evolutionary mystery of his individual return to God, in which God Himself is the guide.

Knowledge of the Mystery of Golgotha is a lifetime’s task; we will therefore limit ourselves to a few basic indications of Rudolf Steiner. In one of his lectures he says: “The Christ had to enter what we bear within us as corpse of the light, corpse of warmth, corpse of air etc. He was only able to become akin to man through becoming akin to death. And we must feel in our souls that the God had to die so that he could fill us – we, who gained possession of death through the Luciferic temptation – and that we can say: The Christ in us” (GA 155, 16.7.1914).

Real death is known only to man because he has taken into himself, as an ‘I’-being, the mineral element – that which has fallen away from life – and has acquired the ability to reflect thoughts, and has gained possession of his, albeit non-substantial, spirit. There is nothing genuine in the world of Maya that corresponds to our concepts, as what is genuine in them is the spiritual element underlying them: “Within the world of Maya, the only thing that shows itself in its reality is death!” But because this is real, it is given to the human being really to overcome it: to return to that true and genuine realm that lies behind his shadow-like thoughts, by uniting consciousness with being – the “Tree of Knowledge” with the “Tree of Life”. This is the first act of the mystery of man’s resurrection. The need for its realization grew into a matter of urgency from the middle of the fourth cultural epoch when man became, finally and irrevocably, Homo sapiens. For, this human being has been given by the Christ the power to metamorphose death. “And by allowing death to prevail over Him, He brought into this human life those forces which bring about for man insight into the true nature of death: namely the knowledge that through this death the foundation is laid for life in the spiritual realm.”

“Christ becomes wedded to death, which on the Earth has grown into the characteristic expression of the Father spirit (see Fig.78). The Christ goes to the Father and is wedded to his manifestation, death, – and the image of death ceases to be true, because death becomes the seed for a new Sun in the universe. ... the death on the cross becomes the grain of seed from which will spring forth a new Sun...” (GA 112, 6.7.1909).

The human being imitates Christ, and conducts experiments with dying in his lesser ‘I’ on the cross of the sevenfold metamorphosis of thinking, when he reaches the fourth element, “beholding”. Human beings are led by Anthroposophy to such an understanding of the Christianity of the Holy Spirit. The power of judgment in beholding allows us, before physical death occurs, to “die” and to live in the spirit. “Die and become” – was the way Goethe expressed this task. And Angelus Silesius formulated it as follows: “ Die before you die, so that you may not die / When you are destined to die: else you may come to grief”.

The deed of Christ, accomplished through the Mystery of Golgotha, attains real power only in the epoch of the consciousness-soul, when the human being with his ‘I’ has achieved mastery of all his three souls. In this epoch, in the year 1899, was completed the final stage of the (already spiritual) descent into matter – Kali Yuga. This had lasted 5000 years, and comprised the evolutionary period that had begun in the Egyptian culture of the sentient-soul and had come to an end when the consciousness-soul had entered the decisive stage of its development. For this reason in the 20th century a crisis was growing in the as- tral body of the human being.

The mirror-reflection of the thought-beings that is produced by the brain is taken hold of by the astral body, as it is there that the lower ‘I’ is formed. With the emergence of the consciousness-soul, this ‘I’ is presented with the task of developing within the tri-unity of the soul an individual, spiritual life. Only the human being himself can therefore bring about the latest metamorphosis of himself as a species, which raises him to the rank of Homo liber. Its qualitative difference as compared to the two others consists in the fact that, in it, either the human being develops everything himself or he takes a path that leads to the total downfall of his personality. There is indeed the risk of humanity’s mass descent into feeble-mindedness, which would then be fixed among the traits of the species. The dominance of relativism, skepticism, the fantastic manipulations of mass consciousness using electronic means – all these are hallmarks of the approach of a hopeless future, which will unavoidably occur if no decisive step is taken towards the true freedom of the spirit, which goes hand in hand with a transformation as species of the threefold bodily nature of man. In this question epistemology merges to a unity with esotericism, sociology, economics, with the aim of awakening these to new life and restoring them to health. In this sense, through the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’ the foundation is also laid for social threefolding, the fundamental ideas for which were developed by Rudolf Steiner.

In the final analysis, the world-constellation of man today is such that, within it, all the above-described metamorphoses of man as a species unite, as they form an evolutionary totality which leads the human being to the Christ, who went through the Mystery of Golgotha. In this totality the most important thing to take place is the incarnation of world-evolution in the human being. All the forces that have created man and the natural kingdoms in the course of three-and-a-half aeons have entered the human being though Christ’s deed of sacrifice on Golgotha. When Christ had become man, he took within him the world- cross of evolution upon Himself. When the human being says: “Not ‘I’, but Christ in me”, he becomes Christophoros, the Christ-bearer; he takes upon himself “his cross”, and gradually becomes one who realizes world evolution in practice. In ascending to pure thinking, to a beholding of ideas, to free imaginations and still higher, man creates in the truest sense of the word a new reality, into which passes the world of otherness-of-being as it is spiritualized. It endows the atoms with the imprint of the new cosmic plan, and they proceed, in harmony with it, to build the structure of the following aeon.

To the extent that the individual human being moves on to fulfil his world task, the axis of world symmetry begins to pass through him. The former axis remains where it is. But the new one, which passes through the individual ‘I’, expresses the dynamic centre of that universe with which the concrete human individuality is merging into one. This universe has a subjective character, but ultimately the universe consists of subjects, and nothing else. Regarding this fact, we find in Angelus Silesius the following remarkable aphorism:

“I am myself eternity, when I depart from time,
And enfold myself in God, and God within myself.”
________________________

With these considerations we have not dealt exhaustively with the theme of the chapter. We will return to it in chapter XII. In order to develop it further, we need to study the structural analysis of the next chapters of the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’.

‘Die Philosophie der Freiheit’

Chapter 6 – The Human Individuality

The method of thinking based on the sevenfold logic of metamorphosis, which leads us towards imaginations, is not meant to be a dead, schematic system that one absorbs once and then merely applies in an automatic and monotonous manner. The laws in it are, indeed, unchanging, but the forms of the thought-process in its unfolding are vari- able.

The thought-forms of the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’ express the striving of the thought-process for mastery of the will-element, and for an enhanced, pure existentiality of the spirit. The laws of metamorphosis are equal to these demands and offer wide scope for the creation of forms.

As we move from the fifth to the sixth chapter we would turn again to Jakob Boehme and see how he describes in the language of alchemy the working of the laws we are studying, at the fifth and sixth stages of the metamorphosis. “This fourth nature-form ascends to the fifth, the living struggle of the parts, that rests within itself. There is present at this stage an inner austerity and silence, as at the first; though it is not an absolute rest, a silence of the inner opposites, but an inner movement of the opposites. It is not what is still that rests within itself, but what is in restless movement – that which has been ignited by the fiery lightning of the fourth stage.” (That ‘constantly moving rest’ in the 5th chapter was able to appear to us as ‘inertia’ of the interpretation; but how well that which Boehme writes harmonizes with what we have considered in our last chapter.) “At the sixth stage the primal being becomes aware of itself as inner life of this kind (life of the second stage and the living struggle of the parts at the fourth stage – G.A.B.): it be- comes aware of itself by means of sense-organs. The living beings (emphasis G.A.B.) endowed with senses embody this nature-form” (GA 7, p.128). The “primal being” of the sixth stage is, in our case, the thought-being which now individualizes itself in the course of the metamorphosis. Of decisive importance for it is the “sense-organ” in us, which acts as the medium for ideal perception. Of extreme interest to us is the fact that Boehme uses the concept of life for the second, fourth and sixth “nature-form” – or element and stage in our case. These are the elements which play within the cycle of metamorphosis the rôle of an agent of transformation, and relate to the nature, not so much of the elements as of the connection between the elements – i.e. the laws of metamorphosis. They differ from the latter through the fact that the actively cognizing ‘I’ is present in them to a high degree, in other words they are less formalized than the laws/connections of the elements.

Elements 2, 4 and 6 stand more in interrelation with the original, higher Trinity, the World-’I’; hence they are the antagonists of what ‘has become’ in the rectangle of elements 1, 3, 5 and 7. But they bring about opposition as a process. In their essential nature they are twofold. On the one hand they are oriented towards the past, to what ‘has become’, and on the other hand towards the future, to what is in the process of becoming; in themselves they belong, admittedly, neither to the first nor to the second. It accorded deeply with structural law that in chapter 2 we highlighted two Cycles (and the third only plays a makeshift role there). As to chapter 4, two of its parts are each formed of two triads, this being determined by its position at the axis of symmetry of Part I of the book. Its Cycle IV also arises by virtue of this position. In it is clearly expressed that which is hidden in chapter 2 – i.e. is present on a purely spiritual level between its first and second Cycles.

The sixth chapter stands in a symmetric relation to the second, with respect to the middle of Part I of the book. Structurally both chapters are also symmetrical. In chapter 6 there are also two Cycles. Its third Cycle, which is indispensable because it provides it with unity and wholeness, was – as we have seen – presented in chapter 5; it appears there as Cycle VIII. The additional, third Cycle was placed at the end in chapter 2; but in chapter 6 it came first, which is again explained by the symmetry of the chapters.

But there is an essential difference between chapters 6 and 2, in that chapter 6 has an individualized thought-form. This is why it is called ‘The Human Individuality’. Nowhere in the book is it so appropriate as in chapter 6 that a discussion of this problem should appear. It arises from the character of the chapter that the thought-technique applied in it puts to an especially stringent test our capacity to advance from reflection to ‘beholding’.

With regard to content, four questions are here set before us which we have already taken up – not only in chapter 5, but already in Cycle V of the fourth chapter – i.e. at a point where we have only just crossed the axis of symmetry and crossed the abyss separating reflection from ideal perception. One even has the impression that the most essential thing about the role of the subject in the process of perception was already said at that stage. But a special part is played here by the difference in method. Earlier, we had to do with an inferring of definitions, which took place according to “scientific method”, and thus inductively. Now, however, it is deduction that plays the dominant role in our discussion. To a certain extent it was this, working out of the future, that determined the course of those investigations, but now that the past has moved on to the “future” of chapter 6 it influences this and changes it, resulting in a partial cancellation (and preserving – Aufhebung) of the predetermination of the deduction.

In other words, with the individualizing of the idea in chapter 6 there is greater emphasis on the ‘how’ than on the ‘what’. Let us note the way Rudolf Steiner builds up the first few pages of chapter 6. He uses the word ‘also’ (German for: therefore, thus, and so) five times, but the meaning would require it to be repeated seven times. Where it has been omitted, we are inserting it in brackets. In cognition, the (German) word “also” is used for the drawing of a conclusion which the ‘I’ carries out when it has accumulated a sufficient number of facts. The “human individuality” in chapter 6 is also engaged in this process. It builds up the first Cycle in the chapter out of seven dual thought- forms which, because we have not yet entered the sphere of the super-sensible, are not of a purely ‘beholding’ character; but nor can they be purely conceptual, because we are within the sixth element. They combine within themselves the one and the other. One of its parts is conceptual in nature (we have marked it with the letter B in the text of the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’), and the other is a ‘beholding’ (marked with the letter A). If we move through seven such thought-forms – which in each single case demands considerable effort in the transition from reflection to beholding – our spirit (mind), with its habit of thinking in abstract concepts only, is powerfully “shaken up”, and submits more easily to the law of sevenfold metamorphosis, in accordance with which the Cycle that conceals these thought-forms within it is constructed.

The thought-form that constitutes the thesis of Cycle I embraces within its ‘beholding’ phase the entire preceding discussion of the character of human inner representations. It is concentrated in a more immediate way in Cycle VIII of the preceding chapter, and also in the Supplement to it. The conceptual part of the thesis has the character of a summarized statement. For this reason we are placing here the first “also” (thus).

CYCLE I
        (Cycle VIII of chapter 5 represents Part A)
1.    (Thus-‘also’) The main difficulty in explaining inner representations is found by philosophers          B[C.1]
      to lie in the fact that we ourselves are not the external things, while our inner representations are          (1.)
      supposed, nevertheless, to have a form that corresponds to the things.

The thought-form of the antithesis (with its ‘however’) also begins with that part which tends in its character towards the manifest clarity that is typical of ‘beholding’. Thanks to this preparation, the conceptual part assumes the character, not of pure abstraction but of a judgment a posteriori; its experience here was ‘beholding’, and it therefore has, itself, the nature of the fifth element.

2.           If we look more closely, however, we realize that this difficulty does not exist at all. ‡ We are           A(2)
        not, it is true, the outer things, but we belong, together with the outer things, to one and the same         (3.)
        world. ‡ That segment of the world which I perceive as my own subject, is permeated by the stream     (4.)
       of the universal world process. For my perception I am, initially, enclosed within the boundaries of
       my skin. But what is contained within this skin belongs to the cosmos as a whole.

The synthesis is built up in a similar way: first a brief act of beholding, and then the perception of the judgment.

3.          Hence (‘also’) for a relation to exist between my organism and the object outside me, it is not           B(5.)
       at all necessary for something of the object to enter my being or make an impression on my spirit
       (mind) like a signet ring in wax. ‡ The question: How do I come to know of the tree ten paces away.       A(6.)
   from me? – is quite wrongly put. It springs from the conviction that my bodily limits are absolute
       barriers, through which information about the things is carried into me. The forces at work inside my
       skin are the same as those that exist outside. ‡ Therefore (‘also’) I really am the things; not I as the        B(7.)
       perceiving subject, but I insofar as I am an integral part of the universal world process.

If we take out from all three elements just their conceptual parts (B) we arrive at a normal logical dialectical triad, which is expressed aphoristically in all-embracing concepts. The ‘beholding’ parts arise as a necessary step in the development; they have been preparing element 4. This also falls into two parts, but both have, of course, the character of ‘beholding’. The first (A’) is oriented towards the left half of the lemniscate of the Cycle, even extending beyond its limits (“the universal world-process” is present there).

4.           The percept of the tree exists together with my ‘I’ within the same totality. This universal                 A'
         world-process brings forth just as much the percept of the tree over there as it brings forth here
   the percept of my ‘I’. If I were not a knower of the world, but its creator, object and subject (percept
         and I) would come into being in a single act – since they are mutually conditioning elements. As
         world-knower I can find what these two share in common as entities that belong together – only
         through thinking, which relates them to one another by means of concepts.

Now follows the second part of the ‘beholding’ (A”), which takes us into the second half of the lemniscate. Content-wise there is a correspondence with Cycle V of chapter 4, and part A’ with its Cycle IV. This means that in both cases we have to do with the phenomenon of transition from speculation to ‘beholding’. We will now make this process clearer with the help of a diagram.

Element 4 also has its conceptual part. This is indispensable because element 5, too, begins with ‘beholding’. If this cannot be separated from element 4, the two merge together. It is also possible to assign the conceptual part of element 4 to element 5. Then its ‘beholding’ is enclosed between the two “therefores”, the two conceptual parts.

4.           The most difficult arguments to refute will be what are known as the physiological proofs of              [C.II]
        the subjective nature of our percepts. I can perceive the same pressure – on my eye, as light and           A"
        on my ear, as sound. A pulse of electricity is perceived by the eye as light, by the ear as sound, by         (1.)
        the nerves of the skin as pressure, by the olfactory organ as the smell of phosphorus. ‡ What are the     (2.)
        implications of this fact? Only this: I perceive an electric shock (or pressure) and after this a light
        quality or a sound or a certain smell etc. If there were no eye, then the percept of the mechanical
impact in the surrounding space would not be accompanied by the percept of a light quality; without
        the presence of an organ of hearing there would be no percept of sound etc. What right has one to
        assert that without organs of perception the entire process would not be there? ‡ Anyone who infers        (3.)
        from the fact that an electrical process in the eye produces light, that what we experience as light is,
        outside our organism, only a process of mechanical movements, – such a person forgets that he is
        only moving from one percept to another, and does not at all arrive at something outside perception.
      Just as one can say: the eye perceives as light a process of mechanical movement in its surroundings,
        so can one equally well say: a regular modification of an object is perceived by us as a process of
        movement. ‡ If I draw on the outer (4.) edge of a disc a horse twelve times, in the forms that its body         (4.)
        assumes while it is galloping, I can, by rotating the disc, create a semblance of movement. I need
        only to look through an opening in such a way that in the corresponding intervals I see the
        successive positions of the horse. I see, not twelve pictures of horses, but the image of a
        galloping horse.

                                                                                                                                                                              B
5.    The above mentioned physiological fact can therefore (‘also’) throw no light on the relation                (5.)
        between percept and inner representation. We must find another way to approach the question.               A
               At the moment when a percept appears in the field of my observation, thinking also                            (6.)
        comes into play through my activity. An element in my thought-system, a given intuition, a concept,
        unites with the percept. When the percept then disappears from view, what remains behind? My
        intuition with the relation to the specific percept, which has been formed in the moment of perception.
        How vividly I can, later, bring this relation to mind again depends on the way my spiritual and bodily           B
        organism functions. ‡ The inner representation is (therefore – ‘also’) nothing other than an                         (7.)
        intuition that has been brought into relation with a definite percept; a concept which was once
        connected with a percept, and has preserved the connection with this percept.

The complicated configuration of the thought-forms in Cycle I is also explained by its content. The conceptual parts of its elements emerge as inner representations do when percept unites with concept. And it is insight into the nature of the inner representation that forms the content of the Cycle. We have already pointed out that the results of the discussion in chapter 4 remained inconclusive. We have merely taken note of the unsatisfactory nature of a number of philosophical, psychological and physiological theories of human perception. With the help of further discussions in the course of chapter 5 we grasped the fact that of special significance in chapter 4 is what is said there about man’s inner representations. With the help of these the human being builds up his own world; with them he unfolds his own activity. We begin to understand the significance of the fact that the human being unites the concepts with the percepts. In the course of this (inner) work his individuality with its striving towards freedom emerges. Now that we have passed through the middle of Cycle I in chapter 6, the task we are given is to understand once and for all that the inner representation is “therefore an individualized concept”. Our ‘I’ identifies with it, and builds up within it the ‘I’s ideal form. In this way, content and method merge together in the text of the book.

6.            My concept of a lion is not formed out of my percepts of lions. But my inner representation of the         A.
        lion is formed on the basis of the percept. I can convey the concept of a lion to someone who has never
        seen a lion. But without a percept of his own, I will not be able to communicate to him a living inner
        representation.

7.             The inner representation is therefore (‘also’) an individualized concept. And now it is                      [C.III]
          understandable to us that the things in the real world can be represented for us inwardly. ‡ The            B(1.)
          full reality of a thing arises for us in the moment of observation, out of the coalescence of concept        A(2.)
          and percept. ‡ The concept receives by means of a percept an individualized form, a relation to this       (3.)
          particular percept. In this individual form, which bears within it as a special quality the relation to the
          percept, it lives on in us and embodies the inner representation of the thing in question. ‡ If we               (4.)
          encounter a second thing with which the same concept connects, then we recognize it as belonging
          to the first, as something of the same kind; if we encounter the same thing a second time, we find
          in our conceptual system not merely a corresponding concept, but the individualized concept with
          its own particular relation to the same object, and we recognize the object.
                The inner representation, therefore (‘also’), stands between percept and concept. It is the                 B(5.)
          determinate concept, which points to the percept.

The first element in Cycle II extends the sevenfoldness of Cycle I to an octave. Here we see repeated a phenomenon that occurs between elements 4 and 5 of Cycle I. The thesis of Cycle II is quite independent, but one can also experience it as consisting of the conceptual part of element 7 and of its own ‘beholding’ and conceptual part. The latter has so wide and all-embracing a character, that it can serve as a new beginning, a new thesis.

       CYCLE II
1.           The sum total of the things I can form inner representations of, I can call my experience. The              A(6.)
       person with the richer experience is the one who has a greater number of individualized concepts. A
       person who lacks all intuitive capacity is not able to gather experience. Things disappear from his field
       of vision because he lacks the concepts that he should bring into relation with them. A person with a
       well-developed thinking capacity, but with poorly functioning perception due to imperfect sense-organs,
       will also be unable to gather experience. In some way or another he can acquire concepts, but his
   intuitions lack the living reference to definite things. The empty-headed traveller and the scholar who
       lives in abstract conceptual systems are both equally unable to accumulate a wealth of experience.
               Reality comes to us in the form of percept and concept; the subjective representative of this                B(7.)
       reality is the ‘Vorstellung’ (inner representation).

Here the dual thought-forms come to an end. The second Cycle is the antithesis to Cycle I; feeling now stands over against thinking and perception – the objects of the foregoing discussions. But where is the unity of the chapter? – the reader will ask. It arises within the (human) subject of cognition, whose ‘I’ is the unity of thoughts, feelings and expressions of will. The human individuality “consists” of these.

2.            If our personality only expressed itself in cognitive activity, the sum of all that is objective would        [C.IV]
       be given in percept, concept and inner representation. ‡ However, it is not sufficient for us to bring            (1.)
       the percept, with the help of thinking, into relation with the concept; we relate it also to our own                  (2.)
       subjectivity, our individual ‘I’. The expression of this individual relation is feeling, which manifests
       as pleasure or pain.

3.       Thinking and feeling correspond to the dual nature of our being, which we considered earlier.               (3.)
       Thinking is the element through which we participate in the general cosmic process; feeling is that
       which enables us to withdraw into the narrow confines of our own being.
             Our thinking connects us with the world; our feeling leads us back into ourselves, makes us into
       an individual.

The introductory consideration of this new component brings with it the risk of falling into a new one-sidedness. This should not just be viewed conceptually; we must turn to ‘beholding’.

4.            If we were merely thinking and perceiving beings, our whole life would pass by in featureless
        indifference. If we could merely take cognizance of ourselves, we would be completely indifferent
        to ourselves. It is only by virtue of the fact that, together with self- knowledge we also have a feeling
        of self and, together with perception of things, feel pleasure and pain, that we live as individual
        beings whose existence is not exhausted with the conceptual relation in which they stand to the
        rest of the world, but who have also a special value in themselves.
               One might be tempted to see in the life of feeling an element that is more saturated with life,
        compared with thinking reflection on the world. We must respond to this by saying that the life of
        feeling only has this richer significance for me as an individual. For the world- whole, my life of
        feeling can only acquire value if feeling, as a percept of myself, enters into a connection with a
        concept and, via this roundabout route, is membered into the cosmos.

‘Beholding’ shows us the dualism of thought and feeling (which first appeared as the introductory motto to chapter 2) as a normal oscillation of the individual between his inner being and the being of the universe. Its resolution means an ascent on the ladder of the individualization of the subject of cognition – i.e. we have here before us the motive force of our personal development.*

* The concrete unfolding of its entire wealth of content will follow in Cycle II of chapter 9 (the second in the second Part of the book).
________

5.             Our life is a constant swinging back and forth between participation in the general world-process        (5.)
         and our individual being. The higher we ascend into the universal nature of thinking, where what is
         individual interests us, in the last resort, as no more than an example, an instance of the concept,
         the more there is a loss in us of the character of the particular being, the specific, single personality.
         The further we descend into the depths of our own life and allow our feelings to resonate with our
         experiences of the outer world, the more we sever ourselves from the universal being. A true
         individuality will be the one who reaches the highest with his feelings into the region of the ideal.

6.              There are people in whom even the most general ideas that enter their heads still possess                (6.)
         that special colouring which shows unmistakably their connection with their bearer. There exist
         others whose concepts come to meet us bearing no trace of individuality, as though they had not
         originated from a human being of flesh and blood.
                 Inner representation already gives an individual stamp to our conceptual life. Everyone has
         a standpoint of his own from which he views the world. His concepts connect on to his percepts. He
         will think the general concepts in his own special way. This particular quality is due to our physical
         location in the world, the perceptual sphere given to the central point where life has placed us.
                 Over against this determining factor there stands another, which is dependent on our peculiar
         organization. Our organization is a special, fully determined and unique entity. Each of us attaches
         particular feelings, and with the most varied degrees of intensity, to our percepts.
                 This is the individual core of our own personality. It is what remains when we have taken into
         account all the determining factors arising from the place we occupy in the world.

7.              A life of feeling devoid of all thought would, of necessity, gradually lose all connection with the           (7.)
         world. The human being with a disposition to unfold his full potential will see to it that knowledge
        of things goes hand in hand with development of the life of feeling.
                 Feeling is the means whereby concepts are imbued with concrete life.

A comparative structural analysis is one of the instruments of our methodology. An important aid to an understanding of the character of the chapters of the entire first (and also the second) part of the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’ can be found in a study of its triune structure. It consists of 3x3 elements and can be represented as in Fig.92.

This schematic figure conveys to us additional aspects for an understanding of the character of all the elements of the seven-membered metamorphosis. As to chapters 2, 4 and 6, they can be compared to the two-headed Janus. They all have the character of the antithesis; at the same time they have the additional function of providing the basis for a relation between the chapters that are to a special degree “pregnant with content”. The antithesis, which fulfils the task of a cancelling and preserving once, twice and three times is always directed towards the past in its first half and towards the future in the second. This is the case with both Cycles in Ch.6; and also in Ch.2. In Ch.2 Cycle I is short, unhurried and bears the hallmark of the content of Ch.1. Cycle II is unusually complex, many-layered, dramatic. It negates the old in order to create the new. If we familiarize ourselves with its content, we realize that the historical-cultural heritage in its traditional aspect condemns us to unfreedom. However, if we cancel it dialectically (not rejecting it completely) a space opens up for the future freedom of the spirit.

In Ch.6, following the law of symmetry (see Fig.), Cycle I is the most significant. In its entirety it embodies an act of self-knowledge, for the possibility of which we are indebted to the five preceding chapters.

The second Cycle of Ch.6 is, in essence, creating a firm basis for the existential monism of the personality. By way of the content, light is thrown here on the whole further structuring of the book.

To attempt a comparative analysis of just the elements of content (1, 3, 5, 7) of the Cycles composing the structure of chapter 6, would be an arduous undertaking indeed. In Cycle I we have obtained seven extremely important theses, which in themselves embody the quintessence of the meaning of the chapter. A correct approach would take all of them into account. But then one must compare them all with all seven elements of Cycle II of Ch.6 and of Cycle VIII of Ch.5. If we do so, a number of interesting mutual relationships emerge, for example in the juxtaposition of the theses:

(Ch.5) C.VIII The most important thing now will be to provide an exact concept of inner representation (Vorstellung).

(Ch.6) C.I The inner representation must correspond to the outer things – one of which is the ‘I’ as a part within the general world pro- cess.

(Ch.6) C.II In the inner representation reality is given to us subjec- tively.

We cannot attempt a comparison of other elements here, as the formalizing of such an undertaking would be an extremely difficult task in this case. With the order of our short formulations we carry out an act of intellectual strengthening of the ‘I’. In Ch.6 this work has already been completed, thanks to the seven “therefores” of Cycle I (the eighth is given in the thesis of Cycle II). The entire remaining content of the chapter is directed towards the development of ‘beholding’. This is not to say that it would be impossible to carry out a comparative analysis of its elements; but this work demands a more active involvement of the reader, and if he wishes to gain this experience, he can develop it himself.