These Guidelines were written from February 1924 through March 1925. Rudolf Steiner died on March 30, 1925
Translated by Frank Thomas Smith
The human being needs spiritual self-knowledge for inner peace. He finds himself in his thinking, feeling and willing. He sees how thinking, feeling and willing are dependent upon the natural human being. Where health and illness are concerned, they must follow the physical body in its strength and debilitation. Sleep extinguishes them. Life’s experiences show how dependent spiritual experience is on the physical body. One may therefore come to the conclusion that self-knowledge is lost midst these everyday experiences. Then the essential question arises: whether self-knowledge and therewith certainty about the true self beyond ordinary experience, is even possible. Anthroposophy wishes to answer this question based upon sound spiritual experience. It is not based on mere opinion or belief, but on experience of the spirit, which is as certain as the experience of the body.
When we look at lifeless nature we find a world revealed in coherent relationships. We investigate these relationships and find that they are the functions of natural laws. But we also find that through these laws lifeless nature unites with the earth as a whole. From this unification of the lifeless with the earth, we can then proceed to a contemplation of the plant-world. We see how the cosmos beyond the earth sends the forces from outer space which extracts life from the lap of the lifeless. We become aware of the essence in the living which extracts from the mere earthly and manifests what works down upon the earth from the distance of cosmic space. In the most insignificant plant we become aware of the essence of the cosmic light beyond the earth, just as a luminous object is reflected in the eye. By such enhanced contemplation we can observe the difference between the earthly/physical, which governs the lifeless, and the outer- earthly/etheric, which acts in living things.
We find man as an ensouled spiritual being placed in this earthly and outer-earthly world. As long as he is in the earthly element, which contains the lifeless, he carries his physical body with him; when he develops the forces which insert the living from the cosmos into the earthly, he has an etheric or life-body. This contrast between the earthly and the etheric has been completely overlooked by modern thinking. For this reason, the most irrational views about the etheric have ensued. Fear of losing one’s self in the fantastic has prevented discussion of this contrast. Without consideration of this contrast, however, no insight into Man and World is possible.
One can contemplate the nature of man insofar as it is revealed by his physical and his etheric body. We find, however, that whatever is revealed from these sources does not lead to consciousness, but remains in the unconscious. Consciousness is not illuminated, but darkened when the physical and etheric bodies’ activity is increased. Even fainting spells can be the result of such increases in activity. Through such observations we realize that something is active in the human organization – and in animals as well – which is not the same as what is active in the physical and etheric. It is not active when the physical and the etheric elements are active through their own forces, but when these cease their activity. We arrive thus at the concept of the astral body.
The reality of the astral body is found when we advance from meditation by the thinking which is stimulated from without to inner contemplation. For this one must inwardly seize the thinking stimulated from without and intensively experience it in the soul as such, without relation to the outer world; and then, by means of the soul-strength acquired by this seizing and experiencing, become aware of the fact that inner organs of perception exist, which spiritually see where the animal and human physical and the etheric bodies are bounded, in order that consciousness can arise.
Consciousness does not arise through a continuation of those activities which derive from the physical and etheric bodies; rather both of these bodies must reach rock-bottom, or even below that, in order to “make room” for consciousness. They are not the originators of consciousness, but merely provide the platform on which the spirit must stand in order to generate consciousness in earthly life. Just as man on earth needs a platform on which to stand, the spirit needs the material foundation of earth on which it can evolve. However, as a planet in space does not need a ground under it in order to claim its place, so the spirit – whose contemplation is not directed through the senses towards the material, but by its own forces towards the spiritual – does not need this material foundation in order to trigger its conscious activity.
Self-consciousness, which summarizes itself in the “I”, alights from consciousness. This happens when the physical and etheric bodies are deconstructed by their own forces, thereby allowing the emergence of the spiritual in man. The deconstruction of these bodies creates the ground on which consciousness is born. Reconstruction must follow, however, if the organism is not to be destroyed. Therefore, if for the experience of consciousness deconstruction takes place the deconstructed must be reconstructed. Self-consciousness lies in the perception of this construction. One can follow this process by interior vision. One can sense how the conscious is transformed into the self-conscious in that one creates from one's self an afterimage of the merely conscious. The consciousness possesses its own image in the organism vacated, as it were, through deconstruction. It becomes self-consciousness when the emptiness is re-filled from within. The being capable of this fulfillment is experienced as “I”.
The reality of the “I” is found when inner contemplation – by means of which the astral body is cognitively grasped – is developed further and living thinking is permeated with the will in meditation. At first one has devoted one’s self will-less to this thinking. Thereby one has allowed a spiritual element to enter into this thinking, just as color and sound enter the eye and the ear when perceived by the senses. In this way, what one has passively been able to bring to life in consciousness can be recreated by an act of will, and in this act of will the perception of one’s own “I” is enabled.
To be continued…