Gray consciousness

Intellectual soul

Ahrimanic

Greco-Roman

Thinking

Red consciousness

Consciousness Soul

Lucifer& Ahriman

Present Epoch

Willing

Black consciousness

Future Con. Soul

Asuras

Next Epoch

Willed Thinking

From The Deed of Christ and the Opposing Spiritual Powers

(Delivered by Rudolf Steiner on March 22, 1909):

"And now let us go further. In our days we are moving towards the epoch when other Beings will draw near to man - Beings who in the future before us will intrude more and more deeply into human evolution. Just as the Luciferic Spirits intervened in the Lemurian and the Ahrimanic Spirits in the Atlantean epoch, so our epoch too will see the intrusion of Beings. Let us be clear about the nature of these Beings.

Of the Beings who intervened during the Lemurian epoch we must say: They entrenched themselves in the astral body of man, drew his interests, impulses and desires down into the earthly sphere. Where - to speak more precisely - did these Luciferic Beings entrench themselves?

You can only understand this by taking as a basis what is set forth in my book Theosophy. There it is shown that the following members of man's being must be distinguished: first, his physical body; then his ether or life-body and his astral body - or as I have called it in that book, the sentient body, or soul-body.

These are the three members with which man was endowed before his earthly existence. The foundation of the physical body was laid on Old Saturn, the ether-body on the Old Sun, the soul or sentient body on the Old Moon. On the Earth was added the sentient soul - which is actually a transformation, an elaboration carried out unconsciously, of the sentient body. Lucifer anchored himself in the sentient soul; and there he remains. Through the unconscious transformation of the ether-body, the intellectual soul came into being, a more detailed description of which is contained in the book entitled The Education of the Child. It was in this second soul-member, the intellectual soul - the transformed part of the ether-body - that Ahriman established his footing. From there he lures man to false conceptions and judgments of material things, leads him to error, to sin, to lying - to everything that originates in the intellectual or mind soul. In every illusion that matter is the sole reality, we must perceive the whispered promptings of Ahriman, of Mephistopheles. Thirdly, there is the consciousness soul (spiritual soul), arising from an unconscious transformation of the physical body. You will remember how this transformation came about. Towards the end of the Atlantean epoch, the etheric body corresponding to the head came right into the physical head and gradually brought about selfconsciousness in the physical body. Fundamentally speaking, man is still working at this unconscious transformation of the physical body, at the development of the consciousness soul. And in the age now, approaching, those spiritual Beings known as the Asuras will creep into the consciousness soul and therewith into the human "I" or ego - for the "I" lights up in the consciousness soul. The Asuras will generate evil with a far mightier force than was wielded by the Satanic powers in the Atlantean epoch or by the Luciferic Spirits in the Lemurian epoch.

In the course of the Earth-period man will cast away all the evil brought to him by the Luciferic Spirits together with the blessing of freedom. The evil brought by the Ahrimanic Spirits can be shed in the course of karma. But the evil brought by the Asuric powers cannot be expunged in this way. Whereas the good Spirits instituted pain and suffering, illness and death in order that despite the possibility of evil, man's evolution may still advance, whereas the good Spirits made possible the working of karma to the end that the Ahrimanic powers might be resisted and the evil made good, it will not be so easy to counter the Asuric powers as earth-existence takes its course. For these Asuric Spirits will prompt what has been seized hold of by them, namely the very core of man's being, the consciousness soul together with the "I", to unite with earthly materiality. Fragment after fragment will be torn out of the "I", and in the same measure in which the Asuric Spirits establish themselves in the consciousness soul, man must leave parts of his existence behind on the earth. What thus becomes the prey of the Asuric powers will be irretrievably lost. Not that the whole man need become their victim - but parts of his spirit will be torn away by the Asuric powers."

"These Asuric powers are heralded to-day by the prevailing tendency to live wholly in the material world and to be oblivious of the realty of spiritual beings and spiritual worlds. True, the Asuric powers corrupt man to-day in a way that is more theoretical than actual. To-day they deceive him by various means into thinking that his "I" is a product of the physical world only; they lure him to a kind of theoretic materialism. But as time goes on - and the premonitory signs of this are the dissolute, sensuous passions that are becoming increasingly prevalent on earth - they will blind man's vision of the spiritual Beings and spiritual Powers. Man will know nothing nor desire to know anything of a spiritual world. More and more he will not only teach that the highest moral ideals of humanity are merely sublimations of animal impulses, that human thinking is but a transformation of a faculty also possessed by the animals, that man is akin to the animal in respect of his form and moreover in his whole being descends from the animal - but he will take this view in all earnestness and order his life in accordance with it.

Man does not as yet entirely base his life on the principle that his true being descends from the animal. But this view of existence will inevitably arise, with the result that men will also live like animals, will sink into animal impulses, animal passions. And in many things that need not be further characterized here, many things that in the great cities come to expression in orgies of dissolute sensuality, we can already perceive the lurid, hellish glare of the Spirits we call the Asuras.

The Asuras are "Beings" that we experience as the force of negative egotism, a black and dark vortex that takes advantage of our evolution away from the group soul to ego independence. This force has the power of a Zeitgeist or time spirit and envelopes the human in gross and selfish egotism which is opposite of the ego force that seeks to unite itself with the Sun-logos. Instead of uniting ourselves in a higher Christ ego through developing pure cognition, the asuras use our evolving spirit to experience the gratification that comes through Power over other egos.

Rudolf Steiner from "Cosmic Memory":

"These spirits implant selfhood, egoism in the body of man. Since they only attain their stage of humanity on Saturn, they remain connected with the development of mankind for a long time. Thus they have important work to perform on man in subsequent cycles as well. This work always acts as an inoculation with selfhood. The degenerations of selfhood into selfishness must be ascribed to their activity, while on the other hand they are the originators of all of man's independence. Without them man would never have become a self-enclosed entity, a .personality.. Christian esoteric teaching uses the expression .Primal Beginnings. (Archai) for them, and in theosophical literature they are designated as Asuras."

In his lecture, the The Etherisation of the Blood, Steiner discusses how the asuras use the highest creativity to create the greatest potential darkness. It seems that the more we evolve as individuals, the greater our potential for self destruction:

Question: What is the relation of chemical forces and substances to the spiritual world?

Answer: There are in the world a number of substances which can combine with or separate from each other. What we call chemical action is projected into the physical world from the world of Devachan . the realm of the Harmony of the Spheres. In the combination of two substances according to their atomic weights, we have a reflection of two tones of the Harmony of the Spheres. The chemical affinity between two substances in the physical world is like a reflection from the realm of the Harmony of the Spheres. The numerical ratios in chemistry are an expression of the numerical ratios of the Harmony of the Spheres, which has become dumb and silent owing to the densification of matter. If one were able to etherealise material substance and to perceive the atomic numbers the inner formative principle thereof, he would be hearing the Harmony of the Spheres.

We have the physical world, the astral world, the Lower Devachan and the Higher Devachan. If the body is thrust down lower even than the physical world, it comes into the sub-physical world, the lower astral world, the lower or evil Lower Devachan, and the lower or evil Higher Devachan. The evil astral world is the province of Lucifer, the evil Lower Devachan the province of Ahriman, and the evil Higher Devachan the province of the Asuras. When chemical action is driven down beneath the physical plane . into the evil Devachanic world . magnetism arises. When light is thrust down into the sub-material . that is to say, a stage deeper than the material world . electricity arises. If what lives in the Harmony of the Spheres is thrust down farther still, into the province of the Asuras, an even more terrible force, which it will not be possible to keep hidden very much longer, is generated. It can only be hoped that when this force comes to be known , a force we must conceive as being far, far stronger than the most violent electrical discharge, it can only be hoped that before some discoverer gives this force into the hands of humankind, men will no longer have anything un-moral left in them.

Question: What is electricity?

Answer: Electricity is light in the sub-material state. Light is there compressed to the utmost degree. An inward quality too must be ascribed to light; light is itself at every point in space. Warmth will expand in the three dimensions of space. In light there is a fourth; it is of fourfold extension . it has the quality of inwardness as a fourth dimension.

Question: What happens to the Earth's corpse?

Answer: As the residue of the Moon-evolution we have our present moon which circles around the Earth. Similarly there will be a residue of the Earth which will circle around Jupiter. Then these residues will gradually dissolve into the universal ether. On Venus there will no longer be any residue. Venus will manifest, to begin with, as pure Warmth, then it will become Light and then pass over into the spiritual world. The residue left behind by the Earth will be like a corpse. This is a path along which man must not accompany the Earth, for he would thereby be exposed to dreadful torments. But there are Beings who accompany this corpse, since they themselves will by that means develop to a higher stage.

Reflected as sub-physical world:

Astral World            the province of Lucifer
Lower Devachan          the province of Ahriman
Higher Devachan         the province of the Asuras

///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Cut

In "Cut" the ego confronts the atavistic double which wells up from the unconscious when the ego confronts itself in the red blood. The "thrill" is the sudden vibrational change in consciousness when the ego mergers into the vision of its own red blood-a sudden vision of self that separates the ego from the body. The image of the head wound, the red blood, and white skin recall the crown of thorns and the bread and wine of the mass . The red iron of the war god Mars summons bloody atavistic memories.
Metabolism and will seep through the boundary of our skin. The iron of Mars in the blood comes straight from the solar heart and the poet treads her own ego and will under foot in a way reminescent of Christ treading on bread of Earth. She then meets with the double, the destructive other speaking through the thumb. Here her ego confronts the racial memory in her blood where the matrix of the folk souls dominates. Here personal history risks losing itself in racial history.

Cut²

For Susan O'Neill Roe
What a thrill ---
My thumb instead of an onion.
The top quite gone
Except for a sort of a hinge

Of skin,
A flap like a hat,
Dead white.
Then that red plush.

Little pilgrim,
The Indian's axed your scalp.
Your turkey wattle
Carpet rolls

Straight from the heart.
I step on it,
Clutching my bottle
Of pink fizz.

A celebration, this is.
Out of a gap
A million soldiers run,
Redcoats, every one.

Whose side are they on?
O my
Homunculus, I am ill.
I have taken a pill to kill

The thin
Papery feeling.
Saboteur,
Kamikaze man ---

The stain on your
Gauze Ku Klux Klan
Babushka
Darkens and tarnishes and when

The balled
Pulp of your heart
Confronts its small Silence surrounds the drying blood
Mill of silence

How you jump ---
Trepanned veteran,
Dirty girl,
Thumb stump.

CUT

EGO, BLOOD, AND SPIRITin the work ofSYLVIA PLATH

Rudolf Steiner, in his lecture "The Occult Significance of the Blood", gives three spiritual archetypes that lie behind physical blood:

1.) Blood is where the inner person contacts the outside. Blood brings the macrocosm into the human microcosm and returns parts of the microcosm back to the outside world. It is the crossing point of the lemniscate that connects the human and the cosmos. Because blood functions as a kind of gate or doorway, power over blood means power over the person. Forces that conflict with the individual's ego may enter through the circulation of the blood.

2.) Blood is a second being, a true double or doppelgange. Lower strata of human consciousness embody themselves directly around the power and flow of blood circulation. Normally impenetrable to the conscious mind, these strata reflect the outer reaches of the cosmos and the history of human evolution. In times of stress the blood double may rise into consciousness triggering atavistic blood memories of the race or tribe.

3.) As our brain forms pictures of the external world, the complex matrix of blood circulation absorbs these pictures and transforms them into constructive forces which the ego uses creatively.

Perhaps, upon the death of her father, SP absorbed the negative of the dying Germanic folk soul into her blood which began to dominate her blood circulation. The doppelganger, in order to survive, struggled constantly with the Christ like freedom her ego craved. Her desire for perfection and power in the world hampered her freedom to create, although it did provide her with the impetus to struggle on.

Unfortunately, she came to rely too heavily upon this will element. Her marital difficulties helped her to take control of her blood by her moving consciously into it. The husband became equated with the father doppelganger (see Daddy) and because the double was now attached to him she was able to finally see it in the open and exorcise it. She gained her ego freedom in the creative sphere(see Ariel), but was unable to replace the strong will to live that she lost with the daddy doppelganger. Her undeveloped will could not protect her and led to the "failed initiation" which we see as suicide.

".....for, incredible as it may seem to the materialistic ideas of the present day, there was at one time a form of consciousness by means of which men considered not only their own sense-perceptions as their own experiences, but also the experiences of their forefathers. In those times, when they said, "I have experienced such and such a thing," they alluded not only to what had happened to themselves personally, but also to the experiences of their ancestors, for they could remember these." Rudolf Steiner, The Occult Significance of the Blood

Cut³ By Sylvia Plath from the Collected Works1

For Susan O'Neill Roe

What a thrill --- My thumb instead of an onion.

The top quite gone

Except for a sort of a hinge

Of skin,

A flap like a hat,

Dead white.

Then that red plush

The thrill is the sudden vibrational change that occurs when our ego confronts the red blood. Our consciousness alters, the ego separates from the body and views it objectively. Some lose consciousness.

Head wound. The bread and the wine of the Mass.

Little pilgrim,

The Indian's axed your scalp.

Your turkey wattle

Carpet rolls

Straight from the heart.

I step on it,

Clutching my bottle

Of pink fizz.

A tramplimg of the vineyards-like the blood of Christ her blood enters the Earth -under foot, under will.

Humor allows the atavistic racial memories to well up. The iron of Mars recalls the bloody striving of humanity to establish dominance of conflicting folk souls. And yet the Martial blood letting leads to the Sun of the Heart and the possibility of a humanity that centers around the free ego.

A celebration, this is.

Out of a gap

A million soldiers run,

Redcoats, every one.

Whose side are they on?

O my Homunculus, I am ill.

The meeting with the double as the ego realizes the ambivalent nature of the blood double. A source of power but at the cost of the autonomy of the ego. Homunculus-the little man who bears the German folk soul. The "I" is sick and must take back its rightful place in the blood.

I have taken a pill to kill

The thin Papery feeling.

Saboteur, Kamikaze man ---

The stain on your

Gauze Ku Klux Klan Babushka

Darkens and tarnishes and when

The balled Pulp of your heart

Confronts its small Mill of silence. Her true ego, dedicated to exogamy(blood mixing) is repulsed by the endogamy(racial blood purity) of the fascist double. Rudolf Steiner: "In earlier times tribes held aloof from each other, and the individual members of families intermarried. You will find this to have been the case with all races and with all peoples; and it was an important moment for humanity when this principle was broken through, when foreign blood was introduced, and when marriage between relations was replaced by marriage with strangers, when endogamy gave place to exogamy. "Endogamy preserves the blood of the generation; it permits of the same blood flowing in the separate members as flows for generations through the entire tribe or the entire nation. Exogamy inoculates man with new blood, and this breaking-down of the tribal principle, this mixing of blood, which sooner or later takes place among all peoples, signifies the birth of the external understanding, the birth of the intellect. The birth of logical thought, the birth of the intellect, was simultaneous with the advent of exogamy. "--Rudolf Steiner

How you jump --- Trepanned veteran, Dirty girl, Thumb stump.

Doppelganger is twisted and disfigured and associated with unhealthy sexuality

The dry, hard blood at the poem's conclusion points to the wisdom that arises from painful experience. The lack of harmony, which is suffering, may be overcome and transmuted to wisdom.

"The joys and pleasures of life, all that life can offer me in the way of satisfaction, all these things do I receive gratefully; yet were I far more loath to part with my pain and suffering than with those pleasant gifts of life, for `it is to my pain and suffering that I owe my wisdom. And so it is that in wisdom occult science has ever recognized what may be called crystallized pain--pain that has been conquered and thus changed into its opposite." -Rudolf Steiner"

We may also gain wisdom by seeking to understand the suffering of another. SP's wisdom gained from these experiences lives on our own ego's striving for freedom.

Excerpts from Steiner's Occult Significance of Blood

Rudolf Steiner:

"Faust is to inscribe his name in his own blood, not because the devil is inimical to it, but rather because he desires to gain power over it."

"Now, there is a remarkable perception underlying this passage, namely, that he who gains power over a man's blood gains power over the man, and that blood is "a very special fluid" because it is that about which, so to speak, the real fight must be waged, when it comes to a struggle concerning the man between good and evil."

"But for work of this kind the student must of course be familiar with those methods of investigation which belong to spiritual science. Now, all that is contained in these legends and ancient world-conceptions about the blood is wont to be of importance, since in those remote times there was a wisdom by means of which man understood the true and wide significance of blood, this "very special fluid" which is itself the flowing life of human beings."

"You are aware that it is by say of the blood that the "inner man" comes into contact with that which is exterior, and that in the course of this process man's blood absorbs oxygen, which constitutes the very breath of life. Through the absorption of this oxygen the blood undergoes renewal. The blood which is presented to the instreaming oxygen is a kind of poison to the organism, a kind of destroyer and demolisher but through the absorption of the oxygen the blue-red blood becomes transmuted by a process of combustion into red, life-giving fluid. This blood finds its way to all parts of the body, depositing everywhere its particles of nourishment, has the task of directly assimilating the materials of the outer world, and of applying them, by the shortest method possible, to the nourishment of the body. It is necessary for man and the higher animals first to absorb the oxygen from the air into it, and to build up and maintain the body by means of it."

"One gifted with a knowledge of souls has not without truth remarked: "The blood with its circulation is like a second being, and in relation to the man of bone, muscle, and nerve, acts like a kind of exterior world." For, as a matter of fact, the entire human being is continually drawing his sustenance from the blood, and at the same time he discharges into it that for which he has no use. A man's blood is therefore a true double ever bearing him company, from which he draws new strength, and to which he gives all that he can no longer use. "Man's liquid life" is therefore a good name to have given the blood; for this constantly changing "special fluid" is assuredly as important to man as is cellulose to the lower organisms."

"The distinguished scientist, Ernst Haeckel, who has probed deeply into the workings of nature, in several of his popular works has rightly drawn attention to the fact that blood is in reality the latest factor to originate in an organism. If we follow the development of the human embryo we find that the rudiments of bone and muscle are evolved long before the first tendency toward blood formation becomes apparent. The groundwork for the formation of blood, with all its attendant system of blood-vessels, appears very late in the development of the embryo, and from this natural science has rightly concluded that the formation of blood occurred late in the evolution of the universe; that other powers which were there had to be raised to the height of blood, so to speak, in order to bring about at that height what was to be accomplished inwardly in the human being. Not until the human embryo has repeated in itself all the earlier stages of human growth, thus attaining to the condition in which the world was before the formation of blood, is it ready to perform this crowning act of evolution the transmuting and uplifting of all that had gone before into the "very special fluid" which we call Blood."

Rudolf Steiner, in the same lecture, discusses the connection between the blood and the human ego:

"Man, however, towers above the animal through the possession of something quite distinct, and thoughtful people have at all times been aware wherein this superiority consists. It is indicated in what Jean Paul says of himself in his autobiography. He relates that he could remember the day when he stood as a child in the courtyard of his parents' house, and the thought suddenly flashed across his mind that he was an ego, a being, capable of inwardly saying "I" to itself; and he tells us that this made a profound impression upon him.

All the so-called external science of the soul overlooks the most important point which is here involved. I will ask you, therefore, to follow me for a few moments in making a survey of what is a very subtle argument, yet one which will show you how the matter stands. In the whole of human speech there is one small word which differs in toto from all the rest. Each one of you can name the things around you; each one can call a table a table, and a chair a chair. But there is one word, one name, which you cannot apply anything save to that which owns it, and this is the little word "I." None can address another as "I." This "I" has to sound forth from the innermost soul itself; it is the name which only the soul itself can apply to itself. Every other person is a "you" to me, and I am a "you" to him. All religions have recognized this "I" as the expression of that principle in the soul through which its innermost being, its divine nature, is enabled to speak. Here, then, begins that which can never penetrate through the exterior senses, which can never, in its real significance, be named from without, but which must sound forth from the innermost being. Here begins that monologue, that soliloquy of the soul, whereby the divine self makes known its presence when the path lies clear for the coming of the Spirit into the human soul.

"In the religions of earlier civilizations, among the ancient Hebrews, for instance, this name was known as "the unutterable name of God," and whatever interpretation modern philology may choose to place upon it, the ancient Jewish name of God has no other meaning than that which is expressed in our word "I." A thrill passed through those assembled when the "Name of the Unknown God" was pronounced by the Initiates, when they dimly perceived what was meant by those words reverberating through the temple: "I am that I am."

This etheric body is, in its turn, permeated by an astral body. And what does the astral body do? It causes the substance which has been set in motion to experience inwardly the circulation of those outwardly moving fluids, so that the external movement is reflected in inward experience.

"We have now arrived at the point where we are able to comprehend man so far as concerns his place in the animal kingdom. All the substances of which man is composed, such as oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, sulfur, phosphorus, etc., are to be found outside in inanimate nature also. If that which the etheric body has transformed into living substance is to have inner experiences, if it is to create inner reflections of that which takes place externally, then the etheric body must be permeated by what we have come to know as the astral body, for it is the astral body that gives rise to sensation. But at this stage the astral body calls forth sensation only in one particular way. The etheric body changes the inorganic substances into vital fluids, and the astral body in its turn transforms this vital substance into sentient substance; but, and this I ask you to specially notice, what is it that a being with no more than these three bodies is capable of feeling?"

It feels only itself, its own life-processes; it leads a life that is confined within itself.

"Now, this is a most interesting fact, and one of extraordinary importance for us to bear in mind. If you look at one of the lower animals, what do you find it has accomplished? It has transformed inanimate substance into living substance, and living substance into sensitive substance: and sensitive substance can only be found where there exist, at all events, the rudiments of what at a later stage appears as a developed nervous system.

Thus we have inanimate substance, living substance, and substance permeated by nerves capable of sensation. If you look at a crystal you have to recognize it primarily as the expression of certain natural laws which prevail in the external world in the so-called lifeless kingdom. No crystal could be formed without the assistance of all surrounding nature. No single link can be severed from the chain of the cosmos and set apart by itself. And just as little can you separate from his environment man, who, if he were lifted to an altitude of even a few miles above the earth, must inevitably die. Just as man is only conceivable here in the place where he is, where the necessary forces are combined in him, so it is too with regard to the crystal; and therefore, whoever views a crystal rightly will see in it a picture of the whole of nature, indeed of the whole cosmos. What Cuvier said is actually the case, viz., that a competent anatomist will be able to tell to what sort of animal any given bone has belonged, every animal having its own particular kind of bone-formation."

"Thus the whole cosmos lives in the form of a crystal. In the same way the whole cosmos is expressed in the living substance of a single being. The fluids coursing through a being are, at the same time, a little world, and a counterpart of the great world. And when substance has become capable of sensation, what then dwells in the sensations of the most elementary creatures? Such sensations mirror the cosmic laws, so that each separate living creature perceives within itself microcosmically the entire macrocosm. The sentient life of an elementary creature is thus an image of the life of the universe, just as the crystal is an image of its form. The consciousness of such living creatures is, of course, but dim. Yet this very vagueness of consciousness is counterbalanced by its far greater range, for the whole cosmos is felt in the dim consciousness of an elementary being. Now, in man there is only a more complicated structure of the same three bodies found in the simplest sensitive living creature."

".........surrounding physical world, and containing, like the plant, certain juices which transform it into living substance, and in which a nervous system gradually becomes organized. This first nervous system is the so-called sympathetic system, and in the case of man it extends along the entire length of the spine, to which it is attached by small threads on either side. It has also at each side a series of nodes, from which threads branch off to different parts, such as the lungs, the digestive organs, and so on. This sympathetic nervous system gives rise, in the first place, to the life of sensation just described. But man's consciousness does not extend deep enough to enable him to follow the cosmic processes mirrored by these nerves. They are a medium of expression, and just as human life is formed from the surrounding cosmic world, so is this cosmic world reflected again in the sympathetic nervous system. These nerves live a dim inward life, and if man were but able to dip down into his "sympathetic" system, and to lull his higher nervous system to sleep, he would behold, as in a state of luminous life, the silent workings of the mighty cosmic laws."

"When evolution has proceeded so far that the sympathetic nervous system has been developed, so that the cosmos has been reflected in it, the evolving being again at this point opens itself outwards; to the sympathetic system is added the spinal cord. The system of brain and spinal cord then leads to those organs through which connection is set up with the outer world."

"Man, having progressed thus far, is no longer called upon to act merely as a mirror for reflecting the primordial laws of cosmic evolution, but a relation is set up between the reflection itself and the external world. The junction of the sympathetic system and the higher nervous system is expressive of the change which has taken place beforehand in the astral body. The latter no longer merely lives the cosmic life in a state of dull consciousness, but it adds thereto its own special inward existence. The sympathetic system enables a being to sense what is taking place outside it; the higher system of nerves enables it to perceive that which happens within, and the highest form of the nervous system, such as is possessed by mankind in general at the present stage of evolution, takes from the more highly developed astral body material for the creation of pictures, or representations, of the outer world. Man has lost the power of perceiving the former dim primitive pictures of the external world, but, on the other hand, he is now conscious of his inner life, and out of this inner life he forms, at a higher stage, a new world of images in which, it is true, only a small portion of the outer world is reflected, but in a clearer and more perfect manner than before."

"Hand in hand with this transformation another change takes place in higher stages of development. The transformation thus begun extends from the astral body to the etheric body. As the etheric body in the process of its transformation evolves the astral body, as to the sympathetic nervous system is added the system of the brain and spine, so, too, does that which after receiving the lower circulation of fluids has grown out of and become free from the etheric body now transmutes these lower fluids into what we know as blood.

Blood is, therefore, an expression of the individualized etheric body, just as the brain and spinal cord are the expression of the individualized astral body. And it is this individualizing which brings about that which lives as the ego or "I."

Schema:

A. The Physical Body-pure matter

B. The Etheric Body-forces that vivify matter into living organisms

C. The Astral Body-sensation, emotion, and thought which is reflected in matter but not reducible to matter

These links are:

1. The inorganic, neutral, physical forces;

2. The vital fluids, which are also found in plants;

3. The lower or sympathetic nervous system;

4. The higher astral body, which has been evolved from the

lower one, and which finds its expression in the spinal cord

and the brain;

5. The Principle that individualizes the etheric body-blood. The primal etheric vital fluids are individualized and now mediate the individualized consciousness of the higher organisms.

"Just as these two latter principles have been individualized, so will the first principle through which lifeless matter enters the human body, serving to build it up, also become individualized; but in our present-day humanity we find only the first rudiments of this transformation."

"We have seen how the external formless substances enter the human body, and how the etheric body turns these materials into living forms; how, further, the astral body fashions pictures of the external world, how this reflection of the external world resolves itself into inner experiences, and how this inner life then reproduces from within itself pictures of the outer world."

"Now, when this metamorphosis extends to the etheric body, blood is formed. The blood-vessels, together with the heart, are the expression of the transformed etheric body, in the same way in which the spinal cord and the brain express the transformed astral body. Just as by means of the brain the external world is experienced inwardly, so also by means of the blood this inner world is transformed into an outer expression in the body of man. I shall have to speak in similes in order to describe to you the complicated processes which have now to be taken into account."

"The blood absorbs those pictures of the outside world which the brain has formed within, transforms them into living constructive forces, and with them builds up the present human body. Blood is therefore the material that builds up the human body. We have before us a process in which the blood extracts from its cosmic environment the highest substance it can possibly obtain, viz., oxygen, which renews the blood and supplies it with fresh life. In this manner our blood is caused to open itself to the outer world."

"We have thus followed the path from the exterior world to the interior one, and also back again from that inner world to the outer one. Two things are now possible. (1) We see that blood originates when man confronts the external world as an independent being, when out of the perceptions to which the external world has given rise, (2) he in his turn produces different shapes and pictures on his own account, thus himself becoming creative, and making it possible for the Ego, the individual Will, to come into life. A being in whom this process had not yet taken place would not be able to say "I." In the blood lies the principle for the development of the ego. The "I" can only be expressed when a being is able to form within itself the pictures which it has obtained from the outer world. An "I-being" must be capable of taking the external world into itself, and of inwardly reproducing it."

"The ego turns in two directions, and the blood expresses this fact externally. The vision of the ego is directed inwards; its will is turned outwards. The forces of the blood are directed inwards; they build up the inner man, and again they are turned outwards to the oxygen of the external world. This is why, on going to sleep, man sinks into unconsciousness; he sinks into that which his consciousness can experience in the blood. When, however, he again opens his eyes to the outer world, his blood adds to its constructive forces the pictures produced by the brain and the senses. Thus the blood stands midway, as it were, between the inner world of pictures and the exterior living world of form. "

"If we think of a heightened form of this consciousness, we shall have some idea of how this was also expressed in a corresponding form of memory. A person experiencing no more than what he perceives by his senses, remembers no more than the events connected with those outward sense-experiences. He can only be aware of such things as he may have experienced in this way since his childhood. But with prehistoric man the case was different. Such a man sensed what was within him, and as this inner experience was the result of heredity, he passed through the experiences of his ancestors by means of his inner faculty. He remembered not only his own childhood, but also the experiences of his ancestors. This life of his ancestors was, in fact, ever present in the pictures which his blood received, for, incredible as it may seem to the materialistic ideas of the present day, there was at one time a form of consciousness by means of which men considered not only their own sense-perceptions as their own experiences, but also the experiences of their forefathers. In those times, when they said, "I have experienced such and such a thing," they alluded not only to what had happened to themselves personally, but also to the experiences of their ancestors, for they could remember these."

"We must now inquire how it was that his form of consciousness was changed. It came about through a cause well known to occult history. If you go back into the past, you will find that there is one particular moment which stands out in the history of each nation. It is the moment at which a people enters on a new phase of civilization, the moment when it ceases to have old traditions, when it ceases to possess its ancient wisdom, the wisdom which was handed down through generations by means of the blood. The nation possesses, nevertheless, a consciousness of it, and this is expressed in its legends."

"In earlier times tribes held aloof from each other, and the individual members of families intermarried. You will find this to have been the case with all races and with all peoples; and it was an important moment for humanity when this principle was broken through, when foreign blood was introduced, and when marriage between relations was replaced by marriage with strangers, when endogamy gave place to exogamy. Endogamy preserves the blood of the generation; it permits of the same blood flowing in the separate members as flows for generations through the entire tribe or the entire nation. Exogamy inoculates man with new blood, and this breaking-down of the tribal principle, this mixing of blood, which sooner or later takes place among all peoples, signifies the birth of the external understanding, the birth of the intellect."

"The birth of logical thought, the birth of the intellect, was simultaneous with the advent of exogamy.

But this mingling of blood which comes about through exogamy is also that which at the same time obliterates the clairvoyance of earlier days, in order that humanity may evolve to a higher stage of development."

"Thus, in an unmixed blood is expressed the power of the ancestral life, and in a mixed blood the power of personal experience."

"That which is able to live in man's blood is that which lives in his ego. Just as the physical body is the expression of the physical principle, as the etheric body is the expression of the vital fluids and their systems, and the astral body of the nervous system, so is the blood the expression of the "I," or ego. Physical principle, etheric body, and astral body are the "Above"; physical body, vital system, and nervous system are the "below." Similarly, the ego is the "above," and the blood is the "below." Whoever, therefore, would master a man, must first master that man's blood. This must be borne in mind if any advance is to be made in practical life. Beauty and truth possess a man only when they possess his blood."

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Notes on the Double

from An Outline of Occult Science

"I am terrified by this dark thing/That sleeps in me" (Elm by Sylvia)

Steiner equates the double with the lesser Guardian of the Threshold. The Greater Guardian seems to be the evolutionary ideal, so in a way Christ is a type of doppelganger in the sense that our evolutionary potential weaves through our being. Both doubles manifest when we gain objective self knowledge, the lesser becomes visible when we are able to bear the vision of our faults and shortcoming. When we objectively view the horror of our shortcomings, then the ideal which we can achieve becomes visible.

Sense free objects(spiritual beings), although they express their essential being, reflect the nature of the human observer. A person's hidden inclinations become manifest in sense free experience, therefore, sense-free observation is clouded by the inner being of the observer. Human nature casts a veil over experiences in pure sense free experiences. The human observer finds it difficult to distinguish the beings in the sense free world from that which is radiated outwards by he himself.

In the world of pure ideation, or spirit, the ego appears as the first image before the human soul. It appears not as the higher self which the ego seeks to become, but as the imperfect lower self. This image is difficult to face and normal consciousness usually blots it out. We constantly conceal our true being from our own perception.

So the double, in normal life, is a subconscious aspect of self that contains unbearable shadows that strive to survive and therefore have a life of their own. The double reacts with the doubles of other persons. We uncover the double in states of pure ideation when we sojourn in the spirit world where the double alters the appearance of all we see spiritually. We must prepare ourselves to face the double or else the meeting will lead to terror and depression. If we bypass the meeting with the double, then the spiritual world cannot be recognized in its true condtion.

Most importantly, the double prevents our knowledge of the spiritual world. It prevents us from seeing our true being as an image in itself. In waking consciousness, the double keeps us invisible to ourselves by a subconscious shame. Because our essential being is a dominant element of the spiritual enviroment, the spiritual becomes invisible if our true self is invisible. There the doppelganger conceals the world of pure ideas and is the "guardian" at the gates of higher consciousness.

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SHADOWY TREES

The Entwining Double

Elm by Sylvia Plath from her Collected Works

Elm⁴

For Ruth Fainlight

I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root:
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there.

Is it the sea you hear in me,
Its dissatisfactions?
Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness?

Love is a shadow.
How you lie and cry after it
Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.

All night I shall gallop thus, impetuously,
Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf,
Echoing, echoing.

Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons?
This is rain now, this big hush.
And this is the fruit of it: tin-white, like arsenic.

I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.
Scorched to the root
My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires.

Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs.
A wind of such violence
Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek.

The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me
Cruelly, being barren.
Her radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her.

I let her go. I let her go
Diminished and flat, as after radical surgery.
How your bad dreams possess and endow me.

I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.

I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

Clouds pass and disperse.
Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?
Is it for such I agitate my heart?

I am incapable of more knowledge.
What is this, this face
So murderous in its strangle of branches? -

Its snaky acids hiss.
It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults
That kill, that kill, that kill.

Again, the fission of self. Who are the changing speakers? Recollection of the experience of sense impressions, remembering the tree, makes the many selves unravel and project outward and carry on dialogue. The true ego, the source of all knowledge and inspiration, is veiled by a taunting double. The poet sees directly into the world of pure ideas, the non-material, but the beings and thoughts there are transformed by her dark self. Her fear of death is laid out before her. The "voice of nothing", true oblivion, greets her healthy curiosity about death. Lovelessness reigns. Most persons could not endure this vision, but the poet has consciously chosen to cross the threshold and meet the Guardian.

At night, the darkness coiled inside her unwinds and stands before her as an objective reality. Sleep is the precursor, the prototype of death-our daily practice of dying where most of us benefit by the oblivion and rebirth. But the poet moves consciously into a sleep where terror balances the ecstatic communication with the Muses. Her consciousness is not anchored to a fixed point. In this quasi sleep state, she does not feel like an ego wrapped in a body, but senses that all outer events constitute her self. The object-subject dichotomy does not exist in this state of being which tolerates no bystanders. The tremendous passions that flow through her are experienced as the violent wind.

Like The Moon and the Yew Tree, this terrifying and "treey" vision is married to the moon. Her nightly encounter with the "Daddy Doppelganger" entwined about her central nervous system is "capped" by the atavistic moon consciousness. Her retention of tribal blood clairvoyance is a " bad possessor" because it suppresses her higher ego powers; however, it endows here with the visionary poetic ability. Her life quest was to wrest these creative powers from the darkness and take total control over them so she could offer them to the solar light of the true self. This she achieves when she rides the solar horse of love in Ariel. Here is the doppelganger or the Lower Guardian of the Threshold blocking access to higher knowledge, appearing as a serpent entwined in the tree of the central nervous. The vision of the poet confirms the teaching of the mystics.

Rudolf Steiner, in his Bhagavad Gita and the Epistles of St. Paul lecture cycle, revealed the meaning of the inverted tree and serpent: Speaking of Arjuna's mighty vision of Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita: "That it is which we meet with in such a grand form in the Gita, which at the end of our last lecture we allowed to work upon our souls, and which Arjuna meets as his own being seen externally; seen without beginning and without end - outspread over all space. " "If we observe this condition more clearly we come to a place in the Gita which, if we have already been amazed at the great and mighty contents of the Gita, must infinitely extend our admiration. We come to a passage which, to the man of the present day, must certainly appear incomprehensible; wherein Krishna reveals to Arjuna the nature of the Avayata-tree, of the Fig-tree, by telling him that in this tree the roots grow upwards and the branches downwards; where Krishna further says that the single leaves of this tree are the leaves of the Veda book, which, put together, yield the Veda knowledge. That is a singular passage in the Gita." " What does it signify, this pointing to the great tree of Life, whose roots have an upward direction, and the branches a downward direction, and whose leaves give the contents of the Veda? We must transport ourselves back into the old knowledge, and try and understand how it worked. The man of today only has, so to say, his present knowledge, communicated to him through his physical organs. The old knowledge was acquired as we have just described, in the body which was still etheric, not that the whole man was etheric, but knowledge was acquired through the part of the etheric body which was within the physical body. Through this organism, through the organisation of the etheric body, the old knowledge was acquired. Just imagine vividly that you, when in the etheric body, could perceive by means of the serpent. " "There was something then present in the world, which to the man of the present day is no longer there. Certainly the man of today can realise much of what surrounds him when he puts himself into relation with nature; but just think of him when he is observing the world: there is one thing he does not perceive, and that is his brain. No man can see his own brain when he is observing; neither can any man see his own spine. This impossibility ceases as soon as one observes with the etheric body. A new object then appears which one does not otherwise see - one perceives one's own nervous system. Certainly it does not appear as the present-day anatomist sees it. It does not appear as it does to such a man, it appears in such a way that one feels: .Yes! There thou art, in thy etheric nature.. One then looks upwards 'and sees how the nerves, which go through all the organs, are collected together up there in the brain. That produces the feeling: .That is a tree of which the roots go upwards, and the branches stretch down into all the members.. The tree is not felt as being of the same small size as we are inside our skin: it is felt as being a mighty cosmic tree. The roots stretch far out into the distances of space and the branches extend downwards. One feels oneself to be a serpent, and one sees one's nervous system objectified, one feels that it is like a tree which sends its roots far out into the distance of space and the branches of which go downwards. / "Remember what I have said in former lectures, that man is, in a sense, an inverted plant. All that you have learnt must be recalled and put together, in order to understand such a thing as this wonderful passage in the Bhagavad Gita. We are then astonished at the old wisdom which must today, by means of new methods, be called forth from the depths of occultism. We then experience what this tree brings to light. We experience in its leaves that which grows upon it; the Veda knowledge, which streams in on us from without. The wonderful picture of the Gita stands out clearly before us: the tree with its roots going upwards, and its branches going downwards, with its leaves full of knowledge, and man himself as the serpent round the tree. "

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The Moon and the Yew Tree

By Sylvia Plath from her Collected Works ⁵

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary
The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.
The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God
Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility
Fumy, spiritous mists inhabit this place.
Separated from my house by a row of headstones.
I simply cannot see where there is to get to.

The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,
White as a knuckle and terribly upset.
It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet
With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.
Twice on Sunday, the bells startle the sky --
Eight great tongues affirming the Resurrection
At the end, they soberly bong out their names.

The yew tree points up, it has a Gothic shape.
The eyes lift after it and find the moon.
The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.
Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.
How I would like to believe in tenderness -
The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,
Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.

I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering
Blue and mystical over the face of the stars
Inside the church, the saints will all be blue,
Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews,
Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.
The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.
And the message of the yew tree is blackness - blackness and silence.

The poet steps out at night and immediately the exterior objects of the world are transformed by projections from her inner being, the trees are the black thoughts of her mind and the light is the cold light of her mind. She achieves consciously the objective visions of inner self and feels akin to a creator God. But again, the doppelganger or the Guardian of the Threshold blocks her further entry into the spiritual worlds. Her overwhelming vision of self prevents her from seeing ".. where there is to get to." The dark tree topped by the mother moon reminds her of the great fall and absorbs all spiritual light. The vision of the inner tree capped by moon consciousness is also a dying remnant of the old clairvoyance which contrasts with the Sun of Ariel.

In light of Steiner's description of the Avayata-tree, it is interesting to consider the following passage from the New Testament book of Matthew: 18 Now in the morning as he returned into the city, he hungered. 19 And when he saw a fig tree in the way, he came to it, and found nothing thereon, but leaves only, and said unto it, Let no fruit grow on thee henceforward for ever. And presently the fig tree withered away. 20 And when the disciples saw it, they marvelled, saying, How soon is the fig tree withered away! 21 Jesus answered and said unto them, Verily I say unto you, If ye have faith, and doubt not, ye shall not only do this which is done to the fig tree, but also if ye shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; it shall be done. 22 And all things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive. (Matthew21:19-21) The Roots of the Fig Tree