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The Work of Secret Societies in the World
The Atom as Coagulated Electricity
by Rudolf Steiner
1904
from
RudolfSteinerArchive Website
The lecture presented
here is also known as
Evolution and
Involution as they are Interpreted by Occult Societies
Berlin, 23rd December
1904.
The significance of
occult knowledge in promoting conscious prolongation of life,
immortality. The universal law of the development of consciousness.
The task of our epoch to permeate the mineral world with human
spirit. Spiritualized natural kingdoms as future soul-content of
man, resting on the law of evolution and involution. Future
penetration of man's spirit into the atom. Relationship of the atom,
thought and electricity. The destruction of the fifth Root Race
through the War of All against All. The significance of forms in
connection with future stages of development. Their correspondence
with the Higher Degrees of Freemasonry. The fifth Sub Race as epoch
of pure intellect, as epoch of egoism and its necessary defeat.
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The Work
of Secret Societies in the World
The Atom as Coagulated Electricity
IN a series of lectures I have been speaking about occult schools
and their ramifications and I think it right today to bring this
whole course of lectures to a close before we pass on to a different
subject next time. A week from now I shall speak about the meaning
of the days connected in the Church Calendar with the Christmas
Festival the less important New Year's Festival and the extremely
important Feast of the Epiphany. The lecture today, therefore, will
be more in the nature of a conclusion.
The question might be asked: What is the deeper significance of
secret societies and of their aims in world-evolution? To such a
question my answer would be that they have a real connection with
the way in which beings in the world evolve and make progress.
As you know, different kinds of exercises are necessary for
self-development, and such exercises are actually available. You
have heard of Hatha-Yoga, Rajah-Yoga, and other exercises of
different kinds, by means of which societies and brotherhoods
connected with occult science have initiated their members. Somebody
may say: All this, surely, could be attained without these secret
societies. But I can tell you and in the course of the lecture you
will realize it that the world cannot do without such societies.
To put it bluntly, it is quite unjustifiable to speak in public in
the style of the manifesto of the Freemasons which I read to you a
fortnight ago. That is only one example. Men cannot reach what is
usually known as immortality unless they are to some extent familiar
with the occult sciences. The fruits of occult science do, of
course, find their way out into the world along many channels.
A great deal of occult knowledge exists
in the various religions and all those who participate deeply and
sincerely in the life of a religious community have some share in
this knowledge and are preparing themselves for the attainment of
immortality in the real sense. But to reach the knowledge of
immortality in full consciousness, as a concretely real experience,
to have the feeling that one belongs in very truth to the spiritual
world that is a very different matter. All of you have lived many
times; but not all of you are conscious that you have lived through
these many lives. This consciousness, however, will gradually arise
and without it man's life is lived out with incomplete
consciousness. It has never been the aim of occult science to
inculcate into men a dim feeling of survival but to impart a clear,
fully conscious knowledge of on-flowing life in the spiritual world.
There is a certain law which governs the progressive development of
consciousness in all future stages of life. It is this: Nothing that
a human being does not himself accomplish for the attainment of this
consciousness, contributes towards its development. There is a maxim
on the face of it rather perplexing that whatever is achieved in
the way of development of consciousness in the world does something
to further the evolution of the consciousness of every single being,
even if such a being has not actually worked at the development of
his own consciousness.
And now try to think of an example of really objective human action.
An architect builds a house; he does not build this house for
himself, but undertakes the task of building it for reasons which he
believes to be entirely impersonal. You know well that the reasons
are very seldom impersonal. There are many people who, to all
appearances, are not working for themselves; and yet in reality are.
A lawyer, for example, is to all intents and purposes working for
his clients. Part of his work may well be selfless, but the real
question is one of earning his living. Whatever men do in business
merely for the sake of their own livelihood, to the extent that
their business only serves that end, just so much is lost in the way
of spiritual gain. On the other hand, everything that is performed
without regard to self, that is connected with the interests of
another, helps to intensify and to strengthen our consciousness in
the future struggles for existence. I hope that this is clear.
And now
think of the Freemasons
When they were true to their original,
fundamental principles, they gave this injunction to their members:
The buildings you erect are to contribute nothing at all to your own
means of subsistence. What has still survived of the good old
Freemasonry takes the form nowadays of charitable institutions and
foundations. And although the Lodges have lost their living roots in
the ancient wisdom, and the occult knowledge once in their
possession, these charitable institutions are evidences of a
humanitarianism which, while it is empty of real substance, still
persists and is cultivated as tradition. Selfless activity is, in
very truth, something that has belonged to Freemasonry. Freemasonry
did indeed urge its members to work in the service of humanity, to
work in the world objectively and selflessly.
We are living now in the epoch of evolution that may be called the
mineral epoch; and our task is to permeate this mineral world
through and through with the spirit within us. Think of what this
means. You are building a house. You fetch the stones from a
quarry and hew them into the shapes required by the building, and so
on. What are you inculcating into this raw material obtained from
the mineral kingdom? You are inculcating human spirit into the raw
material. If you construct a machine, you have laid the spirit that
is part of you, into that machine; the actual machine does, of
course, perish and become dust; not a trace of it will survive. But
what you have done, what you have achieved, passes into the very
atoms and does not vanish without a trace. Every atom bears a trace
of your spirit and will carry this trace with it. Whether an atom
has at some time been in a machine, or has not been in a machine, is
not a matter of indifference.
The atom itself has undergone change as
a result of having once been in a machine, and this change that you
have wrought in the atom will never again be lost to it. Moreover,
through your having changed the atom, through the fact that you have
united the spirit in you with the mineral world, a permanent stamp
has been made upon the general consciousness of mankind; just so
much consciousness goes with you into the other world. Occult
science well knows in what way the human being can perform selfless
actions and how greatly his consciousness will be enhanced by them.
Certain men, who have been deeply imbued with this knowledge, have
been so selfless that they have taken steps to prevent even their
names from going down to posterity! An example of this is the work
entitled Theologica Deutsch. Nobody knows who wrote it.
On the outside there are only the words:
The man from Frankfurt. He, therefore, was one who took care that
his very name should be unknown. He worked in such a way that he
merely added something to the objective world without asking for
honour or for the preservation of his name. And here let it be said
that the Masters, as a rule, are not personages known in history;
they sometimes are embodied in historical personalities when it is
necessary; but in a certain respect this is a sacrifice on their
part. The level of their consciousness is incompatible with work for
themselves, and preservation of a name does, after all, involve
this. It is difficult thoroughly to understand this rule but it will
now be clear to you why the aim of the Freemasons is to work in the
world in such a way that their deeds are hidden in social
organizations or charitable institutions. For selfless deeds are the
real foundations of immortality. In the outer world we see the
reflex of such deeds. They need not necessarily be of great account.
If someone gives a coin to a poor man,
this may be an unselfish deed; but only to the extent that it was
absolutely selfless does it find its way to the sphere of
immortality and very few deeds are selfless to this degree. An act
of charity may be extremely egoistical when, for instance, it gives
rise to a comforting feeling. Charity very often springs from
selfish motives. If a poor man living among us has no meat at
Christmas and we feel bound to give him some in order that we may
feel justified in eating our own Christmas dinner that, after all,
is egoism. In the Middle Ages it would have been impossible to say
who had built many of the cathedrals or painted many of the
pictures. It is only in our epoch of civilization that people have
begun to attach such value to the human name; in earlier epochs,
more spiritual than our own, the individual name was of less
importance. Spirituality in those days was directed to reality;
whereas our epoch adheres to the delusion of thinking that what is a
mere concern of the moment should be preserved.
I have said this in order to indicate the principle by which these
secret societies were guided. The members of such societies were at
pains to efface themselves altogether as personalities, and to allow
what they did to produce its own effects. And this brings us to the
heart of the matter. The fact that some particular thing is kept
secret is of far less importance than that everyone should keep
secret his own share in the work; thereby he secures for himself
immortality.
The rule is therefore clear and
unambiguous: As much as you yourself lay into the world, that much
consciousness the world will give back to you. The measure of what
you yourself place into the world is the measure of the
consciousness that the world will give back to you. This is
connected with great and mighty laws of world-existence. Each one of
you has a soul, each one of you has a spirit. This soul and [this]
spirit are called upon to climb one day to the highest stages of
perfection. But the soul and the spirit were already there before
your physical body existed; they were present before your first
physical incarnation. You existed in physical incarnation in the
early Lemurian, Hyperborean and Polarian epochs.
Before then, however, you were only
beings of soul. But as beings of soul you were part of the world
soul; as beings of pure spirit you were part of the universal world
spirit. The world spirit and the world soul spread out around you
then as nature spreads out around you today. Just as the mineral
world, the plant world and the animal world are around you now, so
were the worlds of soul and of spirit once around you. And what was
then outside you, is now your soul; you have taken into yourselves,
made inward, what to begin with was outside and around you. What is
now your innermost being was once part of an external world. This
has become your soul. The spirit, too, once spread out around you.
And what is now around you will become your inner life. You will
take into yourselves what is now the mineral kingdom and it will
become part of your inner being; similarly the plant kingdom. What
surrounds you in nature will become your inner being.
You will understand now how this is connected with the first example
given. You build a church for others, not for yourself. You can in
very truth take into yourselves a world of majesty, beauty and
splendour if you experience this world as such. To do something for
the higher self does not partake of egoism because it is not done
only for the self; the higher self will be united with all the
others, so that what is done for the higher self is at the same time
done for all. This is the truth that was known to the Freemasons.
When the Freemason was working with his fellow-builders, he knew: In
future times the mineral world will be spiritualized; to build means
nothing else than to spiritualize the mineral world. He knew that
the edifice would one day become the content of his soul.
God once gave us the nature that surrounds us in the kingdoms of the
minerals, plants and animals. We take nature into ourselves. That
nature exists is none of our doing; all we can do is to make nature
part of our own being. But what we ourselves prepare and make ready
in the world that is what will constitute our future existence.
We actually see the mineral world, as such; what we do with the
mineral world, that we shall ourselves become in future times. What
we do with the plant world, with the animal world and with men, that
too, we shall surely become. If you found a charitable institution
or have contributed something to its foundation, what you have
contributed will become an integral part of you. If a man does
nothing with what he can in this way [to] draw into his soul from
outside, then his soul remains empty. It must therefore be possible
for mankind to spiritualize as far as this can be achieved the
four kingdoms of nature, of which man is one. To bring spirit into
the whole external world that has been the task of the secret
societies of every age.
It will not be difficult for you to understand the following Think
of a child who is learning to read and write. To begin with, all the
accessories are around him; the teacher is there, the books are
there, and so forth, but nothing is yet within the child. Work
continues until what was once outside the child has been instilled
into him and he is able to read. And so too is it with nature. In
times to come we shall have within us what is now spread out around
us. As souls we spring from the world soul and when this world soul
was around us we drew it into ourselves. So too the spirit; and so
too it will be with nature. We take nature into ourselves from
outside and nature will be within us as a power. That is the great
thought at the basis of these secret societies.
All progress is the result of involution and evolution. Involution
is the in-taking, evolution the yield, the out-giving. All states
and conditions of world-existence alternate between these two
processes, When you see, hear, smell or taste, you breathe nature
into yourselves. The act of sight does not pass away without leaving
a trace behind. The eye itself perishes, the object seen that too
perishes; but what you have experienced in the act of sight,
remains. It will not be difficult for you to realize that in certain
epochs it is necessary to make such things understood. We are going
forward to an age when, as I indicated recently, men will understand
what the atom is, in reality. It will be realized by the public
mind too that the atom is nothing but coagulated electricity.
The thought itself is composed of the same substance.
Before the end of the fifth epoch of
culture, science will have reached the stage where man will be able
to penetrate into the atom itself. When the similarity of substance
between the thought and the atom is once comprehended, the way to
get hold of the forces contained in the atom will soon be discovered
and then nothing will be inaccessible to certain methods of working.
A man standing here, let us say, will be able by pressing a button
concealed in his pocket, to explode some object at a great distance
say in Hamburg! Just as by setting up a wave-movement here and
causing it to take a particular form at some other place, wireless
telegraphy is possible, so what I have just indicated will be within
man's power when the occult truth that thought and atom consist of
the same substance is put into practical application.
It is impossible to conceive what might happen in such circumstances
if mankind has not, by then, reached selflessness. The attainment of
selflessness alone will enable humanity to be kept from the brink of
destruction. The downfall of our present epoch will be caused by
lack of morality. The Lemurian epoch was destroyed by fire, the
Atlantean by water; our epoch and its civilization will be destroyed
by the War of All against All, by evil. Human beings will destroy
each other in mutual strife. And the terrible thing more
desperately tragic than other catastrophes will be that the blame
will lie with human beings themselves.
A tiny handful of men will make good and thus insure their survival
in the sixth epoch of civilization. This tiny handful will have
attained selflessness. The others will develop every imaginable
skill and subtlety in the manipulation and use of the physical
forces of nature, but without the essential degree of selflessness.
In the seventh epoch of civilization, this War of All against All
will break out in the most terrible form. Great and mighty forces
will be let loose by the discoveries, turning the whole earth-globe
into a kind of [self-functioning] live electric mass. In a way that
cannot be discussed, the tiny handful will be protected and
preserved.
And now you will be able to picture, more clearly than was possible
when I spoke of the things before, why the good and proper form as
it has been called, must be sought, and in what sense Freemasonry
was aware of its duty to build an edifice dedicated to selfless
ends. It is easier to become one of the tiny handful of men who
ensure for themselves a place in the life of the future by using the
good old forms than by having to struggle out of chaos. People
nowadays may be inclined to jeer at empty forms, as they say
but
those forms have nevertheless a deep meaning and purpose; they are
in line with the structure of our period of evolution, and when all
is said and done they are connected with necessary stages in the
development of human nature and of the human soul. Just think of it.
We are living in the fifth period of the
fifth great epoch; we have still to live through two more periods of
this great epoch. Then will follow the seven periods of the sixth
great epoch and then the seven periods of the seventh great epoch.
This makes sixteen stages of evolution in the future. Humanity has
still to climb these sixteen stages. A man who can experience
something of the conditions of existence there possible, is to a
certain degree initiated. There is a correspondence between the
degrees of initiation and the secret of the epochs still to come. In
the life of our planet there are seven great epochs, and each of
these seven has seven sub-periods forty-nine conditions,
therefore, in all.
Thus there are definite stages for the investigation of the secrets
of future phases of evolution. The high Degrees of Freemasonry
originally had no other aim or purpose than to be an expression,
each one of them, of a future stage of the evolution of humanity.
Thus we have in Freemasonry something that has been both good and
beautiful. A man who attained one Degree knew how he must work his
way into the future; he could be a kind of pioneer. He knew too that
one who reaches a higher Degree can accomplish greater things. This
arrangement according to Degrees can well be made, for it
corresponds with the facts. If, therefore, it were possible to
inculcate a new content together with a new knowledge into these
forms, much good would accrue, for Freemasonry would then be imbued
with real spirit once again. Content and form, however belong to the
whole. The state of affairs today is that the Degrees are there but
nobody has worked through them in the real sense! In spite of this,
however, they are not there without a purpose.
The fifth epoch of culture is a purely intellectual age, an age of
egoism. The intellect is egoistical in the highest degree and it is
the hallmark of our time. And so we must make our way upwards
through intellect to spirituality before we can picture the
spirituality that was once actively at work.
The essential secret, therefore, is this: The human being must know
how to keep silence about the paths along which his I unfolds, and
to regard his deeds, not his personal I as the criterion. The real
heart of the secret lies in his deeds and in the overcoming of the
I through deed. The I must remain concealed, within the deed!
Elimination of the interests of the personal I from the
on-streaming flow of human karma this belongs to the First Degree.
Whatever individual karma the I incurs in the process, is thereby
wiped out. Nation, race, sex, position, religion ... all these work
upon human egoism. Only when man has overcome them will he be free
of egoism.
The astral body of every nation, every
race, every epoch, has a definite colour ... You will always find a
colour which is fundamental in the astral body of a human being who
is [a] member of one of these classifications. This specific colour
must be eliminated. Anthroposophical spiritual science works to
level out the colours of the astral bodies of its adherents. They
must be of like colour alike, that is to say, in respect of the
basic colour. This basic colour gives rise to a certain substance
called Kundalini which holds together, within the human being, the
forces which lead eventually to the spirit. This leveling-out
process will bring war and bloodshed in its train war in the shape
of economic strife among nations, pressure for expansion,
suppression in every form, strife in the sphere of investment and
profit, industrial undertakings, and so forth.
And by adopting certain measures it will
increasingly be possible to handle vast masses of people by sheer
force; the individual will acquire greater and greater power over
certain masses of the people. For the course of evolution is
leading, not towards greater democracy, but towards oligarchy of the
brutal kind, in that the power of the single individual will
immeasurably increase. If morals are not ennobled, this will lead to
brutality in every possible form. This state of things will come,
just as the great water-catastrophe came to the Atlanteans.
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