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stand we ourselves, separating the two from each other.
There is still a third direction in man, the direction from above downwards. Here again
we have to make the discovery that the true state of affairs is not as it seems in external
appearance. For from below upwards works Ahriman, and from above downwards
Lucifer. Again we find that the good Gods have thrown up a barrier against Lucifer; at a
certain plane in man his influence is held in check. You will find the plane by taking the
skeleton and removing from it the skull. There where the skull rested on the cervical
vertebrae, imagine a horizontal surface. This invisible horizontal surface is the barrier,
where man can take his stand and hold up the Luciferic influence that comes from above.
Lucifer can come no further, he can only shoot his arrows thence down into man. And his
arrows are now arrows of will. From left to right fly arrows of thought, from front to back
arrows of feeling and from above downwards as well as from below upwards, arrows of
will.
Here, too, we have left to us an intermediate field of action. For about in a line with the
diaphragm, you have the surface that acts as a barricade against the upward pressure of
Ahriman. Ahriman can reach only as far as the diaphragm with his missiles of will, he
can come no further with his will, with his essential being; and in between the two planes
lies our own field of action.
You see how complicated the human being is! Take any one portion of the human figure
- for example, the left Side of the face. As a being of thought, Lucifer can fill entirely this
left side of the human countenance; as a being of feeling he can also penetrate it up to a
point; and as a being of will he can enter right into and through it from above. And you
can go on to discover for every part of the body how Lucifer and Ahriman work in the
human being of space by means of cosmic impulses of thought and feeling and will,
remembering always that as beings of thought we are actually only surface beings, whilst
as men of feeling we have a space between the before and the behind where we can
unfold an activity of our own, and again as men of will we have a field of activity
between the above and the below, between the surface we imagined drawn through the
top of the cervical vertebrae and the surface of the diaphragm. You see, you have first to
abstract all those parts that do not belong to man at all, before you can build up a true
idea of the human form. Then, and only then, are you in a position to do this.
The truth is, the whole form of man has been put together by forces working from
without. It receives its distinctive character from outside itself, and we do not understand
the form of man so long as we consider it merely as it appears at first sight; we only
understand it when we know how it is connected with the whole cosmos of space, when
we are able to see how from right and left, from above and below, from before and
behind, Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces are bearing in upon man, and giving him the
character of a being of space.
And now, my dear friends, this is also the way in which you must approach something
else that has been shaped and formed in accordance with the true cosmic working in the
world. I mean our building here in Dornach. If you look at the Goetheanum (see Note 2)
merely in its outward appearance, you might be disposed to think that the actual building
itself, the space occupied by the wood, was the most important part. That is, however, by
no means the case. The most important part is what, judging by appearances, does not
exist! Take any one of the forms; the essential part of that form is not the shaped and
sculptured wood, but is where there is nothing - where the air bounds the wood. The way
to obtain the true and real Goetheanum would be to take an immense mound of wax and
make a model of the inside of the building, and then study this model or impression.
What you go into when you enter the building, what you stand within and cannot see but
can only feel - that is the thing that matters. I said once on a former occasion that our [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]