Amigos, recomendo usarem a tradução do Google para o texto abaixo, que está na aba desta página, à direita.
Na sexta época (3573-5733) da evolução pós-atlante, ou
pós-Atlântida, seres humanos nascerão com corpos que expressarão
definitivamente suas qualidades morais interiores. As qualidades morais de um
ser humano serão reconhecidas a partir de sua aparência real. A fisionomia
moral estará então muito fortemente em evidência e a fisionomia, tal como é
agora, terá recuado mais para segundo plano. A fisionomia do ser humano hoje é
em grande parte determinada pela hereditariedade: ele se assemelha a seus pais,
seus avós, seu povo e assim por diante. Na sexta época, isso representará papel
nenhum; o próprio ser humano, o indivíduo, determinará sua aparência exterior –
como resultado de suas encarnações (anteriores). Os seres humanos serão todos bem diferentes,
mas cada um terá um carimbo bem definido. Saber-se-á então com certeza: você
terá diante de si, então, um ser humano
bem-disposto (gentil, agradável, responsável, amigável, etc.) ou mal-disposto.
Da mesma forma como hoje conhecemos, tendo diante de nós um francês, um
italiano, então será conhecido: aqui está um ser humano mal-intencionado ou um
ser humano gentil - em todas as muitas gradações. De maneira crescente, portanto, as qualidades morais se expressarão
no semblante individual.
Fonte (Inglês):
Rudolf Steiner. GA 254. Fatos significantes concernentes à vida
spiritual da metade do Século 19. Palestra III.
https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/19151107p01.html
SoniavonHomrich.
In the
future, a man’s moral qualities will be recognised from his actual appearance
ON MAY 20,
2023 BY RIDZERDIN ANTHROPOSOPHY, KARMA AND REINCARNATION, VARIOUS QUOTES
In the
sixth epoch (3573-5733) of post-Atlantean evolution, men will be born with
bodies quite definitely expressing their inner, moral qualities. A man’s moral
qualities will be recognised from his actual appearance. The moral physiognomy
will then be very strongly in evidence and the physiognomy as it now is, will
have receded more into the background. Man’s physiognomy today is largely
determined through heredity: he resembles his parents, his grandparents, his
people, and so forth. In the sixth epoch this will play no part at all; man
will himself determine his outer appearance — as the result of his
incarnations.
Human
beings will all be very different, but each will have a very definite stamp. It
will then be known with certainty: You have before you now a well-disposed or
an ill-disposed man. Just as it is known today: You now have before you an
Italian or a Frenchman, it will then be known: Here is a malicious or a kindly
man — with all the many gradations. More and more, therefore, the moral
qualities will be expressed in the countenance.
Source:
Rudolf Steiner – GA 254 – Significant Facts Pertaining to the Spiritual Life of
the Middle of the XIXth Century – Lecture III –
https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/19151107p01.html
SIGNIFICANT
FACTS PERTAINING TO THE SPIRITUAL LIFE OF THE MIDDLE OF THE XIXTH CENTURY
GA 254
Lecture III
7 November
1915, Dornach
As there is
an opportunity for us to be together again today, I will speak of certain
matters connected in one way or another with subjects we have been studying. I
should like, first of all, to direct your minds to the fact that the attitude
of which I spoke last time, the attitude which leads to a certain denial of the
reality of the spiritual worlds, is fairly universal in the external world
today. Fundamentally speaking — and indeed it is evident — willingness to
approach the spiritual worlds in order to receive from them something that will
enrich and invigorate life, is to be found in only a tiny handful of men. We
can see that this is so.
We shall
not succeed in understanding these matters unless we realise that not many
people today have experienced something that will become more and more
widespread in the world, namely, the tragic wrestling with knowledge. The
feeling that knowledge of the spiritual worlds is needed but only to be
attained by patient surrender of the soul to the spiritual worlds — this
experience, this inner wrestling with knowledge, could not have been present in
those olden times when knowledge came to men through their atavistic
clairvoyance.
This
wrestling with knowledge in our time can only be explained in the light of
facts of which I have been speaking here in recent weeks. 1 When it is a matter
of striving for knowledge today, people are all too prone to give way to
delusions. On the one side they want to be free from any kind of belief in
authority, and on the other side they have succumbed to it in its very worst
form. This is particularly the case at the present time. For when anything that
bears the mantle of science is propounded, belief in it becomes universal. Men
do not want to rouse themselves into embarking upon a genuine, individual
striving for knowledge. Without being aware of it, they are actually too
easy-going, too lazy, to kindle those forces of the soul which become active
whenever it is a matter of wrestling with knowledge. And so they like to pacify
themselves with what is universally accepted as scientific and authoritative,
and acts as a kind of narcotic for the soul-and-spirit. They want to take over
ready-made what is universally accepted so that they need not themselves make
any individual efforts to acquire knowledge. The rebellion against the
world-outlook of spiritual science is to be traced back, fundamentally, to the
fact that the soul is required to activate its own individual forces of
thinking and feeling. But this is not to people's liking; they prefer to accept
knowledge that is ready-made and authoritative.
Men who by
their very nature share in the wrestling for knowledge that characterises our
age — and “our age” means the last three or four centuries — such men dimly
divine and feel that they must evoke all that lies in the depths of the soul in
order to approach the spiritual worlds, in order to unite their own souls with
the spiritual forces weaving and surging through the world. Study of such souls
will make it evident to us how they feel themselves involved in the wrestlings
and strugglings of the age.
In the last
lecture I spoke of significant literary works from which these wrestlings of
the soul amid the impulses of the times can be perceived. But souls who want to
lull themselves to sleep by inducing a kind of mental narcosis, settle down in
some stream of thought into which they were born or educated. This certainly
applies to a large number of souls in our time who through their karma and the
circumstances connected with it, incline more to materialism. They accept the view
of the world presented by materialism. Other souls are more spiritually
inclined and they accept what spiritism or idealism have brought into the
world, stupefying their minds with what they accept, without having the will to
engage in the wrestlings in which the soul is necessarily involved if it is to
find its way into the spiritual worlds.
But today I
want to give an example of a genuinely struggling soul — an unassuming, yet for
all that a significant soul — who participated to the full in the spiritual
wrestlings of the 19th century. At the time of the great wave of philosophic
thinking, the man of whom I am speaking was young. He lived with all the great
thoughts and ideas put forward by the idealist philosophers and
nature-philosophers at the beginning of the 19th century who believed, as did
Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, that it was possible by dint of intense efforts of
thinking to reach the sphere where the world-riddles are unveiled. The man in
question lived through that wave of philosophy which sought to show that a
certain rigid, one-sided kind of thinking can explain everything in the
universe. He lived on through the transition to the time when this thinking was
held to be of no avail, when it was believed that the riddles of the world can never
be unveiled in this way. It was the time when men were saying: thinking leads
us nowhere; we must turn to the vast field of outer, sensory experience; the
objects of sensory experiences must be measured, weighed, compared, traced back
to their origins in an external way. — The man of whom I am speaking was one of
those who still preserved their belief in the power of thinking in days in the
second half of the 19th century when a certain mistrust of thinking became
predominant and faith was invested in external, material observation alone.
This same man made very important discoveries in the field of external
observation, in a domain that is extraordinarily illuminating for the theory of
knowledge.
But because
he had lived on from the time of the sovereignty of thinking into that of
sense-observation, there surged within him those inner forces of the soul which
wrestle with the question: How can man find the link with the actual reality,
the actual truth in the universe? In such circumstances the human soul lives
through strange moments, moments when it feels itself standing as it were
before an abyss; when it says to itself: No matter what efforts are made to
develop really creative thoughts and ideas, where is there any certainty, where
is there any criterion for knowing that it has not all been brought out of the
soul itself, that it is not all subjective and will lose significance at death,
showing thereby that it would not have led into the realities of
world-existence?
Then again
there are moments when the soul asks itself: What is the use of trying to bring
forth anything from the soul? There can be no certainty in it! When
investigations are made in the domains of chemistry or physics where one has to
depend upon the physical world, one can at least feel guided further by the
thread of outer reality.
Such moods
of the soul must be taken for what indeed they are — moods in which the soul is
tossed to and fro between the urge to seek and the urge to abandon all seeking.
A soul of this character is usually one who sincerely and genuinely strives for
knowledge, but who in our age is bound to stand in a peculiar position in the
world — for such a soul, observing the people around, may well realise: How
easily these people persuade themselves into believing that something or other
is irrefutable! The eyes of the mind need be opened only a little and the
frailty of such belief will be evident.
The soul to
whom I am referring was able to find from experience that those upon whom the
responsibility for certain matters in the world rests, witness the appearance
of some apparently important invention or discovery that is blazoned abroad as
great and epoch-making and that they themselves consider highly significant —
and then after a year or two say that there is nothing in it. This soul was
particularly struck by the fate of different medicaments. A remedy is
discovered and then triumphantly proclaimed to the world as a certain cure for
some illness.
People who
take life in a happy-go-lucky way accept such a discovery as epoch-making; but
those who have some knowledge also know that such things appear on the scene
and then disappear again. And so at the time shortly before the thirties of the
19th century, this soul found that a certain medicament — iodine — had become
famous. But he could not bring himself to join without further ado in the furor
created by iodine, for he was only too familiar with the levity with which
people acquire knowledge — due for the most part to indolence. And so in the
year 1821 he writes the first edition of a short treatise at the time when
iodine was beginning to create a stir. The second edition appeared in 1832. It
actually reckoned to find a temporary and partly local interest only. I will
leave the brochure here in case anybody may still be interested in it. 2
The
contents would probably quite rightly be called absurd by every “enlightened”
man. But that does not prevent this “enlightened” man from making similar
mistakes at any time. He does not, however, notice the mistake when it is a
matter of something he has accepted as an object of belief. The man who wrote
this treatise in 1821 — at that time he called himself “Dr. Mises” — is the
same whom you know from scientific literature as Professor Gustav Theodor
Fechner, who in the fifties of [the] last century tried to build a theory of
aesthetics from below upwards, on the basis of actual physical experiments, and
not from above downwards, that is to say, not out of material provided by the
thoughts and experiences of the life of soul. He was a man of whom it can truly
be said that he passed through all the throes of the wrestling for knowledge in
the 19th century. He was the same man who had the controversy with Schleiden,
the botanist, about the influence of the moon upon various happenings on the
earth. I have told you how the decision as to which of the two professors was
right, devolved upon their wives. 3 He is also the same man who struggled to
acquire an idealistic and spiritual conception of the world. You can see how he
endeavoured to do this from what I have said about Gustav Theodor Fechner in my
book “Riddles of Philosophy.”
It may
truly be said that such a soul is a clear illustration of the reality of the
experience which comes to a man when he strives earnestly for knowledge. But
when all is said and done, spiritual science alone can make clear to us the
whole seriousness and significance of a matter such as this. When a man like
Gustav Theodor Fechner writes as he does in this little treatise “Proof that
the Moon consists of Iodine,” he is really trying to show the limitations of
man's thinking, how easily it is prevented from making even an approach to
reality and therefore how remote it is from reality. The fact is that people do
not realise or feel the seriousness, significance and import of human
evolution. And so the aim of spiritual science is to make the horizon of our
view of man's being wider than is possible by means of the recognised science
of today. Spiritual science points our attention to epochs of human evolution
lying in the far distant past, to what man was like in Atlantis and in what
changes he is involved in the course of his development.
Think only
of the following: — Recalling what we have heard about ancient Atlantis — what
is to be said about the world of the animals and the world of men round about
us? Everything was entirely different in the times of Atlantis! We know that it
was during that epoch that men came down again as souls from their sojourn in
the world of the stars. It was then that they again sought for bodies which had
been fashioned for them out of earthly substance. And from the descriptions
given we know, too, how different these human bodies were in Atlantean times. I
have repeatedly emphasised — and you can also read it in my writings — that in
those times the human body was still malleable, pliant, flexible, was of such a
nature that it was still possible for the souls descending from the heavenly
worlds to shape and mould the bodies.
Suppose a
woman — or also a man, to be strictly fair! — becomes furious with anger,
thoroughly malicious, and sends evil thoughts towards another human being. This
does not come so very strongly to expression in an actual change of the
countenance — true, it does so a little, but not drastically — for people today
can be very malicious without this being directly expressed in their
physiognomy. In the times of ancient Atlantis it was different. When there was
malice in a man, his countenance was entirely transformed into an expression of
his inner being — so that it would not have been incorrect to say: that man or
woman looks like a cat. Such a person actually looked like a cat — or if he
were utterly deceitful, like a hyena. His external appearance was wholly an
expression of his inner being. He was capable of metamorphosis, transformation,
in the highest degree.
The animals
were less mutable, but metamorphosis was possible in them too; their physical
body was already far more consolidated than that of man and metamorphosis took
place only very gradually. As species, the animals were capable of
metamorphosis — nor did they transmit to their offspring such stereotyped
characteristics as is the case nowadays. Since the time of Atlantis everything
in man's physical body has become consolidated, has taken on fixed forms. It is
still possible for man today to move his hands and to have a certain play of
expression on his countenance; but in a certain sense his bodily form has
become fixed. The forms of the animals have become completely fixed; this
explains their immobile, inflexible physiognomy. But in their case, too, this
inflexibility was less marked in ancient Atlantean times.
In the
general sense it can be said of man that his physical body today is fixed and
inflexible in a high degree. His etheric body is still mobile; therefore the
etheric body still shapes itself according to what a man is in his inner being.
— So there is meaning, indeed a certain reality, in the fact that if a man is
crafty and malicious his etheric body and his facial expression take on a
slight resemblance to a hyena. The etheric body is still mutable, still has
something about it that enables it to be metamorphosed; but equally with the
physical body, the etheric body too is on the way to becoming inflexible. Just
as since the Atlantean epoch onwards into our fifth post-Atlantean epoch the
physical body has acquired fixed forms, so from the fifth epoch on into the
sixth and from then onwards into the second main epoch after Atlantis, the
etheric body too will acquire firmer forms, with the consequence — as I have
indicated in several lectures — that the etheric body, as it passes with its
fixed forms into the physical body, will assert itself very strongly. We are
living now in the fifth epoch (of the first main epoch after Atlantis), then
comes the sixth and then the seventh, and in these sixth and seventh epochs,
the etheric body, with its inflexibility, will exercise a very strong influence
upon the physical, will make the physical body into a faithful image of itself.
This has
momentous consequences, namely, that in the sixth epoch of post-Atlantean
evolution, men will be born with bodies quite definitely expressing their
inner, moral qualities. A man's moral qualities will be recognised from his
actual appearance. The moral physiognomy will then be very strongly in evidence
and the physiognomy as it now is, will have receded more into the background.
Man's physiognomy today is largely determined through heredity: he resembles
his parents, his grandparents, his people, and so forth. In the sixth epoch
this will play no part at all; man will himself determine his outer appearance
— as the result of his incarnations. Human beings will all be very different,
but each will have a very definite stamp. It will then be known with certainty:
You have before you now a well-disposed or an ill-disposed man. Just as it is
known today: You now have before you an Italian or a Frenchman, it will then be
known: Here is a malicious or a kindly man — with all the many gradations. More
and more, therefore, the moral qualities will be expressed in the countenance.
In its
external aspect, the surrounding world too will be much changed in this sixth
epoch. Particularly those animals which are nowadays consumed as food, will
have died out. Men will sing the praises of a fleshless diet, for it will then
be an ancient memory that the ancestors in olden days actually ate flesh. It is
not the case that all animals will die out, but only certain species of animals
— especially those which have acquired the most inflexible forms will have
disappeared from the earth. — So the outer face of the earth itself will have changed.
To have a
physiognomy which in future time will be so inevitably an expression of the
moral qualities will be like a nemesis, a destiny, setting the seal on a man's
whole being. He will not be able to find in himself any possibility of
resisting this fate. And now imagine the tragic situation! Man will then
actually be obliged to say to himself: Yes, in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch
there were materialists who believed that when the occipital bone does not
exactly cover the cerebellum, these men are bound to be criminals. For the
materialists at that time, this was a theory, but now it has become a reality;
what they regarded as still flexible (the etheric body) has now assumed a fixed
form. — We are actually tending in the direction of bringing the theories of
the materialistic world-conception to fulfilment. They are not reality as yet —
but that is the direction towards which we are tending.
We come
here to a strange secret. — Those who would indignantly repudiate being called
prophets today are the true prophets; they are those who say: The reason why a
man is a criminal is that the occipital bone does not cover the cerebellum.
These men will prove themselves to have been true prophets. — It is indeed so!
The materialists of today are wonderful prophets, without wanting to be. In our
time it is still possible, through proper education, for a counterweight to be
provided for a peculiar formation in the physical body such as an undersized
occipital bone; in the sixth post-Atlantean epoch this will no longer be
possible, for etheric bodies then will no longer be capable of mutation. When
this is the case, quite different measures are required as preventives. If this
state of things is not obviated, the condition described by the materialists
will become a reality. It is the condition depicted with such agonised
suffering in the poems of Marie Eugenie delle Grazie which have been recited
today. These poems can be related to an age already foreshadowed, an age that
will actually have dawned in the sixth post-Atlantean epoch. The poems give one
the impression of having been written by a soul who feels as if plunged into
the void through what can be acquired by way of modern knowledge. The soul
longs to progress but knows nothing as yet that can be a remedy — and then a
picture arises — a picture of what will come to pass if materialism continues
as at present. And if no remedial measure were created against the direction in
evolution which man is induced to take by the forces that are in him, then in
the sixth post-Atlantean epoch he will be subject to the very same fate already
now depicted by delle Grazie.
All the
systems of religion hitherto existing in the world could not prevent a terrible
fate overtaking man in the sixth epoch — the fate of having his moral qualities
expressed in his countenance, in his whole bodily physiognomy. Nor could he do
anything to prevent this if he were to let things remain as the modern
world-conception desires.
These are
grave thoughts. A good means for turning the dreams of materialists into
reality would be if victory were won by those who say: “Spiritual science
cherishes the dream that in the future men will see etheric beings, first of
all the Christ in an etheric form and after that still other etheric forms.
Spiritual science dreams all this, but those who say such things are lunatics
and ought to be shut up in asylums.” — The people who maintain that the things
of which spiritual science speaks are sheer delusions are clever people. Yet if
this world-view were to be victorious, then what I have described will
certainly come about. But this world-view must not, shall not, gain the day —
that must be our unshakable conviction. We must know: If our etheric bodies are
to be so strong that they are able to correct the mistakes of our physical
body, this strength must come from the fact that men learn to take in an
earnest and true way, what will come to them from the etheric world. This will
then work more and more as a factor of healing as we move towards the future.
But above all we must receive spiritual science into our hearts in order to
prepare ourselves to see the Christ in His etheric form, and to take this event
with true earnestness.
A great
stroke can be drawn across the evolution of humanity. Before it, the etheric forces
in man were at work, still shaping and moulding the Physical; but a time will
come when the Physical and the etheric have become fixed. Man will have to
accustom himself to seeing the etheric forces outside him in all manner of
forms and figures, and it will be the etheric realities in accordance with
which we must act, just as now his actions are influenced by sense-perceptions.
We must go forward to a time when we find, first of all, Christ as an Etheric
Being, and in His train, more and more etheric realities. These etheric
realities will then have the strength still to make true individuals out of us.
Many are
the secrets lying behind the process of world-evolution, and many of those
secrets are shattering. — Once upon a time there was a Homer. Read carefully
what I have said in different lectures and also in the little book “The
Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind,” and you will find yourselves asking:
How did Homer become what he was? — It was because he was guided by a still
higher Spirit. Homer well knew that it was so. Hence his poems do not begin
with the words “I sing,” but with the words “Sing, O Muse”. This must be taken
with all seriousness. Homer knew that a higher Spirit was inspiring him. It is
only in the present age that this is regarded as a phrase, just as is the case
with Goethe's lines:
“The sun,
with many a sister-sphere,
Still sings
the rival psalm of wonder,
And still
his fore-ordained career
Accomplishes,
with tread of thunder ...”
In so far
as Homer incarnates again, the “man” will incarnate, not, however, the Spirit
who guided him in those days. But the Being by whom Homer was inspired will be
encountered in the etheric world — or again, the Spirit who inspired Socrates
or Plato, in so far as they were inspired. — We must begin to understand the
spiritual world, the world of spiritual science. Vision will then come of
itself. But if we do not make a beginning with understanding spiritual science,
we move towards the time which brings a terrible nemesis upon mankind.
The materialistic
world-conception may not be true, but for all that it contains an inner truth.
Of this inner truth it can be said: What the materialistic world-conception
describes regarding man would become actual fact if this world-conception were
to gain the day. And it lies with men by means of a different world-conception,
to prevent this materialism from being victorious. The matter is not so simple
as to enable it to be said that the materialistic world-conception is false;
the point is that it lies in the hands of men to gain the victory over it
through deeds, not through feeble thoughts of refutation. The more men there
are who open their eyes to the spiritual world, the more there will be who
realise that the fulfilment of materialism can be frustrated and the greater
will be the possibility of frustrating it.
A man who
is perhaps a poet or an artist today still has inklings which make him say: I
feel my inspiration within myself! Such experiences will continue for some time
yet. But this mood will vanish, will vanish altogether! For men will have an
experience which makes them say: An etheric Being appeared to me, telling me
this or that. I am the instrument through which this spiritual Being works into
this age! —
The
spiritual world is present in all truth; but men can alienate themselves from
it. The materialistic world-conception may be called: the conspiracy against
the Spirit. This materialistic world-conception is not a fallacy only, it is
conspiracy against the Spirit.
In spite of
these very sketchy indications, I hope your souls will grasp these thoughts and
work upon them. It is essential that those who hold the spiritual-scientific
view of the world should know something about the impulses operating in the
life of humanity. Many people will come and say; This is not so, that is not
so; this is not Christian, that is not Christian — and so forth. If these
people come, then, if we have worthily understood through Spiritual Science by
what impulses the world is moved, in our meditative life we shall be able to
glimpse eternal principles. Let people call us fantastic dreamers, or whatever
it may be — we know how mankind and the world evolve. And He Who for the sake
of this evolution fulfilled the Mystery of Golgotha, He is seeing, too, what is
born in our souls as the expression of world-evolution. “Christ is seeing us” —
by this we shall be sustained.
