Even while man is awake, he is in a condition resembling sleep wherever his will is involved. True, he has in his consciousness the ideas lying behind what he wills, but how a particular idea takes effect in the form of will—of that he knows nothing. He does not know how the idea, “I move my arm”, is connected with the process leading to the actual movement of the arm. This process lies entirely in the subconsciousness and it may truly be said that man is no more conscious of the real process of will than he is of what takes place during sleep.
The Earth is one whole, man himself being one of the active factors in the Earth’s evolution.
Each of you has within you what may be called the centre of gravity of your own physical structure. When man is awake, this centre of gravity lies just below the diaphragm; when he is asleep it lies a little lower. There are therefore some 1,500 million of these centers of gravity spread over the Earth, producing a combined effect. And what issues from this combined effect is the actual cause of a great deal of what takes place in the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms on the Earth. It is a scientific fallacy to trace back to mineral causes the forces manifesting in air and water and in the mineral realm; in reality the causes are to be found within man.
Certain human beings learn to employ their will wrongfully, in such a way that they do not confine the destructive forces to their normal operations within the organism but extend them over other human beings, deliberately and consciously applying the forces of destruction that are anchored in their will. That, quite obviously, is a practice that is never, under any circumstances, permissible.
Suppose a being from Mars, having wandered dumbly about the Earth were then to learn some human language, read some geology and thus discover what kind of ideas prevail concerning the processes and happenings on the Earth. He would say: But that is not all. By far the most important factor is ignored. For example, I have noticed crowds of students loitering about in their beer-houses, drinking and indulging their passions. Something is happening there: the human will is working in the metabolism. These are processes of which no mention is made in your books on physics and geology; they contain no reference to the fact that the course of Earth-existence is also affected by whether the students drink or do not drink. That is what a being not entirely immersed in Earthly ideas and prejudices would find lacking in the descriptions given by man himself of happenings on Earth. For a being from Mars there would be no question but that moral impulses, pervading human deeds and the whole of human life, are part and parcel of the course of nature.
According to modern preconceptions there is something inexorable in the play of nature, indeed pleasantly inexorable for materialistic thinkers. They imagine that the Earth’s course would be exactly the same were no human beings in existence; that whether they behave decently or not makes no fundamental difference or really alters anything. But that is not the case! The all-essential causes of what happens on the Earth do not lie outside man; they lie within mankind. And if Earthly consciousness is to expand to cosmic consciousness, humanity must realize that the Earth—not over short but over long stretches of time—is made in its own likeness, in the likeness of humanity itself. There is no better means of lulling man to sleep than to impress upon him that he has no share in the course taken by Earth-existence. This narrows down human responsibility to the single individual, the single personality.
The responsibility for the course of Earth-existence through ages of cosmic time lies with humanity. Everyone must feel himself to be a member of humanity, the Earth itself being the body for that humanity.
With world-consciousness, human responsibility widens into world-responsibility. With such consciousness we feel as we look up to the starry heavens that we are responsible to this cosmic expanse, permeated and pervaded as it is by spirit—that we are responsible to this world for how we conduct the Earth. We grow together with the cosmos in concrete reality when behind the phenomena we seek for the truth.
Nothing can be understood unless one presses on to the underlying realities. The moment it is realized: we have not to ask how the present mineral world has developed out of the mineral processes of another age; we have rather to ask about what has been going on in mankind—at that moment the real meaning of the saying, “the outer world is māyā” becomes clear. Then we begin to perceive in man a reality far greater than is usually perceived. And then the feeling of responsibility for Earth-existence begins.
We must not confine ourselves to the mere mention of repeated Earthly lives but think of the connection between them in such a way that even in external nature we perceive the effects of causes we ourselves laid down in earlier lives. Naturally, in reference to the single, individual human being, we must speak of contributory causes only, for in all these things, as I have said, it is a matter of the collective interworking of men on the Earth. No one should, for that reason, exclude himself as an individual, for each of us has his share in what is brought about by humanity as a whole, and then comes to expression in what constitutes the body for the whole of Earthly humanity in its onflowing life.
We must relate ourselves intimately with Earth-existence as a whole, know ourselves to be an integral part of it.
We must feel ourselves members of the whole Earth. It is of importance again and again to call up the thought: this finger on my hand has true reality only as long as it is part of my organism; if it is cut off it no longer has true reality. Similarly, man has no true reality apart from the Earth, nor has the Earth without mankind. It is an unreal concept when the modern scientific investigator thinks, according to his premises, that Earth-evolution would run the same course if humanity were not there.