Cosmosophy - Volume Two
Cosmic Influences on the Human Being
11 lectures by Rudolf Steiner

In Cosmosophy Volume 2, Rudolf Steiner continues his exploration of the relationships between what the human being is as a totality between birth and death, and what he is between death and rebirth. It becomes clear from his exposition that this is not just a schematically elegant arrangement but a functional interrelationship in which one phase is an involution for the other's evolution. What we contain within us now as components of our physical make-up and overall identity, were outward environmental experiences in the period between death and rebirth, which then condensed into form as we entered incarnation. The organisation and function of our bodily organs, conditioned by our individual karma, are condensed residues of our living experience in spiritual worlds we inhabited in the long period prior to birth. Outer spiritual world concretes into bodily organic form.

Much more detail is also given to the relationships between the human organisation―viewed comprehensively to include physical, etheric and astral bodies and ego―and the earth, moon, planetary spheres and the fixed stars (zodiac). Also brought into relationship with these are our capacities of thinking, feeling and willing as well as the activities of the higher Beings of the cosmos within these.

"Our whole human organization lets us understand the cosmic process, if we know how to look at it. And this is what anthroposophy is all about―to understand the human being in every way. It means that anthroposophy is also cosmosophy, for . . . we bring the whole cosmic process, cosmosophy, to mind when we gain insight through anthroposophy. The two cannot be seen apart. Cosmosophy and anthroposophy belong together. The human being is to be found in the world, and the world in the human being.

"This is also why it is not anthropomorphism to speak of human evolution in the same breath as evolution through Saturn, Sun, Moon and so on in my Occult Science. Cosmic evolution is something that is given, and human evolution is something that is given, for the further we penetrate the secrets of existence, the more do cosmos and human being come together; the more does it become apparent that the separation between cosmos and human being that exists for us on earth is mere maya. The human being belongs to the cosmos, and the cosmos to the human being, and each is to be found in the other."
 

Completion Press
11 lectures, 21 Oct - 13 Nov 1921, Dornach; GA 208
222pp; paperback
ISBN: 0-6463-3748-3
 

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See also Cosmosophy - Volume One

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