The Being of Man and His Future Evolution is the published English title of GA 107, a cycle of lectures Rudolf Steiner gave to members of the Theosophical Society in Berlin across the winter season of 1908 and into the spring and summer of 1909. The volume gathers roughly nine principal group lectures, delivered between November 1908 and June 1909, together with a handful of related single addresses on the astral world and the deed of Christ. Its governing subject is the inner constitution of the human being: how the physical, etheric, astral, and ego members work together, how they fall ill and recover, and how the soul carries the fruits of one earthly life across the threshold of death into the shaping of the next. Steiner treats memory and its quiet twin, forgetting, as a doorway into this larger picture, then widens the view to the moral and cosmic forces that have made the human being what it is and what it may yet become.
Place in Steiner's Work
GA 107 belongs to the years when Steiner was still working within the Theosophical Society, before the founding of the Anthroposophical Society in 1912 and 1913. In his own guidance to newcomers he singled out the lecture volumes numbered roughly GA 95 to GA 125 as a sound place to begin, and GA 107 sits near the heart of that range. It is contemporary with the cycles that built up the picture of the four bodies, the planetary stages of cosmic evolution called Old Saturn, Old Sun, and Old Moon, and the threefold opposition of Lucifer, Ahriman, and the Asuras.
What distinguishes this particular cycle is its insistence that spiritual knowledge be practical. Steiner returns again and again to the claim that anthroposophy is not one more philosophy of life set beside materialism or idealism, but a force meant to enter daily conduct: how a person bears resentment, recovers from illness, or meets the small frictions of a working day. The volume therefore stands as a bridge between Steiner's foundational books, such as Theosophy and Occult Science, and the more specialised medical and Christological cycles that followed. A reader who has met the four members of the human being elsewhere will find them here put to work on questions of health, conscience, and destiny.
The setting matters to how the lectures read. These were group meetings, addressed to listeners who had already spent several winters together, and Steiner speaks to them as people who had reached, in his words, a certain anthroposophical maturity, able to hear about the higher worlds as matters of fact rather than abstract theory. He frames the whole winter as a single course of study whose scattered topics, he tells the audience, will only later group themselves into a whole. This accounts for the cycle's unhurried, cumulative manner. A lecture on laughing and weeping, or on earthquakes and Mephistopheles, is not a digression but a deliberate widening of the same inquiry into how soul and spirit shape the physical human being. For the modern reader, the volume rewards patience: its method is to lay one observation beside another until a pattern emerges, rather than to argue toward a conclusion in a single stroke.
Themes and Structure
The cycle opens by establishing the astral world as the hidden ground of ordinary soul life, then moves through a sequence of apparently scattered topics that Steiner promises will later draw together into a single picture of human health and illness. Several threads run through the whole.
The first is memory and forgetting. Steiner ties remembering to the etheric body, the principle of repetition and life, and argues that a human being possesses a free portion of that body, unused by mere growth, which education and impressions fill. A forgotten idea, on his account, is not lost but set free to work inwardly, nourishing this free etheric organ and even aiding bodily recovery. From this he draws a striking moral consequence: bearing a grudge keeps an image chained outward and undermines health, while genuine forgetting becomes, in his phrase, a blessing rather than a defect.
The second thread is illness and destiny. Steiner classifies illness types, relates recovery to the liveliness of the soul, and points toward karma as a deeper lawfulness behind sickness and health. Here the lectures connect back to memory: a person who in youth received impressions with lively interest, he suggests, has stocked the free etheric body with resources that later aid healing, while a dull or lethargic inner life leaves fewer. The body and the biography are read as one continuous fabric.
A third thread is the moral and religious dimension of human evolution, treated through readings of the Ten Commandments, of original sin, and of the rhythms that govern the four bodies. Steiner places original sin far back in the Lemurian epoch, at the division of the sexes, rather than reading it as a single moral lapse, and so recasts a familiar doctrine as a stage in the long descent of the human being into physical form. A fourth thread, reached in the spring lectures, is the great battle of evolution: the work of the progressive spiritual hierarchies, the Thrones, the Spirits of Wisdom, and the Spirits of Form, set against the hindering powers. Steiner names three such opposing streams across the ages, the Luciferic beings who took hold of the astral body in Lemuria and opened the door to freedom and to error, the Ahrimanic or Mephistophelean spirits who worked in Atlantean times, and the Asuras, who he says assail the very core of personality in our own epoch. Against this background he sets the deed of Christ as the turning point that re-balances the human being's relation to these forces. The cycle closes by gathering these strands into a meditation on evolution, involution, and creation out of nothingness, in which Steiner contrasts what is merely unfolded from earlier conditions with what is brought genuinely new into being.
That is the great blessing of forgetting!
Throughout, Steiner works by widening the lens. A homely fact, an annoyance, a moment of laughter or weeping, is held up until it discloses a law that reaches from the etheric body to the journey between death and rebirth. The structure is less a system than a slow accumulation, each lecture adding a facet that only later reveals its place in the whole.
Glossary Terms from this Volume
This page serves as the hub for the glossary entries in the Thalira Wisdom library that draw on GA 107. Each term below opens its own study entry, where the idea is defined and traced across Steiner's work.
Where to Read It
You can read the full text of GA 107 in English at the Rudolf Steiner Archive, which hosts the complete cycle together with the related single lectures on the astral world and the deed of Christ. For a print edition in English translation, search the publisher catalogue at SteinerBooks. When citing a passage, note both the lecture title and its date and place, since the Berlin lectures of this winter were given on distinct occasions and are sometimes printed under slightly different section headings.
Continue Your Study
To carry these themes further within the library, you may wish to:
- Browse the full Thalira glossary to see how the four bodies, karma, and the spiritual hierarchies connect across many volumes.
- Follow the thread of memory and the etheric body by beginning with the Forgetting entry and tracing its links outward.
- Study the opposing powers named in the spring lectures through the Asuras entry, which places them beside Lucifer and Ahriman.