The Rudolf Steiner Archive

About the Ten-page Book

[ 1 ] Last time, I pointed out to you that symbolic language is necessary in order to express oneself clearly in occultism. What surrounds us today has only been so for a certain period of time, which is actually quite short, because our ancestors during the Atlantean and Lemurian periods lived under completely different conditions. People today can no longer conceive of this. Nevertheless, if we want to understand what is happening today, we must rise to those concepts and ideas ... [gap in the notes].

[ 2 ] Language is not very old; it only developed among the Atlanteans. Our Lemurian ancestors did not yet have language; they had a kind of song, sounds of great magical power, which were like a magic potion and would perhaps seem inarticulate to modern humans, but which surpassed in beauty and melodiousness everything we can find today among the highest animals. These sounds had the power, for example, to make flowers grow faster or to set dead objects in motion. We cannot compare this with our ordinary language today. Therefore, we cannot use our language to describe what belongs to the highest things.

[ 3 ] In occult schools, allegorical language and allegorical writing have therefore always been used. These allegorical symbols are constant expressions that must first be learned to understand. One such expression is that of the ten-petaled book. What is this ten-petaled book?

[ 4 ] The ten-petaled book is something real, something tangible. This book contains great content, but the formulas are only seemingly simple. It is something very real for the secret student, but it is read very differently from an ordinary book, because people with their ordinary minds must form words from letters and sentences from words. The thinking of the secret scientist is different; it is one that grasps units, surveys large contexts at once; it is lived experience, a vision of higher realities. Man forms a collective concept from details. The secret scientist gains an intuitive concept at once through inner experience and does not need to have so many individual experiences. It is like a person who has seen a lion, for example, and can form the concept of “lion.”

[ 5 ] In this way, the secret scientist also gains the concept of astral and mental beings at once, because he sees things at once. There are archetypes for all spiritual things. Just as a painter has a certain intuitive image in his mind and can paint a hundred pictures based on this image, so there are archetypes for all things on the higher planes, which the clairvoyant sees. Reading the archetypes of things, the spiritual origins, is called in occultism: reading the ten-leafed book. In every secret school, one could read this ten-leaf book. Even back then, when humanity was not yet clothed in a physical body, everyone could read this book.

[ 6 ] Let us transport ourselves back to the Lemurian era, when humans clothed themselves in a physical shell. At that time, they lived in a world of images that were entirely pictorial. They did not see images externally, but internally; in their souls, they felt, for example, when they approached another person, a certain warmth or something like bright color images rising up. It was like a vivid dream, pictorial, but not conscious. Only the teachers and leaders of the people could see everything at once, which the others could only feel in the twilight of their souls. Their vision was not limited; everything lay spread out before them like a tableau; they only needed to turn their attention to it. This is the idea of that all-encompassing unity that presents itself to the initiated and the secret student. Today, we cannot see everything at once because we perceive with our sensory tools. For example, a difference between New York and Berlin would not have been seen at that time. Those who see outside their physical body notice that differences in space are only represented to them through their senses. All of today's science consists of building up details that are then put together. But what goes on in the spiritual world is not discovered bit by bit; rather, once a certain level of knowledge has been attained, everything lies open before us.

[ 7 ] Now there are ten levels, which are the ten leaves of the ten-leaf book, which I will now begin to outline for you.

[ 8 ] What is written on the first leaf? It contains an enormous amount, but one must experience it. Think of a flower. When we planted a flower this year, we saw how it took root, how the stem, branches, leaves, and blossoms developed, and finally the seed, the germ, which we put back into the earth. In this very small germ, we no longer see anything of the plant, but it is contained within it, contracted to a single point. Let us look at a tulip, how it is compressed into a point and how it spreads out again. We see the essence of the tulip alternating between great expansion and contraction into a point, as if compressed into nothingness. We can observe this spreading out and contracting into a point throughout the world, in nature and in human beings. Even an entire solar system unfolds, goes through a state of sleep, and then awakens again. In theosophy, these two states are called Manvantara = expansion, and Pralaya = contraction into a point. There is no difference in external perception between the seed of a solar system and a flower; they do not exist for the external senses. Our present world system will also shrink to such a point one day; but in this point, all life will then be concentrated, and it will spring forth from it again. If one imagines oneself in this manifold life of the world compressed into a single point, one has a concept of the divine creative power that creates out of nothing. Those who want to penetrate the mysteries of the universe must learn to concentrate their thoughts on a point, but not on a dead point, rather on a living point that is at once nothing and everything. It is not easy to put oneself in this general sleep of nature, which is a zero-life, but at the same time also an all-life; one must have felt it, thought it, and wanted it. Only those who have thought this through can read the remaining pages.

[ 9 ] To grasp this unity of time, space, and power, to sink into it, that is the reading of the first leaf. In a stanza of the Dzyan book you will find a beautiful description.

[ 10 ] The second leaf shows us duality in all the world. Wherever you go in nature, you will find duality: light and shadow, positive and negative, male and female, left and right, even and odd, good and evil. Duality is deeply rooted in the nature of all becoming, and anyone who wants to understand nature must make this duality clear in their mind. Only when we see duality in our own lives can we come to understand the world. The secret student must make it his duty to learn to think in these dualities. He must never think only one thing, he must always think both together. For example, when he thinks of his relationship to the divine: “A divine self lives within me” — this sentence represents only one thing, to which a second belongs: “and I live in the divine self.” Both are true. The secret student must say to himself:

[ 11 ] Human beings are sensual beings, but they will become spiritual beings; I was once a spiritual being and had to become a sensual being.

[ 12 ] Only then can one recognize all truth, when one imposes on oneself the inner duty to never think in terms of unity, but always in terms of duality. When man learns to think in these dualities, then he thinks correctly and appropriately.

[ 13 ] This is the reading of the second page, the second leaf in the ten-leaf book. In the old German myths of the gods and also in Gnostic books, you will find this duality repeatedly depicted. Certain crude ideas have ... [gap in the notes] and see in particular the duality between the masculine and the feminine and trace everything back to this duality. But in truth, the masculine and the feminine are only a special case of a much higher duality. And to take this special case to explain everything means to blindfold oneself to spiritual reality and to cling to the lowest level.

[ 14 ] The third sheet depicts the trinity. Threefold concepts are found everywhere: human beings are threefold beings, consisting of body, soul, and spirit. Gnosticism speaks of the Father, the Word, and the Spirit. We encounter a threefold concept in Egyptian mythology in the deities Osiris, Isis, and Horus. The threefold nature contains an important secret. Those who accustom themselves to transforming duality into triality gain a tool that leads them to understanding the whole world. To think through the world in its triality means to penetrate it with wisdom.

[ 15 ] Fourth sheet: Pythagorean square. Human beings stand before me as a fourfold entity: they consist of body, soul, spirit, and within them lives the fourth, self-consciousness. Therefore, Pythagoras says ... [gap in the notes]. The lower nature of human beings develops the higher nature from within itself. This is the secret of the fourfold entity that develops from the threefold entity. This fourfold entity is found in all beings. To the comprehensive view of the great initiate, who surveys all periods of time, all beings are the same. Man is a fourfold being living on the physical plane. The lion does not live with its fourfold nature on the physical plane; here it has only its threefold nature: physical body, etheric body, astral body; its I lives in the spiritual world as its fourth nature.

[ 16 ] Higher nature appears only at a lower level than sensual nature. When human beings are able to control their physical body down to its very fibers, they will become Atma; when they control their etheric body, they will become Budhi; when they control their astral body, they will become Manas. This is the fourfold nature: the three members of the lower nature, which will one day be transformed into the higher nature. The fourfold nature is present in all beings that can be found in the world. To the eye of the seer, who can see across great periods of time, all beings are the same, only different for ... [gap in the records].

[ 17 ] How does a lion differ from a human being? To the human eye, a lion is lower than a human being because humans have limited vision. They live today on the physical plane, while lions have left their spirit in the mental plane and their soul in the astral plane.

[ 18 ] Plants and minerals also have their fourfold nature. Plants are only on the physical plane with their physical body and etheric body. Plants and minerals have the other parts of their fourfold nature in the spiritual world. But humans, animals, plants, and minerals all have a fourfold nature. Students of occultism must always experience this inwardly if they want to read the fourth leaf.

[ 19 ] Fifth leaf: When reading the fifth leaf, everything that humans project out of themselves is revealed, like a shadow image cast into the world. This is more than mere four-foldness. He begins to worship. This is called idolatry. Man is a thinking, imagining being. When he begins to think about things, he attributes divine causes to them. Myths arise in which man connects the supersensible with the sensible. The world of myths and legends represents the cultures of ancient peoples in many ways. This whole process lies before the initiate, and there comes a moment when he begins to grasp the thread that runs through all myths.

[ 20 ] The horse, for example, what does it mean? It represents a being that has remained at a certain stage that physical man has outgrown in his development. But there was a moment in the Hyperborean epoch when man first had to develop the capacity for intelligence. Capacities develop long before. Now I have told you that all higher development must be purchased by something else remaining behind. If one wants to rise, the other must sink. At that time, when human beings developed the capacity for intelligence, this was only possible because human nature separated from itself what later developed into the nature of the horse. In the Atlantean epoch, the horse developed, and human beings had an instinctive sense that their development was connected with the horse. This instinct became a myth in later times. The Atlanteans had an instinctive awareness of the relationship between their intelligence and the horse, and therefore, in the first epoch of the post-Atlantean period, the horse was revered as a symbol of intelligence. The first post-Atlantean epochs had to develop intelligence. That is why horses are presented in the Apocalypse when the seven seals are removed. Odysseus devises a wooden horse.

[ 21 ] Three things are necessary for understanding myths: First, one must take the myth literally; second, one must understand it symbolically — as is done in religions; third, one must understand it literally again in a higher sense. When this wonderful connection appears before the intuitive eye, it means reading the fifth leaf.

[ 22 ] Sixth leaf: This contains the secrets of what humans recognize as the supernatural and to which they aspire. The ideals that humans create from their own nature are recorded on this sixth leaf, for example, the great ideals of freedom, equality, and brotherhood. The union of human nature with something that is not yet there, something that man must first achieve, is on this sixth leaf: creation, the will to transcend oneself. “I love him who desires the impossible.” Man learns to look at the future states of humanity; he learns to see the seeds of the future in the present. The initiate can read in the sixth leaf how John described the future states of humanity in the Apocalypse.

[ 23 ] Seventh leaf: Here the student learns to understand the mystery and meaning of the number seven. Things develop in the number seven because the three from which they originate is repeated once more, and they themselves are the seventh. Man must learn to say to himself: I consist of the trinity, from which a higher trinity shall emerge; that is the sixfold. Starting from the trinity, he returns to a higher trinity, the sixfold. He himself is the seventh. To understand this process is to read the seventh leaf.

[ 24 ] We will talk about the eighth, ninth, and tenth leaves next time. The ten-page book is an allegory; it summarizes in a few words what would otherwise take a long time to describe. It is an abbreviation of what has comprehensive life.

[ 25 ] Paracelsus says: The physician must read all of nature, he must take exams in nature, and from the individual letters he must summarize the word, and not draw wisdom only from books.

[ 26 ] In our time, the spiritual had to take a back seat; this had to be so in order to make possible the great conquests of the physical plane, in order to become perfect in the mastery of the sensory world. Now the time is near when humanity must once again deepen spiritually. Humanity is currently rushing toward a stage on the physical plane that could not be endured unless spiritual life were to develop again. An illustration of how necessary it is for man to deepen spiritually: you are familiar with the tremendous advances in electrical science, for example; these forces are associated with an enormous power that will make it possible for man to misuse them. In the not too distant future, human beings will be masters of terrible forces that they will be able to wield on the physical plane. For example, they will be able to cause detonations and explosions in distant places without anyone being able to identify the perpetrator. Humanity will have power. And woe betide us if humanity is not morally up to the task and does not use these terrible forces solely and exclusively for good purposes! The leaders of humanity, the masters, have foreseen this time, and it is the mission of theosophical teaching to prepare minds for what is to come, to warn them, to show them the way and the goal.