The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Fourth Lecture

[ 1 ] Today we will deal with a subject that is related to the broad, comprehensive outlooks into the realm of cosmic space that we undertook last time. We will take a closer look at the spiritual development within the more spatial and material development than we did last time. Last time, we saw how spiritual entities direct and guide that mighty developmental process, which external physical science tells us about in an imprecise way, but theosophy or spiritual science tells us about in detail.

[ 2 ] Last time, we saw how the individual planets, the individual bodies of our solar system, are formed out of a common primordial substance and we generally assumed that spiritual beings of the most diverse kinds are active in all this development. We have also pointed out in other lectures how, in the field of spiritual science, we see in the individual bodies of our world system not only physical, material things, but physical and material things combined with higher and higher and lower spiritual entities, with the most exalted kinds of entities that work for the good of the whole system, and also with spiritual entities of a lower kind that intervene to hinder and destroy. Of course, we must be clear that whatever appears to be hindering and destructive is, on the whole, incorporated in the wisdom of the whole system. Therefore, one would like to say: If something seemingly destructive, inhibiting and evil exists somewhere, then through the course of the whole, evolution is so wisely guided that even this destructive, inhibiting and evil is redirected, diverted for the good, for the best. But what we want to vividly present to our minds today is the existence of such spiritual beings – and first of all we want to consider spiritual beings of a sublime nature – who belong to the creative beings; while man will have to work for a long time in evolution before he ascends to the rank of a creative being. We will particularly consider a class of those entities that were involved in the construction of our solar system when the Earth began its evolution as Saturn in our world.

[ 3 ] Our Earth began its development as Saturn and progressed through the evolution of the sun and moon to its present form. At that time, when our Earth was Saturn, everything on this world body of Saturn was quite different from our present Earth planet. What we call solid rock masses, the mineral world in the modern sense, did not exist on Saturn. But there was also no water in the modern sense, not even air. Rather, what was present of the modern elements of the earth at that time can only be compared with warmth, with “fire”, as we say in occultism. You would not get a correct idea if you thought that this Saturn fire looked like a modern candle flame or a gas flame. You get a correct idea if you consider what pulsates up and down in your own body, if you reflect on the fundamental difference in this respect between a lower animal being, which has retained certain stages of development, and the human being. A lower animal being has the warmth of its surroundings. An amphibian has no internal warmth of its own, but has the warmth of its surroundings; it is as cold or as warm as its surroundings. Man has his own internal warmth, which must be the same as he needs it to be. His organism must ensure that when it is cold outside, he can still maintain his warmth at a certain level, and you know that when disturbances occur in this own warmth, such as fever and so on, that there is also a disturbance in the health of the physical body. You know, the point is that man has the measure of his warmth inside, and he must think of this inner warmth as being based on something like a power that produces this warmth. This power is not water, not earth, not air, but an element in itself, and this element alone was present on the old Saturn, the first embodiment of our Earth. If you had gone for a walk in space back then – this is of course a fantasy, but it is good for forming an idea of what it was like – you would not have seen Saturn; for in its oldest state it did not even spread light. For this, the world bodies must first become a sun or enter into a connection with a sun in order to become luminous. If you had approached the old Saturn, you would have noticed in its vicinity: there is warmth! You would have noticed at some point that it was getting warm, and you would think that there was some space filled with warmth; you would enter as if into an oven. The existence of old Saturn would have been announced by this power of warmth alone. This is a fine material state, of which today's man, least of all a learned physicist, can hardly form a correct idea; but it exists, a state finer than a gas, finer than air, and everything that was present in man at that time, namely the first structures of the physical body, consisted of this substance. If you could remove everything from yourself today except for the warmth of your blood, then you would have those first human faculties again in front of you. But that could not be, because you cannot live like that. Today it is not possible to live with this mineral kingdom, water kingdom and so on, as man lived on ancient Saturn. In those days you could. So today you have to think of everything that you have in terms of juices, tissues, and solid components, for example, and you also have to disregard what you absorb from the air as oxygen. You have to imagine that the only thing left of you is the warmth contained in your blood, which is of course also in a completely different form: a physical human being that consists only of warmth! It is a gruesome idea for a modern-day naturalist, but all the more correct and real for that!

[ 4 ] Such was the structure of man, of his physical body. On this Saturn, all the other creatures that are on Earth today, such as animals, plants and minerals, were not present. In those days, Saturn consisted entirely of human beings, which were clumped together like the small berries of a blackberry that form a larger one. Likewise, the mass of Saturn was a large berry, composed of tiny berries that were human beings. This old Saturn was such a sphere. If we were to examine the surroundings of this Saturn, as we examine the surroundings of our Earth, and find that it is surrounded by an atmosphere in which formations such as fog, clouds and so on occur, we would not find things of a material nature in the not find material things in the environment of Saturn; but we would find spiritual substances, spiritual entities in the atmosphere of Saturn, which are consistently of a higher nature than man was on Saturn at that time in his first creation.

[ 5 ] We now want to deal with a particular kind of being that was associated with the existence of Saturn. There we find the Spirits of Will, then the Spirits of Wisdom, Spirits of Movement, of Form, of Personality, the Spirits of the Sons of Fire and the Spirits of the Sons of Twilight. Today, we will focus in particular on the Spirits of Form, because, as we shall see, they played an important role at the beginning of our present evolution on Earth. From the whole series of spiritual beings present in the atmosphere and surroundings of Saturn, we want to single out the Spirits of Form and be aware that these Spirits of Form have undergone a development to this day, just as all beings undergo a development. Just as man has received the etheric body on the sun, the astral body on the moon, and the I on the earth, and has thereby become more and more perfect, so have the spirits of form also undergone their development.

[ 6 ] These spirits of form had no physical body on Saturn. They were constituted there in such a way that they had an etheric body as the lowest link of their being, which can be compared to the etheric body of a human being. We would therefore have to completely imagine away the physical body and imagine the etheric body as the lowest link of their being. Then these beings have an astral body, an ego, spirit self or manas, life spirit or buddhi, spirit man or atman, and an eighth member that is one degree higher than what a human being can achieve in the course of his development through earthly embodiments. These spirits of form thus work outwardly on Saturn through their etheric body in exactly the same way as a human being on Earth works outwardly through his physical body. They do not have hands with which they can work on Saturn, nor feet with which they can walk, and so on; for these are all members of the physical body. But their etheric body expresses itself in such a way that they continually radiate fertilizing life juices into the Saturn mantle in the form of very fine matter. We can imagine Saturn as we have described it, and from the surrounding area - continually and from all sides - fertilizing life juices radiating onto Saturn like rain from the etheric bodies of the spirits of form. Saturn itself had a property whereby it did not retain these fertilizing life juices, but continually reflected them like a mirror. This is how the mirror images of Saturn that I have already mentioned in earlier lectures arise. You can imagine the warm matter of Saturn continually receiving the rays of the etheric bodies of the spirits of form, and reflecting them back. We can get a rough idea of this if we imagine how rain from the clouds trickles down to the earth, collects in the earth and rises again as vapors. We must not imagine this to have a time in between, but rather imagine this process without a time in between: how the luxuriantly proliferating life juices flow in and are reflected back again, so that the formations of Saturn, the first structures of the human physical body, resemble mirror images. They are actually made up of mirror images. It is a good image for what was present as the physical makeup of man on Saturn, if you imagine a person standing in front of you and look into his eye: you send your light into the other's eye, and your image comes radiating towards you from his eye. So it was with the spirits of form in the environment of ancient Saturn. They sent their life-giving juices down into the warmth of Saturn, and their own form, their image, was reflected in this warmth; and this reflected image was the first formation of the human physical body. Even on ancient Saturn, man was literally in the image of his deity.

[ 7 ] When we now proceed to the sun, which arose from the old Saturn, this further development takes place in that the spirits of form no longer need an etheric or life body; they give up the etheric body. They no longer radiate the fertilizing life juices downwards, but they give off the etheric body, and thus the first physical Anlagen of human beings permeate with the etheric body. The etheric body that human beings have received on the sun is initially formed out of the etheric bodies of the spirits of form, a piece of the etheric body of the spirits of form. These celestial spiritual entities have mirrored themselves in the warm Saturn and have gradually become more independent by sacrificing to it and creating images, becoming capable of the greater deed of laying down their etheric body, sacrificing it, and now permeating with life, with their own life force, what they first shaped as an image. If you could endow the reflection that radiates back at you from the eye of your fellow human being with life, make it independent, so that it would have its own life and could step out of the eye, you would have an act that the spirits of form performed during the transition from the old Saturn to the sun. This was a significant advance for our cosmic development.

[ 8 ] You know, of course, that all legends and myths always have multiple meanings. If we visualize the true facts of world evolution in a spiritual sense, the myths present themselves to us in a surprising way in their truth. This can also happen now with a myth.

[ 9 ] Let us consider the progress that takes place from Saturn to the Sun. On ancient Saturn, the life-giving forces radiated in, were reflected back and were absorbed again by the mantle, by the atmosphere of Saturn. In the old Greek myth, the warm sphere of Saturn was called “Gaea” and the atmosphere “Cronus”. Now consider the myth: the life-giving forces of Cronus continually radiate into Gaea, into Saturn, and are absorbed again. It is Cronus who continually devours his own children! Such a truth of a myth must be felt. If you do not feel it, you do not have the right attitude towards it. Just think about what it means that in the dim and distant past of ancient Greece we find a myth that presents this truth to us in a wonderful way! There is only one possible explanation for such a fact, and that is that the most advanced individuals of humanity, who guided the development of humanity in the mysteries, knew exactly that about the development of the world that we proclaim today in Theosophy. Just as we speak about these things here, so it was spoken of in the old mysteries of Greece, and for the great masses these truths were clothed in images, and these images formed that which we know today as myth. Strange are those people who believe that only in the last forty years truth has been discovered by men, and that all that earlier times knew is only the product of a childish imagination. But it must be called a childish notion when it is emphasized again and again how wonderfully far we have come today. That is the truly childish notion!

[ 10 ] Thus we pass from Saturn to the Sun and continue to consider the evolution of the Spirits of Form. They have laid aside their etheric body, which they have poured out and given to the body of the earth, while the human body has been permeated by the etheric body of the Spirits of Form. They themselves now have the astral body as the lowest link of their being, and their higher development means that they not only have a link above the spiritual man or Atman, but another link as well; so that we must now describe their being with astral body, I, spirit self, life spirit, spiritual man, an eighth member and a ninth member, which are exalted above what man can attain in his complete seven-membered development.

[ 11 ] What kind of “outside” do the spirits of form offer? The Spirits of Form around Saturn have, so to speak, trickled the 'rain of life' down onto Saturn. The Spirits of Form on the Sun express themselves through the impulses, desires and passions that radiate onto the Sun, through everything that is anchored in the astral body. If someone had sat on the sun and looked out into space, they would not have seen lightning flash and heard thunder roll, but they would have perceived the passions of spiritual beings around them in astral light - passions all around, and you would not have to imagine only base passions. These passions, these affects all around, continued to create the planet from the outside in. If we look at the myths further, we literally see the creative “titans” within our evolution of the earth, the creative passions that work from the outside in, from the spiritual air circles of the sun when it was a planet.

[ 12 ] Now we are moving on to the moon - the sun is transforming into the moon. This means in the course of development that the spirits of form now also discard their astral body and that their lowest link is the ego. If we wanted to describe their nature, we would say: just as the human being has the physical body as its lowest link, so these spirits of form, which live around the moon, have the I as their lowest link, then have a spiritual self, a life spirit, spiritual people, an eighth, a ninth link and then a tenth link. So they offer their ego to the outside world. It is very strange, but it is so: they offer nothing but egos to the outside world; they are literally bursting with egos on the outside. All activity in the environment of the moon is as if you were facing beings who express all their individuality, all their peculiarity to you. This happened from the atmosphere of the moon. Imagine that all the I's within you, which are here in your physical body, were suddenly released from the physical body; the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body would be gone, only your I's would be there as the lowest link, and they could express themselves through space. Imagine yourself on the old moon and your selves out in the world, but in such a way that these selves would be embedded in the spiritual substances, only the lowest members of the spirits of form from the air: then you would have an idea of how the spirits of form express themselves as nothing but selves from space. They have given up their astral body, which they still had on the sun, to humans, so that the human being on the moon now consists of a physical body, an etheric body and an astral body.

[ 13 ] In order to put ourselves in this matter well, let us make a small sketch of it in the following way. We will imagine that this is the Saturn human being, the Saturn human being who has the first rudiments of the physical body. Floating above him, we must think of beings who are the spirits of form, who have an etheric body, an astral body, an ego, a spirit self, a life spirit, a spiritual human being, up to the eighth link.

[ 14 ] Now we have to think of the next state. In the case of the sun man, we have the physical body and the etheric body. The etheric body had come into being when the spirits of form poured out their etheric body and retained only their astral body, so that the spirits of form have their astral body, their ego, and so on up to the ninth link.

[ 15 ] Then we go to the moon. We have the human being consisting of a physical body, etheric body and astral body, and the astral body has only come into being because the spirits of form sacrificed their astral body and now have the ego as their lowest link, then the spirit self and so on up to the tenth link. In this way, everything that we call “human” has gradually flowed down from the surroundings of the planet, being assembled from the outside. Everything that is inside was once outside and has entered the human being.

[ 16 ] Let us now follow the development on earth itself: at the beginning of the development of the earth, man has his physical body as an attachment, then his etheric body and astral body. The Spirits of Form come over from the moon. Their lowest link is the I; this I they now also sacrifice and fertilize the human being in his disposition with the I, so that the I, as it appears on earth, is a fertilizing power that now emanates from the Spirits of Form; and the Spirits of Form retain as the lowest link of their being the spirit-self or Manas. If we wanted to describe them, we would have to say: The Spirits of Form rule over us in our environment in the earth's atmosphere. Their lowest link is spirit-self or manas, in which they live and weave, and they have sacrificed what they still had on the moon, the self that works on all sides. That trickled down and fertilized man.

[ 17 ] Now let us follow this process of human development on earth itself. We can indicate the point in the human being where the I is instilled; but today we will only look at this schematically. The human being receives his I. Naturally, this I first encounters the astral body, which surrounds it like an auric sheath; it first flows into this and permeates the astral body. This is at the time we call the 'Lemurian'. In the Lemurian period, over long periods of time that vary for different people, this I first enters and fertilizes the astral body. So let us now imagine this evolved human being.

[ 18 ] The physical body at that time did not consist of bones, flesh and blood as it does today, but was a very soft structure, even without cartilage, and this body was permeated as if by magnetic currents. So the physical body was there, then there was the etheric body as the next, and then the astral body, which is fertilized with the ego. We have to imagine this fertilization in such a way that something like a hole, like an incision, arises in the astral body, like an invagination. It is actually the case that something like an opening arises at the top of the astral body through the influence of the I, an opening down to the etheric body (see drawing on p. 74). This had a great significance and a great effect, and the consequence of it is that the first dim perception of an external physical world occurs. In earlier states, the human being perceived nothing but what lived within him; he was as if hermetically sealed from the outside. He perceived only himself and what was going on within him. Only now did his view open up to an external physical world. But man was not yet completely independent. Many things were still regulated for him by other divine beings with whom he was connected. It was not yet the case that man could immediately see everything around him, as is the case today; but because only his astral body was open, he also only perceived with this body. It was a very dim kind of clairvoyance, which consisted in the fact that when man moved over the earth in this ancient past, he perceived that which was outside his physicality, and indeed insofar as it was sympathetic or unsympathetic, useful or harmful to him. When he moved about in this way, he perceived, for example, a garish red color image that arose as an auric color image; for it was only his astral body that had been opened. Now, when a red color image arose, he knew: there is a being nearby that is dangerous to me! And when a blue-red color image approached him, he knew that he could go there. He only perceived the soul; he did not yet perceive what is present in today's plants, for example. He only perceived what was present as soul in other people and in animals, and indeed also the group souls. So that was the first fertilization with the ego.

[ 19 ] This I gradually took shape more and more, and in such a way that what came into the astral body as a fertilizing element permeated it more and more; so that the I was more and more present in the feelings of pleasure and displeasure of the astral body. As the I spread out in the astral body, what is called the sentient soul in my book 'Theosophy' arose. That is the sentient soul that arose. It is as if the fertilizing I spread its power over the entire astral body and thereby brought about the sentient soul.

[ 20 ] Now we will have to insert an important thing here. We have now seen a fairly normal course of evolution. We have seen how the spirits of form beamed their lowest link, their I, into the old moon, and how, when the moon became the earth, they gave up this I and thereby fertilized man with the I. Now we know that certain entities remained on the moon that did not complete their development on the moon. What does that mean? It means that they did not progress to the stage where they acquired the ability to let their I flow out and thus fertilize human beings. They could not do that. They were still at the old moon level when they worked with their I into the atmosphere of the earth. They were entities that had remained in the vicinity of the human being and worked in the same way as the spirits of form on the moon; this is how these remaining entities worked on earth. In the atmosphere of the earth, the human being was surrounded by I-beings that had not yet given up their I. These entities now strive to do on earth the last thing they had to do on the moon. As a result, the human being was exposed to influences that would not have belonged to him in the normal course of development here. These influences of the I-spirits radiated into his astral body. While the instilled I of the spirits of form was transforming his astral body, at the same time the I-spirits, which had not reached the point of view of the spirits of form, radiated lower forces to him than would have had to be radiated to him in normal development. These lower forces caused the human being to disintegrate into a higher and a lower part. Thus, through the instillation of the I on the part of the spirits of form, we have the I that is predisposed to selflessness, and through what is instilled by the retarded I-spirits, we have the other I that is predisposed to selfhood, to egoism. This is the I that does not yet want to let go of instincts, desires and passions. They penetrate it and permeate the astral body, so that two things are present in the human astral body: selfless instincts, those that want to go higher, and those passions that are permeated with selfishness; these have entered into man through the influence of the I-spirits and are anchoring themselves in him.

[ 21 ] Now let us continue to observe the development itself. We have seen how the astral body has been completely permeated by the power of the instilled I. The next step is that the etheric body is also seized by this power, so that a kind of hole to the outside world also arises in the etheric body. If we want to draw this, we have to do it as if we have a physical body in the middle, then a perforated ether body, which is completely filled by the power of the ego, and then the astral body, which is also filled by the power of the ego. So now we have the power in the etheric body that wants to go outwards: the etheric body opens up to the outside world (see drawing).

[ 22 ] We are now roughly in the first and second third of the Atlantean period in the formation of the human being. Ancient clairvoyance still existed, but not in the sense that only the useful and harmful, the sympathetic and unsympathetic were seen in images; rather, something like living dream images appeared before the person that remained for a long time. For the etheric body is the vehicle of memory, and since these human beings had not yet had any disturbance from the physical body, they retained such images, which they absorbed from outside, for an extremely long time. In those days memory was a particularly outstanding power of the soul. You can read in “From the Akashic Records” what people were like in this respect at that time. It is still not a complete view of the outside world, but a kind of dim clairvoyance. However, this is more comprehensive than perception through the astral body. It encompasses more, allowing everything to arise in powerful images that are clearly formed, like a dream but already corresponding to the external objects; whereas before, the images only served to tell the person how to behave, whether to take this or that direction. But the external objects were not yet seen.

[ 23 ] Now we are going further and arrive at the last third of the Atlantean era. Now not only the astral body and the etheric body, but also the physical body is seized by the power of the ego (see drawing). The disposition for a bulge arises in the physical body. The physical body becomes bulged, and around it we have the etheric body and the astral body. Let us now visualize this schematically; in the course of the next lectures we will get to know the realities of it. So in a sense, such a kind of bulge had occurred. The physical body took up the I within itself. Between the eyebrows lies the point — I have often spoken to you about it — where the I is received. With this opening, which comes about through the penetration of the physical body with the I, we must particularly think of the opening of the physical senses. The I permeates the eye, the sense of hearing; this is not just one opening, but a whole series of openings. All this is happening in the last third of the Atlantean era, and only through this is the physical human body being transformed into what it is today.

[ 24 ] We now call the transformed etheric body, as it was formed in the first Atlantean period, the “mind soul” or “emotional soul”, and the transformed physical body we call the “conscious soul”. So you have presented what you find described in my Theosophy as a consequence of evolution, as it is today. Here you can see how things have gradually formed.

[ 25 ] Now the physical body is also open to the outside and man is only now really getting to know the outside world, and now the conscious transformation of the astral body begins. Before that, everything was more or less an unconscious transformation; for the consciousness soul is only now present. If we want to visualize this state, we have to think of it schematically: the astral body, the etheric body and the physical body are unlocked, and through the fact that the human being enters into a relationship with the outside world, he forms an impact within himself. That is all that the I develops through contact with the outside world, that the I learns during contact with the outside world. Now imagine that the whole thing that the ego develops in this way becomes bigger and bigger, and it is actually the case – admittedly schematically, but entirely in line with the real process – that this new structure, which the human being develops little by little, wraps itself around his astral body and unites with his astral body and then, in the course of evolution, transforms it into the actual human

[ 26 ] Manas or spirit self (see drawing). Man is now in this work, in that he is transforming his astral body into Manas or spiritual self through what he acquires through his contact with the outside world. We are still in the midst of this process. But because the Spirits of Form have abandoned the I and instilled it into man, we are surrounded by these Spirits of Form as entities whose lowest link is a manasic, the spirit-self. If we want to look for these Spirits of Form, for their lowest link, in our environment, we find it in what we ourselves gradually develop as the fifth link. What we develop as human wisdom, by means of which we must become ever wiser and wiser, we should find expressed in our environment as the lowest form of the spirits of form. Let us consider what more exalted, higher entities have done around us, in which we do not yet share. Let us look, as I have often done before, at a piece of thigh bone, in which beams, going back and forth, are joined together into a wonderful scaffold, so that we have to say to ourselves: here, with the smallest amount of material, the greatest measure of strength has been achieved! What man gradually attains in his wisdom, we see here in a mysterious way. Man will gradually learn - what he is not yet able to do today - to build bridge structures through his engineering skills that will be forms of wisdom, which will be as wisely designed as the thighbones support the human torso as pillars. The entire human body is designed so wisely, an expression and a revelation of wisdom, and when we go out into nature, we encounter this wisdom everywhere. Take, for example, the beaver lodges. We see how the beavers gather in certain seasons, when the water reaches a greater gradient, to build a lodge at a certain angle in the water, thereby holding back the water and creating a new gradient, all technically correct and as if they had all the tools of mathematics and other sciences at their disposal. Everywhere around us we find everything imbued and impregnated with wisdom, with that with which we ourselves will be imbued when we have developed manas to its full extent. This wisdom, which we find everywhere, is something that belongs to the members of the spirits of form. Just as our lowest link is the physical body, so the wisdom that we find around us is the lowest link of the spirits of form. Then these spirits of form have buddhi, atman, where we have our etheric body and astral body, and then the eighth, ninth, tenth and eleventh links. So you see, we are dealing here with highly exalted beings, to whom we look up, and when we see wisdom in our environment, we only see the last link of these highly exalted beings. We are to these exalted beings like an animal, a lower being, that crawls around on humans and only sees the physical body on its outside. Forgive me for the image, the comparison! We grovel on the earth and see the wisdom that is for the spirits of form as the physical body is for us. Such a being is what we call the creative spirit in relation to man, for this creative spirit has instilled his ego into him.

[ 27 ] Just as we rise to the Manas in the way described, so we will rise in the further course of development through the transformation of the etheric body: we incorporate the life spirit, the Buddhi. We have in our environment Manas or the spirit self as the wisdom impregnated in the world. Just as this is the lowest link of spiritual entities, the spirits of form, other entities are also linked to the earth, the lowest link of which is not our fifth, Manas, but our sixth link, that is, the spirit of life or Buddhi. In our environment, the atmosphere is for such entities whose last link, as the link of higher entities, corresponds to our spirit of life. And just as it is true that at the beginning of the evolution of the earth an external act instilled the ego into man, so it is true that at a certain point in the evolution of the earth the first impression and influence of those entities occurred which gradually instilled the full power of the Buddhi into man. In the time when the I was instilled in ancient, gray prehistory, after two thousand years there was still not much to be seen of such I's in human bodies. All this happened gradually. It took many millennia for the power of the I to fully develop. Never should one imagine that the instillation of the I was such an event that someone could say: “Nothing special happened, I do not recognize it; this is an event like the ones that happened before!” If any peculiarly “enlightened” minds had lived on earth two thousand years after the instillation of the ego and had founded a materialism at that time, they would have said: Oh, there are some among us who claim that a special power came from heaven and brought all people forward; but that is a dualism of the most reprehensible kind; we, as monists, must declare that this is something that was there before! — These things occurred gradually and slowly.

[ 28 ] Just as at the beginning of the Lemurian period a mighty forward leap occurred through the instillation of the ego, which only later made it possible of developing the spirit-self or manas, so there is an event of fundamental significance whereby man will be able to develop not only manas within the whole human being, but the spirit of life or buddhi. And this event is the deed of Golgotha, is the appearance of Christ on earth! It may be that some people will deny this today; but this event is just as much an effect of the environment as the other was an effect of the environment. Thus we see that we understand the course of the world from its spiritual side when we look into the depths of this world. We gradually learn to raise our gaze not only to a material existence; but we discover spiritual beings and their deeds everywhere we look into space, and through what we call theosophy, we get to know the deeds of these spiritual entities. We live, weave and are within the spiritual entities and their deeds.

[ 29 ] Next time, we want to take a closer look at the human organism and point out the points as they have really developed, after we have looked at them more schematically today.