The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Fifth Lecture

[ 1 ] We face a relatively difficult task today. However, our esteemed audience will surely accept today’s somewhat demanding requests if we also assure them that, in the coming days, we will regain ground where we feel more secure. But if one does not wish to remain stuck in mere abstractions in spiritual science, if one wishes to make one’s way to the realities, then one must occasionally be willing to accept communications that belong to the higher realms of spiritual knowledge. It may be added that today’s remarks are by no means mere deductions or purely theoretical inferences, but rather concern matters that have always been known to those who have delved more deeply into these matters. Thus, they will concern the communication of insights gained by specific individuals.

[ 2 ] Yesterday we saw how a person might find their way within what is called the innermost part of their astral body, if upon waking they could consciously immerse themselves in this astral body, and we gained an understanding of what it means to pass by the so-called Lesser Guardian of the Threshold. Now, what was discussed yesterday is actually quite hypothetical, for in normal life this moment never really occurs—that a person would consciously penetrate into their inner self simply by waking up. We have, however, said that a person can prepare themselves through what is called mystical contemplation for such a conscious descent into their outer bodily sheaths. What this means, however, will only become clear to us in the course of these lectures, and we will also hear what this preparation consists of. For normal consciousness, at most, there are occasional instances where a person experiences such moments of conscious awakening due to circumstances rooted in their previous incarnations. This happens to some people. They wake up feeling a certain sense of constriction. This feeling of constriction stems from the fact that the inner self, which during the night was spread out in the macrocosm and felt free, returns, so to speak, to the prison of its body. Then there may also be another feeling upon waking. This feeling could be characterized more by saying that, when such abnormal states occur, the person feels better at the moment of waking than they do during the course of the day. They feel that there is something within them that they might call their “better self.” This stems from the fact that upon waking, the person has a lingering sensation that something has flowed into them from worlds higher than their own sensory world. These are the kinds of feelings that can arise in normal consciousness and in which, even in everyday life, a certain confirmation of what was said yesterday can be seen. But what has been described can only be fully experienced by the genuine, true mystic.

[ 3 ] The question now is whether one can go even further. For what one experiences there—what was described yesterday—is the inner aspect of the spiritual part of the outer human being; it is the inner aspect of what is called the human astral body. The question now is whether one can descend even deeper to less spiritual parts—or rather, to those parts of human nature that appear less spiritual in ordinary life. They can nevertheless be thoroughly spiritual in their foundations, for everything we encounter in the outer world has a spiritual aspect in its deeper background. The question is whether one can descend even further down to the physical body and whether there lies something else between the astral body—which is the most spiritual at first glance—and this physical body. The anthroposophical books describe this other aspect as the etheric or life body, so that, as we descend, we should encounter, after having become acquainted with the astral body from within, the etheric body and perhaps also some trace of our physical body, which we otherwise only view from the outside, but which we can also recognize from within through such a conscious entry into our physicality.

[ 4 ] However, it is generally not advisable—indeed, it is not without risk—to go a step further in terms of mystical deepening than was described yesterday. Everything that was described yesterday can only be undertaken with great caution by those who have acquired knowledge of what you will find in my book *How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds* or in the second part of my *Secret Science*, about which you will hear more in the coming lectures. To this extent, a person can help themselves for the time being. But to proceed further along this path into the human inner being is not without danger, and in the way people today tend to acquire their spiritual knowledge, it cannot be done at all. Therefore, we will see that a different path of knowledge is chosen today. The path of descending deep into the human inner being without concerning oneself with anything else is one that, in our present-day culture, is normally no longer to be taken. Our present-day spiritual life is such that human beings are only willing to submit to a certain degree, and that they wish to follow their path of knowledge with as much freedom as possible. We shall see that there is also a path into the spiritual worlds that takes full account of this characteristic of modern human nature, and we shall come to know this path—the so-called Rosicrucian path of knowledge—as the true, contemporary path of knowledge. But this path of knowledge is a path of more recent times. It did not yet exist in the mysteries, that is, in those places where people in antiquity were initiated into the deeper secrets. There were mysteries that simply led people past the little guardian of the threshold and into their own inner being, and mysteries that led people out into the great world, so that they had to undergo a kind of ecstasy. These two paths are the ones that were primarily taken and experienced in ancient times. The path of descending into one’s own inner self was best and most intensely experienced in those places of initiation known as the Egyptian Mysteries, the Mysteries of Osiris and Isis; and today, in order to describe what a person can experience during this descent into their inner self, we will have to draw somewhat on the experiences of a student of the Isis and Osiris Mysteries. As we shall see in the following lectures, it is certainly possible today to attain the initiation that leads to a full understanding of these mysteries, but no longer by the same path as in ancient Egypt. In ancient Egypt, something was necessary that modern human nature would rebel against. For it was necessary that at the point where the human being was to enter into their own inner self—or even earlier—the human being no longer sought progress independently through their own paths of knowledge, but rather entrusted themselves to what is called, in an expression of Eastern philosophy, a guru, a great initiated teacher. Otherwise, the path was too perilous for the individual. As a rule, even the steps of mystical contemplation described yesterday were taken under the guidance of the guru, the great initiated teacher.

[ 5 ] What, then, is the purpose of the guidance provided by these great initiated teachers? We heard in an earlier lecture that when we immerse ourselves in our physicality each morning, our souls are received by three forces, which we have described using terms drawn from ancient terminology: the power of Venus, the power of Mercury, and the power of the Moon. What is generally understood by the Venus power is something that a person can still deal with on their own when they descend into their own inner being. They can cope with the Venus power by receiving a certain training in humility and selflessness. Before undertaking such a journey into the unknown worlds of his own inner being, he must suppress all egoistic impulses, the impulses of self-love, and train himself in selflessness. He must become a being who feels love and compassion, not only for his fellow human beings, but for all existence. Then, at most, he can still surrender to that power—which we have referred to as the Venusian powers—when he descends into his physicality. But the matter would become far more dangerous if the human being were to surrender himself even to those powers we have designated as the powers of Mercury. In the ancient Egyptian initiations, he was guided by the great teacher, who, through his earlier experiences, was able to handle these powers of Mercury in a fully conscious manner. A Hermes or Mercury priest led the human being into his own inner self. This, however, required strict submission to everything that this great teacher demanded of the student. It required such a degree of submission that the student had to resolve to completely set aside his own ego, to will nothing of his own, to have no impulses of his own even within his soul, but strictly to carry out only what the Hermes priest instructed him to do. This obedience, which would be repugnant to modern man and to which he no longer needs to submit, the student of the Egyptian Mysteries had to fully master. For many years, he had to follow the teacher not only in his outward actions; he had to entrust himself to the guidance of this teacher even in his thoughts and in his emotional world, so that he could safely descend into his own inner being. Now we come to the things that many people have experienced—things that are recounted from the experiences the individual underwent under the guidance of his great teacher—and which one might describe by saying: The individual came to know a deeper layer of his own inner being.

[ 6 ] Yesterday we described vividly and concretely what it means to come to know one’s astral body from within. Now let us recount some of what the initiate in the Isis and Osiris mysteries experienced, under the guidance of his teacher, with regard to the human etheric or life body. There, through the suspension of his ego, the human being was led to see with the spiritual eyes of his teacher, to think with the thoughts of his teacher, to become a kind of external object to himself, and to look at himself through the eyes of his teacher. And there he was introduced to strange experiences, experiences in which he had the feeling that he was going back in time; and at the same time he had the feeling as if his entire being, which he now beheld through the spiritual eyes of the Hermes priest, were expanding, growing. He had the feeling as if he were expanding within himself, as if he were growing upward into times that preceded his present life, as if he were moving backward through the sequence of time. And he gradually began to feel that he was going back many, many years, a span of time far longer, many times longer than the life he had lived since his birth; thus the student experienced a vast journey back through the sequence of time. And while he was experiencing this, seeing through the eyes of the initiated teacher, he first saw himself, but then he saw further back in the sequence of time many generations, whom he felt were his ancestors. For a certain time, the initiate had the feeling that he was walking up the line of his ancestors, but not in such a way that he was, as it were, within these ancestors, not as if he were identical with his ancestors, but as if he were, so to speak, hovering above them up to a certain point, up to an ancient ancestor. Then the impression faded. It was as if he were seeing earthly forms to which his own existence was somehow related.

[ 7 ] The point was that the guide had to make it clear to the initiate what he had actually seen. We can only begin to understand what he saw in the following way. When one enters into existence through birth—that is, with one’s spiritual being, after having passed through the spiritual world between death and a new birth—one carries within oneself not only the characteristics one brings from the previous life, but one also carries within oneself—as everyone who observes life knows—everything that is called inherited traits. One is born into a family, a people, a race. Through this, one carries within oneself what are called inherited characteristics; one carries within oneself the heirlooms of one’s ancestors. Naturally, one does not bring these heirlooms with oneself from one’s last incarnation, but they have been passed down from generation to generation. Now the question is to recognize: What is the significance of the fact that the human being, with his innermost being, incarnates precisely in a particular family, in a particular people, in a particular race? What is the significance of the fact that, in his descent through birth, he seeks out very specific hereditary characteristics? — He would never seek out these specific characteristics if he had no connection to them whatsoever. In fact, the human being is connected to these characteristics long before birth. If we start with a particular person and trace back to their father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and so on, then—if one could truly follow this inwardly—the hereditary traits would manifest through a very specific number of generations, up to a certain generation. Then these hereditary traits fade away. That is to say, you can trace a series of generations, and you will find that the hereditary traits are passed down through them. Finally, they are still present in their most diluted state, and then they disappear entirely.

[ 8 ] Just as we see hereditary traits gradually disappear over the generations, so too can we observe, starting with a person, that the traits present in the son are most similar to those of the father, somewhat less so in the grandfather, even less in the great-grandfather, and so on. Now, the Isis and Osiris priest who was to be initiated actually traced the person back so far until he reached that ancestor who still possessed characteristics that the power of heredity had carried down to him. This shows us that the human being has certain connections to what we call his hereditary traits. It is indeed the case that we have entered into a spiritual relationship with that ancestor from whom we have still inherited something, with that great-great-great-grandparent from whom we still possess certain, however diluted, characteristics within us. Yes, in a certain sense, it is true that human beings prepare for a long time what ultimately become their inherited characteristics. They do not merely inherit them, but in a certain sense they bestow them upon their ancestors, implanting them in them from the spiritual world. They work through entire generations in such a way that ultimately the physical body to which they feel drawn can be born. As strange as it sounds, it is true that we ourselves have worked from the spiritual world on the physical bodies of our ancestors in order to gradually shape, from the spiritual world, those qualities that we ultimately receive as inherited traits at birth.

[ 9 ] This is what first becomes apparent when a person is led down into their own etheric or life body. It becomes clear to them that this etheric body they now carry has, in fact, a long history, that it has long been prepared by them. Long, long before they could enter into existence through this birth, they themselves had worked in the spiritual world on the etheric or life body that they now bear. And they began working on this etheric body at the very moment when the most ancient ancestor set foot on the physical earth, from whom the human being has still inherited certain characteristics. This is a true experience of a part of our etheric body. By listing that the human being consists of a physical body, an etheric or life body, an astral body, and an I—by doing so, one has merely provided certain pointers, certain core teachings. What this looks like—what exists there as our own inner being, enveloped within a shell—can only be understood by familiarizing oneself with the messages of those who have descended into this human shell themselves.

[ 10 ] Thus, as a human being passes through his own birth, he enters the realms he traversed before he came into existence through birth; thus, as a mystic, he comes to know a part of his life before birth—a vast part that spans centuries. For it is centuries that he traverses there, back to the time when, in the life between his last death and his present birth, he began to form the archetype of his etheric body. At the moment he began this, the first seed of the distinctive characteristics sprang into the blood of a physical human being; these characteristics became more and more pronounced until this etheric body was ready to take on, at birth, the characteristics it had itself helped to bring about. That is one side of the experience. What one experiences there is, so to speak, a reconstructing of everything that one had to do oneself in the spiritual world long before one entered into existence through birth in this incarnation. What one built there and then, as it were, pushed together and compressed into one’s present etheric body—what has condensed in the etheric body over the course of centuries—was called the “Higher Self,” the heavenly or spiritual human being. Thus the technical term existed: The human being comes to know their Higher Self by entering the etheric or life body. — This was called the heavenly or spiritual human being, because the human being had to feel that what had descended from him was formed out of the spiritual realm.

[ 11 ] Once the individual had been guided this far by the Hermetic initiate, he came to know something else. He came to know something that might at first have seemed foreign to him, but which the teacher explained to him as something that should not, after all, be entirely foreign to him. It was shown to him—and the student soon realized that this was true—that he was confronted by something he himself had once left behind from his own human nature, something that had been left behind by him, something that was intimately related to him, but which now stood before him as something external, as something foreign. What is this with which the human being was connected in such a very strange way? We will understand it best if we begin with a description of the moment of death.

[ 12 ] Spiritual research shows us that at the moment of death, a person sheds their physical body. What remains of them is what we have come to know as the “I” and the astral body, which leave the body every night during sleep, and what remains at first is the etheric or life body. After death, the human being lives for some time—though this amounts to only a few days—in these three aspects of their being: in their ego, in their astral body, and in their etheric body. But then the most essential part of their etheric body departs from them like a second corpse. It is always said—and I believe I have also rightly indicated this—that what departs as a second corpse disperses into the general etheric world, dissolves, and the human being takes with them only an essence, an extract, a seed into the life they now begin between death and a new birth. This is how the process is usually described, but in reality it is considerably more complicated. What dissolves there, what gradually passes into the general etheric world like a second corpse, takes quite a long time to dissolve completely, and it is the last traces of this dissolving etheric body from his last life that the initiate now encounters as something foreign when, in his journey back, he has developed upward to the point in the sequence of time where the human being has arrived at his last ancestor from whom he has still inherited something. There he encounters the last remnants of his last etheric body. And now, as he continues his initiation, the human being must, as it were, penetrate this last etheric body of his that he has left behind, and then he lives backward again, almost, but not quite as long a time as he previously lived through up to his last ancestor. The time up to the oldest ancestor stands to the time he now has to live through as seven to five. Now the human being lives through a time in which he finds, so to speak, the last remnants of his former life becoming ever more and more condensed. As it contracts for his perception, his last etheric or life body becomes more and more similar, until he finally arrives at the form that his etheric body had at the moment when he passed through his last death. And now, after the form has contracted more and more, they stand before their last death. At this moment, there is no longer any doubt for the initiated person that reincarnation is a truth, for they have gone back as far as their last death. Thus we have come to know the part that the human being finds as the remnant of their last earthly life.

[ 13 ] In spiritual science, what a person experiences as coming toward them from their last earthly life has always been referred to as the “earthly human being” or the “lower self.” Thus, almost halfway through their initiatory experiences, the person undergoes the union of the higher with the lower, and then traces the lower back so far that they descend all the way to their last life. In this way, during their initiation, the human being undergoes a cycle in which, penetrating into their present etheric body, they reach the etheric body of their last life and then return again to their present life. Through spiritual vision, they unite with what they were in a previous incarnation. In spiritual science, this was always called a cycle and was expressed through the symbol of the coiling, self-enveloping serpent. The serpent is a symbol for many things, including the experiences of the initiate into the Isis and Osiris mysteries, which have just been described.

[ 14 ] Thus we see that the statement “The human being has an etheric body” does not fully capture the nature of this etheric body. One only comes to know its nature by entering into it. Then one comes to know the two human beings united within each person; one comes to know karma, so to speak, in action. One can then understand how it comes about that one enters into existence in a very specific way through birth. One had to wait from one’s last death until the new birth, until the old etheric or life body had dissolved, and only then could the process of forming the new etheric body begin. But what I have just described shows you that the human being has not in fact completely overcome that which dissolved as his old etheric body, for he still finds it when he descends into his own inner being. Why can he find it again? Well, because he has retained an essence, an extract of it. If he had not retained this extract, then he would not be able to find again that part of his etheric or life body that has dissolved.

[ 15 ] So you can see how deeply grounded this is—something that can only be revealed bit by bit in lectures on spiritual science. When it has been said elsewhere, even in exoteric lectures, that after death a person takes with them an essence of their etheric body, this is no abstraction. We have now reached the point where you can see where spiritual research derives this from. Everything communicated on this subject is based on the deepest possible foundations; it is all based on spiritual research. Here you have a fragment of this research; here you have a description of how these fragments are sought out, which are then communicated in the outer spiritual science.

[ 16 ] Thus, humanity has arrived at its final death, and we have thereby come to know certain qualities that the mystic, delving even deeper within himself, comes to know through his initiation under the guidance of his teacher. If yesterday we became acquainted with astral qualities that present themselves to us as an infinitely heightened sense of gratitude on the one hand and an infinitely heightened sense of responsibility on the other—as what the mystic finds in his astral body—then today we have become acquainted with what the mystic finds when he descends into his etheric or life body: the “Upper” and the “Lower.”

[ 17 ] The subsequent stages of the initiation then lead the individual to a point where, having reached his last death in his spiritual review, he can proceed and come to know his last life. But coming to know this last life is not particularly easy. The point is that, under the guidance of their guide, the person is now once again reminded that they must not proceed further without first completely surrendering themselves, without falling into complete self-forgetfulness; for one cannot proceed if one still possesses even a trace of the personal self-consciousness of this present incarnation, this life between birth and death. As long as one still calls anything one’s own, one cannot come to know what is, in fact, a different personality: the previous incarnation. One must become capable of regarding oneself as another—that is the crucial point—yet without losing oneself. One must therefore become capable of transformation to the extent that one can feel: one slips into a completely different physical body. — Only then, when one has reached this degree of selflessness—which is a complete forgetting of everything that can be experienced in this incarnation—when one has merged with one’s guide to the greatest possible degree, can one proceed to the last incarnation, from the last death to the penultimate birth. Then—and this is important now—one does not experience what one sensually saw in the outside world during the previous incarnation, but one now experiences everything one worked on within oneself in the last incarnation, everything one made of oneself in the last incarnation. What the eye has seen, what the ear has heard, whatever has come to meet us in the outer world at all—one experiences this in a different way. But what one experiences is what one has made of oneself in one’s last incarnation up to the last death. One experiences all the efforts one has gone through to advance oneself a little further in this past incarnation.

[ 18 ] Once you have gone through this, once you have lived through this work on yourself, the Guide then leads you back to your current incarnation, to your present embodiment. So the transition now moves quickly from the previous incarnation to the current one, and only then do you find yourself again. And now one has a peculiar feeling, the feeling that one actually consists of two personalities, that one has brought one personality with oneself, and that one has entered into one’s present personality with this personality. This gives the feeling of being inside one’s physical body. One cannot experience oneself in one’s physical body in any other way than through the feeling that one has settled into it with one’s previous incarnation.

[ 19 ] As I have repeatedly suggested, in ordinary, everyday life we see the physical body from the outside. Now, for the first time, we gain an understanding of what it means to see the physical body from the inside. The only way to enter into oneself is to take the detour through the previous incarnation. Then one is immersed in it and can look at one’s own physical body through the eyes and experiences of the last incarnation. But that is not enough, for one still perceives very little of one’s present physical body. For when the guide has brought the person to the point where they have once had the feeling of standing consciously within themselves with their previous personality, the guide must then have the person retrace the entire path once more. Now, in the same way as has been described, they retrace the path from the penultimate birth to the penultimate death; there they experience once more what they went through in the spiritual world in the meantime as the higher and lower self, and live back up to their penultimate incarnation, thus reaching their penultimate incarnation through their penultimate death. Mind you, one can only reach one’s previous incarnation through a single cycle; then one must return to one’s body and can now make a second cycle. Then one arrives at the penultimate incarnation. With this, one returns once more to the present body. Now one has the feeling that one is contained within one’s present personality as three personalities.

[ 20 ] This cycle can be repeated as often as necessary until the individual ascends to a point far back in Earth’s evolution. There the person finds that they were incarnated in a previous personality during the preceding cultural epoch, the Greco-Roman era; that they were incarnated in an even earlier culture during the Egyptian era; in an even earlier one during the ancient Persian culture; and in yet another earlier one during the ancient Indian era. Then they continue to trace themselves back to what you have described as the Atlantean era, and even further back to the so-called Lemurian era. That is where the possibility of having such experiences as have just been described comes to an end. Thus, the human being actually has the possibility of tracing himself inwardly through all possible cultures and races all the way back to the beginning of his earthly existence, to his first earthly incarnation. Within what we call the innermost part of our physical body, all our previous incarnations are actually contained as forces. What we are today outwardly as a physical body contains within itself, as forces, all our earlier incarnations. You see, when one says exoterically that the human being consists of a physical body, an etheric or life body, and an astral body, this means that the human being consists, first of all, of something that, viewed from within, appears as nested incarnations. In fact, all our incarnations are at work, united within our physical body. And when we speak of the etheric or life body, we must bear in mind that, viewed from within, it appears as a cycle that flows backward, from our present birth to our final death. There the qualities of our sheaths become apparent—those aspects of ourselves into which we can mystically immerse ourselves, into which we can descend.

[ 21 ] But then, once the human being has gone back that far, once he has arrived as a candidate for initiation, guided by the hand of the Hermetic initiate during his first incarnation, he learns much more; at this point in his journey backward, he learns that at a certain time in our Earth’s becoming, in our Earth’s development, he was quite different from what he is now, and that the environment, too, was quite different from what it is now. The Earth was quite different back then, in the time when the human being lived in his first incarnation, in his first embodiment. When we look out into the world now, we encounter three kingdoms of nature: the animal kingdom, the plant kingdom, and the mineral kingdom. We essentially have all three of these kingdoms within us; we have the animal, plant, and mineral kingdoms within us. We have the animal kingdom within us because we have an astral body that powerfully permeates our outer body; the plant kingdom through the fact that we have an etheric or life body that does something similar. We have the mineral kingdom within us through the fact that we unite the substances that are externally in the mineral kingdom with ourselves, take them into ourselves, and allow them to pass through us. Indeed, when we ascend so far in the spiritual realm that we have reached the experience of the inner life of our physical body during our first incarnation, we realize that the Earth had just arrived at that point in its development where the mineral kingdom had only just emerged in its present form. That is why we were able to form our first physical embodiment at that time, because as the mineral kingdom was forming, we were first able to take in something of this mineral kingdom within ourselves. In doing so, we arrive at the very beginning of the mineral kingdom on our Earth.

[ 22 ] Now you might say: Yes, but wasn’t this mineral kingdom on our Earth actually here before the plant and animal kingdoms? — Anyone who thinks only as far as the end of their nose, so to speak, might well believe that. But anyone who thinks a little in terms of analogies will say to themselves: Even in ordinary coal, I already have something that originated from a plant and only became mineral after having previously been plant-based. — Under conditions different from those of today, the plant kingdom could have existed before the mineral kingdom. The mineral kingdom is a later formation than the plant kingdom. The plant kingdom preceded the mineral kingdom. It is not the plant kingdom that follows the mineral kingdom, but rather the plant kingdom already existed beforehand under different conditions. The mineral kingdom arose as a product of the hardening of the plant kingdom. And at the very moment when the mineral kingdom formed on our Earth, at that very moment, humanity entered its first earthly incarnation. The mineral kingdom developed over certain long periods of time. Since the development of this mineral kingdom, we have been undergoing our earthly incarnations. We thus only appropriated this mineral kingdom at that time. Before that, we were substantial beings in a different way; before that, we had not yet incorporated the substances of the mineral kingdom into ourselves, as we have them within us today as physically embodied human beings. — That is why it has always been said in spiritual science: Our Earth has advanced in its development to the formation of the mineral kingdom, and with this, humanity has simultaneously appropriated this mineral kingdom.

[ 23 ] Now we see once again how, by descending within himself to the awareness of his physical body, a human being reaches a point where he steps outside of himself. How could we expect it to be otherwise? We know that through our astral body we are related to animals, through our etheric body to plants, and through our physical body to minerals. No wonder that, when we descend to the physical body, we encounter the mineral kingdom as the outer boundary at this point. We enter, as it were, into ourselves and, strangely enough, arrive at a point where we step out of ourselves and into the mineral kingdom. Not, however, into the mineral kingdom that surrounds us today, but into the one as it was at the moment of its emergence on Earth during the Lemurian era. We distinguish between our present Earth epoch, which goes back to the time of the great Atlantean catastrophe, and the one preceding it, the Lemurian epoch. Before the Atlantean catastrophe, the face of the Earth was quite different from today. It was a great continent on which we lived, situated between present-day Europe and Africa on the one hand and America on the other—the Atlantean continent. In an even earlier epoch of Earth’s history, the face of the Earth was different once again. At that time, human beings—that is, ourselves in our earlier incarnations—lived on a continent that we would have to seek today on Earth between Australia, Africa, and Asia, in ancient Lemuria, as modern science also calls it. At that time, humanity underwent its first incarnation, and the mineral kingdom came into being. That was also the moment when the Moon, which we have in the heavens today, separated from the Earth. In the past, our Moon was connected to our Earth. Let me just mention that in passing. We will discuss how this is being researched in the coming days.

[ 24 ] We have thus seen that when we look within ourselves and truly come to know ourselves, when we delve deep into our inner selves through a genuinely mystical experience guided by the Master, we emerge from ourselves. Our path leads us out of the human realm and toward the mineral earth—that mineral earth from which we have derived our earthly materials, our physical substance.

[ 25 ] This is the path I wanted to describe to you as the one that could be traversed—and was traversed—by many in the ancient mysteries of Isis and Osiris. As I said, it could only be traversed under the guidance of a leader to whom one submitted in the strictest sense. If people back then had not submitted themselves with their whole being to the guide, they would never have been able to walk the paths that have now been described; instead, they would have descended into their inner selves and come to know the very worst aspects of their inner being. They would have come to know what their selfish ego had made of them. It will be our task in the coming days to describe the other path, the path of the Nordic mysteries, which led people not inward but outward into the heavenly world. And after we have become acquainted with these two paths—neither of which is viable today due to the advanced state of human nature, which seeks freedom from absolute subservience—we will come to know the path that is viable and appropriate for human nature today: the so-called Rosicrucian path.

[ 26 ] It should also be mentioned that certain modern mystics sought to help themselves when they did not have a guru to whom they could submit so strictly. They knew how to help themselves in a different way, and it is interesting to see how the path of such mystics also becomes understandable once one is familiar with the mysteries that have just been described. Take Meister Eckhart, for example. He was a medieval mystic who did not have a guide in the sense that the ancient initiates of the Isis and Osiris mysteries had, but rather descended into his inner self, so to speak, on his own. It would have been very dangerous for him if, beyond a certain point, he had simply continued on in his own inner contemplation, which arose naturally within him. He would hardly have been spared the danger that, at a certain point, the claim of his own ego would have arisen. For that is precisely the danger in this descent into one’s own inner self: that one’s own ego asserts itself in a selfish manner. One can, of course, speak at length about how a person should descend into themselves and how they can delve so deeply within themselves that they find the God-man within. But those who speak this way have generally not come very far. If they had come far, they would also have found that, when left to their own devices, the selfish ego asserts itself in a terrible way. One could observe in such mystics that, as long as they were guided by conventional external life, they were quite decent people; but the moment they sink into their inner selves—that is, when they abandon what acts upon them from the outside and seek their inner being—this inner being also asserts itself. While these people were previously prompted by external upbringing to tell the truth, it can happen that when the selfish ego asserts itself, they begin to lie, that they become insincere people, that they develop more selfish tendencies than other people in ordinary life. Such experiences can be had by anyone who observes misguided mystics who like to talk about the need to immerse oneself in one’s own inner self in order to find the higher self. One usually does not find this higher self, but rather one finds one’s most ordinary self, which is generally worse than the conventional person. One must guard against this claim of the selfish ego.

[ 27 ] In the Egyptian mysteries, the initiate was protected by the priest of Hermes, who took on the role of guide, so that the student no longer followed his own ego. Meister Eckhart did not have such a teacher. Tauler acquired one at a certain point, but Eckhart did not have such a guide. But how did he protect himself from the selfish demands of the ego? A person of such sound character as Meister Eckhart—just like almost all the Christian mystics of the Middle Ages who did not have such a guru—protected himself by allowing himself to be completely permeated by the feeling: Now you are no longer yourself; now you have become another; now it is no longer you who speaks, feels, or wills what you speak, feel, or will; now let yourself be completely filled with Christ. — He made the Pauline saying true: “Not I, but Christ in me.” Then he underwent this transformation. He, so to speak, ceased to be himself. He gave up his ego and allowed himself to be filled by another ego. “Entwerden,” the opposite of “werden,” is a beautiful word used by the Christian mystics of the Middle Ages. Just as one “becomes” an independent ego, so these mystics sought to “unbecome,” that is, to give up their ego entirely and to be completely filled with another ego. These were the remedies against the selfish claims of the ego, to which mystics such as Meister Eckhart or the mystic who is the author of the so-called “Theologia Deutsch” resorted, so that they did not wish to speak from themselves, but rather could allow a higher human being—a human being who can inwardly enliven and inspire the present human being—to speak through them. Hence the repeated emphasis by these mystics that they wished to surrender their self entirely to what they experienced inwardly. Thus, as modern times drew near, we see how the Christian mystics of the Middle Ages, who were already living in anticipation of the times of modern humanity, replaced the external guru with an inner guru, with Christ. What now needs to be done so that the human being, who stands at the very center of today’s spiritual life, may find his way into the spiritual worlds while maintaining his present state of mind and soul—this will become clear to us tomorrow, once we have first discussed the path undertaken in the Nordic mysteries to become acquainted with the macrocosm into which the human being enters upon falling asleep. We will begin with a description of falling asleep and go on to describe the macrocosmic spheres into which people immersed themselves, and then make the transition to the newer methods of the path of knowledge into the higher worlds.