The Rudolf Steiner Archive

First Lecture

[ 1 ] Now that we are resuming the activities of our Berlin branch, it seems fitting to look back just a little on what has moved our hearts since the time last year when we began the work of the Berlin branch in the same way.

[ 2 ] You will no doubt recall that about a year ago, on the occasion of the General Assembly of our German Section, I gave a lecture at the Berlin branch on the sphere of the Bodhisattvas. That lecture on the mission of the Bodhisattvas in the world was intended to serve as an introduction to what then occupied us primarily throughout our branch meetings last winter: a consideration of the Christ problem, essentially in connection with the Gospel of Matthew. We have, of course, engaged in such reflections on the Christ problem in various ways in connection with other Gospels, such as the Gospel of John and the Gospel of Luke. And we have pointed out that, in the future, in order to further deepen our understanding of this Christ problem, we will also undertake a study that will essentially be based on the Gospel of Mark.

[ 3 ] In our reflections on the Christ question, we have not approached the matter in such a way as to attempt a mere exegesis of the Gospels. It has often been stated here—I would almost say in a radical way—that whatever spiritual science has to say about the events in Palestine should still be able to be said even if there were no external historical documents at all concerning those events in Palestine. For, at the deepest level, what is decisive for the description of the Christ events is not for us what is written in any book or document, but what is written in the eternal, inner, spiritual record—the Akashic Records, which can be deciphered through clairvoyant consciousness. What we are to understand by this has often been mentioned here. And then we approach the Gospels in such a way that we compare what we have first explored through spiritual research itself with what is given to us—let us say, with regard to the events in Palestine—in the Gospels or in the other documents of the New Testament. However, we have found that we learn to read these documents, so to speak, only by delving into those mysteries relating to the events in Palestine without them, and that precisely because we first explore the corresponding events without being influenced by these documents, our high esteem—our reverence, we might say—for these documents grows to a very special degree.

[ 4 ] But if we do not focus solely on the immediate—and at times most pressing—interests of our shared existence, but rather recognize that our entire historical context, our contemporary culture, demands, so to speak, a new understanding of the sources of Christianity, then we must be clear that through spiritual science we are called not only to satisfy our own need for knowledge regarding the events in Palestine, but that we are called to translate, from the perspective of spiritual science, into the language of contemporary cultural needs, what we have to say about the significance of the Christ event for the entire development of humanity. But it is not enough, however, if we were to limit ourselves, for example, to what the past centuries have contributed to the understanding of the Christ problem and the figure of Christ. If that were sufficient for the educational needs of the present, there would not be so many people today who can no longer reconcile their need for truth with what has been handed down in the Christian tradition, and who, in one way or another, even deny what is reported to us about the events in Palestine and what has been believed for centuries. All of this may indicate to us that a new understanding, a new approach to Christian truths, has become necessary for our time.

[ 5 ] Now, among the many things that can bring us closer to the exploration of Christian truths, there is one means in particular that can prove especially fruitful in our field of inquiry. This consists in broadening our perspective, in expanding our world of feelings and sensations beyond the horizons that humanity has held regarding the spiritual world over the past centuries. How we can broaden our horizons may become clear to us through a very simple and obvious suggestion.

[ 6 ] We all recognize—to turn to the great mind closest to us in the development of Western culture—Goethe as a titanic spirit. And many of our reflections have shown us the depth of spiritual insight hidden within Goethe’s personality. These reflections have also led us to recognize how we ourselves can climb to spiritual heights by penetrating the fabric of Goethe’s soul. But no matter how well we come to know Goethe, no matter how deeply we immerse ourselves in what he can offer us—there is one thing we cannot yet find in him that we must have today if our vision is to be properly expanded and our horizon extended beyond the most essential spiritual needs. Nowhere in Goethe do we find any indication that he realized what we can learn today, what can bear fruit for us today, if we take into ourselves those concepts of humanity’s spiritual development that have only become possible to grasp through the exploration of spiritual documents in the 19th century: if we take in the achievements of Eastern life. There we receive various concepts through which we are by no means led away from an understanding of the Christ problem, but through which, if we take them in correctly, we are actually led to a true and complete appreciation of Christ Jesus. That is why I, too, believed that a consideration of the Christ problem can be introduced by nothing better than a discussion of the mission of the great spiritual individuals of humanity, who from time to time must intervene in the development in a particularly tangible way, and whom we designate, using a concept taken from Eastern philosophy, as the Bodhisattvas. For centuries, concepts such as that of the Bodhisattvas were simply absent from Western spiritual development. And only once one has oriented oneself toward them does one ascend accordingly to the realization of what Christ has been, can be, and will continue to be for humanity.

[ 7 ] Thus we see how a broad spectrum of humanity’s spiritual development can be put to fruitful use in order to truly grasp, in a worthy manner, what we are called upon to understand for the sake of that education and culture, for that spiritual life, in which we are immersed. And from yet another perspective, it was important that, wherever possible, we let our spiritual gaze roam over the past centuries, that we emphasized the difference between a person from the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries and a person from the 18th or 19th century; and that we emphasized that, for example, very little was known in Europe about Buddha and Buddhism even a century ago. But the ultimate thing in our field of work—even if not the means of our striving, then at least the actual impulse and also the goal of our striving, and what we are working toward—is ultimately the mood, the feeling, the sensation that creeps into our soul when it is touched by the great spiritual truths. For what matters is not so much what this or that person wishes to know, but rather what warmth of feeling, what power of sensation, what nobility of will rises up from our soul when the great truths of humanity strike that soul. And more important in our branches than what can be said in words is the mood, the wave of feeling that can prevail in one of our branches when the words weave through the space. These feelings, these sensations, are of many kinds. And in regard to what is to stand before our souls right now, the most important, the most significant sensation should be the one that must gradually and necessarily develop within us: awe before the knowledge of the great spiritual truths, the feeling that these great spiritual truths are of such a nature that we should approach them with timid reverence, that we should not believe we can encompass a great fact with some hastily cobbled-together concept or a few quickly formed ideas.

[ 8 ] I have often used the analogy that we cannot fully grasp a tree standing before us if we paint a picture of it from a single vantage point; rather, we must walk around it and paint the tree from various angles. Only by synthesizing these different images do we arrive at an overall impression of what the tree is. This comparison, however, is meant to paint a picture in our minds of how we should approach the great spiritual realities. We should be clear that we cannot make any progress whatsoever in any real or supposed understanding of the highest things if we always approach them from only one side. And although there is or may be truth in the sight of a thing, we should never abandon the humble feeling that all our ideas are and can be only views taken from a single vantage point. If we allow this feeling to permeate us, we will gladly and willingly seek out from all directions the ideas, sensations, and feelings that enable us to illuminate the great facts of existence from the most diverse angles. Our time makes this necessary. More and more, the need to view things from the most diverse angles will develop in our time. Therefore, we no longer close ourselves off today to any other perspective or opinion, to any other path toward the highest things than our own or that of our own culture. Even within what Western cultural development itself has offered, we have sought, in the course of recent years, to uphold this principle, which can lead us to genuine humility of knowledge. We have never presumed—and I may well say: it was deeply inscribed in my soul that such presumption should never be possible in this place—to offer a system, a general overview, of what the great events we summarize under the Christ problem are supposed to be. Rather, it has always been said: We approach it from one perspective or another; and at other times it has been said: We approach it from yet another perspective. — And attention has always been drawn to the fact that we do not thereby exhaust the problem, and that we wish to continue our work calmly and patiently.

[ 9 ] The purpose of drawing on the various Gospels was to take the opportunity to examine the problem of Christ from four different perspectives, and we then found that the four Gospels do indeed provide us with points of reference for these four different perspectives, and that we found the following principle laid out in the Gospels themselves: You should not approach this immense problem all at once, in a single glance, but rather you should approach it from at least these four different spiritual directions. And you should hope: if you approach the problem from these four spiritual directions, designated by the names of the four evangelists—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—then it will gradually come closer and closer to you. And it will come so close to you that you will never need to say of yourself that you are excluded from the great truth without which the human soul cannot live in its deepest inner being, nor will you ever say that any form of truth you have grasped is already the whole truth.

[ 10 ] So, what we were able to cultivate over the course of last winter was, so to speak, designed to gradually instill in us a spirit of humility in our pursuit of knowledge. And without this spirit of humility, we truly cannot make any progress in the spiritual life. That is why, throughout these reflections, every effort was made to emphasize, time and again, the fundamental conditions for spiritual progress. And anyone who has followed the lectures here attentively from week to week will not be able to claim that the fundamental conditions for spiritual progress in knowledge have not been pointed out everywhere.

[ 11 ] Spiritual progress in knowledge—this is, after all, one of the driving forces underlying our entire spiritual science movement. Spiritual progress in knowledge—what is its purpose for our soul? It is meant to meet the deepest, most human longings and needs of our soul; it is meant to give us that without which a person who fully feels their human dignity cannot live. And it should provide this to us within the realm of spiritual science in a way that meets the needs for knowledge of our present time. That which cannot be explored with the ordinary senses—to which the human being belongs not as a sensory being but as a spiritual being—is precisely what that progress in knowledge, offered to us through spiritual science, should enlighten us about. The great questions concerning the place of the human being in the sensory world, concerning what lies beyond the revelations of this sensory world, the truths about what lies beyond life and death—these questions correspond to a deep, indeed the most human, need of the soul. Even if, due to all manner of circumstances, human beings push aside the questions relating to such matters, even if they manage for a time to rob themselves of them by saying to themselves: Science cannot investigate this after all; human beings lack the abilities for it—in the long run, and for the true nature of human feelings, the need for answers to these questions never fades. Where does that come from which we see taking shape in the course of childhood and adolescent development? Where does that go which we harbor in our soul when physicality begins to fade and die away? in short, how human beings are connected to a spiritual world—that is the great question that springs from a most human need, and without an answer to which a person can only exist by numbing themselves to their most human needs.

[ 12 ] But because this question springs from such a deep need, because the soul cannot live in peace and contentment unless it receives an answer to these questions, it is only natural that people would want to find answers to these questions in an easy, convenient way, so to speak. And how many paths are pointed out today—even though these questions, as some would like to deny, have become particularly pressing in all spheres of human life—how many paths are pointed out today! It is no exaggeration to say that of all the paths offered to people today when these great enigmatic questions confront them, the spiritual-scientific path is the most difficult. Indeed, one may also say something else. There will be many among you who consider one or the other of the sciences, of which there is much talk in the world, to be difficult, and who perhaps do not even venture into them because they are daunted by all that must be overcome in order to penetrate such a science. It may also be that the path we have called spiritual science appears easier than the path into mathematics, botany, or some other branch of natural science. Yet, taken absolutely, this path is itself more difficult than the path into any other science. This can be stated without exaggeration. Why does it seem easier to you? Simply because it stirs the soul’s interests with tremendous force and corresponds to what lies closest to every soul. If it is the most difficult of all the paths offered to humanity today as a way up into the spiritual world, we must not forget another fact: that this path is meant to lead us to the highest in our soul life. Is it not natural, then, that the path to the highest must also be the most difficult? Nevertheless, we must never allow ourselves to be deterred by the difficulty of the path, nor ever close our souls to the necessity of the difficulty of the spiritual-scientific path.

[ 13 ] Among the various necessities of the spiritual scientific path, one has been repeatedly emphasized here: that whoever sets out on the spiritual scientific path should first carefully take in what spiritual research is already able to offer regarding spiritual mysteries and the facts of the spiritual world. We are thus touching upon a particularly essential chapter of our spiritual scientific life. How many would be quick to say: Here we are being told of an immense spiritual science, of spiritual facts that this or that spiritual researcher, this or that enlightened being, this or that initiate has beheld and investigated. Would it not be much more correct if one simply showed us the way to quickly ascend ourselves into the regions from which one looks into the spiritual world? Why do you keep talking about it: This is how it looks, this is how this or that person saw it! Why don’t you show us a way to ascend quickly ourselves?

[ 14 ] For good reason, the facts that have been researched from the spiritual world are first presented in a broad sense before we delve into what might be called the methods of soul training, which can lead the soul itself up into the spiritual regions. For something very specific is achieved by first devoting ourselves to the study of what spiritual researchers have revealed from the spiritual worlds. We have emphasized that while the facts of the spiritual world must be researched, they can only be discovered through clairvoyant consciousness; but we have also often emphasized: once the facts have been found, once any trained clairvoyant consciousness has observed these facts in the spiritual world and then communicates them, the communication must be such that even anyone who has not undergone clairvoyant development can verify the facts and recognize the truths with the sound sense of truth that lies within every soul, and with truly unbiased logic. No true spiritual researcher, no person gifted with clairvoyant consciousness in the true sense of the word, will communicate any fact of the spiritual world in any other way than so that anyone who truly wishes to do so could verify this fact even without clairvoyance. But they will also communicate it in such a way that it can have its full value and full significance for a human soul.

[ 15 ] What value do communications of spiritual facts—and the concepts of spiritual facts—hold for the human soul? Their value lies in the fact that a person who knows what the spiritual world is like can align their life, thoughts, feelings, and perceptions accordingly, and can orient themselves regarding their relationship to the spiritual world. In this sense, every communication of spiritual facts is valuable even if the person receiving it cannot explore them themselves through clairvoyant consciousness. Indeed, even for the clairvoyant, this fact only acquires human value when they have brought it down into a sphere where they can express it in a form accessible to all people. No matter how much a clairvoyant may explore and perceive in the spiritual realm, it is entirely worthless to him and to any other human being as long as he has not brought what he has seen down into the sphere of ordinary understanding and expressed it in such concepts and ideas that the natural sense of truth and sound logic can grasp the matter. Indeed, the clairvoyant himself must first grasp the matter if it is to have any value for him. Value begins only where logical examination begins.

[ 16 ] To put it bluntly, we could test the validity of what has just been said. Among many other valuable insights regarding spiritual truths and spiritual messages, you will no doubt find it significant to consider what a person can take with them through the gate of death from the spiritual truths they have absorbed on the physical plane between birth and death. Or let us frame the question this way: How much remains to the person who, through the cultivation of a spiritual life, has received communications about the spiritual world here—how much remains to them of what they have thus perceived, of what they have thus made their own? Exactly as much remains to them as they have understood, as they have grasped, as they have translated into the language of ordinary human consciousness.

[ 17 ] Imagine a clairvoyant person who may have made very special discoveries in the spiritual world through purely clairvoyant observations, but who failed to express these observations from the spiritual world in a language that, for any given age, is the language of the ordinary human sense of truth. Do you know what happens to him or to his legacy? All these discoveries are erased after death. Only that much remains valuable and meaningful after death as has been translated and reformulated into a language that corresponds, in any age, to a language of a healthy sense of truth.

[ 18 ] It is certainly of the utmost importance that there are clairvoyant individuals who can convey messages from the spiritual world that can enrich the lives of others. This brings blessings to our time, because our age needs such wisdom and will not be able to develop further unless it embraces it. It is essential that such messages be communicated to our contemporary culture. And even if this is not yet recognized today, in half a century or a century it will nevertheless be a universal human conviction: Culture cannot continue without the conviction of the existence of spiritual wisdom, and humanity would culturally perish without the reception of spiritual wisdom. There is something that humanity will need in the future if it wishes to continue developing, something more necessary than all outwardly visible cultural means: that is the acceptance of spiritual wisdom. And even if all the skies were conquered for transportation, humanity would still face the prospect of cultural death if it did not accept spiritual wisdom. This is undoubtedly the case. There must be the possibility of looking into the spiritual world.

[ 19 ] What spiritual wisdom holds for individual souls after death is of a different value than humanity’s progress on Earth. To gain a proper understanding of this, we must first ask the question: What does the clairvoyant person gain from what he has explored through clairvoyance and expressed in a form that reflects a sound sense of truth and sound human logic? What does he gain, by being able to look into the spiritual world, that yields more fruit after death than someone who, due to his karma, did not have the opportunity to look into the spiritual world himself during the relevant incarnation, and was therefore dependent on hearing only from others about the results of spiritual research? How do spiritual truths differ for an initiate and for a person who has only heard them and cannot look into the spiritual world? Is the initiate better off than the one who could only receive these things?

[ 20 ] For humanity as a whole, looking into the spiritual worlds has greater value than not doing so. For those who look into them enter into contact with the spiritual world; there they can teach not only human beings but also other spiritual beings and help them progress. Thus, this clairvoyant consciousness has a very special value. But for the individual, only knowledge has value, and in terms of individual value, the most clairvoyant person does not differ from one who has only received the messages and, in a corresponding incarnation, was unable to look into the spiritual world. What bears fruit after death is what we have absorbed as spiritual wisdom, regardless of whether we have seen it ourselves or not.

[ 21 ] In doing so, we have set before our souls one of the great, most venerable ethical and moral laws of the spiritual world. However, perhaps our contemporary moral sensibilities are not refined enough to fully comprehend this particular ethos. Individually—that is, in the higher sense of satisfying one’s ego—no one gains an advantage simply because their karma affords them the opportunity to glimpse into the spiritual world. Everything we wish to acquire for our individual lives, we must acquire on the physical plane and also shape into forms that satisfy the physical plane. And if a Buddha or a Bodhisattva stands higher than other human individuals in the hierarchies of the spiritual world, it is precisely because they have acquired this higher state through so many incarnations on the physical plane. What I meant by the higher ethics, the higher moral teaching that arises from spiritual life, is this: No one should imagine that through the development of clairvoyance they gain an advantage over their fellow human beings. That is not the case at all. They do not achieve any progress that can be justified in an egoistic sense. They achieve it only insofar as they can be more to others. Serving egoism—which is immoral—is completely excluded in the spiritual realm. Through spiritual enlightenment, a person cannot achieve anything for themselves. What they achieve, they can achieve only as a servant of the world in general, and for themselves only by achieving it for others as well.

[ 22 ] This, then, is how a spiritual researcher stands among his fellow human beings. If they are willing to hear what he has discovered and to take it in, they thereby gain an equal advantage over him and reach the same level of individual development as he has. In other words, the spiritual can only be put to use within the general human spirit, not within the egoistic spirit. There is a realm in which one is moral not merely because one resolves to be so, but because immorality and selfishness would be of no help to one. But then it is also easy to see another truth: that it is dangerous to enter the spiritual world, the spiritual realm, unprepared. Nothing selfish can ever be achieved for life after death through spiritual life. However, through spiritual development, a person can desire selfish things for this life, for life on the physical plane. Even if, so to speak, one cannot achieve anything selfish for the spiritual world, one can desire to achieve something for this world that lies in the realm of selfishness.

[ 23 ] Most people who aspire to a certain level of higher development will surely say: “It goes without saying that I must strive to be unselfish before I can gain entry into the higher world.”—But believe me: there is probably no area of human self-deception where the deception can be as great as when one says, “I strive to be unselfish!” —It is easy to say that. Whether one can actually do it, whether one can truly accomplish it oneself, is an entirely different question. It is, above all, a different question because when one begins to cultivate activities within the soul that can lead into the spiritual world, only then does one encounter oneself in one’s true form. In the outer world, in many respects, a person does not live in their true form. They live woven into a web of ideas, of impulses of will and moral feelings, in patterns of behavior dictated by their environment, and rarely does a person ask the question: How would I act, how would I think about a matter, if I did not feel compelled by what I have been taught to think or act in a certain way? — If a person were to answer this question for themselves, they would see that they are usually much, much worse than they assume.

[ 24 ] Now, practices designed to help a person learn to ascend into the spiritual world have the effect of causing one to outgrow everything with which one is intertwined through habits, through upbringing, through everything that surrounds us. Very soon one outgrows all of this. One becomes, spiritually and emotionally, in terms of one’s sensibilities, ever more naked. The shells we have put on ourselves and to which we cling in our ordinary feelings and actions—they fall away. Hence that very common phenomenon, which has also been discussed many times: Before a person begins spiritual development, they may be a reasonably decent person, perhaps even a sensible one, who does not do anything particularly foolish in life. Now he begins a spiritual development. Whereas before he was quite modest and perhaps even said to himself: “I am, after all, a quite modest person!”—he now begins, under the influence of spiritual development, to display a very haughty nature, begins to commit all sorts of follies and foolish acts. When he enters into spiritual development, he loses, so to speak, his footing and direction. Why this is so can best be seen by one who is at home in the spiritual world. For two things are necessary to find one’s bearings in the face of what approaches the human soul from the spiritual world, in order to maintain balance: One must be able to avoid becoming dizzy in the face of what approaches us from the spiritual world. In physical life, our organism protects us from becoming dizzy through what we have called in the anthroposophy lectures the sense of balance, the static sense. Just as there is something in the physical human being that enables them to remain upright—for if the organism does not function properly, the person becomes dizzy and falls over—so too is there something in spiritual life through which the person can orient themselves to the world in relation to their own situation. They must be able to do this. Spiritual collapse consists precisely in the fact that what previously supported us is no longer present—those acquired sensibilities, the effects of the fabric of the external world—so that we are then left to rely on ourselves. The supports fall away, and then the danger is near that we will become dizzy. We can then easily become arrogant when the external supports for us disappear. Arrogance naturally resides within us; it simply did not come to the surface before.

[ 25 ] How, then, does one achieve spiritual balance so as not to become disoriented? By selflessly, diligently, and earnestly absorbing what spiritual research has uncovered and what has been recast into logical formulas that correspond to the ordinary sense of truth. It is not out of caprice that it is emphasized here again and again that it is necessary to truly study what we call spiritual science first. It is not emphasized so that I can speak here quite often, but because there is no other way to obtain the firm foundations for spiritual development. The devoted, diligent absorption of the results of spiritual science is the antidote to spiritual dizziness, to spiritual uncertainty. And many a person who, through a development driven by misconceptions, falls into spiritual uncertainty—even if it seems to them that they have been quite diligent—should know that they have failed to take in what can flow from the wellspring of spiritual science in the first place. That is what we need: this study of the facts of spiritual science from all sides. And that is why, even during the past winter in our branch, when we ultimately sought to make clear the significance of the Christ event for humanity, we nevertheless kept returning to the need to emphasize the fundamental conditions of spiritual progress.

[ 26 ] Human beings need a focused spiritual life in order to progress, but they also need something else. While the study of spiritual science provides security for the human soul, a second source provides what we also need. This is a certain spiritual strength, a certain courage in spiritual life. We do not need the kind of courage required for spiritual progress in our ordinary daily lives, not because our innermost being, our spiritual-soul human being, is embedded in the physical and etheric bodies during ordinary waking daily life, from waking up to falling asleep; and at night we do nothing and can do no harm. If a human being could act even in sleep, as an undeveloped human being they would bring about terrible things. But the physical and etheric bodies contain not only the forces that are active within us insofar as we are conscious or even merely thinking and feeling human beings, but also those forces upon which divine-spiritual beings have worked throughout the Saturn, Sun, and Moon epochs right into our Earth epoch. There, the forces from higher regions are constantly at work. We rely on them. And when we wake up and enter the physical and etheric bodies, we simultaneously entrust ourselves to the divine-spiritual forces that dwell within our physical and etheric bodies for our salvation and blessing, guiding us through daily life from morning to evening. This is how it is: the entire divine-spiritual world works within us, and we can, in essence, do much to make things worse, but not much to improve them.

[ 27 ] But now consider that all spiritual development depends on our ability to free our inner being—our astral body and our ego—so that we may, so to speak, learn to see and perceive clairvoyantly what lives unconsciously from the moment we fall asleep until we wake up; and because it lives unconsciously, it cannot cause any harm. What is unconscious in those members in which divine-spiritual forces are present must become conscious within us. All the strength and power that has been given to us—as we are taken into the hands, upon waking, by that which is anchored in our physical and etheric bodies—fades away when we become independent of the physical and etheric bodies and begin to perceive clairvoyantly. The entire power and force of the world remains outside. We have withdrawn from those forces that make us strong and provide a bulwark against the world that acts upon us from the outside. We have withdrawn from the forces that support us. But the world has remained as it is, and we therefore still face the full force, the full onslaught of the world. All the strength that otherwise comes to us from the physical body and the etheric body, we must then have within ourselves in order to withstand the impact of the world and to offer resistance. We must develop all of this in our ego and astral body. We develop this through the rules that are given to us, which you will find in my book *How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?*. All of this is designed to give our own inner being that strength which was previously bestowed upon us by higher beings and which is lost when the external supports are removed—that strength which can make us resilient against the impact of the world, even when we ourselves have set aside the support offered by our physical and etheric bodies.

[ 28 ] People who do not build up their inner strength sufficiently to replace the forces they shed along with their physical and etheric bodies through truly devoted spiritual exercises—above all through the purification of the qualities we call immorality in the outer world—such people may indeed acquire, to a certain degree, the ability to glimpse into the spiritual world. But what happens? They become what one might call hypersensitive; they become overly sensitive. They feel as if they were being stung spiritually from all sides; they cannot withstand what comes at them from all directions. This is one of the significant facts one must know when striving for spiritual progress: to strengthen oneself inwardly by truly cultivating the noblest, best qualities of the soul.

[ 29 ] What qualities will these be, based on what we have just said today? — If it is impossible to live in the spiritual world under the sign of egoism, if egoism is of no help to us there, then it will only be natural that the expulsion of egoism—of everything that is subject to the arbitrary desires of the spiritual—will be the preparation for spiritual life. The more seriously and with greater dignity one takes this very principle, the better it is for spiritual progress. One cannot take it seriously and with enough dignity. Anyone who deals with these matters often hears someone say: “I did not do this out of selfishness!” — But when this word is about to pass the lips, one should pause, should not let it pass the lips, but should say to oneself: Actually, you are not the sort of person who can say that you do anything without a trace of egoism! — That is much wiser, because it is much truer. And what matters is the truth, especially with regard to self-knowledge. In no other realm does untruth take such a heavy toll as in the realm of spiritual life. There, one should demand of oneself to be truthful rather than delude oneself with the fog of: “You are unselfish.” — Better to be truthful and say to oneself: If I admit my selfishness, then at least I have an impulse to cast it off.

[ 30 ] I would like to express what is connected with this spiritual concept of truth as follows. It is quite easy to make the following judgment: There are people who claim to have experienced and seen all sorts of things in the higher worlds; this is then spread and presented to the public. If one realizes that this is not true, should one not use all one’s strength and resources to combat it? - Certainly, there may be perspectives from which such a struggle is necessary. But for the spiritual person concerned with truth, there is always another consideration: namely, that only that which is truth springs from the spiritual world and bears fruit for the world, and that that which is untrue certainly bears no fruit. To put it simply: No matter how much one may fabricate lies regarding spiritual matters, these fabrications have very short legs. Those who spread such lies should realize that they cannot bring about anything truly fruitful with them. In the spiritual realm, only the truth is fruitful. This begins right where we start our own spiritual development, where we should begin to honestly admit to ourselves what we actually are. This is something that must also live as an impulse in all spiritual, in all occult movements: that only the true can be fruitful and effective. Truth is certainly something in the world that justifies itself through its fruitfulness, through its blessing for humanity. And the lie, the untruth, is something that is barren and ineffective. It has only one single effect, which I cannot elaborate on further today and therefore wish only to hint at: it rebounds with the greatest force upon the propagator of the untruth himself. We will consider another time what is meant by this significant statement.

[ 31 ] So today I wanted to give you a sort of retrospective on what we’ve been up to in our branch meetings over the past year, and to once again evoke the mood and emotional atmosphere that permeated our souls and filled the room.

[ 32 ] If we now consider the work carried out outside our branch over the past year from just one perspective, I might perhaps point to my own contribution, which is embodied in the Rosicrucian Mystery Play *The Gate of Initiation* that we performed in Munich. This mystery play was intended to strive toward something we will discuss in the coming branch meetings. For now, let it suffice to say that it was possible, precisely in this—one might say—more artistic form, to present in an individual expression what can otherwise only be stated in general terms. When we speak here or elsewhere of the conditions of spiritual life, we speak in a way that is appropriate for every soul. But it is necessary to always bear in mind that every human being is a distinct being, an individual being, and that individualization must take place with regard to each soul. That is why there was once a need to depict, so to speak, a soul at the threshold of initiation. Therefore, do not regard the Rosicrucian Mystery as a doctrinal treatise, but as an artistic depiction of the preparation for the initiation of a single human being. It is not a matter of how this or that person progresses, but specifically of the one depicted in the Mystery as Johannes Thomasius—that is, the entirely individual form that the preparation for initiation takes in a single human being.

[ 33 ] In this way, we have, as it were, gained two major perspectives by drawing closer to the truth: first, by describing the broad aspects of progress, and second, by delving into the innermost depths of a single soul. We will always be inspired by the fact that we must approach the truth from many sides and wait patiently until the various views of the truth coalesce into a unified perception. Let us make this humility of knowledge a particular priority. Let us never say that human beings cannot experience the truth. They can experience it! It is just that they cannot possess the full knowledge of the truth all at once, but only one aspect at a time. This makes human beings humble. True humility must also be a feeling that arises within our branches, one that is to be carried out from there into the rest of the contemporary culture of our time, so that it may have an effect in the wider world. For our time, given its very nature, needs much of this humility of knowledge.

[ 34 ] In light of these suggestions, we will continue our efforts to present the Christian problem, so that we may also experience how to attain this humility of understanding and, through it, continue to progress further and further in the experience of truth.