The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Tenth Lecture

[ 1 ] In the course of our lectures, we have been able to point out how people at various times have formed ideas about what actually lies at the heart of the beings and events of the world. What lies at the heart of this is that, by forming certain ideas, certain concepts, and by acquiring specific sensations and feelings regarding the events and beings of the world, arrives at something that gives him satisfaction—something of which he must say that it creates a necessary connection with things for him, whether this provides him with an explanation for the mysteries of the world or yields satisfaction in some other way. In this way, human beings demonstrate that they do not simply confront the world as they are, but that they seek, in relation to what appears to their senses and also to their clairvoyant perception, a knowledge of what lies deeper—of that which is initially hidden—so that they may stand in true harmony with the world. In this way, human beings show that they seek an explanation of the world at all, that this world presents them with riddles, that their relationship to the world is not concluded with the way they must initially face it. In ancient times, this was expressed by focusing on that feeling which human beings have precisely toward the most striking entities and facts of the world’s becoming. It was said that human beings initially have a sense of wonder toward things and entities, and that from this sense of wonder springs all philosophy, everything that human beings strive for as an explanation of the world. But now, based on experiences that anyone can have, we may say: The human soul, out of a sense of wonder, strives for something that dampens this wonder, that takes it away. — It cannot remain at the level of mere wonder, for otherwise the whole world would consist solely of wonders. The human soul cannot remain in a state of wonder before the wonders of the world; it must quell this wonder, must, so to speak, remove what appears as a wonder of the world from its path by finding within itself a kind of explanation, an answer to the mysterious and wondrous nature of worldly phenomena and beings.

[ 2 ] We have seen, for example, how the ancient Greek soul dispelled wonder in various ways by looking beyond to what was present to an ancient clairvoyant consciousness as an explanation of the world, and what it expressed through its divine figures. As soon as the Greek realized that in this or that fact of the world, in this or that thing in the world, spiritual beings were at work—beings represented by the forms and entities of Greek mythology—his sense of wonder was immediately transformed into a kind of harmony between his own soul and the wonders of the world. In our present-day world, which is materialistic compared to the Greek world, people think differently. Our time is averse to providing answers to the world’s mysteries through pictorial representations wherever it deems it necessary to dampen the sense of wonder. Our age would regard such an answer as something fantastical if it were to offer an explanation for the things of the world. Our age strives for a rational answer to the world’s mysteries, for an answer to the world’s mysteries that can be described as scientific. But from the wide variety of feelings that may have been aroused in the course of this and other lectures, you can gather that the approach that is common today—the rational, dry, sober, scientific approach—is merely a phase, an epoch, in the endeavor to dampen wonder at the wonders of the world. For when modern man looks back from his own approach—which he calls scientific—at the Greek form of explaining the world, and calls it childish and regards it as though it had sprung solely from the imagination and had nothing to do with reality—when man believes that he has now found what is to remain scientific for all time—then he must be told that he is very short-sighted. For just as the course of human development has moved beyond the Greek form of explanation and has advanced in our time to a corresponding sober and intellectual demand, so too will humanity move beyond this intellectualistic, materialistic conception, and if we are not wiser by then, we will think of what is considered genuine science today in the future just as we think of Greek culture. Kepler’s laws, our biological laws, would appear to our descendants as mythology just as Greek mythology appears to us, unless these descendants, through a broader worldview, were to realize that every form of explanation stands on equal footing. The infinite arrogance of our time, which claims that mythology is fantasy and our science is ultimately an explanation, will be overcome, and people will realize that our time, just like earlier eras, could only be a phase that must be overcome. But precisely when one considers our kind of sober, rational explanation of the world—what is called science—one must say: It is our explanation of the world, with its rational forms and rational ideas, that is least capable of penetrating deeply into true realities.

[ 3 ] We must seriously ask ourselves: Where does this come from? If you take into account the overall spirit of the lectures given so far, as well as many other things that have been spoken to you over time, then you must realize that the way in which human beings view the world has changed in many ways over the course of history. Humanity has changed, and in the ancient times of clairvoyance, much stronger, more powerful forces were drawn upon from the totality of the human being than is the case today. With a purely materialistic explanation, the soul, so to speak, uses the brain as an instrument to separate the thinnest, most shadowy formations as intellectual ideas in order to provide an explanation of the world. The old explanations of the more or less clairvoyant times were far richer, far more imbued with reality. We saw yesterday how our brain is a kind of apparatus that causes our astral body to stagnate, to come to a standstill, and allows the formations of this astral body—because they are not passed through by our brain—to come into consciousness as our world-thoughts. In the times of the ancient clairvoyant consciousness, however, it was not only these formations of the astral body that were held back by the human being, but also those of the etheric body. The result was that the human being allowed much more of his own being, of his own self, of his soul substance to flow into the formations of his cognition.

[ 4 ] We could put it schematically: The ancient form of clairvoyance—and indeed the ancient, far more imaginative vision of the Greeks—was such that when a thought of Zeus or Dionysus arose in the mind of an ancient Greek, it was richly and densely filled with reality—a reality that was, admittedly, initially drawn from the substance of the human soul itself, but because this substance was drawn from the very depths of the world, such a conception of the gods held by the ancient Greeks possessed far more reality than the mental images of the modern age. If I were to represent the thought of the ancient Greek with a circle, I would have to draw for you the thought of a modern person as much thinner, filled with far less soul-substance. (The corresponding drawing was sketched.) The human soul draws much less and much thinner material from within itself than before when it forms the structures of today’s ideas and concepts, so that the world picture the soul can appropriate with today’s consciousness contains much less of worldly reality than the earlier structure. Thus the truth is the opposite of what is usually formed by today’s scholarly philosophical arrogance, which believes that the Greeks had fantastical constructs in their gods in which there was no reality, and that reality exists only in today’s laws of nature with their abstractions. No, that is not the case. The constructs of Greek knowledge were far more densely imbued with true reality, and in comparison, the knowledge that comes to us today through the laws of nature is like squeezed lemons. This is something the soul can feel when it is not prejudiced by the scholarly and scientific arrogance of our time, but when it thirsts for the fulfillment of consciousness with reality. When our soul feels that it must thirst for reality, then, in the face of what is presented to it today in particular in what is called rigorous science, it has the feeling that it is most entangled in illusion or Maya precisely there. Never has there been such entanglement with Maya in the world as in the constructs of today’s philosophy or scientific thinking.

[ 5 ] Why did this come to pass? Because, in the course of his earthly evolution, man had to develop his present sense of self! To do so, he had to be entirely alone and independent with himself, with his self. To do this, they had to be separated from that connection with the outside world. Those strong, substantial elements, which gave them the ability to infuse their creations with a wealth of spiritual substance—as in the case of the Greek gods—would have made it impossible for human beings to attain self-awareness, because they would have been too deeply immersed in the world. In order for human beings to become strong in terms of their sense of self, they had to be torn away, isolated from the realities of the world, so that our soul had to become weak, infinitely weak, in the face of those realities for objective knowledge of the world. As a knowing soul, as a conscious soul in relation to world consciousness, our soul—which is particularly suited to developing ego-consciousness—is at its weakest in the face of the states it once experienced itself. Because of our weakness, which we were compelled to develop, those thinner ideas, imbued with little reality, and such intellectual laws of nature must appear in our present consciousness.

[ 6 ] Anyone who, today, is educated—whether through scholarship or the prevailing belief in authority—to embrace a scientific mindset that dwells purely in abstractions will certainly not come to feel that sense of infinite impoverishment in the face of true reality. But whoever feels within themselves a thirst to become one with the reality of the world knows how, at a certain point in their life, the feeling overtakes them: Oh, how distant one feels from true reality in all of today’s conceptions, how one feels trapped in mere external schemas, in shadows! - This could also be expressed in external scientific terms, and you will find it expressed in this way in my small work *Truth and Science*, published many years ago. There it is shown that, by arriving at ordinary intellectual knowledge, a person attains only a part of knowledge, of truth, and advances toward a different form of the world than the one that presents itself to them. This is the scientific path, which is quite viable, even if it sounds incomprehensible to the philosophy of our time. But on the other hand, there arises the striving to penetrate, through esoteric paths, into a more vibrant reality than mere abstract intellectual laws can provide. And then, when the soul feels that with today’s normal consciousness it can produce only ideas that are Maya in comparison to the full-bodied reality—if this soul is not a squeezed-out lemon that acknowledges only the present sciences—then it feels empty in the face of world reality. Then it does feel that with its ideas it can reach the ends of the world, the far reaches of the cosmos, but it does not heed the saying from the second drama, “The Trial of the Soul”: “Do not end at the far reaches of the cosmos.” For whoever seriously wished to end at the far reaches of the world would be overcome by a feeling as if they were spreading out with ideas that are already weak in themselves across an infinitely vast space. There they become even more diluted, and the farther we go into the far reaches of the world, the thinner they become, and we stand before the infinitely empty abyss with our ideas. This must occur as a trial of the soul. The one thirsting for reality, who, in the spirit of abstract scientific inquiry, must seek to understand the mysteries and wonders of the world, ultimately stands before the emptiness of the universe with ideas that dissolve completely into spiritual mist. Then the soul must feel infinite fear of the void. Whoever cannot feel this fear of the void is simply not yet ready to perceive the truth beyond present consciousness.

[ 7 ] Thus, if we wish to extend our present consciousness into the vastness of the cosmos, we are confronted with the terrifying specter of the fear of cosmic emptiness—a fear that cannot be spared anyone who takes present-day normal consciousness seriously. The soul must undergo such a trial if it wishes to experience the spirit and essence of our time. It must, at some point, stand before the abyss that opens up on all sides when we seek to penetrate the vastness of space with our ideas, and feel this infinite fear of the void, of losing oneself in the expanse of the universe, in the vastness of the cosmos. And if we are familiar with that phrase from Goethe’s worldview: “Becoming one with the universe, expanding one’s self into a world…,” then we must say: When, using the means of modern knowledge, one ventures into the far reaches of the universe and attempts to comprehend the world with today’s philosophical principles—which must always be abstract, since they are derived from present consciousness—then a healthy soul must undergo the trial of standing before the void, before the abyss on all sides, the fear of being consumed, with the best part of one’s being, with that which constitutes consciousness, in the endless nothingness. — This feeling is the universal feeling, and all other feelings of the soul’s trials are merely specific manifestations of this fear of the void, this horror vacui. And it would be unhealthy for a narrow-minded soul if one could not feel how present consciousness shatters and fragments in the face of the infinite universe as soon as it seeks to expand into that universe. This is the fate of the soul when it seeks to venture out with its present consciousness into the distant reaches of the universe, into the vastness of the cosmos.

[ 8 ] There is another path the soul can take. This is the path where it descends so deeply into its own depths that, in doing so, it experiences what constitutes its very being. Just as our soul is with its consciousness in this present life, so it truly experiences only what it has added to its constitution on Earth. What was taken in as the astral body during the old Moon period is the subconscious, which shines forth in the etheric body but is not experienced in normal consciousness. Even less does the human being experience what was acquired during the Sun Age as the etheric body, or indeed what was acquired in the physical body throughout the Saturn, Sun, and Moon Ages and into our Earth Age. These are closed-off realms. But countless generations of gods and spiritual hierarchies have worked on these closed-off realms. Of course, when we descend there through clairvoyant insight, through esoteric training, and we penetrate beyond our ego-consciousness into our own being and encounter what is within us as the astral, etheric, and physical bodies, then we do not enter a void; rather, we enter a far more condensed world substance. Everything that countless spiritual hierarchies have worked into us humans over millions and millions of years—that is what we encounter down there. But when a person seeks to settle in through serious self-knowledge, as esoteric training provides, when they learn to dive down into the achievements of countless generations of gods over millions of years, they do not encounter in pure form what the gods have accomplished. For into all of this, the human being has pressed down what he himself has lived out in terms of drives, desires, passions, emotions, and instincts through the generations. And what he has thus formed has, in the course of earthly incarnations, become connected with what is down there in the astral body, etheric body, and physical body. This forms a dense mass; into this we first enter. What we ourselves have driven into this divine being veils our own divine being from us, so that when we dive down into ourselves, we find the opposite of what we find when we venture out into the vastness of the worlds.

[ 9 ] When we venture out into the vastness of the world, we run the risk of ultimately finding ourselves facing nothingness. When we delve into our own selves, we run the risk of entering regions that grow ever denser—regions we have condensed through our instincts, desires, and passions. Just as we feel the substance of our consciousness shatter and disintegrate when we venture out into the far reaches of the universe, so too, when we dive into the depths of our own souls, do we feel more and more how we are pushed back, just as if by a rubber ball that is pressed and then springs back. Time and again we are pushed back by ourselves when we want to dive into our own inner being. We can certainly sense this. Not only do our instincts, desires, and passions—which we first encounter when we go within ourselves—appear horrific to us when we face them directly, but on top of that, they seem as though they want to seize us at every moment. They grow strong, they grow powerful; their volitional nature comes to the fore. Whereas, in our ordinary state of consciousness, we do not follow this or that impulse, these impulses and instincts immediately unleash their full force the moment we delve a little into ourselves, and we cannot help but yield to them. We are constantly seized by a will of a lower nature arising within us and cast back into ourselves as worse than we were before. There we stand, so to speak, before the density of the drives and instincts when we turn inward. That is the other danger.

[ 10 ] Thus we face tremendous dangers: when we venture out into the vastness of the universe, dissolving ourselves completely into nothingness with our consciousness, and when we sink into ourselves, subordinating all consciousness to the drives and instincts within our being, and succumbing to the greatest possible egoism. These are the two poles between which all trials of the soul lie: the fear of nothingness, and the descent into egoism. And all other trials of the soul are specific manifestations of what we might call, on the one hand, the pole of dissolution into nothingness, and on the other, the descent into egoism, into egotism. In this regard, even higher knowledge is dangerous. For what do we learn through this higher knowledge? We learn how countless spiritual hierarchies have been concerned with us, how our physical, etheric, and astral bodies are composed in all their parts by the hierarchies, how the spirits of the world have worked so that humanity could finally come into being. Then it dawns on the human being that, when he dives esoterically into his own inner self, he says to himself: You have actually been the goal and purpose of the gods; they have worked toward you. — Therein lies the great danger that the human being will fall into immense arrogance.

[ 11 ] Capesius is horrified by this arrogance when he hears from Felix Balde how the spiritual hierarchies have worked and that the goal of all divine activity is humanity. This meaning lies at the heart of Capesius’s horror. And it is part of his soul’s trial that he comes to know this. That is why it is so necessary for human beings to approach the realization that they are the goal of the gods through humility and to perceive it in humility; otherwise, it leads to arrogance. For in the world, when we recognize human beings as the goal of the gods, every opportunity exists to become arrogant and haughty. In the macrocosm, every opportunity for this exists when we continually see the gods striving to shape what human beinghood is. It is good if we form a little more concrete a picture of how the gods have worked on the shaping and other development of the human being: the Thrones, together with the spirits of personality, during the ancient Saturn era; the Cherubim together with the Spirits of Wisdom and the Archangels during the ancient Sun Age; the Seraphim together with the Spirits of Movement and the Angels during the ancient Moon Age. Can we still perceive anything on Earth today of this work on human formation coming in from the outside? Here we touch once again upon a peculiar phenomenon of our modern spiritual life, a phenomenon that has already had to be addressed many times in these lectures.

[ 12 ] There is, in fact, nothing that could provide more exoteric evidence for everything that is proclaimed here in spiritual science than the findings of modern science. The way in which modern science has developed its findings over the past few decades provides proof everywhere for everything that is proclaimed here. However, these facts are often least understood by those who discover them. And the explanation of these facts by external philosophy and science is, in turn, the greatest obstacle to understanding spiritual science. The facts are proof everywhere, but the current explanations of the facts are an obstacle everywhere: that is the peculiar phenomenon. — I have already pointed out individual such facts in various places. From the spirit of my lectures you can gather that the brain was, so to speak, the last thing to be developed in the human being. The other organization was worked into the human being earlier by the spirits of the various hierarchies. But even today, the semi-subconscious continues to work on the organization of the brain, so that one can observe it; only it is not interpreted correctly—what modern science presents here as such beautiful, such wonderful facts. Let us consider an example.

[ 13 ] This past April would have marked the fiftieth anniversary of a highly significant discovery in modern science which, if properly understood, serves as full proof of the spiritual-scientific theory of evolution, a testament to it. The results of spiritual science can be discovered only through clairvoyance; they can be confirmed by the facts brought to light by external science. The fiftieth anniversary of that significant lecture could have been celebrated—the one that Broca, the great physician and philosopher, delivered at the Paris Anthropological Society in April 1861 on the speech center. For what Broca accomplished is full proof that within the inner laws of the physical brain lie the predispositions for that configuration, for that formation of a specific part of the brain, which leads to the consciousness of the art of speech and also to the understanding of speech sounds. When Broca discovered in April 1861 that the organ of speech is located in the third frontal gyrus of the cerebrum and that this organ must be in order if a person is to understand speech sounds, and likewise another part if they are to pronounce them, a significant advance was made that can be utilized in the spiritual sciences and serves as evidence for spiritual scientific facts. Why? Because the very way this speech center develops shows that the human being’s external movements—the movements of the hands, that is, what the human being performs half-unconsciously in life—contribute to the configuration of this speech center. Why is this speech center particularly developed on the left side in humans? Because, under the cultural conditions that have prevailed until now, the human being has made special use of the right hand. Thus, it is the etheric and astral bodies, which execute the gestures of the hands from the subconscious, that influence the brain and shape it. Anthropologists today clearly demonstrate that the brain is shaped from the outside in by macrocosmic world activity. If this part is injured or paralyzed, then there is no ability to speak. If we consider that when one side of the brain—which is usually strongly developed due to our right-handedness—is unleashed from the left side, which is still possible in childhood but not later on, it becomes evident that the brain can indeed be shaped from the outside through systematic activity in such a way that it develops a speech center in the corresponding third cerebral convolution on the right side. Must we not say: Is it not the most erroneous thing we can imagine to think that the ability to speak is formed by brain structure? — No, brain structures do not create it, but rather the human being through the activity they develop. The ability to speak forms in the brain from the macrocosm. The speech organ comes from language, not language from the speech organ. This is what has been discovered through this significant physiological fact of Broca’s. Because the gods or spirits of the hierarchies have helped human beings to carry out such activities that create their speech centers, the speech center has been formed from the outside. The speech center arises from language, not the other way around.

[ 14 ] Properly understood, all such modern discoveries provide ample evidence for spiritual science, and it is a pity that I can only ever touch on such matters briefly. If one could speak at length about characteristic things of this kind, you would see how short-sighted are those who say that spiritual science contradicts modern science. On the contrary! It contradicts only the explanations offered today by modern scholarship, but it does not contradict what science presents as facts. Just as we are, during our earthly existence, shaped by our macrocosmic constitution as human beings, it is the activity of the hierarchies that has formed us from the outside. We are truly a product of the macrocosm. Thus, we are today a product of our limb movements, our gestures, which speak a silent language and are imprinted in the brain, which previously had no predisposition for speech. Primitive man had no predisposition for anything within himself; rather, everything was shaped, formed, and given to him through the macrocosmic activity of the spiritual hierarchies.

[ 15 ] From this we see that, with our present consciousness, we are indeed weak human beings. If we turn outward toward the world, we face a void; if we turn inward, we find ourselves trapped by our own volitional nature. And this is how the severe trials of the soul arise—trials that must occur when a person, from the present standpoint of their consciousness, seeks to approach the mysteries of the world in one direction or another, mysteries that must first astonish them because they confront them as wonders of the world.

[ 16 ] Where does what has just been said come from? Well, it comes from the fact that when we venture out into the vastness of the universe, we enter a region that we have precisely described in the last two lectures as the region of the higher gods or spirits, who are merely the conceptualizations of the real gods or spirits. We thus find ourselves in a world that has no independence. No wonder that what this world can offer us ultimately leads us into emptiness. Just as the human being strives to advance toward knowledge when he ascends to where his thinking and his concepts can initially reach, there he himself arrives only at concepts—concepts of the gods—and cannot enter into true reality. But if a human being delves deep within themselves, into what has been formed within them over millions and millions of years, then they arrive at the deeds, the results of the other divine-spiritual worlds, which we have called the subterranean, the true gods, in the course of the last lectures. But to penetrate to them, we must first pass through our own drives, desires, and passions, through all that which captures us, absorbs us, and transforms us, so that we must follow it. And this leads us into egotism, into selfishness, and cuts us off from these lower gods. Thus we have the other pole of the soul’s trials. If we wish to approach the higher gods, we enter into emptiness, into the realm of mere imagination. If we wish to approach the lower gods, all imagination abandons us, because we are seized by the blind, frenzied drives within our own inner being and burn ourselves up in them. That is why the trials of the soul are so difficult. There is, however, one thing that initially opens up a purely theoretical prospect for us. We must tell ourselves: however thin the ideas may be, however thin everything that egoity and egoism can give us may be, it is still derived from the whole of the world. And if we can only find our way into this consciousness of ours in the right way—by viewing it in its independence, seeing it as it is in itself—and if it then grows stronger and stronger, then perhaps we will make progress in one way or another, so that the trial of the soul can be passed. It should only be noted here how we can advance in a different way than with ordinary, normal consciousness.

[ 17 ] Let us assume that we imbue ourselves with what we have already referred to in various ways as the Christ impulse; we learn to understand, in its deepest meaning, the Pauline saying: “Not I, but Christ in me.” - Then, with our normal consciousness, we stand there at first and say to ourselves: We do not want to let this normal consciousness act alone; we do not want to remain solely within our own personality, but rather we want to imbue ourselves with the substance that has been present in the Earth’s atmosphere since the Mystery of Golgotha—the Christ-substance. When we permeate ourselves with it in this way, we do not merely carry our thin ideas out into the vastness of the world, but we take—even as we venture far into the expanses of space—the substance of Christ with us. All our ideas are then permeated by the substance of Christ, and in this process something most remarkable emerges, which I would like to clarify for you through the scientific developments of recent times.

[ 18 ] At first, people started with external natural phenomena and attributed them to all sorts of forces and the like. Then people came to attribute what takes place in the external world—light, sounds, and so on—to vibrations of moving etheric particles or moving, weighable material particles, and were pleased that they could reduce the entire world to a world of moving, vibrating atoms of ether and the like. Now this approach, since it leads nowhere after all, as people have seen, has already been largely abandoned; yet the general public consciousness remains backward in this regard, always lagging a few steps behind scientific progress. There is still a widespread longing to explain the entire world through the abstraction of oscillating atoms, as if space were filled with nothing but vibrations, nothing but oscillations. Yes, you see, when one arrives at such conclusions using our ideas and the empirical experiences one can gain from reality, then one truly feels, the moment one approaches the so-called atomistic world, this emptiness immediately, for those atoms that are conceived do not actually exist. Atoms can exist insofar as they have empirical reality, as far as the microscope goes, as far as matter goes, as long as it is endowed with light and heat; but to explain light and heat themselves, one must not resort to atoms or atomic vibrations, for then one devises a world system within the world, and a devised world system leads to something that no longer has any real content at all. That is why this old atomistic theory has no content at all. One conceives it, but feels that it does not intervene in reality anywhere.

[ 19 ] The situation is different when we permeate our ideas, when we permeate our abstract laws everywhere with what is in truth the Christ impulse—which, as you all know, does not refer to anything that an orthodox creed has in mind, but rather to the great macrocosmic Christ impulse. We must permeate ourselves with this in the Pauline sense. Not our abstract ideas and concepts, but what they are as our present form of consciousness, permeated by the Christ impulse—that is what we carry out into the world. And here experience reveals something quite peculiar. As we become ever emptier and poorer, and our consciousness ultimately shatters and scatters into the void of the world when we venture out with a Christ-less consciousness—as soon as we have taken in the Christ impulse, the farther we go into the distant realms of the world, into the vastness of space, the richer and fuller our consciousness becomes. And when we advance to clairvoyance, then through the Christ-filled soul we have abundant soul substance, so that the true causes of reality ultimately stand before us as supersensible realities, mighty and magnificent. While our Christ-less consciousness leads us into the void of the vastness of the universe, the Christ-filled consciousness leads us to the true causes of worldly phenomena and the wonders of the universe. That is why I was able to say in the little book *The Spiritual Guidance of Man and Humanity*: As foolish as it may seem today, in the future chemistry, physics, physiology, and biology will be permeated by the Christ impulse, and true science will be permeated by the Christ impulse in many ways that we cannot even dream of today. Anyone who refuses to believe this need only leaf through history to see how the reason of future times was often the folly of earlier times. May they take comfort in this, should they perhaps wish to pity us because we assume that what is considered folly in our time is the reason of the coming age! As foolish as it may seem to today’s humanity to think of a Christian chemistry, so reasonable will it appear to posterity. When we carry Christ out into our worldview, he will give us fullness instead of emptiness.

[ 20 ] And if we take the other path—if, in the Pauline sense and in the spirit of what has been said here so far, we fill our souls with the Christ impulse and then turn inward—what happens then? The Christ impulse has the peculiarity that it acts upon our egoism, upon our selfishness, as if dissolving it, as if destroying it. It is remarkable: the further we descend within ourselves with the Christ impulse, the less our selfishness can affect us. We then penetrate ever deeper into ourselves, and as we pass through our egoistic drives and passions with the Christ impulse, we come to recognize the human being and come to know all the mysteries of the world-miracle that is the human being. Yes, this Christ impulse allows us to go much further still. Whereas otherwise we are thrown back like a rubber ball and do not descend into ourselves, into the realm of our own human organization, through Christ we penetrate ever deeper and deeper into ourselves, penetrate through ourselves, and emerge, so to speak, from ourselves onto the other side. So that when we penetrate out to one side into the vastness of the worlds and find the Christ principle everywhere in the distant reaches of space, on the other side, when we penetrate downward into the realm of the underworlds, we also find everything impersonal, everything free from us. On both sides we find that which transcends us. In the vastness of the worlds we do not scatter or dissipate; we find the world of the higher gods; downward we penetrate into the world of the true gods.

[ 21 ] And that which guides us within ourselves and leads us into the vastness of the world—we could draw it as a circle and would ultimately come together outside of ourselves. That which is the nature of will, into which we otherwise plunge as into a realm where we burn, and that which is the vastness of space, within which we disintegrate as into nothingness: these come together. — And our thoughts about the world unite with the will that confronts us from the world when we descend into it. Thoughts filled with will, willing thoughts! Through such a process, we no longer stand before abstract thoughts, but before the world-thoughts that are creative in themselves, that are capable of willing. Willing thoughts: but that means divine beings, spiritual entities, for thoughts filled with will are spiritual entities. Thus the circle is closed. Thus we push through the trials of the soul that we encounter, whereas otherwise we would pass into nothingness through the weakness of our own soul. Thus, when we descend into ourselves, we pass through excessive egotism—that is, through the soul that is strong in egotism and selfishness—toward both sides, toward that which may indeed lead us to trials of the soul, but which can never tell us anything about the world.

[ 22 ] We must walk both paths, must experience both forms of resistance: both the fear of emptiness and the resistance of our own ego. And thus, penetrating through ourselves toward the other side of the nature of the will, approaching the world, we are seized—as soon as we emerge from ourselves in this way—by infinite compassion, by infinite sympathy with all beings. And this compassion, this sympathy—this is what connects, when the cycle is closed, with the world-thoughts that otherwise vanish and now receive substantial content. The Christ impulse gradually leads us to close the circle, leads us to recognize what dwells and lives in the vastness of space as will-filled, that is, essential thoughts. But then, when the trials of the soul have led us further in this way, we are purified in our soul, permeated by the process of purification we had to undergo. By having to penetrate downward through everything that the Guardian of the Threshold shows us as the cause of egoism, we are also immune to all that might cause us to scatter into the vastness of space and feel the fear of emptiness.

[ 23 ] Such wisdom, which essentially leads us to the deepest mystery of the trials of the soul, prevailed in the ancient Greek mysteries. That is why the Greek mystics, the disciples of these mysteries, were led, on the one hand, to a fear of the infinite abyss and to knowledge, and on the other hand, to the temptation of egoism and to the overcoming of egoism through infinite compassion and empathy with all beings. And in marriage, in the union of compassion, of sharing in the suffering of others through thought, they experienced the purification of all trials of the soul. A faint, a very faint reflection of this was created by the primal tragedy, the primal drama in Greece. The early dramas of Aeschylus and also—albeit only to a very small extent—those of Sophocles allow us to recognize their purpose. They were there to evoke fear and pity through the manner in which a plot is continuously presented on stage, and to lead to purification, to the catharsis of fear and pity. Aristotle, who inherited the tradition that Greek drama reflected on a small scale the colossal, grandiose sensation of fear and selfishness, of the overcoming of fear through fearlessness, of selfishness in compassion, in infinite compassion - Aristotle, who knew that drama was a means of education on a small scale, defined tragedy as a representation of connected events suitable for arousing fear and pity in the human soul and purifying it with regard to these qualities.

[ 24 ] These magnificent truths have been lost to the human soul over time, forgotten. And when people began to study Aristotle again, from the 18th into the 19th century, they amassed an entire library of explanations of what Aristotle actually meant by this. What he meant will only be understood when we once again grasp the emergence of drama from the ancient mysteries. Thus, scholarship can only scratch the very surface, for all the work in these libraries has yielded little in terms of the Aristotelian definition of fear and pity when it comes to explaining the concept of drama. Thus, however, we see how trials of the soul must arise from the becoming of the world and humanity. We also see, however, how these trials of the soul arise because our soul feels compelled to take two paths: one path into the distant realms of the world, the other into the depths of its own being; that it must pass trials because it cannot have a view in either direction, yet that it can hope to close the circle, to find the will on one side and the thoughts on the other, and thereby the true realities—that through which the world reveals itself as a willing spirit, as spiritual will.

[ 25 ] What we ultimately arrive at is that the entire world dissolves into Spirit for us, that we perceive Spirit everywhere, and that we must recognize everything that is physical and material merely as the outer manifestation of Spirit, as the illusion of Spirit. Because we do not know ourselves to be in the Spirit, though we do live in the Spirit, we must undergo such trials. For although we live in the Spirit, we do not know it. We see the Spirit in a deceptive form and must advance from the deception that we ourselves are, from the dream in which we dream ourselves, toward reality; we must cast off everything that still recalls the material or the laws of the material. This is a path whose end we can only sense, but from such intuitions springs the strength that tells us: We will finally be able to close the circle and, in the revelation of the Spirit, find the solutions to the wonders of the world and the fulfillment of the trials of the soul.

[ 26 ] Thus, a genuine consideration of spiritual science must never discourage us. And even if we must be shown how difficult the trials of the soul are, how they must arise again and again, we must nevertheless tell ourselves: We must come to know them, yes, we must even go through them, for merely knowing them in the abstract does us no good. But we must also have the confidence that we will progress through the trials of the soul to spiritual revelations. Of course, anyone who would take comfort in the fact that spiritual revelations must come eventually, and that one should therefore not seek out the trials of the soul, will fall into trials of the soul all the more. For example, someone who might say: There you have presented us with the first Rosicrucian drama, in which we find a development of the soul that seemed to show us that Johannes Thomasius had already reached a certain height. Well, if we rely on that, then we can distance ourselves from the second Rosicrucian drama, “The Trial of the Soul,” and simply hope that the spiritual revelation will follow at some point. Why do we need to engage with the trials of the soul? — Anyone who thinks this way would be throwing themselves right into the worst trials of the soul, for we cannot escape through our normal consciousness, through our intellectuality, what must be laid upon us as a trial of the soul. Therefore, it is better if we bring before our soul everything that this soul can experience in terms of trials, if we become acquainted with all the trials of human souls and do not lose heart in realizing that even a person like Johannes Thomasius can fall into error and delusion and must find his way forward along paths quite different from what one might initially imagine. But we must never lose confidence that the human soul is destined to raise its divine self up to the revelations of the Spirit. Therefore, the path of the human soul is such that it faces the world, sees this world as Maya or the great illusion, feels that within this Maya or great illusion the wonders of the world are hidden, that wonderment arises as the first trial of the soul, that the trials then become ever heavier and heavier, but that the soul can retain its strength, so that it comes to close the circle and finally finds, in the spiritual revelation, the resolution of the wonders of the world and the purification of the trials of the soul. This is the path that the human soul takes—and not only the human soul—which all divine hierarchies strive for and carry out within the human soul.

[ 27 ] We have thus outlined what we have essentially set as our task for this year’s cycle: to evoke an understanding of the connection between wonders of the world, trials of the soul, and spiritual revelations.