The Rudolf Steiner Archive

1. The Christ Impulse in the Course of History I

My dear Theosophical friends!

[ 1 ] Since we so rarely see each other here, let’s start by discussing some general matters. And then, since we’re gathered here in such a small, intimate circle, we can address any specific requests that might be brought up. It will be good to discuss, in general terms, the nature of the human being in relation to the entire nature of our world, the greater world. And in this session, this nature of the human being should be discussed not so much as it is in general theosophy itself—for example, in my book *Theosophy*—since everyone can gain sufficient knowledge from that—but rather, today we want to take a look at the human being more from within the human being.

[ 2 ] When we occasionally reflect on ourselves as human beings, it must be immediately apparent to us that we perceive the world around us through our senses, gather impressions of it, and then reflect on the world. These two aspects of human existence are constantly brought to the forefront of our consciousness. For example, when we have turned off our light in the evening and, before falling asleep, allow the impressions of the day to pass through our soul once more, then we know: throughout the day, the world has had an effect on us. Now only the memories of the day’s impressions can ebb and flow within our soul. Now—we know this—we reflect; now we are already immersed with our soul in the aftereffects of what is unfolding within us through these external impressions. If we set aside the ordinary, trivial relationships, we describe what unfolds in our soul—like a memory of the day—as the individual. It is precisely because we are intelligent, individual human beings, intellectual beings as humans, that we are able to let the world pass before us in images, as has just been suggested.

[ 3 ] Now, in our spiritual life, this individual aspect is intimately connected with external impressions. When we observe the world during the day, sensory impressions and our thoughts constantly flow together in a jumble. And in the evening, when we no longer have sensory impressions but allow the impressions to pass through our soul, we know quite clearly: these are the images of what we experience out there. Our impressions of the external world and what we are as individual human beings flow together. They merge. Now, as we all know, there is a way to make this inner, individual element within us ever more alive and ever more precise. And this is achieved through the means already familiar to us, which are described, for example, in my treatise “How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?” This is, after all, the first thing one can experience in one’s inner life: the feeling that one is no longer necessarily dependent on the outer world through one’s thoughts. If, for example, someone can reflect on what happened on Saturn, the Sun, and the Moon, then they have such lofty thoughts. For, of course, no human being can receive external impressions—impressions of an external nature—of what happened on the ancient Saturn, the ancient Sun, and the ancient Moon. We need not go that far. When, in a quiet moment, we ask ourselves: How much has changed in my concepts since my youth?—this is already an independent attitude toward the world within the individual element. When we form views on life and maxims, we feel that we are becoming more independent in the intellectual element. This growing independence within the individual intellectual element is of great significance for human beings. For what does this growing independence mean? What does it mean when a person acquires life maxims through experience itself—of things independent of external impressions—not through teachings, not through theories? It means that they become more independent in their etheric body. This is the very beginning of a long process. The beginning is such that a person does not even notice that they are raising their etheric body a little; the end is that they can make it completely independent of the physical body.

[ 4 ] While the beginning is a very gentle process of becoming independent, the end is a complete withdrawal of the etheric body and a perception through the etheric body. We then perceive our surroundings through this independent etheric body. We can experience this perception even if we have not yet progressed very far in our inner mystical experience. We can make this clear to ourselves and understand it to a certain extent if we recall how our perception works in the physical body. Now, my dear Theosophical friends, with our physical body we perceive through our senses, which are independent. Our eyes are independent, our ears are independent. We can perceive the world of colors and the world of sounds independently. We cannot do this when we perceive with our intelligence. In the case of the intelligence, everything is unity; nothing is demarcated into separate spheres. We cannot perceive with etheric eyes and etheric ears as we do in individual sensory spheres, but rather we view the etheric world in its entirety. And when we begin to speak of this, we can describe how unified and all-encompassing the etheric experience appears. I do not wish to speak of the fact that the experience can go much further, but only to draw attention to the fact that when a person perceives how life principles are formed, they can thereby perceive something of the etheric elements.

[ 5 ] Anyone who looks into the etheric world and gradually comes to realize that such a higher world exists can develop a conviction from within that the physical body is underpinned by an etheric body. As soon as the topic of an etheric body comes up, we must find our bearings through significant insights and through things we experience, so to speak. Once one knows that an etheric body permeates the physical body, one will no longer find it incomprehensible when the occultist speaks in his own way about what paralysis is: What normally occurs through proper training happens in an abnormal way. It can happen to a person that their etheric body withdraws from the physical body. The physical body then acts independently. This creates the possibility of paralysis, for the physical body is then deprived of its animating etheric body. But we need not even go as far as the phenomenon of paralysis; we can also better understand life in its everyday manifestations. What, for example, is a slacker? A slacker is someone whose etheric body has been weak from birth or who has weakened it through neglect. One then attempts to correct this by stripping the physical body of its leaden heaviness and making it lighter in some way. A true cure, however, can only come from the astral body; through stimulation, it will have a revitalizing effect on the etheric body. But there is something else one must realize. The etheric body is actually the bearer of our entire intellect. When we fall asleep at night, all our ideas and memories actually remain in the etheric body. A person leaves their thoughts behind in the etheric body and encounters them again only in the morning. By shedding the etheric body, we shed the entire structure of our experiences.

[ 6 ] This etheric body is, however, also structured in such a way that, when we examine it from a spiritual-scientific perspective, we can perceive very clearly that human beings are actually subject to far more changes over time than is commonly believed. Isn’t that right? We all know that human beings have gone through their periods of incarnation. It is not without purpose that we incarnate again and again. The human gaze is short-sighted. People believe that human society has always been organized as it is today. Human organization changes from century to century; it is simply not possible to investigate this in the external realm. In the forebrain lies an organ, arranged in fine convolutions, which has only developed since the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It is an organic form for the purely intellectual life of those centuries. We can well imagine how impossible it is for such a detail in the brain to change without, albeit on a small scale, the entire human organization changing as well. So that, in fact, the human organism exhibits changes from century to century. Yet the change in this regard can only be ascertained by tracing the Akashic Records. And there the changes in the etheric body can best be traced. There we see how people in ancient Greece or ancient Egypt had entirely different etheric bodies. The entire currents were different.

[ 7 ] Now, in order to arrive at a thought that might be fruitful for us, I would first like to make a brief aside to point out that even in everyday life one can assume the existence of a multitude of worlds. A person falls asleep without realizing that they are in another world. The fact that they sleep through it and know nothing of it is no proof that it does not exist. However, the other worlds extend into that world in a certain way. When a person is in the physical world, they perceive through the senses; when they withdraw into themselves, they do not: Then they have an intellectual world, and this borders on the physical one. Yet within themselves, besides the already developed intellectual element, they find two entirely different ones. Can a person develop these other elements?

[ 8 ] A simple reflection can show that there is a more peculiar world of inner life than that of mere intellectual thought. It is present when we can say to ourselves: As human beings, we feel morally. This is the world where we associate specific experiences with feelings of sympathy or antipathy. This goes beyond intellectual experience. Someone shows goodwill toward another, and that pleases us, or ill will, and that displeases us. This is quite different from what is merely intellectually experienced. Mere reflection cannot give rise within us to the feeling of whether an action is moral or immoral. There may be intellectually highly perceptive individuals who have no sense of the repulsiveness of a purely selfish act. This is a world unto itself, the same world we also perceive when we admire the beautiful and sublime in works of art or find the ugly repulsive. What uplifts us in works of art, we cannot grasp with the intellect, but only with our inner life. Thus we can say: something penetrates into our lives that transcends the intellectual. When an occultist observes a soul at such a moment when it feels revulsion at an immoral act or delight in a moral one, the soul is undergoing a higher stage of soul life. Merely thinking is a lower stage of soul life than the delight or displeasure in moral or immoral acts. When a person, in a strengthened etheric body, attains a more intense sense of what is moral and immoral, we observe not merely the etheric body becoming independent, but a strengthening of the astral body, a special stimulation of the astral forces. So that we can say: A person who is particularly sensitive to moral and immoral actions will develop exceptionally strong forces in the astral body, whereas one who elevates their etheric body only intellectually—for example, through exercises that strengthen the power of memory—may well develop very far in clairvoyance, but will not emerge from the etheric-astral world, because only the intellectual element is active within them. If one wishes to go beyond the astral world, one must perform exercises that express sympathy for moral actions and antipathy toward immoral ones. Then we do indeed ascend to a world that, in a different sense, lies beyond our world as merely astral. We then ascend into the heavenly world. So that we can say: In the great world of the invisible, the heavenly world of the macrocosm corresponds to what lives within us in relation to moral or immoral impressions, the astral world of the macrocosm to what is within us in the intellectual-physical perception of the physical world. That which develops in the intellectual element corresponds to the astral world; that which develops in response to moral or immoral actions corresponds to the heavenly world, the Devachan world.

[ 9 ] There is yet another element in the human soul. There is a difference between moral action that is pleasing and the feeling of obligation to actually perform the moral action that one finds pleasing and to refrain from the immoral. This sense of obligation is the highest achievement a human being can attain in the world today.

[ 10 ] What we must regard as a ladder of the human soul is therefore:

1. The sensual person.
2. The intellectual human being. This is the one who faces the first invisible world.
3. The morally sensitive aesthetic human being, who feels pleasure or displeasure at moral and immoral actions. This corresponds externally to the lower Devachan world.
4. The morally active human being.

[ 11 ] The fact that human beings act upon what they inwardly perceive as their highest moral impulses corresponds, in the outer world, to the higher Devachan world—the world of reason—where the beings who represent the absolute rationality of the world reign. If a person can grasp that in the world of their moral impulses there is a shadow image of the highest world from which they originate, then they have understood much about the macrocosm.

[ 12 ] Thus we have the physical world and the world of the intellect, the moral world or the heavenly world of the lower Devachan, and the world of reason or the higher Devachan world. The cosmic worlds cast the shadows of the sensory world within us: the intellectual world, intellectual clairvoyance; the aesthetic world, moral feeling; the world of reason, moral impulses to action. Through a kind of self-knowledge, human beings can perceive these different levels within themselves.

[ 13 ] Well, this entire human constitution has changed over the course of time. People today are not at all the same as they were in ancient Greece or ancient Egypt. Back then, in the time of ancient Greece, human beings were such that higher beings guided the soul element within them; therefore, people at that time felt something like a natural obligation toward those beings. Now we are in an age where human beings are guided by the intellectual element, and therefore they feel something like an aesthetic-moral obligation. Back then, however, it would have been impossible for anyone to think that if a moral impulse were present, it would be possible to act otherwise. Even in Greece, people felt such a sense of obligation toward what was pleasing or displeasing that they felt compelled to act accordingly.

[ 14 ] Now we have entered a new era in which people no longer feel any obligation toward the aesthetic element, as expressed in the saying: “There’s no accounting for taste.” —- But one can surely find common ground with those who have cultivated good taste.

[ 15 ] What people used to feel in the moral and aesthetic spheres, they now feel is necessary in the intellectual sphere: to have a certain guidance, so that one cannot think as one pleases, but must conform to the laws of logic. But this brings us to the lowest level of human experience. We are now at a transitional stage, as is clearly evident. For if we consider the past millennia, we see that the human physical body has become increasingly dry and rigid, that human beings have simply changed. A millennium and a half ago, the physical body was significantly softer and more supple. The physical body has become increasingly harder. In contrast, something quite different has also occurred in the etheric body—something that human beings have been less able to experience precisely because this etheric body has undergone an upward development. It is significant that we are at the crucial point in time when human beings must become aware that their etheric body is to become something different. This is the event that will unfold precisely in the twentieth century. While on the one hand the strengthening of the intellectual element is making itself felt, on the other hand the etheric body is becoming so much more independent that people will have to take notice of it. For some time after the Christ event, people did not think as intellectually as people do today. This intellectual thinking causes the etheric body to become increasingly independent, so that it is also used as an independent instrument. And in this process, it can be observed that it has undergone a secret development that makes it possible to become aware of the Christ in the etheric body. Just as Christ was seen physically back then, he will now be able to be seen in the etheric. So that in this twentieth century, the vision of Christ—as Paul saw him—will occur as a natural event. A number of people will be able to see Christ in the etheric. So that people will know him, Christ, even if all the Bibles were burned. We will then have no need of tradition, for we see him, we behold him. And this is an event of a significance similar to that which took place on Golgotha. More and more people will come to behold the Christ in the coming centuries. The next three millennia on Earth will be dedicated to a development in which the etheric body becomes increasingly sensitive, so that certain people will experience this and other events. I would like to mention just one more event: that there will be more and more people who want to do something and then feel the urge to hold back. Then a vision will arise, and people will become increasingly aware: What will happen in the future is the karmic consequence of what I have done. Some “forerunners”—I would like to use this word in the sense of “laggards”—are already at the point where they sense such things. This occurs particularly in children.

[ 16 ] There is a great difference between what trained clairvoyants experience and what is described here—what is experienced naturally. Trained clairvoyants have experienced Christ since time immemorial through certain exercises. On the physical plane, when I encounter a person there, I have them right in front of me; through clairvoyance, I can perceive them in entirely different places, where I do not stand directly before them. Perceiving the Christ clairvoyantly has always been possible. But to encounter him—because he now stands in a different relationship to humanity, namely in such a way that he helps one from the etheric world—is something that, apart from us, is a fact independent of our clairvoyant development. From the twentieth century onward, over the next three thousand years, certain people will be able to encounter him, to encounter him objectively as an etheric form. This is different from when a being ascends through inner development to the point of seeing him.

[ 17 ] This, however, places the exalted being we call Christ in an entirely different evolutionary chain than when we speak of the Buddha. The Bodhisattva who became the Buddha was born into the royal house of Suddhodana and became a Buddha in the twenty-ninth year of his life, which means that he no longer needed to incarnate thereafter. When such a being—a Bodhisattva—becomes a Buddha or a Master, this signifies an inner development, merely a higher one, that every human being can undergo. Esoteric training of the human being is only the beginning of what leads to becoming a Buddha. This has nothing to do with what happens around people. Such people appear at certain times to advance the world. But these are different events from the Christ event. Christ did not come from another human individuality, but Christ came from the macrocosm, whereas all Bodhisattvas have always been connected to the Earth.

[ 18 ] We must therefore be clear that, when we speak of Bodhisattva or Buddha beings, we are not referring to the Christ at all. For the Christ is a macrocosmic being who became connected to the Earth only through the baptism of John. That was the physical manifestation. Now comes the etheric manifestation, then the astral, and then an even higher one. But first, humanity must be ready to experience this higher stage. What humanity can experience is part of the general laws of the Earth. The being we call Christ—or by other names—will also bring about what we might call the salvation of all earthly souls into the Jupiter being, while everything else will fall away with the Earth. Theosophy is not something arbitrary, but something important that had to come into the world. The world must learn to understand the Christ Being who lived on Earth for three years. That was at the beginning of our current calendar.

[ 19 ] You will find more details about the two Jesus children in my book *The Spiritual Guidance of Man and Humanity*. The Christ event was prepared by a figure associated with the Essene sect, Jeshu ben Pandira, who was born a hundred years before the two Jesus children were born in Palestine. Thus, one must distinguish between them and Jeshu ben Pandira, whom Haeckel, among others, has reviled in a most unworthy manner. The Gospel of Matthew essentially stems from this very high being, Jeshu ben Pandira, as a preparation for what was to come.

[ 20 ] How should we understand the relationship between this Jeshu ben Pandira and Jesus of Nazareth?

[ 21 ] At first glance, these individualities have nothing to do with one another, except that one served as a precursor to the other; but as individualities, they are in no way related. Rather, the fact is that in the boy Jesus of the Gospel of Luke, we have a somewhat inexpressible individuality that is difficult to grasp because, as soon as he was born, he could speak—and speak in such a way that his mother could understand him. This individuality of the Gospel of Luke was not intellectual, but tremendously primal and elemental in terms of moral feelings. The Buddha-individuality has worked into the astral body of this being.

[ 22 ] Once he has become a Buddha, he is a being who no longer needs to incarnate on Earth. As long as he is a Bodhisattva, he incarnates. After becoming a Buddha, he works down from the higher worlds, specifically through the astral body of the Jesus of the Gospel of Luke. The forces emanating from the Buddha are present in the astral body of this boy Jesus. Thus, the Buddha current is contained within the Jesus of Nazareth current.

[ 23 ] On the other hand, what the Eastern scriptures say is also true for the Western occultist: that at the moment the Bodhisattva becomes a Buddha, a new Bodhisattva arrives. At the moment when Gautama Buddha became a Buddha, that Bodhisattva individuality was taken from the earth, and a new Bodhisattva is now active upon it. It is that Bodhisattva who is to become a Buddha at the appointed time. Indeed, the time has been precisely determined when the successor of Gautama Buddha, Maitreya, will become a Buddha: five thousand years after the Buddha’s enlightenment under the Bodhi tree. Approximately three thousand years from our time, the world will experience the Maitreya Buddha incarnation, which will be the final reincarnation of Jeshu ben Pandira. This Bodhisattva, who will come as the Maitreya Buddha—who in his reincarnation in the flesh will also come in a physical body in our century, though not as a Buddha—will make it his mission to impart to humanity all true understanding of the Christ event.

[ 24 ] True occultists acknowledge the incarnations of the Bodhisattva, the future Maitreya Buddha. Just as all human beings undergo a development of the etheric body, so too does this individuality. The closer humanity comes to the one who will be the Maitreya Buddha, the more this individuality will undergo a special development, which in its highest stages will, in a certain sense, be something like the baptism of Jesus of Nazareth: a change of individuality takes place. In both cases, a different individuality is taken on. They enter the world as children, and after a certain number of years, their individuality is changed. It is not a continuous development, but a development that undergoes a break, as was the case with Jesus. In his case, we have such a replacement of the individuality in the twelfth year, and then again at the baptism by John. Such a replacement occurs precisely in the Bodhisattva who becomes the Maitreya Buddha. These individualities are suddenly, as it were, fertilized by another. In particular, the Maitreya Buddha will live continuously with a certain individuality until the age of thirty, and then a transformation occurs for him, as we see with Jesus of Nazareth during his baptism in the Jordan. But one will always recognize the Maitreya Buddha by the fact that, when he is present, people know nothing of him prior to this exchange of individuality. And then he suddenly appears.

[ 25 ] This is the defining characteristic of all bodhisattvas who become Buddhas: that they lead an anonymous life. Human individuality will increasingly have to rely on itself in the future. It will be characteristic of the individual that he will go through the world unrecognized for many years and will only then be recognized by the fact that he acts as a unique human being through his own inner strength. Throughout the millennia, and also by modern occultists, it has been recognized as a requirement that his being remain unknown from his youth until the birth of the intellectual soul, indeed until the birth of the conscious soul, and that he attain his significance through no one other than himself.

[ 26 ] That is why it is so important to be unyielding up to a certain point. Any true connoisseur of the occult would find it strange that a Buddha is supposed to come in the twentieth century, since every occultist knows that he can only come five thousand years after Gautama Buddha. However, a Bodhisattva can be incarnated and will be.

[ 27 ] This is part of the occultist’s fundamental knowledge: that the Maitreya Buddha will remain unknown during his youth. That is why I have emphasized for years that the fundamental principle of occultism must be observed: before a certain age, no one may be given a mandate from certain central authorities to speak about occult teachings. This has been emphasized for years. When younger people speak, they may do so for good reasons, but they do not do so on an occult mandate.

[ 28 ] The Maitreya Buddha asserts himself through his own power. He appears in such a way that no one can help him except the power of his own soul.

[ 29 ] An understanding of the entire evolution of the Earth is essential for approaching true Theosophy. Those who fail to develop this understanding will cause the modern Theosophical movement to wither away.