The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[ 1 ] From the spiritual sphere new light on the evolution of humanity sought to break through in the knowledge acquired during the last third of the nineteenth century. But the spiritual sleep in which this acquired knowledge was given its materialistic interpretation prevented even a notion of the new light, much less any proper attention to it.

[ 2 ] So that time arrived which ought by its own nature to have evolved in the direction of the spirit, but which belied its own being – the time wherein it began to be impossible for life to make itself real.

[ 3 ] I wish to set down here certain sentences taken from articles which I wrote in March 1898 for the Dramaturgische Blätter (which had become a supplement of the Magazine at the beginning of 1898). Referring to the art of lecturing, I said: “In this field more than in any other is the learner left wholly to himself and to chance ... Because of the form which our public life has taken on, almost everybody nowadays has frequent need to speak in public ... The elevation of ordinary speech to a work of art is a rarity. We lack almost wholly the feeling for the beauty of speaking, and still more for speaking that is characteristic ... To no one devoid of all knowledge of correct singing would the right be granted to discuss a singer ... In the case of dramatic art the requirements imposed are far slighter ... Persons who know whether or not a verse is properly spoken become steadily scarcer ... People nowadays often look upon artistic speaking as ineffective idealism. We could never have come to this had we been more aware of the educative possibilities of speech ...”

[ 4 ] What then hovered before me could come to a form of realization only much later, within the Anthroposophical Society. Marie von Sievers (Marie Steiner), who was enthusiastic on behalf of the art of speech, first dedicated herself to genuinely artistic speaking; and then for the first time it became possible with her help to work for the elevation of speech to a true art by means of courses in speaking and dramatic representations.

[ 5 ] I venture to introduce this subject just here in order to show how certain ideals have sought their unfolding all through my life, though many persons have tried to find contradictions in my evolution.

[ 6 ] To this period belongs my friendship with the young poet, now dead, Ludwig Jacobowski. He was a personality whose dominant mood of soul breathed the breath of inner tragedy. It was hard for him to bear the fate that made him a Jew. He represented a bureau which, under the guidance of a liberal deputy, directed the union “Defence against Anti-Semitism” and published its organ. An excessive burden in connection with this work rested upon Ludwig Jacobowski. And a sort of work which renewed every day a burning pain; for it brought home to him daily the realization of the feeling against his people which caused him so much suffering.

[ 7 ] Along with this he developed a fruitful activity in the field of folk-lore. He collected everything obtainable as the basis for a work on the evolution of the peoples from primitive times. Individual papers of his, based upon his rich fund of knowledge in this field, are very interesting. They were at first written in the materialistic spirit of the time; but, had Jacobowski lived longer, he would certainly have been open to a spiritualizing of his research.

[ 8] Out of this activity streamed the poetry of Ludwig Jacobowski. Not wholly original; and yet born of deeply human feeling and filled with an experience of the powers of the soul. Leuchtende Tage¹ he called his lyrical poems. These, when the mood bestowed them upon him, were in his life-tragedy really something that affected him like days of spiritual sunlight. Besides, he wrote novels. In Werther der Jude² there lived all the inner tragedy of Ludwig Jacobowski. In Loki, Roman eines Gottes,³ he produced a work born of German mythology. The soulful quality which speaks from this novel is a beautiful reflection of the poet's love of the mythological element in a folk.

[ 9 ] A survey of what Ludwig Jacobowski achieved leaves one astonished at its fulness in the most divers fields. Yet he associated with many persons and enjoyed social life. More over, he was then editing the monthly Die Gesellschaft,⁴ which meant for him an enormous burden of work.

[ 10 ] He had a consuming passion for life, whose essence he craved to know in order that he might mould this into artistic form.

[ 11 ] He founded a society, Die Kommenden,⁵ consisting of writers, artists, scientists, and persons interested in the arts. The meetings there were weekly. Poets read their poems; lectures were given in the most divers fields of knowledge and life. The evening ended in an informal social gathering. Ludwig Jacobowski was the central point of his ever growing circle. Everybody was attached to the lovable personality, so full of ideas, who, moreover, developed in this club a fine and noble sense of humour.

[ 12 ] Away from all this he was snatched by an early death, when he had just reached thirty years. He was taken off by an inflammation of the brain, caused by his unceasing labours.

[ 13 ] There remained to me only the duty of giving the funeral address for my friend and editing his literary remains.

[ 14 ] A beautiful memorial of him was made by his friend, Marie Stona, in the form of a book consisting of papers by friends of his.

[ 15 ] Everything about Ludwig Jacobowski was lovable: his inner tragedy, his striving outward from this to his “luminous days,” his absorption in the life of movement. I keep always alive in my heart thoughts of our friendship, and look back upon our brief association with an inner devotion to my friend.

[ 16 ] Another friend with whom I came to be associated at that time was Martha Asmers, a woman philosophically thoughtful but strongly inclined to materialism. This tendency, however, was modified through the fact that Martha Asmers kept intensely alive the memory of her brother Paul Asmers, who had died early, and who was a decided idealist.

During the last third of the nineteenth century Paul Asmers had lived, like a philosophical hermit, in the idealism of the time of Hegel. He wrote a paper on the ego, and a similar one on the Indo-Germanic religion – both characteristically Hegelian in form, but both thoroughly independent.

[ 17 ] This interesting personality, who had then long been dead, was brought really close to me through the sister Martha Asmers. It seemed to me that in him the spirit-tending philosophy of the beginning of the century flamed forth like a meteor toward its end.

[ 18 ] Less intimate, but of constant significance for a long time thereafter, were the relationships which came about between the “Friedrich Hageners” – Bruno Wille and Wilhelm Bölsche – and myself. Bruno Wille is the author of a work entitled Philosophie der Befreiung* durch das reine Mittel.⁶ Only the title coincides with my Philosophie der Freiheit. The content moves in an entirely different sphere. Bruno Wille became very widely known through his important Offenbarungen des Wachholderbaumes,⁷ a philosophical book written out of the most beautiful feeling for nature, permeated by the conviction that spirit speaks from every material existence. Wilhelm Bölsche is known through numerous popular writings on the natural sciences which are extraordinarily popular among the widest circles of readers.

[ 19 ] From this side came the founding of a Free Higher Institute, into which I was drawn. I was entrusted with the teaching of history. Bruno Wille took charge of philosophy, Bölsche of natural sciences, and Theodor Kappstein, a liberally minded theologian, the science of religion.

[ 20 ] A second foundation was the Giordano Bruno Union. In this the idea was to bring together such persons as were sympathetic toward a spiritual-monistic philosophy. Emphasis was placed upon the idea that there are not two world-principles – matter and spirit – but that spirit constitutes the sole principle of all existence. Bruno Wille inaugurated the Union with a very brilliant lecture based upon the saying of Goethe: “Never matter without spirit.” Unfortunately a slight misunderstanding arose between Wille and me after this lecture. My words following the lecture – that long after Goethe had coined this beautiful expression, he had supplemented it in impressive fashion, in that he had seen polarity and ascent as the concrete spiritual shapings in the actual spiritual activity in existence, and that in this way the general saying first received its full content – this remark of mine was interpreted as a reflection upon Wille's lecture, which, however, I had fully accepted in the sense he himself intended.

[ 21 ] But I brought upon myself the direct opposition of the leadership of the Giordano Bruno Union when I read a paper on monism. In this I laid stress upon the fact that the crude dualistic conception, “matter and spirit,” is really a creation of the most recent times, and that likewise only during the most recent centuries were spirit and nature brought into the opposition which the Giordano Bruno Union would oppose. Then I indicated how this dualism is opposed by scholastic monism. Even though scholasticism withdrew from human knowledge a part of existence and assigned this part to “faith,” yet scholasticism set up a world-system marked by a unified (monistic) constitution, from the Godhead and the divine all the way to the details of nature. I thus set even scholasticism higher than Kantianism.

[ 22 ] This paper of mine aroused the greatest excitement. It was supposed that I wished to open the road for Catholicism into the Union. Of the leading personalities, only Wolfgang Kirchbach and Martha Asmers stood by me. The rest could form no notion as to what I really meant to do with the “misunderstood scholasticism.” In any case, they were convinced that I was likely to bring the greatest confusion into the Giordano Bruno Union.

[ 23 ] I must call attention to this paper because it belongs to a time during which, according to the later views of many persons, I was a materialist. But at that time this materialist passed with many persons as the one who would swear afresh by medieval scholasticism.

[ 24 ] In spite of all this I was able later to deliver before the Giordano Bruno Union my basic anthroposophic lecture, which became the point of departure for my anthroposophic activity.

[ 25 ] In imparting to the public that which anthroposophy contains as knowledge of the spiritual world, decisions are necessary which are not altogether easy. The character of these decisions can best be understood if one glances at a single historical fact.

[ 26 ] In accordance with the quite differently constituted temper of mind of an earlier humanity, there has always been a knowledge of the spiritual world up to the beginning of the modern age, approximately until the fourteenth century. This knowledge, however, was quite different from anthroposophy, which is adapted to the conditions of cognition characterizing the present day.

[ 27 ] After the period mentioned, humanity could at first bring forth no knowledge of the spiritual world. Men could only confirm the “ancient knowledge,” which the mind had beheld in the form of pictures, and which was also available later only in symbolic-picture form.

[ 28 ] This “ancient knowledge” was practised in remote times only within the “mysteries.” It was imparted to those who had first been made ripe for it, the “initiates.” It was not to reach the public because there the tendency was too strong to use it in an unworthy manner. This practice has been maintained only by those later personalities who received the lore of the “ancient knowledge” and continued to foster it. They did this in the most restricted circles with men whom they had previously prepared.

[ 29 ] And thus it has continued even to the present time.

[ 30 ] Of the persons maintaining such a position in relation to spiritual knowledge whom I have encountered, I may select one who was active within the Viennese circle of Frau Lang to which I have referred but whom I met also in other circles with which I was associated in Vienna. This was Friedrich Eckstein, the distinguished expert in the “ancient knowledge.” While I was associated with Friedrich Eckstein, he had not written much. But what he did write was filled with the spirit. No one, however, sensed from his essays the intimate expert in the “ancient knowledge.” This was active in the background of his spiritual work. Long after life had removed me from this friend also, I read in a collection of his writings a very significant paper on the Bohemian Brothers.

[ 31 ] Friedrich Eckstein represented the earnest conviction that esoteric spiritual knowledge should not be publicly propagated like ordinary knowledge. He was not alone in this conviction; it was and is that of almost all experts in the “ancient wisdom.” To what extent this conviction of the guardians of the “ancient wisdom,” strongly enforced as a rule, was broken through in the Theosophical Society founded by H. P. Blavatsky – of this I shall have occasion to speak later.

[ 32 ] Friedrich Eckstein wished that, as “initiate in the ancient knowledge,” one should clothe what one treats publicly in the force which comes from this “initiation,” but that one should separate the exoteric strictly from the esoteric, which should remain within the most restricted circles of those who fully understood how to honour it.

[ 33 ] If I was to develop a public activity on behalf of spiritual knowledge, I had to determine to break with this tradition. I found myself faced by the requirements of the contemporary intellectual life. In the presence of these the preservation of mysteries such as were inevitable in ancient times was an impossibility. We live in the time which demands publicity wherever any sort of knowledge appears. The point of view favouring the preservation of mysteries is an anachronism. The sole and only possibility is that persons should be taught spiritual knowledge by stages, and that no one should be admitted to a stage at which the higher portions of this knowledge are to be imparted until he knows the lower. This, indeed, corresponds with the practice in lower and higher schools even of an ordinary sort.

[ 34 ] Moreover, I was under no obligation to anyone to guard mysteries, for I received nothing from the “ancient wisdom”; what I possess of spiritual knowledge is entirely the result of my own researches. When any knowledge has come to me, only then I set beside it whatever of the “ancient knowledge” has already been made public from any side, in order to point out the harmony in mood and, at the same time, the advance which is possible to contemporary research.

[ 35 ] So, after a certain point of time, it was quite clear to me that in coming before the public with spiritual knowledge I should be doing the right thing.

• 1. Luminous Days.
• 2. Werther the Jew.
• 3. Philosophy of Freedom through the Pure Means.
• 4. Society
• 5. The Coming Ones
• 6. Philosophy of Freedom through the Pure Means.
• 7. Revelations of the Juniper Tree.

Preliminary note: At the beginning of the evening's discussion, a question was asked about the third Copernican law. Rudolf Steiner's detailed answer is published in the volume “The Fourth Dimension”, GA 324a, pp. 177-189.

Rudolf Steiner: Now a series of other questions have been asked, to which I would like to refer only briefly, because some of them are nonsensical. Here, for example, this question:

What criteria can a non-clairvoyant use to distinguish whether communications from a clairvoyant originate from spiritual knowledge or from illusions?

Dear attendees, I would actually prefer to eliminate the word 'clairvoyance', which so many people use to do mischief with, like Count Keyserling recently. If such words do not give rise to mischief, then it does not matter if they appear in our literature, but with all that such people call 'clairvoyance', who would rather do anything than set out , which I also characterized in my lecture cycle on the “Limits of Knowledge”, I would rather use a different word for the real seeing of the spirit - seeing brightly, that is, seeing brightly. That is why I have tried to gradually eliminate this word everywhere in the newer editions of my books, which always causes confusion with all kinds of amateurish and charlatan-like stuff.

Now, if it is a single case of someone coming to you and saying that he is a psychic and telling you something he has seen, then you have no way of distinguishing whether he is telling you some kind of illusion or whether what he is saying is based on truth. You can't do that in an individual case; there is no universal guide for that. You can only, as a reasonable person, gain a judgment from the whole context of life, but also an almost completely certain judgment. You see, if some alleged psychic tells you all kinds of stuff and, when he talks about things of ordinary life, talks nonsense, then you can be pretty sure that what he tells you from the higher worlds is also nonsense. But if you find that a person has a healthy sense of external, physical reality, that he looks at external reality with a healthy mind, like other rational people, that he finds his way into it, that he orients himself to external reality, then when he speaks of things of the spiritual world, there is something that speaks for him, that is, not for him as a person, but for the correctness of his view. If, in addition, he presents what he says about the spiritual worlds in such a way that it is logical, then one can test the reality of the context without being clairvoyant. As I said, you cannot draw any conclusions from a single message, but from the context of a whole series of messages, you will, simply through an ability that every person has, even without being clairvoyant, come to understand what is meant by what someone says. Furthermore, a person who deserves to be called a clairvoyant today – but now in a higher sense – when a person speaks about the spiritual world as it must be done here in this place, then, my dear audience, he does not stop at telling things only from the higher worlds, but he always speaks at the same time about the things of this world, in which the higher worlds play a role. He speaks to you, for example, about how what one has experienced in the spiritual can be applied to medicine, to the kind of medicine that really needs to be studied. He does not speak of medical charlatanry, where a person is chosen by some Luciferic or Ahrimanic spirit and then dabbles and cures whatever comes to hand. It cannot be about anything like that. The only thing it can be about is the penetration of that which is physically real, but in which the spirit always lives, with the spirit. For materialism never understands the physical. And I believe that, for example, working in the social sphere could be one of the external reasons for proving the inner justification of what is being asserted here in spiritual terms.

So there is no externally abstract criterion, but only from the whole context of life can one know whether one is dealing with illusions or realities when it comes to the claims of the spiritual researcher. His spiritual research is certainly no illusion if he can descend into realities with them, if he is able to give something to the life that is allotted to man here between birth and death precisely through his spiritual science. For example, when I presented research results about higher worlds, people often objected to me, saying that I was starting from abstractions. Yes, but all that could be mere auto-suggestion, just as there are people who get a taste of lemon in their mouths just by thinking of lemonade, even if they don't get any lemonade. — I could only tell people: Of course, it is true that one can evoke all kinds of illusory hallucinations or visions through thought, but these are just illusions. You can indeed have the illusion through suggestion that you have a taste of lemonade, but whether the mere thought of lemonade will quench your thirst, I would doubt; you would still need the real lemonade for that.

Anyone who is completely involved in things, not outside of them, can distinguish between what is reality and what is merely thought, and for them it is clear that there are just as many differences in life for looking into the higher worlds as there are here in the physical world. I can even reveal to you, my dear audience, the criteria for determining whether something is a lie or the truth, which apply to the clairvoyant as well as to anyone else. The clairvoyant cannot test whether his observations are based on reality better or worse than the person to whom they are communicated, because he too must test them from the whole context of life, which one simply finds with common sense, even if one has common sense in ordinary life. Another person, if they have common sense, can always test the clairvoyant results.

We are not at all afraid of a scientific criticism of spiritual science, especially not if this scientific criticism is carried out with the utmost exactness and precision. What harms us is only the criticism of superficial people, those people with empty thoughts, with thought-shells. Such people, who are afflicted with mere thought-shells, like Count Hermann Keyserling, who has no will at all to go into the matter, then simply end up telling lies. In his latest book, Keyserling makes the very nice claim that Steiner's entire anthroposophy is actually just materialistic natural science elevated to the spiritual; this can be seen from the fact that Steiner started from Haeckel.

Now let us examine this utterly dishonest assertion in the light of what I wrote as a starting point in the introduction to Goethe's scientific writings. You see, dishonesty is actually always the height of mental dullness.

These things must be said, ladies and gentlemen. I always wait a long time before I am forced to say such a thing myself, and I actually only talk about these things when they have not been emphasized by others for a long time. Because after all, these things do not affect me at all. I cannot read Count Keyserling's books because I cannot find any thoughts in them. And I am used to people complaining. But today it is about something else. Today it is about the fact that we are indeed rapidly sailing into destruction if full clarity and courageous clarity are not established in this area. Today it is about the salvation or destruction of humanity, and today the pests must be sharply pointed out who try to drive out the necessary thoughts from people through such filth by saying that it is not necessary to undergo a spiritual development because what one can learn from something like the writing “How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds” is not needed by someone who is a gentleman and has a good upbringing.

Now, my dear attendees, at a time when such assertions can be made, the fire is burning, and it must be extinguished!

I would now like to quickly discuss another question:

What is anthroposophy's position on the use of hypnosis in medicine?

Well, dear attendees, all these things, hypnosis or suggestion and the like in therapy, always lead into an area that lies below that which we encompass with our ordinary day-consciousness. If I were to draw you a diagram quickly, it would look like this: (diagram missing)

If ordinary consciousness is here, the anthroposophical science in question strives upwards into a higher consciousness, into imaginative, inspired, intuitive consciousness. But one can also bring consciousness down to a lower level. This is already the case in ordinary dreaming; in deep sleep, in dreamless sleep, it is moved down even further. Now there are all kinds of intermediate states, and such a tuning down of consciousness actually transforms the human being into an Untermensch, in that his soul and spirit are so elevated that they cannot fully engage with the physical body and also cannot be conscious of themselves and the world, because the human being is not yet developed enough to have consciousness outside of the body. In this case, we are dealing with a demotion of the spiritual-mental to the etheric-physical plane, and then all the effects that can be brought about, which you are indeed familiar with, actually take place in a subhuman sphere. You downgrade the whole constitution of the person, the spiritual-soul-physical constitution of the person. And that is why such things are only to be applied when it comes to therapeutic issues. But even in the therapeutic area it is a matter of ensuring that they may only be applied by the person who understands the things – by which I do not want to claim that modern medicine, as it is practised today, is a good guide to understanding these things. But once these things are understood, they can of course be applied to the human organization in the same way as other poisons – because they are poisons.

So, in all these things, we are dealing with the fact that, therapeutically, we can resort to anything that can improve a person's state of health in a desirable way. However, we should not imagine that we are leading people into a higher sphere when we convey something to them where their consciousness, their ordinary consciousness, is completely shut out. Instead, we lead them into the subhuman, into the etheric-animalistic, not into the physical-animalistic but into the etheric-animalistic, if we put him into a state like hypnosis and if he is receptive to such a state. This lowering of consciousness is basically particularly loved today because the upward development into the spiritual worlds is perceived as something uncomfortable.

Here is another question: What is anthroposophy's position on healing magnetism?

Well, my dear audience, this can only be discussed if one can really treat things seriously. With a simple yes or no or with a simple sentence, such things cannot be treated if one has a scientific conscience. Today's healing magnetism – yes, one would not have to have learned about it in order not to know that there are a great many people working in it who have sought employment everywhere else, and when they have not found any anywhere else, they have become healing magnetizers. To demand spiritual-scientific explanations for such things is a bit much. But I would like to point out to you that these things must all be traced back to their elementary prerequisites. For example, there is the fact that for certain mental and physical conditions of the soul, the mere loving assurance contributes something to the healing process. Just think how much real therapeutic effect comes from genuine loving treatment of the sick person in one direction or another. Now imagine these things intensified, imagine loving treatment intensified to caressing treatment, and you have something that leads very strongly to what is healing magnetism. However, these are such imponderable things that they cannot be grasped in rough terms. It is entirely possible – depending on the case, it really depends on the how and not on the what – that the person who talks about these things, depending on whether he has the imponderables in mind or not, may just as well say something important or talk nonsense. So it is more important that one approaches these things only with a truly scientific conscience. And that is why I have always been careful to discuss these things publicly, for example, because some things are extremely colored when they are passed on.

Now, I would not want anything personal to come of it either, but anthroposophy must be something that really meets the necessary demands of our time, and one must not do anything that could in any way bring one into the danger of being a dilettante. It is very easy to fall into this amateurish neighborhood when dealing with these matters. One could say that healing magnetism is beneficial, depending on whether it occurs with knowledgeable, but now imponderable, genuine healers, or whether it occurs with people who are mere charlatans, who, after trying their hand at other fields, now also try their hand at the field of healing. Of course, as soon as the subject of healing magnetism was mentioned, before that it was suggestion, and now Christian Science is mentioned, which is asked about here:

How is it that Christian Science can heal if it merely suggests the mind?

Isn't it true that with Christian Science one must say approximately the same as with healing by magnetism, only in a somewhat different field. Whether a thing works or not does not depend on what we think about it. Because just imagine if you were to slap someone and you had the opinion that it was about some forces that don't even exist, the slap on the person's cheek will be exactly the same regardless of whether you have a false theory, a self-suggested theory, or something similar. When we speak of Christian Science, we are dealing with similar phenomena; you can also test these very similar phenomena in the field of education.

I have repeatedly spoken of the imponderables that operate from person to person and also applied them to the field of education. Suppose you want to explain the immortality of the soul to a child, the passing of the soul through the death of the human being, and you point to a butterfly pupa: that is, so to speak, the human body. The butterfly comes out: that is the soul. And you then apply this to the supersensible. You can now get two things. In your own state of mind, you can be a very clever, intelligent person who, of course, in this day and age does not believe that what you are describing with the butterfly chrysalis really has any other connection to immortality than as a symbol. The clever person makes it up; he does not believe in any connection himself, but says it to the child because the child is stupid and he is clever, because he makes something up that he presents as a comparison. That is one state of mind. The other state of mind is that of the spiritual researcher. He sees everywhere stages of an existence that is in polarity and intensification - words that Goethe already used. He looks at the chrysalis from which the butterfly crawls out, and he himself comes to believe that the butterfly crawling out is an image that the spiritual worlds are drawing for him. He is not a clever person in today's sense, he is not a clever person, but he is a person with a sense of reality. In reality, the deeds of the spirit are everywhere.

Now there is a difference in teaching: if you are a very clever person and want to make the child understand the matter through the invented symbol, you will generally achieve nothing. But if the picture lives in us, if we are imbued with the feeling that here the spirit of nature itself has drawn the image of the immortal soul in the emerging butterfly, then imponderables work from your soul to the soul of the child, then the child, because it receives something of life, also has something for life.

However, forces are at work from person to person that cannot be weighed with a scale or measured with a ruler, even though everything is set up according to measure, number and weight. And these things will still provide a rich contribution to what should enrich our lives, things that will be more meaningful for the salvation of humanity than some applications of science. If we look into these things, we will see that there are still quite other forces that will come to humanity precisely through the application of spiritual science. But for this to happen, on the one hand, true scientific conscientiousness must be taught, and on the other hand, the will must arise to penetrate into the spiritual worlds with this scientific conscientiousness.

I would like to conclude for today. We will then try, tomorrow, before you leave, my dear honored attendees, to present a summary in the evening, not so much in the form of questions as in the form of a lecture, as a farewell.

Today we will speak about the development of the causal body. We hold to the fact that on average, reincarnations happen in such a way that centuries pass between two incarnations. The causal body is initially at a lower level, then [after further incarnations] at a higher and ever higher level. The first incarnation of the human being, and thus the formation of the causal body, occurred in the third root race of our earth round. Before that, the immortal human spirits had not yet incarnated in the bodies we now wear, nor in similar bodies. We will talk about the previous conditions.

I would now like to show how development occurs. You can get an idea of the regular stages of development by looking at the Indian and European cultural epochs. The European sub-race is not at a higher or lower level than the Indian one – the Indian sub-race is more spiritual, the European one is more intellectual. We get the same content from spirituality that the Indian sub-race gets from intellectuality. We can grasp spiritual things today if we were previously incarnated in a spiritual race. What we saw spiritually at the time when the Genesis of the Old Testament was written can be more easily grasped intellectually today. That we are able to understand today what the causal body created in earlier centuries is because we were even more spiritual as human beings then; we were still able to see higher truths directly. If we look at the Indians and also the Jews of ancient times, we see that they grasped the truths spiritually; today the Jews have also lost the spiritual, and the Indians have become more materialistic. Earlier it was not the custom to give the truths in a rational form, as we do today, but everything was given figuratively; and that which was originally given in a pictorial way is the spiritual truth. Those who know the symbols can understand the spiritual.

Scholars argue about the biblical account of the seven days of creation and the myth of the Fall of Man. However, the myth of the Fall of Man describes nothing other than what happened in the third root race, during the Lemurian period: the transition from the asexual to the bisexual. Kama-Manas and the bisexuality of man belong together; Kama-Manas appears as the mind that is active, that is the one pole, the other pole is the bisexuality. The separation into two sexes and the appearance of the mind in Kama-Manas, that is what the Fall of Man myth of the Bible represents. Each and every one of the facts must have been alive in the minds of those who created this myth. The facts were told in high mythical language. In the Bible they are somewhat distorted; for the connoisseur it is clear where the content of this myth is distorted and how it must have originally been. |

We will see how the myth was given at a time when humanity was still more spiritual. Step by step, we can take on the myth of the Fall of Man and we will recognize the deep wisdom in this myth.

The serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said unto the woman...

The serpent symbol stands everywhere for the initiate. The one who is initiated in a certain way and brings a content to humanity from his initiation was called “serpent”. The serpent is the symbol of the one who is able to guide humanity through Kama-Manas. All that was manasic within the dense Earth was less “cunning”, so the serpent said to the woman:

... Yes, should God have said:
you shall not eat from every tree in the garden? (Genesis 3, 1)

The trees represent what people should work with Kama-Manas, thereby advancing within the earth, within the physical matter. The mind culture is meant, which is to work on what grows and thrives within the earth.

And the woman said to the serpent: We may eat fruit of the trees of the garden. But of the fruit of the tree which is in the middle of the garden, God said: You shall not eat of it, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.

As long as the human spirit had not embodied itself, there was no death and also not the present-day reproduction. Reproduction in the earlier human races happened in a different way: one body released the other. It was a differentiation without fertilization. There was no birth and death; only an attracting and repelling in elective affinity took place. The serpent, the master of Kama-Manas, could say: “When you acquire Kama-Manas, you eat of the tree, then you undergo a development.” That planet spirit, who is called Jehovah and who formerly led humanity alone, knew what would happen if Manas mixed with Kama through the serpent. When that happened, then men must also die.

And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die:<5> for God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.

You shall not surely die, but your eyes shall be opened –: that is, you will have to develop the Manas through Kama. You will have to see everything through the eyes and then acquire knowledge. – Before that, people did not know what good and evil was, because they were guided from above.

And the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree desirable to make one wise; and she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.

Then the eyes of both of them were opened...

Then the humans moved into the bodies and were able to observe through the sensory organs.

... and they realized that they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons. (Genesis 3, 6-7)

Previously, they could not perceive this, only now did they become “naked”. Physical matter shows the nature associated with kama manas, and the physical matter of “clothing” is the result of kama manas. Previously, man had a higher, finer matter, so he had no need to be ashamed. He had to make the physical matter suitable for his higher nature first. God did not make Kama, but Manas. But man was ashamed and made clothes.

And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden when the day had become cool. (Genesis 3, 8)

Until then, the planet spirit had guided people. Jehovah is the God of physical nature, in the “Secret Doctrine” the God of procreation, a moon god. Mrs. Blavatsky was held against her will for correctly characterizing Jehovah. Man receives sexuality from the cosmos through Jehovah.

And the man hid himself and his wife from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.

And the Lord God called to the man, saying, “Where are you?” And he said, “I heard your voice in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.” (Genesis 3, 8-10)

In the beginning, people could not hide at all because Jehovah was guiding them. The Kabbalah says this much more clearly. In the original times, the secret doctrine was only given figuratively. “Adam-Kadmon” means the sexless Adam. Now the intellectual nature is within man, whereas before it was outside. Now man hides it in his inner nature, he hides it from outer wisdom.

And he said: Who told you that you are naked? Did you not eat of the tree, of which I commanded you, you should not eat of it?

Then Adam said: The woman whom you have joined me gave me of the tree, and I ate. (Genesis 3, 11-12)

The single-sex being has become a two-sex being. This was what had enabled the snake to lead humans down the path of Kama-Manas.

Then the Lord God said to the woman, “Why have you done this?”

And the woman said, “The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.” So the Lord God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this, be cursed more than all cattle and all wild beasts (Genesis 3, 13-14)

On thy belly shall ye creep: and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life.

To creep on one's belly and eat dust means nothing other than: everything that can be achieved by Kama-Manas can be achieved by man within earthly development.

And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed. (Genesis 3, 15)

From the middle of the second race until the middle of the sixth, the polarity between seed and mind is taken over by animal sexuality. The mind can never want what sexuality wants.

The man shall crush your head, and you shall strike his heel.

Hostile forces will come from here and there. One pole is the kama-manasic forces, the other pole is the kamic forces. A new kind of unhappiness entered that had not been there before, and that is kamic.

And to the woman he said: I will greatly multiply your pain and your conception; in pain you shall bring forth children; and your desire shall be to your husband, and he shall rule over you.

This means that a new Kamic current is emerging. Lust and displeasure is essentially the nature of the Kamic. Man and woman always mean in the esoteric language the two forces: the man means the outer force, the woman the inner soul. 'Man and woman therefore mean outer energy and inner, soully power of mind. As long as man is on this physical path, the soul man must submit to the physical man. Consciousness must submit to the laws of physical development, that is, “He shall be your master”.

And to Adam he said: Because you have hearkened to the voice of your wife and eaten of the tree of which I commanded you saying: Thou shalt not eat thereof, accursed be the ground on your account; with toil shalt thou eat its yield all the days of thy life.

With sorrow shalt thou eat thy bread —: Jehovah is the planetary spirit whose rule extends only as far as Kama-Manas. A new regime is emerging. Therefore, Jehovah cannot allow Kama-Manas to enter into development. He therefore says, “I must create a cosmic counterbalance, because you obeyed the voice of your wife, the consciousness that has been filled with Kama-Manas, and ate of the knowledge of Kama-Manas, of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat. So be the field cursed for your sake -: thus the physical earth. At that time it was given to man as a self-evident gift, and now he must conquer it bit by bit. In the past, what animated man was more dissolved. “Cursed” means: made independent, depressed. He could no longer see the finer matter. Sorrow: that is a new unhappiness.

Thorns and thistles shall it bring you, and you shall eat the herb of the field.

In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for from it you were taken. For dust you are and to dust you shall return.

But he must become spiritual. He must work in the physical world until he has spiritualized himself again.

And Adam called his wife's name Eve, because she is a mother of all living. (Genesis 3, 20)

And from that hour on, Adam called his consciousness Eve, the mother of everything that man creates on earth, the mother of everything that man has developed on this path of evolution. And that will be the Eve, the kama-manasic one.

And the Lord God made tunics of skins for the man and his wife, and clothed them. (Genesis 3, 21)

He gave the physical-spiritual people from the outside what they needed to get ahead.

And the Lord God said, “Behold, Adam has become one of us, knowing good and evil.” (Genesis 3:22)

Remember the image I used, where the light source is in the center and the balls around it reflect the light. Now the balls themselves are glowing, and God says: Before you were only a reflection of me; you were only the thought I sent out, now you have become independent beings, living, detached, independent beings.

But now, lest he reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever! So the Lord God drove him out from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken.

Adam was chased out of the Garden of Eden. He was no longer allowed to stay there; he was no longer allowed to eat from the tree of immortality as he could do before; he had to acquire another nourishment for himself. The Manasic does not pass through the gate of birth and death. Disembodied wisdom represents the tree of life. Now man became kamayanic, and now he must go through birth and death. There are two different trees in paradise, of which he was allowed to eat from one. Now after the fall he should no longer do so. With Kama-Manas he has lost the possibility of eating from this immortality.

So the Lord God drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the Garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.

The Cherub is the planetary spirit, signifying Manas, or immortal life; not signifying knowledge through Kama-Manas. The Cherub standing by Jehovah was placed before the Garden of Eden, that man should not penetrate into that Garden wherein is to be attained Truth in its primeval form.

Now imagine the development of humanity before the time of the third root race. It was the Dzyan-Chohan who guided them. Through being guided by him, they had access to wisdom. Man was directly guided spiritually, not through eyes, ears or inner organs. But now, when he had become kama-mana, the cherub stood before man and would not let him approach the tree of life. Man must first have passed through all kinds of births. This will continue to be the case until he has acquired the original immortality again.

The people of the third, fourth and even the fifth race still had a certain spiritual life; today we are mainly kama-manasische people, who are only endowed with a small spiritual influence. But we have already reached the lowest point, and theosophy, the theosophical movement, is intended to bring back the influence of spirituality. In the past, truths could not be taught in a rational form, so everything was given in images; then people became aware of higher knowledge. Those who still have some of the earlier spirituality are difficult to understand today; they express many things in sentences that are difficult to understand. You have to guess what the leader wants to say, because everything is only expressed figuratively. But it is the same thing that is to be expressed in Theosophy today. We could not interpret the Fall of Man in such a spiritual way if we had not received the wisdom from elsewhere. In the past, it was acquired mythically; today it is revealed to us through the advanced development of our causal body. In later stages of development, it will be revealed to you as a manasic wisdom.

Wherever we, as human beings, have striven for knowledge, whether as mystics or realists or in any way at all, the acquisition of self-knowledge has been demanded of us. But as has been repeatedly emphasised on other occasions, self-knowledge is by no means as easy to achieve as many people believe—anthroposophists sometimes among them. The anthroposophist should be constantly aware of the hindrances he will encounter in his efforts. But the acquisition of self-knowledge is absolutely essential if we are to reach a worthy goal in world-existence and if our actions are to be worthy of us as members of humanity.

Let us ask ourselves the question: Why is the achievement of self-knowledge so difficult? Man is a very complicated being. If we mean to speak truly of his inner life, his life of soul, we shall not begin by regarding it as something simple and elementary. We shall rather have the patience and perseverance, the will, to penetrate more deeply into the marvellous creation of the Divine-Spiritual Powers known to us as Man.

Before we investigate the nature of self-knowledge, two aspects of the life of the human soul may present themselves to us. Just as the magnet has North and South poles, just as light and darkness are present in the world, so there are two poles in man's life of soul. These two poles become evident when we observe a person placed in two contrasting situations. Suppose we are watching someone who is entirely absorbed in the contemplation of some strikingly beautiful and impressive natural phenomenon. We see how still he is standing, moving neither hand nor foot, never turning his eyes away from the spectacle presented to him, and we are aware that inwardly he is picturing his environment. That is one situation. Another is the following: a man is walking along the street and feels that someone has insulted him. Without thinking, he is roused to anger and gives vent to it by striking the person who insulted him. We are there witnessing a manifestation of forces springing from anger, a manifestation of impulses of will, and it is easy to imagine that if the action had been preceded by thought no blow need have been struck. We have now pictured two contrasting situations: in the one there is only ideation, a process in the life of thought from which all conscious will is absent; in the other there is no thought, no ideation, and immediate expression is given to an impulse of will. Here we have examples of the two extremes of human behaviour. The first pole is complete surrender to contemplation, to thought, in which the will has no part; the second pole is the impelling force of will without thought. These facts are revealed simply by observation of external life.

We can go into these things more deeply and we come then into spheres in which we can find our bearings only by summoning the findings of occult investigation to our aid. Here another polarity confronts us—that of sleeping and waking. From the elementary concepts of Anthroposophy we know that in waking life the four members of a man's being—physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego—are organically and actively interwoven, but that in sleep the physical and etheric bodies remain in bed, while the astral body and ego are outpoured into the great world bordering on physical existence. These facts could also be approached from a different point of view. We might ask: what is there to be said about ideation, contemplation, thinking—and about the will and its impulses on the one hand during waking life and during sleep on the other?

When we penetrate more deeply into this question it becomes evident that in his present physical existence man is, in a certain sense, always asleep, Only there is a difference between sleep during the night and sleep during the day. Of this we can be convinced in a purely external way, for we know that we can wake in the occult sense during the day, that is to say, one can become clairvoyant and see into the spiritual world. The physical body in its ordinary state is asleep to what is then and there happening and we can rightly speak of an awakening of our spiritual senses. In the night, of course, we are asleep in the normal way. It can therefore be said: ordinary sleep is sleep as regards the outer physical world; daytime consciousness at the present time is sleep as regards the spiritual world.

These facts can be considered in yet another light. On deeper scrutiny we realise that in the ordinary waking condition of physical life, man has, as a rule, very little power or control over his will and its impulses. The will is very detached from daily life. Only consider how little of all you do from morning to evening is really the outcome of your own thinking, of your personal resolutions. When someone knocks at the door and you say “Come in!”, that cannot be called a decision of your own thinking and will. If you are hungry and seat yourself at a table, that cannot be called a decision made by the will, because it is occasioned by your circumstances, by the needs of your organism. Try to picture your daily life and you will find how little the will is directly influenced from the centre of your being. Why is this the case? Occultism shows us that in respect of his will man actually sleeps by day, that is to say he is not in the real sense present in his will-impulses at all. We may evolve better and better concepts and ideas; or we may become more highly moral, more cultured individuals, but we can do nothing as regards the will. By cultivating better thoughts we can work indirectly upon the will but as far as life is concerned we can do nothing directly to it, for in the waking life of day, our will is influenced only in an indirect way, namely through sleep. When we are asleep we do not think; ideation passes over into a state of sleep. The will, however, awakes, permeates our organism from outside, and invigorates it. We feel strengthened in the morning because what has penetrated into our organism is of the nature of will. That we are not aware of this activity of the will becomes comprehensible when we remember that all conceptual activity ceases when we ourselves are asleep. To begin with, therefore, this stimulus shall be given for further contemplation, further meditation. The more progress you make in self-knowledge, the more you will find confirmation of the truth of the words that man sleeps in respect of his will when he is awake and sleeps in respect of his conceptual life when he is asleep. The life of will sleeps by day; the life of thought sleeps by night.

Man is unaware that the will does not sleep during the night because he only knows how to be awake in his life of thought. The will does not sleep during the night but it then works as it were in a fiery element, works upon his body in order to restore what has been used up by day.

Thus there are two poles in man, the life of observation and ideation, and the impulses of will; and man is related in entirely opposite ways to these two poles. The whole life of soul moves in various nuances between these two poles, and we shall come nearer to understanding it by bringing this microcosmic life of soul into relation with the higher worlds.

From what has been said we have learnt that the life of thought and ideation is one of the poles of man's life of soul. This life of thought is something which seems unreal to materialistically minded people. Do we not often hear it said: “Oh, ideas and thoughts are only ideas and thoughts!” This is intended to imply that if someone has [a piece] of bread or meat in his hand it is a reality because it can be eaten, but a thought is only a thought, it is not a reality. Why is this said? It is because what man calls his thoughts are related to what thoughts really are as a shadow-image is to the actual thing. The shadow-image of a flower points you to the flower itself, to the reality. So it is with thoughts. Human thinking is the shadowing forth of ideas and beings belonging to a higher world, the world we call the Astral plane. And you represent thinking rightly to yourself when you picture the human head thus—it is not absolutely correct but simply diagrammatic. In the head are thoughts but these thoughts must be pictured as living beings on the Astral plane. Beings of the most varied kinds are at work there in the form of teeming concepts and activities which cast their shadow-images into men, and these processes are reflected in the human head as thinking.

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

As well as the life of thought in the human soul, there is also the life of feeling. Feelings fall into two categories: those of pleasure and sympathy and those of displeasure and antipathy. The former are aroused by good deeds, benevolent deeds; antipathy is aroused by evil, malevolent deeds. Here there is something more than and different from, the mere forming of concepts. We form concepts of things irrespectively of any other factor. But our soul experiences sympathy or antipathy only in respect of what is beautiful and good, or what is ugly and evil. Just as everything that takes place in man in the form of thoughts points to the Astral plane, so everything connected with sympathy or antipathy points to the realm we call Lower Devachan. Processes in the Heavenly World, or Devachan, are projected, mainly into our breast, as feelings of sympathy or antipathy for what is beautiful or ugly, for what is good or evil. So that in our feelings for the moral-aesthetic element, we bear within our souls shadow-reflections of the Heavenly World or Lower Devachan.

There is still a third province in the life of the human soul which must be strictly distinguished from the mere preference for good deeds. There is a difference between standing by and taking pleasure in witnessing some kindly deed and setting the will in action and actually performing some such deed. I will call pleasure in good deeds or displeasure in evil deeds the aesthetic element as against the moral element that impels a man to perform some good deed. The moral element is at a higher level than the purely aesthetic; mere pleasure or displeasure is at a lower level than the will to do something good or bad. In so far as our soul feels constrained to give expression to moral impulses, these impulses are the shadow-images of Higher Devachan, of the Higher Heavenly World.

It is easy to picture these three stages of activity of the human soul—the purely intellectual (thoughts, concepts), the aesthetic (pleasure or displeasure), and the moral (revealed in impulses to good or bad deeds)—as microcosmic images of the three realms which in the Macrocosm, the great Universe, lie one above the other. The Astral world is reflected in the world of thought; the Devachanic world is reflected in the aesthetic sphere of pleasure and displeasure; and the Higher Devachanic world is reflected as morality.

 Thoughts: Shadow-images of Beings of the Astral Plane (Waking) Sympathy and Antipathy: Shadow-images of Beings of Lower Devachan (Dreaming) Moral Impulses: Shadow-images of Beings of Higher Devachan (Sleeping) 

If we connect this with what was said previously concerning the two poles of the soul-life, we shall take the pole of intellect to be that which dominates the waking life, the life in which man is mentally awake. During the day he is awake in respect of his intellect; during sleep he is awake in respect of his will. It is because at night he is asleep in respect of intellect that he is unaware of what he is happening with his will. The truth is that what we call moral principles, moral impulses, are working indirectly into the will. And in point of fact man needs the life of sleep in order that the moral impulses he takes into himself through the life of thought can become active and effective. In his ordinary life today man is capable of accomplishing what is right only on the plane of intellect; he is less able to accomplish anything on the moral plane for there he is dependent upon help coming from the Macrocosm.

What is already within us can bring about the further development of intellectuality, but the Gods must come to our aid if we are to acquire greater moral strength. We go to sleep in order that we may plunge into the Divine Will where the intellect does not intervene and where Divine Forces transform into the power of will the moral principles we accept, where they instill into our will that which we could otherwise receive only into our thoughts.

Between these two poles, that of the will which wakes by night and of the intellect which is awake by day, lies the sphere of aesthetic appreciation which is continuously present in man. During the day man is not fully awake—at least only the most prosaic, pedantic individuals are always fully awake in waking life. We must always be able to dream a little even by day when we are awake; we must be able to give ourselves up to the enjoyment of art, of poetry, or of some other activity that is not concerned wholly with crass reality. Those who can give themselves up in this way form a connection with something that can enliven and invigorate the whole of existence. To give oneself up to such imaginings is like a dream making its way into waking life. Into the life of sleep you know well that dreams enter; these dreams in the usual sense, dreams which permeate sleep-consciousness. Human beings need also to dream by day if they do not wish to lead an arid, empty, unhealthy waking life. Dreaming takes place during sleep at night in any case and no proof of this is required. Midway between the two poles of night dreaming and day dreaming is the condition that can come to expression in fantasy.

So here again there is a threefold life of soul. The intellectual element in which we are really awake brings us shadow-images of the Astral Plane when by day we give ourselves up to a thought—wherein the most fruitful ideas for daily life and great inventions originate. Then during sleep, when we dream, these dreams play into our life of sleep and shadow-images from Lower Devachan are reflected into us. And when we work actively during sleep, impressing morality into our will—we cannot be aware of this actual process but certainly we can of its effects—when we are able to imbue our life of thoughts during the night with the influence of Divine Spiritual Powers, then the impulses we receive are reflections from Higher Devachan, the Higher Heavenly World. These reflections are the moral impulses and feelings which are active within us and lead to the recognition that human life is vindicated only when we place our thoughts at the service of the good and the beautiful, when we allow the very heart's blood of Divine Spiritual life to stream through our intellectual activities, permeating them with moral impulses.

The life of the human soul as presented here, first from external, exoteric observation and then from observation of a more mystical character is revealed by deeper (occult) investigation. The processes that have been described in their more external aspect can also be perceived in man through clairvoyance. When a man stands in front of us today in his waking state and we observe him with the eye of clairvoyance, certain rays of light are seen streaming continually from the heart towards the head. Within the head these rays play around the organ known in anatomy as the pineal gland. These streamings arise because human blood, which is a physical substance, is perpetually resolving itself into etheric substance. In the region of the heart there is a continual transformation of the blood into this delicate etheric substance which streams upwards towards the head and glimmers around the pineal gland. This process—the etherisation of the blood—can be perceived in the human being all the time during his waking life.

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

The occult observer is able to see a continual streaming from outside into the brain, and also in the reverse direction, from the brain to the heart. Now these streams, which in sleeping man come from outside, from cosmic space, from the Macrocosm, and flow into the inner constitution of the physical body and etheric bodies lying in the bed, reveal something remarkable when they are investigated. These rays vary greatly in different individuals. Sleeping human beings differ very drastically from one another, and if those who are a little vain only knew how badly they betray themselves to occult observation when they go to sleep during public gatherings, they would try their level best not to let this happen!

Moral qualities are revealed distinctly in the particular colouring of the streams which flow into human beings during sleep; in an individual of lower moral principles, the streams are quite different from what is observable in an individual of noble principles. Endeavours to dissemble are useless. In the face of the higher Cosmic Powers, no dissembling is possible. In the case of a man who has only a slight inclination towards moral principles the rays streaming into him are a brownish red in colour—various shades tending toward brownish red. In a man of high moral ideals the rays are lilac-violet in colour. At the moment of waking or of going off to sleep a kind of struggle takes place in the region of the pineal gland between what streams down from above and what streams upward from below. When a man is awake the intellectual element streams upwards from below in the form of currents of light, and what is of moral-aesthetic nature streams downwards from above. At the moment of waking or of going off to sleep, these two currents meet, and in the man of low morality a violent struggle between the two streams takes place in the region of the pineal gland. In the man of high morality there is around the pineal gland as it were a little sea of light. Moral nobility is revealed when a calm glow surrounds the pineal gland at these moments. In this way a man's moral disposition is reflected in him, and this calm glow of light often extends as far as the heart. Two streams can therefore be perceived in man—the one Macrocosmic, the other, Microcosmic.

To estimate the significance of how these two streams meet in man is possible only by considering on the one hand what was said previously in a more external way about the life of the soul and how this life reveals the threefold polarity of the intellectual, the aesthetic and the moral elements that stream downwards from above, from the brain toward the heart; and if, on the other hand, we grasp the significance of what was said about turning our attention to the corresponding phenomenon in the Macrocosm. This corresponding phenomenon can be described today as the result of the most scrupulously careful occult investigation of recent years, undertaken by individuals among genuine Rosicrucians. These investigations have shown that something similar to what has been described in connection with the Microcosm also takes place in the Macrocosm. You will understand this more fully as time goes on.

Just as in the region of the human heart the blood is continually being transformed into etheric substance, a similar process takes place in the Macrocosm. We understand this when we turn our minds to the Mystery of Golgotha—to the moment when the blood flowed from the wounds of Jesus Christ.

This blood must not be regarded simply as chemical substance, but by reason of all that has been said concerning the nature of Jesus of Nazareth it must be recognised as something altogether unique. When it flowed from His wounds, a substance was imparted to our Earth, which in uniting with it, constituted an Event of the greatest possible significance for all future ages of the Earth's evolution—and it could take place only once. What came of this blood in the ages that followed? Nothing different from what otherwise takes place in the heart of man. In the course of Earth evolution this blood passes through a process of “etherisation.” And just as our human blood streams upwards from the heart as ether, so since the Mystery of Golgotha the etherised blood of Christ Jesus has been present in the ether of the earth. The etheric body of the Earth is permeated by the blood—now transformed—which flowed on Golgotha. This is supremely important. If what has thus come to pass through Christ Jesus had not taken place, man's condition on the Earth could only have been as previously described. But since the Mystery of Golgotha it has always been possible for the etheric blood of Christ to flow together with the streamings from below upward, from heart to head.

Because the etherised blood of Jesus of Nazareth is present in the etheric body of the Earth, it accompanies the etherised human blood streaming upwards from the heart to the brain, so that not only those streams of which I spoke earlier meet in man, but the human blood-stream unites with the blood-stream of Christ Jesus. A union of these two streams can, however, come about only if a person is able to unfold true understanding of what is contained in the Christ Impulse. Otherwise there can be no union; the two streams then mutually repel each other, thrust each other away. In every epoch of Earth evolution understanding must be acquired in the form suitable for that epoch. At the time when Christ Jesus lived on Earth, preceding events were rightly understood by those who came to His forerunner, John, and were baptised by him according to the rite described in the Gospels. They received baptism in order that their sin, that is to say, the karma of their previous lives—karma which had come to an end—might be changed; and in order that they might realise that the most powerful Impulse in Earth evolution was about to descend into a physical body. But the evolution of humanity progresses and in our present age what matters is that people should recognise the need for the knowledge contained in Spiritual Science and be able so to fire the streams flowing from heart to brain that this knowledge can be understood.

If this comes to pass, individuals will be able to receive and comprehend the event that has its beginning in the Twentieth Century: this event is the appearance of the Christ as an Etheric Being in contradistinction to the Physical Christ of Palestine. For we have now reached the point of time when the Etheric Christ enters into the life of the Earth and will become visible—at first to a small number of individuals through a form of natural clairvoyance. Then in the course of the next three thousand years, He will become visible to greater and greater numbers of people. This will inevitably come to pass in the natural course of development. That it will come to pass is as true as were the achievements of electricity in the nineteenth century. A number of individuals will see the Etheric Christ and will themselves experience the event that took place at Damascus. But this will depend upon such men learning to be alert to the moment when Christ draws near to them. In only a few decades from now it will happen, particularly to those who are young—already preparation is being made for this—that some individual here or there has certain experiences. If he has sharpened his vision through having assimilated Anthroposophy, he may become aware that suddenly someone has come near to help him, to make him alert to this or that. The truth is that Christ has come to him, although he believes that what he saw is a physical man. He will come to realise that what he saw was a super-sensible being, because it immediately vanishes. Many a human being will have this experience when sitting silent in his room, heavy-hearted and oppressed, not knowing which way to turn. The door will open, and the etheric Christ will appear and speak words of consolation to him. The Christ will become a living Comforter to men. However strange it may as yet seem, it is true nevertheless that many a time when people—even in considerable numbers—are sitting together, not knowing what to do, and waiting, they will see the Etheric Christ. He will Himself be there, will confer with them, will make His voice heard in such gatherings. These times are approaching, and the positive, constructive element now described will take real effect in the evolution of mankind.

No word shall be said here against the great advances made by culture in our day; these achievements are essential for the welfare and the freedom of men. But whatever can be gained in the way of outer progress in mastering the forces of nature, is something small and insignificant compared with the blessing bestowed upon the individual who experiences the awakening soul through Christ, the Christ who will now be operative in human culture and its concerns. Men will thereby acquire forces that make for unification. In very truth Christ brings constructive forces into human culture and civilisation.

If we look into early post-Atlantean times, we would find that men built their dwelling places by methods very different from those used in modern life. In those days they made use of all kinds of growing things. Even when building palaces they summoned nature to their aid by utilizing plants interlaced with branches of trees and so on, whereas today men must build with broken fragments. All the culture of the external world is contrived with the aid of products of fragmentation. And in the course of the coming years you will realise even more clearly how much in our civilised life is the outcome of destruction.

Light itself is being destroyed in this post-Atlantean age of the Earth's existence, which until the time of Atlantis was a progressive process. Since then it has been a process of decay.* What is light? Light decays and the decaying light is electricity. What we know as electricity is light that is being destroyed in matter. And the chemical force that undergoes a transformation in the process of Earth evolution is magnetism. Yet a third force will become active and if electricity seems to work wonders today, this third force will affect civilisation in a still more miraculous way. The more of this force we employ, the faster the earth will tend to become a corpse and its spiritual part prepare for the Jupiter embodiment. Forces have to be applied for the purpose of destruction, in order that man may become free of the Earth and that the Earth's body may fall away. As long as the earth was involved in progressive evolution, no such destruction took place, for the great achievements of electricity can only serve a decaying Earth. Strange as this sounds, it must gradually become known. By understanding the process of evolution we shall learn to assess our culture at its true value. We shall also learn that it is necessary for the Earth to be destroyed, for otherwise the spiritual could not become free. We shall also learn to value what is positive, namely the penetration of spiritual forces into our existence on Earth.

* See also the section at the end of the text, containing answers given by Dr. Steiner to questions.

Thus we realise what a tremendous advance was signified by the fact that Christ lived for three years on the Earth in a human body specially prepared in order that He might be visible to physical eyes. Through what came to pass during those three years men have been made ready to behold the Christ who will move among them in an etheric body, who will participate in earthly life as truly and effectively as did the Physical Christ in Palestine. If men observe such happenings with undimmed senses they will know that there is an etheric body that will move about in the physical world, but is the only etheric body able to work in the physical world as a human physical body works. It will differ from a physical body in this respect only, that it can be in two, three, nay even in a hundred, a thousand places at the same time. This is possible only for an etheric, not for a physical form. What will be accomplished in humanity through this further advance is that the two poles of which I have spoken, the intellectual and the moral, will more and more become one; they will merge into unity. This will come about because in the course of the next millennia men will become aware of the presence of the Etheric Christ in the world; more and more they will be influenced in waking life too by the direct working of the Good from the spiritual world. Whereas at the present time, the will is asleep by day, and man is only able to influence it indirectly through thought, in the course of the next millennia, through the power which from our time onwards is working in us under the aegis of Christ, it will come about that the deeds of men in waking consciousness too can be directly productive of Good.

The dream of Socrates, that virtue can be taught, will come true; more and more it will be possible on Earth not only for the intellect to be stimulated and energized by this teaching but for moral impulses to be spread abroad. Schopenhauer said, “To preach morality is easy; to establish it is very difficult.” Why is this? Because no morality has yet been spread by preaching. It is quite possible to recognise moral principles and yet not abide by them. For most people the Pauline saying holds good, that the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. This will change, because the moral fire streaming from the figure of Christ will intensify recognition of the need for moral impulses. Man will transform the earth by feeling with ever-increasing strength that morality is an essential part of it. In the future, to be immoral will be possible only for individuals who are goaded in this direction, who are possessed by evil demons, by Ahrimanic, Asuric Powers and more-over aspire to be so.

In time to come there will be on Earth a sufficient number of individuals who teach morality and at the same time sustain its principles; but there will also be those who by their own free decision surrender themselves to the evil Powers and thus enable an excess of evil to be pitted against a good humanity. Nobody will be forced to do this; it will lie in the free will of each individual.

Then will come the epoch when the Earth passes into conditions of which, as in so much else, Oriental Occultism and Mysticism alone give some idea. The moral atmosphere will by then have gathered strength. For many thousands of years Oriental Mysticism has spoken of this epoch, and since the coming of Gautama Buddha it has spoken with special emphasis about that future condition when the earth will be bathed in a “moral-ether-atmosphere.” Ever since the time of the ancient Rishis it was the great hope of Oriental Mysticism that this moral impulse would come to the Earth from Vishva-Karman or, as Zarathustra proclaimed, from Ahura Mazdao. Thus Oriental Mysticism foresaw that this moral impulse, this moral atmosphere, would come to the Earth from the Being we call the Christ. And it was upon Him, upon Christ, that the hopes of Oriental Mysticism were set.

Oriental Mysticism was able to picture the consequences of that event but not the actual form it would take. The mind could picture that within a period of 5,000 years after the great Buddha achieved Enlightenment, pure Akashic forms, bathed in fire, lit by the sun, would appear in the wake of One beyond the ken of Oriental Mysticism. A wonderful picture in very truth: that something would happen to make it possible for the Sons of Fire and of Light to move about the Earth, not in physically embodiment but as pure Akashic forms within the Earth's moral atmosphere. But then, so it was said, in 5,000 years after Gautama Buddha's Enlightenment, the Teacher will also be there to make known to men what the nature of these wonderful forms of pure Fire and Light are. This teacher—the Maitreya Buddha—will appear 3,000 years after our present era and will speak of the Christ Impulse.

Thus Oriental Mysticism unites with the Christian knowledge of the West to form a wonderfully beautiful unity. It is also disclosed that he who will appear three thousand years after our era as the Maitreya Buddha will have incarnated again and again on the Earth as a Bodhisattva, as the successor of Gautama Buddha. One of his incarnations was that of Jeshu ben Pandira, who lived a hundred years before the Christian era. The being who incarnated in Jeshu ben Pandira is he who will one day become the Maitreya Buddha, and who from century to century returns ever and again in a body of flesh, not yet as Buddha, but as Bodhisattva. Even now there proceeds from him who later on will be the Maitreya Buddha, the most significant teachings concerning the Christ Being and the Sons of Fire—the Agnishvattas—of Indian Mysticism.

The indications by which the Being who is to become the Maitreya Buddha can be recognised are common to all genuine Eastern mysticism and to Christian gnosis. The Maitreya Buddha who, in contrast to the Sons of Fire, will appear in a physical body as Bodhisattva, can be recognised by the fact that in the first instance his early development gives no intimation of the nature of the individuality within him. Only those possessed of understanding will recognise the presence of a Bodhisattva in such a human being between the ages of thirty and thirty-three, and not before. Something akin to a change of personality then takes place. The Maitreya Buddha will reveal his identity to humanity in the thirty-third year of his life. As Christ Jesus began His mission in His thirtieth year, so do the Bodhisattvas, who will continue to proclaim the Christ Impulse, reveal themselves—in the thirty-third year of their lives. And the Maitreya Buddha himself, as transformed Bodhisattva, speaking in powerful words of which no adequate idea can be given at the present time, will proclaim the great secrets of existence. He will speak in a language that has first to be created, for no human being to-day could formulate words such as those in which the Maitreya Buddha will address humanity. The reason why men cannot be addressed in this way at the present time is that the physical instrument for this form of speech does not yet exist. The teachings of the Enlightened One will not stream into men as teachings only, but will pour moral impulses into their souls. Words such as will then be spoken cannot yet be uttered by a physical larynx; in our time they can be present only in the spiritual worlds.

Anthroposophy is the preparation for everything that the future holds in store. Those who take the process of man's evolution seriously resolve not to allow the soul's development to come to a standstill but to ensure that this development will eventually enable the spiritual part of the Earth to become free, leaving the grosser part to fall away like a corpse—for men could frustrate the whole process. Those who desire evolution to succeed must acquire understanding of the life of the spirit through what we to-day call Anthroposophy. The cultivation of Anthroposophy thus becomes a duty; knowledge becomes something that we actually feel, something towards which we have responsibility. When we are inwardly aware of this responsibility and have this resolve, when the mysteries of the world arouse in us the wish to become Anthroposophists, then our feeling is true and right. But Anthroposophy must not be something that merely satisfies our curiosity; it must rather be something without which we cannot live. Only then are our feelings what they ought to be, only then do we live as building stones in that great work of construction which must be carried out in human souls and can embrace all mankind.

Anthroposophy is a revelation of world-happenings which will confront the men of the future, will confront our own souls whether still in the physical body or in the life between death and a new birth. The coming changes will affect us, no matter whether we are still living in the physical body or whether it has been laid aside. Understanding of these events must however be acquired during life in the physical body if they are to take effect after death. To those who acquire some understanding of the Christ while they are still living in the physical body, it will make no difference, when the moment comes for vision of the Christ, whether or not they have already passed through the gate of death. But if those who now reject any understanding of the Christ have already passed through the gate of death when this moment arrives, they must wait until their next incarnation, for such understanding cannot be acquired between death and rebirth. Once the foundation has been acquired, however, it endures, and then Christ becomes visible also during the period between death and the new birth.

And so Anthroposophy is not only something we learn for our physical life but is of essential value when we have laid aside the physical body at death.

This is what I wished to impart to you today as a help in answering many questions. Self-knowledge is difficult because man is such a complex being. The reason for this complexity is that he is connected with all the higher Worlds and Beings. We have within us shadow-images of the great Universe and all the members of our constitution—the physical, etheric, astral bodies and the ego—are worlds for Divine Beings. Our physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego form one world; the other is the higher World, the Heaven world. Divine-spiritual Worlds are the bodily members of the Beings of the higher spheres of cosmic existence.

Man is the complex being he is because he is a mirror-image of the spiritual world. Realisation of this should make him conscious of his intrinsic worth. But from the knowledge that although we are reflected images of the spiritual world we nevertheless fall far short of what we ought to be—from this knowledge we also acquire, as well as consciousness of our worth as human beings, the right attitude of modesty and humility towards the Macrocosm and its Gods.

Rudolf Steiner's Answers to Questions at the End of the Lecture

Translated by George Adams

Question: How are the words used by St. Paul, “to speak in tongues” (Cor. I: 12), to be understood?

Answer: In exceptional human beings it can happen that not only is the phenomenon of speaking present in the waking state, but that something otherwise present in sleep-consciousness only, flows into this speaking. This is the phenomenon to which St. Paul refers. Goethe refers to it in the same sense; he has written two very interesting treatises on the subject.

Question: How are Christ's words of consolation received and experienced?

Answer: Men will feel these words of consolation as though arising in their own hearts. The experience may also seem like physical hearing.

Question: What is the relation of chemical forces and substances to the spiritual world?

Answer: There are in the world a number of substances which can combine with or separate from each other. What we call chemical action is projected into the physical world from the world of Devachan—the realm of the Harmony of the Spheres. In the combination of two substances according to their atomic weights, we have a reflection of two tones of the Harmony of the Spheres. The chemical affinity between two substances in the physical world is like a reflection from the realm of the Harmony of the Spheres. The numerical ratios in chemistry are an expression of the numerical ratios of the Harmony of the Spheres, which has become dumb and silent owing to the densification of matter. If one were able to etherealise material substance and to perceive the atomic numbers the inner formative principle thereof, he would be hearing the Harmony of the Spheres.

We have the physical world, the astral world, the Lower Devachan and the Higher Devachan. If the body is thrust down lower even than the physical world, it comes into the sub-physical world, the lower astral world, the lower or evil Lower Devachan, and the lower or evil Higher Devachan. The evil astral world is the province of Lucifer, the evil Lower Devachan the province of Ahriman, and the evil Higher Devachan the province of the Asuras. When chemical action is driven down beneath the physical plane—into the evil Devachanic world—magnetism arises. When light is thrust down into the sub-material—that is to say, a stage deeper than the material world—electricity arises. If what lives in the Harmony of the Spheres is thrust down farther still, into the province of the Asuras, an even more terrible force—which it will not be possible to keep hidden very much longer—is generated. It can only be hoped that when this force comes to be known—a force we must conceive as being far, far stronger than the most violent electrical discharge—it can only be hoped that before some discoverer gives this force into the hands of humankind, men will no longer have anything un-moral left in them.

Question: What is electricity?

Answer: Electricity is light in the sub-material state. Light is there compressed to the utmost degree. An inward quality too must be ascribed to light; light is itself at every point in space. Warmth will expand in the three dimensions of space. In light there is a fourth; it is of fourfold extension—it has the quality of inwardness as a fourth dimension.

Question: What happens to the Earth's corpse?

Answer: As the residue of the Moon-evolution we have our present moon which circles around the Earth. Similarly there will be a residue of the Earth which will circle around Jupiter. Then these residues will gradually dissolve into the universal ether. On Venus there will no longer be any residue. Venus will manifest, to begin with, as pure Warmth, then it will become Light and then pass over into the spiritual world. The residue left behind by the Earth will be like a corpse. This is a path along which man must not accompany the Earth, for he would thereby be exposed to dreadful torments. But there are Beings who accompany this corpse, since they themselves will by that means develop to a higher stage.

Reflected as sub-physical world:

Astral World—the province of Lucifer
Lower Devachan—the province of Ahriman
Higher Devachan—the province of the Asuras

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

I should like to take some of those subjects we have had here this Summer, which have been brought up in the course of our considerations, and to go more deeply into them. To-day, tomorrow, and the day after, I will therefore bring forward certain historical, and also a few objective facts; and to-day by way of preparation, I Should like to point to a few historical facts, and from these, and especially from the revelation of certain historical personalities, we shall then draw conclusions upon which we can base our deeper considerations.

In all ages those who have been initiated into the Mysteries, have always uttered, and correctly, a certain saying. It is this:—“Unless a person knows how to value aright those two streams of world-conceptions which we have mentioned:—Idealism and Materialism,—he either falls through a trap-door into a kind of 'cellar' as regards his view of the world, or he enters blindly along the other paths which one traverses to reach a World Conception.” Now the trap-door through which one may fall and which may very well escape notice in the “Weltanschaumergaleben,” has been regarded by the Mystery Initiates of all as the Dualism which cannot find the bridge between the Ideal—one can also call it the “spiritually-coloured Ideal”—and the Materialistic, that concerned with matter. And the blind alley into which one may stray along the various paths of philosophy if one does not find the balance between Idealism and Materialism, for those same Mystery Initiates this blind alley was Fatalism.

Our recent epoch clearly inclines on the one side to a dualistic outlook, and on the other to a fatalistic philosophy, although these things are not admitted nor even clearly seen.

Now, I should like to-day, to take a personality out of the life of the twilight of the 4th Post-Atlantean epoch with reference to the life of philosophy, and give a brief sketch of him, and his outlook; and we can then consider other personalities more characteristic of the World-Conceptions of our own, the 5th Post-Atlantean epoch. A very, very characteristic personality in the Western life of thought, St. Augustine, who lived from the year 354 to 430 of our Christian era. We will recall certain thoughts of St. Augustine because, as you will see from the dates I have quoted, he lived in the twilight of the 4th Post-Atlantean epoch which came to an end in the 15th century. We can clearly see the approach of this end, starting from the 3rd-6th Post-Xian centuries. Now St. Augustine had to pass through the impressions of the most diverse World-Views. We have often discussed these things. Above all, St. Augustine passed through Manichaeism and Scepticism. He had taken all those impulses into his soul which one gets if on the one hand, he looks at the world and sees everything Ideal, Beautiful and Good, all that is filled with Wisdom, and then on the other hand, ell that is ugly, bad and untrue. Now we know that Manichaeism only “gets on” (this is coarsely expressed, but it can be expressed in this way)—it only gets on with these two streams in the Ordering of the Cosmos, by postulating an eternal, everlasting polarity, an everlasting dualism, between Darkness and Light, Evil and Good; that which is full of Wisdom, and that which is filled with wickedness.

Manichaeism only `gets' on with Dualism, (in its on way quite correctly), by uniting certain old pre-Christian basic concepts with its acceptance of the polarity in World-phenomena. Above all, it unites certain ideas which can only be understood when one knows that in ancient times the Spiritual world was perceived by humanity in atavistic clairvoyance, and perceived in such a way that men's visions of the Spiritual world were in their very content, similar to the impressions made by the Sense-world of perception. Now, because Manichaeism took into itself such ideas of a physical appearance, (sinnlichen schein) of the supersensible, it thereby gives many people the impression of materialising the spirit, as though it presented the spirit in a material form. That, of course, is a mistake which more recent views of the world have made, (as I have explained lately) a mistake even made by modern Theosophy. St. Augustine actually broke with Manichaeism because in the course of his purified life of thought, he could no longer boar this materialisation of the spirit. That was one of the reasons which made him break with Manichaeism.

St. Augustine then also passed through Scepticism, which is a quite justifiable view of the world, in se far as it points man's attention to the feet that through the mere observation of what a person can gain from this Sense-world and his experiences therein, he can learn nothing concerning the supersensible. And, if one is of [the] opinion that one cannot stand for the supersensible, as such, one begins to doubt the existence of any knowledge of the truth itself. It was doubt of the knowledge of the Truth through which St. Augustine also passed; and thereby obtained the strongest impulses.

Now if one wishes to see what led St. Augustine to place himself in western philosophy, one must point to the apex of his perceptions, from which radiated all the light which rules in him, and which was also the apex of the view of the world which he finally developed. That is the point, my dear friends; and it can be characterised in the following ways:—St, Augustine came to acquire that Certainty, the true Certainty subject to absolutely no deception, which can only be acquired by man with reference to what he experiences in his inner soul. Everything else may be uncertain. Whether the things which appear to our eyes, or are audible to our ears, or which make impressions on our other Sense-organs, are really so constructed as they appear to be to the evidence of the senses, that one cannot know. We cannot even know how this itself appears, when one shuts one's Sense organs to it, That is the way in which persons think of the external perceptible world, who think after the way of St. Augustine. They think this externally perceptible world, as it lies before us, can offer no unconditional certainty, can give no unconditioned truth; that man can gain nothing out of it on which he can stand on a firm substantial point. On the other hand, a man is present in what he experiences in his inner soul; quite regardless as to how he experiences it there, he himself experiences those ideas and feelings in his inner being. He knows himself to be living in his own inner experiences. And so, to such a thinker as St. Augustine, the fact is substantiated by his own inner experiences;—that, with reference to what man experiences in his inner sou1 as truth, he gives himself over to no possibility of deception. One can relieve that everything else the world says is subject to deception, but one cannot possibly doubt that what one experiences in one's inner being, as one's ideas and feelings, is the truth; that is certain. That firm basis for the admittance of an indisputable truth, formed one of the starting-points of the Augustinian philosophy.

Again in a striking way, in the 5th Post-Atlantean epoch, Descartes again took up that point; he lived from 1596 to 1650, thus in the dawn of the 5th Post-Atlantean epoch. His assertion:—“I think, therefore I exist,” which remains true even if we doubt everything else, that he takes as his starting point, and in this perception he simply takes the standpoint of St. Augustine.

Now my dear friends, the fact is that with reference to any world-conception one must always say: A man who lives at a particular point of time in human evolution acquires certain views:—only those who come later can see these. One must say that it is always reserved for those who come afterwards to see things in a more radical, true way, than does the person who has to utter them at a certain period of time in human evolution. One cannot get away from this fact; and it would be well, if especially from our Anthroposophical standpoint, as I have often told you, if it were recognised consciously and thoroughly, that even what is said now, even that we acquire as ever such advanced knowledge about Spiritual things, that must not be grasped as a sum of absolute dogmas. We must be quite clear that those who come after us, in future times, will see greater than we ourselves can. On this rests the true Spiritual evolution of mankind, and everything of a hindering nature in the Spiritual progress of mankind rests finally on the fact that human beings will not admit this. They like to have truths presented to them, not as the truths for one definite epoch of time, but as absolute timeless dogmas,

And so, from our point of view, we can look back on St. Augustine and shall have to say: If one stands on St. Augustine's standpoint, one must sharply look to this.—that he assumes uncertainty as to the truths of all external revelations, and true certainty only in the experience of what we carry in our souls. Now, if one gives oneself to such a perception as that, it presupposes that, as a human being, one has a certain courage. One would not perhaps need to mention so decidedly what I am now going to say, unless we had to admit the fact that it is characteristic of the world-view of our present age that it lacks courage, the lack of courage I refer to here is expressed in two directions. The one is this. When a person boldly admits, as did St. Augustine, that you can only find true certainty as regards what you yourself experience in your inner being, then the other pole of this courage should be there which is not there in our present age. One must also have the courage to admit that thin true Certainty concerning reality is not to be found in external Sense-Revelation. It requires real inner courage in one's thought to deny external Reality in its utterances that true Certainty, which is held by modern Materialism as absolutely secure. And, on the other hand, it requires courage to admit that true certainty only comes when one is truly conscious of what one experiences inwardly. Certainly such things are said, even in our times, and there are those who demand this two-fold courage of their fellow-man, if they are anxious to create a world-conception. But one has to things differently about these things to-day, if one wishes to think exhaustively. And herein the whole historical position of St. Augustine is revealed for modern mankind, because one has to think differently about these matters. To-day one must know something which neither Augustine nor Descartes took into consideration. I have spoken of this where I discuss Descartes, in my book “The Riddles of Man.” To-day we must admit: The belief that one can come to a satisfactory philosophy through a grasp of one's immediate inner being as man, as it offers itself to-day,—the belief that one can reach a firm standpoint in one's inner being,—is refuted every time one goes to sleep. Every time a person to-day passes into the unconsciousness of sleep, from him is snatched that absolute certainty of inner experience of which St. Augustine spoke,—the Reality of that inner experience is snatched from him. Every time you go to sleep until the moment of waking, the reality of real experience forsakes you. And the man of our age to-day, who experiences his inner being in a different way from that of the 4th Post-Atlantean age, even from that of the twilight of the age of St. Augustine, has to admit: “No matter how acute a certainty is experienced in one's inner being, yet for man's life after death, there is no certainty at all; for the simple reason that the reality of his experiences sinks into the realm of the unconscious, every time he goes to sleep, and a modern human being does not even know whether it does not pass into Unreality, and so what man apparently experiences securely in his inner being is not made safe from attack. That my not be theoretically refuted perhaps, but the very fact of sleep contradicts it.

Now if we turn attention to whit has just been said, we recognise how, in reality, St. Augustine with a far greeter justification than Descartes later, (who after all only merely repeated St. Augustine in another age) with what right St. Augustine could arrive at his view. Through the entire 4th Post-Atlantean epoch, and even through the age of St. Augustine, there still lived in human beings something of an echo of the old atavistic clairvoyance. History to-day unfortunately notices those things far too little and really knows little of them; but numerous were those persons throughout the whole 4th Post-Atlantean ago who, from their personal experiences knew that there existed a Spiritual life. Because they beheld it. And in the 4th Post-Atlantean age—it was different in the 3rd or in the 2nd Post-Atlantean epochs—in the 4th age they beheld it chiefly because it played into their life of sleep. So that we may say: In the 4th Post-Atlantean epoch it was not the case for human beings, (as it became later in the 5th epoch), that their sleep transpired completely unconsciously. Those human beings of the 4th Post-Atlantean epoch knew that, from sleeping until waking up, there was a time in which all that they had as ideas, as feelings from waking to sleeping, still continued to work, but in other forms. Their waking life of truth dived down, as it were, into a dim, but conscious life of sleep. In that age one still knew that what was experienced as inner truth, was not only truth but also reality, because one knew those moments of sleeping life in which was revealed, not merely as an abstract life but as a real concrete life in the spirit, what one had experienced in one's inner being. It is not a question to-day of proving whether St. Augustine himself could say, from his own experience, “I know myself that during the time between going to sleep and waking, there arises an experience which is true, even if not real inwardly.” The fact that one could grasp ouch a perception, on which one could stand firm, was still absolutely possible in the age of St. Augustine.

Now, you see, if you take what I have just said with reference to the subjective nature of man, and generalise it over the whole Macrocosm, you come to something else. You come to that condition from which subjective nature in an older epoch, and still in the 4th Post-Atlantean period, has really preceded; that from which it really became possible. Let us speak for a moment of the pre-Christian era. You must bear in mind that the Mystery of Golgotha is the dividing line between those ancient atavistic perceptions and the newer ones, which are only to-day in their beginning. In that pre-Christian age one could still cling to certain living Mystery-Truths. The Mystery Truths, to which I am now referring, are those which pertain especially to the great secret of Birth and Death. That is considered by certain Mystery Initiates as a secret which, they think, may not be referred to among the profane. (I have also spoken of this in recent lectures). They consider that those secrete should not be imparted to the world, because the world is not yet ripe to receive them. In that pre-Christian epoch there was in the Mysteries a certain view concerning the connection between Birth and. Death in the great Cosmic Life into which man with his entire being is inserted. In that pre-Christian age, through those Mysteries, man turned his attention specially to Birth, to all the processes of being born into the world. Anyone who is acquainted with the World-views of ancient times, knows also what emphasis was laid on the process of Birth,—of Arising, Sprouting, Growing;—all those processes, all those ancient views, specially concerned themselves with this. I have often emphasised what a gigantic contrast appeared through the Mystery of Golgotha. I have put it in the following way. Just think how, 600 years before the Mystery of Golgotha, Buddha, who stands ever in the evolution of main as the conclusion of the pre-Christian World-Conception, is led to his conceptions because, amongst other things, he beholds a corpse. “Death is suffering.” It becomes an axiom with the Buddha, that suffering must be overcome, A means must be found to be able to turn away from death. The corpse is that from which Buddha turns, in order to come to something which for him, can though spiritualised, can be filled with Sprouting, Growing life.

If we now turn to 600 years after the Mystery of Golgotha, to another part or the world, and other human beings, we see that the vision of the Corpse of Christ on the Cross is not something which man has to turn away from, but to which he has to turn, which is regarded whole-heartedly as the symbol that can solve the riddles of the Cosmos in so far as they refer to man and his development.

There is a wonderful connection within this 1200 years, six hundred years Before Golgotha, the turning away from a corpse gives an uplift to one's concept of the World; 600 years after Golgotha there is developed a symbol, The Image of the Crucifix, a turning towards death, towards a corpse, in order to create those forces from that Corpse, by which one can reach a concept of the world able to throw light on human evolution. Among the many things which show the mighty transformation which appeared in earthly evolution through the Mystery of Golgotha, there is this Buddha symbol, this turning away from the corpse; and then comes the Christ-symbol, the turning towards the Corpse—the Corpse of that Being Who in regarded as the highest Being ever seen on the Earth.

It was really the case that in a certain connection the old Mysteries put the Mystery of Birth in the very centre of their world-conception. But therewith, my dear friends, (since we are talking of Mystery-knowledge and not merely giving forth trivial views) therewith you have before your souls a deep cosmological secret. Your attention is turned to that with which is connected the life of Birth in the World's evolution.

And one does not come to understand this life of Birth in the Cosmos unless one can go beck to the Riddle of the Old Moon. know indeed that the preview: incarnation of the Earth before it became Earth was Old Moon, and in many of the phenomena connected with our present Moon, that camp-follower, so to speak of the Old Moon.—(you can read this up in my “Outline of Occult Science”)—in various phenomena connected to-day with the present Moon, with this straggler, we simply have the after effects of what occurred in the Moon-Incarnation of the Earth, at the time which preceded our earthly development.

Now there would be no such thing as Birth in all the kingdoms of nature, there would be nothing born on the Earth, were it not that the law of the Old Moon prevailed through this straggler, which is the satellite of our Earth. All birth in the various kingdoms of nature and man, is dependent on the activity of the Moon. With this is also connected the fact that the Initiates of the ancient Hebrews regarded Jehovah as the Moon-God, as a Divine Being who arranged the process of bringing forth; Jehovah was honoured as a Moon-Divinity. It was clearly seen that cosmologically, behind all the processes of birth throughout all the kingdoms, there ruled the laws of the Moon. And so one could, I might say, symbolically utter a deep secret of Cosmology by saying: when the Moonlight falls on the Earth, on what is represented through this light, depends everything connected with all the Sprouting, Growing and `being born' on the Earth. In those pre-Christian ages one did not turn in the highest Mysteries to the life of the Sun, one turned to the reflected sunlight, that is, to the Moon, whenever the secret of Birth was alluded to. And the peculiar “Nuances” which were poured over the depths of those pre-Christian conceptions depended on the fact that the initiates knew the Mysteries or the Moon.

They regarded the Sun Mysteries as something quite veiled, something hardly bearable for a humanity not fully prepared, because they knew that it is a deception, a maya, to believe that through the rays of the Sun falling on the Earth those things which Sprout and Grow are enchanted out of the various kingdoms of nature. That is a deception, a maya. It was known that from the life of the Sun did not depend the process of Birth, but, on the contrary, the decaying, decreasing life, the process of Death. These were the secrets of the Mysteries. The Moon causes things to be born, but the Sun causes them to die. And, however highly for other reasons the Sun-life was honoured in those pre-Christian Mysteries, the Sun-life was honoured as the cause of Death. The fact that beings had to die was not to be ascribed to the Sun, the 2nd incarnation of the Earth, but has to be ascribed to the resent Sun, which appears so magnificently on the horizon.

Well, the decay of life, the opposite of birth, is connected with the Sun-life, but, my dear friends, there was something else, not so important in that pre-Christian age, but very specially important in our post-Christian age: and that is, that all conscious life is connected with Sun-life, and that conscious life through which man has especially to pass in the course of his earthly evolution, that consciousness which shines forth especially in the 5th Post-Atlantean age to which we ourselves belong, that is most intensely connected with the Sun-life. Only we must consider this Sun-life Spiritually, as we have attempted to do in the course of lectures given this Summer. For, if indeed the Sun is the creator of Death, of the decaying life in the Cosmos and also of man, yet the Sun is at the same time the creator of conscious life. The conscious life was not so important in the pre-Christian ages, because it was then replaced by an atavistic clairvoyant life, which still remained as an inheritance of the Moon. For our post-Christian age it has however become important, far more important than life. Consciousness has become more important than life, because only through consciousness can the goal of earthly evolution be reached—which is, that this consciousness should be attained in the corresponding way by the humanity on earth. You must receive this consciousness from the giver, the Sun, from which comes the living into Death and not the life of Birth.

Therefore the Mystery of Golgotha appears as that power in earthly development which has now become the most important thing for this evolution:—the Son of the Sun, the Christ, Who passed through the Body of Jesus of Nazareth,—That is connected with the deepest Cosmic secrets. The ancient Mystery Initiates said to their pupils:

“Try to recognise through your sleep-life how the Moon-forces are playing into it. (We know that even waking-man is partially asleep). Try to recognise the MOON-life in your sleep-life, for it plays into your sleep-life, as the Silvery Moon-shine plays into the darkness of night.”

The Christian Initiates on the contrary said to their disciples: “Try to recognise that in your waking-life consciousness shines; for the Sun-Forces pour into your waking-life, just as from morning till evening the Sun shines outside in the life of the Earth.”

You see, this reversal was fulfilled through the Mystery of Golgotha, and, whereas in pre-Christian ages the most important thing was to recognise the origin of Life, it has now become the most important thing to recognise the origin of Consciousness. Only through learning to unite this cosmological wisdom with what man experiences as true certainty in his soul, which means, only by grasping Spiritual Science with one's Inner Being, does man come to see the Spiritual Reality concealed in that which otherwise lacks this reality it his inner being.

Now with those means possessed by St. Augustine, the means possessed by those who stand on an Augustinian basis, one cannot get very far, because every sleep refutes the real certainty of one's inner experiences. Only when its Reality is added to this inner experience does man come to a really firm stand on the basis of his inner experience.

You see, my dear friends, that which we think to-day, that which we feel to-day in our present life on Earth, has not as yet any reality. This is even recognised to-day, by a few scientifically-thinking men. What we think and feel in our inner soul is unreal at present; and that is just the peculiarity—that which we experience most intimately, that which shines indubitably in us as truth, without doubt that at present has no reality. But this is really the fruitful seed for our next earthly life. That of which St. Augustine was speaking, and for which there is no guarantee of its reality, that we may say, is the seed for the next earthly life. We can say:—it is true that the truth shines in our inner being, but it shines simply as a gleam, (Schein). To-day it in still but a gleam, but in our earthly incarnation that which now is gleam, and as such is simply a germ, will become a fruit which animates our next incarnation, as the seed of the plant this year will animate the visible plant of next year. Only when we conquer time can we find in what we now experience inwardly, a reality. Of course we should not be the human being we are and that we should be, if we experienced our inward truth as though it were a reality like the external world. We should never become free. There could be no question of freedom; we should not even be personalities, we should simply be woven into an ordering of Nature, and whatever occurred in us would occur of necessity. We are only personalities and especially free personalities, because from out of the weaving of natural events there arises as a kind of miracle, the gleam (der Schein) of those things which we experience in our inner soul and which will only become external reality, like that of our environment, in our next earthly incarnation.

It is the deceptive nature of our age to which all fantasy still gives itself, that we do not take into consideration the fact that what springs up inwardly as an unreality is one earthly incarnation, becomes a concrete reality in the next. We shall speak further on this point in the next two lectures.

We see hew from the standpoint we have acquired to-day we can look back at the standpoint of St. Augustine, how we can understand him, and to a certain extent can see in him what he himself could not yet see. Thus St. Augustine stands for us as a specially significant figure in the twilight of the 4th Post-Atlantean age, because with especial sharpness he points to the one stream in world-happiness to the stream of the Ideal; and in this stream he seeks to find a firm point. St. Augustine sought that firm point. To-day we only want to bring forward the historical fact.

There had not yet come to people in his age that tremendous swing of the pendulum which came about with the Mysteries of Birth and of Death; for only out of this Mystery of Death of which we shall Speak further tomorrow, can one find a real substantiation of the absolute certainty of what man experiences inwardly as Truth.

We shall now have to make a great jump. Just as we have characterised what reveals itself in St. Augustine as representative of the twilight of the 4th Post-Atlantean age, so we will take certain personalities characteristic of our 5th Post-Atlantean age, and study them according to a certain direction. Of these I will select two.

One of those persons in whom a certain tendency was developed which is characteristic for the 5th age, is Count Saint-Simon, who lived from 1766 to 1825, Another is a pupil of Saint-Simon, Auguste Comte, who lived from 1798 to 1857. If we have in St. Augustine a personality who, with all the means which stood at his disposal, sought through his knowledge, to substantiate Christianity, so an the other hand in Saint-Simon and also in Auguste Comte, we see personalities who are led completely astral [astray?] as regards Christianity. We can best gain a clear idea of what lived in Auguste Comte, as also in a certain sense in Saint-Simon, if we briefly outline the chief thoughts of Auguste Comte.

Auguste Comte is to a great extent representative of a certain world-view in our age; and it is only due to the fact that people trouble so little as to how certain impulses in philosophy incorporate themselves into the life of man, that Auguste Comte is regarded as a kind of rarity, in historical life. These persons do not know how, perhaps not quite everywhere, but still in countless human beings, Auguste Comte exercises a school-masterly influence in the essential directions of their thinking, and one may say that Auguste Comte is representative of a great portion of the philosophical life of the present.

Auguste Comte says that humanity has developed through Three stages, and has now reached the third stage. If one observes the soul-life of men through these three stages, one finds in the first stage that the ideas of man tended mostly towards Demonology. The first stage of evolution in the Comte sense is the demonological stage. Human beings imagined that behind the sensible phenomena of Nature supersensible Spiritual beings were active and operative; spirits were imagined everywhere in trivial life—demons were threatening everywhere, big demons and little demons. That was the first stage.

Then men passed on, as they developed. a little further, from the standpoint of Demonology to that of Metaphysics. Whereas they first thought demons, elementary beings, were behind all phenomena, they then put abstract ideas in their place.—People became Metaphysical when they no longer it wasted to be believers in demons. Thus the second stage is that of Metaphysics. They united certain concepts with their own life, and thought that through those ideas they could come to the basis of things.

But man has now gone beyond this stage. He has entered on the third stage, in which Auguste Comte quite in the sense of his master Saint-Simon, assumes that man no longer looks on demons, no longer looks to metaphysical concepts when seeking the basis of the World, but simply to that which results as the Sense-Reality of positivistic science. The third stage is therefore the stage of Positivism, of Positivistic Science. The revelations to be obtained simply through external scientific experience should be regarded by man as leading to a world-conception. He should explain himself in the same way as the metaphysical explanation given about the orderings of space, as physics explain the law of Forces, Chemistry the ordering of Substances, or Biology the ordering of Life. Just as everything can thus be explained by the different Sciences, so Comte tried to present a like harmony in his great work on Positive Philosophy. Everything which can be experienced through the various positive Sciences is considered by Comte as the sole thing worthy of men in the third stage. Christianity itself he still considers as the highest development of the last phase of Demonology. Then appeared Metaphysics,—which gave man a number of abstract concepts. But a concrete reality which alone can give an existence worthy of man on Earth, that can be given by Positive Science alone, according to Comte. And so he even tries to found a Church on the basis of positive Science, to bring man into such social structures as can be grasped on a basis of Positive Science. It is very extraordinary to see to what things Auguste Comte really came at last. I will only bring forward a few really characteristic features. He occupied himself a great deal with the founding of a Positivistic Church. Now if you just take the various points, you will at once perceive the spirit of it. This Positivistic Church was to bring out a kind of Calendar. A certain number of the days of the year were to be devoted, for instance, to the memory of such people as Newton or Galileo, or Kepler; the bearers of Positivistic Science. These days were to be devoted to their veneration. Other days should then be devoted to the condemnation of such people as Julian the Apostate or Napoleon. All that was to be regulated. Life itself was to be regulated with a great sweep, according to the basic principles of Positivistic Science.

Now anyone who knows life to-day, knows that no great number of human beings would take such ideals as those of Auguste Comte seriously although that Is simply cowardice, because in truth people do think as Auguste Comte did. If one studies the image the Positivistic Church of Comte gives, one actually gets the impression that the structure of his Church accords absolutely and entirely with that of the Roman Catholic Church. Only the Christ is lacking in the Positivistic Church of Auguste Comte, and that is the extraordinary thing. That in just what we must place before our souls as characteristic.—Auguste Comte seeks a Catholic Church without the Christ. That is what he came to, when he took those three stages into his soul;—Demonology, Metaphysics and Positivism. And one can say he took over all the “clothing” of Christianity, as it came to him out of history. He considered the clothing very good; but the Christ Himself he wished to banish out of his Church. That is the essential point round which everything revolves in Auguste Comte. A Catholic Church without the Christ.

That, my dear friends, is infinitely characteristic of the dawn of the 5th Post-Atlantean age, because as Auguste Comte thought, so a spirit had to think who had absorbed in his soul the element of Romanism, and thought from out of this element of Romanism, while at the same time he thought fully in the sense of the 5th Post-Atlantean epoch, with its so absolutely anti-spiritual character. And to Auguste Comte and his teacher Saint-Simon, are in the highest degree characteristic of the dawning of our 5th Post-Atlantean age. But in this 5th age many things have yet to be decided, and therefore other shadings appear which are still also possible. I just want to throw a few historical lights before you to-day, on which we can then build further.

An extraordinary contrast to Auguste Comte is Schelling, who lived from 1775 to 1854; and he also is to a certain extent characteristic of the dawn of our 5th Post-Atlantean age. Of course I cannot put before you even diagrammatically the world-view of Schelling. We have spoken often of it from this or the other point of view—it is most manifold in itself. I cannot even give you any idea now of its structure, but can only point out various characteristics.

I told you St. Augustine takes his stand in the twilight of the 4th Post-Atlantean age with the purpose, so to observe the one stream, the Ideal, that thereby he could get a firm point on which to stand. We now enter on the 5th Post-Atlantean Age. In its dawn we have such spirits as Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte who, in a purely natural materialistic ordering, seek a firm point in positivistic science. Thus we have two streams—Augustine on the one side, Auguste Comte on the other. Schelling seeks to get behind what can be seen in the world with the ordinary means of the 5th Post-Atlantean age; he seeks first abstractly and philosophically for a bridge between the Ideal and the Real, the Ideal and the Material. He tried with infinite energy to find the bridge. (You can find the essential points of this in my book “Riddles of Man.”) He seeks with infinite energy to bridge over that opposition and he came at first to all kinds of abstract thoughts in the course of this bridge-building. While he first built on the same basis as Johann Gottlieb Fichte, he went a little further, and attempted to grasp something in the world as real Being—something which is both the Ideal and the Real at the same time. Then came a time in Schelling's life in which it appeared impossible to him, with the methods of abstractions brought to him in the course of time out of the 5th Post-Atlantean age, to build a bridge between those two. So he said one day: “Human beings have really only acquired on the basis of their modern learning concepts by which they can grasp the external ordering of Nature. But we have no concepts by means of which we can come behind this external Nature to that sphere where one could build a bridge between the Ideal and External Reality.” It is extremely interesting that one day Schelling made the following admission. He said, it appeared to him as though the learned people of the last centuries had concluded a silent contract tending to wipe out everything of a deeper nature,—all that could lead one to a real true life. Therefore he said: “We meet turn to the unlearned people.” That was the time when Schelling started studying Jacob Boehme, and found in him that Spiritual deepening which then guided him to his final and theosophical period of life, from which proceeded his wonderful books the “Freedom of Man,” “The Gods of Samathrace,” the Kabiri Divinities; followed by his “Philosophy of Mythology” and the “Philosophy of Revolution.”

Now what Schelling most sought, especially in the last period of his life, was to understand the intervention of the Mystery of Golgotha into the history of mankind. That he sought especially; and while so doing it occurred to him that, with the ideas at the disposal of modern learning, one could never really understand the life which flows from the Mystery of Golgotha; which means that one could never come to understand the true life of man. Thereby Schelling formed the conclusion, (and that is the tendency which I want to emphasise especially now:—we will build further on this in the next lecture)—which is in complete contrast to that of his contemporary, Auguste Comte. That is the remarkable thing. We may say that Auguste Comte seeks a Catholicism, or I might better say a Catholic Church, without Christianity; Schelling, with his views, sought a Christianity without a Church. Schelling seeks, as it were, to Christianise the whole of modern life, to permeate it with Christianity; so that everything which human beings can Think and Feel and Will is absolutely saturated by the Christ-Impulse. He does not seek a separate clerical life for Christianity, especially not after the type found in historical evolution, although he studied this life very carefully.

Thus we have those two extremes—Auguste Comte's thought, of a Church without Christ, and Schelling's thought, of a Christ without a Church.

I just wanted to place these historical views before your soul, in order to be able to build further on these things. We have seen one spirit who seeks a firm starting point in Idealism—A spirit, Auguste Comte, who seeks a firm starting point in Realism, and then a personality such as Schelling who seeks to build a bridge between them. Both these tendencies preceded the evolution in which we ourselves are engaged.

We may say the following:—we can now survey those things which have contributed through many centuries to the life of World-Conceptions, and then we can turn our attention to the way in which these ideas have developed in the widest circles of human beings. The study of Auguste Comte gives a very important Aperçu, but Comte himself could not attain this, because he stuck so rigidly to his positivistic prejudices. But something which can give us an important starting point for our considerations for the next days results, when we see in an Aperçu the connection between St. Augustine, Auguste Comte, and Schelling, I will just put this at the conclusion of these considerations, because I should like it to have a place in your souls. We shall then have to speak of that which is connected in a significant way with just this. Now, as this Aperçu results from a consideration of what I have told you, I will simply put aphoristically, without giving the foundations for it in detail, the reason why this, which is not to be found in Auguste Comte, is to be found in others. I have told you that it is important not to consider the life of these World-views individually in the abstract, but one must regard them as incorporated into the entire life of humanity. Only thereby does one reach a standpoint of reality, when one can see the incorporation of these things into the collective life of mankind.

It was clear to Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte that they could only come to their positivism in recent times, that it would have been impossible in an earlier age. Auguste Comte feels it especially strongly; he says approximately “My mode of thought is only possible in our Age.” That is something which is of infinite importance in our modern Movement, and in connected with that Aperçu to which I am referring. if one takes what Auguste Comte considers as a starting point for his threefold division, one can say in his sense, that this threefold division is Theology, Metaphysics, and what he calls Positivistic Science.

It in very characteristic that one can put this question: “Who will most easily be a believer in any one of these directions?” I beg you not to misunderstand what I am saying with reference to this Aperçu not even to grasp it as a one-sided radical dogma to be applied very roughly with absolute certainty to our present age, but to take it as applying to the whole evolution of man, as it must be if one will regard what I now say. One can ask: not “who will be a believer?” but “Who will most easily be a believer in any one of these directions? From a very careful consideration, contradictory to facts as it may seem, this results:—The one who most easily becomes a believer in Theology (please, not a bearer, not a theologian, nor a worker, but simply a believer; I am not speaking of religion but of Theology) is the Soldier. The person who most easily becomes a believer in Metaphysics is the Official, especially the legal Official. And the person who is most easily becomes a believer in Positivistic Science is the Industrial.

It is important if one must judge life, not to remain in the abstract, but to look at it quite unprejudiced, and then such questions have to be put.

I just want this quite treated as an Aperçu which results when one intimately studies Auguste Comte, because he was conscious that he was only completely comprehensible to the Industrials; and only In an Industrial Age could he appear on the scene with his views. That is connected with the fact that the Industrial is most easily a follower of Positivistic Science; the Soldier most easily a believer not merely of Christian but of any Theology; and the Official most easily a believer, a follower of Metaphysics.

Aperçu

Theology—The Soldier
Metaphysics—The Official
Positive Science—The Industrial

St. Augustine 354–430
St. Simon 1766–1825
Auguste Comte 1798–1857—A Catholic Church

Demonology
Metaphysics
Positivistic Science

Schelling 1775–1854—Christianity without a Church.

Dr. Steiner: Today, I would first like to hear the wishes and reports from the members of the faculty. In the first part of this meeting, I want to know if the faculty has any wishes or questions we should discuss without the extended faculty, that is, without the younger teachers who will come later.

I would first like to know how the instruction in the ninth grade is going, and I would like to hear the experiences of the teachers working with that class.

A teacher: In the eighth and ninth grade German class, we are reading Herman Grimm.

Dr. Steiner: Have you had an opportunity to bring other things into the lectures by Grimm? How far have you come in history? What did you do with his first lecture where he speaks about Rome in the second part of his characterization of the last centuries?

A teacher: The children did not know that history.

Dr. Steiner: It is important that you cover the history of the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, at least in the ninth grade. Perhaps you could do it that way. It is missing in the ninth grade. In teaching about these centuries, the goal would be that the students understand the present, don’t you agree? They are now fifteen years old. You could go through those themes as Herman Grimm presents them in each chapter and take the nineteenth century as a confluence of the histories of various peoples. Use the themes of the last four centuries as leitmotifs. Actually, it would be important to do that in both classes, only you should do it in different ways. In eighth grade, more narratively and in ninth grade, go more into the major ideas of the last centuries.

You need to work toward being able to present the major ideas to the children. There is a great deal of material in those lectures you can expand upon by bringing in literature from everywhere.

(Speaking to another teacher) You teach mathematics. Have you gone through geometrical drawing with the children?

I have been so occupied with other things, but do you find it necessary to bring so much reasoned and theoretical material into physics? Doesn’t so much purely conceptual material slow things down?

A teacher: I want to present only what is absolutely necessary.

Dr. Steiner: How many of the experiments have the students mastered? In electricity, it is, of course, necessary to present the observations very rationally with little theoretical speculation. That is something that probably does not stick with them too well. From a purely didactic perspective, it should not stick well. I think in this case we should have the ideal of developing the necessary concepts out of the experiment and drawing on the blackboard as little as possible. We should develop the whole thing out of the experiment. You can also try your Socratic method. When you develop something theoretically, the Socratic method is not of much help, since how can the children know anything? You can hardly ask them questions. Since you can do experiments, I would certainly take advantage of those opportunities. You can save a great deal of time. If you go through electricity in that way, you will complete it. The children will learn a great deal more than if you just explain the concept of voltage. Didactically, that would be unwise. You will then need to do two weeks of geometrical drawing, but only two weeks.

A teacher: In the foreign language class, we read the Forum scene from Julius Caesar.

Dr. Steiner: Could you also do that in writing as a kind of essay? You need to do something like that, also. In German, too, so that they have a picture, one that they can really articulate.

(Speaking to the German teacher) You don’t have any themes? It would not hurt if you repeated the material in your lecture, using your own words.

A report is given about French.

Dr. Steiner: In any event, we can do what we projected for the ninth grade.

The German teacher: I now need to do Jean Paul.

Dr. Steiner: I did not mean you should do everything one after the other. It is now mid-November, and we need to do some history. Actually, the four centuries in their context. You really need until mid-January in both classes. For all the other classes, the curriculum is fixed.

A teacher: Will this curriculum then become standard in the future?

Dr. Steiner: For now, we need to know what we need to do this year.

A teacher: Should we teach literary history in foreign languages?

Dr. Steiner: With those children you do not need to do anything more than to say something about Shakespeare in passing, for instance. Or things you can take care of in that way.

The methods the public schools use for Latin and Greek are horrible and utterly decadent. We need to bring our children along so far that they find a connection. When we have sufficiently developed our methods, we need to bring our children just as far. But our methods will not present things in the same way. I think that when we resolve this problem, you will no longer have discipline problems, and then you can achieve that. The real problem is that your children are out of control every five minutes.

The Austrian college preparatory high schools were exemplary. When you think of Leo Thun and 1854, their curriculum was the very best imaginable; Gautsch ruined it. They did history well. In Weimar, I found a different understanding of world history, namely, from the creation of the world until the Hohenzollern, only fifteen pages, and three volumes about the history of the Hohenzollern.

We also have the independent religious instruction for this class. How are things there?

A teacher: We have nine grades in three groups.

Dr. Steiner: Why have the classes become so enormous? If the distribution is reasonable, then large classes will not hurt. But in your case, the children are really sitting on top of one another. Mr. U.’s class is too large. We need to divide it. Seventy-three children! They don’t fit into the available seats, and then they push one another out. Terrible! Today, the worst students were absent. It is absolutely clear that we need to divide this class, and I think we should do it. Particularly in these cases where the instruction really depends upon having contact with the individuals—you must be able to ask one or another question as often as possible—surely we can arrange for two periods and divide the class between them. This is, at best, a question of space and is something we must solve, as otherwise we will fail in that area of instruction. Who could also give that class?

A teacher: I would be happy to do it.

Dr. Steiner: It needs to be someone who was not previously in religion. You may have been out for a number of years, but it still forms your thoughts. We have no one on the faculty. Of course, this is a difficult problem to solve, but we will have to get over this hurdle. The teacher must bring warmth into the instruction, warmth. I would, for example, propose A., but I do not know if he can acquire the necessary pedagogical perspective. How about trying A., since in the present crisis, who else could we propose from the anthroposophical movement? There is no one.

We’re stuck. I know of no one else. We cannot hang this around the necks of the teachers. The ninth grade is so small you can easily make contact with the individual students.

(To a teacher) It seems to me that you need a helper in your class, Miss H. Perhaps Miss S. could help you. We need to speak about that. You need someone especially when the children need to work. The class is too large for teaching in chorus. It has peripheral areas, and you cannot reach out into the farthest realms. I would prefer having two classes, but Miss S. can work in your class and help you when the children are busy, for instance, in drawing or painting. The class is falling apart. Individual children are not active enough during class. They just sit around. I also wondered if you could give a period and then stay in the class while Miss S. gives the next period. That would take care of the discipline problem. We could think about how to do it. In principle, a class could have one hundred and fifty students, but we will not have such large rooms. You have fifty students in your class, but it is too large.

A teacher: I would like to ask if I should stay with the C-major scale and emphasize the absolute tone in tone eurythmy. I was wondering if it was incorrect to present tone eurythmy as relative.

Dr. Steiner: You can do that.

A eurythmy teacher: I always assumed the absolute tone.

Dr. Steiner: You can teach the eurythmy movements by remaining with the absolute, but you don’t need to do that pedantically. What are the children doing with you in shop class?

A shop teacher: We have continued last year’s projects.

Dr. Steiner: How is the discipline in handwork this year? Last year, the last period was handwork and the discipline was quite good. Do you have much to do? I am asking because I think we should have discussed it in the foundation course last year. Is it possible to meet every other week about that subject, that is, apart from the school as such? Can you formulate some questions that will lead to a positive result? It would be good if we remained in contact about such things, if you developed some questions where you have doubts, and I could suggest some themes we could discuss when I am here. I hope in the future I will have some time to devote myself entirely to the Waldorf School. You need to think about some questions where you are having problems and send them to me so that I can answer them when I return.

A comment is made concerning painting.

Dr. Steiner: (To a class teacher) You have presented it?

A teacher: You saw some attempts today.

Dr. Steiner: As such, they were quite good, but you will need to work less from the conventional and develop writing more out of drawing and painting. That must be your goal. Guidelines are available for the first grade, but you must slowly develop them further so that color is more developed.

A teacher: At present, I can’t find a way. I am groping in the dark.

Dr. Steiner: Some of the children have done very good things, but it must come more out of the color. T.F. has some talent.

A teacher: I have found that the children have difficulty with forms using watercolor.

Dr. Steiner: You should not emphasize chalk too much. Unfortunately, we are not so far along yet, but it is quite important that we delineate. First, we will have an ordered curriculum in the lower classes. Of course, the others will do nearly the same thing, but we need to take the children’s age into account. The main thing now is that we awaken an inner feeling for color in the children, an experience of the world of colors, so that the children receive a feeling for the life in the world of colors through experiencing fairy tales.

A teacher: We need to give the children forms, particular motifs.

Dr. Steiner: The children will get forms if you allow their fantasy to be active. You need to allow the forms to grow out of color. You can speak with the children in the language of colors. Think about how exciting it is when to work with the children so that they understand something like: Here is a coy violet with a brash red right next to it. The whole thing sits upon a humble blue.

You need to do it concretely, so that the colors do something. That forms the soul. What we can imagine in the colors can occur in a hundred different ways. You need to get the children to live in the colors by saying things like, “When the red peeks through the blue.” Allow the children to really do that. I would try to bring a great deal of life into it. You must try to bring them out of their lethargy. Bring some fire into it. Nowadays, it is generally necessary to develop this feeling for colors. It is not as corrupted as music, but it will favorably affect their feeling for music.

A teacher: Would you be in favor of practicing drawing as well as painting?

Dr. Steiner: Not mechanical drawing. They should do that only when the object is geometrical understanding. In any event, it is important to work out of the polarity of light and dark. In that regard, the ninth grade has not shown itself to be particularly lively, and you need to help them.

A teacher: Could the eighth and ninth grades have painting lessons?

Dr. Steiner: That would have to occur in the periods we already have. We should do more artistic work, that is quite evident. That is also why it was important to me that Miss Hauck come into the handwork class and that handwork be taught artistically. Mostly the handwork is boring, and I would like to see it done really artistically. In handwork, you can use a ruler, but it is inappropriate with paper. We could form a bridge between shop and handwork. There are a number of things that can be painted. There are also things the children could paint by themselves at home. If the children would make things for their dolls, there is much we could develop. We could develop a sense of style and color. If we could overcome the naturalism in making dolls, we could make something lively, laughing dolls, ones that are artistic. That would be very beneficial.

Just as you can get children accustomed to writing in different ways, I do not know why you cannot teach children how to make a poster and how a poster can be beautiful, and how they can recognize the beauty of a beautiful poster. They should also recognize an ugly poster. But people look at such things without becoming angry. We must develop taste. We should develop a feeling for style. Concerning the feeling for style, the instruction, even in the most artistic schools, is terrible.

We had the most disgusting examples here a short time ago. You all know the drawings in Towards Social Renewal. They were changed to make them more current. What did the artist do? He created the motif so that the left side repeated on the right. He made a Gothic window out of it. Such things occur.

We could achieve something beautiful in the tenth or eleventh grade. One of our industrialists wants a logo for his baby food. That is something that should be created from within. There are inner needs. Today, people know only about art objects, but that is how it should be if it is to imitate something. In Basel, there is an art teacher who says he does not understand why, if I paint an eye here, I cannot paint the other one there. There is something to be said for that as long as you do not go along with the thing itself. What I mean is an inner ability to experience, that is what I mean by a feeling for style. People need to experience a triangle or a rectangle and not simply imitate. Today, people make dolls by simply imitating and not experiencing them from within. You need to be able to experience within yourself how a doll laughs or cries, and that all needs to be done properly, including the clothing. The girls could make a doll and the boys, a jester. We must take the capacity for inner experience into account in painting with colors.

A teacher: Could we use that also with tones?

Dr. Steiner: I think they can also be experienced inwardly. A music teacher: Should we express that to the children through words? The melody or the individual tones?

Dr. Steiner: That results from the theme alone, or the melody. If you treat tones that way, then something artistic results. I think that is what Goethe meant about how he learned to play the piano.

A teacher asks if the children should make eurythmy shoes.

Dr. Steiner: The children would become weak and ill from that. I think that would lead to problems. But, on the other hand, is there so much to making eurythmy shoes?

A teacher: Now, many children make them for the others.

Dr. Steiner: How long does a child need to make a pair of eurythmy shoes? I think that among the members there are many, that is, among the women, there are many who could make at least a dozen such shoes in a day, or at least nine or ten.

A teacher: There is a student in the fifth grade who does not want to do eurythmy. He has no interest for art, only for physics and electricity.

Dr. Steiner: Just as there are unmusical people, there can also be uneurythmic people. I would not excuse him from class. That should happen only when there is a partial idiocy present.

Comment about student S.

Dr. Steiner: The one who crept out from under the seats?

You need to always think, for example, I will make the drawing in a corner, I will make it large or small. You should make him develop some inner activity. You should not allow him simply to sneak away; he needs to be inwardly active. It is better if the boy has to do something that he first needs to decide to do. You can achieve the most with that boy by giving him some attention and being friendly. He can also be well behaved. I have found it curious. I have only seen when he is punished. What he did, I never saw.

Wherever we, as human beings, have striven for knowledge, whether as mystics or realists or in any way at all, the acquisition of self-knowledge has been demanded of us. As has been repeatedly emphasized on other occasions, however, this knowledge of the human soul is by no means as easy to achieve as many people believe—anthroposophists sometimes among them. The anthroposophist should be constantly aware of the hindrances he will encounter in his efforts. The acquisition of self-knowledge is absolutely essential, however, if we are to reach a worthy goal in world existence and if our actions are to be worthy of us as members of humanity.

Let us ask ourselves why must self-knowledge be so difficult for us. Man is truly a complicated being, and if we speak of his inner life, his life of soul, we should not begin by regarding it as something simple and elementary. We should rather have the patience and perseverance, the will, to penetrate always more deeply into this wonderful structure, this organization of the divine-spiritual powers of the world, which can appear as man.

Before we investigate the nature of this self-knowledge, two aspects of the life of the human soul may present themselves to us. Just as the magnet has north and south poles, just as light and darkness are present in the world as the principle poles of the light, so there are two poles in man's life of soul. Both these poles can appear when we observe a person placed in two contrasting situations in life. Suppose we are watching someone standing on the street who is entirely lost in the contemplation of some strikingly beautiful and impressive natural phenomenon. We see how still he is standing, moving neither hand nor foot, never turning his eyes away from the spectacle presented to him, and we are aware that he is engaged in making an inner picture of what he sees. We say that he is absorbed in contemplation of what surrounds him. That is one situation; here is another. A man is walking along the street and feels that someone has insulted him, injured him. Without much thinking, he is roused to anger and gives vent to it by striking the person who insulted him. We are there witnessing a manifestation of forces springing from anger, a manifestation of impulses of will, and we can easily imagine that if the action had been preceded by thought no blow need have been struck. We have now pictured two extremely different deeds. In the one there is only the forming of a mental picture, a process from which all conscious will is absent; in the other there is no thought, no forming of a mental picture, and immediate expression is given to an impulse of will. These two things present us with the two extreme poles of the human soul. One pole is surrender to contemplation, to forming mental pictures, to thought, in which the will has no part; the second pole is the impelling force of will without thought. We have arrived at these facts simply by exoteric observation of outer life.

We can go into these things more deeply, and we come then into those spheres in which we can find our bearings only by summoning the findings of esoteric research to our aid. Here another polarity confronts us—that of sleeping and waking. We know the esoteric significance of the relationship between sleeping and waking. From the elementary concepts of anthroposophy we know that in waking life the four members of a man's being—physical body, etheric body, astral body, and I—are organically and actively interwoven but that in sleep the physical and etheric bodies remain in bed while the astral body and I are poured out into the whole great world bordering directly on our physical existence. We could also approach these facts from a different point of view. We might ask what there is to be said about contemplation of the world, forming mental pictures, thinking, and the will and its impulses during waking life on the one hand and during sleep on the other.

You see that if one penetrates more deeply into this question it becomes evident that in his present physical existence man is, in a certain sense, essentially always asleep. He sleeps differently during the night, however, from the way he sleeps during the day. You can be convinced of this in a purely outer way, because you know that one can wake in the esoteric sense during the day, that is to say, one can become clairvoyant and see into the spiritual world. The ordinary physical body is asleep to this observation, and one can rightly say that it is an awakening when man learns to use his spiritual senses. In the night, of course, we are asleep in the normal way. One can therefore say that ordinary sleep is sleep in relation to the outer physical world; daytime consciousness at the present time is sleep in relation to the spiritual world.

These facts can be considered in yet another light. On deeper scrutiny one realizes that in the ordinary waking condition of physical life, man has, as a rule, little power or control over his will. The will quite detaches itself from daily life. Observe attentively what we call the human will, and you will see how little man has in his control during daily life regarding the will impulse. Only consider how little of all you do from morning to evening is really the outcome of your own thinking and forming of mental pictures, of your personal, individual decisions. When someone knocks at the door and you say “Come in!” that cannot be called a true decision of your own thinking and willing. If you are hungry and seat yourself for a meal, that cannot be called a decision made by the will, because it is occasioned by your condition, by the needs of your organism. Try to picture your daily life, and you will see how little the will is directly influenced from the human center. Why is this the case? Esoteric teachings show us that regarding his will man actually sleeps by day; that is, he does not really live within his will impulses at all. We can evolve better and better concepts and mental pictures, or we can become more highly moral, more refined individuals, but we can do nothing regarding the will. If we cultivate better thoughts we can work indirectly upon the will, but we can do nothing directly to the will that concerns life. This is because in our daily life our will is influenced only in an indirect way, namely, through sleep. When you are asleep you do not think; you do not form mental pictures. The will, however, awakes, permeates our organism from outside, and invigorates it. We feel strengthened in the morning because what has penetrated into our organism is of the nature of will. That we do not perceive this activity of the will, that we know nothing about it, becomes comprehensible if we consider that all conceptual activity sleeps when we sleep. To begin with, therefore, we will offer this suggestion for further contemplation, further meditation. You will see that the more progress you make in self-knowledge, the more you will find confirmation of the truth of the words that man sleeps in his will when he is awake and sleeps in his conceptual life when he is asleep. The life of will sleeps by day; the life of thought sleeps by night.

If man is unaware that the will does not sleep during the night, this is because he only understands how to be awake in his life of thought. The will does not sleep during the night, but it works then in a fiery element, works upon his body in order to restore what has been used up by day.

There are thus two poles in human beings, the life of observation and forming mental pictures and the impulses of will, and the human being is related in entirely opposite ways to these two poles. These are only the two poles, however. The whole life of soul lies in various nuances between these two poles, and we shall come nearer to understanding this soul life by bringing the microcosmic life of soul into relation to what we know as the higher worlds.

From what has been said we have seen that the life of forming mental pictures is one of the poles of one's soul life. This life of forming mental pictures is something that seems unreal to externally, materialistically minded people. We often hear the thought expressed, “Oh, mental pictures and thoughts are only mental pictures and thoughts!” This is intended to imply that if one takes a piece of bread or meat into one's hands, this is a reality, but a thought is only a thought. By this is meant that one cannot eat a thought, and thus a thought is not real but “only” a thought. But why? Basically, because what man calls his thoughts are related to what thoughts really are as a shadow-image of an object is to the thing itself. The shadow-image of a flower points you to the flower itself, to the reality. So it is with thoughts. Human thinking is the shadow-image of mental pictures and beings belonging to a higher world, the world called the astral plane. You represent thinking rightly to yourself when you picture the human head thus (this is not absolutely correct but simply sketched schematically). In this head are thoughts, which I shall represent with these dashes. These thoughts that are in the head, however, must be pictured as living beings on the astral plane. Beings of the most varied kinds are at work there in the form of teeming mental pictures and deeds that cast their shadow-images into human beings, and these processes are reflected in the human head as thinking. Continuous streams move from your head into the astral plane, and these are the shadows that establish the life of thought within your head.

As well as what we can call the life of thought, there is yet another life within the human soul. In ordinary life one distinguishes (this is not entirely correct, but I say it so that one can receive a concept from ordinary life) between a life of thought and a life of feeling. Feelings fall into two categories: those of pleasure and sympathy and those of displeasure and antipathy. The former are aroused by good, benevolent deeds; antipathy is aroused by evil, malevolent deeds. Here there is something more than and different from the mere forming of mental pictures. We form mental pictures of things regardless of any other factor. Our soul, however, experiences sympathy or antipathy only regarding what is beautiful and good or what is ugly and evil. Just as everything that takes place in the human being as thoughts points to the astral plane, so everything connected with sympathy or antipathy points to the realm we call Lower Devachan. Just as I could draw lines earlier between mental pictures and the astral world, so now in relation to feeling I can point upward to Devachan or the heavenly world. Processes in the heavenly world, or Devachan, are projected, mainly into our breast, as feelings of sympathy or antipathy for what is beautiful or ugly, for what is good or evil. In what we can call our experience of the moral-aesthetic world, we bear within our souls shades of the heavenly world or Lower Devachan.

There is still a third province in the life of the human soul that we must strictly distinguish from the mere preference for good deeds. There is a difference between standing by and taking pleasure in witnessing some kindly deed and setting the will in action and actually performing some such deed oneself. I will call pleasure in good and beautiful deeds or displeasure in evil and ugly deeds the aesthetic element, as opposed to the moral element that impels a person to do good. The moral element is at a higher level than the purely aesthetic; mere pleasure or displeasure is at a lower level than the will to do something good or evil. In so far as our soul feels constrained to give expression to moral impulses, these impulses are the shadow-images of Higher Devachan, of the higher heavenly world.

We can easily picture these three separate stages of activity of the human soul—the purely intellectual (thoughts, mental pictures, observation), the aesthetic (pleasure or displeasure), and the moral (revealed in impulses to do good or evil deeds)—as microcosmic images within human experience of the three realms which, in the macrocosm, the great world, lie one above the other. The astral world is shadowed in the world of thought, the intellectual world; the Devachanic world is shadowed in the aesthetic sphere of pleasure and displeasure; and the Higher Devachanic world is shadowed as morality.

If we connect this with what was said previously concerning the two poles of the human soul, we must experience the pole of intellect as that which dominates the waking life, the life in which man is intellectually awake. During the day man is awake regarding his intellect; during sleep he is awake regarding his will. Because at night he is asleep regarding his intellect, he becomes unconscious of what he is undertaking with his will. What we call moral principles and impulses are working indirectly into the will. In fact, man needs the life of sleep in order that the moral impulses he absorbs through the life of thought can come into effective activity. In his ordinary life today, man is capable of accomplishing what is right only on the plane of intellect; he is less able to accomplish anything on the moral plane, for there he is dependent upon help coming from the macrocosm.

What is already within us can bring about the further development of intellectuality, but the gods must come to our aid if we are to acquire greater moral strength. We sink into sleep in order that we may plunge into the divine will where the intellect does not intervene and where divine forces transform into the power of will the moral principles we receive, where they instill into our will what we could otherwise receive only into our thoughts.

Between these two poles, that of the will that wakes by night and that of the intellect that is awake by day, lies the sphere of aesthetic appreciation that is continuously present in man. During the day man is not fully awake; only the most prosaic, pedantic individuals are always fully awake in waking life. Human beings basically must actually dream by day, they must always be able to dream a little when awake; they must be able to give themselves up to art, poetry, or some other activity that is not concerned wholly with crass reality. Those who can give themselves up in this way form a bond that can enliven and invigorate the whole of existence. To give oneself up to such thoughts is to a certain extent like a dream penetrating into waking life. You know well that dreams enter into the life of sleep; these are real dreams, dreams that permeate the other consciousness in sleep. This is also something that human beings need by day if they do not wish to lead an arid, empty, unhealthy waking life. Dreams come during sleep at night in any case, and no proof of this is required. Midway between the two poles of night dreaming and day dreaming lies the condition that can live in fantasy.

So here again there is a threefold life of soul. The intellectual element in which we are really awake brings us shadow-images of the astral plane when by day we give ourselves up to a thought, wherein originate the most fruitful ideas for daily life and great inventions. Then during sleep, when we dream, these dreams play into our life of sleep, and images from Lower Devachan are shadowed into us. When we work during sleep, impressing morality into our will—we cannot perceive this directly, but certainly we can perceive its effects—when we are able to imbue our thinking during the night with the influence of divine-spiritual powers, then the impulses we perceive are shadowings from Higher Devachan, the higher heavenly world. These are the moral impulses and feelings that live within us and lead us to say that human life fundamentally is justified only when we place our thoughts at the service of the good and the beautiful, when we allow the very heart's blood of divine-spiritual life to stream through our intellectual activities, permeating them with moral impulses.

What we present here as the life of the human soul, first from outer, exoteric observation and then from observation of a more mystical character, is revealed by deeper esoteric research. The processes that have been described in their more outer aspect can also be perceived in man through clairvoyance. When a man stands in front of us today in his waking state and we observe him with the clairvoyant eye, certain rays of light are seen streaming continually from the heart toward the head. If we wish to sketch this schematically, we must draw the region of the heart here and show the continuous streamings from there to the brain, flowing in the head around the organ known in anatomy as the pineal gland.

These rays of light stream from the heart to the head and flow around the pineal gland. These streamings arise because human blood, which is a physical substance, is continually dissolving itself into etheric substance. In the region of the heart there is a continual transformation of the blood into this delicate etheric substance that streams upward toward the head and flows glimmeringly around the pineal gland. This process, the etherization of the blood, can be shown in the human being throughout his waking life. It is different now, however, in the sleeping human being. When a human being sleeps, the occult observer is able to see a continual streaming from outside into the brain and also in the reverse direction, from the brain to the heart.

These streams, however, which in sleeping man come from outside, from cosmic space, from the macrocosm, and flow into the inner constitution of the physical and etheric bodies lying in the bed, reveal something remarkable when they are investigated. These rays vary greatly in different individuals. Sleeping human beings differ greatly from one another, and if those who are a little vain only knew how badly they betray themselves to esoteric observation when they go to sleep during public gatherings, they would try their best not to let this happen!

Moral qualities are revealed distinctly in the particular coloring of the streams that flow into human beings during sleep; in a person of lower moral principles the streams are quite different from what is observable in a person of higher principles. Endeavors to disguise one's nature by day are useless. In the face of the higher cosmic powers, no disguise is possible. In the case of a man who has only a slight inclination toward moral principles the rays streaming into him are a brownish red in color—various shades tending toward brownish red. In a man of high moral ideals the rays are lilac-violet. At the moment of waking or of going to sleep, a kind of struggle takes place in the region of the pineal gland between what streams down from above and what streams upward from below. When a man is awake, the intellectual element streams upward from below in the form of currents of light, and what is of moral-aesthetic nature streams downward from above. At the moment of waking or of going to sleep, these two currents meet, and in the man of low morality a violent struggle between the two streams takes place in the region of the pineal gland. In the man of high morality and an outstreaming intellectuality, a peaceful expansion of glimmering light appears in the region of the pineal gland. This gland is almost surrounded by a small sea of light in the moment between waking and sleeping. Moral nobility is revealed when a calm glow surrounds the pineal gland at these moments. In this way a man's moral character is reflected in him, and this calm glow of light often extends as far as the region of the heart. Two streams can therefore be perceived in man—one from the macrocosm, the other from the microcosm.

To estimate the full significance of how these two streams meet in man, we must first consider what was said previously in a more external way about the life of the soul and how this life reveals the threefold polarity of the intellectual, the aesthetic, and the moral elements that stream downward from above, from the brain toward the heart; we must also grasp the full significance of what was said about turning our attention to the corresponding phenomenon in the macrocosm. This corresponding phenomenon can be described today as the result of the most scrupulously careful esoteric research of recent years, undertaken by individuals among the genuine Rosicrucians. (see Note 7) These investigations have shown that something corresponding to what has been described in connection with the microcosm also takes place in the macrocosm. You will understand this more fully as time goes on.

Just as in the region of the human heart the blood is continually being transformed into etheric substance, so a similar process takes place in the macrocosm. We understand this when we turn our eyes to the Mystery of Golgotha, to the moment when the blood flowed from the wounds of Jesus Christ. This blood must not be regarded simply as chemical substance, but by reason of all that has been described as the nature of Jesus of Nazareth, it must be recognized as something altogether unique. When it flowed from His wounds and into the earth, a substance was imparted to our earth which, in uniting with it, constituted an event of the greatest possible significance for all future ages of the earth, and it could take place only once. What happened with this blood in the ages that followed? Nothing different from what otherwise takes place in the heart of man. In the course of earthly evolution, this blood passed through a process of “etherization.” Just as our blood streams upward from the heart as ether, so, since the Mystery of Golgotha, the etherized blood of Christ Jesus has lived in the ether of the earth. The etheric body of the earth is permeated by what the blood that flowed on Golgotha became. This is important. If what has thus come to pass through Christ Jesus had not taken place, man's condition on the earth could only have been as previously described. Since the Mystery of Golgotha, however, there has existed the continuous possibility for the activity of the etheric blood of Christ to flow together with the streamings from below upward, from heart to head.

Because the etherized blood of Jesus of Nazareth is present in the etheric body of the earth, it accompanies the etherized human blood streaming upward from the heart to the brain, so that not only do these streams that I described earlier meet in man, but the human bloodstream unites with the bloodstream of Christ Jesus. A union of these two streams can come about, however, only if man is able to unfold true understanding of what is contained in the Christ impulse. Otherwise, there can be no union; the two streams then mutually repel each other, thrust each other away. In every age of earthly evolution, we must acquire understanding in the form suitable for that epoch. At the time when Christ Jesus lived on earth, preceding events could be rightly understood by those who came to His forerunner, John, and were baptised by him according to the rite described in the Gospels. They experienced baptism in order that their sin, that is to say, the karma of their previous lives, karma, that had come to an end, might be changed, and in order that they might realize that the most powerful impulse in earthly evolution was about to descend into a physical body. The evolution of humanity progresses, however, and in our present age it is important that man should learn to understand that the knowledge contained in spiritual science must be received and gradually be able so to fire the streams flowing from heart to brain that anthroposophy can be understood. If this comes to pass, individuals will be able to comprehend the event that has its beginning in the twentieth century: the appearance of the etheric Christ in contradistinction to the physical Christ of Palestine.

We have now reached the moment in time when the etheric Christ enters into the life of the earth and will become visible, at first to a small number of people, through a natural clairvoyance. Then in the course of the next 3,000 years, He will become visible to greater and greater numbers of people. This will inevitably come to pass; it is an event of nature. That it will come to pass is as true as were the achievements of electricity in the nineteenth century. A certain number of individuals will see the etheric Christ and will themselves experience the event that took place at Damascus. This will depend, however, upon such human beings learning to observe the moment when Christ draws near to them. In only a few decades from now it will happen, particularly to those who are young in years—already preparation is being made for this—that some person here or there has certain experiences. If only he has truly sharpened his vision through engaging himself with anthroposophy, he may become aware that suddenly someone has come near to help him, to make him alert to this or that. The truth is that Christ has come to him, although he believes that what he sees is a physical man. He will come to realize, however, that this is a super-sensible being, because it immediately vanishes. Many a human being will have this experience when sitting silently in his room, heavy-hearted and oppressed, not knowing which way to turn. The door will open, and the etheric Christ will appear and speak words of consolation to him. The Christ will become a living comforter to men. However strange it may as yet seem, it is true nevertheless that many a time when people, even in considerable numbers, are sitting together not knowing what to do and waiting, they will see the etheric Christ. He Himself will be there, will confer with them, will cast His word into such gatherings. We are now approaching these times, and the positive, constructive element now described will take hold of the evolution of humanity.

No word shall be said here against the great advances made by culture in our day; these achievements are essential for the welfare and the freedom of human beings. Whatever can be gained in the way of outer progress, however, in mastering the forces of nature, is something small and insignificant compared with the blessing bestowed upon the person who experiences the awakening in his soul through Christ, Who will now take hold of human culture and its concerns. What thereby awakens in human beings will be unifying, positive forces. Christ brings constructive forces into human civilization.

If we were to look into early post-Atlantean times, we would find that human beings built their dwelling places by methods quite different from those used today. In those days they made use of all kinds of growing things. Even when building palaces, they summoned nature to their aid by having plants and branches of trees interlace with one another, and so on. Today, human beings must build with broken fragments. We make all culture of the outer world with the products of fragmentation. In the course of the coming years you will understand even better how much in our culture is the product of destruction.

Light is destroying itself within our post-Atlantean earthly processes. Until the time of Atlantis the earthly process was a progressive process, but since then it has been a process of decay. What is light? Light decays, and the decaying light is electricity. What we know as electricity is light that is destroying itself within matter. The chemical force that undergoes a transformation within earthly evolution is magnetism. Yet a third force will become active, and if electricity seems to work wonders today, this third force will affect civilization in a still more miraculous way. The more of this force we employ, the faster the earth will tend to become a corpse and its spiritual part prepare for the Jupiter embodiment. Forces have to be applied to destroy the earth in order that man can become free of the earth and that the earth's body can fall away. As long as the earth was involved in a progressive process, this was not done, since only the decaying earth can use the great achievements of electricity. Strange as this sounds, it must gradually become known. We must understand the process of evolution to evaluate our culture in the right way. We shall learn thereby that it is necessary for the earth to be destroyed; otherwise, the spirit will not become free. We shall also learn to value what is positive, namely, the penetration of spiritual forces into our existence on earth.

We thus realize what a tremendous advance was signified by the fact that Christ necessarily lived for three years on the earth in a specially prepared human body in order that He might be visible to physical eyes. Through what came to pass during those three years, human beings have become ripe to behold the Christ Who will move among them in an etheric body, Who will enter into earthly life as truly and effectively as did the physical Christ in Palestine. If human beings observe such happenings with undimmed senses they will know that there is an etheric body that will move about within the physical world, but they will know that this is the only etheric body able to work in the physical world as a human physical body works. It will differ from a physical body in this respect only, that it can be in two, three, even in a hundred, a thousand places at the same time. This is possible only for an etheric, not for a physical form. What will be accomplished in humanity through this further advance is that the two poles I have mentioned, the intellectual and the moral, will more and more become one; they will merge into unity. This will come about because in the course of the next millennia human beings will learn increasingly to observe the etheric Christ in the world; more and more they will be permeated in waking life, too, by the direct working of the good from the spiritual world. Whereas now the will sleeps by day, and man is only able to influence it indirectly through thought, in the course of the next millennia, through what from our time onward is working in us under the aegis of Christ, it will come about that the deeds of human beings in waking condition, too, can be directly productive of good.

The dream of Socrates, that virtue be able to be taught, will come true; more and more it will be possible on earth not only for our intellect to be stimulated and energized by this teaching but, through this teaching, for moral impulses to be spread abroad. Schopenhauer said, “To preach morality is easy; to establish it is most difficult.” Why is this? Because no morality has yet been spread by preaching. It is quite possible to recognize moral principles and yet not abide by them. For most people the Pauline saying holds good, that the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. This will change, through the moral fire streaming from the figure of Christ. Through this, the need for moral impulses on earth will be increasingly clear to man. Man will transform the earth in so far as he feels with ever-increasing strength that morality is an essential part of the earth. In the future, to be immoral will be possible only for people who receive immoral help, who are goaded in this direction, who are possessed by evil demons, by Ahrimanic, Asuric powers, and who strive for this possession.

This is the future condition of the earth: there will be a sufficient number of people who increasingly teach morality and at the same time offer a moral foundation, but there will also be those who by their own free decision surrender themselves to the evil powers and thus enable an excess of evil to be pitted against a good humanity. Nobody will be forced to do this; it will lie in the free will of each individual.

Then will come the time when the earth passes into conditions which, as in so much else, are only described in the great definitions of Oriental occultism, Oriental mysticism. The moral atmosphere will by then have gathered considerable strength. For many thousands of years Oriental mysticism has spoken of this moment in time, and since the coming of Gautama Buddha it has spoken especially strongly about that future condition when the earth will be bathed in a “moral-ether-atmosphere.” Ever since the time of the ancient Rishis it was the great hope of Oriental mysticism that this moral impulse would come to the earth from Vishva-Karman or, as Zarathustra proclaimed, from Ahura Mazdao. Oriental mysticism thus foresaw that this moral impulse, this moral atmosphere, would come to the earth from the being we call the Christ. It was upon Him, upon Christ, that the hopes of Oriental mysticism were set.

Oriental mystics were able to picture the consequences of that event but not the actual form it would take. They could picture that within a period of 5,000 years after the great Buddha achieved Enlightenment, pure Akashic forms, bathed in fire, lit by the sun, would appear in the wake of one Who could not be recognized through Oriental mysticism. A wonderful picture in very truth: that something would come to make it possible for the Sons of Fire and of Light to move about the moral atmosphere of the earth, not in physically embodied form but as pure Akashic forms within the earth's moral atmosphere. Five thousand years after Gautama Buddha's Enlightenment, so it was said, the teacher will also be there to make known to human beings what these wonderful forms are, these pure forms of Fire and Light. This teacher—the Maitreya Buddha—will appear 3,000 years after our time and will be able to teach people about the Christ impulse.

Oriental mysticism thus unites with the Christian knowledge of the West to form a beautiful unity. It will also be disclosed that he who will appear 3,000 years after our time as the Maitreya Buddha will have incarnated again and again on the earth as a Bodhisattva, as the successor of Gautama Buddha. One of his incarnations was that of Jeshu ben Pandira, who lived a hundred years before the beginning of our era. The being who incarnated in Jeshu ben Pandira is the same one who will one day become the Maitreya Buddha and who from century to century returns ever and again in a body of flesh, not yet as Buddha himself but as Bodhisattva. Even in our age there proceeds from him who later will be the Maitreya Buddha the most significant teachings concerning the Christ being and the Sons of Fire—the Agnishvattas—of Indian mysticism.

Those things by which man can recognize the being who is to become the Maitreya Buddha are common to all genuine Eastern mysticism and to Christian wisdom. The Maitreya Buddha who, in contrast to the Sons of Fire, will appear in a physical body as Bodhisattva, can be recognized by the fact that at first in his youth his development gives no intimation of the nature of the individuality within him. Only those possessed of understanding will recognize the presence of a Bodhisattva in such a human being, manifesting between the ages of thirty and thirty-three and not before. Something akin to an exchange of personality then takes place. The Maitreya Buddha will reveal his identity to humanity in the thirty-third year of his life. As Christ Jesus began his lifework in His thirtieth year, so do the Bodhisattvas, who will continue to proclaim the Christ impulses, reveal themselves in the thirty-third year of their lives. The Maitreya Buddha himself, as transformed Bodhisattva, speaking in powerful words of which no adequate idea can be given at the present time, will proclaim the great secrets of existence. He will speak in a language that must first be created, because no human being today could find the words with which the Maitreya Buddha will address humanity. The reason human beings cannot yet be addressed in this way is that the physical instrument for this form of speech does not yet exist. The teaching of the Enlightened One will not stream into human beings as teachings only but will pour moral impulses into their souls. Such words cannot yet be uttered by a physical larynx; in our time they can be present only in the spiritual worlds.

Anthroposophy is the preparation for everything that will come in the future. Those who take the process of man’s evolution seriously resolve not to allow the soul's development to come to a standstill but to ensure that its development will eventually enable the spiritual part of the earth to become free, leaving the grosser part to fall away like a corpse—for human beings could frustrate the whole process. Those who desire evolution to succeed must acquire understanding of the spiritual life through what we today call anthroposophy. The cultivation of anthroposophy thus becomes a duty; knowledge becomes something that we actually experience, something toward which we have responsibility. When we are inwardly aware of this responsibility and have this resolve, when we experience the mysteries of the world so as to arouse in us the wish to become anthroposophists, then our experience is right. Anthroposophy must not, however, be something that merely satisfies our curiosity; it must rather be something without which we cannot live. Only when this is the case do we experience in the right sense; only then do we live as living building stones in that great construction that must be carried out in human souls and that can embrace all humanity.

Anthroposophy is thus a revelation of true world phenomena that will confront people of the future and will confront our own souls, whether still in a physical body or in the life between death and a new birth. The coming upheaval will concern us regardless of whether we are still living in the physical body or whether we have laid it aside. People must acquire understanding of the earth in the physical body if it is to take effect between death and a new birth. To those who acquire some understanding of Christ now in the physical body, it will make no difference, when the moment comes to behold Christ, whether or not they have already passed through the portal of death. But if those who now reject understanding of the Christ have already passed through the portal of death when this moment arrives, they must wait until their next incarnation, because such understanding cannot be acquired between death and a new birth. Once the foundation has been acquired, however, it endures, and then Christ becomes visible also during the period between death and the new birth. Anthroposophy is thus not only something we learn for our physical life but also has value when we have laid aside the physical body at death.

This is what I wished to impart to you today as an understanding of humanity and a handle in answering many questions. Self-knowledge is difficult because man is such a complex being. The reason for this complexity is that he is connected with all the higher worlds and beings. We have within us shadow-images of the great world, and all the members of our constitution—the physical, etheric, and astral bodies and the I—are worlds for divine beings. Our physical, etheric, and astral bodies and I form one world; the other is the higher world, the world of heaven. For the divine-spiritual beings, the higher worlds are the bodily members in high, divine-spiritual worlds.

Man is so complex because he is truly a mirror-image of the spiritual world. Realization of this should make him conscious of his intrinsic worth. From this knowledge, however, that although we are pictures of the spiritual world we nevertheless fall far short of what we ought to be—from this knowledge we also acquire, in addition to consciousness of our worth as human beings, the right attitude of modesty and humility toward the macrocosm and its gods.

Rudolf Steiner's Answers to Questions at the End of the Lecture

Question: How are the words used by St. Paul, “to speak in tongues” (I Cor. 12:10), to be understood?

Answer: In exceptional human beings it can happen that not only is there present the phenomenon of speaking in the waking state but something otherwise present only in sleep-consciousness flows into this speaking. This is the phenomenon about which St. Paul spoke. Goethe spoke about it in the same sense; he has written two most interesting treatises about this phenomenon.

Question: How will one understand Christ's words of consolation?

Answer: Human beings will feel these words of consolation as though they arise in their own hearts. They can also be received through physical hearing.

Question: What is the relationship of chemical forces and substances to the spiritual world?

Answer: There are in the world a number of substances that can combine with or separate from each other. What we call chemical action is projected into the physical world from the world of Devachan—the realm of the harmony of the spheres. In the union of two substances according to their atomic weights, we have a shadowing of two tones of the harmony of the spheres. The chemical affinity between two substances in the physical world is like a shadowing from the world of the harmony of the spheres. The numerical ratios in chemistry are really an expression of the numerical ratios of the harmony of the spheres, which has become dumb and silent owing to the densification of matter. If one were able actually to bring material substance into etheric dilution and to perceive the atomic numbers as the inner formative principle, one would hear the harmony of the spheres.

We have the physical world, the astral world, the Lower Devachan, and the Higher Devachan. If one thrusts the body down lower even than the physical world, one comes into the sub-physical world, the lower astral world, the lower or evil Lower Devachan, and the lower or evil Higher Devachan. The evil astral world is the province of Ahriman and the evil Higher Devachan the province of the Asuras. If one drives chemical action down beneath the physical plane, into the evil Devachanic world, magnetism arises. If one thrusts light down into the sub-material—that is to say, a stage deeper than the material world-electricity arises. If what lives in the harmony of the spheres is thrust down farther still, into the province of the Asuras, an even more terrible force, which it will not be possible to keep hidden very much longer, is generated. One can only hope that when this force comes—a force we must conceive as being far, far stronger than the most violent electrical discharge—one can only hope that before some discoverer gives this force into the hands of humanity, human beings will no longer have anything immoral left in them.

Question: What is electricity?

Answer: Electricity is light in the sub-material state. Light is there compressed to the utmost degree. An inward quality, too, must be ascribed to light; light is itself at every point. Warmth can extend itself in the three dimensions of space. In light we must speak of a fourth dimension; it can extend itself in a fourfold way; it has the quality of inwardness as a fourth dimension.

Question: What happens to the earth's corpse?

Answer: As the residue of the ancient Moon evolution we have our present moon that circles the earth. Similarly, there will be a residue of the earth that will circle Jupiter. Then these residues will gradually dissolve into the universal ether. On Venus there will no longer be any residue. Venus will manifest, to begin with, as pure warmth, then it will become light, and then it will pass over into the spiritual world. The residue left behind by the earth will be like a corpse. This is a path along which man must not accompany the earth, however, because he would thereby be exposed to dreadful torments. There are, however, many beings who will accompany this corpse, since they themselves will by that means develop to a higher stage.

 Reflected as sub-physical world: Astral World ............. the province of Lucifer Lower Devachan ........... the province of Ahriman Higher Devachan .......... the province of the Asuras 

RUDOLF STEINER: It is most important that, along with all our other work, we should cultivate clear articulation. This has a kind of influence, a certain effect. I have here some sentences that I formulated for another occasion; they have no especially profound meaning, but are constructed so that the speech organs are activated in every kind of movement, organically. I would like you to pass these sentences around and repeat them in turn without embarrassment so that by constant practice they may make our speech organs flexible; we can have these organs do gymnastics, so to speak. Mrs. Steiner will say the sentences first as it should be done artistically, and I will ask each one of you to repeat them after her. These sentences are not composed according to sense and meaning, but in order to “do gymnastics” with the speech organs.¹

Dart may these boats through darkening gloaming
Name neat Norman on nimble moody mules

The N is constantly repeated, but in different combinations of letters, and so the speech organ can do the right gymnastic exercises. At one point two Ns come together; you must stop longer over the first N in “on nimble.”

Rattle me more and more rattles now rightly

In this way you can activate the speech organs with the right gymnastics.

I would recommend that you take particular care to find your way into the very forms of the sounds and the forms of the syllables; see that you really grow into these forms, so that you consciously speak each sound, that you lift each sound into consciousness. It is a common weakness in speech that people just glide over the sounds, whereas speech is there to be understood. It would even be better to first bring an element of caricature into your speech by emphasizing syllables that should not be emphasized at all. Actors, for example, practice saying friendly instead of friendly! You must pronounce each letter consciously. It would even be good for you to do something like Demosthenes did, though perhaps not regularly. You know that, when he could not make any progress with his speaking, he put pebbles on his tongue and through practice strengthened his voice to the degree that it could be heard over a rushing river; this he did to acquire a delivery that the Athenians could hear.

I will now ask Miss B. to introduce the question of temperaments. Since the individual child must be our primary consideration in teaching, it is proper that we study the basis of the temperaments with the maximum care. Naturally when we have a class it is not possible to treat each child individually. But you can give much individual treatment by having on one side, let’s say, the phlegmatics and melancholics, and the sanguine and choleric children on the other side; you can have them take part in a lively interchange, turning now to the group of one temperament, and then calling on another group for answers, saying this to one group and that to another. In this way individualization happens on its own in the class.

A comprehensive picture was presented of the temperaments and their treatment.

RUDOLF STEINER: You have given a good account of what was spoken of in our conversations together on this subject. But you may be going too far when you assert, with regard to the melancholic temperament, that it has a decided inclination toward piety. There is only one little word lacking: “often.” It is also just possible that the melancholic disposition in children is rooted in pronounced egoism, and in no way has a religious tendency. With adults you can leave out the little word “often,” but in young children the melancholic element often masks a pronounced egoism. Melancholic children are often dependent on atmospheric conditions; the weather often effects the melancholic temperament. The sanguine children are also dependent on atmospheric conditions, but more in their moods, in the soul, whereas the melancholic children are affected more unconsciously by the weather in the physical body.

If I were to go into this question in detail from the standpoint of spiritual science, I would have to show you how the childish temperament is actually connected with karma, how in the child’s temperament something really appears that could be described as the consequence of experiences in previous lives on Earth. Let’s take the concrete example of a man who is obliged in one life to be very interested in himself. He is lonely and is thus forced to be interested in himself. Because he is frequently absorbed in himself, the force of circumstances causes him to be inclined to unite his soul very closely with the structure of his physical body, and in the next incarnation he brings with him a bodily nature keenly alive to the conditions of the outer world. He becomes a sanguine individual. Thus, it can happen that when someone has been compelled to live alone in one incarnation, which would have retarded the person’s progress, this is adjusted in the next life through becoming a sanguine, with the ability to notice everything in the surroundings. We must not view karma from a moral but from a causal perspective. When a child is properly educated, it may be of great benefit to the child’s life to be a sanguine, capable of observing the outer world. Temperament is connected, to a remarkable degree, with the whole life and soul of a person’s previous incarnation.

Dr. Steiner was asked to explain the changes of temperaments that can occur during life, from youth to maturity.

RUDOLF STEINER: If you remember a course of lectures that I once gave in Cassel about the Gospel of St. John, you will recall the remarks I made concerning the relationship of a child to his or her parents.² It was stated there that the father-principle works very strongly in the physical body and the I, and that the mother-principle predominates in the etheric and astral bodies. Goethe divined this truth when he wrote the beautiful words:

From my father I have my stature [connected with the physical body] and the serious conduct of life [connected with the I], from my dear mother my happy nature [connected with the etheric body] and joy in creative fantasy [connected with the astral body].

There is extraordinary wisdom in these words. What lives in the human being is mixed and mingled in a remarkable way. Humankind is an extremely complicated being. A definite relationship exists in human beings between the I and the physical body, and again a relationship between the etheric body and the astral body. Thus, the predominance of one can pass over into the predominance of another during the course of life. For example, in the melancholic temperament the predominance of the I passes into the predominance of the physical body, and in a choleric person it even cuts across inheritance and passes from the mother element to the father element, because the preponderance of the astral passes over into a preponderance of the I.

In the melancholic temperament the I predominates in the child, the physical body in the adult. In the sanguine temperament the etheric body predominates in the child and the astral body in the adult. In the phlegmatic temperament the physical body predominates in the child and the etheric body in the adult. In the choleric temperament the astral body predominates in the child, the I in the adult. But you can only arrive at a true view of such things when you strictly remember that you cannot arrange them in a tabulated form, and the higher you come into spiritual regions, the less this will be possible.

The observation was expressed that a similar change can be found in the sequence of names of the characters in The Guardian of the Threshold and The Souls’ Awakening.³

RUDOLF STEINER: There is a change there that is definitely in accordance with the facts; these Mystery Plays must be taken theoretically as little as possible. I cannot say anything if the question is put theoretically, because I have always had these characters before me just as they are, purely objectively. They have all been taken from real life. Recently, on another occasion, I said here that Felix Balde⁴ was a real person living in Trumau, and the old shoemaker who had known the archetype of Felix is called Scharinger, from Münchendorf. Felix still lives in the tradition of the village there. In the same way all these characters whom you find in my Mystery Plays are actual individual personalities.

Question: In speaking of a folk temperament can you also speak of someone as belonging to the temperament of one’s nation? And a further question: Is the folk temperament expressed in the language?

RUDOLF STEINER: What you said first is right, but your second suggestion is not quite correct. It is possible to speak of a folk temperament in a real sense. Nations really have their own temperaments, but the individual can very well rise above the national temperament; one is not necessarily predisposed to it. You must be careful not to identify the individuality of the particular person with the temperament of his whole nation. For example, it would be wrong to identify the individual Russian of today with the temperament of the Russian nation. The latter would be melancholic while the individual Russian of today is inclined to be sanguine.

The quality of the national temperament is expressed in the various languages, so one could certainly say that the language of one nation is like this, and the language of another nation is like that. It is true to say that the English language is thoroughly phlegmatic and Greek exceptionally sanguine. Such things can be said as indications of real facts. The German language, being two-sided in nature, has very strongly melancholic and also very strongly sanguine characteristics. You can see this when the German language appears in its original form, particularly in the language of philosophy. Let me remind you of the wonderful quality of Fichte’s philosophical language or of some passages in Hegel’s Aesthetics, where you find the fundamental character of German language expressed with unusual clarity. The Italian folk-spirit has a special relationship to air, the French a special connection with fluids, the English and American, especially the English, with the solid earth, the American even with the sub-earthly—that is, with earth magnetism and earth electricity. Then we have the Russian who is connected with the light—that is, with earth’s light that rays back from plants. The German folk-spirit is connected with warmth, and you see at once that this has a double character—inner and outer, warmth of the blood and warmth of the atmosphere. Here again you find a polaric character even in the distribution of these elementary conditions. You see this polarity at once—this cleavage in the German nature, which can be found there in everything.

Question: Should the children know anything about this classification according to temperament?

RUDOLF STEINER: This is something that must be kept from the children. Much depends on whether the teacher has the right and tactful feeling about what should be kept hidden. The purpose of all these things we have spoken of here is to give the teacher authority. The teacher who doesn’t use discretion in what to say cannot be successful.

Students should not be seated according to their attainments, and you will find it advantageous to refuse requests from children to sit together.

Question: Is there a connection between the temperaments and the choice of foreign languages for the different temperaments of the children?

RUDOLF STEINER: Theoretically that would be correct, but it would not be advisable to consider it given current conditions. It will never be possible to be guided only by what is right according to the child’s disposition; we have to remember also that children must make their way in the world, and we have to give them what they need to do that. If in the near future, for example, it appeared as if a great many German children had no aptitude for learning English, it would not be good to give in to this weakness. Just those who show a weakness of this kind may be the first to need to know English.

There was a discussion on the task given the previous day: to consider the case of a whole class that, incited by one child, was guilty of very bad behavior; for example, they had been spitting on the ceiling. Some views were expressed on this matter.

RUDOLF STEINER interjected various remarks: It is a very practical method to wait for something like this to wear out, so that the children stop doing it on their own. You should always be able to distinguish whether something is done out of malice or high spirits.

One thing I would like to say: Even the best teacher will have naughtiness in the class, but if a whole class takes part it is usually the teacher’s fault. If it isn’t the teacher’s fault, you will always find that a group of children are on the teacher’s side and will be a support. Only when the teacher has failed will the whole class take part in insubordination.

If there has been any damage, then of course it is proper that it should be corrected, and the children themselves must do this—not by paying for it, but with their own hands. You could use a Sunday, or even two or three Sundays to repair any damage. And remember, humor is also a good method of reducing things to an absurdity, especially minor faults.

I gave you this problem to think on to help you see how to tackle something that occurs when one child incites the others. To demonstrate where the crux of the matter lies, I will tell you a story of something that actually occurred. In a class where things of this kind often happened, and where the teachers could not cope with them, one of the boys between ten and twelve years old went up to the front during the interval between two lessons and said, “Ladies and gentlemen! Aren’t you ashamed of always doing things like this, you good-fornothings? Just remember, you would all remain completely stupid if the teachers didn’t teach you anything.” This had the most wonderful effect.

We can learn something from this episode: When a large proportion of the class does something like this because of the instigation of one or more of the children, it may very well happen that, also through the influence of a few, order may be restored. If a few children have been instigators there will be others, two or three perhaps, who express disapproval. There are almost always leaders among the children, so the teacher should pick out two or three considered suitable and arrange a conversation with them. The teacher would have to make it clear that behavior of this kind makes teaching impossible, and that they should recognize this and make their influence felt in the class. These children will then have just as much influence as the instigators, and they can make things clear to their classmates. In any situation like this you must consider how the children affect one another.

The most important thing here is that you should evoke feelings that will lead them away from naughtiness. A harsh punishment on the part of the teacher would only cause fear and so on. It would never inspire the children to do better. The teacher must remain as calm as possible and adopt an objective attitude. That does not mean lessening the teacher’s own authority. The teacher could certainly be the one to say, “Without your teachers you would learn nothing and remain stupid.” But the teacher should allow the correction be carried out by the other children, leaving it to them to make their schoolmates feel ashamed.

We thus appeal to feelings rather than to judgment. But when the whole class is repeatedly against the teacher, then the fault must be looked for in the teacher. Most naughtiness arises because the children are bored and lack a relationship with their teacher.

When a fault is not too serious it can certainly be very good for the teacher to do just what the pupils are doing—to say, for example, when the pupils are grumbling, “Well I can certainly grumble too!” In this way the matter is treated homeopathically, as it were. Homeopathic treatment is excellent for moral education. It’s also a good way to divert the children’s attention to something else (although I would never appeal to their ambition). In general, however, we seldom have to complain of such misdemeanors. Whenever you allow mischievousness of this kind to be corrected by other children in the class, you work on the feelings to reestablish weakened authority. When another pupil stresses that gratitude must be felt toward the teacher, then the respect for authority will be restored again. It is important to choose the right children; you must know your class and pick those suited to the task.

If I taught a class I could venture to do this. I would try to find the ringleader, whom I would compel to denounce, as much as possible, such conduct, to say as many bad things about it as possible, and I would ignore the fact that it was this student who had done it. I would then bring the matter quickly to a close so that a sense of uncertainty would be left in the minds of the children, and you will come to see that much can be gained from this element of uncertainty. And to make one of the rascals involved describe the incident correctly and objectively will not in any way lead to hypocrisy. I would consider any actual punishment superfluous, even harmful. The essential thing is to arouse a feeling for the objective damage that has been caused and the necessity of correcting it. If teaching time has been lost in dealing with this matter, then it must be made good after school hours, not as a punishment but simply to make up the time lost.

I will now present a problem of a more psychological nature: if you have some rather unhealthy “goody-goodies” in the class—children who try to curry favor in various ways, who have a habit of continually coming to the teacher about this, that, and the other, how would you treat them? Of course you can treat the matter extremely simply. You could say: I am simply not going to bother with them. But then this peculiarity will be turned into other channels: these “good” children will gradually become a harmful element in the class.

• 1. Elsewhere, Steiner stated: “In giving artistic shape and form to speech, healthy cooperation and harmonization of body, soul, and spirit manifests. The body shows whether it can incorporate the spirit correctly; the soul reveals whether the spirit truly lives in it; and the spirit is vividly present, working directly into the physical.” Creative Speech, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1978, p. 33. The original German speech exercises may be found in the appendix.
• 2. The Gospel of St. John: And Its Relation to the Other Gospels, Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY, 1982.
• 3. See Rudolf Steiner, The Four Mystery Plays: The Portal of Initiation, The Soul’s Probation, The Guardian of the Threshold, and The Souls’ Awakening, trans. Adam Bittleston, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1983. The four plays will be published individually; see The Souls’ Awakening: Soul and Spiritual Events in Dramatic Scenes, trans. Ruth and Hans Pusch, Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY, 1995 (the other plays will follow).
• 4. Felix Balde is a character in the Mystery Plays.

Today we will go over to some of those eurythmic exercises more related to the activity proceeding from the soul. Before we begin, however, it will be necessary to take note that it is usually assumed when a person produces an expression of will or when he arrives at a judgment, that these expressions are connected with the human nervous system alone. This, however, is not at all the case; one must make it clear to oneself that the judgments which the human being passes, for example, are bound up with his entire constitution; that man pronounces a judgment out of the totality of his being. Thus when one makes the eurythmic movement corresponding to a judgment, here again, the whole human being is influenced in a certain manner; it is not only the head which will be subject to the influences of what arises through judging eurythmically. Mrs. Baumann will show us the movement which corresponds to confirmation, and then the one corresponding to negation. Naturally it should be carried out several times without interruption when used as therapeutic exercise. Now this confirmation and negation is precisely that which can be called a judgment; when one confirms or negates something one has to do with the nature of judgment in its essence. When you give such a confirmation or negation, the movement works, when it is repeated frequently, by way of a detour through the etheric body very strongly on the respiratory system. One can by this means counter a tendency to shortness of breath. You can for example repeat the confirmation ten times consecutively, then the negation, and follow this up with confirmation, negation, confirmation, negation—both ten times consecutively. Whatsoever illness this shortness of breath may be the symptom of, by this means one will be able to counteract it in such a way that the entire constitution is affected as the whole matter occurs by way of a detour through the etheric body. You must only keep in sight what is being done here. One could interpret what Mrs. Baumann has done touching upon what is essential in it as follows: what she projects thereby into the world is a thought that has become fleeting, a thought which has gained wings and gone over into movement. When a judgment is fixed eurythmically—as a confirmation or negation—then it is a thought which rides on the movement. And because the thought rides on the movement one projects in fact on the one hand, a part of this being outwards; on the other hand, because the thought rides on the movement one takes a part more thoroughly into oneself than otherwise. That is to say, one makes a movement through which one becomes more awake than one otherwise is. Such movements are actually movements that awaken. However, because one does not wake up with the ego at the same time in the same manner, the activity of the ego is in a certain way dampened. This dampening of the ego is not absolute, however, but in relation to the organism. In fighting shortness of breath by means of this detour through the etheric body this constitutes what would be the first symptom reached and what is introduced into the whole human constitution by means of the byway through the etheric body.

Now a disposition of the will:¹ sympathy and antipathy. Now imagine you make this movement repeatedly, one after another: sympathy, antipathy, sympathy, antipathy, or only one of these two. When one does this, in a certain sense one is setting out something which one carries within oneself; naturally this can only be confirmed through observation. It is a sort of falling asleep. The other movement (confirmation and negation; the ed.) must be carried out quickly, and this must be carried out slowly. It is indeed a movement which brings forth the imagination of sleep in the observer; imaginatively one falls asleep in a way with such a movement—not in reality, however, at least that shouldn't happen. But because one in reality doesn't go to sleep while making this movement, the “I” is more strongly active in relation to the body than it usually is. And by means of such a movement the circulation and the digestion as a whole are stimulated. The entire digestion is really stimulated in such a manner that through such a movement the tendency to belch, for example, can be counteracted.

Now we want to express that which one could call the feeling of love towards something (Mrs. Baumann). Take a good look at this, the feeling of love for something. Imagine it carried out ten times consecutively and accompanied by a powerful E between each of the movements. Thus, Love-E, Love-E, and so on, one after another. You accompany the movements which you have learned as expressing feeling in eurythmy—it could be another feeling as well—with the movement for E. Here we have a strong influence which proceeds from the human etheric to act on the astral nature and which has the effect of warming the circulation. It is something which really works on the circulatory system in a beneficial manner. One cannot say that it accelerates or retards the circulation; it affects it in a beneficially warming manner.

We also have something which could be called a wish: Hope. (Miss Wolfram) Look at this and picture to yourself that one carries out this movement for the wish repeatedly—always returning to the position of balance, then carrying out the movement for the wish again—and always alternating it with the movement for U. This means that the astral will act very strongly upon the etheric and it can be said that a beneficial warming effect on the breathing system will result. Naturally one must take into consideration that all these things of which we have spoken today occur by way of the etheric body and can, therefore, never show what effect they have on the following day. Some effects may appear after two to three days and are then, however, all the more certain.

Now imagine that we make a bending and stretching movement with the legs and at the same time a definite B-movement (Mrs. Baumann). That which I have just shown you simultaneous with a decided B movement, now rest, B while bending, ten times consecutively. That is something which people who very frequently have migraine or other headaches should do. The time for them to do it, however, is not when they have the headache, but rather when they do not.

A particularly effective movement is the following: bend and stretch the torso forwards and backwards accompanying this movement simultaneously with the movement for R. (Miss Wolfram) Bend forwards, bend backwards with the R; that consecutively and often. That affects the whole rhythmic system, the rhythm of breathing and of circulation, positively. When there are irregularities present there, this will work extraordinarily well under all conditions.

Now I will ask you to take a look at another most effective movement which consists in shaking the head to the right and left with the movement for M. The head should not be turned, in so far as possible, but only bent to the right and left, and that with the M-movement. That is something which when practised has a very strong quieting effect on all possible irregularities in the lower body, again by way of the etheric body. Irregularities in the lower system which express themselves through pains can be mitigated thereby. One must combat tendencies to such pains when the pains are not present. That is the crux of the matter. While the pains are present it cannot very well be carried out. The important thing is to carry it out so long as the pains are not present.

Please take note of the following: strike the knee with the foot, stemming the movement of the foot against the knee; picture this accompanied by an E movement with the arms. It is a very beautiful movement. It can and should be carried out as an exercise with children in school, as when it is done frequently it wages war against the most varied aspects of clumsiness. The children will at least he well cured of their clumsiness when they practise just this exercise. And when the children come and say that their shoulders hurt so and everything possible hurts, then you should reply: that is exactly what I wanted; you will be especially glad about it once it's better again! Every pain that is brought about in this manner combats clumsiness. Thus in respect to this one can deal quite energetically with the children.

Now we will take a look at another variety (of movement). Imagine every sort of E movement which can be carried out with the arms now projected onto the floor. This movement comes into existence when this line crosses the other at an angle. Now let us imagine it in this way: Mrs. Baumann places herself here, Miss Wolfram there. Now walk and accompany the whole thing with an E movement with the arms. Run so that you pass by one another, but pay attention that you don't run into each other. So you make an E on the floor and an E with the arms and you pay attention at the same time that you don't collide. It is this taking notice of the other person, this exerting of one's concentration on him combined with the E-gesture which works together with the movement here. This exercise can only be carried out with two people. It is—when carried out by two people—essentially what one would call a strengthening of the heart, all that which is connected with the phenomena which one generally terms the strengthening of the heart.

Question: Could one have this exercise carried out by one sick and one healthy person?

One can readily do that, but one would perhaps have to have the healthy person omit the E-movement with the arms. This movement is especially intended for the clinical situation where one will, of course, have two people in need of a strengthening of the heart; it really is better if one has two such people.

Now let us imagine the movement so: one of the ladies stands here, the other here, behind one another. When you arrive here, then Miss Wolfram carries out the path which you have begun, but in such a manner that she is always facing forwards. Then as the movement carries on, you take this part of the path and you the other. You initiate the continuation of your own movement in the other person and accompany it with the O position of the arms. Now one must see that the people who do this begin at a certain tempo; to begin with it must be slower, then become ever faster and faster. This rapid tempo should then ebb out into a slower one. That is then a movement which serves to strengthen the diaphragm significantly and thereby the whole breathing system. Here again, when one leaves out the O movement with the arms one can have a healthy person participate, but it is of course best to employ two people who are in need of healing.

Now I will ask you, Mrs. Baumann, to demonstrate the H movement for us once again. And now I will ask you to make this movement in such a way that you hold the arms still and imitate the movement with the shoulders alone as well as possible. In this case, however, one must accustom oneself to doing this movement with the shoulders and making an A with the arms at the same time, an A of any sort with the arms. That should be repeated frequently. You see, that is what could be designated as: “laughing eurythmically”. That is how one laughs eurythmically. And when one laughs thus eurythmically that which one has in the curative effect of laughing itself is really very greatly heightened. The curative effect of laughing is well known. But when one practises laughing eurythmically, this curative effect is proportionately greater. You could do it otherwise as well, however.

Miss Wolfram, please make an A movement of some sort. And now try to make the same movement I spoke of before, the shoulder movement of the H, but do it quite slowly as if you wished to do it thoughtfully. Thus into the A movement of the arms one makes the shoulder movement of the 11. One could designate that as follows: the whole organism is brought into accord with the feeling of veneration. It encompasses all that which the feeling of veneration actually effects in the organism. The effect on the human organism of the feeling of veneration, when it is habitual, is to make the organism as such actually more durable, more sturdy. It becomes capable of greater resistance. People who really have the capacity for veneration inherent in them become more capable of resistance within their organism. That is why everything which brings children to veneration, to the gift or capacity for reverence makes children more resistant. And one can come to the assistance of this capacity for resistance through this last eurythmic exercise.

One must keep in mind that what we have demonstrated today as decision, expression of will, hope, love, what we have shown in respect to certain organic pains, what we have demonstrated as a means of combating clumsiness and so on, all these things are related to man in such a way that the human being is gripped through them in the innermost part of his organic being and by way of a detour through the etheric body actually derives the possibility of making this etheric body into a workable instrument. The etheric body is a part of man which becomes stiff in most of those people who sit out their lives, spend their lives without interest for their surroundings. And it is not good when the human etheric body becomes stiff; nor for the organic functions is it good. When one has the exercises which we have described today carried out by children in moderation and by the appropriate patients very energetically (one can see by the indications given which patients have need of them), the etheric body will become supple and inwardly flexible. And by means of them one will do the children as well as the adults a good service.

These movements are indeed such that one can give them priority over the usual gymnastic movements; the usual gymnastic movements are taken in reality from the physiology, from the physis of the body alone and they tear the physical body continually out of the etheric body. Thus, the physical body then makes its own movements which do not pull the movements of the etheric body in the appropriate manner after them. For this reason the usual, merely physiologic, gymnastics is basically a school for materialism, since by means of it materialistic thought is transformed into feeling. Eurythmy makes man capable of recognising himself within increasingly and of gaining control over himself inwardly. Therefore such exercises have a pedagogic-didactic value as well as therapeutic and hygienic value. The attempt should be made to have these exercises—those described today, I mean—carried out by adults as well in moderation and to develop them in such a way that they could be carried out by the sick in a clinical situation.

A question has been put to me which could perhaps lead to something—and some other questions as well. Here is the question: “The Chinese cannot pronounce the letter R, they substitute L for it. Strawberries thus becomes stlawbellies, for example. Does that have to do with their race?”

It has to do with the organisation of the organism insofar as that is racially determined, of course. Through the particular gift of one part of mankind for one sound or another one can see what tendencies are inherent in certain people by virtue of their race. I brought such things to discussion just a few hours ago.

Other questions have been put about exercises which could be used in relation to conditions of indolence, insufficient reaction, lethargy and so on; conditions which frequently have to do with an insufficient thyroid activity. And here it has been brought to our attention that Fliess, in his well-known book about the course of life, has placed this complex of symptoms in the intermediate sexual category. How could a contemporary author not do so? Everything about which he knows very little he chalks up to the intennediate sexual category, or some other way. He puts the left-handed, for example, in the same category. I want to emphasize, expressly, however, that I have never recommended a eurythmic exercise with a special right-left emphasis to anyone.

(Attention was drawn to the exercises which one should begin either to the right or to the left: iambus, trochee.)

That is not in order to particularly accentuate an emphasis on the right or left, but rather in order to call forth the feeling of the iambus or trochee within the forward motion. That is thoroughly justified. The fact is that it has less to do with the long-short than it has to do with the particular movement. It is quite correct; it has to do with the fact that what lives in the breathing system is reversed when it is transferred into the system of movement. The upper man and the lower man are the reverse of one another. Thus every imaginable iambus in the breathing system, brought forth in speech, must of necessity become a trochee in the movement of legs and vice versa. Eurythmy in its entirety is based on this principle. You may test the whole of eurythmy in respect to it: eurythmy does not follow the principle of similarity in its execution, but the movement which is in keeping with the polar image. It is all entirely in accord with the image formed as the other polarity. This idea must be maintained throughout. But I have never recommended to anyone that he do something especially right or left; that should be left completely to the feeling. The question of whether a thing should be done with the right hand or the left hand should be determined only by those matters which would otherwise come into consideration. I do not want people to have the impression that I would have suggested an emphasis on the right in particular eurythmic exercises to any more left-sided person whosoever. That is not the case.

In addition I would like to emphasize the following. It is the case that when one has to do with insufficient reaction or with lethargy this more general indication will fall into some category which I have already given; lethargy is a general expression and can be relegated to something or other about which I have spoken. The appropriate movements should then be carried out.

On the whole one should see that with an exercise such as I have just given in connection with judgment and expression of will²—that the appearance of indolence, of lethargy and so on can be combatted very especially by that which I have given for the expression of will. And if one should notice that this is not particularly effective, one can alternate that exercise with the exercise that I have given for judgment, but in such a way that one attempts to discover—as it is here a question of trial—whether it is more effective when one varies the expression of will and the expression of judgment in a ratio of three to two or of two to three—one shorter, the other longer. And since these things work by way of a detour through the etheric body, one will find that one will first have to begin and carry on with these exercises for two to three days and according to the circumstances—when one sees that they are not having the proper effect—make a change on the third day. But in general one can say that the one exercise so well as the other will have an awakening effect on man in both directions. The will exercise and the judgment exercise are thus the ones that come into particular consideration.

In order that there be no misunderstanding, I emphasize that of course the opinion must not arise that these exercises would have a very significant effect after being carried out for two or three days. That would be an error. In order to produce an effect, these exercises should be carried out for at least seven weeks. Thus one can maintain—without necessarily being mystically inclined—that the space of time necessary for the beneficial effects just described to show themselves would be about seven weeks.

That is what I wanted to tell you today concerning these matters. I would like to request that the corresponding session tomorrow follow the other directly, after a short pause. Tomorrow will be the last eurythmy session then, as it will be necessary to have two purely medical sessions one after the other on Monday.

• 1. Willenszustinnung
• 2. Willensäusserung

Dear friends,

Yesterday we examined the human constitution as far as it can be seen in human beings themselves or in connection with their immediate environment. Now we must go out beyond humanity. For everywhere humanity stands in some relation to the forces in the universe, and one can only understand these various relations if one explores the immense diversity of the universe itself.

Just think, dear friends, how manifold the forces in the universe are! Look at a growing plant, for instance. Follow the growth of its stem upward from the earth's surface, and the growth of its root downward. Right there are two opposite tendencies within the plant: a striving upward and a striving downward. And if today we were far enough along in scientific research—so often used for less important matters—to use it for such a thing as the growth of a stem upward and the growth of a root downward, we would find the connections in the universe that would then finally explain the totality: humanity and the world, microcosm and macrocosm. For we would find that everything connected with the stem's upward growth has some relation to the unfolding of the sun's forces in the course of the day, in the course of the year, even beyond the year. And we would find that everything connected with the root's downward growth has some relation to the moon's forces and the moon's changes. If therefore we look at a plant properly, we already come to see through its form a relation between sun and moon. We have, so to speak, to extract the simple image of a plant from the whole universe, from all the forces in the universe.

Someone who is really observant will never see the root other than striving downward into the earth and at the same time rounding itself. The root rounding itself into the earth—that is the picture of the root that one must have, the rounding form pushing into the ground. (Plate V, left) We must see the stem differently as it unfolds in an upward direction. Someone who combines sensitivity with observation will have the definite feeling that the stem strives to stream out as a line. The root wants to unfold in a rounding, circular direction; the stem wants to unfold in a linear direction. That is the archetypal form of the plant. And in the linear striving upward we must see the presence of sun forces on the earth. In the root's striving toward roundness we must see the presence of moon forces on the earth.

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

Now let us look further. We think of the sun as being at a great height and of the plant as streaming to reach it. But the plant does more than just reach upward; it reaches out in width, it creates peripheries. And we find within its upward striving that something else is active, at first just at its top in the blossoms we find the forces of Venus working with the sun forces. Then as blossoms unfold below, as leaves come, moving inward from the periphery, we find the forces of Mercury working. On the one hand if we want to understand the structure of the plant as it pushes toward the Sun, we must see that the sun forces are helped by the forces of Venus and Mercury.

On the other hand we must realize that these forces alone would not be able to form the plant. With them alone, the plant-being would in a certain sense only attain a compact, solid form. For it to unfold as one sees it, for instance, in the most extreme example in a tree, there are forces working everywhere counter to the Venus and Mercury forces: namely, the forces of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Thus in addition to the basic polarity of sun activity and moon activity, there is also the activity of all the other planets in the universe. (Plate V, left)

In the plant you have the entire planetary system in front of you. It is right there on the earth. And perhaps it is not so ridiculous that a scholar—a half or three-quarters scholar as Paracelsus¹¹ was—made such a statement as this: “When you eat a plant you're eating the entire planetary system. For all those forces are contained in it.” Paracelsus said it like this: With the plant you eat the whole heaven.” The world is indeed formed in such manifold variety that one does have in one's immediate environment the forces of the entire macrocosm—in growth, in structure, in the disposition of all living things.

Now let us get back to the human being. We showed yesterday that one can go from the area of lung breathing to a higher area where there is a finer inhalation. And we discovered that this finer inhalation carries karmic streams in from the past. We can go still further. If we have working into the human being what I would like for the moment to call a refined breath stream, (Plate V, right) we can say the following: If one would unfold only what lies in the astral body and ego, one would never reach the sun, with the human constitution as it is at the present time. When one is in the ego and astral body during sleep, one does not reach the sun sphere. There is only darkness. If one were to live in the astral body and ego without any connection to the etheric and physical bodies, one would not come to the sun. How, then, does this happen?

Let us consider first what the situation is when the astral body and ego approach the etheric body. In clairvoyance one can bring this condition about fairly easily, by strengthening thinking—strengthening it by very thorough, energetic meditation. Then it is easy to come to this condition; it is the beginning of initiation. One slips down into the etheric body but is not yet able to take hold of the physical body; one remains in the etheric body. In this condition it is possible to think very, very well. One sees nothing, hears nothing, but one can think very well. Thinking is not in the least extinguished, but seeing, hearing, and the other sense activities are suppressed. At first, thinking remains the same, except that one can think more than previously. One can think such thoughts as we are expressing here, for instance thoughts about the macrocosm. Thinking becomes wider. One knows clearly: “now I am in the etheric world.” Thus when one is in the etheric body, one is truly in the world ether. One has the clear experience of this: “I am in the spiritual world out of which the sense world comes.” But one is not able to differentiate between spiritual world and sense world, one is beyond a differentiated sense world. The sun no longer shines, the stars no longer shine, there is no moonlight. There is no longer a clear distinction between the kingdoms of nature on the earth. A person only has that faculty when down in the physical body in normal life or in a higher stage of initiation. But in exchange for the blurring of the contours of the sense world, there is a general spirituality, the weaving life of the spirit.

If one goes further, if one takes conscious hold of the physical body and begins to live in the organs, the perceptions that had become dim or had vanished begin to emerge again (with the exception of earthly forms) as spirit entities. Where earlier in ordinary consciousness one had seen the sun and then it had become dark, foggy, but had still been within the general weaving spirituality, now there appear beings of the second hierarchy. Now one can differentiate in the spiritual world. Moon and stars appear again, but in their spiritual aspect: they are now spiritual colonies—they can be called that, or something similar. Now one understands how in ordinary everyday consciousness humankind sees the sun, for instance, in its physical form, and the same with other things, but when someone has entered consciously into a physical body, and has actually taken hold of it in its spiritual dimension, the sun is seen as a spiritual being, and the same with the whole world. Now we know that with each sun ray shining down upon us during the day, spirit is also entering us. Through every sense experience spirit is entering us. We have therefore to regard the higher, finer breathing as a breathing that is continuously impregnated by spirit. And we perceive that the sun is living in every sense perception that streams into us. It is indeed the spirit of the sun, or the spirits of the sun. The sun is present in every sense perception. In our finer breathing the sun force, the sun life is streaming straight into us.

So you see the relation humanity has to the sun. When a ray of light streams into your eye, the sun spirit is streaming in with that ray of light. The spirit of the sun is the substance of the finer breathing. With our sense perceptions we breathe in the manifold ingredients of the spiritual sun. You have there an important view of the human being from one direction. As one unfolds in an etheric body, (Plate V, yellow) one develops in the etheric body thinking—the thoughts of the universe. These thoughts of the universe in which one finds oneself when living consciously in an etheric body are at first devoid of warmth or cold, devoid of tone. They are a kind of vague feeling in which one's feeling of self merges with one's feeling of the macrocosm. But if now one takes hold of the physical body, one enters into the spirit of the sense perceptions. And the thoughts are infused from various sides: through the eyes, the sun essence—thought—that is breathed in is infused with color; through the ear, thought is tinted with tone; through the organ of warmth, thought is tinted with warmth or cold. There you have the cosmic relation of thought to sense perception. Thought must be understood as preceding the sense experience; then the sense experience comes through infusion, tinted by the sun.

Humankind simply does not realize that the sun-being streams into us with every sense perception. And on the path of the sun, past karma streams in too. It is by no means a childish image to think of the sun as a receptacle of past karma. If we understand the human head properly, we must say the spiritual sun rays stream in invisibly and are transformed as they stream in into something physical, which then appears as merely a physical attribute in the world of color, tone, warmth. And at the same time, on the path of these sun rays that slip in through the senses into the nerves, karma enters into us. That is one side of the human being.

Now let us look at the other side. Karma goes out at that place in the organism where the lymph is, the place where everything is alive and active that has not yet been drawn into the blood. There we find outgoing karma. What are the paths of outgoing karma? To know that, we must acquaint ourselves through spiritual science with the moon forces.

And now if we gradually come from the etheric world to which we have become accustomed and take hold of the physical body in its periphery, the area of the senses, then all the life streaming in from the sun and bringing our past karma with it appears to be bringing reproach, and to be doing much to disturb us. But far more important than the disturbing elements in our karma is this knowledge, this insight that we can attain. It is by virtue of our past that we have become what we now are. The life of our inner being is enriched by the perception of the sun entering on the paths of the senses and nerves. If we can separate ourselves from our karma and concentrate on the instreaming forces of the spiritual sun, we will experience an infinite happiness as we receive them. We will wish that the sun element were in us perpetually; we cannot help longing for it. The sun element enters into us lovingly if we wish it; it is what we know in physical life in a weaker form as our active human love. This is the interplay of sun activity with the human inner world, the loving penetration of the sun into humans and into everything that wants to sprout and grow and thrive in humans. The living sun rays enter lovingly. Here love is not merely a soul-spiritual force: it is the force that calls everything physical to germinate and sprout and grow, everything that can be beneficial to humans in every way when they value it. This is the force of which a human being is aware through direct outer vision.

Now if one takes hold of the physical body in the other direction, in the direction of the forces that develop the lymph and prepare it for entering into the blood, one becomes aware of the activity of the moon. This is of quite a different character. On the one hand we can say the spiritual sun is active in the way we have indicated; on the other hand the moon is active. When we work to grasp the process of the lymph-blood formation inwardly, we find we are entering into the activity of the moon. And we have the constant feeling that the moon wants to take something away from us, to lift something out of us. With the sun we had the feeling that it wants continually to give us something. With the moon we have the feeling that it wants continually to take something out of us. And if we are not alert while we are observing the moon's activity, when we have consciously taken hold of the physical body and are engrossed in the lymph-blood formation, if we are not absolutely alert and in complete control of our vision, suddenly the continuity is broken and standing there before us is a spiritual being similar to ourselves but distorted, almost a caricature of ourselves, a being we have brought to birth. We would miss this emanation if we were not alert. But it does not seem particularly strange to us as it separates from us and confronts us. It is hardly more than an enhanced view of ourselves in a mirror. When we look at ourselves in an ordinary mirror, that is the physical world. When we see ourselves reflected in the etheric world by the moon forces, that is a higher kind of mirroring.

Let us review the whole process. There is nothing particularly amazing about it. But it shows us that we are indeed connected with the universe. That the moon is continually separating forces from us, which then it makes independent, forces that were living in us and that then go out into the spiritual world, streaming out into the macrocosm, constantly carrying images out of us into the macrocosm. But now think how it could be if such an image, which the moon forces are continually producing in humanity and which then they want to take out of us to carry into the distances of the world, if such an image were held back in the human body and kept there. And not merely an image, an abstraction, but a form permeated by forces.

How could such a form be retained in the human being? We have the moon forces continually striving to pull and draw the human image out. How could this form be held back? It can remain in humans if the sun forces are brought in deeply enough from another side. Then the form remains in the human being; then an embryonic life begins. Fructification consists of nothing else than that the sun forces are drawn down to where the moon forces are active in the lymph. Thereby the image that would otherwise go out takes hold of physical matter in the human body. What otherwise is a mere image now takes on physical form. For this to happen, sun forces combine with moon forces in the lymph system of the human organism. (Plate V)

Let us look at the other side. We can also investigate the moon forces higher up: then we find that the opposite happens. Then the human being is not formed again in the human body, but the sun macrocosm is given form in the human. Now we have a different view of the macrocosm. When the embryo is formed, a physical world arises within the human being that must come out. When on the other hand the moon forces activate their desire nature—they want to capture and draw down the sun forces—then the spirit in the universe comes into being within the human. The spirit of the universe is engendered, a spiritual embryo. Then the possibility is given for forming what must come in from the spiritual world, what has been in the spiritual world up to the time of a new earth-life and now comes in as spirit embryo. Then, the union of the two takes place in the human being.

If we explore these things, we come to see that they are completely interwoven. Then we have the true explanation of the human being's relation to the universe.

Now help comes from every direction. The sun activity that is uniting here with the moon activity has the help of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. What, then, are the tasks of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn? Recall, dear friends, what I said yesterday. When the sun forces are going in, first they must stop for the light; second, they must stop for the macrocosmic chemism; third, they must stop for the life. The Saturn forces bring about the stop for the light, the Jupiter forces in their wisdom bring about the stop for the world chemism, the Mars forces the stop for the life. There you have in detail the drawing-in of the sun forces modified by the forces of the so-called outer planets.

From the opposite direction you have the moon forces modified. When they work alone in their full strength, they bring about the formation of the embryo, that is, the physical formation. When they are less strong, they do not enter into physical matter but stay in the direction of the spirit, combining with the Venus forces of soul love. They can be still weaker—when they unite with what comes from the other side, the forces of Mercury, the divine messenger, who in ordinary everyday earth-life leads the lower forces up to the higher.

Look at the two diagrams, right and left. (Plate V) If we look out at the plant world spread as it is around us, we find the sun, moon, and stars everywhere. If we look within the human being, the sun, moon, and stars are there too, in exact correspondence. When something within is not in order, there is some trouble in the inner collaboration of sun, moon, and stars. If we as therapists want to restore it to order again, we must search in outer nature for a corresponding Saturn activity, for instance, that will work therapeutically on an unhealthy moon activity—and so forth. It is all out there. You see people will begin to have confidence in medicine again when they see that in the inner constitution the human being comprises the whole world. This is the knowledge we would like to bring to medicine again, knowledge it once had. The world will only have its trust in medicine restored when these things are once again understood.

But now let us look at the other side. Look first at the moon activity in human beings. See how it is striving continually to draw the human element out, to carry it into the universe. Let the picture stand before us—the human being striving to get out, wanting to be carried into the universe. This must not be presented to humanity as an abstraction, this shattering secret, but in picture form—the moon working continually to lift human beings out of themselves, to show them their relation to the macrocosm. The human being comes into earth-life as an embryo within another human being. But when this moon activity is enhanced by Venus and Mercury activity, then the human being is born not physically, but spiritually. If we add to the physical birth what we can invoke of Mercury and Venus activity, we bring about a spiritual birth. The human being is then born spiritually, outside, in the universe. We baptize the human being.

The working of the physical sun is always present in human beings. We can add to that perception a consciousness that the spiritual sun also is active in us, that on the paths of the physical-etheric sunlight, the light rays, chemical rays and life rays, the spirit is also pouring in. Spirit enters humans by way of the same paths that the physical-etheric sun activity enters: through the senses. In the same way that human beings perceive in everyday physical life the physical-etheric activity of the sun, we enable them to perceive the soul-spiritual activity of the sun. We give them communion.

Going out from the communion, we find on the one hand what is related to the help the sun is given: the darkening that relates to the light, the constant nearness of death to life. We go to the outer planets that are connected with the sun, and we add to the communion at the proper moment the anointing.

Or we go into human beings, and before they have any thought of the macrocosm, we hold them fast in their inner life, wanting not merely to give them their place as human beings in the macrocosm, but wanting to plant the macrocosm in them—in picture form, so that it becomes a seed developing in them. We give them confirmation.

If individuals receiving the sacraments live in them with full consciousness, they will be continually healed by them—healed of the universal illness to which they succumb, or are in constant danger of succumbing in statu nascendi simply by reason of their having incarnated in the physical material world. This is the priest's task.

It can also happen that an individual is by nature continually in statu nascendi of wanting to be free in the spiritual world, wanting to get out of the physical world, yet is obliged to remain in it during earth-life. And this causes in the organism not a state of unspirituality but a state of superspirituality, that is, illness. Medical measures must be prescribed, the opposite pole to the sacraments, when illness appears. This is the physician's task.

Thus we see on the one side the spiritual healing of the priest, and on the other side the priestly attitude of the physician, the physical healer. If we recognize how their tasks can be coordinated, we have grasped the significant connection between pastoral work and medical work. Then pastoral medicine is not just a theory, but embraces the working together of human beings.

• 11. Paracelsus (1493–1541). Swiss physician and alchemist.