The Rudolf Steiner Archive

For many years past we have been studying anthroposophical truths, details of anthroposophical knowledge, trying to approach them from different sides and to assimilate them. In the course of the lectures now being given, and those yet to come, it will be well to ask ourselves what Anthroposophy should and can give to the men of our time. We know a good deal of the content of Anthroposophy and we can therefore approach the question with a certain basis of understanding.

We must above all remember that the anthroposophical life, the anthroposophical Movement itself, must be clearly distinguished—in our minds at any rate—from any kind of special organisation, from anything to which the name “Society” might be given. The whole character of modern life will of course make it more and more necessary for those who want to cultivate Anthroposophy to unite in a corporate sense; but this is made necessary more by the character of life outside than by the content or attitude of Anthroposophy itself. Anthroposophy in itself could be made known to the world in the same way as anything else—as chemistry, for instance—and its truths could be accessible just as in the case of the truths of chemistry or mathematics. How an individual assimilates Anthroposophy and makes it a real impulse in his life could then be a matter for the individual himself. A Society or any kind of corporate body for the cultivation of Anthroposophy is made necessary because Anthroposophy as such comes into our epoch as something new, as entirely new knowledge, which must be received into the spiritual life of men. Those who have not entered the sphere of anthroposophical life need a special preparation of their souls and hearts as well as the constitution of soul belonging to the present age. Such preparation can be acquired only through the life and activities in our groups and meetings. There we adapt ourselves to a certain trend of thinking and feeling, so that we realise the significance of matters which people in the outside world who know nothing of Anthroposophy will naturally regard as fantastic nonsense. It might, of course, be argued that Anthroposophy could also be made more widely known through public lectures given to entirely unprepared listeners; but those who belong to our groups in a more intimate sense will realise that the whole tone, the whole manner of delivering a lecture to an unprepared public must necessarily be different from that of a lecture given to those who through an inner urge and through their whole attitude, are able to take seriously what the general public would not yet be able to accept. Quite certainly this state of things will not improve in the immediate future—on the contrary, the opposition will become stronger and stronger. Opposition to Anthroposophy in every domain will increase in the outside world, just because it is in the highest degree necessary for our age, and because what is the most essential at any particular time always encounters the strongest resistance.

It may be asked: Why is this so? Why do human hearts resist so vehemently just what is most needed in their epoch? An anthroposophist should be able to understand this, but it is too complicated a matter to be made even remotely clear to an unprepared public.

The student of Anthroposophy knows of the existence of Luciferic forces, of Luciferic beings who have lagged behind the general process of evolution. They work through the hearts and souls of men and it is to their greatest advantage to launch their fiercest attacks at times when, in reality, there is the strongest urge towards the spiritual life. Because the opposition of the human heart against the progressive impulse in evolution originates from the Luciferic beings, and because these beings will launch their attacks when as it were they already have men by the throat, the resistance of human hearts will inevitably be strongest at such times. Hence we shall understand that the very reason why the most important truths for humanity have lived on from earlier times is that the strongest opposition had to be contended with. Anything that differs only slightly from what is customary in the world will rarely encounter fierce opposition; but what comes into the world because humanity has long been thirsting for but has not received it, will evoke violent attacks from the Luciferic forces. Therefore a “Society” is really nothing more than a rampart against this understandable attitude of the outside world. [1] Some form of association is necessary within the framework of which these things can be presented, with the feeling that in those to whom one speaks or with whom one is in contact there will be a certain measure of understanding, whereas others who have no link with such an association are oblivious of it all.

Everyone believes that what is given out in public is his own concern and that he has to pass judgment upon it; he is instigated, of course, by the Luciferic forces. From this we realise that it is indeed necessary to promulgate Anthroposophy and that Anthroposophy is bringing something essential into our age, something that is longed for by the present thirst and hunger for spiritual nourishment and—whatever the circumstances—will come in some form or other; for the Spiritual Powers who have dedicated themselves to the goals of evolution see to it that this shall happen.

We can therefore ask: What are the most important truths that should be implanted in humanity at the present time through Anthroposophy? Those for which there is the most intense thirst are the most essential. The answer to such a question is one that can very easily be misunderstood. For this reason it is necessary, to begin with, to make a distinction in our minds between Anthroposophy as such and the Anthroposophical Society. The mission of Anthroposophy is to bring new truths, new knowledge, to humanity, but a society can never—least of all in our age—be pledged to any particular tenets. It would be utterly senseless to ask: “What do you anthroposophists believe?” It is senseless to imagine that an “anthroposophist” means a person who belongs to the Anthroposophical Society, for that would be to assume that a whole society holds a common conviction, a common dogma. And that cannot be. The moment a whole society, according to its statutes, were pledged to a common dogma, it would cease to be a society and begin to be a sect. Here is the boundary where a society ceases to be one in the true sense of the word. The moment a man is pledged to hold a belief exacted by a society, we have to do with pure sectarianism. Therefore a society dedicated to the principles described in these lectures can be a society only from the aspect that it is under the right and natural spiritual impulse. It may be asked: “Who are the people who come together to hear something about Anthroposophy?” To this we may reply: “Those who have an urge to hear about spiritual things.” This urge has nothing dogmatic about it. For if a person is seeking for something without saying, “I shall find this or that,” but is really seeking, this is the common element which a society that does not wish to become a sect must contain. The question: What does Anthroposophy as such bring to humanity? is quite independent of this. Our reply must be: Anthroposophy as such brings to humanity something that is similar to all the great spiritual truths that have been brought to humanity, only its effect upon the human soul is more profound, more significant.

Among the subjects we have been studying in our lectures there are many that might be considered less distinctive from the point of view of something entirely new being presented to modern humanity. Nevertheless they are fundamental truths which do indeed penetrate into humanity as something new. We need not look very far to find this new element. It lies in the two truths which really belong to the most fundamental of all and bring increasing conviction to the human soul: these are the two truths of reincarnation and karma. It may be said that the first thing a really serious anthroposophist discovers along his path is that knowledge of reincarnation and karma is essential. It cannot, for example, be said that in Western culture, certain truths—such as the possibility of becoming conscious of higher worlds—present themselves through Anthroposophy as something fundamentally new. Anyone who has some knowledge of the development of Western thought knows of mystics such as Jacob Boehme or Swedenborg, or the whole Jacob Boehme school, and he knows too—although there has been much argument to the contrary—that it has always been considered possible for a man to rise from the ordinary sense-world to higher worlds. This, then, is not the element that is fundamentally new. And the same applies to other matters. Even when we are speaking of what is absolutely fundamental in evolution, for example, the subject of Christ, this is not the salient point as regards the Anthroposophical Movement as such; the essential point is the form which the subject of Christ assumes when reincarnation and karma are received as truths into the hearts of men. The light thrown upon the subject of Christ by the truths of reincarnation and karma—that is the essential point.

The West has been profoundly concerned with the subject of Christ. We need only be reminded of men in the days of the Gnosis, and of the time when esoteric Christianity was deepened by those who gathered under the sign of the Grail or of the Rose Cross. This, then, is not the fundamental question. It becomes fundamental and of essential significance for Western minds, for knowledge and for the needs of the religious life only through the truths of reincarnation and karma; so that those whose mental horizons have been widened by the knowledge of these truths necessarily expect new illumination to be shed on old problems. With regard to the knowledge of reincarnation and karma, however, all that can be said is that tentative indications are to be found in Western literature, for example, at the time of Lessing, who speaks of the subject in his essay, The Education of the Human Race. There are also other examples of how this question has dawned upon minds of a certain profundity. But for the truths of reincarnation and karma to become an integral part of human consciousness, assimilated by the hearts and souls of men, as in Anthroposophy—this is something that could not really happen until our own time. Therefore it can be said that the relation of a man of the modern age to Anthroposophy is characterised by the fact that certain antecedents have enabled reincarnation and karma to become matters of knowledge to him. That is the essential point. Everything else follows more or less as a matter of course if a man is able to acquire the right insight into the truths of reincarnation and karma.

In considering this aspect of the subject, we must also realise what it will mean for Western humanity and for humanity in general when reincarnation and karma become matters of knowledge which take their place in everyday life as other truths have done. In the near future, reincarnation and karma must pass into the consciousness of men far more deeply than was the case, for example, with the Copernican view of the universe. We need only remind ourselves of how rapidly this theory penetrated into the human mind. Only a comparatively short period in world-history has elapsed since the Copernican view of the universe first became generally known, yet it is now taught even in the elementary schools. As far as the effect upon the human soul is concerned, however, there is an essential difference between Copernicanism and the anthroposophical world-conception, in so far as the latter is based on the fundamental principles of reincarnation and karma. To be able to characterise the difference, one really needs a group of anthroposophists, of people who come together with good will to understand, for things would have to be said that would cause too great a shock to those outside the anthroposophical Movement.

Why is it that the Copernican view of the universe has been accepted so readily? Those who have heard me speak of it or of modern natural science in general know well that I pass no derogatory judgment on the modern scientific mode of thinking. Therefore in characterising the difference I shall not be misinterpreted when I say that for the acceptance of this world-picture, limited as it is to the presentation of external relationships and conditions of space, an epoch of superficiality was necessary! The reason why the Copernican theory took root so rapidly is none other than that for a certain period of time men became superficial. Superficiality was essential for the adoption of Copernicanism. Depth of soul—that is to say, the exact opposite—will be necessary for acceptance of the truths of Anthroposophy, especially of the fundamental truths of reincarnation and karma. If, therefore, the conviction grows in us to-day that these truths must become a much stronger and more widespread influence in the life of mankind, we must realise at the same time that we are standing at the boundary between two epochs: one, the epoch of superficiality, and the other, the epoch when the human soul and human heart must be inwardly deepened. This is what must be inscribed in our very souls if we are to be fully conscious of what Anthroposophy has to bring to humanity at the present time. And then comes the question: What form will life take under the influence of the knowledge of reincarnation and karma?

Here we must consider what it really means for the human soul and heart to recognise that reincarnation and karma are truths? What does it mean for the whole of man's consciousness, for his whole life of feeling and thinking? As anyone who reflects about these things can realise, it means no less than that through knowledge the Self of man grows beyond certain limits to which knowledge is otherwise exposed. In past times it was sharply emphasised that man could know and recognise only what lies between birth and death, that at most he could look up with faith to one who penetrates into a spiritual world as a knower. Such conviction grew with increasing strength. But this is not of very great significance when regarded merely from the aspect of knowledge; the subject becomes really significant when we pass from the aspect of knowledge to the moral aspect. It is then that the whole greatness and significance of the ideas of reincarnation and karma are revealed. A very great deal could be said in confirmation of this but we will confine ourselves to one aspect.

Think of the people belonging to earlier epochs of Western civilisation and the great majority of those living at the present time. Although they still cling to the belief that the being of man remains intact when he passes through the Gate of Death, it is imagined—because no thought is given to reincarnation and karma—that man's spiritual life after death is entirely separate from earthly existence. Apart from exceptional phenomena to which credence is given by those with spiritualistic leanings, when the dead are alleged to be working into this world, the current idea is that whatever takes place when a man has passed through the Gate of Death—be it punishment or reward—is remote from the earth as such, and that the further course of his life lies in a quite different sphere, a sphere beyond the earth.

Knowledge of reincarnation and karma changes this idea entirely. What is contained in the soul of a man who has passed through the Gate of Death has significance not only for a sphere beyond the earth, but the future of the earth itself depends upon what his life has been between birth and death. The earth will have the outer configuration that is imparted by the men who have lived upon it. The whole future configuration of the planet, as well as the social life of men in the future, depends upon how men have lived in their earlier incarnations. That is the moral element in the ideas of reincarnation and karma. A man who has assimilated these ideas knows: According to what I was in life, I shall have an effect upon everything that takes place in the future, upon the whole civilisation of the future! Something that up to now has been present in a limited degree only—the feeling of responsibility—is extended beyond the bounds of birth and death by knowledge of reincarnation and karma. The feeling of responsibility is intensified, imbued with the deep moral consequences of these ideas. A man who does not believe in them may say: “When I have passed through the Gate of Death I shall be punished or rewarded for what I have done here; I shall experience the consequences of this existence in another world; that other world, however, is ruled over by spiritual Powers of some kind or other, and they will prevent what I have within me from causing too much harm to the world as a whole.” A man who realises that the ideas of reincarnation and karma are based upon reality will no longer speak like this, for he knows that men's lives will be shaped according to what they have been in earlier incarnations.

The important point is that the fundamental ideas of the anthroposophical conception of the world will pass over into the souls and hearts of men and arise as moral impulses undreamed of in the past times. The feeling of responsibility will be intensified to a degree that was formerly impossible, and other moral insights will necessarily follow. As human beings learning to live under the influence of the ideas of reincarnation and karma we shall come to know that our life cannot be assessed on the basis of what has taken expression in one life between birth and death, but that a period extending over many lives must be taken into account.

When we encounter another human being with the attitude that has prevailed hitherto, we feel sympathy or antipathy towards him, strong or moderate affection, and the like. The whole attitude of one man to another in the present age is in reality the outcome of the view that life on the earth is limited to the one period between birth and death. We live as we should after all be bound to live if it were true that man is on the earth only once. Our attitude to parents, brothers, sisters, friends, is coloured by the belief that we have only one life on the earth.

A vast transformation will take place in life when the ideas of reincarnation and karma are no longer theories held by a few people as is the case nowadays—for they are still largely matters of theory. It can truly be said that there are numbers of people to-day who believe in reincarnation and karma; but they act as if there were no such realities, as though life were actually confined to the one period between birth and death. Nor can it be otherwise, for habits change less quickly than ideas. Only when we introduce into our lives right and concrete ideas of reincarnation and karma, only then shall we find how life can be fertilised by them.

As human beings we begin life in the circle of our parents, brothers and sisters, and other relatives; in our early years those around us are there owing to natural factors such as blood-relationship, proximity and the like. Then, as we grow up, we see how these circles expand, how we enter into quite different connections with human beings, connections that are no longer dependent on blood-relationship. These things must be seen in the light of karma and then they will illumine life in an entirely new way. Karma becomes of significance only when we grasp it as a concrete factor, when we apply to life itself the facts brought to light by spiritual-scientific investigation. These facts can, of course, be discovered only by such investigation, but then they can be applied to life.

An important question in connection with karma is the following: How does it come about that at the beginning of the present life, for example, we are drawn to certain others through blood-relationship? Spiritual-scientific investigation of this question discovers that as a rule—for although specific facts come to light there are countless exceptions—the human beings with whom we came to be associated involuntarily at the beginning of our life, were close to us in a former life—in most cases the immediately preceding one—in middle life, in the thirties; then we chose them voluntarily in some way, drawn to them perhaps by our hearts. It would be quite erroneous to think that the people around us at the beginning of our present life are those with whom we were also together at the beginning of a former life. Not at the beginning, not at the end, but in the middle of one life we were associated, by our own choosing, with those who are now our blood-relations. It is frequently the case that a marriage partner whom someone has chosen deliberately will be related to him in the next life as father or mother, or brother or sister. Spiritual-scientific investigation shows that speculative assumptions are generally incorrect and as a rule contradicted by the actual facts.

When we consider the particular case just mentioned and try to grasp it as a finding of the unbiased investigations of Spiritual Science, our whole relation to life is widened. In the course of Western civilisation things have reached the point where it is hardly possible for a man to do otherwise than speak of ‘chance’ when thinking about his connection with those who are his blood-relations. He speaks of chance and in many respects believes in it. How indeed could he believe in anything else if life is thought to be limited to one period only between birth and death? As far as the one life is concerned a man will of course admit that he is responsible for the consequences of what he himself has brought about. But when he leads the Self beyond what happens between birth and death, when he feels this Self to be connected with other men of another incarnation, he feels responsible in the same way as he does for his own deeds in this life.

The general view that a man has himself karmically chosen his parents is not of any special significance, but we gain an idea of this ‘choosing’ which can actually be confirmed by other experiences of life when we realise that those whom we have chosen so unconsciously now, were chosen by us in a former life at an age when we were more conscious than at any other, when we were fully mature.

This idea may be unpalatable to some people to-day but it is true nevertheless. If a person is not satisfied with his kith and kin he will eventually come to know that he himself laid the basis of this dissatisfaction and that he must therefore provide differently for the next incarnation; and then the ideas of reincarnation and karma will become really fruitful in his life. The point is that these ideas are not there for the sake of satisfying curiosity or the like, but for the sake of our progress. When we know how family connections are formed, the ideas of reincarnation and karma will widen and enhance our feeling of responsibility.

The forces which bring down an individual human being into a family must obviously be strong. But they cannot be strong in the individual now incarnated, for they cannot have much to do with the world into which he has actually descended. Is it not comprehensible that the forces working in the deepest depths of the soul must stem from the past life when he himself brought about the connections by the strong impulse of friendship, of ‘conscious love,’ if it may be called so? Conscious forces prevailing in one life work as unconscious forces in the next. What happens more or less unconsciously is explained by this thought. It is most important, of course, that the facts should not be clouded by illusions; moreover the findings of genuine investigation almost invariably upset speculations. The logic of the facts cannot be discovered until afterwards and nobody should allow himself to be guided by speculation, for that will never bring him to the right vantage-point. He will always arrive at a point of view that is characteristic of a conversation of which I have already spoken. In a town in South Germany a theologian once said to me: “I have read your books and have realised that they are entirely logical; so the thought has occurred to me that because they are so logical their author may perhaps have arrived at their content through pure logic.” So if I had taken pains to write a little less logically I should presumably have gone up in the estimation of that theologian, because he would then have realised that the facts presented were not discovered through pure logic! Anyone, however, who studies the writings thoroughly will perceive that the contents were put into the form of logic afterwards but were not discovered through logic. I at any rate could have done no such thing, of that I assure you! Perhaps others might have been capable of it.

Regarded in this way, these things bring home to us the deep significance of the idea that the most important impulses proceeding from Anthroposophy must necessarily be moral impulses. Emphasis has been laid to-day upon the feeling of responsibility. In the same way we might speak of love, of compassion and the like, all of which present different aspects in the light of the ideas of reincarnation and karma. That is why through the years it has been considered of such importance, even in public lectures, always to relate Anthroposophy to life, to the most immediate phenomena of life. We have spoken of “The Mission of Anger,” of “Conscience,” of “Prayer,”² of the different ages in the life of the human being, approaching all these things in the light in which they must be approached if we assume that the ideas of reincarnation and karma are true. The transforming power of these ideas in life has thus been brought home to us. In reality the main part of our studies has been to consider the effect of these fundamental ideas upon life. Even if it is not always possible in abstract words to convey the significance of reincarnation and karma for the heart, for conscience, for the character, for prayer, in such a way that we are able to say: “If we accept the ideas of reincarnation and karma, it follows that ...”—nevertheless all our studies are illumined by them. The important thing for the immediate future is that everything—not only the science of the soul but the other sciences too—shall be influenced by these ideas.

If you study a lecture such as the last public one on “Death in Man, Animal, and Plant,” you will see that it was a matter of showing how men will learn to think of death in plant, animal and man when they discern in themselves that which stretches beyond the single human life. It was made clear that the Self is different in each case. In man there is an individual Ego, in the animal there is a group-soul, and in the plant we have to do with part of the whole planetary soul. In the case of the plant, what we see outwardly as dying and budding is to be conceived of simply as a process of falling asleep and waking. In the animal there is again a difference; here we find a certain degree of resemblance to man inasmuch as in a single incarnation a self comes into some kind of evidence. But in man alone, who himself brings about his incarnations, we realise that death is the guarantee of immortality and that the word ‘death’ can be used in this sense only in the case of man. In using the word ‘death’ in the general sense, therefore, it must be emphasised that dying has a different signification according to whether we are speaking of man, or animal, or plant.

When the anthroposophist is able to accept the ideas of reincarnation and karma in the form in which we must present them, as distinct from earlier conceptions such as are found, for example, in Buddhism, his studies will lead him quite naturally to other things. That is why our work has been mainly devoted to studying what effect the ideas of reincarnation and karma can have upon the whole of human life. In this connection it is obvious that the work of any anthroposophical association or society must be in conformity with the mission of Anthroposophy. It is therefore understandable that when we speak about questions which may seem to those outside Anthroposophy to be the most important, the fundamental truths are the basis upon which we speak of matters closely concerning every Western soul. It is quite conceivable that a man might accept from Anthroposophy those things that have been described to-day as fundamentally new and not concern himself at all with any of the differences between the various religions, for the Science of Comparative Religion is by no means an essential feature of modern Spiritual Science. A great deal of research is devoted to the subject of Comparative Religion to-day and in comparison with it the studies pursued in certain societies connected with Spiritual Science are by no means the more profound. The point of real importance is that in Anthroposophy all these things shall be illumined by the ideas of reincarnation and karma.

In another connection still the feeling of responsibility will be essentially enhanced under the influence of these ideas. If we consider what has been said to-day about blood-relationship and companions once freely chosen by ourselves, a certain antithesis comes into evidence: What in one life is the most inward and intimate impulse, is in the next life the most outwardly manifest. When in one incarnation our deepest feelings of affection go out to certain human beings, we are preparing an outer relationship for another incarnation—a blood-relationship, maybe.

The same principle applies in another sphere. The way in which we think about some matter that may seem to us devoid of reality in one incarnation will be the most determinative factor in the impulses of the next; the quality of our thinking, whether we approach a truth lightly or try to verify it by every means at our command, whether we have a sense for truth or a tendency to fanaticism—all this, as the result of assimilating the ideas of reincarnation and karma, will have a bearing upon our evolution. What is hidden within our being in the present incarnation will be most in evidence in the next. A person who tells many untruths or is inclined to take things superficially will be a thoughtless character in the next or a later incarnation; for what we think, how we think, what attitude we have to truth, in other words what we are inwardly in this incarnation, will be the standard of our conduct in the next. If, for example, in this incarnation, we too hastily form a derogatory judgment of someone who if really put to the test might prove to be a good or even a moderately good man, and we carry this thought through life, we shall become unbearable, quarrelsome people in the next incarnation. Here is another illustration of the importance of widening and intensifying the moral element in the soul.

It is very important that special attention should be paid to these things and that we should realise the significance of taking into our very soul what is really new, together with everything else that with the ideas of reincarnation and karma penetrates as a revitalising impulse into the spiritual development of the present age . . .

My aim has been to bring home to you the importance of reflecting upon what constitutes the fundamentally new element in Anthroposophy. This of course does not mean that an anthroposophical society is one that believes in reincarnation and karma. It means that just as an age was once ready to receive the Copernican theory of the universe, so is our own age ready for the ideas of reincarnation and karma to be brought into the general consciousness of humanity. And what is destined to happen in the course of evolution will happen, no matter what powers rise up against it. When reincarnation and karma are truly understood, everything else follows of itself in the light of these truths.

It is certainly useful to have considered the fundamental distinction between those who are interested in Anthroposophy and those who oppose it. The distinction does not really lie in the acceptance of a higher world, but in the way thoughts and conceptions change in the light of the ideas of reincarnation and karma. And so to-day we have been studying something that may be regarded as the essential kernel of anthroposophical thought.

• 2. See: Metamorphoses of the Soul. Vol 1 and Metamorphoses of the Soul. Vol 2

Today and next time I am going to speak about the Gospel of St. John. I would mention that what I have to say will only really be comprehensible to those who are already somewhat familiar with spiritual science. It would, however, take us too far out of our way if we went into everything unfamiliar to non-theosophists. You are probably aware that latterly New Testament textual criticism has discredited the John Gospel as an historical source. It is said in theological circles—at least in advanced circles—that the first three gospels, the synoptic gospels, are the only documents relevant to the life of the founder of Christianity. They are called synoptic because they can be taken together to form a general picture of the life of Christ Jesus. On the other hand modern theologians try to interpret the John Gospel as a sort of poetic work, a confession of faith, the writings of a person portraying his feelings, his intimate religious life as it was born in him through the impact of Christianity. Thus the John Gospel could be considered as a devotional work, a deeply felt confession of faith, not as anything that could be taken as Christian historical facts.

But for everyone who immerses himself in the writings of the New Testament, one fact is indisputable: an immediate life flows from the John Gospel, and there is a conviction, a source of truth of a different nature to that proceeding from other religious writings. There is a certainty, which needs no outer confirmation. There is a feeling that comes over one when one meets the John Gospel if one is sensitive to inner soul life and spiritual devotion. Only with the help of spiritual science can one understand why this is so. Many a time have I told you how spiritual science helps towards a more intimate connection with religious documents.

You all know that when one first meets the scriptures one adopts the attitude of a simple person and takes the facts as they are described, without criticism; one takes the bread of religious life from these sources and is satisfied with it.

Many people of our day who had this naive outlook and then became “clever”, became “enlightened”, noticed the contradictions in the gospels. Then they rejected the gospels and lost faith. They said: We cannot reconcile remaining faithful to these writings and seeking wisdom in them with our conscience and our sense of truth. This is the stage of the “clever” ones, the second stage.

Then there is the third way that people approach religious documents. They begin to explain them symbolically. They begin to see symbols and allegories in them. This is the way of free-thinkers, especially in recent times.

Bruno Wille, the editor of the paper “Der Freidenker” (The Free Thinker), has now chosen this way. He has taken to explaining symbolically the Christ myth and the Bible in general. The really necessary way of development that man needs, an inner turning point, cannot follow from this. Those who are less ingenious will explain the scriptures less ingeniously. Others who are more ingenious will be better. Much will be read into it that springs from human ingenuity. The third way is thus a half believing, but arbitrary, attitude.

Then there is quite a different standpoint. One learns that there are realities pertaining to higher worlds, that besides our world of the senses, there are soul-spiritual things, and that religious revelations are not concerned with the sense world but present facts of a higher world. Those who have gotten to know the realities of the astral world which lies behind our sense world, and of the devachanic (or mental world) which lies even deeper, will come to a new and higher understanding of religious sources. It is impossible to understand the John Gospel without rising to such higher worlds. The John Gospel is not a poetic work, nor a writing arising from mere religious fervour, but sets forth revelations from higher worlds that the writer of the gospel has received. It is something like this—I will briefly describe it. The supporting evidence I will not deal with today; perhaps I can go into it next time. The writer of the John Gospel learned, through experience in higher worlds, what took place at “the beginning of our era“ that related to the life of the founder of Christianity, and his acts.

Let me give you an example of the difference between just knowing, and truly comprehending. We have recently mentioned here that someone can be next to us, we can see what he looks like, but we need not necessarily really know him for what he is. I have told the story of the singer who, at an evening party sat between Mendelsohn and someone else she did not know. She got on very well with Mendelsohn, but towards the other guest, though he was very courteous, she felt an aversion. Afterwards she asked, “Who was that bore on my left?” The answer was, “It was the famous philosopher Hegel”. If the lady had been told previously that the great philosopher Hegel would be present at a party, that alone would probably have been enough for her to have accepted the invitation. But because he sat beside her unknown, he was a bore. This is the difference between seeing and understanding, between just knowing and comprehending.

He who was the founder of Christianity could not readily be recognised if one only possessed the ordinary intellect employed in the sense world. It needed that which the Christian mystics so often expressed in profound and beautiful language. This was what Angelus Silesius meant when he said:

There is an inner experience of Christ—there is the possibility to realize inwardly what took place outwardly as events in Palestine between the years 1 and 33 A.D. He who came into this world from higher worlds must be understood from a higher world. And he who portrayed Him most deeply had to raise himself to the two higher worlds we have mentioned, the astral and the devachanic, or mental worlds. This elevation of John, if we so name him, was the elevation into these two higher worlds. His Gospel reveals this to us.

The first twelve chapters contain John's experiences in the astral world. From chapter thirteen onwards it is his experiences in the devachanic, or mental world. He who wrote it down says of Christ (the words are not to be taken literally): Here on this earth He lived, here has He worked with divine powers, with occult powers. He has healed the sick, he has gone through everything from death to resurrection. It is impossible to understand these things with the ordinary intellect. Here on earth there is no science or learning by which one could really understand what occurred. But there is the possibility of rising to the higher worlds. There one can find the wisdom to understand Him who walked here on earth among us. Thus did the writer of the John Gospel rise to the two higher worlds and become initiated. It was an initiation, and the writer describes his initiation into the astral world and the devachanic, or mental world.

In olden times, in regions where man's body was still suited to these things, such an initiation took place as follows. The person had to go through a sort of sleep-state. What now takes several years in a modern European initiation—because the modern European can no longer go through the process I will describe—what today is achieved through long exercises of meditation and concentration, was achieved in a short time by some individuals, after the appropriate exercises of meditation and concentration. I particularly emphasise that anyone who really wishes to receive initiation must, in some form or other, face the two important experiences about to be described—though in a somewhat different way. He must go through a sort of sleep condition. To understand the nature of sleep, let us remind ourselves what takes place when one sleeps. One's higher bodies are then separated from one's lower bodies. Man consists of a physical body, which one can see with one's eyes. The second member is the etheric body which surrounds the physical body and which is much finer than the physical body. Currents and organs of wonderful variety and splendour are active in it. The etheric body contains the same organs as the physical body. It has a brain, heart, eyes etc. They represent the forces which formed the corresponding organs. It is as if one cooled water in a vessel until it becomes ice. In this way you should picture the arising of the physical organs through the densifying of the etheric organs. The etheric body extends only a little beyond the physical body.

The third member is the astral body. It is the bearer of desires, wishes, passions, etc. It permeates the physical body in the form of a cloud. There are colours—violent passions appear as lightning flashes. The peculiarities of temperament glide through the body in glowing points of varying intensity.

The whole inner man is expressed in a luminous form. This is the real ego of man, the bearer of the higher centre of his being. In normal sleep the physical and etheric bodies are lying in bed. They are closely united. The astral body and all the rest is separated. As long as one does not do anything particular one is unconscious when the astral body is outside the physical body. One is as unconscious as one would be in the physical world without eyes or ears. One could live as long as one liked in the physical world; if one had no eyes there would be no colours, if one had no ears there would be no sound. So it is when the astral body is outside the physical body. It is spread out in the soul world, but one does not see this world or become aware of it because one has no astral sense organs. They must gradually be formed. If a person does not practice exercises he remains unconscious in higher worlds. But if he does practice then he can attain consciousness in these higher worlds. When his astral body acquires organs he begins to see the astral world around him. Those of you who have often attended these lectures will know that there are seven such organs. They are called wheels, chakrams or lotus flowers. The two-petalled lotus flower lies between the eyes—between the eye-brows, the sixteen-petalled lies in the region of the larynx, the twelve-petalled lies in the heart region. If these organs are gradually developed one becomes clairvoyant in the astral world.

This astral vision is something quite different from physical sight. You can get some idea of astral vision if you think of the flow of dream life. In dreams we have symbolic pictures—true symbols. One sees symbols. One loses consciousness of what takes place here in the physical world, but one can experience in symbolic pictures such events as the life of Christ Jesus as John describes it from his own experience in the astral world. Descriptions of this nature form the content of the first twelve chapters of the John Gospel. Don't misunderstand me. I know many will say: If all this is astral experience, then it is nothing real and what is told us of the founder of Christianity is not authentic. But this is not the case. It would be as if one denied that a man of flesh and blood could be a genius, because one cannot see genius. Although one learns the truth of Christ Jesus only on the astral plane, it is still a fact that he lived his life on the physical plane. We are dealing with symbols on the astral plane and outer reality on the physical plane. Nothing is taken away from the facts when we understand them more deeply in the sense of the John Gospel.

Initiation in the astral world is preceded by, and depends on what is called meditation. This means that the soul sinks into itself—I have often described it here. To reach a meditative experience one must make oneself blind and deaf to all sense impressions. Nothing must be able to disturb one. Cannons can go off without one being aware of it in one's inner life. One does not achieve this at once, but through constant practice one can attain this capacity. One must empty oneself also of all past experiences. Memory must be wiped out. The soul must be concerned only with itself and then out of its inner being there arise the eternal truths which are able—not only to awaken our understanding—but to release capacities which lie slumbering under a spell in our souls. These great eternal verities will rise up in man according to the maturity he has attained through his karma—the one, as Subba Row says, in seven incarnations, another in seventy years, another in seven years, others in seven months, seven days or seven hours.

John sets forth the means whereby his soul was led to perception on the astral plane. The formula he used for meditation stands at the beginning of his gospel. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was a God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by Him, and without this Word was not anything made that was made. In it was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in the darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not.”

In these five sentences lie the eternal verities which loosed the spell in John's soul and brought forth the great visions. This is the form of the meditation. Those for whom the John Gospel is written should not read it like any other book. The first five sentences must be taken as a formula of meditation. Then one follows John on his way, and attempts to experience oneself what he experienced. This is the way to do it; so it is meant.

John says: Do what I have done. Let the great formula, “In the beginning was the Word” work in your souls and you will verify what is said in my first twelve chapters.

This alone can really help towards understanding the John Gospel. Thus is it intended and thus should it be used. I have often spoken of what the “Word” signifies. “In the beginning” is not a good translation. It should really read: Out of the primal forces emerged the Word. That is what it means: The Word came forth, came forth out of the primal forces. Thus “in the beginning” means: coming forth out of the primal forces.

When man is in this sleep condition he is no longer in the sense world. He moves into a soul world and in this soul world experiences what the sense world really is. The truth of the sense world is revealed. He starts out from these words derived from the sense world leading back to the primal forces, and rises up to the words of truth. Every truth has seven meanings. For the mystic, immersed in contemplation it has however this meaning: The knowledge, the Word which emerges, is not something that merely applies to yesterday and today, but this Word is eternal. This Word leads to God because it was ever with God, because it is the very essence that God has planted into all things.

There is however, still another way of understanding this, and one acquires it if one returns day after day to the momentous words: “In the beginning was the Word”. When one begins to understand, not with the intellect, but with the heart, so that the heart becomes one with these words, then the power begins to work, and there begins the state of mind of which John speaks. He says it with great clarity: “All things were made by Him and without the Word was not anything made that was made”.

What do we find in this Word? We find life. What do we perceive through this life—through this light? We must take these religious texts quite literally if we want to attain higher knowledge. Where does this light shine? In the darkness of night. It comes to those who sleep. It comes to everyone who sleeps. But the darkness comprehended it not—until the ability develops to perceive it on the astral plane. Thus is the fifth verse to be understood literally. The astral light shines into the darkness of night but man does not normally see it, he must first learn to see.

As all this became reality for the writer of the John Gospel, the light dawned and he saw who He was, He whose disciple and apostle he was. Here on earth he had seen Him. Now he had found Him again on the astral plane, and he knew that He who had walked the earth in the flesh only differed in one respect from what lived in his own deepest inner self. In every single man there lives a divine man. In the distant future this divine man will arise resurrected in every man. As man stands before us today he is, in his outward appearance, to a greater or lesser extent, an expression of the inner divine man, and this inner divine man works constantly on the outer man.

Last Thursday [Public Lecture, Berlin, 15 Feb, 1906. “Reincarnation and Karma”] I already pointed out how one can illustrate this by a simple comparison. Look at a child. One could be tempted to say that these innocent features came from the father or mother, an uncle or an ancestor. However, everything within the child expresses itself in the features, in the gestures of the hands and in all its movements. What slumbers in the child strives to come to expression. Finally the individual emerges and the physiognomy becomes an expression of the individual soul, while previously it showed more of a family type. In primitive man the individual soul is usually still slumbering and has but a meagre existence. In the course of many incarnations and efforts the individual emerges, the soul aquires more power over the physical body, and the physiognomy takes on the imprint, or the expression of the inner man. An immature person expresses little of the power of the soul. Gradually man matures, and full maturity is reached when the inner word has become flesh completely—when the outer has become an exact imprint of the inner, so that the spirit shines through the flesh. This however, John only understood once his higher self had appeared clearly before his astral eyes. It stood in front of his astral eyes and he knew: This is I. Today have I experienced it on the astral plane. However it will gradually descend as it did in Him, who I followed. This is the deep relationship between Christ Jesus and the divine man that exists in every man. This is the deep inner experience of John.

The inner soul lives unconscious in man and he only becomes aware of it through the processes we have described.

What does it mean to say: something becomes conscious. Can we become conscious of something which lives within us? As long as it only lives within us we are not aware of it. Man is not aware of what he carries within him, what is subjective. I will use a crude comparison to make clear what I mean. You all have a physical brain but you cannot see it. It would have to be taken out, and then you could see it. For the same reason, though there is a certain difference, you cannot see your higher self. It is the “I” within you. But it must come out if you are to see it, and this can only happen on the astral plane. When it is outside and confronts you, then spiritually, it is as if you had a physical brain on a platter and made it the object of your sense perception.

The writer of the John Gospel describes this process. His own higher ego appears before Him—his own higher ego, which in its fullness represents the Christ. When you know this you will be able to understand certain hints and truths in the John Gospel. You will be able to understand certain things quite well with the help of what I said up to now. In occult language one describes what this ego inhabits—the physical body, which it has built for itself to dwell in—as the temple. Thus one says: The soul dwells in the temple.

It is not altogether a painless procedure when for the first time the soul must leave the temple of the body so that it becomes visible outside of it. This leaving of the body is not without pain. All that forms this higher connection with the physical body are bands that are not so easy to loosen. Imagine that you are bound with fetters and you break loose. You would experience pain through this tearing apart. It is like a process of tearing apart when the astral body leaves the physical body when it leaves it, perceptibly. Leaving the body in sleep is different, one is not aware of it. If one leaves it consciously then one experiences pain.

When man begins to develop astral consciousness, things on the astral plane appear to him as in a mirror. The number 165 should not be read as 165 but as 561—as reflected writing. Everything appears reversed on the astral plane. Even time is reversed. When you follow someone on the astral plane you start, to begin with, from where he is. Then you go back to his birth. You can follow him on the physical plane forwards; on the astral plane backwards. Leaving the physical body is like this: It is as though we were leaving the temple of the physical body and were laid hold of from all sides. This is the occurrence which John wants to describe. He left his body in order to experience the Christ, his own higher divine self, confronting him. People around him have their astral bodies bound strongly to their physical bodies as if with fetters. Had John remained like them he would have continued to be fettered to his physical body. Now let us read how this occurrence is described pictorially and symbolically in the John Gospel, chapter 8, verses 58 and 59: “Jesus said unto them, verily, verily I say unto you: Before Abraham was, I am. Then took they up stones to cast at him: but Jesus hid himself, and went out of the temple, going through the midst of them”, through the hindrances. With this ends the eighth chapter. This is the passing out of the astral body from the physical body. The final act, leading to the leaving of the physical body and to higher vision, usually lasts three days. When these three days are up, one attains a consciousness on the astral plane comparable to that previously experienced on the physical plane. Then one is united with the higher world.

In occult language this union with the higher world is called the marriage of the soul with the powers of the higher world. When one has left the physical body, this appears to one as a mother would appear to a new-born child, were the child able to be conscious at birth. Thus the physical body confronts one, and the astral body can very well say to the physical body: This is my mother. When one has celebrated this marriage one can say this. One can look back on the former union. This can happen after three days. This is the occult procedure on the astral plane. In chapter 2, verse 1, it is stated: “And the third day there was a marriage in Cana of Galilee; and the mother of Jesus was there”. This is the pictorial expression for what I have just said. It happened on the third day.

When a person enters the astral world, he finds himself in a region from which he can rise a step further into a still higher world—the mental, or devachanic world. This entry into the devachanic world can only be gained at the expense of the complete extinction, the death of the lower nature. He must go through the three days of death and then be awakened. Once he has attained vision of the astral plane and the pictures of the astral plane have confronted him, he is mature and ready to receive knowledge on the mental or devachanic plane. It is possible then to describe the awakening on the devachanic plane. To find oneself on the higher plane with conscious clarity of thought, this is the awakening of Lazarus.

John describes the awakening of Lazarus. Previously he has shown that through this chain of events one can enter the higher worlds. In chapter 10, verse 9, it is said: “I am the door: by me if any man enter in he shall be saved and shall go in and out and find pasture”. This is the awakening of what was wrapped in sleep and is now awakened on the devachanic plane. John goes through it. John is Lazarus, and John means nothing more nor less than what is described in his first twelve chapters. He describes as an astral experience that he was awakened on the astral plane. Then followed the initiation for the devachanic plane. Three days he lay in the grave, and then he received the awakening. The raising of Lazarus is the awakening of John who wrote the gospel.

Read everything up to the chapter on the raising of Lazarus and you will find no mention of John anywhere. Consider Lazarus and John. It is said of John (John, ch. 13, v. 23): “Now there was leaning on Jesus' bosom one of his disciples, whom Jesus loved.” Regarding Lazarus, you find the same words—that He loved him. It is the same person. He is not mentioned previous to the awakening. He appears for the first time after he is “raised from the dead”. These are the enigmas hidden in the John Gospel. The disciple whom the Lord loved is he whom the Lord himself has initiated. The writer of the John Gospel was he whom the Lord loved. How was he able to say this? Because he had been initiated, first on the astral plane and then on the devachanic plane. If one is able in this way to find the deeper meaning of the John Gospel, then will one be able to understand it in its true profundity, and then it becomes one of the greatest texts ever written. It is the description of the initiation into the depths of the inner life of the soul. It has been written so that everyone who reads it can follow the same path. And this one can do. Sentence for sentence, word for word, one can find within oneself, by rising to the higher plane, what is described in the John Gospel. It is not a biography of Christ Jesus but a biography of the developing human soul. And what is described is eternal and can take place in the heart of every human being. This text is an example and a model. Hence it has this living and awakening power which not only makes people into Christians but enables them to awaken to a higher reality. The John Gospel is not a profession of faith, but a text which really gives strength, and a self-supporting, independent higher life. This springs forth from the John Gospel, and he who does not merely want to understand it, but to live it, has truly comprehended it.

With these few words I could only touch on the contents. Next time we will go into certain details. Then you will see how every single sentence confirms what we have said today in general terms. Step by step you will then see that the John Gospel is not addressed merely to the human intellect, but to man's entire soul forces, and that real soul experience springs from it.

Last time I spoke about the first twelve chapters of the Gospel of St. John. We saw that the Lazarus miracle represents the initiation of a man into the spiritual world. Every sentence of the John Gospel directs one to the higher world. When we make it alive in us, we come to know the Christian initiation. Those who know other forms of occult training and are aware that there are other paths of initiation, also know that he who seeks the path today will be led along different ways. These are known to most of you. Those who have already some contact with spiritual life know that there is an esoteric side to our spiritual scientific strivings. The Christian initiation has similarities with other ways of initiation, but today this path can no longer be followed. He who would tread it must be led by the hand of an experienced teacher, but in view of our modern normal mode of life, it is questionable whether this path is still open. Let us again call to mind the Lazarus miracle in connection with the Christian initiation.

We will start from the normal state of sleep. What happens when a person sleeps? In man we have the physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego. What happens occultly, when a person sleeps? The physical and etheric bodies remain in bed. The astral body, together with the ego, rises out and floats over them in the form of a ring, in the case of an undeveloped personality, and later, in the form of the physical body. The astral body is not inactive. It has something to do. When the person is awake, the astral body penetrates and interweaves the physical body. When it is outside, it works on the physical body, protecting and caring for it. The relation of the astral body to the physical body, is like that of a workman to his machine, but with the difference that in this case the workman is in the machine, he ensouls the various parts, and makes them move. This resemblance of worker to machine applies even better when the person lies asleep. The astral body then works from outside. What does it do? It makes good the damage suffered by the physical body during the day. So one can see the disadvantages for people who sleep badly. Beings belonging to the third elemental kingdom have an influence on the astral body. Beings belonging to the second elemental kingdom get at the etheric body and those belonging to the first elemental kingdom get access to the physical body to destroy it. Only when the astral body works on the physical body during sleep are these destructive processes made good.

Just to know this does not have any influence. When however, a person begins to work on his spiritual development, he must also create the necessary conditions for the astral body to work upon the physical. Meditation influences the work of the astral body upon the physical and etheric bodies during the night. Only beneficent beings must be allowed access to the human being ... He who seeks initiation must achieve the utmost calm. This includes the avoidance of all stimulants, especially alcohol. Other requirements for any higher striving are control of thought, a morally blameless life, the effort not to be swayed to and fro by every feeling, be it pain or joy, but to maintain balance in the soul. This makes it possible for good beings to be active when the astral body works on the physical and etheric bodies during sleep.

In the initiation described in the John Gospel, the astral body, together with the etheric body, leaves the physical body. This latter remains as though dead. This is what is meant when it is said that Lazarus lay three days in the grave. The Lazarus miracle is thus the scene of an initiation. The astral and etheric bodies need to be led back into the physical body. This the master brings to pass. The disciple is now an ‘arisen one’ who can remember the experiences in the higher worlds. This is possible for everyone. However what, in the old days, was a process lasting three and a half days takes place in a different manner today. The experience is the same, but it is achieved by different methods.

The pupil of the Christian initiation has to undergo seven trials. They were not only physical but spiritual experiences.

Those who had undergone them knew that real experiences are possible outside of the body. At the first stage the pupil experiences how man has become what he is. This was achieved through a train of thought as follows: The plant must have a mineral soil. Minerals are of lower rank than plants. But the plant must bow down and say, “To thee oh stone, though thou art lower than me, I owe my existence, my life”. The animal is of higher rank than the plant. It breathes oxygen and exhales carbon dioxide. The plant exhales the oxygen. The animal must say to the plant, “To thee oh plant, I humbly bow, for without thee I could not live.” The same relation exists between the higher ranking human being and the lower kingdoms. He too must say to them, “If you were not there, I should not be.” One must completely fill oneself with this feeling and bow oneself in all humility. Out of deeply felt experience of gratitude, one must be able to bow down before what is lower than oneself. This is the washing of feet, the first stage of a Christian initiation. Christ bows down before the disciples and washes their feet. What is here experienced, represents a symbol of the higher world. He who is able to live spiritually in the higher world, who has achieved this deep feeling that Lazarus had, he experiences the washing of feet in the higher world. He who experiences humiliation in the physical world, goes through the washing of feet in a higher world. This is the sign that he has reached the first stage on the way to initiation. In his body, this is expressed by the feeling that all his muscles are newly strengthened. When the muscles become steeled after the feeling of humiliation, this signifies the first stage of initiation.

The second stage of the Christian initiation is the scourging and smiting. One must learn to bear calmly what formerly hurt one—to take upon oneself the suffering of the world. This too finds expression in the higher world. The strength acquired by the soul is symbolised as scourging and real blows. Then one day one feels a sort of prickling or stinging all over the body—a sign that one has stood the test. This is a real experience that a person goes through when he follows this path. The great mystics experienced it. Such a person has reached the second stage.

The third stage is the crowning with thorns. At this stage one does not only bear pain but also contempt from one's fellow men. One has to win the fortitude to bear the feeling of obliteration, when there is no one there to give one courage and strength except oneself—when one is considered entirely worthless, and yet one remains inwardly upright. Thus must it be experienced. This is felt in the spiritual world as the crowning with thorns. One sees oneself with the crown of thorns. Pains in the head will be felt in the physical body. Changes take place in the brain, something that later also becomes noticable in the waking state.

The fourth stage is the crucifixion. Through this a person learns to feel his own body as a foreign object, something like a piece of wood. He no longer connects his ego with his body. In the spiritual world he sees himself with the cross on his back. With this the fourth stage is reached. Physically the stigmata appear. In the case of certain saints this is no myth. It indicates that they have reached the fourth stage. Such saints are bearers of the cross.

If a person has got as far as this he comes to the fifth stage. This is the mystical death. The whole world appears as if covered with a veil. Everything around has lost its old value. While a person feels himself thus lost in darkness, suddenly the veil is rent and he begins to see the ultimate spiritual and original aim. He gazes into a quite new, world. At the same time he learns to recognise what lies at the bottom of the human soul. He becomes a second person by the side of himself and looks down on his lower self, which is separated from him. His body is the mother that he sees standing below him and the transformed lower self is the disciple who bears witness that Christ lives. Now the higher self can say to the lower self, “Behold thy mother!” (John, ch. 19, v. 27)

When a person has gone through this fifth station he can progress to the sixth stage, the burial and resurrection. Everything pertaining to this planet becomes the body of the Christian mystic. He feels as though the whole earth was part of him. He has ceased to be a separate being. He is one with the whole life of the earth. Through burial he is inwardly bound with it. The grave becomes the source of his experience—man and animal, plant and rock around him become transparent. He has lost his own separate life, the higher life of the whole Earth ...

The seventh stage is known as the ascension into heaven. It signifies that he is completely taken up into the spiritual world.

The John Gospel is a description of this Christian path of initiation. He who takes it as an account of an external happening does not understand it. It can only be comprehended if one has lived through it inwardly. This is what Angelus Silesius means, when he says:

When thou dost rise above thyself
and let God hold his sway:
Then present in thy spirit is the ascension,
for ever and for aye.

Angelus Silesius, “The Cherubinic Wanderer”

As no creature can see the sunlight unless its eyes are opened so no one can understand the mystery of Golgotha, if they have not inwardly experienced it. Once one has come to such an inner experience, one can appreciate why the reckoning of time is divided into before and after Christ.

Christianity attains its real meaning when it is followed as an inner path. The John gospel is a document which can be lived sentence by sentence. If one has lived it, one knows that external criticism does not apply. All criticism vanishes, and every doubt disappears, if one knows that what is written is to be lived through and through. Every line can be lived inwardly. The Christian spirit has to be experienced in the depth of the soul. He who saw for himself how everything took place knows that he speaks the truth and says so. For he is the risen Lazarus.

What we have said so far about the Gospel of St. John has taken us deeply into the essence of Christianity, and has shown us what profound mystical power lies hidden within this Christian document. We have seen that it should not be read like a report of outer events, or an historical account, but a script engraved by life, so that every sentence re-lived, transforms something in us.

We have followed the seven stages of spiritual ascent in the life of St. John. Today we will add something which goes even deeper. A few examples will show that I have not forced an arbitrary meaning on the gospel, but that by means of occult teaching we are able to understand many things that otherwise would remain dark and unintelligible. First I will remind you of the seven stages of initiation which existed at the time of the birth of Christianity.

In the last lecture we came to know the Christian initiation, but it was not Christianity that first made initiation possible. At all times, ever since there were men as we know them on earth, it was possible to become an initiate—to ascend to higher stages of human existence. Through Christianity all these things became more inward. Since Christianity has provided us with such documents as the John Gospel—which only needs to be allowed to work and live in us—one can achieve much, and rise to spiritual heights. There were no such documents in pre-Christian times available. One had to be introduced into hidden mystery temples, or centres, and according to the various peoples, the lower stages of initiation differed. In the higher stages national peculiarities were of no account, and they were the same for all peoples even in much older times.

I would like to describe the seven stages of initiation as they were practised in the Persian Mithras cult. It was a form of initiation that was cultivated in the whole of Asia Minor, in Greece and Rome, and even as far as the Danube basin it was practised far into the Christian era. For a long time it was possible to go through these stages even in the hidden cultic centres and temples in Egypt which were often built into the solid rock. They were only accessible to those who came to know them as morally advanced pupils and initiates after strict tests. The first grade was the “Raven”. As a raven the neophyte carried the knowledge acquired in the outer sense world into spiritual life. The idea of the raven has lingered in myths and sagas. There are the Ravens of Wotan, the ravens of Elijah, and in the German Barbarossa saga ravens are the intermediaries between the emperor under a spell in the mountain and the outer world. In the Mithraic mysteries “Raven” signified a grade of initiation.

The second grade was that of the “Occult One”. This was the name for someone who had already received some important occult secrets.

The third grade was that of the “Fighter”. These were initiates who felt their higher self to the extent that they understood sayings such as one finds in the second part of “Light on the Path”.¹ Only an initiate of the third grade can understand such sayings. This does not mean that the ordinary person cannot reach a certain comprehension. Everyone has a higher self, and if one is able to abnegate one's lower self and make it a servant of the higher self then one can say in a certain sense: “Though thou fightest thou art not the fighter”. But it is not until one has reached a particular stage of initiation that one really knows what this sentence signifies. What one formerly considered as higher interests become mere subsidiary interests, mere servants of the fighter.

The fourth grade was achieved when complete inner harmony and calm, equilibrium and strength are gained. This grade was called that of the “Lion”. Such an initiate had so developed the occult life in himself that he could represent the occult not only with words but with deeds.

Meanwhile the consciousness of a person who has passed through these four stages of initiation extended further and further. He identified himself with ever larger groupings of people. All these names have a hidden meaning. For instance, the expression, “The Occult One”. What is a human being as we see him in front of us? He is what is in him. As a Raven an initiate of the first grade—he tries to overcome what is only in him. Then his interests become wider. What people around him are, what they feel and what they will, becomes his own feeling and his own will. The terms were coined in times when there were still communities which were kindred enlarged families. How did one regard such a family? One said they were members of a soul-family tracing right back to a common ancestral pair—members of a hidden ego.

An initiate of the second grade, an “Occult One”, had so ennobled his ego that it became the ego of his community; he made their interests his own. The occult entity of a human community was able to live in him. When the ego of such a human community became the ego of an individual initiate then this community became his dwelling place. The “Fighter” fought for the larger community. In ancient Palestine one designated as a “Lion”, he who had raised himself up to encompass the consciousness, the ego, of a whole tribe. The “lion” of the tribe of Judah is the term applied to someone who had reached such a stage of initiation that he bore within himself the ego of the whole tribe.

The initiate of the fifth grade had so overcome his personality that he could take up the folk-soul. The folk-spirit lived in him. In Persia such an initiate was called a “Persian”. In Greece one would have called him a “Grecian”, if it had been the custom. What does this grade signify? For him everything individual has vanished and his consciousness has become one with the whole. This constitutes a higher state of consciousness.

Today it is different. Because of the splitting up of all communal groups we meet with quite different stages of initiation. But at the time of the birth of Christianity it still had a meaning when one spoke of souls initiated to the fifth grade. You can verify this in the John Gospel. Take the first chapter, verse 45:

“Philip findeth Nathanael and saith unto him: We have found him of whom Moses in the law and the Prophets did write, Jesus of Nazareth the son of Joseph. And Nathanael said unto him: Can there any good thing come out of Nazareth? Philip saith unto him: Come and see. Jesus saw Nathanael coming to him and saith of him: Behold an Israelite indeed in whom is no guile!”

Nathanael is here acknowledged as an initiate of the fifth grade. This means that he had learned to know what for us men is the essence of life, the Tree of Life. Earlier in life one tastes of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. One partakes of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge the moment one is able to say “I” to oneself. When the higher, the spiritual, in man awakens it can happen that God has to protect man. Jehovah was concerned lest man, after having eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, should also eat of the Tree of Life before he was ready for it. The initiate of the fifth grade learns what relieves this concern and what raises one beyond all death and all that is transitory. This is the spiritual element.

How can the spiritual element become established in man? For someone who has penetrated more deeply into Theosophy it is something which flows through the whole world. For him whose vision is able to penetrate into higher worlds, all that is, to begin with, a stage of inner development even on higher planes, is expressed at first on the astral plane as a picture. When a person has reached the fifth grade of initiation he always sees a picture on the astral plane, which formerly he had not seen—the picture of a tree, a finely branched, white tree. This picture on the astral plane, which is to be taken as a symbol of the fifth grade of initiation, is called the Tree of Life. He who had reached this point is said to have sat under the Tree of Life. Thus Buddha sat under the Bodhi Tree and Nathanael under the Fig Tree. These are terms for the picture on the astral plane. What is seen are reflections of inner—even bodily inner things. The Bodhi Tree is but the astral mirror image of the human nervous system. He who through initiation is able to direct his gaze inward, sees his inner life, even his bodily inner life, projected, reflected into the outer astral world. So you see what is intended in this chapter of the John Gospel.

Nathanael is addressed as one who knows. It is implied: We understand each other. “Jesus said unto him, ‘Before that, Philip called thee, when thou wast under the fig tree, I saw thee.’” This means, we are brothers of the fifth grade of initiation. It is a recognition between initiates. “Nathanael answered and saith unto him, ‘Rabbi, thou art the Son of God, thou art the King of Israel.’” You see the recognition is complete. Jesus answered him, and said that it will become apparent that he is more than an initiate of the fifth grade. He said, “Because I said unto thee I saw thee under the fig tree, thou believest; thou shalt see greater things than these.”

I would also like to draw your attention to the conversation with Nicodemus, which you will find in the third chapter. There we have the significant words, “Verily, verily I say unto thee, except a man be born of water and of the spirit, he cannot enter into the Kingdom of God.” What does it mean to be born anew and to see the Kingdom of God? It means to have awakened the higher self, to be born so that the eternal core of one's being is awakened. What does it mean to enter the kingdom of heaven? It means to see not only the reflection of Devachan here on earth as we see it through our physical eyes, but to see this realm directly itself. He alone can do this who has not only been born for this physical world, but is born a second time.

Take what I have used as a comparison, but one which is more than a comparison. Take it literally. To be born means to proceed from an embryo to a stage at which one perceives the outer world with the senses. If one does not pass through an embryonic stage one can never be ready to be born. Those who know this stage also know that ordinary life is an embryonic stage for the higher life. This leads us deep into the meaning of ordinary life. It could be quite easy for someone who directs his gaze towards the spiritual world to become convinced that there is such a world and that man is a citizen of it. He could then proceed to disregard the physical world and to believe that one cannot depart from it quickly enough, and that one should mortify the flesh, the sooner to reach the spiritual world. This shows ignorance. It is as senseless as if one would not allow the human embryo to mature but would bring it into the world at two months, and expect it to live there. Likewise for the higher world, one has to develop to become mature. Such is he who has developed his higher self. The physical world is the school. He who has developed his ego here is ready to enter the kingdom of heaven, which means to be born again. Man has to go through birth and death ever and again, until he has gained his full maturity in order to enter the spiritual world itself, so that he no longer needs physical organs. Thus we have to realise that everything we do by means of our eyes, ears and other senses is work done for the higher life.

Certainly, we have, frequently said that man must develop higher senses, that he must develop the chakrams or holy wheels, which enable him to enter the spiritual world and see it. But how does he come to obtain these holy wheels? Through his work on the physical plane. Here is the place of preparation. Our work here prepares the organs for a higher world. As the human being is prepared in the mother's body, so in the body of the great world mother—where we are while leading our physical life—is prepared what is necessary to make it possible for us to see and act in higher worlds. One is perfectly justified to speak of a higher world and to value it higher than our lower world, but we should only use these terms in a technical sense. All worlds are, basically, equally valid expressions of the highest principle, in different forms. We should not despise any world. In this way we learn to relate ourselves rightly towards both the lower and the higher worlds. This is the requirement for entering into the third chapter of the John Gospel.

It must be understood that Jesus speaks to Nicodemus of a genuine rebirth, and that, above all, he wishes to remind him that looked at in this way, the ordinary, everyday life must be reborn as a higher life and recognised as such. He who reads this chapter really carefully will see that this is what is meant.

Many circles lay it against Theosophy that it teaches reincarnation—the gradual maturing of humanity through rebirth and repeated earth lives. It is said that Christianity knows nothing of this teaching of reincarnation. But actually in the John Gospel there is a clear indication that when he spoke intimately with his disciples, Jesus taught reincarnation. For instance, one can only make sense of the ninth chapter (the healing on the Sabbath of the man born blind) if one bases it on the idea of reincarnation. One must remember that he spoke in the language current at that time. In Greece it was then usual to speak of the power that permeates man's innermost being and leads it forward. For the Greeks and all other peoples of that time, the power that made man into man and caused him to develop was God. An outer God, a God in the next world, was unknown in those days. Therefore one called what lived in man, the God in man. Thus if one spoke of the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob, it was the higher self that was meant. One can only understand the Old Testament if one appreciates this conception of God. Jesus too speaks of the God living in man when talking intimately to his disciples: “His disciples asked him, saying, ‘Master, who did sin, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’ Jesus answered, ‘Neither hath this man sinned nor his parents, but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.’”

These three sentences speak clearly enough. Neither had he sinned in his physical body, nor had his parents; therefore the Jewish law that God will visit the sins of the fathers upon the children unto so and so many generations does not hold good. But the works of God in man shall be made manifest, i.e. the self in man that passes through all his incarnations. These words which Jesus spoke to his disciples could not be clearer. You know the orthodox explanation. Think, if someone meant what is supposed to be said here: The glory of God should be made manifest in a blind person. This presumes that it was arranged that someone should be blind so that Jesus could heal him and the glory of God be made manifest. Can this be reconciled with true Christianity? No. Christianity would be morally degraded. Interpreted theosophically, this image carries a truly beautiful and noble meaning.

It was always so when Jesus spoke intimately with his disciples. That it was so, is especially revealed in the scene known as the transfiguration. It is, however, not in the John Gospel. We find it in the seventeenth chapter of St. Matthew and in the ninth chapter of St. Mark. In St. John it is not to be found. The only reference that could have any relation to it is the passage in the twelfth chapter, verse 28: “‘Father glorify thy name.’ Then came there a voice from heaven saying, ‘I have both glorified it and will glorify it again.’” And further in verse 31: “‘Now is the judgment of this world. Now shall the prince of this world be cast out. And I, if I be lifted up from the earth will draw all men unto me.’ Thus he said, signifying what death he should die. The people answered him, ‘We have heard out of the law that Christ abideth for ever, and how sayest thou: the Son of Man must be lifted up? Who is this Son of Man?’ Then Jesus said unto them, ‘Yet a little while is the light with you. Walk while ye have the light, lest darkness come upon you for he that walketh in darkness knoweth not whither he goeth. While ye have light, believe in the light, that ye may be the children of light.’”

We find the transfiguration scene in all the evangelists except St. John. This is significant. Let us clarify the meaning of this scene. What takes place? Jesus goes with three disciples Peter, James and John—up a mountain: this means into the inner sanctuary where one is initiated into higher worlds and where one also speaks in occult language. Then it is said: the master took his disciples up into a mountain—it means that he went to that place where he expounded the parable to them. The disciples were carried up into a higher state of consciousness. They saw then that which is not transitory but eternal. Moses and Elias appear and Jesus himself with them. What does this mean? In occult science the word Elias means the same as El—the goal, the way. Moses is the spiritual scientific word for truth. By the fact that Elias, Moses and Jesus appear you have the fundamental Christian truth: I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. Jesus himself says—this is a fundamental Christian mystical truth—“I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.” (John, ch. 14, v. 6)

The important thing is that here the eternal is shown as against the temporal, and the disciples see into a world which lies beyond this world. Afterwards they said to the master, “All this should only have come to pass once Elias has come again.” Thus they spoke to him as though reincarnation was taken as a matter of course, as also in many other passages in the gospels. John asked, “Art thou Elias come again?” Then answered the master, “Elias is indeed come again—John the Baptist is Elias. But the people did not recognise him. Say it unto no man until I come again.” Here we have the general, religious, profound truth of reincarnation uttered in the intimate conversation between the master and his disciples. At the same time it is set down as a testament: “Say it unto no man until I come again.” This coming again refers to a much later time, the time when all men will recognise Christ through their higher comprehension. When this comes about then will He reappear to them.

Thus time is being prepared through the theosophical world conception. Christ will reappear in the world. The doctrine of reincarnation and karma as a generally accepted idea was to be laid aside until this time. At that time people should know nothing of reincarnation and karma, so that they were obliged to take the life between birth and death as something of particular value and importance. Humanity had to pass through all stages of life experience. Up to the time of Christ, reincarnation was generally accepted. Life between birth and death was only a passing episode. But then man had to learn to take life on earth as something important. An extreme form of this teaching was the dogma of eternal punishment and eternal reward. This is an extreme form. What mattered was that each human individuality, each “God-man”, should pass through one incarnation in which he knew nothing of reincarnation and karma and in which he appreciated the vital importance of life between birth and death.

If you read theosophical books you will find that the time between the two incarnations is fifteen to eighteen hundred years. This is about the same length of time as between the birth of Christ, and the present day. Those living then, appear again today. Because of this they are able again to accept the new teaching. Therefore, the theosophical outlook was really prepared on Mount Tabor by Christ Jesus. If we look at world history in broad lines, we should not think that we are dealing either with truth or with error which we can censure. It is not a question of absolute truth or error, but of what is right for man at any given time. If I sat here with a group of boys no more than ten years old, and set about teaching them higher mathematics, I would be teaching them truth and yet it would be folly. I must give a person what he needs, at any given stage of his development. It is not right for us today to say in retrospect, that the Christian teaching contained errors. No. In order to master the physical plane, one had to take this one life seriously. Certainly, the priestly sages of Chaldea taught great spiritual truths. They brought down a vast knowledge of the spiritual world, but they used the most primitive tools, and did not know how to use the forces of nature in everyday life. The physical plane had first to be mastered. To do this, man's whole life of feeling must be directed towards it. Christianity had to prepare mankind to master the physical world. This was decreed, it is the testament from Mount Tabor. What lies behind this declaration is something wonderful.

If one penetrates deeper, one will find more and more. If we want to understand religious documents which came down to us from times which had true knowledge of spiritual life and not a materialistic way of thinking, we must realise that the mode of thought was so different, that if one spoke of man, one spoke in a completely different way.

Now I must tell you something which though easy to understand intellectually, is difficult for the man of today to grasp with his whole soul. The time when the gospels were written was the dawn of Christianity. One used names then in a way which I will now explain. One did not look to the outer physical man, but one saw something higher, the spiritual, shining through it. A name was not used as it is today, it had a significance. Suppose someone was called James (Jacobus). James really means water. Water is the spiritual scientific term for the soul element. If I call somebody James, I say that his soul shines through his body. With this, I signify that he belongs to the watery element. If I give the name James to an initiate, he is to me the symbol for water (Hebrew—Jam). James is nothing but the technical name for an initiate who especially governs the force of water in its occult sense.

Thus were the three disciples who were taken up to Mount Tabor called by their initiate names: James means water, Peter stands for earth, or rock (Hebrew—Jabascha), John signifies air (Ruach). Thus, John means he who has attained the higher self. This leads us deep into the secret doctrines. Transport yourself back into the time when man only possessed the lower principles—the third Root Race, the Lemurian epoch. Mankind did not then breath air, he breathed through gills. Lungs and breathing through lungs developed later. This process coincided with the impregnation by the higher self. Air is, according to the hermetic principle, the lower which represents the higher—the higher self. If I call somebody John (Johannes), then he is one who has awakened his higher self, who governs the occult forces of air. Jesus is the one who governs the occult forces of fire (Nur). Thus you have in these four names, the representatives of earth, water, air and fire. They are the names of the four who ascended Mount Tabor.

Think of these four together on the Mount of Transfiguration. There you have at the same time, the initiates who govern the four elements: fire, water, air and earth. What happened? It was made manifest spiritually that through the appearance of Jesus, the whole power of the elements was renewed in such a way that the life pulsing through the elements passed through a new, important phase of its development. This is the transfiguration seen occultly. If somebody goes through the transfiguration in this manner, if he has within himself the stages of water, earth and air, and even rises to the forces of fire, then he is a reawakened one, someone who has gone through the crucifixion. Thus, in the case of the other evangelists, this scene is but a preparation for the deeper initiation scene of the crucifixion itself. In the John Gospel, everything is already prepared. The preparatory scene does not appear, only the death on the Mount of Golgotha. Jam, Nur, Ruach, Jabascha—INRI—this is the meaning of the words on the cross.

One can go deeper and deeper into the religious texts and never finish learning. Sometimes when one hears an explanation like this it sounds forced. But every step that leads you deeper will furnish evidence that it is not forced. Superficial explanations seek to avoid the “depths” purposely. But there are depths in these writings. Those who know something can always say to themselves: probably there is much more in it, I have still much to learn. This is the attitude of reverence that we can bring to religious texts.

This reverence is of the utmost importance, for it will become strength in us drawn from the depths. There is one important sentence that I can only touch on. In chapter 19, verse 33,we find: “But when they came to Jesus and saw that he was dead already they brake not his legs ... ” and in verse 36, “For these things were done, that the scripture should be fulfilled, A bone of him shall not be broken.” You know that this reminds one of a passage in one of the books of Moses (Exodus 12:46). Rightly understood, it has a deep meaning. It is deeply symbolical, but I can only touch on it.

If you look around the world you will have to admit that man as he is now incarnated in the flesh has no power over life, nor over what stands, above life. He is only master of the lifeless inorganic forces. Man cannot oblige a plant to grow, or to grow faster. He would have to acquire occult power, to do so. Far less is he able to master what is higher than life forces. What he is able to control is the lifeless outer world. There, he exerts his mastery in everyday work over the materials with which nature provides him. He creates works of art, pictures of the Almighty, but he cannot breathe life into them. He can only copy life. He cannot awaken an intimation of life in the lifeless, even in the most sublime Christian works of art. This is so because man has enfolded his astral and etheric forces in the solid, dense physical body. Thus he came to have this relation to the outer world—to be master only of the lifeless. The higher forces which are not tied to the physical must be awakened, and then man will again be able to master life. As it is, he can only control physical forces, and not life itself.

This is connected with the fact that the human body which was once soft and pliable has now become more and more solid. If you go back in evolution you will see that man has changed very much. In Lemurian times he had no skeleton. This was formed later. The bones were the last things to appear in the human organism. He will have them until he has spiritualised himself again, until he has awakened again his inner forces and learned the lesson which he can only learn in this dense body with its hard skeleton. Christ Jesus is that spirit whose cosmic mission it was to be incarnated in just such a body in order to show man the way out of this world into a higher world. He is the leader and guide into the higher world. That which has to find its way into the higher world is symbolised by the solid human skeleton. As long as man had not reached the stage of having a hard skeleton, he did not need a Messiah. But for this present epoch he needs the Messiah, the Redeemer.

Thus it is evident that the forces in Jesus which are connected with the higher world do not concern present day humanity. We can express it by calling the skeleton the exterior; water, the etheric body; blood, the astral body; and then the spirit. *[First Epistle of John, ch. 5, v. 8, (literally) “And there are three that bear witness: the spirit and the water and the blood.”] Therefore blood and water can flow from the body of Christ. These are of no import for the present cycle of human development. On the other hand, that which supports the whole, which leads man upwards to the throne of the Eternal, what he needs in order to learn the lesson, that must be kept uninjured. This is the skeleton, the symbol for the lifeless in nature. Through this skeleton, Christ is connected with the present cycle of man's development. This is what must be kept intact until such time as man shall have reached higher stages. We can follow this back to the corresponding passages in the Books of Moses. But this can be done some other time.

Today I wanted to add something which will have shown you that the John Gospel is inexhaustible, and how full it is of strength and life. As we take it in and absorb it, it gives us strength and life. This is why this gospel is the leading scripture for those who wish to penetrate deeper and deeper into theosophical Christianity. If theosophy is to work for Christianity it is from this, above all, that it must start. But clearly, if I were to explain the John Gospel in its entirety to you, I should have to take the whole winter. I should have to take it sentence by sentence and then you would see how deep are the words ascribed to John, i.e. to him whose very name indicates that he is a herald of the higher self. He is the representative of air, and master of the higher forces, who, from the perception of the higher self, wrote his Gospel according to St. John.

It would be futile and in vain, to attempt to fathom, or criticise this gospel with the powers of the ordinary intellect. In our time the intellect has achieved great things, but the John Gospel is not written for the intellect. Only he who has overcome the intellect and is able to lead it to the heights of spirit power as John did, can understand his gospel. Theosophy would be quite wrong to undertake an intellectual critique of this John Gospel. Instead, it should immerse itself in it, in order to understand it. Then we should see that a new spirit of Christianity—not only the spirit of the past, but a future Christianity, can proceed from the John Gospel. We will become aware of the deep truth of one of the most beautiful and profound sayings of Christ. Out of his mouth we are told that Christianity is not something that has merely lived in the past, but that the same power still lives today. True it is what Christ said: I am with you always, even unto the end of time.

• 1. “Stand aside in the coming battle, and though thou fightest, be not thou the warrior.” Light on the Path, Mabel Collins, Theosophical University Press. Pasadena, California, 1971.

Again and again we see how difficult it is for people today to understand theosophical life. I therefore intend to present some general ideas on the subject. The nature of theosophy is such that everyone who feels drawn to it hopes it will fulfil his deepest longing with regard to the spirit. Yet if we want to know the right core idea of theosophy for the present time, if we want to fill the whole of our conscious mind with the idea that the spiritual principle is something very real, then it is indeed time that we respect the dignity of the individual who is our neighbour. We acknowledge the individual principle, for as human beings endowed with sentient souls we would not permit ourselves to injure the outer person of someone else, nor would we permit ourselves to encroach on his personal freedom. But we have not yet reached the point and are still far from being able to extend such tolerance to the inmost reality of the human being. We are as yet far from being aware—at most we are so in theory, but certainly not in practice—that sentience and thought, the spiritual principle altogether, is something very real. Surely this is something you all understand. Everyone understands today that it is utterly and absolutely real when I slap someone. But people do not find it so easy to believe that it is something real to send bad thoughts to someone. We have to be aware that the bad thought I have about someone I meet—antipathy, hatred—is like a slap in the face to his soul. A negative inner response, feelings of hatred and lack of love for others are truly the same as the ordinary external injury inflicted on someone. It is only when you know this that you become a theosophist.

If we let ourselves be wholly aware of this, if we understand that the spirit in ourselves is a reality, we have grasped the idea of theosophy, and such thinking will have an important consequence. People who are members of a cultured society will not slap each other in the face, they will not cause bodily harm to one another. But I need not tell you the thoughts, the opinions held by people sitting side by side in our cultured society. You know it. It is the function of the Theosophical Society to make people aware of the need for sympathy and the inviolability of the person. If you have seven people sitting together in our present day and age—a time when people are above all concerned to have opinions, views—they will have thirteen opinions, and because of those thirteen opinions they would really like to split up into thirteen factions. That is the consequence of differences in opinion. The theosophical movement must replace this difference of opinion with the deep-down idea of brotherhood. We only grasp theosophy, this idea of brotherhood, fully when we are able to sit together in brotherhood even if other thoughts we have show the greatest possible differences. We want not only to respect and honour the individual nature of the other person, wholly aware of and acknowledging his full human dignity, but also to acknowledge to the very depth of our souls the inner life of our fellow human being.

This means, however, that we have to remain sitting on our chairs and stay with the other person even if opinions differ to an extreme degree. No one should leave the theosophical community, the theosophical brotherhood, because of a difference of opinion. This is indeed the special quality of theosophists, that they remain brothers even if they are not of the same opinion. Unless we come together in the spirit of brotherhood we shall not be able to bring a core idea of theosophy to realization. For this alone makes it possible to let the deepest secrets that lie dormant in people's souls emerge, abilities that lie deep down in our soul as though asleep. We have to understand that we can work together with others even if there are fundamental differences of opinion among us.

It was not for nothing that the Theosophical Society was founded in the last third of the 19th century.¹ The way in which it seeks the spirit does differ markedly from those of endeavours in which others seek to gain proof of human immortality. There is a big difference in the search for the eternal as one sees it in the Theosophical Society and the search for the eternal in other movements that seek the spirit. The theosophical movement is in reality nothing but a popular form of the occult brotherhoods that existed secretly everywhere in the world through the millennia. I have mentioned before that the most outstanding, the greatest brotherhood founded in Europe in the 14th century, was the Rosicrucian brotherhood. This Rosicrucian brotherhood is really the source, the starting point for all other brotherhoods and has preserved the culture of Europe. Occult wisdom was taught in strict secrecy in these brotherhoods. To define the aims of the individuals who met in those many different brotherhoods I would have to speak of the great, sublime wisdom taught and of the study of this wisdom in those occult brotherhoods, with the Rosicrucian brotherhood the most outstanding among them.

The teaching and the work done in those brotherhoods enabled human beings to become aware of the eternal core of their being. They enabled human beings to make a connection with the higher world, with the worlds that are above our own, and to look for guidance to our elders, for the guidance of those who lived among us and had reached a level which all of you will reach at a later time. We call them the ‘elders’ because they have hastened ahead of general evolution and reached this high level before us. We thus have the certainty of the eternal core of our being, and of its awakening so that human beings will be able to gain sight of the eternal just as ordinary people do of the world perceived through the senses. To achieve this, they must follow in the footsteps of the elders who live among us everywhere. These elders or ‘masters’, the great guides of humanity, have always been the most important leading figures among humanity, always the most important leading figures in the sublime occult wisdom through which man becomes aware of the eternal core of his being. Up to the middle of the 19th century people wishing to be received into such an occult brotherhood had to go through stringent examinations and trials. Admission would only be granted to individuals whose character guaranteed that the sublime wisdom taught would never be used for base purposes. They also had to have the kind of intelligence that ensured that they would understand anything given to them in the occult brotherhoods in the right way and give it the right meaning.

People had to meet these conditions, giving a full guarantee that they were in a position and had the right attitude to receive the most sublime teaching in life if they wanted to be members of such a brotherhood. People may be little inclined to believe it, but everything truly great that happened up to the French Revolution and into the 19th century came from those occult brotherhoods. People were not aware how much they were influenced by the streams that came from the occult brotherhoods. Let me describe a scene to show how those occult brotherhoods worked in this world. Let us take the following scene. A highly gifted, important man is quite unexpectedly visited by a seemingly unknown person. This unknown person knows how to arrange things so that a conversation develops between him and the important person, a statesman, for example. All of this in the most natural way and quite by ‘chance’, though we have to put the word ‘chance’ in quotes. The conversation is not just about anything, for in the course of it things are said that without his realizing it enter into the mind, the intellect of the individual who is being visited. Such a discussion, which may perhaps take no more than three hours, then brings about a complete change in the individual concerned. Believe it or not, but that is how many great ideas that played a major role in the world were implanted in human minds. Voltaire's great ideas were stimulated in this way, and he probably had no idea who it was that he spoke to, someone apparently utterly insignificant who nevertheless had important things to tell him. Some of Rousseau's² basic ideas were established in this way; and so were Lessing's.³

This kind of influence coming from occult brotherhoods gradually died away in the course of the 19th century. The 19th century was of necessity the century of materialism. The occult brotherhoods had withdrawn. The great masters of wisdom and of harmony in the sentient soul⁴ withdrew to the East, if we may use a technical term. They no longer influenced the West. And then something of special significance happened in the West. Let us consider this, so that we may get a clear understanding of the significance of the Theosophical Movement.

It was in 1841 that people who were members of the most secret society realized that something important was about to happen in Europe. To contain the flood waters of materialism, it was necessary to direct a stream of spiritual life into humanity. This was the time when a certain difference of opinion arose, initially among occultists. Some would say that humanity was not yet ripe to receive spiritual facts and experiences, and that the system of silence should be maintained. These were the conservatives. The system has much to be said for it, for the dissemination of occult truths holds great dangers. Others would say that the danger of materialism was too great and something had to be done against it, so that at least the most elementary knowledge should be conveyed to humanity. But—in what form? People had completely got out of the habit of grasping the spirit in its true form, they were no longer able to rise into higher worlds in any real way, they no longer had an idea of them, so that such a world actually no longer existed for them. How could one teach a human race which only understood materialism and show that there is also the spirit? Why was it so important to help humanity gain awareness of the world of the spirit?

Here we touch on one of the important secrets that lie dormant in our age. I have indicated on a number of occasions why we have a Theosophical Movement, and why it is needed. Anyone able to look into the world of the spirit knows that everything which exists in outer material terms has its origin in the spirit, comes from the spirit. There is nothing material that does not come from the spirit. The health and sickness people know in outer terms thus also comes from their way of looking at life, from their thoughts. The saying ‘What you think today you'll be tomorrow’ does indeed hold true. You have to understand that when people have bad, corrupt ways of thinking in one age, the next generation and the next age will have to pay for this physically. It is the truth that lies in the saying of visiting the iniquities of the fathers upon the children for many generations.⁵ The fact that people began to think in such coarse material terms in the 19th century, turning their minds away from anything spiritual, did have its consequences. What people thought then will be fulfilled. And it will not be long before strange diseases and epidemics will appear in our human world. Nerviness, as we call it, will take on serious forms not more than half a century from now. Just as there was the plague once, and cholera, and leprosy in medieval times, so there will be epidemics in the inner life, diseases of the nervous system taking epidemic form. These are the very real consequences of the circumstance that people lack a spiritual core to their life. Where someone has awareness of this vital core at the centre, he will grow healthy under the influence of a sound, true and wise way of seeing the world. But materialism denies the soul, denies the spirit; it hollows people out, focusing them on the periphery, on the outside. Health is only possible if the inmost core of the human being is spiritual and true. The very real disease that follows when the inner human being is hollowed out—that is the epidemic in mind and spirit which we now face.

We have a Theosophical Society in order that people may be given awareness of the spiritual core of their being. It exists above all to bring health to humanity, and not in order that one person or another knows something or other. It is not a matter of you knowing—I mean merely knowing—that reincarnation and karma exist. What matters is that these ideas become the very life blood of the soul, the spiritual core of our being, for they are sound. It is not a matter of proving or disproving them, nor of founding a science where reincarnation and karma are presented in strictly mathematical terms. There is only one proof of what is taught in the science of the spirit, and that is life itself. The teaching of spiritual science will prove to be true when healthy life develops under its influence. This will be the proof of what is taught in theosophy. If you want to have proof of theosophy, you must live theosophy; then it will show itself to be true. Every step and every day must gradually give us proof of the truths taught in the science of the spirit.

This, then, was the reason why a Theosophical Society came into being. But how could one teach 19th-century materialists that there is a spirit? The spiritualist movement then came up. It came up exactly because people did not think it possible to teach humanity that there is something which is of the spirit; one had to show the spirit, to see it with one's own eyes. In Stuttgart someone asked why theosophists were unable to give Haeckel solid proof that there is a spirit. You see, solid evidence was to be provided as to the spirit. People first tried to do this with the aid of spiritualism. They tried for decades, right into the 1860's and 1870's. But then an awkward situation arose. Let us take a look at it. It will show you the difference between the theosophical way of rising to higher worlds and any other approach that is used. We are not for the moment concerned with the truth or untruth of spiritualist phenomena. It is evident that phenomena exist that bring spirits from other worlds into our world, so that definite proof can be furnished even for people who will only accept what they can perceive through the senses. We have grown out of the foolishness of saying that a lot of cheating goes on in spiritualism. Yes, there is false coin, but there is also true coin. We'll leave the truth issue aside for now.

But does one learn from attending a seance? We assume—leaving all else aside—that we are dealing with genuine revelations. If one has been presented with the apparition of someone dead, this is definite proof of the immortality of the human soul. It has been physical proof, one is able to convince oneself that the dead are still there in some world or other, and that they can even be called into our world. But it shows us that just to know this is of no real account; it is not what matters. Let us assume you have all been convinced in this manner, with a dead person brought into this group in a seance. You would then know that the human soul is immortal. But the question is, does such knowledge have real significance in a higher sense for the true higher life of man? At first people thought that would be the case. They thought people could be taken one step higher if they knew that there is immortality. But this is the point where the view held in the science of the spirit differs quite distinctly from one where all one is given is visible proof of immortality.

Here is a kind of analogy. I have spoken of all kinds of higher worlds before. I have told you what it is like in the astral world and the devachan,⁶ and you know that after death the human being must first enter the astral world and then the devachan world. Let us now assume that many of the people sitting here say: ‘What he's telling us is something we cannot believe. It is too improbable.’ People who do not believe it, who go away and do not come back, would really have to prove their point of view entirely on their own. But with those who come back, even though they do not believe these things, it does not matter at all. I would say to those who come back: ‘Don't believe anything I say. You do not have to believe anything. That is quite immaterial. You may even consider it to be humbug, or think I am telling you something that comes from an utterly fantastic realm—but do listen and take it in.’ That is what matters.

Imagine I were to draw you a map of Asia Minor. Someone might come along and say: ‘The rivers and mountains he is drawing there are nonsense.’ I would then say to him: ‘I do not mind in the least that do you not believe me. But look at it, and keep it in mind. When you go to Asia Minor, you will find that it is true, and you'll then know your way about.’ What really matters—also for astronomers—is to go to higher realms, map in hand. That is what matters. And that is also true for knowledge of a higher world. We can only really enter into it if we take something of its essential nature into ourselves. So when I speak of the astral, you must take in something of the nature and the ways of that swaying, mobile character of the astral world, and when I speak of the devachan, you must take in something of the peculiar nature of that world which is so much the opposite of our own world. if you just make a connection with these ideas and a feeling comes alive in you for those higher realms, you will get a feeling for the state of awareness we have when the astral world surrounds us, for the state of awareness when the devachan world is around us. If you enter in a living way into the states a seer experiences as he rises into those worlds, this is something different from having solid proof that you can come across something or other in life. That is the difference between the method used in the science of the spirit and all other ways of gaining certainty of the spirit's existence.

With theosophy we seek to rise into the higher worlds so that we shall be able to gain direct sentient awareness of the spiritual, so that we have a breath of the higher worlds whilst still in the physical world. The spiritualists' approach, which I have described to you, is to bring the world of the spirit down into the physical, put it here before us, as if it were material. The theosophist seeks to raise the human world to the sphere of the spirit. The spiritualist says: ‘If the spirits are to be shown to be real, they must come down to me. They have to tickle me, as it were, then I can perceive them through the sense of touch.’ The theosophist goes up towards them, he seeks to come closer to them; he seeks to develop inwardly, so that he may understand the things of the spirit.

It may help to use a simple analogy. It is difficult enough, in present circumstances, to rise to the level of some higher spirits who have incarnated in the flesh. Imagine Christ Jesus were to appear in our midst today. How many people do you think would accept him? I won't say that some would call the police if someone were to make the claims today that Christ Jesus once made. But it all depends on people being ready to see what is going on right beside them.

Another analogy. A singer arrived a bit late for a dinner invitation.⁷ Her chair between two gentlemen had remained empty. One of them was Felix Mendelssohn, who was a friend of hers, the other was someone she did not know. She talked happily to Mendelssohn; the gentlemen on her left was very agreeable, paying her all kinds of compliments which she did not like, however. She therefore asked Mendelssohn: ‘Who is the silly fellow sitting on my other side?’ ‘That is Hegel, the famous philosopher,’ Mendelssohn replied. If she had been invited to meet Hegel she would no doubt have behaved differently. But having no idea as to who he was as she sat beside him, she took him for something of a fool.

Believe me, it is perfectly possible for you to come across one of the masters and take him for something of a fool. We can only recognize these higher spirits incarnated in the flesh if we have made ourselves capable of doing so. People would not recognize Christ Jesus if he were to come down among us today, unless he showed himself in the way they would imagine him to be. It is the aim of theosophy to develop and transform human beings, making them able to recognize the higher worlds. And this is a problem for the awareness we have in our present civilization. What matters is not that the principle which lives in higher worlds descends to us but that we ascend towards it. We need to develop the ability to ascend to higher worlds. This alone will make it possible for us to reach the higher worlds in a worthy way when we depart from this world at our death. Someone who has a map of Asia Minor can find his way around there, a map created out of life itself. If we know about the things that await us over there, we are going to enter into a world that we know, knowing what may be found there.

Mere knowledge of such a world does not mean much, however. Here we are on the threshold of a great mystery, and another fact that is of the utmost significance. It was because of this fact that European and American occultists decided to abandon the spiritualist approach in the 1870's and start the theosophical movement. The great occultist conference held in Vienna at that time provided a major impulse towards this change of tactic.

To initiate the spiritualist movement it had been necessary to establish a number of procedures. These procedures, established in countries where people were educated, had come from American occultists or lodges. The spiritualistic approach was decided on in those lodges. It consisted in offering particular groups the opportunity to galvanize certain dead people and thus furnish solid proof of immortality. This means that initially the astral corpses of certain dead people on the astral plane were sent to spiritualist groups, into the physical world. They were to give proof of immortality. Now we may ask: ‘Is it right for occultists on earth to make the dead appear?’ It is true there is no border between dead and alive for those who do occult work. They are able to visit the dead in the astral world and in the devachan. If they want to they can indeed—as I have told you—furnish proof of immortality in spiritualist groups. Please take note of this and remember it. It would not make much sense to anyone who is not well versed in these things. But it was different for the occultists. It was found that this way of gaining conviction of immortality was not only worthless but in some respects extraordinarily harmful. This way, where people did not become better people but were given solid evidence of immortality in the physical world, was not only worthless but in fact quite harmful, the reasons being as follows.

Imagine people who have gained proof of immortality in this way then abandoning their longing to gain access to the higher world. They would have become materialists also as regards the world of he spirit. They knew themselves to be spiritualists, but in their way of thinking they were nothing but materialists. They believed in a world of the spirit, but thought it could be seen with the aid of the senses and not by spiritual means. It was then found that when individuals with such materialistic ways of thinking came to kama loka⁸ they were even less able to recognize things over there than the materialists were. The materialists generally believed themselves to be in a dream world; this usually happens when one gets there. The materialist thinks he is dreaming and that he'll wake up any moment. The human being sees himself in kama loka—he dreams, he sleeps, he wants to wake up.

For someone who has become convinced of the spiritual world's existence and now finds that this world does look very different after all, it is not the case that he just finds himself in a dream world. The difference between what he thought the spiritual world to be and what he now perceives it to be is like a lead weight to him. Remember, human beings have enough to contend with as it is when they reach kama loka, especially being unable to satisfy their desires. Gourmets for instance could only gain such satisfaction when they still had their tongue or their senses, and now they will no longer have them. It will then feel as if they were parched with thirst, or in a burning furnace.

The feeling is not exactly like that of parching thirst, but it is similar. If you consider everything human beings have to experience and go through over there, one might sum it up in the words: ‘He has to get used to living without a body.’ This is, however, difficult for anyone who is much attached to the sensual sphere. It is not really very difficult for anyone who has tom himself away from the sensual sphere. Someone who has done nothing to raise his soul higher, to develop it further, will know this difference between the spiritual and the sensual; it will be like a difference in weight, as though he were weighed down with a leaden weight. The spiritual and the sensual need different ways of perception, and the individual concerned expects the spiritual to be material and tangible. Over in the world of the spirit he finds, however, that the astral is very different by nature. The difference feels like a weight that threatens to drag him down again into the physical world, and that is the worst thing.

These are the reasons why the masters of wisdom abandoned the method used in the 1850s, 1860s and early 1870s to give certainty of the higher world. They abandoned this method and decided on the theosophical path of development to give access to the world of the spirit. Essentially this is based on two things. One is that it is most eminently necessary to create a spiritual core [other set of notes: spiritual centre] so that humanity will be protected from new diseases affecting mind and spirit. The other is to make it possible for humanity to develop to a higher level and reach the higher world rather than draw the higher world down to themselves. Instead of dragging the higher world down to us, we must be raised into the higher world. Rightly understood, this gives you an idea of, a feeling for, the true mission of the theosophical movement. In this sense the theosophical movement sets us the task of developing to higher and higher levels, so that we may grow into the world of the spirit. Then, I think, the idea of brotherhood will come to us absolutely of its own accord. We would no longer want to go off in different directions. People only go apart for as long as they want to be completely on their own on this physical plane. In reality we are only separate whilst on the physical plane. As soon as we rise to the higher world we do become aware of brotherhood in the spirit; spiritual unity comes to awareness.

I have tried on several occasions to speak to you of this brotherhood in the spirit, at least in ideas for the intellect. It is so beautifully expressed in the words: ‘This is you.’ Let us think of this. As I told you before, if you cut off my hand, in a very short time it will no longer be my hand. It can only be my hand if it is part of my organism; otherwise it is no longer a hand; it shrivels up. As a human being you are such a hand belonging to the earth organism. Imagine you are raised a few miles above the earth. There you cannot live as a physical human being, you cease to live as a human being. You are part of this earth just as my hand is part of my body. The illusion of being independent creatures arises because you walk around on this earth, whereas the hand is attached to the body. But that does not matter. Goethe was referring to something very real when he spoke of the earth spirit. He meant to say that the earth has a soul and we are its members. He spoke of something real when he wrote the following lines for the earth spirit:

In life's floods, in roaring activity
I move up and down,
Going hither and thither.
Birth and the grave,
Weaving to and fro
Creating ardent life,
I work the rushing loom of time
Weaving the godhead's living garb.⁹

And so even the physical human being is part of the earth organism, part of a whole. And now think about the soul and the spirit—there it is exactly the same. I have so often said that humanity would not be able to live if it had not developed further against the background of the other realms on earth. In the same way the more highly developed human being cannot exist without the less developed one. A spiritual principle cannot exist without those that have remained behind, just as a human being could not exist if it were not for the fact that the animals have remained behind, and an animal cannot exist without the plant, nor the plant without the mineral. This is brought most beautifully to expression in the gospel of John after the washing of the feet: ‘I could not be, were it not for you...’¹⁰ The disciples were a necessity for Jesus, the soil that fed him. This is a great truth. Just look into a court of law—a judge sitting on the bench, feeling superior to the accused. But the judge might reflect and say to himself that they may well have been together in an earlier life when he did not fulfil his obligations to the accused and this has made him the way he now is. If the judge's karma were investigated it might turn out that he should really be sitting in the dock. The whole of humanity is an organism. If you tear out at a single human being, that human being cannot continue but will shrivel up. A common bond unites us all. We will begin to understand this when we seek to develop the faculties we need for the higher world, so that we may truly rise and find the core in us that is the essence of the spirit. If that essence of the spirit lives in us it will lead us to brotherhood. This exists already on the higher planes. On earth we have only an image of it. Brotherhood here on earth is but an image of what exists on the higher planes. We deny something that already exists in us if we do not cherish brotherhood among ourselves here on earth.

That is the deeper meaning of the brotherhood idea. And we must therefore seek to bring the theosophical ideas to realization more and more, in such a way that we understand the other human being in his very depth of soul, and that we stay together as brothers however great the differences of opinion. That is true togetherness, true brotherhood, where we do not ask that the other individual should be in harmony with us by thinking the same way, but allow every individual to have his own opinion. Then the greatest wisdom will be achieved as we work together. This is a more profound view of our first theosophical principle. If we take our idea of brotherhood to be such that we say to ourselves: ‘We belong together, whatever the circumstances, and however much someone's views may differ from our own. Differences of opinion can never be a reason for us to separate.’ We shall only fully understand one another if we let each other be as we are. I know this view of theosophical brotherhood is still a long way off, and it cannot take effect until the theosophical idea has taken root in this sense, in this style.

• 1. The Theosophical Society had been founded by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott in New York in 1875.
• 2. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712–78), French philosopher, educationalist and author.
• 3. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim (1729–81), German writer.
• 4. Figures of supreme importance in human evolution. These sublime spirits have already walked the road which the rest of humanity still has to travel. They are now working as ‘the great masters of wisdom and harmony in man's inner responses.’ (From a letter Rudolf Steiner wrote to a member, Berlin, 20 January 1905). See also lecture of 24 August 1911 in Wonders of the World (GA 129); lecture of 26 December 1909 in Festivals of the Seasons (GA 117); The Christian Mystery. Novalis the Seer, Berlin 22 Dec. 1908 (GA 108).
• 5. Exodus 20:5
• 6. A Sanskrit and Tibetan compound noun meaning 'go country'; the corresponding Christian term is ‘heaven’.
• 7. The singer was Therese Devrient (1803–82). Her memoirs were published in Stuttgart in 1905.
• 8. A compound noun that may be translated as ‘desire world’; the Christian equivalent is ‘purgatory’.
• 9. Goethe, Faust 1, Night scene.
• 10. There is a gap here in the text as it was taken down.

As announced, today's lecture will be concerned with a tragic event that has happened these days—the eruption of Vesuvius.¹¹ It will, of course, not be possible to discuss the details of this natural event. Our task is to awaken insight into such natural phenomena out of the science of the spirit. Let me therefore present some basic elements that will make insight possible. We should note in advance that even among occultists it is considered one of the most difficult things to speak about the mysterious configuration and composition of our planet earth. It is known—anyone who is even a little informed on occult subjects will have heard of this—that it is easier to gain living experience of something of the astral and the mental world, of kama loka and devachan and bring it to ordinary daytime conscious awareness, than to penetrate the secrets of our own planet earth. These secrets are indeed among the ‘inner’ secrets, as they are called, reserved for a higher grade, the second grade of initiation. No one has so far spoken in public about the inner earth, not even within the theosophical movement. I would therefore stress from the very beginning that today's lecture is definitely not for people who are new to theosophy. This is not because there may be difficulties as regards purely conceptual understanding the content may in fact be easier to understand than many other things but because someone who does not have sufficient knowledge of the research methods used in the science of the spirit will immediately ask: ‘How do you know all this?’ I am going to give a rough outline of the facts and at the same time indicate the ways in which these matters can be investigated. There will no doubt be members of the audience who are not used to hearing unusual things, so that what I am going to say today may seem fantastic to them. Please remember that we can never understand everything. These things are part of the most advanced knowledge in occultism.

It will thus be necessary for me to speak about the inner earth from the occult point of view. As you know, scientists offer very little information. New theories on the origin of volcanoes and on volcanic activity in general, have come up roughly every five years in recent decades. What I am going to say today will be pushed aside with a wave of the hand by modern scientists, as something that has nothing to do with science.

As an introduction, let me show you how this objection would appear to occultists. It is considered to be the task of modern science to explain the devastating ejection of matter from the inner earth substance to the surface, the terrifying quakes that will now and then destroy thousands and thousands of human lives, explaining it in purely mechanical terms. One theory is that the inner earth consists of red-hot liquid matter, more or less like an overheated stove, another sees the origin of volcanic phenomena in foci in the surface layer that do not go deep down into the inner earth. More recent theories tend to take this second line. You can hear about the things modern science has to say in popular science lectures or read about them in a literature that varies in quality.

The objections that may be raised by geophysicists to the kind of approach we are going to use here may be compared with a very ordinary everyday event. Let us assume someone has had his room furnished by someone else who wanted to do something nice for him. A third person might come and speak of the loving care given to the choice of the different pieces of furniture, how he had followed particular ideas, and so on. But someone else might object: ‘Why should there be any underlying ideas? The pieces were made at a cabinet maker's and are therefore his work.’ Both are right, the person who speaks of the way the cabinet maker made the furniture and the other person who knows what was in the heart and mind of the person who gave the furniture and commissioned the cabinet maker to make the pieces. Scientists are therefore quite right from their point of view. But they should be able to rise to the admission that it is possible to have two completely different points of view. We are definitely not concerned to reject the cabinet-maker insights of modern science. What matters to us is to reveal the ideas according to which everything was created and brought into existence, and that is the spiritual aspect.

Let me now go straight on to considering the inner earth. This can of course only be done in general terms. As you can imagine, the interior of the earth will always look a little different, depending on where we are on the surface when we consider it. To the scientist of the spirit, the earth is far from being the dead product modern science presents. It has life and is filled with soul and spirit, just as the human body is not only what anatomists show it to be. Just as the human body is filled with soul and spirit, so is the whole body of the earth filled with soul and spirit. And just as the blood consists not only of the chemical compounds chemists are able to identify, so specific substances and layers in our earth are far from being just the things metallurgists, crystallographers and chemists are able to discover. Just as the nerves are not just the anatomical structures defined by scientists, having special significance in giving expression to a soul quality, so there is also an aspect of soul and spirit to everything that makes up our earth.

Physicists are actually only able to penetrate a short distance towards the inner earth. The few thousand metres they are able to reach are indeed of little significance. Scientists can only deal with the outermost shell of the earth's body. No such limits are set to clairvoyant research when it explores the body of our earth. Here it is indeed possible to penetrate to the centre of the planet earth. Clairvoyant research also sees the earth to be made up of layers, and it has been found that these layers open up to perception in stages.

Any of you who have heard the lectures on John's gospel¹² will remember that there are seven stages of Christian initiation. They are 1) the washing of the feet, 2) the scourging, 3) the crown of thorns, 4) carrying the cross, 5) the mystic death, 6) entombment and 7) resurrection. Something truly remarkable emerges for each of these initiation stages in relation to the scientific investigation of the earth. At each of these initiation stages a further, deeper layer of our earth becomes transparent. Someone who has reached the first stage of initiation can thus penetrate the first layer of the earth. Someone who has reached the second stage penetrates a second layer which looks very different. Someone who has borne the crown of thorns sees a third layer. Then comes the stage of bearing the cross, when the fourth layer becomes visible. The fifth stage, mystic death, opens up a further layer. There follows the sixth stage, that of entombment. The seventh layer corresponds to the resurrection. You thus have seven consecutive layers. Beyond these seven layers, which are the seven levels the human being reaches in going through these seven stages of initiation, lie two more layers of the planet earth, an eighth and a ninth. The inner earth thus consists of nine layers. I have made them all more or less the same width in the drawing (Fig. 1), though in reality they vary in thickness. The thickness of the layers will be of less interest to us, however.

Let us try and describe those nine consecutive layers a little. The upper layer is the one which contains all the things to which modern science is limited, everything that exists by way of solid rock or the materials for solid rock.

Then comes the second layer. It differs from the one above it mainly in that it is in a relatively soft, fluid state. Everything it contains is such by nature that occultists call it the fluid or soft earth. The outer layer is called solid or mineral earth. The second layer contains things of which ordinary physics cannot tell us, for it is not possible for the time being to create conditions on the earth's surface where the kind of substance found in this layer can actually exist. It cannot be found on the earth's surface because it needs the tremendous pressure of the upper layer to hold everything in the second layer together. If you were to take the upper layer away, the material beneath it would rush out and spread out in the whole universe with incredible speed. That is the second layer.

The third layer is called the earth vapour. It is more difficult to characterize than the second. You might think of water vapour. Apart from its vaporous state it is also full of life. So we have a layer that essentially has life, whereas the other two earth layers, the first and second layers, do not actually have life. All the second layer has is a tremendous potential for expansion, to shatter apart. The third layer, on the other hand, has life, and this is present at every point.

The fourth layer is such that all the things found in the three layers above it, which still have more or less something of the nature of our ordinary matter, no longer have the substantial nature we find on the earth. The substances in this layer cannot be perceived with the outer senses. They are in an astral state. Everything that exists in the three uppermost layers of the earth and is still in a way related to the things we have on the earth's surface, is here found to be in the astral state. In the terms used in the Bible we can say: The spirit of God moved above the waters.¹³ Let us call it the ‘water earth’, which is also the occult term. The water earth is also the origin, the source of all matter on earth, all outer matter, irrespective of whether it is found in minerals, plants, animals or humans. This matter, found in everything there is on our earth, is in a volatile, astral form in this water earth. You have to realize that everything we have by way of physical forces also has its original astral forces, and that these original astral forces condense to become physical. These original forces exist in the fourth layer, the water earth.

The fifth layer is called the fruit earth. This is for a quite specific reason. Scientists or people in general will ask: ‘How did life come about?’ This is a frequent subject of discussion not only in popular lectures but also in the scientific literature. But you must still be wet behind the ears in the sphere of spiritual science to ask this question. It is a question that simply does not arise in the science of the spirit, only the question: ‘How has dead matter come about?’ I have tried to explain this to you before using an analogy. Look at pit coal. It is simply rock now, and yet if you were able to trace it back through several millennia in earth's evolution you would find that the matter you have there in that piece of coal comes from vast forests of ferns that have turned to coal. So what is pit coal? It has developed from whole forests; dead today, it once was wholly alive.

If you were able to look at the bottom of the sea you would find all kinds of calcareous formations. If you were to observe marine creatures you would see that they are all the time secreting lime, calcium carbonate. This calcareous shell remains behind as solid matter. So once again you have something dead that is the product of something living. If you had developed your supersensible organs of perception and were able to go back far enough in earth's evolution, you would find that everything dead comes from something alive, and that even rock crystal and diamonds, in short, everything that is dead, derives from life. Fossil development in outside nature is a process similar to the development of a skeletal system in us. You know there are fishes that do not yet have a bony skeleton. In man, too, you would find no bones in earlier stages, only cartilage. Everything that is part of the skeletal system is the beginning of lifelessness in man, it is the same condensation process and you should think of the earth's living body in the same way. The whole of it is a living organism. The right question to ask is therefore: ‘How did dead matter, lifeless matter, come about?’ To ask how the living came from the dead is one of the silliest questions to ask, for life was there first, and dead matter separated out from it in fossils, in a hardening process. And so there was life throughout the whole of our earth once, and the life which existed then, where there was as yet no dead matter, was originally living matter. This is still to be found in the finite earth. It does not just have a life similar to present life, like the things we talked of before. Here in the fruit earth we have life at its most original, and this was also to be found on the earth's surface when nothing lifeless had as yet developed. So that is how we should see the fifth layer, the fruit earth.

The sixth layer is the ‘fire earth’. Just as the fruit earth contains all that lives, so the fire earth holds all that exists by way of drive or instinct. It holds the original sources of all that is animal life, life that may know pleasure and pain. You may think it strange, but it is true that this fire earth is sentient as soon as it expands. This can be observed. It is a truly sentient layer of the earth. Everything that exists on earth and once filled the whole earth is found in specific layers in the earth. Just as dead matter comes from life, so does everything that merely has life come from the soul sphere. Anything which merely has life does not come from anything bodily. Sentience, soul quality, comes first, and the bodily arises from it. All forms of matter originate in soul quality.

The seventh layer is called the earth mirror or reflector, and there is a particular reason for this. Someone who is not familiar with the ‘seven unutterable secrets of occultism’, as they are called, would find the content of this seventh earth layer grotesque. It holds all the forces of nature, but as spirit. Let me try and explain it like this. Think of magnetism, electricity, heat, light or any force of nature, but as something spiritual. Thus a magnet attracts iron. That is an inorganic effect. Think of this in spiritual terms, as if the magnet were attracting the iron out of inner sympathy, and think of electrical wires as transformed into something spiritual and moral, as if the forces of nature were not mechanical, indifferent forces but had moral effects. Think of the forces of heat, repulsion, attraction in terms of soul and moral qualities, qualities, as if you wanted to do something nice for people and had an inner feeling about this. So this is how you first of all imagine the whole of nature in moral terms.

And now think of the whole of nature as something immoral. Imagine everything you can think of by way of morals in human nature has been turned into its opposite. This is what appears in the earth mirror. So there is nothing there of what here on earth we call ‘the good’; quite the contrary, the kind of activities that are most powerful there are those that are the opposite of what people call good. Such are the qualities of the material parts in this layer of our earth. Originally it actually had a great deal more of them, but they are gradually improving as morality develops, and the moral development of our earth means that the forces in this earth mirror will change completely from being immoral to being moral. The moral process in human society has significance not only for society itself but for the whole planet. It comes to expression in the way the forces of this layer change into moral forces of nature. When our human race will have progressed so far that it will have produced the highest morality, then everything anti moral in this earth mirror will have been overcome and transformed into something moral. That is the purpose of the seventh layer.

The eighth part of the inner earth is given various names. In the Pythagorean School of antiquity it was called the number generator. In the Rosicrucian School it was called ‘the fragmenter’. This eighth layer, which in turn consists of a number of forces, has a most peculiar property that can only be discovered in a very strange way. When the pupil has reached the stage which in Christian initiation is reached only after the resurrection, he must do the following if he is to get any idea at all of what is happening here. He has to take a flower, for instance, and visualize it very clearly in his mind's eye. Then he must concentrate on this place in the inner earth, doing it in such a way as if he were looking into this place through the flower. Everything would then be seen a hundred and a thousand fold through the flower. Hence the name is ‘the fragmenter’. If you were to take a formless object, a piece of wood, perhaps, this would not happen. But if you take a plant, an animal or even a human being, they would then appear to you in countless numbers. A work of art would also be multiplied many times in this way. Not a piece of formless matter, therefore, but a work of art, irrespective of what kind, providing it is substantial—this is multiplied many times. This is a particular property of this layer, which is why it is called the fragmenter, or in the Pythagorean School the number generator, the latter because it shows the things that exist on earth as single objects multiplied many times over.

Then comes the ninth layer, which lies immediately around the earth's centre. This is extremely difficult to penetrate for people today, even for someone advanced in spiritual training. All one can say is that one can become aware that certain parts of the inner earth have a particular relationship to individual organs of the human and animal body. Above all you find forces there that have been moved to the periphery. These are forces the mode of action of which is difficult to describe. They are in a living connection with the human brain, and further inwards with human brain functions. Still further inside in this sphere are forces that relate to the human and animal powers of reproduction.

So here we have the configuration of our earth as seen with the clairvoyant eye and taught in occult schools ever since such schools existed. What you see drawn on the board here is a mystery that is really and truly taught in all occult schools.

There are, however, all kinds of connections between individual layers, just as in the human body individual organs are linked in many different ways by blood and nerves. Links go from the centre in all kinds of directions. Above all there are two directions in which forces move; these are exactly at right angles to one another and pass through the centre of the earth. They are not strands but directions in which forces move. Many other directions may also be noted. The following is important when looking at these things. When we explore the uppermost layer we find it is interrupted by a hollow space that lies inside this outermost layer. A kind of canal links this hollow space with the fifth layer which we call the fruit earth.

A natural disaster such as a volcanic eruption involves the deeper layers of the earth, which I have drawn for you. This applies to both volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. The material of the uppermost layers is set in motion by forces that go from the fruit earth to the hollow space I have mentioned. These forces essentially arise in the fifth layer of the inner earth. The fire earth is also involved, for it is disturbed. It is really always in a state of unrest but becomes particularly restless at times when abnormal phenomena such as earthquakes or volcanic eruptions occur. Now the fruit earth—from which all life has arisen—is connected with all that lives. The fire earth on its part is connected with everything that has sentience, knowing pleasure and pain, with the lower soul aspect, its passions and drives.

I can only give you a few glimpses of this vast area, to show how events on the earth relate to unrest in the fire and fruit earths. When the human being of today was for the first time fructified with a higher soul principle on this earth and began to be human, tremendous drives were still active under the influence of the fruit and fire earths. It was all raging and roaring in a way that was very different from anything possible today. Human beings of the Lemurian age were tremendously active. That whole Lemurian continent which lay in the region between today's Australia, Asia and South Africa, perished in catastrophic volcanic eruptions, with the fruit and fire element of the earth raging wildly. This was connected with an element in human beings who at that time still lived entirely in their drives and instincts. A close connection still existed then between drives, desires and passions on one hand and volcanic activity on the other. The end of the Lemurian continent was brought about by the magnificent egoism of the last Lemurian races who practised a form of black magic that is beyond our powers of imagining.

The end of Atlantis, the Flood, as it is called, was also connected with the moral quality of Atlantean peoples. Only traces remain of all this, yet up to a certain level we can show a definite connection between the lives people led and such phenomena. We must of course be extremely cautious in establishing this, for it is only too easy for fantasy to creep in. One has to base oneself solely on facts determined by occult research. Occultists seek to establish what happened when Vesuvius erupted in AD 79, when the earthquake happened in Calabria,¹⁴ the earthquake at the time of Christ, or the Lisbon earthquake in 1755. Many people died in those natural disasters. If people perished in them, this does not necessarily mean they did something in a previous life to deserve it. It is, however, part of the karma of these people that they should perish in this way. This is one reason why one looks at the karma of those who perished. The other is the following. Theosophical handbooks often describe kama loka and devachan as if it was merely a consequence, an effect of the previous earth life. But the dead actually still influence this earth life. They play a role when changes occur on earth, in phenomena of civilization or of nature. Imagine we were born in the early years of Christianity and then reborn again in the present age. The fauna and flora of Europe would have changed tremendously. Many animals and plant species would have become extinct, with others taking their place. In the science of the spirit the explanation of this is not considered to be something supernatural, but that the powers man has when he is not in his body actually join forces with those of nature, so that human beings influence their future lives with the powers they have in devachan or kama loka. If you see animals today that differ from those seen thousands of years ago, this is partly due to human influences. Human beings thus have a part in what we call the forces of nature. The dead are continually involved in work on the natural phenomena, and in many respects we can regard natural events reflecting something which the dead bring about in this world.

The matter is not so simple in the case of volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, but these nevertheless have something to do with human beings who have not yet reincarnated. They are quite definitely connected with souls that are to be incarnated at the time when such earthquakes take place. As an occultist one thus has two problems to solve, firstly the question as to what happens with the people who die in earthquakes, and secondly the question as to what kind of people they are who are born at the time of an earthquake, so that they may come down into this visible world. Both kinds of investigation show a connection between the cataclysms and the moral and intellectual qualities we must observe in humanity. It emerges that the people who perish in such a tragic event are quite apart from all their usual karmic tendencies brought together with other souls in the place where an earthquake occurs because of karmic realities. All the souls that perish in such quakes are given the opportunity of overcoming a final element that still blocks the way for their karma, so that they may change from materialists into idealists and gain insight into things of the spirit.

On the other hand people who are born in such situations are strangely enough souls who are attracted to drives, instincts and passions, in a way, and born to be real materialists. People born under the influence of such an event become materialists, and generally practical materialists, people who are materialistic in their morals in life. The power of nature is connected with the power which human beings develop as their own in devachan, and the forces that arise when the fire and the fruit earth react in such disasters have an inner connection with souls who are destined to have an attitude of practical materialism in their next life. Souls born under the auspices of volcanic eruptions are thus truly materialistic unbelievers, people who want to know nothing of a life in the spirit.

These are the two facts we can truly state, and you can easily see how this will continue to go in that direction in earth evolution. The more human beings overcome genuine materialism, the fewer such disasters will there be in our earth. There is this attraction between materialism and the principles to be found in the fire and fruit earth, and our earth will grow calmer and more harmonious to the same degree as humanity comes free of materialism.

There has, however, been a strange development with regard to materialism in recent centuries. As you know, I have always stressed that medieval times were more spiritual than our own age. The majority of people, at least in Europe, had more of a feeling for spirituality. More recent times, when materialism has been growing, have brought numerous volcanic eruptions. Vesuvius is the only volcano that is still active on the mainland of Europe. Consider the number of eruptions there,¹⁵ with particularly severe ones recorded in 79, 203, 472, 512, 652, 982, 1036, 1139 ... 1872, 1885, 1891 ... 1906.

These figures may be read in any way you want. All I can say is that occult teachings were popularized for much deeper reasons than people generally believe. Those who initiated this knew full well what was intended, and that was intensive spiritual development for humanity in harmony with the great cosmic scheme of things. A lay person may show little interest in decisions made in the spiritual science movement the great, all-encompassing thoughts about what happens, not only for humanity, but also for the world. It seems to be dogma, but in reality it is something of tremendous depth and significance for the whole cosmos.

These are things we have to emphasize again and again. So let me repeat. I have tried on this occasion to speak of something that will not normally be mentioned, not even in our theosophical movement, presenting it for those who are accustomed to receive spiritual things in the right way. I have tried to refer to certain points that are connected with the most profound secrets of occultism. They can help you to gain moral insight into events of the kind we have known in the last few days. There is, however, one thing we must always keep in mind. Beware of attaching anything fantastic to these complex and comprehensive situations. We must limit ourselves to things substantiated by sound methods that have proved their value not just for thousands of years but from the very beginning of occultism. We should only consider things that truly have their origin in initiation science, where access to these secrets is possible. What I have told you of today about the significance of such events is based on genuine research—the importance for the individual who perishes and also for the individual who is born at such a time, compelled by his own urge to incarnate. These are things that give as deep insights into human nature.

An occultist should not be afraid of saying things even if they sound incredible and I would therefore in conclusion wish to tell you something incredible which nevertheless is based on sound research. Something remarkable happened during the well-known eruption of Vesuvius that caused Herculaneum and Pompeii to be buried. As you know, the famous Roman writer Pliny the Elder died on that occasion.¹⁶ It is extraordinarily significant to do an occult study of his destiny. Today I do not want to consider his personal destiny but something else. You all know what is meant by the ‘akashic record’. You know that with the help of this record it is possible to go back to certain points in time, for instance the time of that eruption of Vesuvius. Something strange emerges here. I spoke of the peculiar nature of he eighth layer in this lecture, the fragmenter or number generator. This layer also has great significance for the physical human body. The physical matter of the human body as we know it in the usual sense perishes when we die. It dissolves in the uppermost layers of the earth, but the sum total of energies maintaining the form of the physical body does not. You can find this in the seventh layer, the earth mirror, as it is called. So if you pick the moment when someone has just died in the akashic record and follow the fate of the different bodies, you will see that the physical corpse perishes, but the physical form can be found as something that remains in the seventh layer, the earth mirror. That is where the things are kept that can be studied in the akashic record. It is actually a kind of reservoir for the forms that remain. The matter perishes, but the form is preserved.

If you follow such a preserved human form you see that it remains in this seventh layer for a time. After that it is indeed split apart in the eighth layer, the number generator or fragmenter. What happens is exactly the same as I told you earlier when speaking of a flower. This form body of a human being will appear to you to be divided many times over. It will appear again later when other human beings are configured. Note this well, therefore. Man, as he lives amongst us today, has not only his individual nature, his inmost nature; he also has other human beings in him where his form is concerned, in the middle of his body. And it is in fact possible to show the influence which the fragmented bodily form of Pliny has had on the thinking of materialistic scientists who took this fragmented form into themselves.

Such mysterious things are discovered when we penetrate the earth's constitution. You will now be able to understand that in some respect the outer aspect, the configuration of our body, also depends karmically on such earlier events. An occasion like the death of Pliny has an effect on the configuration of many brains in later times, not on the souls but on the physical forms. These are especially subtle processes and they are truly important if one wishes to understand the connection between man and earth.

The secrets known by the Rosicrucians I have spoken to you before about their profound wisdom—include insights of the kind I have spoken of today. The Rosicrucians did not see the earth as a lifeless clod, the way modern scientists do. Goethe, the great poet and theosophist, also knew that the earth is not dead or lifeless. It was no poetic speechifying, but an image showing a spiritual reality when he made the Earth Spirit say the words:

In life's floods, in roaring activity
I move up and down,
Going hither and thither.
Birth and the grave,
Weaving to and fro,
Creating ardent life,
I work the rushing loom of time,
Weaving the godhead's living garb.¹⁷

To Goethe, this earth was the outer garment of divine powers. Today I wanted to show you something of the way they work.

• 11. In April 1906 the summit peak of Vesuvius collapsed. The volume of matter involved was c. 100 million cubic metres. This material was ejected due to vapour pressure, raining down as ashes that darkened the region for days and combined with the lava flow to cause severe damage. More than 100 people lost their lives. See also lecture given in Berlin on 1 January 1909 (The Deed of Christ and the Opposing Spiritual Powers; from GA 107).
• 12. Lectures given in February and March 1906 (GA 97): Steiner R. The Christian Mystery (GA 97). Tr. A. R. Meuss. Gympie, Australia: Completion Press 2000.
• 13. Genesis 1:2
• 14. The worst earthquakes in Calabria had been in 1783, 1812 and 1906.
• 15. Some of the figures taken down were incorrect and have been omitted.
• 16. Gaius Plinius Secundus (AD 23 or 24–79). The 20 volumes he wrote about the wars between the Romans and Germanic tribes have been lost; Tacitus partly based his own work on them. Pliny was in command of the Roman fleet when the great eruption of Mount Vesuvius occurred. Wanting to see the phenomenon from close-by he landed at Stabiae (Castellamare) where the gases killed him.
• 17. Goethe, Faust 1, Night scene.

On the eve of the day we call White Lotus Day let us remember the great individual to whom we are indebted for giving the impulse for the theosophical movement Fifteen years ago on the 8th of May, Mrs Blavatsky¹⁸ left the physical plane. We speak of the anniversary not of her death but of a second, different birthday when we remember the day when this individual, who did great things for humanity when in her physical body, was called to other spheres from where to continue her work. This day should arouse feelings and inner responses in us through which we get a sense of the way of working which human beings are called on to follow when they are no longer on the physical plane. This work may be all the more significant if they find suitable instruments for it on the physical plane. The members of the theosophical movement are meant to be such instruments. They are able to be such through the truths gained in the science of the spirit which you take into your hearts and minds all the year round.

The individual who was so incomparably selfless and the first to give the great messages that are taken up in the theosophical movement, may be brought a bit closer to us on this anniversary. Not many of us have an idea what Helena Petrovna Blavatsky truly was and will continue to be for the world. What does it matter? In the first century after Christ, Tacitus, a historian of incomparable significance, lived in Rome.¹⁹ A century after the spiritual movement on which the whole of our western culture has been based had arisen he had no more to say about it than that far away, on the edge of the Roman empire, an insignificant sect was reported to have been founded by a certain Jesus, a Nazarene.

Is it surprising, then, if academics, professors and many educated people know nothing of Mrs Blavatsky's mission, or at least have only wrong and confused ideas and prejudices? There are laws according to which a great person appearing in this world must arouse contradiction, prejudice and misunderstanding. It will happen again and again that something minor and insignificant is only slowly and gradually overcome by something great that holds certainty for the future. The event which has come into the world through Helena Petrovna Blavatsky is one that cannot be measured in a short time span. It was an event in the face of which our words today have grown too shadowy. If the potential that lay in Mrs Blavatsky's mission comes to realization, a new stage will be reached not only in the way humanity understands the world and sees things, but also in the way human beings feel and inwardly respond. Let us consider the tremendous change that will come today for some and for many more in the future.

So that we may understand one another, let me paint a picture for you. Let us go far back to ancient Greek times. The magnificent sculptures, poetic works and scholarship that have come down to us from that time, the divine poetry of Homer, the penetrating thoughts of Plato, the teaching of Pythagoras—all this comes together for us if we cast an eye on what we may call the Greek mysteries. Such a mystery centre would be both school and temple. It was not open to those who were not yet able and worthy to take in those truths, but only to those who had prepared themselves to face truth with hallowed feelings. When they were admitted to the centre from which all the art, poetry and scholarship came, onlookers who were not yet initiated into clairvoyant power were able to see in an image—those in whom the dormant powers of mind and spirit had already been awoken would see the reality of it—how the god descended into matter, embodying himself there, and now rests in the realms of nature to await his resurrection. The mystery pupil would see that all realms of nature, the mineral, plant and animals worlds, have the sleeping god at their foundation, and that man is called to experience the resurrection of this god in himself, knowing his soul to be part of the godhead. Everywhere out there the human being can perceive something from which he is meant to arouse the slumbering godhead. In his own soul, however, he feels the divine spark itself, feels himself to be the god and gains certain knowledge of his immortality, of being at work and alive in the infinite universe. Nothing compares with the sublime feeling the mystery pupils would experience in such centres. Everything was to be found there—religion, art, knowledge. His religious feelings were aroused by the objects of veneration, holy feelings of wonder and awe would be kindled by works of art, and the riddles of the world were revealed to him in beautiful images that inspired devotion. Some of the greatest people who knew this were to say: It is only through initiation that a human being rises above the transitory and earthly to reach the eternal. Perhaps the most beautiful word we can use to speak of a scholarship and art that is deeply immersed in the sacred flame of religious feeling is ‘enthusiasm’, which means ‘to be in god’.

Having contemplated this picture and now letting our thoughts move to the present time we see not only that it has all become separated for us—beauty, wisdom and religious devotion—but that our civilization has grown so abstract and rational that the living fire of those times has been lost and grown shadowy by nature.

Some of the outstanding representatives of cultural life in our present age who felt they were not understood and thus isolated, therefore looked back to those great periods in the infinitely distant past when human beings still had communion with the spirits and the gods. They knew this, and in the stillness of the night would often long to be back in the past, at the Eleusinian Mysteries. Those were the last, wonderful times of the ancient Greek mysteries. A profound German thinker, one of those who had contemplated the riddles of existence, reflects for us the mood that would come on him when his thoughts went back to the ancient centres of Greek wisdom—the mood of one who went far away in the spirit. It was Hegel, that great master of thought, who sought to encompass the images once seen by the pupils in the mysteries.²⁰ He wrote:

Eleusis
To Hölderlin²¹

Around me, in me, calm is reigning.
The ever-active cares of busy people sleep.
They give me freedom and a breathing space.
Thank you. O night.
That frees me—White mists are drawn
Over the distant hills to veil them By the moon.
The bright ribbon of the lake Reflects a gentle light.
Memory puts far away the endless noise of day,
As if many years had passed since.

Those are the words of the reflective thinker as he looks deeply into the riddles of the world, being able to encompass all that lived in his own heart in his thoughts only. Looking back now to the Mysteries of Eleusis he continued:

Your image, beloved, comes before me,
And the joy of days now gone. But it soon yields
To sweeter prospects of seeing you again.
Now the longed-for ardent embrace becomes a picture
That I see before me; then the scene where questions come,
And more secretly, looking to see
What may have changed in my friend's
Demeanour, mien, way of thinking
Since we last met; delight in being sure
Of finding the old trust again, grown firmer, riper,
A union that no oath did ever seal—
To live for free and open discourse,
And never, never make a pact with statutes
That regulate opinion and the way we feel.
Now the great wish that took me to you
So easily over mountains and across rivers
Is negotiating with inert reality
But soon a sigh marks division between them
And with it, the dream sweet fantasy created soon is gone.

My eye is raised to the eternal vault of heaven,
To you, O brilliant star of night!
And from your eternal space there flows
Forgetfulness of all my wishes, all my hopes.
My mind is lost as I thus gaze,
All that I called my own has vanished.
I give myself to the immeasurable.
I am in it, am all, and am but it
Thought when it returns to me feels alien,
It fears the infinite and in a maze
It fathoms not the depths that are beheld.
Fantasy brings the eternal close to the mind,
Marrying it with form and figure. Welcome,
Sublime spirits, lofty shades
Whose brows do radiate perfection!
Be not afraid, I feel it is my heartland, too,
The glory and solemnity that shines around you.

So we have a thinker calling up the spirits who in truth did appear to the pupils at Eleusis. Then he calls up the goddess Ceres who was at the heart of the Eleusinian Mysteries. For Ceres is not only the goddess of earth's fruitfulness but also the one who fructifies cultural life.

Ha! If the gates to your sanctuary were to open now,
O Ceres, once enthroned in Eleusis!
Overcome with enthusiasm I'd now feel
The shivers of your nearness,
Understand your revelations,
I'd tell the images' sublime meaning, hear
The hymning at the meal the gods would take.
The sublime words of their counsel.

Yet silence now reigns in your halls, O goddess!
The gods have gone away to Olympus,
Away from desecrated altars;
Gone away from the tomb of humanity profaned
Is the genius of innocence whose magic once brought them here.
The wisdom of your priests is silent.
Nothing from the blessed sacraments
Has survived for us, and in vain does now
The curiosity of scholars look for more than love
Of wisdom. The seekers own it now, and despise you.
To master it, they delve for words
That would express your sublime reality.
In vain! It is but dust and ashes they discover,
In which your life will not return in all eternity.
Yet those eternally dead, content in moderation
Also liked to delve in decay, with soul all gone. In vain.
No sign remained of your fastness, no trace of any image.
To the son of sacred faith, sublime things taught,
Unspoken depth of feeling, were much too sacred
To let dry signs and symbols take their place.
Thought cannot encompass the soul,
For outside time and space, immersed in its sense
Of vast infinity, it forgets itself and once again awakens
To full awareness. Wanting to speak of this to others,
E'en in angels’ tongues, you'd know the poverty of words.
He shudders, having thought so small the sacred,
Made it so small that words seem sinful now;
Trembling he keeps silent.
Thus the initiate imposed on himself a silence that a wise
Law bid lesser spirits never to proclaim
What they did see, hear, feel in the holiness of night,
Lest the clamour of their nonsense disturb the better man
In his devotions; the hollow sound of words
Make him wax angry at the sacred thing itself, that it
Should not be trodden in the mire, entrusted
Even to memory, that it should never be
The toy and merchandise of sophists,
Selling for a pittance,
Nor a mantle for wordy pretenders, nor a rod
Upon the back of cheerful lads, and be so empty
In the end, that its life roots would lie
But in the echoes of alien tongues.
Avariciously, goddess, your sons did not
Take your honour into alleyway and market, keeping it
Within the sanctum in their breast.
You therefore did not live upon their lips.
Their life did honour you. You live on in their deeds.
During this night, too, I did hear you, sacred goddess.
Often the life of your children also reveals you to me.
I often sense you to be the soul of their doings!
You are sublimity of mind, steadfast faith
Unshaken in a divine spirit, though all else may perish.

In recent times need arose to bring the power of thought to expression in an ideal way on the one hand and a more materialistic way on the other. Hegel, too, was no longer understood, being altogether one of the lost spirits of humanity. In the second half of the 19th century the spirit of materialism entered into everything, and it now prevails almost everywhere. If it were to keep the upper hand, materialism would cause human culture to turn to stone in every way.

A strange attitude came to the fore in the second half of the 19th century. In the 18th century, Lessing was still saying that a faith need not be meaningless just because it arose in the pure, innocent childhood of humanity.²² Materialists will, however, say that this faith, which is the basis of culture for all peoples, represents childish fantasies, and that only the thoughts created by means of scientific thinking reflect a mind that is both male and mature. Everyday life has become a hustle and bustle for material goods to satisfy purely physical needs, and much worse things will arise from this in future. Scientists who pride themselves on their achievements consider themselves far above anything humanity has achieved in the past to gain a relationship to the world—the priestly wisdom of ancient Chaldaea and Babylon, the teaching of Pythagoras and others. It is said of Plato, that great mind, that one cannot make head or tail of the confused ideas he has bequeathed to us. His Timaeus is said to be incomprehensible, but people do not ask for the reason why it cannot be understood.²³ Here we may think of Lichtenberg's words that when a head collides with a book and there is a hollow sound this may not be due to the book. In practice, materialism has also given rise to hypocrisy; above all people are not prepared to admit that life is governed entirely by materialistic aims. There has hardly ever been so much talk of ideals and such lack of understanding as in our time.

The mission of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky came at this time. Perhaps it may be permitted to state, without saying anything against her as a person, that her soul was given a task that was really too much for it. To solve the riddle as to why it was this woman in particular who was called upon to give to the world the message of theosophy, we find that she was the only possible means the spirits could find to make themselves understood by Western peoples. People in official positions had not the least conception of the spiritual realities humanity needed. The very idea of the spirit had been lost, and when anyone would speak of the spirit those were but empty words. This strange woman, who even as a young person had unusual psychic and spiritual gifts, was called upon to give the world a message which no academic person could give. From her earliest days her view of the world differed to some degree from that presented at schools and universities in the 19th century. She was able to perceive spiritual entities in everything around us, and they were as real to her as tangible objects are. From her young days, she felt great veneration for a sublime spirit. No human soul will even gain higher insight without such veneration. You may have a brilliant mind or a clear, rational mind, you may even have developed dim powers of clairvoyance, but you will not progress to genuine, true insight without the feeling we call ‘great veneration’. True insight can only be given to us by spirits who are well ahead of humanity in their evolution. Everyone will admit that people differ in their levels of development. Maybe people don't like to admit it so much in this day and age, but it cannot be denied that there are differences. Most people will, however, believe that the level of insight they have gained is indeed the highest, and they will not easily admit that there are more highly developed minds, greater than Goethe and Francis of Assisi. This, however, is the basic condition if true insight is to be gained. No one can gain it unless they have this great veneration, something that has been completely lost in our levelling age.

An important fact relates to this great veneration. We all come from worlds of spirit, from an original life in the spirit. The part of our soul that is divine comes from a divine source and origin. There was a time for each of us when the ability to look out from the soul world into the world perceived through the senses first awoke in us. In very early times, human beings had dim but clairvoyant perception. Images would arise from the soul that pointed to a real world around them. Conscious awareness in the senses, as we know it today, only came later. There was a particular moment in the development of each of us—shown symbolically for Eve in the paradise story²⁵—when the serpent of knowledge came to us, in an incarnation that happened a long, long time ago, and said the words: ‘Your eyes will be opened, you will know good and evil in the visible world around you.’ The serpent has always been the symbol of the great spiritual teachers. Every human being had such an advanced teacher and on one occasion was with one of them when he spoke the words: ‘One day you will know the world around you as it is perceived through the senses.’

A human being who has developed great veneration will meet such a teacher once more in life, when the senses for the spirit are opened up for him. In occult terms this is known as ‘finding the guru again’, the great teacher. Each must seek his guru and will only be able to find him if he is capable of great veneration and also knows that there is something that goes beyond run-of-the-mill humanity.

This great veneration and knowledge of the existence of the great teachers lived in Mrs Blavatsky, and it was because of this that she was called to make something about these great teachers known to humanity. The guru works in hidden ways and can only be recognized by someone who has found his way to him of his own accord. Helena Petrovna Blavatsky thus had the right inner feeling that enabled her to give present-day humanity something that is quite new.

Anyone who has had some insight into the places where the truth is represented also realizes that taking hold of something new like this does have its problems. The time then comes for someone who knows something about the search for the truth when he loses his critical approach to the great human spirits. He will no longer consider superficial things about them. People who have no idea of the position which such great people hold in the world will cling to such superficial aspects. Someone able to grasp the situation will be grateful for the gifts those great spirits have given. This is indeed the only possible attitude to a person such as Mrs Blavatsky. ‘Much admired and blamed as much’,²⁶ this woman called Helena came among the people. It would seem that hardly anyone else has had so much nonsense and silly things said and written about them as Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, except, of course, for others of the same stature. Some academics have made the strange statement that she had written a great work, her Secret Doctrine,²⁷ which contains the Dzyan verses, which are said to be a very ancient tradition. Others who were opposing them said, however, that Mrs Blavatsky had invented the verses, pretending that they were ancient tradition. Only academics can take foolishness to such a level. Let us assume, just for the moment, that Helena Petrovna Blavatsky had really invented the verses and let us consider them in more detail. If we study them for a while, two or three years maybe, we find that all our scholarship and all discoveries, all the achievements of modern science, may still be of interest but pale into insignificance compared with the great revelations made in these verses. Don't you think that this would make us venerate Helena Petrovna Blavatsky even more? Now of course someone who uses just the short span of two or three years to enter into the profound meaning of these verses will not care if they were written thousands of years ago or by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky in the last third of the 19th century. On reflection one even has to say to oneself that in the latter case the miracle would be even greater. It then seems all the more foolish for critics to raise objections which merely show that they have not understood a single word of it all. So there you see some of the great obstacles that rose in the path of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. People who talk of her having had some fault or other clearly have no idea of her true importance.

Mrs Blavatsky spoke of phenomena in the occult worlds. Anyone who knows the path she followed to reach those worlds will also know the dangers connected with this. If you consider how easily our passions are roused even in the world of the senses, and the deep abysses someone had to experience who had to look into the occult worlds in the way it had to be done in order to write a book like Secret Doctrine, will no longer consider the superficial things connected with this important person and those around her. She was strong, but the resistance the world offered almost broke even her. She met so much lack of understanding and false authority, and if we consider the receptiveness and sensitivity of her occult powers, we can understand why she was more or less a broken woman when she came to the end of her life. But the things she has given to the world shall live on in humanity and have a future.

The mood I wanted to recreate for you, using the words of one of the greatest men of our time, this mood of longing must spread more and more. The longing can be satisfied with the things Mrs Blavatsky was destined to give to the world, things that need to be developed more and more. We honour her most if we see her as someone who has given the impetus. She only sought to prevail as a faithful disciple of the great spiritual powers that stood behind her, and the only people to work in harmony with the theosophical stream are those who do so in accord with those spiritual powers. The life of the spirit, which has become shadowy, will come alive again if people come to understand more and more of the things Helena Petrovna Blavatsky wanted to bring into the world with such courage, such energy and boldness. And it is possible to gain deeper insight into the nature of such a Lotus Day if we ignore all historical gossip and make every effort to consider the things that are important.

We have the right understanding for the theosophical movement if we come to realize that the living spirit of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky must continue to act through us for the salvation and progress of humanity. We'll then not merely say in an indolent, sentimental way that her immortal spirit is celebrating another birthday, but actively help it to live and work in the places where it should take effect. It surely was the only personal wish our founder had that the members of the theosophical movement would be a living means of giving expression to the spirit which she herself selflessly put wholly at the service of this spiritual movement. The more members understand this spirit of selflessness, and the more they understand that it behooves us to gain insight and understanding, the more will they do justice to the spirit of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. One always hears people say: ‘Love and compassion are the main thing.’ Of course they are, but it needs insight and understanding to make love and compassion bear fruit. It is not uncommon to be facile, even among those who believe themselves to seek the spirit. To say ‘love’ is something you learn in a second. To gain insight for the salvation and progress of humanity needs an eternity. The meaning the theosophical movement has for us must more and more be that insight is the foundation of all true spiritual activity. It is important, therefore, that we work without respite to follow in the footsteps of our founder—step by step, never giving in to the laziness of wanting to grasp it all in a day rather than learn it properly. We can study this very well in the writings and the work of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, and all talk is in vain that is mere refusal to face up to things. What we must learn, continuing the work she herself started on the physical plane, is to seek to gain insight and knowledge in the science of the spirit.

• 18. Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna, née Hahn (1831–91). Born in Yekaterinoslav in the Ukraine, went to the USA in 1873. In 1875 she founded the Theosophical Society with Henry Olcott. Later she continued her work in India.
• 19. Tacitus (c. AD 55–120). Annales XV, 44.
• 20. Hegel (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, German philosopher, 1770–1831)
• 21. Hegel sent the work Eleusis to his friend the poet Hölderlin in 1796.
• 22. Lessing. Gotthold Ephraim (1729–81), German writer. Erziehung des Menschengeschlechtes (education of the human race) p. 78 ff. Berlin 1844.
• 23. The dialogue in this book, written late in Plato's life, shows the connection between the world of space and the cosmic soul; this has also given rise to the laws that govern the movements of heavenly bodies. Summing up, Plato wrote: ‘It has been shown how this world evolved—evolved uniquely and on its own, perfect in its nature and phenomena, visible and encompassing the great fullness of all things visible, a living organism within which all other mortal and immortal organisms have their being, the sense-perceptible image of a god who can only be conceived in thought.’ Timaios 92 C.
• 25. Genesis 3:5
• 26. Faust 2, Before Menelaus' Palace.
• 27. Published in London, New York, Madras in 1893.

On a number of occasions I have taken the opportunity to reject the prejudicial view that the theosophical approach is far removed from practical life. Quite the contrary. We have often been able to show that theosophy should take us deeply into practical life, for it teaches us the laws of the spiritual principle that is continually shaping life all around us. People who only know the laws of life as it shows itself on the outside know only a small part of life. By far the greater part are the hidden things in life, hidden to the ordinary senses. I am sure it will not be very long before people come to realize more and more that in order to cope with life we have to study the hidden worlds. The materialistic view would lead to crises in all areas, above all in the sphere of health, and also in education, where the question arises: How should humanity educate its coming generation? Materialism would also lead to crises in everything connected with society, politics and civilization. Life would be such that one day people would no longer know how to help themselves. To explain what I mean let me say a few things on educational issues, for this will surely be of interest to everyone.

People who consider education from the materialistic point of view will only too easily arrive at a completely wrong set of rules. For they will never think of the way life follows its own strict rules and they will thus fail to realize that there are periods in life that have profound significance. They'll be quite unable to think, for instance, why the childhood period from the 6th to the 8th year differs fundamentally from the period that extends from the 7th or 8th year to sexual maturity. People who have no idea as to what happens to a young person at this time will also fail to realize how important it is to observe these periods most carefully. It matters that we know what the human being is in these three periods—the first, which is up to the 6th or 7th year, the second, up to the 14th or 15th year, and then again the period that follows for the next 7 or 8 years. These are three ages in human life that have to be studied with care, not just on the surface but also in occult terms, which has to do with the worlds that are hidden to the ordinary senses.

You know that human beings consist not merely of this physical body but have a physical body, an ether body, which is the basis of the physical body and similar to it in configuration, and then the astral body, which to clairvoyant vision looks like a cloud in which the other two bodies are embedded. The astral body also holds within it the principle that bears human I-nature. Let us look at these three bodies as they are in the developing human being.

To get the right idea you have to understand that the periods in which a human being can be seen in physical existence are preceded by the period before birth when the human being is in the maternal womb. You need to distinguish in purely physical terms between life before birth and the periods that follow, and understand that a human being would not be able to live if he were born too soon, coming too early into the externally visible world. He would not be able to live in that world because his sense organs, through which he relates to the outside world, would not yet be fully developed. Our organs develop when we are in the maternal womb until we are born—eyes, ears and everything we need to live in the physical world. And a human being cannot take up contact with the physical world before his organs have been adequately prepared in the protective shelter of another physical body. Birth is the time when the human being has reached a level of maturity where he is able to be in contact with the world without a protective shelter. It will, however, be a long time before this is also the case for the ether body and the astral body. They have not yet reached the point where they can be in direct contact with the world around them. A process which is very similar to the one that happens when a human being is born in the physical body takes place for the ether body in the period from birth until about the 7th year. It is only then that we can say the ether body has been born. The astral body is only born in the 14th or 15th year, and is then able to develop independent activity in relation to the surrounding world.

So you have to understand that no serious demands should be made on the ether body up to the seventh year and none on the astral body up to the 14th year. If one were to expose a child's ether body to the brutal world, it would be just like putting him out into the outside world in the fifth month of his embryonic life, though it would not show itself with the same vehemence. The same applies to exposing the astral body to the outside world before the 14th year. This is something you must understand. Up to the 7th year, only the physical body has been born to the point where the surrounding world may fully influence it. The ether body has so much to do with itself up to the 7th year that we would damage it if we were to influence it from outside in any particular way. Up to this point, therefore, we should only influence the physical body. The education of the ether body may be taken in hand from the 7th to the 14th year, and it is only permissible to influence the astral body from outside in education from the 15th year onwards.

To influence the human physical body is to let the child gain external impressions. These will develop the physical body. Anything in this direction that has not been done by the 7th year can hardly be made up for later on. Up to the 7th year the physical body is at a stage where external sensory impressions should be brought to it to develop it. If the child's eyes see only beautiful things up to the 7th year, they develop in a such way that they will have a feeling for beauty for the rest of that life. Later on it will not be possible to develop a sense of beauty in the same way. The things you say to a child or the things you do are much less important in the first 7-year period than the kind of environment you create for the child and everything the child sees and hears. During that time, inner powers of growth need to be helped and supported by external impressions. The child's creative spirit will make a piece of wood, with a few dots and lines to mark eyes, nose and mouth, into a human figure. A doll that is as beautifully made as possible and given to the child will tie the child down; the inner powers of the spirit are then fixed on to something that is already laid down and not encouraged to be active themselves. As a result, the creative powers of imagination will be almost completely lacking in later life.

This is very much how it is with all impressions gained in the sense-perceptible world. What matters is what you yourself are in the child's world, anything children see and hear directly. They will be good people if they see good people around them. They imitate the things they perceive around them. It is this power of imitation, the influence of examples, that we must value most highly. The right approach will therefore be to do as many things as possible which your child can imitate. This, then, is where the emphasis should lie as we take care of the physical body in the 1st to 7th years. It is not yet possible to influence the higher bodies by deliberate educational measures at this age; during this time, when they are still very much caught up in themselves, you influence them by what you are. A wise person will bring wise thinking to effect in the child's mind just because he or she has that wisdom. Apart from this, anyone bringing up and educating a child should seek to be as complete as possible in themselves when with the child, to think good, noble thoughts, just as a healthy maternal body has a healthy influence on the child's body.

The time when you can influence the ether body by means of educational measures begins with the 7th year. Two things have to be considered—habits and memory, both connected with the ether body's development. A person shapes his ether body by his habits and by taking things up into memory. We should therefore try to give the growing young person a solid foundation in life that is based on good habits. Someone who does something different every day and does not have a secure foundation for his actions will lack character later in life. To develop a basic set of habits is therefore something to be done in the time from the 7th to the 14th year. And we must also influence the memory at this time. What is needed, therefore, is to give the child sound habits and a treasury of knowledge that has been memorized. It really is one of the errors of our materialistic age to think that children should be made to form their own opinions as early as possible. Quite the contrary, we should do everything possible to shield children from this. This is a time when children should still learn things that are given with authority. The people around a child should not merely influence him by example in his second 7-year period, but by direct instruction. Great powers of memory do not always develop with ‘why’ and ‘wherefore’ but by basing everything on authority. Children must therefore have people around them on whom they can depend, whom they can trust, and who make them feel they can believe in their authority.

The young person should only be guided towards independent insight and judgement after this period. If you take away authority too soon you deprive the ether body of its opportunity to develop thoroughly. It is therefore best not to offer proof and opinions to children in their second 7-year period, but examples and parables. Opinions act only on the astral body, and this is not yet free to accept them. We should tell the child as much as possible about great people. The effect of considering such historical figures should be that the child seeks to emulate them. The question as to death and birth is also much better answered by means of examples. You might show the child a caterpillar, for example, how it makes its cocoon and how finally the butterfly emerges from the pupa. This is a truly beautiful example of how a child develops from its mother. Much can be achieved by taking examples from the natural world itself.

It is equally important to teach the child not moral principles but moral parables. This is very evident in some of the sayings of Pythagoras. Instead of reciting: ‘In your undertakings, you should not concern yourself with things which you can see right away are bound to fail,’ he said pithily: 'Don't smite the fire with your sword!' This is a particularly good example. And to teach that one should not get mixed up in anything for which one is not yet sufficiently mature he said: 'Refrain from beans!' Apart from the purely physical there was also a moral aspect to this. Black and white beans would be distributed when decisions had to be made in ancient Greece, and a count would be made of how many white and how many black beans had been returned. Elections were also done in this way. And so instead of saying: 'You're not yet mature enough to get involved in public affairs,' Pythagoras simply said: 'Refrain from beans!'

This addresses the creative powers of imagination and not the powers of the intellect.Fld GA The more you use images the greater the influence on the child. Goethe's mother could not have done anything better than to tell her son beautiful moral tales.²⁸ She never preached at him. Sometimes she did not manage to finish a tale and he would then invent his own ending.

It is particularly bad if developing young people are urged to be critical before they reach their 14th year, to act according to their own opinions, so that they lose the beneficial powers of authority around them. It is extremely bad if there is no one to look up to. The ether body will wither, growing weak and sick, if it cannot hold on to great examples as it develops. And it is also particularly bad if they develop their own creed and want to have opinions about the world before they are ready for this. They will only be ready if their astral bodies can develop in freedom. The more we are able to protect them from forming opinions and taking a critical view too early, the better will it be for them. A teacher will be wise therefore to try to let reality show itself in the events themselves before the astral body has come free, and not invite young people to assume a fixed creed, though this is done over and over again in materialistic education. The chaos among the religious confessions would soon vanish if this principle were followed. Powers of judgement and logical thinking should be developed as late as possible and only when a feeling for individual nature arises as the astral body comes free. Before that human beings should not plump for anything individual; the object of their faith should be something given. But in the years that follow individual nature comes most powerfully to expression in the relationship between the sexes, when one individual feels drawn to another.

So you see, if we make a proper study of the three bodies of man we will indeed have a thoroughly practical basis for the proper education aid development of the human being. The science of the spirit is therefore not impractical, it is not something up in the clouds, but something that gives us the best possible directions on how to take action in life.

There is urgent need today to go more deeply into the science of the spirit, for otherwise humanity will come to a dead end. People are critical about earlier times today, saying children were not called on early enough to make their decisions on God and the world. But that was really quite a healthy instinct, and today we must return to this more and more deliberately. The instinctive insights of the past have gone, and with them a degree of certainty about individual things in life. It would be wrong, however, to ruin the human race all at once. If people had been utterly radical in following materialistic principles in education, in medicine, law and so on, our human order would have broken up long ago. But it was not possible to destroy it all; part of the past has remained. Materialism would take humanity into a dead end, and this is why we need the science of the spirit.

Teachers who really still have a feeling for a child's soul simply feel stifled by the standardization in the education system and by regulations that are a caricature of what they should actually be, based on the superstition that we are only dealing with the physical body. Even religious faith does not protect us from this. What matters is that people get a feeling for the spiritual, which really goes beyond the sphere of the senses. This is also why people who stick to external formulas for their principles of education will not find the right way. They cling to traditional church dogma and do not want to know about the evolution of the spirit. This is mainly what we have to deal with. The things we need today must come from spiritual worlds. For anything materialism has produced is fit only to make people sick in their physical and higher bodies. A serious crisis will be inevitable unless humanity goes deeper. Many things point very clearly to the important decisions now being made among humanity. You have to look at the inner aspects; external forms will not do.

People's longing for and interest in the spirit cannot be killed. Spiritualism has been found to be an answer by some of the people who harbour such longings. There the aim is to demonstrate the reality of the spirit in a material way. And it is remarkable to see the attitude of the Roman Catholic Church which, after all, ought to be wholly given to the spirit, with every external action a reflection of something that exists in the spirit. But it is strange to note what happened just recently, which is that someone in the Church has been looking for external proof of the spiritual. A book by Lapponi, personal physician to the Pope, has appeared in which he is making a downright plea for spiritualism.²⁹ This is strange because the people for whom the book has been written clearly are no longer spiritually minded; they need tangible proof that there is a world of the spirit. It certainly is something to reflect on when the Pope's personal physician makes a plea for spiritualism. The longing for the world of the spirit is there, but no feeling for the teaching given about that world in their own sphere.

Materialism thus creeps into religious confessions which basically should not be the least bit materialistic. And you can see the importance of a movement that appeals to man's true insight into the spirit, a movement that is not ascetic, however, and removed from everyday life, but at every moment truly helps you really to understand the practical significance of this spiritual element.

Now we also should not ask: ‘How can I quickly develop all kinds of occult powers?’ or: ‘How can I spin a cocoon around myself so that I won't be touched by reality?’ People who ask such questions are egoists and nothing but spiritual gourmets. If they only want to enjoy the things that please them, they are simply doing, at a slightly more refined level, what someone who is a gourmet does even when it comes to his breakfast.

A true theosophist seeks to understand life and to serve it. Parents take a theosophical approach when they consider it to be their task to help the child's development at every step. Don't ask: ‘How can we do that in this day and age?’ It is important to know that what matters is to keep firmly in mind that the soul is eternal. People are prepared to believe in an eternal life into which they enter after their death—immediately, if possible. But when someone is really and truly convinced of the soul's eternal nature, the time from his 2nd to his 80th year is simply a span of 78 years to him, and what is that compared to eternity? You then believe in the eternal nature of existence, and this is also something you must feel and which calls for patience. We must get in the habit of working to serve the whole of humanity, and it does not really matter at all if we can put anything we learn to immediate use or not. We must above all seek to put it into practice again and again, and everyone is bound to find some small area or other where he can do so. But nothing will ever happen if people merely go about criticizing everything. It is better to do just a very, very little, without complaining that we cannot apply the things we have learnt, than to do nothing at all. This should be the law governing our practice.

Life changes of its own accord when we work with the science of the spirit in this way, and you are changing the world without actually noticing it when you become a theosophist. The main thing, and the wisest thing we can do, is first of all to grasp the essence of spiritual science and then to live by it as intensely as we are able. In that way we make it part of life; the rest will follow of its own accord. Mothers and teachers who are theosophists will do things differently without even noticing it compared to someone who has no idea. If you know the configuration of the human being, you will quite instinctively observe the different kinds of development in a young person. Above all genuine, deeper understanding of theosophy will put an end to the kind of hypocrisy where the grown-ups waste their time on all kinds of trivia and then enter the nursery with deadly serious intentions. This happens because people have no faith in the spirit.

We have seen once again that the science of the spirit offers a practical approach to life and that it is senseless prejudice for opponents to say that it is remote from life. In reality it takes us right into life. Today, solid middle-class citizens feel rather special at being able to talk about theosophy. A time will come, however, when people will see this differently. They will realize where keen interest in life really lies. A time will come when people will say: ‘People were completely reactionary when they clung to a stream in time that held no potential for the future, not wanting to know about the great practice in life that offered humanity the prospect of new insights in the spirit, insights of the kind given to us in the theosophical view of the world, insights that will grow firm in us and of increasingly greater practical value because the theosophical way of thinking has been kindled and has come alive in us.’

• 28. See Goethe's Dichtung and Wahrheit (truth and fiction), Book 10, last but one paragraph.
• 29. Prof. Lapponi, personal physician to Popes Pius X and Leo XIII. Book on hypnotism and spiritualism, German edition published in 1906. It should be noted that the lecture was taken down imperfectly, and that the German edition of the work was not available to Rudolf Steiner at the time it was given. It was not published until the end of the year.

I am delighted to see you again after such a long time—the branch members and those of you who have joined the meetings in the course of the year. Let us hope that the winter which lies ahead will take our work and our spiritual movement some way forward again, and that we'll gain a little more depth in finding our way to the world of the spirit and living in it.

We have not seen one another for a long time but in a way this period is like all those other times when we were not together in outer terms. For the members of this branch are deeply and most eminently concerned to see this spiritual movement spread in the world as well as letting it enter into their own hearts. All our seeking in theosophy would be just a refined form of egoism if we were not also interested in having other people in this world hear of the movement and take an interest in it, just as we ourselves love being part of it.

The speaker has been able to talk to wider audiences and all kinds of different people in recent times, and it is good to know that people from all levels of society and of all classes have a longing for the world of the spirit, something which is also evident in the fact that the theosophical movement exists.

Perhaps we may just make a brief review of those wider audiences as we start our winter studies. The tour I was able to undertake to make the theosophical movement more widely known took me to Leipzig, Stuttgart, Baden-Baden, Alsace, Switzerland and Bavaria. I was able to speak in Leipzig, Stuttgart, Baden-Baden, Colmar, Strasbourg, Freiburg im Breisgau, Heidelberg, Basel, Bern, St. Gallen, Regensburg, Nurnberg and Weimar. In some places I gave lecture courses. The course in Leipzig consisted of fourteen lectures, the one in Stuttgart took more than a fortnight,³⁰ during which time people interested in the theosophical movement had to meet daily. Such courses are probably the most effective way of helping the theosophical movement gain deeper entry into our time. It is not so easy to spread the theosophical movement with sufficient intensity if one can only give one or two lectures and arouse initial interest But when people are given an introduction to life in the spirit for a whole two weeks, they can begin to realize that a new world can open up for them.

There are, of course, infinitely many obstacles that prevent people from getting closer to the science of the spirit and from living with it One does have to go more deeply into the approach we have come to call theosophy, for only then will hearts and minds begin to get an idea, a feeling, that this higher world is something very real. Initially everything they hear is taken to be not only incomprehensible but also pure fantasy. People do not find it easy to let go of the accepted view that the things we speak of in theosophy are mere dreams and fantasies and to realize now that our spiritual movement is concerned with something that in a most profound sense is the very basis of the real world. Many think that people who talk of these things are remote from the realities of life. However one gradually comes to see the point of view that can be gained, and realize that this is something down-to-earth, not living in cloud-cuckoo-land, but is at deeper levels, giving us strength, insight and truth. It enables us to find genuine ways of achieving the great tasks humanity has been given in this world. It is prejudice to say that theosophy is inimical to life, that it denies life. One hears people say: ‘Theosophy presents the world in a very nice light, offering great ideals, but it deflects people from life itself, from the true enjoyment of and pleasure in life.’ It has even been said that theosophists may have nice things to tell, but that these are not wholesome.

This kind of prejudice will probably take longest to disappear. It will always be possible to find people who understand the things presented in theosophical literature and lectures. It will be harder for them to find their way out of the kind of inner responses and feelings that are part of their upbringing and acquired prejudices. Inner responses and feelings are harder to overcome than are thoughts that need to be discarded. You may even hear someone say: ‘Yes, of course, we want to devote ourselves to theosophy, but we also don't want to spoil things for people who want to make the most of life.’ They'll say that we must remember that young people should enjoy life. It is a question, of course, of what we take pleasure in, and the issue must really go deeper. For it is possible to look for better and more noble objects of pleasure and to work with these to take life to a nobler level. We can give life a new content and there is no need to spoil young people's pleasure in life, for we shall give them new kinds of pleasure and enjoyment. People often find it hard to understand that one may find the things others consider entertaining rather uninteresting—going to the cinema, and spending one's time talking about things that have nothing to do with the reality of life. Perhaps a day will come when we speak of today's popular amusements as of a cloud-cuckoo-land.

It probably does not happen very often that someone envies someone else the inability to enjoy things, but it does happen. We have a small theosophical group in one particular city. One of our theosophists, who takes a tremendous interest in the science of the spirit and has also adopted a certain theosophical life style, is living with someone else who is also interested in the science of the spirit but cannot yet give up his predilection for roast suckling pig, that is, he really loves to eat roast suckling pig. Sitting there eating his suckling pig he then gets pangs of conscience because he is still much given to this enjoyment. And he thinks the other individual is lucky because he no longer has a taste for suckling pig. The point is that the other individual has developed different needs. And the day may well come when people who are no longer looking for common amusements will be considered true examples, and people will look to them for the good.

Much deeper down lie the prejudices that come from learning and intelligence and prove an obstacle to humanity's progress. You can find an article in a journal about national epidemics. A well-known academic³¹ who works in the field of psychiatry and deals with issues that lie between psychology and psychiatry, writes about mass epidemics. He refers to a phenomenon that existed for 200 years, to the end of the Middle Ages, with excessive asceticism widely practised as a ritual, with people throwing themselves to the ground, scourging and torturing themselves, their fantasies going to extremes and leading to strange excesses. This may be seen as a disease. The psychiatrist calls it hysteria of epidemic proportions. He goes on to say that hysterics of that type are often open to suggestions that cannot be evaluated by thinking. When a person sees someone else who has hurt his arm, he'll feel compassion and do what he can to help. We need not go into the things that go on in normal people's minds. But there are others who feel the pain in their own arm, abnormally so, when someone gets hurt. This is due to suggestion. It can reach such levels that the individual is completely out of control, his inner life lacking all order and given up to all impressions coming from outside.

When a materialistic soul expert speaks of such a phenomenon affecting whole populations, he is referring to public suggestion coming from particular groups—in medieval times from the monasteries—and becoming widespread. A kind of ‘disease of the age’ develops. People are not inclined to ask what they should think about such a thing when it comes up. They are wholly caught up in the suggestion. Such an expert will speak of the matter in all seriousness, but he fails to notice one thing, which is that an independent person who is capable of insight into himself will be able to recognize and clearly distinguish another kind of epidemic among the masses. This has reached many social groups today, even highly educated people. It consists in people living under the influence of specific suggestions, both positive and negative. If you speak of the truths to be found in the science of the spirit to such people, the truths will act as a negative suggestion on them. Such people cannot understand them; they will find them intolerable. Many materialistic prejudices that are widespread today act as positive suggestions. What do you find in medical, theological and law faculties? Suggestion that influences specific social groups and goes so far that one is perfectly justified in calling them a kind of disease, just like the kind of mass epidemic of which I spoke.

A well-known biologist has written something rather strange in a widely-read journal.³² It is strange—perhaps not so much for someone who only reads a bit here and a bit there, but for someone who studies the whole it is something he finds in 95% of the whole academic world. He will find that in future it will be possible to speak of a kind of academic madness, academic feeble-mindedness just as we now speak of hysteria. In the essay it says: ‘If a rolling billiard ball strikes another and makes it move, I cannot imagine that nothing passes from the one to the other.’ The scientist calls the peculiar spectre which emerges from the first billiard ball, creeping into the second one and setting it in motion under the influence of the first ball, the materia movens. He thinks he is enormously clever but is in fact only under the influence of materialistic suggestion, which affects him just as mass hysteria influenced people in the 16th century. Now just think how the suggestions to which a person is subject are apt to live around him. Their number is infinite. If they occur in large numbers—and it is possible to list a great many of them—they may be brought together in a picture that would be a disease picture of modern academic knowledge like that of dementia precox, which we keep hearing so much about.³³

There you see the unfreedom of those who are governed by suggestion. A little bit has changed since the Middle Ages. Only a theosophist is able to realize this. In medieval times people would speak of possession when something spoke out of a human being which was not that person himself. Today people laugh at the idea of possession and speak of an illness instead. This kind of possession, which existed in medieval times, has grown a little less today. It only shows itself in particular circles today. Another kind of possession, real and genuine possession, is however widespread today. The medieval kind of possession was astral by nature, today it is mental. The spirits to be found in academics today, spirits that possess them, are on the mental, the devachanic plane. In the world which is considered to be the only real world they come to expression as thoughts and are therefore also said to exist as thoughts. Just as the world of human feelings, inner responses, passions, drives and desires is not merely something arising from existence in a body, but is something independent, true and real in its own right, so the world of thoughts, too, is a distinct entity. It is just that the thoughts which human beings have are not real. These human thoughts are but shadow images of the real thoughts, just as human passions and feelings are only shadow images of something completely different. We have often spoken about the way these things are connected. We know that things we are able to observe in human beings through the physical senses are indeed the physical body, which is only part of the whole human being. We know that muscles and nerves, bones and blood are only part of the whole human being. These things, which we call the parts, the elements, of the human body, are part of the physical world. In the same way, however, human feelings and thoughts belong to another world, the astral world.

This is where modern logic takes the strangest leaps. People do not realize at all today that their own thinking, their own logic, should really tell them how impossible the conclusions are which they are drawing all the time, and that they are including things in their trains of thought that are obvious suggestions. It is terribly easy and it only needs some very commonplace ideas for an audience to accept what one is saying if for five minutes one presents them with an inevitable sequence of conclusions. They fail to realize that the debris of old life and of old ways of seeing things covers it all. That is the way it is with 'inevitable conclusions'.

Someone who was born blind and might be among us would be quite right in thinking we were indulging in fantasies when speaking of light and colour. This has never been a truth to him. He'll object that things can only be known by touch. He need not believe what we tell him, but he would nevertheless be wrong. What matters here is not that he is wrong but that he does not have the organ to perceive light and colour. The moment he is given that organ a new world will exist around him. True theosophy will never assume another world; it will merely approach it in a different way. The higher worlds of the theosophists are here around us, just as the world of colours is around the blind person. Someone born blind whose condition is operable may regain the use of his physical eye. We are saying no more than this in theosophy when we say that it is possible to develop the inner eyes. Just as it has been possible to achieve the physical eye, made with such art, so it is also possible to create organs out of the passions, instincts and feelings that live in us, organs of perception that will truly open up new worlds around the human being. It is thus possible to help human beings to achieve and develop this, so that they will be able to look into these other worlds just as they otherwise do into the physical world. This is the astral world of which we speak in theosophy. Within the outside world it is as real as is the world of colour within the world given by the sense of touch.

Someone who knows nothing of these worlds should not raise objections to them. It should be a general principle for everyone that we may only speak of things that we know something about and should never make statements about things about which we know nothing. All opinions about the science of the spirit based on the idea that those worlds must remain unknown to us are therefore a logical monstrosity that does no good at all. No one should ever say: ‘Any world I do not know about does not exist for me.’

So much to characterize the prejudices we meet. These are the suggestions made in today's academic world. And many, many people are subject to these suggestions. A lecture based on the science of the spirit is heard once, after which people continue to hear hundreds and thousands of things said to be highly significant, but they always involve elements that come not from materialistic science but from the materialistic interpretation of science.

It is hard to combat these suggestions with good sense, and this is something only someone able to see more deeply into the intellectual life of today is able to know. Popular science, busy as it is, has an extremely harmful effect because it is presented with an air of authoritative infallibility which can only be shown in its true light at some future date. People today have no idea how much they are subject to suggestion presented with an authoritative air. Take what I am saying merely as a characterization and consider how odd it is that nations struggle to rid themselves of one authority yet at the same time fall prey to new ones.

In the past, people would fall for suggestion, with their I given up to something that was active in them, but someone able to look into the higher worlds would see real entities. Human thoughts relate to certain spirits in the ‘devachanic’ world the way shadows do to the actual objects. The thought images you have are shadows cast by spirits in the devachanic or mental world. The thought that lives in you is but such a shadow image, all by itself. Someone with vision, someone who has developed his higher sense organs, will see it in connection with a spirit. If you see a shadow cast on a wall you can only understand it if you relate it to the object which cast it. It is the same with your thoughts. Without anything to relate them to, your thoughts are shadows. They relate to spirits that are as real in a higher world as this hand of mine is here. Just as my hand casts a shadow on the wall, so do the higher spirits cast their shadows in this our world. And these shadows are your thoughts.

The human being, as we see him before us, is really the scene of events that take place beyond the physical world. As a physical entity, man is in the first place complete in himself, and as such he lives in a physical world that is complete in itself. To understand the human being as a physical entity we have to remain in the physical world. To investigate and understand blood as a physical substance, for instance, you have to remain in the physical world. To understand the nature of feelings, inner responses and passions, you will either have to use empty phrases or relate these things to spirits that are behind the physical world, to a world that relates to this one as the world of colour does to the world of touch. Also you have to use a similar approach to understanding the world of thought.

So you see that man has a share in the higher worlds, that the astral body extends into those worlds, and that the devachanic world for its part casts a kind of shadow into this world. Someone who knows nothing of those higher worlds is subject to them like a slave, powerless against powers that control the chains. Just as the physical person can only be free if able to develop the will to face another person in freedom, so can the astral nature of man only be free if it recognizes its connection with the whole astral world. For as long as people live only in their ordinary inner feelings, their astral nature has them on leading strings, as it were. They are always possessed by it. They come free when they recognize it. Just as we perceive and know the physical world around us, so we must face those spirits, spiritual eye to spiritual eye, and know who we are dealing with. It is the same for the world of human thoughts. This is the way to real freedom, seeing through the world around us. To gain the right measure of understanding we have to consider what lies behind the physical aspect. A beginning has to be made and you need to study these things; the world must study these things.

There is some justification for the following objection, which is also raised by many people: What good it is to us to hear someone tell us of worlds which we ourselves are unable to see? You see, it is the first step towards being able to see into those worlds oneself. Why is it the first step? Because the physical world appears in a somewhat different light to someone who has gained insight than it does to materialistic minds. A comparison may show the different standpoint a theosophist should gain in relation to the physical world. We may take our example from ordinary writing. Someone unable to read may look at it and so may someone who is able to read. They both see the same thing; there is no difference in what they actually see. The person who is unable to read will say: I see lines going down and up, longer and shorter lines. He'll be able to describe them. Someone who is able to read however will find that the lines have meaning. He'll not describe the shape of the letters but find meaning in them.

That is how it is with the whole world when it is seen from the spiritual scientific point of view. Compared to this, take our modern conventional science. Here the world is described in the way someone who has not learned to read describes the letters. For the other person all things in the world become letters; they gain significance and he learns to read them. When someone unable to read describes the shapes of the letters, this cannot be said to be wrong. Many people say our ideas are divorced from reality when we say that the word or the world also holds a specific meaning. You cannot say anything against this objection; it is the everyday view of things. But there is another way of looking at things where every flower becomes a letter, every plant species a word, and the world a great book.

The world holds something within it that goes beyond its physical aspects. The signs for this have no lips, however, and therefore meaning has to be given to them. A completely new world opens up in the devachan for someone able to read the writing of the plants. You can also think of every animal in the world as a letter, and you will gradually be able to decipher these letters. If you understand what comes to expression in animal lives you will relate to them as someone able to read and not as someone who merely describes the letters, which is the way of modern conventional science. Learning to recognize the word that lies in the animal you are able to see another, completely different world behind the physical world—the astral world. Learning to see the plant world as letters you gain the ability to see into the mental world. This is not something divorced from reality. Quite the contrary, it is something firmly based on reality that teaches us to see the abundant meaning of life.

It truly is the case that we only perceive the true significance of spiritual insight into the world if we compare it with reading. What would be the point if I were to draw something on the board here and describe it if there was no meaning to it? It gains meaning in that we perceive its significance. And that is how it is with the world. We gradually come to realize why the world exists, what it can mean to human beings and what human beings themselves are within the world.

Telling you all this, I did not mean to present something new. Those of you who have heard about theosophy on several occasions will know it all. I have been telling it to you to give you a means of rebutting the statement that theosophy is unscientific, to arm you against objections reputed to be logical. Only someone using a shortsighted logic has objections to raise against the science of the spirit. A logic that explores every nook and cranny will show that no objection can be raised but that it is absolutely sensible. It has to be understood therefore that people who base themselves on a scientific point of view in their attacks on theosophy are doing so not for logical reasons but on the basis of suggestion. When you are free of such suggestion and know that thoughts are but the shadows cast by devachanic spirits, and if you then hear a professor who is under the influence of the mental world say that a billiard ball is moved by materia movens, which transfers to a second billiard ball—you can see behind the scenes and see that he is influenced by other spirits.

The earth is atremble, in a way. It presents us with major tasks. Questions arise from the serious challenges of our time. It will not be possible to solve the social question, which has already caused so much bloodshed, with the suggestions people are making at present. The political parties seeking to solve the social question are also under the influence of such suggestions. Someone able to see behind the physical aspects sees the demon who stands behind many a party supporter. It can never be otherwise than it was in the case of Robert Owen,³⁴ a noble and caring person with good knowledge of social conditions in England. He wanted to create an example of an economy where he asked good and bad workers to join him in establishing a social community. He based himself on the understandable prejudice that people are essentially good and one only needed to put them in a situation where they had a chance to earn a proper living. In such a situation, he believed, they would be able to have the kind of life they desired. But this philanthropist finally had to admit that it was not possible to start with practical measures in one’s efforts for social progress but that one had to teach people first, addressing their understanding.

Someone able to see into the world of the spirit perceives what lies behind the physical plane. He will see how people live together, some in the greatest misery, poor and oppressed by labour and need, and others indulging in superabundance, enjoying all kinds of things. If one does not go beyond the physical plane it will be easy to imagine how the situation can be changed. This is what most people do when they feel they are called to be reformers today. They do not find themselves in the same situation as someone who was born blind and after a successful operation suddenly sees the world around him to be full of colour. For then they would see all kinds of different spirits behind everything physical. When they try to bring their well-meant plans for reform to realization but take no heed of the spirits behind it all, the situation will be much worse fifty years later than it has ever been. All the social ideals of today would go grotesquely against the astral world unless this astral world of human passions, desires and wishes were to change as well. General misery, a terrible ferment in the world, a dreadful struggle for existence would then take the place of today's struggle which is terrible enough as it is.

You need only look a little bit into the world of the spirit and you can see the situation. Human beings are not just bodies to be provided with food; human beings are also spirits, and they are in touch with other spirits. The task of those able to see the occult world is to make them aware of being comrades, members, of higher worlds. Imagine a human being, and a few beetles crawling around on this human being. The beetles can have no idea that this human being, this spiritual entity, is something different from themselves. They will describe the shape, e.g. of the nose. That is how human beings describe the heavens, Mars, the Sun, Mercury and the other stars. A modern astronomer is just like a beetle which has no idea that the nose belongs to a soul when he describes Mercury, Mars, the Sun. He describes them just the way he sees them, like a beetle crawling around in the cosmos. We shall only know how to describe the reality of things when we realize that the stars have souls, that spirit is present everywhere, that the whole universe is ensouled. That and nothing else is the aim with the science of the spirit. It is as logical as that. Prejudices, being sheer suggestion, make it difficult to make people aware of what this spiritual view of the world is really about.

The aim of this introductory lecture has been to show the resistance met by people who think in terms of the science of the spirit and who in the eyes of the world represent this science. Each of you may find yourself in a position where you have to show firmness in the face of views presented to you from the outside. It is part of the work in our groups to help members to stand firm. They should be sufficiently sure inwardly that in spite of everything they come up against in the world they have a living inner certainty of the world of the spirit and are thus armed against any objection that may be raised. It is not the amount of theosophical knowledge we have but our inner awareness, inner life and inner certainty that matter. Many people who represent other approaches want to enter into discussion with us, wanting to offer wisdom which theosophy already has. They keep saying things which a theosophist has long since left behind. He will characterize but not criticize. He will not make propaganda in the usual sense, for that cannot be our task. People must come of their own free will if they are to join our ranks. To make propaganda and agitate is not the theosophists' task. It therefore also is not for them to refute others. One seeks to characterize the standpoint of spiritual science itself. The other person has to enter into the spirit of it. Agitation—if a public lecture may be said to be such—consists in telling people: theosophy has this and that to offer. Anyone destined to come to it will come to it. A theosophist does not have to offer views and opinions. He speaks of realities in a higher world, and realities, facts, are beyond dispute. A theosophist presenting the spiritual scientific point of view will stop himself from presenting his own opinions. As theosophists we speak of ancient wisdom that has always been known to wise people. You'll never have two people having different opinions once they have entered the higher realm. At most it may be the case that one of them has not penetrated far enough. This is the kind of attitude a theosophist can develop. He should not impose himself on others, but he should be sure in his heart and sure of himself in presenting theosophy to the world. Someone who knows will also be able to find words for the knowledge he has in him.

This, then, is the way the theosophical approach, and other approaches which are in opposition to it, should be characterized and not criticized. If we develop this attitude more and more, we'll have the best possible means of being active theosophists in the world. We shall understand the world around us more and more and investigate it in the spirit. That is the theosophical way of doing things.

In conclusion one more example, one of those that will shock people when it is referred to in public. These things are simply true and can be found with the means of our spiritual research. I would like to describe a phenomenon of our time to you, and you'll see how we come to understand the world around us if we really penetrate the things which the science of the spirit has to offer. Please do not take my words amiss, for one will have to get used to the fact that there are things of which we do not yet have the least idea. Who would have thought fifty years ago that there is a substance where it just needs a tiny granule to damage our health? Fifty years ago no one knew anything about it. There are things that have an effect before people know about them and understand them. This substance is called radium. In this case, people did not yet have the physical instruments to understand it. When it comes to things of the spirit, people lack the spiritual instruments.

There are members of the socialist movement who are extraordinarily radical and would really like to hit out and destroy everything. Other members are to some extent conservative in their views. You find all kinds of different trends among them. One group within the socialist movement is a closed group with a remarkably homogeneous, like-minded view and the same way of doing things. They have been the least radical people. Basically this is the trade, the occupational group, which gave rise to the socialist union movement—the printers.³⁵ They were the first to develop a more formal set of rules within the social movement. Rates of pay were agreed on for the relationship between workers and employers. It has even gone so far that a newspaper is produced for the printing trade the editor of which is not a socialist at all, having been thrown out of the socialist party. This shows how moderate the group is.

Now it is possible to ask if we can investigate the spiritual causes of these things just as we can physically investigate the actions of radium. Yes, we can. Do not be too surprised at the answer given in the science of the spirit to the question as to why there is such a group within the socialist movement. It is due to the action of lead on the human soul. All things in the world around us, be they small or large, are the physical bodies of spiritual principles. Gold, silver, copper, everything that lives around us is body for a spiritual principle. Lead, too, is the visible body of a particular spirit. And anyone working with lead is dealing with the metal not just in its chemical sense but also in its spiritual nature. Lead not only affects the lungs; it also has quite a specific effect on the rest of the human being. So there you have the source of the unusual views held in this occupational group.

Now something else—something that happened to me just a few days ago. Someone I know well came to me who cannot explain why he is able to find analogies and see connections in his scientific work with a facility that is unusual even among academics. Such an ability is due to a highly mobile mental body. I thought I’d find out how this phenomenon comes about. After a time I was able to tell the man that he probably had a lot to do with copper. This proved to be true, for he plays the French horn. The small amount of copper in it had such an effect on him.

Now just think. Without knowing it, people are subject to all kinds of influences. I spoke of suggestion earlier. We now see the influence of the whole world of the spirit that is around the human being. And what is theosophy? It is a way of penetrating into the world of the spirit and its laws. And what does this mean? It means freedom, for only insight will give freedom. When we know something we can relate to it in the right way. Gaining insight in the spirit is therefore the greatest process of liberation we can ever possibly have. True development and progress lie in the things the science of the spirit can teach us. People will only come to the search for truth in the spirit when they want to be free. However, today they will not gain knowledge of the spirit, and we can see that it is impossible for them to do so, if they want to be free not only of social prejudices but also of everything else, including things they do not yet have the power of mind to understand. People who still depend on fashion and so on, will not be greatly inclined to consider the influence of the metals that exist around them. But a beginning must be made, a small beginning for something that is large, very large. What I wanted to do today was to take just a bit of a look at something in which the science of the spirit can hope to be a beginning.

• 30. ‘Populärer Okkultismus’, Leipzig 28 June–11 July 1906 (notes from members of the audience in GA 94). At the Gates of Spiritual Science 14 lectures, Stuttgart 22 Aug.–4 Sept. 1906 (GA 95). Tr. E.H. Goddard, C. Davy. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1976.
• 31. Möbius, Paul Julius (1853–1907), neurologist and lecturer in Leipzig. Über den Begriff der Hysterie und andere Vorwürfe vorwiegend psychologischer Art, Neurologische Beiträge 1. Heft, Leipzig 1894. See also Nachrichten der Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung Nr 22 (Michaeli 1968) S. 30f.
• 32. Has not so far been identified.
• 33. Dementia precox is an earlier term for schizophrenia.
• 34. Owen, Robert (1771–1858), Welsh social and educational reformer. The community he established at New Lanark in Scotland did not prove viable (it has now been restored by the New Lanark Conservation Trust). In 1833 Owen organized the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union. See also Anthroposophy and the Social Question, essay first published in Lucifer-Gnosis 1906-1908 (in GA 34). Tr. H. Collison. 2nd edition Spring Valley: Mercury Press 1982. Also in Reincarnation and Immortality, Tr. M. & E. Tapp. New York: Multimedia Publishing Corp. 1974.
• 35. The German Printers Association was the first socialist union to be established in Germany in 1866.

A week ago we considered the view of the world based on the science of the spirit in so far as it can have meaning for people today. modern people will of course first of all base themselves on observations made through the senses and on their rational minds. They may also base themselves on modern science, which is also based on observations made through the senses and rational thinking. We have shown that it is possible to meet all objections to the science of the spirit that may arise from the present-day scientific approach. Please do not misunderstand the reasons for considering the subject in this way. It was not done so that we might go out and enter into discussion with people who have not yet given a thought to the science of the spirit. There can be no question of this. Anyone who has not yet a mind to consider it and also is not inclined to do so will first of all have to learn to put his mind to it. It is not a question, therefore, of having arguments available for use in discussions, but everyone may in his own heart and mind raise objections that may come up in the light of modern popular science or modern life in general. You need to be reasonably sure of yourself. This, then, has been the purpose of the things we considered the last time.

It can simply never be the mission of the spiritual scientific movement merely to satisfy people’s curiosity or thirst for knowledge. It is true that among many theosophists this curiosity, or, to put it more politely, this thirst for knowledge, has been and still is the reason why they made contact with theosophical endeavours. However after a time anyone who has come purely from curiosity will be disappointed. Not that the science of the spirit does not have the amplest means of satisfying people's thirst for knowledge, down to the deepest depths of existence, but the knowledge we are concerned with in the theosophical movement will only serve a purpose if it becomes active knowledge, knowledge out of which one takes action, putting it into practice in everyday life. People should therefore at least have the urge to make this knowledge part of life.

When someone comes to the science of the spirit he can easily find himself on the horns of a dilemma. You need to see this dilemma clearly. Many of the people who come to theosophy fall into two categories. Some will say: I want to help, I want to be of value to society. They think the theosophical movement should give them the means to do this, so that they can start right away. Others may perhaps only have the illusion of wanting to help. In reality they merely want to satisfy their curiosity and hear of things they find sensational. Neither of these two categories will be the right kind of members for the Theosophical Society. Those who want to start helping right away fail to consider that you have to learn things first and acquire skills if you are to be able to help. One has to tell them that they need to be patient and develop the powers and skills that will make them helpers of humanity. They have to limit their ambitions. The people who merely want to satisfy their curiosity will have to understand that not one of the means and abilities given to them should be accepted unless they are prepared to be part of and serve the whole of human evolution. This will need a long time. The Theosophical Society should first of all generate secure knowledge and awareness of eternity and existence in the spirit. Someone who has this awareness then says to himself: It is not my intention to launch right away, from my present imperfect standpoint, into all kinds of enterprises to reform humanity, and so on.

Patience is called for on the one hand, and on the other the will to be part of and serve the whole of human evolution. The method of the Theosophical Society lies between these two things. And we must not concentrate on just one of them but pay heed to both. We need to have both patience and the will to be active, but not as an arithmetic mean of the two, for they need to be developed separately in our hearts and minds. Do not confuse the two things! It is a very different thing if one has an arithmetic mean or has the two things separately in one’s heart and mind.

The theosophical view of the world was brought to life some decades ago to meet these two requirements and has since been there for humanity. The knowledge we have taken in over the years, everything that has so far been said, is brought back to mind once more, for the more often we do this, the better it is. Knowledge should become a living power of intent. This means that some of the older members will hear some things again which they have heard before, perhaps in another context, and perhaps merely to refresh their memories. This is the way in which the theosophical view of the world was brought to life some decades ago. What was it before that? It was something we call secret or occult teaching, that is, something done in small groups by people specially admitted to them. In earlier times students were subjected to severe tests of their will intent, feeling and thinking before they were admitted to those closed groups, the esoteric or occult brotherhoods. The influence of those brotherhoods is something which in future will come from a larger group of people. More and more people will be called to have such an influence. A small group of the elect thus always had the influence which the theosophical movement is now to gain. Whether they were the disciples of Hermes or the pupils of the Eleusinian mysteries, occult schools in Egypt or Christian Gnostic schools, or the Rosicrucians in Europe—in every case, small, carefully defined brotherhoods were a major influence. Modern people with their intellectualized science know nothing, or practically nothing of this, but it is a fact that all cultivation of the mind and through this also all material civilization came from such brotherhoods.

It has been said on a previous occasion that all material civilization, everything people create using hammer, saw, axe and so on, has its foundation in cultivation of the mind. You may consider everything in this light, however large or small. Take one of the great engineering feats of our time, the Simplon Tunnel or the St Gotthard Tunnel. Very few people ever realize that these could never have been built if it had not been for a man called Leibniz.³⁶ The tunnels could not have been built if it had not been for differential calculus. The idea which at one time inspired those thinkers to do such subtle calculations has made all these things possible in the physical world. Everything that happens on the physical plane ultimately goes back to thoughts and ideas. It is a dreadful illusion for people to think that there is anything in civilization that does not ultimately go back to the spirit, the mind. Take what you will in the fields of art, of technology, industry or trade—the most practical, most commonplace and most everyday things ultimately go back to something that happened in the human soul.

Where do the great impulses, ideas, mental creativeness originate? Here we come to a sphere in which we can begin to understand how the occult brotherhoods of earlier centuries and millennia worked. Take an example, though a modern materialistic thinker would never think of it. An ardent, enthusiastic youth living in the 18th century, someone with the gifts for great things, needed just the stimulus of something that may look like a chance happening, something utterly insignificant. He met, as if by chance, someone who seemed indifferent. This person said a few words to the young man that appeared to make no special impression. I am saying ‘appeared’, for something did happen in the enthusiastic young man’s soul. The encounter during which those seemingly insignificant words were said did have significance after all. So what did actually happen? Something of the greatest significance for civilization came from an insignificant incident that appeared to be a matter of chance. The brothers who are the true and greatest guardians of humanity’s treasure of wisdom are in this world. They may be walking about among us; we may meet them. But they wear a magic hat as far as ordinary people are concerned. It is up to them to recognize a brother, for the brothers never identify themselves. In past centuries they were even harder to recognize than they are today. What mattered, however, was their influence. Imagine such a brotherhood of occult initiates. One of the brothers approaches the young man as though by chance. But chance events like these are brought about by the wisdom of this world. A few insignificant words ignite a spark in the young man’s mind that is of the greatest conceivable importance for our civilization. The young man was Jean-Jacques Rousseau.³⁷ An event that seemed of no significance sowed a seed that led Rousseau to develop his philosophy. There is nothing random about the powerful impulses that came into our civilization with it. They are not apparent in the ordinary history of civilization but quietly let the stream of wisdom continue that is in the care of the brotherhood. The decision as to what will serve the needs of humanity is made in the brotherhood. The brothers are wise, they are prophets. They know what humanity needs. And when the need arises they'll send one of the brethren into the world to bring a new impetus into evolution.

Another example is one I have given before. It concerns the German theosophical philosopher Jakob Böhme and can be found in any Jakob Böhme biography.³⁸ As a boy he was apprenticed to a shoemaker. One day the master and his wife had gone out. They had told him not to sell anything, but merely look after the shop. Someone came in who made a deep impression on the boy. The stranger wanted to buy something but Jakob was not permitted to sell him anything. When the man had gone, Jakob heard his name called. He went to the door and the man said to him: ‘Jakob, you’re small now but one day you'll be great. You'll be someone people will be amazed at.’ This man gave the impulse for the things Jakob Böhme later wrote about.

You'll see even better what this is about if we take another example that may take you even more deeply into the secrets of the brotherhoods. Imagine that someone who is unknown—unknown in the outside world, well known to the initiates—writes a letter to a powerful privy councillor or a minister. The letter may be about something of no great importance, perhaps asking for a minor request to be granted. If an initiate were to read this letter, someone able to read it very differently from the way an ordinary person would read it, he would note something very special about it. It may be that one has to leave out every third word from the beginning of the letter, or every fourth word counting from the end. The words which remain have considerable significance, influencing the will of the person to whom it is addressed. This person may merely have read a request to have some refuse removed. But in reality the letter says something of tremendous importance. Now you may say: ‘But the man did not read that.’ That is not true. The surface self-awareness did not take it up, but the secret of such a code is that the right words remain and impress themselves on the ether body, on the subconscious mind, and the person concerned will have taken them in after all.

Impulses can be given in this way to make people do things, and it is possible to convey instructions in secret ways without people being aware of it. This is, of course, only a minor example compared to things of enormous significance that exist in the world. An initiate is able to go about in any form. He has the means of influencing not only people’s everyday level of consciousness but also the other levels of the human mind.

You know about the German philosopher and mystic Henricus Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim.³⁹ His teacher was Johannes Tritheim, abbot at Sponheim.⁴⁰ The abbot wrote books which to modern materialistic minds seem either romantic or highly Baroque, certainly something one would not find very interesting.

It is thought that these works also met with an indifferent response in the days of Johannes Tritheim of Sponheim. But there is a key to reading these books. If you omit certain things from the beginning and others from the end, something remains, and this residue represents a large part of what is today presented as elementary theosophy. Reading these books one therefore is truly reading also with the subconscious mind, reading the material which today is presented as theosophy. For centuries, many people thus unknowingly took theosophy into their hearts and minds. These have been significant influences in our civilization that may be considered together with the kind of processes we discussed a week ago concerning the effects of copper and lead.

You can see from these examples that occult brotherhoods were active in the world through the millennia for the benefit of humanity. This was right for those past times but it will no longer be right in the future. Initiates who know the meaning and significance of evolution will therefore say: ‘What happened in the past is no longer right for the future.’ It would be a poor kind of inspiration that would always look for the truth in the past and not know its living reality, which is that the truth always changes for the future. Someone who is truly inspired will not only seek to learn from the earliest teachers of humanity but reshape the truths he is given, being alive to the present time.

Something that must rise up against this old form of occult work in every human soul is the idea of freedom, the idea of its value and the dignity of man. People are unfree if influences are brought to bear on them in that way. Freedom, however, and this has been shown before, is not something finished and complete but something human beings struggle to gain in the living process of evolution. Freedom is the goal of humanity and not a birth right. And freedom depends on insight. There is no other way of overcoming the old influences that came from the brotherhoods than to make occult knowledge itself widely known. The basic aim of the theosophical movement is to make people free as they learn the spiritual truths that used to be the preserve of the occult brotherhoods. In the old days, the world knew nothing that went beyond the physical plane, and today it knows hardly any of it. Only when the world comes to know the things that go beyond the physical plane will people be able to have the mysterious influences and forces that play between one human being and another, between one nation and another, truly under their own control. That is the human mission for the future and therefore really also the mission of the theosophical movement.

The science of the spirit thus shows itself to be something very different from all other present-day movements. Many questions now arise for human beings, the facts force them to face them. Above all there is the social question, which comes up in all kinds of different forms. It includes matters of personal freedom, nationalism and racism and the colonial issue. All these issues, and also, most important, the issue of education, are shown in a special light, a different light, with the science of the spirit than is otherwise possible at the present time. Why is that so? A small example may show this.

There is a movement in psychiatry today that is little known to lay people. But as newspaper articles now present everything to the world, some of you will have taken some notice. This truly touches on important matters. Look at the latest book publications. You'll find an interesting small volume on Robert Schumann’s illness. A psychiatrist⁴¹ has decided to go for Robert Schumann—and also other people—and show that he suffered from the condition which alienists call dementia precox meaning premature dementia.⁴² You may know that not only Robert Schumann but other great people have also been investigated for their mental state—Goethe, Heine and quite a few others. There are even two publications which are not without interest, though they are about investigations of the person of the Christ in this respect.⁴³ All this is possible in our materialistic age. One such alienist says that if a mind comes to abnormal expression this is due to an abnormality in the person’s organization.⁴⁴

One thing modern alienists are sure of is that such conditions cannot be influenced by reasoning with people. You'll see what I mean in a minute. For a time it was thought that if someone suffered from a particular form of mania that came to expression in abnormal religious ideas, it would be possible to correct this by talking sense to them, presenting sensible arguments to them. Mania sometimes takes quite a specific form. Someone imagines he is being persecuted, for example. The alienist considers this to be a symptom.⁴⁵ Persecution mania is just a symptom to him, with an abnormality of the brain the true problem. You cannot overcome someone’s delusions by explaining that he is not being persecuted at all, for you cannot change the way the brain is organized Up to this point, the alienist is in fact right The spiritual scientist does not intend to judge someone else from an amateur point of view. You may present sensible ideas to the person concerned, but you'll not cure his mania. At the most it will then take another form.

Let us take the case of Hölderlin, another person who is studied by alienists.⁴⁶ Hölderlin was destroyed by his longing for ancient Greece. An alienist would say that he suffered from a disease of the brain, and that everything else is symptomatic evidence. The disease may have been hereditary in origin. It is therefore believed that it is not possible to influence the constitution of the organism, primarily the constitution of the brain, out of the life of mind and spirit. You see, these researches in psychiatry take one to fathomless depths. The physical body is accepted as something that is given, and the mind and spirit is like a kind of vapour rising from that body. Even the greatest mental achievements, the work of people of genius—if it is abnormal, materialistic scientists will ascribe it to abnormal brain functions. That is what your alienist, your psychiatrist, will tell you. Whatever you may say to contradict him, he will insist that the whole life of the mind and spirit depends on the physical organization. As far as it goes, the positive statement is correct, but these people do not understand what is really involved here; they have no idea.

This brings us to something of which you should take careful note. It concerns an extraordinarily important secret, though perhaps not everyone would consider it to be such. The truth is that the human organ which performs its function has originally been created by that function itself. The brain has originally been created by thoughts. The blood develops the life of feelings. There can be no life of feelings without warm blood. It is a fact that the blood has originally been created by the life of feelings. This is a completely new way of looking at these things. Now we may say to ourselves that we certainly cannot change the human brain with the ideas people produce in their brains today. But behind that brain are different thoughts, thoughts unknown in materialistic science and these have originally created the brain. This is the world of thoughts we must get to know; it is the world of creative ideas. We thus have to distinguish between ordinary thoughts and a world of thoughts that floods—truly floods—the world. It is because the brain has been born out of the world of thoughts that the human mind is able not only to produce the kind of thoughts that come from the brain’s world of thought but also to have a part in the world of thoughts that lies behind the physical organization.

With this, one learns to govern the life of thoughts. And so one also does not cure people by producing logical reasons but by entering much more deeply into the realm of mind and spirit. It is possible, with thoughts taken from the true world of the spirit, to change the physical organism purely out of the realm of thoughts and make a sick organism well again.

The spirit thus exists in two ways. We have the spirit that first of all presents itself outwardly in the phenomena of nature, in art, science and the economic products of engineering and industry. This spirit is a product of physical life. But behind it is its creator, and that, too, is spirit.

An image may help to show this. Imagine I have some water here and I apply a particular procedure to cool it down so that it turns to ice. If we heat some of the ice so that it turns to water again, we have three things—the original water all around, the ice, and something that is turning to water again. You may look at the human brain like this. The spirit which fills the whole world has condensed into the brain as water does to ice. Thoughts are brought forth from the brain just as water is from ice when this is heated. Essentially, therefore, you may take all matter to be condensed spirit, contracted spirit and you can see the things of the mind and spirit that show themselves in the world to have come from the physical. Materialistic thinking considers only the condensed matter and has forgotten that the spirit is behind the world of matter, that a spiritual world exists beyond the physical that creates matter. The theosophical movement should take people back again to the spirit that is behind the material world.

We can now also return to something I mentioned the last time we met. I talked about writing. We write something down, let us say the word ‘spirit’. Someone who has no concept of the spirit clearly would not write the word. But someone else may come along who has no concept of the spirit, who is altogether unable to read, and he would describe a line curving down, then up again, then down again and so on. No one would get the idea that this means ‘spirit’, for the person giving the description is unable to read. That, however, is how the facts are described in science today. For the word to be written, a meaning had to be there that was poured into this piece of writing. The writer may go away, someone else may come along, look at what has been written, and know what the writer wanted to say. That is also how it is with the original spirit in relation to our physical world. This physical world is like writing, simply writing. In ordinary everyday science, the individual objects in this world are described in the way I said. An occultist would know, however, that these individual objects mean something else as well, apart from the description given in outer terms and that they can be read, being letters of the spirit. If we look at this world as the writing of the spirit, if we consider everything in the world around us—minerals, plants, animals and people—to be letters written by the spirit, we enter into the world of the spirit of our own accord as we read the physical world.

It is not too easy, however, to read like this. To give you an example, let me tell you the following. A chemist may take blood, analyse it and say it consists of such and such constituents. He has now done his job and he knows what blood is. Reading in the spiritual scientific and occult sense, however, you find that blood could not have come into existence in the form in which we have it if there were not the phenomena behind it which we call astral phenomena. The spirit of the world acts on matter through the astral phenomena. There could never have been such a thing as blood in the physical world if the astral world did not exist behind the physical world. All kinds of things could exist, but blood is only possible because there is the astral world behind it. You thus read the astral in the blood, just as you read the world ‘spirit’ in these letters. Reading the letters that exist here in the physical world leads to perception of the astral sphere.

This is altogether the right way of entering into the world of the spirit—to give heart and mind to the world around us. It may be less of an effort to enter the world of the spirit in a number of other ways, but it is a more certain way of doing it if we study the phenomena that surround us. A mineral has something different to say, a plant something different again, an animal, a person—all of them are indeed different letters. If you bring your heart and mind to them, they will tell you of the world of the spirit.

You will therefore find study of our world one of the first things you are directed to do in Rosicrucian schooling—devoted, dedicated study of the world. When we started our theosophical movement, some people said: ‘The things he is telling us can be found in any book on science. He is talking about origins, the struggle for existence, and so on; but we want to hear of the things that go on in the world of the spirit.’ There may in fact be more of these things in it than the people who asked to hear are able to cope with. But we should start with secure insight into our immediate reality, not mere description but real understanding.

Take what follows as an important fundamental truth—it has always been considered to be such in Rosicrucian occult schooling. The sense-perceptible world presents itself in the way our external physical senses are able to perceive it. Things look different in the astral world, very different. And they look completely different again in the devachanic world. That is how it is with our perceptions. The thoughts and logic we use to grasp the physical world, the astral world and the devachanic world are the same. Right thoughts are right in the devachan, on the astral plane and on the physical plane. If you learn the right way of thinking on the physical plane this will give you a reliable guide in all worlds. It means, however, that we have to learn to think in a way that has real significance, meaning and depth. No one should therefore save themselves the trouble of entering into this physical world with his thoughts and considering this world to be letters, writing that tells of a higher world of the spirit.

In the great process of liberating humanity, our prime concern is therefore to gain a meaningful approach to the significance of physical phenomena. They are the gate that leads to the world of the spirit. The work calls for a great deal of self-denial but it has to be undertaken. If human beings truly take on this task and gradually ascend to the world of the spirit in doing so, learning to grasp things from the point of view of that world, they play a part in the great tasks of culture and civilization. They can only do so if they are free human beings. As soon as people would seek to develop a civilization for the future on any basis other than freedom their products would all be stillborn, with ideas belonging to the past taken into the future. The tremendous difference from earlier ways will be that human beings and not principles or institutions are the active agent. It is true, in the past, too, things were done by human beings only. However it was only a small group whose principles came to be generally accepted. Some would praise those principles, believing them to be original. People were speaking of something they had derived from principles. But this was merely the impulse that had come from the initiates. Take the initiation of Heraclitus,⁴⁷ for instance, in early times. He presented the truths he had discovered in external formulas that were further elaborated by countless people. They thought they were thinking original thoughts; but that was not the case. You only learn to think original thoughts by seeing what lies behind things and grasping their real significance.

I hope you have developed something of a feeling for the way human beings should make themselves part of the process of civilization, being able to walk through between one pillar, which is patience, by being prepared to learn and not act too soon, and the other pillar, which is the will to serve the progress of human evolution. They can do this if they allow things to come alive to them more and more through the senses and in this way penetrate to the creative spirit. This is something you have to feel inwardly, be alive to inwardly, and then you are a theosophist. People must reach a much greater level of freedom in future than they have in the past, and there have to be many more of them. Not that long ago only very few people in Europe were really free. Civilization radiated into the world from small centres, reaching others in the form of views and opinions, so that they came to believe everything else to be erroneous. Rousseau, too, thought he was only presenting his own views, his inmost being, when in fact he was influenced from quite a different source.

The initiates knew that life between birth and death, which is encompassed in the phenomena we perceive through the senses, is governed by forces that do not cease at death; that forces which exist also before birth merely assume a different form during physical life. This enabled the initiates to give impulses, being able to see what lies behind death. The glass standing here will never be able to move of its own accord. And what lies between birth and death is equally unable to move of its own accord. The forces which move what lies between birth and death are always present; they are the eternal. The initiates know them and a large part of the human race will have to get to know them in the future.

Make this an inner feeling, for this inner feeling is important Without it, you will not progress in occult studies. It will depend on this if you join the ranks of the theosophical movement as a rightful member. This inner feeling will also give you a degree of certainty in guiding you through something which you perceive all around you. We perceive chaos in our civilization. That is true. Theoretically speaking, materialism holds chaos in it. It is monstrous that when someone opens a book today he is presented with a mass of unconnected individual insights. Nothing but details, and chaos everywhere, also in the social life out there.

What is someone who is not part of the theosophical life going to do? He'll offer suggestions as to how things may be done in a better way. Think of the many recipes for social relationships humanity has known! The theosophical movement differs from all other movements in that it does not offer recipes, and does not say how things might be done in a better way. Efforts to find recipes do nothing for our future culture and civilization. Nor do discussions on how to create peace in the world. Setting up programmes is something that belongs to the past. The future depends on the existence of people who act in the right way out of their own resources. In theosophy we do not say what is the right thing to do, but show people how they can learn to do the right thing. If thirty people come together, it would not be theosophy to say that if they have a particular constitution they will live together in peace. Instead, every individual is shown how he needs to reach a level of inner development where he'll find the right way out of his own resources in his relationship with others. That is the mission of theosophy in a movement that serves the future.

Taking a broad view, we have been considering the world situation, and above all war and peace, in various lectures,⁴⁸ also the issue of women’s rights and the social question. As he becomes free, torn away from the compulsions of his environment, man is at the same time taken into the higher worlds, for he needs to be truly free to enter those higher worlds. No one can ever enter the higher world under compulsion. Here we see the good side even of chaos. If our whole civilization had not fallen into chaos, individuals could not have unfolded freely out of their own resources. They would always have been bound to their environment. The old order must break apart and become chaos. We face great changes in this respect and no one can hope to reform anything in the world except by means of inner development. Anything else would be amateurish prophecy.

We have tried in these two sessions—the last one and this one—to grasp the significance of the spiritual scientific movement as a movement for civilization. The next time we'll consider how human karma comes into play within the whole progress of civilization and look at individual karmic relationships of the human being. In other words, we'll consider what human beings take from one incarnation to the next and how they take part in the world process as they progress from incarnation to incarnation. This is the task we intend to take on in a week’s time.

• 36. Differential calculus makes it possible to work with differentials, i.e. infinitely small differences. Together with integral calculus it is of major importance for all the problems in the exact sciences and mechanics. Differential and integral calculus, known together as 'infinitesimal calculus', were created by Leibniz and Newton, working independently of each other, at the end of the 17th century.
• 37. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). His famous Du contrat social (1762; Engl. transl. in 1764: A Treatise on the Social Contract) was in opposition to the optimism over progress in the Age of Enlightenment. Rousseau saw the artificial world of civilization as the root of all evil and demanded that humanity should return to nature. His theory of the ‘general will’ provided the basis for the constitution of the French Revolution. (see Heyer K. Beiträge zur Geschichte des Abendlandes, VI. Band: ‘Gestalten und Ereignisse vor der Französischen Revolution’, Stuttgart 1964).
• 38. Böhme, Jakob (1575–1624), theosophical mystic. His first biography was written by Abraham von Franckenberg (died 1652). Later biographies in German: Fechner H.A., Jakob Böhme, sein Leben und seine Schriften, Gorlitz 1857; Claasen J. Jakob Böhmes Leben und seine theosophischen Werke, 3 Bde, Stuttgart 1885; Martensen H. Jakob Böhme, London 1949; in English: Hobhouse S. Jakob Böhme, His Life and Teaching 1950.
• 39. Agrippa von Nettesheim, Henricus Cornelius (1486–1535). De occulta philosophia, Cologne 1510; De incertitude et vanitate scientiarum, Cologne 1527 (German by F. Mauthner, Über die Eitelkeit und Unsicherheit der Wissenschaften 1913).
• 40. Trithemius, Johannes (1462–1515), Abbot of Sponheim Benedictine Monastery at age 23, later of Schottenkloster in Wurzburg, Germany. Wrote among other things Staganographia and Polygraphia to provide instruction in an occult symbolic script; Antipalus maleficiorum, directions on how to fend off black magic practices; De septem intelligentiis libellus, the book of the second planetary spirits. See Silbernagl I. Johannes Trithemius (in German), 2. AO. Regensburg 1885.
• 41. Möbius, Paul Julius (1853–1907), neurologist and lecturer in Leipzig. Über den Begriff der Hysterie und andere Vorwürfe vorwiegend psychologischer Art, Neurologische Beiträge 1. Heft, Leipzig 1894. See also Nachrichten der Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung Nr 22 (Michaeli 1968) S. 30f.
• 42. Möbius P.J. Über Robert Schumanns Krankheit Leipzig 1916.
• 43. Rasmussen E. Jesus. Eine vergleichende psycho-pathologische Studie Leipzig 1905; de Loosten (G. Lomer) Jesus Christus vom Standpunkte des Psychiaters Bamberg 1905.
• 44. ‘All forms of mental disorder had to be known, understanding their connection with physical changes... Medically speaking there is only normal and abnormal. If someone deviates from the norm, the rule, the usual, and that abnormality reaches a certain level which goes beyond the ‘range of health’, on which there are different views, the person is abnormal or, and essentially this is the same, pathological.’ Möbius, P. J. Ausgewählte Werke Bd 2, Leipzig 1903, S. 6.
• 45. ‘It may of course happen that someone with persecution mania has been subject to persecution, as was the case with Rousseau. But the majority of patients have never been persecuted and we simply do not know why persecution ideas in particular are so often signs of brain disease.’ Loc. cit. S. 22.
• 46. Hölderlin, (Johann Christian) Friedrich (1770–1843). German poet.
• 47. Heraclitus (died c. 460 BC). ‘Pre-Socratic’ Greek philosopher.
• 48. Berlin 12 October 1905: The present situation of the world. War, peace and the science of the spirit. Anthroposophical News Sheet 1945: 13: 35-40; Hamburg 17 Nov. 1906 (not in English); Hamburg 2 March 1908 (not in English) [all in GA 54]