The Rudolf Steiner Archive

What Christianity has become in the world was long in preparation. The core saying of Christianity is “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”

In the most ancient times everything was imbued with a religious atmosphere. Those who were to know something of the secrets of the world were prepared for their divine calling in mystery schools. There they were initiated into the riddles of existence. The secret schools of Egypt also served this purpose. Above all, those who were to be initiated had to have attained a certain maturity in life. Then one had to undergo very specific exercises that prepared the person to free themselves from the sensual, to purify the passions, so that the person no longer clung to the views that come through the gates of the senses. He had to free himself from this and reach a certain maturity. In the mystery schools, one received scientific, occult instruction. In it, it was made clear to the student how the spirit has developed. They thought of a sleeping god in the stone, then a god who has a little more consciousness in the plant and so on. The world spirit then woke up completely in man. All sciences were imbued with these views. They knew how man has developed through the realms. Goethe also depicted this in the development of the homunculus. Everything that is spread out in nature is, as it were, an outstretched human being. Every single link in the human being is related to something out there in the world.

The physician in the sense of Paracelsus has recognized the connection between a remedy and the human organism; that man has been related to anything in nature. He saw the deity spread out in nature and summarized in man again. When man had attained this knowledge, when he had undergone certain exercises, he was brought into a completely closed room in a different state of consciousness. There the person underwent a very specific process that lasted three and a half days. He now experienced in reality in the soul room what he had learned in class, namely the emergence of Horus from Isis and Osiris. The god really descended to earth, and in descending, he was spread out in the natural realms.

Man then learned to understand himself as a spiritual being. The pupil experienced an entombment, a resurrection and an ascension in all religious mysteries. The profound myths, which are symbolic representations of great truths of the world, are not contrived.

The Germanic myths also show in detail, in a wonderfully vivid way, what the mystery school student experiences. What was told of Wotan and so on were symbolic experiences in the mysteries. In the astral, the mystery school student experienced the descent of the god, the spreading of the god, entombment, resurrection and ascension. All this always takes place in the astral realm. It is a familiar experience in the astral realm. What the initiates were able to see in ancient times, people in Christianity were supposed to believe, even if they did not see it. Christianity was a mystical fact.

What took place in the astral realm for the mystery school student took place on the physical plane as the incarnation of Christ. The mystery school student had anticipated all of this. The physical is only a condensation of what happens in the realm of the soul.

Every external action that takes place in the physical world is only a condensation of an often-repeated action in the astral realm. There, rhythmic repetitions of what is to happen physically take place beforehand. Nothing happens in the physical that has not been repeated many times in the astral realm. The physical is a stepping out onto the physical plane of what had taken place in the astral realm. The incarnation of Christ was the physical realization of an astral experience.

Paul was the first to experience the incarnation of God within himself, to experience it inwardly. For him, the conviction was drawn solely from the walk to Damascus. After the incarnation of Christ, one could become a nature mystic on the physical plane, in contrast to the soul mystic of antiquity. The fact that Christ was there has brought about something that was not there before. Mystics like those of Christianity were not there before. Budhi, grace or gnosis, the second ability of the higher trinity, could only be attained through the mysteries. Christ could only come to life within through the incarnated Logos in the flesh.

The mystery students of antiquity were called prophets. They told of their experiences in the astral realm, which took place there repeatedly before becoming physical. Everything that is a mystery today will become reality in the future. Everything secret will one day be revealed. The fulfillment of the old mystery is the incarnation of Christ. This provided the opportunity to tell something new that would happen in the future, when the time was fulfilled.

Humanity has developed through several root races in this round, and we are now in the fifth root race. In this root race, the development of the intellect is to take place. The previous root race was the Atlantean one, which lived on the lost continent of Atlantis. They did not yet have our thinking mind, they still had an [intuitive] visual faculty.

Spiritual life within, in the sense of the material age, is called a 'sealed book' in the occult language. You have the option of hiding your inner self. A lion or a fish will openly display their character, but humans do not do that now. Since he has been processing external impressions with his passions, he is a sealed book. This begins with the fifth root race. First it begins in Indian culture. In the Vedas we still have a faint reflection of this ancient Indian culture. The second culture was the Persian, the third the Egyptian-Babylonian-Assyrian, but especially the ancient Semites. Judaism is one of its main expressions. The fourth culture begins around eight hundred BC and is related to the Druidic and Celtic cultures. Christianity was founded within the fourth sub-race.

The conquest of the third sub-race by the fourth is expressed in a spirited myth in the Trojan War. Homer was a mystic, a “blind seer” - that is the constant expression of the mystics by which the seer was designated. The Trojan War is the external, symbolic expression of the replacement of the third sub-race by the fourth sub-race, the replacement of the priestly culture by the kings. It was only in the fourth sub-race that the combining intellect fully developed. The means by which man of the fourth sub-race has overcome the third sub-race is the combining mind, the cunning of Odysseus. The horse is the symbol of the mind. It is also the symbol for every sub-race within the fifth root race.

What has been sealed in the first four sub-races is the mind in its most diverse forms. Through Christianity, the mind is internalized and spiritualized. The mission of Christianity will only be fulfilled in the sixth sub-race. This mission is foretold, and in the sixth sub-race people will have developed in such a way that what is now hidden in man will be unsealed. The seals will gradually be broken by the Mystic Lamb at the throne of God. During the sixth sub-race, six seals will be broken. This shows how the intellect will gradually emerge.

The first seal: a white horse appears. This is what happened to the first sub-race that went out to populate areas of Asia, with the first secular culture. The solution of the second seal means the whole culture of the second root race, which is based on war. Occultism does not see these conditions as past. Today, alongside the other cultures, we still have the culture of the second sub-race, the red horse. This is also a veiled intellectual point of view.

At the third seal, the black horse appears, the symbol of the third sub-race - in which the law, justice, is expressed. Paul writes about this law in contrast to grace. The god of the third sub-race was a god of justice. The rider on the black horse holds the scales in his hand as a symbol of this.

The fourth horse, a pale horse, signifies the dying to the lower nature, the realization of what the higher life is. At the fifth seal the higher life begins. There is no horse again. The white robe of the souls is the outer garment that they receive when the inner is awakened. The sixth seal is the last that can be opened.

In the fifth Atlantean sub-race, it was the Proto-Semites who went forth to found the sub-race of the fifth root race. All sub-races of the fifth root race contain a proportion of these Proto-Semites. In the seventh sub-race, man will not only feel Christ mystically, but will also recognize Him. This realization is represented by spiritual sounds. The spiritual man will then be able to hear the inner word through initiation, which is a presentiment of clairaudience. This is expressed by the trumpets. The seven sub-races of the sixth root race are indicated by the sounding out into the world through the trumpets of the angels. The sixth root race is a counter-image to the Lemurian root race. In it, individual karma ceases again. A higher state occurs. Then man consciously attains what he previously went through in a dream-like state. In the sixth root race, the decision comes. The one unites completely with the material, the other completely with the spiritual. The angel of the abyss pulls down man, who burdens himself with kinship with matter. Man has made the kinship with the material so great that he is pulled down by it.

The differentiation of sun, earth and moon develops in reverse in the sixth sub-race. The sun and moon are depicted as the two witnesses of earthly development.

With the seventh root race, the earth enters the astral state. This is described in the Apocalypse. Everything is born in the astral globe. Then everything on earth will shine and live out its soul. The soul of the sun and moon then stands out. This is the woman, clothed with the sun and the moon at her feet. She carries in her body the state that the earth will undergo.

The astral body develops out of the human animal. The beast with seven heads is what is left of the seven races. The seven parts are the seven parts of man, and the three are the hidden higher parts, the logoi.

The two-horned beast: The horn always represents a globe. The seven globes are seven horns. The Earth represents two such globes for the occultist. Mars and Mercury together form the Earth for him. The Earth is the two-horned beast in the astral Mars and Mercury.

The occultist places the globes on the hundreds places. On the ones places he puts the sub-races, on the tens places the root races, on the hundred places the globe. At the sixth sub-race of the sixth root race on the mental globe, the sixth, Johannes stops. He says where the human animal has arrived, namely at wisdom, the number 666.

What now develops through a Manvantara is called by the apocalypticist a new earth, a new Jerusalem. He calls the old one Babylon. This is what was the main thing in the whole round: Kama-Manas, the characteristic of the whole fourth round of the earth. Babylon is overcome in the fifth round, Kama is then overcome.

In the fifth round, the result of karma can be seen. People will bear on their faces what has developed within them. Most people will then have reached a point in their development where they have settled their karma; but those who have acquired higher knowledge for selfish purposes will be eliminated from development. They will go to the eighth sphere. Those who eliminate themselves out of selfishness will go there.

During the fifth round, the elimination cannot yet take place completely. The recognizing element emerges from the Manichaean. But the creative and lasting can only emerge from the Budhi element. During the fifth round, it is decided what will be separated. But during the sixth round, the complete separation takes place. This only occurs in the Budhic development of the sixth round. The casting out of evil from the Earth is described in chapter 17, verse 10 of the Apocalypse. Five have fallen, one is – the sixth round – and one will come – the seventh round. The Beast that was, has gone to ruin; it is the casting out of evil into the eighth sphere.

(The Physical, Mental And Spiritual Entities Of Man) Reincarnation And Karma (Re-embodiment Of The Spirit And Destiny)

Report in the “Stadt-Anzeiger” of April 29, 1905, morning edition, second page

On Tuesday, Dr. Rudolf Steiner, the Secretary General of the German branch of the Theosophical Society, spoke about the three entities of the human being: physical, mental and spiritual. On Thursday, he discussed the basic concepts of theosophy, reincarnation and karma, and the re-embodiment of the spirit and destiny. In the lectures, the speaker explained how the human being is made up of different entities and how the practical mystic, by undergoing a certain training, is able to turn his attention completely away from the physical body so that he no longer sees it, but instead looks at the space filled by a similar one, the etheric body, which is extraordinarily finely organized and is the carrier of life. In the ordinary person, it is just as mortal as the physical body. The third is the astral body, the carrier of desire and suffering, wish and passion; the fourth limb, the actual self, dwells in it. If, according to the speaker, the human being develops further, then the transformed astral body comes to manas, the fifth limb of the human being; in the same way, the human being can transform his ether body into budhi; and the immortal seventh limb of the being is the highest state of perfection.

In the second lecture, Dr. Steiner spoke about the meaning of life and evoked two ideas: the question of reincarnation and that of human destiny. Reincarnation, as the speaker explained, means nothing less than that man has to recognize something eternal and lasting in human nature, that this lasting is not exhausted in the time between birth and death, but that life continues after death, in order to later embody itself anew and take up the cycle again. We are not dealing with one human life, but with many, and with the fact that what is present has already been there and will return. Above all birth and death there is something higher that reaches beyond it; life shows itself in ever new repetition. As science teaches, only life can arise from life; theosophy adds that the soul can only arise from the soul. In the case of humans, the individual is described, in the case of animals, the species; humans have a biography, animals do not; individuality belongs to humans alone, that is what remains, as in the case of animals, the species. Just as humans belong to the animal kingdom, Theosophy describes them, like natural science, as a species, but as an individuality, their essence as a species is not exhausted. Through his activity and way of life, the human being in the next life transforms his individuality spiritually, just as the animal changes physically within many generations through a changed way of life. We have determined our destiny through our previous activity and determine destiny for future lives. The practical mystic and the wise see only experiences and lessons in pain and suffering, which they would not want to miss because they have learned to overcome them. The speaker concluded his lecture by saying that as long as man does not work on himself, external forces will work on him. The more he frees himself from these, the more man becomes master of his destiny, as far as it is bound to his astral body, and can cope with karma. This also explains the words of a great Theosophist: Man is not immortal, he makes himself immortal. — The lectures, which were received with approval, were followed by stimulating discussions.

Let us take a look at the short life of Friedrich von Hardenberg, known as Novalis. Novalis is more a memory of a past life than a life in itself, a fine personality, an individuality who, from the very beginning, had the most profound spirituality as an inclination within him. One is always amazed at how Novalis combines the highest intellectuality, the sharpest thinking, with a wonderful spirituality.

He was a trained mining engineer who had a complete mastery of mathematics and the physical sciences, who combined mathematical thinking with a fine, delicate, and yet fiery, ether-like spirituality, who lived this harmoniously in a way that is perhaps unparalleled in life. You have to be able to empathize with what is contained in Novalis' sayings and fragments to realize how deeply he penetrated into the inner structure of the world. You also have to be able to empathize with his enthusiasm for mathematics. For him, it is a great poem that introduces us to the secrets of the world. Man ponders the connections between space and time. If he can imbibe the harmony of the stars, which revolve around the sun according to eternal laws, with the formative forces that work within the earth in ore veins, crystal formations and so on, then he can sense the living essence of the world.

Novalis is filled with true enthusiasm for mathematics. He calls mathematics, which can show such paths of understanding, a sublime religion. It is wonderful how he is able to embrace this seemingly dry science with fervent devotion. For him, the sensory world existed only as a reflection of eternally living spiritual facts, which reveal themselves to earthly perception in natural laws.

Novalis fell deeply in love with a thirteen-year-old girl who died soon after their engagement. The shock he experienced was tremendous. It opened the gates of the spiritual world to him. Novalis speaks with the deceased as with a living person; he called his own further life a 'her-after-death'. She is always present to him. The friendship that later united him with another girl can be called a supersensible one. She is like an emblem for the spiritual being that hovers above and with whom he will completely merge.

There was a power of spirituality in him that stands unparalleled in the modern age.

In earlier lives, Novalis had undergone profound initiations. Thus, he entered this life with a predisposition for a true, real understanding of world events. He appeared in the spiritual sky like a meteor, scattering spirit everywhere in a way rarely found in the expressions of newer spirits.

The fresh, youthful nature of Novalis was characterized by two poles: a great intellectuality and a deep spirituality. The whole wealth of his manifold creative thinking converged in him into an all-embracing sense of totality, which had its source of life in a divine source. He sensed the source everywhere as spirit. Novalis called this consciousness “magic”. The creative imagination, the feeling of the soul was for him a reproduction of the great cosmic feeling; it became for him “magical idealism”. He experienced his ego as related to the ego of all other beings, and he felt that all beings were related to each other. Thus Novalis merged with the spiritual weaving and life of nature.

In the “Apprentices of Sais” you will find the story of the young man “Hyacinth”, who has an intimate relationship with the creatures of nature. He and the girl “Rosenblüte” are bound by a warm friendship. The animals of the forest and the flowers of the fields are his companions in his secrets. It is told how he meets a man with a long beard who has a book from which Hyacinth learns a great deal. Now he is driven to seek out what constitutes the innermost being of man. This, what man must seek, Novalis called “the blue flower”. It is the seeking of the higher self in man.

We also find this significant symbol in oriental mysticism as the lotus flower. It is a symbol of the higher self, of chaste, purified humanity, in which the self can unfold. It is still enclosed as if by petals – later it will bear fruit and seeds. Novalis had brought such knowledge with him from his previous incarnations.

We are now told how Hyacinth wanders to the land of secrets, always searching, until he finds a veiled figure. When he removes the veil, he sees little roses.

In Novalis's “Hymns to the Night”, his experience of cosmic-human unity is expressed lyrically. This is also the case in the “Spiritual Songs”, this harrowing document of merging with Christ.

Everything he wanted to say to the world, Novalis set out in the novel “Heinrich von Ofterdingen”. But he died before he could finish it. Let us recall in our minds what he intended to accomplish.

We are transported back to the time of the Wartburg Singers' Contest when Heinrich was young. But the course of events takes us out of the world of the present and into a fairytale world. We have to transport ourselves back to the time when the area of the Atlantic Ocean was still land. There was once a lively life there, people whose activities would indeed seem like a fairytale to present-day people. It was a land where rain and sunshine were not distributed as they are now. The sun was hidden by fog, the air was watery. It is not for nothing that the Nordic sagas called Atlantis 'Niflheim', that is, Mistheim. There was no distinction between rain and sunshine, only a gradual transition from water to air. A rainbow would not have been possible there. The events of those ancient times are preserved in the legends of the flood, the ark, the rainbow, and one stands amazed at the infinitely deep truths contained in the ancient religious records. At first glance, the biblical account of the rainbow seems allegorical. But here we are faced with a fact: a rainbow would not have been possible in ancient Atlantis. It is one of those sacred moments that overwhelm the occult researcher when he is transported back in time to these older times.

Novalis's seer's eye looked into this ancient realm, which one can truly speak of as a fairytale realm. Man did not yet have his reasoning mind back then; he lived life with nature. He built his house in such a way that it grew out of the rocks and plants. There were no myths back then. What are the myths that our peoples tell each other? The gift of shaping worlds in poetry is only peculiar to our post-Atlantic race; the Atlanteans did not have it. But the Atlanteans still had the gift of transforming plants, even animals and humans. The metamorphic powers of Circe in the Odyssey point to such metamorphic powers of humans. Everything that humans bring forth from within as myth, the people of Atlantis had experienced and seen with their own eyes. The great poets of our time have preserved the images of their poetry from what they had seen on Atlantis itself.

Novalis interweaves his own memories with the story of “Heinrich von Ofterdingen” and brings the ancient Atlantis to life in his tales. He then takes us to more recent times, to the period of city foundations. This time brings with it the emergence of the bourgeoisie and material culture. The rise of the bourgeoisie is linked to external, material culture. What was previously poetry becomes something else.

The origin of our poetry points to the mysteries. We have to go back to the time when the sacred mysteries were the source of inspiration for the poetry of Homer or Aeschylus and Sophocles, when ancient culture laid the foundation for what worked as a spiritual force in Homer and Aeschylus. Only after long trials were the purified admitted to the higher mysteries, the primeval mysteries, which took place in the supersensible, in the astral world. But there was a reflection of this in later times, for example in the Eleusinian mysteries. There the so-called primal drama was enacted. It was depicted how God, the soul of the world, descended into matter and how the descending, suffering and resurrecting God shows the way of redemption. It was the choir that, as in an echo, expressed the language of cosmic events in the ancient Greek mystery drama.

In Aeschylus we experience the transition of the ancient sacred primal drama into the secular drama. It blossoms from a branch that has grown out of the mystery being. The other branch was philosophy, and the third branch was religion.

In the mystery centers, the ancients possessed the unity of religion, poetry and science. There, science was vividly demonstrated. As three branches from one root, these areas worked side by side and into each other. It was only later that they diverged. This separation of the three areas was necessary so that each could become perfect in its own way. So they had to go their separate ways for a while. Great minds seek to reunite what has had to separate in this way. Therefore, we find the striving for the unification of the arts in such phenomena as, for example, in the musical drama of Bayreuth. The aim is to create a total work of art that encompasses the three areas of intellectual life on earth.

Poetry arose out of truth. Originally, poetry was nothing other than the garment of truth. Novalis looks back to primeval times, when poets strove to express the highest truth in their works. If we turn our gaze to the primal poems of humanity, we do indeed find this expression in them. In Atlantis, man was still at one with nature, with his God, and the mysteries presented a picture of reality as it was experienced. Later, memories of these times were revived in the myths. These memories were something sacred and real for Novalis. He said to himself: In the future, what people still carry hidden within them as memories will become reality again. What we create out of our imagination as poets and thus bring into consciousness will one day become fact. The present world is growing into a new spiritual reality. As people carry the seeds of poetry into material life, something very special also grows out of material life. The guide on the way to this new world is Sophia, wisdom.

Novalis sets the events of his story in the time of the rising city culture, in that time when the outer life begins to become material, when it passes into the civil element of the physical plan. For him, the bearers of the future are the poets. The seed of poetry is placed in material culture. Novalis lets Heinrich von Ofterdingen be a kind of seer. He dreams of the blue flower, dreams that are not like other dreams, but a reflection of spiritual reality. He lets him experience different things: legends and historical events come to life, for example, the time of the Crusades shines in, the spiritual that flowed from the Orient into Europe, in the description of the prisoners in the castle.

The most important thing for Henry is his encounter with a miner who has spent almost his entire life underground. It is described what one can feel when working in the shafts under the earth. The stars of heaven shine towards him like the future. In the depths of the earth, he finds his past, as it were. The metals are wondrously related to man. What has developed down there over the millennia, the secret of the divine world order, is brought up by the miner, thrusts itself towards the miner. The selflessness in the work is brought home to us when it is described how the gold is brought to the surface. The miner is only interested in how the gold comes out of the earth: in it he recognizes the creative divinity. It is a beautiful, moral description of the selfless interest in what would otherwise inflame people's selfishness. The miner, who always works in the dark, only has the right idea of the magnificence of light.

Heinrich then meets the old hermit in the cave. The hermit has a wealth of life experience behind him and records it in a book. He talks about how only he who sees in all that is mortal a parable of the immortal is a true historian. This encounter deepens Heinrich's experiences again.

Then, in Augsburg, Heinrich meets Master Klingsor, who is a seer. In a fairy tale, we learn from him what the future will be for all of humanity: a higher world will be born out of this world. There is a poetic magic in the story of the young man's love for Mathilde, who later turns out to be Cyane again – a reference to the fact that the ephemeral is a symbol of the eternal. He knows that out of what is now a hard, stony reality, another world will grow in the future.

Then the absorption into the astral world is described: the land of Astralis symbolizes evolution, development. Poetry becomes a magical force that transforms people. Novalis believes in the magical power of the imagination, where it does not flow licentiously, but rather places itself under the guidance of Sophia and permeates the whole world with the power of creative Eros.

We may see a reincarnated Pythagorean in Novalis.

Yoga means striving for union with the source of divine truth. The one who strives for this is a yogi. A yogi must lead a certain way of life; in so doing, he seeks to open the source of truth within himself. Certain things that a yogi must strive for cannot be carried out in our [Western] life. But that doesn't make them any less true. Sometimes it is better to renounce than to not renounce in terms of development. For example, every killing takes a person back in development. The Hindu strictly adheres to this. He would not kill vermin, for example. But within our Western way of life, one cannot adhere to such a rule, even if it remains true.

Man achieves union with the primary source of divine truth by purifying his three bodies more and more.

In the Christian mystery, the mystic says to himself: “I should achieve union - the unio - with the Holy Spirit, the Word or the Son and the Father.” This is achieved by purifying the astral body, the etheric body and the physical body.

When the astral body is purified, then man can unite with the Holy Spirit.

If we want to form thoughts about the world, then there must be thoughts in it. The whole world must carry within it the plan that one subsequently thinks. The [creative] world thought is called the “Great Architect” by the Freemasons and the “Holy Ghost” by the Christians.

If you look at the world, you will find wisdom. The whole world, down to the last detail, is built by this wisdom. For example, a bone is so wisely [built] from infinitely fine beams that no engineer could even begin to imagine it. Everywhere you look, you will find the wisdom of the world, which we extract in our everyday thinking and in science. The ordinary person does not consider how to organize his actions so that they fit into the plan of the world. The yoga student transforms his drives; he consciously follows the laws of logic. Thus, his astral body no longer works against his ego, but his ego illuminates his astral body. In this way, he achieves catharsis. Then he becomes one with divine wisdom; this is the union with the divine spirit. Our astral then unites with the spirit of the world. This can only be achieved in stages, by going through certain meditations. He tries to live within himself by devoting himself in a certain way to exercises according to the instructions of experienced people.

The religions strive to fill man with thoughts that are independent of space and time. Our everyday thoughts are largely produced by the environment in space and time. Just think about how many of our thoughts have arisen from the fact that we live at a certain time, under certain circumstances, in a certain place, in a certain environment.

The union with the Holy Spirit or the World Tree Master is the first step of yoga that transforms our animal nature into a life of virtue. Man then imprints the eternal in the world through his actions, if he regularly, even if only a few minutes a day, occupies himself with thoughts of eternity. Even if the actions of the meditator and the non-meditator appear the same on the outside, everything that comes from a meditator has a completely different effect because something of the general world spirit flows into his actions.

The etheric body must also be transformed. It is also worked on alongside during the transformation of the astral body. The astral body can be transformed through great, ideal feelings, through immersion in great truths; but this does not go beyond the soul. But working on the etheric body goes beyond the soul. To achieve this, a person must study those things that are related to their external nature, for example, temperaments. Usually one of the temperaments prevails in a person. The melancholic person lets little affect himself from the outside, but he is very attached to these effects. The phlegmatic person also lets little affect himself, but he is not very attached to these effects. In the case of the choleric person, there is a strong influence [from the outside] and also a strong after-effect. In the case of the sanguine person, one also sees strong impressions, but no after-effects.

Only when we know ourselves well in this way can we begin to educate our temperament. The yogi must bring harmony to the four temperaments. This already reaches down into the etheric body. Much has been achieved by the person who, for example, is able to curb his attention through self-education. Much has been achieved by the person who has become a level-headed person out of an irascible person. (Usually, a person gives up the temperament he was born with even at death). One must delve into the way the temperaments work. The yogi studies them and also applies them. He is constantly striving to educate the missing aspects of his being. If you have managed to change your temperament, you have achieved a lot. If a person who is hot-tempered becomes harmonious in one lifetime, it is much more significant than if a person was harmonious all his life. With every change in lifestyle, a person acquires a bit of vitality. Some people cannot stand “working on their temper. But if he can endure it, he gains vitality and becomes younger at the same time. This also applies to the physical when he changes his way of life. If he can endure it, if he can successfully make such a fundamental change to himself several times, then he will also grow older in years, he will then become younger. This intervention in the inner being is a real rejuvenation process.

The etheric body is the carrier of life, [and when the human spirit works into this etheric body, it supplies it with spiritual powers, rejuvenating powers].

The yogi must regulate the life functions; he must do what evolution demands. Those who want to understand how to nourish themselves as yogis must take into account the connections with nature to some extent.

This also applies to their food.

We can observe various currents in the historical development of humanity. In the period from Augustine to Calvin, the inner life of Christianity attained great depth in mysticism. External science, on the other hand, stood still. It was an involution of science and an evolution of the mystical life. Then, starting with Copernicus, there began an involution of the mystical life and an evolution of science. Now an evolution of the mystical life has begun again. Thus life swings back and forth. Man has gone through such congestions and forward movements in his evolution. The first great congestion occurred when man entered into the Saturn existence. He came from a different development. He could have undergone a one-sided high development without this, but he would not have been able to reach the earth. The sun existence is then a progress of development; the moon existence is a congestion. The earth existence is an equilibrium.

On Saturn, man was a mineral being; that was a congestion. On the sun, he was vegetable; that was a furthering. On the moon, there was another congestion, and on the earth, the equilibrium. There, man must choose for himself whether he wants to remain in the congestion or whether he wants to develop further into new stages of existence. Everything that is animalistic, that originated on the moon wave, signifies a retrogression. Everything that is on the sun promotes progress. That is why eating plants has a beneficial effect. In contrast, animal food contains inhibiting lunar power. This is how man brings himself back.

Initially, as the earth developed, humans first repeated the earlier conditions on earth. There is a great difference between what is warm-blooded and what is cold-blooded in the animal kingdom. Warm-blooded animals are created by Kama working from within. Passion, or Kama, produces warm blood. In fish, on the other hand, Kama works from the outside as the World Kama. The fish egg is hatched by the sun. This is the case with all cold-blooded animals. The warm-blooded animals are the ones most closely related to humans. For those who aspire to purify their Kama, it is a good exercise to abstain from all warm-blooded animals. If they eat a piece of meat, they eat the whole animal. The Kama of the animal is undivided in every single piece of meat.

Before man had reached the stage of becoming warm-blooded, he warmed his body from the outside. In the case of lower animals, kama also acts from the outside. A fish is the expression of the whole world kama. When you eat a fish, you eat the whole world kama with it. He [man] then basically works against evolution because he associates himself with the blockages from the outside. He fraternizes with something that is tremendously inhibiting. It is similar with the consumption of eggs. They are shaped by the general Kama. With them, one absorbs the general Kama.

Favorable for the yogi, on the other hand, is everything that grows directly in the sun: grains, fruits, and so on. Less favorable is what thrives in the moldy earth, under the earth, including everything onion-like and garlic-like. Potatoes are also not among the beneficial things. The potato is a stem transplanted into the earth, a shoot from an older plant that grew above the earth. It only migrated into the earth with the later development of the earth. The leek-like plants grew on the moon, firmly rooted in the living things within. Mistletoe is also a harmful plant, a parasite. Some plants are just as harmful as lower animals, snails and so on.

[Mistel, which still today parasitically takes root on living things, is a remnant of the moon; also mushrooms that thrive on soil that still contains living things.

There are two natures in man, a lower and a higher one.

[So wrote Goethe:]

Two souls, alas! dwell in my breast:
The one wants to separate from the other:
The one, in its crude love of pleasure
Clings with clinging organs to the world,
The other forcibly lifts itself from the dust
To the realms of high ancestors.

Everything that belongs to the formation of warm blood, flesh, muscles, and bones is of a lower nature. Flesh, muscles, and bones are something that has hardened from the development on the moon. The development on earth should be an upward development. Therefore, man should only enjoy what is connected with it.

Everything in the animal that is connected with life itself, that belongs to the animal's life process, is beneficial, for example milk and everything that is prepared from it. From the occult point of view, milk, cheese and so on have a beneficial effect because they belong to the beneficial life process of the animal.

[Milk is therefore beneficial, also because animals give it up voluntarily. Some seek a substitute for meat, especially those who live as vegetarians because they do not want to kill. They eat plants that contain substances similar to those found in animals: they eat legumes. However, these are detrimental to occult development. They originate from the moon in that they are embedded in a shell. This separates them from the sun's energy and they tend towards hardening. Therefore, they are not favorable for occult development. Their consumption often has dire consequences. They make the dream life impure, it becomes desolate and confused. This can often be observed in vegetarians. But the vision of the higher worlds should begin with the vision in dreams. It is therefore desirable that this vision only allows pure, beautiful images to arise.

Roots also tend towards hardening. In contrast, anything that is bathed in sunlight is beneficial: flowers, leaves, fruits.

From the mineral kingdom, anything that separates out of mineral solutions as a sediment is harmful, for example, all salts. These should be avoided if possible.

Wine has only existed since the Earth cycle. It would have been impossible earlier. Everything that has the composition of alcohol disappears again in the future. Two thousand six hundred years ago, wine was a great rarity. Eight hundred years before Christ, the consumption of wine began. In the past, it was something extraordinarily rare. Eight hundred years before Christ, a new world cycle begins, the fourth sub-race of the fifth root race. In the previous races, the consumption of spirits played a minor role. In the first races, it was completely out of the question for them to drink wine. They knew that those who consume wine cannot go beyond the four principles that nature has given them. He cannot purify the astral body to such an extent that the manasic develops. The ancient Indians knew this; only the later Persians knew something about the enjoyment of wine. The enjoyment of wine was only really introduced in the fourth sub-race. In this race, man was to refrain from the higher principles. [His earthly personality was to emerge and be purified through man's own work.] He should purify his earthly personality. It was the education in Kama-Manas, the resurrection of the fleshly, the personal in Kama-Manas [- Noah - Melchizedek -]. In Christianity, the education of man was to emphasize the personality, the one life between birth and death. It was still natural for the Egyptian slave to return one day. The teaching of reincarnation and karma had to be excluded for a time, so that the valuable part of the personality, of Kama Manas, could come out. This is physically achieved by drinking wine. In Christianity, drinking wine is permitted.

Water is really the drink of him who wants to look up into the higher worlds, wine is the drink of him who does not want to look up into the higher worlds. The yogi must therefore refrain from drinking wine, because only then can he truly grasp the higher worlds. When a person begins to work on his etheric body, he must take himself in hand in this way.

The work on the astral body takes place, as it were, within the soul. The work on the etheric body is done by acting on the temperament and purifying the physical body. When man forces the etheric body under the power of his ego, then man becomes such that he absorbs into himself what works as [spiritual] substance in the world plan.

[Part of proper thinking is being able to reason logically. Coffee has the same effect in the digestive tract and on thinking [...]. It causes logically ordered thinking, but in a dependent way [...]. If a person wants to think independently, they must free themselves from the craving for coffee.

Erratic, unstable thinking is correlated with tea. It has a dispersing effect on the upper levels.

The question is what kind of person we should become. The organs that we have in common with predators should disappear; the organs that plants require should develop. Man should eat food that comprehends the meaning of his becoming. Not too much, but not too little protein either. Legumes contain too much protein. Those who eat them are overwhelmed by a lower mode of thinking. The vegetarian must at the same time acquire a spiritual mode of thinking. Comprehend nature in its becoming! [...]

The significance of the Lord's Supper: to move from the nutrition of dead animals to that of dead plants. This is to be replaced by a nutrition that does not kill the life in the plants [...]. At the end of the fifth cultural epoch, no animal products will be consumed anymore. Through Christ, the physical body is being killed in the entire human race. In the middle of the sixth root race, there will be no more physical bodies. Then the human being will be ethereal. Then the human being will produce mineral nutrition in the laboratory.

At the end of the Atlantean era, everything that produces egoism will be done. In the sixth cultural epoch of the fifth root race, the I will again come to higher development. Meditation:

I break the pride of the Philistines
And tear the bloody flesh from their mouths
And the abominations from their teeth
Surely your King will enter with you.
He is just, full of victory and humility
And he rides on a donkey
On a young foal of the she-donkey.

Hosiana [...]

The Lord will help him
Like precious stones they will
Rise up on his soil.
For what good things do they have
And what beauty do they have:
Grain that makes the young men [...]
And must [...]
That makes the maidens bloom.

[Sach 9,6-17]

Blood of plants, which retains vegetative blood and milk. ([Soma] was an intoxicating drink among the Indians made from rice).]

Thought is the substance that flows to us through becoming word. [Through the word, one person can communicate to another what lives substantially in each of them as thought.] The air wave is only the form for this substance. Imagine this applied to the world. At first, everything there is in outer forms: minerals, plants and animals. The divine word corresponds to the outer world. This divine Word resounds in the world, and the forms of things arise.

In the divine soul rests the hidden Father-thought. Then it streams out as the divine Word [the second Logos]; then the divine Word becomes the forms of things. We understand the spirit as the form of things; but the Word itself is within the forms. [It is also in the human form.] The union with the Word, which the yogi strives for, takes place during the transformation of the etheric body. [The yogi strives to experience the Word of the creative deity in the living currents of his etheric body.] Then he becomes a chela. Then he hears the Logos resounding in all things with his etheric body. This is the union with the Son.

The third stage is the union with the Father. This is the stage of mastership. [Then man can himself continue to build upon his physical body.]

The great principle the yogi has in view is one: the union with the Father. He says to himself: In so far as you become similar to the Godhead, you approach the Godhead.

[This happens first through the purification of the astral body. Through this, he achieves the unio mystica, the union with his divine self. Then he strives further. He experiences union with the Son by experiencing world thinking and world feeling through his transformed etheric body. And finally, the last thing is that man experiences union with the Father and thus consciously works on his physical body. That is the great perspective, the work of the human being for the future of the human race.

Supplement from the transcript by Camilla Wandrey

Thus, yoga is the path to higher knowledge, and also to participation in the higher worlds in general. Yoga means union with the divine source of existence, with the spiritual sources of the world. The yogi develops the powers within themselves to penetrate into these worlds of origin. He seeks the sources of knowledge that come from spiritual life itself. Anyone who wants to become a yogi must, without fail, acquire a belief in the higher development of the human race. This is not a blind faith, but an active belief that it is possible to go beyond the present state of the human race, that forces within human nature can be developed that have not yet been expressed and are waiting to be developed. Yoga is a path that consists largely of abstinence and requires patience and endurance. In today's cultural life, it is indeed difficult to achieve yoga. That is why the theosophical movement was necessary.

One may ask how long it takes to achieve yoga. That depends on the person striving for yoga. It can take incarnations, it can take seventy years, seven years; there are people who achieve it in seven months, seven weeks, even in seven hours. It depends on the stage of existence at which a person finds himself. Often he can be further than he realizes. He may already be inwardly capable of exercising his willpower and mental powers in higher worlds. It may also be that someone in a previous incarnation was much further along than he has come today. In this life, it may not have emerged through the conditions of physical life, which was already within him. The previously acquired powers must then be brought out again through the powers of the present life. For example, someone may have been a wise priest with a magical will, and this would now have to be brought out in a later incarnation. But perhaps the brain development in the later incarnation is not so far advanced as to make this possible. Perhaps other powers are also lacking. Perhaps love and kindness are missing. Then the earlier powers cannot be brought out again, and it takes longer for some people and shorter for others until yoga is achieved.

Above all, it is necessary to develop an inner life that is as intimate as possible, in order to explore what is within us. We must distance the concept of yoga more and more from what is externally tumultuous. Yoga must take place entirely in the seclusion of the inner life.

Higher spiritual qualities should never be developed without strengthening the character at the same time. Just as a blue liquid and a yellow liquid, when mixed, produce a green liquid, so are the spiritual and physical powers of man united. When the spiritual is brought out, the physical nature remains behind, as it were, as a sediment. Much depends on these remaining properly mixed. It is through this that man becomes a particular man, that this higher nature is connected with the lower nature. In the yogi, the higher nature is withdrawn, and all those qualities that are bad in man then come to the fore if absolute character development does not go hand in hand with it. If you strive for yoga, you must always be prepared to face the strangest things in life. These were, for example, the temptations of St. Anthony. When you seriously begin to do yoga exercises, you have to be prepared for the lower nature to come out. Some people who have been truthful up to that point begin to lie, to cheat, to become unreliable. This happens if the yoga student is not required in the strictest sense to constantly strengthen his character. That is why the greatest emphasis is placed on the development of morality in the old, genuine yoga schools. Annie Besant says: spiritual training without morality can only lead to wrongdoing.

The yoga training consists of bringing certain things that a person would otherwise do unconsciously into consciousness. In this way, the student brings the unconscious breathing process into consciousness. The Hatha Yoga training places the greatest emphasis on this process from the outset. However, it only leads to a certain point in development. It breaks off at the realization of the astral. That is why man should not follow the path of Hatha Yoga, but that of Raja Yoga. This leads the disciple, if followed correctly and with earnestness and perseverance and devotion, into the highest spiritual worlds. In the Raja Yoga school, a process such as the breathing process is seen as part of the whole. Many other things that we do unconsciously must be brought into consciousness.

The thought process is largely ignored. We must learn to follow the inner process of thinking with attention. This is only possible through complete calmness towards the outside. No thought from the outer world must be in the soul. And then we must bring thoughts into this calmness ourselves and focus all our attention on a specific thought.

It is best to devote yourself to a thought that contains strength. To consciously devote yourself to such a thought in complete outer seclusion, to immerse yourself completely in it, that is meditation. The disciple must repeatedly live intimately with such thoughts, resting completely on them in all silence. It is difficult for a European man of culture to immerse himself in such a concept for a long time. But the yogi must do so. In this way he develops powers in his soul that were not there before. These powers arise from the unconscious depths of the soul when we rest so quietly in ourselves in a thought. The thoughts of ordinary life call upon the soul for various emotions. But one must learn not to be led by the soul's powers, but to lead them. One must learn to hold back an arising outburst of anger. We must maintain complete mastery and control over our inner selves. This is achieved through this silent devotion to thoughts that contain forces.

Each exercise requires a counter-exercise to prevent one-sided overdevelopment from leading to deformity – as in gymnastics. The so-called secondary exercises are very important.

For meditation it is necessary:

1. To fix a thought of strength in the soul - concentration.
2. To identify oneself with the thought.
3. To remain in it for a time in complete calm.

The regulation of the breathing process is connected with such training of thought. If it is tackled alone, it is Hatha Yoga; if it is a part of the other training, it is Raja Yoga. The seven degrees of the Persian initiation are based on this: Raven, Occultist, Warrior, Lion, Persian, Sunrunner, Father.

Sun runners were those who had made their lives a very rhythmic one. In this way, the human being integrated his thinking, feeling and soul life into the natural process. Everything in nature lives in rhythm: the sun, the moon, the wandering stars go or come in a certain rhythm. Plants and animals are connected to the seasons in a very specific way. Everything that lives outside lives in rhythm; life is based on rhythm. In the case of human beings, however, everything has become arbitrary, the arbitrariness of the astral body. It makes life unrhythmic. The human being must make it rhythmic again, because rhythm generates strength and life. Therefore, the yogi must meditate every day at a certain hour.

If he meditates at seven o'clock today and tomorrow at eleven o'clock, then again one day not at all, the rhythm is disturbed. But if you decide to say a prayer every day at seven o'clock, then one at twelve o'clock and another one before going to bed, then these are fixed points that bring rhythm into your life. Part of the rhythmization of life is the rhythmization of the breathing process. This is connected with the deep things that exist between a person and the whole universe.

In a sense, plants and human beings belong together. Human beings breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide. In the case of plants, it is the other way around. They release oxygen and, from the carbon dioxide that human beings exhale, they form their bodies by retaining the carbon. Apple trees, for example, need children to play around them. There is a connection between plants and human nature. The plant grows rhythmically according to natural laws. It is chaste through and through, since it does not yet have astral life within it. Thus, on the one hand, it is higher than man, but on the other hand it is lower. It stands as an ideal before the yogi. He must become similar to it by rhythmizing the breathing process.

The yogi knows that one day the human being will be able to absorb the plant existence within themselves, to carry out within themselves the process that they now leave to the plant. This means that he will retain the carbon in himself and consciously build his body with it. Man will develop an organ in himself through which he will prepare oxygen for himself, so that he does not need to take it from plants. He combines this oxygen with carbon to form carbonic acid and then stores the carbon in himself again. In this way he will later build his own body structure, as plants do today. His body will consist of transparent, clear, soft carbon. In this way he transforms his body into the “philosopher's stone”. This is a future perspective that the yogi already anticipates today through his rhythmic breathing process, which he carries out according to the instructions of his teacher. He breathes in rhythmically and holds his breath for longer. In this way, one develops carbon in oneself – and thus approaches the nature of plants by using it to build one's body. The yogi gradually unites with the divine source of existence, becoming a co-creator of the world. He experiences new worlds.

When we sleep, we cannot hear the most beautiful music. It is there; we do not perceive it. In this way, the human being is asleep with respect to the higher worlds. And just as there is waking up to the melodies of this world, there is waking up in the spiritual world through the rhythmic breathing process.

When you consciously invest your entire soul life in the breathing process, then imaginative knowledge begins. Ordinary life brings us material knowledge through the senses of the physical body. Imaginative knowledge consists in our being able to awaken images in the soul that are not mere visions, but that are grounded in the source of existence. The outer world also only stimulates images in our soul, ideas that correspond to it. Images that arise through the yoga process stimulate the inner being in the right way. In the right way, that is to say: truthfully. They correspond to the truth that permeates the world and is wisdom. But to do that, a person must be true within. That is the difficulty in the training of yoga. As long as a person has personal desires, he cannot distinguish truth from untruth in the higher world. That is why there is a constant need to become selfless, to renounce everything personal.

The Pythagorean disciple was told: Only when a person is no longer concerned about whether he is still alive or not, can he learn something about life after death. All personal desires must be eliminated. When personal desire is eliminated within, wisdom expresses itself and the wisdom that permeates the world can shine in. Man then comes to imaginative knowledge.

The third stage is that of the rational will; and the fourth stage is that of [intuition]. The third stage involves the complete restraint of what is in us as desire, urge, craving, passion, through the strengthened will. As long as one does not completely master this, one only makes the truth illusory.

One must develop absolute inner calm, patience, endurance, steadfastness. One must never lose the indispensable harmony with one's surroundings. If the wisest person were to fall asleep here, he could not receive anything there with his wisdom. He would be considered insane. All madness is a lack of harmony with one's surroundings. Then one cannot progress when that happens. One should not become a drunken person, but a sober one, says Plato, and that applies to the person who strives for yoga. He must not neglect his daily duties in any way. This is absolutely necessary for the practice of yoga. And in this it is important to develop modesty. Only under the influence of the highest modesty can one speak of the higher worlds in the right way. An inner high degree of humility must go hand in hand with the yoga training. The oriental student has an easier time in the respect and esteem of other people; the western student has a harder time of it. But a lot depends on this. It is also necessary to have the most profound trust in the teacher. This is necessary because one must have a fixed point. The yoga student, in a sense, leaves the whole rest of the world. His relationship to the world changes, is reversed, so to speak. All things take on a new meaning. He becomes alienated from his surroundings, all things change; a certain spiritual alchemy takes place in him. Now he must do everything the physical world demands of him out of a certain inner sense of duty. He must find a completely new point of view towards it. If the yogi does not develop full strength of character in this, then he can easily lose touch with his surroundings. That is why the teacher is the fixed point for him. In the East, the guru regards the teacher as the embodiment of the divine in man. In reality, divine beings are truly present and active in the higher human nature that the teacher must have developed. It seems obvious to the Oriental that there is a higher being in the guru. This is not the case in the West. When someone in the West undergoes the yoga training, they also find the opportunity to reach their goal through their inner trust in the teacher.

Report in the “Mühlheimer Zeitung”, No. 667, December 5, 1905

a. Cologne, December 4. Last Friday and Saturday, the General Secretary of the German Section of the Theosophical Society, Dr. Rudolf Steiner, gave two fascinating and significant lectures in the Isabellensaal of the Gürzenich. On Friday, the speaker talked about “the origin of the world”, and, following on from that, on Saturday about “the creation of man”; both topics were illuminated from the point of view of the theosophist. In the first lecture, the great difference between the theosophical and materialistic views of the creation of the world was pointed out. Theosophy brings the old teachings of creation, which in our days have been dismissed as childish and naive, and which were tried in their creation, into mythical form to approach the understanding of contemporaries, to reintroduce them. A glance at these old teachings shows that they all have the same basic idea about the creation of the world, only expressed in different ways. The ancient Germans killed the giant [Ymir], the Egyptians killed Osiris, and created a world from their parts; even the later accounts of creation only appear to be different. The sacrifice of the god would be necessary everywhere in religions to develop a world or culture. In religions, therefore, the divine spirit is placed at the beginning of events, through it matter is animated, the inanimate is made alive. In our days, since Kant-Laplace, one imagines the creation of the earth from a primeval nebula that was in a rotating motion. From this, the world bodies formed. Similar to how smaller drops separate from a large rotating drop of oil in a glass of water due to the vibration, according to today's view, the gradually formed ball of matter hurls smaller ones, thus producing suns and planets. Even if Theosophy accepts this genesis as far as it takes place in matter, this view does not satisfy the Theosophist, because the modern theory does not answer the question of how spirit came to earth and how life entered this matter. The speaker continued by saying that the answer to this cannot be given scientifically or speculatively; it is only possible to gain clarity about this through one's own inner development. Goethe emphasized that every physical apparatus used as a research tool must be placed above the human being himself, whose organs represent instruments of a much higher order. Goethe also pointed out that the great world outside finds its true reflection in us and that there is no force in the environment that does not also apply to the inside of the human being; that is why he directly related the world around us as the macrocosm to the world within us, as the microcosm. Just as we are connected with a visible world, we are also connected with an invisible one. The human being as a physical organism forms the pinnacle of life, which is also expressed in the fact that he can say “I” to himself. This is not possible for any other being; nor can this “I” say “I” to another, rather each person can only say “I” to themselves. With the I, the human being presents himself as the crown, the perfection of physical life, but only at the beginning of the spiritual world. In the environment, as the mirror image of our inner world, we see at the beginning of the physical world the perfect spiritual world. The religions now place the sacrifice of God at the forefront of creation for the reason that God not only wanted to create a beautiful and wise world, but also a loving one. But true love can only exist in freedom, so he had to, as it were, immerse himself in the world, lose himself in it, so that we can recognize him around us and, of our own free will, engage with his spirit and develop in the direction of his spirit. When the ancient Egyptians conceived of their Osiris as resting in sleep in the world, they thereby demonstrated a fine understanding of the ancient wisdom teachings and the essence of all religions.

In the second lecture, Dr. Steiner began by noting that the question of human descent is connected to what we understand by human destiny. As a theosophist, one must have a different view of human descent than the materialists. Today, human beings only partially reveal the characteristic features of their entire nature; to obtain a complete picture of the human being, it would be necessary to consider what these have looked like in the various phases of development. In addition to the physical body, one must also speak of an etheric body in humans, which represents the actual body of life, and an astral body, which, as a sentient soul body, first created the physical body according to ancient theosophical wisdom. For, according to the theosophical view, we create our bodily form out of the spirit, through the soul, the speaker said. Depending on the external circumstances, the spirit and the soul have built up the outer appearance and adapted it to the given circumstances. At the time of the Atlantean civilization, the culture of

a lost continent situated between America and Europe, the conditions on Earth and in the atmosphere were quite different than they are today. The people of that time mastered their environment through their inherent spiritual powers and not through reason, as we do today. He could directly put the forces of nature, such as the life force, as it is present in plants, for example, into his service; it was only much later that man developed the ability to think. Theosophy must reject what modern researchers have claimed, that man descended from apes; even the latest research already contradicts this theory. No researcher has been able to prove that man is a further development of the ape species. If one wants to accept this, then there must necessarily have been a regression in the gibbon, the ape species whose skull is closest to that of modern humans, namely a regression of its colossal arms and hands. But this contradicts every reasonable theory of evolution. Theosophy presents the relationship between humans and animals – and especially between humans and apes – in such a way that humans and apes once shared a common stage of development, at a time long before the Atlantic one. From this common stage, the spiritually inclined man developed from his similarly designed companion, who was bound by lower instincts, to the heights of humanity, while the latter degenerated into bestiality. This view of theosophy corresponds to its fundamental conception of the relationship between man and his environment, which is most closely related to him. In stone, in plants, in animals, the theosophist recognizes soul-related beings that are subject to laws similar to his own, for, according to the theosophical view, in order to become a human being, he must first develop through all the kingdoms of nature. The speaker, whose captivating presentation we can only hint at here, was met with enthusiastic applause.

The Sermon on the Mount is usually not appreciated in its full depth because many people understand it to be a sermon that the Lord is said to have preached to the people. But in reality it is not addressed to the people, but “spoken on the mountain”. This means: in the intimate sanctuary, where the secrets of religion are shared.

With the people, Jesus speaks in parables, but when he is alone with his disciples, he explains many things to them. “On the mountain means in the mystery”. The most important teaching “on the mountain is that which is called the ‘transfiguration’. There Jesus talks to his disciples about reincarnation. He tells them: John the Baptist is Elijah, they just did not recognize him. There on the mount of transfiguration, time and space were overcome for the disciples James, Peter and John; they saw beings who were no longer incarnated: Moses and Elijah. “Eb means the goal, the path. ”Moses means the truth; in the middle is Christ - the life. So the disciples saw before them: the path, the truth and the life.

When reading this scene, we find that the disciples speak a significant word. In the path of discipleship, three stages are distinguished. The first stage is that of the homeless man, the second stage is that on which man builds “huts” in the spiritual world. The disciples were at this stage at that time, so they said: “Here let us build huts.

Jesus had taken the three disciples, who were on the second level of fellowship, with him into the mystery. Everything that is spoken “on the mountain” means that we are dealing with an intimate revelation to the disciples. It says:

When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain, and his disciples came to him. [Matt. 5:1]

Even if we understand this sentence only literally, we can see that it is not a sermon to the people. He went away with his disciples. We are therefore dealing with an intimate teaching that is only to be spoken before the familiar disciples. These are then in turn to teach the others who are outside.

The Sermon on the Mount speaks of two worlds. From this we can learn how the sensual and the supersensual relate to each other. Man must first slowly and carefully get used to judging things when entering other worlds. In the astral world, everything appears as a mirror image, even with numbers. For example, 364 is 463 in the astral world. What happens in a certain direction here in the world appears in the astral world as a mirror image. People who develop clairvoyance through pathological conditions tell of terrible animals that pounce on them. These are the lower passions of man; they appear in the astral world in the mirror image. What comes from man comes back to him in the astral. The passions come towards him as figures from outside. This is an example of how the inner self appears in the mirror image when we perceive it in the higher world. Every thing, everything here in the sensual world, has a real mirror image in the supersensible world. The very first sentence of the Sermon on the Mount points this out. We must bear in mind that language is more spiritual than we think.

The word 'blessed' is related to the word 'soul'. This is also the case in Greek. 'To be blessed' means to bring the soul to full development. Just as 'holy' is related to the words 'whole', 'healthy' and 'pure'. The Holy Spirit is the healthy Spirit, who is completely pure. Blessed is he who has developed his soul, who has ascended to the supersensible. Bit by bit, the Lord explains to his disciples how they become blessed, how they ascend.

The first Beatitude says:

Blessed are they that mourn, and weep, and make themselves clean; they shall have joy of God. [Matthew 5, 3]

That means that the Kingdom of Heaven is within themselves. This is the profound connection between the material and supersensible worlds. Those who long for the spirit will find the reflection of their striving within themselves, the Kingdoms of Heaven. This is the natural connection between our striving and the reflection, the Kingdoms of Heaven. Nothing can happen in the sensual world that does not have its counterpart in the supersensible world. If we disdain the spirit, the spirit flees. If we strive for the spirit, the reflection flows towards us. Thus Christ always explains the connections to his disciples.

Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted [Matthew 5:4]

Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth [Matthew 5:5]

Those who have not developed within themselves what is called meekness, who are irascible, cannot have the necessary counter-image, namely the kingdom of the earth, for themselves. One should not try to enter the kingdom of heaven without first having redeemed the kingdom of the earth and then bringing it with one into the kingdom of heaven. We are here on earth to redeem and deify everything that is on earth. Just as the bee flies over the fields, collecting honey from the flowers and carrying it into the beehive, so the soul flies over the world to gather experiences and bring them into the realm of heaven. We must learn to let the world come to us and let it work in us. If we absorb everything, if we show gentleness and full fertility to the earth, it will also bring us something.

Blessed are those who hunger for righteousness, for they will find satisfaction within themselves.

[Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. [Matt. 5:7]]

Just as the north and south poles necessarily belong together, so the one link of the sensual world and the other in the supersensible world necessarily belong together.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.

God reveals Himself only to pure hearts. A person who is incapable of purifying his heart from all the impressions flowing to him from the sense world cannot experience the counter-image in his heart. When the heart is pure of sensual and memory material, then it can see God. But that which is full of sensual and memory material excludes the Godhead. There is the image and the counter-image: the pure heart – the Godhead.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be children of God by themselves.

When Jesus wanted to explain this to his disciples, he said: There are children of God and children of men. The children of God want to remain children of God; the children of men want to become children of God. The children of God are also called the descendants of Abel, the children of men the descendants of Cain. The descendants of Abel did not descend to the greatest human labor and toil; they accept what comes from God, even blood, and bring it to God as a sacrifice.

The children of men have descended lower. They must sacrifice from what they themselves have gained through their labor. Therein lies a profound contrast in the spiritual life of man. The children of Abel were generally priests who want to draw from the trancelike inspiration that takes what God gives and sacrifices it to him. God has ignited in us the trance-like, unconscious inspiration. On the other hand, there is a fully conscious wisdom that man acquires during his journey on this earth. Cain's children are the people who conquer this wisdom. If people had remained Abel's children, they would have been led by the hand of divine naturalness; but God wanted to let them be free. They have to become Cain's children. This initially led to a lack of peace. This led to Cain killing his brother. The children of Cain must develop peaceableness within themselves again, and then they will become children of God through themselves again. This is a sentence that, above all, refutes the basic view of those who believed that the old Abel principle should be revived. They say: People are not meant to be able to become children of Abel again once they have been children of Cain. That is why the Jesuit order wants to keep humanity in its dullness with the divinity. He wants to fight evil by not giving people the opportunity to become free. The Jesuit order almost contradicts this sentence that people can become children of God again through themselves, and believes, however, that they are acting in the spirit of Jesus. Ignatius of Loyola said: We do not want to let people descend so low. The good should be preserved at the expense of the light.

Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Here we see the opposite of what is said in the first sentence. Begging for the spirit comes from the person themselves. Here we find that which works from the outside; there the mirror image is formed within, which works against it. It becomes ever clearer to us that this basic tendency lies in the Sermon on the Mount. We thereby gain a deeper understanding of what Christ gives to his disciples “on the mountain, in the mystery.”

If we look at the seemingly radical sentences from this point of view, we can understand this. In the sensual world, we are separate from each other. In the moment when we feel ourselves in the supersensible world, we are one. Only in the sensual world are we many. We believe that our physical skin is a boundary. However, we are not separated from each other by it. That is an illusion. We go beyond that and are connected to each other. In truth, we are intertwined. When we intuitively grasp this on an emotional level, we will come to a different understanding of our fellow human beings. We will feel when our fellow human being directs his anger at us, when in truth it is we ourselves who are directing the anger at us. If we imagine a bond between soul and soul, we feel that the separation ceases to exist and we feel that we have no right to perceive the intention of another person as if it did not belong to us.

Jesus wanted to make it clear to his disciples that external justice is not what matters, but empathy for the soul of the other person. He says:

You have heard that it was said: “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” But I say to you, do not resist an evildoer. [Matt 5:38-39]

But I say unto you: Love your enemies, so that you may understand that you are one. [Matt. 5:44-45]

So it should not be “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”, but I must feel responsible for what the other person does. This is where thinking in the supersensible should come into play.

If anyone demands my coat and I feel at one with him, I will not hesitate to give him everything. If my coat is his coat, then my cloak is also his cloak. I will not go one mile with him, but two. That it is I who live completely in the other, that is what Christ expresses here. We must think supernaturally, completely free from sensuality.

But if your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. [Matthew 5:29]

Man has desires; he can satisfy them only through the physical organs. The possibility of satisfying these desires depends on the physical organs. Kamaloka arises from the fact that when a person dies, he still has desires for what only the physical organs can offer him. He must first get used to no longer using sensual organs. We should use our senses here in this world in such a way that we draw the spiritual out of things with the help of our senses. As we behold the sensual, we should continually lift ourselves up to the spiritual. To the same extent we prepare ourselves for devachan. This is what Christ means when He says:

And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is expedient for thee that one of thy members should perish, rather than that thy whole body be cast into hell. [Matt. 5:29-30]

If the right eye tempts you to remain in the sensual, then free yourself from what the eye clings to. Of course, this does not mean physically plucking it out.

Every sentence of the Sermon on the Mount implies a profound mystery wisdom about how the sensual and the supersensible are connected. Here Jesus explains the essence of Kamaloka to his disciples, and further teaches them: Man should never abuse the supersensible for sensual purposes. The Godhead should never be forced to do something that is not within the cosmic laws themselves. We should not bring down the supersensible sphere, but rise to the supersensible world. There is a great temptation, for example in spiritualism, to want to see the manifestations of the spiritual world. Man wants to bring down the spiritual world instead of developing upwards. The truth of spiritualism cannot be denied, but the method is attacked. We do not want to interfere with the transcendental sphere through our sensual sphere.

Christ emphasizes the perniciousness of the oath, because one should not interfere with the transcendental; one should not pull down heaven to confirm earthly matters.

Do not swear at all, either by heaven, for it is God's throne; or by the earth, for it is His footstool.

If you want to have the supernatural, you should rise to the supernatural. No one should touch the supernatural laws. Not my will, but yours be done.

We should not have the rights that the tax collectors have. We should know that the great unity reigns between “mine” and “yours”.

For if you love those who love you, what reward will you have? Do not even the tax collectors [...]? [Mt 5,46]

You shall be perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect.

You shall act consciously, out of the supersensible world.

The conclusion of the speech also contains profound occult aspects. Many believe that they have come to the truth through all kinds of arts. However, it is not only a matter of acquiring the higher powers, but also of putting them at the service of humanity. It is not so easy to preserve that which must be preserved when man rises to higher powers. One can make very definite observations in the case of people who develop their higher powers and do not at the same time also raise their character to higher levels. They then easily become more imperfect than before.

Let us suppose that one has a solution of two substances, for example a red and a blue liquid mixed together; it would be a mixed color. In the same way, in everyday life, man is a mixture of his lower and higher nature. As man usually is, the higher nature prevents his lower nature from coming to evil, radical excesses. By interweaving the higher and lower soul, we are protected from such radical excesses in ordinary life.

Higher development means the withdrawal of the higher soul from the lower. Thus the higher soul is revealed; but the lower soul is then left to its own devices. In occult higher development, we have the higher nature, but also the lower nature – each on its own. That is why the lower nature comes out completely in people who develop occultly. Therefore, it is necessary to develop character, morality, and full self-control alongside occult development. The morality prevailing on earth is the solid rock floor on which we must rest. If we do not build on it, we build on sand. Jesus says:

Many will say to me, 'Lord, Lord, did we not acquire the higher ability of prophesying?' [Matthew 7:22]

It would be strange if Christ wanted to call all those who have acquired this ability “evildoers.” He is speaking here of those who, along with higher abilities, have not also acquired higher morals.

Whoever hears my words...

– by this he means his teachings, which he gave them; one should absorb them with the supersensible consciousness – at the end it says:

The people were horrified at his teaching.

When Jesus had finished his teaching, a commotion was heard in the innermost part of the temple, in the Holy of Holies, signaling that a revolt had broken out among the people outside. This took place outside the temple. The people had not heard the Sermon on the Mount; the last sentence has no relation to the others. Christ-Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount only for his disciples, in order to express the entire character of the supersensible world to his disciples. They were to become his apostles through his communicating his most intimate intentions to them in the holy of holies. Through this knowledge their words, which they spoke before the world, were inspired.

Today, we want to take a look at the world of medieval legends from the point of view of the theosophical worldview. Two important legends are characteristic of the intellectual development of Europe in the Middle Ages, the two legends that are grouped around the Holy Grail.

In earlier times, the knowledgeable expressed themselves to the people about the deepest truths through legends and myths. If the people who lived where Northern and Central Europe is today had been taught such concepts as we now get in the theosophical world view, the people of yore would not have understood them. The sages spoke to each people and age as that people and age could understand. They always based their teachings on the law of reincarnation.

The sages who told the secrets of the world to the peoples of Northern and Central Europe were the Druids. “Druid” means “oak”. When it is said that the Germans celebrated their religious services “under oaks”, it does not only mean that they really celebrated their services under natural oaks, but it also means that they were under the guidance of the Druids. And when it is said that Boniface “fell the oak,” it means that the old Druidic service was overcome by Christianity. A true fact was given in the form of the saga. The Druid introduced the true facts into the sagas. The Druid priest was already speaking to all the souls that are today absorbing our worldview. He spoke to them in a way that was appropriate for that time. All of us who have adopted the theosophical worldview have heard the same things before in myths and fairy tales, otherwise we would not be able to understand them today. This is the secret of the great masters: they live fully in the awareness that they are among people who are repeatedly embodied.

Throughout the Middle Ages, the basic truths of Germanic-Central European culture lived in a great saga. If we get to know this saga, we understand what was present in the Middle Ages. The Druid priests nourished the awareness that once upon a time there was a high culture far to the west. This culture was in a land called Nifelheim or Nibelungenheim. This Nifelheim was the old Atlantis. It used to be a foggy place because of its peculiar atmospheric conditions, which were very different from ours.

The Germanic tribal saga thus truly reflects the truth. It points to an ancient land that once existed between Europe and America, where the Atlantic Ocean is now. This ancient land of Atlantis perished, along with the treasures of power and wisdom. These treasures were referred to as gold, and their demise is told in the saga as the sinking of the gold of the Nibelungen hoard. The treasure of the Nibelungs is to be raised in a new way, more in the East, in Europe. First Wotan, then Siegfried are the initiates who have the task of bringing the old treasure back to today's Europe, of making the Nibelung hoard fruitful again for newer culture in a certain way. The fact that the saga presents us with a secret initiate, Wotan, helps us to gain a deep insight into another ancient culture. The letters W and B correspond to each other. Wotan, Wodan is the same as Bodha Buddha. Wotan is actually the Germanic form of the word Buddha. We come across a common origin of the European Wotan religion and the Asian Buddha religion. The Buddha religion did not spread so much in India, but among those peoples of Asia who still had something of the Atlantean culture in them. The Wotan peoples also brought their views from the Atlantean culture. Their further development was expressed in the legends that the Druid priests had taught them. The saving of the hoard of the Nibelungs - the Atlantean culture - by Wotan and Siegfried is particularly beautifully expressed in these sagas.

A tragically prophetic thread runs through these sagas, which can be found from Russia via Germany to France and England, and can be found everywhere where druid priests taught. They taught prophetically: a twilight of the gods will come. We are the remnants of Atlantean culture. We must die to make way for something better. Our initiates are prophets of what is to come. A certain tragedy is expressed in all those who are initiated in the manner of Siegfried. The Song of the Nibelungs contains an ancient form of initiation: the distress of the Nibelungs, the lament of the Nibelungs. The very intimate disciples were taught that another would come who would bring the spiritual life. The mood of the Götterdämmerung was spread everywhere. All lived in the feeling and the intimate disciples in the certainty: One will come who will be very different from our initiates. - This is expressed in the saga through Siegfried.

In Scandinavia and Russia, the Drotten mysteries were analogous to the Druid mysteries. “Drotte” is another form of Druid. Throughout the ancient mysteries, Sig is the name of the original, great initiate. All names composed with “Sig” lead back to Sig, for example Sigurd, Sigmund, Sieglinde and so on. Siegfried was the initiate who had found peace in initiation. “Peace” means that which leads the human being beyond all doubt; it is the satisfaction of desire, the desire for knowledge, for power. Siegfried is depicted in all pictures as invulnerable. Achilles, the Greek initiate, remained vulnerable at one point, at the heel. Siegfried, after overcoming the dragon, became invulnerable except for one point, the point between the shoulder blades. This is where the cross is to be carried. This symbol played a profound role in the ancient mysteries. There it was said: You are all vulnerable at the point where one will have the cross. The one who will cover this place with the cross, the cross-bearer, will be the great initiate who is no longer vulnerable. This is what gives the Nordic saga its great appeal. This wisdom was an apocalyptic wisdom.

All occultists know that this wisdom emanates from a central oracle of twelve initiates, the so-called “White Lodge”. From there, the wisdom is carried out into the world. Nowhere is this different from the fact that the individual knows himself to be connected to the others. Everywhere there were twelve members of the lodge. Such are also the twelve apostles. The consciousness of those who intuitively perceive and the wisdom of those who know leads back to the Round Table of King Arthur. This is nothing other than the Great White Lodge, which in the Siegfried initiation made clear to the nations what it had to say to the world. Great initiates were members of the Round Table, which existed in Wales until the time of Queen Elizabeth of England. Then it was abolished for political reasons.

Two very specific political currents were traced back to these primeval times by medieval popular consciousness. In the Frankish people, who were so fortunate as to conquer the West of Europe, there was a dynasty that actually traced its origins back to the times of Atlantis. They were called the “Wibelungen” or “Nibelungen” — from which the word “Ghibellines” later emerged. There was an old consciousness of a ruling dynasty rising among the Franks, rooted in the old Nibelungen land, combining secular and priestly power. That is why Charlemagne tried to have the royal crown placed on him in Rome, to add a spiritual element to the secular one.

Originally, all the power that was assumed was derived from what had come over from Atlantis. The fact that people thought and sensed that a twilight of the gods was coming also connected a certain tragic trait to the ruling dynasty. It was said: Those who want to know can well become initiates, but they must be replaced by something else. This sentiment was first expressed in the well-known Barbarossa saga; then something was added that was not in the usual saga. Barbarossa was correctly thought of as a continuation of the old Franconian rulers. The Hohenstaufen were the Ghibellines, Waiblingen, Wibelungen, Nibelungen, in contrast to the Guelphs, the Guelfs. The more intimate version adds to the well-known Barbarossa saga that Barbarossa brought the Holy Grail from Asia to Europe. He himself perished as a physical personality and now waits for his time to come. This expresses the whole mood of the Middle Ages towards ancient paganism and the new Christianity.

People began to look at their own national soul and said: We brought our culture over from ancient Atlantis. But it is destined to perish; Christianity must take its place. But it will rise again, purified, cleansed, elevated by Christianity. — A beginning was made to create a transition from the end of the descent to the beginning of the ascent. A beginning was made to imagine the course of the lower German spiritual culture in such a way that the clairvoyant, Atlantean consciousness was replaced by something that had yet to come. Natural bravery, piety, virtue had to be reclaimed in a different, new way. There were three conceptions, conceptions of three definite powers: Wotan is the intuitive power as represented by the initiate; Wili is the will itself; We is the mind, with a tragic trait where it becomes apocalyptic. Now another time was to come. Now, through the Christian teaching, the point of passage was to be gained, and one was to ascend again to what was before the twilight of the gods.

That Barbarossa sits in the mountain means that he is an initiate. The “mountain” is the place of initiation. Christ went with his disciples “on the mountain” - into the mystery. The ravens signify an initiation of Barbarossa. In the Persian initiation ritual, there are seven stages of initiation. The “ravens” signify the first stage of personal initiation. They denote the still existing connection of the initiate with the environment. Think of the ravens of Elijah. We also find ravens with Wotan. They mediate his communication with the environment. Thus, Barbarossa, the initiate, also had the ravens around him, which still kept him connected to the world.

Barbarossa had brought the Holy Grail from the Orient. This Holy Grail had been kept on the Mons salvationis, the mountain of salvation. It is now surrounded by the successors of King Arthur's Round Table, the twelve knights who added the Christian initiation to the old pagan initiation. The Grail is the symbol of the Christian initiation. Those who wanted to be initiated into the secrets of the Holy Grail became Christian initiates. One becomes a Christian initiate by first going through all doubts and then getting a firm hold in the connection with Christ Himself. One thing is necessary for this: direct trust in the figure of Christ. The first disciples placed particular emphasis on the fact that Christ was there. They say: We want to bear witness that we were with Him. We have laid our hands in His wounds. What we have seen and heard ourselves, that we proclaim. Paul is an apostle because he has truly seen the Risen One in spirit. It depends on the direct experience, which one acquires not through wisdom and logic, but directly.

It is clear to us what Parzival is meant to achieve on his wanderings. Parzival's mother is called Herzeleide. If you read Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival, who was a thoroughly initiated man, deeply, between the lines and words, you will find that the name of Parzival's mother, Herzeleide, is a reflection of the tragic trait that lay in the German soul. Those who do not follow the Parzival path carry sorrow in their hearts; they have to gain peace for themselves. Wolfram von Eschenbach knew how to clothe the saga in a beautiful form. With the one fact, he meant a profound symbol - the female personality always signifies consciousness: Herzeleide is the state of consciousness from which Parzival starts. At first he has a tragic consciousness. He struggles through everything that worldly knighthood can offer, with a naive, simple consciousness, in order to come to the secret of the Holy Grail.

We must keep this together with the Barbarossa saga. Barbarossa went to Asia to seek the secrets of the Holy Grail, the initiation of Christianity. But he perished on the way to the Holy Grail. He has to wait “in the mountains” until Christianity can find the connection to the earlier initiation. Barbarossa brought Christianity, but has not yet achieved the deeper initiation of Christianity.

Parzival is the new Christian initiate, the great symbol that replaces the Siegfried initiation. Siegfried has overcome the lower nature, the lindworm, the snake. Parzival becomes the initiate of the Holy Grail, who gets to know the one who is invulnerable where Siegfried was still vulnerable. In Parzival, the original idea of Christianity is expressed. It no longer knows the idea of reincarnation. One regards the one life between birth and death as the only one. The valuable thing is the one incarnation. One no longer looks up to Manas, Budhi, Atma. The Parzival initiation was only to come to the awareness of the connection with Christ, to consider the one incarnation in which man comes to knowledge through compassion and not through knowledge to compassion, as it happens through theosophy. Theosophy teaches us to recognize how we are one with all people. Through it, one knows that one is responsible for what our brother does. Theosophy leads through knowledge to compassion. But humanity had to go through a period of development for a while, where it was to come to knowledge through compassion. It had to descend into the depths of compassion, because one can also come to knowledge there. It had to be so, in order that people might get to know this earthly world in all its importance. Christianity was to educate humanity, so that the earthly might also be grasped in its significance. Therefore, man first had to be directed, steered downwards, in the moral sense, towards physical life. Only then could he arrive at the great achievements that begin with city culture.

The progress of the Middle Ages is described in the saga in the transition from the Parzival saga to the Lohengrin saga. This saga emerges at a time when cities are being founded all over Europe, primarily serving the emerging bourgeoisie, which is no longer based on the spiritual life but on the material life. All material achievements are prepared in the cities, for example, the art of printing. Without the culture of the cities, modern science would not have been able to develop in this way. The universities are also a consequence of this culture. A Copernicus, a Kepler, a Newton and so on would not have been possible without it. Dante's “Divine Comedy” and the painters of the Renaissance can also be traced back to the culture of the cities.

The saga of the connection between Parzival, the father, and Lohengrin, the son, points to the importance of urban culture. Elsa of Brabant represents the cities, the urban consciousness. In all mysticism, that which works against the physical world is presented as something feminine. Goethe speaks of the “eternal feminine”; in Egypt, Isis was worshipped in this sense.

Let us consider the stages of the chela's initiation. The chela must first overcome three stages. The first step is that of the homeless man, where man is torn out of the physical world, where he becomes objective towards the physical world. He must unlearn to be partial, he must learn to love everything equally; he does not love less, but he transfers his love to everything that deserves love, not just to his homeland and so on. The second step is where the chela builds huts. He finds a new home. The disciples on the mountain have reached this stage. They are beyond space and time, they see Elijah and Moses. That is why they say: “Let us build huts.” The third stage is that of the swan. A swan is the chela who has come so far that all things speak to him, even those who have their consciousness on higher planes. On the physical plane, only man has the ego. The animal has consciousness on the astral plane, the plant on the mental plane (rupa plane), the mineral on the higher mental plane (arupa plane). One must rise to higher worlds to find the I, the names of other beings; there things speak their own names to the chela. The world then becomes resounding and sounding for him everywhere. In view of this fact, Goethe says:

The sun resounds in the ancient manner In the spheres of the brothers' song, And its prescribed journey it completes With a thunderclap.

He repeats this reference from the prologue in heaven where he leads Faust over into the higher worlds:

The new day is already born for the ears of the spirit. Rock gates creak and rattle, Phoebus' wheels roll and clatter, What a roar brings the light! It trumpets, it trompets, the eye blinks and the ear is amazed, Unheard-of things are heard.

It is not a matter of indifference that the Prologue in Heaven in the first part of “Faust” and the second part begin in this way. Goethe was pointing to something very specific: it is the third degree of chelaship, where the world around us becomes resounding and all things tell us their name. Jesus had reached such a degree when he was to receive Christ. This degree was designated in the White Lodge as the swan. Swans were those who were no longer allowed to speak their name, but to whom the whole world revealed its names.

Lohengrin, the son of Parzival, is the initiate who founded city culture, who was sent by the great Grail lodge to fertilize the consciousness of medieval humanity. Elsa of Brabant characterizes the striving human consciousness, which is fertilized by the environment, the masculine. The urban consciousness represented by Elsa is to be fertilized by Lohengrin, by the Holy Grail. The connection between Lohengrin and Elsa of Brabant is the connection between material culture and the spiritual task of the fifth sub-race. The swan is the man initiated in the third degree, who brings in the Master from the Great Lodge. Man must let the Master work upon him without asking about His nature. Elsa of Brabant must accept what He gives her as her due. The moment she asks out of curiosity, the initiate disappears. All this is expressed in the Lohengrin saga.

The Templars had brought the initiation wisdom of the Holy Grail from the Orient to the Mountain of Salvation, mons salvationis, the place of initiation of Christianity. An initiation ceremony pointed directly to the future of the whole human race. It was said: a time will come when Christianity will experience a new phase. The progress of human spiritual culture has always been consciously referred to as the progress of the sun. Before 800 BC, the sun passed through the constellation of Taurus for about 2200 years. Over in Asia, the bull was worshipped as the divine. Even before that, the twins were worshipped in Persia for the same reason: good and evil, duality. Around 800 BC, the Sun entered the sign of Aries or the Lamb. This is indicated by the legend of Jason and the Golden Fleece. Christ calls Himself the Lamb of God because He appeared under this sign. [Today the Sun is in the sign of Pisces.] The Knights Templar point to the next constellation; the Sun will then enter the constellation of Aquarius. There Christianity will truly arise for the first time, paganism united with Christianity. This culture will resurrect a new John. This moment will occur when the sun is in the sign of Aquarius. John means 'water bearer'; he will be the herald of a new era of Christianity. It is said that the Knights Templar pointed to John the Baptist, not to Christ. But the John of whom they speak is the Aquarius.

The last phase of Christianity, which originated with the initiate Lohengrin, has brought about the period of usefulness, which has now reached its peak. The theosophical movement wants to be the successor of such movements, as the Parzival movement was and as the one that originated with the initiate Lohengrin. Modern materialism also owes its origin to great initiates, but it must be replaced by a new phase, by a new cycle. This is what Theosophy wants to bring about. But it is always the initiates who speak when a new cultural impact is to be given.

The first 12 chapters in the gospel of John

In modern theology, clear distinction is made between the first three gospels and the gospel of John. The first three are called the synoptic gospels, whilst the latter is often said to be a composition for teaching purposes and of no historical value. What matters is, however, that everything said relating to the Christ in the gospels is a profound symbol which at the same time is an important historical fact. In reality the first three gospels differ from the gospel of John because they were written by disciples who were less profoundly initiated, whereas the gospel of John was written by the most deeply initiated disciple.

The gospel of John actually makes no direct mention of John, only referring to him as the disciple whom Jesus loved. This is a key word for the one who was most deeply initiated. To indicate that some disciples were the most intimate initiates it would be said that the master loved them.

The disciple who wrote down the gospel of John first of all described something he had himself experienced. Chapters 1 to 12 are experiences in the astral world, chapter 13 and those that follow experiences at the devachanic level. This is highly significant and characteristic of the whole of it. John described experiences on the astral level because he took the view that it is only possible to understand what Christ Jesus accomplished on this earth if one considers it in the light of the spirit. The things the master did and said could only be understood if one put oneself in a higher state of consciousness. Inner development can enable human beings to gain true vision in the astral world. This is only achieved by doing specific meditations. The individual must close himself off from the outside world. He must let eternal truths arise in his soul. A new world then opens up all around him.

What Christ Jesus did on earth could only be properly judged by going into a higher world. Things experienced with Jesus in the physical world only became clear if seen in astral terms. To gain living experience of what Christ Jesus had done, one had to use suitable Christian meditation to enter into a state where the soul gained understanding of the Christ.

John said so first of all in his introduction. This is a meditative prayer from the beginning to ‘and the darknesses did not comprehend it.’ When the soul gains living experience of what lies in those words, the powers arise that enable us to grasp the content of chapters 1 to 12. ‘In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was a god.’ This ancient truth was presented in visible form in all the ancient mysteries, above all those with an Egyptian bias.

Words sound in air-filled space, otherwise we would not hear them. The figures of the words we speak are in that space. If the air could be suddenly made to go rigid as I speak the waves that buzz around in the air would fall down as rigid solid bodies. A mystery teacher would tell his pupil: ‘Just as a human being speaks, wresting his inner life away and passing it into the air, so the cosmic soul also spoke, but into much more subtle matter, into Akasha matter, and this would then become solid.’ Everything around us is condensed word of god. And so, the mystery teacher said, the world all around us is frozen word of God, a frozen logos. ‘In the beginning was the word and the word was with God.’ It was still within itself, it was itself a god. Then it filled space and froze. This logos is now present in everything. Everywhere around us we have the crystals of the logos. But as life evolved, the logos arose from its state of slumber, as it were. In man it became the light of insight. When we gain insight, God, who has originally descended into the world, comes to us out of this world. One must enter wholly into this, penetrating so deeply into the world that one realizes: The logos lives in the world.

Originally there was the creation of the physical human being. The spiritual human being entered into this physical human being. Then light shone into the darkness. But the darknesses did not at first comprehend it. When a human being develops further, there comes to him the content of astral truth vision. He then sees clearly what Christ Jesus was, and what his teaching signified: that the time was ripe in those days to bring forth a reverse Adam. Man had descended into his body, and with this came birth and death. Light then entered into the darkness.

There was need to help humanity to understand again that life is the victor in the struggle with death. John the Baptist thus came as a forerunner. The Baptist made it known that a new kingdom would take all that was old and still wholly in the sign of the original creation by divine powers. Until then it was said that the god would destroy those who went against his laws. The new kingdom was one, however, which man would find in himself through living experience of the god. The idea of the old covenant had been that humanity had to obey God's commandment. The new covenant was that human beings should follow the god in them of their own free will. This is the love of goodness. It was prophetically foretold; it had to increase. The Christ as the representative of the new covenant had to increase; John, being only his forerunner, had to decrease.

Two major elements came together at this point. John saw this in his vision where everything appeared in form of images. At the same time the actual Baptist and his historical mission appeared to his inner eye. The whole mission of Christianity now presented himself to him. He described this in the first chapter.

Let us go back to very early times, at least 2000 years before Christ. Wise individuals had advanced so far that they were initiated into the mysteries. One symbol used was the offering of the water. The mystery priest used water as a symbol. It is a law that man shuts himself off from the higher world of the spirit if he takes alcohol. Someone wishing to enter the worlds of spirit in a living way must not drink wine, not even the wine of the offering.

The marriage in Cana characterizes the Mission of Christianity. The ancient mystery priests had the most sublime teachings, given out of profound understanding in the spirit. But one thing that was lacking in pagan culture was the conquest of the physical world. Their tools were still extremely primitive, the whole of outer civilization was primitive. People had not yet gained a relationship to the things that had to happen directly down here on earth. They had to learn to control the earth and this meant they had to be limited to the physical. They had to grow strong and hallow the lower human being.

This culture was prepared for by great teachers who spoke of the significance of the physical level. Egyptian art was great in its spiritual concepts but not in the form it took at the physical level. The whole of Greek art consisted in bringing the human being down to the physical level. Roman law also brought humanity down to the physical level. The cult of Dionysus was connected with all this. The representative of wine was actually shown as a god. The story of the marriage in Cana shows the introduction of wine into human evolution in sublime fashion. The true purpose was to show that water is greater than wine. It was transformed into wine because humanity had to be taken down to the physical level.

Today we have come down to the physical level in every respect. If there is no moral development to go hand in hand with civilization at the physical level, physical achievements are destructive. Moral development will enable humanity to generate energies that will be very different from those that are now to be found at the physical level. Keely⁴⁴ set his engine in motion with vibrations created in his own organism. Such vibrations depend on a person's moral nature. This is the first hint of a dawn for a technology of the future. We will have engines in future that are only set going by energies coming from people who have moral qualities. Immoral people will not be able to set them going. Purely mechanical mechanism must be transformed into moral mechanism.

The approach used in the science of the spirit is preparing the way for this ascent. Christianity first had to guide humanity down. Now it must guide them upwards again. Wine must be transformed into water again.

John was able to see beyond physical reality. The deed accomplished by the Lord, his mission, thus appeared to John the disciple in the image of the marriage at Cana in Galilee. This is how one should read the first 12 chapters of the gospel of John. It does not say that Mary asked him but the mother of Jesus. This is a mystic term. In mysticism, ‘mother’ always refers to something that needs to be inseminated when the human being ascends to a higher level. Jesus had to take the whole of human consciousness, such as it had been until then, to a higher level. The consciousness of all humanity needed him to take it a step forward. This is why Jesus was able to say: ‘Woman, what have I to do with you?’ He would not have said this to his mother.

On the third day, a marriage took place. This means that John lay in the sleep of initiation for three days. There the vision of the marriage in Cana in Galilee occurred. In a sleep lasting three days he went through the events that took place in the world of the spirit. On the third day he experienced the vision of the marriage in Cana. All that follows are events he saw in his astral vision.

In the third chapter we have the talk with Nicodemus. In his astral vision it would always be the Lord himself who appeared to John. In the talk with Nicodemus we hear what was to happen to John. The Lord put things very clearly. Nicodemus did not at first understand him. It is John himself who needed to understand; it was explained to him in the vision that it was a matter of killing off the lower human being, with the higher human being coming alive. He gradually understood who Jesus actually was; that the powers of the world's origin, the father of the world, were alive in him. This is why we then have the words Jesus said about the father. The occult powers Jesus possessed appeared to John as an astral reflection of the actual events. John was thus learning the most profound truths through the Lord himself.

In the fourth chapter we have the meeting with the woman of Samaria. The Lord said to her: ‘You have had five husbands and the one you have now is not your husband’ She was to be raised to the higher self. For this, she had to go through the lower bodies. Those were the old husbands. She now had to be connected with the higher self. That was the new husband. In the story of the man who was born blind it became evident that it was his karma to be unable to see.

The first events described in John's gospel are astral experiences. Surely it is natural that John himself was not present, seeing that he perceived it all in image consciousness? John is not mentioned in the first 12 chapters. He was not yet the disciple, experiencing all these things in the astral level.

He then slept the initiation sleep. He was to rise to a higher degree. This happened as he lived through the experiences of the three days and on into the fourth day. The initiation took 3 ½ days. Then he saw his own initiation, his own resurrection. This was the raising of Lazarus.⁴⁵ Lazarus wrote the gospel of John. Martha and Mary were the states of consciousness in his soul, one divine, the other turned to life on earth. The description of the Lazarus miracle is the description of a higher level of initiation. The 12^th chapter prepares for the actual recognition of the Jesus personality. John himself then says: ‘Now I know him, who has raised me from the dead.’

John's higher development begins with the 13^th chapter. Every word in the gospel of John can be understood if we take it as John's living experience. He then became conscious in his I, and this was no longer an image consciousness. He consciously became the disciple whom the Lord loved.

• 44. Keely, John Worrel (182–1898), American engineer. Rudolf Steiner spoke of him on several occasions, e.g. in Ursprung und Ziel des Menschen. Grundbegriffe der Geisteswissenschaft (GA 53), Berlin, 30 March 1905; The Temple Legend (GA 93). Berlin, 2 Jan. 1906. Tr. J. Wood. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1985; Steiner R. Cosmic Being and Egohood (in GA 169), lecture given in Berlin on 20 June 1916. Typescript translation C 43 at Rudolf Steiner House Library, London; Polarities in the Evolution of Mankind (GA 197), Stuttgart, 8 Nov. 1920. Tr. not named. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1987. Considerable detail, but confusing, may be found in in Blavatsky, HP, The Secret Doctrine vol. 1.
• 45. John 11: 1-45. See also Steiner R. Christianity as Mystical Fact and The Mysteries of Antiquity (GA 8). Tr. H. Collison, rev. C. Davy, A. Bittleston. Bristol: RudoIfSteinerPress 1992.

Notes from Memory by Mathilde Scholl.

John the Baptist foretold Christ Jesus in the middle of the fourth sub-race. Now, on the other hand, the individuality of the Master Jesus guides humanity over from the fifth to the sixth sub-race – again to John the Baptist, to Aquarius. Christ Jesus is the living word. All beings of nature converge in man and form the word in him. That is the ego in man – Jesus Christ. Man becomes Christ when he experiences inwardly that the whole world flows together in him, is one with him. The time when Christ first appeared among men was when He was the first of mankind to embody the ego. That was the seed from which all self-consciousness, all personal consciousness, sprang up.

But he gave his I back to the world. In doing so, he showed people the way of de-selfing.

On Judgment Day, when all will rise again, it will be seen whether man has led the I only to egoism or to de-selfing. Then the separation between people will take place. Those who have developed to the point of selflessness, their awakening, their waking up in the I contains the future seeds of humanity. This is the sixth sub-race, from which the sixth root race will descend. Those who have developed their ego only as far as selfishness will not experience a real resurrection. They have the germ of death within them. This will become the seventh sub-race, which will develop into the kingdom of evil and become dross. This is the chaff that is thrown into the fire. The sixth sub-race is the wheat from which something new can sprout.

This separation is now being prepared. Through the principle of brotherly love, which has its representative in the Master Jesus, the unification of humanity into the sixth sub-race is brought about, which, based on this principle of brotherly love, grows into the future.

When the sixth sub-race has reached perfection, the Word, the Christ, will be present not only in one individuality but in all, and the individual human beings will then together form the letters of this Word, the new Christ, who will then be the Risen One in an entirely different sense. As I was already in the third root race, His life was sunk into humanity. He will arise in full development in the sixth root race, in the totality of humanity.