The Rudolf Steiner Archive

With the Apocalypse we enter into the deepest depths of the Christian world view. Every great religion has had its secret teachers, and so has Christianity. Above all, we must be clear about the nature of the secret teaching. The Apocalypse is nothing other than the Christian secret teaching. We only have to understand the key words: “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.” This is the core of Christianity. Believing and seeing are two opposites. Christianity should also bring bliss to those who believe even if they do not see. The great mystery at Golgotha had its harbingers in the earlier human races. Even in the ancient mysteries, as long as our root race is on earth, something was celebrated in secret temple sites, something was shown to people that was nothing other than the mystery of God's deeds in the world.

We accompany our ancestors to the places that were most sacred to them. There they were shown how the God Himself descends to Earth, how He merges with material existence. This is called the crucifixion of the deity in the earthly. This was depicted in such a way that a human form was placed in a kind of coffin; this meant that the deity entered matter. It was then shown that the human being must perfect himself; then he would find God within himself. This is the same power that is crucified in matter and can therefore be reborn out of matter.

Everything that has become religion, art and science has emerged from the mysteries. The mysteries were a pictorial representation of what later took place at Golgotha. The drama of God developed more and more in its details. If one could follow what the temple priest said to the temple student, one would hear roughly the same thing that is written in the Gospel of John. It had condensed into a canon. The Christian gospels are ancient temple records. The teaching was taken from the depths of the temples. It is nothing new. This is hinted at in the gospels, especially in John. What the disciple saw in the temple was intended to depict what had happened in the world. This was depicted in this one testament. What was depicted in the temple site is expressed by John:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not.

The student who was admitted to the mysteries could see in them an image of the great mystery of the world. What had been presented in the mysteries had actually taken place in Palestine. Christianity is a fulfillment. It has emerged onto the historical stage; the temple documents were kept secret. Those who were admitted to the mysteries had to take a sacred oath not to reveal any of it to the uninitiated. Today, any science can appropriate knowledge, but the ancients said: Only a pure heart may know, in an impure heart knowledge becomes an evil power. Only those who could communicate the word of knowledge from a worthy heart and feeling to others were allowed to know. Only the word of knowledge that was warmed through by good, pure and noble feeling was respected. The temple records were the secret revelation for the disciples of the mysteries.

Now Christ had truly been revealed. Through this, Christianity was brought out of the temples and onto the world stage for the whole world. Those who believed without looking into the temples were also to be blessed. For thousands of years, a secret teaching was proclaimed in the temples; this was revealed through the appearance of Christ.

The initiates were to work in such a way that people would be prepared for the future. The prophets were initiated into the mysteries. Every content of initiation is revealed later. At that same moment, new content is given for a new future. Christ himself performed such an initiation in the miracle of Lazarus. The Gospel had been revealed through Christianity, it had become a message. A new secret teaching now developed in early Christianity. Outside, the content of the Gospels was proclaimed, the suffering, the resurrection. But in the mysteries, events of the future were presented. Even today there are still Christian mysteries. They depict what is to happen in the distant future.

Christ is what is called in Theosophy the second entity of the divine Trinity. This consists of the three entities: God the Father, the Word and the Holy Spirit. The Father is that towards which everything strives, the entity towards which the whole unknown universe is moving. The Word is the guide to the Father. It was seen in all worlds as that which leads to the Father. 'Veda' means 'the Word'. The most ancient records of the Indians were called the 'Vedas'. The Indian knew that his Rishis - his teachers - were inspired; they imparted the 'Vedas', the 'Word', which was inspired by the Deity, the Word from which the world originated. In ancient India the Word was not something external. It reflected the essence of the object.

The ancient Germans had a runic writing system; in ancient times, when a person pronounced the name of a thing, he knew that the thing had come into being from the word. That is why we find the unpronounceable name of God among the Jews, because it was the essence itself. That is why the actual name of God - Yahweh - was only used on the most solemn occasions and for the most solemn actions.

The ancient peoples said to themselves: The world was created by the word, the Logos. The word once excited world vibrations, rhythmic movements from which the world emerged. The third divine essence is that which the word can grasp, which gives strength to strive up to the Father. The Word, the divine power of creation, the second link in the divine trinity, has taken on human form.

And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.

Man will not always appear in this coarse material form; the development of man in the flesh is the fourth round or cycle. Before that, man was in a freer material form and remained in a completely different kind of existence for three cycles. But the abilities he now has, he could only acquire in the flesh. He must now develop upwards again through finer materials.

The sixth cycle will be special. He will then be in a more refined matter. Today we can only embody the word in physical air vibrations. Only insofar as I express my being in the word does it come to another. But in the sixth cycle we will consist of a finer substance, so that we will reproduce our whole being outwardly in vibrations and reveal our whole being to all people. Today, the human being can hide much through gross materiality. But then, in the sixth round, we will be entirely vibration, entirely sound, beings that communicate with the environment in rhythmic or non-rhythmic waves. Then the word, the name of the human being, is external physicality. Now the human being cannot communicate his entire being to the outside world. But there have always been beings who are superhuman, like the word itself; these can be in the flesh in the fourth cycle, which the others will be in the sixth cycle. The word has already become flesh in Christ. What can take place for human beings in the sixth cycle has been realized in the fourth cycle through Christ in humanity. This is the mystery of the Incarnation of the Logos.

The goal of man is: You shall develop to such an extent that you can turn your whole being outwards. That is the following of Christ. In the sixth cycle, man is to become what Christ exemplified in the fourth cycle. Clement Alexandrinus, Origen, were Christian initiates and imbued with the full significance of the goal, that a millennium, a cycle, must come when man will have the opportunity to be an outward seal imprint of Christ living in the flesh. Thus, a dormant Christ principle is hidden in man. In order for this to become manifest, the human being must pass through various states. This was presented in the first Christian mysteries. We find this in the first chapters of the Apocalypse. The “firstborn from the dead” means that he was the model in the fourth round of what it means to live the whole word in such a way that it will be revealed.

Human development is much older than history. Our present root race - [the Aryan,] the fifth - developed in its first sub-race in present-day India. The Indian religious books were written only in much later times. In the beginning, nothing external about the development of humanity was entrusted to man. This was guided by the old Rishis to a religious belief that was wonderfully monotheistic. The second sub-race - the Persians - developed a religion based on the principle of duality; however, this was not written down until much later. In the third sub-race, a three-part deity was recognized, especially in Egypt. This had an effect on the preceding races. Only now were the Vedas written down. The mysteries were shown in the Egyptian pyramid temples, and the gospels were taken from there. The flight to Egypt indicates this.

The third sub-race is followed by the fourth, the Greco-Roman sub-race, in which Christianity developed; then the scientific world view developed in place of the religious one; the culture of the intellect developed from the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Like a swan song, something of the old world view still lies in that time, with which the new world view was linked at that time.

The emergence of the innermost being of man before other people is what the creed of Christ must become. Those who can fully understand that Christ belongs to the world will be the twenty-four elders who worship the Lamb, Christ. In the future, in the sixth root race, some will be able to worship the Lamb in all its significance. Then man can mingle with those who worship the Lamb. This is represented by the symbol of the four beasts – lion, cow, man and eagle – who worship among the elders.

In addition to the physical body, man also has an astral body. This is not as developed as the physical body. In relation to the physical body, man is similar to God; the human race will only become more beautiful. The further perfection will be that he will perfect the astral body. Sensation, feeling and the like will become more perfect. This happens in the fifth cycle. We are still facing this cycle. Now the human being's astral body is not yet so far developed. Only the physical body is developed now. In the astral body, he only becomes a human being in the fifth cycle. There, where the human being lies before the Lamb, adoring, he does not yet stand as a complete human being. There he has one of the forms of animality. He has gained this astral form of man through earlier stages of development. Certain qualities of animality are expressed in the races. Courage is represented by the lion, sensual creativity by the ox, the cow; man represents the lower man, the Kama-Manas man, who rises above the earthly. These are not yet god-like. Men mingle with the god-like and are symbolized by the four animals; that is the point at which man will have arrived in the sixth root race, after a destruction has once more swept over the earth.

Now John describes more distant, later conditions. The messages are sent to the seven churches. The races not only live one after the other, but also next to each other. They also all have leading personalities, of whom history tells nothing.

The various schools that have fulfilled their task and now still rigidly and conservatively adhere to their task, but which must hand over their mission to humanity, are the seven communities. These receive the seven letters. The apocalypticism first clears away the old secret teachings to make way for the new secret teaching. The message to the seven churches is: You can no longer be guides, now a new revelation must come, a new church.

The apocalyptic also described the three subsequent rounds. These rounds cannot be seen with astral clairvoyance, but only when a person enters the world of Devachan, the mental world. When a person has reached that stage, he sees in spirit. When a person enters this world of Devachan, he does not see, but he hears. He is clairaudient there. 'Clairaudient' is the term we use for the spiritual world. There he hears the music of the spheres, which was spoken of in the schools of the Pythagoreans. Goethe also alludes to the sounds when he speaks of the spirit. 'The sun resounds', says Goethe. This indicates the audible state, as it is in Devachan. “The sight of it gives strength to the angels.” The angels are the spiritual beings who preside over the planets. If you want to see how a cycle unfolds, you have to recognize in the world that which resounds; the apocalypticist indicates these world cycles in the trumpets of the angels.

In the sixth round, the whole being will now be clearly revealed before everyone. But even before the sixth round begins, man can develop the Christ principle out of himself. What used to be external has become an ability in man through internalization, involution. Externalization, the evolution in the great world laws, and internalization, involution, are related to each other as exhalation and inhalation. As man passes through the races, he assimilates that which lives around him. All have passed through the ancient Indian period, then through all the other sub-races, and so they will live in the time when they will lie in adoration at the feet of the Lamb. The seven seals will be broken when man has come to the knowledge of himself, to the worship of Christ. Then the book will be unsealed. Because John indicates that this is still before the seventh race, he first has six seals opened; only later the seventh seal, when man has progressed even further in his development.

Initially, people became acquainted with their religion through the scriptures, which they understood literally. Today, it is considered enlightened to have outgrown religious documents. Regarding the Old Testament, it has always been said that it is impossible to reconcile the biblical concepts with an enlightened consciousness. People started to understand the scriptures figuratively; they still held on to the symbols. This understanding of biblical symbolism then led people to still take the biblical spirit with a certain seriousness. But even theologians today can hardly decide on anything other than to take the first chapters of the Old Testament only as a figurative representation. A rather cozy view can arise from it, but as man progresses, he cannot remain with this view. It is a kind of path of development: first to move away from the orthodox view, then from the figurative view and to move on to another, again in a sense literal view.

But for this we must learn to understand the language of the old wisdom teachings and recognize that the old teachers did not invent stories, did not create fantasies, but that they had a different conception of the truth than we have today. They wrote down the eternal truth in their teachings. This cannot be brought directly to every person, while the sensual truth can be brought to everyone.

The great teachers of old had themselves undergone an inner development. Their vision was a spiritual one. They knew that what they saw in the spirit could not be seen by everyone around them. The nations were still childlike in their perception. Accordingly, the great truths had to be given to them in a special form suitable for their understanding. Now all great teachers approached people with the awareness that the soul is immortal. It must be developed towards the truth. Moses, for example, knew that when he linked to the ideas of the people, he was planting something lasting in the soul, in the causal body. The materialistic thinker believes that the soul perishes at death. But Moses said to himself: If I communicate the truth to man today in a certain form, it will have an effect in his soul. Later he will be ripe to recognize the truth in its true form. Moses knew that later others would come who would interpret what he taught. He prepared the form. That which he prepared has gone through the incarnations of the souls. He did not consider it right to tell people the final form of the truth right away.

He himself had the truth in the background. He expressed this in the seven days of creation. He brought the truth into the form that corresponded to people's childlike understanding at the time. If he had spoken of the “round” days, he would not have been understood. He therefore spoke of days, as in ancient India one speaks of the days and nights of Brahma.

On the moon, man had a dream-like consciousness. There he had developed dream consciousness to its highest level. Each of us had come there in a kind of germinal state; there he had perceived in a dream-like way, absorbed it and developed it into a germ. These germs slept over from the moon to the earth. A spiritual germ was the human being who came to earth. He had slept through a [pralaya] into the earthly state.

Now his destiny is to come to clear consciousness. He has to go through a long series of states. In the first three rounds, what he had gone through on earlier planets was repeated. Moses speaks of the rounds. During the first round, man is in the first elementary realm. The dream state gently transitions into a state that man has now reached. The moon man did not distinguish between himself and the other objects. For him there was a dream-like pictorial reality in the way the external world is there for us in a dream. He did not perceive through the senses. The contrast between himself and his world was to be developed by man in the first round on earth. Moses calls it the difference between heaven and earth. He was to recognize himself as an earthling next to heaven. That is what happens in the first cycle of development.

In the beginning God created heaven and earth. The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep.

Man did not distinguish between himself and the individual objects. It was all still chaos. Then, after the first round, man went through an intermediate state again and then came to the second round. There the objects already got more definite boundaries. He can already distinguish what is around him. It is no longer desolate and confused. He can distinguish between what is spiritual and what is an external object. Before that it was dark on the face of the deep; the Spirit of God hovered over the waters. All that was human was water. The human germs together formed the waters. The Spirit of God brooded over the human germs, which He called forth into forms. There was light.

As soon as we see the outside world, when the entities confront us, only then can they reveal themselves to us. There was light.

God divided the light from the darkness; he made day and night. [Genesis 1:5]

Man perceived the objects. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

Now followed the Rupic round, the formative round, in which one could perceive existence. There shall be a difference between the waters; each should have its own Kama. Every single human being was set apart by God setting a boundary and dividing the waters above and below the firmament. He implanted in the individual human germ the ability to distinguish between the spiritual and the physical. The two souls were laid in the human being; the soul that looks up and the soul that looks into the earthly, that lives in the earthly.

In the third round, man enters the third elementary realm. The individual astral bodies of human beings became more and more distinct. Now man becomes independent. He steps out of the mother soil of the earth. He reaches the plant existence. These are not our present plants. Man was in the plant existence himself. All the separated astral bodies gained the ability to bring forth astral beings like the plant. During the third round, man was called to the animal existence, but in a plant-like nature, because the animal had not yet developed the body of passion. He had no warm blood yet. This was formed in the third round of the third elementary realm. The insemination indicates that fertilization has not yet taken place.

God said: Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together to one place, and let the dry land appear.

In the beginning, the astral body was not visible. Now it is becoming distinct. The dry land is only the special, more solid form that forms a boundary around itself. The gathering of the waters signifies the general astral world in its entirety.

And God said, “Let the earth bring forth grass and herbs.” [Genesis 1:11]

This was man. The ancient Germans also believed that man emerged from ash and elm, and the ancient Persians also believed that man emerged from a tree.

And have his own seed with himself [...] [Genesis 1:11]

means that each species carried its own seeds within itself and that there was no sexual reproduction.

The fourth round is the one in which the physical human being prepares himself as he is now. Man entered the mineral kingdom, he took on a body that was subject to chemical and physical laws. In the next round, he will no longer have that, but will then control his astral body just as he now controls his physical body. He will then have astral organs, he will be able to develop his organs himself when he needs them, when the astral body will control everything physical. But now, in the fourth round, man can only act with regard to the laws of the mineral world. In the physical, mineral body we are enclosed as in a house. It was only through our becoming physical ourselves that the whole world became physical. Previously, he gained knowledge of the world around him through a kind of clairvoyance. With the fourth round, the whole world of sensual objects has emerged around him. Moses could therefore say:

There are lights in the firmament of the heaven, which divide the day and the night, and give signs, times, days, and years. [Genesis 1:14]

Kant says that space and time come from man himself. Moses said that even then. Everything that can be perceived by the senses only came into being when man became physical, mineral. Through the physical round, we make the mineral body more and more perfect and also develop our astral body. In the next round, it will be developed in the same way as the physical body is today. Man will then float as if in an airy realm. Then man will have become a free being, then he will truly have become an animal being. Only then will animality be expressed in man. The astral body of man is meant here in the image of animals because the astral man moves freely in the astral world, like whales in the water, birds in the air and so on. - That is the fifth round or the fifth day.

In the sixth round, the human Kama-Manas body is formed, the lower mind body, which we now wear hidden in the physical shell. In the sixth round, man will stand as a human being in the true sense of the word, no longer enclosed in a shell. At the same time, the higher animals are formed with man. The Kama-Manas body then reaches the higher level of animal life.

And God said, “Let us make man in our image, in the likeness of ourselves: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

Only then will man become what he is meant to become.

So God created man in his own image, in the likeness of himself; male and female he created them.

Through sexuality, the human being develops into a being that will be male and female. The original text reads: He created man male-female. Only now does man truly gain dominion over the animals. He only acquires power, magic, when the actual human being is liberated on the sixth day. - On the seventh day, man had become God-like. In the seventh round, man is in the aupa state again; he has become creative himself, has become God himself, hence it says:

God rested on the seventh day. [Genesis 2:2]

The fourth round is the most important for human life. Man used to be less dense. Moses says:

He took the solid substances of the earth. [corresponds to Genesis 2:7]

He was surrounded by dust. He adopted the mineral laws. He was formed from the dust of the earth, and the living soul was formed in him. When the human being in the Lemurian race acquired solid forms — a skeleton — sexuality also arose. The solidification went hand in hand with the division into the sexes. In the second chapter, Moses describes the human being who later emerged in the Lemurian race, in the two-sexedness. This was taught in all mysteries. It was only in the fourth round that the plant and animal forms emerged as they are today. During the development of man, the plants and animals split off from him. The lower animals had arisen before. Warm-blooded animals only arose with humans. The animals developed as a result of retarded humans splitting off. The animals are the decadent human nature. They no longer fit into today's conditions. They are creatures that have remained at earlier stages. The original animal forms split off first, only then did the two sexes of humans arise.

In the beginning, man used his entire productive power externally. In the beginning, man reproduced from within himself. When he had lost the ability to penetrate dense matter, he used half of his productive power as a thinking organ.

On the one hand, man became a sexual being, while on the other, he developed half of his productive power internally into a thinking organ. He now acquired the ability to process the spirit with his brain. The spirit now fertilized him. At the same time as the division into two sexes, the thinking human being emerged. He recognized good and evil. During this period, the spinal cord and the brain also developed.

This is the snake that originated in man himself. He went through the amphibian stage. This being was his own seducer. It began to develop with the beginning of its passage through sexuality. Spinal cord and brain first developed in amphibians, and in man in the amphibious state.

Anyone who wants to know the origin of the Catholic Mass must trace it back historically to the mysteries. Mysteries are places of worship in which higher knowledge is not only taught and acquired, but in which the phenomena in question are also demonstrated. The mysteries have taken on a particularly popular form in the currents of worship that came from Persia and Egypt. It is from these that the mass has emerged.

Anyone who wanted to gain knowledge of higher worlds before the appearance of Christ had to be accepted as a student in a secret school. He first had to learn how the world and man came into being. He was introduced to an examination of the origin of the world and the significance of man within the world. He was taught how the divine world spirit has taken shape everywhere. Minerals, plants, animals and so on were seen as formations of the world spirit. Man is a confluence of all that is in the world. Paracelsus once said: All entities of the world are letters, and man is the word in which all these are found. Man is the microcosm in the macrocosm.

The disciple was taught how the Divine Being splits into many details, only to be reunited in man. The disciple was allowed to experience this splitting of the Divine and the return to man.

Man has brought low desires, passions and instincts into the world. The lower animal forms are decadent products of man. Everything that is expressed in animals by lower passions has been brought into the world by man. An original state of the world was as we now see it realized in the mineral world. The gem has no desire, no craving, no wish; the gem is chaste and undemanding. If you imagine the other entities with the same chaste and undemanding nature, you have the ideal of the secret disciple. He had to awaken in him the feeling: You must become again as pure, desireless creation, which has emerged so chaste from the hand of the Creator. He sacrificed everything lower - that was the “catharsis”, the purification of instincts, desires, passions - this corresponds to the “sacrifice” or “oblatio” in the Mass, the second part of the Mass.

The first part is the proclamation or the “Gospel”, where the message of the dissolution of the world spirit in nature is imparted, the intellectual insight into how the world has come into being. This is followed by the second part, the sacrifice. The secret disciple had to have the will to retrace the path to the original chaste form of creation. When he was ready for this, he was admitted to the actual mysteries. In the Egyptian mysteries, he then had to spend three days alone in a locked room and was placed in a state of consciousness in which he could have higher types of perception. He now experienced the descent of the god into the world and the distribution in the world of souls or the astral world, after he himself was ready to sacrifice himself in a similar way.

He first experienced an image that was clear to him through a sure realization: This was once you, in the time when you were still without drives and passions, when you were still without desire. He saw his own image in the distant past, a human image on a higher level. The second was that he saw how this human image on a higher level gave rise to a male human image, whose face shone like the sun. This was Osiris. He saw the emergence of Osiris from the primeval man, surrounded by a radiant aura. From the second image, the present form was then created after a second entity had been separated - Isis - and Horus, the present human being, was born. Now he was an awakened soul.

In the present human being, when he lies asleep, one has first the physical body, then the etheric body and further on the actual aura that lifts out of the sleeping person. The person is in his aura; he has then left his physical body. In the depths of the temple mysteries, the secret disciple consciously experienced the described states in the astral body. He was then a “transformed, a ”consecrated one. He who is transformed in this way perceives the light phenomena of the lower beings.

This process was the third step of the mysteries, the ‹transformation› of man into his astral form. Then the secret student had realized: Just as you have seen the Osiris, you were once like that too; you were astral and then became physical; a second time you should plan to become embodied. By free decision the soul should return to the physical body. When he came out of the mysteries again, he should consciously carry the physical body with him. Now he also received a new name. He felt that this was his eternal name. Each of us has such a name, which he carries in all his incarnations. The initiate carried this eternal name. He had voluntarily incarnated in his body. The human being now speaks “I” to his own body. But the initiate knew that he is not the same as his body. He carries his body on his back. Such a one is crucified in his body; he is the one crucified in matter. Now he steps out and consciously does all the things he used to do unconsciously. This union with the body was called 'communion', the fourth process in the mysteries. He who is thus transformed and reunited with his body is a true initiate.

Now Christ appeared on earth. This appearance of Christ on earth meant that what had previously taken place in the mysteries now took place before the world in physical space. In the past, individuals had gone through the mysteries. All this had now become a historical event, a real historical event in the sacrificial death of Christ Jesus. Now Christ Jesus has established a memorial in remembrance of these mysteries. Those who joined Christ no longer needed to look. To look means to “look into a mystery”. Those who were to come to inner knowledge no longer had to learn to look through the mysteries. They could remain with the external sign. This external sign has a deeper meaning.

The three highest members of the human being are Atma, Budhi and Manas. In the past, when one spoke of “man”, one spoke of Atma, Budhi and Manas. At that time everyone believed that each life was only one in a long series among many, and that it was a life earned. Man was steeped in this. At the same time, there was something about the personal life that man basically looked beyond. He did not attach great value to it.

The task of the first two millennia after Christ was to educate humanity for the higher self through KamaManas. The personal life should be taken seriously and with grandeur. Man spends about two millennia in Devachan. During this period, all of humanity will pass through an incarnation in which value is placed on the personal.

Christ went with Peter, James and John to the mountain - that is, to the sanctuary. This was the introduction to devachanic vision. There they saw Moses and Elijah beside Jesus. 'El' - in 'Elijah' - means 'the way', Moses is called 'the truth' - the moral truth - and Jesus is 'life'. Jesus says to his disciples: 'Elijah has appeared again. John was this Elijah. He told them further: But do not tell until I reappear. They should not speak of the doctrine of reincarnation until he would come back in a new world cycle. For two millennia, the world should get to know the value of the personal. That which runs through from one incarnation of man to another is the finer matter of man, the water, the spiritual. This is also referred to in: “The Spirit of God brooded over the waters,” the waters - the people. The impersonal man is symbolized by the water.

Wine is the symbol for the personal man. Christ transforms the water into wine. He transformed an impersonal religion into a religion of the personality. Just as water turns into wine, so does the impersonal nature of man turn into the personal. He who can grasp the teaching of reincarnation and wants to rise above personality must abstain from wine. He who enjoys wine will never arrive at an understanding of what is impersonal in man.

The lower body should be ennobled and glorified, which is why Christianity should live without the doctrine of reincarnation for two millennia. Christ had appeared to sanctify the personality. As a sign that Christ had taken upon himself the entire sacrifice that used to take place in the mysteries, Christ instituted the sacrifice of the Mass. In it, the mystery act was repeated in an outward sign.

The external action of the Mass is as follows: the priest goes to the altar with the altar boy. First there is a preparatory act, the 'relay prayer' and the 'Kyrie Eleison'. The deeper Mass consists of four parts: 'Gospel', 'Sacrifice' - Oblatio, 'Transformation' and 'Communion'.

During the “Gospel”, a passage from the Gospels is read. This takes place on the right side of the altar. The actual altar is built so that it faces east. The priest stands on the north side. Here he reads the message. This refers to the fact that the human being in the first root race, the polaric one, was also in the north, from where he descended more and more into matter.

The second part of the mass is the 'oblatio' or 'sacrifice'. The priest sacrifices what represents the higher man, just as man used to sacrifice himself. The chalice is the outer symbol for the human heart. What we have in our hearts represents something future; it is less developed now, but contains the spiritual. When man no longer thinks in matter but in the spiritual, then the heart will be the organ of thought. Today the heart is still personal. The wine in the chalice represents the personal. The wafer signifies the brain. Bread and wine are now transformed into the higher nature, into Christ Himself.

The sacrifice brings about the transformation of man. This act is spoken softly so that only the priest himself can hear it. This is an allegorical indication that the truly divine in man is something that he only speaks to himself. Every human being can only say “I” to himself. This is why the Jewish secret doctrine could only let the name be pronounced with particular shyness, the name Yahweh, which is the actual “I” within. That is why the words in the offertory are spoken half in silence and half murmured. That is why the third part, the consecration, is the sacrifice of the Mass.

All this shows that something in the external nature stands as a symbol for what the divinity itself is. In the coarser matter and in the finer matter, the divinity is represented. The bread and the wine, body and blood. At the moment when the consciousness is fully awakened that we are dealing with transformed matter, then on the altar we have in the host a matter such as it is in our brain, and in the wine a matter such as it is in our heart - in the blood.

The priest breaks the host in a certain way, into a certain number of pieces, namely nine:

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1. Corporatio = embodiment
2. Nativitas = birth
3. Circumeisio = circumcision
4. Apparitio = appearance
5. Passio = suffering
6. Mors = death
8. Gloria = glory
9. Regnum = kingdom

These nine parts represent the transformed human being, who participates in the higher. These are the nine parts of the human being. The parts that the human being experiences within his personality are 1 to 7, and 8 and 9 extend beyond the personality, which is why they are placed next to it.

Thus, in communion, man unites with his seven-part nature and strives for 8 and 9: 'Gloria' and 'Regnum'. This is accompanied by the Lord's Prayer. First, the Paternoster refers to the existing God of heaven, then to “Thy name”, the name of God, the Logos, who became flesh in Christ, and then to “Thy kingdom”. The whole thing is a parable for the existing world. Man should understand his communion with the existing world. Only the human being who came out of the mysteries understood the world. This is expressed in the Paternoster.

On particularly festive occasions, the procession also includes the 'Sanctissimum', that is the consecrated monstrance containing the Holy Body. At the top of the monstrance is a sun-like rounding with rays, the rounding rests in a half-moon shaped cover. This is also how Osiris and Isis were depicted. The union of Isis and Osiris is represented by the words 'Sanctissimum' above the altar, a symbol of the time when the sun still enveloped the moon.

No priest who is not ordained or authorized to wear the stole may read the sacrifice of the Mass. The stole is the actual priestly garment. The priest first wears a skirt, then the “alba, a shirt-like garment with a belt, then a symbolic garment, then the stole, which is crossed over the chest, and over that the casul.

The stole is the actual insignia of priestly dignity. Therefore, when he wears the stole, he feels like a servant of the church. He is no longer allowed to proclaim his own opinion. He keeps his personal opinion to himself; he says to himself that it could be wrong, and he proclaims what has been believed for thousands of years.

The new era led everything spiritual into the material in the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. People learned to judge the world according to material conditions. After Galileo and Copernicus, all attention was drawn down to the physical plane. Everything was conditioned by karma. As a later religion, Protestantism no longer had any understanding for the sacrifice of the Mass. When we see and hear the Mass celebrated with full understanding, we have before us the last reflection of the consecration performed in the ancient Egyptian pyramids.

The physical man emerged from the solar man Osiris; he shall become the solar man again. He has unconsciously descended from the height of the sun; consciously he shall ascend to it again. Solar heroes are those who walk with such certainty on their spiritual path as the sun on its orbit. These solar heroes have reached the sixth degree of initiation. The degrees of initiation for the Persians were: first a raven, second a secret, third a warrior, fourth a lion, fifth a Persian, sixth a solar hero - solar runner -, seventh a father.

First of all, one must consider the various states of consciousness through which man has passed. He is now in the state of bright day-consciousness. Before that, he has passed through three other states of consciousness. The first consciousness was a kind of dull all-consciousness, such as the stone that lives in space has today, but brooding in a dull state of consciousness. This condition can still be caused pathologically even now. In a deep trance, people often begin to draw world systems; but they have no control over their consciousness.

In the second state of consciousness, that of dreamless sleep, man can perceive everything alive. Every night, man undergoes this state. He is then in a kind of plant trance; he carries out the [vegetative] functions quite well during this time. The state of consciousness is that of dream sleep, which is much lighter than the previous one; but even then, man does not receive any sensory impressions as he does in the waking state. Then people did not see things, but an image of the soul arose in them.

Now we find ourselves in the fourth state of consciousness. The previous states of consciousness were linked to other planets just as our waking consciousness is linked to the earth. Man is a product, born out of the circumstances in which he moves. Esoterically, the first planet is Saturn, the second the Sun, the third the Moon and the fourth is the Earth. On Saturn, man has already gone through the various states of form. In the middle of the first round - that is, of the first elementary realm - Saturn became physical. With Saturn, it depends on the first round. The following six rounds on Saturn are not of particular importance for humans. Other beings from earlier world cycles have completed their development there. During the seventh round on Saturn, humans had reached the point of becoming physical, but they had a body that was merely oval-shaped, spherical. This state was subject to neither birth nor death. This physical body went through the entire Saturn development.

One could imagine that the whole of Saturn is composed of individual human spheres, a mulberry; a morula stage was Saturn. The whole thing slept from one pralaya to another manvantara, the solar condition. There the human being was in a kind of plant trance. It was only during the second round of the sun that man attained the new. There his consciousness developed into a kind of human plant trance. There, man no longer had an immortal physical body. The whole was an all-life, a living organism that secreted new human spheres from itself. The third to seventh rounds on the sun are not important for humans, but only for other beings. On the sun, a second realm is emerging alongside the human realm, namely a special mineral realm. The minerals there are still growing, they are still more plant-like. They are still so similar to the human kingdom and not yet as separate as they are now.

After a pralaya, the moon manvantara begins. This is when the image consciousness of dream sleep develops. In the third moon round, this actual moon stage is developed. Man then becomes an image-conscious being, outwardly like a kind of animal state. In the first round on the moon, he has repeated Saturn; in the second round, the sun. In the third round of the moon, he develops the new, the actual moon state. The fourth to seventh rounds on the moon are not of great importance to him. They are a descent on the moon.

Now the development of the earth begins. In the first round, there is a repetition of the Saturn condition, in the second round a repetition of the sun condition, and in the third round there is a repetition of the moon condition. In the fourth round, the actual earth condition occurs, the state of waking consciousness. In the fourth round, the human being passes through the state of the unmanifest form, then through the astral state, and finally through the physical. Now, in the first round on earth, he has gone through the stage of Saturn, the mineral kingdom; in the second round, the stage of the sun, the plant kingdom; in the third round, the stage of the moon, the animal kingdom. In the fourth round, the human being proper emerges.

The external differences between the four stages are as follows: On Saturn, there is a silent, dark existence. One would not have seen anything at that time, not even clairvoyantly. On the sun, everything begins to shine. There, the spiritual resounding begins. This resounding of the sun is transferred to the human being in the solar round - the second round on earth. In the second round, the human being is a resounding being. Everyone received their own tone. Every person has their own special tone, which signifies them in the world. They still have this tone, it resounds within.

On the moon, he was physically a luminous being. What he is today only in the astral, that was the physical of the human being then, namely, luminous. He was a star, a luminous being on the moon. This state was repeated on earth in the third round. In the fourth round, the new was added on earth.

After passing through the arupa state, the rupa-mental state and the astral state, in the fourth round man became physical. It was only in the finest physical etheric matter that man developed, in the polaric race, at the beginning of our physical development. The polaric people were ether people. They repeated the Saturn stage once more. They were spheres at the beginning of the physical formation of the earth and immortal. An immortal race inhabited the pole at that time. Then man passed into the sun stage. Before that, everything was still dissolved, ethereal. Then man separated himself as an air being in the Hyperborean period. He formed a kind of sphere that sounded, vibrated, trembled and reacted to impact and pressure internally. This is how he perceived the changes in the outside world. The solar stage of the Hyperborean period came to an end when the finest substances withdrew, leaving only coarser substances that began to glow.

At the beginning of the Hyperborean Age, the present physical sun emerged from the earth. This caused a tremendous catastrophe on the earth. All life was drawn out.

Now man begins to reproduce in two sexes. At the beginning of the Lemurian period, that is, during the third root race, the coarser substances emerged from the earth that the earth could no longer use. That is the physical moon that was then separated from the earth. Again, a great catastrophe took place on the earth. Now all beings had their own warmth. Until then, all humans were in a kind of light state. In the Lemurian period, the fourth stage was that of intrinsic warmth.

Man was a sounding being on the sun, a luminous being on the moon, and became an intrinsically warm being on the earth. All animals that have intrinsic warmth only split off from humans after that. It was only through intrinsic warmth that Kama could move into humans. Only humans and animals with their own warmth have Kama. The fish is still a sleeper today, dispassionate. From the middle of the Lemurian period, man himself becomes inwardly warm, kamic, passionate. In the past, the maturing of man was brought about from the outside. At that time, the general warmth incubated man, the warmth that surrounded the earth. Man then absorbed this warmth within himself.

This is what the Prometheus myth points to. The warmth was brought into man from heaven. Man became a fire being. In this way he acquired passion; before that he had no passion, no inner warmth of his own. That is why it is said of the earlier time: “The Spirit of God brooded over the waters - human souls.” This was the warmth that brings everything to maturity.

Now, on the other hand, man is a creature with its own warmth. These conditions had not existed before. Man had learned the earlier conditions on earlier planets. He learned this new condition on earth. Now the earth was left to its own devices after it had acquired its own warmth.

But there were great leaders who could give humanity a jolt. Such beings studied the conditions that were beyond the conditions of the earth. These were the Manus, leaders, divine beings. They had to study a planet from which one could learn what the earth still needed. The planet was Mars. Mars looks to the clairvoyant as if people had already lived on it. The discarded Kama shells can be found on Mars. These Kama shells look like a kind of snake skin that has been left behind. It is Kama that is capable of being fertilized with the spirit. Such a stage had to be studied on another planet, where the beings had just reached the point of having left this stage behind.

Another stage was found by the Manus on Mercury; the Kama-Manas stage. This was necessary for the Earth. The Kama stage of Mars had to be fertilized with the Manas stage of Mercury. Repetitions for the Earth were the Saturn, Sun and Moon stages. The Mars and Mercury stages were added. The influx of Mercury forces is represented by Mercury's snake staff. The Hermes staff represents the impact of the spirit's monad.

The clairvoyant does not count the Earth itself in the planetary development. He says it is Mars and Mercury together. The Earth still has three rounds to go through. These are important for the following planetary stages. In the fifth round, it enters the plant kingdom. It then lives in a kind of paradise, in the Garden of Eden. There the lowest realm will be the plant kingdom. Everything that man produces there will be a plant. In this way, man prepares what will be on the next planet. This next planet is esoterically called Jupiter. It is the Jupiter that will arise from the earth. The sixth round, the animal kingdom, is a preparation for the sixth planet, Venus - so-called because of its similarity to Venus. On the seventh planet, Vulcan, completion follows. No mere physical brain can conceive the state of the last planet. Only for the clairvoyant arises the possibility of knowing something about Vulcan.

The great sages have written down this planetary development, and everyone can read it in the days of the week. You start with Saturday: Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Mars day, Mercury day, Jupiter day, Venus day and Saturday again - Vulcan. Mars day and Mercury day stand together for the earth. Mars corresponds to the god Tin and Mercury to the Wotan of the Germans - see Tacitus' Germania. In all nations, the days of the week have names that reflect occult development. Thursday, Jupiter Day, represents the future; therefore, it is especially sacred to occultists. For the occultist, the next Saturday would always be Volcano Day, which coincides with Saturday. The periods of time that are traversed on the planets cover many millions of years. On Earth, everything that has already occurred is repeated. Every idea is a repetition, every work of art is a repetition. The outer, bright consciousness of the day is repetitive. On the next planet, a psychic state of consciousness occurs. It differs from the present state in that the human being enters a luminous state from the state of his own warmth, developing his own light. There he consciously becomes a luminous being. There he can consciously produce glowing colors. There he can transform the light into a glowing imagination.

In the fifth round of the fifth planet, the human being will have become a luminous form, an apparition. Today, the clairvoyant can produce glowing forms in the astral realm; in doing so, he anticipates the state of the fifth round of the fifth planet. But he must work with earthly powers. [...]

On the sixth planet, super-physical consciousness sets in. This is magical. The created being of light remains. There, the human being has a magical consciousness. On Vulcan, he will have reached the consciousness of the seventh stage; he will be spiritual. This can only be expressed in a symbolic language, but not in an ordinary language. From Earth onwards, the last rounds are preparations for the following planets. The deeper essence in man goes through this whole development. In the spherical being of Saturn, man was already present as a point. A thread runs through all states of consciousness. Man goes through all stages.

Since the Martian stage, since man has warm blood, his own warmth, conflict has also arisen. Before that, he was a peaceful being, had no passion. In the lower animal species with cold blood, there is no conflict - Kessler, a Russian naturalist, has confirmed this. The thread that was already found on Saturn and that extends to Vulcan is called the Pitri being.

The smallest expresses the greatest. When man got blood, his astral body began to take on the form that it now has. It developed through five races in the Lemurian period, then through seven in the Atlantean period, and finally through five in the Aryan period. In the races, there is a repetition of the earlier conditions. The religious consciousness of the ancient Indian people recognized the One God; this is the germ of all later religions. This was a repetition of the polar stage of the earth. In the Persian race we find a repetition of the Hyperborean stage, and in the Chaldeans and Egyptians the trinity, a repetition of the Lemurian time with the impact of Kama in the fourth sub-race of the fourth stage of the earth. Kama-Manas joins them.

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.

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.

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.

Dear attendees! Anthroposophy is still accepted by many people today who are only able to look at it from the outside as a more or less fantastic attempt to penetrate into areas of the world through knowledge that a serious scientist should not concern himself with. And it is true that anthroposophy, by developing special powers of knowledge, wants to penetrate into areas of life that are important to people above all else, and to which science, with its great triumphs, which are fully recognized by anthroposophy, has no access. Above all, it must be said that there are already scientists today who take their work very seriously and who are concerned with all kinds of abnormal human soul-body forces. These scientists point out how human beings can develop effects that show that they are rooted in the world in other ways than mere natural science can determine. But it is precisely such serious scientists who find the path taken by anthroposophy fantastic. They see it as being open to enthusiasm or perhaps even superstition. In any case, they do not see it as a path that can be taken seriously scientifically.

Now it really must be said that those people who are prone to enthusiasm, to nebulous mysticism, and who are of the kind that today, as is so common, easily run to anything that somehow calls itself occult or the like, will by no means find any lasting satisfaction in anthroposophy. For this anthroposophy aims to work with the seriousness, the conscientiousness, and the methodology that is absolutely in line with the direction of more recent scientific development. And above all, the healthy, harmonious, human thinking must be applied in this anthroposophy. And so it is that the enthusiasts and the superstitious people soon give it a wide berth. Of course, this does not prevent those people who want to reject everything that is unfamiliar to them with a slight wave of the hand from saying: Only neurasthenics or hysterical people have an interest in anthroposophical research.

Now, my dear audience, it is difficult to explain the nature of anthroposophy in a short evening lecture in the face of this. But I will try to show the paths of this anthroposophy and at least hint at the results that this anthroposophy can arrive at, in order to characterize how this anthroposophy can be, although it is not for dreamers or superstitious people; but how it can be a soul food for all those who, with a healthy common sense in practical life, but who, precisely because of this, need support, security and direction for their soul life, in keeping with the spiritual development of our time, and also certain forces that can only be truly effective in the outer practical, social life if they are drawn from a spiritual, from a supersensible world and carry the human soul out of such a world.

Now, no spiritual research could possibly make any impression or exert any fruitful influence in the long term if it were to contradict the significant developments that have taken place over the last three to four centuries, and particularly in the nineteenth century, through natural science and its practical results. But that is certainly not what anthroposophy wants. It seeks to follow into the spiritual world the very paths that have led to significant results in natural science. It must therefore side with those natural scientists, the level-headed natural scientists, who, after thoroughly pursuing the paths of natural science, speak of the limitations of natural science. These limits soon become apparent when one considers that natural science can only observe the external sense world, can only combine the facts of the external sense world that arise from observation or experiment through the intellect, through the mind, and then can combine certain natural laws from these observations, from these experiments; natural laws in which, however, the human being with his physical corporeality is also harnessed. But the attempts made to go beyond the limits set by the sensory world by mere reason alone — as one also says, by philosophical thinking — always leave the unbiased person unsatisfied. The unbiased person feels: as soon as scientific thinking, as we are accustomed to it today, leaves the paths of sensory experience, experiment and observation, thinking left to its own devices enters into uncertainty. The dispute between philosophical systems testifies to the extent to which thinking left to its own devices enters into uncertainty. Anthroposophical research in particular makes it clear how this thinking, which we have in ordinary life and in ordinary, recognized science, not only binds itself to the sensory experience of the level-headed natural scientist out of habit or arbitrariness, but how it itself is dependent step by step on this sensory experience, so that it only has certainty when this external experience, this sensory experience, guides it.

In short, my dear audience, just when one cannot think in a lay and dilettante scientific way, one sees the inadequacy of this kind of thinking left to its own devices, which somehow wants to philosophically penetrate into the supersensible. Many people in our time therefore do not think much of satisfying their soul needs, their longings for the eternal in the human soul, through such self-abandoned thinking. And in our time, when the old traditions of religious life, of faith, as such are becoming increasingly shaky and shaky, people do need such new supports. Therefore, many deeper minds are found in our time, which understand: a philosophy of life that relies on reason alone cannot give the soul the necessary support and security. That is why such deeply-disposed natures today turn to certain mystical directions.

Particularly when one speaks seriously of what anthroposophy can be for today's human being, one must characterize these two pitfalls that one must avoid in one's research. The one pitfall is the purely intellectual world view that wants to go beyond the supersensible through thinking left to its own devices; the other is certain mystical directions. These seek to penetrate into deeper shafts of the human soul life by means of man, as it were, immersing himself in his own inner being. They seek to bring up from these deeper shafts that which is not present in ordinary life and which connects the eternal in the soul with the eternal world-ruling powers. Anthroposophy must draw attention to these two pitfalls because it must show that it is absolutely serious about not carelessly stopping at either side, when it cannot provide a sure basis for knowledge. Anyone who can observe the inner life of the human soul with an open mind – esteemed attendees – can no more remain with a more or less nebulous mysticism than he can go beyond the limits of knowledge of nature through self-abandoned thinking. We usually do not know how that which lives in the depths of the soul is connected with external sensory impressions. We usually do not know how the human memory works. Decades ago, someone may have unconsciously or subconsciously, without fully realizing it, received some impression from the outside world. It has descended into the soul life; there it has been transformed. He may have connected with human emotional life; connected with human sympathies and antipathies, with impulses of the will. He has become something quite different, but he is still only a transformed external impression. And then, as one says, it is brought up out of the soul through inner contemplation and is thought to come from eternal depths, not from some external world through an external impression. In this way, illusions upon illusions can arise in nebulous mysticism. That is why anthroposophy cannot stop at this mystical immersion in the human interior. If the human inner life is taken as it appears in ordinary life and as it is also used for research in ordinary science.

Precisely because Anthroposophy is fully aware that one cannot penetrate to anything that is not is not already present in some form in this ordinary life, anthroposophy must look for cognitive powers that have yet to be developed, that lie dormant in the human soul – one could also say, if one wants to use a scientific term – that lie latent in it and can be brought forth.

That there are such forces slumbering in the human soul, that they can be awakened, that they can become higher powers of knowledge than those of ordinary life and ordinary science, can only be proved by practice, which I want to talk to you about this evening. But to even arrive at seeking such powers of knowledge through one's own soul development requires something I would call intellectual modesty. At some point in life, this intellectual modesty must say to us: You were once a child with dream-like soul powers, soul powers that were without any orientation towards the outer world, with a soul state that was dull compared to the one you have today. External education and life have brought out of the soul what lay dormant in it. They have developed those powers of perception that are generally recognized today in a person who has had a corresponding education, whether in life or in some other field. Now, for once in your life, you have to say to yourself, with intellectual modesty: from the point of view that you have gained in this way through ordinary education, through ordinary life, you can now take your self-development into your own hands and get further than you were, you can bring further forces out of the soul that lie dormant in it. And it is with such forces, slumbering in the soul of every human being, and which in their development represent nothing other than a continuation of the normal human soul forces, that Anthroposophy seeks to do research. Research into that which lies behind the world of the senses, research into that which is hidden in the human soul as something eternal, and which is connected with the most important longings and life riddles of this human soul. I will not, however, speak to you about external measures that might be taken to develop such forces lying dormant in the soul. I must first speak to you of the intimate exercises of the human soul if I am to characterize the paths that Anthroposophy takes into the supersensible world.

In my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” and in the second part of my “Occult Science” and in other books, I have pointed out in detail everything that must be gone through in energetic and persistent soul exercises so that man can come to such supersensible knowledge. I will have to characterize the essence of what is written there in detail.

The first thing that is involved is the development of the soul in terms of [the powers of] presentation and thought. Just as you can strengthen a muscle by using it in work, so you can indeed strengthen the powers of thought of the human soul by using them in a certain way, using them again and again, indeed using them again and again in rhythmic succession, so that they become something quite different from what they initially are. To do this, it is necessary to bring a clearly defined idea or a clearly defined complex of ideas into the center of consciousness, and then to withdraw one's attention from everything else by strong inner volition and to concentrate the entire life of the human soul on this one idea or this one complex of ideas. In order to achieve what is necessary, however, this complex of ideas must be such that it is not taken from our ordinary memory life. I have already indicated how what we bring up from ordinary memory life can put us in illusion, it brings up reminiscences that lie dormant in the unconscious. One cannot know what will come up from the soul if one were to take an idea or a complex of ideas from one's ordinary memory life and make it the focus of one's soul life, and then concentrate on it. Therefore, one should take something that one finds, let us say – this is just an example – in some book by someone else, a saying, a sentence. What matters is not the content, but the fact that one is strengthening one's thinking by working with thoughts, and that one is taking some material that was previously unknown to one, that is newly entering one's soul life. We will see in a moment why. Or else, one can have some experienced person in this field compose such a spell. Because what matters is that what enters into the center of the soul life, and on which one then concentrates the whole soul life, on which one focuses all attention, that it approaches the human being as otherwise only any external sense impression, such as a color or a sound or any other external sense impression. What Anthroposophy strives for in this path of research is quite definitely the outer sensory perception. This outer sensory perception presents itself to us from the outside, compelling us to accept its content. Just as the human being faces external perception as something foreign, and is thus particularly alert to it, so too should the soul life face what I have been talking about here, which should be brought to the center of experience. For the human being should be as alert in their thinking as they are when they are facing an external sensory impression.

In this way, I am already drawing your attention, dear attendees, to the fact that what anthroposophy strives for as a path of knowledge must not be confused, as unfortunately still often happens today, with everything that tends towards the pathological, the diseased side of the soul life. For anyone who can look at human mental life with an open mind, it is clear that even ordinary memory – admittedly, it lies in the realm of the healthy, of course – is connected to the human physical organism, and that when the normal connection between the human soul and the physical organism develops in the direction of the abnormal in the process of remembering , when the soul life becomes more bound, more intimately bound to the physical organism, those pathological conditions arise which express themselves in hallucinations, in visions, in illusions, in easy suggestibility, and so on, and which lie at just the opposite pole from that to which anthroposophical paths of knowledge lead. Everything that presents itself to us pathologically leads the soul life deeper down into the bodily functions, deeper down than the ability to remember lies. What is developed through the described strengthening of thinking makes human thinking more and more similar to the behavior of the human soul when taking in an external sensory impression. Just as the human being is much more alive when absorbing an external sensory impression than in ordinary, more passive thinking, so too should thinking be energized so that it becomes as alive and intense as the experience of an external sensory impression would otherwise be. It is precisely in this coming to life of the world of thought that one notices more and more that one is penetrating into a soul life that is not the ordinary one. You know, my esteemed audience, how pale, rightly called pale, the ordinary thought life is compared to the life in sensual impressions and in external processes in general. Just as one usually lives in sensual impressions and external processes, so should the whole thought life become for those times when one wants to devote oneself to supersensible knowledge.

Now, in order to avoid being misunderstood, I must point out another difference between the abnormal states of mind I have just mentioned: the person who seeks anthroposophical knowledge develops such strength of thought while the ordinary personality continues to exist in its full, healthy state of mind. A second personality develops, so to speak. And the first, the personality with common sense, with healthy criticism, remains controlling next to the developed personality, the personality with the higher cognitive ability. When someone falls into hallucinations, visions, illusions, when they become a medium, when they are exposed to suggestions, then their entire ordinary, healthy personality enters into the state of hallucinating, of illusions, and so on. The radical difference of the thoroughly healthy anthroposophical path is that the ordinary personality always remains as healthy as it is in life, controlling, criticizing, alongside the developed other personality. On this condition, it may be said that – it takes years for some people, depending on their disposition, but only months for others; some can achieve it in a few weeks through meditation and by concentrating on a specific thought content, that is what I call it – it may be said that it can be achieved that a person feels similarly to how they feel during ordinary thinking. In ordinary thinking, he needs the physical organism. In this respect, one could say, anthroposophical spiritual science fully recognizes the validity of materialism.

In order to develop his soul abilities at all in ordinary life and in ordinary science, man needs the physical body. And he only becomes free of the physical body by strengthening his thinking, making it more intense, more alive. Thought becomes free from the physical body to the same degree that external sensory phenomena are free from the physical body. Consider how independent the physical apparatus of the eye is from the rest of the human organism. I cannot characterize it further now, I would just like to hint at it. What happens in the eye under the influence of the outside world is what, to a certain extent, makes man subject to an objective world in the sensory perceptions of the eye. By linking his thinking with this objective world, thinking itself is also introduced into an objective world. Through sensory perception, man comes out of himself in a certain way.

This is not the place for deep epistemological considerations, but what I am saying can be understood by any simple human mind. Man comes out of himself when he does meditation and concentration exercises as I have described them. But then man realizes how he is only now gradually learning to develop the soul life as such independently of the body. However grotesque and paradoxical it may still sound to a modern person, one learns through experience, through the practice of life, what it means to have thoughts outside of the human physical organism. These thoughts are, however, different from the usual pale thoughts, and also from those that deal with natural laws. These developed and strengthened thoughts are as pictorial as the outer sensory impressions themselves. What is fully clear to the anthroposophical researcher must not be missing at this stage of knowledge. In the writings mentioned and elsewhere, I have called this stage of knowledge the imaginative stage. Imaginative not because one imagines something, but because thinking passes completely from the abstract form into the pictorial, into the living, into the intensified form. But what is absolutely necessary for anyone embarking on anthroposophical research to be aware of within this imaginative thinking is that they know: you are now only carrying something with you in your thoughts that lives within your own human being.

You see how carefully the anthroposophical path of knowledge must be described. It must be emphasized that this first stage allows one to experience one's own inner being more intensely, but that one must realize that one is not yet experiencing an external world, but only this human inner being. But we do achieve a first result when we explore the inner being through such a more intensive, pictorial, imaginative process of imagining. For we gradually learn to have before our soul, as in a comprehensive tableau of life, everything that has formed us, that has affected us inwardly, spiritually, from birth to the present moment. We normally carry what we have in our soul only in the form of ordinary memory. The stream from which memories of this or that experience arise, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, essentially runs subconsciously. We know how abstract it is, how shadowy it is compared to the real experiences when we are immersed in these memory images. These memory images should not be confused with what now occurs before imaginative knowledge. It is not mere memories that arise, but rather something that suggests how one has become. Yes, right back to the first years of childhood, one sees the inner forces that have developed the ordinary abilities of life in one. One sees how the moral and intellectual faculties have developed, how they have been integrated into the forces of growth and nutrition. One really looks into the human interior.

You learn to recognize what I have called the formative forces of the human being. You really learn to recognize a second body. But if you want to characterize it precisely, you have to say: it is a temporal body. It is something that is constantly developing in a mobile way. You cannot draw it without realizing that you are drawing or painting it like a flash of lightning. That which is mobile in time can only be captured in a moment, and so it is with this human formative forces body. In truth, it is a unified organization in time, and it must be understood in that way. There have always been older intuitions for such higher insights, and what I call the formative forces body has also been called the etheric or life body. If one learns to recognize it in the suggested way, not through logical conclusions or otherwise, but through direct inner vision with the imaginative knowledge that has been acquired, then one knows once and for all: what is human organization is not only played out by the fact that there is a sum of chemical and physical forces constitute the human physical body, but because a spiritual soul has entered the physical organization at birth or conception, and that a second, a spiritual-soul, a supersensible body, which is not only spatial, which is temporal, which is always mobile, works in us. And one learns to recognize the inner relationship that exists between thinking, imagining and the forces of growth. As long as one only looks at the human being from a physiological and biological point of view, one finds the forces of growth on the one hand and, on the other, through inner observation, for example, the abstract powers of thinking. Through the imaginative contemplation of which I have just spoken, one learns to recognize how a gradual transition takes place between the ordinary forces of growth and the forces of thinking, how, by strengthening itself, imagining itself leads to that which at the same time brings about growth, the development of the inner organic power from stage to stage in the growing human being. Thus imaginative knowledge becomes a first result of anthroposophical inner research.

Now it is not enough to merely concentrate one's soul life on some idea or on a complex of ideas. Although everything I have described and what is explained in the books mentioned aims to enable the person to carry out such exercises in full arbitrariness, with complete inner composure, as one would otherwise only have in ordinary life , and also comes to such concentration, such directing of attention to a certain idea, it is nevertheless the case that one gradually feels surrendered to such ideas, feels too strongly surrendered, if other soul exercises are not undertaken in a different direction. Therefore, one must, just as faithfully as one concentrates on certain ideas, again do exercises so that these ideas in consciousness, whenever one wants, extinguish, are in turn put out of consciousness. Then one comes to establish what one can call the consciousness. Otherwise, empty consciousness is only present in people during the time from falling asleep to waking up. And if one has not gone through any school of practice, then there is a great temptation to fall into a kind of sleep when consciousness becomes empty of external impressions – or even when it is so strongly taken in by external impressions that it no longer distinguishes them. The ability to achieve an empty consciousness is essential for further progress in anthroposophical research. This does not mean that the person enters into some kind of sleep or dream state, but that they can remain fully conscious without introducing anything through their own inner strength, as they would otherwise do with external impressions or with a strongly developed life of thought or feeling or will. And then, when the life of thought has been strengthened in the way described, so strongly strengthened that one is, as it were, inwardly grasped in the direct experience of this memory tableau of which I have spoken, when one's entire previous life on earth stands before one's eyes like a huge tableau, if one's imaginative life is strong enough, then one can also manage, while being completely awake, to dampen, throw out of consciousness, and create an empty consciousness, the individual idea that one has brought to the center of consciousness in this way, or that has placed itself there. Once one has practiced this for a while (again, it varies from person to person depending on their disposition) one can determine whether it takes longer or shorter. I can only say that anthroposophical research is no easier than research in an observatory, laboratory or clinic; one must persistently and diligently undergo such exercises as I am describing now for a long time.

Once you have managed to expel individual ideas from your consciousness after they have been there, and to create an empty consciousness, then you can also remove from your consciousness that which has presented itself to the soul as a tableau of memories, which has appeared to you as a body of formative forces, as a temporal organism. It takes a strong inner soul power to do this. One must first acquire it by attenuating other images until one's consciousness is empty. But in the end one attains this power to attenuate the entire formative body so that it penetrates into the deeper layers of consciousness. Then the moment may come when imaginative knowledge first enters the second stage of supersensible knowledge for the comprehension of human self-life, the second stage of knowledge, inspired knowledge.

Do not be put off by the expression; one must have expressions everywhere. They do not mean anything traditional or superstitious in this case, but only what I am characterizing here. So, after one has first strengthened one's thinking, after one has strengthened one's soul to such an extent that an empty consciousness can be established, then the objective spiritual world can penetrate into this empty consciousness, just as breathing air penetrates into the lungs as something objective.

And now, through direct perception, the human being experiences what he has gone through spiritually and soulfully before he connected with the physical human body as a spiritual and soulful being. In this moment of inner soul-searching, the great and powerful occurs: the spiritual and soulful in itself, in its own essence, appears before the soul's vision; one sees the soul as it was in a purely spiritual-soul world before it united with the physical-bodily substances and forces through birth or conception, which are given to it through the hereditary powers of parents and ancestors.

The essence of anthroposophical research is that it advances to the perception of the real soul-spiritual not through mere thinking, not through mystical contemplation, but through the development of soul forces that otherwise lie dormant within people. Of course, when one hears something like this, it would be easy to say: Well, then only those who advance to such insights can speak with such conviction of the immortality of the human soul – or rather, when I speak of what I have spoken of so far – of the unborn nature of the human soul. Now, firstly, it is possible through books such as I have mentioned for every person to take the first steps towards such supersensory knowledge as I have described. And even if today they are still unusual paths for the soul, anyone who has entered them knows that they will increasingly become the paths of human development. Because they are only now entering the spiritual development of humanity for the first time, they may seem paradoxical to many. But just as little as one needs to be a painter to be enchanted with a good painting with full inner soul, to see through it in its essence, in what the painter wanted, just as little does one need to be an anthroposophical researcher to recognize as true what the anthroposophical researcher asserts. Common sense is quite sufficient, just as ordinary perception of an artistic achievement is sufficient to appreciate it. For there is an original disposition in the human soul for the perception of truth. Therefore, it cannot be said that only those who are spiritual researchers in the way described can recognize the results of spiritual research. It is only that over many centuries of human development, people have become accustomed to not accepting such things at all, which has gradually caused prejudices for the mind, for the intellect, which today still do not allow what characterizes anthroposophical research as its paths and its results to appear as reasonable for the common sense of a healthy person.

I have now described how the human being can come to his or her own immortality by developing in one direction, looking beyond birth or conception through imaginative and inspired knowledge. However, the paths of anthroposophical research must go further. Not only should the power of imagination and the power of thought be developed, but also the human willpower should be developed to a higher level. I will again state the principles of this. Admittedly, that which is the most intimate part of the human soul, human feeling, the content of the human mind, lies right in the middle between thinking and willing. But that which lies at the center of the soul as our emotional life develops into the higher worlds when, on the one hand, the life of thinking develops, as indicated, and on the other hand, the life of will develops.

If, on the one hand, a kind of ideal for anthroposophy is the experience of the soul in outer perception, then, on the other hand, for the development of the will forces slumbering in the soul, the ideal becomes that which takes place in the moral life, above all in the devoted life of love, in the human soul. I know, honored attendees, that when we speak of devoted love, we are mentioning something that many people want to keep far away from all real powers of knowledge. However, it is not the case that love, as it exists and is justified in ordinary life, should be considered any kind of power of knowledge. But just as thinking is developed on the one hand, so too is the ability to love devotedly developed on the other hand, in order to thereby free the will from the physical organism just as much as the life of thought can be freed from the physical organism in the way indicated. Apparently it is not at all exercises of the soul in the ability to love that come into question here. Nevertheless, they lead to an increased ability to love, to the point of insight. Again, I will only hint at the principle. The following exercise develops the will in particular and develops such an ability: Imagine something that you are accustomed to imagining only in a certain way from the earlier to the later, from the beginning to the end, now in reverse order. For example, one imagines a drama backwards from the last event of the fifth act to the first event of the first act. Or one imagines a melody backwards. Or one imagines only the evening after the usual daytime life backwards. But one must go into as much detail as possible, one must imagine in small portions backwards.

What is the point of this? Dear attendees, in our ordinary lives we develop our thinking through the external sequence of events. Thinking is passively devoted to the external sequence of events. In doing so, it also makes itself dependent on the laws of the physical human organism. The physical human organism is devoted to the external sequence of events through the physical senses. Thinking is dependent on this sequence of events. And by bringing up experiences in a pictorial way through memory, it nevertheless remains dependent on the external sequence of facts. Of course, one can object: with logical thinking, man makes himself independent of this sequence of facts. But what does he ultimately aim for when he makes himself independent? Precisely to recognize the external sequence of facts even better. We think logically so that we can see through the spatial and temporal sequence of facts even better. We are lifted out of this dependence on the external world of facts, but also out of the dependence of thinking, by developing thinking in this way, by thinking from back to front, thus in reverse order to the sequence of external facts. But in this way we now develop the will. In the life of the soul, thoughts, feelings and will interact. In abstract thinking we can separate the three; in the life of the soul, the will is present in every thought, connecting and separating the thoughts; and thoughts are active in the will, even if the connection between thoughts is as unclear to the ordinary consciousness as the state of consciousness during sleep at night. But it is precisely the will, when given over to thinking, that develops freely and independently of the world of facts and also of the human body through such reverse thinking.

If one adds to these exercises others that I would describe as intensified human introspection – all of which must be done with absolute inner composure and complete arbitrariness – one performs such introspection in such a way that one observes what one does, what one thinks and feels, the whole way , how if one were to stand beside oneself as another, as a second person, one becomes pensive with regard to the will, then the will gradually breaks away from the physical, if the exercises are only carried out long and energetically, especially if one also actively engages in one's own development. Just consider how people are helped in ordinary life by what life itself provides. Certainly, everyone today is different from what they were ten or twenty years ago in terms of certain finer nuances of the soul life. Life has done that. But if you take your self-development into your own hands, you set yourself the goal: you should incorporate this or that quality; if you work towards incorporating such qualities, you work particularly energetically towards getting rid of certain habits, then you develop that which tears the will away from physical corporeality. And now one arrives at having the will living in the soul, so to speak, only to the extent that it is completely permeated by thoughts everywhere; it is torn away from the body, it has become transparent. Consider how little transparent the will is when we form the thought, let us say, to raise our arm, to raise our hand. The thought, the intention, is clear, and afterwards, when the hand is raised, we see from the sense impression what has happened. The unfolding of the will that lies in between is as hidden from human consciousness as the processes of falling asleep themselves. But now we experience a will in which we are completely immersed, as we are otherwise only in thoughts, a will free of the body, which submits to the imaginative and inspired ideas, free of the body, that we have received before.

And now, honored attendees, as we experience how our will can become body-free, as we can, in a sense, step out of our bodies with our will, we are now experiencing the essence of human immortality on the other side. This stepping out of the body is nothing other than an image of the knowledge that occurs when a person steps through the gate of death. While man is outside of his body, he becomes aware of what he experiences through this strengthened will, through this will that has become deliberate, which I call the stage of intuitive knowledge. While he is outside of his body, it is immediately clear through his qualities as an image of what enters the spiritual-soul world as a spiritual-soul being when man leaves his physical body in physical corporeality. In this intuitive knowledge, one learns to recognize the other side of human eternity, which extends beyond death.

You see, dear attendees, the eternal part of the human soul does not come to light through anthroposophical research, but is pieced together from the prenatal and, if I may say so, the post-mortal existence, from unbornness and immortality. And by getting to know what is eternal, what is immortal in the human soul, one also learns to recognize the worlds that surround this human soul when it is in its pure spiritual-soul nature, by looking at what the soul was before birth or before conception. Of course, there is still another objection possible, the objection: Yes, how do you know that what you are looking at in your consciousness really lies in the time before birth or before conception? Now, just as with ordinary memory, when you remember an experience you had ten years ago, the memory itself contains the time, as you cannot believe that you have something in your consciousness that is only there in the present , just as the content of consciousness itself points to the time in which the experience took place, so that which we experience as spiritual and mental carries within it the time before birth or before conception. But we also become aware of the worlds that are not the sensual ones, because we only perceive them through the human senses between birth and death. But the worlds that we perceive through the soul senses, if I may use the expression, before birth and after death, they are now unlocked. We get to know them as concrete, essential worlds. And by getting to know these worlds, we also get to know the spiritual-supernatural world that always surrounds us, which we cannot penetrate through mere philosophical speculation. We can penetrate it only by developing more and more imaginative, inspired, intuitive knowledge.

This intuitive knowledge, which in a certain respect is the highest level of knowledge for looking at the external spiritual world, already comes to us in ordinary life, albeit in a different form. And I had to point this out as early as the beginning of the nineties — if I may make this personal remark — from my own soul development in my “Philosophy of Freedom” how the moral impulses of the human being — and the moral life gives the human being his actual value and his actual dignity — are drawn from a world that I also called an intuitive world back then, a world of spiritual substance. And I already said in this “Philosophy of Freedom”: The true moral impulses are drawn from a spiritual, supersensible world through pure, sensuality-free thinking. I established freedom in human life by pointing out that the question is usually asked wrongly. One asks: Is man free or unfree? He is just as free as he is unfree. Unfree in relation to everything that are the ordinary actions of life, which are bound to the physical organism, where they are impulsed by instincts, drives. But man develops more and more to freedom by coming to get his impulses for the moral, the ethical life from a spiritual world through pure thinking, even in ordinary life, even if more or less unconsciously. And man is free to the extent that his moral impulses come to him from a spiritual world. Therefore, what man grasps as moral intuitions becomes the model for what must now be asserted in anthroposophical research as the highest level of knowledge, as the intuitive level.

One might be tempted to say: we can learn in our moral life what the cognitive life must also achieve. However, in our ordinary consciousness we are given the opportunity to have such intuitions in our moral life. They are contained in what our conscience offers us. With regard to the knowledge of the supersensible world, to which the human soul with its supersensible part belongs, intuitive knowledge must first be sought after one has gone through imaginative and inspired knowledge. Inspired knowledge first offers the objective, the entry into an alien world. Intuitive knowledge is the complete surrender to the objective spiritual world. One only gets to know the latter objectivity sufficiently when one first admits that imaginative knowledge only leads into one's own subjective world. And when one gets to know a spiritual world in this way, then everything that is there as a sensual world is also revealed in the form of the spiritual. That is to say, one remains completely on the ground of natural science for the field of nature. One does not speak or fantasize about all kinds of spiritual, nebulous entities in nature. One ascends through real knowledge to that which is seen as spiritual entities when the objectively observed sensual things and entities metamorphose before the spiritual gaze in the way that I can only hint at for you today in a few cases.

You see, in the sensory view and in ordinary science, the sun is given with sensory contours. We see it that way for ordinary consciousness. It is given with sensory contours in space. Ordinary science calculates its correct, indisputable position through astronomy and astrophysics in relation to this sun. For the spiritual view that I have described to you, the sun changes. That is, of course, for the one personality, which remains fully intact, as it sees it. Otherwise one would become a hallucinator and not a spiritual researcher. But that which remains so fully intact shows itself at the same time in its supersensible essence. One learns to recognize that the sun is not only the being that stands spatially out there in space, but that a solar element, which is only consolidated and concentrated in the physical space of the sun, fills the entire space of the universe that is accessible to us, permeating all beings in the nature kingdoms and also permeating the human being himself. One gets to know the spiritual, supersensible power of the solar element.

And just as one becomes aware in one's ordinary consciousness that external facts live on in the human being as feelings, as thoughts, as triggers of will impulses, so one comes to recognize that in the depths of human nature the external spiritual-supernatural sun-like quality finds its continuation. One gets to know the sun-like quality in one's own human nature. One would like to say: everything transforms from a sharply contoured form into a becoming, into an ongoing life. And the human being's own internal organs metamorphose before the supersensible eye in such a way that they appear in the process of becoming. While the heart, lungs, brain and other human organs are sharply defined for the ordinary sensory view, so to speak representing things, it happens for the supersensible view that we can only speak of a heart process, a stomach process, a brain process, a lung process. Everything merges into life, comes to life. And as the sun-like essence pours itself into this life, we perceive, at a higher level, everything that is emerging life, that is connected with that which makes us young and keeps us young, what growing, sprouting, sprouting forces are in the human being, but also the sprouting, sprouting forces out there in the realms of nature, in the plant kingdom, in the animal kingdom and also in the mineral kingdom. One now learns to see through the realms of nature and one's own inner human being spiritually and soulfully. The peculiar thing is that otherwise the human being is faced as a whole; his individual organs are individual parts. Now one learns to recognize how the individual organs are assigned to the different areas, the different forces of the cosmos. One learns, for example, to recognize how the brain forces are assigned to the solar forces, in that they are in the first half of life, as other organs, namely the heart, are assigned to the solar forces.

But one also learns how to recognize the solar on the one hand, for example, the lunar on the other. Again, the moon is only sensually seen as a clearly defined cosmic body. A lunar quality flows through the whole of outer space, all the outer realms of nature and the human being itself. This includes all the forces of decline, all the forces of retrogressive development, all the forces through which we age, through which our organs become dulled, become dulled, somehow merge into descending development. One now gets to know this mechanism of the human organism and the external mechanism of nature from a new perspective, by being able to see the solar and the lunar together.

And in the same way, in relation to other celestial bodies, we learn about the force-giving, the sustaining, the process-sustaining, and the becoming. One learns to recognize it in its continued effect within the human being, in its effect outside in nature. But in doing so, one enters a field where it can be shown how anthroposophy can be thoroughly fruitful for other sciences, to which it does not stand in opposition, but which it would like to further develop by fully recognizing what they themselves can achieve, how spiritual science can have a fruitful effect on other areas of life.

By learning to see in this way, the becoming, the process of the human inner organism, one learns to recognize in a more intimate way the health of the human being, the illness of the human being. One gets to know the breakdown of some organic processes, as it occurs in disease processes. One also learns to recognize how one can contribute to recovery through opposing processes. Above all, one gets to know the connection between the outer nature and the human inner being. For example, one learns to recognize how certain degenerative, destructive forces of one organ or another can be balanced by the sun-like, constructive forces, say, in the plant or mineral kingdom. One gets to know the healing powers by following the supersensible in nature and in man. And that can emerge from anthroposophy that has already emerged precisely in relation to medicine.

Physicians have taken up the suggestions that can arise from this kind of anthroposophical research, and medical-therapeutic institutes have been established in Dornach near Basel and in Stuttgart, which are in the process of developing, in a thoroughly exact way, those healing methods and remedies that arise from the suggestions of anthroposophy. This is an example of the kind of cross-fertilization that anthroposophical research can provide for the individual sciences and practical areas of life. What can otherwise only be tried empirically, and only after trying can one say how it works in this or that direction in the human organism, can be understood because the natural process according to the sun and moon and according to the other cosmic processes, and the inner human natural process and soul process and spirit process can be understood. Rational medicine, a medicine of inner insight into the pathological and healing processes, can be substituted for the mere trial-and-error medicine. Similarly, a physics and a biology institute are being established in Stuttgart. That is all I want to mention. The individual sciences can certainly be fertilized by anthroposophy.

But what Anthroposophy provides in this way, by pointing to our own immortality in connection with the spiritualizing of the supersensible in the universe, can also have a fruitful effect on life in other ways. This should be shown by a particular example, the Dornach building, the Goetheanum, the School of Spiritual Science in Dornach near Basel. Anthroposophy has been practised for a long time now, and the time has come when a number of friends of Anthroposophy have given rise to the building of a home for Anthroposophy. The circumstances, which I do not have to describe here, brought this home for Anthroposophy, this Goetheanum, close to Basel.

If the necessity of building a spiritual movement its own home had been felt in any other field, then contact would have been made with this or that architect. Perhaps a Romanesque, Gothic or Renaissance building would have been constructed or something similar. Anthroposophy could not do that. No matter how much one may dispute the artistic side of what has been created, what some claim it is not in any case. But if one is imbued with what anthroposophy can give as an attitude of the soul, then one is a strict critic oneself and initially describes what one has to describe only as a beginning. The Goetheanum should also be described from this point of view. Because Anthroposophy does not strive for one-sidedness, but because it springs from the whole, full humanity, and in turn wants to place the whole, full human being in the world, it could not be a matter of building a randomly stylized building as a home.

I would like to use a trivial comparison: just as the individual forms of a nutshell are built according to exactly the same laws as the nut kernel – as you can see, the same forces act in the shell in their position and in their mutual relationship as they do inside the nut kernel – so, if anthroposophy is is to be understood not as a theory, not as a collection of dull ideas, but as real life appearing in ideas, then what appears as its framework, so to speak its structural shell, must be made of exactly the same spirit as the ideas in which the supersensible life is presented. Therefore, everything that has been realized in Dornach, whether architecturally, pictorially, sculpturally or in any other artistic way, must come from the same spirit as that which is spoken as the Word on the podium. This appearance of ideas and thought-forms cannot be other than the kernel of the nut to the shell, to that which speaks out of forms that are not straw-like allegories or symbols; there everything has flowed into the truly artistic. And yet, even if the whole is only a beginning, one may still refer with a certain certainty to Goethe and in particular to Goethe's view of art. One need only think of how Goethe put it: “When nature reveals her manifest secret to someone, that person feels a deep longing for her most worthy interpreter, art.” In another saying, Goethe expresses the same sentiment: “Art is a manifestation of secret natural laws that would never be revealed without it.

In that anthroposophy, in the way it has been characterized, really wants to penetrate into the deepest laws of nature, into the laws of the supersensible spiritual world, it also feels inspired for the artistic and knows how to incorporate the living, not the symbolic, into the material. She has just the right feeling for the material, so that she does not feel comfortable in some artistic, symbolizing cloud cuckoo land, but in the most eminent sense, she lets what is her spiritual life be revealed through the art form. In this way, without anything didactic occurring, what goes beyond all theory into the knowledge of the supersensible can at the same time be fruitful for the artistic field.

I can only give isolated examples of the practical effects of anthroposophy. Thirdly, I would like to mention the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, which has already found a certain following here too. This Waldorf School was founded by Emil Molt and is run by me. It is run in such a way that it is not intended to oppose the great achievements of pedagogy and didactics of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. It is mindful of the great pedagogical maxims that are there. But precisely those aspects that are often expressed today in the field of education as a longing for reform show that something is needed to implement the well-intentioned maxims of the great educators in practice in the individual. Anthroposophy does not want to replace old maxims with new theoretical ones in this field, but to serve their practical implementation. That is why the Waldorf School in Stuttgart is definitely not a school where Anthroposophy is to be grafted into children; that is far from our minds. We have therefore quietly entrusted Catholic religious education to the Catholic pastor and Protestant religious education to the Protestant pastor. Only for those children who would otherwise be dissidents have we provided a free religious education. The religious aspect of the world view is not what gives the Waldorf School its specific character. What it seeks to achieve is that anthroposophical knowledge teaches us to recognize the human being in terms of body, soul and spirit, to recognize this in the child; that, based on our knowledge of the human being, we can read the curriculum for each school year, for each month, for each week from the child; that it is only through a true knowledge of the human being that we can truly establish the art of education and the art of teaching. In the practical side of education and teaching, in the “how” of how to carry it out, we should let what anthroposophy can give have its effect. And if people were not so opposed to anthroposophy, purely out of misunderstanding, as they are, then far more consideration would be given to such things as occurred this summer during the anthroposophical congress in Stuttgart.

For example, a teacher at this Waldorf school showed how one-sided everything is that is supposed to be made fruitful for teaching through experimental pedagogy and experimental psychology, especially in recent times. Anthroposophy does not go against what is being done in these experiments either, but it can show that what is learned about the human being in this way can only bear fruit in the right way if one also enters into the soul through inner contemplation into the soul; when the lessons are not based merely on experimental results about memory, the development of the powers of mind and will, about fatigue and so on, which have been obtained externally, where one can stand far from the human soul. Rather, what can be gained from the soul itself will only bear fruit when one also gains the ability to look intimately into the human soul, into this wonderful, enigmatic human soul that develops from the first childlike day, from week to week, from month to month. Only when we have the right sense of insight are we capable of educating. And anthroposophy, because it does not just go to the surface but learns to recognize the whole, the full human being in body, soul and spirit, can create such a higher, inspired, spiritualized art of education.

The art of education is what anthroposophy seeks to practise in the Waldorf school. It is not some kind of world view that is imposed on the children. Now a teacher at the Waldorf school has discussed in a particularly intimate way – the lecture has now been published as a brochure – the significance of experimental psychology and what it could become through deepening. In my opinion, Dr. von Heydebrand has presented something extraordinarily significant here, with regard to the appreciation of a one-sided current of development in the present time. This would undoubtedly have been discussed much more in pedagogical circles if it had not grown precisely on the much-disliked soil of anthroposophy.

And anthroposophy can also have a living effect on the outer social life. Here too is an example, even if it is only a small beginning. Emil Leinhas also gave a lecture at the Stuttgart Anthroposophical Congress, which has also already been printed, and in it he gave a spirited critique of contemporary economics. The title is 'The Bankruptcy of National Economy'. Emil Leinhas shows how this national economy must remain unfruitful for real social life if it is only understood in the pattern of outer, natural scientific thinking, and not supplemented by the knowledge of spiritual, supersensible forces at work especially in human life.

We see, especially in the social sphere, the devastating effect of a way of thinking that would like to apply the one-sided natural science approach to social life as well. Let us look at the terrible devastation that is growing ever greater and greater and that ultimately poses a threat to the whole of Europe, indeed to the whole of the civilized Western world. Let us look at what is happening in the social sphere in Eastern Europe and become aware that the underlying reasons for the emergence of these destructive forces are nevertheless that we have not been able to permeate social life with what arises from a spirit-perceiving consciousness. If we look at people only as the economics teachers of the nineteenth and early twentieth century did, uninspired by spiritual-scientific knowledge, then destructive social forces must ultimately emerge, as they have in Eastern Europe, and must become a threat to the whole educated world in a much higher sense if a spiritual element is not introduced into our social order.

Now, dear ladies and gentlemen, I have only touched on a few areas in which anthroposophy can be fruitful, in scientific and other areas of practical life. Only at the end would I like to suggest something that must be mentioned last, although it is not the last: By leading to the direct beholding of the eternal in the human soul, by leading to the direct knowledge of that which lies beyond birth and death, to the unborn, to the immortal in the human soul, by leading to those worlds in which the human soul lives when it is not clothed with an external physical body. By becoming acquainted with these two worlds, it also becomes acquainted with what is in human nature, deeper than physical human nature, more comprehensive, more intense than that which the soul experiences when it is in the spiritual world before birth or after death. What is found in the human soul is not exhausted in the contemplation of the natural or supersensible world.

After getting to know the two worlds, which of course only appear to be two worlds and in truth interact according to the whole meaning of the presentation, so that one cannot speak of dualism versus monism in anthroposophy; when one learns to recognize something in the human soul which reveals itself as a synthesis of these two worlds, that is the innermost, human, eternal core of being, which goes through repeated earthly lives, so that human life is made up of such pieces that lie between birth and death and between death and a new birth. And by learning to recognize the outer cosmos in terms of its spiritual significance, one also learns to look in a different way at times when man was still more akin to the outer cosmic existence. There were no repeated lives on earth then. And in the future, when man will have found a more intimate union with the cosmos again, the repeated lives on earth will also cease. But for a long period of time we have to observe, through the same powers that I have described, what can be called the contemplation of repeated earthly lives. Through this one is led in a cognitive way to the spiritual world.

As I have already indicated, human feeling and perception are taken along by the development of the powers of thought and will. This human feeling, insofar as it lives and wants to live out in religious devotion, can only deepen when the human soul is also presented with knowledge of that which is eternal in the soul, which is spiritual and supersensible in the cosmos. Anthroposophy certainly does not want to found some kind of sect in the world. It does not want to found a new religion. Take the whole meaning of what I have tried to explain today: it is something that wants to strive scientifically, but which, due to its special kind of scientific striving, can never become a mere specialty because it concerns every human being. Therefore, one cannot say: Anthroposophy is something like botany or zoology or geometry, which in their higher parts can only be recognized by individual specialists. Anthroposophy is something that concerns every human being. And the development of the spirit will bring it about that it will concern more and more people. And every person, through what is in them in body, soul and spirit, can understand and receive what Anthroposophy, albeit as the result of arduous research, has to present to the world, provided they are open to it. But the fact that the supersensible world emerges as a result of research does not in fact take away a person's religious life, but deepens it. Religions have every reason to look to anthroposophy as something that can offer them help, that can give people exactly what they need to come to religious devotion again, after modern life has taken away much of this religious devotion, especially in the modern intellectual life. It is therefore a complete misunderstanding to believe that true, genuine religious devotion, true, genuine religious experience could somehow be endangered by anthroposophy. This is another area in which anthroposophy can be thoroughly fruitful.

Those who see through what is actually at stake may say that anthroposophy in particular accommodates the deepest human longings of the more active minds of modern humanity.

And if I am to briefly summarize in a few words what I have tried to describe as the essence of anthroposophy – although this can only be done insufficiently in a short lecture – I would like to say: the human being stands before us with his physical body. We look at him. His soul and spirit speak from the depths of his being. It speaks from his face, from each of his movements. We do not have the whole person before us if we do not see this spiritual-soul in the natural-physical. Natural science has brought it to a high level of perfection over the last three to four centuries, especially in the nineteenth century. Anthroposophy does not want to rely on laymanship or dilettantism, although it is for everyone. The anthroposophical researcher wants to exclude any laymanship or dilettantism in the field of natural science. He wants to see genuine science and genuine methodology developed in the field of natural science. But in doing so, he is particularly aware of how external natural science, which has rightly celebrated such triumphs and has made such a significant impact on practical life, how this natural science represents something external that can be compared to the physical body of the human being.

Wherever we look with the unprejudiced eyes of a whole human being, equipped with the insights of natural science, we encounter something like the way the soul and spirit appear in human physiognomy and human movements; we encounter something as science, as knowledge of the soul and spirit in the knowledge of nature. I would like to say: through its physiognomy, through the way it develops, the knowledge of nature can point to this spiritual-soul aspect of a particular knowledge. Just as the natural human being reveals the spirit and the soul in the way his body is formed, so true scientific knowledge reveals a higher, supersensible knowledge that goes to the spiritual-soul. What the human soul and human spirit are in the human body, that, ladies and gentlemen, is what the soul and spirit are in knowledge. For a true natural science, the anthroposophical paths and results are what the soul and spirit are in knowledge.