The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[ 1 ] In the last lecture I told you that contemporary humanity cannot know anything because our thinking nowadays does not lead to real knowledge. In earlier times, say a thousand or fifteen hundred years ago, whoever wanted to learn anything had to undergo special training in thinking. People did not believe that they could understand anything of the spiritual world with their ordinary, everyday thinking, and therefore there existed a kind of schooling of thinking. Today, on the other hand, none of the education we receive enables us to educate our thinking in any real way.

[ 1 ] This means that we are quite unable to think. I will give you an example that you probably saw in the newspaper a few days ago.⁶ There was an article on a very common dream, a recurrent dream of flying. We can all remember dreams of flying, floating, or falling. Such dreams often occur soon after we go to bed. But you know all this. In this article a writer, versed only in today's natural scientific thinking, attempts to explain this kind of dream. You will see that this kind of thinking leads nowhere in such matters. He says: "This dream of flying, according to Dr. Richard Traugott, is actually induced or triggered by a contraction of the body." What is the writer saying here, what does he believe? He thinks that at the time of going to sleep the body contracts or twitches. But, I ask you, has it not happened to you that you have had this same experience when you are awake? And when does it happen to you? As far as my own experience goes, this kind of sudden jolt or start happens when you are afraid. It is when you experience something startling or frightening that you experience that kind of bodily jerking or contracting. The same thing can happen if, let's say, you go out onto the street and you see a man whom you believed to be in America. At the moment you notice him, your body is jolted—because you are surprised. Now you could not imagine that starting with what has just been described you would feel yourself flying! The problem is that people can invent all kinds of ideas, but those ideas do not particularly fit the observation. The thoughts seem to fit as long as one makes experiments in the laboratory with lifeless matter; but the minute one tries to explain something real, they don't fit anymore.

[ 1 ] Let us continue with this writer. He says: "The cause of this contraction resides in the difference of muscle tension in sleeping and in waking. In the waking state there is a constant flow of energy from the central nervous system to the muscles." He assumes that in the waking state there are constant electric currents moving between the muscles and the nerves. "These energy currents create the muscle tension necessary for the maintenance of the bodily balance that the harmonious interplay of the musculature requires. In sleep this muscle tension largely disappears. During the period of going to sleep the reflexivity of the spinal cord actually increases, and thus the relaxation of the muscle tension, or rather the stimulus that this process exerts on the spinal cord, easily leads to this twitching reflex." So presumably, in the nervous system of the spinal cord there is a stimulus that is continuous and that increases the muscle tension. The writer goes on: "Other sensations that exist in our organs, particularly the rising and falling movements of the chest musculature and the rib cage, may even more directly influence the development of this feeling of flying, floating in the air, or swimming." In other words, muscle tension increases, contracting the body to such an extent that finally, when we are asleep, we experience a condition like that of flying or swimming.

[ 1 ] Now, after all this, just think back in your own experience to when you were breathless (panting) and your chest was tight. Did it ever occur to you that you were having a swimming sensation—not to mention the sensation of flying? On the contrary, in such moments you feel particularly heavy. The article goes on to say other things. For instance, attention is called to the amount of pressure and resistance we feel, when awake, on our bodies where they rest on something. Then, supposedly, when we fall asleep, we become aware of the lack of pressure and resistance. But really, gentlemen, this doesn't make sense. After all, when we are awake and walk, we actually are supported only on a very small surface! We feel that we are walking on the soles of our feet. Of course, when we sit down, we are resting on a larger surface than the soles of our feet. But even if you were to add the surface area of both these places where the body contacts the outside world, this still does not compare to the surface we need when we are asleep. So, as you can see, this kind of thinking really leads one to talk nonsense. This kind of thinking is what passes for science today. Our same scientist tells us that the electric currents in the nerves are stronger when we are asleep; they stimulate the muscles, and they cause the sensation of flying—so that one believes one is flying. Or he tells us that the support disappears when we sleep! One can hardly believe what he goes on to say, for he speaks of: "the disappearance of the perception of pressure and resistance, that in the waking state is present in all the parts of the body that need a support . ." It is not to be believed that he could fail to take into account that there is a much larger surface being used in sleep. But he doesn't care about this, because contemporary thinking never really reaches any real explanations or clarifies what really happens when we go to sleep.

[ 1 ] Let me now clarify what really happens when we go to sleep. From this you will see how one can really achieve insight into the higher, spiritual world. First I will show you this in an image. Remember that this is only an image! Let's assume you have here someone's physical body. (He draws it on the blackboard, left) Within it, there is an etheric, supersensible body—I will draw it in yellow. This fills out the physical body and is invisible. When we are asleep, these two bodies remain behind in the bed. When we are awake, the astral body is also within those two bodies—I will draw the astral body in red here. Within the astral body there is the ego, the fourth member—I will show it in violet. This, then, is the human being when awake: physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego—inserted one within the other.

[ 1 ] Let us now look at our sleeper: when he is in bed, he has only a physical body and an etheric body (drawing, center). Outside these are his astral body and ego (drawing, right). What lies in the bed therefore may be compared to a plant, for the plant also has a physical body and an etheric body. If a plant had no etheric body it would be a stone, and it would not be alive and could not grow. So what is lying in bed is like a plant—the plant does not think, and what lies in bed does not think in the sense of conscious thought. But it is also true that thoughts are in there somewhere, as I have already explained to you; and sometimes these thoughts are even more clever than those we use when we are conscious. However, there are no daytime thoughts such as we are used to, and in this respect what lies in bed is like a plant.

[ 1 ] But when we describe what lives outside that which lies in bed, this feels no boundaries. You can start to have an explanation of this, if you notice that when you leave the boundaries of your body, your consciousness disappears. When you are in your physical body, your astral body has to be as big as it is; but when you leave it, then your astral body suddenly grows—it grows to gigantic dimensions, because the physical body no longer contains it and makes it small. At the moment you go to sleep, at the moment you move out of your physical body, you feel as if you were growing larger and larger.

[ 1 ] Now, let's say you drink a glass of something. I guess I'd better not talk about a glass of alcohol, or else the word would be spread that I speak in favor of alcohol. As you know this is a rather unpleasant issue in Switzerland these days. So let us say you drink a glass of water with a little raspberry juice. If you put some raspberry juice in a glass of water, you can taste the raspberry juice easily. If, however, instead of a glass, you take a small bucket containing the equivalent of five bottles of water, and if you put only the same amount of raspberry juice in it as you put earlier in your glass, the raspberry juice is diluted—spread out over a much larger amount of water. You have much less of the raspberry taste. When I was a little boy, I grew up in the vicinity of a winery. There were big cellars with barrels of 400 buckets of wine. If we had filled one of these with water instead of wine and had added a little raspberry juice and stirred it, you could have drunk the water without at all realizing there was raspberry juice present. This is clear, I am sure. Now, gentlemen, as long as the astral body is as small as the physical body it is like the raspberry juice in the glass of water; your astral body expands only to the limit of your physical body. But when you leave the physical body in sleep, it no longer contains the astral. The astral body spreads out, just as the raspberry juice spreads out in the 400 buckets of water. Therefore in your astral body you have no consciousness. Consciousness is created through the fact that the astral body is concentrated or contracted.

[ 1 ] Here you have a true explanation for what actually happens when you go to sleep. As long as we are awake, our astral body is in our fingers and our toes, in all our muscles. When we feel the astral body in our muscles, we have the feeling of being dependent on our physical body. The physical body is heavy. We feel the heaviness of the physical body. In the moment we leave the physical body, we leave behind its heaviness. In this brief moment before consciousness has completely disappeared in sleep, we no longer feel the heaviness. We do not feel that we are falling, for in fact we are rising; we feel, rather, that we are floating into the air. This sense of not being bound to a physical body, this sense of enlargement, is what we experience as flying or swimming. We can feel ourselves moving freely until consciousness disappears and we go to sleep completely. In contrast to what has just been described, all the natural scientist can say is: our muscles twitch. And, as you well know, when our muscles twitch we feel them more than we usually do, and when that happens, it does not make us feel that we are flying—on the contrary, that is when we feel most narrowly tied to the physical. Another example is that when someone is surprised—Wow!—his mouth gapes open. This is because he is then so much connected with his muscles that he can no longer control them. The experiences of one's muscles twitching in surprise, or loosing control when "wowed," are the opposite of those prevailing when we go to sleep. When we go to sleep, we leave behind our muscles; therefore there cannot be a contraction of the muscles. When we lie down and rest on a larger surface of our bodies, there is rather a relaxation of the muscles. We do not need to hold our muscles together by means of our astral body. They relax, they do not become tenser. Because we no longer need to exert an influence on them, we believe that we are free of our muscles, and because of this we fly away with our lighter astral body.

[ 1 ] Now consider for a moment what I told you last time about learning to think in a way opposite to our everyday thinking. Here you can see how today's ordinary thinking, when trying to explain the human being, results in the opposite of the truth. Therefore the first thing you must do is to think correctly—which really means being able to think the opposite of what holds true in the physical world.

[ 1 ] People have lost the habit of thinking correctly. They can no longer think in such a way that they can reach the spiritual world through thinking.

[ 1 ] There are many people today who speak our language, and this language contains the word "spirit," so they use it. The problem is that they no longer have any real picture of what the word "spirit" means. They can make mental pictures only of physical things. But if we want to think of the spiritual, we come to something without physical characteristics, and therefore to something that you cannot perceive in the physical world. But thinking nowadays is so tainted that people actually wish to see the spiritual world in a physical way. As a result of this, they become what we call spiritists. They say to themselves: If a physical body can move a table, the fact that I can do this means I exist. Then they continue: If a spirit exists, it must also be able to move a table. And this is how the practice of "table-tapping" originated. People rely on table-tapping for signals from the spiritual world. This is because their thinking has become twisted or warped. Their thinking is materialistic in nature. It says: I must have the spiritual, but I must have it in a physical guise. Spiritism is the most materialistic concept of all, and it is very important to understand that.

[ 1 ] Now perhaps someone will say: But I have been present where people sat around a table and linked hands in a chain, and the table started to move and hop around, and all kinds of things of that sort. The external facts are true. It is quite possible to sit around a table, to make a chain of hands, and at some point the table will be set in motion. But this is the case when any small motion in some way starts a larger motion. If we have a railroad train with a locomotive and an engineer, the driver does not get out of his engine and go to the back of the train and start pushing it when he wants to start moving. In fact, he would not be able to do that. He would never be able to set a train into fast motion in this way. As you well know, the engineer makes a very small motion, and the train soon starts to move very fast and pull many cars. Why? Because the connections are established in the right way so as to result in the train moving. In this way, physically, a very small motion starts a larger motion.

[ 1 ] This is the case in the purely physical process of people creating a chain of hands around a table. They then start to twitch very slightly and, lo, and behold! from these small motions a larger motion results. This motion is transferred through the material plane. But this is really a very ordinary physical event.

[ 1 ] Now, if there is one person among those present at the table-tapping who has any thoughts in his subconscious, then these thoughts are translated into the twitching of the finger tips, causing a response, which forms letters which we can then read. However, what we read as an answer in such cases was always present somewhere in the subconscious of one of the people there. This is true, no matter how clever the answers seem to be. I have explained to you that when a person enters into the subconscious, he is entering something much more profound than his ordinary consciousness. This is can be seen in the practice of table-tapping. Nevertheless, the fact of people turning to spiritism is proof of the strength of materialism in our time.

[ 1 ] Ordinary thinking does not bring us to any true explanation of what a human being is. That was obvious from the newspaper article I mentioned here today wherein there was an attempt simply to explain a flying dream. The author of the article explains it in exactly the opposite way to which it should be explained. People no longer seem able to study things of real interest. I have often talked to you about dreams. Let me now repeat a few important facts.

[ 1 ] Let's say someone dreams he is in Basel in some town square. Suddenly—in dreams everything is possible—he finds himself standing in front of a fence.

[ 1 ] The fence has pickets: here one, there another; and here one is missing and there is a gap; and then another picket, and another gap. Now he dreams that he wants to jump over the fence, and he impales himself on one of the pickets, and this hurts—hurts so much that he wakes up and notices that he has not been impaled, but rather that he has a terrible toothache. He has a toothache and it wakes him up. He has a missing tooth in his upper jaw and he also has another missing tooth and this is what he saw in his dream picture as missing pickets in a fence. There was an exact correspondence to his upper jaw and its missing teeth. He then touches one of his teeth and he finds out which one hurts him. There is a cavity, and it hurts. One can certainly have such a dream.

[ 1 ] What is really happening here? This whole episode was actually played out in the dreamer's waking life. You can really say: So long as I was asleep, I was happy; I did not feel my awful toothache. Why not? It is because the astral body was outside the physical body, and the etheric body does not feel the toothache. You can hit a stone as much as you want, and even break little pieces off it, but the stone as such does not feel it. You can tear a plant and the plant will not feel it, because it does not have an astral body—it has only an etheric body. You would soon stop picking roses and other flowers in the meadows, if the plants were to hiss like snakes because it hurt them. However, it does not hurt the plant, and a human being, when asleep, is like a plant. As long as we are asleep, the tooth does not hurt. But when the astral body slips back into the physical body, as soon as this happens, we 'inhabit' our teeth. Then, you see, the astral body is in the teeth. Only when we are completely in our body do we feel what hurts our body. When we are not quite within our body, what hurts appears to us as an external object.

[ 1 ] Say, for instance, I burn a match: when looked at from without I will see it burning white. But if I had somehow lived within that match with my conscious astral body, I would not have only seen it externally. I would have felt it as a pain! In the case of the teeth, until I am fully in my body, when I first slip in, I feel them as if they were external objects, and I therefore make an external picture of them for myself that in some way resembles some aspect of them. Since I cannot make quite the right picture, which I could do only through spiritual science, I make a picture of a row of pickets instead of a row of teeth. Where there are gaps in my row of teeth, I have gaps in the row of pickets. As you can see, as a result of the confused picture that arises as a consequence of not quite being fully in the body, there is an error. Because when we are asleep we are outside our bodies, the inner is interpreted as the outer. I have been able to study what happens in such cases when observing little children as I taught them. They have no feeling as yet for the correct use of speech and I have often experienced that a child who has just started to write "Zahn," the word for tooth, will instead write "Zaun," the German word for fence. Such a child has to be told that this is false, wrong. Somehow the child was scared entering his body—not leaving it, but entering it. This does not cause a flying dream but a fearful dream, a nightmare. The child has a nightmare and somehow expresses this in the form of the fence dream. There is a connection between the child's misuse of words and the images of the dream. The images of the dream come into existence through words. There are always verbal connections. These help us to see more clearly what is really happening.

[ 1 ] The man I referred to before—Richard Traugott—has written a great deal about dreams, most of it is as absurd as what he wrote about the flying dream.⁷ When he speaks, equipped with ordinary science, he says exactly the opposite of what is actually the case. He does not understand that because the astral body grows larger when leaving the physical body it perceives itself as flying, and that when it is forced to shrink on reentering it pictures itself as someone (or something) who is squeezed somehow. The muscles tighten, causing an anxiety dream. The anxiety dream occurs precisely when the man who wrote the article would claim that there should be a flying dream. It is also possible to have anxiety dreams when the process of going to sleep does not proceed properly. Let's say, for example, that you are lying down and you have the sensation that you are being strangled by someone. This can happen if you are in the process of going to sleep and somewhere there is a disturbance, so that you cannot go to sleep, but you keep trying to do so anyway. You pass in and out of sleep, and returning into your body correctly is not quite possible because you are still tired. This can be felt as a strangling sensation, because the astral body is being forced in some way, and cannot quite enter correctly. Knowing this kind of thing, you can explain all these matters much better.

[ 1 ] This brings us to the fact that one more thing is necessary if we really want to know the spiritual world. One must be absolutely clear about the fact that the physical body is not involved here. One must be able to live in the astral body alone, in a way that does not involve the physical body at all. If one wants to know the spiritual world, one must induce a sleeplike condition in oneself. In ordinary life this occurs only when one slips out of one's physical body, which is viewed externally as the condition of sleep. But as I mentioned in my example of the raspberry juice in the large casks of water, in sleep the astral body (or juice) normally becomes gigantic and this must not be allowed to happen. The astral body must be held together through an inner effort of another body. Do not think now about the astral body and the human ego, just think again about the image of the drops of raspberry juice. Create a vivid image of a glass of water with only one drop of raspberry juice in it. The raspberry juice expands in the water to the limit of the glass, but it is still perceptible. But if you assume a container a hundred thousand times larger, then you would not be able to perceive anything of the juice, and this is comparable to our normal inner experience in sleep. Now, imagine for a moment that this drop of raspberry juice takes on an impish character. I put this impish drop in a cask with four hundred buckets of water; it has a real temper and says to itself: I am not going to let myself get mixed up in all this water, I am going to remain myself. Were this to happen, you would then have a huge casket with one drop of raspberry juice in it; and if you reached this drop with the tip of your tongue, if you went through all that water to the exact spot where the raspberry juice held itself together, then you would actually taste the sweetness of that single drop.

[ 1 ] I must stress here that I am speaking only metaphorically about the raspberry juice with its impish character. The opponents of Anthroposophy can be quite funny at times. There was once an article in a Hamburg newspaper in which Anthroposophy was insulted from all possible sides; and there, it is true, I was actually seen as an imp or devil, and in that case indeed it was meant very seriously, as if I myself were not just an imp but the devil's own helper—as if I were the very devil come into the world. To return therefore to the image I gave you: the drop of raspberry juice is only a devil's imp insofar as it can keep itself quite small when it is put into the water.

[ 1 ] In the case of the astral body, it is possible for it to stay as small when it leaves the physical body as it is when it is within the physical body; but it can develop the forces necessary to do this only by learning to think sharp, well-honed thoughts. I told you we must develop independent thinking. This independent thinking is much stronger than the weak thinking possessed by most people.

[ 1 ] The first requirement for knowledge of the spiritual world is very sharp and well-honed thinking. The second requirement is the ability to think backward. The outer physical world proceeds forward, therefore one needs to learn to think in reverse. This strengthens one's thinking. One must learn that truth which I told you about last time: the part is greater than the whole. This once again is something that contradicts what the physical world seems to indicate; but if one can do this one can put oneself into the spiritual world. All these things I have mentioned cause the astral body to remain small in spite of the fact it is not contained in the physical body—so that it does not simply flow out into the common astral ocean.

[ 1 ] All these requirements fit together, but you must be careful that all these things are taken with the same sobriety and the same scientific attitude with which the physical world is ordinarily examined. The moment we slip into fantasy, we are finished with the scientific. Our clear and definite approach must never be allowed to turn into fantasy.

[ 1 ] Let's take the case when one has a pain in one's big toe. You feel this pain through your astral body. If we had only a physical body, we would not feel the pain; and likewise if we had only an etheric body, we would not feel the pain. If this were not true, the plant would squeal when it was plucked! But we squeal when we have a pain in our big toe—of course, we don't actually squeal, but you know what I mean. We all feel like making a noise when we experience a pain of this kind. Why is this?

[ 1 ] Our astral body is spread throughout our whole physical body, and when our astral body reaches the spot where something in our big toe is out of order, this is brought up to the brain by the astral body, and we have a mental picture of our pain. But let's assume someone has a sick brain that does not allow him to register the pain in his big toe in that certain spot in the brain where it is normally felt. One needs a healthy place in one's brain to be able to register the pain in one's big toe. Assuming this spot in the brain is sick, and remembering what I have told you—that neither the soul nor the astral body can become sick—the pain in your big toe cannot be registered. What happens under these conditions? The specific place in the individual's physical brain is sick, but this still leaves the etheric aspect of the brain. The etheric aspect of the brain that remains is not properly supported by the physical part, and we may therefore ask: What will the etheric body do in such a case? The etheric body makes a great deal of this toe; not only does it notice it, it makes a mountain of it. The pain to the etheric body will appear to us as little beings, little mountain-climbing beings sitting in this mountain. So here we have the big toe transferred into a spatial picture, into a large space—just because the brain is sick. If this were to happen to you, you would swear that there was a mountain in front of you. In actuality this mountain is only your big toe, and it is clear that this is a delusion. It is very important to protect oneself from such sick delusions when one penetrates into the spiritual world, or else one can slip into total fantasy. How can we avoid these delusions? This has to be done through real schooling. We must learn what can result when the physical body becomes sick in any way, so that we will not be confused when merely physical manifestations appear to be real spiritual occurrences! For this reason we must learn truly active thinking, thinking backwards, thinking such as I described last time—a thinking very different from our ordinary thinking in the physical world. In this way one will be protected against delusion, and one will recognize the physical origin of what we have just described. In earlier times people were prepared so to penetrate safely into the spiritual world. There was a real method or art of preparation, which was called dialectic. This meant that people really had to learn to think. Nowadays, if one were to suggest to people that they must first learn to think, they would pull our hair out—for everyone is convinced that they already know how to think. But if one looks back to earlier times, it is actually true that there was a real schooling of thinking, or a dialectic. One had to be able to think both forward and backward, and one had to be able to form concepts in the right way.

[ 1 ] How, we might ask, did this training take place? It took place through the activity of speaking, and at the same time as one spoke, one learned to think. I have just given you an example of this, when I talked of children first learning to speak and then learning to think. But of course such thinking is at first entirely childlike. Nowadays this childlike thinking is preserved by people throughout life, although it is worthless in later life. If one were to continue to learn thinking through speaking this way, then one would have to ensure that with each in-breath and each out-breath the air moved correctly in and out for correct speaking is connected with correct breathing. For speaking to be rightly connected to the breathing process the air must come in and go out in the proper manner.

[ 1 ] Much depends on one's being prepared for correct speaking, because correct speaking prepares one for correct breathing. Whoever knows how to breathe correctly can also speak for a long time without becoming tired. Through the art of dialectic, one once learned how to speak and breathe correctly, and therefore how to think properly. These days, however, people are no longer able to think properly, for their breath keeps bumping into the organ of their breathing at every moment. Just listen to some academics when they speak. First of all, they do not speak very much in general; they usually read, and they use their eyes very much for support. But if you listen to an academic speaking, for the most part it is as if the person were short of breath. It is as if he were constantly bumping into his own body.

[ 1 ] For this reason everything that is said becomes a picture of the physical body. Whether one has a sick spot in one's brain, and consequently makes a mountain, with mountain spirits, out of a painful big toe; or whether one keeps bumping into oneself with one's breath whenever one thinks, with the result that true thinking cannot emerge—it is all the same. Because your breath is constantly bumping into your physical body, you will perceive the whole world as a physical phenomenon. Now, what really is the source of this materialism? Materialism comes from two facts: people do not know how to think correctly, and they do not breathe out correctly. It seems to them as if the whole world were made up of pressure and thrust—which they have in themselves—because they have not been prepared through right thinking. Therefore we can say: A person is a materialist because he cannot get out of himself; inwardly, he keeps bumping into himself.

[ 1 ] Let us return for a moment to Mr. Traugott. What he should really say is that the flying dream is caused by the fact that we go out of ourselves, and the astral body starts to grow larger. However, he does not conclude this. He thinks, indeed he thinks a great deal. And what happens if someone wants to think, and think some more, when in fact he is unable to think? What really happens? First of all, you will see him frown, and if this doesn't help he will hit his forehead and thus tighten his muscles, and then he tightens them some more, and he may even hit himself again so that his muscles are really tight. What is Mr. Traugott really doing when he is thinking about dreams. Instead of looking at things as they really are, he tightens his own muscles, and what he finds is what he himself is doing—muscle tension. I've got it he says: the dream is caused by muscle tension! He confuses his own attempt at thinking about dreams with reality. We can all learn something from Mr. Traugott. We can learn what is happening to him when he thinks about things, and when you yourself read the story. What happens today when we read what people print is that we learn what they themselves imagine is true. Whenever we read the newspapers today, we have to say we really learn very little about what is really happening in the world, but we do learn what the people who sit in the editorial rooms would like to be happening in the world.

[ 1 ] The same is true of today's materialistic science. Through it you will not learn what the world is; rather, you will learn what materialist professors think about the world. If you penetrate this a little, you will see that Anthroposophy has no intention of deceiving the world, but in fact it wants to put honesty in the place of deception and illusion, and in place of what is often untrue, very often consciously so.

[ 1 ] You may see from this discussion that honesty, inner honesty, is the fourth quality that must be present if we are to be able to reach into the spiritual world. If you contemplate the world in this way, you will see there is very little honesty operating in the world, and it is no surprise that not much of it can be seen in science.

[ 1 ] We have therefore seen four required qualities: independent thinking, thinking not linked to the outer world, thinking whose quality is completely different from the physical world, and thinking honestly. We will look at other characteristics next time.

• 6. The report appeared in the Basler Nachrichten, July 5, 1923.
• 7. For example: The Dream, Psychologically and Cultural-Historically Viewed, Würzburg, 1913.

There are many questions still pending from those asked recently, but I will tie in some of these with the recent subject of dreams. We shall start with a question that seems to have broken many scholars' heads, and that is the question of the lizard's tail.

As you know, if we see one of these large lizards and grab it by the tail, the tail breaks. In fact, it is very difficult to catch such lizards because, when the tail breaks, the lizard runs away quite happily without its tail. The tail seems brittle and scientists attempt to establish whether the tail is really torn away or if it is somehow left behind by the animal. Contemporary science proceeds in a materialistic way and therefore tends to assume that the animal simply has weak muscles in that part of its tail and that these muscles just cannot hold together under the strain of being caught.

But there is a little-noticed fact that is undervalued, which is that when the lizard is caught and kept in captivity for a long time it loses the ability to let go of its tail. It is as if the tail becomes stronger and therefore increasingly difficult to pull off. The peculiar thing is that when the lizard is in the wild he loosens his tail easily, and when he is in captivity he holds onto it. What is really going on here?

You see, people direct their thoughts toward the musculature around the tail, instead of looking at all the facts, facts that would very easily give the answer to why the lizard in captivity does not lose its tail. The missing evidence is that the animal in the wild is scared when one tries to catch it, because it is very unusual for it to be caught and may actually be the first time this has happened to it. The first time a man comes into its vicinity the lizard is scared and becomes so brittle that it lets go of its tail. Once the lizard becomes used to the proximity of people—when people are constantly near it—the lizard loses its fear and likewise stops losing its tail.

Even a superficial observation of all the facts in this situation leads us to conclude that fear plays a very important role in the case of the lizard. But we must examine this fear more carefully and say: The fear that this lizard has when people come near it to catch it—this somehow comes out of the animal when it is caught, though normally it remains inside. It is this fear that holds the matter in the tail together and makes it strong!

Let me introduce here a remarkable phenomenon of human life. As you know, when people who are very dependent on their soul life become scared they get diarrhea. The fear causes diarrhea. How can we understand the meaning of this? This means that whatever is normally held in their intestines is no longer held together as it was. What was it that held things together in the intestines? When fear rises up in the soul it stops holding things together in the intestines, but when fear remains in the intestines it holds things together.

The same thing is true of the lizard. If one looks at a lizard, it is like one's own lower body: it is completely filled throughout with the soul quality of fear.

It is especially true of the tail that it is completely filled with fear; and when this fear is pressed out or expressed, the tail breaks. The fear, however, normally remains within the animal. The animal does not feel the fear while in captivity because it is used to people, and because of this the fear can remain in the tail and hold it together. Here we see a very important quality of soul that has a certain significance for the bodily constitution.

Human beings also contain fear. We have fear in our big toe, in our legs, in our belly—there is fear everywhere. This is not everywhere the case however. Fear does not normally rise above the diaphragm—it does so only when we have nightmares. Nevertheless, fear does have a role to play: it holds our organism together. It is in our bones that fear lives most strongly. The bones are strong and hard because a terrible fear lives in them. It is fear that holds the bones together. When we feel our bones too much, our bones get soft. Those children who were fearful at the time when their bones were not yet completely hardened, develop weak bones—a condition called rickets. It is possible to cure children with rickets by reducing their fear through some soul work. But it would be quite false to say that this fear in us is something of the soul: that we need only approach the fear in a somewhat higher manner in order to have an experience of a higher kind of knowledge. To enter this subject in the wrong way would not be good, for we would make ourselves sick in body and soul at the same time. We must do something entirely different.

In order to gain knowledge of the spiritual world—I have already given you various other means—we must learn to live correctly in the outer world. How do people really live in the outer world these days? As we said recently, we freeze terribly, and often we sweat a lot, and this is how most people normally experience living in the world. First they sweat, then they freeze. This is not the only way one can live into the outer world, however. Rather one should try to cultivate a certain capacity, so that when it is cold one isn't just cold but rather one becomes aware of a kind of qualitative experience that goes with it, namely that of fear. When one is aware of fear, one easily notices that with the return of warmth fear disappears. When a person cultivates a certain awareness of fear connected with the coming of snow; when the warm rays of the sun bring a certain pleasant comforting feeling—that person is in fact living into the outer world in a way that leads to higher knowledge. This belongs with the other requirements I have tried to describe to you. It is really true that whoever wants to gain higher knowledge must feel something when he comes close to a glowing piece of iron, and he must feel something different when he approaches a piece of flint. When he approaches the glowing iron, the feeling should arise: here is something that is related to my own warmth and is good. But when he picks up a piece of flint he should feel a sense of strangeness and a somewhat fearful mood. (You can see immediately that whoever wants to gain higher knowledge cannot be nervous, as we say these days, or else he would drop the piece of flint the minute he takes it into his hand, because he is afraid of it!) One must be brave and conquer the fear. At the same time we cannot be like a moth that takes so much pleasure in the light that it flies right into it, to its death

The example of the insect flying into the flame gives you a good idea of the relationship of a flame to the spiritual world. We really must acquire a sensitivity to the inner feeling for whatever is at hand out there in nature. What will this produce? Let us examine things as they are now. Materialists assert above all that the earth has a crust of hard stone—they believe in this hard rock of the earth because they can walk on it and when they touch it, it is hard. Materialists believe in this hard rock, but whoever wants to gain higher knowledge should experience a certain fearfulness of this same hard rock. This fear is totally absent when a man finds himself in the warm air. I will draw the warmed air above the hard rock. (He draws on the blackboard.)

When one considers the warm air, fear is totally absent. (To show the warmth of the air I will color it red.) Yet it is possible to enter a condition such that even the warm air would make one afraid. This is the case when one attempts to get closer and closer to the feeling that one gets from the warm air. In a person who feels more and more comfortable living in the quality of the warm air, the warmth too will eventually cause fear. It seems strange, but the better one feels, the more fearful one becomes! When one gets used to feeling completely at ease in warmed air, when one becomes more and more used to the warmth and is fully at ease inside all of nature, then one can find spiritual knowledge. At this point something quite remarkable happens—I will try to make it clearer for you. Most people try to keep cool, to cool off when they get warm—all they know is that it is very pleasant to get cooled off. But if, instead of this, one were to remain warm, if one were to soak up the good feeling of the warmth—then whatever it is that I have drawn here schematically (yellow) would start to fill itself with all kinds of images (upper light) and the spiritual world would literally arise: the spiritual world which is contained in the air, which one does not normally feel and is not conscious of, because in most cases one cannot tolerate the warmth in the air. When one becomes accustomed to seeing those beings in the air, one gradually reaches the point where one can tell oneself: when I take a stone in my hand, it is very hard; but when I become more and more aware of the spiritual, when I am able to penetrate into the spiritual, when there is more and more activity around me—not just the sensory world but also the spiritual world—I can do something more. I cannot slip into the hard ground with my physical body of flesh and blood, but with my astral body I can actually slip into the earth (lower red). This is very interesting—at the moment that one starts to perceive the spiritual world in the realm of the air, at that moment one slips so far out of one's body that stones are no longer perceived as obstacles—and one can actually dive into the hard earth the way a swimmer dives into water. What is interesting is that we cannot penetrate into the air as spirits, for there are already other spirits there, but in the earth, which is empty of spirit, it is very easy to gain entrance—one can dive under as a swimmer does.

In between the solid and the gaseous elements we have the watery element (blue). This rises and falls as rain. Up above, as I am sure you have seen, there are sometimes formations of lightning (upper red). The water is between the hard earth and the air; it is thinner than earth and denser than air. What is the meaning here? This is something that is easiest to understand if we consider lightning.

According to the scientists, lightning is an electric spark. Let us examine why, according to them, it is an electric spark. You probably know all this but I will repeat it. If we take a sealing-wax rod and we rub it with a leather strap, it becomes electric; and if we have little pieces of paper, they are attracted by the rod; and so it is possible to electrify all kinds of objects by rubbing them. This is often shown to children in school. But there is also the specific need for something else. If you do this experiment in a very humid room, you will not be able to electrify a rod or anything else. First you have to dry everything thoroughly with a dry cloth; then, and only then, can you produce some electricity, for water does not produce electricity.

Now, according to the scientists there are clouds up above that rub against each other and somehow produce electric sparks. Even the child can tell you that in order to produce electricity you must remove all water, for if there is anything wet in the apparatus you will not be able to produce any electricity—even a child can tell you this. This is the kind of nonsense we are being told: it is clearly impossible to produce lightning by clouds rubbing against one another.

Think for a moment whither the water evaporates—it rises and reaches higher and higher into the region of the spiritual; it moves away from matter empty of spirits here-below and rises into the spiritual world above. It is actually spirit that produces what looks like our electric spark. For, as we rise, we move higher and higher into the regions of the spiritual. Matter is present only in proximity to the earth. Higher up, it is surrounded by the spirit. Therefore, at the moment when the water vapor rises and reaches the region of the spiritual, the flash is produced. The water First becomes more spiritualized and then it falls down again, "densified".

If one observes nature correctly, one is forced to come to spiritual subjects; but if one absolutely refuses to take the spiritual into consideration, one is then left with no alternative but to make all kinds of absurd statements like the ones you heard about the flying dreams or the lizard's tail or the cause of lightning. Everywhere we can look, it is clear that it is impossible to explain nature if one does not bring in the spiritual.

We will now try to proceed further. When one stands on the earth, starting from the feet and moving up, one is always related to the lower spiritual beings, and one can dive in like a swimmer. When we move out of our physical body with our astral body, we can actually penetrate into our solid surroundings and find ourselves within solid matter. (We cannot however do this with the surrounding air.) We can actually wander around, but this wandering around in the solid element has very important aspects. When we conduct ourselves correctly in relation to warmth then we come to the point of seeing spiritual beings in the air. But when we go out of our body at night and unite ourselves with the earthly in a spiritual form, then it can happen, when we awake, that we can still sense something around us of what we experienced when we were in the hard matter of the earth. Something remains in the soul.

Some of you may have noticed on awakening that it is easy to hear very soft sounds; and if, as you wake, you are really attentive you may have an experience similar to hearing someone knocking at the door. It is quite remarkable that when we live into the air with our soul there arise images, and when we live into the solid earth—into matter—with our soul, as a swimmer does who dives into water, then we experience tones.

It is very important to know that all hard matter continuously produces sounds that of course we cannot hear if we are not inside of it. All solid matter continuously contains tones and we can hear them on waking up only because we are still half in our surroundings. These sounds can have a very special meaning in certain cases. It is completely true, for example, that it sometimes happens, when a person dies at some distance, that someone else may hear on waking what sounds like a knocking at the door. This knocking sound is related to the dead.

Now of course it is very difficult for one to understand these things properly. But just think: You would all be unable to read, that is, to make sense of signs or letters on paper, if you had not first learned to read. In the same way one cannot immediately understand the wonders at work when one hears tones on waking up. You do not of course have to believe that there is actually a dead person standing at the door knocking with his fingers. But the dead do reside on earth in the first days after death, and they do live in the solid material of the earth. The fact that tones arise in connection with solid bodies does not necessarily have to seem very remarkable. It was quite widely known in the past when people paid attention to such things. People can have a premonition when someone at a distance dies. This means that someone has died and is still bound in his soul to the solid earth. Tones arise out of the dead when they abandon the earthly realm. It is just as easy to hear the sounds that are made at a distance as it is to read a telegraph message from someone who has transmitted from America. These kinds of long distance effects transmitted through matter are present on earth and are always there, and in days when people paid attention to these things the connection of the spiritual with the earthly was well known. This is not some fairy tale it is actually something that was perceived in earlier times.

As you can see, we are now entering an area that is described nowadays as superstition. But it is actually possible to explain these things scientifically, just as other scientific things are explained only you must know how to do this accurately.

One could come to the point of perceiving the spiritual world in the air: that is, if men were not so "poor me" as they so often are today. (The more civilized men become, the more depressed and plaintive they become in a certain way.) Those whose daily work forces them to live in great heat have no time during work hours to perceive the spiritual world and so they lose the opportunity to perceive the spiritual world contained in the air. The fact that one can see spiritual beings in the air is not in itself a dangerous thing; everybody could perceive those beings without further delay and without it in any way being dangerous.

However, in the case of hearing, if that seizes a person too strongly, and one enters a condition where one hears all kinds of things—that is a danger. The reason is that there are people who can come gradually to the point where they hear all kinds of things—they hear all kinds of things told to them. Such people are on the road to madness. There is a simple reason why there is never a danger in seeing the spiritual beings that are in the air. I will make it clear by using a comparison. If you were in a boat and you fell into the water you could drown but then, if someone pulled you up, you could have all kinds of experiences, except that of drowning: you would not actually drown. In the same way, if the human soul goes out and up it can see all kinds of things; however if it sinks into solid matter, it does in a way drown spiritually. This spiritual drowning happens when people lose their own consciousness in that they give it up to all kinds of things that are told to them inwardly. It is not a very serious danger when a man sees the spiritual outwardly. This is the same as walking around in the world, and just as a man is not afraid of a chair that is in front of him, so gradually he stops being afraid of spiritual beings and actually enjoys what he sees. But when things are heard inwardly, then we sink into the solid earth with our whole spiritual life, with our whole soul life, and it is possible to drown in that—one stops being truly human. Therefore one must always look with some caution and wakefulness at those people who say that all kinds of things have been told to them inwardly. That is always dangerous. Only the human being who is firmly rooted in the spiritual world and knows his way about can understand what is really being said, which amounts to this: it can never be higher beings speaking in a case like this it can only be spiritual beings of a lower nature.

I have told you these things in great detail so that you can see that as human beings we must come to a completely different conception of the outer world if we want to penetrate into the spiritual world. Of course there are people who can say: Why have the spirits made it so difficult for us to get to know them? But gentlemen, just think what kind of being a human would be if one didn't really have to make an effort to penetrate to the spiritual world—if one was always within it. One would be a purely spiritual automaton. A human being only comes to a proper relationship to the spiritual world, to the degree that he or she has really worked at it. It does indeed take the hardest inner effort in order to research and explore the spiritual world. It is not difficult to take one's ease at a laboratory bench and to make all kinds of experiments. It is quite easy to cut up corpses and thereby learn all manner of things but it takes inner work to really penetrate into the spiritual world, and for this kind of work the contemporary, educated world is too lazy. Because of this laziness people say: I have made these exercises on how to reach knowledge of the higher worlds—but I didn't see anything. The problem is that such people believe that these things have to be given to them outwardly, not that they have to work and conquer them inwardly. This indeed is in keeping with what people nowadays want—they want everything to be ready-made for them. As I have mentioned to you already, human beings these days want to put everything on film. They want to make a film of everything so that they can look at everything from the outside.

If we want to make progress—real progress, spiritually—we must make sure that no matter what we take up from the world, we will work it through. Therefore, in the future, those people will penetrate most deeply into the spiritual world who will as much as possible avoid having everything on film for their comfort. Rather they should choose to think everything through for themselves, to think along, so that when people tell them things about the world they will be participants in the thinking. As you can see, I have not shown you a film! Even if we had time for it, I would not attempt to present things to you with a film. I have done a few drawings, but these were done at the time and you could see them being made, so you could see what I was trying to do with every stroke and were able to think along with me.

This is also what needs to be introduced in the education of children. As few finished drawings or pictures as possible should be given, and as many as possible that are done in an impromptu manner, because in this way the child works inwardly with the teacher. In this way people become awakened to an inwardness that leads to a deeper living into the spiritual and thus enhances their understanding of the spiritual. Also one should not give children finished theories this makes them dogmatic. What really matters in all cases is that they are brought into autonomous activity this in turn will make the whole body freer.

I want to mention one other subject which arises from the questions I received from you. Many of you have read that potatoes were introduced into Europe at a particular time in history, for the people of Europe were not always potato-eaters. In fact a rather interesting story is related to this. There is an encyclopedia, in which I myself collaborated—but not in the article in question, for in this there is something comical, namely: According to the article, it is universally said that Drake introduced the potato into Europe. There is in Offenburg, which is now occupied by the French, a Drake monument. I looked it up in a conversational dictionary,⁸ and there it stood: The monument was erected to Drake in Offenburg, for it is rumored (wrongly) that he brought potatoes to Europe. One can say if anything is even attributed to a person, people in Europe will build a monument to him. But this is not what I wanted to talk about rather, that at a particular time potatoes were introduced.

Let us now take a closer look at potatoes. When we eat potatoes we are not really eating a root the roots are the little things dangling off the potatoes, and these are removed along with the peel when one cleans them. The potato itself is actually a thickened stem. An ordinary plant grows and it has a root and then a stem—and if the stem becomes thicker, as is the case with the potato, there arises a kind of knot or tuber, which is really a thickened stem. You should remember this when you are eating a potato—you are eating a thickened stem. We should ask, what does it mean for us that with the introduction of the potato into Europe we learned to like the taste of thickened stems?

If you look at a whole plant, it is made up of root, stem, leaves, and flower. (This is drawn.) A plant is something quite remarkable. The roots down there become very similar to the soil insofar as they contain many salts; and the flower up here is very similar to the warm air, so that it is as if through the heat of the sun the flower were continuously cooked. As a result the flower contains many oils and fats. In other words, when we look at the plant we find roots at the bottom, and the root is rich in salts, whereas the flower is rich in oils. Therefore when we eat roots we introduce many salts into our intestines these salts in turn make their way to the brain and stimulate it. If for instance someone suffers not from migraine headaches but from ordinary headaches—the type that seem to fill your head—it is very good for that person to eat roots. One can see how a certain salty sharpness is present in those roots, and this can already be established by the taste. If you eat a flower, the plant is in fact already half-cooked; the oils are already on the outside and this is what primarily fattens the stomach and the intestines and, in turn, affects the lower body. These are the kinds of things doctors have to take into account when they prescribe teas. There will never be a very strong influence on the head if someone cooks flowers in the tea on the other hand, if you cook the roots, they will have a strong effect on the sick person's head.

So you can see that when considering the human being we pass from the stomach to the head or from the bottom to the top. With plants, we must do the opposite. To find the correspondence, we must proceed from the flower to the root. Remember—this may enlighten you as to the meaning of potatoes—that the root is connected with the head. The potato has a tuber, which is something that is not entirely turned into a root. Thus when you eat potatoes you are eating, by preference, plants that have not quite become roots. If one limits one's self to the eating of potatoes—too many potatoes—it is not possible to pay a proper amount of attention to the brain, so that all these potatoes stay down below in the digestive tract.

This is why we say that potato-eaters neglect their heads or brains. You will only perceive this connection if you are an adept of spiritual science. But one can say that ever since the habit of eating potatoes has become firmly established, the head has become less capable, and it is the tongue and throat that have been particularly stimulated. This is why the potato is particularly appreciated as a side dish for people, because it stimulates the body below the head, leaving the head itself unburdened.

If, on the other hand, we eat red beets, we develop a great craving for the activity of thinking. This happens unconsciously. Potatoes only make one crave the next meal. Potatoes make one hungry because they don't quite reach the head. In contrast to this, the red beet satisfies so quickly because it actually reaches all the way to the head, and that is the most important thing. Of course it is very unpleasant for people to disturb their ease with thinking. Therefore they will very often eat potatoes more readily than red beets just for this reason: that to do so does not stimulate their thinking. They become lazy and their thinking becomes lazy. The red beet on the other hand stimulates thinking—it is a true root—insofar as it actually makes one want to think, and anyone who does not want to think does not like red beets. If you need to have your thinking stimulated, the salty stimulation of radishes, for instance, might be necessary. Anyone who is not quick in the head will get good results eating radishes—because the addition of radishes to his meals will set his thoughts into movement.

So we can now see a remarkable thing: the radishes stimulate thinking, and it is not necessary to be really active oneself thoughts come naturally as a result of eating radishes thoughts so strong that they also stimulate very powerful dreams. On the other hand, one who eats a lot of potatoes will not have strong thoughts, and his dreams will make him heavier. If you habitually eat potatoes, you will find yourself constantly tired and always wanting to sleep and dream. You can see that there is enormous cultural and historical meaning in what foods people actually have access to.

One could say from what I have shown you: The way things really are we live completely in matter, from matter, and yet this is not true. I have often told you that human beings have a totally new body every seven years it is constantly being renewed. Whatever matter was in our body eight to ten years ago is nowhere to be found now: it has been expelled. We have cut it away in the form of our nails and with our hair it has run out of us with our sweat—it all goes out. Some of it goes out more quickly and some more slowly, but eventually it all passes out. So what is the true story? Well, this is more or less the way it goes. I will start by giving you a schematic drawing. Let us say this is the human being, who is constantly producing tissue, and expelling it, and always absorbing new matter and of course it is easy to think: Well, it comes in through the mouth and it goes out in feces and urine. In this way the human body is seen as a kind of tube. The matter enters while we are eating, and then is expelled after we have held onto it for awhile: this is more or less the way digestion is presently thought of. But in the real human being nothing at all of earthly matter naturally goes in—this is an illusion. What really happens is the following: Let's say we eat potatoes. This does not mean that we actually absorb anything from the potatoes. Something in the potatoes stimulates us, it stimulates our throat, it stimulates our larynx etc.—everywhere the potatoes go to work, and the result of this is that we receive the strength to expel the potatoes again. In this process of expulsion, something from the earth comes into us, but it comes from the ether, not from solid matter, and it is this that builds us up in the course of the seven years. We are really not built up from earthly matter. When we eat, we do so in order that we may be stimulated. In reality we are built from what is above us, so that all the ideas and conceptions people have of food coming in and food going out again, with the side effect of leaving some material inside, do not at all fit the situation. To repeat: what is really happening is that a stimulation occurs and in response to this stimulation a counter-force enters from the ether, and our whole body is built up from the ether. Nothing that we have in us is built from earthly matter. It is like this: when we push at something and there is a counter-push and a kind of reflexive push coming back to us, we must not confuse the pushing with the reflex action. We must not be confused by the fact we need food. The actual purpose of food is that we do not become lazy in the reconstitution of our bodies. We must not confuse this stimulating activity with the fact we happen to be taking in material food.

Now of course there can be all kinds of irregularities that enter the normal situation—such as, if we eat too much, the food stays in us too long, and we accumulate matter that should not be there—fat. And if we take in too little, then we are not stimulated enough and we absorb too little of what we need from the spiritual world, from the etheric world, which is so necessary for we do not build ourselves from the earth and its matter but rather we actually build ourselves up from what is outside the earth.

If it is the case that within around seven years the body is renewed, the heart is also renewed. The heart that I carried in me eight years ago is not there anymore. It has been completely renewed by what surrounds the earth—by light. Your heart is actually compressed sunlight, and what we have taken in as nourishment has only given us the necessary strength to concentrate the sunlight. All our organs are built from our light-surroundings. All that we eat, that we take in by way of nutrition, affords only stimulation.

The only thing that food does give us is that it builds a kind of inner chair, in which we feel ourselves, as we would feel the pressure against us of a chair. In ordinary life, as a result of this resistance we have the feeling of our self, our ego, and this is related to the physical material we have in us. You feel your body as you are constantly pressing upon what you have made out of the cosmos. When you sleep, you do not feel it, because you are constantly outside yourself. You feel your body, for it is like a kind of resting bed that is made for you. In some cases it can be hard and bony and in others it can be softer, but it is really like a bed in which one goes to sleep. Of course you know the difference between a soft feather bed and a wooden bench—we feel a difference as a result of which one we have. However, we also feel in the one condition as in the other that this does not concern the real, essential human being. The real human being is what sits inside of it all. I will explain to you next time how all this is related to higher knowledge.

When people nowadays want to reach knowledge, they do not deal directly with human activity rather, they concern themselves with whatever it is that their 'chair' offers them.

• 8. Pierers Konversation-Lexicon, Seventh Edition, in twelve volumes, Berlin and Stuttgart, 1888-1893.

Good morning, gentlemen! Since not all of you are here today, I will perhaps speak in such a way that those who are not here will not miss much. Perhaps you have something to ask?

One questioner (Mr. Burle) wants information about reincarnation. There are many more people on earth today than there used to be!

Another question: He had often noticed that people like to turn, whether it's in dance or something else. Even when a dog is running, it always returns to the same place. Even if you get lost in the forest or in the fog, you will come back to the same place.

Dr. Steiner: That is actually a very interesting question!

First of all, the question that was asked regarding incarnations. If we take into account anthroposophical spiritual science, we come to the conclusion that every person who lives now has a whole number of earthly lives behind them and still has many ahead of them, so that the human soul always returns. We must not imagine that what is meant by this has anything to do with what was often believed in ancient times: that human beings have passed through animal bodies and the like. Our opponents ascribe this to us. There can be no question of that. But two objections can be made against the idea of human beings recurring again and again. Mr. Burle has the first.

The usual view is that the population of the earth is constantly increasing, that we therefore have considerably more people in Europe today than, let us say, for example, about a hundred and fifty years ago. Isn't that what you mean? So if all those who are here today, with a large population, were to be traced back to their previous lives on earth, far too many would come out? So one would have to say: There were far fewer people living in the past, and there are far more people living today. So how can it be that people from the past are appearing in present-day bodies? That is the question. This question is asked very often. There would be too many people today for us to be able to say that they had all been here before.

Well, there are a number of things to be considered. First of all, the statistics that are compiled are only ever based on certain areas where the population is increasing extremely rapidly, and this gives the impression that if the population of the Earth had been constantly increasing, as if, say, three or four thousand years ago there had been only a few people on the Earth and today there were an enormous number of people on the Earth. You calculate back that far. For example, they say that in Europe the population has approximately doubled in the last one hundred and fifty years. Now you calculate further back and say that two to three thousand years ago there must have been terribly few people on the earth.

But, gentlemen, this is also in complete contradiction to the facts that we otherwise know. I am merely drawing your attention to the following. You see, if we go back before the time of Christ's birth, say perhaps two thousand years, the largest pyramids were built in the Nile region of Africa, in Egypt; the entire Nile has been regulated. And when you think about the crowds of people that were needed to build these huge structures, for example, just the sphinxes, which are huge in size, to produce them in such large numbers as they were produced, you get the view: it is quite wrong to think that there was a small population in Egypt at that time, but there must have been a dense population in Egypt, much denser than the population is today in Saxony or in Belgium, for example. So the idea that you go back in the development of the earth and encounter fewer and fewer people is quite decidedly contradicted by the facts of history.

Furthermore, if we go much further into Asia, we find huge canal systems laid out. If we have Europe here (it is drawn) – I have already drawn it for you – we have Africa there. The Nile and Egypt would have been there, and over here we have Asia. It is an enormous continent that continues on. And here we have this teeming population that built the pyramids and so on. Over there we have the old Chaldean country in Asia. You know that in the Bible it says of Abraham that he came from Ur in Chaldea. This Chaldean country existed at that time. And in this country, in ancient times, huge canal systems were built, the remains of which can still be seen today. These, in turn, required huge masses of people. So you have to imagine that, simply proven by the facts, several thousand and even a thousand years before the birth of Christ, huge masses of people were present in Africa and Asia.

Furthermore, you must bear in mind that when the Europeans came to America, they settled there. But America was not empty of population in those days. That old Indian population, of which I have told you, which was so copper-colored, has died out completely. If you look at the remains, some of which are buried, you can see that there was a huge population with which the Europeans did not come into contact.

So this is simply not true, that there were far fewer people on Earth in the past. Just think, we don't even have accurate data on the current population, only for a certain area. What do European statisticians know today about the Chinese population today and a thousand years ago! All that travelers tell us about this indicates that the population does not always decrease as one goes back, as is usually assumed, but that there have been times when the earth was extremely heavily populated. There have certainly been times when certain areas in particular have been less populated, but we will soon see that this does not matter. So that in general, even in the face of what can be known through the external science, the objection that there are too many people today as reincarnations from earlier times can be completely dismissed.

But there is something else to be considered. You see, if you look at people today, you come to the conclusion that one of them, let us say, has gone through a thousand years between death and the present birth, the other perhaps only five hundred years, the other perhaps fifteen hundred years in the spiritual world before coming down again. So that the people who live today were by no means all there at the same time, but at different times. When there was once a smaller population on earth, then the souls just waited upstairs until there was more population again.

So what can be said about incarnation and reincarnation, about re-incarnation, is absolutely in line with the facts. I have often said – and this is an objection that has been raised time and again over the many years in which I have been lecturing – that this is just a mathematical calculation. Let us assume that in the year 800 A.D. there was a person somewhere; now in the year 1000 A.D. there would have been another person (it is drawn). Now we have 1923. Now it may well be that the one from then meets the one who is there, because the one from then undergoes a shorter journey. Now in 1923 there are already two, and in 800 and 1000 A.D. there is always one at these different times. So they do not all have to be there at the same time and come back at the same time. So that also applies to those times when the earth is less populated, that there are fewer souls coming down to earth.

If you think about it, you realize that it wasn't just that there were two people here once, then four, then six and so on, but the further back you go in the population of the earth, the more you realize that it happens in a very rhythmic way. There are times when there are many people on earth and times when there are fewer people on earth. And we never come back to a single couple, as the Bible says. It is not meant that way. It cannot be said that there was once a couple, as it is written there. So you would have to say that if you only assume that there were once two people, there would always have to be only two, and in the meantime none at all. But that is not the case. Real science contradicts what fantastic science believes today.

But now something else. You see, one must be clear about the fact that a certain time must pass before man comes back down to earth. And then you can ask: Yes, when does he come down? - Then, if you really research this matter to the end, you will find out: One who has occupied himself a great deal with the spiritual world here on earth grows more easily into the spiritual world after death. Because he has occupied himself a lot with the spiritual world, he then needs a relatively long time between death and a new birth. You may be surprised that I say long. He can spend a long time in the spiritual world because he has already learned a lot from the spiritual world. People who have occupied themselves a great deal with the spiritual world can develop better there, remain there longer and come back later. On the other hand, someone who is only concerned with the material world comes back relatively soon. And so things also shift.

This is one objection. Then there is another objection, quite different. I have already pointed it out to you. It is this: why are the former incarnations not remembered? - Yes, you see, gentlemen, it is like this: if someone says that man can calculate, then there is no doubt about it – man can calculate. Now someone says: but I will prove to you that man cannot calculate. Well, how do you do that? Then he brings a small child who cannot do arithmetic. But he says, 'That is also a human being.'

It is the same with earlier lives on earth. Man can gradually learn this, and he will learn to remember his earlier lives on earth as he continues to develop further and further on earth. This is precisely something that spiritual science says that man is not yet ready to remember in the present, what he experienced in a previous life. But what we can say in spiritual science is completely in line with that. You see, gentlemen, you are awake from morning till evening. You experience everything around you. And when you remember, you only remember what you have experienced while awake. Just think how quickly you forget even your dreams, which, as I have already told you, do not mean anything special! So the human being remembers what he has experienced here while awake. But there is something else that he does not remember here on earth. That is what he experiences in a state of sleep. And in fact we experience a great deal more in a state of sleep than we do when we are awake, only with our present consciousness man cannot yet grasp the experiences of sleep. Once the ability to do so has been acquired – which can indeed be acquired by man – then we know that an enormous amount is experienced in sleep. But in general man does not yet know this. Now the human being dies, and what he experienced while awake disappears after two or three days. It seems as if all the thoughts that one experiences while awake simply go away after two, three, four days. And then all the things that one has experienced in sleep emerge. As I have already mentioned, these take up a third of one's entire life on earth. That is, what a person experiences inwardly, he does not know even here on earth. He will know it when he becomes more and more engrossed in spiritual science.

Therefore, we need not be surprised that in the present life on earth we are still unconscious of things that happened in earlier lives on earth. I also told you the other day what a difference it makes if I put a shirt button down without being aware of it – then I can walk around looking for it in the morning, always looking – and if I explicitly remember: You put this button here –; then I won't walk around looking for it, but will go straight for it. It just depends on whether you think of something.

In ancient times, people knew that they repeatedly live on earth, but through the millennia they did not think of it at all as something spiritual. Therefore, they cannot remember it in the present life on earth. But there comes a time when they will remember, just as there comes a time when a four-year-old child will be able to count.

Now comes the other question: Man has such an urge to go around in circles. That is quite a correct observation. I must draw your attention to the following. We learn, as we have emphasized before, that as a child we actually only stand and walk, we learn as a child to move upright and so on. Now just imagine you are lying in bed asleep, and you wake up with a dream. Not only can you dream of turning over, of course that is the first thing, but you can even dream of flying! And dreams in which a person flies, initially in a spiritual sense of course, are not that uncommon. The fact that a person flies in their dreams usually comes from the fact that they wake up. When they are awake, they are accustomed to either feeling the ground under the soles of their feet or feeling the seat of a chair under them, to have something under them on which they are sitting upright, in short, to always feel something under them when they are awake. When a person is lying down, it is very rare for him to bump into the bed with the soles of his feet, because the soles of his feet are free. So he wakes up in a situation he is not used to. He thinks he is in the air and flying. That is his first belief.

But now you have to consider the following. When we first learn to walk and stand in life as children, that is, to be upright, then the ability to straighten up is not innate in us; we are just learning it. On the other hand, we now ask ourselves: where does this ability to straighten up come from? What are we doing when we walk upright? — You just have to think very carefully about what you are doing. Imagine there is the surface of the earth (drawing $. 24). If you let go a stone here, it will fly to the earth. Why? We say because the earth attracts it. Whether that is exactly true, that the earth attracts it as if on a thread or not, would have to be properly understood first. We could also talk about that some time. But in any case, there is a force there that pulls it down, otherwise it would not fall. And wherever the stone is, it falls vertically to the ground.

We too must learn to place ourselves in this line. We must learn to place ourselves in the vertical line when we are human beings on earth. So we fit ourselves into this vertical line. Our whole physical body would make no sense at all if we did not fit ourselves into the vertical position. Because look at the animals that do not walk in a vertical position, but walk on all fours: Yes, their toes are designed quite differently from our fingers! So, if our physical body is to make sense, we have to fit into the vertical position; that is absolutely necessary.

But what the physical body needs, does the etheric body also need? You know, I told you: we not only have this physical body, which we see with our eyes when we look at a person, which we can touch with our hands, but we also have a fine etheric body. Yes, this etheric body does not need to adapt in this way. It retains different habits. What habits? Well, gentlemen, you know that the earth is round and that day and night alternate. How do day and night change? The sun is here (it is drawn) and when the sun's rays fall on the earth, it is day on this side. It would always be day if the earth did not turn. When this half, which is red here, comes over here, it is night on this half and day on the other half - it then comes over here.

So day and night arise because the earth is turning. Now just imagine: the etheric body of a person, this fine body that a person also has, does not get used to the vertical position as a child, but always wants to participate in the rotation of the earth. This etheric body always wants to move around the earth; it always wants to be like this, it always wants to make this movement. If the ether body did not want to make this movement, then you, if you were walking straight in the direction of the earth because the earth was making this movement, would constantly want to turn around because you would always be in pain from the impact you would receive. There must be something in you that always participates in the movement of the earth, otherwise you would always be in pain.

From this you can also see how thoughtless present-day science is. It knows very well that the earth rotates, not only that movement that the physical body makes when it has adapted to this vertical position. But now you have no body that participates in this movement! That is the story.

Now imagine that you are fainting. When you faint, something leaves your physical body and etheric body, the I and the astral body, that is, the actual spiritual-soul. And you feel that the etheric body wants to turn. At first you turn spiritually, just as in the morning when you dream, when you feel that the ground is not under you. So when you faint, you turn spiritually at first. When a person feels dizzy, for example, only the soul wants to turn. But imagine that you now walk along without thinking. Yes, when you walk along without thinking, you mechanically move your physical body. You do not think about walking at all, and especially when it is foggy in the forest, you cannot think about walking; you do not know where to go, where to turn, where to go. When you walk with your physical body, you are heading towards a certain point. Sometimes you don't even know it, but the path itself guides you to a certain point. But when it's foggy, you can't see anything; your physical body doesn't know its way around. Then your etheric body comes; it just wants to make its movement, and that is a circular movement. So it follows the circular movement, and pulls the physical body with it! When you are merely dreaming or dizzy, the astral body makes the movement. But when you are on the move, the ether body draws the physical movement into the physical body, and you take part in it. From this, however, you can see that the ether body is not at all earthbound. The ether body in man does not take part in what is on earth.

Now just imagine: as such, a human being is an earthly creature between birth and death. There he has to work. But you know, it does not always go with the work. The physical body would wear out and so on. Now the human being wants to move his physical body, but he does not want to move it in the way that the physical body has adapted to the earth; he wants to move it according to the ether body. But the ether body wants to make circular movements, and so the human being dances. And ordinary dancing consists precisely in man following not his physical body but his ether body. The desire to dance exists precisely so that man can forget his physical body and feel that he belongs to the world.

However, according to his inner feeling, a person would want to belong to the world far too much and follow his etheric body. Actually, most of the time a person does not want to move the way the earth wants him to, but rather wants to follow his ether body. And he would quite like to move in circles, as the ether body wants to move. Therefore, a person must get used to movements that belong to the earth. And we have included these usual movements in education: gymnastics. Why do we do gymnastics? Gymnastics consists of adapting to the earth even more than one is otherwise able to adapt to the earth. By detaching oneself from one's etheric body, one does gymnastics. But one must also, in order not to become completely estranged from the great world, the outer world, do such movements that do not bind one to the earth.

Now, you see, we live in an age of materialism. Those people who long for materialism the most live in the West. The Orientals, those who have had an old culture, the Asians, they have no great longing to belong to the earth. They consider the earth to be a veritable vale of tears, much more so than the Christian, and those who live in the Orient, in Asia, want to get out of there as quickly as possible.

But Westerners are very fond of the earth, very fond of it. They don't say that out loud, but they would actually like to stay on earth forever. That's why they would like the following. And now I have to tell you something: the etheric body wants to move in accordance with heaven. The planets move in circles, so the earth moves in circles. The etheric body wants to move in a circle, the physical body wants to get out of this circle. If it has a lot of work to do, it will get out of this circle; but suppose the higher classes in the West, who have nothing to do, how do they feel about it? They feel a bit strange, they feel uncomfortable because the etheric body is constantly pestering them. When such a beefsteak-eating person goes through the world, the etheric body is constantly pestering him, constantly tormenting him, and he wants to make circular movements. And this beefsteak-eating person then wants to follow these circular movements of the etheric body. Gosh, that's so uncomfortable! The etheric body wants to dance all the time, make round, beautifully round movements, and the beefsteak eater can't keep up. Now he wants to get his physical body used to not letting itself be dragged into the round by the etheric body all the time. Now he does sports; not just gymnastics, but sports. And the result of this sport is that the person comes out of his ether body completely, following only the physical movements on earth. In this way, the person becomes more and more friendly with the earth and turns away from the spiritual world.

You must not think that one loses touch with the spiritual world merely by not thinking about it, but also through such things as doing too much sport, when one thus completely diverts the physical body from the etheric body. This is terrible for man, and it is even something that is, I would say, a very worrying thing. The more sport is done, the more people forget the spiritual and come back again from the spiritual world immediately after their death, in a very short time. So that therefore, when everything in the West would not receive something spiritual, the Earth would gradually be inhabited only by people who no longer want to go back to the spiritual world. But then there would gradually be only people on earth who would gradually destroy the earth completely. We are already beginning to see a little of this. This little is already quite strong for people of the present time. But when people no longer pay attention to their etheric body, but only to their physical body, that is something that will cause terrible conditions on earth. And here again spiritual science must intervene. This can only be done by opposing those movements which are entirely directed towards driving people into their physical body, making them entirely earthly, and opposing them with other movements.

Now people are already so minded that the most important thing for them is to become earthlings. You will understand, even now, after I have given you so many lectures, that without being a Philistine, the heart aches in such matters.

You see, I was also in England last summer. Just as we were leaving, the whole of England was in a state of agitation, waiting for the evening papers to report on the most important event. Everyone was eagerly awaiting the evening papers. What were they waiting for? The result of the football match!

We have just come down from Norway. When we got on, there were many people there to accompany us. The platform was full of people. And when the train started to move, we heard: Hurray! Hurray! - And at the next station they shouted: Long live him! - Yes, of course it wasn't for our sake, but rather, the question is what was there. I just managed to find out: They were soccer players who had come up from Central Europe and were now going back.

Yes, what are people interested in today? Much more than in some event that has something to do with the weal and woe of millions of people, people today are interested in these things, which gradually draw the physical body away from the etheric body, so that the human being becomes no more than an animal on earth.

That is the reason why the movements that are being made all over the world today and that are spreading further and further, must be countered by others: these are the eurythmic movements. These are aligned with the etheric body. When you see eurythmy, you see all the movements that the etheric body performs. When you watch sports, you see all the movements that the physical body performs.

Yes, gentlemen, that is extraordinarily important, for at the same time there is a longing for sport. I do not want to speak against sport in general. Of course, sport is quite good when it is practised by people who also work, because at work one has to get used to more unnatural movements; if one then introduces natural movements into sport that are more suited to the physical human being, then recovery through sport is good. But this modern-day sport, in which many people also take part who have no need to recover, what is that? Yes, there are sportsmen today who, under certain circumstances, go to church quickly in the morning and pray: “I believe in one God in heaven, and so on.” Then they go to the sports field. Yes, they do not say it with words there, but what they do there, if you put it into words, it means: “I do not believe in a God in heaven. He gave me the etheric body, but I don't want to know anything about that. I believe in flesh and bones, that is my only bliss. — You see, that is of course the necessary, unconscious consequence of what is being done today. It is not only by saying that one does not want to know anything about the spiritual that one is a materialist, but by such things, by which one tears the whole human being away from the spiritual.

So that in relation to your question earlier, one can say: If someone goes into the forest and it is foggy, and he gets lost, it may happen that he runs after his etheric body. That's not so bad, he just comes back to the same place. If you turn around – that's not so bad, there is a lot of back and forth, once back and forth to the etheric body, once back and forth to the physical body. That is because man has both and should also develop both. That is contained in it. But the fact that today in the West in general there is a tendency to break away completely from the etheric body and to take care of the physical body alone, that is what accounts for the terrible materialism that is the actually harmful materialism. Because thought materialism is not even the most harmful. The most harmful is the materialism where the whole person comes down to the animal. That is indeed what one must consider.

It is very easy for people to say: Yes, he is a Philistine, railing against sport! Sport is something extraordinarily useful. But I am not railing against sport at all. People should only do sport, they are free beings. But they will then destroy themselves entirely as human beings if they only pay homage to sporting things.

In this respect, it must be made clear that what I said in the first chapter of the “Key Points” applies in the broadest sense. Of course, when I wrote these “Key Points”, I thought that I would write in such a way that people would think about them. Well, they didn't give a damn about it! They didn't think at all, and the “Key Points” were not understood at all. I said: Of course, we have a great democratic, proletarian movement, but if you look, most proletarians today imitate what the bourgeois imitated them in the past, they imitate science and believe in what is presented to them at the universities. Sometimes the proletarian parties are the first to vote for laws – I recall the freedom of the press; the socialists are usually the first to say: Yes, there must be a board of experts and the like. And with regard to sport: sport is, of course, a bourgeois invention, which will also be copied if possible! Of course it won't work completely; but all the same, in spirit, it is simply copied and regarded as something that is the only thing that is beneficial, whereas in fact the proletarian movement can only become something if it gets its own impetus, if it doesn't copy what the earlier classes did. That is why I have written this first chapter. Everywhere you could see how the proletarian movement unfortunately comes under the influence of belief in authority. That is why I have written this first chapter in the “Key Points” and thought that people would think about it.

But of course, thinking is something that people who do sports do not like at all; because when someone is really doing sports, they get out of thinking. You can only think with the etheric body. No matter how hard you try, you cannot think with your physical body. Therefore, when asked: Should one eat meat or just plants to be able to think better? - one can only say: You cannot cultivate thinking through eating; you have to do that through the etheric body. You have to enter into the etheric body.

So you see, the etheric body almost shows its presence in the human being through these circular movements that the human being wants to make, through the desire to dance or through this getting lost and going in circles.

Yes, gentlemen, if you have ever lived in Vienna, for example, then you know that the Viennese are easy-going people. They are; they are cozy, but they are easy-going people. In Vienna there is the Prater. This is a large pleasure garden, a huge pleasure garden. The Prater is something where you actually go on Sundays if you have not been a good-for-nothing who went to the Prater every day. There are sausages in the Prater, Bajazzi and so on, all sorts of things. But the paths in the Prater are designed in a peculiar way as paths. Because the paths are designed that way, you will always end up at the same place. You walk down a long street, go into the forest somewhere; yes, after a while you will be back where you were! If you were at a hot dog stand, you are back there now. The paths are designed that way. You see, of course they didn't say to themselves: We'll lure the Viennese out to amuse themselves – but they felt it, sensed it, and that's why they laid out the paths so that people don't even need the fog to get back to the same place, but they made circular paths that the etheric body wants, where the person already feels completely removed from the physical body. You can also feel so absorbed that you enter into a real sense of well-being. If you have no sense of direction, you will go in circles. But if you already have paths that make you go in circles by yourself, you also have the feeling of well-being. And that is what the people who created the Prater wanted to evoke in the Viennese: that their etheric body would have a real sense of well-being when they kept coming back to a place like this. It is very ingeniously designed. It still exists today. You can see for yourself how the paths go. If you get lost in them, you will find your way back, but you will get turned around. And this turning around, especially if you do it all Sunday afternoon, is something that leads people into a real sense of well-being.

Now this is a much more innocent sense of well-being than many other feelings of well-being. You know that orientation also ceases in other ways, I have told you the story before: when you come home late at night and you don't really know whether you are drunk or not, you put your top hat on the bed. If you see it once, you are not drunk, if you see it twice, you are drunk. This is because it turns. You see, something is turning there too: the astral body. If the person lying in bed is drunk, his astral body turns. But if someone brings in the etheric body in a more spiritual way, by walking on round paths, the etheric body turns. That is the more innocent kind of turning.

Drinking goes into the astral body, while turning goes more into the etheric body. Then one also understands what a difference there is. Because if I look at someone who is drunk, yes, he does not turn like someone who walks on round paths, but with him everything turns as if his astral body itself had now become the earth. He turns as the earth turns. That is the astral body that turns.

But when people dance or spin around in the Viennese amusement park Wurstl-Prater, it is the etheric body that turns. It takes the physical body with it; that is the more innocent one. You can say: in the case of someone who dances, it is the etheric body that turns, and in the case of someone who is drunk, it is the astral body that turns. So you can tell by looking at a person's life what they do whether it is the etheric body that is doing it or the astral body.

You see, today's science does not yet deal with such things. Therefore, it cannot answer the big questions of civilization, because people do not know how to set things up so that man does not become completely inhuman. Humanity is becoming more and more animal-like if today's obsession with sports remains as it is.

Something spiritual must enter into humanity. And I am convinced that those people who, on the one hand, get to know the earth through work will also long to enter into the spiritual realm and gradually learn to understand that the spiritual must also be cultivated, that it is necessary.

Well, that is what I wanted to tell you for the time being. We will talk about these things in more detail so that everything becomes clear to everyone.

Good morning! Actually, today I would like to add something to what I presented last time. I believe that we will increasingly know better what the human being actually is in the context of the world when we look at precisely such things. So today I would like to add to what we discussed last time how things actually behave in reality when something like a cataract or a black cataract comes over the eye. The eye then becomes useless. At first, the person gets the impression that there is something flickering before their eyes. Then it becomes more and more unclear and unclear before the eyes, and then they can no longer see what they had just seen.

Now, what is this eye disease caused by? It is due to something in the eye, which should be transparent, like glass, becoming opaque. If you put opaque paper or a cardboard cover instead of transparent glass on a window, you can no longer see through it. The same is true of a severely strabismic eye. There is something there that should be transparent but has become opaque.

Let's make this very clear. I have drawn the eye for you several times. It grows out of the brain (see drawing), out of the skull; this is a side view. There is something at the front with a protrusion, and inside the eye, blood vessels and the optic nerve expand. So blood vessels and the optic nerve come together.

But then there is something else in the eye, which is a kind of muscle attachment. This muscle attachment carries what is called the lens. So inside the eye, a very small transparent, lens-shaped body is carried by the muscle. If you imagine a small lens that is transparent, it is suspended inside the eye. And you have to see through this lens. When viewed from the front, this lens looks like this (see drawing), and you have to be able to see through it. From this alone you can see that it is a matter of our having to have a transparent eye if we are to see. The eye must be transparent. If you think about it properly, you will say to yourself: It cannot be the eye that sees, because the eye must turn away, make itself transparent, so that it can see. If you smear these window panes, for example, so that you cannot see through them, you no longer see out. Yes, it is you who see through the glasses. The glasses cannot see, but you yourself see. Likewise, it is not the eye that sees, but there is something in man that sees through the transparent eye.

Now, what happens when a person becomes seriously ill? When a person becomes seriously ill, this lens in the eye becomes opaque. It is very small, this lens, but when you have it out of your eye and see through it, it is transparent. But a lens from a seriously ill person is white, milky, not transparent. So I would have to draw the beautiful transparent lens of the healthy eye like this, and the opaque lens like that. So the lens has become cloudy and opaque.

You see, it always helps in these matters that the individual parts of the human body are elastic, elastic in many respects. So if you have a very sick eye and you cut into it in a certain direction, then this muscle asserts its elasticity here, and the lens, which is otherwise held by the muscle, pops out when you make a hole here. So you imagine that you have a very sick eye. You cut into it in a certain way. The operations are relatively very simple because the body comes to their aid everywhere. The lens pops out. You have it in your hand, put it in the dissecting glass, the lens that has become opaque. Now, of course, the person cannot see at all when the lens is out, because he needs the lens to see. I will show you in a moment why he needs the lens to see.

So if you have operated on a person in this way, by removing their lens, it will become light around them again, whereas before they saw nothing at all. He can already see out, but if he is operated on now, when the lens is removed, he will only see objects that are very far away. But the vision is still not good enough. So we have been given an unusable eye. The vision is not good enough for us to see what we could see here with the lens removed, for example. The eye has become unusable.

Now, after such an operation, a person is given glasses. You see, this is an artificial lens. He used to have a lens inside his eye and now he has an artificial lens. Now, the artificial lens is used to redirect the visual rays, which used to go so that he could only see things very far away before the lens was removed, so that he can see things close up again. That is what this glass in front of his eye does. So the lens that was inside his eye can be replaced by a transparent glass. Of course, it is less perfect because it is not alive. The lens in the eye is alive, it can be moved, and that naturally has its advantages. But in any case, in an emergency, you can see if you simply take out the lens that has become opaque and replace it with glasses for cataracts. Then the person can see again.

In this way, one is able to see exactly how the matter of seeing actually lies: that one has an apparatus in the eye, a tool for seeing, because one can even replace a small part of the eye, precisely by means of an external tool, namely the cataract glasses. That the living glasses, that is, the lenses, have an advantage over these cataract glasses, these replacements, may be clear to you from the fact that the lens, which is like this (a drawing is shown), when you want to see something very far away, has to be made a little thinner. Then you see something further away. So when the hunter aims and wants to shoot something further away, he has to make his lens thin. The muscle that sits here (pointing to the drawing, $. 35) does that; it makes it thinner. If you want to see something very close up, to read something small, then you have to make the lens thicker. Again, the muscle does that. Of course, this cannot be done with cataract glasses, because otherwise you would always have to put on a different pair. That is what you do sometimes. There are already people today who need two different pairs of glasses, for near and for far. But because the lens in the eye is alive, you can adjust it internally and see near and far.

Now you can also see why, if I have removed the lens completely, only distant objects can be seen, because it is as if I had made the lens completely flat when I removed it. Then I can see things that are very far away again. But then again, my eyesight is not good enough.

Behind the lens is a slimy substance called the vitreous humor. This can also become opaque. If it has become opaque, it cannot be operated on because it cannot be replaced in any way.

When you look into the eye from the outside, it is black. There is the lens, behind this black pupil. And it is black because you are looking at the background of the eye. You look through the entire lens and through everything [the vitreous body].

But now we have to ask ourselves: what actually happens when the lens becomes opaque? Imagine the glass. When the glass is transparent, the light passes through. If you have something opaque, it means that the light does not pass through, that the light is stopped. Now, in the eye, light has to go in and out through the lens. You see, light belongs to the ether. It does not belong to matter, to the substance of heaviness, which is outside, but light belongs to the ether.

Now I have told you that, in addition to his physical body, a person also has an etheric body. And what does it mean that the lens is transparent? That the lens is transparent means that the etheric body of the person, which passes through everything – I am now drawing it in red – can simply pass through the lens. If the lens is perfectly transparent, the etheric body can pass through the lens. This means that at the point where the lens is, the person has a small piece of etheric body. If the lens becomes opaque, it is because the substance in the lens clumps together. If salt or something similar settles in the lens, then it becomes opaque. It is just like when you have dissolved salt in a glass of water. As long as the salt is dissolved, you have an almost transparent salt solution. When the salt settles down there (it is drawn),

then it becomes opaque down there. That means the substance does not let the light through. So when salty particles settle, the lens becomes opaque. With age, such salty particles settle. The transparent parts of the human being become opaque.

So in serious illness, the transparent lens can become opaque. What is the consequence of this? The consequence is that the etheric body of the human being can no longer enter the opaque lens. Now there is a small hole. The human being has his etheric body everywhere, and when he is healthy, this etheric body fills everything. When the lens becomes diseased and opaque, the etheric body cannot enter the place where the lens is. Now you have no etheric body at the place where the lens is. So we have to say: what is the disease of weakness? The disease of weakness is that the person has no etheric body at the place where the lens has become opaque in the eye.

But you can't actually see with the etheric body alone. If you could see with the etheric body, you would always see at night, because you also have the etheric body in bed at night, only the astral body is outside. So you don't see with the etheric body. You see with the soul. But you need the etheric body to see. The astral body is also still there – it is the third that a person has – and it in turn fills everything. If this astral body now wants to see at the point where there is no etheric body, it cannot, because the etheric body is missing at that point. And so we can say: How does something like this happen, that we see? It is because our astral body is inside our etheric body. — But if the etheric body is eliminated at a point, pushed aside because the lens and the eye are opaque, we cannot see. The astral body cannot see there. Is that understandable?

It is confirmed: Yes!

This is how our astral body becomes able to see that the etheric body can enter at the point where the lens is, where it is most needed. If you understand something like the disease of weakness correctly, you can really see from it how the human being has an etheric body and an astral body.

If a person is at the beginning of such a severe illness, it can be said that this severe illness comes from the fact that the salts deposited in the eye, in the lens, do not allow the etheric body to enter the eye. Now something would have to be done to make this lens transparent. If the matter is very advanced, if the lens is already completely permeated with salts, and has therefore become opaque, then there is nothing left to do but to operate it out and replace it with cataract glasses. But the thing is that if the cataract is at the very beginning, there is still something else that can be done. And this is precisely where I want to show you how the human being is connected to his environment.

Take the earth, for instance. Plants grow out of the earth. You see, a plant like this naturally has a physical body. We can touch it, look at it. But this plant also has an etheric body, because it is alive, and everything that is alive has an etheric body. If the plant had no etheric body, it would be a stone. It has an etheric body, it is alive. But the plant cannot feel or sense. It has no astral body. But the astral substance is everywhere in the environment of the earth. The astral is everywhere. We have an astral body within us, but the astral is also everywhere in the environment of the earth. I will tell you how one can come to the conclusion that the astral is everywhere. We will have to draw on a rather remote fact that seemingly does not belong to this at all.

You all know that fire-breathing mountains occasionally, well, just come into spitting, as one says, that glowing masses fly out. I will describe such a fire-breathing mountain to you a little. First, there is the ground at the bottom, filled with ordinary rock. If we look at Vesuvius, for example, which is in Italy near Naples, the ground there, the basic ground, consists of Apennine rock, as it is called. So we have the usual rock down there, which is also found in the surrounding area. But then somewhat different layers are piled up there. It is layered like this (see drawing). At the point where, for example, Vesuvius erupts, there is a crevice in the earth. And when Vesuvius erupts, ash and water first come out of this crevice; then rock-like bombs come out. All of this is hurled up to the surface. Sometimes it is liquid, sometimes bomb-like. Then it runs down, runs further down. And everywhere there are these rocks that are thrown out like bombs. They flow down again. In between, there is rain mixed with mud. All this then piles up to form such a mountain. So first, hot water mixed with ash is ejected from the interior of the earth. When it runs down, it turns into a very viscous mud. Then, a little later, come these bomb-like chunks that rush up and are hurled around everywhere. In this way, such fire-breathing mountains are raised.

Now, gentlemen, I would like to tell you how science usually behaves in the face of such a phenomenon as fire-breathing mountains. Science says: Yes, all sorts of things that are under the earth come rushing out. The fire-breathing mountains are usually near water. - Certainly, that is also true. There are few fire-breathing mountains in the middle of the country; they are usually near the shore, near the water. —- So there, because there is a crevice in the ground anyway, the water could get in, and the water that is there then boils because of the heat inside the earth. And this boiling water then pushes out all the substances that are down there. – So now first of all one of the scholars says, writes a book about it and in this way explains the formation of the fire-breathing mountains, as they say.

Now someone else comes along and says: Yes, but we have reasons to assume that these fissures are not wide enough for water to get in. We cannot assume that the water, even if the fire-breathing mountains are also near the water, can enter through these cracks in the earth. So what the first scholar said is not entirely correct. You have to explain the matter in a different way.

Now, there comes the and says: Yes, inside the earth, the thing is not the same as outside, but inside the earth the metals are liquid. Like the iron in the furnace, when it is processed, is liquid, so are the metals liquid inside the earth. There are liquid metals inside. - Well - names are easy to find - these liquid metals are then called magma. So there is magma inside it – well, liquid metals. And now, when this liquid metal, this magma, comes to a place where it can more easily escape – here it is too hard for it to escape everywhere, otherwise it spews out everywhere – when it comes to a place where it can more easily escape, then it just escapes there, and that's where it comes out. – So says the other. So it happens, says the other, because of the unevenness in the density of the earth; the magma radiates in one direction or another.

Then a third or a fourth comes along and says: Yes, but the magma can't have the strong power to throw the bombs out so powerfully! That can't be the explanation either. Then a few others come along who say something else. And then it is written in the ordinary books that are for the people. They write: Actually, we still don't know the reason why the fire-breathing mountains arise. — That's about the state of affairs today. Usually you will find: one person claimed this, the other that — but we don't really know what the cause is. For the most important things, we don't know what the cause is!

But now I will tell you something. The thing is this: when you come to the area where Vesuvius is very close, in the neighborhood of fire-breathing mountains, there is a very beautiful phenomenon. If you take a piece of paper and light it, then suddenly the earth begins to smoke. So you have the earth here (it is drawn), light a piece of paper here, now that is burning (red), and now the earth starts to smoke everywhere under the paper flame, all by itself, and you can gradually be surrounded by the rising smoke as you burn a large piece of paper. This is, of course, a very beautiful phenomenon. Tourists guides show people traveling in Italy how the smoke comes out of the ground when you just light a piece of paper.

Now, what does that mean anyway? Yes, you see, gentlemen: at that point in there, there is a certain accumulation of water vapor. There in the earth - at the point where this vapor comes out - it has accumulated inside. It cannot get out if the air above it has a certain density. The air keeps this vapor in. Now, you all know that when air is warmed, it becomes thinner. When you heat a room, the air also becomes thinner. Warm air is always thinner than cold air. So when you light a fire here, the air becomes thinner. The thinner air can no longer hold the vapor down, and so it escapes. Of course, it must first be down there. There must be something down there for it to flow out. Yes, but, gentlemen, think about what you have done! You have not been down there and blown the steam up. You did not do that, but you lured the steam out from the outside by lighting a piece of paper. So if you light something up here above the ground, you can lure the steam out. Because you make the air thinner, you lure the steam out.

You see, the learned gentlemen are now constantly searching for the causes of water vapor coming out of the volcano, of bombs even flying out; they are looking for these causes, yes, they are looking for them underground. But they are not there at all, just as the causes of the water vapor coming out when you light a paper are not under the ground, but the causes are outside, outside the earth.

You just have to be able to understand the things that are facts in the right way, then you will understand the things. So just as little as you are in here and blow the steam out of the earth, but lure it out through the thin, heated air, so something lures out everything that is down there. And you see, you can't get solid rock out of there by just lighting a piece of paper, otherwise those curious Englishmen who were traveling around here would not only be enveloped in smoke if they lit a piece of paper near Naples, but they would also get a good whack in the nose from all kinds of stones! You don't get that there, but only the rarefaction of the air and the steam rising. But here, above Vesuvius, when it begins to spew, to erupt, everything that lies above it in the astral is rarefied. And this astral is rarefied by the far-out forces of the stars, the planets. So when a certain constellation of stars is above Vesuvius, as it often is – it doesn't usually occur that way, it occurs precisely at this point – then, just as here through the paper, here through the constellation of stars, because the astral is thinned above, that which is below is torn out.

So you show a small eruption of Vesuvius when you see the sulfur fumes – not only water vapor but also sulfur vapor – coming out. It's called the Solfatara. So wherever these mighty volcanic eruptions take place, it is not what is down there that is active, but what is outside, what comes straight from the star constellations.

Of course, sometimes there is a bit of, how should I say, meddling, self-importance in such things. So someone once came up with the idea that certain such things come from the star constellations, from the position of the sun and moon, for example. That was Falb. Perhaps the older ones among you have already heard of the famous Falb theory. Falb did not just say that earthquakes, but also volcanic eruptions, for example, come from the star constellations. That was true. But he was also a terribly vain man and liked to act important about the matter.

Now he has come up with something else that is also important. You know, in mines, a terrible plague is the so-called firedamp. Something happens in the mines because the gases ignite as they flow powerfully through the mine. Now Falb has said: This particularity of the gases also does not come from the earth's underground, but from the position of the sun and moon, for example. And Falb, after what he had thought up, even compiled prophecies of earthquakes and of striking weather in mines. Well, that was often not true, sometimes it was true. The way it is, of course, is that sometimes unforeseen things happen during natural events; then the story is not true. But Falb then published a calendar throughout the year. He indicated the so-called critical days. When special star constellations occurred, when there were special positions of the sun and moon, he said: “There must be firedamp on that day” or “There must be an earthquake.

Once upon a time – it was a long time ago, more than thirty years – I was at a lecture by Falb. Falb, who was a tall, slender man, presented his theories convincingly, that is, he presented how – he knew nothing of the astral, but believed that it only came from this heat thinning -, how the heat is thinned and how it is then lured up from below, just like with such solfataras, the gases from mines either become firedamp or something like that. Now that was a large hall. Falb was standing up there. He explained it, explained it well. There was a lot of truth in his explanation. Suddenly, in the middle of his explanation, he says: So a certain position of the sun and moon causes a change in the air, firedamp must form, it is lured out – bang, it knocks on the door. A newspaper boy from the “Neue Freie Presse” enters, brings a telegram, and lays it on the lecture table. Falb is just not refined, says: It must be something important! - opens the telegram during the lecture, reads: In the and the mine, major explosions have just occurred. - Now Falb had just prophesied these explosions in his lecture and had contacted the “Neue Freie Presse”: If something comes in, send it to me in the lecture hall! Falb often worked with such things; he was just a bit vain. But it did happen, gentlemen. Just as Falb had explained that something like a kind of firedamp had to come again, the newspaper boy brought him the telegram. And he said, “You see, ladies and gentlemen, that's how the evidence is delivered to the table!”

Well, of course that was a bit of a boast. But there was a great deal of truth behind such things, especially with Falb. The fact is that you have to say: these thick, heavy masses are not thrown out from below by pushes, as the scholars always say, but lured out from above, by the position of the stars. Only, I would like to say, when the steam rises from this burning paper and you are completely immersed in this steam, the air is a little thinner. It cannot be so severely thinned that the solid masses can be hurled upwards by the mere air; the ether must be thinned and then the astral. This leads us to the conclusion, when we have correct explanations for our fire-breathing mountains, that our Earth is everywhere enveloped not only by the substance of the Earth, but also by the astral. Today's science simply has no courage to explain such things in a truly appropriate way. It has no courage!

So when we imagine the earth, we have to think of it as being surrounded everywhere, first by the ether, but then also by the astral. Now, however, the astral also penetrates everywhere. But plants generally do not take in the astral. They only have an etheric body. They only take in the ether, they do not take in the astral. But there are certain plants that do take in the astral. These are the poisonous plants. And that is the difference between the non-poisonous plants and the poisonous plants: the non-poisonous plants have no astral in them, and the poisonous plants have an astral in them.

Now, what does that mean? You see, one of the most poisonous plants is the deadly nightshade. If you have a deadly nightshade here, it is so black because the astral is absorbed into it. So the deadly nightshade absorbs the astral. But because belladonna takes in the astral — it does not actually destroy itself completely — it has the power within itself to continually destroy physical matter. Belladonna is very sharp on the inside; it wants to destroy physical matter. Therefore, when we eat a deadly nightshade berry, the deadly nightshade juice, as soon as it is inside us, immediately begins to destroy our inner matter. We must perish under the deadly nightshade. The deadly nightshade has the inner power to destroy physical matter.

Do you think that we can now introduce the diluted, properly diluted deadly nightshade juice into a person's blood in the right way by inoculation? Then, when the lens starts to get salts, to become cloudy, we can fight this cataract with the deadly juice of the deadly nightshade, if it is properly diluted, has become so weak that it no longer has a toxic effect, and disperse what has arisen as a deposit. I have drawn the sentence for you here (on the board). So if we have brought the destructive juice of the deadly nightshade, which everywhere drives everything else apart, by means of a correct vaccination here on the lens, then it also drives apart the salts that have deposited there, and the lens can possibly be cured.

Of course, if the cataract is already too far advanced, you can't rely on this story too much. But if you notice the condition in a person at the right time, when the cataract is not yet so advanced, you can still fight the cataract without having to operate to remove the lens later.

Therefore, it is usually not how homeopathic doctors do it. They administer the diluted deadly nightshade. It works, but not very strongly; the problem always comes back. So, you can't usually achieve anything in this way. But you can achieve a great deal by administering it into the blood. The blood then goes everywhere, and also enters the eye.

This also shows you something else. Namely, you see this: if we have a poison like that of the deadly nightshade, if we eat a lot of the deadly nightshade – of course a little is enough, but that is a lot in this case – if we eat a relatively large amount of the deadly nightshade, it destroys us from the stomach, already from the pharynx, our physical matter. We can no longer live. If we dilute this deadly nightshade juice more and more, the physical parts are no longer attacked, but the deadly nightshade juice is digested and still attacks the head very strongly. One can then use the deadly nightshade juice to correct people when they have become very nervous, when they have become dizzy, by giving them highly diluted deadly nightshade juice to eat, which expels what has settled there.

expels. But if you take it so thinly that it no longer affects the head, then it still works on the eye. The eye is the organ that is sensitive to the thinnest amounts of belladonna. Belladonna, “the beautiful woman”, is called the belladonna because it has such beautiful black eyes. So the eye is still receptive to the smallest amounts of belladonna juice. It is remarkable that our human being is receptive to the various substances in the environment in the most diverse ways. As already mentioned, too much belladonna juice destroys the entire eye, but in dilution the eye is receptive to the belladonna juice. Other organs are receptive to other juices. So that for each substance something in our body is particularly receptive and causes different things.

Take the human liver, for example. Yes, it is the case that the human liver actually has an awful lot to do. I have already told you how it is an inner observer. It has an awful lot to do in the process of digestion. In particular, the liver in the human body has to do a great service in processing fatty substances. If the liver cannot work properly, then all the fat that a person has accumulates and migrates around the body in the most diverse ways. Fat migrates instead of being processed in the liver. The fat that a person consumes also has a special relationship to the liver. Just as good substances have a relationship to the limbs of the human body, so too do toxins have a certain relationship to all parts of the human being.

And so we can say: We can, so to speak, make the lens in the eye bright again when it has darkened, thereby sending the astral body back into this piece of the human being when we instill something into the person from the environment that particularly attacks the eye. This is, for example, the appropriate dilution of deadly nightshade juice. From this you can see that in deadly nightshade juice we have something that attracts the astral element in the eye, so that the person can see through the astral; it draws in the astral, and the astral then in turn draws in the etheric.

Therefore, I would also like to say: even if the deadly nightshade grows outside, it attracts the astral. The etheric is already inside, it does not need to be attracted. If one can properly study this fine process that occurs in the deadly nightshade healing in the case of strongly wandering eyes, then one also understands what is going on outside in the deadly nightshade. The excluded astral is drawn in by the belladonna juice. So the belladonna juice also draws in the astral from the world. The belladonna juice is an attraction for the astral. And when we are poisoned with belladonna, too much astral is drawn into us, this astral begins to boil and this boiling destroys our physical.

But when too much physical matter is destroyed – in the badly stricken eye it is destroyed because too much has been deposited – then we have to remove it again. Away with it! Then one could indeed hope, gentlemen, that one could also heal with belladonna, with deadly nightshade, when salts or similar substances are deposited elsewhere in the body. If, for example, a person develops gallstones or urinary stones, then something solid is deposited, which should not actually be there. Then one would have to hope that if one can cure this in the lens of the severely stricken eye with belladonna, one could also cure the gallstones and the bladder stones with belladonna. This can be done if one only uses the substance correctly. It can be done!

So you can see that things all fit together, and if you understand nature correctly, you can also understand people correctly. Now we have come back to the etheric and astral body from this side, just as we came to the etheric and astral body last time when turning around. If you simply look at things in the right way, you will come across these supersensible parts of the human being everywhere. These things are really not made up, but are based on a science that goes further than ordinary science in every respect.

Next Wednesday, if you don't have any questions prepared, we will continue talking about these things.

Good morning, gentlemen! Does anyone have any further questions?

A question is asked regarding cataracts. The questioner says that he was in hospital in Basel in 1916 because of an inflammation of the iris, and that he received injections into the head. Now he would like to ask whether these injections could have had a harmful effect.

Dr. Steiner: Have you noticed anything in yourself? Of course, it is out of the question that these injections could have caused a disease. These so-called flies, these phenomena you speak of, do not have to indicate any kind of serious illness, but come from something else. The injections have the peculiarity that they sometimes weaken the nearby muscles a little, and then you can no longer move the muscle as freely; the eye becomes a little stiff. When you focus on something, it doesn't come into focus properly, and that's where these 'gnats and flies' come from. So this often comes from a slight weakness in the adjustment, I would say. Why did you have the iris injections?

Questioner: It was thought to be the vitreous humor.

Dr. Steiner: It is always better to fight such things with other means, as long as possible, through inner means. Some things cannot be fought through inner means; then one tries to inject. But you don't need to worry about that. It's not necessary.

Is there perhaps another question we can answer?

Questioner: I would like to come back to the turning. I and also my colleagues noticed that when we talk about the heart, there is some ambiguity. I thought about how Doctor once drew for us how the Earth is connected to the moon and the fluid - I don't know if I'm expressing myself correctly =, the sun is around it. The heart is on the left side of the body. I would now like to ask whether the heart is actually connected to the whole world mechanism?

Dr. Steiner: Here we have to recall various things that we have already discussed. I once said: In science today, people have completely wrong ideas about the heart. They think the heart is a kind of pump, and that the heart pumps blood all over the body. So they think: the heart contracts. When the heart contracts, it becomes smaller, holding less blood in itself. This pushes the blood through the veins, it is pushed into the body, and because the heart is elastic, it is thought to expand again. This brings the blood back again. — So today we attribute to the heart that it behaves like a pump, that it pumps blood throughout the body.

You see, that is a completely wrong view. It is a view that stems from the materialistic age, which attributes everything to the mechanical, when one thinks that the heart should be a real mechanical pumping device that pumps blood throughout the body. In doing so, no consideration is given to how all of life takes place in a living being. I would like to draw your attention to one thing in this regard.

There is a very small, lowly animal that actually consists only of a kind of tube. If I wanted to draw this animal, I would have to draw it something like this (see drawing): There would be a skin. Such a tube is the animal. Inside it is hollow, and there it is simply like a small harbor, a small cup. It still has little cilia, tiny hairs, with which it can move. This little animal lives in the water. It is called Hydra because it lives in the water. This little animal, Hydra, has the peculiarity that, when compared to higher animals or to humans, it is nothing more than a mere stomach. And this tube actually does nothing other than absorb all kinds of granules, that is, all kinds of food, that come near it and then digests them inside. So the little animal lives in the water; all kinds of nutrients swim in the water. The animal swims around, swims up to the nutrients, absorbs these nutrients, just like our stomach does; it also absorbs. Of course, this little animal does not have a pharynx or a mouth that prepares the nutrients. The Hydra simply absorbs these nutrients and digests them. The strange thing, however, is that it has the excretory organ, the anus, in the mouth at the same time. It also secretes through the mouth again immediately. So, everything is together in this little animal.

Now it is natural: if something wants to be a living being, especially an animal, it must not only eat – it must eat – but it must also breathe. And this little animal breathes with the outside of its skin. There are tiny holes all over it. These holes are found wherever there is organic matter, living matter. And it draws in the air it needs from the water through these holes. So you can say that this little animal, the Hydra, has an inside, a cavity with which it eats. On the outside, it has its respiratory organs. So the animal draws in the air, and the air also enters in the middle into this hollow space. The animal can eat and breathe. It is always busy with this. The animal swims around everywhere in the water, eats and breathes in the air from the water, which is also contained in the water.

What will the materialistic person say? He will say: Well, this little animal simply consists of this skin. This skin, which has grown inside in such a way that it is a nutritional apparatus on the inside, and on the outside it is a respiratory apparatus. — That is what the materialist says. But we cannot say so, because we must consider that to be a highly superficial view and must say: No, this little animal also has an etheric body, in which it is enclosed, and also an astral body, in which it is also enclosed. It still has that, these are the invisible limbs,

Now, gentlemen, can you prove by any means that the animal is also something invisible besides the visible? The materialist says: I take care of the visible, I do not take care of the invisible. The visible, that shows me a kind of stomach inside, on the outside it is a kind of lung, and I am satisfied with that.

Now you can do something special with this animal. Not true, gentlemen, we don't wear gloves, but we still remember what it looks like. If you have a glove, you can turn it inside out. So imagine that the glove is brown on the outside for my sake and has a gray lining on the inside. If you now turn it around so that the gray is on the outside and the brown is on the inside, you have turned it over correctly; now the inside is on the outside and the outside is on the inside. You can cut off a finger and do the same with the individual finger. Then, when you cut off the finger and turn it around, you have something like this hydra. The hydra looks like a single finger. And the strange thing is: just as you can turn this fingerling around so that the inside is outside and the outside is inside, you can also turn this Hydra around. You can do that, you can really turn it around. And then what I have drawn here (in the drawing, $. 53) in red is on the outside and what I have drawn in blue-violet is now on the inside. But the hollow space is now also outside, and what used to be outside is now inside. And the strange thing about it is that now the Hydra suddenly starts swimming around again. It doesn't mind at all. It swims around in the water again, eating and breathing. She now eats the granules in this newly formed cavity and breathes through what used to be the stomach wall. So it doesn't bother Hydra at all. It doesn't harm her at all. She starts to eat with what she used to breathe with, and to breathe with what she used to eat with.

Yes, gentlemen, if it were the case that it had only grown like this, and there was only a stomach inside and respiratory organs on the outside, the Hydra could do nothing but breathe in from the inside and start eating from the outside. But it doesn't do that. Instead, when it is turned around, it turns its stomach into lungs and its lungs into a stomach. Yes, now I would like to know how that would happen if there were nothing but a stomach and lungs! If you have a tool, a glove or whatever it is, you can turn it around if it is something external. If it is something internal, you cannot just turn it around, of course. So what is left of the etheric and astral body, the invisible, remains. And because that is there, the body of the hydra can simply be turned around. So you see: if you just look with a clear eye at what is actually going on in nature, you will immediately find out that the materialistic view must be absolutely wrong. So that one can say: That which actually eats and breathes is something invisible. And because the body of the Hydra is not constructed like ours, it does not have bones and muscles, but everything is one and the same substance, that is why the Hydra can use this one substance for everything.

It is not true that we cannot turn our stomachs inside out because it is so specially formed, because we do not consist of the same material as the Hydra, but our materials are different. But inside our stomach must also breathe, and the air that we have in it, it draws in from the outside as well. So our stomach is already a kind of Hydra.

From all these things, to which much more could be added, it is clear that even in the smallest animal we can prove that there is something invisible that underlies this animal.

Now, gentlemen, from this you can see that when we speak of what actually moves our whole being, we come to the conclusion that it is something invisible. If you take the external movement when we walk, you will not come to the conclusion that it is your big toe that takes the step, but you will say: I walk, it is my will that causes me to walk. When the organs move within – and it is not only the heart that moves, for example, the intestines are constantly moving; the intestines move in waves, otherwise the chyme could not be digested; so within the human being everything is in motion, there are constant movements within. So when the organs move within, these movements are not caused by the material part within us, but they are caused by that which is invisible within us. So we have to say: the heart is not a pump, but the heart is moved by our astral body. - So we have an astral body, and it moves the heart, or rather because our real self is also in the astral body, we also move our heart with our self, and we move it in a very special way.

If you look at the heart, as Mr. Burle quite rightly said, it is located on the left side of a normal person, not as strongly as one usually thinks, but it is located on the left side. And then the large veins come out of the heart here. The large artery and the other veins actually come out of the heart.

Now it is like this: when I breathe in, for example, I nourish myself with oxygen, so to speak. When I breathe out, I breathe out carbon dioxide. When I have breathed out the carbon dioxide, I immediately feel an oxygen hunger. I want to breathe in again. Yes, that has nothing to do with my heart at first, but with my whole body. My whole body gets the oxygen hunger. When it gets oxygen hunger, it drives all its blood to move, because the blood must have oxygen. Through its astral body, the body sends the blood to where it can get the oxygen.

Or suppose I am walking or working. Then the food burns up in me. I have already explained this to you. As a result, the blood becomes poor in nourishment. When one is working, the blood always becomes poor in nourishment. Now, what does the blood want? The blood wants to get nourishment again. The blood, as it were, seizes the nourishment that the stomach and intestines have absorbed. All of this, this hunger for air and food, sets the blood in motion. It is the blood that moves first, and the blood carries the heart with it. So it is not the heart that pumps the blood through the body, but the blood moves through the hunger for air and food, and this moves the heart. So we have to say that it is our invisible self that moves the heart.

Now, gentlemen, when you hear this, you may raise a question. You see, with our anthroposophy, it is always the case that our opponents think they are making the objections. But you know the objections long before. You make them yourself beforehand. That is why I always draw your attention to the objections. You may object: Yes, what use is our heart if it does not pump blood through the body? If the blood moves, we might not need the heart, which is supposed to be carried along.

Yes, you see, that is what people say who have no real understanding of the human body as a whole. There is a big difference between the human head and the rest of the human being. I have told you something about this difference before. Suppose you are walking or working. Yes, the head is not involved in that. The head sits with the rest of the body, like you sit in a carriage. You sit very still. The carriage has to move its wheels, the horses have to pull. But our hands and feet have to work, and the head sits inside as the one that does not work, right? Otherwise, we would somehow have to have ropes on our ears and use them to set the wheels on the machines in motion. We don't do that. The head doesn't work. Imagine if you could attach ropes to your hair – most people today could no longer do this because they are bald. That would be very bad for you. The head does not actually work, it sits quietly on the rest of our organism. But why is that? Yes, you see, the head is something completely different from the rest of the human being. The rest of the human being is a movement apparatus. The head is only to that extent a movement apparatus, as it participates in the movements and so forth; the movements work up into our head. But the head is not that which itself makes the movements.

The head has sensory organs on the outside. That is where it perceives what is outside. But the head also perceives what is going on inside, only unconsciously in most people. If I want to look outside so that I know what is going on outside, I need my eyes. If I want to look inside, at the blood circulation, I need my heart. The heart is not just there to pump blood through the body, but is a sensory organ that perceives everything, like the whole head. We would know nothing about our blood circulation – of course, with our upper floors we know nothing about it either, but there must be knowledge in the head – if the head did not perceive our whole blood circulation through the heart.

I have already told you how the liver is a perception organ. The lower movements, for example, are perceived by the liver. But the heart perceives all the movements of the whole person. This sets the heart in motion. Through the movements caused by the hunger for breathing and the hunger for food, the heart is set in motion. And from the movements of the heart, one can tell whether something in the body is in order or in disorder.

Now, imagine that someone has drunk an awful lot of alcohol on a particular evening and is, as they say, thoroughly drunk. This disrupts the entire blood circulation. The next day, the head notices through the heart: the entire blood circulation is out of order. The result is a hangover, a familiar headache. Yes, why is there a buzzing in the head? You see, when it's a nice day and I look around with my eyes, I have a nice impression. If it's awful weather out there, I have a bad impression. Yes, gentlemen, when everything is moving properly in the blood, the head has a good impression, everything is in order in the head. But when there is a storm in the blood – that is what happens when someone has been drunk in the evening – then the head has a stormy impression through the heart, everything is mixed up.

So we only understand what the heart is when we know that the heart is actually the inner sense organ through which the head perceives everything that is going on in the body.

If we look around us in the world, it turns out that the human being stands in relation to the whole world through his invisible part, through that which I have called his astral body. The most important stars in relation to which the human being stands are the sun and the moon. Now, the human head is mainly in relation to the sun, but the rest of the human being is actually in relation to the moon. And one can say that it is, of course, an awful superstition to think that something can be done with the current phases of the moon. But there is a rhythm in the human being that is also expressed in the blood and is similar to the lunar rhythm. Man orients himself to the whole world. And so it is also the case that the movement of the blood does not depend on food alone. When a person is completely healthy – after all, in a sense he is a free being – then in a sense he makes himself independent of the external forces of nature, and in a sense he also makes himself independent of the whole world. But the moment a person begins to feel a little ill, he becomes dependent on the whole world.

Let us suppose that someone is ill and you can tell from their pulse. There is a huge difference for the person who can perceive it between the pulse in the morning and the pulse in the evening. You can tell a lot from the difference between the morning pulse and the evening pulse. But for certain sick people, there is also a big difference between the pulse at the full moon and the pulse at the new moon. Human beings are dependent. Even if they can make themselves independent when they are healthy, a certain dependency remains, and this is particularly evident when they are ill. So we have to say: in terms of what makes an impression on our hearts, we are already related to the movement of the heavenly bodies, namely the moon. We are related to the movement of the moon. — In this respect, a great deal of observation still needs to be done.

I told you earlier that in a normal person, the heart is slightly shifted to the left. But just as there are left-handed people and most people are right-handed, doing everything with their right hand, there are also, curiously enough, right-handed people. There are people who do not have their heart on the left, but on the right side. Most of the time this is not noticed at all, because the difference is, of course, an internal one. If someone is left-handed, you notice it very quickly, but if their heart is shifted a little to the right instead of to the left, you don't notice it so quickly. But it would be interesting to examine precisely such people, who have their heart on the right side, to see how they are somewhat different in life than those who have their heart on the left side. A person whose heart is on the right side, that is, shifted to the right, is someone who actually always has to do certain things at a certain time of year or at a certain time of day. The right-heart person is much more dependent on the external environment than the left-heart person. And if the heart has only moved a little bit to the right – after all, it is not in the same place for everyone, but a little bit different for each person – if it is still on the left, but has moved a little bit to the right, then he immediately has the desire to align himself more with his surroundings. He immediately wants to do something special in spring, let's say, and something special in autumn. Of course, you can't always do that and then ruin yourself. People have no idea how they can ruin themselves.

For example, in the case of children who have their hearts a little to the right, you have to proceed differently at school – it doesn't need to be noticed – than with those children who have their hearts in the right place. When a person's heart is to the right, they are then led to make much more use of their astral body.

You see, gentlemen, that is the story: if someone works at a machine for a long time, you can say that in general the work becomes mechanical. It becomes more unpleasant because you yourself become a piece of the machine, but if you work at a machine for a long time, you do the movements and so on mechanically. Imagine that you are quite normally a real left-handed person. The father was also a left-handed person, the grandfather too, the great-grandfather too. It has slowly crept in. And when you are born as a son, you naturally make the same movement internally that your father and grandfather and great-grandfather have already made. It's as easy as if you've been working on a machine for a long time.

If you are a right-hearted person, the position of your heart is not inherited from your father. As a rule, the father is not also a right-hearted person. That is not inherited. In that case, you have to start things over and over again from your astral body, so to speak. You don't have the whole inheritance in you. And the consequence of this is that such a person, who is a right-hearted person, has to apply much more inner strength to keep the whole blood circulation in order. And that is why such a right-hearted person is much more concerned with the external.

The following is even possible. Suppose you are not a right-heart person at all, but a perfectly normal left-heart person. But if you become a ballet dancer – it happens to men too, but even more so to women – then ballet dancing also affects the heart. Now, ballet dancing is also very materialistic. But in ancient times, when people were encouraged to dance, for example in ancient Greece, the fact that they then incorporated movements that imitated the stars even pushed the heart a little to the right during their lifetime. Even today, dance still has a strong effect on the heart of a dancer, even though it has become materialistic, because it moves the heart a little to the right. And if one paid more attention to these things, one would see, when one dissects the human being after death, how the heart has stretched certain vessels apart. The fact that the person in question was a dancer is why the heart has been pushed a little to the right - you can still see that after death.

This answers the question that Mr. Burle asked. It is answered by seeing that when man is more devoted to his astral body, he actually does not want to follow his usual blood circulation, but he wants to control it even more, and in doing so he indulges in movements that are more like the movements outside the earth, towards the moon. Can you understand that? (Answer: Yes!)

So what you asked today, that it is very easy to see that a person has a certain longing to do this, is precisely because man's whole heart movement is controlled by the invisible part, that he then, I might say, slips a little over to the invisible and that he then actually directs himself according to the external and not merely according to the inner blood movement, which is directed towards breathing and nourishment. All these things can be explained if one really understands the human being.

And now I would like to tell you something that is still a little bit related to what we discussed last time. Last time we saw: there inside the eye, there is this small lens (it is drawn). If a person has normal vision, then this small lens is transparent. If a person gets cataracts, then the lens becomes opaque. Salts are deposited. So we can say: In a healthy person, here in the eye – if that is the front of the eye – is the lens; it is transparent. In a person who is seriously ill, we have the lens in which salts have been deposited, making it opaque. Because the lens is transparent, the human being's astral body can see the world through the transparent lens. He sees everything in the world.

When you get used to very, very intense thinking through things like the ones I have described in the booklet: “How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds”, there comes a moment when you can do something very special. But getting used to very intense thinking is not something people today want to do easily. Because people today do not withdraw completely into their own thinking, because they say: everything must be given to us from the outside; we must explore the secrets of the world from the outside. Of course, it is also uncomfortable, because you have to be very careful with this thinking. If you think very vividly, you have to be terribly careful, of course. But there comes a moment in life when you can do something very special.

Not that I can lift a chair with my hand, everyone understands that because it happens all the time. But I can also leave my hand alone, not use it for what it usually does. What the lens of the eye does is not so much in the power of people. If you have an impression from the outside, well, then you look through your lens of the eye towards this impression. If you have no impression, then the lens of the eye remains still.

But, gentlemen, just imagine someone who has really made an effort to think very hard. He is completely absorbed in his inner thoughts. He is not looking outwards, he is leaving his eye lens alone, just as you leave your hand alone when you are not using it. Yes, then the whole starry sky is reflected at the point where you would otherwise have the transparent lens with which you would otherwise see. That is, I would like to say, the downright wonderful thing about this method, which you develop in the way I have described in 'How to Know Higher Worlds', is that you learn to use the individual organs not only for the earth, but also for the other world. When salts have naturally deposited, the lens becomes thick and automatically opaque. When one reflects deeply, it remains transparent, but the person does not see through the lens, he does not look outwards. And from there it begins to illuminate the whole world from the lens. But then one sees the spiritual. And you see the whole starry sky in its true, inner meaning. This small place in man, where the lens is located, can teach you about everything you dare to say about stars and so on. You see, it is actually so wonderful with man that at the smallest point is the seat of knowledge that is tremendous.

Those who are very healthy – of course, one does not need to wish this for any human being – even have this whole story easier, they do not have to exert themselves so much with their thinking. They only need to concentrate very little to be able to see inwardly when they have forgotten how to see outwardly. But this is what must always be emphasized when speaking of such higher knowledge: when speaking of such higher knowledge, it is always so obvious that one can, of course, exert oneself too much, and then, instead of higher knowledge, something can occur, such as, let us say, the disturbance of the lens. The lens can then become somewhat opaque due to this strong inner concentration, even if one does not become strong-minded, but something opaque. Therefore, in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds,” everything is described in such a way that a person can achieve what is discussed there, but without becoming ill as a result. No exercise should be described in such a way that it can make one ill. But this lens is the place in the human being that can actually reveal the entire spiritual world to us at the very back of the eye. And so we can say: you can see outwardly when everything is transparent in the eye. You can see inwardly when something is deliberately made opaque.

Yes, gentlemen, this is something that can make it clear to you how knowledge of spiritual worlds actually arises. Knowledge of spiritual worlds arises precisely from the fact that one first finds in one's head the individual points that are not needed for ordinary activity, because they are at rest. Through the lens, one first gets to know the outer world. But one can train the whole body so that all possible uses of the senses are suspended for a moment. If, for example, one does not use the heart – blood circulation can continue, but one switches off the heart as a sense organ – then one begins to perceive the whole blood circulation. But then one does not just perceive the blood circulation. When you make your heart so that you can see through your body to the blood circulation, when you do not feel your heart inwardly and do not feel the pulse beat, but see through it, as you learn through the lens to see out into the world with your head, when you learn to see through yourself, then, gentlemen, you see not only the blood circulation, but you see the whole movement of the moon, everything that the moon does, and you see how the moon relates to the sun. And then you see the relationship of the heart to the sun and moon.

You see, in the old days, all this was easier for people. They were not yet schooled to learn only from the outside world. They did not want to see everything in front of them. If you had taken a Greek, a person who had lived twenty-seven or twenty-eight hundred years ago, to the movies, he would not have watched the movie for long because he would have fainted. at the moment when the old Greek would have looked at it, inside him, but not just in one limb, but in the whole person, what you get when a limb falls asleep, when something presses on it. Not a real sleep would have come to the person, but this falling asleep of the whole person would have arisen if you had sat the old Greek in a cinema. He would have fainted from it, of course. The ancient Greek would not have been able to watch it at all, because at that moment his head would have received such a disturbance in the whole blood system through the heart that his whole body, not just individual limbs, would have fallen asleep, and the head would no longer have been able to control anything. He would have fainted. Man has become quite different from what he was in ancient times. Today, modern culture has caused such a disorderly blood circulation that people no longer faint in cinemas.

If you have really studied spiritual science a little bit and then go to the movies, you have to pull yourself together very hard, otherwise you can still faint today. But it's not true, we are all human, and one takes on the characteristics of the other. And it is the case that people no longer have the blood circulation system of ancient times, like the ancient man. That is why the ancients could see more clearly into the circulatory system and could speak more easily of the sun and the moon than we can. We are cut off from it and must first reconnect to it through exercises. We must first properly restore the organs so that we can see.

You see, the ancient Greeks could still understand when older people told them something about how things actually are on earth. We must not believe that everything handed down from ancient times is always superstition; it is just that in many cases later generations have transformed it to such an extent that it has become superstition. It is indeed strange how things that are quite reasonable at first simply become superstitions later on. When people no longer know how things should actually be done, then these things become superstitions. For example, the ancient Jews did not eat pork. Yes, they knew that, because of their race and the area in which they lived, pork made them weak. Then it later became superstition. The things that later become superstition always go back to earlier reasonable things. So we don't have to believe that what was previously available as old knowledge is always nonsense, but you can't always rely on the old because the old things have been falsified many times. That is why you have to research everything anew.

That is why it is so nonsensical when people say of anthroposophy that it merely collects together what already existed. Nothing is collected together, but everything is newly investigated! And to those of you, gentlemen, who say: In Anthroposophy they only collect all kinds of old Gnostic stuff — just ask them where they can prove that the story of the eye lens is found as I told you last time and today, where you can find it in any book. You cannot find it because the story has been completely forgotten. Therefore, you can answer anyone who says that the things have been collected together: You are lying because you do not even know what is said there – that the whole view of the heart and so on is renewed.

It is the case that everything is originally explored here and then comes to the whole person. And from such simple things as the fact that a person moves while dancing and turning, which I touched on last time and today, prompted by Herm Burle's question, one can see a lot. It can be understood.

But, gentlemen, then something else will come out, which is what humanity fears most. Because, you see, once anthroposophy gets through – today you can't do anything; if you want to do something practically, all hell breaks loose; even if you just say things, the opposition arises immediately, as you are well aware – but once anthroposophy gets so far that it penetrates into our schools, that it asserts things everywhere, something else will come. Then people will know which movements are right for their health and their entire metabolic development and which are wrong. Then the time will come when work will be organized around the human being. Today, work is organized around machines. Today, people have to move in a way that those who discovered the machine find appropriate. Later, people will realize that what comes from the machines is not the main thing; the human being is the main thing. Therefore, there must only be such machines that are designed for man. This will only be possible once anthroposophy has been fully accepted. Then it will be possible to say: everything mechanical must be geared to man.

But something is needed for this. First, one must understand that the heart is not a machine, but is directed towards the human being. Then one will also be able to find the basis for the outer machine that shapes it in such a way that it is directed towards the human being. But a science that has made itself so comfortable that it describes the heart as if the human being had only a pump in his blood circulation makes no conscience of making the machine so that the human being must adapt to it. Our whole false social situation is connected with this false view in science. And therefore one must understand that only a correct thinking about man must come first; only then can a correct social life begin. As long as one believes that the heart is a pump, one will not be able to adjust correctly in the outer life either. Only then, when one knows that the invisible man is higher than his heart, it is he who moves his heart, then one will also adjust the machines according to man. We must begin to realize this.

Today people make it much too comfortable for themselves. They make it much too comfortable for themselves. What is most international today? The football game! I explained it to you the other day. But what is spiritual is always pushed together into small circles and so on. It fragments. Right, in Norway you can hear: Long live him! or you hear a German song sung when footballers (from Germany) are up. But otherwise people separate.

What must be grasped is the spirit, but in such a way that it is grasped in the particular. Not that one speaks in general terms of spirit, spirit, but it must be grasped in the particular.

We will continue the discussion next Saturday.

Well, gentlemen, what have you decided?

Question: The various chemical substances have the property of giving certain colors to a flame, for example. On the other hand, many stars also have a color shimmer, like Mars. I would like to know more about this. For example, Mars has a reddish shimmer. Iron, when it oxidizes, rust, also has a reddish color. Are there any connections here?

Dr. Steiner: That is, of course, a very difficult question. First of all, we need to recall what we have already discussed about colours. We have already discussed various aspects of colours. You have to bear in mind that the colour of a body is connected with the whole way in which it is situated in the world. So let us imagine we have some kind of substance. This substance has a very specific colour. Now do you think that this color can possibly express itself quite differently when you bring this substance to the flame, so that you then get a certain coloration of the flame? You must realize that, when the flame arises by itself, the flame already has a certain color and that when we bring a substance into the flame, two colors interact: that of the substance and that of the flame. But there is something very peculiar about the way colors relate to each other in the world. I will tell you something about that now.

You know the usual rainbow. The rainbow has a red band, then it turns orange and yellow, then the band turns green, then blue, then the band turns a little darker blue, indigo blue and then the band turns violet. This is how we get a number of seven colors that the rainbow itself has (see drawing). Of course, people have always observed these seven colors and explained them in a variety of ways, because the seven colors that you get from a rainbow are actually the most beautiful colors that you can see in nature. And besides, you must know that these colors are as if they were floating freely. They arise, as you know, when it is raining somewhere when the sun is shining. Then the rainbow appears on the other side of the sky. So when you see a rainbow somewhere, you have to ask yourself: where is the weather? Yes, on the opposite side, away from the rain, the sun must be. That is how it should be. That is how the seven colors of the rainbow come about.

But these seven colors also occur in a different way. Imagine that we burn a metal-like body, heating it more and more, so that it becomes very hot. Then this metal-like body first, as you know, becomes red-hot, and finally white-hot, as they say. So imagine that we have created a kind of flame by what I might call actually a metal flame. But it is not an actual flame, it is a glowing metal, a metal that glows all over. If you now look at such a metal, which glows all over, through a so-called prism, you do not see a white-hot mass, but you see the same seven colors as in the rainbow.

I will now draw a schematic diagram (see page 72). Imagine that there is this glowing metal, and now I have a prism like this. You know what a prism is. It is drawn here from the side, as a triangular glass. There is my eye. Now I look through it. Now I don't see a white body, but I see the seven colors of the rainbow, the seven consecutive colors red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. So through the prism I see what is actually white, what is incandescent, in seven colors. From this you can see that what is incandescent can be seen shimmering in the colors of the rainbow.

Now, there is something else that can be done that is extremely interesting. You see, such a white-hot mass can only be produced when a metal, a solid body, is made to glow. But if I have a gas and burn the gas, then when I look through a prism, I don't get the seven colors, I don't get such a seven-color band, but something completely different.

You may ask how you can get a glowing gas. Yes, it is very easy to get a glowing gas. Imagine, for example, that I have ordinary table salt. There are two substances in ordinary table salt: first, a metal-like substance called sodium, and then there is chlorine. This is a gas that, when spread out somewhere, when it is somewhere, immediately hisses sharply into the nose. It is the same gas that is used, for example, to bleach laundry. The laundry items are bleached by letting chlorine brush over them.

So when you have sodium and chlorine together as one body, it is our common table salt, which we use to salt our food. If you take away the chlorine and put the sodium, which is then whitish, into a flame, the flame turns completely yellow. Why is that? Yes, gentlemen, that is because the sodium, when the flame is hot enough, turns into a gas, and then the sodium gas burns yellow, gives a yellow flame. So now we not only have a really glowing metal body, but we also have a gaseous flame. If I now look at this through my prism, it does not become seven-colored in the same way, but essentially remains yellow. Only on one side – and here you have to look very, very sharply – you see something bluish and something reddish. But on the whole you don't really notice that; you only see the yellow.

But that is not the interesting thing yet. The most interesting thing is this: if I set up the whole story here, enter the yellow flame here (see drawing on page 72) and now look through plate s my prism again, what will you say? You will say: when I look through Bee there, I see red, orange, yellow, green and so on. There is yellow there too, you will say. So when I look through it, the yellow will be particularly strong here, you will say, it will be an especially bright yellow, a very luminous yellow. Yes, you see, that is not the case. What is there is that no yellow appears at all, that the yellow is completely eliminated, erased, and there is a black spot. Just as there can be a yellow gas flame, there is also, for example, a blue one. You can also find substances, such as lithium, that have a red flame. Potassium and similar ones have a blue flame. If you now put a blue flame in here, for example, it is not the case that the blue appears stronger here, but again there is a black spot here. The strange thing is this: when you make something glowing, when something glows as a solid and is not gas, but glows, then you get this color band of seven colors. But if you only have a burning gas, then you get more or less a single color, and this single color then extinguishes that in the whole color band, which it itself has as a color.

What I am going to tell you now is something that people have only known for a relatively short time, having only been discovered in 1859. It was only in 1859 that it was discovered that in a seven-color band emanating from a glowing solid body, individual colors originating from glowing gases or burning gases extinguish the corresponding colors.

From this you can already see how extraordinarily complicated one color affects another. And this is why, when you look at the sun, it appears as if it were a white-hot body. It is right that way: if you look superficially through a prism, you also see these seven successive colors in the sun: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. But if you look more closely, then in the sun, in the solar disc, there are not these seven colors, but only approximations of the seven colors, and in between there are nothing but black lines, a whole lot of black lines. So if you look closely at the sun, you don't have a seven-color band, but you have the seven colors, but they are interrupted everywhere by nothing but black lines.

What do you have to say to yourself then? When you don't see the right, uninterrupted band of colors from the sun, but rather a band of colors interrupted by black lines, well, you have to say: Between us and the sun are nothing but burning gases that are always extinguishing the corresponding colors as they pass by. So when I look at the sun instead of at a glowing metal and see the black lines, I have to say to myself wherever I see the black lines: there, in other words always at the respective point, the yellow is being extinguished, for example here by sodium. When I look at the sun and see a black line in the yellow, I have to say: between me and the sun is sodium. And so I see black lines in the sunlight for all metals. So between me and the sun, all kinds of metals are spread out in space in gaseous form.

What can we conclude from this? Gentlemen, we can conclude that space, at least the area surrounding the Earth, is filled with nothing but not just glowing, but burning metals. When you consider that, then you have to realize that basically we cannot speak of the earth standing there and the glowing sun being up there, but what we see actually depends on what is between us and the sun, and the physicists would be very surprised if they could actually get into the sun, because it would not look as they assume it to be, but what one sees actually comes from what is between man and the sun. So you can see from this example how complicated the connection between substances and colors actually is.

So if you have a flame somewhere, and the flame, say a candle flame, has a certain coloration, you first have to ask: Well, what is inside the candle? In the flame, you have those substances in a gaseous state – they usually become gaseous due to the heat of the flame – that are inside the candle in a solid state. If we then look through a prism, as I have done here with the flame: a substance that is gaseous colors the entire flame. For example, the flame turns yellow due to the sodium. If you had a flame somewhere, for example in this room, and then looked at it through a prism, you would see the sodium blackness almost everywhere. You don't even need to add the sodium somehow. If the apparatus are arranged very precisely so that you can see correctly, you will find these black lines everywhere, which should actually be yellow and which basically come from the fact that there are tiny traces of sodium everywhere. There is hardly anything on earth that does not have small traces of sodium. But this proves that sodium is absolutely necessary in nature. Where it is not, we could not live. We also have to have a certain amount, a certain amount of sodium in us at all times, and we have to process the sodium. And it only betrays itself by the fact that it erases the yellow lines everywhere and makes them black.

Now, you have to remember what I told you before: what causes blue and violet colors? What causes red and yellow? - Well, I told you that blue appears in the vastness of space, because out there, where we see the firmament, there is nothing. It is the vast, black space of the universe. So we see the vast black space of the universe. But we do not see it just by looking out in front of us. Between us and this wide black space are the water vapors that are constantly rising. Even when the air is clear, water vapors are constantly in the air. If the Earth is here (he draws a picture), the water vapour is here and the black space is all around, then the sun shines through these vapours. If you were standing down there and looking up, you would not see black, but blue. Through the illuminated you now see the dark space in a blue colour. That means that when I see something dark or gloomy through something illuminated, I see it in blue.

The dawn and dusk are, as you know, yellowish or yellowish-reddish. When the Earth is here (it is drawn), since the vapors are all around and now the sun is coming up here, I see it illuminated. I see a bright spot here, but I see it first through the dark vapors. This makes it yellow for me. When I see a bright color through a dark color, it turns yellow. When I see a dark color through a bright color, it turns blue. Blue is the darkness seen through a bright color, yellow is the brightness seen through a dark color. That's understandable!

If I now have the yellow through the yellow sodium flame, then this yellow sodium flame means that the sodium is a substance that, when it evaporates, becomes bright but at the same time produces something dark around it. So the sodium actually burns like this: when the sodium burns here, the white light shoots up in the middle (diagram, left) and all around it, darkness shoots up, and that's why I see the whole thing yellow. So the sodium radiates light, but all around it, because it radiates light so strongly, it creates darkness.

You should not be surprised that the strongly luminous sodium produces darkness around itself, because if you are a fas t runner and run quite fast and someone else wants to keep up with you, he will just fall behind. That which splashes out is just a fast runner; it therefore appears luminous through the darkness, it appears yellow to me.

With an ordinary candle flame, the particles scatter in such a way that it becomes bright around the edges and dark in the middle. Therefore, if you have an ordinary candle flame, you see the dark through the light. Here the bright dots splash (see drawing, right). Here in the middle it remains dark and therefore appears blue. So if you have a yellow flame, as you do with sodium, it means that it splashes extremely strongly. If you have a blue flame, it means that it does not actually splash strongly, but rather splinters.

This is the fundamental difference between the effects of the substances in the world. Imagine I have a glass tube here; I melt both ends of it. Now, however, I also pump out the air so that I get a completely airless glass tube. Now I do the following: I introduce an electric current here, which ends there, and here [on the other side] too; this is a current that is then closed here. So now the two poles of electricity are facing each other. Between them is the vacuum. Now something very strange happens: on one side electricity is spurting out and on the other side, where it appears bluish, such waves are forming (see drawing on page 78), and these then merge.

There, so to speak, the light continuously splashes into the dark, the light electricity into the dark. So you have the two flames that I showed you separately. You have them on one pole of the electricity and that one on the other pole. What the sodium flame does is done here on one side, what the ordinary candle flame does is done on the other.

If you proceed in the right way, you get different types of rays here, including X-rays, which, as you know, can be used to see solid components, bones and so on, or foreign components that the body has within itself.

So the thing is that there are substances in the world that radiate. There are other substances that do not radiate, but, one can say, that glow and cover themselves on the surface with such waves. The substances that cover themselves on the surface with such waves are bluish; the substances that radiate are yellowish. If a dark body then comes before the yellowish, the yellowish becomes reddish. So if you make the yellowish darker again, it can become reddish.

So you see, gentlemen, we have bodies in the world that partly radiate and thus show the light colors that are on one side of the rainbow, and that on the other hand do not radiate, but send out such waves. This is how you get the bluish colors that are on the other side of the rainbow.

If you know this, then you will say to yourself: There are such stars as, for example, Mars, which radiates yellowish-reddish, or as, for example, Saturn, which radiates bluish. Now you can see from the nature of the star how it behaves. Mars is simply a star that radiates a lot, so it must appear yellowish-reddish. It is a star that radiates a lot. Saturn is a body that behaves more calmly and is covered with waves. You can almost see the waves around it. If you have Saturn, you can still see the waves around it as rings. It appears blue because it is surrounded by waves.

Now, what we observe on the earth's bodies shows us, if we observe them correctly and not indifferently, how the bodies are out in space. But we must be clear about the fact that all of space is filled, as I have told you, with all possible substances, which are always actually in a combustible state.

Now take a body, for example iron: it rusts. That is what you meant by your question, isn't it? Iron rusts, and that makes it redder than it otherwise is. So we have a body that is relatively dark, that rusts and that becomes reddish as a result. Now that we have studied colors, we will be able to provide information about what that actually means: iron becomes reddish when it rusts, that is, when it is constantly exposed to the air. Let's make it very clear to ourselves what that means. Of course I don't have all the colors here, but you can probably imagine what I mean. So let's assume we have the blue iron. Now it is exposed to the air. Now, because it is exposed to the air, it becomes reddish due to rusting.

Now you can tell yourself that the reddish color arises from the fact that you have a bright object that you see through darkness. So a bright object seen through darkness becomes reddish. When I look at the iron as it is in its normal state, it is dark at first, that is, it emits wavy lines. But when I expose the iron to the air for a long time, when the iron is in the air for a long time, then the air comes to the iron; and the iron gradually becomes so in the air that it begins to resist the air internally. It resists the air, begins to radiate. And that which radiates, like the sodium flame here, where there is darkness all around, turns yellowish or reddish. So you can say that the relationship between iron and air is such that the iron begins to tingle on the inside and radiates. The iron becomes tingly and radiates.

Now you know that iron is also present in the human body, and as a very important substance. Iron is contained in human blood, and iron is a very important component of blood. If we have too little iron in our blood, then we are people who cannot walk properly, who quickly become tired, who become weak. If we have too much iron in our blood, then we become agitated people and lash out at everything. So we have to have just the right amount of iron in our blood, otherwise we will feel bad. Now, gentlemen, nowadays people are less concerned with these things, but I have already drawn your attention to the fact that if you investigate how man is connected with the whole world, you find that blood in man is connected with the influence of Mars. Mars, which is moving, actually always stimulates the activity of blood in us. This is due to its affinity with iron. That is why ancient scholars who knew this attributed to Mars the same nature as iron. So in a sense, Mars can be seen as something similar to our iron. But at the same time, it shimmers reddish yellow, that is, it is constantly radiant in its interior. So in Mars we see a body that is constantly radiating within.

This whole thing can only be understood if, on the basis of these studies, we say to ourselves: Mars has an iron-like nature, is an iron-like substance; but it is constantly tingling, it constantly wants to become radiant. Just as iron wants to radiate through the influence of the air, so Mars wants to radiate constantly through the influence of its surroundings. So, in fact, it has a nature that constantly wants to tingle inside, that is, to come to life. Mars constantly wants to come to life. — This can be seen in its entire coloration and in the way it behaves. When dealing with Mars, one must know that it is a world body that actually constantly wants to come to life.

With Saturn it is different. Saturn has a bluish shimmer, that is, it does not radiate, but it surrounds itself with a wavy. It is just the opposite of Mars. Saturn wants to constantly pass into the dead, constantly becoming a corpse. You can see from Saturn that it surrounds itself, so to speak, with brightness, so that we then see its darkness through the brightness bluish.

Now I would like to draw your attention to something: You can have a very nice experience if you ever walk through a willow forest, or a forest with willows, on a not completely dark but very twilight night. Every now and then you might see something that makes you wonder: Gosh, what is glowing over there? What is it that glows like that? Then you go close and the glowing turns out to be rotting wood. So that which is rotting becomes luminous. If you then went very far away and looked at it and behind it, behind this glowing, you would have a dark area, then the glowing would no longer appear luminous to you, but blue. And so it is with Saturn. Saturn is actually constantly decaying. Saturn decays. That is why it has a light color all around, but it itself is dark, and that is why it appears blue, because we look at its own darkness, I might say, through its decay products, which it has around itself. With Mars, we see how it continually wants to live, with Saturn we see how it continually wants to die.

That is the interesting thing, that one can look at world bodies in such a way that one can say of them: the world bodies that appear to you in a bluish glow are perishing, and those that appear to you in a reddish, yellowish glow are only just emerging. And so it is in the world: in one place there is something that is emerging, in another place something that is passing away. Just as in one place on Earth there is a child and in another place an old man, so it is in the universe. Mars is still a young man and wants to live forever. Saturn is already an old man.

You see, the ancients studied that. We have to study it again. But we can only understand what the ancients meant if we find it again. That is why, as I said last time, it is so stupid when people say that anthroposophy only writes down what can be found in old writings. Because you can't understand what you find in old writings! You see, you only understand what is written in the old scriptures and comes from the right ancient wisdom when you have found it again. In the Middle Ages, before America was discovered, there was a saying that was very interesting; almost every single person said it. If you had lived at that time, you would have known the saying too. In the Middle Ages, all kinds of people said the saying, because you still learned the saying the way you learn something today, yes, I don't know, an agitprop slogan.

This slogan is:

Oh Sun, a king of this world!
Luna your gender receives.

Luna is the moon.

Mercury copulates you quickly.
Without Venus you would all be nothing,
The Marten chooses himself to the man.

So Mars.

So the saying implies: Venus, who is also a young figure, has chosen Marten as her husband, Mars. It is thus implied that Mars is a youth out there in the universe.

Without Jupiter's power, you lack everything.

So Jupiter is also hinted at, how he intervenes everywhere. And then it is said at last:

So that Saturn, old and decrepit,
appears in many colors.

Do you see how beautifully this medieval saying contrasts the youth of Mars with the age of Saturn?

Oh Sun, a king of this world!
Luna your lineage receives.
Mercury copulates you quickly.
Without Venus' favor, you all achieve nothing, The Marten to the man chosen.
Without Jupiter's might, you lack everything.
That Saturn, old and decrepit,
In many colors he appears.

So you see, it will not be understood, and that is what people show. Because if a modern scholar reads such a saying, he says: Well, that's a stupid superstition! He laughs at it. If you find what is true in such a saying, he says that it has been copied. So, no, it is impossible to imagine how foolish people actually are, because they cannot understand it. No modern scholar understands what lies in such a saying. But if you can do spiritual research, then you come across it again, only then do you understand it. One must first find these things again oneself, otherwise these old sayings, which are folk wisdom, really remain quite worthless. But it is also wonderful when one finds these things through spiritual research, and then one discovers this tremendous wisdom in simple folk sayings! This just testifies that the old folk sayings are taken from what was taught in ancient schools of wisdom. That is where these sayings come from. Today, people cannot go to their scholars in this way, because today's science does not produce sayings! There is not much that can be applied in life. But there was once a time when people knew such things as I have told you again today. They then wove them into such beautiful sayings. And then, of course, all kinds of things arose from it, sometimes misunderstandings too, of course. Now, this saying that I have just quoted to you about all the planets, yes, that has been forgotten, but other sayings have then been distorted.

Of course it is also significant when, let us say, the animals do this or that. They are connected with the universe. We can tell from the tree frog that something is going on with the weather when it climbs up. Isn't it true that the tree frog is used as a weather prophet when it climbs up or down its ladder? That is because everything that lives is in relationship with the whole universe. Only that was later distorted, and it is of course not completely unjustified when one also has such sayings, which one can make fun of when one listens to them, because stupidity has taken hold of them. For example, if someone says: 'If the cockerel crows on the dung heap, the weather will change or remain as it is' – well, that just shows that you shouldn't mix everything up and you shouldn't mix the stupid with the clever either.

The saying that I have quoted to you is, of course, one that points to secrets in the universe that are related to light and color. On the other hand, what people often say about what the cockerel does and the like can, of course, be ridiculed, as it is in the saying itself that I have quoted to you. But on the other hand, there is sometimes something extraordinarily profound and very wise in the sayings of the peasants, which are gradually being forgotten. And the farmer is not sad when it snows in March, because there are certain connections between the grain seed and the March snow.

In this way, we can see from such things how the whole world can be understood from what we observe on earth. It would be better to stick to what the tree frog can do, which is to climb up and down depending on the weather, than to stick to the marmot, which sleeps, and thus miss out on all the secrets of the universe.

I hope it has become clear to you what I developed in relation to your question. It is complicated, of course, and cannot be said in a few words. So I had to say all that, but you will be able to summarize it. It is quite interesting, isn't it, to see the context in this way.

Next Wednesday.

Does anyone have a question?

Questioner (Mr. Burle): I would like to describe an experience from my youth that is related to fate and that is described, for example, in religion as if we had a guardian angel. I was once setting up cones as a boy, I was nine or ten years old at the time, and just as I was busy setting them up, a voice called: “Get away!” It was so intense that I quickly jumped away. And a moment later, the large ball had come crashing down right where I was standing. I asked, “Who called me?” But none of the others wanted to have done it, and the voice could not have come from there either.

The other time it happened was in a smithy where people were grinding their ploughshares. There was a large wheel there. There were five or six of us boys, enjoying ourselves. I was maybe eleven years old. I stood on the wheel spoke to push the wheel down. I liked doing that. So I said to the other boys: “Pull the quick-release trap, then I'll step from one step to the other.” They all pulled hard, but they couldn't do it. Even though I was the smallest, I went to see. The wheel had turned very fast, and it would obviously have been my death if they had raised the quick-release trap.

I would be glad if the doctor would comment on whether a higher power can express itself in such a case.

Dr. Steiner: Well, gentlemen, I would like to speak to you about such things, but here, of course, everything must be discussed in such a way that it can be scientifically justified. Such things are not taken from anthroposophical spiritual science just as they are very often taken by people who indulge in all kinds of superstition, but these things must of course also be - because they are much more important for life than one might think - considered in a thoroughly scientific way. Now I will tell you one thing first, as a preparation.

You see, a person actually only pays attention to a very small part of life. They do not pay attention to a large part of it, and because they do not pay attention to it, they believe that part of life is not there. For example, If someone walks past a house and a brick falls from above and kills him, this is very much noticed, and of course it causes a great stir in the circles in which the person concerned is known, and also otherwise. People talk about it a lot.

But now suppose the following: someone wants to leave in the morning. Now, at the last moment, when he is about to leave, he notices that he has forgotten something that absolutely must be taken care of, and as a result he is delayed for five minutes. Now he leaves. Now the brick falls five minutes before he passes by, and since he is passing by, it does him no harm. If he had left five minutes earlier, the brick would have smashed his head in. But of course no one talks about that, because no one can overlook that. No one can know – he himself naturally forgets, no one pays attention – what would have happened if he had not delayed a few minutes. Now, you see, these things are simply not noticed, but they are present in life just the same. There are countless such things, where we are saved from misfortune by our destiny, but they are not noticed at all. They are not studied for the simple reason that they cannot be easily traced. You can only trace them if the matter is somehow particularly striking, if it demands attention. Then you follow such things.

There was once a person who sat at his desk a lot, and the rest of the family lived downstairs. He often went up to this room of his. Now he dreamed once that a great misfortune would befall him on a certain day, that he would be shot. Now, what did the person in question do? He told the others, and they told him to be very careful, because he could be shot during those days. So he did not go out, but stayed in his room all day. But he had such an eerie impression of the dream, because he had often experienced it in the past – it was back in the days when people paid more attention to such things – that there are such true dreams. He had an unpleasant feeling. And it was this unpleasant feeling that made him aware of himself. And then it happened that at a certain moment he became restless and had to get up from his seat because of this inner restlessness. At that very moment, a shot rings out, passing right by his chair! He had an old rifle from much earlier, which was hanging in the anteroom – the door was open – and a servant had picked it up. He hadn't realized that it was loaded, held the rifle carelessly, it went off, and the shot went past where the man had been sitting.

So you see, there is a double concatenation of fate. First there is a banal dream. On the other hand, because his fate is not yet fulfilled, because he is still supposed to live, he is driven away at just the right moment by an inner urge. But now the other comes into consideration. You see, at that same moment he could just as easily have heard: “Go away!” as you heard it (turned to Mr. Burle). He could just as easily have heard that. How would that have happened? You see, when one speaks of a spiritual world, one must be clear about the fact that one must not speak foolishly of the spiritual world. But one would still be talking nonsense about the spiritual world if one were to believe – as many people do, at least those who are spiritists – that there are Germans and French and English and Spaniards and Chinese in the spiritual world. But they would have to be there if one were to hear, from the spiritual world, “Go away!” because then some spiritual being would have to speak German. It would speak French to a Frenchman, because if it spoke German, he would think it was an inarticulate sound, or these days he might even think it meant something very bad. So that would be a very foolish thought if one were to imagine that “Go away!” was spoken by a spirit, because a spirit cannot be German or French or English. That is the nonsense of spiritualists, that they think they can get in touch with the dead through a medium and get answers and believe that this is how spirits speak. Of course they don't. Even though they are present, they don't do it. But the following is the case.

This kind of connection with the spiritual world, which gives one the possibility to also speak scientifically of a spiritual world, presupposes that one first gets out of the habit of thinking that the spirits speak in an earthly language. First one must get to know the supersensible world and then one can translate what the spirits say in a supersensible language into an ordinary language. If the person sitting at his desk had heard, “Go away!” — that could have been just as well. But the fact of the matter is, gentlemen, you have heard from me that the whole human being is filled with reason. I once explained to you: the liver perceives processes in the human abdomen, the lungs perceive, the whole human being is a sensory organ. The heart perceives, through the heart one perceives the blood circulation. But in ordinary life one does not need these organs for perception. One needs one's eyes and one's nose, but one does not need these organs for perception. These organs have a very specific peculiarity. Take, for example, the liver, gentlemen! You see, if you cut the liver out of the body, then it is this organ that you know from animals, because you have probably seen some kind of liver, at least goose liver. But this organ has an etheric body that is connected to the other etheric body (drawing, yellow), and it also has an astral body (violet) and then it is still permeated by the ego. So this organ, the liver, has something spiritual about it. In your head you perceive the spiritual, but in your liver you consciously do not perceive the spiritual. There you, as you are organized in ordinary life, cannot overlook anything, just as I recently explained to you that you do not perceive the spiritual in your small eye lens. But one can see the whole sky with the small eye lens. Through all head organs spiritual entities almost do not speak. The whole world speaks through the head organs, the stars with their movements and so on. But through the other organs, for example through the liver, spiritual beings actually speak. The stomach speaks to the liver, but so do spiritual beings, and to the lungs too. Spiritual beings speak to all the organs that are not needed in ordinary conscious life.

Now, gentlemen, if the head is actually dependent on perceiving only what it sees outside in the external world, then the inside of the human being, the lower organs, are designed to perceive in the spiritual world. These organs are extraordinarily fine. They are really quite fine. And you can see that they are fine from the fact that sometimes conditions arise from such organs. These conditions are usually not noticed, and they are not noticed because our medicine is so imperfect. You see, you will have experienced at some time or other that someone gets diarrhea from a huge fear. You do not pay attention to it because you do not even imagine that diarrhea can come from fear. But it comes from it. There is an influence from the outside world. But this influence can also come from the spiritual world. And from the spiritual world it does happen that these organs do perceive, but perceive quite different things than are in the outside world.

I have already told you several times: we humans go through different earth lives. Yes, if people were to go through different earth lives so far, they would not have been able to do so. If a person is to develop here on earth from an early age, he must have a guide, namely an educator or teacher or something like that, otherwise he would remain quite stupid. But in the spiritual world every person really has such a guide who leads him from life to life and who also really pays attention in each individual life, not to the things over which we are free, over which we ourselves think rationally, but to the things over which we cannot think, but with which our human organization is connected. And so it happens that when someone is sitting there and is in a certain state of anxiety, he then becomes particularly sensitive to what lies ahead for him. This sensitivity must also be judged in the right way. One must distinguish very carefully: does this sensitivity arise for the spiritual, or can this sensitivity still be explained physically? If someone is not critical, he cannot speak correctly about these things.

I will also give you another example. There was once a patient who lived on the fourth floor of a house, and the doctor had to come to her every day, even when she was already getting better, because the matter was quite dangerous. The doctor did not come to this patient at the same hour every day, but at very different hours, but this patient knew exactly every day up on the fourth floor: Now the doctor is coming - even when he was still downstairs. When he was still outside the gate, she already knew: Now the doctor is coming. But she knew it in particular when he was still at the bottom of the building's hallway, before he had climbed a single step. People told the doctor this and said: Yes, she knows that through clairvoyance. Well, the doctor was a bit twitchy at first. Doctors don't believe that right away. But now, when he was approached again and again by people who told him, “Yes, our daughter is clairvoyant, she knows when you are down there,” he said, “I'll give it a try!” And he quietly took off his boots before going into the gate. And then she didn't know! Now, you see, there are cases like that too, of course, and they have to be properly investigated. Because this sick woman had simply developed a highly sensitive hearing from lying there for so long and could hear the footsteps downstairs, which you wouldn't otherwise hear from below. If one immediately says that this is clairvoyance, then one naturally has no right to speak of spiritual worlds. One must know exactly how to distinguish between what can still be perceived with the senses and what can no longer be perceived with the senses.

The things that happen show, however, that the senses can become extraordinarily sensitive. Because in ordinary life, of course, a person on the fourth floor with steps below is not able to hear them immediately. But just as the senses in the head and the other senses can become sensitive, so too can the inner organs, which are also senses, become sensitive to the spiritual. And so if, for example, the liver is under the impression that “today I could be shot,” then it is particularly sensitive, and the consequence of this is that the liver can hear, but now not in some Italian or German language, the warning from the spiritual being that is really there.

But now the wonderful thing happens: the liver has to transmit it to the head first, otherwise the person cannot perceive it; because there, on the way from the liver to the head, it is translated into the language that the person speaks. That is the wonderful thing about it, because that is where the mystery lies. Only then can you say what a strange being this person is. He is not only able to have intuitions, but, what is much more wonderful, he actually unconsciously translates into his language what comes to him in spiritual language.

From this you can see: everything that is written down in some spiritualistic circles is said to the underbellies. It's just that people are reluctant to admit it. They think the spirits speak Italian or French, but it all comes from within the person. And yet, there is a connection to the spiritual world in these sessions too, only a very bad one. This is then translated into all kinds of things.

But from this you can see that when something like this 'go away' occurs, you have to be clear about one thing: the actual connection with the spiritual world still remains unclear. You don't have a proper idea if you simply imagine that the guardian spirit whispered in your ear. Instead, you have to know how this happens, albeit indirectly. Then you understand something else as well. Then you realize that people can refute something like that very easily. Because for an ordinary person, the one about the man who took off his shoes is a refutation. He says: People think it's clairvoyance, clairaudience, but there was no clairaudience there, just ordinary hearing. So it's the same in the other case.

Yes, that is precisely what must be investigated first, gentlemen! And then, if you exercise the necessary caution, you will see that the spiritual world does indeed constantly work with human destiny in these roundabout ways, especially strongly in childhood, of course. Why in childhood? Yes, in childhood the astral body is much more active, it works much more intensely. Later it no longer works so intensely. When the liver is still soft in a child, the astral body can transfer what it hears in the spiritual world to the liver. Later, when the liver has become hard, it can no longer transfer anything.

Now you have to think about what an event like the one experienced by Mr. Burle means when you are actually facing death and not what is quite well foreseen by the external nature of things. Because at that time, when you heard the “Go away!”, you could have died? (Confirmed.) So you would have died. There are many such cases in a person's life. It's just that many go unnoticed. But this is one that you noticed very clearly.

But now you have gone through many earlier ones before you went through your present life on earth. Yes, gentlemen, what you went through earlier in your lives on earth wants to be lived out in the right way. It wants to be lived out in such a way that, for example, you now have a really long life in this life, so that everything can be lived out as it was determined by your earlier lives on earth. Now, external nature can even contradict this. One day, due to external circumstances, I may be exposed to an accident, may have to die, and the matter could become such that, let us say, when I die, I actually die in my previous earth life after an unreasonably early period of time. It is not right after the previous earth life that I die so early because I still have something to do on earth. Now I could also die. Do not believe that it is absolutely certain that I will not die! I could also die, it could be my misfortune. I could die, but my whole destiny would be changed. Because I would then not have the little bit of life on earth that I should still have lived through. The whole destiny would be changed! Now this spiritual being, which guides the human being from life to life on earth, intervenes and can warn him. There is always a reason why it can warn him. But of course the circumstances are extremely complicated, and sometimes it can also be the case that this being, which wants to protect the person, if we want to use the word that way, succumbs to other beings that prevent it, that keep it away. In the spiritual world, such struggles can certainly take place. But when evil entities, if I may express myself so, have no particular interest in it, then the warning comes through. And so it came through at the time. And that very special things can happen, even outwardly, yes, that also happens countless times.

You were surprised, weren't you, in the second case you told from your life, why it wasn't turned any further. Because if it had been turned further, you would have had to perish. The others couldn't let the water run, only you could do it then. Now, why was that? You couldn't see externally what it was. (Mr. Burle: No!) It was because this spiritual entity, wanting to warn you or to preserve you, paralyzed the will of the others at that moment. This always works through the person himself, not in an external way, not through another. The will was paralyzed in the others at that moment, they could not manage to move the muscles. So that's the way things are, that's how things are connected. So that whenever one wants to talk about the spiritual world, one must be sure that the spiritual world works through the human being. Just as one cannot see a color without an eye, one cannot perceive the spiritual world without this inner activity of the human being. That is indeed what one must always bear in mind if one wants to pursue real science and not end up in superstition. Because it is the case that what is on earth, the different languages, no longer applies to the spiritual world, but only languages that one must first learn apply there. If you want to penetrate into the spiritual world – and I have described what exercises you have to do to penetrate into the spiritual world – then, above all, you have to be able to stop thinking while you are penetrating into the spiritual world. Not forever, that would be bad, but for the moments when you want to penetrate into the spiritual world. Because human thinking is only for this earthly world. That is why thinking is so closely related to speaking. We actually think in words in the physical world, and only by gradually getting used to not thinking in words can we approach the spiritual world.

And now I will explain to you what it is like when a person looks directly into the spiritual world. Imagine that Mr. Burle was a clairvoyant at the moment when it happened to him, when he was told “Go away!”, but a real clairvoyant. What would have happened then? If Mr. Burle had been a clairvoyant, then he would not have needed to do this terribly ingenious work inwardly, to translate into German what a spiritual being had told him, but something else would have come. Because then he would have learned how the same spiritual being can interpret, can make gestures, can make signs. Because spiritual beings do not speak in words, but they make gestures. Of course not like the gestures of a deaf-mute, but they make gestures. People are usually not satisfied with these gestures because, like the spiritualists, they want to hear something. But in the real spiritual world it is not so, there things are not audible with the outer ear. One cannot grasp at all how a reasonable person can imagine that he hears the spirits with physical ears, because physical ears cannot listen there. It is nonsense to believe that physical ears can hear the spirits. Of course it must be the astral body of some organ that hears the ghosts. But that is also not real external seeing and hearing, but it is a knowledge of how one must interpret the signs that these beings make. And then Mr. Burle, if he had been clairvoyant, would have seen a spiritual image instead of hearing: “Go away!” he would have seen a spiritual image, you know, as if someone were pushing him away. And if he had then perceived it spiritually correctly inwardly, then it would not have needed to be translated first into ‘Go away!’ But all this happens quietly and calmly, and people are not accustomed to receiving the spiritual world quietly, calmly, in silence. If there were danger in the air, you would not want to be calm. You would be agitated, but agitation does not allow you to perceive the spiritual world. And if destiny is to speak, it will speak in such a way that the person can understand it.

You see, as you know, there are people who can think mathematically very easily and there are those who cannot think mathematically at all, those who are good at calculating and those who cannot calculate at all. These different abilities do exist. But precisely when one makes a real effort in mathematical thinking, then one can enter into real clairvoyance more easily than when one has no concept of mathematical thinking at all. And therein lies the reason why people today find it so difficult to enter into the contemplation of the spiritual world. For those who undergo training today are still mostly those who go through Greek and Latin, literature and all sorts of things, through all that where one can think sloppily. Yes, most so-called educated and learned people have actually only learned to think “sloppily” because they think in the way the ancient Romans or Greeks actually thought, and the others then learn it from them. And so today there exists just a terribly sloppy thinking, no thinking at all, that really has power in itself. That is why it is impossible today to understand correctly the things that have been taken from the spiritual world. If people had a truly sharp thinking, then they would come much sooner to an understanding of what is going on in the spiritual world. You can see from external events that have taken place in recent centuries how man, on the other hand, is almost anxious not to reach the spiritual world. I will explain this to you with an example.

You see, when a certain Stephenson first pointed out that carriages could be made with iron wheels that run on rails, it was presented to the scholars of his time. That was not so long ago. Now the scholars started to calculate, did the right calculation. What did they find out? They calculated: A wagon would never move forward if there is a rail here and a wheel there (it is drawn), where the wheel is supposed to go over the rail like that. It can't be. — And they continued calculating and worked out: The wheel can only move forward if the rail is toothed like this and the wheel is also toothed so that a raised tooth always engages with one of the same shape. So the scholars have calculated that if the carriages had cogwheels and the rails also had teeth in which the carriage cogwheels engage, it would then be possible for the carriages to move forward and they have proved that this is the only way that trains can move forward. Well, gentlemen, you see, things are going very well today without cogwheels and toothed rails! What did people do? Not so very long ago. Yes, they did calculations. But they only kept the calculations in their heads, they did not let the rest of their minds work with them. That dulls the calculations. Calculations are precisely the way to become enlightened. But in the last century people even opposed calculations. But as a result, all the rest of the thinking has also been confused. And in 1835, when it got to the point that people no longer debated about “cog wheels”, but the first railroad in Germany was set up from Fürth to Nuremberg, they in turn summoned the Bavarian Medical Council and asked them whether the railroad should be built, whether it was healthy. This document is extremely interesting. It was not so long ago, less than a century. The document was issued by a meeting of learned gentlemen, who said that it would be better not to build railways because the people sitting in them would become extremely nervous. But if people force them to build railways if they want to move forward quickly, then they should at least put up large, high wooden walls to the left and right of the tracks so that the farmers do not get concussions from the rapid passing of the trains. That is what the document of the learned gentlemen says.

Yes, that is how people judged. But do not think that today they would judge differently about those things that really make their way into the world in a forward-looking way. They do not judge differently today either. Because the fact that people laugh today about what happened in 1835 is just afterwards, and so people will only be able to laugh about what happens today afterwards, when it will be almost a hundred years ago. People have very particular ideas about things that are supposed to be new. The railways did not go down well at all, because they ran counter to people's way of thinking. When, for example, the first railroad to Potsdam was to be built in Berlin, the Postmaster General had to be asked, because he had supervised the four postal carriages that went from Berlin to Potsdam and back every week, and he had to give his opinion on whether a railroad should be built. So he gave his opinion: yes, he did let a postal carriage go from Berlin to Potsdam four times a week, and there was hardly anyone sitting in it. Why should we build a railroad when there is no one in the mail coach? Today, ten to twelve trains run from Berlin to Potsdam every day, and they are all full. Not just now, at this moment, but they were all full. You see, for a few centuries now people have found it difficult to find their way into what is actually happening in the world. Therefore, one does not perceive the things that are happening, and at most one believes a person who, I might say, is an external authority. One sometimes believes something. So I will tell you a story.

There was a very famous engineer in England – this was not so long ago, about forty years ago – I think his name was Varley, a very famous engineer, whose intellect was not doubted by anyone. The following happened to this very famous man. He went with his wife from London to the countryside because his sister-in-law, his wife's sister, was very ill; she was almost dying. They stayed out there for a few days. Now, on the first night, this gentleman, who was a very famous engineer, was lying in bed and suddenly had what is known as an 'alpaca', and he couldn't move a muscle. If the 'alpaca' passes quickly, it's not too bad, but if you can't move a muscle and stay awake for a long time, you can suffocate. Now he was lying there, actually already dazed, so that he just had the thought: I'm going to suffocate. Well, you know, there's a person who you think is going to die in a few days. You also want to keep the house quiet. So he tried to pull himself together, but he didn't succeed. Suddenly he sees the sick woman standing next to his bed, and she addresses him by his first name and says: “Get up!” This startles him so much that the shock enables him to move his limbs again. Since he was a very clever person, he knew that this had saved him. Well, he was naturally glad that something like that could happen. You can understand that, because other things have happened in the world. There were people who had been mute for fifteen or twenty years, who suddenly got a great fright and became able to speak again. So a great fright can, of course, create something terrible in a person, but it can also be beneficial. And in the morning, when the gentleman in question had got up, he visited his sister-in-law, who had been lying in bed all night. But the first thing she told him, without him mentioning it first – because he wanted to spare the sick woman the dream, of course, and did not want to tell it – was that she said: “You know, I had a strange dream that night. I dreamt that I had to go to you and scare you so that you wouldn't suffocate. And then I went and scared you so that you wouldn't suffocate. That was my dream. She was a few rooms away from him.

You see, this is a story that cannot be doubted. I relate this story to you only because it was related by a man who otherwise thought quite soberly in the world, for he was a sober electrician and famous in his profession. I do not want to relate stories that have been picked up on the street, but this is a story that is as authentic as if someone from the laboratory were to tell it.

What is the situation here? I have already told you, gentlemen, that during the night the ego and the astral body leave every human being. So when the patient was asleep, the ego and the astral body were not in the body that was lying in the bed. So what is now this so-called protective spirit could not get directly to the man, because the man had the sober thinking that people have acquired over the centuries. If Mr. Burle had had sober thinking back then – which of course he certainly did not have as a little boy, because after all, he was no more a scholar then than he is today – he would not have heard that, because sober thinking drowns it out, blows it away. This Mr. Varley had this sober thinking. His protective spirit could not have frightened him so easily. This protective spirit even took the detour of using the sleeping, sick sister-in-law in her astral body, so that he was frightened by the astral body that it brought to his bed. The sister-in-law would never have known that. She could have easily forgotten such a so-called dream, and would not have been able to tell anything if she had been a healthy person. She died a few days later, when the astral body goes into the spiritual world anyway. He had already prepared himself for that. As a result, the sick person was able to retain more easily what she had heard a few days before her death, which she was to learn afterwards. And the consequence of that was that she also knew the matter.

So you see, if you observe such things correctly, then you come to speak about them in the same way as you speak about them when you have a retort somewhere in the laboratory, a flame underneath, you put sulfur in there, it is yellow at first, but then it turns brown, later red. This can be described. In the same way, it is possible to describe the nature of spiritual phenomena if one applies truly sound thinking to them. But this must, of course, be the basic condition. Now in our time everything is made confused by the fact that just this confused thinking, which I have described to you, is prevailing. And I have described this confused thinking to you not just for the sake of describing thinking to you, but I have described it because I wanted to draw your attention to the fact that even in the case of a person in whose destiny an intervention was to be made, who thus still had something to do on the physical earth, the matter was such that, since he could never have had direct perception, this detour was chosen via the patient. But one must see the matter in the right way.

I think I have already told you what happened to Dr. Schleich, who recently died in Berlin, who was a very famous man in Berlin, a famous surgeon, but who also had a certain inclination – he was cleverer than the other doctors – to understand such things. Now, the following happened to Schleich: One evening a man came to him and said, “I just pushed a pen into my hand in my office, and some ink went into it. You have to take my hand off immediately, amputate it, because otherwise I'll die of blood poisoning.” Schleich said, “Yes, but, sir, I have to look at the wound first.” “No,” said the man, ‘it has to be done right away!’ ‘I can't do it, I'm not allowed to do it!’ said Dr. Schleich. Then he looked at the wound and said, ‘The wound can be sucked out very easily.’ So he sucked out the wound. The patient insisted that his hand be removed. “I can't remove your hand,” the doctor said. The man said, “Then I must die!” He didn't believe that the wound was harmless; he said he must die.

Now Dr. Schleich felt very uneasy. Then another doctor telephoned him and reported: “The patient told me that he was with you, but you didn't want to cut off his hand. Now he is with me.” But this doctor couldn't take his hand either because of the small stab wound. Dr. Schleich couldn't sleep all night, it was so scary for him.

The next day he went to the house where the man lived: he had died during the night! He was dissected, and there was no sign of blood poisoning. But the man had to die. Now, Schleich simply said to himself: This is a death by suggestion – as we know today, don't we, yes: suggestions take place. All sorts of things are done under the influence of suggestion. You can achieve a lot through suggestion.

To give you an idea of what can be achieved through suggestion, I would like to share the following with you. For example, you can say to someone: I'm putting a Spanish plaster on you! - but you just stick a small blotting paper on him, and he gets a big blister! The soul penetrates into the physical. You can achieve something like that. Anyone who studies such things knows that you can do that. Schleich said to himself: Well, now the man has imagined that he is dying. So this imagination has had a suggestive effect on him, so death by suggestion.

He absolutely refused to believe me when I said it was nonsense. In this case, it was nonsense to say that the man had died by suggestion, because the facts were quite different. You see, this man's nerves were destroyed because he had completely destroyed nerves in the excitement of his recent life as a clerk and businessman; blood had flowed into his nerves. One could examine the blood in the veins quite well, that was all right. And when you examined the nerves, there was so little blood in them, which cannot be examined by external means, but the nerves were destroyed by the penetration of blood. This made the man twitchy, he pushed the pen into his hand because he was clumsy, and without much being noticed externally, he was already marked for the next night. He had to die for internal reasons, because his nervous system was permeated with blood. And then he had a premonition and became anxious, so that the psychological effect was just the opposite. Schleich thought he had conjured up his own death. He did not conjure up his own death; death came through his physical organization, but he had a premonition in his soul that death would come.

You see, there you have a striking example of how one must think correctly if one wants to see into the spiritual world. One must know exactly where the crux of the matter lies, so to speak, otherwise one can be a great learned gentleman and yet interpret the spiritual world quite wrongly. That is exactly what happened to Sir Oliver Lodge, who is one of the greatest physicists in England. This happened to Oliver Lodge, that he interpreted the spiritual world wrongly. Because his son was killed in one of the battles that took place in the world war. He was terribly sad that he had lost his son, Raymond Lodge, and so he became involved with a whole network of mediums. A very skilled medium was brought to him and it was arranged that through this medium his son Raymond spoke to him after his death. Now, under the impression that his son died on the German battlefront, this naturally made a great impression on him and was also a great comfort to him.

But now Sir Oliver Lodge is also an extraordinarily great scholar and does not believe so easily. But then something happened that made him almost unable to do anything but believe. And behold, what happened is the following. The medium, as they say, made it known to him from a trance state, that is, from a semi-conscious state, that his son had had himself photographed in the last days before he died and told him that there were two photographs available.

Now it happens very often that several pictures are taken in succession by such photographers, and usually people are seated a little differently for the second shot. So the medium says that the son is sitting differently in the second picture and describes how it is slightly different from the first, quite correctly. And Oliver Lodge immediately said to himself: Gosh, if what she describes were true: photographed a few days before the death, in two different positions! —- At that time in England, no one could have known that this was true, because it had only happened a short time before the death; because the seance took place two weeks or three weeks after the death of the son. Lo and behold, eight days after the seance took place, the two photographs arrived in London by mail – after all, parcels took a long time back then. And it was true, absolutely true! So, in his opinion, there was no other explanation than that his son had told him this from the afterlife.

And yet it was not so in this case, but the medium had already come into a trance, into a different state, and had a premonition, as it happens, so she only had a premonition of it. The people who were sitting around the medium only now, after eight days, have known about the photographs when they had arrived, but the medium had a foresight of them and had already seen them eight days earlier. So there was no connection with the hereafter, but everything happened on earth. The medium only had a presentiment, and Oliver Lodge was deceived after all. You have to be so careful! So everything is correct, that man lives beyond death, that he can also express himself, but you have to be sure. When Raymond Lodge says in English: “Shortly before my death, I had two photographs taken, the positions have changed.” You have to wonder if that is really him. After all, after death, communication in English comes to an end; otherwise the spirit would also have to be able to speak English. The information must therefore come from the subconscious of the medium, from what is not conscious in ordinary life.

I wanted to tell you, precisely because I was prompted by Mr. Burle's question to tell you such delicate things today, how careful you have to be, because you are responsible for what you say; I wanted to show how you cannot just take any concept at face value, but have to investigate everything. And only after long reflection can one say: Yes, a protecting spirit has just spoken. But the fact that the words were expressed in German happened only through the mediation of man. And if any human beings cannot do something, then their muscles must first be paralyzed from the spiritual world. Everything must go through the human being.

Then, once you have learned this as a basis, you can move on. We will continue to talk about this next Saturday.

Have you perhaps noticed something, gentlemen?

Mr. Dollinger: I wanted to ask about the fate of human beings. Millions of people died in the great world war. Did they bring this with them into the world as their fate? What does it look like in the spiritual world in connection with world development?

Dr. Steiner: We can also talk about this in connection with other things, because it is absolutely necessary that one does not simply explain things in anthroposophy as people sometimes do. What is said must be scientific. Now, with this in mind, I would like to tell you something that will help us to understand how the great catastrophe, this terrible world misery of so many people, could have been possible at all. Nowadays, people no longer pay attention to how one person is actually connected to another. It is the case that today all people actually stand isolated in the world. Even if, out of habit or some lingering superstition, you know and observe the things I have told you about in the last lesson, you usually explain them wrongly.

Now I want to tell you a simple story that can show you how today no one even considers the fact that one person is connected to another in any way. Once upon a time, the following occurred, which is well documented, like a scientific fact. In one family, a younger family member, an eighteen- or nineteen-year-old girl, was ill, not so ill that she was bedridden, but she had to lie down again and again. Now, for a while, her mother was with her, taking care of her. She was lying on the sofa, so her mother was caring for her. When she had almost fallen asleep, her mother went into another room and read something out of a book to her husband and other family members. It was in a room quite a distance from the one where the sick woman was lying.

The sick woman now had the following realization. When her mother had gone out the door, she suddenly had the urge to get up. She got up and followed her mother through two rooms into the third room, where she found her reading. She was extremely surprised that they were not at all surprised. The sick woman, who could hardly walk and had just been left asleep, now appeared in the room where the mother only wanted to be for a while because she also wanted to take care of the others. She was a bit strangely touched by the fact that they remained completely calm. Now the mother, who was reading, suddenly said: “But now I have to see what is wrong with my daughter!” — and went out of the room. But the daughter followed. The mother went through these two rooms again and found the daughter lying on the sofa, but terribly pale. She did not speak to her at first. But then, when she spoke to her, the daughter did not answer, she was very pale. So the daughter had always followed her mother and now she saw her mother walking along and she, the daughter, saw herself lying on the sofa. And the daughter was again very surprised about it, first that she saw herself lying on the sofa, secondly that the mother was addressing her. At that moment it is as if the daughter receives a terrible blow, and what is lying on the sofa becomes of a slightly better complexion, and the matter is back to the old one.

This is a well-established story; the event actually took place. But now all kinds of people are coming who want to explain it. Yes, they then explain it as follows, for example: Well, this daughter also has an astral body in addition to her physical body. People talked about the astral body until the 16th century, that is, until four hundred years ago, just as we talk about the nose or the ear. But that is not something that has been preserved to this day; it has been generally forgotten. So those people can talk about the astral body and can say: Well, the astral body went out, walked around the rooms, experienced what the others were reading and so on, went back in and slipped in at the moment the mother addressed the girl.

But, gentlemen, you must realize that when you explain it this way, you explain it as if there were a second physical person inside you, as if there were a circle around you, and as if you could slip out of it and go for a walk like a physical person. It is a strong superstition to explain it in this way. This superstition is very common among learned people today, otherwise things like those of Oliver Lodge, which I have told you, would not happen. It always depends on knowing what really happened there.

Now, what really happened is as follows. The mother is sitting with her daughter and caring for her. Right, something is taking place that is called loving care, and the daughter is very, very comfortable being cared for by her mother. She feels her mother's love. At such a moment, gentlemen, when one feels the love of the other so strongly and is also very weak, the strange thing happens that one no longer thinks with one's own astral body. It becomes dull and the astral body of the other person gains power over one's own astral body. Then it even happens that one begins to think with the thoughts of the other person who is next to one. Now it so happened that while the mother was still caring for the daughter, this feeling that developed was transferred to the daughter in such a way that the daughter felt and thought exactly like her mother. Now the mother is leaving. Just as a ball that I push then rolls away, so the daughter now thinks not with her own thoughts, but with the thoughts of the mother. And while the mother goes through the two rooms, the daughter always thinks with the thoughts of the mother. And while the mother reads aloud, the daughter thinks with the thoughts of the mother.

So the daughter naturally remains lying quietly on the sofa, but she is constantly thinking with her mother's thoughts. And when the mother then becomes restless, going back again, the daughter thinks, she also goes back. And now you need not be surprised that the daughter has turned pale. Because just consider: if you lie as if in a deep swoon for a while, you will also turn pale. Because something like that naturally causes a faint-like state when you think with the thoughts of the other person. And when the mother returns, it has the effect on the daughter that she is shaken and can have her own thoughts again. So you see, the correct explanation in this case is that a person has an extraordinarily strong effect on the other, especially in his spiritual part. But this occurs especially when the person upon whom the effect is being exerted is himself very weak. If he cannot develop strength of soul himself, then the strength of soul of the other person can very easily have an influence on him.

But that is how it is in life in general. Often we do not even think about the great influence people have on each other. Do you think that when someone tells you something and you believe it, that you always have reasons, reasonable reasons, that convince you? That is not true at all. If you like someone, you believe them more than you believe someone you hate. The story is that the soul of one person has an extremely strong influence on the soul of another person. So you have to say to yourself: I have to know how strongly one person influences another. I have to know exactly how things are with spiritual things if I want to talk about them at all.

I will now give you another example, which I am telling you about for a specific reason. Because someone could say: Yes, Dr. Steiner does not believe at all that a person can step out of themselves, he only believes that one person can influence another. — No, I just gave you an example where you could see very clearly how one person influenced another, here the mother influenced the daughter.

Now another example where there can be no question of one person having been influenced. Two students live together in a room. That happens to students all the time. One is a math student, the other is a philology student and understands nothing about math, understands nothing about math at all. But now, one evening, they are working away furiously, as they say in student slang, one with his Latin grammar, the other with his arithmetic problem that he wants to solve and just can't figure out. He can't do anything. The one with the language is doing reasonably well and goes to bed quite satisfied. But the math student doesn't go to bed satisfied, because he hasn't mastered his task. With languages, you usually don't know whether you have mastered something or not. At most, you make mistakes, but you think they are right. In mathematics, however, if you haven't mastered anything, nothing comes of it. That's the difference. Well, they go to bed; so at around half past twelve or twelve o'clock, the two go to bed.

When it is about three o'clock, the math student — the language student has looked at the clock — gets up, sits down at his desk again and starts calculating, calculating, calculating. The language student is extremely surprised, but he has enough presence of mind to wait quietly and see what happens. The other calculates, calculates, then gets up from his chair again, lies down in bed and continues sleeping.

At eight o'clock the next morning, they both get up. The math student says: Gosh, I have a real headache today, like when we had a few drinks the whole evening, and we were at home! The other one said: That doesn't surprise me! Why did you get up during the night and work? - What, I worked? That didn't even occur to me! I just laid in bed the whole night, - says the math student. “But you did get up!” says the other. ‘You picked up the pencil and did the sums, over and over!’ ‘Well,’ says the first student, ‘that's not the point!’ ‘Well, let's have a look,’ says the language student. ‘It must say what you wrote!’ The math student checks. The whole calculation was there, everything he hadn't been able to do that evening was done.

Now you see, there you have an example where there is absolutely no question that the other person did not cheat, because he would not have been able to solve the problem. He was merely a student of languages and, furthermore, he saw how everything went. So the person in question, without knowing it himself, got up and solved the whole calculation. So there is no question of any kind of influence from someone else. The person in question actually got up during the night.

But now, when you explain this, something very strange comes out. You see, as you know, we first have our physical body, then the etheric body, the astral body and the ego body. I call everything a “body”; of course they are not external bodies, but I call these four parts of the human being “bodies”. Now, gentlemen, when we sleep, only our physical body and etheric body are in bed; the astral body and the ego body are outside. We see them around the physical body and etheric body. I have already explained all this to you. This is what happened to the math student. He goes to bed. He can sleep well, so he brings his astral body and his ego body out, but he is still disturbed by the fact that he has not solved his arithmetic problem. If the astral body and the ego body had now slipped into his physical body and into his ether body, then he would have woken up and would have been unable to do anything again, probably not solving the task again. But the astral body and the ego body did not do that at all; instead, the restlessness into which he fell only made him puff. The astral body can puff, it can even puff the skin a little. But that can only happen through the air, not physically, because the astral body is not physical. But it can set the air in motion. And that has a particular effect on the eyes, something on the ears, especially on the nose and mouth. Wherever there are sensory organs, this puff of the astral body has a very strong effect. So the student goes to bed, but his astral body keeps pushing from the outside, but does not enter. But because it is pushing, the physical body with the etheric body automatically feels pushed like a machine to get up. However, the astral body remains outside, because if it had been inside, the student would have become conscious. So he sits down. It does not even occur to his astral body and his ego to enter. Yes, who is doing the calculating now? Now the physical body and the etheric body are doing the calculating, and the etheric body is capable of doing the whole calculation, which it cannot do if the astral body and the ego are inside.

From this you can see, gentlemen, that you are all much cleverer in your etheric body than in your astral body and in your ego. If you could do everything you can do in your etheric body, then you would be clever chaps! Because the whole point of learning is actually to bring up what we already have in our etheric body into our astral body.

So what actually happened to the math student? You know, in the old days there were almost no teetotallers or anti-alcoholics among students, but they usually drank quite a lot. And so the two guys didn't just drink every night, they also sat in pubs a lot, and as a result — through the influence of alcohol on the blood — the astral body was ruined. The etheric body was less ruined. And the consequence of this was that the student of arithmetic would have been able to solve the problem quite well if he had gone to the pub less, but because he had so strongly influenced his astral body, he could not solve the problem while awake. He first had to get rid of the corrupted astral body; then he could sit down at the table and his ether body, which had remained cleverer, solved the arithmetic problem. So we can do with the etheric body precisely what the mind does. We cannot love with the etheric body; that has to be done by the astral body, but everything that the mind does, can be done with the etheric body. So we can say: This example shows us very clearly that there is no influence from another side, but that the student of arithmetic is only dealing with himself.

Now imagine this very clearly: we have (see diagram) the physical body, here the etheric body (yellow), which passes through the physical body. And now, to make it easier for us to see the whole person, I will draw the astral body, which is there at night, outside (red). It is very small at the top and huge at the bottom. Then the I, the ego body (violet). So that's what we're like at night. So actually we are two people at night. You don't have to imagine this as a second physical person here, but it is quite spiritual, what is out there. Otherwise you would fall back too much into materialism if you did not imagine it spiritually. But from this you can certainly have the opinion that man is actually this two-part being in himself, a spiritual-soul part and a physical part with the etheric body. The person who is awake is only through this as he is, that every morning the astral body and the I-body are properly integrated into the physical and etheric bodies (arrows).

Now you might think that this could not always happen properly. There are, in fact, some very strange cases. There was once a girl – such things always happen when they happen of their own accord, that is, when they do not happen through practice. They happen when a person becomes a little weak, for example in young girls who have just reached maturity, in the early stages of female maturity. So there was a girl of nineteen or twenty who had the following experience. She had days when she talked, but those who belonged to the family could not understand anything she said, nothing at all. She talked about completely unknown things. It was very strange. For example, she could say: Ah, good afternoon, I am very pleased that you are visiting me. We saw each other two days ago in... - ah yes, we went for a walk in the beautiful forest. There was a spring there. Then she waited. It was just like on the telephone, you couldn't hear the other person, but then you heard the answer. It was as if she was answering something: “Well, yes, you took the glass and drank.” And so it was that you always heard what the person concerned said in response to something someone else had said. Those around could not see the others. But the girl was in a completely different world and talked in it. It happened, for example, that Well, it's not true, she couldn't move, she just stayed very quiet on days like that. But when she was sitting like that and someone puffed at her, she didn't say, “Why are you puffing at me?” Instead, she said, “It's a terrible wind! Close the window, it's drawing so terribly!” She had completely different ideas about what would happen when someone puffed at her, for example. Well, she stayed like that for a day or two. Then came a few days or a longer period when she was quite calm, knew everything, spoke properly with people, knew nothing of what had happened in these other days. She remembered nothing. When people told her about it, she said she knew nothing about it. It was just as if she had been asleep. But something else occurred. When she was in this other state, she remembered everything that happened in this other state and nothing at all of what happened in her ordinary state. She could see the whole of the life she had led in what others called a dream world.

What was it with this girl? What I am telling you now happens countless times, of course, and sometimes in a gruesome way. You see, I had an acquaintance with whom I worked together for a while. He then became a professor at a German university and one day he just disappeared. Nobody knew where he had gone. All the investigations led nowhere in the end. The only thing they could find out was that he had come from his place of residence to the train station and had bought a ticket. But since a large number of people were boarding, they didn't know where he had bought his ticket. He left. He just didn't come back for a very long time. Then it happened that a stranger came into the vagabonds' shelter in Berlin, wanted to be admitted, and when he was asked for his papers, it turned out: that was Professor XY from there and there. He ended up in Berlin in a shelter for the homeless. He came back and was able to resume his professorship quite well. Isn't that right, it automatically continues; it doesn't hurt to have a little break. So he continued to do that. But his relatives – he was even married – continued to investigate what had happened in the meantime. And it was something like this: the person in question had bought a ticket to a certain station, not very far away. He had done all this very cleverly. He then got off, bought another ticket – it was not yet the time when passports were needed – and traveled to a completely different country, then to yet another country, then a completely different route – was stationed in a town in southern Germany – to Berlin, lived in a homeless shelter, was admitted there, knew absolutely nothing about it all, was in a completely different state of consciousness.

What happens to such a person? You see, with such a person it is the same as with such a girl. With such a person, when he is supposed to wake up, the astral body and the ego body do not quite come in, only push from the outside, and then the physical body and the ether body go through all that. Such people behave tremendously cleverly. This is also a well-documented story, similar to one that I myself experienced with an acquaintance.

Another story: A person first buys a train ticket, does the same with it, and travels to a station not far away. Then he has to think of all kinds of ruses; his etheric body does all this. He gets as far as India and stays there for a few years. And then, after he has forgotten everything, he lives on as before.

Yes, you see, these things are really so that one must say: there you see deep into the whole being of man. - For what happened now to the man whom I knew so well, who made his journey through two countries and ended up in the homeless shelter? He had now returned to his college, and had even been appointed to a different college to replace a famous professor. One day I happened to be in the city in question. He no longer associated with me, as indeed happened in general: during the time I was giving anthroposophical lectures, many people who had previously associated with me no longer wanted to associate with me. One day they said: Yes, Professor XY has left again. But this time he did not reappear, but was found dead. He had drowned himself. Yes, what had happened? You see, this had happened: he had again reached the same state where the astral body was just puffing him. Then he remembered the earlier events in his etheric body and was so frightened by them that he committed suicide. So you can see quite a lot about a person's nature when you know how the various parts of the human nature interact.

Now, however, the matter is as follows: there was once a person who also came into such states, and there he told the story in such a way as if he were a completely different person than he was now, so that the other people understood nothing at all. He described how he was active in the French Revolution (the story took place in the 19th century). He described entire scenes. What had happened to him? It was something like the case of those people I told you about. But what had happened to him?

In ordinary consciousness, man does not know very much about what is going on in the astral body and in the ego body, but he still experiences a great deal in them. Now, imagine the following happens. You see, I want to describe to you what happens when a person wakes up. When a person wakes up, this astral body splits first. Here (see drawing p. 112) it breaks off, and one part goes into the head, the other, the lower part, goes into the other body. This also happens sometimes. Now imagine: if the head takes up the astral body and the ego more easily than the lower part, then the astral body can be in the head earlier, but not yet in the lower part. In that case the person starts talking as if he were a completely different person. What is entering then? You see, for a moment the ability to look back into a past life enters. One learns to look back into a past life. But one cannot interpret it properly, one does not understand it, and so one invents something that one has learned in history. The one who was in a different state because his astral body and his ego came into his head earlier said that he was French and experienced the French Revolution. He had learned that, it is just a reinterpretation. But he experienced himself in a past incarnation, in a past life, and he could not understand that right away; so he interpreted it in this way.

You just have to realize that until the 16th century – so only four centuries ago – people talked about such things, even if it was rather foolish and rather vague. It was something extremely important to people. Wherever people came together – not that they told each other ghost stories, but it was the case that they took this just as seriously as the other events of life – they told each other such things and knew that they existed. It is not true that people did not know about this. Today – yes, please, gentlemen, just try it once and tell such stories as I have told you now in your party meetings, you will soon see how you are dismissed – today it is not possible to talk about these things in a natural, reasonable way. They are no longer even mentioned. And scholars talk about them least of all. I will prove to you that they know the least about it.

Now think of one of the most important scientific facts that occurred in the 19th century. A resident of Heilbronn became a doctor. And since the people at the University of Tübingen considered him to be a rather unqualified person, he could not become much, and so in 1839 he allowed himself to be recruited as a ship's doctor and went to Hinterindien with a very full ship. The ship had quite a mishap. It was a rather rough sea and the people became seasick. When they arrived in Hinterindien, almost the entire ship's crew was sick. The ship's doctor was constantly very busy. Now, in those days, if someone had this or that, the usual thing was to have his blood drawn. That was the first one.

Now, a person has two types of veins. In one vein, the blood that squirts out during bloodletting is reddish. Right next to it is another vein. When the blood squirts out of that vein, it is bluish; then bluish blood squirts out. When you bleed an ordinary human child, you don't get the red blood out, of course. The body needs that. You get the bluish blood out. The doctor knows that very well. He also knows where the blue veins run and does not prick into the red ones. So the good Dr. Julius Robert Mayer, who was a ship's doctor, had to bleed a lot. But everywhere he pricked people, the blood that came out was not a bluish color, but a light reddish color. “Gosh,” he thought to himself, “I must have missed again!” But when he did it to the next person and paid more attention, light reddish blood came out again. Finally, he can no longer help but say to himself: Well, when you come to the tropics, to the hot zone, it is not as usual, the blue blood turns reddish from the heat. — Of course, this was something that Julius Robert Mayer considered a very important discovery, and rightly so. He saw something extraordinarily important.

But now we have to make a hypothesis, an assumption. Imagine that, not in the 19th century, but in the 12th century, it had happened to someone. He had traveled somewhere with people. They didn't make such long journeys back then, but the fact that an entire crew almost perished could have happened to anyone. So let's assume that a whole crew had fallen ill at the time, the doctor had bled them and found that the blood, which should actually be blue, was reddish. So there must be some kind of heat. What would he have said? Yes, in the 12th century, he would have said: What is it that makes blood blue? And he would have said, since he knew all the things I have told you, even if only vaguely – because anthroposophy did not yet exist and things were still hazy – he would have said, because he at least had an inkling of the answer: Yes, by Jove, the astral body does not sink as deeply into the physical body as it does in those in whom the blood is completely blue! He would have known that the astral body is what makes the blood blue. But warmth keeps the astral body out. Therefore the blood becomes less blue and remains similar to the red blood. — He would have said: That is an important discovery, because now I understand why the ancient Orientals had such great wisdom. In them, the astral body has not yet penetrated so deeply into the physical and etheric bodies. He would have had enormous respect for the wisdom of the ancient Orientals and would have said to himself: Now the Orientals are only infected by people who have a lot of bluish blood, and it is no longer possible for them to bring their ancient wisdom to light. A ship's doctor from the 12th century would have said that.

A 19th-century ship's doctor knew nothing at all of what I have now told you. What did he say to himself? He said to himself: Well, there is the heat. This causes combustion. A stronger heat causes stronger combustion. So the blood burns more strongly when you are in the hot zone. - And he found the law of heat transformation in force, which plays such an important role in today's physics, a very abstract law. He was not interested in any of the others. He finds the law that plays a major role in the steam engine, for example, where heat is converted into work. And he said: I can see from the fact that red blood comes out of it that the organism in the hot zone simply works harder, therefore generates more heat. - So now Julius Robert Mayer finds something completely mechanical.

You see, that is the big difference. In the 12th century, people would have said: the blood is redder there because the astral body does not sink as deeply. In the 19th century, however, nothing was known about the spiritual, and it was simply said that the human being works like a machine, and the fact is that heat produces more work and thus more heat is transformed in the human organism. Yes, gentlemen, what Julius Robert Mayer did as a great scholar is roughly the way of thinking of all people today. That is the case. But because man can only think and feel in this way about what is no longer spiritual, he has lost touch with other people. And at most, when he becomes ill and weak like the girl I told you about, then he empathizes with other people to such an extent that he even goes with his thoughts to another room. That is, of course, a big difference! Of course, we have come an enormous way and have made great progress, but our humanity has not progressed; it has regressed. We speak of the human physical organism only as if it were a machine. And even the greatest scholars like Julius Robert Mayer speak of it only as if it were a machine.

Yes, gentlemen, if things continue like this on earth, then all thinking will become a chaos. All horrors and catastrophes would occur. Even now people no longer know what they should actually do. Therefore, they approach something with all their might and say: Yes, our reason no longer holds us together, so nationality must hold us together. These nation states arise only because people no longer know how to hold together. And that, gentlemen, that one no longer knows anything about the spiritual world, that is what has actually caused the immense misery – the other is the external appearance – that has caused the immense misery. And to say: People deserve this because they did bad things in their previous life – that is nonsense, of course, because that is not the fate of each individual, but it is the common fate of each individual. But everyone experiences it in this life. Just think of how much misery people experience in their present life. It does not come from a past life. But in the next life, they will suffer the consequences of the misery they experience now. The result of this will be that they will become wiser and that the spiritual world can enter them more easily. So the present misery is already an education for the future.

But something else can be concluded from this. Imagine that anthroposophy had already begun in 1900 and had really become very well known. But people opposed it and did not want to hear about the spiritual world. Now, gentlemen, if you had a schoolboy in the old days who didn't want to learn anything – now they have changed their minds about that; I won't say whether it's right or wrong – then you gave him a good thrashing! Some of them then started to learn after all. It helped some of them. Yes, people didn't want to learn anything spiritual until 1914. Now they have been beaten by the fate of the world, by their common destiny. Now we will see if they help.

Yes, that is indeed the case, gentlemen, you have to see this as a common human destiny! Because what has happened? You see, the girl I told you about was thinking with her mother's thoughts. People have gradually completely given up thinking for themselves and only think with the thoughts of those they have as authorities. People must start again, every single one of them, to think for themselves, otherwise they will, especially if they know nothing of the spiritual world, be continually influenced by it, but in a bad sense. And then one can say: One can really see that what has come over humanity as misery is, I would say, a beating of fate, and one can still learn from it. No matter how many congresses are held, none of it helps. The people who want to support the mark with today's intellect will cause it to fall by half, because this intellect, which is completely of the earth, is of no use, absolutely no use. When a body does not have enough fluid in it, it becomes sclerotic, calcified. And when the soul knows nothing of the spiritual world, then in the end it gets the mind, which is no longer useful. And humanity is heading for this fate if it does not continually receive nourishment from the spiritual world.

Therefore, the only real remedy is that people begin to take an interest in the spiritual world. You see, that is how you have to answer the question that Mr. Dollinger asked. You have to express things a bit radically, but that is how the connections are.

I have to go to Stuttgart next week, but I will be back very soon. I will let you know the time and date of the next lesson.

Question regarding earthquakes.

Dr. Steiner: You probably mean the earthquakes that are happening in America now? Of particular importance with regard to such questions are always those volcanic phenomena that, I might say, do not occur so intensely, not so powerfully at the same time, but which show in detail that something is happening over time in the earth's environment. And here I would like to draw your attention to something else, which is perhaps less noticeable, but which many people can relate to more than these individual phenomena, which of course had a terrible effect on those who were nearby, but which are of less significance for the greater part of humanity. And then you just remember that in the last few years people could talk about the fact that extraordinary weather conditions prevail. We cannot deny that in recent years there have not been any really proper, lasting summers, especially not in our areas. But that is spreading across a large part of Europe and further afield.

Now, when something like this is mentioned, people usually talk about how large icebergs float in the northern seas and how so-called cold spells then emanate from these mighty floating icebergs. You may also remember that during last year's so-called cold spell, it was reported by ships that if they took even a slight northerly course, these huge floating icebergs could be found everywhere in the Atlantic Ocean.

But we must realize that the things that occur in this way do not come from the earth alone, but are connected with the whole evolution of the world. And here we must ask ourselves: What about the distribution of warmth and cold on our earth?

I would like to draw your attention to something that I may have mentioned before, but in a different context, which can be important for us when considering this question. You may have heard that particularly in northern Siberia, in Asia, there are very special conditions in the ground. To give you an idea, I would just like to note the following. If we have the map of Europe like this (it is drawn), here is Norway, here is the north coast of Germany, here it goes over to Holland and so on, there would be Ireland, England, and there we would come over the large peninsula to Asia. There is the border between Asia and Europe. There is Russia. Here we come over to Asia and have Siberia. Over there is the so-called Arctic Ocean. That is just drawn to help you orient yourself. Now, elephant-like animals have been found in this area of Siberia a long time ago, which no longer exist today, and which therefore existed on Earth a very, very long time ago. And you also know that elephant-like animals no longer live up there at the Arctic Ocean. Elephant-like animals belong in much warmer areas. But the strange thing is that these elephant-like animals, which are deep in the ground, in the icy ground, were so fresh that you could still have eaten the meat if you like to eat elephant meat. These animals were in the icy ground just as if someone had wanted to eat the meat and had stored the animals in the ground for that purpose. So these animals in northern Siberia were simply preserved, as they say, their meat was kept fresh, for many, many millennia.

Now, you see, gentlemen, it is impossible that this could have happened slowly over time. Because if the animals had lived up there, simply died and gone into the ground, they would have rotted away long ago, and at most you would have found the remains of bones, as you would find anywhere else. But here you find whole fresh animals. This is only possible if these animals once lived there and an ice wave came very quickly, covering these animals, sealing them in, so that they could be preserved in the same state with the fresh meat for thousands of years. So you can see: there must have been a time when a mighty blast came from the south and blew water up into the ice region. The water froze instantly, and these animals were instantly frozen in this enormous Siberian ice cellar, where they remained for thousands of years.

Now you will all admit, of course, the earth has no reason to suddenly do something like that. Because where should the forces come from in the earth itself, that it could carry out something like that? These things can only come from the extraterrestrial stellar influences. So if you imagine that there is the earth (it is drawn), “since here the southern regions are the equatorial regions – only south in relation to the north, of course – then such a stellar constellation must have existed here once, which simply threw the water up again. So, through the constellation of the stars, through the position of the heavenly bodies, this water was thrown up, immediately froze and buried these animals. You can see from such things that the constellation of the stars has a powerful influence on the distribution of land and water and ice on Earth.

Now, I recently explained to you how volcanoes also originate from that which is outside of the earth, how that which is under the earth is, so to speak, brought out from the interior of the earth. So we can also say that when, for example, the mighty Etna erupts, things are not hurled out from below; rather, a stellar constellation acts from above downwards, and this brings these fiery masses out of the interior of the earth.

From this we see that today very many things interact, and this causes, on the one hand, that we have these cold spells. The cold spells are therefore also caused by the extraterrestrial. The fact that we have these volcanic eruptions and earthquakes also stems from the extraterrestrial. But now one can never fully assess such an occurrence if one is not clear about the fact that man himself is intimately connected with all these extraterrestrial conditions.

You see, you have probably already heard of so-called haemorrhages, where a person's blood no longer takes the right path, so that it spews out of the mouth instead of being distributed throughout the body. This is called a haemorrhage. Such haemorrhages occur particularly easily when a person is at certain stages in life. We must ask ourselves: What is the actual relationship between a hemorrhage and what is happening outside? — Now, if you remember that man does not consist only of his physical body, which we can touch with our hands, but that man consists of the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and the I-body, then you will have to say to yourself: Of course, we can shed the physical body. It is heavy, it is heavy mass, it is connected with the earth. But the etheric body is connected with the environment. And when we look at things in the human being, it is the case that the moon has a huge influence on the human being. But the moon does not have such an influence on people as it does now; rather, we are led back to very ancient times. In ancient times, the moon had an extremely strong influence on people. People had to do something specific during the waxing moon, something specific during the waning moon, and so on. And in particular, in those older times, the reproduction of the human race was entirely based on the moon. It is so interesting to see how people who still have traditions from ancient times think about these things. They definitely think that it is of great importance whether a person is conceived in the waxing moon or the waning moon, for example. This is a very important thing in ancient traditions. And the moon then also exerts its influence on the whole development of the person, but in such a way that the person carries these lunar influences within them. So it is not that it has a direct influence on the person when there is a full moon or something like that; but we see the moon waxing and waning; that once had an influence on the person, and that has remained and continues. So it is not the current phase of the moon that has a great influence, but something that is similar to the old moon phase and is an old heirloom has a great influence. And so you could say that the moon has a certain influence.

But we wouldn't have any blood in our heads at all if it weren't for the moon. We would all walk around with very pale faces, terribly pale faces, if it were not for the influence of the moon. The moon draws our blood up from our body to our head. That is the influence of the moon, that the blood is willing to go to the head at all. This is extremely interesting. The blood only goes up into the human head because of the influence of the moon. Otherwise, the blood would always go down. Now, when a person becomes so weak in his entire body that he can no longer sufficiently resist these forces of the moon that draw the blood up, the blood rushes too strongly into the human head, and that is how a hemorrhage occurs. We must always have this influence, but when it becomes too strong, the blood rushes too strongly to the human head and that is how blood comes out.

And you see, what the hemorrhage is in the individual human being is something like water bursting out [pointing to Siberia] or erupting from a volcano in the great outdoors outside. Only there it is not the influence of the moon, but the influence of the more distant stars. You must imagine that when we simply develop as human beings, we are continually exposed to other influences. I will illustrate this to you. Imagine once again, here would be the earth (it is drawn), here the moon goes around the earth. I will draw it as it looks. So the moon goes around the earth, and it has its greatest influence on people first. But outside of the moon are the other stars, Venus, Mercury, the sun, Mars, Jupiter and so on, and then the fixed stars. Now you must be aware that it is different whether, let's say, Mars is behind the Sun or whether Mars has already moved on and is already next to the Sun. When Mars is behind the Sun, it has less effect on Earth because the Sun covers its effect. When Mars is in this position [next to the Sun], it has a stronger effect on Earth. And so it always depends on the position of the stars how strongly the earth is affected. This science of the position of the stars is almost not developed at all today, and so people only look at what is happening on earth, icebergs and so on, but they do not look at the stars.

Now one cannot investigate these things from the earth either, but one must be clear about the fact that one must investigate these things from the human being. These things must be investigated from the human being.

Now I would like to tell you something: if you go through the development of humanity in modern times, you will indeed find huge changes in this development of humanity. We do not want to go back very far, but let us go back, say, six hundred years. If we go back six hundred years – today is 1923 – we come to 1323. You have to bear in mind that if you had lived then, you would not have known that there was such a thing as America or Australia. People did not know any of this, they only knew about Europe and Asia and a small part of Africa, very little of Africa. So six centuries before our time, imagine, people only knew about a small part of the world. And above this earth they saw the moon rise and set, the sun rise and set, the stars, and everything was such that all life took place only in a small space. Yes, gentlemen, in those days people knew little about the earth and had no idea about the movement of the stars. But they knew something about the spiritual influences of the stars. This is connected with the fact that people lived in small circumstances. People got their influence from these small circumstances.

Well, you know, it didn't take long: in 1492, Christopher Columbus of Genoa set out with a small number of ships, and he was of the opinion that one could travel around the world. Christopher Columbus did not want to discover America at all, but he was given the idea that the earth must be spherical. Before that, people thought the earth was flat. Now he was given the idea that the earth must be spherical. And so he equipped himself with a number of ships. There was resistance, but he still got these ships from the government, equipped them, and believed that he could sail around the world. At least that's what he thought. He said to himself: if we go from Europe over there to the east, we'll find (pointing to the drawing) Asia, down there is Hither India, there is Farther India. — So he knew that if you go over there by land, you come to India. Now he wanted to go around the globe of the earth from Spain and come to India from the other side. That was what Columbus wanted. He wanted to travel around the world because he hoped, so to speak, to make the first practical use of the roundness of the earth. He wanted to travel around and discover India from the other side. Now he set out and came across America, and thought: This is the other side of India. — That is why this area was also called the West Indies, as it is still called in part today.

So you see how, through the thinking of people, the spherical shape of the earth has actually been gradually conquered for knowledge, how it was only gradually realized that one had come to the other side of America and realized that this was not India, but a new country. So 1492, that's only 431 years ago that people discovered America at all.

But the discovery of America means something completely different. And if you want to understand what the discovery of America means, then please consider the following. You see, in 1492, I told you, Christopher Columbus set out first and discovered America. In 1543, Copernicus came on the scene and was the first to put forward the world view that the sun stands still and the earth moves around the sun like the other planets. So what every child learns at school today has only been around since that time. Do you realize how many years that is? It's only 380 years! It is only since that time that people have had any idea at all of what is already taught in elementary school today. Before that, people knew nothing about any of these things. But they thought about it all the more, about what influence the moon has on people. People knew what I have told you now, that the moon drives the blood to the head. People recognized this influence on people.

Now you have to consider what the discovery of America actually means. You see, people talk so thoughtlessly and history presents it that way: discovery of America, people have possessed genius after all! - Yes, gentlemen, but you have to imagine it quite differently. What kind of people do you think lived in America at the time when Columbus came across it? Well, not even five hundred years ago, the copper-red Indians lived over there, and these Indians did not think like you do today in Europe. They knew a lot about the influence of the stars. So there lived in all of America at the time a population that knew an extraordinary amount about the influence of the stars. They oriented themselves entirely to the influence of the stars. And then the Europeans came, civilized humanity. Now, you see, as late as the 19th century, the Indians said that the Europeans always brought something strange with them, something white, with little ghosts on it. But these were very harmful ghosts, terribly harmful ghosts, and the Europeans would use them to conjure the Americans. At least that's what the Native Americans thought. And do you know what it was that the Native Americans feared so much, what they thought made the Europeans such terrible guys who caused so much havoc? It was the books, the white sheets of paper with the letters on them! The Native Americans looked at them, thought they were magic and said: “These people are using them to cast spells on us.

And so the people came together. And then the extermination of the Indians began. But where did the people who exterminated the Indians come from? They came from Europe! And if the people who still lived in Europe in 1323 had come over there, their beliefs would have been much more similar to those of the Indians. Because these people in 1323 in Europe still knew about the influence of the stars. They could have understood each other much better. But the people who came over did not understand the Indians at all, they could only exterminate them. And on the spot where the exterminated Indians were, European humanity developed. You just have to bear in mind that the Americans who developed there are, after all, Europeans. Isn't it true that the ideas that people often have based on what they learned at school are really quite stupid sometimes.

I would just like to point out one thing to you. Today people talk so much about the French. But around Nuremberg, the people are still called Franks today. The French are just the immigrated Germanic people who then adopted the Latin language in a modified form. So everything that is talked about, when one does not know how things came about and rages because it is presented that way in history, is sometimes so boundlessly foolish, so boundlessly stupid. And so it is boundlessly stupid there too. They don't even consider that the people of Europe who migrated to America had developed in Europe over the last three hundred years. The main immigration only happened much later, in the 18th and 19th centuries. That's when America was first settled. And what kind of people came over then? Well, the illiterate ones also came over, but they didn't have much influence. Those who came over and had a great influence were those who had been educated in Europe, especially in science, who had learned the Copernican doctrine, who had completely different views about the stars.

Imagine how this all fits together in world history. On the one hand, the spherical shape of the earth is proven by the fact that one can travel around the earth at all, and on the other hand, that it is not the sun that rises and sets, but that there is space all around and the earth goes around the sun, that the earth is not a plane, that the sun does not sink into the water in the evening, but that the earth goes around the sun.

You see, people do not think about what the actual connection is between the discovery of America, which took place in 1492, and 1543, when Copernicus came up with his new view of the stars. There is a close connection. Don't think that what happened could have happened without the influence of the stars on people. Columbus did not think: “Now I will go over to the West” without the influence of the stars. You only have to consider how foggy it was. He did not know that he was discovering America. He just wanted to sail around the world. It's like a blind hen finding a grain of corn. You can't say that it was his own mind, but that people are driven by influences. And what drives them are the stellar influences. So we also have to ask ourselves: Why did Copernicus think the way he did about the stellar influences? — then we ourselves have to look for the causes in the stellar influences.

We have a time in the Middle Ages - I told you, it was still like this six hundred years ago - when people still have concepts that relate to a very small world. Then suddenly they get concepts that go all around on the earth and all around in the sky. All concepts diverge. Yes, gentlemen, you really have to think a little deeper about what is going on in people. One must penetrate into these things with real science. One must therefore study man. Now I have already told you many things about man. I will now tell you a well-attested fact again, so that you can see how things are.

There was an Austrian poet, Robert Hamerling, who was transferred to Trieste as a secondary school teacher at a certain time, in 1855, and he took a great interest in everything that was going on. At the time, Robert Hamerling was also very interested in how all sorts of swindlers passed through Trieste, but so did some people who produced anomalies, so-called mediums. He liked to visit all such gatherings, but he was not at all superstitious. He really saw how most of these things were fraudulent. But once he thought to himself, when he saw a person with a particularly strange medium: now I want to see for myself. Now Hamerling had known a young girl in Graz, where he lived before coming to Trieste, who died very soon afterwards and from whom he had received a lock of hair. He had this lock of hair from the young girl made into a small wreath, tied it together, pinned it on a small piece of paper and then put it in a little box. He kept this as a souvenir. It had become particularly valuable to him after the person in question had died. He took it with him to Trieste among his other things. Nobody knew anything about it. He never told anybody anything about it – he remembered that very clearly – and never showed the box to anybody. Besides, the circumstances were such that he would not have liked to show it anyway. It was something that embarrassed him a great deal. So he had a secret box, so to speak, that contained this. He took it with him when he went to the meeting to see the medium. And with this medium it was the case that people gave all kinds of objects, which they put in envelopes or boxes; the medium took it in his hand, touched it and then said what was in the box. Now, such things are very often interspersed with fraud; you have to keep an open mind about these things.

For example, I was once at a meeting where a medium was brought in, and the man they call the impresario went around the audience and had all kinds of things written down on pieces of paper. He took these, but stopped walking. The medium was blindfolded. And while he was still standing there – he just said: Tell me, what do I have in my hand? – the medium immediately said what he had in his hand. So if someone wrote down his own name, he gave it to the impresario, who read it and then crumpled up the piece of paper. The medium could not see anything, but then said what was on it. Now, you see, the people at the table where I was sitting at the time were terribly curious – because the people were terribly amazed – and they said that now someone should write something down where the guy was not clever enough, where he could not communicate, because they all believed that he communicated with the medium through all kinds of signs. Well, I wrote down the name Spinoza and a work by Spinoza, the “Ethics”, because people believed that the impresario naturally did not know who Spinoza was. But he took over Spinoza and the “Ethics” just as well, and the medium answered correctly. People were terribly amazed. But, you see, the matter was very simple. The impresario was a ventriloquist and the medium only pretended to answer, while the impresario spoke from the medium's mouth. So one must not be taken in. I must always emphasize that one must not be taken in by these things. That is precisely the difference between superstitious, gullible people and those who can judge these things.

But Hamerling took the little box with him and no one knew anything about it. Then he sent this little box, the contents of which no one knew about, down among the other objects. The medium was sitting in front of a table. He sent up the box. Well, first the other things were determined. The medium did that fairly quickly. And the moment she came to his box, she took it in her hand and flung it away. Now Hamerling thought: now it is the case that this is of course agreed with all the others; with me it cannot be an agreement, the medium does not come to that and flings it away! - So he went and said that he still wanted to know what was in it. The box was picked up again. The medium flung it away again. It was picked up again. Then the medium said, very stammeringly: a lock of hair and a piece of paper! Now, of course, he was amazed. Any fraud was out of the question, absolutely out of the question. Then he asked why she kept throwing it away. She said: because it comes from a dead person. Now, that was even more surprising. So that is a case where – I am not mentioning other cases except those that you can find in the literature, otherwise I could mention hundreds of others – any deception is out of the question. And what is the underlying cause? The medium must not know what is there at that moment, but must seek it out from the unconscious. There is a very specific influence at work here.

I once told you that sometimes the influence of buckwheat groats down in the cellar can still be felt on the third floor. Do you remember how I told you that? Such an influence, which only manifests itself in the head, is the underlying cause. And the medium then says what is in there – why? Because the medium is a person in whom the blood is more subject to the influence of the moon than in other people. It does not have to be so strong as to cause a hemorrhage – it could also occur in a medium who is not subject to giddiness – but the blood is drawn to the head more than in other people. This results in a strong influence, and this kind of influence can be present.

If you consider this, you will say to yourself: Yes, the powerful influences of the stars, of course, they are constantly affecting people. And everything that Europe has experienced together with America and the whole earth for four hundred years is under the influence of the stars. But what is this star influence like? Well, gentlemen, you have to imagine the following. Imagine that here is the Earth (it is being recorded). There was the piece of earth that people used to know only. Somehow the stars are above it, I am of course only drawing it schematically for you. People are under the influence of these stars. This is the time before the discovery of America. People have firmly established ideas. If you look at the pictures and portraits of the old councilmen, you will see that people have their fixed ideas and that they stand with both feet firmly on the ground. This is because in those days there was a constellation of stars where the stars were very close together. Since then, we have had a different star constellation. When the earth is there, the stars are, so to speak, much more oblique, of course again drawn very schematically. If you were to draw it in detail, each one would naturally stand out, so to speak. You will say: But the fixed stars have not changed? — But they have changed too, although not to such an extent. So you can see from this: the spaces between them became larger in the 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th centuries. The concepts have dissolved. And now there is again a time coming when the spaces become smaller, when the stars again contract. This is only very little with the fixed stars, but it is still the case. Even when one records the fixed stars, one sees that the fixed stars have to shift. And now men are exposed to the fact that they have acquired ideas through the influence of stars that were far apart. But now they have to get concepts under the influence of the stars that are close together again. There is a completely new star constellation in the world. This can be seen if one has lived awake from the previous century into this century. You see, I was born in 1861, so I consciously experienced the time in the seventies, eighties, nineties and now the 20th century. Yes, in my childhood it was quite different from today! In my childhood people simply thought quite differently than today. Everything has changed now, and in one area in particular it has changed completely. When I was a little boy of twelve, I didn't have much money back then to buy books, but every year we were given a school program; it contained the most important physical terms of the time. Well, I spent a lot of time chewing over those. They were hard to grasp. Even back then, I had to learn differential calculus to understand the concepts. But I know what the physical concepts were back then.

But today it is quite different. When someone studies physics at university today, he learns something completely different from what we learned as boys. And from what happened then, we can see that the physical concepts have disintegrated. Today, no physicist knows which concepts to use. In the past, we spoke of space and time as two different things. Today, the physicist speaks of four dimensions, taking the first, second, and third as dimensions of space and the fourth dimension as equivalent to time. Most people have no idea what teaching is like today. People who are outside of schools still live with the concepts that I learned as a boy. But in actual physics today, they are already talking about something completely different. This shows that the concepts have become completely mixed up. Today, the physicist knows least of all what he is supposed to do. Everything has become mixed up.

Yes, gentlemen, it shows you in the human mind that there is a different star constellation. For the story is that today's people all have more blood in their heads than people through all the centuries have had in their heads, because the moon is supported by the stars, which in turn are closer together. So if you study human evolution, you find that a wave of blood has gone up to the head through the star constellation. But this wave is not only happening in man, but on the whole earth. And it is this same influence that once threw the cold from south to north and buried the mammoths, which are still fresh meat in Siberia today, as if in a large ice cream factory. Just as it was thrown up then, just as blood is driven up into the head by the moon, so today these volcanic eruptions are thrown up by the stars. Thus we have today the effect of a star constellation coming from the other side of the Earth. It passes through North America, through Greenland, and throws cold air over here, so that today, as a result of the star constellation, large masses of cold air are continually being thrown from west to east.

And now I have told you: If you go to Italy, you only need to light a piece of paper on certain parts of the ground and it will smoke from below. It is not that the earth throws up the smoke, but that I make the air above warm and thin, causing these vapors to rise. Now the star constellation throws these air masses from west to east. We are exposed to them here, which is why we now have this climate. Here it goes from west to east. But this causes the ground below to throw out its masses, its fire masses. First they were thrown out over America by the huge volcanoes and the huge earthquakes. Now it is moving further and further east. Etna and Vesuvius are all beginning to erupt because the wave is flowing over there, and down below it is becoming elastic. It is not pushed up from below, but is brought to the surface by the star constellations. In the human being, blood is pushed into the brain, and on Earth, masses of air are thrown over and fiery masses of gas are thrown out from under the Earth and transported to other places. It is the same story. It all starts with the stars.

If people understood why they think differently now, they would also understand why Etna is spitting fire. But for that to happen, the human being must first know that he is not something that can be considered in isolation, but must be considered in connection with the whole universe. That is precisely it. And people have completely forgotten how to consider things in the universe. It is really quite interesting how animals, in this respect, as I have also told you before, are much cleverer than humans. Animals usually even migrate before a volcanic eruption or something like that occurs, while people stay put. Why do animals migrate? Yes, when the other influence comes, the other star influence, then it is like this with the animal: the animal is built so that it has its legs there (see drawing $. 138), its backbone, the vertebrae, its head there. When the stars move across it, the entire spine is continuously exposed to the stars, vertebra by vertebra exposed to the stars, and they belong together, they belong so closely together that we have 28 to 31 vertebrae in our back and the moon takes 28 to 31 days to go around. It is so closely related.

But man walks upright. With him only the head, this little piece of the head, is exposed to the starry sky. He has his spine lifted out. So that with man only the blood is exposed to the influence of the stars, not the nervous system. But with animals the nervous system is exposed to the influence of the stars. That is why the animal notices the influence of the stars much sooner than man and migrates when earthquakes and volcanic eruptions occur. Man stays put. The mere fact that the animal can migrate and thus shows us that the star influence is acting on the animal, that in itself is proof that we are not dealing here with random waves coming from the earth, but that the star influence is acting from outside. That is what shows us this whole interesting connection with the whole universe. Man is not merely an earthly creature, but man is a being placed in the entire world of the stars.

Now, of course, this also leads us to understand that after people have forgotten their old knowledge of the stars, they have to get it again. So, I would like to say: It is indeed the case that with anthroposophy, we have to give humanity what it needs in a new way, otherwise humanity will remain confused. Because the stars, which are arranged more closely together, no longer fit the concepts from other times; only the concepts that anthroposophy can bring fit again.

Now I have already been given four questions today. We will see if we can make progress next time. I may have to be away on Wednesday. I will let you know when we will have the next session.

How does one come to see the spiritual world?

If you continue the train of thought from last time, you come to the following. When I was young, very young, there was a great stir when a traveling hypnotist performed with people. Now, one does not need to give such people special praise for bringing extraordinarily serious things to the public in a theatrical way, and I certainly do not want to sing the praises of Hansen, who in the seventies and eighty years ago, in the last century, in a theatrical way, gave performances on a subject that at that time had not yet been dealt with at all by science, that science knew nothing about. But since then, science has taken hold of this subject precisely under the influence of Hansen's theatrical performances.

Now I would like to tell you about an experiment that Hansen performed in front of an astonished audience after it had been forgotten for a long time. He took two chairs, placed them at a certain distance (I will draw them), and then hypnotized a person simply through the influence of his own personality, as they say. He first brought the person to a sleep-like state – but in a sleep-like state that is much deeper than ordinary sleep – then he could take this person and lay him down so that the head was on one chair and the feet on the other. Now you know that if this happens to a person who is fully conscious, he will fall down between the two chairs. This person did not fall down between the two chairs at first, but remained lying stiff as a broomstick where he was. But that was not enough. Hansen, who was a rather corpulent, heavy person, now went and stood boldly on the person's stomach. So there stood the heavy Mr. Hansen on top of him. The man did not move, but remained lying there like a plank, even though Mr. Hansen was standing on him.

So this is something that can definitely be done, that has been done many times since then, and that science no longer doubts, whereas it used to know nothing about it and had to be taught about it by the not very likeable Mr. Hansen. You see, a person in this state is said to be in catalepsy.

When something occurs in such a way that someone can lie there like a wooden board and even stand on it, and it happens temporarily under the influence of another personality, well, then it is just an experiment, then it is not so particularly bad. But we can say that in a small way this condition is found in life. It is found sometimes. Of course it then actually only occurs to the person who can make medical observations. And it occurs to a person when they fall into a very specific illness that is called a mental illness.

For example, there are people who, while they were previously very determined people, useful in their jobs, suddenly think as if all their thoughts have been frozen. It may happen that a person regularly went to work every morning, say, at eight o'clock. He got up at the right time and so on. Suddenly he likes it very much in bed. He always wants to get up, but he can't find the will to do so. And when fear does take effect – he has the clock lying next to him, it is a certain time – and he has finally got up, he cannot find the will to have breakfast, then again not to leave. He finally comes to always saying to himself: I can't, I can't – and finally behaves like a stick, cannot make up his mind. And this goes so far that he falls into a kind of state that can be seen in his body: he is rigid. While he used to move his arms quickly, he now moves them slowly, and while he used to run like a jack-in-the-box, he now finds it difficult to take one step after the other. The whole person becomes rigid and heavy. This is something that sometimes occurs as an illness in people as early as adolescence.

It is the same condition, only not so strong and only that it does not occur all at once, but very slowly. Of course, when a person begins to become cataleptic, you cannot put him on two chairs and stand on them or sit on top of him, but he becomes so that he can no longer properly control his body.

That is one state. But Hansen also demonstrated other experiments to the people, which were always imitated in the past, but which have also attracted the attention of science since that time. Before they were brought to the attention of science by the dilettante and actor Hansen, they had not been studied. These conditions consisted of the following: Hansen would have someone from the audience come forward. Foolish people have said that he discussed it beforehand, but that is nonsense, of course. He just recognized the right personalities from the audience who could be used for this. It doesn't work equally well with everyone; he had developed an eye for who was suitable. Now he had a person come out of the audience and again his personal influence took effect. He stood there, placing himself firmly on the ground with his own legs, which were very thick. He had a look that made you think that when he went in at the front, he would come out at the back, a piercing look, as they say. And he always had his eye like this, you see (it is drawn): when he looked at a person, his eye was open like this, so that the white at the top and bottom remained visible. While usually the eyelid extends over the white, so that the white above and below the pupil cannot be seen, with him it was so that the gaze was particularly fixed, as one says.

Now, this made a huge impression on the person he had chosen as his victim; he was already beginning to lose consciousness, as they say. He lost consciousness, but something very strange happened. Hansen then said: “You cannot move from the ground now. Your feet are glued to the ground! He tried it out, he couldn't move, couldn't take a single step. He just couldn't, he remained standing. Then Hansen said to the appropriate victims: 'You must kneel down now!' He knelt down. 'Look, an angel is appearing up there.' He folded his hands, made a terribly ecstatic face and looked up at the angel. Hansen did all this with these people, whom he had chosen as victims. Of course, he chose people who were somewhat weak-minded, but he was able to do these things to them and then do them in front of the whole audience. His things were not frauds – many people also claimed that he was a fraud – but they were things that have since been imitated at the scientific institutes and are therefore considered.

He also did the following, for example. He took a chair and sat it down to the one who was in such a state that he had no thoughts of his own, but only the thoughts that Hansen put into his head. Now Hansen stood there and said, “Here is an apple!” - “Isn't it? Apples are very good, apples are tasty.” Now he took a potato, gave it to the man, and he bit into it with enormous pleasure and ate the potato as if it were an apple. So Hansen could not only persuade people to see an angel, but also to persuade them that a potato is an apple and is eaten as an apple. Then he took water, for example, and said: “Now I'll give you a particularly sweet wine!” - Oh, you could see how he enjoyed the sweetness! - Hansen made such attempts. That was the other kind of experiment.

What did he do to the people on whom he experimented? He killed the will. He had no will at all. With the people he treated as I said last, he only influenced their thoughts. They had to think only as Hansen thought; when he said, “This is an apple,” and so on, according to Hansen's taste, and when he said, “This is an angel,” they followed Hansen's thought and saw the angel.

Yes, you see, Hansen could do a lot more. For example, he did the following: he had someone come forward from the audience whom he thought was a particularly suitable victim, and he hypnotized him first, that is, he made him so that he had no consciousness of his own, that he took in all the thoughts that Hansen fed him. Now he said: Now ten minutes will pass. I will wake you up after ten minutes. Then you will go to the man sitting over there in the corner and take the watch out of his pocket like a thief. Now he woke the first one up – Hansen was meanwhile doing all kinds of things with everyone – he got restless, got up, went over to the man sitting in the corner and took the watch out of his pocket.

Now, you see, of course you use Latin names. The Latin language, as I have already told you, is always used for logic; and those experiments that I described to you first are called hypnotic experiments, and these, where he is already awakened and does the same thing afterwards – post means after – they are called posthypnotic experiments. Since then, we have spoken of hypnosis and posthypnosis and know that a person can enter into such states.

These things point the way to a deep insight into human nature, for it has actually been found that these posthypnotic suggestions can be extended much further. If someone is hypnotized deeply enough and told, “After three days you must do this or that,” he will do it, provided he has the right personality. These experiments have been done.

Now, of course, these things do not occur with such intensity in real life. But, as I have shown you with the person who can no longer move, they do occur, albeit in a weakened form. The other state also occurs in real life. You will have met not only people who are completely paralyzed and no longer know what to do with themselves, who are in a sense cataleptic, but you will also have met people who suddenly start - while they used to be quite level-headed people - to become very talkative people. You can't keep up with them; their thoughts bubble up, they prattle on and on like a wheel. They are just like people who eat a potato for an apple, except that in the one case Hansen is the one who has influence, while those who have their thoughts so quickly, who let their thoughts bubble up, are dependent on their own belly. Because that is the interesting thing, that your own gut – I have told you a lot about how the liver and so on think in the gut – thinks much faster than the head. And when a person's head becomes so weak that it no longer offers the necessary resistance to these thoughts coming from the gut, no longer makes them slow enough, then these thoughts bubble up. So they are hypnotized by their own gut.

That is the strangest thing in life: man has these two opposing organs, the head and the belly. Both think. But it is true: the head thinks slowly and the belly thinks quickly. The head thinks much too slowly and the belly much too quickly, but you know: if you mix very thick and very thin, you get a middle state. It is the same with people: the states of the head make the states of the stomach slow and the states of the stomach make the states of the head fast, and in this way they balance each other out.

You see, the world's processes are based on the fact that opposite states interact. In this respect, what we call science today still has a tremendous amount to learn. I will tell you something right away. Suppose you have a reasonably normal human being. When this person reaches about 72 years of age — you can calculate that, I have already drawn your attention to it — he has lived 25,920 days. That is 72 years. That is how many days a person normally lives. And if you measure a person's breaths, you will find that he takes just as many breaths in a day. So a person, if he lives normally and his organism is not destroyed beforehand – because otherwise he cannot live to be 72 years old; if you don't live to be 72 years old, you are destroyed by something – lives as many days through breaths in a day. This is how a person lives. He lives in such a way that every day, from sunrise to sunrise, he takes 25,920 breaths, and that during the ordinary course of life he lives to reach the age of a patriarch for 25,920 days.

Yes, but what does that mean: we live a normal life that reaches the patriarchal age, 25,920 days? What does that mean? - It means that we go through 25,920 days and nights with the Earth. We go through this, we can experience it 25,920 times. What does the Earth do when it gets dark and light? Yes, you see, gentlemen, that is precisely the important thing, which Goethe already sensed and which we can say with certainty today: when it begins to get light, the Earth draws the forces of light, the world forces, to itself at the place where we are. It is different in the other hemisphere, where it is the other way around, but it is the same process. So the earth and everything in the earth breathes in light; when it is night, it breathes out again. What we do with the air in the short time between inhalation and exhalation is what the earth does in a day.

So you see, the earth is terribly much slower than we are, terribly much slower. We take as many breaths in one day as the earth does in our entire lifetime. You can see that from this. But if you look more closely, something special comes out in humans. Man breathes in such a way that the blood needs the breath. The blood is produced in the intestines, that is, in the abdomen; the abdomen therefore wants to breathe so quickly. We can therefore say: human breathing is connected to the abdomen.

You see, if you really look at the head from a scientific point of view, as our science is now doing, only through the stomach, then it is the case that the head always tries to reject breathing a little. Respiration also goes to the head. The head wants to breathe in such a way that it only takes one breath a day, and it constantly slows down our breathing. The head only wants to breathe in such a way that it inhales and exhales once a day, while we inhale and exhale in about four seconds. The head actually wants to slow down the breath, make it much slower. So that we can say: cosmic breathing is actually carried out by the head; only the breathing rushes constantly from the body up to the head, quickly, and the breathing moves slowly from the head to the body. So you have a person who gets his will inhibited, who becomes rigid, what happens to him? The breathing in the abdomen is not in order, and the very slow head breathing wants to spread over the whole body. Now the guy is lying there and Hansen is standing on it. The head breathing wants to control the whole body: it becomes rigid. But if someone chatters and chatters and chatters, then the head breathing no longer wants to do the right thing, and the fast body breathing comes up, and he chatters. Then, as they say, you don't get hypnotized, but your thoughts escape.

Now you can say – really, you can say that: But actually the world is stupidly arranged, because we are in constant danger of becoming fools, either because our head breathing is not right in relation to our body breathing or our body breathing is not right, That is a bad thing. Because of these things, we are constantly exposed to the danger of becoming fools. You can say: Gosh, how stupid the world is set up! But I will tell you something else, gentlemen.

Consider, for example, woman, the female. Insofar as the female is human, it is natural for her to have a faster bodily breathing and a slower breathing of the head. The slower breathing is the cosmic breathing. But the woman only breathes with her head. The rest of her body breathes faster. They just go at it at random. But suppose the woman becomes pregnant. What happens then? You see, for a certain small part of the body in the uterus, the head breathing is introduced into the rest of the body's breathing through the fertilizing substance that comes from the man. So that now the woman, while she is pregnant, has a slow head breathing, but also a slow breathing in the lower abdomen. Slow head breathing mixes into the body breathing, so that now the human being has head breathing twice as a result. And what develops? The head first. So what has entered the body through fertilization? You see, cosmic breathing, which we otherwise only have in our heads, has entered. The human being takes in the whole world in the breathing process. So fertilization actually consists in the human being taking in the whole world through the breathing process. What happens during human fertilization is actually that, while otherwise the human body always has only human bodily breathing, for nine months cosmic breathing is implanted, which otherwise the human being has only in the head.

In this way you can see the relationship between the human being and the whole universe. At the point where the human being comes into being, in the mother's womb, the mother only wants to breathe in such a way that one breath takes the whole day. In this way, the mother slows down the processes there so that she can not only live, but also form a new human being. Because of what otherwise carries out these slow processes with the head, we live through our head for our lifetime of 72 years. If we say that a human being normally lives for 72 years and if we see that it takes nine months to develop a new human being, then it is no wonder that a new human being develops in nine months, because a human being lives for 72 years, we just compress the 72 years into breathing, and a new human being emerges. But this is something that allows you to see so deeply into the whole of nature that you can also get the basis for different thinking.

Now look at the earth and the plants inside it. So let's say we have the root of the plant, we have the stem of the plant with the leaves, and we have the flower up there. If you look at the root, it is completely surrounded by salts in the ground. There are salts everywhere (drawing p. 226). These salts are heavy. So the root is completely immersed in the 20th layer of heaviness. But heaviness is a very peculiar thing. It is overcome. If you were to take the severed heads of people, they would still have quite a weight. The human head is heavy. Or if you finally take a pig's head in your hand, it is heavy. When you carry the head on you, you do not feel how the head is attached and is heavy, because the heaviness is overcome in the head. But in the same way, heaviness is also overcome in the plant. If the plant were to feel the heaviness in the leaves, it would not grow upwards, but downwards. But now the plant grows upwards, it overcomes heaviness. But by overcoming gravity, it becomes accessible to light. The light works within it, and the light comes from top to bottom, against gravity. Thus the plant ascends more and more towards the light, becoming more and more, whereas as a root it was embedded in the salts of the earth, now exposed to the sun with its light. Through its exposure to the sun with its light, fertilization takes place in the plant (see illustration); the ovary with the germ is formed, so that through the effect of light the new plant comes into being. With plants, this can be seen quite clearly. That which I have called cosmic breathing in the human being, which is implanted through fertilization, is brought to the plant every year through the light, so that the plant grows from heaviness to light and thus to fertilization.

We will therefore say: what must first be observed in man through thought, so that one knows that cosmic breathing is entering, that a little head is emerging at a certain point in the interior of the human body – we see that too every year when we look at the plants. The outer world comes from the infinite space in the form of light and brings the cosmic into the plant, and the earth is fertilized by the cosmos in its plant world. This is extremely interesting. When you look at a plant blossom, you can say to yourself: the cosmos is fertilizing the blossom. The other is only an addition, that the dust comes across and so on; that is just an addition, because in the physical everything must proceed physically. But in reality it is the light that comes from the cosmos and fertilizes the plant blossom, that lays the germ for the new plant.

Yes, gentlemen, but can you not see what is actually happening? What is actually happening cannot be seen because it is small. But you can sense it! Let us now look at what is happening in the plant in a completely different way. Let us assume that here is the earth (see drawing $. 228). Don't look at a plant, but look at the earth as in the distance - from a mountain perhaps, where it is best to see - the fog rises, as they say. There the fog rises. The fog consists of water. If you were to look at the plant, the story would not be entirely dissimilar, it would be something similar. If you were to look at such a plant, you would see – if you just sat down for a long time, the whole spring, and always observed – that at first it is deep, then it rises, and divides into leaves. But the mists also disperse when they rise. So there, in the plant, it is only the solid salts that rise up to the flower. Now look down at the earth: there, only water rises, not solid parts, as when it becomes a plant; but the water rises. When the plant reaches a certain place up there, it is fertilized by the universe. When the water that rises here in the form of fog reaches a certain place, it is also fertilized by the universe. And what happens then? Yes, gentlemen, there is a flash! That doesn't always happen, but when fertilization occurs and things are as explicit as they are in summer – otherwise lightning also occurs, but it is invisible – the water here is fertilized by the universe through light and warmth. The same thing that happens in the plant happens up there and is visible in the flash. And when the fog up above has been fertilized, it falls back down as fertile rain. So when you see a fog cloud rising, it is actually a—very thin—huge plant; it opens its blossom up above in the universe, is fertilized, contracts, and the fertilized water droplets fall back down in the rainwater.

Now you have an explanation for lightning. People believe that there is something like a giant Leyden jar or giant electrical device up there; but that is a misconception. In reality, the water of the earth is fertilized out there so that it can carry out its processes on earth again. And what happens in the plant happens only much deeper because the plant is more solid; up here near the blossom, when it is the right season, little sparks happen that you just don't see. But these little flashes lead to fertilization. So in the appearance of fog and rain, you have the same phenomenon that occurs in the plant during fertilization. And that then goes right up to the human being, where the cosmic breathing, the breathing of the world, which otherwise is only in the head, occurs in the lower body of the human being.

Now take the cataleptic person. What is the case with him? Yes, gentlemen, if one were to examine the cataleptic body, one would find that it has become particularly salty. It has become similar to a plant root, especially in the head. When our head becomes as salty as a plant root, we become foolish through the stiffness of the head, which then only extends to the rest. So when you see people who can't bring themselves to leave, who can't even raise their hands to get out of bed in the morning, they've got too much salt in their heads, they've become too similar to the plant's root. When you see people who just keep talking and talking, they've become too similar to the plant's blossom. Because when you talk, you're actually only talking about part of what you know. But those who chatter on and on always want to say everything they know. They actually always want to create a whole human being, because it is their gut that is talking. And when the gut draws in and absorbs the world, it becomes the head. But it happens too quickly, like with the gut, like with human breathing.

So we can say: Hansen made the people, who he laid on two chairs and then stood on, too similar to a plant root in their heads. There you can see the relationship between the human head and the plant root. You can even make the whole head similar to a plant root. And the people he persuaded to eat a potato like an apple, he made similar to a flower. There you can see the similarity of the belly man, that is, the lower body man, to the flower. What Hansen demonstrated to the scientists is still being done today, but people have not yet come up with an explanation that leads into the whole universe.

So now we can also answer the question of whether nature is really so stupidly designed that we can become fools, either through incorrect head or abdominal breathing, sometimes cataleptic through head breathing, sometimes talkative through having flight of thought and not being able to use our will. Now, to the person who thinks this is so extraordinarily foolish and says that if he had made the world, he would have made it somewhat differently, then we would not have to be exposed to the danger of being able to be fools in two directions. if that were not the case, if we could not also produce head breathing in the human being's belly, which occurs when we become rigid, then humans could not come into being at all, then fertilization would not be possible, then there would be no humans on earth!

So you see, the danger that we become fools is connected with the fact that we can come into being at all. If somehow nature had had the intention of not letting people come into being, well, then, no, then there would be no need for fools to come into being either. But because people had to come into being, there must also be the danger that fools could come into being. So one thing is connected with the other. There is no reason to grumble about nature when you see how things are connected. You could also say: Gosh, it's stupid that 2 x 2 = 4! — I wish it were 6; then I would have more. But that doesn't work! And it is also not the case that a person is on earth at all without the risk that the person will become foolish. You just have to see through these things correctly. But then you will also be able to see things correctly everywhere.

Then one will say, when one looks at lightning: Is lightning only up there? Oh no, it is all around us throughout the summer, fertilizing the plants, over the meadows, over the forests, everywhere there is lower lightning. And in the end it is lightning that always goes on in us. Internally we are completely permeated by the same phenomena that we sometimes see when it flashes, and our thoughts are a flashing within us. Of course, what once appears as a mighty flash of lightning runs very weakly in our thinking. But now you will also be able to say to yourself: It does make sense to say that when I look at lightning, the thoughts of the world appear to me, because that is the same as what is in me. You just have to look at things not superstitiously, but scientifically.

You see, it is interesting, after all, that at the end of the 19th century, science had progressed so far that it did not even pay attention to such important things, that a charlatan, a swindler like Hansen, had to come and show people these things. Only then did science begin to take notice of these things. But from this you can see that in the last third of the 19th century, science was not as advanced as people always say. Of course, in the external fields, people made great discoveries at that time, they found X-rays and so on, but in the internal human field, they did not at all demand to know anything proper, and still do not demand it today. Therefore, our science cannot be applied to the human being and is of no help to the human being. You can establish as many universities as you like today: if you go there, what works in the human being will not be explained to you. But at the same time, it is not explained to you what the actual process of plant fertilization is either. And with the rising fog and descending rain, the matter is explained as if it were not really much different from cooking on the stove: that the vapors rise and then fall again. That is simply not the case. Instead, as the vapors rise, they enter an area at the top where they are fertilized by the universe, and lightning is proof that they are fertilized. And then you can see the fertilization, which also happens otherwise.

But the thing is that it has a great significance. Take the year. In a year there is winter and summer, as there are day and night in twenty-four hours. And in a human life there are 25,920 days. If you now take 25,920 years, you get the time when the earth was not yet, and when it will not be again. We are now a little beyond the middle, so the earth has existed for about 13,000 years; then it will perish again, after about 11,000 years or so. Just as man lives 25,920 days, the earth lives 25,920 years as it is now. It changes; it was once young and is now growing old. And that is extremely important to know: every year the waters must be exposed to the universe, at some point, at some place on the earth, the waters must be exposed to the universe every year, otherwise the earth would not be able to live. The earth lives with the universe as we live with the air. If someone were to take the air away from us on earth, we could not take our 25,920 breaths a day. If someone were to take away the sun, and with it the light, the earth could not live. So the earth lives through the whole universe, as we live through the air around us. — So you can really say: We walk on the earth; the earth walks in the universe. We breathe on the earth; the earth breathes in the universe.

You see, you could create a very strange science. You know, the human head is round (he draws it) and, if you are not yet very old, you have hair here. Now there are creatures living in this forest – well, that's not desirable, but it does happen. Let us assume that they use the scales here to form a place where the cleverest of them always come together and teach the stupid ones; that would be a lice university on the human head itself. Well, you can assume that. What would these clever lice teach the stupid ones? They would teach: the head is something inanimate, because we walk around on it. The inanimate scales form. If you dig a little deeper, you come to the inanimate bones. —- That's what the clever lice would explain to the stupid lice at the lice university up there. They would explain the human head in much the same way that we at our universities explain the earth. These lice professors – excuse me, I mean, of course, those who are at the head – would know nothing of the fact that the human head is alive; they would therefore expound a geology of the head and declare the head dead. Yes, but, gentlemen, that is what they do in our schools! They declare the earth dead. They know nothing of its breathing. Because at this lice-infested university, you would never learn that a person breathes; nothing would be explained about human breathing. It would be explained: the human being is dead, the human head is a dead ball. And if head lice did not come into any relation with body lice, head lice would never learn anything about the body at all.

And so it is: If people on earth do not come into contact with other higher beings, they will never learn that the earth also sends its waters out into space as a body and is fertilized, breathes and is fertilized. Yes, we can really get an idea of how the science of the earth is constructed from there, from the head - from the idea of what would be presented as a science at this head university. That is how it really is! And you can see from this that it is necessary to go beyond that which can be seen from a limited point of view. One must go beyond it.

And what comes out is a real spiritual science that proceeds just as scientifically and can therefore also explain those things that Hansen brought to science back then.

Well, gentlemen, we are not yet finished with this hypnosis question and with the other. I will discuss these things a little next time, because they have to be compared with how they relate to ordinary sleep. And what happens when a person sleeps, what happens when a person becomes cataleptic – because in ordinary sleep you cannot lie on two chairs and let yourself be stepped on – the difference between sleep and hypnosis, the difference between catalepsy and thought transfer, I will explain further to you next Wednesday at nine o'clock.