The Rudolf Steiner Archive

It will be my task in these lectures to build a bridge from the ordinary experiences of everyday life to the most lofty concerns of man, and in so doing find a new point of contact between our daily life and what Anthroposophy or spiritual science has to give for our soul and spirit. For, as you know, my dear friends, the more thoroughly we absorb what spiritual science can give the more does it flow into our feeling, into our willing, and into those forces which we need in order to meet the manifold events and circumstances of life. And we know, too, that this spiritual science, which we can now learn by reason of the inpourings that are coming at this very time from higher worlds, is to a certain extent a necessity for mankind. Within a comparatively short time man would inevitably lose all confidence in life, all inner calm, all that peace of mind which is so necessary to life, if the message to which we give the name of Anthroposophy or spiritual science were not able to come to mankind precisely in our time.

But now it is also well known to us that this anthroposophical spiritual stream brings into sharp collision two divergent tendencies in man's thought and feeling and perception. One is a direction in thought and feeling which has been in preparation for many centuries and which has by now gained complete hold upon mankind, or will most assuredly do so in the near future. It is what we call the materialistic outlook, using the word in its widest sense, and it makes attack, so to say, upon the other direction of thought which is given with anthroposophy, it attacks the spiritual outlook on the world. And more and more pronounced will the conflict become in the near future between these two directions of thought. It will, moreover, be fought in such a way that it will often be very difficult to know with which direction of thought one is dealing. For the materialistic tendency of thought, for example, may not always come before one in unvarnished truthfulness, it may assume all manner of disguises. There will indeed be plenty of materialistic streams which will wear a spiritual mask, and it will be far from easy at times to know where materialism lurks and where we are to recognise the true spiritual stream. How difficult it is to form correct conclusions in this respect I endeavoured to show from various instances in two lectures which I recently delivered. In the first it was my aim to awaken an understanding for the ease with which one can become a sincere opponent of the anthroposophical world conception if one lets oneself be ruled by the thoughts and ideas that prevail in the world to-day. “How one refutes Spiritual Science”—that was what I tried to demonstrate in the first lecture, and I went on to give another on the subject of how Spiritual Science may be advocated and substantiated.

Not that I imagined for a moment I could bring forward everything that might be brought forward on the one and on the other side; my aim was merely to call forth a feeling for the fact that it is perfectly possible to adduce a surprising number of arguments against the anthroposophical world conception, and to do so with great apparent justification. There are in our day men who simply cannot do other than make opposition with their whole soul to anthroposophy, and they belong by no means to the most insincere of our age, very often they are the most honest and devoted seekers after truth. I have no desire at this point to go over again all the grounds that can be brought forward against anthroposophy. I only want to suggest that from the very habits of thought of our time such grounds do easily result and can be well established. It is perfectly possible in our day to refute anthroposophy root and branch. But the question arises when one refutes anthroposophy in this way, when one adduces all reasons and arguments which can be leveled against anthroposophy: by what path does one come to such a position? Suppose that someone today out of the fundamental inherent tendency of his soul adopts anthroposophy, and then proceeds to make himself acquainted with all that the modern sciences can teach from their materialistic basis. Such a man can most radically refute and disprove anthroposophy or spiritual science. In order to do so, however, he must first of all induce a particular standpoint in his soul, he must assume the purely intellectual standpoint. You will see more clearly what is meant if you will now follow me in a consideration of the very opposite condition of soul. For the moment let us leave it at the simple statement, which I make out of personal experience, that when a man who is conversant with all the results of science in the present day abandons himself entirely to his intellect he can then refute anthroposophy radically. Let us now refrain from discussing this any further and turn in another direction, so as to approach our theme from a new aspect.

Man can look upon the world from two sides. He finds one view of the world when, for example, he considers a wonderfully beautiful sunrise. He sees the sun come to view, as it were, giving birth to itself from out of the gold of the dawn, he watches how the sunshine spreads over the earth, and he contemplates with deep feeling the power and the warmth of the sun's rays as they enchant forth life from the ground of the earth in a yearly returning cycle. Or again, a man may give himself up to contemplation of the setting sun; he beholds the twilight deepen until the darkness of night falls and countless stars shine out in the vault of heaven, and he sinks himself in meditation on the wonder of the starry heaven at night-time. When a man contemplates nature in this way he rises to a conception which must fill him with deepest blessing. For he can rise to a conception similar to a thought expressed once so beautifully by Goethe when he said: “When we look up to the wonder of the starry world, when we contemplate the whole process of the universe with its glories and marvels, then we are led at last to the feeling that all the glory that lies open to our view in the whole universe that surrounds us only has meaning when it is reflected in an admiring human soul.” Yes, man comes to the thought that just as the air that is all around him forms and builds his being—entering into him, so that he can breathe it, so that by the process it undergoes inside him it can build up his being—just as man is thus a product of this air and of its laws and processes of combination, so he is a product in a certain way of the whole wide world that constitutes his sense environment, he is a product of all that flows not only into his sense of sight, but into the sense which opens to the world of sound and the other worlds which stream in through our senses. Man comes to feel that he confronts the external sense world as a being in which this whole sense world is contained; he feels himself as a confluence of the world that is around him. And he can say to himself: When I look more closely into nature that is round about me, when I meditate upon it, perceiving it with all my senses, then I see how the true meaning of all that I behold out there finds its best fulfilment when it is crystallised out into the wonderful form of man himself.

And in very truth, when a man attains to seeing this, the feeling can come over him which has been expressed with such elemental force by the Greek poet:

“Many a wonder lives and moves,
But the wonder of all is man!”

For in man all the revelations of the external world flow together; all the one-sidedness becomes in man a many-sidedness. We contemplate the world of the senses, and we behold man standing in its midst as a being of sense, in whom everything else in the world is contained. For the more accurately we study the world the more closely do we see that in man all the one-sidednesses of the universe flow together and are united into a whole. And then, as we develop this feeling towards the great world, beholding how it all flows together in man, a thought can arise in our soul that can fill us with a deep sense of blessedness—the thought, my dear friends, of the God-willed man. We can feel how it is really as though the deeds and purposes of the Gods had built up a whole universe and had let stream forth from it on every side influences and workings which could at length flow together and unite in their most precious work which they placed into the very centre of the Universe—Man. Wrought by the will of the Gods! So said one who also contemplated the world of the senses in this aspect, namely in its relation to man. What, said he, are all the instruments of music in comparison with the marvellous structure of the human ear? What are they beside the marvellous structure of the human larynx, which is, in truth, like the ear, a musical instrument? Many a thing in the world can awaken our wonder and admiration: and if man, as he stands within the world, does not arouse this feeling, it is only because we have not learned to know him in all the marvel of his structure. When we give ourselves up to such a contemplation then the thought may indeed arise in our heart: What countless deeds of wonder have the divine and spiritual Beings performed that man might come into being!

That, then, is one path, my dear friends, on which man may be led in his consideration of the world. But there is another. And the other path opens up for us when we develop a feeling for the majesty and power, for the overwhelming greatness of what we call our moral ideals; when we look into our own soul and take cognisance for a moment of what moral ideals signify in the world. It belongs to an all-round healthy human nature to be very sensitive to the greatness and sublimity of moral ideals. And we can develop in us with regard to the moral ideals within a feeling that works just as overpoweringly in the soul as the feeling inspired by the glory and beauty of the revelations of the universe without. It can, indeed, be so when we enkindle within us love and enthusiasm for the moral ideals and purposes of man. A great warmth of feeling can then fill the soul. But this is now followed, quite necessarily, by a thought which is different from the thought that follows naturally on the contemplation of the world just described, which rests upon the revelation of the universe through man. There follows now a thought which is experienced most intensely of all by those very people who have the most sublime conception of the power of moral ideals. It may be expressed thus. How far art thou, O man, as thou art to-day, how far art thou removed from the lofty moral ideals which can rise up in thy heart! How tiny and insignificant art thou, with all thou dost and canst ever do, in comparison with the greatness of the age moral ideals thou canst set before thee! And not to feel so, dear friends, not to feel oneself small in comparison with one's ideals can only mean one has a mind that is itself pitiably small! For it is precisely as his mind and soul grow that a man comes to feel more and more his inadequacy in face of his moral ideals. And another thought then begins to dawn in the soul, a thought which can often come over us human beings, namely, the resolve to put forth all our courage and all our strength that we may learn to make moral ideals more living and strong within us than they have been hitherto. Or it may also happen that in certain natures the thought of their inadequacy in moral ideals takes such firm hold in their souls that they feel quite crushed by it, and feel themselves estranged from God, just because they have, on the other hand, so powerful a feeling of man as God-willed in his external aspect, as he is placed into the world of the senses. “There I stand”—perhaps they say to themselves—“as an external being. When I consider myself as external being I am bound to say to myself: You are confluence of the whole God-willed world, you are a God-willed being, you bear a God-like countenance! Then I look within me ... there I find ideals which God has inscribed into my heart, and which it is quite certain ought to be God-willed forces within me...” And then they feel a sense of their own inadequacy welling up out of their soul.

These are the two paths man can tread in his observation of the world and of himself. He can look upon himself from without and experience a wonderful sense of blessedness in his God-willed nature; he can look upon himself from within and experience an overwhelming sense of contrition for his God-estranged soul. A healthy state of mind, however, can do no other than come to the following conclusion: From the same divine source whence come the forces which have placed man in the midst of the universe—as it were, like a strongly concentrated extract of the universe, from the same divine source must also spring the moral ideals that be finds inscribed in his heart. Why is it the one is so far removed from the other? That is actually the great riddle of human existence. And truth to say, there would never have been such a thing in the world as Theosophy, or even Philosophy, if this breach had not arisen in the souls of men, if this discord which I have described had not been more or less consciously felt, whether as a dim and undefined sensation or as a clear and organised perception. For it is from the experience of this discord in the soul that all deeper thought and contemplation and enquiry have sprung. What is there to come between the God-will man and the God-estranged man? That is the fundamental question of all philosophy. Men may have formulated it and defined it in countless different ways, but it lies at the root of all human thinking. Is there a way by which man can see a possibility of building a bridge between the indubitably blissful vision of his external nature and the equally indubitably disturbing vision of his soul?

At this point, my dear friends, we must say a little about the road the human soul can take in order to lift itself up in a worthy manner to a consideration of the great and lofty questions of existence. For in treading this road we shall be able to discover the sources of many errors.

In the world outside, in so far as this world is ruled by external science, when people speak of knowledge, you will always find them say: Yes, of course, we arrive at knowledge when we have formed right judgments and exercised correct thinking. I recently cited a very simple example to illustrate how great an error is involved in this assumption that we are bound to arrive at truth when we make correct and reasonable judgments; and I would like to relate it again now, to show you that accuracy of reasoning need by no means lead to the truth.

There was once a small boy in a village who was sent regularly by his parents to fetch bread. He used always to have ten kreuzer, and bring back in exchange six rolls. If you bought one such roll it cost two kreuzer, but he always brought back six rolls for his ten kreuzer. The boy was not particularly good at arithmetic and never troubled himself as to how it worked out that he always took with him ten kreuzer, that a roll cost two and yet he brought home six rolls in return for his ten. One day a boy was brought into the family from another part and he became for our small boy a kind of foster-brother. They were of about the same age, but the foster-brother was a good arithmetician. And he saw how his companion went to the baker's, taking with him ten kreuzer, and he knew that a roll cost two. So he said to him, “You must bring home five rolls.” He was a very good arithmetician and his reasoning was perfectly accurate. One roll costs two kreuzer (so he reasoned), he takes with him ten, he will obviously bring home five rolls. But behold, he brought back six. Then said our good arithmetician: “But that is quite wrong! One roll costs two kreuzer, and you took ten, and two into ten goes five times; you can't possibly bring back six rolls. You must have made a mistake or else you have pinched one ...” But now, lo and behold, on the next day, too, the boy brought home six rolls. It was, you see, a custom in those parts that when you bought five you received an extra one in addition, so that in fact when you paid for five rolls you received six. It was a custom that was very agreeable for anyone who needed five rolls for his household.

The good arithmetician had reasoned, quite correctly, there was no fault in his thinking; but this correct thinking did not accord with reality. We are obliged to admit the correct thinking did not arrive at the reality, for reality does not order itself in accordance with correct thinking. You may see very clearly in this case how with the most conscientious, the most clever logical thinking that can possibly be spun out, you may arrive at a correct conclusion and yet, measured by reality your conclusion may be utterly and completely false. That can always happen. Consequently a proof that is acquired purely through thought can never be a criterion for reality—never.

One can also go very far wrong in the linking up of cause and effect when, for example, one applies it in respect of the external world. Let me give you an instance. Let us suppose a man is walking along the bank of a stream. He comes to a certain place, and you observe from a distance that at this point he falls over the edge into the water. You hurry up to him, meaning to save him; but he is drawn up out of the water quite dead. Now you see before you the corpse. You can quite well maintain, let us say, that the man has been drowned. You can go to work with your proof in a very able way. Perhaps at the place where he fell into the water there was a stone. Very well then, he stumbled over the stone and fell in and was drowned. The sequence of the thought is quite correct. When a man goes to the bank of a river, stumbles over a stone that is lying there, falls into the water and is pulled out dead—he must have been drowned. It cannot be otherwise. Now precisely in this instance it is not necessarily so. When you stop allowing yourself to be ruled by this particular connection of cause and effect, you may be able to discover that this man, in the moment when he fell into the water, was seized with a heart attack, in consequence of which, since he was walking at the edge of the stream, he fell in. He was already dead when he fell in; though everything happened to him just as it would to a man who fell in alive. You see, when someone comes to the conclusion, in this case from the sequence of the external events, that the man in question slipped, fell into the water and was drowned, the conclusion is quite a false one, it does not correspond with reality. For the man fell into the water because he was dead; he was not pulled out dead because he had fallen in. Twisted conclusions like this are to be found at every turn in the scientific literature of our time; only they are not noticed, any more than this instance would have been noticed if one had not taken trouble to investigate the matter. In more delicate and subtle connections of cause and effect such mistakes are continually being made. I only want to indicate in this way that in point of fact our thinking is quite incompetent to form a decision in respect of reality.

But now, if this is really so, if our thinking can be no sure guide for us, how are we ever to save ourselves from sinking into doubt and ignorance? For it is a fact, whoever has had experience in these matters and concerned himself deeply with thinking, knows that one can prove and disprove everything. No philosophy, however penetrating in its thought, can impose upon him any more. He may admire the acumen and penetration of its thought, but he cannot give himself up to the mere reasoning of the intellect, since he knows that one could just as well reason intellectually in the opposite sense. This is true of everything that can be proved, or disproved. In this connection one can often make intensely interesting observations in everyday life. There is a certain fascination, though of course only a theoretical fascination, in making the acquaintance of people who have come to that particular point in soul evolution where they begin to perceive and experience that everything can be proved and everything disproved, but are not yet sufficiently mature to adopt what we may call a spiritual attitude to the world.

In the last few weeks I have often been forcibly reminded of a man I once met who showed to a remarkable degree such a constitution of soul and yet was not able to come through to a grasp of reality such as spiritual science could give. He had come to the point of seeing quite clearly the possibility of contradicting and establishing every single statement that philosophy could possibly make. I refer to a professor in the University of Vienna, who died a few weeks ago, a man of quite unusual ability and intelligence, Laurenz Mullner. A remarkably gifted man, who could adduce with great clarity proof for all possible philosophical systems and thoughts; he could also contradict them all, and always styled himself a sceptic. I once heard him utter this rather terrible exclamation: All philosophy is really nothing but a very pretty game!—And when one observed, as one often had occasion, the quick flash and play of the man's mind in this game of thought, it was interesting also to see how you could never be sure of Mullner on any point, for he never admitted anything at all. At most, when someone else had spoken against a particular point of view, he would take great delight in bringing forward whatever could be brought forward for the confirmation of that point of view—and this in spite of the fact that perhaps a few days before he had himself picked it to pieces relentlessly. A most interesting mind, in fact from a certain aspect one of the most significant philosophers who have lived in recent times. The manner in which he came to be led into such a mood is also very interesting. For besides being a profound student of the history of the philosophical evolution of mankind, Mullner was a Roman Catholic priest. And it was always his earnest desire to remain a good Catholic priest, notwithstanding that for many years he was a professor in Vienna University. He was steeped in Catholic ways of thought, and this had the effect, on the one hand, of making all the mere game of thought which he found in the world outside seem small in comparison with the methods of thought which were fructified with a certain religious zeal. But his Catholicism had also this effect, that in spite of all, he yet could not get beyond the position of doubt. He was too great a man to stop short at a mere dogmatic Catholicism, but on the other hand his Catholicism was too great in him for him to be able to rise to a theosophical grasp of reality. It is extraordinarily interesting to observe such a soul, who has come to the point where one can actually study what it is the man needs if he is to approach reality. For it goes without saying that this able and most intelligent man saw quite clearly that with his thinking he could not approach reality.

As long ago as in ancient Greece it was known what the healthy human mind must take for its starting point if it hopes one day to reach reality. And the same statement that was uttered in ancient Greece still holds good. It was said: All human enquiry must proceed from wonder! That statement must be received in a perfectly positive way, my dear friends. In actual fact, in the soul that wants to penetrate to truth, this condition must first be present: the soul must stand before the universe in a mood of wonder and marveling. And anyone who is able to comprehend the whole force of this expression of the Greeks comes to perceive that when a man, irrespective of all the other conditions by which he arrives at the study and investigation of truth, takes his start from this mood of wonder, from nothing else than a feeling of wonder in face of the facts of the world, then it is in very truth as when you drop a seed in the ground and a plant grows up out of it. In a sense we may say that all knowledge must have wonder for its seed. It is quite a different thing when a man proceeds not from wonder but perhaps from the fact that in his youth his good teachers have drummed into him principles of some sort or other which have made him into a philosopher; or when perhaps he has become a philosopher because—well, because in the walk of life in which he grew up it is the custom to learn something of the sort, and so he has come to philosophy purely by dint of circumstances. It is also well known that the examination in philosophy is the easiest to pass. In short, there are hundreds and thousands of starting points for the study of philosophy that are not wonder, but something altogether different. All such starting points, however, lead merely to an acquaintance with truth that may be compared with making a plant of papier-mache and not raising it from seed. The comparison is quite apt! For all real knowledge, that hopes to have a chance of coming to grips with the riddles of the world, must grow out of the seed of wonder. A man may be ever so clever a thinker, he may even suffer from a superabundance of intelligence; if he has never passed through the stage of wonder nothing will come of it. He will give you a cleverly thought-out concatenation of ideas, containing nothing that is not correct—but correctness does not necessarily lead to reality. It is absolutely essential that before we begin to think, before we so much as begin to set our thinking in motion, we experience the condition of wonder. A thinking which is set in motion without the condition of wonder remains nothing but a mere play of thought. All true thinking must originate in the mood of wonder.

Nor is that enough. We must go a step further. Even when thinking originates in the mood of wonder, then if a man is predisposed by his karma to grow sharp-witted and clever, and quickly begins to be proud and take pleasure in his cleverness and then perhaps gives all his energy to developing that alone, the wonder he felt in the beginning will no longer help him at all. For if, after wonder has taken hold in the soul, then in the further course of his thinking a man does no more than merely “think,” he cannot penetrate to reality. Please let me emphasise here that I am not saying a man ought to become thoughtless and that thinking is harmful. This opinion is often widespread in our circles. Just because it has been said that one must proceed from wonder, people are apt to regard thinking as wrong and harmful. When a man has made a small beginning in thinking and can reckon up the seven principles of the human being, and so on, there is no reason why he should then cease thinking. Thinking must continue. But after the wonder another condition must show itself, and that is a condition we may best describe as reverence for all that to which thought brings us. After the mood of wonder must follow the mood of veneration, of reverence. And any thinking that is divorced from reverence, that does not behold in a reverent manner what is proffered to its view, will not be able to penetrate to reality. Thinking must never, so to say, go dancing through the world in a careless, light-footed way. It must, when it has passed the moment of wonder, take firm root in the feeling of reverence for the universe.

Here the path of true knowledge comes immediately into open opposition with what is called science in our day. Suppose you were to say to someone who is standing in his laboratory with his retorts, analysing substances and then again building up compound by a process of synthesis—suppose you were to say to him: “You cannot really hope to investigate truth. You will, of course, think it out very beautifully and piece it together in your mind, but what you are doing is no more than mere facts. And you approach these facts of the world without any piety or reverence. You ought really to stand before the processes going on in your retorts with the same pious and reverential feeling as a priest feels before the altar.” What would such a man say to you to-day? Probably he would laugh at you, because from the standpoint of present-day science one simply cannot see that reverence has anything whatever to do with truth and with knowledge. Or, if he does not laugh at you, at best he will say: “I can feel great enthusiasm for what goes on in my retorts, but that my enthusiasm is anything other than my own private affair, that my enthusiasm should have anything to do with the investigation of truth—that you can never persuade a person of intelligence to believe.” You are bound to appear foolish in the eyes of present-day scientists if you venture to say that research into the nature of objects, and even thought about objects, ought never to be divorced from reverence, and that one ought not to take a step forward in thought without being filled with the feeling of reverence for the object of one's enquiry. Reverence is, however, the second requisite on the path of knowledge.

But now a man who had attained to a certain feeling of reverence, and then, having experienced this feeling of reverence, wanted to press forward with mere thought—such a man would again come to a nothingness, he would not be able to get any farther. He would, it is true, make some discoveries that were quite correct, and because he had gone through these first two stages, he would with his correct knowledge have also acquired many clearly and firmly established points of view. But he would inevitably, for all that, soon fall into uncertainty. For a third condition must take hold in the soul after we have experienced wonder and reverence, and this third mood we may describe as feeling oneself in wisdom-filled harmony with the laws of the world. And this feeling can be attained in no other way than by having insight into the worthlessness of mere thinking. One must have felt over and over again that he who builds on correctness of thinking—whether he ends by confirming or contradicting is of no account—is really in the same case as our little boy who reckoned up the number of the rolls so correctly. Had that little boy been able to say to himself: “My reckoning may be quite correct, but I must avoid building upon my correctness of thought, I must follow truth, I must put myself into accord with reality”—then he would have found out something which stands higher than correctness, viz., the custom of the village to give in an extra roll with every five. He would have found that one has to go out of oneself into the external world and that correct thinking stands us in no stead when we want to find out whether something is real.

But this placing oneself into wisdom-filled harmony with reality is something that does not come easily, does not come of itself. If it were so, my dear friends, man would not in this time be experiencing—nor would he ever have experienced—the temptation that comes through Lucifer. For what we call discriminating between good and evil, acquiring knowledge, eating of the tree of knowledge, was most assuredly planned to come for man by the divine leaders of the world—only at a later time. Where man went wrong was in wanting to possess himself too early of the knowledge of the difference of good and evil. What had been intended for him at a later time, the temptation of Lucifer made him want to acquire earlier; that is the point. The only possible outcome was an inadequate knowledge, which has the same relation to the true knowledge man would have won in the way intended for him, as a premature birth has to a normal one. The old Gnostics actually used this expression, and one can see now how right they were. They said: Human knowledge, as it accompanies man through the world in all his incarnations, is in reality a premature birth, an Ectroma; because men could not wait until they had undergone all the experiences which should have led them step by step to know-ledge. A time should have been allowed to pass, during which man should have brought certain moods and conditions of soul to greater and greater maturity, and then knowledge would have been bound to come to him. This original sin of mankind is still being constantly committed. For if men were not guilty of this sin they would care less how quickly they can acquire this or that truth and would be concerned instead as to how they might grow mature for the comprehension of truth.

How strange it would seem to a man of the present day if some-one were to come and say to him: “The Theorem of Pythagoras is quite comprehensible to you, but if you want to have a deeper understanding of the hidden meaning of the statement: ‘The sum of the squares on the two sides of a right-angled triangle is equal to the square on the hypotenuse’”—or to take a still simpler case, if someone were to come and say to him: “Before you are ripe to understand that three multiplied by three is equal to nine you must go through this or that experience in your soul! For you can only grasp that truth when you have brought yourself into harmony with the laws of the world, which have so ordered things that mathematical laws appear to us as they do!” Why, he would only laugh, and even louder than before! Really and truly men are still continually guilty of the original sin, for they think that at each stage they reach they can comprehend everything, without any regard for the fact that man needs first to have a certain experience before he can comprehend this or that. It is really essential to be inwardly sustained and upheld all the time by the consciousness that with all one's strict and precise thinking one can, as a matter of fact, get nowhere at all in the domain of reality. This realisation belongs to the third condition of soul which we are now describing.

Use all the efforts we may to judge correctly of something, error can always creep in. A true judgment can only result when we have attained a certain maturity, when we have waited for the judgment to “jump” to us, not when we put ourselves about to find it, but when we take pains to make ourselves ripe for it to come to us. Then the judgment we form will belong to reality. The man who exerts himself ever so strenuously to hit upon a correct judgment can never expect by such exertion to arrive at a judgment that is in any way conclusive or satisfactory. He alone can hope to come to a true judgment of a matter who applies all his care and thought to making himself riper and riper to receive the right judgments from the revelations which will then stream into him, because he has grown ripe to receive them. It is possible to have quite strange experiences in this connection. A man who is quickly on the spot with his ready-made judgment will naturally think that if someone has fallen into the water and is pulled out dead he has been drowned. But a man who has learnt wisdom, who has grown mature in the experience of life, will know that a general correctness of thought is of no significance at all, but that in each single case one has to give oneself up to the facts as they present themselves and let them form the judgment. You may constantly see the truth of this confirmed in life.

Take an instance. Somebody makes a statement. Well and good. You yourself may have another view of the matter. You may say: What he says is quite false. You have yourself an altogether different opinion. Now it can very well be that what he says and what you say are both false, in a certain respect both judgments can be right and both false. At this third stage of the soul you will not see anything conclusive in the fact that one person has a different view of a matter from another person; that tells nothing at all. It merely says that each of these stands on the pinnacle of his own opinion. Whereas he who has learnt wisdom always reserves his judgment, and in order not to be involved in any way with his judgment he will wait with it even when he is conscious that he may be right. He holds back, putting his opinion to the test, as it were. But suppose someone makes a statement to-day and then two months later says the very opposite. In such a case you can completely exclude yourself, you have nothing whatever to do with the two facts. And when you look at these two facts and let them make their own impression upon you, you do not need to oppose either of them, they contradict each other mutually. The judgment is made by the external world, not by you. Then, and then only, does the wise man begin to form a judgment. It is an interesting fact that one will never understand how Goethe pursued his study of natural science unless one has this conception of wisdom, where one has to let the objects themselves do the judging. Therefore did Goethe make the following interesting observation—you will find it in my Introduction to Goethe's Natural Scientific Works. He said: We ought really never to make judgments or hypotheses concerning external phenomena; for the phenomena are the theories, they themselves express their ideas, if only we have grown mature to receive impressions from them in the right way. It is not a question of sitting down in a corner and puzzling out in one's own mind something that one then considers correct, it is a question rather of making oneself ripe and letting the true judgment spring to meet one out of the facts themselves. Our relation to thinking must not be that we make thinking sit in judgment upon objects but rather that we make it an instrument whereby the objects can express themselves. This is what placing oneself in harmony with objects means.

When this third stage has been experienced, even then the thinking cannot be allowed to stand on its own feet. Then comes what is in a sense the very highest condition of soul to which man has to attain if he would arrive at truth. And that is the condition to which we may give the name devotion or self-surrender. Wonder, reverence, wisdom-filled harmony with the phenomena of the world, surrender to the course of the world—these are the stages through which we have to pass and which must always run parallel with thinking, never deserting it; otherwise thinking arrives at what is merely correct and not at what is true.

We will here make a pause at the point to which we have come, rising from wonder through reverence and wisdom-filled harmony with world phenomena to the stage we have named “surrender” but have not yet explained. To-morrow we will speak further about it. Let us hold all this well in mind, and on the other hand let us also remember the question we threw out at the beginning, namely, why it is one only needs to make oneself intellectual in order to be able to refute spiritual science. Let us consider that we end our lecture to-day on these two questions, which tomorrow we will proceed to answer.

Yesterday we were considering the successive moods of soul that have to be attained if human thinking—if what is ordinarily called knowledge—is to enter the realm of reality, and we came to a condition of soul that we named surrender. In other words, a thinking that has risen to the conditions of soul we described before—a thinking, that is, which has become possessed of wonder, and has then learned what we called reverent devotion to the world of reality and finally what we called knowing oneself to be in wisdom-filled harmony with the phenomena of the world—if such a thinking be not able then to rise still further and enter the region we have described as a condition of surrender, it cannot come to reality. Now this surrender is only to be attained by making the resolute endeavour again and again to face for ourselves the inadequacy of mere thought. We have to take pains to stimulate and strengthen within us a mood that may be expressed as follows. It must be as though we were constantly saying to ourselves: I ought not to expect that my thinking can give me knowledge of the truth, I ought rather solely to expect of my thinking that it shall educate me. It is of the utmost importance that we should develop in us this idea, namely, that our thinking educates us. If you will really take this point of view as a practical rule of life you will find that there are many occasions when you are led to quite different conclusions from those that seem at first sight to be inevitable.

I daresay there are not many of you who have made a thorough study of the philosopher Kant. It is not necessary. I only want here to refer to the fact that in Kant's most important and revolutionary work, “The Critique of Pure Reason,” you will always find proofs adduced both for and against a proposition in question. Take, for example, a statement such as the following. “The world once had a beginning in time.” You will find that Kant puts, perhaps on the other side of the same page, the statement: “The world has always existed, from all eternity.” And then he proceeds to adduce valid proofs for both statements, notwithstanding that the one obviously expresses the very opposite of the other. That is to say, Kant proves in the same manner that the world has had a beginning and that it has had no beginning. He calls this method of reasoning “Antinomy” and thinks it is itself an evidence that the human faculty of knowledge has boundaries, seeing that man is forced thereby to arrive at contradictory conclusions. And, of course, he is right, so long as one expects by thinking to come to conformity with some objective reality. So long as we give ourselves up to the belief that by thinking or by the elaboration of concepts or, let us say, by the elaboration in thought of experiences we have in the world, we can come to reality, so long are we indeed in desperate case, if someone comes forward and shows us that a particular statement and its exact opposite can equally well be proved. For if this is so, how are we ever to arrive at Truth? If, however, we have learned that where the situation demands a decisive pronouncement, thinking can come to no conclusion about reality, if we have persistently educated ourselves instead to look upon thinking as a means to become wiser, as a means to take in hand our own self-education in wisdom, then it does not disturb us at all that at one time one thing can be proved and at another time its opposite can be proved. For we very soon make the following discovery. The fact that the elaboration of concepts does not, so to say, expose us in the least to the onset of reality, is the very reason why we are able to work with perfect freedom within the sphere of concepts and ideas and to carry on our own self-education by this means. If we were perpetually being corrected by reality, then the elaboration of concepts would not afford us a means of educating ourselves in this manner in perfect freedom. I would like to ask you to give careful consideration to this fact. Let me repeat it. The elaboration of concepts affords us a means of effective and independent self-education, and it can only do so because we are never disturbed in the free elaboration of concepts by the interference of reality.

What do I mean when I say we are not disturbed? What sort of disturbance could reality make in the free elaboration of concepts? We can picture to ourselves a little what such a disturbance would be like if we contrast—purely hypothetically for the moment, though, as we shall see later, it does not need to remain entirely in the realm of hypothesis—our human thinking with divine thinking. For we can say, can we not, that it is impossible to conceive of divine thinking as having nothing to do with reality. When we try to picture the thinking of the Gods, we can only conceive of it—still speaking for the moment purely hypothetically—as intervening in reality, as influencing reality. And this leads inevitably to the following conclusion. When a human being makes a mistake in his thinking, then it is a mere logical mistake, it is nothing worse. And when, later on, he comes to see that he has made a mistake he can correct it; and he will at the same time have accomplished something for his self-education, he will have grown wiser. But now take the case of divine thinking. When divine thinking thinks correctly, then something happens; and when it thinks falsely, then something is destroyed, something is annihilated. So that if we had a divine thinking, then with every false concept we should call forth a destructive process, first of all in our astral body, then in our etheric body and thence also in our physical body. If we had active divine thinking, if our thinking had something to do with reality, then a false concept would have the result that we should, as it were, stimulate inside us a drying up process in some part or other of our body, a hardening process. You will agree, it would be important to make as few mistakes as possible; for it might not be long before we had made so many mistakes that our body would have become quite dried up and would fall to pieces. We should, in fact, soon find it crumble away if we transformed into reality the mistakes in our thinking. We actually only maintain ourselves in real existence through the fact that our thinking does not work into reality, but that we are protected from the penetration of our thinking into reality. Thus we can make mistake after mistake in our thinking. If later we correct these mistakes we have thereby educated ourselves, we have grown wiser, and we have not at the same time committed devastation with our mistakes. As we strengthen ourselves more and more with the moral force of such a thought as this we learn to know the nature of the “surrender” of which I spoke and we come at last to a point where we do not at critical moments of life, turn to thinking, in the hope to gain knowledge and understanding of external things.

That sounds strange, I know, and at first sight it seems as though it would be quite impossible. How can we refuse to have recourse to thinking? And yet, although it is impossible to take such a line absolutely, we can take it under certain conditions. Constituted as we are as human beings in the world, we cannot on every occasion suspend judgment on the things of the world. We have to judge and form opinions—we shall see in the course of these lectures why that is so—we have to act in life and cannot always wait to penetrate to the depths of reality. We must judge—but we should educate ourselves to exercise caution in accepting as finally true the judgments and opinions we form. We should, as it were, be continually looking over our own shoulder and reminding ourselves that where we are applying our keenest intellect, just there we are treading on very uncertain ground and are perpetually liable to make mistakes. That is a hard saying for cocksure people! They think they will never get anywhere at all if they are to doubt whether the opinion they form on some event is conclusive. Observe a little and you will see that very many people, when some statement is made, think it necessary at once to say: “But what I think is this”—or when they see something, to say: “I don't like that!” or “I like it!” This kind of attitude must be given up by anyone who does not rest content to go through life with easy self-assurance; it must be given up if we want to set the course of our inner life in the direction of reality. What we have to do is to cultivate an attitude of mind which may be characterised in the following words: “Obviously I have, of course, to live my life, and this means I must form judgments and conclusions. I will, therefore, employ my power of judgment in so far as the practice of life makes this necessary, but I will not use it for the recognition of truth. For that I will be for ever looking cautiously over my shoulder, I will always receive with some degree of doubt every judgment that I happen to make.”

But how are we then to arrive at any thought about truth, if not by forming judgments in the ordinary way? We have already indicated yesterday the right attitude of mind, when we said that we ought to let the things speak, let the things themselves tell their secrets. We have to learn to adopt a passive attitude to the things of the world, and let them speak out their own secrets. A great deal of error would be avoided if men would do this. We have a wonderful example in Goethe, who, when he wants to investigate truth, does not allow himself to judge but tries to let the things themselves utter their own secrets. Let us suppose we have two men, one who judges and the other who lets the things tell their own secrets. We will select a very clear and simple example. One man sees a wolf and describes it. He finds that there are other animals besides which look like this wolf, and he arrives in this manner at the general concept “wolf.” And now he can go on to form the following conclusion. He can say to himself: In reality there are many individual wolves; the general concept of “wolf” which I make in my mind, wolf as such, does not exist; only individual wolves exist in the world. Such a man will easily state it as his opinion that we have really only to do with individual wolf beings, and the general concept of wolf which one holds as an idea is not anything real. There you have a striking example of a man who merely judges and forms opinions. This is the kind of conclusion he develops. And how about the man, on the other hand, who lets reality speak for itself? How will he think of that invisible quality of wolf which is to be found in every single wolf and which characterises all wolves alike? He will look at it in this way. He will say to himself: Let me consider a lamb and compare it with a wolf. I am not going to formulate any judgment on the matter, I am simply going to let the facts speak. And now, let us imagine this man has the opportunity to see with his own eyes how the wolf eats up the lamb. He sees the event take place before him. Then he would have to say to himself: “The substance which before was running about as lamb is now inside the wolf, it has been absorbed into the wolf.” It needs no more than the perception of this fact to see how real the wolf nature is! For if we were to rely on what we can follow with our external senses we might easily be led to the conclusion that if a wolf were deprived of all other food and were to eat nothing but lamb he must gradually—for the metabolism that goes on inside him will produce this result—he must gradually come to have in him nothing but lamb substance. As a matter of fact, however, he never becomes a lamb, he remains always a wolf. That shows quite unmistakably, if one judges the matter rightly, that the material part of the wolf has been quite erroneously assumed to constitute “wolf” as such. When we let ourselves be taught by the external world of facts, then it shows us that besides what we have before us as material substance in the wolf there is something else, something we cannot see and that yet is real in the highest degree. And this it is which brings it about that when the wolf eats nothing but lamb he does not become lamb but remains wolf. All of him that is merely perceptible to the senses has come from lambs.

It is difficult sometimes to draw a sharp line of demarcation between judging and letting ourselves be taught by reality. When, however, the difference has once been grasped and when judgment is only employed for the ends of practical life, while for an approach to reality the attitude is taken of allowing ourselves to be taught by the things of the world, then we gradually arrive at a mood of soul which can reveal to us the true meaning of “surrender.” Surrender is a state of mind which does not seek to investigate truth from out of itself, but which looks for truth to come from the revelation that flows out of the things, and can wait until it is ripe to receive the revelation. An inclination to judge or form opinions wants to be continually arriving at truth at every step; surrender, on the other hand, does not set out to force an entrance, as it were, into this or that truth, rather do we seek to educate ourselves and then quietly wait until we attain to that stage of maturity where the truth flows to us from the things of the world, coming to us in revelation and filling our whole being. To work with patience, knowing that patience will bring us further and further in wise self-education—that is the mood of surrender.

And now we must go on to consider the fruits of this surrender. What do we attain when we have gone forward with our thinking from wonder to reverence, thence to feeling oneself in wisdom-filled harmony with reality and finally to the attitude of surrender—what do we attain? We come at last to this. As we go about the world and observe the plants in all their greenness and admire the changing colours of their blossoms, or as we contemplate the sky in its blueness and the stars with their golden brilliance—not forming judgments but letting the things themselves reveal to us what they are—then if we have really succeeded in learning this “surrender,” all things in the world of sense become changed for us, and something is revealed to us in the world of the senses, for which we can find no other word than a word taken from our own soul life.

Suppose this line (a—b) represents the world of the senses as it shows itself to our view. Suppose you are standing here (c) and you behold the world of the senses spread out before you like a veil. This line (a—b) is intended to represent the tones that work upon your ear, the colours and forms that work upon your eye, the smells and tastes that work upon your other organs, the hardness and softness, etc., etc.—in short, the whole world of the senses. In ordinary life we stand in the world of the senses and we apply to it our faculty of judgment. How else do all the sciences arise? Men approach the world of the senses and by many kinds of methods they investigate the laws that prevail there. You will, however, have gathered from all that we have been saying that such a procedure can never lead one into the world of reality, because judgment is not a leader at all; it is only by educating one's thinking, it is only by following the path of wonder and of reverence, etc., that one can ever penetrate to the world of reality. Then the world of the senses changes and becomes something entirely new. And it is important that we should make discovery of this if we would gain any knowledge of the real nature of the sense world.

Let us suppose that a man who has developed this feeling, this attitude of surrender, in a rather high degree, looks out over the fresh bright green of a meadow. At first sight he cannot distinguish the colours of any individual plants; the whole presents a general appearance of fresh green. Such a man, if he has really brought the attitude of surrender to a high degree of development, will perforce feel within him at the sight of the meadow an inner sense of balance; he cannot help being moved to feel this mood of balance—a balance that is not dead but quick with life, we might compare it to a gentle and even flow of water. He cannot help but conjure up this picture before his soul. And it is the same with every taste, every smell and every sense-perception; they inevitably call up in his soul a feeling of inner movement and activity. There is no colour and no tone that does not speak to him; everything says something, and says it in such a way that he feels bound to give answer with inner movement and activity—not with judgment or opinion but with movement, active, living movement. In short, a time comes for such a man when the whole world of the senses flings off, as it were, its disguise and reveals itself to him as something he cannot describe with any other word than will. Everything in the world of the senses is will, strong and powerful currents of will. I want you to mark this particularly. The man who has attained in any high degree to surrender, discovers everywhere in the world of the senses ruling will. Hence it is that a man who has developed in himself even a small measure of this quality of surrender, feels pain if he suddenly sees a person coming towards him wearing some startling new fashion of colour. He cannot help experiencing this inner movement and activity in response to what approaches him from outside; he is sensible of will in everything and he feels united with the whole world through this will. The world of the senses thus becomes, as it were, a sea of infinitely differentiated will. And this means that while other-wise we only feel it as spread out around us, this world of the senses begins to have for us a certain thickness or depth. We begin to look behind the surface of things, we begin to hear behind the surface of things—and what we see and hear is will, flowing will. For the interest of those who have read Schopenhauer I will here remark that Schopenhauer divined this ruling will in a one-sided way in the world of sound; he described music as differentiated workings of will. But the truth is that for the man who has learned surrender, everything in the world of the senses is Ruling Will.

And now when a man has learned to detect everywhere in the world of the senses this ruling will he can go further, he can penetrate to secrets that lie hidden behind the world of the senses and that are otherwise inaccessible to him.

If we would understand aright the nature of the next step we must ask ourselves the question: How is it we gain any knowledge at all of the sense world? The answer is simple: By means of our senses. By means of the ear we acquire knowledge of the world of sound, by means of the eye knowledge of the world of colour and form, and so on. We know the sense world through the medium of our sense organs. A man who confronts this world of the senses in an ordinary everyday manner receives impressions of it and then forms his judgments. The man who has learned surrender receives impressions in the first place through his senses; and then he feels how there streams across to him from the objects active, ruling will; he feels as if he were swimming, together with the objects, in a sea of ruling will. And when a man has come to this point and feels the presence and sway of will in the objects before him, then his own evolution drives him on of itself to the next higher stage. For then, having experienced all the previous stages leading up to surrender—the stages we have called feeling oneself in harmony with the wisdom of the world, and before that reverence, and before that wonder—then, through the penetration of these conditions into the last gained condition of surrender, he learns how to grow together with the objects with his etheric body also, which stands behind the physical body. He grows together with the objects with his physical body, that is with his sense organs, in the active ruling will. When we see, hear, smell, etc., then as men of surrender we feel the ruling will streaming into us through our eyes and ears, we feel ourselves in true correspondence with the objects. But behind the physical eye is the etheric body of the eye, and behind the physical ear is the etheric body of the ear. We are filled through and through with our etheric body. And just as the physical body grows together with the objects of the sense world when man penetrates to the ruling active will, so too can the etheric body. And when this takes place man finds that he has an altogether new way of beholding the world. The world has undergone a still greater change for him than was the case when he penetrated through sense appearance to the ruling will. When our etheric body grows together with the objects of the world, then we have the impression that we cannot let these objects remain as they are in our ideas and in our conceptions and thoughts. They change for us as soon as we come into relation with them. Suppose a man who has already experienced the mood of surrender in his soul is looking at a green leaf, full of sap. He turns the eye of his soul upon the object before him, and at once he finds he cannot leave it as it is, this juicy green leaf; the moment he beholds it he feels that it grows out beyond itself, he feels how it has in it the possibility to become something quite different. You know that a green leaf, as it grows gradually higher and higher up in the plant, turns at last into the coloured flower-leaf or petal. The whole plant is really no more than a transformed leaf. You may learn this from Goethe's researches into nature. So when the student beholds the leaf he sees that it is not yet finished, that it is trying to grow out beyond itself; he sees, in short, more than the green leaf gives him. The green leaf stimulates him to feel within him something of a budding and sprouting life. Thus he grows together—quite literally—with the green leaf, feeling in himself, too, a budding and a sprouting of life. But now suppose he is looking at the dry and withered bark of a tree. If he is to grow together with that he cannot do otherwise than be overcome with a feeling of death. In the withered bark he sees—not more, but less than is there in reality. If anyone looks at the bark from the point of view of external appearance alone he can admire it, it can give him pleasure, in any case he does not see in the dead bark something that shrivels him, piercing him, as it were, in the soul and filling it with thoughts of death.

There is nothing in the whole world that does not, when the etheric body grows together with it, give rise to feelings either of growing, sprouting, becoming, or of decaying and passing away. Everything shows itself in one or other aspect. Suppose, for example, a man who has attained to surrender and has then progressed a further step turns his attention to the human larynx. He will have a strange impression. The larynx will appear to him to be an organ that is quite in the beginning of its evolution and has a great future before it. From what the larynx itself tells, he will feel that it is like a seed, not at all like a fruit or like a withered object, but like a seed. He knows quite clearly from what the larynx itself brings to expression that a time must come in human evolution when the larynx will be completely transformed, when it will be of such a nature that whereas now man only utters the word, he will one day give birth to man. The larynx is the future organ of birth, the future organ of procreation. Now man brings forth the word by means of the larynx, but the larynx is the seed that will in future times develop to bring forth the whole human being—that is, when man is spiritualised. The larynx expresses this quite directly when one lets it tell what it is. Other organs of the human body show us that they have long ago passed their zenith, and we see that they will in future times be no longer present in the human organism.

Such a vision is compelled to behold everywhere on the one hand a growing, a coming into being, and on the other hand a dying away. It sees both as processes going on into the future. Budding, sprouting life—death and decay; those are the two things that we find intermingled with one another all around us when we attain to this union of our etheric body with the world of reality. In connection with this power of vision man has to undergo, when he is a little further on, a very hard test. For with each single being that he meets and that makes itself known to him he will always find that while some parts of the being arouse in him the feeling of budding and sprouting life, other contents or parts give him the feeling of death. Everything that we see behind the world of the senses makes itself known to us as proceeding from one or other of these two fundamental forces. In occultism what we behold in this way is called the world of coming into existence and of passing away. And so, when we confront the world of the senses we are looking into the world of arising and passing away, and what lies behind is Ruling Wisdom.

Behind Will is Wisdom! I say expressly ruling wisdom, for the wisdom man brings into his ideas is as a rule not active at all, but a wisdom that is merely thought. The wisdom man acquires when he looks behind the active will is united with the objects; and in the kingdom of objective things, wherever wisdom rules, it does really rule and the effects of its working find actual expression. When it, so to speak, withdraws from reality, then begins the dying process; where it flows into reality, there you find a coming into existence, there you find budding, sprouting life. We can mark off these worlds in the following way (see diagram 1). We look at the sense world and we see it first as A, and then we look at B which is behind the sense world—the world of ruling wisdom. From out of this world is taken the substance of our own etheric body, what we behold outside us as ruling wisdom—that we behold, too, in our etheric body. And in our physical body we behold, not merely what sense appearance shows, but also ruling will, for everywhere in the sense world we see ruling will.

Yes, the strange thing is that if we have attained to surrender, then when we meet another man and look at him, his colour, whether it be inclined to red or yellow or green, does not seem to us merely red or yellow or green, but we grow together for example, with the rosy-cheekedness of his countenance. We feel the ruling will there, and all that lives and weaves in him, as it were, shoots across to us through the medium of the colour in his cheeks. People who are naturally inclined to observe and note rosy cheeks will say that a rosy-cheeked person is alone healthy. We approach our fellow-man in such a way as to see in him the ruling will. And we may now say, turning to our diagram, that our physical body, which we will denote by this circle here, is taken from the world A, the world of ruling will. Our etheric body, on the other hand, which I will denote with this second circle, is taken from the world of ruling wisdom, the world B. Here you have, then, the connection between the world of ruling wisdom that is spread around us, and our own etheric body—and the world of ruling will that is spread around us, and our own physical body. Now in ordinary life man does not know of these connections, the power to do so is taken from him. The connections are there all the time, but they are, as it were, withheld from man, he can have no influence upon them. How is this?

As a matter of fact there are opportunities in life where our thoughts and whatever we develop in the way of judgments and opinions are not so harmless for our own reality as they are in everyday existence. In the ordinary everyday waking condition, good Gods have seen to it that our thoughts have not too bad an influence on our own reality; they have withheld from us the power our thoughts might otherwise exercise upon our physical body and etheric body; and it would really go very hardly with us in the world if it were not so If thoughts—let me emphasise once more—were to signify in the world of man what the thoughts of the Gods do in reality signify, then man would evoke inside him with every error in thought a slight death process, and little by little he would be quite dried up. And as for an untruth! If with every lie he told man had to burn up the corresponding bit of his brain—as would have to happen if man had power to work into the world of reality—then we should soon see how long his brain lasted! Good Gods have withheld from our soul the power over our etheric body and physical body. But that cannot be so all the time. For were we never to exercise any influence from our soul upon our physical and etheric body then we should quickly come to an end of the forces that are in these bodies, we should have a very short life. For in our soul, as we shall see in the course of these lectures, are contained the forces that must flow ever and again into the physical and etheric body, the forces we need in our etheric body. This inflow of forces takes place at night when we are asleep. In the night there flow to us from the universe, coming to us by way of our ego and astral body, the currents that we need to dispel fatigue. There you have in actual fact the living connection between the worlds of will and of wisdom and the physical and etheric bodies of man. For into these worlds vanish during sleep the astral body and ego. They enter into these worlds and build there centres of attraction for substances which have then to flow out of the world of wisdom into the etheric body and out of the world of will into the physical body. This must go on in the night. For if man were present in his consciousness, this instreaming could not happen rightly. If ordinary man were conscious during sleep, if he were present with all his errors and vices, with all the bad things he has done in the world, then this would create a strange apparatus of attraction in those other worlds for the forces that are to stream in. Then tremendous disturbances would be set up in the physical and etheric bodies by the forces man's ego and astral body would send into them out of the world of ruling wisdom and the world of ruling will.

Therefore have good Gods made provision that we cannot be present when the right forces must stream into our physical and etheric body by night. For the good Gods have dulled the consciousness of man during sleep, that he may not be able to spoil what he undoubtedly would spoil by his thoughts were he conscious. It is on this account that we have to undergo great pain when we are on the path of knowledge and are making the ascent into the higher worlds; if we are in real earnest it must necessarily bring us great pain. You will find in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, a description of how the life of man by night, the sleeping life, is, so to speak, made use of, to help man to rise from the world of external reality into higher worlds. When man begins from out of the world of Imagination to light up his sleep consciousness, when he begins to lighten it with knowledge and experiences, then it is important for him to make sure that he himself gets out of the way and so shuts out of his consciousness all that might cause disturbance to his physical and etheric bodies. It is an absolute necessity, in making the ascent into higher worlds to get to know oneself thoroughly and exactly. When we really know ourselves we cease as rule to love ourselves. Self-love comes to an end when we begin to have self-knowledge; and this self-love—which is always present in a man who has not attained to self-knowledge, for it is an illusion to imagine we do not love ourselves; we love ourselves more than anything else in the world—this self-love must have been overcome if we are to be able to shut ourselves out of our consciousness. We must, in actual fact, come to the point where we say to ourselves: As I am now, I must eliminate myself. We have already gone a long way in this direction in that we have attained to self-surrender. But we must now not love ourselves at all. We must have the possibility at every moment to feel—I must put myself right on one side; for if I do not shut out completely all those things in me that otherwise I quite like to feel in me, errors, trivialities, prejudices sympathies, antipathies—if I do not put these right away then my ascent into higher worlds cannot be made aright.

Because of these errors, disturbing forces will mix with the inflowing stream from higher worlds that has to enter into me to make clairvoyance possible. And these forces will stream into my physical and etheric bodies, and as many as are the errors, etc., so many will be the disturbing processes set up. As long as we are not conscious in sleep, as long as we are not capable of rising into the world of clairvoyance, so long do good Gods protect us and not let these currents from the world of will and the world of wisdom flow into our physical and etheric bodies. But when we carry up our consciousness into the world of clairvoyance, then no Gods are protecting us—for the protection they give consists in the very fact that they take away our consciousness—then we must ourselves lay aside all prejudice, all sympathy, all antipathy, etc. All these things we must put right away from us; for if we have anything left of self-love, or of desires that cling to the personal in us, or if we are still capable of making any judgment on personal grounds, then all such things can work harm to our health—namely, to our physical body and etheric body—when we follow the path of development into higher worlds.

It is exceedingly important that we should be clear about these things. And it is easy to perceive the significance of the fact that in ordinary day life man is deprived of all influence upon his physical and etheric body, his thoughts, in the manner in which he grasps them when he is within these bodies have nothing whatever to do with reality, they are quite ineffective and consequently unable to form any judgment about what is real. By night they would be able to do so. Every false thought would work destructively on the physical and etheric bodies. If we were conscious in the night we should see before us what I have just been describing to you. The world of the senses would appear to us as a sea of ruling will, and behind it would appear the wisdom—the wisdom that builds the world, beating through this will, as it were lashing it up and down into great waves, and with every beat of the waves evoking continually processes of coming into existence and of passing away, processes of birth and of death. That is the true world, into which we have ultimately to look, the world of ruling will and the world of ruling wisdom, and the latter is also the world of perpetual births and perpetual deaths. That is the world that is our world, and it is of immense importance for us to recognise it. For if we once recognise it we begin to discover in very truth a means for attaining to a greater and greater height of surrender; because we feel ourselves interwoven in perpetual births and perpetual deaths, and we know that with every deed we do we connect ourselves in some way with a coming into existence or with a passing away. And “good” will begin to be for us not merely something of which we say: That is good, I like it, it fills me with sympathy. No, we begin to know that the good is something that is creative in the World-All, something that always and everywhere belongs to the world that is arising and coming into being. And of the “bad” we begin to feel how it shows itself everywhere as an outpouring of a process of death and decay. And here we shall have made an important transition to a new world-conception, where one will not be able to think of evil in any other way than as the destroying angel of death, who goes striding through the world, nor of good in any other way than as the creator of continual cosmic births, in great and small. And it is for Spiritual Science to awaken in man a sense of how through this spiritual world-conception he can deepen his whole outlook on life, as he begins to feel that the world of good and the world of bad are not merely as they appear to us in external maya, where we stand before them with our power of judgment and find only that the one is pleasing to us and the other displeasing; no, the world of good is the creative world and the bad is the destroying angel who goes through the world with his scythe. And with every bad thing we do we become a helper of the destroying angel, we ourselves take his scythe and share in the processes of death and decay. The ideas that we receive from a spiritual foundation have a strengthening influence upon our whole outlook on life. This strength is what men should now be receiving that they may carry it into the evolution of the future; for indeed they will need it. Hitherto good Gods have taken care of man but now the time has come in our fifth Post-Atlantean epoch when destiny, and good and evil will more and more be given over into his own hands. Therefore it is necessary to know what good and evil mean, and to recognise them in the world—the one as a creative and the other as a death-dealing principle.

You will have been able to see from yesterday's lecture that there is a connection between the physical body of man and what we call the world of the senses. We saw how the human physical body is of the same substance as we find in the sense world outside us—the substance that we spoke of yesterday, and that we recognised to be of the nature of will. In the sense world outside us and in the human physical body as well, we have active ruling will. To this extent it is, therefore, true to say that the physical body of man is a part of the external world of the senses. You will remember that we went on to speak of how behind the world of the senses lies a world of coming into being and passing away, and in this latter world we found wisdom; we found that its true form may be described as active ruling wisdom. And what we call the etheric body of man is really composed of the substance of wisdom. Now the etheric and physical bodies of man have something more inserted into them, they contain within them an astral body and an ego; for as we know, man as a whole, as we encounter him on earth, is a conjunction of physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego.

At this point I shall have to direct your thought to a matter which may perhaps be a little difficult, but which, when we have once grasped it, will help us very greatly in our understanding of the world and especially of the nature of man himself. You will be ready to accept the assumption that physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego must at some time have been brought together and formed into a whole. Now it is a fact that if one who has developed clairvoyance tries to observe how the four members of man's nature are joined together, then he has the impression—we shall see later why it is important to consider this impression—he has the impression that they are united in an irregular manner. In the human being of the present day we find them combined in such a way as to force us to conclude that at one time or other a disorder and an irregularity has come in. That is a remarkable fact and demands our attention—that an investigation of the four members of man's being leads to the conclusion that they are not placed one into the other as they originally belonged together, but that a disarrangement has at some time come about. This is the impression they make upon one.

Now here we have once more an opportunity of seeing what infinite depths are contained in the primal truths of religion if they are but rightly understood. For what we have expressed as a disarrangement is marvelously described in the Bible in the words that are spoken to man by Lucifer, when he is trying to tempt man. He says: “Your eyes shall be opened and you shall distinguish between good and evil.” In these words lies a very deep truth. We are not to understand that the eyes only are to be opened. The eyes are here representative of all the senses. If we understand Lucifer's words aright we may render them as follows: “All your senses shall work in a different way from the way they would work if you were going to follow the Gods and not me”—i.e. Lucifer. Owing to the influence of Lucifer the senses have a different form of activity from what they would otherwise have. It is extraordinarily difficult for a man of the present day to picture to himself how the senses work, and I shall have here to say something that will strike you as absurd, in my endeavour to make clear for you how the senses would work if no disorder had come into the conjunction of the four members of man's nature through Lucifer. It must sound absurd, because it is almost impossible to believe that some other form of activity in the senses was the original right one, rather than the activity we experience in them. If you are asked the question: What are the eyes of man really for? then what is more natural and obvious than to answer: Why, of course, for seeing. And from that aspect there is certainly some justification for calling a man a fool who says the eyes are not for seeing. In reality, however, if we go back to the beginnings of Earth evolution we find that the eyes of man did not originally belong to the faculty of seeing: that they do so now is due to the temptation of Lucifer. It is like this. The power of vision that man has was not intended to press through the eye and go out beyond to reach so-called “things”; what should have happened if all had gone forward in accordance with the original purposes of the Gods was that in every act of seeing man should become directly conscious of his eye—that is, he should not see the external object, but feel and experience his own eye. He should become aware of the activity that is going on in the eye itself. As it is to-day he is not aware of this but only of what happens by means of the activity in the eye, he is aware of the external object with which he is confronted. He ought really to be involved in his seeing at a much earlier stage, and not only when the seeing has reached the object; in the eye he ought to be already conscious of himself. The activity of the eye—this is what he ought to feel.

In the case of the eye such an experience is scarcely possible to-day unless one has undergone special occult development. With the hand it is possible. A man can at least distinguish whether he is catching hold of an object with his hand or whether his hand is merely moving freely in an aimless way. In the latter case he is conscious only of the actual activity of the hand itself. But if to-day a person directs his power of vision to the eye he sees nothing. This is how it stands with present-day man. It was not, however, so intended from the beginning. The intention was that when the human being considered his eye or his ear or any of his sense organs, he would perceive the ruling will of which we have spoken, he would really swim in the ruling will and recognise the fact from the peculiar manner in which it affected his eye, etc. His experience with the eye would thus have been similar in every respect to his experience with the hand. When you take hold of an object you discover that it is hard or soft, according to whether it yields to your touch. But you are all the time really aware of what you yourself are doing with your hand. This is how it would be also with the eye. But that could only be if the etheric body were rightly fitted into the physical body. Only then should we be able directly to perceive our eye and feel its connection with the ruling will. The etheric body is, however, not rightly fitted into the physical body. That is the remarkable fact we have to recognise. But this is only one example of the disarrangement that exists in the human being. There is no single member of man's nature that is rightly fitted into the other members, everything is in disorder. If it had not been for the Luciferic influence at the beginning of Earth evolution all the members of man's being would have been placed within one another quite differently. That is the point I want to make clear to-day; I want to show you the particular and significant results that have followed on the disorder brought about by Lucifer's influence in the connections between the four members of man's being.

It will be helpful at this point if I begin to write down the facts in tabular form on the blackboard. See table.

We will take first the relation that exists between the physical body and the etheric body which is inserted into it. If, as was originally intended by the Gods who guided human evolution, the etheric body had been poured into the physical body in a perfectly regular manner, then the human being would experience all around him—I can assure you it is hard to find words for it when there is no such experience!—something like a perpetual flowing and trickling of ruling will. Everywhere he would perceive differentiated will, for he would detect a certain difference in the workings of the will according as he was conscious of directing his eye or his ear or some other organ on the world around him. All these organs in their variety would only afford him the possibility of experiencing will in as many new ways, but it would always be will, flowing will. That is what would have happened if the etheric body had been fitted into the physical body in the way that was intended by the Gods. It is, however, not the case. What has happened is that the etheric body is not completely within the physical body, it has, as it were, left a piece of the physical body for itself, it does not penetrate the whole of it; with the result that the physical body has from a certain aspect a surplus of its own activity which it should by right not have. Thus there are places in the physical body of man which are not filled with the etheric body as they should have been in accordance with the original intention of the Divine Spiritual Beings who guide Earth evolution. And these places where the physical is not properly penetrated by the etheric body are where the sense organs have come to development. It is owing to this fact that the sense organs have attained their present form. Hence it is that in the case of every sense organ we find the very remarkable phenomenon of a purely physical activity from which the prevailing life activity is completely excluded.

For consider how you have, for example, in the eye something you can compare with the purely physical workings of a camera obscura, of a photographer's apparatus. It is just as if a piece had been left out in the general penetration of the etheric body. And that is what has actually happened. It is the same with the peculiar inner ear where there is a kind of keyboard in the labyrinth of the ear. The etheric body has been, as it were, pushed back and you have activities that are purely physical in character and are not penetrated with the etheric body. This is the origin of what we call sense impressions. The experience of colour is due to the fact that the etheric body does not penetrate the organ of vision in the proper way, and that consequently purely physical activities are carried on there. And it is the same with all the senses, there is a preponderance of physical body over etheric body. We can, therefore, set this down as our first result. In the relationship between physical and etheric body we have to do with a condition which we may call a preponderance of physical over etheric body. Were this preponderance of the physical body not present then we should not have around us, as we have to-day, the whole expanse of the world of the senses, but man's connection with the world around him would be that he would perceive it all as flowing, surging, ruling will. Were it not for this preponderance of the physical over the etheric body, man would not feel himself to be passive, but active, as he does when he stretches out his hand. We are here stating a fact of extraordinarily deep interest that is actually manifest to higher and occult observation—the fact that the whole world of the senses depends on this, that the etheric body has been, so to say, held up from entering into the sense organs, and that where these are situated there the purely physical world has found place in man.

And now we come secondly to the relation between etheric body and astral body. Again there is not a right and proper penetration the one of the other, but a preponderance shows itself of the etheric body over the astral body in the nature of man. A very slight degree of clairvoyance will quickly lead to an investigation of this preponderance of etheric body over astral body. It does not take much to perceive it. If there were no such preponderance then among other things man would never be able to shed tears. If you observe some one weeping, excreting from the glands of the eye that singular salty fluid, then if you have a slight degree of clairvoyance you will notice at once that there is in this case a too great activity of the etheric body in relation to the activity of the astral body. What he experiences astrally the human being is unable to impress fully into the life of the etheric body; the etheric body has a preponderance over the astral body and this comes to expression in the fact that the etheric body works back on to the physical and presses out the tears from it. And it is the same with all processes of glandular excretion in the human being. They all depend on a preponderance of etheric body over astral. The disturbance of balance, when its effect is continued on into the physical body, comes to expression in the various glandular excretions. Otherwise no excretion would take place when the glands were active; but the activity of the astral body, if it were to coincide with the etheric body, would be used up in the inner movement and activity of the glands. The glands would not expel anything, they would fulfil their whole function in themselves. No expulsion of matter would take place. Thus you see how tremendous to an occult observation appear the consequences of the Luciferic temptation. If Lucifer had not entered into the world order nobody would ever, for example, be able to perspire, but instead of the activity that takes place in perspiration, there would be in the corresponding organs an activity and movement that exhausted themselves inside the organs; nothing at all would be expelled from the glands. So that we may put down as our second point a preponderance of etheric body over astral body. If the peculiar nature and appearance of our sense world is to be traced to the first preponderance, the preponderance of physical over etheric body, then this second preponderance, that of etheric over astral body, must be regarded as the cause of what we may call our impressions and sensations. For man's whole general feeling of his bodily condition comes from this preponderance of etheric body over astral body. It is the subjective expression of this preponderance.

But now, if we would continue the train of thought, we must not proceed diagrammatically. If you were to proceed diagrammatically it would, of course, be perfectly easy, you would simply have to say: He has demonstrated to us a preponderance of physical body over etheric body, and then a preponderance of etheric body over astral body, and now we come to a preponderance of astral body over ego. This is how you would proceed to complete the scheme on purely intellectual foundations. You would, however, get no true result; the train of thought cannot be continued in that way at all. As a matter of fact, whenever you receive a communication of an occult fact and set out to draw conclusions with your intellect in a schematic way, you will always find that reality gives quite a different result. It is no use trying to carry on the train of thought in an intellectual way; sometimes it will be correct for a while, but then it will fail. And here the fact is that we have to take as our third disarrangement an inverted preponderance, namely, a preponderance of astral body over etheric body. Thus it is once more the relationship of these same two bodies that concerns us, and this time occult observation discovers a preponderance of the astral over the etheric body. And this preponderance is the one that in the eyes of man is the most important of the three. For when you consider the human being from a perfectly material point of view you can really imagine him to be as he is pictured in many materialistic books, namely, as nothing else than a great big apparatus of digestion, a sort of machine that eats and digests and builds up its body out of the substances it has received in eating and has elaborated in all kinds of ways. As a matter of fact you find the human being described in this way in books that are written from a materialistic outlook; the picture they give is little more than of a great digestive apparatus, that takes in food, works it up and distributes it to the muscles, bones, sinews, etc. If you look away from all that man is through the fact that he perceives the world of the senses and through the fact that in the whole feeling he has of his body he experiences various glandular processes of excretion—if you look away from all this and consider the human being merely from the point of view of the receiving of nourishment, investigating what happens with the substances from the time they are received through the mouth until the time they are absorbed into the blood stream, then you have before you a material process which is the ultimate physical expression of the preponderance of the astral over the etheric body. You will remember that whenever we consider the world from a spiritual point of view we always have to see behind every phenomenon of the senses a spiritual reality. What the senses can perceive is no more than the external appearance. And so behind all these coarser processes of the receiving and the elaboration of nourishment we have to look for spiritual forces, and these spiritual forces are to be found in the preponderance of the astral over the etheric body. This preponderance is expressed in the normal physical organic life-processes.

It is indeed a strange conclusion to which we have come, and I beg you to regard it closely. You must be clear that the very thing that materialism often sees as the whole human being, the very thing that for most people is the principal concern and care of life—to receive nourishment and to bear it to the various organs of the body—has only come into existence through the fact that the Luciferic influence has given rise to a preponderance of the astral over the etheric body in man. In other words, if it had not been for Lucifer, if Lucifer had not at the beginning of the evolution of man shifted in this way the relationship between the astral and etheric bodies, then the human being would not eat and digest and work over the substances as he does to-day. What, from a materialistic standpoint, is the principal thing about a human being is thus all due to a Luciferic action, for it is nothing else than the result of a displacement between astral and etheric body. The astral body has through Lucifer come in for an extra share of activity and has thereby achieved a preponderance over the etheric body. It is Lucifer's doing and it has had the result of making man a receiver of coarse material nourishment. For man was not destined to receive material nourishment, he was intended to have a kind of existence that did not require it. This fact brings to expression in a marvellous way how through the temptation of Lucifer there has come about what we may call the “expulsion from Paradise.” For to be in Paradise means nothing else than to be a spiritual being and to have no need of physical nourishment. That which appears to the vast majority of people who are materialistically inclined as the greatest pleasure in life—when we see it for what it is, is their expulsion from Paradise. Human beings have not only been punished by being obliged to receive and digest food, but they have been doubly punished. For the very event which as related in the symbols of the Bible was seen to inflict the greatest loss and sorrow to man, the very event which by the expulsion from Paradise makes it necessary for man to take physical food, has become for the majority of human beings one of the keenest enjoyments of life! Such a change has man undergone that to be outside Paradise has become his greatest pleasure. It is indeed a strange fact in human life that we here have to face, but it must be learned and known.

Finally we come to a fourth disarrangement. And the fourth concerns the relationship between the ego and the astral body. Here the Luciferic displacement has brought about a preponderance of the ego over the activity of the astral body. You see what it is that is missing; we have no preponderance of astral body over ego. Such a thing does not exist. One must not just make a diagram, one must always proceed according to observation. As we have seen, in the astral body and etheric body we have first one relation and then its reverse, whereas here we only have the preponderance of ego over astral body. This means that the ego or I has not that relation with the astral body which it was originally intended to have before the entrance of the Luciferic influence; it is more egoistic than it ought to be. This has happened through the Luciferic influence. What then exactly took place to bring about this fourth preponderance? In order to understand this we need first to have a clear idea of what would have been the right and proper relation between I and astral body.

The only way to come to know the right and true relation is to re-establish it. In the human being as he stands to-day in the world, subject as he is to the Luciferic influence, the relation between I and astral body is not in order; the I has the preponderance. Man is more I-ish than he should be. (You must forgive the strange expression; it is literally true.) Now we have in these lectures been pursuing a consideration which leads us to see what the I of man ought really to be like. A right and proper relationship will come about when man undertakes a wise and energetic and patient self-discipline and acquires the qualities we have described under the names of wonder, reverence, feeling in harmony, surrender. The ego will then stand in such a relation to the astral body that an unprejudiced observer will have the impression that the relation is now a true one, that the ego has now cancelled and undone what came in through the Luciferic influence. Only by developing these four qualities of the soul in the very highest degree can the original relationship be righted again. And how does the ego stand then to the astral body? The relationship is a very remarkable one. You can form an idea of it if you will follow attentively some of the chapters in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment. As man is to-day, he is perpetually intimately interwoven with his thinking, feeling and willing. It is not easy to discover a condition in external consciousness where man is merely in his ego and not interwoven with thinking, feeling and willing. Make the experiment of trying to grasp the pure thought of the I. Our friends make valiant attempts to grasp the pure thought of the I when Dr. Unger makes the demand upon them again and again to think this thought of the I apart from all thinking, feeling and willing. They are left breathless in their efforts! (See “Principles of Spiritual Science,” by Carl Unger.)

You see how difficult it is to come to the I of man even in thought, to say nothing of actually separating it in reality from thinking, feeling and willing. In the ordinary way man's soul is traversed all the time with thoughts and feelings and impulses of will, as well as with desires. His ego is never for a moment separated from thinking, feeling and willing. But this separation is what we attain by means of the four conditions of soul as I described them. We become able to stand outside thinking, feeling and willing, and to look upon these as something outside ourselves. Our own thoughts must then be as indifferent to us as are the objects around us. We no longer say: I think—for our thinking has for us the appearance of a process that goes on of itself and is no concern of ours. And it must be the same with feeling and willing. If one reflects a little one is bound to admit that although it may be possible to have this before one as an ideal some day capable of fulfilment, yet man is, as a matter of fact, so mixed up with his thinking, feeling and willing that it is an exceedingly difficult matter for him to extricate himself. He would find it most difficult to go through the world saying to himself: Here am I going through the world, and with me all the time is a companion who hangs on to me because I have grown together with him, who is like a kind of double. All my thinking, feeling and willing go on alongside of me. I am not that which thinks and feels and wills, I am what I am in my I, and I walk by the side of what I carry around with me like three sacks, one filled with my thinking, one with my feeling and one with my willing. But until we have come to a practical realisation of this “three sacks” theory we shall not be able to form any correct idea of how the ego would now stand in relation to thinking, feeling and willing if all were as originally intended by the divine beings before the Luciferic influence interposed. Man was destined to be an onlooker of himself, it was not intended that he should live inside himself. For what was really the nature of the original temptation? Let us put it as tritely as possible:—

Lucifer approached the human I or ego, which man ought to have preserved in all its purity beside the astral body that had been given to him on the Moon, and said something like this: “Look here, Man! It is tedious to go wandering about always with this one single centre-point of ‘I am’ and merely to be able to look on at the rest; it would be much more amusing to dive down into thy astral body. I will give thee the power to do this, and then thou wilt not any longer be standing there on one side with thine ego and looking on at thy double, but thou wilt be immersed in thy double. And then needst not fear that thou wilt be overwhelmed and drowned, I will provide for that, I will give thee some of my own power.” Thereupon the ego of man did dive down into the astral body and was saved from drowning by being inoculated with Luciferic power. And the Luciferic power that man then received was the preponderance of the I over the astral body, it was the excessive egoism, which is a Luciferic quality in man. And what is this quality actually? How does it manifest in life? It shows itself to begin with in the fact that we are involved and entangled first in our thoughts, and then also in our feelings and our impulses of will. In the first place with our thoughts. If it had not been for Lucifer man would never have hit upon the ridiculous idea that he has an intelligence inside him and that he himself cherishes thoughts within him. He would have known that the thoughts are outside him and that he has to look on at his thinking. Man would always have considered and contemplated, and waited till the thought was given to him, waited until the purpose and meaning of the thinking was revealed. You will find this set forth, for example, in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. Man would never have had the idea that he has to connect together all kinds of thoughts and form a judgment or opinion within himself. This forming of judgments within ourselves, independent of revelation, is a Luciferic nature in us. And the whole intelligence of man, in so far as he regards it as his property, is a mistake. It is nothing but the temptation of Lucifer that makes man imagine he should have intelligence. And now you will understand how this intelligence, having come about through a shifting of this kind, can by no means be taken as the criterion for all human comprehension of reality.

I pointed out in my lectures in Carlsruhe (From Jesus to Christ) that for a man who builds upon his intelligence it seems quite reasonable to say: “If I am to understand the Resurrection as part of the Mystery of Golgotha I must simply discard my intelligence altogether. For everything it says contradicts the Resurrection.” So says the man of the nineteenth century, so says even the theologian of the nineteenth century in so far as he is a theologian of the liberal school. But how should he ever expect that the Mystery of Golgotha—a deed that is not entangled with the Luciferic influence, a deed that lies altogether outside Lucifer's domain and came into the world for the very purpose of vanquishing Lucifer—how could he expect that he could ever grasp such a deed with an intelligence that he owes to Lucifer? Nothing can be more obvious than that these things can never be grasped with a man's own intelligence. For his intelligence is Lucifer's gift to him and is not adapted to understanding things that have nothing to do with the working of Lucifer. You see what deep connections lie behind these things. Were the Mystery of Golgotha comprehensible with human intelligence, then, my dear friends, there would have been no need for it to take place. The Mystery of Golgotha would have been quite unnecessary. For the very purpose of it is to balance out the disorder which arose through the Luciferic influence. The Mystery of Golgotha was enacted in order to cure man of that singular arrogance and pride which manifests in a desire to comprehend everything by means of the intellect. This is the very place where we can perceive how limited is the intellect as such. I have frequently protested against the idea that human knowledge is limited, but the intellect as such is certainly limited.

• 1. Preponderance of physical body over etheric body.
• (a) The sense world.
• 2. Preponderance of etheric body over astral body.
• (b) The whole feeling of the body.
• 3. Preponderance of astral body over etheric body.
• Normal organic bodily processes.
• 4. Preponderance of I over astral body.
• N.B.—At (b) Lucifer and Ahriman meet.

Let us now study this table and discover where was the starting point of the shifting or displacement that occurred in man's nature. It is obvious that the first disarrangement to come about was what we have called the preponderance of the I over the astral body. All the Luciferic influence over man began with this—that Luciferic power was given to the I and the I got impurely mixed up with thinking, feeling and willing, and then maintained the Luciferic preponderance over the astral body. The astral body in consequence was able to gain an ascendancy on its part over the etheric body. And thus the whole balance in man was upset. It is just as though by the Luciferic influence a blow had been dealt at the astral body, and the astral body had passed it on and so gained an ascendancy over the etheric. But it can go no further that way. The etheric body does not hand on the blow. It is like hitting a rubber ball. You can push into the ball for a certain distance but then it comes back again. So we can speak of a preponderance of astral over etheric body, and then the story is reversed. For now it is the etheric body that rebounds and asserts a predominance over the astral, giving us a reverse predominance of what we had before. And then follows the predominance of physical body over the etheric body. These latter two strike in the opposite direction. Why do they strike back? It comes about because while here Lucifer is striking in, Ahriman, in the physical and etheric body, is striking back from the other side. Here in the middle, where you have on the one hand the ascendancy of etheric body over astral body and physical body over etheric body, and on the other hand the ascendancy of astral body over etheric body and I over astral body—here in the middle you have Lucifer and Ahriman in collision. Here they come up against one another. Thus, there is in man a centre point where Lucifer and Ahriman meet in their own true nature. And man can either swing in the direction of Lucifer and bore his astral body deeper than is right into his etheric body, or he can take hold of the impetus in the power of Ahriman and strike the etheric body too deep into the astral body. Such are the dynamic effects with which we have to deal.

Our next step will be to realise that everywhere in man's nature we actually have to do with the working of forces. Except for one instance, namely in the case of a preponderance of astral over etheric body, where we have to consider the taking of food and the elaboration of substances in digestion—nowhere but in this one instance have we come across a working of matter. This leads us to feel a necessity to investigate from an occult point of view the nature of what we call substance or matter; and with this question we will begin our considerations tomorrow.

Now we know that this extension is usually reckoned according to three dimensions, height, breadth and depth or length. It is, you will agree, a common, almost a trivial truth that things are extended in space according to three dimensions. We must, therefore, recognise as the most evident characteristic of matter its extension in three dimension. Now, as we saw, we cannot apply conditions of space to what lies in the soul. It is, therefore, obvious that something else must exist in the world, other than what fills up space as substance or matter. For we have evidence, even on the physical plane, of processes and conditions that are not extended in space—soul experiences, as we call them.

Now if we approach soul experiences with as little prejudice as we did the conditions of matter in space we shall very soon find in them another quality without which these soul experiences would not be there at all. And that is, we are bound to admit, that soul experiences take their course in time. Although we cannot say that a feeling or an impulse of will is five yards long or five square yards in size, yet we must admit that what we think or feel, in short all soul experiences, take their course in time. It is not only that we need a particular period of time for experiencing them, but also one soul experience comes earlier, another later. In short, what we, experience in the soul is subject to time. Now as a matter of fact, in our reality, in all that surrounds us and in what we ourselves are, space and time conditions are everywhere mixed. In the outer world things happen in such a way that they are spread out in space and also follow one another in time, each requiring for itself a certain time. Before we can come to the occult truth about all this we must put the question: How then does space stand in relation to time? And so, you see, in this anthroposophical course of lectures we come quite innocently up against a very great philosophical question, one upon which—to speak metaphorically—countless heads have been broken! We come, that is, to the relation of time to space. Perhaps it will not be easy for you to follow the train of thought fully now that we have in such an innocent way come up against the relation of time to space; for the greater number of you have had no special philosophical training. But if you will take a little trouble to try to follow, you will see how fruitful such thoughts are, and how, if you work them over in meditation, they can lead you further in your study.

It is good to take your start from the time which you experience in your own soul. Ask yourself how you experience time in your own soul? Let me speak more clearly. I do not ask you to think of time as you see it on the clock; there you only compare your inner experience with outer processes. I want you now to put right out of your mind all reading of the clock and other outer events. Consider only how does the time relationship express itself in your soul? Ponder over it as deeply as you will, and you will find that you can think of nothing as a standard for time but the following: you can grasp a thought when it is aroused in you by some external perception. You are looking at something, and a thought or idea arises in your soul. When you enquire more exactly into the relationship between yourself and the idea or the thought, you have to answer: While I have the thought, I myself am actually the thought. Try and think the thing over to the very end and you will say: While I am engrossed in the thought, then I am, in my innermost being, the thought. It would be mere prejudice to say that together with this concept you had also the idea of the “I am.” The “I am” is not there while you have surrendered yourself to the thought. You are yourself the thought. Without a certain practical training you cannot be something else simultaneously with the thought which you hold.

Firstly then, man is in the thoughts and feelings which are directly given to him. Suppose you let this piece of chalk incite you to a thought; then, if you exclude everything else, if you are absorbed in the idea that has been stimulated in you by the perception of chalk, your inmost being is one with the idea of chalk. But now suppose you have grasped this idea and all at once you remember that yesterday you also saw chalk; and you compare the idea of chalk that has been given you by direct perception with what you experienced yesterday. And you will be aware that though you are completely identified with the chalk observed to-day you cannot identify yourself with the chalk of yesterday. This latter is a memory picture and must remain so. You have truly become one with the chalk of to-day, but the chalk of yesterday has become something external for you. The chalk observed to-day is identified with your own inner being of to-day; your memory picture is, to be sure, something upon which you look back, but in comparison with the other it is objective and external. And it is the same with everything you have experienced in your soul with the exception of the present moment. The present moment is for the moment your inner being; everything that you have experienced—you have rid yourself of, it is already outside you. You may imagine, if you wish to have a picture of it, that the present moment with your concepts is a snake, and what you put outside you is the cast-off skin of the snake. And as the snake casts its skin again a second and a third time so you can have ever so many cast-off ideas which are for you something external in comparison with your temporary present inwardness. That is to say, as far back as you can remember, you have continually been making outward what was first inward. The idea of the chalk, for example, which you now have, the very next moment you have made it external to you, while you yourself have passed on to something else. That is to say, you are working at a continual exteriorisation. You are perpetually creating something within you and then leaving it behind; this innermost that you have in you at once becomes an outer, just like a sloughed skin. Our soul-life consists in this—that the inner is continually becoming an outer; so that within our own being, within this inner spiritual process, we are able to distinguish between the real innermost and the outer within the inner. We are all the time within our own being, but we have there to distinguish two parts: first, our real inwardness, and secondly, the part of our inwardness which has become an outer.

Now this process which we have seen accomplished of the inner becoming an outer—this really gives the content of our soul-life; for if you think it over you will find you can call your “soul” all you have experienced, right back to the time which you first remember in early childhood. One who has forgotten all that he has ever experienced would actually have lost his ego. Thus in the fact that we can put memories behind us, and yet keep them, like continually cast-off skins—in this possibility lies the reality of our soul-life. Now one can conceive of this reality of soul-life as being fashioned in all manner of different ways. Let me ask you to observe how in each single moment the soul is shaped differently from what it is in any other moment. Suppose you go out into a beautiful starlit night or suppose you listen to a Beethoven symphony; you have in those moments identified with your own inner being a wide region of soul-life. Suppose you step from this starlit night into a dark room; it is as if this soul-life of yours were suddenly shrunk together; only a few ideas are there. Or suppose the symphony comes to an end; then the region of ideas, in so far as they come from hearing, dwindles away for you. And when you sleep then your soul-life shrinks right up until you wake up again and spread it, like a bird ruffling its feathers. So you have a continuous re-shaping of the soul-life. And if we now draw—but this is only a symbol; for we must draw in space, and yet we mean time, which is not spatial—if we would draw the content of our life of soul, then we could form it in many different ways. Here (a) it is shrunk, here (b) it expands, we should have to think of it as shaped most variedly, while here (c) there is always the content of soul-life. From this symbol, making the invisible visible, you can recognise the shrinking and the enlarging. A soul-life which listens to a symphony is richer than one which hears only a single note. So one can say that the soul-life opens out and then draws itself together, expands and contracts—only as we say this we must not let any space conceptions mix in with it. During this expansion and contraction one thing is unquestionably present, and that is inner spiritual movement. Movement! Soul-life is movement.

Only we must think of movement not as movement in space but as we have described it. And this expansion and contraction gives forms. So you have movement, and the outer expression of movement in certain forms. But there are no space forms. The forms here meant are not spatial forms, but forms of expanding and contracting soul-life. And what lives in this expansion and contraction? You will get near the reality if you consider a little what must live therein. Therein live your feelings, thoughts, impulses of will, in so far as that is all spiritual. It is like water which swims along, moving in forms, but it is all spiritual. And now we shall need still another conception in order to realise the whole. We said: Thoughts live therein, conceptions, feelings, impulses of will. But the impulses of will are, in a certain sense, more fundamentally necessary than the thoughts themselves. For if you consider how this soul-life is at times in quicker motion and at times in slower motion, you will perceive that it is really will itself which brings it into motion. If you stimulate your will you can bring the thoughts and feelings into quicker flow; if the will is indolent then it all moves along more slowly. You need the will in order to expand your life of soul. So we have seriatim, first, Will; then, all that lives in feelings and conceptions, all that is within our soul-life—I say advisedly, our life of soul—and this we can grasp as a manifestation of Wisdom; then we have Movement—expansion and contraction; and then Form, which appears as the expression of movement. You can quite exactly differentiate within your soul-life: will, wisdom, movement, form. These weave and live within the life of soul.

It is a pity that this cycle of lectures could not last a month for then we could speak more exactly and fully. And you would see how it can be accurately established that there, in your own soul-life, a process takes place which has its root in the will, and contains within it wisdom and movement and form. Now you will see that the series we have here given for the life of soul follows, in a wonderful way, the names we had to give for the successive hierarchies—Spirits of Will, of Wisdom, and of Movement, and Spirits of Form. In presenting our soul-life in this manner we have, so to say, surprised the hierarchies in one spot, we have really caught them inside there. There they reveal themselves in a most singular way in the inner soul-life of man—and they reveal themselves in such a way that their activity is entirely unspatial. And if we have gained nothing more, we have at least established this important point; we have gained, as it were, a first conception of an important quality of these four hierarchies, namely that they are not of space. We know, therefore, that by “Form” is meant the unspatial spiritually formative power of form. That is very important. So when we speak of “forms” created by the Spirits of Form we do not mean external forms in space but those inner formations that only exist for consciousness and that we can grasp in the course of our soul-life. Everything passes there in time alone. Without time you cannot imagine it at all. If you look away from the illustration, which is of no importance for the thing itself, you must imagine it in so far as you remain within the soul-life, as unspatial space.

And so, my dear friends, when we say that the Spirits of Will worked first on Old Saturn, the Spirits of Wisdom on Old Sun, the Spirits of Movement on Old Moon and the Spirits of Form on the Earth, we must bear in mind the purely inner quality of the Spirits of Form, and we shall have to say: The Spirits of Form created man on the earth in such a way that he still has an invisible form. This agrees, in a wonderful way, with what emerged yesterday. Invisible forms, not forms of space, were first given to man by the Spirits of Form at the beginning of his earthly evolution. And now we must at the same time bear in mind that not only we ourselves but all outer objects that come to meet us, and of which we are aware in the outer world by means of our senses, are nothing less than an external expression of an inner spiritual. Behind every external material thing in space we have to look for something similar in kind to what lives in our own soul. Only, of course, we do not encounter it with the outer senses; it is behind what the outer senses offer.

How can we now represent an activity out beyond that of the Spirits of Form, beyond what they create as not yet spatial form? This is the question we now have to face. When this activity goes further—beyond will, wisdom, movement, form—still further beyond form, what happens then? That is the question. You see, if a process in the universe has come as far as Form—which is still altogether in the realm of soul and spirit, and is not spatial at all—if the process has advanced as far as this super-sensible form, then the next step is only possible through the form, as such, breaking up. And that is exactly what shows itself to occult knowledge. When certain forms, created under the influence of the Spirits of Form, have developed up to a certain point, then they break to pieces. And if you now fix your mind upon these shattered forms, if you think of something that arises through the breaking up of forms that are still super-sensible—then you have the transition from the super-sensible to the sensible and spatial. Broken-up form is matter. Matter, as it occurs in the universe, is for the occultist nothing more than form broken, shattered and split asunder. If you could imagine that this chalk were invisible and yet had this characteristic parallelepiped form, and if you were then to take a hammer and strike the chalk smartly so that it crumbled into a lot of little pieces, then you would have broken up the form. Supposing in the moment in which you broke up the form the invisible were to become visible—then you would have a picture of the origin of matter. Matter is spirit that has developed as far as form and then burst and broken into pieces and fallen together in itself.

Matter is a heap of ruins of the spirit. It is extraordinarily important to grasp this definition. Matter is a heap of ruins of the spirit. Matter is, therefore, in reality spirit, but shattered spirit.

When you come to think it over, my dear friends, you will perhaps say: “Yes, but we have spatial forms such as the beautiful crystals; in the crystals we have very beautiful spatial forms—and now you say that all matter is ‘a heap of ruins of the spirit,’ is ‘shattered spirit.’” Let me give you a picture of it.

Think of a falling cascade of water [see diagram (a)]. But imagine it is invisible, you do not see it. And here (b) you put an obstacle in its way. When the water strikes here (b) it scatters into drops (c). Now we are imagining that the cascade of water is invisible, but that what is broken up becomes visible. Then you would have here a cascade shattered in pieces, and would have a picture of the origin of matter. But now you must think away this obstacle down below, for it does not exist; if it did we should have to assume that there was already matter there. You must imagine it in this way. Without there being any such obstacle you have matter—spiritually, that is, supersensibly—you have matter in movement. In the act of assuming form, it is in movement; for movement precedes form. There is not anything anywhere but is permeated by the deeds of the Spirits of Movement. And this movement, this form, arrives at last at a point where it becomes, so to say, exhausted and splits asunder in itself. We must so grasp it that we have, to begin with, something streaming out which is entirely soul and spirit. Its impetus is limited, it comes, as it were, to the end of its energy, is thrown back upon itself and thus breaks to pieces. So wherever we see matter we can say: Behind this matter lies a super-sensible, which has come to the limit of its activity and there split up. But before it split up it still had—inwardly and spiritually—form. And when it shattered the spiritual form went on working in the separate scattered ruins. Where it works strongly, then, after the breaking and scattering, the lines of the spiritual forms continue, and in the lines they then describe we can still trace an after-working of the spiritual lines. There you have the origin of crystals. Crystals are reproductions of spiritual forms which through their own impetus still kept their original direction but in the opposite sense.

What I have here sketched for you is very nearly exactly what occult observation finds in the case of hydrogen. The origin of hydrogen is as though a ray rushed out from eternity, became exhausted and flew asunder; but we must draw it as if here the lines overshot themselves and so kept their form.

This is what hydrogen looks like to the occult observer. There is something like an invisible ray coming from endless world distances and finally breaking—like a ray which flies asunder. In short, matter everywhere can be called broken spirituality. Matter is indeed nothing else than spirit, but spirit in a broken-up condition.

There is still another difficult idea which I must place before you, which is connected with what I said at the beginning of the lecture. I said that within the soul and spirit itself we have to distinguish between an outer and an inner. Now it is of such contrasts that all space dimensions are really composed; so that everywhere where you have a dimension of space you can think of it as proceeding somewhere or other from a point. That point is the “inner,” and all the rest is the “outer.” For the plane, the straight line is an inner and all the rest an outer. Space is, therefore, nothing else than something that originates together with matter when spirit is shattered and thereby goes over into material existence.

Now it is extremely important to understand the following. Suppose this breaking-up of spirit into matter happens in such a way that the spirit breaks, shatters, of itself, without having come up against any kind of external obstacle that should cause it to split up and shatter. Imagine that the breaking-up takes place, so to say, in the void. If spirit breaks into the void then mineral matter results. Thus spirit must first of all actually break up in itself from out of spirit: then mineral matter arises. But now suppose you do not have a process that takes place in the universe in such a virginal way; suppose you have a breaking that takes place out of the spirit but finds a world already prepared; a breaking in pieces that does not take place into the void but, for example, into an etheric corporality that is already there. As I said, if it develops into the void the result is mineral matter. But we are supposing now that it develops into an already present etheric corporality. Thus the spirituality splits up and breaks into an etheric body, and the breaking material and the etheric body are already present and prepared. Not into the “virgin soil” of the world but into the etheric body, spirit breaks and becomes matter. And when this is the case plant matter originates.

Now yesterday we came across a peculiar etheric substance. You will remember what we wrote on the blackboard. We found an etheric body which outweighed the astral substance, which, so to say, overshot the astral substance. And we said that that was due to Luciferic influences which had been brought to bear upon man. But we found something more. We found also physical corporality which had a preponderance over etheric substance, that is to say over the etheric body. As a matter of fact, we found that first, did we not? I want you now to give your attention for a moment to this remarkable connection that we found in the badly combined organisation of man—a connection between the bodies which is really entirely due to Luciferic influence. There, where the physical meets with the etheric body and the etheric body is everywhere diverted by the preponderance of the physical body, we have, not a condition where spirit breaks and scatters merely into etheric substance as such, but where it rushes into a bodily condition that is certainly etheric, but which is outweighed by the physical. And when spirit breaks into such a substance, then nerve substance, nerve material, arises. Spirit streaming into etheric corporality that is overweighed by physical corporality gives rise to nerve matter.

We have now three stages in materiality. First, the ordinary mineral matter that we come across in the sense world. Then the matter that we find in the bodies of the plants; and, lastly, the matter that we find in the body of man and of animals, and that arises owing to the presence of irregularities in these bodies. Now think of all we should have to do if we wished to reckon up all the various conditions that give rise to the manifold kinds of matter in the world! We saw yesterday what a number of irregularities can occur through the Luciferic influence. We saw, for example, how the etheric body may outweigh the astral body. When spirit rushes into an astral body of this kind, that is, into an astral body which is outweighed by an etheric body, then we have muscle matter. This is why the matter of which nerves and muscles are composed has such a strange and unique appearance; you cannot compare it with anything else. It is because in both cases the matter comes into existence in such a complicated manner. It will help you to form a true picture if you think of the different results you obtain when you take some molten metal, and first let it spurt up into the air, then into water and then, let us say, into a hard firm substance. In a like complicated way do the various kinds of matter in the world arise. My main purpose in all I am telling you to-day is to show you into what depths of existence we have to descend if we want to investigate these things at their, foundation. Consider, for instance, a condition that takes us still further into matter; consider the irregularity brought about where the ego outweighs in its ego-ness the astral body, when you have spirit spraying and dispersing into this condition, the result—but only after long détours—is bony matter. It all depends ultimately, as you see, on the conditions under which the matter sprays up and scatters when it arises out of spirit. Keep well in mind what I have told you even if you have not been able to follow every thought in detail. You will have grasped the main point, which really comes to this—that we have to look upon matter always and everywhere as spirit that is splitting up and scattering, but that there can also be something already there which opposes the breaking spirit. And according as this or that meets it, the spirit will spray out into something different; and thus arise the various configurations of matter—matter that composes nerves, muscles, plants, etc.

But now a question will arise in your minds. You will ask: How would it have been with man if the Luciferic influence had not entered into him in this connection? We related yesterday how it would have been in many different aspects, but what would have happened in this connections. Well, you see, man could not have had such nerves as he has to-day. For these nerves only arise in their particular form of matter through the fact of the irregular connection of the bodies of man. Similarly he could not have had bones or muscles if it had not been for the Luciferic influence. In short, we have seen how the various kinds of matter arise through forms being spiritually poured into something which is only there at all because of Luciferic influence. None of these different substances—muscle, nerve, etc.—could have come into existence without the Luciferic influence. With still more intensity than we did yesterday must we ask the question: What then is man altogether as material man? Man as he meets us externally is simply and solely a result of the Luciferic influence. For unless the Luciferic influence had been there he would have had no nerves, no muscles, no bones in the present-day sense of the words. Materialism describes nothing but what Lucifer has made of man. Materialism is thus in the most eminent degree discipleship of Lucifer; it rejects all else.

Let us then ask: What would man be like if he had remained in Paradise? In order that tomorrow we may be able to carry our study further—and with rather easier conceptions—I will give you now to-day a brief sketch of what man would have become if it had not been for the Luciferic influence. If it had not been for this influence, then we should have in human evolution on the earth, to begin with, what came from the influence of the Spirits of Form. For the Spirits of Form were the last Spirits of the higher hierarchies who worked into man. Now these Spirits of Form created a purely super-sensible form—nothing spatial at all. What man would have been—I will only sketch it for you in quite a cursory manner to-day—what man would have been, no outer eye could see, no outer senses could perceive; for pure soul forms cannot be perceived by outer senses. What man would have been coincides with something I have described in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds—it coincides with what is there given as Imaginative knowledge. An “Imagination” would man have been, created by the Spirits of Form. Nothing of a sense nature, purely super-sensible Imagination.

If we were to draw a rough diagram of what man would have been like—(see following diagram)—we should have an Imagination picture of what the Spirits of Form created as an Imagination of man. But it would also be permeated with what remained over in man from the creative working of the earlier hierarchies. We should have to show it in our diagram as permeated first of all with what was left in man from the Spirits of Movement, the Spirits of inner Movement (2). That would reveal itself to us as what we have described in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds with the words “Inspired Knowledge.” For these movements would only be recognisable as Inspiration. This means that we should have first the complete man, consisting of Imagination, and then we should have as well movement—Inspiration. And what the Spirits of Wisdom give would be Intuition. This would be a positive inner content with which all the rest would be in a manner filled out. We must put here (3) Intuition, that is to say, immediate being—Beings. And the whole we would behold as proceeding out of the cosmos and enclosed in an egg-shaped aura which would be the outcome of the working of the Spirits of Will. Such would be the super-sensible nature of man, consisting of contents which would be accessible to super-sensible knowledge alone. Fantastic as it may appear, it is the real Man.

If we may say so symbolically, it is Man in Paradise, who does not consist of the material contents of which man now consists but who has a super-sensible nature throughout.

And what happened through the Luciferic influence. Breaking-up spirit (that is to say, matter), spurted, as it were, into the Imaginations, and the result stands there to-day in the bony system of man. The bony system is the Man of Imagination filled out with matter. Matter does not belong to what is really the higher Man; through the Luciferic influence it has been shot into what would otherwise only be Imagination. We must picture to ourselves—if such a thing were not absurd—that there was a time when one could quite easily pass through a human being, but that then these Imaginations drew together, and, in addition, were afterwards filled out with bony substance. Nowadays we should knock up against bones if we tried to pass through a human being. But man only later became impenetrable.

That which is in man from the Spirits of Movement is filled out with muscle substance, and that which would be perceived as Intuition is filled out with nerve substance. It is only when we get beyond all these that we come to the super-sensible. With the etheric body of man we are already in the super-sensible. The etheric body is to-day only in the smallest degree material; it appears as very fine jets or sprays of the etheric, giving rise to a matter finer than that of which nerves are made, a kind of matter that does not really come into consideration for us here at all.

So you see, man is really a being who has undergone a great coarsening in his nature. For were he as he was originally intended in the purposes of the Gods he would have no bones, but his form would consist in super-sensible “Imagined” bones; he would have no muscles to serve as an apparatus for movement, but he would have super-sensible substance moving within him; whereas now what moves in him has been everywhere interlarded with muscle substance. The super-sensible movement which was given to man by the Spirits of Movement has become physical movement in the muscles, and the intuition given by the Spirits of Wisdom has become in the man of the senses nerve substance. Nerve substance has been, so to say, crammed into the Intuition. And so when you find a drawing of the skeleton in an anatomy book you can think to yourself: It was originally intended to be a pure Imagination and has become so coarsened by the Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences that it meets us to-day as dense, thick, hard bones that can be broken and fractured. So fast and firm have the Imaginations become! And now do you still say that man cannot find in the physical world any reflection of the world of Imagination! Whoever knows what the skeleton really is may find, when he looks at it, a picture of the world of Imagination. And when you see a picture of the man of muscle you really ought to say to yourself: That is an utterly unnatural picture, it is inwardly untrue. In the first place I see it, whereas I ought to hear it spiritually. For the true state of the matter is this—rhythmic movement has been interlarded, by a super-sensible process, with muscle substance which does not really belong to it at all; what remains ought not to be seen but heard, like the swaying movement of music. You should really hear Inspirations. And what you see pictured there as the man of muscle—are the Inspirations of Man made rigid in matter.

Finally we come to the man of nerves. The man of nerves we ought really neither to see nor to hear, but only to perceive in an altogether spiritual manner. From a cosmic point of view there is a complete distortion in the fact that we have visibly before us what should only be grasped in purest spirituality. It is in reality a spiritual sheath that has been, so to speak, injected with physical matter. We see before us visibly what should only be perceived as an Intuition. The expulsion from Paradise means simply this—that man was originally in the spiritual world, that is to say, in Paradise, and he there consisted of Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition—that is, he was in an entirely super-earthly existence. And then, owing to the very conditions he had himself induced under the Luciferic influence, he received into him an inrush of breaking spirit, of matter. Matter is thus something with which we are filled but which does not belong to us. We bear it in us, this matter, and because we bear it in us we must die a physical death. There you have, in point of fact, the cause of physical death, and of much besides. For inasmuch as man has left his spiritual condition he lives here in physical existence only until matter gains the victory over what holds it together. For the nature of matter is such that it is perpetually trying to break up and go to pieces, and the matter in the bones is only held together by the power of Imagination. When the power of the bones gains the upper hand then the bones become incapable of life. It is the same with the muscles and the nerves. So soon as the matter in the bones, muscles and nerves gains the upper hand over Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition and is able to break asunder, in that moment must man lay down his physical body. There you have the connection between physical death and the Luciferic influence. We shall follow it up tomorrow by showing how evil, too, and many other things—illnesses, etc.—have come into the world.

Yesterday's lecture achieved this result, that at the end of all our various complicated considerations we were able to obtain an idea of how we are to picture matter, the thought picture we are to make of matter and substance. We found that we must conceive of matter as broken spiritual forms—pulverised spiritual forms. And as we went on to speak of how we, as human beings, are yoked to material existence, of how the broken and scattered spiritual form has penetrated into us men of earth and filled out our being, we found ourselves inevitably led to give further consideration to this most essential fact of all material existence, a fact that has been beautifully represented as the expulsion from Paradise. We had to consider, that is to say, the process by which man is penetrated with earth matter. You will have formed the idea from what was said yesterday—that is, if you followed what was said not merely with conceptions of thought, but entering a little into its deeper meaning—you will have formed the idea that man is in reality a kind of double being. Let me remind you of what we pointed out the day before yesterday when we showed how it was through the Luciferic influence that what we may call our sense perceptions were inserted into our being, it was through Luciferic influence that we as men of earth received our various sense perceptions. We indicated, you will remember, that these sense perceptions, which belong essentially to earth, were, as a matter of fact, not predetermined for man from the beginning, but instead a kind of intimate living together with the ruling Will; and that the hearing we have to-day with the ear, the seeing with the eye and the perceiving with the other organs of sense, are processes which are directly due to Luciferic influence. Then we were able to go on to show how a more inward process, namely, what appears in our body as the processes of gland secretion, has come about through a further disarrangement in the members of man's organisation, which we described. And, finally, the quite normal organic activity of nourishment and of the digestion of substance in the human body—this we referred back to a kind of preponderance of activity in the astral body over the activity in the etheric body, which preponderance was again due to Luciferic influence. Such was the result of our study the day before yesterday. We saw, that is, how the coarse material processes in man—nourishment and digestion, gland secretion, sense perception—are all, as they occur in man, to be attributed to the influence of Lucifer. Yesterday we found from another aspect that what we call nerve substance is again due to Luciferic influence, and similarly muscle substance and bone substance.

Let us consider a little further this double being in man. On the one hand we have seen that sense perception, glandular activity and the whole organic process of metabolism are due to Luciferic influence, and on the other hand that the very presence of nerves and of the human systems of muscle and bone are similarly due to the same Luciferic influence. What kind of relation is there between these two men—on the one hand the man of senses, glands and digestion, and on the other hand the man of nerves, muscle and bone? What cosmic task is set for these two, coupled closely together as they are in the nature of man? Now if you will think it over you will easily—even without any further occultism—come to the idea that all that is connected with the activity of senses and of gland, as well as all that is connected with the metabolic system, belongs to what is transitory and feeting. We need only look at it in a superficial way in order to see that when it has played itself out in man it passes away and is gone. It is something man leaves behind him. Let us make that fact quite clear and present to our minds. There is no lasting and eternal purpose to be fulfilled in the performance of these organic activities. You only need to look round a little and learn from what science and everyday life can teach in order to realise how terribly these processes enclose us in this life.

We are in this aspect mere apparatus for nourishment and digestion, etc.; it is like a wheel that goes round and round perpetually in the same way. Unless we are prepared to reckon it as a particular step forward in human nature when man develops, in the course of years, as he has occasion, a refined taste for this or that special food or drink, we shall be obliged to say that we can find extraordinarily little progressive evolution in this perpetual treadmill of eating and digestion. It repeats itself again and again in the same way, and that we as human beings, in so far as we have to carry out these activities, have thereby any special worth for eternity—well, I hardly think there is anyone who could even allow himself to dream such a thing. Gland secretion, too, has really fulfilled its task as soon as it has taken place. It has, of course, its significance for the life of the organism as a whole, but it has no eternal value. Nor has sense perception as such, for sense impression comes and goes. Think how pale and dim, after even a few days, is what you have received in the way of sense impressions, how entirely and radically different memory is from sense perception. You will, I think, be ready to admit that though sense perceptions are often very beautiful and bring delight to the life of man in their immediate experience and observation, they have nevertheless no value for eternity. That is quite certain. For what has become of the value of the sense impressions you received, perhaps as a little child or as an older boy or girl? All the sights and sounds which penetrate then into your eye or your ear—where are they now. How pale are our memories! When you contemplate this thought—that man, in so far as he is a man of senses, of glands and of digestion, has by virtue of these activities no worth for eternity—then you will easily be able to unite it with the thought we expressed yesterday in a general way and that we can, unfortunately, only indicate very slightly in this short course of lectures—the thought, namely, of scattering form, of form that is breaking and scattering and dispersing. When form sprays into these activities, when shattered form, that is to say matter, is driven into the organism it brings about sense activity, gland secretion and metabolic activity. Hence it is evident that in these activities we have to do with breaking form, with a form that breaks to pieces. It is nothing more than special manifestations of the destruction process in form that meets us in sense activity, gland secretion and the activity of digestion. They are particular processes of what we can describe in general as the destruction process in form, or as the shooting of form into matter.

When, however, we come to nerve activity, muscle activity and the strength and effective virtue of the bones in man, the case is altogether different. We were able to show yesterday that in the bony system we have Imagination that has become material, in the muscular system Inspiration that has become material and manifests in movement, and in the nervous system materialised Intuition. And now we have reached a point where we can go on from this and give a fuller description of a truth that can only be partially described in more general anthroposophical lectures. When man passes through the gate of death, gradually little by little through decay or combustion or however it may be, his bony system falls to pieces. But what remains when the bony system crumbles away in the material sense is the Imagination. The Imagination is not lost. It remains in those substances which we still have in us even when we have passed through the gate of death and enter Kamaloka or Devachan. We retain in us a picture form which the thoroughly experienced clairvoyant does not indeed find to be quite like the bony system of man; but when a less trained clairvoyant lets it work upon him he finds an outward similarity in the form to the bony system; and on this account is death, not without some justification, represented in the Imagination of the skeleton. The picture goes back to an untrained, but for all that, a not altogether mistaken clairvoyance.

And combined with this Imagination is what remains from the muscles, when they decay in the physical sense. From the muscles remains the Inspiration, of which they are in reality only the expression; for the muscles are Inspirations steeped, soaked in matter. The Inspiration remains for us when we have passed through the gate of death. That is a most interesting fact. And so to from the system of nerves, when the nerves themselves have undergone their process of decay, we have left after death the Intuition. All these are actual constituent parts of our astral as well as our etheric body.

You know that man does not lay aside his etheric body completely; an extract from the etheric body we take with us when we have passed through the gate of death. But this is not all. There is something else we have now to discover. Man carries his system of nerves continually through the world, and this system of nerves is nothing else than Intuition interspersed with matter. As man bears this system of nerves through the world it is really so that in the places where the nerves are situated in the human organism there is always Intuition, and this Intuition rays out a spirituality which man has perpetually around him like kind radiating aura. It is thus not only a question of what we take with us when we go through the gate of death; but we have also to consider the Intuition which we are sending out from us all the time, in proportion as the nerves decay. A process of decay is going on in you all the time, you need to be continually formed anew—even although in the case of the nerves there is a greater measure of durability that elsewhere. A constant steaming out takes place which can only be perceived by means of Intuition. So that we may say spiritual substance—a substance that is perceptible to Intuition—is perpetually raying out from man in proportion as his physical nerve system goes to pieces. So that you will see from this, inasmuch as man makes use of his physical system of nerves, inasmuch as he uses it up and brings it to destruction, he is not without significance for the world. He has, in fact, great significance. For it depends on the use man makes of his nerves, what kind of intuitively perceived substances stream Inspiration. And this outstreaming takes place in such a way that it is continually peopling the world with infinitely finely differentiated processes of movement. Inspired substances stream out from man into the world. (The words are not very happy but we have no others.) And from man's bones there streams out what we may call Imaginatively perceived substance. There you have the most extraordinarily interesting fact. Let me enlarge on it a little, not in order to overfeed you with results of clairvoyant research, but because it is really interesting.

Through this radiating from the bones as they decay man literally leaves behind him, everywhere he goes, pictures; that is to say, spirit pictures perceptible by means of Imagination. Fine shadow pictures of us remain behind wherever we have been. After you have gone out of this hall a finer and well-trained clairvoyance could still perceive on the chairs fine shadow pictures. They would be perceptible for a time until they were received into the general world process—delicate shadow pictures of each individual which have been rayed out from his bony system. These Imaginations are the cause of that unpleasant feeling one has sometimes when one comes into a room that has been lived in before by an uncongenial person. The feeling is due, in the main, to the Imaginations he has left behind. One still meets him there in a kind of shadow picture. And in this connection a sensitive person is not far behind the clairvoyant, for he has an uncomfortable feeling about what another person has left behind him in a room. The clairvoyant has only this advantage, that he can make visible to himself in an Imaginative picture what the other only feels more instinctively.

But now what happens to all that we let radiate out of us in this way? All that rays forth from us in this way, my dear friends—take it altogether and you have, in very deed and truth, the whole influence that is exerted by us on the world. For whatever you do, when you do it, you move, you bring your system of bones and muscles into movement. Not only so, but even when you only lie and think you are still raying forth from you substance that is perceptible to Intuition. In short, whatever activity you engage in you are sending out this spiritual substance into the world, it is perpetually passing over from you into the world. Now the fact is, if these processes were not taking place there would be nothing left of our earth when it came to the end of its evolution, nothing left of it but pulverised matter which would pass over like dust into universal space. But something is saved through man from the material process of the earth and lives in the general cosmos, in the universe; and it is what can arise through Inspiration, Intuition and Imagination. In this way man gives to the world that wherefrom the world builds itself up anew. Man, as it were, provides the building-stones. This it is that will continue to live as the soul and spirit of the whole earth when this earth's material substance is rent and shattered like a corpse; even as the individual soul and spirit nature of man lives on when man has passed through the gate of death. Man bears his individual soul through the gate of death; the earth bears over into the Jupiter-existence what has come of the Imaginations and Inspirations and Intuitions of man. There you have the great difference that exists between the two men in man. The man who perceives with his senses, who secretes in his glands, who digests and who nourishes himself—that is the man who is destined for what is cast off, he is of time and passes away. But that which is the result of the presence of nerves and muscle and bone—that is incorporated into the earth, in order that the earth may thereby continue to exist.

And now we come to something which stands like a great mystery in our whole existence, and which, because it is in very truth a mystery, cannot be grasped by the intellect; rather is it for the soul to believe it and penetrate to its depths. It is, none the less, perfectly true. That which man lets stream out from him into his environment divides itself quite distinctly into two parts. There is, firstly, that part of the Inspiration, Intuition and Imagination upon which general cosmic existence, so to say, depends, the cosmos receives it, and drinks it in. But there is another part which cosmic existence does not receive but, on the contrary, rejects. Cosmic existence makes its attitude quite clear, as much as to say: “These Inspirations and Intuitions and Imaginations I can use, I absorb them in order that I may carry them over to the Jupiter existence.” But others cosmic existence rejects, it refuses to receive them; and the result is these other Intuitions, Inspirations and Imaginations, being nowhere received, remain as such for themselves; they remain—spiritually—in the cosmos, they cannot be disintegrated. Thus, what we ray forth from us falls into two parts, that which is gladly received by the cosmos and that which the cosmos rejects. The cosmos is not pleased with the latter and leaves it alone. It remains where it is. How long does it remain? It remains there until such time as the human being comes and himself destroys it by means of outstreamings, which are of a kind able to destroy it; and as a general rule no other man has the power to destroy outstreamings that are rejected by the cosmos than the one who himself sent them out. Here you have something of the technique of karma, here you have the reason why we must ourselves meet again in the course of our karma all those Imaginations, Inspirations and Intuitions which have been rejected by the cosmos. For we must ourselves destroy them and annihilate them; the cosmos receives only what is correct and right in thought, what is beautiful in feeling and what is morally good and sound. Everything else it rejects. That is the secret, that is the great mystery. And whatever is false in thought, whatever is ugly in feeling and whatever is morally evil—a man must himself erase from existence if it is to be no longer there; and he must do so through the necessary thoughts and feelings or will impulses or deeds. It will follow him all the time until he has erased it. And so you see it is not true to say that the cosmos consists only of neutral laws of nature or expresses itself only in neutral laws of nature. The cosmos that is all around us—of which we believe we can perceive with our senses and grasp with our intellect, has quite other forces in it as well. If we may put it in this way, the cosmos vigorously repels and repudiates the evil, the ugly and the false and is eager to receive into itself the good, the beautiful and the true. It is not merely at stated times that the powers of the cosmos sit in judgment, but this sitting in judgment is something that goes on throughout the whole of earth evolution.

And now we can find an answer to the question: How does the evolution of man stand in relation to the higher spiritual Beings?

We have seen how on the one hand the man of senses, glands and digestion has come into being through Luciferic influence. And the other man, too, we can in a sense attribute to Luciferic influence. But whereas the first man is a man doomed to destruction, destined solely for time, it is the part of the other man to save human nature for eternity, for duration, to carry over something human into a future existence. The man of nerves and muscle and bone has the task of carrying over what man experiences on earth. And so you see in reality man fell down from his spiritual height when he became the first man—the man of senses, glands and digestion—and is gradually working his way up into spiritual existence through having received as a counterpoise the second man—the man of nerve, muscle and bone. But now the strange thing is that this excretion of Intuitive, Inspirational and Imaginative substance could not take place in any other way than through the material processes, being processes of destruction. If our nerves and muscles and bones were not perpetually decaying, if instead they were to remain as they are, then we should not be able to send out from us this spiritual substance. For it is only the destruction and decay in material existence that can give occasion for the spiritual to light up and burst into flame. And thus if our nerves and muscles and bones could not decay and finally be destroyed in death, then we should be condemned to be chained to this existence on the earth and not be able to partake in the further evolution that goes on into the future. The present would become hardened into stone for us, and there would be for us no evolution on into the future. Like two balancing forces—each holding the other in equipoise—are the forces that play in the one and in the other man within us.

And now, in between the two, as it were mediating between the two, we find a substance of which we have frequently spoken in our more general lectures but to which we have as yet made little allusion in this connection. Between the two stands the blood—which is in this connection also a “special fluid.” For as we have seen, all that we have learnt to know as nerve substance, etc., has only become so in those particular workings of force which were due to the action of the Luciferic influence. But in blood we have something which has directly undergone, as substance itself, the Luciferic influence. You will remember we saw how the manner in which physical body, etheric body and astral body work into one another would be different, had it not been for the Luciferic influence. But there we have to do in a certain respect with super-sensible things which only afterwards take up matter into themselves; which work upon matter with the Luciferic influence they had themselves first undergone, and make it what it is. The substance of nerve and muscle and bone owes its existence to the fact that certain bodies of man are irregularly put together. Upon the substances as such Lucifer has no influence; for these substances arise as the result of what he has done, they are there because he has displaced, disarranged, the bodies. Where Lucifer approached the human being he brought about a disarrangement as between the bodies. But upon the blood Lucifer works directly—upon the blood as matter, as substance. Blood is the one case—and therefore a “special fluid”—where in the material substance itself we have evidence that present-day man is not as he was really intended to be, is not as he would have been but for the Luciferic influence. For blood has become something quite different from what it should have been.

Again, you will say, a rather grotesque idea! But it is true. Recall what we said yesterday about the whole origin of matter. We said that matter arises when spiritual form comes to a kind of boundary or limit and there breaks and scatters; this pulverised form then shows itself as matter. That is the actual earthly matter. It really only occurs directly in this way in the mineral world, for the other substances are changed and modified through being taken hold of by other things that intervene. The substance of blood, however, as such, is a unique substance.

Blood substance was originally also destined to come first of all to a certain limit. Suppose you have here (a) purely spiritual form-rays of the blood substance, and here (b) its force is exhausted. Now according to the tendencies originally inherent in it, blood substance was not meant to be dispersed and sprayed into space, but here at the boundary (b) it was to become just very slightly material and then spray back into itself, spray directly back again into the spiritual. That is how the blood ought to have been. To put it rather crudely, blood ought only to have come so far as to form as it were a skin of substance, fine and slight, it ought only to have come to the point of beginning to be material. It should be forever shooting out of the spiritual for a moment, becoming matter just to the extent of being materially perceptible, then again shooting back into the spiritual and being received up again into it. A perpetual surging forth from the spiritual and shooting back into it again—that is what blood should have been. Its inherent tendencies are directed to this end. Blood was designed to be a perpetual flashing up of light in the material. It was really intended to be something entirely spiritual. And it would have been so if men had at the beginning of earth evolution received their ego from the Spirits of Form alone; for then they would experience their ego through the resistance created by the momentary lighting up in the blood. In the lighting up in the blood man would experience the “I am”; it would be the organ for his ego perception. That would, however, be the one and only sense perception which man would have had at all; the others would not be there if everything had happened without the Luciferic influence. Man would have lived in union together with the ruling Will. The single sense perception that was designed for man was this—in the flash of blood substance and in the immediate rush back into the spiritual, to perceive his ego. Instead of beholding colours and hearing tones and perceiving tastes man ought really to live within the ruling Will; he ought to be, as it were, swimming in it. What was designed for him was that from out of the spiritual World-All, into which he would be placed as a pure Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition, he should gaze down upon a being on the earth or in the environs of the earth—not feeling to himself: “I am in that being,” but: “I gaze down there—it belongs to me—the spiritual blood becomes for one moment material, and in what flashes up to me I perceive my I.” The one and only sense perception which should have come is the perception of the I or ego, and the one and only substance which was intended for man in the material world is the blood in this form of momentary flashing up. So that if man had become like this, if he had remained the man of Paradise, he would look down from the World-All upon that which was destined to symbolise him on this earth and to give him the consciousness of I, namely, a purely spiritual being consisting of Imaginations, Inspirations and Intuitions, within which the I shoots up in the attempt to break through. And in this flash man would be able to say: “I am, for through me has come into being that which is of me down below.”

It is strange but it is a fact. Man was intended to live in the environment of the earth. Suppose a man were living here (a) in the environment of the earth, then it was intended he should him-self produce on the earth his reflection, and only through this reaction ray back again his ego, and then he would say: “There below is my sign.” It was not intended that man should carry round about with him his man of bones and his man of glands, etc.—still less that he should pronounce the grotesque verdict: “That is I.” It should have happened quite differently. Man should have lived in the environs of the earth planet, and sunk a sign and symbol into the earth in the flashing up of form in blood, and he should then have said to himself: “There I drive in my stake—my sign and my seal, which gives me the consciousness of my ego. For what I have become, in that I have passed through Saturn existence and through Sun and through Moon existence—with that I can hover here outside in the World-All. It is the ego I must now add; and the ego I perceive by inscribing myself in the earth below, so that I can always read in the flashing of the blood what I am.” We were, therefore, not originally intended to walk the earth in bodies of flesh and bone as we do, but to circle around the earth and make records, as it were, down below from which we might recognise and know that we are that—that we are an ego. Whoever overlooks this fact has no true knowledge of the nature of man.

Then came Lucifer and brought it about for man that he should have not merely his ego for sense perception, but that he should feel his astral body, too, as his ego, all that he had acquired on the Moon as astral body—thinking, feeling and willing. The ego was thus no longer pure, something else was mixed with it; and this led to the necessity for man to fall down into matter. The expulsion from Paradise is the fall into matter. And immediately there followed the change in man's blood. For now instead of flashing up for a moment and then being received back again into spirituality, the blood becomes real blood substance; it drives right through and spurts up as blood substance. It receives the tendency to be as we know it to-day. And so this blood substance, which by rights should return into the spiritual in the very moment when it becomes material, now gushes up into the rest of man and fills his whole organisation, undergoing modification in accordance with the various forces in man. According, for example, as it penetrates into a preponderance of physical over etheric body or of etheric body over astral body, and so on, the blood turns into nerve substance, muscle substance, etc. Thus Lucifer compels blood to a greater materiality. Whereas blood has been designed to shoot up and immediately disappear again, Lucifer brought it into a coarse materiality. That is the one direct deed that Lucifer has performed in matter itself. He made blood into matter, whereas with other things he at least only brought disorder among them. Were it not for Lucifer blood would not be as it is at all, it would instead exist in a spirituality which comes only to the edge of materiality, only to the status nascendi, and then at once returns. Blood as matter is the creation of Lucifer, and since man has in blood a physical expression of the ego, man's ego is bound up here on earth with a creation of Lucifer.

And since again Ahriman is only able to approach man because Lucifer is there before him, we can say: Blood is what Lucifer has thrown down for Ahriman to catch. So that both have now an approach to man. Can we wonder that an ancient primal feeling makes Lucifer-Ahriman look upon blood as his earthly property? Can we wonder that he has his contracts written in blood, or that he attaches great value to Faust's signing the contract with his blood? For blood belongs entirely to Lucifer. Everything else holds in it something divine; with nothing else is he quite at home, even ink is for Lucifer more divine than blood; blood is precisely his element.

We see, then, that man has these two beings in him, the man of senses, glands and digestion, and the man of nerve, muscle and bone. The corresponding forces of both are charged with a coarse materiality, and both are supplied with blood, in the form it has assumed through the action of the Luciferic influence. For it is quite obvious, is it not, even to external science, that man, in so far as he is a material being, is entirely a product of his blood. Everything in man that is material is nourished out of blood, it is really all transformed blood; from the point of view of matter, bones, nerves, muscles, glands are all of them nothing else than transformed blood. Man is actually blood, and as such he is a walking Lucifer-Ahriman. He carries Lucifer-Ahriman round with him all the time. It is by virtue of what is behind matter, and is poured into matter through the blood, that man belongs to the divine world and to a forward-moving evolution, not to an evolution that is a mere relic of the past. Lucifer—and Ahriman, too—came into our world through remaining behind at particular stages of evolution.

Bearing in mind all we have said, we can see quite clearly how at the very beginning of earth evolution men had something in common, something that united them. They had from the first in their blood something that was common to them all. For if the blood had remained as it was designed to be for man it would have been a pure emanation of the Spirits of Form. In the blood the Spirits of Form would live in us. These Spirits of Form are, as most of you know, my dear friends, none other than the seven Elohim of the Bible. Remember all that was said in the Munich cycle of lectures on Genesis (The Biblical Secrets of Creation), and you will see that if man had kept his blood in the state it originally was to have had, he would feel in him the seven Elohim; that is to say, he would feel his ego in him as seven-membered. One of its members would be the chief and would correspond to Jahve or Jehovah, and the other six would, to begin with, be subordinate for man. This seven-foldness that man would feel in his ego, as it were, a surging up within him of each of the seven Elohim or Spirits of Form, would have produced originally and spontaneously in him the sevenfold nature that we now have to acquire with so great toil and trouble. Because his blood has been tainted by Lucifer, therefore man has to wait so long; he has to wait until he has sent forth sufficient outstreamings of Intuitive and Inspired and Imaginative substance from nerves, muscles and bones for him to be ripe to receive once again this sevenfold nature into himself. As yet we have only come so far as to count up in an abstract manner as follows: the nature of man as it plays into the ego from physical body, and from etheric body, as it plays in from astral body, and from the very self of man—Jahve or Jehovah—and from Manas or Spirit Self; the nature of man as it plays in from Budhi or Life Spirit, and from Atma or Spirit Man. But man would never have been able to effect this specific darkening of the six other members and this outstanding illumination of the one, the ego, had not authority been given to Lucifer to interfere in the course of evolution. The real cause why at the beginning of earth evolution the other members suffered a darkening, while the ego grew particularly bright and was made to shine with a light-filled ego-ness—was that the ego was hurried into dense matter, so that it was able to come to a clear consciousness of its individuality, of its particular single individuality, whereas it would otherwise all along have felt its sevenfoldness.

Thus we see on the one hand that if man's blood had remained as it was he would have come to an ego that would from the outset have had a sevenfold character. Through Lucifer having been given him, man has come, however, to an ego that is single and unitary in character, he has come to feel and know his ego as the centre of his being. We can, therefore, understand how the blood in its originally intended form contains something that could work in a social direction, that could bring men together, so that they might feel themselves to be one common race of humanity. This would have been so if the seven Elohim had come to revelation in the human egos, as it was intended they should in the beginning. Lucifer's gift to man has meant that man feels himself as a particular individuality and cuts himself off in his self-dependence from the common race of mankind. The world process takes its course on earth in such a way that through the working of Lucifer man is inclined to become more and more independent, whilst through the working of the seven Elohim he is inclined more and more to feel himself a member and part of the whole of humanity.

What result this has on morality and on the whole life of man in his evolution—of this we will speak tomorrow.

Note A.

It has already been pointed out that in the days from December 24 to January 6, no occult meetings can take place in which the ritual is used. During the momentous thirteen days which close with the spiritual birth of the Christ, the wise Masters withdraw from the East in order to gather the strength which they radiate over Humanity during the rest of the year and which for us is the Wisdom we have to follow.

It has also been said many times that the symbols you see in our temple and the rituals performed in it do not arise out of nothing, but that they are deeply connected to cosmic constellations and regulated by laws that will be revealed in more detail later. They have been handed down to us from century to century from the mysteries of ancient times, so that they can form the right channels for the spiritual currents that the Masters of the East send down to us. They cannot therefore be explained or understood in any exoteric way. The wise Masters of the East are Beings belonging to the three higher worlds, working as it were in the past, in the present and in the future, and whom we can visualize in our mental image as above us when we utter our prayer. - The prayer follows: “Brothers of antiquity...”

One of the most important symbols is the three flames that stand on the altars of the East, West and South and to which our attention should be drawn first. In them we should see the symbols of wisdom, beauty and strength, but we should not understand them to mean worldly wisdom, worldly beauty and worldly strength. Wisdom is not to be found on the physical plane, and anyone who is involved in the occult life should make up his mind never to pronounce the word “wisdom” and think of it as the worldly wisdom that presents itself in the external sciences, for example, or that which is referred to as general knowledge. A learned person is not wise; a wise person does not need to be learned, and may even be a very naive person, but a wise person is one who keeps wisdom in his heart, who speaks and feels from his heart, as it were: I see my God at work in every petal – a person who senses and perceives his God in all of creation and feels connected to creation and the divine. But bear in mind that this does not mean that one should be a pantheist to do so; one must have a much more intimate mental image of such a person, an inexpressible feeling of being sheltered in the divinity of the world, which gives him peace and bliss in his being.

We must acquire such wisdom for ourselves, it must permeate our entire being so strongly that it is no longer possible for us to think that we are not always and forever surrounded and cared for by the spirit of the world, so that inner peace and security can no longer leave us.

Such perceptions and feelings will flow into us from the astral world, which consists of living, flowing, moving wisdom, which forms the background, the source of the nature that surrounds us, and which permeates the entire physical world. It is from there that we must draw the strength to become wise. It cannot be found in the physical world itself.

The beauty symbolized by the second flame also has nothing in common with the beauty in the world; it does not refer to any worldly object. To glimpse something of this beauty, we must turn our gaze to the starry night sky and immerse ourselves in it, so that we feel, as it were, that spiritual beings rule behind it. A deep, heartfelt piety should fill us with this. Or, when we experience a sunset and feel how the radiant orb sinks slowly below the horizon in a purple glow, so that the shadows grow longer and longer and finally nature all around is completely shrouded in darkness, then again a deep, and so strongly identify with the divine power in our soul that the inner sun will shine and radiate in our soul – just as the midnight sun can shine into the dark Christmas days for the student of occultism and the spiritual beings can be seen in their sublime beauty, in all their majesty. In this sense, we must think when we think and speak about beauty, and these thoughts, as discussed here, should transform the concept of beauty.

Beauty can be found in the lower Devachan, and there it flows down upon us from the beings in beautiful pictures and forms. But on this plane one also still finds the ugly, and that is precisely in what is often called “beautiful” on earth. We find every lie there as something ugly, and we can even find something beautiful in this world that is based only on illusion and delusion. For example, we find beautiful figures and forms there, even angelic figures created by black magicians, who thus envelop themselves as if in a veil to hide their own selfish goals. One can have come quite far in the esoteric life and in a certain life deal with magical arts or black magic; then such people can show themselves in the lower Devachan plan in such angelic forms, wrapped in a veil of beautiful garments. So there is no absolute, true beauty in this realm, and only genuine, heartfelt devotion can reveal the true devachanic beauty to us.

The third flame symbolizes power – again, not what we know as power in the physical world, but this power is said to flow from the higher devachan into the physical world and develop in people as “active virtue”. This is the virtue that consists in continually allowing our personality to recede, in fighting our ambition, especially when it expresses itself in wanting to shine with our gifts. It is this virtue that should make us aware that we rest in the Godhead, that we are only a small part of the true, great perfection, so that we feel how all vanity and pride are unreal, so that it would be foolish to want to be proud of something.

Particularly at the beginning of their occult path, people often become haughty or vain and proud; for example, when they start to notice small successes in themselves, they soon feel superior to others. But that is not the way to achieve active virtue. Nor will he find the way who seeks to impart his knowledge or powers to others, if he wants to teach what he has received of higher teachings himself, and if he then allows himself to be venerated by those to whom he imparts something. These vices are great obstacles which man himself places in his own way. But also those who offer such adoration place these obstacles in the way of the esotericist. By combating these vices in the physical world and constantly guarding against falling prey to them by practicing “active virtue,” the power found in the higher Devachan as a sum of high spiritual beings will flow into us as spiritual strength and strengthen our inner being.

Notes B by Unknown

The reason why in the days from December 24 to January 6 (the day of Epiphany) there is no ceremony at the meetings of our occult brotherhood is that those whom we call the wise masters of the East withdraw to the sanctuary during this time to gather forces there, which are then given to all of humanity as well as to our occult fraternity in a new strength.

When we see ourselves surrounded by all the symbols that confront us in our Masonic temple, we should always remember that we are not dealing with imaginative things, but with something very real. We should remember that through these symbols the powers of the wise masters of the East flow to us.

When we look up to those who have guided us from the beginning of the world through the Saturn, Sun and Moon periods, we turn to those whom we call the Brothers of Antiquity and pray: “Brothers of Antiquity”.

Then we look up to those who guide our present development, and so we call upon them: “Brothers of the Present”.

And those who will be the guides and leaders of humanity in the times to come, we address as brothers of the future and pray: “Brothers of the Future”.

As we now offer our prayer, and indeed already before that, we turn our gaze to the three lights that are lit on the three altars: on the altar of the East, from which we shall receive wisdom, on the altar of the South, from which we shall receive beauty, and on the altar of the West, from which we shall receive strength. Let us now take a moment to consider the three words “Wisdom, Beauty and Strength” in their actual meaning. These three words were known in all mysteries and it was known that all progress is based on them, but the one who uttered them knew that their true meaning cannot be found in the physical plane. What we feel here are only mirror images that are reflected back to us from the spiritual world. Wisdom can only be found on the astral plane, beauty on the lower devachan, strength on the higher devachan.

What we find as wisdom on the astral plane is reflected for us as truth; the beauty that can only be found in the lower devachan is reflected for us as true piety and the strength in the higher devachan as active virtue. We should therefore get into the habit of using the word wisdom only in its true sense, as the truth of thinking; what is usually called wisdom in relation to external knowledge is not wisdom. A wise person is one who looks at the world and feels the God in every plant, every flower petal, not in a pantheistic sense, but feels the rule and work of the world spirit. This can be done even by the most naive mind, and only a person who feels this way can truly be called wise.

If we now bear in mind that we are always surrounded by this world spirit, then we also know that we stand before this world spirit as we really are, not as we want to appear before the world through dishonesty and untruthfulness. In the higher worlds, there is nothing that can hide our vices from us. There we stand completely abandoned by everything we have surrounded ourselves with here as deception; lies and dishonesty have no access to the higher worlds. These words do not even exist there because the qualities are simply not present.

And if a person were really so bad that he did not bring a single good quality from his past life on earth, he would not even be able to enter the lower Devachan, but would have to reincarnate as soon as possible.

Therefore, before a person can enter the higher worlds, he must discard all his vices when passing through Kamaloka. There he must discard everything that is false, insincere, and so on; he cannot take any of that with him, because only good is accepted in the higher worlds, because there is no evil there. When he returns to a new incarnation, he takes up all his passions and faults again as his karma, which he must shed in a new incarnation.

Beauty is what radiates down to the physical plane as true piety. When we look up into the night sky, we should not only see the stars as such, but we should sense in them the divine spiritual beings that are hidden behind them. A feeling of deepest piety should permeate us. And when we watch a sunset, we should think that as the sun goes down, another sun, a spiritual sun, may arise in this darkness, one that shines and glows more brightly than the physical sun that has just disappeared before our eyes, the midnight sun.

We must feel and sense this in every moment. This is what radiates from the spiritual world as true piety, which lives up there as beauty. This beauty is hidden from us as if behind a veil; we do not see it until we are prepared for it, until we have abandoned our vices. For example, lying would appear here as ugliness, and everything we perceive as beauty or believe we see before we are fully worthy to enter the sphere of beauty, what we see as angelic figures, as beautiful, sublime images, all this is deception. We only come to true beauty through true piety.

But it may happen that a person in the period between death and a new birth has, due to special circumstances, been allowed to see this beauty, even though he himself was not pure. From that he has received great strength, so much so that in a new incarnation he is able to weave a garment for himself that surrounds him with radiant beauty. He can do that, but it is not true, it is a lie. He then appears before the eyes of the world in this radiant garment, but anyone who can see behind it knows that it is the work of the devil. This really happens, and there are many such people.

What shines down as strength onto the physical plane is understood there as what is called morality and virtue. Only those who have developed these qualities can hope to penetrate into the higher Devachan. The higher worlds reject everything that does not belong there. All the egoism, ambition, vanity, anxiety and fear that we bring with us cannot enter there, and man must learn to understand that these qualities mean great foolishness on the higher planes.

Nevertheless, there is a certain difficulty for those who are already a little more developed, so that they can and may receive occult truths and share them with their fellow human beings. Very easily, a feeling of personal veneration and worship arises among their listeners, and this can lead to these qualities, which they thought they had discarded, awakening anew in them despite their earlier higher level. Everyone must free themselves from this, then the recognition from the earlier worlds will radiate down as strength.

So when we pronounce the three words “wisdom, beauty, strength”, we must get into the habit of feeling them as forces that radiate down from higher planes and are reflected on the physical plane. And we must develop through truth and piety and virtue, then we will find these again in the spiritual worlds as wisdom, beauty and strength.

When the student in the mysteries uttered these three words, he thereby expressed his creed, which was as follows: I know that behind the physical world there is a spiritual one, but that wisdom can only be found in the astral plane. I know that behind the physical world there is a spiritual one, but that beauty can only be found in the lower Devachan. I know that behind the physical world there is a spiritual one, but that strength can only be found in the higher devachan plan.

So we now ask those whom we address as the brothers of the past, present and future to light the lamps of their wisdom, beauty and strength in us and so invoke them:

Brothers of the past...
Brothers of the present...
Brothers of the future...

C. Notes from the estate of Elisabeth Vreede

If we now move from the form of these symbols to their meaning for our inner being, then we must not think of worldly wisdom, worldly beauty or worldly strength when we hear the words “wisdom”, “beauty” and “strength”.

Wisdom cannot be found on the physical plane. Here everything is Maya, and in reality, man sees everything upside down here. If one were to believe that wisdom could be found somewhere on the physical plane, one should always be aware that it only appears to be wisdom on the outside, but is not wisdom in reality. Where we think we see life, there is decay; where there seems to be decay, there new life is hidden. And so we can never meet wisdom in that which presents itself to us on the physical plane. Everyone who is involved in the occult life should make it a point never to utter the word “wisdom” in ordinary life without considering that they only understand worldly wisdom, for example, the wisdom that we encounter in science or that which is generally referred to as erudition. A learned person is therefore not wise; a wise person does not need to be a scholar, and can even be a rather naive person who is far removed from all learning. A wise person is one who carries wisdom in his heart, who recognizes the wisdom that governs everything around him.

We can form a mental image of such a person looking at a green, juicy plant leaf; then, at the moment he looks at it, he would have the sensation that it is growing beyond itself, that it has the potential (ability?) within itself to become something completely different. The green plant leaf later becomes the colored petal of a flower; he sees in it the sprouting, sprouting life that wants to go beyond itself, and then he also feels sprouting life within himself. But suppose he sees a barren tree bark; then he would only be able to grow together with it by being overcome by something like a deathly mood. A learned person would be able to admire this bark; a wise person sees the dying of the tree in the bark. The wise person sees creation and decay everywhere, and in his heart he carries the feeling that tells him: I see my God reigning in every petal, I experience my God in all creation, and I feel inseparably connected to this God. One should not think that such a sage must be a pantheist; one should imagine a much more intimate connection between this sage and his God, an inexpressible feeling of being sheltered in the divinity of the world, a feeling that gives him peace and bliss in his being. (The archetype of Felix Balde has evidently been described.)

This is the wisdom we should acquire, which should permeate our entire being in such a way that it becomes impossible for us to imagine ourselves for even a moment outside the world spirit, but we are then aware of being surrounded and protected by the world spirit. Inner peace and inner security can no longer leave us. We feel that we are standing in it forever.

Such feelings should flow into us from the astral world, for there we find the living, ruling wisdom that forms the soil and the source of the surrounding nature and permeates the whole sensual world.

He who aspires to become true in thought, who in everything he does or wills, rises to the ruling, active wisdom, in order to draw the truth from it, will receive the power from the astral world and become wise.

The beauty symbolized by the second flame has just as little in common with worldly beauty as wisdom has with the wisdom of the world. This too does not refer to any worldly object.

Continuation of the postscript:

Especially at the beginning of their esoteric journey, people often become proud and vain, for example when they start to notice small successes in their exercises, when images from the imaginative world begin to appear. Then they soon believe themselves to be superior to others, and they are inclined to talk about it to others. But nothing can hinder our progress as much as the lack of the ability to remain silent. Not being able to remain silent about one's exercises, not being able to talk about them where it is not appropriate, not being able to remain silent about secrets that have been shared with us means killing something in our etheric body. We kill the forces with which we had counted on to help us move forward, and we then have to renounce further progress.

But this is not the way to achieve “active virtue” when one begins to share one's knowledge with others. If someone begins to teach what he himself has received in the way of higher knowledge, and he allows himself to be approached by the worship that others offer him, then active virtue would turn into vice and hinder his progress. But also those who pay homage, who are so quick to put people on a pedestal, or who believe that they occupy a place of honor by practicing this or that activity, are also obstacles in the way of progress for the true esoteric. We should constantly face such vices, and we should always be on our guard against them by practicing and permeating ourselves with active virtue. Then the forces that can be found in the higher devachan as the high spiritual beings can flow down to us, and our inner being can be strengthened.

In the astral world, we find wisdom when we appropriate truth in thought. In the lower devachan, we encounter beauty. And in the higher devachan, we find exalted beings who will give us the strength to realize active virtue on the physical plane.

Today we'll ask ourselves what we learned through our exoteric study of theosophy. At least theoretically the answer will be that we've become aware that the whole world and our physical body is maya or illusion. At least we assume this theoretically, and it more or less remains a hypothesis for us. But when we begin an esoteric training this acceptance of a mere hypothesis should increasingly become a truth. We should become deeply aware that we don't really have a firm ground in which we can take root that we only live on the surface of the foaming sea of life, that we never dive down into the real sea of reality, and that therefore we're always a plaything for illusions. Those who want to tread an esoteric path should and must arrive at this insight A certain feeling of despair, fear, and being abandoned will arise in most of them. The fear will be like that of someone standing at the edge of an abyss. Despair and forlornness will envelop a budding esoteric, because all the supports he thought he had in life will fall away from him like maya or illusion. His God seems to be torn away from him, because he only sees the false and delusive things in creation; this knowledge can make an atheist out of him.

And why must we tread this path, why must we look deep into the world of illusion, why have the Gods placed us in this unreal world? For they could have given us true reality instead of this play of life's wave on the surface. We'll see later that it's wise and good that the world is maya, illusion. If everything was true reality, we wouldn't look for truth and perfection any more. We couldn't develop any capacities, and since there wouldn't be anything wrong, no vices could exist. So we couldn't acquire virtues, we couldn't develop freely at all. Since we would always be living in the active, ruling Godhead, we'd never have an opportunity to freely dive down into the depths of reality, or to look for real knowledge. We would stop looking for God. “Looking for God” has a deep biblical meaning that one can only understand esoterically. After creating for six days, God rested on the seventh day. God had been active during the recapitulations of Saturn, Sun and Moon evolution, and he rested on the seventh day, after the world had been created. Then God couldn't be found anymore out to the horizon of our earth evolution. He was invisible, and this is deeply significant.

What's really divine is hidden behind visible creation—that's the great truth that we must look for behind sensory illusion. And since the world is illusion, it gives us an opportunity to develop our I through all false maya so that we shall find reality and the Gods. And what path does estoteric training point out to us, what means does it give us so that we can arrive at a knowledge of higher worlds faster than a man in everyday life? It gives us certain concentration and meditation exercises through which the soul forces in us can be awakened and that would otherwise remain slumbering in us for a long time yet. I want to emphasize that a pupil shouldn't go on this path out of blind confidence in his teacher or out of a blind reverence for him, because that would be the completely wrong way. He should use his own intellect in everything he does, and he shouldn't let other people think for him. He should test everything including what's connected with his exercises and meditation. When he's immersed in meditation, he shouldn't think that it has a suggestive effect, for that would be an entirely wrong assumption. They can't have a suggestive effect because they're put together in such a way that anyone can arrive at the imagination to which the exercises only point. Let's look at the meditation: In pure rays of light … what could have a suggestive effect here, since the content indicates something unreal? For anybody who says this knows that the Godhead can't be found in light rays. The exercise is like a symbol that stimulates us to create an imaginative picture while we try to immerse our soul in the Godhead of the world. We should let our own intellect speak and not act out of blind faith. It's better to remain in doubt until we arrive at a knowledge of the truth through our own efforts. Someday we'll get to that point.

And what's the other unavoidable experience one has by faithfully doing the exercises? It's a splitting of the personality.

A man will begin to feel as if something was accompanying him, something that thinks and hears with him and even speaks with him if he's inwardly weak. It's a second ego that emerges, a doppelganger that one has placed outside one. The more seriously someone treads the esoteric path, the more of his old man he places outside him, that is, he sheds one skin after another like a snake. These skins become like a second body, a doppelganger who never leaves one again for the rest of one's life. In the old Egyptian mysteries someone who had placed his double outside him was called a kha man. The double is chained to the kha man to constantly remind him what he was or still is. That's not always a pleasant feeling. But the awareness that he always has his double with him will remind him of his defects and that he should improve himself. He should constantly feel this presence, otherwise things would get dangerous, and because of his many, high ideals and intentions, he would forget what his inner life and defects are. Under certain circumstances it could even endanger a high initiate's life if in spite of his high striving he would forget this double for even a moment. He could actually lose his physical body through death, somewhat like one who's concentrating on a sublime problem, forgets to pay attention to traffic and gets run over. The more the double appears the better it is for our development, for otherwise, we would be living under great delusions about ourself. For we can't see the progress we've made; only our teacher can. Let's recall the place in the story of creation where the Elohim had ascended to the sun after they created man. It was only there that they could judge their work: “And the Elohim saw everything that they had made and behold it was very good.” They had attained perfection and that's why they could judge their work.

These lectures will perhaps have given you some idea of what a complicated being man is and from how many sides we must consider him if we would come near to his real nature. I want now to point to one more fact of evolution, and it is one that may be classed among the most significant of all the results we can arrive at when, with the help of clairvoyant research, we study the whole course of man's evolution—looking back over the period from very ancient times until to-day, and looking forward to what shall come for the race of man in the future. I have, in the course of these lectures, drawn your attention to a perception that man can acquire when he educates his faculty for knowledge in the way we described; when, that is to say, his soul in its efforts after knowledge enters into the moods we characterised as wonder, reverence, wisdom-filled harmony with the events of the world, and lastly, devotion and surrender to the whole world process. You will remember I explained how if the soul enters upon these moods or conditions, man's faculty of knowledge can gradually rise to a perception of two converse processes that are everywhere around him. Man learns to distinguish in his environment between what is becoming and what is dying away. He says to himself at every turn: Here I have to do with a process of becoming, something that will reach perfection only in the future, and here again, on the other hand, I encounter a gradual dying away, a gradual disappearing. We perceive the things of the world as existing in a region where everything is either coming into being or passing away. And I pointed out in particular how the human larynx is really an organ of the future, how it is called to be in the future something entirely different from what it is to-day. To-day it merely communicates to the outer world by means of the spoken word our inner moods and conditions, whereas in the future it will communicate what we ourselves are in our entirety; that is to say, it will serve for the procreation of the whole human being. It will be the reproductive organ of the future. A time will come when the larynx will not merely help man to express by means of the word what is in his heart and mind, but man will use the larynx to place his own self before the world; that is to say, the propagation of man will be intimately connected with the organ of the larynx.

Now in this complicated microcosm, in this complicated “little world” which we call “man,” for every such organ that is only as yet a seed and will later on in the future attain a higher degree of perfection, there is another corresponding organ which is gradually dwindling, gradually dying away. And the corresponding organ for the larynx is the organ of hearing. In proportion as the hearing apparatus little by little disappears, in proportion as it grows ever less and less, will the larynx grow more and more perfect and become more and more important. We can only estimate the greatness of this fact when we look back, with the help of the Akashic Records, into a far distant past of mankind and then from what our research reveals are in a position to form some conception of what the ear was once like. Great new vistas are opened up for a knowledge of the nature of man when we trace back the human ear to its original form. For in its present state this hearing apparatus of ours is no more than a shadow of what it once was. To-day it hears only tones of the physical plane, or words that express themselves in tones on the physical plane. But that is only a last remnant of what used to flow into man through the hearing; for through this hearing apparatus once flowed into man the mighty movements of the whole universe. And as to-day we hear earthly music with our ear, so in ancient times did world music, the music of the spheres, flow into man. And as to-day we men clothe words in tones, so in times past did the divine Word of the Worlds clothe itself in the music of the spheres—that Word of the Worlds of which the Gospel of St. John tells, the Logos, the divine Word. Into what we may call man's hearing in the old sense of the word, there flowed from the spiritual world a heavenly music, the music of the spheres, just as now into our hearing flows the human word and the earthly music, and within the music of the spheres was what the divine Spirits spoke. And as to-day man compels the air into forms with his word and his singing and his tone, so did the divine words and the divine music bring forth forms.

And now let us consider that most wonderful of all the forms created by Divine music. We may approach it in the following way. When to-day you give utterance to a word or even only to a vowel, let us say the sound “A”—then through this sound the possibility arises of creating a form in the air. It was in like manner that form entered into the world out of the cosmic Word, and the most precious of all these forms is man himself; man himself was created in his original state by being spoken out of the divine Word. “The Gods spake!” As to-day the air comes into forms through the word of man, so did our world come into its form through the Word of the Gods. And man is the most excellent of these forms. The organ of hearing was, of course, then infinitely more complicated than it is now. It is to-day quite shrunk and shriveled. To-day it is an external organ, penetrating only a limited distance into the brain, but once it extended inwards over the whole human being. And everywhere throughout man's being moved the paths of sound which spoke man into the world, as the utterance of the Word of God. Thus was man created—spiritually—through the organ of hearing, and in the future, when he has ascended again, he will have an ear that is quite small and rudimentary. The meaning and purpose of the ear will have completely gone. The ear is in a descending evolution; to compensate for this, however, the larynx, which is to-day only like a seed, will have developed to greater and greater beauty and perfection. And in its perfection it will speak out what man can bring forth for the world as the reproduction of his being, even as the Gods have spoken Man into the world as Their creation. So is the world process in a sense reversed. When we consider the whole human being as he stands before us we have to see in him the product of a descending evolution, and when we take an organ like the ear we find it has already reached a densification of the bony matter in the small bones of the ear, it is, as it were, in the last stage of descending evolution. The sense as such is disappearing. Man, however, is developing on into the world of spirituality, and his ascending organs are the bridges that carry him over into spirituality. Such is the relationship between the world of the senses and the world of the spirit. The world of the senses makes itself known to us in descending organs, and the world of the spirit in ascending organs.

And it is the same everywhere. In the whole world as it presents itself to our view we can follow in some way this becoming and dying. And it is important that we should learn to apply the idea to the other things in the world. It will teach us a great deal. Thus in the mineral world, for example, we can also find something that is in an ascending evolution, something that is to-day only at the seed stage. It is quicksilver. Quicksilver is a metal that will undergo transformations in the future but transformations that will lead to greater perfection. Quicksilver as metal has not yet pulverised all the forces that every substance possesses in the spiritual before it becomes substance at all. Powers that belong essentially to the nature of quicksilver still remain in the spiritual, and these it will in the future be able to bring forth and place into the world. It will assume new forms. Thus quicksilver corresponds in the world of the minerals to the human larynx, and also in a sense to the organ that is attached to the larynx—the lung. Other metals—copper, for example—are in a kind of descending evolution. Copper will, in the future, show itself as a metal that has no more inner spiritual forces to place out into the world, and that is consequently more and more obliged merely to split up and crumble to cosmic dust.

I have here set before you a few examples of connections which will in future increasingly become an object of study. Men will study more and more the relationships between the processes of becoming and of passing away in the several kingdoms of nature, and will learn to find—not through experiments and tests but through an Imaginative knowledge—relationships between particular metal substances and particular organs in the human body. And as a result substances whose effects are already partially known from external experience will, through Imagination, be able to be known in all their healing power, in all their reproductive and restorative power over the human body. All kinds of relationships and connections will be discovered between the several things and beings of the world.

Thus, man will come to recognise that the virtues which lie in the seed of a plant are differently connected with man than the virtues contained in the root. All that we find in the root of a plant corresponds in a manner to the human brain and to the nervous system belonging to the brain. [see Summary] It goes so far that in actual fact the eating of what is to be found in plant roots has a certain correspondence with the processes that take place in the brain and nervous system. So that if a man wants his brain and nervous system to be influenced from the physical side in its task as physical instrument for the life of the spirit, he receives with his nourishment the forces that live in the roots of plants. In a sense we may say that he lets think in him what he thus receives in food, he lets it do spiritual work in him, whilst if he is less inclined to eat of the root nature of plants it will be rather he himself who uses his brain and nervous system. You will see from this that if a person consumes a quantity of root food he is liable to become dependent in respect of his experiences as soul and spirit; because something objective and external works through him, his brain and nervous system surrender their own independence. And so if he wants it to be more himself who works in him, then he must diminish his consumption of roots. I am not, my dear friends, giving suggestions for any particular diet, I am merely informing you about facts of nature. And I warn you expressly not to set out to follow what I have said without further knowledge. Not every person is so far advanced as to be able to dispense with receiving the power of thought from something outside himself; and it may very easily happen that a man who is not ripe to leave it to his own soul-life to provide him with the power of thinking and feeling—it can easily happen that if such a man avoids eating roots he will fall into a sleepy condition, because his soul and spirit are not yet strong enough to evolve in themselves out of the spiritual those forces which are otherwise evolved in man quite objectively, and independently of his soul and spirit. The question of diet is always an individual question and depends entirely upon the whole manner and condition of the development of the person in question.

Again, what lives in the leaves of plants has a similar connection with the lungs of man, with all that belongs to the system of the lungs. Here we may find an indication of how a balance can be created, for example, in a person whose breathing system, owing to inherited tendencies or to some other condition, works too powerfully. It would be well in such a case to recommend the person not to eat much of what comes from the leaves of plants. There may be another person whose breathing system requires strengthening, and then we shall do well to advise him to eat freely of such food as comes from leaves. These things have their close connection also with the healing forces that are in the world in the several kingdoms of nature, for those parts of the individual plants which have a definite relationship to man's organs contain forces of healing for those regions of man's organism. Thus, roots contain great forces of healing for the nervous system, and leaves for the lung system.

The flowers of plants contain many healing forces for the kidney system, and seeds in a particular way for the heart, but only when the heart sets itself too strongly in opposition to the circulation of the blood. If the heart yields too easily to the circulation, then it is rather to the forces that are in the fruits, i.e. in the ripened seeds, that we must turn. These are some of the indications that result when we take into consideration that the moment we pass from man to surrounding nature all that presents itself to our senses in the world of nature is actually only the surface.

• Roots—Brain.
• Leaves—Lungs.
• Flowers—Kidneys.
• Seeds—Heart.
• Fruits—Blood system.

In the plants, what belongs to the world of the senses is only on the surface. Behind what reveals itself to sight and taste and smell are the soul-and-spirit forces of the plant. But these soul-and-spirit forces are not present in such a way that we could speak of each single plant as ensouled, in the same way that each single human being is ensouled. That is not the case. Whoever were to imagine it would be giving himself up to the same delusion as a man who thought that a single hair or the tip of the ear, or, let us say, a nose or a tooth, were ensouled. The whole human being is ensouled in his totality, and we only learn to look into the soul nature of man when we pass from the parts to the whole. And we must do the same in the case of every living thing. We must take care to observe it spiritually and see whether it is a part or in some sense a whole. All the various plants of the earth are by no means a whole for themselves; they are parts, they are members of a whole. And as a matter of fact we are only speaking of a reality when we speak of that to which the several plants belong, as parts belong to a whole. In the case of man we can see at once to what his teeth, his ears, his fingers belong; physically they belong to the whole organism. In the case of the plants we do not see with the eye that to which the single plant belongs, we cannot perceive it with a physical organ at all, for the moment we reach the whole we come into the realm of the spirit. The truth about the soul nature of the plant world is that it has the plants for its individual organs. There are, as a matter of fact, for our whole earth only a few beings who are, so to say, collected together in the earth and have as their single parts the plants, just as man has the hairs on his body.

We can, if we wish, refer to these beings as the group souls of the plants. We can say, when we go beyond what our senses can behold of the plant, that we come to the group souls of the plants, which are related to the single plant as a whole to a part. Altogether there are seven group souls—plant souls—belonging to the earth, and having in a way the centre of their being in the centre of the earth. So that it is not enough to conceive of the earth as this physical ball, but we have to think of it as penetrated by seven spheres varying in size and all having in the earth's centre their own spiritual centre. And then these spiritual beings impel the plants out of the earth. The root grows towards the centre of the earth, because what it really wants is to reach the centre of the earth, and it is only prevented from pushing right through by all the rest of the earth matter which stands in its way. Every plant root strives to penetrate to the centre of the earth, where is the centre of the spiritual being to which the plant belongs.

You see how extraordinarily important is the principle we laid down—to go always to the whole in the case of every being or creature, to see first whether it is a part or a whole. There are scientists in our days who look upon the plants as ensouled, but they look upon the individual plant in this way. That is no cleverer than if we were to call a tooth a man; both stand at the same mental level. Many people are ready to think, when they hear views like this put forward, that they are quite theosophical, just because the plants are regarded as having soul; but really all such talk on the part of science has no value at all for the future, the books are so much waste paper. To look for individual souls in the separate plants is to say: I will extract a tooth from a human being and look in it for a human soul. The plant soul is not to be found in the single plant but has its most important point in the centre of the earth, whither the root tends, for the root is that force in the plant which strives ever towards the most spiritual part of plant existence.

When we are considering a theme such as this we shall find, my dear friends, that we come across statements made from the standpoint of the present-day view of nature which can bring us near to the gateway of truth, but only to the same degree as Mephistopheles can bring Faust into the realm of the Mothers—namely, just to the outermost door and no further. For as little as Mephistopheles can go down with Faust into the realm of the Mothers, so little can present-day natural science enter into the spiritual. But as in a certain sense Mephistopheles gives the key, so does natural science. Natural science gives the key, but it does not want to enter itself, even as Mephistopheles does not want to enter himself into the realm of the Mothers. It is true in a sense that natural science gives us clues which, if we have acquired the mode of knowledge described in these lectures, can often bring our knowledge to the gateway of truth.

Natural science to-day, following the impulse of Darwin, has drawn—from observation of the world of the senses alone—an important conclusion; natural science speaks of the principle of the so-called “struggle for existence.” Who is not ready to see this struggle for existence all around him as long as he takes cognizance only of what the external world of the senses affords? Why, we meet with it at every turn. Think of the innumerable eggs laid by the creatures of the sea, how many are destroyed and perish, and how few actually grow up and become new creatures. There you have, apparently, a fearful struggle for existence. One could well begin to lament over it if one listened only to the world of the senses, and say: of the millions and billions of eggs so many, so very many, go under in the struggle for existence and so few survive. But this is only one side of a thought, my dear friends. Take hold now of the same thought at another end! In order to bring your thinking on in a certain direction, let me ask you to grasp the same thought at another point. You can also lament in a similar way over the struggle for existence in another connection. You can cast your eyes over a field of corn where so-and-so many ears are standing, each holding so-and-so many grains of corn, and you can ask the question: How many of these grains of corn are lost in some way or other and never fulfil their true purpose; and how few of them are planted again in the earth that they may become new plants of the same kind as the old ones? We can thus look over a field of corn that is promising a rich and plenteous harvest and say to ourselves: How much of all that sprouting life will perish without having attained its goal! Only a very few grains will be buried in the earth for new plants of the same kind to arise. Here again we have an instance, only in a rather different sphere from that of the sea-creatures, where also only a very few come to fulfilment.

But now let me ask you what would become of the human beings, who must eat something, if every single grain of corn were buried again in the earth? Let us suppose that it were possible—theoretically we can suppose anything—for such an abundant growth to take place that every single grain of corn could come up again; but we must also think of what would happen to the beings who have to find their nourishment from corn. Here we come to a strange pass; a belief that might appear justified when we look at the world of the senses is shaken. When we look at a field of corn in respect of its own physical existence we might seem quite justified in concluding that every single grain should grow into a whole plant. And yet the standpoint is perhaps false. Perhaps in the whole connection of things in the world we are not thinking correctly when we ascribe to each single grain of corn this aim and object, namely to grow into a whole plant. Perhaps there is nothing to justify us in saying that the grains of corn which serve other beings for food have somehow failed in their cosmic aim. Perhaps there is nothing that compels us to say that the eggs of the creatures of the sea have failed in their aim when they have not grown into fishes. It is in reality no more than human prejudice to suppose that every single seed ought to become again the same being. For we can only measure the tasks of the individual beings when we turn our eyes to the whole. And all the eggs that perish by the million in the sea every year, and do not grow into fish, provide food for other beings who are only not yet accessible to man's vision. And in very truth those spiritual substances which struggle their way through to existence and become the countless eggs of the sea that are apparently lost—they do not lament that they have missed their goal; for their goal is to be nourishment for other beings, to be received up into the very being of these other beings. Man stands outside with his intellect and imagines that only that has meaning which strives towards the goal which he, through his senses, is bound to see as the ultimate goal. But if we look at nature without prejudice and with an open mind we shall see in every single stage of every single being a certain perfection and fulfilment, and such perfection does not rest only in that which the being will eventually become, but is contained already in what it is.

These are some of the thoughts, acquired in occultism, which must take root in your heart and minds. And if you now turn away from the external world and look into your own soul you will observe that you have there in your soul a rich store of thoughts. Thoughts are perpetually streaming into your soul, perpetually lighting up within it; and only a very few of these thoughts are clearly grasped, only a very few become a conscious part of the human soul. When you go for a walk in the town, reflect how much enters your soul by way of your senses, and yet how little you observe in such a way that it becomes a permanent part of your soul-life. You are continually receiving impressions, and the sum of all the impressions you receive is related to the portion of them which becomes a permanent conscious possession of your soul as the great mass of fish spawn in the sea that is brought into being year by year is related to the proportion of it that actually grows into fish. You, as well, have to be forever going through this same process in your own soul, the process of bringing, over a vast region, only a very small quantity to fulfilment. And when man begins to lift the veil a little and gain some vision of the great flood of pictures of fantasy and of thought out of which he emerges when he emerges from sleep—the dream affords for many persons a last trace of the immeasurably rich life man leads in sleep—then he can come to realise that there is meaning in the fact that he receives so many impressions that do not come to clear consciousness. For the impressions that actually come to clear consciousness are lost to the inner work of man, they cannot work upon the system of the sense organs, nor the system of the glandular organs, nor the system of digestion, neither can they work upon the systems of nerves, muscles and bones. That which becomes conscious in the soul, and which present-day man carries in him as his conscious inner soul-content, has no more power to work upon the organism; its characteristic is that it is torn loose from the mother earth of the whole human being and thus comes into his consciousness. All the rest of the soul-content—which bears the same relation to these conscious thoughts and ideas as the many eggs do to the few that become fish—all the countless impressions that come into our soul from without and do not come into consciousness, work upon the whole human being.

Everything in his environment works continually upon man in his totality. The dream can sometimes teach you how far what lives on in your soul as conscious idea, how very far that is from being all that enters your soul; many other impressions are entering your soul all the time. You have only to give attention to such things and you will find they occur constantly in life. You dream of some situation. Perhaps you dream you are standing opposite a man who is talking with another man. You are standing there and making a third. In your dream you have a clear and exact picture of the countenance of the man opposite you. You say to yourself: “How do I come to have such a dream? It gives the impression of being concerned with people I know in physical life, it seems to relate itself to physical life. But where does it come from? I have never heard or seen this person.” And now you pursue it further; and when you examine carefully you find that a few days ago you were opposite this person in a railway carriage, only the whole experience passed by you without your consciousness being awakened. In spite of that, however, it entered deeply into your life. It is only owing to inexactitude of observation that people as a rule know nothing about these things.

The conceptions that dreams bring before us in this way are by no means the most important of the impressions that work upon the soul. The most important are quite other impressions. Think for a moment, my dear friends, how the process I described to you yesterday has been continually happening all the time in the evolution of humanity. By means of his bony system man has been continually producing Imaginations, by means of his muscular system he has been sending into the world Inspirations, and by means of his nervous system Intuitions. All these are now there in the world. The outstreamings that are evil, each man must himself receive back again and carry away through his destiny. But the rest builds up and takes form and is perpetually there in man's environment. In very deed all the Imaginations and Inspirations and Intuitions that man has given out into the earth world, even only since the Atlantean catastrophe, are present and are part of our environment. The good things man has given out—these the individual men do not need to take back again in the course of their Karma; but what they have sent out into the spiritual atmosphere of the earth all through the centuries of the successive epochs is actually present for the men who are now living on earth, just as much as the air is present for physical man. As man breathes physical air, as the air from his environment enters right inside him, so do the Imaginations, Inspirations and Intuitions that have been developed penetrate into man, and man partakes of them with his soul and spirit. And now it is important that man should develop a real relation to all this in his environment, that he should not meet what he has himself imparted to the earth in earlier epochs of its existence as if it were strange to him, as if he were unconnected with it. He can, however, only become connected with this spiritual content he has given to the earth when he gradually acquires the power to receive it into his soul.

How can this come about? When we come to make a deep study of the spiritual meaning of earth evolution we discover that in the time when post-Atlantean man had still something left of ancient clairvoyance, Imaginations, Inspirations and Intuitions were communicated in great abundance to the spiritual atmosphere of the earth. That was a time when spiritual substance was given forth in large measure. Since the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, and especially from the present day onwards, we gradually send out less and less; what falls rather to us is to receive the old substance, for it is something with which we are intimately connected; we have the task to take up again into ourselves what has been sent out. That means it is required of man to replace an earlier spiritual outbreathing by a spiritual inbreathing. Man must grow ever more sensitive and receptive to the spiritual that is in the world. In ancient times that was not so necessary, for men of those olden times were able to put forth from them spiritual substance, they had, so to speak, a reserve store. But this reserve of spiritual substance has been so deeply drawn upon since the fourth post-Atlantean epoch that in future man will, in a sense, only be able to send out what he has first absorbed, what he has first inbreathed. In order that man may be able to take his place with full understanding in this new task in earth existence—to this end is Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science there in the world. When a man feels drawn to Anthroposophy it is not just that it takes his fancy as one among many other things in the world that take his fancy. He is drawn to Anthroposophy because it is intimately and deeply bound up with the whole of earth evolution, intimately bound up with the task that lies immediately before man to-day in evolution, namely to develop understanding for the spiritual all around him. For from the present time onwards it will be the case that those who do not develop understanding for the spirit behind the senses, for the world of the spirit behind the world of the senses, will be like men whose breathing system is so injured that they cannot take in air and they suffer from difficulty in breathing. To-day we still have left in our ideas a certain inheritance from primeval human wisdom, and we feed upon these old ideas. If, however, we are able to observe the evolution of mankind in modern times with the eye of the spirit we shall perceive that while discoveries abound in the field of the material and external, in the spiritual a kind of exhaustion shows itself, a strange poverty of spiritual content. New ideas, new concepts, arise less and less among mankind. It is only those who do not know of ancient concepts and who are always rediscovering the old for themselves—that is to say, their whole life long remain in a sense immature—who can imagine that it is possible for ideas to develop and mature in these days. No, the world of abstract ideas, the world of intellectual ideas is exhausted. There are no more new ideas springing up. The time of Thales marks the rise of intellectual ideas for Western thought. And now we stand at a kind of end; and philosophy as such, philosophy as a science of ideas, is at an end. Ideas and thoughts belong only to the physical plane, and man must learn to lift himself up to what lies beyond ideas and thought, that is, beyond the world of the physical plane. To begin with he will lift himself up to Imaginations. Imaginations will again become for him something real and actual. That will bring about a new fructification of the spiritual in mankind. That is why, my dear friends, Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science gives Imaginations of great and mighty world processes. Note how different from everything else of its kind is the description given of Saturn, Sun and Moon. Compare it with the abstract concepts of natural science. Everything in Spiritual Science has to be given in pictures, it has to be presented in such a way that it is not directly realisable in the external world of the senses. We say of Old Saturn that it had a condition of warmth, of warmth alone. That is sheer nonsense for the present-day world of the senses; for the world of the senses knows nothing of warmth substance as such. But what is nonsense for the world of the senses is truth for the world of the spirit, and the next step required of man in the near future is to live his way into the world of the spirit. Those who will not resolve to breathe the air of the spirit—and Spiritual Science has come into the world to make the soul of man susceptible to the air of the spirit—those who do not want to make themselves responsive to Spiritual Science will actually approach a condition of spiritual shortness of breath and spiritual exhaustion. One can already see many persons approaching this condition, and it leads on to a spiritual wasting and decline, to an actual “consumption” of the spirit.

Such would be the lot of men on earth if they wanted to stop short at the world of the senses. They would go into a spiritual decline. In the future development of civilisation there will be men full of sensitiveness for the spiritual, full of heart for all that Spiritual Science will give, and for the world of Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition as it springs up spontaneously in the souls of men. So will it be for a part of humanity: they will have understanding and devotion for this world of the spirit. And it will be these men who will fulfil the task that is set before the earth in the near future. Others perhaps will be content with the world of the senses, not wanting to go beyond it, not wanting to go beyond that shadow picture which the conceptions of philosophy and of natural science afford. Such people are moving in the direction of spiritual shortness of breath, spiritual consumption, spiritual sickness and disease. They will become dried up in earth existence and not attain the goal that has been set for earth evolution. Evolution goes on, however, in such a way that each one is compelled to ask himself the question: Which way will you choose? In the future men will stand, as it were, on two paths, to the right and to the left. On one path will be those for whom the world of the senses alone is true, and on the other will be those for whom the world of the spiritual is the truth.

And since the senses, such as the ear, for example, will disappear, since at the end of the earth all the senses that belong to the earth will have completely disappeared, we can form some idea of what that consumption and wasting away will be like. If we abandon ourselves to the world of the senses we abandon ourselves to something which abandons man in the future of earth evolution. If we press through to the world of the spirit we develop ourselves in the direction of something that wills to come nearer and nearer to man in the future of earth evolution. If we want to express it in a symbol we may say that it is possible for man to stand there at the end of the earth evolution and to speak as Faust did when he had been blinded physically—(for man will be not only blinded to the world around him but deaf to it in addition, he will stand there blind and deaf and deprived of taste and smell)—he will be able to say with Faust: “But in my inmost spirit all is light—yes, and all is glorious ringing tones and words of men!” Thus will the man be able to speak who has turned to the world of the spirit. But the other, the man who wanted to remain at the world of the senses would be like a Faust who, after he was blinded, would be compelled to say: “Blind hast thou become without, and within shines no light of the spirit, darkness alone receives thee.”

Man has to choose between these two Faust natures in his relation to the future of the earth. For the first Faust would be one who had turned to the world of the spirit, whilst the second would be one who had turned to the world of the senses and had thereby become closely united with something of which man must feel that it is unsubstantial and unreal, and moreover that it robs him of his own reality and being. Thus does that appear which we set out to discover and bring from occult heights—thus does it appear, my dear friends, in its relation to the immediate daily life of man. I think I need not spend words in pointing out what moral principles and will impulses for present-day humanity can proceed from a real understanding of occult science.¹ For out of a rightly understood wisdom will a rightly understood goodness and virtue be born in the human heart. Let us strive after a real understanding of world evolution, let us seek after wisdom—and we shall find without fail that the child of wisdom will be love.

• 1. Printed by C. F. Hodgson & Son, Ltd., 2 Newton St., London, W.C.2.

Yesterday we got to the point in our esoteric training where we place our doppelganger outside us. It's verily not a pleasant feeling when we see all of what we previously had in us unconsciously objectively before us, which then accompanies us wherever we go. We heard that it's a Luciferic being, Samael, with his hosts who brings the doppelganger out of us. From this, one sees that Luciferic beings also do good things and not always bad ones. If we always carried our defects in us unconsciously, we could never become aware of the destructive, ruinous things that they do in our body and in the whole cosmic substance. As long as Samael hasn't brought our defects out from within us, as long as we don't see them objectively before us as our doppelganger, so long the Gods graciously keep us from seeing the ruinous, destructive force of jealousy, hate, envy and other passions and emotions that we stream out into our environment. A clairvoyant sees that these passions tear something down in our physical body and in the cosmos' substance, whereas the good stimulates upbuilding forces. So basically Samael is a blessing for development. He shows us our inner nature all the more accurately the more seriously we take our training in hand. We then see defects objectively which we hadn't paid any attention to previously. Now we'll become increasingly disgusted with them and they'll spur us on to get rid of them.

An esoteric will then unavoidably have a feeling as if he couldn't get any air, as if he would suffocate. This feeling arises because the pupil begins to pay attention to his subtle soul stirrings, especially to the untruthfulness that slumbers potentially in every man. We don't mean the cruder lies and hypocrisies that lower natures generate, but the finer nuances that we don't notice through our superficiality and which we often do not even acknowledge. As an example, let's assume that someone learns that a theosophical lecture is going to be given someplace. He thinks: That's something good, I'll go there—but at the same time he thinks that he'll meet someone there whom he'd like to be with. Nevertheless, he tells himself that this isn't the main reason so that he imagines he's really going there on account of the lecture.

Such things happen every day; one lies to oneself and doesn't want to notice it. But now the untruths we hadn't noticed crowd into our consciousness so we think that they'll suffocate us.

Another example will show us how much men live on the surface in all of their actions and even in their duties. (Followed by the example of teachers who were supposed to be tested a second time and didn't know what was in the textbooks that they used every day.) This superficiality spreads out over our whole soul life, so that we don't even see the lies that we tell ourselves.

When we first begin to exercise we might not notice much progress; thoughts about daily life stream to us from all sides. It'll take a long time for us to notice any results from our exercises and for a second being called Azazel to begin to draw our attention to our superficiality, Samael and Azazel must both bring something out of us, but a third being must bring us something. He must bring us a longing for a higher, spiritual life. The next example shows us what's meant by this. A scientist who's fired by a desire for knowledge and would like to know everything suddenly finds himself at a wall, so that he can't press on with his intellect. In most cases he'll say: A human intellect can go no further, and he will resign himself to this. But others who feel that their soul is more alive will look further and will be led to spiritual science. There they think they can investigate beyond the limits that materialistic science has set up before them. But as soon as they tread an esoteric path, they'll feel like they're drowning. For as a man presses ever deeper into esotericism, the limits move ever further apart until he gets to a point where everything moves away and he's standing over an abyss. He feels no support anymore, everything disappears under his feet. It's only by going further on the path, by eagerly continuing the meditations that it'll dawn on him that maya must fall away before he can know the truth, spiritual reality; Azazel brings us this knowledge; he preserves man from spiritual or intellectual drowning.

Then there's a fourth being, Mehazael. He awakens the feeling in us and makes us aware that we're bound to time and space. The best way to clarify this is to place a condition before our soul that many of us have experienced. This is when we wake up in the morn and feel burdened by duties and worries that are like chains that the new day brings with it. This goes together with another one of wanting to shake off the chains that hold us fettered to this burden that is all the harder to bear since we know that we are powerless against it, that we must end ourselves. Here Mahazael shows us our karma. We'll be able to bear this burden more easily as soon as we tread the esoteric path. Mehazael shows it to us so that we don't resist it uselessly; for thereby we would only make our karma worse instead o shaking if off. And so in the end, these four Luciferic forces are a blessing for us.

We saw that every time we let our rage and hate run wild and we don't master our passions, we pulverize something in us and in cosmic substance, into which our feelings, sensations and thoughts flow continuously. Thereby we not only harm ourselves—we create karma for our environment. So far we've only studied karma theoretically. We'll now see how much deeper and more complicated karma's action is.

To become aware of the whole action of these four beings in us, we must keep on meditating strongly. In addition to meditating on the rose cross and on other things and esoteric verses that are given us, we should try to meditate on feelings and sensations, which is much harder. For instance, if we meditate on sympathy and immerse ourselves completely in this feeling, warmth will stream through us; meditation on antipathy will arouse a cold feelings in us. For instance, if we first meditate on the rose cross and then on a strong will impulse, an impulse for a good deed, we'll then see an inner light and feel a stream of warmth. Our exercises and meditations aren't successful right away; it goes slower with some and faster with others, depending on development and karma One will succeed after fifty times, another will take a whole lifetime, but we should wait patiently and go forward courageously. Where did the sun get the power to appear at the same place every morn and radiate its light?

An esoteric's life should become quite different from what it was before. He's really leading two lives—one that gradually crumbles and dies, and another one that gives him light out of the spirit from which he came. Wise masters in ancient mysteries expressed the dying of the old man and the flaming up of the new man through the Christ spirit in the words: Ex Deo nascimur, In … morimur, because Christ's name was too sacred to utter. Per Spiritum Sanctum reviviscimus.

The so-called “Traumlied” (Dream Song), which will be performed today, requires a few remarks to be made beforehand.

I already referred to this Dream Song in my Christmas address to you a few days ago. There I was able to say that the establishment of Christmas is by no means an imaginary one, one that has arisen from thought, but that the establishment of Christmas arises during the course of the year from very specific inner processes that can take place in the human soul when this soul comes to clairvoyant visions as the highest fruits of the soul, either through certain powers inherent in the natural course of things or through trained clairvoyance. We can best understand what may actually lie at the root of the human soul by visualizing the following thought.

All the plants, all the sprouting and sprouted growth that sunlight and solar warmth conjure up in spring and allow to flourish throughout the summer, all this, as it were, enters into a winter sleep, into winter darkness, on a kind of winter path at the time when Christmas was moved from the historical consciousness of humanity. The time in which Christmas is celebrated seems to us like sleep, like the darkness of the natural world. It is the opposite with the human soul as it is with the natural world. While the beings of nature descend into darkness and accompany the human soul into this realm of outer eclipse, it becomes, or can become, lighter in the human soul. She can, through the natural course of things, which we have often hinted at as a certain inherited clairvoyance, or through trained clairvoyance, dive straight into the brightest spiritual world, where the secrets of the spirit, hidden behind the outer sensual things, then dawn on her. And just as this descent of the plant world around the time of the winter solstice is subject to a regular law, so too the spiritual blossoming of human beings is subject to such a law, so that it coincides in its luminous brightness with the natural darkness into which the Christmas festival is placed.

It might seem as though such things are only being expressed out of today's schooled clairvoyance, or, as our opponents say, out of mere fantasy. But there will always be a living, fully valid proof of what people and nations experience outwardly. Therefore, it was extremely interesting for me that, after I had spoken about this Christmas clairvoyance within our movement for several years, which introduces us to the meaning of the Christ-being, to the arising of the Christ-being precisely when the human soul is most strongly immersed in clairvoyance , and I once again came to Norway, which is spiritually related to us, for a lecture cycle — that a remarkable vision was brought to me up there, of which, however, anyone who is familiar with such things must immediately say: Yes, it is reminiscent of many similar visions that have always been experienced by Germanic peoples, visions that many people have seen with their clairvoyant vision during the period of the thirteen nights from Christmas Eve to Epiphany, January 6. There the human soul can look into the spiritual world and see the fate of the human soul in the disembodied state, when it goes through Kamaloka and it then becomes clear to it how a relationship is established between the higher spiritual worlds and the deeds of people here on earth. And it is interesting that the person of whom we are told in this dream song and to whom these visions in this Nordic region are attributed through this dream song is a person who bears the name Olaf Åsteson. It is said of him that during these thirteen nights he underwent in a kind of clairvoyant experience what the Nordic man can feel as a vision in his way. He first learned how human deeds continue to unfold after the human being has passed through the gate of death, but he also learned how that which we call the Christ-being , how the office of judge of Jesus, the Christ, enters into the Nordic spiritual order of life after death, as the old world judge, the so-called face of Jehovah, the archangel Michael. So that, in addition to everything else that appears to the clairvoyance of Olaf Åsteson, the penetration of Christianity into the north can be heard, and that everything becomes clairvoyantly clear to him during the period of the Jesus birthday festival in the thirteen nights that he sleeps through.

Which consciousness becomes clear? It is now strange that this is already hinted at in the name, which quite obviously originally meant in the north such a human consciousness, which is inherited from the forefathers, from the ancestors. Olaf is truly himself in those times when the ancient, clairvoyant ancestral consciousness arises again in him. He who has inherited his consciousness, his inner being, from his ancestors: that is contained in the name Olaf. And Äste means love, the love that is passed down in the blood from generation to generation. Olaf is the son of this love, Åsteson, is the consciousness that has been passed down from generation to generation from the old clairvoyant times, is like resurrected ancestry. Olaf, who is born with this clairvoyant consciousness, recognizes the destiny of the human soul, and at the same time sees the intervention of the being we celebrate in Jesus' birthday festival as his entry into earthly existence. And strangely, while such visions have certainly always been experienced, especially in Germanic countries, this dream song seems to have been forgotten. In 1850, the preacher Landstad set out to collect folk songs in Telemarken, a lonely mountain valley where few people lived at the time. And among the many folk songs, he did not know since when, he did not know for how long, the song of Olaf Åsteson was alive in the vernacular – the song of Olaf Åsteson, who in the thirteen nights saw the destiny of the human soul after it had passed through the gate of death, and the coming into the world of Christ Jesus. He did not know when this song of initiation of the human soul came into being, for it was always recited in the vernacular, leaning on a musical mood. The few people in the lonely mountain valley enjoyed it, and there it was read by the preacher Landstad, in that it spoke to him of the secrets that had been uncovered – as if from the folk mind itself – about initiation in ancient times. And so it came to be that Landstad found it in the vernacular. Many people naturally believe that it alludes to Saint Olaf, who introduced Christianity in 1030 AD and whose mother was called Love. This is the case with many things that have both a historical and a spiritual significance.

Furthermore, it is interesting that this dream song has now quickly penetrated a large part of the Nordic people and lives in the hearts of the Norwegian people. There is, after all, a great movement in Norway to bring the old days back to life, and with that to revive the old language, which is very close to the ancient Germanic language, the Nordic language, in contrast to the Danish language, which was introduced later. Now this song is in a language that echoes the oldest language that has been preserved there, and the people who want to revive their antiquity in the first place, to whom this song spoke to the heart, and in the last ten to fifteen years it has not only penetrated into the hearts of the people, but also into the schools. It is sung and recited everywhere, and everywhere you hear, so to speak, where the soul awakens to the old folkways, the dream song of Olaf Åsteson, who in the thirteen nights from Christmas to January 6, so to speak, was naturally initiated into the sacred secrets of humanity. And for this reason, we would like to present this dream song of Olaf Åsteson to you today. Miss von Sivers will recite it. I tried to make a provisional arrangement so that it could be recited in German. Mrs. Lindholm helped me to make the peculiar language in which the song lives and now lives more and more and has become an aria of folk song possible in German. So we will now hear it in this provisional arrangement, which I was able to create in a few days.

The Dream Song

I.

So listen to my song!
I will sing to you
of a nimble youth:

It was of Olaf Åsteson,
Who once so long slept.

Of him I will sing.

II.

He went to rest on Christmas Eve.
A heavy sleep soon fell on him,
And he could not awaken
Before on the thirteenth day
The people went to church.

It was Olaf Åsteson,
Who once slept so long.
Of him I will sing.

He went to rest on Christmas Eve.
He slept for so long!
He could not wake
Before the thirteenth day
The bird spread its wings!

It was Olaf Åsteson,
Who once slept so long.
I will sing of him.

Olaf could not awaken
Before on the thirteenth day
The sun shone over the mountains.
Then he saddled his nimble horse
And rode hastily to the church.

It was Olaf Åsteson,
Who once slept so long.
I will sing of him.

The priest was already standing
At the altar reading the mass,
When at the church door
Olaf sat down to tell
The content of many dreams,
Which in the long sleep
Filled his soul.

It was Olaf Åsteson,
Who once slept so long.
Of him I will sing to you.

And young and old alike
Listened attentively to the words,
Which spoke of his dreams of Olaf.

It was Olaf Åsteson,
Who once slept so long.
Of him I will sing to you.

III.

“I went to rest on Christmas Eve.
A strong sleep soon embraced me;
And I could not awaken
Before on the thirteenth day
The people went to church.

The moon shone brightly
And the paths stretched far and wide.

I was raised up in the clouds
And thrown into the bottom of the sea,
And anyone who wants to follow me
Cannot be overcome by serenity.

The moon shone brightly
And the paths stretched far and wide.

I was raised up to the height of the clouds
Then plunged into gloomy swamps,
Beholding the terrors of hell
And also the light of heaven.

The moon shone brightly
And the paths stretched far and wide.

And I had to travel in the depths of the earth,
Where the streams of the gods rush terribly.
I was unable to see them,
But I could hear the rushing.

The moon shone brightly
And the paths stretched far and wide.

My black horse neighed not,
And my hounds did not bark,
Nor sang the morn's bird,
There was a single miracle everywhere.

The moon shone bright
And far the paths extended.

I must have traveled in the ghost land
er Dornenheide weites Feld,
My scarlet cloak was torn from me
And also the nails of my feet.

The moon shone brightly
And the paths stretched far and wide.

I came to the Gjallarbridge.
In highest wind heights this hangs,
With red gold it is studded
And nails with sharp points it has.

The moon shone brightly
And the paths stretched far.

The ghostly snake struck me,
The ghostly dog bit me,
The bull stood in the middle of the road.
These are the three creatures of the bridge.
They are of a terribly evil nature.

The moon shone brightly
And the paths stretched out wide.

The dog is snappy,
And the snake wants to sting,
The bull, he threatens mightily!
They let no one cross the bridge
Who does not want to honor the truth!

The moon shone brightly
And the paths stretched far and wide.

I crossed the bridge,
Which is narrow and dizzying.
I had to wade through the mire....
They are now behind me!

The moon shone brightly
And the paths stretched far and wide.

I had to wade through swamps,
They seemed bottomless to my feet.
When I crossed the bridge,
I felt earth in my mouth
Like dead people lying in graves.

The moon shone brightly
And the paths stretched out far and wide.

Then I came to water,
In which the ice masses shone brightly like blue flames
...
And God, he directed my mind
So that I avoided the area.

The moon shone brightly
And the paths stretched far and wide.

I turned my steps to the winter path.
On the right I could see it:
I looked as if into paradise,
Which shone brightly in the distance.

The moon shone brightly
And the paths stretched out wide.

And God's high Mother,
I saw her there in the splendor!
To Brooksvalin to go,
So she called me, announcing,
That souls are judged there!

The moon shone bright
And the paths stretched far and wide.

IV.

"In other worlds I dwelt
Through many a night's length;
And God only can know
How much of soul-afflict I saw —

In Brooksvalin, where souls
To the world's judgment are subject.

I could see a young man
who had murdered a boy:
Now he had to carry him forever
on his own arms!
He stood in the mud so deep

In Brooksvalin, where souls
Are subject to the judgment of the world.

I also saw an old man,
He wore a cloak of lead;
Thus he was punished for Living in greed on the earth,

In Brooksvalin, where souls
Are subject to the judgment of the world.

And men appeared,
Who carried fiery substances;
Dishonesty weighs
On their poor souls

In Brooksvalin, where souls
Are subject to the judgment of the world.

I could also see children
Who had glowing coals beneath their feet;
They did evil to their parents in life,
Which weighed very heavily on their spirits

In Brooksvalin, where souls
Are subject to the Last Judgment.

And to approach that house,
It was laid upon me,
Where witches were to work
In the blood they had angered in life,

In Brooksvalin, where souls
Are subject to the Last Judgment.

From the north, in wild hordes,
There came riding evil spirits,
Led by the prince of darkness,

In Brooksvalin, where souls
Are subject to the Last Judgment.

What came from the north
Seemed evil above all else;
He rode in front, the prince of darkness,
On his black steed.

In Brooksvalin, where souls
Are subject to the world's judgment.

But from the south came
Other hosts in lofty calm.
Saint Michael rode ahead
At Jesus Christ's side

In Brooksvalin, where souls
Are subject to the world's judgment.

The souls, laden with sins,
They had to tremble in fear!
The tears ran in streams
As evil deeds follow

In Brooksvalin, where souls
Are subject to the Last Judgment.

In majesty stood Michael
And weighed the human souls
On his scales of sin,
And standing by in judgment
The Judge of the world, Jesus Christ.

In Brooksvalin, where souls
Are subject to the Last Judgment.

V.

"Blessed is he who in life
Gives shoes to the poor;
He need not walk with bare feet
In the field of thorns.

Then speaks the tongue of the scales,
And world truth
Sounds in the spiritual state.

How blessed is he who in earthly life
Gives bread to the poor!
He cannot be hurt
By the dogs in the other world.

Thus the tongue of Libra speaks,
And world truth
Resounds in the spiritual state.

How blessed is he who in earthly life
Gives grain to the poor!
He cannot be threatened
By the sharp horn of the bull
When he must cross the Gjallar bridge.

Then the tongue of Libra speaks,
And world truth
Sounds in the mind.

How blessed is he who in earthly life
Clothes to the poor gives!
He cannot freeze to death
The ice masses in Brooksvalin.

Then speaks the tongue of Libra,
And world truth
Sounds in the mind.

VI.

And young and old alike
Listened intently to the words,
Which told of the dreams of Olaf. You have slept for so long... Wake up now, O Olaf Åsteson!