The Rudolf Steiner Archive

1. Question: Training.

Rudolf Steiner: No student is accepted who is prone to fantasy. Anything that leads to self-deception must be avoided by the strictest methods. How does one apply the Gospel of John from chapter 13? The teacher sets the task of developing a very specific state of mind, and so on.

Their task is to read the Bible, they read inaccurately. It is significant, for example, that the mother of Jesus is not mentioned by name in the Gospel of John.

2. Question: Creation (Genesis 1). Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9).

Rudolf Steiner: “God created” means: God developed the Earth out of the karma – creavit – of the previous planet. Language is indeed a development from unity to multiplicity. Many languages exist, and it is not without human guilt.

Here, where my hopes and dreams found peace, let me name this house ‘Wahnfried’ [hopes and dreams at peace].¹⁹⁵

These are the words Richard Wagner wrote for the house he had built in Bayreuth. The house brought fulfilment of a deep longing. To him, all of life had been endeavour, hopes and dreams. Peace came to his hopes and dreams with his occultist dramatic work Parsifal.

People generally believe that when a work of art such as Wagner's Parsifal is produced, all the thoughts that may be found in it have been deliberately put in by the artist. That, however, is not the way a mystic will ever consider a work he has created. A plant also does not know the laws which the botanist discovers when he studies it. Invisible powers were hovering above Richard Wagner. The occult contents of Parsifal come from them. Much of the process we call ‘occult training’ lived in Wagner. Wonderful things may be discovered by following the development of someone throughout his life. You can observe truths dawning in his mind that were systematically nurtured in occult centres for centuries.

Let us consider the way in which the secrets that later came instinctively to Wagner were presented to the pupils at occult centres. All kinds of physical and mental exercises were done and this intimately shaped their faculty of occult vision. The teacher would above all awaken a basic mood in the student that would give him an intimate relationship to the natural world that surrounded him. The pupil would be guided through the realms of nature and taught to approach nature inwardly in the same way we approach human beings. Seeing a smile we surmise a cheerful mood of soul, tears are to us another specific inner response. The pupil would be shown how to perceive correspondences between physiognomy and soul life also in the natural world. An occultist is someone for whom these things become very real in his inner life. Looking at the natural world, the pupil would be told: ‘All is physiognomy, reflecting something that is of the spirit.’ A plant in brilliant colours would be the smiling mien of the earth spirit to him, another the sorrowful mien of the earth spirit. An occultist thus takes emotional impressions with him through all parts of the world.

A crystal chastely lets light pass through itself. Here matter is free from desire and longings. Human substance is more perfect, but it is full of pleasure and pain, desire and passion. The day will come when human substance will be as chaste and precious as that of a crystal. The pupil's heart and mind would be attuned to finding images in looking at the world of nature, showing how the flesh would develop at a future time. Objects in the outside world are seen as expressions of the world's soul by the occultist, and this is just as objective as the spatial forms a mathematician is able to visualize. And just as it is impossible for two mathematicians to teach different things about a theorem, so it is impossible for two individuals who have gained access to higher knowledge to have different inner responses. Mystical things are beyond dispute, just as mathematical concepts are.

When a pupil had practised like this and was then found ready for it, another idea would be presented to him. He was introduced to something that was the most beautiful and most pure and yet also the most questionable. He would be told: ‘Look at the plant. The chalice of its corolla faces the sun. The sunbeam influences its growth and maintains it. It presents its reproductive organs to the sun in a chaste way. These parts, kept hidden in shame by man and animal, are chastely turned towards the sun in the plant. Now look back into the far distant past. Then man, too, was at the stage at which the plant has remained. Then he, too, had his reproductive organ facing the sun. The head, the root, was in the soil. Mystics have always known that man is an inverted plant. Only he developed further in the course of evolution, first becoming horizontal, like the animal, and then assuming the upright form human beings have today. He went through the plant realm and the animal realm to reach the human realm. Plato referred to this when he said that the world's soul has been crucified on the world's body.’ Man has not yet come to the end of his evolution, however. He is in a transitional stage where he must overcome desire and reach a higher spirituality. Desire must be overcome in the part he turns away from the sun, winning through to a higher spirituality. Then man will offer the chalice of his essential nature to the higher spiritual sun as purely and chastely as the plant does.

This ideal of the plant's chalice made spiritual was presented to those who were pupils of the Holy Grail. They were told that the holy chalice was the plant corolla which had gone through the sphere of animal life and had then been purified again and made spiritual. The words spoken to the pupil were: ‘The potential for this chalice, which takes the rays of the spiritual sun into itself; also lies in the human being. Man has finished organs and others that will only develop in future. In the far distant future man will reproduce himself the way we create a wave in the air when we say a word today.’ When the pupil had made these feelings his own, he was able to feel in those occult fastnesses how the power that sprouts forth from the plants at the time of Good Friday and Easter will in future also show itself in man, having been cleansed and purified. This sprouting growth was experienced especially on Good Friday, and people also felt that a pledge had been given with Christ's sacrificial death that man might have the possibility of gaining possession of the Holy Grail through his struggles. The sap that is the blood of Christ makes man pure, just as the plant has pure sap flowing through it. This was something the pupils experienced at the most solemn moments. The thought of redemption arose clearly before them when they had their inner experience of the relationship between Christ's sacrificial death and the sprouting plant. This idea came to be ever present for Richard Wagner. Wagner used the figure of Alberich to represent the birth of the I and of egotism. He used the E flat organ pedal for this.¹⁹⁶

In 1856 he tried to give form to the riddle of life on earth in a play called The Victors. A youth was loved by a girl belonging to the lowest caste in India. The difference in their castes made him turn away from the girl and become a pupil of Buddha. The pain this gave to the girl was so great that she realized that she had been a Brahman in an earlier life who had refused the hand of a low-caste girl. This is how Wagner was searching for a way of helping people to understand cosmic thought.

In 1857 Richard Wagner was standing outside the Villa Wesendonk near Zurich and looking out upon the Lake of Zurich and the countryside. Seeing the sprouting plants he came to see the relationship between redemption and plant life. A basic feeling for the ideal of the chalice came to him, an ideal the followers of the grail had always known. Later he tried to find the music that would express the evolution that leads from plant chalice to grail chalice. And he then found peace in his hopes and dreams.

The Parsifal idea has always been part of more recent culture, lying hidden in it as a seed. In his poem The Secrets, Goethe wrote of a youth walking through the woods to a monastery where he was received into the community of initiates. This youth seems like a Parsifal on his way to the grail castle. Asked about the poem by a group of students, Goethe explained that there are many different religious views in the world. Each of the twelve men whom Brother Mark found in the monastery was the representative of one of them, and the thirteenth among them was their leader.

Goethe was representing the occult lodge in his poem where there are no disputes over different opinions but only love. On reaching the monastery the young man saw a cross above the entrance with roses wound around it. He asked: ‘Who has made roses the companions of the cross?’ The sign of the rose cross expresses a thought that is part of the whole of world evolution. Someone who understands the ideal and the symbol is able to find it everywhere. Ancient legend tells of Cain looking for the door to paradise.¹⁹⁷ He was not admitted, but Seth was. Seth found the tree of knowledge and the tree of life intertwined. He took three seeds and put them on the dying Adam's tongue. A tree grew from them. That was the tree which Moses saw in flames, hearing the words: ‘I am he who was, who is and ever shall be.’¹⁹⁸ Moses got his staff from this tree. The great door to Solomon's temple was made of its wood, also the bridge which the Christ crossed on his way to the Mount of Olives, and finally the Cross on Golgotha. Those who knew of the grail had added: When the wood had grown dry and become the cross, it produced living shoots as a pledge of life eternal. The grail pupil would see this in the form of roses. Here past and future come together. Goethe touched on this secret in verses such as:

Tell none but the wise,
For the crowd will cast instant derision.

This is also the mood behind the words: ‘Who has made roses the companions of the cross?’ Wagner brought this stage of evolution most intensely to expression in his Parsifal. Everything Parsifal does has meaning. Nothing he does is superficial. He is allowed to be active in the supersensible world and does most at the point where he reaches the greatest pinnacle of his inner development.

This can be heard so marvellously in Wagner's last work. When we see the group of holy people gathered around the grail, and Parsifal who first of all kills—he shoots the swan—and then becomes the redeemer, we understand what Wagner meant with the words: ‘hopes and dreams found peace’. He had wanted to show that it was possible to reach in the musical sphere what it had not been possible to show by means of drama. Until then, music had only given expression to inner feelings. On the other hand people felt it was importunate to use the term ‘drama’. Deepest inner feelings begin where words cease to be. Wagner was looking for a link in musical drama. The spoken word was to stop at the given moment, leaving the stage to music. Without Parsifal, Wagner would not have achieved the ideal he strove for. At the point where he penetrated to the highest level in the supersensible sphere, he needed the most intimate musical element. He found the purest musical expression for this in his Parsifal. As an artist and musician he sought to show what lived in Wagner the mystic.

• 195. See Kleeberg L. Wege und Worte. Erinnerungen an Rudolf Steiner aus Tagebüchern und Briefen. 2. Aufl. S. 134 ff. Stuttgart 1961.
• 196. In the Rheingold prelude.
• 197. See Steiner R. The Temple Legend (GA 93). 20 lectures, Berlin 1904–1906. Tr. J. Wood. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1985
• 198. Exodus 3: 1-5 & 14.

The aim of these lectures is to give a survey of what we are accustomed to call theosophy. Theosophy must become a new impulse of culture in an encompassing way. For a long time humanity has been yearning for it, and from many aspects it is called upon to give an answer to the burning questions now advanced by men. At the present time, however, theosophy is to a great extent something which people not only wish to oppose, but something which they look upon as questionable, even as mad, like the dreams of certain fantastic brains.

Of course, if they were to ask these dreamers what THEY seek through theosophy and what they expect from it, their answer will be a rather wide one. Those who have recognised the vital essence of theosophy, which modern people take to be mere dreams, look upon theosophy as something which in a few decades will have an immense significance for human thought and feeling, and for man' s will and actions.

There is nothing into which theosophy cannot shed its light as an impulse, nothing into which it is not called upon to shine.

It is a well known fact that at the present time there are many problems, hygienic, social or pedagogical problems, or women's suffrage, and even greater is the number of answers supplied to these questions. But if we investigate all these questions and answers in an objective way, we come to the conclusion that modern civilisation puts the questions rightly—for they are determined by the conditions of our time—but that our modern epoch is not able to supply the answers to these questions without further ado. One who shuts his eyes and ears to the problems of our time, will continually encounter obstacles along his path. A time will come when men will realise that they must face many other problems too: these problems arise out of the inner, and outer strife of humanity, out of all the pains and sufferings and out of the shattered hopes in every field. But only theosophy is able to supply an answer.

Ever greater grows the number of people who despondently bow their heads, who fulfil their duty, but do not know the reason for their work and whose nervous state of mind often culminates in despair, and even affects their physical health, ending in neurasthenic conditions.

Let us only allude to these things, for the fundamental idea which should rise up before us is that theosophy is not something which takes hold of the minds of a few lazy people, who have nothing better to do, but theosophy must penetrate into practical life.

During the thirty years of its existence, the Theosophical Society of course had to pass through many things and many an illness of childhood, which made people question its significance! But it will extricate itself from these illnesses and show what it is capable of. Spiritual science must become an all-encompassing concern, a universal task, because it must supply the answer to questions which are, after all, the fundamental questions of all existence, and it must point out the way in which modern men should grasp these questions and why religions and sciences exist at all. Whatever we do, and if art, science and practical activities are to exist at all, we must go back to certain fundamental questions, and these must in some way or other be solved. All religions were attempts to give an answer to such questions, an answer which was always in keeping with the intellectual and cultural stage of different peoples.

Theosophy does not wish to be a religion, it has nothing to do with sects and it does not agitate.

Religion, as you know, is as old as human endeavor. If we gain an insight into the different religions of different nations, we come to the conclusion that all these religions endeavoured to supply an answer to the questions: What is, in the first place, man's essential being? Secondly, what is his task and goal? and thirdly, what reaches beyond physical existence?

In regard to these questions, a strange epoch lies behind modern humanity, one which called into life many a doubt in religion. Let us ask: How many people are there to-day who need religion, but who are not able to have it? Some of us can look back into times when religion was still a truly experienced life, when it still counted far more, indeed in a much higher measure, than is the case to-day with single religiously disposed natures. These natures still possess something of that warm feeling which existed throughout thousands of years. The longing, the need for what we call the spiritual world, or the longing for religion, still exists to-day; indeed, among the most truth-loving natures this longing has even grown. Such a person may say to himself: When I was a child, I still had true faith. But then things changed: I become acquainted with so-called science and with its facts, and since science speaks in quite a different way, for instance, concerning the origin of the world, I seriously began to doubt that which I once believed in my childhood. And there followed a deeply sad mood in life; the soul felt as if it were torn and devastated, and when it looked out into the world, no light was shed upon the inner contrasts. This explains the torn state of mind swaying between religious longing and satisfaction of the soul, and it also explains the tragedy of modern man, But the strife of such souls is perhaps better than the other condition: namely, to ask nothing at all, to lose the habit of asking questions, to become superficial and just allow oneself to be driven along by ordinary life.

Is it the fault of religion that things have come to such a pass? No! It is plainly evident that this is not so, for every religion, even the ancient myths and legends, have means and ways to lead the heart once more towards the spiritual world to reanimate the soul, if the soul is willing.

Who would have thought that such mighty impulses from the ancient myths, which had apparently died out thousands of years ago, leading an almost hidden, unknown existence, could rise to new life, as is the case in Richard Wagner's dramas?

It is not necessary to found a new religion; the time for this has past. What is needed now, is a new attitude towards religion, a new understanding of religion! What has changed, is the human spirit, the human soul, the human heart!

If we immerse ourselves in the development of human souls, we shall find in the course of these lectures, that human souls have already lived many times upon the physical plane, and that they gradually developed, until they reached the present stage, At first, this may sound strange, yet during past lives our souls have frequently heard the deep truths which will be explained in to-day's lecture.

The teaching of reincarnation will, for instance, be advanced; but your souls have listened, as they are listening to me now, to the Druids who lived and taught particularly in this region. These druidic teachers of ancient times already taught the truth of reincarnation to a smaller circle; they cultivated this primordial wisdom concerning the riddles of life. They went out to those whose souls thirsted for a deeper knowledge. But if these teachers of ancient times had spoken as I am speaking to you now, your souls could not then have understood them, for at that time the human spirit had not yet reached the present stage of development. Logical thought did not as yet exist in the human spirit. Man possessed instead the possibility of grasping truths in the form of images. These teachers therefore spoke in the form of images, and these images are known to us to-day in the form of legends and myths. If in the past our souls had not heard these teachings, we could not understand the spiritual truths to-day, when they are taught to us in a new form.

The soul thus makes enormous progresses through thousands of years; it continually takes on a new shape and therefore truth must be presented in a constantly new form; it must ever again be proclaimed anew. Let me give you a second example.

Let us go back into, the evolution of humanity as far as the ancient Egyptians, Chaldeans and Babylonians. When these peoples were the bearers of culture they did not look upon the sun and the stars as mere physical bodies. To-day, when a materialistic astronomer contemplates the heavenly bodies, he only sees in them physical bodies, and nothing besides. Even the earth is to him a physical body in the world's spaces, and man crawls about upon it, like the gnat upon our hand.

But it was otherwise among the ancient Egyptian astronomers. When the ancient Egyptian astrologer looked upon a star, he did not think of a purely physical body, for the star meant to him something quite different than it does to modern men. When he pronounced, for instance, the name of Mercury, he uttered it with veneration. It never passed through his mind to address the physical heavenly body, just as you would not dream of addressing a body made of cardboard. Everything which the eye perceived was at that time the expression of something spiritual. For the ancient astronomer, the physical star Mercury was therefore the expression of the Spirit of Mercury. You must not grasp this intellectually, but with your feeling, for otherwise you cannot understand what lived in the soul of such an astronomer. Everything in the world was to him the expression of something spiritual. He said: Everything is Spirit, and I, as a spirit, am a part of this Spirit.

You should bear in mind this feeling of the sages of ancient times; we should endeavour to understand them, and grasp what they knew concerning the processes which took place in the spiritual spaces. Those who immerse themselves in this feeling, know how immensely superior is this conception to our modern materialistic one! It is necessary to understand the sages of olden times; we should find out what they knew concerning that which took place in the spiritual spaces of the universe, for then we begin to notice the tremendous difference between their conception and our modern one, and the enormous significance of those ancient teachings of wisdom! This may seem ridiculous to the materialistic sense of our time, which is only acquainted with the purely physical conception of astronomy—yet it is so.

How did it come about that man has now lost the understanding for the spiritual life which lies at the foundation of all physical existence? Why had this to occur?

Let us turn our gaze to our immediate surroundings. Were you able to compare man's present environment with that which once surrounded him at every step, you would find that at that time man only possessed the most necessary means of subsistence; but he had, on the other hand, more comprehension for spiritual things. This comprehension for the spiritual world had to withdraw in order to give man the possibility to acquire his present dominion over the earth. Every technical and industrial progress of the present time could only be achieved through a world-conception which had become materialistic, through the fact that the spirit, the super-sensible world, withdrew. At the cost of spiritual contemplation man gained, in the course of the last centuries, his rule over the physical world. It is a primordial, eternal law of humanity that capacities acquired in one sphere, can only be gained by the withdrawal of others upon another sphere. For instance, man could never have called into life the possibilities of travel and communication had other capacities not withdrawn. The sense for spiritual things had to withdraw, in order that everything which now surrounds us might arise. All that once filled the human soul had to withdraw, to render possible the conquest of the physical world.

Thus we see that around the 16th century men lost the vision of the spiritual world, and we see how the materialistic conception took hold of humanity. Those who believe that they themselves do not live in the very midst of such materialism are greatly mistaken.

It is not the task of spiritual science to deny or renounce things; it does not intend to criticise the bad world of to-day; but it wishes to indicate the necessity of man's descent into matter. The great horizon of spiritual life had to withdraw from humanity while this descent took place, and this explains why man lost the old way of comprehending spiritual things. The truths exist in their old, earlier forms. Spiritual science can show how those truths can be rendered accessible to modern men. This is its chief aim. Consequently theosophy is merely the instrument whereby the deepest truths can be rendered accessible to the modern human spirit, in order that they may be grasped in their full depth.

To-day it is once more necessary to draw attention to the Spirit. We should not content ourselves with pointing out the “magnificent progress” of modern times! Spiritual truth is always accessible to us, and we must comprehend it in different ways.

If we turn back to ancient India and Egypt, and to ancient Greece at the time when Christianity arose, we always come across the same ancient truths, in different forms. There were always leaders of humanity who took care that the truths which had paled with the decay of civilisations should, at given times, be communicated anew. All the great founders of religion can be found among such leaders.

Before the dawn of our modern epoch, before the time of Copernicus and the 16th century, care was taken also in Europe to establish the foundation for a new way of proclaiming spiritual truths. Around the 16th century, lived certain people who were able to interpret the signs of the times. As early as 1459, a higher spiritual individuality, known in the external world as Christian Rosenkreutz, founded, with quite a small number of men, an occult school for the cultivation of wisdom, of ancient wisdom, but in a form suited to modern men. This is the wisdom of the Rosicrucians, cultivated for the first time around 1459. As stated, this wisdom is nothing new; it is the ancient primeval wisdom, but in a form suited to modern men.

What is the connection between this Rosicrucian wisdom and Christianity? There is no difference between the genuine Christian teachings and those of the Rosicrucians. If we grasp Christianity in its essence, we obtain the theosophy of the Rosicrucians. It is not necessary to found a new religion, but Christianity should be grasped in the way in which the early Christians grasped it. Only a few people still know something concerning the mysteries of the early Christian development. Even official theology has not the slightest idea of this. We come across St.Paul, as a man who had a deep knowledge of the Christian mysteries, who taught those mighty truths which were to guide humanity throughout thousands of years. At Athens, St. Paul had founded a school, whose leader was Dionysios thc Areopagite. Dionysios was a genuine disciple of St. Paul.

The teachings of Dionysios have always remained alive, and they have always been taught, particularly to those who had to bring Christ's living Word out into thc world. Had men stopped at Dionysios' standpoint, no new form would have been required. But the new era dawned, and with it arose the necessary of proclaiming these truths in such a way that no science could raise any objection against them. This is the aim of the Rosicrucian theosophy. Rosicrucian theosophy is therefore that form of religion which is suited to our time.

Only those who understand Christianity in the right way, can have an idea of its living content.

If we were in the position to hear from every side that which Rosicrucian theosophy had to say in connection with true Christianity, we would discover that scientific facts do not contradict these descriptions. The chief thing to bear in mind is that there should be no contradiction between religion and scientific facts, and that these scientific facts should harmonise with religion.

What does the Rosicrucian theosophy wish to give us? The knowledge of higher worlds, that is to say, of the worlds to which man will belong, when his physical body shall have decayed. It gives him the knowledge of life, the knowledge of the true nature of death and of human development. In this way, it can give him new strength in regard to religious truths and religious life.

No one should say: I stand firmly upon the foundation of the ancient teachings, and these suffice for me ... What do I care for those who doubt!—No opinion can be more selfish or un-Christian that this! It is still possible to-day for a certain number of men to live upon the foundation of old religions, but in a not too distant future this will no longer be possible. Those who have an insight into that which great social upheavals throw up to the surface, cannot judge in this way. They will realise that it is not possible to quarrel over the fact that theosophy must be proclaimed.

Thinking men know that spiritual science exists in order to supply an answer to the most burning questions, and that it is actually able to reply to all these questions. After all, one can prove or disprove anything, but this is not the essential point: It is impossible to quarrel over a REMEDY; the essential point is the success which we achieve with it. It is exactly the same with spiritual science. Humanity needs spirituality as a remedy, and it can only recover from its illnesses if this remedy streams into it. It is an evolutionary factor of our civilisation, and a giver of life.

Our modern way of living does not suffice, for it is directed exclusively towards physical-bodily things. The aim of theosophy is the health and recovery of Soul and Spirit. Spiritual science is nothing arbitrary; our present time and its problems call for it. All that it tells us, constitutes the teaching of those men who were able to make investigations in this sphere.

Spiritual science leads us into higher worlds, into which no physical eye can look, and which contain the causes of the effects to be found in the physical world. It will bring us knowledge of the external part of human nature, of every individuals essential being, the knowledge of the spiritual worlds and their hierarchies.

As we learn to know these, we also learn to know man's mission and significance. What we should endeavour to grasp is the true essence of human nature. We shall learn to know worlds which exist, but which cannot be perceived through our ordinary physical senses. Some might say: What you are telling us is very fine, but we cannot really know anything about it.—Fichte has already supplied an answer to this objection. Imagine that you were to enter a world of blind-born men, as the only one endowed with sight, and that you were to describe colours to these blind men ... These men will say: You are telling us nonsense; colours do not exist. But if the blind could be operated on, so as to give them the power of sight, they would be able to experience this world of colours and of light.

The same argument applies to the above objection. Those who raise it, adopt the same standpoint of the blind. No one should therefore say: Such things do not exist ... For no man has the right to speak of “limits of knowledge”, as did Du Bois-Reymond. As many worlds exist, as there are organs able to perceive them, and this is an infinite number of worlds! We are unable to perceive them to-day, because we still lack the organs of perception. The world is not only spatially infinite, but also intensively infinite: These is a world for every organ of sense. These worlds are still inaccessible to us yet they exist,—they exist, where we ourselves exist. The only thing needed is that our eyes should be opened, for these worlds are in our very midst.

The words of Christ: “Do not seek the Kingdom of God, for the Kingdom of God is in your midst”, should be taken literally. Also spiritual science speaks in this sense of the spiritual worlds. There have always been initiates who knew how to enter these kingdoms of heaven. Every religion speaks of these kingdoms. Spiritual science is but the means of disclosing anew this fundamental truth contained in every religion: Whatever we see and perceive round about us, is but the result and the effect of what takes place in the spiritual worlds. Whatever manifests itself upon the earth, is but the development of that which works and lives in the spiritual worlds.

Official Christianity has long ago lost the capacity of understanding the depths of religious documents. Spiritual science therefore had to take over the task of supplying the key to the forgotten treasures of knowledge, thus offering humanity, which is standing at the parting of thc roads, the remedy which it needs. Yet spiritual science does not know fanaticism; it simply relates and clearly sets forth man's being; it indicates his destiny after death, and how his soul develops outside the physical body. It describes that which takes place in the higher worlds; it speaks of the evolutionary stages of the earth and of the other planets, and it throws light upon the life-path trodden by man so far, and upon his future path. It points to that which man must still pass through, in order that he may reach his goal.

We shall try to grasp man's being and the nature of the worlds from which he comes. This is the sphere of knowledge to which spiritual science leads us.

Now we might object that all this only exists for the so-called clairvoyant seer, who is able to look into the spiritual worlds. Of what use is it to us, for these worlds are not accessible to us!

To this objection we can reply: There are, to be sure, certain methods of training which are only suited to the spiritual investigator, which make the above objection seem justified. But the path of Rosicrucian training is a different one. The clairvoyant eye and the ear of an initiate are of course needed if we wish to penetrate into the spiritual worlds, but our ordinary logic suffices to understand them. All that the spiritual investigator describes to us, is accessible to our logical reason; our sound common sense suffices for the comprehension of such things. Those who cannot grasp them, simply lack logical power. For the discovery of spiritual mysteries the clairvoyant eye of the spiritual investigator is of course needed, but our ordinary logic suffices in order to understand the things described in Rosicrucianism.

Those who cannot understand these things, should not ascribe their lack of understanding to the Rosicrucian training. Their failure does not depend upon the fact that they are not clairvoyant, but because their understanding is not sound and their thought is not consistent. Many people have no idea of logic. There is a modern musician, for instance, who even said that it is a mistake to think over things ... Even our scientists do not think beyond a certain limit. But if we use our understanding in the right way, we are able to grasp spiritual truths and spiritual wisdom, and they can become alive within us. If you keep on asking: Of what use are these things to us? I can give you the following reply:—Nothing can be given to us which is of greater importance than the knowledge of spiritual science! This alone transforms us into real human beings and gives us, even at the present time, a contented heart and a soul that has reached harmony.

With more words we do not proceed far in this field, for the striving after knowledge is an earnest matter and we must immerse ourselves in the necessities and problems of life. We must endeavour to pass on courageously from one sphere of spiritual life to the other, for this will give us an insight into the whole evolution of the universe and of man. The overwhelming greatness of these events will not only take hold of our hearts, but awaken new capacities within us; which render us more capable to face the tasks of everyday life. Direct forces stream out of spiritual science, and these become a treasure which cannot be lost and which transforms us into creative man beings.

You will understand the physical world, only if you learn to know the spiritual world. Spiritual science is not meant for cranks, but for the most practical of the practical!

Every form of life is spiritual. Even as ice is condensed water, so matter is condensed spirit. Mineral, plant, animal, or man—each is a condensed form of the spirit.

In this sense, the Rosicrucian theosophy will lead us to understand the spiritual foundations of the world. It does not change us into brooding egotists, but into lovers of life, for it does not despise ordinary life, nor estrange us from our earthly tasks, but it unites us with them. It stimulates us to diligent activity, for it knows that every action, as well as every Being, is an expression of the Spirit.

Yesterday we spoke in an introductory way of the aim and essence of the spiritual-scientific movement; to-day we shall penetrate more directly into the essence of this science. It has the disadvantage that it may shock those who are not familiar with these things, but we must have patience and realise that many things which seem almost nonsensical at first, will in the course of time appear well founded and comprehensible.

Of the subject which lies before us, we shall first of all consider the nature of the human being.

Let us place this human being before our soul. He is a most complicated being, the most complicated being of all which we encounter in the known world. Those who possessed a deeper insight have therefore always called man a microcosm, in contrast to the macrocosm, the universe. Paracelsus used a very fine comparison expressing man's being in the form of an image. He said: Contemplate Nature around you, and imagine every being in Nature, every plant, animal and stone, as the letter of an alphabet, and if you imagine a word written with these letters, you obtain man.

We find, in this connection, the confirmation of Goethe's words, that we must understand the whole of Nature in order to understand man.

To begin with, my explanations will only be a kind of sketch of man's nature. This will be related to the explanations of the following days in the same way in which a charcoal sketch is related to the finished picture.

If we contemplate man with our physical senses, when he stands before us as an earthly being, if our eyes perceive him and our hands can touch him, we look upon him, from the materialistic standpoint, as complete, as a whole being. Yet a deeper, that is to say, a spiritual contemplation of the world, sees in that which is perceptible to our physical senses only a small part of the human being, that part which the anatomist dismembers and dissects, The anatomist endeavours to understand the human being through the intellect, by dissecting the visible part into cells which can only be perceived through the microscope, and he thinks that he thus obtains an idea of the structure and activity of the single organs.

Ordinary science thinks that all this constitutes the physical body of man. But at the present time, man's physical body is frequently looked upon in the wrong way, for people think that the human being standing before them only consists of a physical body. This is not the case at all, for higher members of human nature are intimately connected with the physical body, are active through it, and it is through these members that this body becomes manifest in the form in which one human being confronts another. The physical body would present an altogether different aspect were we to separate it from the higher members of human nature. Man has this physical body in common with the whole mineral world. All the substances and forces which are active in mineral substances, such as iron, arsenic, carbon, etc, are also active in the substances of the human body and in the physical body of animals and plants.

Our attention is immediately drawn to the higher members of human nature if we once realise the tremendous difference which exists between man's physical body and the other physical substances which surround us in the mineral world. You will know that this wonderful structure of the physical body bears within it what we call inner life, consciousness, desires, joy and pain, love and hate; this physical body does not only contain substances pertaining to the mineral world, but also thoughts. You may indeed perceive the glow upon the countenance, or the colour of the hair, but you do not perceive what takes place within the physical body in the form of inclinations and dislikes, joy and suffering, etc, All this we do not see, nevertheless it takes place within the covering (sheath) of the skin. This is the most evident and irrefutable proof that there is something in addition to the physical body, something besides mere physical substances.

When you watch a tear falling, this tear is but the physical expression of sorrow, which is an inner process, Now look upon the mineral world: these minerals are dumb! You cannot perceive in them any joy or sorrow, nor any other inner life. The stone has no feelings and no consciousness, such as we have. To a spiritual scientist this stone appears like the nails upon our fingers, or like the teeth. Observe one of your finger nails: it has no feeling, no consciousness, nevertheless the nail forms part of your being. There must be something within us which brings about the formation of nails and teeth, and in the same way there must be something in the world outside which produces minerals. The nails themselves have no consciousness, but they form part of something which is endowed with consciousness. If a small beetle creeps over one of our nails, this nail perhaps appears to it as a mineral. This is the case when we creep over the earth, without being aware that behind this mineral earth there is consciousness, even as there is, consciousness behind our nails. Later on we shall see what kind of consciousness lies at the foundation of the mineral world. This Ego-consciousness of the mineral world lies high above us, even as, for instance, the consciousness, of the small beetle creeping over our nail is surpassed by our own consciousness behind the nails.

The Rosicrucian philosophy ascribes this consciousness of the mineral kingdom to a world which it calls the WORLD OF INTELLIGENCE; there lies the consciousness of minerals, and there lies also the foundation of human intelligence, enabling us to form thoughts. Yet the thoughts which live in us are very deceptive, for human thoughts are related to the Beings of the Intelligent World in the same way in which our shadow is related to our real self. Even as the shadow upon the wall is not I, but only my own shadow, so man's thoughts are only shadow-pictures in the world of the spirit. But here on earth we are able to grasp a thought because in the Intelligent World there is a real Being who produces this thought. This is a world in which our thoughts are real beings, whom we encounter in the same way in which we here meet other human beings. This Intelligent World of the Rosicrucians is for an initiate the higher Devachan World, the Arupa Devachan of the Hindoos, or the higher Mental World. When an initiate passes through the physical world, every portion of the earth speaks to him of life, and he experiences everywhere the manifestations of another world. Since in our physical body we are nothing but portions of the physical world, we also have a subordinate physical consciousness, reaching as far as the Intelligent World, that is to say, as far as the consciousness of the mineral world.

Our physical body is therefore, in its substances, of mineral nature, and the consciousness of the physical body lies there where the consciousness of the mineral world is to be found.

What is, however, the difference between our physical body and a mineral—for instance, a rock crystal? If we compare our body with a crystal; we find upon comparison, that
our body is a most complicated thing, Let us picture to ourselves the difference between a mineral and a living being.

In regard to the substances, there is no difference at all, for exactly the same substances can be found in living beings as in minerals, except that the structure is far more complicated.

If you have before you the mineral and its form, you will find that it remains the same; if it only depends upon itself. But this is not the case in a living being, in a plant, an animal, or a human being. As soon as a substance takes on so complicated a form that it can no longer be held together through its own forces, in other words, that it would decay if left to itself, there is something in this substance which prevents it from decaying, and in that case we have before us what we call a LIVING BEING.

Spiritual science therefore says: A living being would decay into the component parts of its substances if it were left to itself, if within it there did not exist something which prevents this decay. That which every moment prevents this living being from decaying, the preventing factor of such a decay, is what we call the etheric or the vital body. This is of an entirely different nature from the substances which constitute the physical body in every living being, and it has the capacity to produce the most complicated physical substances, to maintain them and to prevent their decay. What a living organism thus reveals in a purely external form, is what we call LIFE. This etheric or vital body, or this body of formative forces, cannot be perceived by physical eyes, but it can be perceived through the first degree of clairvoyant vision, and it is the task of a clairvoyant to develop himself so as to be able to perceive this etheric body. Modern natural science does indeed try to discover the etheric body, but it tries to form a conception of it in a purely speculative way, by speaking, for instance of vital force, or vital energy.

How does the etheric body appear to a clairvoyant eye, that is to say, to the clairvoyant?

If you contemplate an object of the mineral world, for instance, a rock crystal, through the eye of a clairvoyant, eliminating for this purpose the physical substance, by deviating as it were, your attention from it you would see nothing in the space occupied by the physical crystal. This space is void. But if you contemplate in the same way a living being, a plant, an animal, or a human being, this space occupied by the physical body will not be empty, for it will be filled up by a kind of shape of light, and this is the above-mentioned etheric body.

The etheric body is not of the same kind in every living being; on the contrary, it takes on very different forms, even as regards shape and size in relation to the physical body of the living being in question; this varies according to the stage of development of the different beings. The etheric body of plants has quite a different shape from the plants themselves; the etheric body of animals has a greater resemblance to the external shape, and the etheric body of man appears as a shape of light which corresponds almost exactly to the form of the physical body. If we contemplate, for instance, a horse from this standpoint, we see its etheric body protruding rather far from the head as a shape of light, but it more or less resembles the shape of the horse's head. But in the case of an average man of to-day we can see his etheric body protruding only slightly above the head and its sides. In regard to the substance of the etheric body, one generally has quite wrong ideas. Even in theosophy people write and talk a lot of confusing nonsense on the etheric body, but this forms part of the “childhood illnesses” of the Theosophical Society, and they must be overcome. To obtain a correct idea of the substantiality of the etheric body, please try to follow my thoughts in this comparison:—

Imagine that you have one hundred pounds and that you spend more and more: Your property will grow smaller and smaller and finally you will have nothing at all. This would be the least possible substantial state of your property. But there is one still less substantial, when you diminish still more the zero-stage of your property by making debts and acquiring a “negative” property. You can therefore reduce your property still more, for you have less than nothing if you borrow, for instance, ten pounds.

Or imagine this applied to something else. Imagine a battle with its tremendous noise; if you go further away from it the noise will grow weaker and weaker; the silence will grow until you finally hear nothing more. If you reduce still further this stage of hearing nothing at all, then it will be more than silent around you, more than soundless ... Such a silence actually exists, and it is in the highest degree blissful, though an ordinary person will not so easily be able to imagine it.

Now imagine these examples applied to the density of substance. At first you will have the three generally known aggregate conditions: the solid, liquid and gaseous conditions; but in accordance with the above-mentioned example of the property, you should not remain by these three conditions. Even as it is possible to dilute the property into a “negative” property, so the substance can also become thinner and thinner, more and more diluted, beyond the gaseous stage. Imagine therefore a kind of substance opposed to the physical substance; this will give you a kind of idea of that which constitutes the etheric body.

A “negative” property has the opposite qualities of a positive one, for a “plus” property makes us rich, and a “minus” property poor; the more money I have, the more I can buy; the less money I have, the less I can buy. In the same way, the cosmic ether, of which the etheric body of every living being is a part, has the opposite qualities of physical substances.
Even as physical substance has the inclination to fall asunder, to decay, so the etheric body has the inclination to hold everything together, preventing the physical body, which it permeates from decaying. As soon as the etheric body abandons the physical body—in other words, when physical death arises—the decomposition into the elemental parts immediately sets in. We have thus traced matter into a world where it has the opposite effect of our physical matter.

When I say that man's etheric body resembles his physical body, I mention a fact which must be borne in mind and which must be mentioned here, for it will give rise to important conclusions in following lectures. This statement must be subjected to an important limitation, for in reality the etheric body differs greatly from the physical body and resembles it only in its upper part, in the head; but it differs from it greatly in regard to the fact that it is of opposite sex: man's etheric body is feminine, and woman's etheric body is masculine. Every human being is therefore bisexual; the sex of the physical body is only an external expression, having its opposite pole in the etheric body. Even as a magnet has a north pole and a south pole, even as a magnet cannot have only a north pole, so we also find two poles in man: the pole and the counter-pole.

The etheric or vital body, also called the body of formative forces, therefore constitutes the second member of man's being, and from birth to death it remains intimately connected with man's physical body, and when the etheric body severs itself from the physical body, this signifies death.

The physical body is first built up by the etheric body; the etheric body is, so to speak, the architect of the physical body. If you wish to have a picture for this, take that of water and ice: When the water cools down, it takes on another shape, it becomes ice. Even as ice is formed out of water through condensation, so the physical body is formed out of the etheric body.

Ice—water, physical—etheric body; this means, that the forces of the etheric body have become tangible, physically perceptible in the physical body. Even as the water already contained the forces which then manifest themselves in the solid ice, so the etheric body already contains, all the forces needed for the structure of the physical body. The etheric body thus already contains a force producing, for example; the heart, or the stomach, or the brain, and so forth. For each organ of our physical body there is a predisposition in the etheric body; these predispositions are not substances, but currents of forces.

Man has the etheric body in common with every plant and animal, that is to say, with every physical being manifesting LIFE,

Now we may ask: Do the plants have a kind of consciousness such as we have found for the world of the minerals? We have already seen that spiritual research discovers the consciousness of minerals in the higher Intelligent World, the origin of our thoughts.

Even as our fingers do not have a consciousness of their own, for the consciousness of the finger forms part of man's consciousness, so the plants form part of a state of consciousness lying on the lower Intelligent World, in the heavenly world (Rupa Devachan), When the spiritual investigator enters this world, he encounters in it the souls of the plants. There, the souls of the plants are Beings, such as we are beings here on earth; and these Beings are related to the plants in the same way in which man is related to his fingers.

The consciousness of plants is therefore rooted in this lower Devachan World. In it are rooted the forces which lie at the foundation of every growth and of every organic structure; in it are also rooted the forces which build up our physical body, that is to say, the forces of our etheric body, which, we have already designated as the architect of our physical body. This consciousness of the vegetable world is far higher and wiser than the consciousness of man,

You will realise this at once if you bear in mind the wise structure not only of man's physical body, but of every being permeated by an etheric body, that is to say, of every living being. What enormous wisdom is needed to build up the simplest physical body of any living being; not to mention the most wonderful structure all living beings on earth; the human body!

Observe, for instance, man's upper thigh bone; how wonderfully and in accordance with every rule of architecture the single little osseous joists and beams are put together! In its upper part, the upper thigh bone is far more complicated than it appears to us externally; for it is composed of a trestle of beams whose angles are arranged so skillfully that the weight of the whole body is borne by the least quantity of matter; truly a far greater work of art than the most complicated bridge construction; no engineering skill in the world could imitate it!

Or contemplate the structure of the heart: it is built so wisely that man with all his wisdom is but a child in comparison to that wisdom which reveals itself in the structure of the heart. How many things does the human heart withstand, though man's foolish attempts to ruin it every day, for instance, through our so-called stimulants—coffee, alcohol, nicotine.

Forces reaching as far as the astral world are needed for the construction of such a wonderful edifice as our physical body; only the Beings of this astral world are, trivially speaking, clever enough to build up such a physical body.

And now we come to the third member of man's being. Plants have a physical body and an etheric body; but they lack something which both man and the animals have; they have no pain, no desires, no sufferings, and no sensations whatever. This is the difference between man and animal on the one side, and the plants on the other. The difference consists therein that inner, processes take place in the animals and in man. From processes observed in plants, modern science even seeks to ascribe sensations to plants. It is a shame to see how concepts are being misused! These are no inner processes, as in the case of a sensation—such sensations might just as well be ascribed to a blue litmus paper. Such mistakes arise if sensations are looked for in the physical world; no sensation can be found in the physical world in a phenomenon of the kind which may be observed in certain plants, for we must rise up to heavenly worlds if we wish to find sensations in plants. To prevent misunderstandings, let me add that in the case of so-called reacting plants, for instance, in the mimosa, the sensitive process of reaction does not reflect itself in the physical world as a sensation, but only in the lower Intelligent World, the seat of the plant's consciousness. Here, in the physical, world, only man and animals have instincts and passions, joys and pains. Why?—Because they have, in addition to the physical and etheric body, also the astral body, the third member of human nature.

To a clairvoyant seer, the astral body appears in such a way as to envelop the whole human being in an egg-shaped cloud, and within this cloud every sensation comes to expression, every instinct and every passion. The astral body is therefore the carrier of desire, pain, suffering and joy. This third member presents a different aspect from the etheric body and the physical body. When man is asleep, only the physical and the etheric body lie upon the bed, whereas the astral body and the Ego are lifted out; but when the astral body and the etheric body go out of the physical body, then death arises, and with it the decay of the physical body.

Why is this third member called astral body?—No more appropriate name could be found for it! Why?—Because this member has an important task which we must bear in mind. At night, this astral body is not inactive, for then it works upon the physical and etheric body, and the clairvoyant seer can observe this. During the day, we use up our physical and etheric body, for everything we do uses up the physical body, and the expression of this is fatigue. Now the astral body repairs what we use up during the day. The astral body really eliminates fatigue while we are asleep. This shows the importance and necessity of sleep. The clairvoyant seer can do this repair-work consciously. The refreshing element of sleep depends on the fact that the astral body has worked in the right way upon the physical and astral bodies. But since the astral body must first return into the physical and etheric bodies, the refreshment of sleep arises gradually, that is to say, about one hour after waking up.

Something else, something important is also connected with the fact that the astral body goes out during sleep. When the astral body enters in connection with the external world during the waking life of daytime, it must live together with the physical and etheric body; but when it extricates itself from the body, that is to say, during sleep, it is freed from these fetters of the physical and etheric body. Then something wonderful arises; the forces of the astral body then reach as far as the starry world, where the soul-Beings of the plants are to be found, and it draws its strength from that world. The astral body reposes in a world where the stars are embedded. This is the world of the Harmony of the Spheres, according to the Pythagoreans. It is a reality and not a mere fancy. If we live consciously in this world, we can hear the harmonies of the spheres, we can hear the stars resounding in their reciprocal forces and relations. In this sense, Goethe was an initiate, and in this meaning we should read the beginning of the Prologue in Heaven of “Faust:—

“Die Sonne tönt nach alter Weise
In Bruderspharen Wettgesang,
Und ihre vorgeschriebene Reise
Vollendet sie mit Donnergang.
Ihr Anblick gibt den Engeln Stärke,
Wenn keiner sie ergründen mag;
Die unbegreiflich hohen Werke
Sind herrlich, wie am ersten Tag.”

(Translation after Latham)

“The sun, with many a sister-sphere,
Still sings the rival psalm of wonder,
And still his fore-ordained career
Accomplishes with tread of thunder.
The sight sustains the angels' prime,
Though none may spell the mystic story;
Thy Works, unspeakably sublime,
Live on, in all their primal glory.”

People do not know Goethe, and as a rule they are not aware that he was an initiate, for they simply say: A poet needs images ... . Yet Goethe knew that the sun stands in the midst of a choir and that it resounds as Spirit of the Sun! Goethe therefore remains by this image and continues:—

“Horchet! Horcht dem Sturm der Horen!
Tönend wird für Geistesehren
Schon der neue Tag geboren.
Felsentore knarren rasselnd,
Phöbus' Räder rollen prasselnd;
Welch Getöse bringt das Licht!
Es drommetet, es posaunet,
Auge blinzt and Ohr erstaunet,
Unerhörtes hört sich nicht.”

(Translation after Latham)

“Hark! The Hours in storm are winging,
And to spirit ears loud-ringing,
Now the new-born day is springing.
Rocky portals clang asunder,
Phoebus' wheels roll forth in thunder,
What a tumult brings the light!
Loud the trump of dawn hath sounded,
Eye is dazzled, ear astounded,
The Unheard no ear may smite.”

During the night, the astral body lives in this world of stars. During the day it comes into a kind of disharmony of wordly things, whereas at night, during sleep, it is once more embedded in the world of the stars. And in the morning it returns with the forces which it brings along from this world. From the astral world we bring with us the harmony of the spheres, when we awake from sleep! The real home of the astral body is the world of the stars, the astral world, and that why it is called astral body.

Now we have learned to know three parts of human nature; the physical body; the etheric body and the astral body.

The fourth part, the Ego, we shall learn to know next time. The Ego is that member which raises man above the animal and makes of him the crown of creation.

The animal does not have man's consciousness, although it has a certain kind of consciousness, just as we have seen it in the case of the plant and of the mineral; but the consciousness of animals lies in the astral world. Man's fourth member, the Ego, constitutes with the other three members, the, “holy fourfold essence” of man, of which all the ancient Schools speak.

Man therefore has the physical body in common with the mineral, the etheric body in common with the plants, and the astral body in common with the animal. He alone has an Ego, and this raises him above the others. In man we find, as it were, the essence of everything which we see spread out round about us. In fact, a microcosm! We must therefore first learn to know our environment, if we wish to know man.

We should therefore think of these three members, of these three bodies, as sheaths, woven in different regions, and we, that is to say, our Ego, lives in these sheaths, together with the higher members of human nature, together with our immortal part.

There is a “holiest of holies” in man which we may designate as his self-consciousness. Those who see this in the right way, have no difficulty in perceiving that this word “self-consciousness” expresses at the same time the true meaning of human life. Self-consciousness is the capacity for transmitting the knowledge that One is an EGO.

You may clearly obtain an idea of this if you bear in mind that there is one name in the whole language which fundamentally differs from all the others: it is the word “I”. Anyone can designate the table, but, “I” is a designation which can only be applied individually to one's own self. To every other person one is a “you”. Never can the word “I” resound from outside, if it is to designate my own being. Spiritual science has always experienced this.

In the Jewish religion, for instance, when speaking of man's inner being, it was referred to as the unspeakable name of God. For the Hebrews said: When the “I” is to be pronounced, it must resound from the central point of our being. No being outside can utter this name: A kind of shudder therefore passed through the whole congregation when the priest uttered the word JAHVE, “I am the I am”. The God within man begins to speak—this is the pure, original, meaning of the Jewish name of God. You will also learn to know other names, but they all stand in some kind of relationship to this one name.

With this word “I,” we designate the fourth member of man's being. Through the Ego, and from this centre, man works upon the other members of his being, upon his astral body, etheric body and physical body. No matter how far we go back into the history of human development, we find that man always possessed these four members, and it is this which distinguishes him from the animals.

Let us now form an idea of the relationship between developed and undeveloped men in regard to these four members. Consider under this aspect one of the most savage men, who eats up his fellow-men, and compare him with an average European, and the latter again with a highly developed individual—Goethe, for example, or Schiller, or Francis of Assisi. The savage blindly follows the instincts and passions contained in his astral body. He has an Ego, but this Ego still lives completely under the sway of the astral body. An average man of the present time is already able to distinguish good and evil, and this is due to the fact that he has worked upon his astral body. He has worked upon it and even transformed certain instincts into so-called ideals. Man reaches an ever higher stage of development the more he transforms his astral body through his Ego. The modern average European has transformed a good part of this astral body. An individuality such as Schiller or Goethe has already transformed the greater part of the astral body. But a human being who has subjugated all his passions through his will, as for instance, Francis of Assisi, has an astral body which is entirely transformed by his Ego, there is nothing left in this astral body which is not completely under the sway of the Ego.

That part of the astral body which man has been able to transform, we designate as “Manas” or “Spirit-Self”. This is the fifth member of his being. We may then say: The Ego contains the seed for the transformation of the astral body into Manas, Spirit-Self,

Now man has the possibility to transform not only his astral body, but also his etheric body, so that the Ego also becomes the sovereign of the etheric body. But you must realise that this is a far more difficult and slower work. The difference between the transformation of the astral body and of the etheric body is the following:—

Consider what you knew when you were eight years old, and what you have learned since your youth! The bearer of all these transformations is the astral body. Consequently it changes essentially every day through the external impressions which you take in. But this is not the case with the etheric body. If you wish to have an idea of this imagine the following:—If you were a choleric child at the age of eight, you will probably still lose your temper even to-day. Only a few people succeed in transforming themselves to such an extent as to change also their habits, inclinations, temperament and character. This does not in any way contradict what I have explained above. The astral body is indeed connected with pleasure and pain and the other sensations, but when these have become habitual and so-called character traits, then they are rooted in the etheric body; and if we wish to transform these habits, then the etheric body must be transformed, for it is the bearer of every habit and character-trait.

I have frequently compared the transformations of astral body and etheric body with the progress of the minute and second hands of the clock.

Later on we shall speak of the development of the more advanced pupil. He is not a pupil in the meaning of ordinary life, not only one who learns something. Undoubtedly, such a pupil must also learn a lot, but far more important than learning, is the above-mentioned work upon the etheric body: He must succeed, for instance, in transforming a choleric disposition into gentleness of character. Spiritual science in particular gives him indications for this.

He who succeeds in transforming from one day to the other at least one of his habits, that is to say, some quality of his etheric body, has attained a high stage of development. Such a transformation of the etheric body should go hand in hand with the other things which the disciple of occult science learns. But even if a man knows nothing of such a training, he nevertheless transforms his etheric body of his own accord—though slowly and gradually, and throughout many incarnations And that part of his etheric body which he has been able to transform, we designate as Budhi, or Life-Spirit, which constitutes the sixth member of human nature.

Then there is the stage lying far, far above the others, upon which man learns to work upon his physical body and to transform it. That part of his physical body which he has learned to control, we designate as Atma, or Spirit-Man. It is the seventh member of his being. Atma is connected with the German word “atmen”, to breathe, for the process of transformation goes out from the breathing process.

We can only form an idea of what it means to control one's physical body consciously, through the Ego, if we bear in mind how little we really know of our physical body. This knowledge has nothing to do with the assertions of modern anatomy concerning man's physical body. Long before modern anatomy existed, there were ancient teachings, which of course were not known publicly, but which contained a knowledge concerning man's inner being. This knowledge enabled the wise men of ancient times to follow, for instance, the currents of life and of the blood, and they were thus able to observe themselves inwardly, to observe the physical body and all its organs. When we shall have reached this stage of development, not one portion of our body will move without the conscious participation of our will. This is the transformation into Atma, the Spirit-Man.

Now someone might object: The Physical body is the lowest member of human nature; how is it possible that its transformation should constitute the highest member? Just because the physical body is the lowest member, man's highest effort is needed in order to gain control over this body. The transformation of the physical body is intimately connected with the acquisition of power over forces which permeate the whole cosmos. And the sway over these cosmic forces is what we designate as magic.

Man's true inner nature thus consists of seven parts. But those seven parts are completely intermingled. A true idea of this intermingling can only be obtained if we compare it with the seven colours of the rainbow, which are all contained in the light of the sun. Even as the light consists of these seven colours, so man consists of his seven members.

Let us now consider the significance of this structure of man's being in connection with the knowledge of man's whole life-path. Yesterday we learned to know the nature of sleep. The physical body and the etheric body lie in the bed; respiration and blood-circulation remain, as life-expression of the etheric body, but everything pertaining to the astral body is lifted out of the physical body and the etheric body together with the Ego.

When death arises, something else appears, in contrast to this. Whereas the physical body and the etheric body remain united throughout the life between birth and death, death separates the etheric body also, and not only the astral body, as in sleep, from the physical body. But the physical body is so complicated (let us bear in mind yesterday's explanations) that it must decay, if obliged to rely upon its own forces.

Let us now observe clairvoyantly the human being after death: Before us lies only the physical body, and above it soar, the astral body and the etheric body ... Immediately after death, the deceased human being experiences a peculiar manifestation: At the moment of death, the course of his whole life appears in the field of human memory, like a spread-out picture. Every event, even the most insignificant, passes before him in the form of an image. This is the natural result of the fact that the etheric body, besides having the above-mentioned quality of preventing the decay of the physical body, is also the bearer of memory. As soon as it loses its first task, it devotes itself intensely to this second task. Since every event in life, whether, pleasure or suffering, is connected with joy or pain, owing to the permeation of the etheric body with the astral body, now that the astral body is also severed from him, man experiences those memory pictures, that is to say, he experiences his whole past life, without any sensations or feelings, as if it were a great panorama.

As long as the etheric body remains connected with the physical body, the instrument which it must use, the brain renders our memories incomplete; we only retain fragments of life impressions in our memory. The deficiency of the physical brain is responsible for this, but as soon as the etheric body becomes emancipated from the physical brain, it can remember everything.

An analogy may even be found in ordinary life, during the shock which one experiences, for instance, at the moment of drowning, or crashing, etc. This is simply due to the fact that at such a moment the etheric body becomes forcefully severed from the physical body, which also takes place, for example, in a slight degree when an extremity falls asleep (pins and needles), or in hypnosis. In the case of a hypnotized person, the clairvoyant can see his etheric body hanging out at both sides of the head. Materialistic physiology objects that in hypnosis there is a physical change in the blood, but people simply mix up cause and effect.

Man's first experience after death is therefore this retrospection of his past life, which differs in length, but averages about three and a half days.

Then comes a second kind of death, when the etheric body completely severs itself also from the astral body, so that a kind of etheric corpse remains behind. But this corpse soon dissolves, more or less quickly in each individual case, and becomes part of the universal cosmic ether. Yet it does not dissolve altogether; a kind of essence remains from the past life. The Ego takes this essence along with it; it is an imperishable treasure, which remains for all the subsequent incarnations. After every incarnation a new leaf is added, so to speak, to the proceeding one. In Theosophy this essence of the etheric body is called the Causal Body, and the quality of the causal body determines the way in which the future incarnations take place.

Now the astral body remains alone ... What is the difference between this condition, in which it is severed from the other members, from the physical body and the etheric body, and that of sleep, in which it also remains alone? The forces which it had to use during sleep in order to elaborate and improve the physical body, have now become emancipated, through the fact that the physical body has definitely been laid aside. The astral body now uses those forces for its own self and is conscious of this. In this state of self-consciousness the astral body now passes through a time which can be understood best of all if we consider the following:—

Imagine that you are enjoying a specially tasty dish—you eat it and enjoy its taste. This pleasure is not rooted in the physical body, but in the astral body, but it can only arise because it has the required organ, namely a tongue and a palate. Thus the physical body supplies the instrument for the gratifications of the astral body.

Now, what takes place after death, when the physical body has been discarded? The instrument is lacking, the transmitter of enjoyment, but the astral body has not lost the longing and desire for some special pleasure. Now imagine this state as vividly as possible. It resembles the condition of a man who is thirsting in the midst of a desert. After death the astral body still feels the desire for certain enjoyments, in the same measure in which it was accustomed to feel this during the past life on earth, and for this reason the time after death is for so many people a time of unsatisfied desires.

This condition is named Kamaloka (Kama means desire, and locus place). It is the same condition which we find described in many myths—for instance, the tortures of Tantalus, or purgatory. Of course, this condition is not only a torturing one; it tortures us until the astral body has lost the habit of desiring enjoyments. The more needs the astral body feels during physical life the longer does this condition of Kamaloka last.

But you may gather from the above, that according to the quality of these needs experienced by a human being during his past life on earth; the astral body may encounter in Kamaloka experiences which are not only torturing, but under circumstances very good and pleasant. The astral body will, for instance, feel pleasure in every moment of joy given to him by Nature and its beauty. In order to experience this enjoyment of Nature and its beauty, we must indeed have eyes to see, but beauty is something that transcends the physical, and therefore this condition is in Kamaloka the source of increased enjoyment. These things produce great joys and wonderful experiences even during the Kamaloka period.

Thus we may render this Kamaloka time more beautiful by emancipating ourselves from purely physical enjoyments. If you consider this, you will be able to understand several things in life, for instance, everything which constitutes art. The more ideal art is, the more the ideal essence manifests itself through art, the stronger and the more uplifting will, be the influence of the work of art, an influence transcending physical life. The Spirit is the real element of art. The materialistic short-sightedness, alone has led to naturalism in art.

After passing through this Kamaloka period, we therefore reach the stage where we have lost the habit of physical enjoyments, and this means that we must now pass through an entirely different condition. The soul now discards all those parts of the astral body which man, that is to say, the Ego, has not yet transformed. The discarded astral sheath now constitutes the third corpse which we leave behind.

Now that the Ego has united itself with that which it has gained from the other bodies—viz. with the above-mentioned essence of the etheric body and with that of the astral body—it passes on to the Spirit-realm. There it lives until the time of a new birth.

We shall speak of this tomorrow. To-day I only wish to emphasize once more that all these spiritual worlds exist continually round about us, and not in a “Beyond”, which is spatially separated from us. One who can look into the spiritual worlds can at any time perceive the above-mentioned corpses, as shadows or spectres. It is these corpses which so frequently intrude themselves in spiritistic seances. But if such an astral corpse is mistaken for the individuality in question, it is just as foolish a mistake as that of taking the physical corpse for the living human being, Thus the astral corpse frequently reveals very ridiculous traits, for it possesses the very qualities which the Ego has discarded.

Since it is our task to-day to continue following, man's destinies in the spiritual world, it will be advisable if we first form some idea of what we designate as a world, in the spiritual-scientific meaning.

We are conscious of the world round about us, because we have certain capacities and organs which enable us to perceive it. If we had other organs, this world would present an entirely different aspect. For example, if a man had no eyes enabling him to see the light, but an organ enabling him instead to perceive electricity, then he would not see this room flooded with light, but he would perceive electricity in every wire, flashing, streaming through it.—The world round about us, what we call our world, is therefore dependent upon our sense-organs.

The astral world, too, is nothing but a sum of phenomena, which the human being experiences in his environment , when he has severed himself from his physical body and from his etheric body, so that he can use forces enabling him to see what he cannot otherwise see. This is the case, when he has discarded his physical body and his etheric body. The perceptive organs for the astral world are the organs of the astral body, analogous to the sense-organs of the physical body.

Let us now contemplate the astral world.

Through methods which will be discussed later, a man endowed with spiritual vision can perceive the astral world even here, in his physical body. The astral world differs greatly from our physical world. You may obtain some idea of what is round about you in the astral world, if you summon up before your soul the life of dreams, which is the last trace of that early clairvoyance which man once possessed in times gone by. You all know this life of dreams from your own experience, as world of chaotic images. How does it come about that man dreams at all? We know that while we dream, the physical body and the etheric body lie on the bed, while the astral body soars above them. In a sound, dreamless sleep, the astral body is completely lifted out of the etheric body; but in a sleep filled with dreams, certain tentacles of the astral body still reach into the etheric body, and this enables man to perceive the more or less confused pictures of the astral world.

The astral world is as transparent as the dream-pictures; it is, as it were, woven out of dreams. But these dreams which constitute the astral world differ from ordinary dreams, for they are the images of a reality, just as “real” a reality as the physical world. We perceive this reality in the same way in which we perceive dreams, for the astral world, too, is perceived symbolically. You all know that the world of dreams is a symbolical world. Everything from the world outside which enters our sleep, takes on a symbolical aspect in our dreams. I will give you a few typical examples of dreams, which will show you how a simple impression from outside constitutes the foundation of a dream's symbolical image.

For example, you may be dreaming that you have caught a frog. You feel its slippery body, and on waking up you find that you are holding the cold end of the sheet in your hand. Or you may dream that you are in a cellar, in a dark hole full of spiders' webs: You wake up ... with a headache. Or you may see snakes in your dream, and when you awake you will find that you have abdominal pains. Or another dream: An academician has a long dream of a duel, beginning with some insult and ending with the pistol-shot: He hears the shot, awakes, and discovers that a chair has fallen.

The whole course of this last dream can also show you that the conditions of time are quite different in dreams. Not only does time run backwards, so to speak, but the whole conception of time loses its meaning in a dream. During a dream, we may pass through a whole life in the fraction of a second, in the same way in which our whole life passes before our soul's eye during the moment of drowning, or crashing. The point to be borne in mind in all these dream-pictures is that the cause which gave rise to them appears in the form of IMAGES.

This is the case in the astral world. Its images can be interpreted. The same astral experience always appears in the form of the same image; there is always regularity and harmony in these pictures of the astral world, whereas our ordinary dreams are chaotic. In the end, we can find our way about in the astral world just as well as in the physical world.

The astral world is woven out of such pictures, but they are the expression of soul-beings. After death all human beings are enveloped in such pictures, which are in part very rich in colour and form. Also when we are asleep the astral body can be seen in the midst of streaming, changing forms and colours. If we have the astral power of vision, we can perceive these astral beings in a surging sea of colours.

The astral world has, however, one peculiar quality, which appears strange to one who hears this for the first time. In the astral world everything exists, as it were, in the form of a picture reflected in a mirror, and a pupil of spiritual science must therefore get accustomed little by little to see things in the RIGHT way. For instance, you may see the number 365, but this really corresponds to 563. This applies to everything which we see in the astral world. There, everything that goes out of our own being appears as if it were coming towards us. It is most important to consider this fact.

When astral images arise, for instance, in pathological conditions, we must know how to deal with them. They often appear when people are delirious; a delirious person often sees all kinds of faces and forms rushing towards him, for the astral world becomes accessible to him in this pathological condition. Although these astral pictures seem to be rushing towards him, they are in reality streaming out of him. Progressive doctors should bear this in mind, for in future such symptoms will be more and more frequent, arising out of a concealed religious longing. The subject of a painting such, as for instance, the well known “Temptation of Saint Anthony” is based on such astral experiences.

If you think these things through to the very end you will no longer find it strange that time too is reversed in the astral world. An echo of this may be found in dreams. In this connection you should remember the above-mentioned example of the duel in a dream. In the astral world everything is reversed; even time. When we observe the development of a tree astrally, we first perceive its fruit, then its blossoms, and so on backwards to the seed.

After death, during the time in which we must lose our earthly habits, our whole life in the astral world runs backwards. But this process of living through our whole life once more backwards, concluding it ,with our first impressions of childhood, is faster than the one on the physical plane; it lasts about one third of the duration of our life on earth. Thus we live through our life again in a reversed order, but we experience many other things too.

Let us suppose that you were eighty years old when you died, and that now you live through your life backwards as far as your fortieth year. At that time you may, for instance, have boxed someone's ear, thus causing him pain. In the astral world this sensation of pain also appears as if in a mirror, i.e. YOU now experience the pain felt by the other person when you boxed his ear. But this also applies to every pleasant experience.

Only when the human being has thus passed through his whole life backwards, is he ready to enter the heavenly world. Religious traditions should always be taken literally. If you bear in mind what I have just now explained to you, you will easily understand that the human being can only enter the spiritual world—and the spiritual world is the one which the Bible designates as “Kingdom of Heaven”—when he has lived through his whole life backwards as far as infancy. This lies at the foundation of Christ's words: “Unless you become as little children you cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven”. For on reaching the stage of childhood in his reversed passage through life, the human being discards the astral body and enters the spiritual world.

Now I must give you a description of the spiritual world. The Kingdom of Heaven differs from the physical world even more than the astral world. But since it is only possible to describe the spiritual world with expressions taken from the physical world, it should be borne in mind even more than for descriptions of the astral world, that everything I say about the spiritual world should only be taken comparatively.

In the Kingdom of Heaven we also find a triad, as here on earth. Even as upon the earth we find the three aggregate states of solid, liquid and gaseous, and accordingly divide the earth into continents, oceans, and atmosphere, so we may also distinguish three similar spheres—but, as stated, only as a comparison—in the spiritual realm. The continental sphere, however, consists of something which differs from our rocks and stones. What constitutes the firm ground of the spirit realm, are the archetypal images of the physical world. For everything physical has its archetype, even man. The clairvoyant seer perceives these archetypal images as a kind of negative, that is to say, he sees space as a kind of shadow-form, and round about it radiant light. But corresponding, for instance, to the blood and nerves, these shadows are not uniform. But a stone, or a mineral reveal in their archetypal images a uniformly empty space surround by raying light.

Even as you walk, on firm ground here on earth, so in the spiritual realm you walk on the archetypal images of physical things. This forms the continents of the spiritual world.

When the human being first sets foot on these continents, a definite aspect always presents itself to him: It is the moment when he first has a clear perception of his own body lying before him. For he himself is spirit. Normally this takes place about thirty years after death, and this is connected with the fundamental experience: “This is you.” The Vedanta philosophy based one of its fundamental teachings on this knowledge, the “Tat twain asi”—this is you. All such expressions are drawn out of a deep spiritual knowledge.

The second sphere of the spiritual realm is the oceanic sphere. Whatever is life here in the physical world, i.e. everything that possesses an etheric body, exists in the spiritual realm as if it were a liquid element. Streaming, surging life flows through the spirit-realm. It even collects like the waters of the ocean, in a kind of ocean-basin, or to be more precise, like the blood streaming through the veins and collecting in the heart.

And thirdly we have the atmosphere of the spirit realm, consisting of all the passions, instincts, feelings, etc. You have all these sensations up there as an external perception, resembling the atmospheric phenomena here on earth. All this blows through the atmosphere of Devachan. As a clairvoyant, you can perceive in the spirit-realm all the sufferings and joys experienced on earth. Every passion, every feeling of hatred and such like, appears in the spirit-realm as if it were a storm. A battle, for example, appears in such a form that in the Devachan world the seer experiences a tremendous storm. The whole spiritual world is thus permeated with wonderful joys which pass through it, but also with terrible passions.

In the same way it is possible to speak of spiritual ears. When you have advanced to the stage of having an insight into the Devachan world, you may both see and hear these floating phenomena, and what you thus hear is the HARMONY OF THE SPHERES.

We have thus characterised the spiritual region up to this stage. But there is a fourth region in Devachan. Up to now we have found in it:

1. The prototypes of all physical forms; as the continents
2. The prototypes of all life, as the oceans
3. The prototypes of all soul-life, feelings, etc., as the atmosphere

Now there is something in human life which cannot have its origin in the external world, and its spiritual content constitutes the fourth sphere of Devachan. There we find every original idea, going as far as the creative productions of genius. All that is original, that is to say, all that man puts into the world, thus enriching the world, the prototypes of all these creations form the fourth sphere of Devachan. This concludes the description of the lower parts of Devachan.

Beyond this there are three higher spheres, but during his physical life man can only reach them through a higher initiation. They are only accessible to an initiate, and after death, they can only be perceived by more highly developed individuals.

What does such an advanced initiate experience when he penetrates into the next higher sphere of Devachan? At first he experiences that which is designated in Occult Science as the Akasha Chronicle. Everything that occurs in the world and that has ever occurred in it in the past, is preserved as an impression in a fine substantiality, which is imperishable.

Let me illustrate this through at example: Now I am speaking to you, but you would not hear me if my voice were not able to produce vibrations in the air. Thus every word which I utter exists in the air in the form of fine movements. These fine movements of course vanish, but everything which occurs here on earth becomes impressed in that fine substantiality which we experience when reaching the spiritual world. This impression is everlasting. Every word, every thought, everything which has ever taken place in humanity, can be read in the Akasha Chronicle. This entails either initiation, or that moment after death when the human being enters the higher devachanic sphere, that is to say, when he has developed so far as to perceive this high sphere of Devachan after death. In that case he is able to look into the past.

The Akasha Chronicle is a writing which preserves everything that has ever occurred. But it is not really a writing in the ordinary physical meaning, for it consists of images. You see, for example, Caesar in every situation of his life,—you do not see what he has done, but the inner impulses which led him to his deeds. These Akasha pictures possess a high degree of life, and if we cannot interpret them in the right way, they can give rise to great delusions. The source of many spiritistic aberrations is, for example, the appearance of an Akasha picture at one of these seances. If you summon Goethe, and the Akasha picture of November 25th 1797 appears before you, giving you information concerning some question, this picture will reply as Goethe would have replied had he been asked that question on November 25th 1797. Only those who really know the spiritual world can judge whether they are dealing with a reality or with a shadow. These descriptions can show you what aspect the higher spheres of the spiritual world present.

The first experience is therefore the perception of one's own body, and this experience is the starting point for all other experiences. The human being feels strongly that he has emancipated himself from his bodily involucres, for the most blissful of moments is the one in which he discards the last body, the astral corpse. Even as a plant wedged in the fissure of a rock would experience it as bliss to be freed, so this feeling of blissfulness becomes a fundamental sensation of the human being. It permeates him and transfigures the other feelings which were once experienced in an earthly manner, for instance, feelings of friendship, which may perhaps undergo certain transformations here on earth, but which are deepened and purified in the spiritual realm.

Also a mother's love for her child undergoes such a purification, and vice versa. The originally animal feeling of belonging to one another, which even here upon the earth took on a moral character, unfolds a still higher moral-power in Devachan, Every tie on earth becomes deepened in the spiritual realm, and all connections interpenetrate.

Through love man works his way up from the narrowness of egotism to the encompassing experience of cosmic life. There, nothing, is divided or severed; each one works for the others, for even in the spiritual world activity and work constitute the element which carries, furthers and unites the souls. But Love is the inexhaustible source of all life.

It will be our task to-day to describe to a certain extent the human being during his sojourn in Devachan between death and new birth. In this connection we must first of all form an idea of that which man gains through the fact that during his passage through the spiritual world he is, to begin with, active for his own sake. We can picture this more easily if we bear in mind the relationship of two things: of that which we experience, and of that which our experience becomes during the time between birth and death.

Consider, for instance, everything which you experience when you learn to write. You would find it difficult, to remember all the things which you had to take in at that time in order to learn the or writing. Think of all admonishments of your teacher. Perhaps even of his anger! All this passed through your soul, and what has remained? The capacity to write. Everything else has become blurred and the art of writing has remained.

This is the course of things in life generally—not only during the life between birth and death, but in the whole life of the universe, both in the physical and in the super-sensible world.

It is possible to form a conception of how the things explained above are active in the super-sensible world. Let us, for example, take Mozart. When he was quite a young boy he heard a long piece of music at St. peters in Rome; according to an old tradition it was not allowed to write down this music, but Mozart wrote it down afterwards, from memory. What memories you must have had! And he could do this as a young boy! How do materialists explained this? They would protest energetically if they were asked to believe that an ox grows out of a piece of earth, that in animals such as the ox arises in a way which does not correspond to Nature. They say: Miracles do not exist ... and they are perfectly right in this. But in the face of spiritual things they become tremendously superstitious and believed in miracles at which point materialists simply accept back such as the one just now described from Mozart's life, and without further ado they place it to the account of heredity. Yet at Mozart's case, an explanation not arising out of a spiritual science describes just as great a miracle as that of an ox growing out of a piece of earth. For it is possible for a human being gradually to acquire an excellent memory if he turns his spirit again and again towards the same object. Memory develops in exactly the same way in which something perfect develops out of something imperfect, and it would be a miracle if Mozart's memory had grown out of nothing!

The answer of spiritual science to such a problem is that even in such a case upgrade developed gradually and naturally. If a materialists seeks an explanation for it, he cannot extricate himself otherwise that by admitting that he must either believe in miracles or that capacity is which does manifest themselves prove that they already existed in a former life and that they followed an entirely natural course of development.

Reincarnation is consequently the logical deduction of such a train of thought. And those who explain, through a materialistic way of looking at things, that such a perfect memory as that of the young boy Mozart can arise out of nothing, should follow their belief to a logical conclusion and admit, for instance, that frogs develop without further ado from mud—A fact which was accepted by a natural scientists before the time of Francesco Redi. Consequently, those who wish to be logical in spiritual science state: Even as an oak-tree grows out of the acorn and develops gradually, so our soul-capacities develop little by little, and when a human being enters life with capacities so highly developed as those of Mozart, this undeniably proves that the human being gained these capacities during former lives on earth. This gives us a clue to the comprehension of man's destiny in the spiritual world.

The essential point is therefore that the experiences of one life transform themselves into capacities for the succeeding life. All the dispositions of character which we bring with us in this life are the fruit of experiences gained during earlier lives on earth. For this reason it is necessary to study man's passage through Devachan in order to understand fully how the experiences of one life become capacities in the next life.

When we pass through our life on earth, we daily experience many things, and all these experiences appear in the panorama-picture already described to you, which rises up before the soul's eye immediately after death. But the capacities which we have gained through all these experiences remain as an essence, and we take along with us into the spiritual world this essence,which endures for all times to come.

When the human being enters Devachan, he perceives the regions described to you yesterday; the continental region, consisting of the archetypes of all earthly forms; the oceanic region, consisting of everything which is life; the air-region, consisting of everything pertaining to the soul, pleasure and pain, joy and suffering, etc. In the continental region the human being first perceives the archetype of his own physical body, and in the air-region he of course perceives, to begin with, also that which took place within his own soul during his past life on earth in the form of joy, suffering, pleasure, pain and passions. In other words, he once more perceives all the experiences of his past life, but in an entirely different way than during his passage through the Kamaloka period, which I have already described to you. In Kamaloka he lived through them once more in order to lose the habit of being dependent on them. In the watery region of Devachan man experiences all the peculiarities of his bodily life, and in the air-region of the celestial world he passes through all his psychic experiences.

It is important and of great interest to realise that everything which we have experienced in the course of one life—our feelings concerning the world, pleasure, pain, etc.—that in the spiritual world all this surrounds us as an external world. We need not feel sad that there our sufferings lie spread out before us. This is not sad at all, for there, all our sufferings exist in the same way in which storms exist in the physical world and in the spiritual world all our joyful experiences appear to us like wonderful cloud-phenomena. In Devachan our own inner experiences do not exist within us, as here on earth, but they live in our environment in an external form, in the same way in which a picture of Nature lies spread out before us. Our inner experiences live round about us, as if they were images, sounds or atmospheric phenomena; they have become objectified, as heavenly forms.

I have told you that it is not sad if our sufferings come raying towards us; just as little sad as lightning or thunder in physical life. Those who perceive these connections know what they owe to their sufferings in particular. Just those who have passed through pain and suffering will always say that they gratefully accept joy and pleasure, but that they would never wish to do without suffering and pain. We owe all Our wisdom to our suffering and pain during past lives on earth. A man whose physiognomy bears upon it the mark of wisdom in this life, owes this to the fact that in former lives he experienced the world's connection as suffering.

I have already explained to you that everything which we have experienced during our earthly-life lies spread out before us in pictures, etc, , when we enter Devachan. What does this signify? It will be easier to understand this if we realise what influence the environment exercises upon us. You all know Goethe's words: “The eye has been formed through the light and for the light.” What does this mean? The eye must exist in order to perceive the light. If we did not possess our eyesight the world would be dark and gloomy. But what is the origin of the human eye? It has been formed by the light itself, and similarly the eye would degenerate if there were no light. It has, for instance, been possible to observe this fact directly, in the case of animals who immigrated into the caves of Kentucky.

Light is the origin of the power of sight. Once upon a time man was not endowed with sight, because he still lived under quite different conditions; in earlier times of the earth's development the sun was not visible to an external sensory eye. Let us remember in this connection what the legends relate in regard to “Niflheim”.

The:more man lived exposed to the sun, the further the eye developed by the light of the sun. All the other sense organs developed in the same way: sound formed the ear, heat the sense of heat. We would have no sense of touch if there were no hard objects. The external world moulds and forms our body.

This is most important in practical life; in fact, theosophy is always meant to be applied to practical life. It is also most important in education, for only an educator who can look deeply into man's nature educate in the right way.

The physical body develops until the child changes its teeth, the etheric body develops up to the 14th/15th year, and the astral body up to the 21st year. We must know all this if education is to be approached practically and not fantastically. Since the disposition of the physical body is what we must bear in mind up to the seventh year, physical impressions, that is to say, everything which the child perceives through his sense organs, must be considered deeply and thoroughly. Sins of omission in education in connection with the form and disposition of the physical organs in the child's body, are a loss for the whole of life.

An insight into this last sentence gives medicine in particular many guiding lines for a right treatment of illnesses, among others, for instance, rickets, How is it that rickets arise just in this period of life? Just because; the child is moulding its body, and that is why these symptoms manifest themselves in the form (deformed bones, bad teeth, wrong form of the skull, etc.) But for this very reason the child is still able, until dentition, to correct the wrong forms and lead them back to a normal condition. We can see that even the most crooked legs grow straight again if the child receives the right treatment, and that perfectly sound second teeth can develop even if the milk-teeth were quite defective, whereas crooked legs which were not healed up to the seventh year remain crooked for the whole of life.

Up to the seventh year the brain is also engaged in the work of moulding its plastic forms, and the fine developments and forms of the brain's shape which could not be moulded up to that time are lost forever. Since the physical brain is the instrument through which the spirit manifests itself, it is of tremendous importance that this instrument should be moulded as finely as possible, that is to say, that it should be prepared during, the first seven years of life. For even the greatest individuality can do nothing with a defective brain, just as the greatest pianist cannot play well on a piano which is out of tune. Spiritual science, can give most important guidance to pedagogy, as well as to medicine, particularly in regard to the development of the brain.

In modern medicine one comes across a complete misunderstanding of facts particularly in this field. Rickets manifest themselves in a deformation of the bones, but very frequently they also appear in the shape of a defective glandular system and diseased mucous membranes; that is to say, children affected with rickets frequently have symptoms of swollen glands, adenoid growths, etc. A third pathological symptom in such children is that at school they frequently remain behind spiritually and that they become apathetic, indeed even slightly idiotic. In reality this is based on the defective development of the physical brain, particularly of its so-called corticose substance, which must above all be developed in its finest structure during these years. And in the same way the other symptoms are based on defective development.

Through the modern natural-scientific training and attitude, modern medicine is in such cases more than inclined to follow the example of modern natural science, namely to look upon the external symptoms as cause and effect, linking them up together like pearls on a chain and completely ignoring the deeper spiritual causes. What is the result? The facts are: rickety bones, adenoid growths, diminished attention and comprehension on the child's part. The conclusion to which modern doctors arrive is: Children with adenoid growths become mentally defective Owing to those growths; consequently it is necessary to remove them. The growths are consequently removed by operation. If this conclusion were right, every child who underwent such a treatment would respond to it by the disappearance of the impediments in the brain. But what is observed after such a treatment in the great majority of cases? The operation results in a sham success of brief duration, for the growths appear again after a very short time. But if the illness is to be attacked at its root—and this is quite possible, only now this would lead us too far away from our subject—the deformed bones, the swollen mucous membranes and glands disappear, as well as the impediments in the working of the brain.

After this digression, let us new return to our subject. The external world thus calls into being and moulds the right physical forms. Up to the seventh year, the child is in reality nothing but sense-organ. Everything which it takes in with its senses is elaborated ; above all, what it sees and hears in its immediate environment. Until dentition, the child is therefore an imitative being, and,this goes as far as its physical organisation. This is quite natural. Through its sense-organs, the child takes in its whole environment. And it is always practicing how to use it to limbs. It watches how its father or mother, etc. do this or that thing, and it simply imitates them. This goes as far as the movements of hands and legs. If the father or the mother are, for instance, fidgety people, then the child will also become fidgety in countless cases; if the mother is calm, then the child will of course, also become calm. We must try to produce the right counter-condition by placing the child in a right environment.

It is absolutely necessary to stimulate the child's fantasy, besides giving it sensory impressions, if it is to receive the influences needed for the development of the physical brain. It is consequently necessary to give a small child toys which are as simple as possible. A natural child will again and again turned to the “old doll”, made of a rag, no matter how beautiful the “new doll” which it receives. Only the spoiled children of our age are brought up on “beautiful”dolls. What is the reason for this? The child must exert its fantasy in order to transform the red-doll in its fancy into something resembling human shape, and this is a sound activity for the brain. Even as the arm grow stronger through gymnastic exercises, so the brain develops through this exercise.

Also the colours in, the child's surroundings are important. They exercise quite a different influence upon a small child than upon an adult. Many people think that green has a calming effect upon children. But this is quite wrong. A fidgety child should be surrounded with red and a calm child with green or blue-green. The effect of red upon the child is as follows: If you look upon a bright red and then turn your gaze away quickly to a piece of white paper you will see its complementary colour, which is green. ... By this I mean to, illustrate the tendency which the eye has to produce the opposite colour. The child also attempts to do this; inwardly he seeks to unfold the activity which calls forth the counter-colour. This is an example showing how the environment can influence a child.

In a similar way the child is influenced by everything which surrounds it, in addition to many, many things which I shall explain later, in another connection. All this contributes to a very great extent to the development of the child's physical body, from its birth to dentition; to the development of the etheric body, from the seventh to the fourteenth year; or to the development of the astral body, from the fourteenth to the twenty-first year, etc. Indeed, during the whole life the surrounding world exercises its influence upon the human being. The proverb, “Tell me with whom you go, and I will tell you who you are”, is based on this insight, for “with whom you go” means “what takes place in my environment”. This environment therefore has a strong influence upon us. This applies particularly to the time when the astral body develops, from the fourteenth to the twenty-first year, and it is an almost daily experience that a young person can easily be astrally corrupted by his environment during these years.

It is exactly the same in Devachan, as here in physical life. Even as here on earth the human being is constantly exposed to the influences of the atmosphere, so he is also exposed to them in Devachan—and there the atmosphere consists of all psychic life, our own and that of our fellow men. All this soul life continually influences the, human being, and gifts and talents develop through the fact that they attract the psychically kindred astral forces from the environment, allowing them to exercise their influence. Mozart was born with such a great musical memory because in a former life he had gathered experiences having this goal in view, and then allowed these experiences to exercise their influence for a long time, during his life in Devachan. Through our environment in Devachan we pass through an enhanced development of our innermost being—indirectly, through all our experiences during our preceding life on earth.

All our capacities are therefore the fruit of former lives, and in Devachan they have been further developed. This is the bliss-giving feeling in Devachan. In Devachan we hatch out what we are able to do in our present life, And in accordance with this is the feeling which we have during the whole intermediary time of our Devachan existence: This feeling, connected with everything productive, is bliss.

Here on earth we often feel pain, but in Devachan even pain is bliss, for there we realise, that we acquire wisdom through pain. Even a materialistic scientist has discovered this fact his book “Mimic of Thought” he writes: “Every wise countenance reveals the expression of crystallised suffering”. From the pains of his preceding life the human being in fact produces through his experiences in Devachan talents and wisdom for his next life on Earth. And the feeling of producing this is one of untold bliss.

You may see a pale reflection of this here on earth in a hatching hen. If you transfer this to the spiritual plane and enhance it immensely you obtain the feeling of incessant infinite bliss between the time of Kamaloka and a new birth,—for then the human being works out all his dispositions and capacities for the next life. Everything there becomes a source of blissful life.

We have therefore seen that one source of bliss in Devachan is all the ties formed here on earth are formed once more in Devachan, indeed we experience the spiritual part of those relationships in an immensely enhanced form. The other source of bliss is the productive, creative activity for our next life, as described above.

If the spiritual investigator now turns his gaze upon this activity of man in Devachan he perceives that this productive work has a meaning not only for the individual human being and for his future organisation, but that the human being must contribute and cooperate in a significant way in the progress of the whole evolution of the earth. It is an error to think that in Devachan we are only concerned with our own affairs. How must we work, as blissful spirits in the realm of spirits?

The activity of the dead is a cooperation in the development of our earth . . . We might easily ask: Why are we always born again, after having passed through the experiences of one earthly life? Is not reincarnation useless?

But this is not the case. It is never useless for a man to be born again. The single lives on earth are so far apart , that we always learn something new and pass through new experiences. Centuries elapse between two incarnations, and when we return, the earth has completely changed. Let us suppose that we lived on earth in the second century after Christ. What aspect did the earth present at that time? Even the descriptions of this region, of the Elbe and the Weser etc. of a much later period would be quite different from present descriptions, for here, in Nassau-Hessen, there were still virgin forests.

When the human being is born again, he experiences something quite different from his former life. During our various lives on earth we participate in the development of the earth itself, through the very fact that we incarnate again and again. In addition there is the change brought about by every civilisation. Think of what a Roman boy was able to do! Of the great difference in the education of a boy of the present time! As we have seen, all these experiences are immensely important. It therefore has a deep significance that the human being must always come back again.

Let us now ask: Who changes the face of the earth? The dead themselves, who live in the spirit-realm, do this, through the power which they there acquire, enabling them to work upon this transformation of the earth. Even as human beings are here active externally upon the earth, so the dead are active upon the spiritual prototype of the physical earth. It is they who send their forces into this physical earth, cooperating in its transformation. Of course, there are leaders in this work and higher beings who take over the guidance. In this spiritual realm—which is in our very midst—the dead work upon the transformation of the countenance of the earth.

Why am I in this very place to-day? Why have I been born here? Because I myself have, so to speak, prepared my bed in the very place where I was born. The forces which have a transforming influence both upon the oceans and, upon the surface of the earth, are the forces of our dead. We know that the Atlantic Ocean of to-day was once upon a time a wide expanse of land; this transformation too has been brought about by our dead, and these forces are quite natural and in no way miraculous.

An insight into such things proves with absolute logic the importance and necessity of this work in the spirit realm. If we only know how to interpret the phenomena in the right way, we may even describe this work. Here on earth we breathe the air; we could not live without air. It is similar with the dead, except that there the light plays the same part which the air plays here on earth. The initiate perceives the dead in the midst of light, which is spread out everywhere. A clairvoyant seer, for instance, sees the plants surrounded by the spirits of the dead and these spirits of the dead make the plant grow through the light and change the plant. In the spiritual world we shall all soar above the earth and work upon the plants.

If we thus contemplate the world in connection with the spiritual beings, it becomes larger and more significant to us.

In conclusion, let me mention a few things which can help us to understand certain fine details in our civilisation.

At times, the seer finds that his own observations are confirmed by phenomena in the history of ancient peoples, which before were enigmas to him. It is, for instance, a well known fact that at first primitive nations possess a kind of clairvoyance enabling them to see things of which we have no idea. These primitive races often saw in the shadow, for example, something which is connected with the soul. The clairvoyant now returns to this through his own observations. For if you look in to the shadow which you yourself throw, you first learn to perceive your own spiritual emanations. If we retain the physical light, we perceive the spiritual in the shadow-space. This knowledge has been preserved in occult science, and many who had no inkling of this truth have used it, for example, Chamisso in his “Peter Schlemihl”. This is a man who lost his shadow and is very unhappy over this. But it is a spiritual fact that the soul is visible in the shadow, and the man without a shadow is therefore a man without a soul.

There are hundreds of examples of this kind. We really learn to know the world fully if we learn to know its spiritual foundations. Spiritual science therefore is not for brooding people, but for those who wish to be active in practical life. We do not wish to withdraw from the visible world, but rather to understand it better.

The higher facts are related to the visible world as magnetism is related to iron. We learn to know iron fully if we also learn to know magnetism. A few examples will show us that especially that which we learn to know in the spiritual world bears fruit in practical life.

A pupil should remember the basic principle: I can wait patiently. Impatient striving doesn't bring one forwards. Whatever one does will bear fruit in the future. The great masters have promised us this. The pupil should meditate on the first formula every morning. First he should discard every worry and thought. A man comes out of the astral world and feels restored. He will feel quiet. Then the first meditation. Don't think what the words mean, but let them flow into one. They contain the highest forces, for they aren't arbitrarily put together, but with the greatest wisdom. Meditate everything pictorially. The retrospect last. Look back at every little detail from the end to the beginning. Memory is the bridge on which we're led to the invisible Akashic record. In the retrospect we have streets, fields, flowers, rocks, etc. recalled through memory or we could really look back at them with our eyes. This takes place in the previous time order. But there's also another kind of looking back: as if time periods were in space. So-called memory is lost, but something higher is gained. In higher worlds everything runs from end to beginning; the pupil goes backwards to prepare for this. Regrets are egoism, so the retrospect should be without them.

When, as we saw yesterday, man has reached the stage in the spiritual world in which he has, so to speak, transformed everything which he possessed in the form of capacities and talents acquired during his earthly life, then the time has come for him to prepare for a new incarnation. But we must realise that two things should be dealt with in that which comes towards us from the human being. One thing is that which reproduces itself in the course of physical heredity, and the other is that which the human being brings along into the world from his earlier lives on earth.

To-day we shall have to describe man's descent into the world, but you need not object to the word “descent”, for it is not a spatial descent, but a gradual process of development whereby man comes out of the world which is round about us and enters into the physical world.

Yesterday we saw that the spiritual world should not be sought in a “Beyond”, but that it is also round about us; modern man, however, is not able to perceive this spiritual world.

Out of this spiritual world develops that which we designate as a new embodiment. We saw that from his former life man retains an essence of his etheric and of his astral body, a survey of his experiences, and that he also took with him into the spiritual world that part of his astral body which he had been able to transmute, casting off the unrefined part.

It will be easier to form an idea of reincarnation if we bear in mind a few other things concerning the life after death. We saw that immediately after his physical death man lives for about three and a half days within his etheric body and that his past life rises up before him in these three and a half days like a kind of picture. The etheric body dissolves and then comes the Kamaloka time; this is the time of purification, in which the astrality still requiring purification is cleaned and purged.

But now I must mention another experience. When this memory picture arises immediately after death, man has a significant experience. He has the experience as if he suddenly grew in size, quickly breaking through his own surface and growing out into space. This feeling does not vanish until he is born again. Man feels that he is as large as the whole world to which he belongs, as large as the whole space of the universe. This will enable you to realise that man can look upon his body and experience it as something which does not belong to him, for he sees his passions as if they were outside his body. He has the strange feeling of being spread out over the whole universe.

Then comes something which is more difficult to understand. During the whole time of Kamaloka man feels as if he were really split up into space. You may understand this better if you bear in mind the following: During the time of Kamaloka, when man lives through his life backwards as far as his childhood, in the manner described, he passes through all his experiences as if they were reflected in a mirror. If he once slapped someone's face it is he who now feels the slap, for he feels that he is a part of the world once occupied by the other person. For example, if you died here in Kassel and the other person whom you slapped lives in Paris, then you feel as if one part of your being were in Paris. Thus you feel as if you were split up over, the whole world; parts of you live, so to speak, wherever you have to look for something. But you should understand this in such away that you cannot feel anything in the space between Kassel and Paris. If you thus bear in mind all the events of your life, you really feel split up into many many places during your passage through the period after death.

The following may serve you as a simile: A wasp. consists of two parts, a front and a back part, with a very thin connection. Now imagine that the back part were completely severed, but that the wasp nevertheless, drags it along with it. This is more or less the way in which you can picture to yourself what I have just described: You feel that you consist of single parts and that there is no connection between them. But when the human being enters Devachan, he once more feels as he did immediately after death, namely as if he filled up the whole space of the universe.

Now, when in Devachan man has transformed all his dispositions into talents and capacities, the Ego once more feels attracted towards the physical earth and endeavors to descend to the earth in a physical incarnation. First of all the Ego surrounds itself with an astral body. This process takes place through the fact that Ego attracts everything astral; the astral substance comes shooting towards it, as it were. It is just as if you were holding a magnet in front of iron filings; even as these filings are attracted in definite forms, so the Ego attracts the astral substance. But while passing through the soul and spirit realms the Ego has gained impressions through its experiences and all these form the fundamental forces which help to build up the new astral body. The new astral body thus takes along with it everything that the human being has experienced during his former life and in Kamaloka. All the impressions which he has had there, have a definite influence upon the way in which the new astral body enters into him.

The human being has now acquired an astral body; but he must also have the other members. The astral body has only been formed through its own forces of attraction. Before conception, man is enfolded only by this astral body. The seer therefore continually sees these astral germs of human beings waiting to be born—that is to say, waiting to be conceived. He sees them flying about with a tremendous speed; bell-like shapes move about. through space with enormous speed; distances play no part whatever; they move so rapidly that distances play no part at all.

Now comes the enfolding with an etheric body; but that a process in which the human being does not become enfolded with his own forces alone. His own forces, which lie in him, can no longer care for the etheric body; for that purpose, man needs the help, of certain spiritual Beings who must cooperate in this.

You may have an idea of these Beings if you bear in mind that you sometimes use words which you do not generally connect with any definite thought; for instance, the word Folk-spirit, Folk-soul. To-day we have no definite idea in connection with this word, but only something quite abstract. But the clairvoyant seer connects with it something quite different. There really are Beings of a higher nature, who exist even as we ourselves exist, but who never incarnate in the flesh, and these beings are the souls, or the souls of tribes and races. We do not use a vague expression when speaking of the Folk-soul: The Folk-soul is a real being, except that it does not possess a physical body, for its lowest member is the etheric body. Then the Folk-soul has an astral body, the Ego, Manas, Budhi, Atma, and a still higher member which man does not attain and which Christian Esoterisism calls the Holy Spirit, and which Theosophy generally designates as the Logos.

The clairvoyant seer may therefore address the Folk-Soul even as he addresses other human beings. To-day we have no real conception of such things and believe that this word designates characteristics of single nations. But this is not true—a reality is connected with it. The understanding for such things was necessarily lost through the materialistic conception, but it will be reached again. To-day men are inclined to dissolve such things into empty concepts. This had to come. For this same reason a book had to be published in our modern epoch which constitutes, so to speak, the very opposite of a theosophical conception. This book had to appear and has been greatly admired. It is Fritz Mauthner's “Kritik der Sprache” (The Critique of Language). Mauthner is a thinker who dissolves everything which lies beyond sensory things. Only a radical thinker who had been abandoned by every good spirit, could have the courage to write as Mauthner did, breaking with everything that is spiritual and real. In centuries to come, men will turn to this very book when they wish to know how people used to think at the beginning of the 20th century.

The Folk-Soul is a reality; it spreads out like a mass of fog, and in it are embedded all the etheric bodes of the individual human beings belonging to a definite nation and its forces stream into the etheric bodies of individual men.

Now there are spiritual beings having the rank of these Folk-souls, who cooperate in the building up of the etheric body of the new soul. These spiritual beings bring about the fact that the human being is led towards the nation which is most suited to him. The etheric body does not always fit quite perfectly; all the disharmonies which you often encounter in life often depend upon the fact that man is unable to build up his etheric body through his own forces. A complete harmony will only be reached upon a much later stage of development of the earth.

The enfolding with the etheric body takes place with great rapidity—a speed which you cannot conceive of if you compare it with physical conditions. Still higher spiritual beings then lead man towards the parents who are able to supply him with the substance which he needs for his physical body.

The modern materialist who sees that the son resembles his parents, will not be able to believe that something else is also connected with the body inherited from the parents. Of course, as regards our body we resemble our ancestors, but this does not contradict the facts explained above.

Let us observe a definite case—the family of Bach In the course of two hundred and fifty years, over 29 more or less significant musicians have come out of that family. Materialists will say: This clearly proves that there is such a thing as heredity!—In the same way the family Bernoulli produced eight mathematicians in a short time. How can we explain this? We can understand this best of all if we bear in mind hereditary conditions. As this is easier to grasp in the case of a musician lot us observe the family of Bach.

Let us suppose that a young Bach had lived in Rome during his former incarnation, that he had elaborated his dispositions and was ready to reincarnate. Supposing he had brought with him, as the result of his former incarnations, the greatest musical gifts; he could do nothing with these gifts if he were not able to find a well developed ear. Without such a well developed ear, he would be just as helpless as a great artist without an instrument. Necessarily such an individuality would have to incarnate in a body supplying a good organ for his dispositions. But the external form of the inner and outer organs is hereditary and if this individuality wished to become a musician, a well developed ear would be essential! Where can he most easily acquire such an organ? In a family of musicians. So he is led towards a family where he can find the best organ for his further development and the unfolding of the talents reposing in him. At that time, the best which could be found in that direction were the parents of Johann Sebastian Bach.

And how do matters stand with the brothers Bernoulli? Mathematical thought does not depend upon the structure of the brain (for mathematical logic does not differ from any other), but the mathematical gift is based upon the specially exact development in the structure of the three semicircular canals. This is an organ not larger that a pea, embedded in the middle of the ear and consisting of three semicircular canals, exactly corresponding to the three-dimensional space. If one canal lies exactly horizontally, then the second one stretches from right to left, and the third one from the front to the back.¹ They all face one another in an angle of 90 degrees The essential thing is therefore this exact position: The more exact the right angle is, the better does the organ function. If the organ is in any way injured, giddiness arises; you can no longer orientate yourself in space. The mathematical talent, that is to say, the possibility of using it, is based upon a specially fine elaboration of these canals. And this organ is inherited in the same way as, the musical ear.

The brain forms thoughts concerning space in exactly the same way in which it forms thoughts on philosophy. But the fact of having an understanding for the forms in space depends upon these three semicircular canals. Thus an individuality with highly developed mathematical gifts will incarnate in a family in which this organ has reached the most perfect development and this was the case in the family Bernoulli.

A suitable instrument is also needed in order to be morally efficient. An individuality with a high morality therefore seeks parents who promise to supply the best instrument for this purpose. The proverb, which is often used so superficially and trivially: “one cannot be too careful in the choice of one's parents”, is true in the deepest and most earnest sense, for a child chooses its own parents, so to speak.

Many people might object to this and ask: How can we explain mother-love, if that is so? For mother-love depends on the fact that the mother knows that the child is part of her own self. But viewed in the right light, mother-love does not suffer in any way—on the contrary, we learn to know it better.

Why is a child born to a certain mother? Because its spiritual qualities lead it to a mother who is spiritually related to it, and the child loves its mother even before it is conceived; mother-love is, as it were, the counter-part of this primary love and attraction. Consequently this insight even deepens the idea of mother-love.

Now the occasion for incarnate is essentially dependent on the qualities of father and mother; and there, father and mother work differently. When a human being descends to a new birth, the Ego, which possesses more volitional forces, feels more attracted by the father, and the more astral forces by the mother. The father has a greater influence upon the Ego, the will and character, and the mother has more influence upon the astral body—that is to say, more in the direction of thought. Of course, it is best of all if both parents are suited to the individuality seeking to incarnate.

When man descends, those forces are also active which were impressed upon him when he ascended to the spiritual worlds. All this develops forces of attraction and he is drawn into the sphere which was related to him from the very beginning. He is consequently led towards those human beings with whom he was already connected before.

Let me give you an example based on real fact. It once happened that a man was sentenced to death by a vehmgericht of four or five judges and executed. The former life of these six men was investigated through spiritual science and it appeared that they had formerly all been together on earth, but that the executed man had been their chieftain and that the others had been sentenced to death by him. The last execution was therefore a kind of atonement. This case in particular brings into clear evidence the law of Karma.

Thus the various forces which man attracted during his former life exercise a determining influence when he is born again, both in regard to the structure of his body and the place of birth, and in regard to his later destiny. Disharmonies appear in the physical body even more strongly than in the etheric body.

All these things show how man becomes enfolded by the three bodies when he is born again. And in every incarnation one Ego works upon the astral body, the etheric body and the physical body. Later on we shall see how man ascends to this high degree of perfection, for he transforms the astral body and the etheric body more and more. Out of the purified astral body develops Manas, out of the purified etheric body Budhi, and out of the purified physical body Atma. We are therefore able to imagine the ever growing perfection of man from incarnation to incarnation.

This appears most beautifully in the Lord's Prayer. But we can only understand it in the right way if we grasp it in the truly Christian meaning, as it was grasped in the Occult School of St. Paul. In this School the Lord's Prayer was explained according to its true Christian meaning, and the pupils were told: Imagine the higher members of human nature, which develop, through the fact that man more and more refines his three lower members. Early Christianity used to look upon these three higher members (Manas, Budhi, Atma) as man's higher nature. By developing the three higher members more and more, man gradually approaches the Godhead. From this standpoint, the esoteric Christians of the past used to call the three highest members the Divine Nature, and they called the highest Atma, i.e. the Father. This is the deepest divine essence in man: the Father in Heaven.

The Father is the essence towards which all men develop. He is the centre of the world's creation. The creation in the Christian meaning, can be best imagined if we bear in mind the sacrifice. Think of your mirrored-image, and assume that you could be just as selfless as this mirrored image, to the point of being able to sacrifice your own life. This is how we must think of a selfless creative activity: We ourselves must become completely one with the created object.

Now imagine the Father as the centre of a reflecting hollow sphere: The Father's image will in that case be reflected a thousand-fold. The esoteric Christian of olden times said to himself: Look at the world: All the Beings in it are, after all, the reflected images of God. And in their esoterisism they used to call this reflection of the Godhead's own image “the Kingdom”, that is to say: God, reflecting Himself everywhere.

“Continue now to develop your feelings,” was the instruction given to the pupil of esoteric Christianity in olden times, “continue to develop, your feelings. and if you can perceive God in everything, if you have dissolved the Godhead in an infinite number of single objects, and if you wish to distinguish these objects you must give each a name. This name: must be sanctified, it must be hallowed, for every single creature is a mirrored image of' the Godhead.”

In the course of his development, aiming at the attainment of God, man enters into these three elements. But you must not think that man becomes God. Take a drop out of the ocean: In its essence it is akin to the ocean, but it is not the ocean. In the same way the drop of divine nature within us is akin to God, to be sure, but it is not “the Godhead.” By developing the three highest members more and more, man gradually becomes united with the Kingdom; for the spiritual world comes down to him.

Here you have the three first entreaties in the Lord's Prayer: the first place, the appeal to the Father; in the second place, the entreaty that the Kingdom should come to us; in the third place, the Hallowing of the Name.

If we develop those three highest members within us, we shall always endeavour to avoid acting in a way which is not in harmony with the Spirit of the Father, from Whom we descend and to Whom we go in our development.

In contrast to the three higher members esoteric Christianity then considers the four lower members of man which must also become more and more perfect.

The physical body consists of the same substances which are also to be found outside in Nature, and these substances continually go in and out of our physical body. Indeed, if the physical body is to remain healthy, they must continually go in and out.

The etheric body has forces which are inter-related with the whole Folk-soul, even as the physical body's forces are inter-related with the whole of Nature. If the physical body is to remain sound, physical substances must go in and out of it day by day. If the etheric body is to remain sound, it must not develop upon an individual basis, but enter into harmony with the whole Folk-soul and with all the higher Beings.

The word “trespasses” is connected with the word “debts.” Debts clearly show that you do not stand there isolated, but that you live within social connection with your fellow-men.

That which brings disorder into the astral body of man was considered in early Christian esotericism as something connected with man's inclinations, passions, impulses and desires. Everything which can bring disorder into these is expressed by the word “temptation”. “Trespasses” are something which brings man into connection with the social community, whereas “temptation” is something into which every man may fall, in so far as he is an individual being.

If physical substances did not go in and out of our physical body, this body would come into disorder. Hence, we pray: this day our daily bread.

If the etheric body did not enter into a harmonious relationship with the Folk-soul, that is to say, if it did not insert itself harmoniously into the whole social structure, this body too would come into disorder. Hence we pray: Forgive us our trespasses.

If man fell into the error of giving way to every temptation which approaches him, this would bring disorder into his astral body. Hence we pray: Lead us not into temptation.

The Ego can commit errors which we designate as “evil”. Everything which transforms a normal, sound self-consciousness
into to evil, that is to say, into selfishness, belongs to these errors of the Ego (which is our own Self). To these errors belong all the aberrations of selfishness and egoism. Hence we pray: Deliver us from evil.

The physical body can thus develop soundly if we nourish it in the right way with daily bread.

The etheric body can develop soundly, if we bring it into a right harmony with the social structure in which we live.

The astral body can develop soundly, that is to say, it can be purged and purified, if we overcome all temptations.

The Ego can develop soundly, if we endeavour to transform every form of egoism into altruism, every form of selfishness to selflessness. Thus we may see in the Lord's Prayer a prayer encompassing the whole development of man.

Someone might now object—and you will often come across this objection: The Lord' s Prayer is one that was given by Christ Jesus for every man. Of what use are explanations such as the above, since the majority of men knows nothing about them?

The naive' person need not know anything about them. Look at the rose. The greatest wisdom has built up the rose, and yet even the simplest man may rejoice in it! It is not necessary to know anything of the wisdom contained, in the rose. It is the same with the Lord' s prayer. A power goes out from it and influences the human soul, even if the soul in its simplicity does not know this . But the Lord's Prayer could never contain this force had it not been drawn out of the deepest wisdom. Every great prayer, such as this greatest of all prayers, has been drawn out of the deepest wisdom, and the power of such prayers is based upon this fact. If you think that this is simply a thought-out explanation, you will be wrong, for the Being Who gave us the Lord' s Prayer laid into it this deep power.

You may therefore see that only with the help of spiritual science can we understand that which we practice daily the power of which has been experienced by mankind for nearly two thousand years.

Now we have reached a stage in the development of humanity where it is no longer possible to proceed without such a deepening of our understanding. Formerly, that is to say, up to that moment, humanity was able to feel the spiritual forces contained in this prayer without knowing its deeper meaning. But now humanity has progressed so far in its development that it must ask after this meaning, and an answer has to be given now.

The Christian religion will not lose any of its value thereby, but it will, on the contrary, manifest itself in its whole depth. Religious truths will be gained anew through the greatest wisdom. The esoteric explanation of the Lord's Prayer is an example of this. (See Rudolf Steiner's booklet: The Lord's Prayer) It shows us the path which man must tread through many incarnations. If he walks in the spirit of the four petitions referring to the four lower members, they will help him to fulfil the work leading to the development of his higher members, as expressed in the first three petitions of the Lord's Prayer.

• 1. In regard to the human head, and the directions “above, below”, “right and left”, “in front and at the back”, the organ as a whole stands like a cubus poised on its point.

To-day we must speak of what is designated as the Law of Karma, the law of cause and effect in the spiritual world. To begin with, the last lectures should be borne in mind, because they showed us how life as a whole takes its course through a series of incarnations. You have all been in the world many times and you will often return to it. We shall see later on that it is not right to think that our incarnations repeat themselves through all eternity either in the past or in the future. On the contrary, we shall see that they began at a certain point in time and that a time will come when they will cease; the human being will then continue his development in a different form.

Let us first consider that space of time in which reincarnations take place. In connection with this we should realise that everything which we call destiny, whether relating to character and inner qualities or to external events, is brought about by our preceding incarnations, and that everything which we do in this life has an effect upon our subsequent lives. The great law of cause and effect, the law of Karma, thus runs through all our incarnations.

Let us now picture to ourselves how this law is active in the whole universe—not only in the spiritual, but also in the physical world.

Take two imaginary jugs of water and then assume that you are heating an iron ball until it becomes red hot. You then drop it into the first jug, What will happen? The water will hiss and the ball will become cool. Then take the ball out of the first jug and drop it into the second one. In that case the water will hiss no longer and the ball will not become much cooler. We therefore find that the ball behaves differently in each case; in the second case it would not have behaved as it did, had it not been dropped into the first jug. Consequently the way in which it behaved in the second case is the result of what happened to it in the first jug. Such a connection is called Karma. The ball's Karma brings about the fact that the water in the second jug does not hiss and that the ball itself does not become much cooler.

I will now give you an example from the animal kingdom showing that preceding life-conditions bring about subsequent ones. Take those those animals which immigrated into the caves of Kentucky; their eyes gradually degenerated through the complete deprivation of sunlight. The substances which are generally used for the structure of the eyes go to other organs and as a result the eyes degenerate and the animals little by little become blind It is then the destiny of all their descendants to be born blind. Had the parents not immigrated into the dark caves, the descendants would not have been fated to lose their eyesight. The condition of blindness is therefore the consequence of the immigration into the dark caves.

Spiritual science explains that everything which occurs in the world is dependent upon Karma. Karma is the general law of the universe. Even the Bible speaks of this law at the very beginning. It says: “In the beginning God created the heaven and earth”. On reading this superficially, as is generally the case to-day, you do not notice that these words lie within the meaning of the law of Karma, but you notice it without further ado if you consult the original text of this ancient document, or if you take one of the oldest Latin translations, for instance the Septuagint, which the Roman Catholic Church still considers as the authoritative translation of the Old Testament, and particularly of Genesis. Perhaps in an introductory course such as this one, which is to acquaint you step by step with the immense depths of the spiritual-scientific world-conception, it is not inappropriate to deviate a little from our main subject.

Modern man has really no connection with the “living word”. Speech has become, on the one hand, a conventional means of communication and, on the other; a“business language”. Things were quite different in ancient times, when words were being coined, for the human being still possessed a living connection with the word. Indeed, in the remotest times, even the single letter leading to the composition of a word had a deep significance. A modern man has not the faintest idea of that which passed through the soul of an ancient Hebrew sage when he uttered the word “bara”, contained in the first sentence of Genesis; and which posterity—that is to say, the Latin world—translated with “creare”, and which we translate with “created”. What is the deep meaning of the word “bara”? In the German language we still find the same root “bar” in the word “gebären”, to bear children.

The root “K-r” lies in the word Karma. It is the same root which also lies in the word “creare”, so that when we say “creare” in Latin (to create), this simply means: something arises as the result of earlier influences; that is to say, something arises which is karmically determined by something which preceded it!

We can speak of Karma in the way in which we interpret it to-day only since the influx of the Luciferic influence, that is to say, from that moment onwards in which man took upon himself guilt. Consequently something of the idea of guilt always adheres to everything connected with the word Karma. “Creare” therefore means to produce something brought about karmically by earlier connections and conditions, whereas the root “bar” does not contain anything of this karmic relationship. How does this come about? Undoubtedly through the fact that the ancient Hebrew was still connected far more intimately with the spiritual world and still realised quite clearly that at a time when “the Elohim were meditating creatively” it was not yet possible to speak of Karma in the meaning in which we generally speak of it. But in the Latin epoch of human evolution man was already completely severed from the spiritual world, as we shall see upon some other occasion, and therefore he could imagine even the Elohim's “creative meditation” only within a karmic connection.

But “bara” as well as “crease” do not mean that God created the world out of nothing; both words contain the meaning that God led over earlier conditions into new ones ... in the same way in which a mother does not bear her child out of nothing. To bear a child means that the child passes over from a former concealed condition within the mother's womb into a condition in which it becomes visible in the external world.

This shows you how the meaning of the Bible can be distorted. Theology was the first to decree that God made the world out of nothing, (for theology no longer knew anything of the cosmic epochs of evolution which preceded earthly existence) and whole libraries have been written on this subject. Yet all these theologians fought against windmills, like Don Quixote. We should always know, however, against whom and against what we are fighting; that is to say, we should always reveal the original meaning of the ancient documents.

If we think of this Law of Karma in the right way, as the connection between cause and effect, applying it not only to physical life here on earth between birth and death, but also to the life in the spiritual world, we shall find that this very law of Karma becomes a torch which illuminates our own life. Insight into the law of Karma not only gives us a deep intellectual satisfaction, but it also profoundly satisfies our heart and soul and gives us the right understanding of our relationship to the world. More and more you will realise its deep significance and that only a true insight into this law of Karma enables you to mould your life harmoniously in regard to your environment.

The law of Karma does not throw light upon abstract riddles of the universe, but upon problems which we actually encounter in life at every step. Is it not a real life-riddle when we see that one human being is born in misery and poverty, apparently without any fault of his own, and that the finest gifts which lie concealed within him must atrophy owing to the social condition into which life has placed him? We must often ask ourselves in life: How can we explain the fact that an apparently innocent man is born in the midst of misery and pain, whereas another man is born without his merit in surfeit and wealth, surrounded at the cradle by those who tenderly love him? These are problems which modern superficiality alone can ignore.

The deeper we look into the law of Karma; the more we find that the hard injustice apparently presenting itself to a superficial observation of this law disappears. We then realise more and more why one man must live in one condition of life and another man in another. Injustice and hardness in one or other life-situation can only be seen if we limit ourselves to the observation of one life; but if we know that this one life is the absolute result of former deeds, the injustice, completely vanishes, for we perceive that the human being prepares his own life.

Someone might now object: It is terrible to think that all the blows of destiny which a human being encounters in this life are brought about through his own fault! We must realise, however, that the law of Karma is not something for sentimental people to brood over, but that it is an active law, rendering us strong and giving us courage and hope. For even though we ourselves have moulded our present life with all its hardships, we know at the same time that Karma is a law the chief significance of which must be looked for, not in the past, but in the future. No matter how deeply oppressed we may be in the present owing to the result of past deeds, our insight into the law of Karma will bear fruit in our subsequent lives. Our attitude determines what fruit our deeds will bear, for no action is without consequence. It is far more theosophical to look upon Karma as a law of action, as an active law! For no matter what we do, we cannot escape the consequences of our deeds. The more we suffer in this life and the better we bear our sufferings, the more shall we profit by this in future lives. Karma is a law which solves the riddles of life which we encounter at every step.

What is the connection between a preceding and a subsequent life? We should clearly bear in mind that everything which we experience as inner effects of external events—joy or pain over things which we encounter in life—that all this has an influence upon our future lives.

Now you know that everything living within us in the form of pleasure and pain, of joy and suffering, is borne by the astral body. Everything which the astral body experiences during this life, particularly if experiences repeat themselves again and again, appears in the next life as a quality of the etheric body. Some object in this life which gives us pleasure and which we call up in our soul again and again, will produce in the next life a deep inclination and predilection for this particular object. But this inclination and predilection are character qualities, and their bearer is the etheric body. Consequently the effects produced by the astral body in a preceding life become qualities of the etheric body in the next life. What you repeatedly experienced during this life, appears in your next life as fundamental character. A melancholic temperament is due to the fact that in a preceding life the human being in question had many sad impressions throwing him again and again into a sad mood; as a result, the etheric body will have the inclination to sadness in the next life. The opposite may be found in people who obtain something good from everything in life, thus producing in their astral body joy and happiness and an uplifted mood; this will become a lasting characteristic of the etheric body in the next life producing a merry temperament. But if a human being courageously overcomes every sad experience in spite of the hard school in which life has placed him, his etheric body will be born in the next life with a choleric temperament. If we know all this, we can almost prepare our etheric body for our next life.

The qualities which the etheric body possesses during one life appear, in the next, in the physical body. Thus if a man has bad habits and bad characteristics and does nothing to get rid of them, this will appear in the next life in the physical body as a disposition, a predisposition to illness. Strange as this may sound the disposition towards certain illnesses, particularly infectious ones, depends on the bad habits of a preceding life. This insight therefore enables us to prepare health or illness for our next life. If we conquer a bad habit, we become healthy and immune against infections in our next life. Thus we can prepare health for our next life. By endeavouring to foster only noble qualities, we can prepare a healthy body for our next incarnation.

A third and most important thing should be borne in mind in order to understand the law of Karma:—To truly estimate our actions in this life. So far we have only spoken of what takes place within the human being; but what he does during this life, that is to say, his attitude towards his environment and his actions, produce a result which appears in the surrounding world during his next life.

A bad habit in itself does not mean that I have done something; but if this bad habit leads to an action, this action changes the external world. In fact, everything which thus exercises an influence upon the physical world returns to us during our next life as our external destiny in the physical world. Thus the deeds of our physical body during this life become our destiny in the next. We learn this through being placed in this or in that life-situation. Whether a person is happy or unhappy in one or other condition of life depends upon his actions during his preceding life. An appropriate and instructive example for this case is that of the vehmic murder, which shows us how an external action during one life falls back upon men as their destiny during the next one.

This is a brief sketch of karmic relationships in regard to individual human beings . But we can speak of Karma not only in the case of individual persons, for man should not consider himself as a single being. If the individual were to rise even a few miles above the earth, the result would be the same as if the finger severed itself from the body.

If we penetrate into spiritual science we are literally forced to admit through this knowledge that we should not delude ourselves to the extent of insisting that we are single beings. This applies to the physical world and even more to the spiritual world. Man belongs to the whole world and his destiny is involved with that of the entire world. Karma touches not only the individual, but also the life of whole nations.

Let me give you an example: You all know that in the Middle Ages there were pestilences resembling leprosy. In Europe they completely disappeared only during the 16th century. Quite a definite cause, a spiritual cause, produced this form of pestilence in the Middle Ages. Materialists are of course inclined to trace such a contagious disease to bacilli, but not only the physical cause should be borne in mind in such illnesses. We can make exactly the same mistake if we try to find out, for example, why a man has been whipped, what is the cause of this whipping. A person of insight will immediately discover that certain brutal men in the village were the cause of the whipping. In this case it would be foolish to say that the blue wheals are due solely to the fact that the sticks came down so and so many times on the man's back. The purely materialistic cause of the blue marks is undoubtedly the fact that the sticks came down on the victims back, but the deeper cause must be sought in the brutality of the men who whipped him. Similarly the pestilence of the Middle Ages has a spiritual cause in addition to the materialistic one of the bacilli.

We have an analogous example in weeping. Its spiritual cause is sadness, but its material one is the secretion of the lachrymatory glands. It hardly seems possible that a famous modern scientist should have come to the same foolish conclusion mentioned above, but he actually made the monstrous statement that the human being does not weep because he feels sad, but that he feels sad because he weeps!

But let us get back to the pestilence. If you wish to explain the deeper cause of this disease spiritually, you must look back upon a significant historical event. Upon the great masses of peoples coming from the East, who overflowed Europe, bringing with them fear and terror. These Asiatic masses were people who had remained behind at the ancient Atlantean stage, and were consequently decadent races. They were races whose decadence had the character of putrefaction, which was particularly strong in their astral body. Had they invaded Europe without bringing s0 much terror and fear to the Europeans, nothing would have happened. But these hordes brought with them fear, terror and and alarm, whole nations in Europe experienced this state of fear and terror. Now the putrid substance of the Huns' astral bodies mixed with the terror-stricken astral bodies of the peoples whom they had invaded. The degenerated astral bodies of these Asiatic hordes unloaded their bad substances on the terror-stricken astral bodies of the Europeans, and this putrid substance was the cause of the pestilence, the physical effects of which appeared later on.

This is in reality the deep spiritual cause of pestilence in the Middle Ages. Consequently something which had a spiritual cause appeared later in the physical body.

Only those who know the law of Karma and have insight into it are called upon to play an active part in the course of history.

Let me now tell you something which contributed to he founding of the spiritual-scientific world-conception: Karma influences not only individual men, but also nations, and even humanity as a whole. Those who pursue the course of history in the spiritual life of Europe know that materialism came to the fore during those last 400 years or so. The most innocent aspect of materialism is to be found in science, for there every mistake can always be perceived and corrected. The influence of materialism is far more harmful in practical life, where everything is viewed from the angle of material interests. But materialism would never have entered practical life, had men not had a predilection for it. The influence of of materialism is most harmful of all in the sphere of religious life, that is to say, in the Church: The Church above all has been heading towards materialism for centuries. In which way? If you go back to the days of early Christianity, you would never have heard people say, for instance that the seven days creation was actually accomplished in seven days, as we so often hear to-day, nor was the “seventh” day imagined in such a way that after a hard piece of work someone sits down and rests. The materialistic age has lost all knowledge of the reality underlying this work of seven days.

It is the task of spiritual science to give mankind an explanation concerning the true meaning of this ancient document, Genesis. (See Rudolf Steiner's Secrets of the Bible Story of Creation GA 122)

It is the materialistic conception in religion which corroded most deeply the life of nations. Materialism will hold sway more and more in the religions sphere, and. particularly in this direction people will less and less realise that the spirit, not physical material things, counts most of all. It will readily be admitted that the materialistic way of thinking, feeling and willing has gradually penetrated into the whole life-conception of mankind, and finally this appears in the state of health of the succeeding generations.

In an epoch in which men have a sound conception of life, a strong central point is produced within them, enabling them to be self-contained personalities whose descendants become strong and healthy. But an epoch in which people believe only in matter, will give rise to a generation of men who have a body where everything goes its own way, where nothing is directed towards a centre, thus producing symptoms of neurosis, of nervous diseases. If materialism continues to be the ruling world conception in the future, these nervous health conditions will gradually increase.

The clairvoyant can tell you exactly that which must occur if materialism is not counter-balanced by a sound spiritual conception. Mental diseases would in that case become epidemical and even newly born children would suffer from symptoms of trembling and from other nervous disturbances, while the further result of the materialistic mentality would be a race without any power of concentration; in fact, we can see this already to-day. About three decades ago, this thought—how mankind would fare without spiritual remedy against the effects of materialism—led to the inauguration of the spiritual-scientific movement. Many discussions may arise regarding a remedy, yet no objections can be of much avail in the face of the chief argument: its efficacy. It is the same with the efficacy of spiritual science as a remedy, for it is a preventive against that which would inevitably occur if men continue along the path of materialism.

If we reflect more deeply over the law of Karma, we cannot look upon men as a single being, but as forming part of a community subjected to the law of Karma. The law of Karma is not of much use to those who wish to believe in a blind fate. It would of course be quite wrong to attribute such a character to the law of Karma. Yet we constantly come across people who fall into this error. One person says: “I know that it is not my fault that this or that thing happens to me; it is my Karma and I must bear it!” Or another one says: “I see a person who is in misery; but I must not help him, for this misfortune is his own fault; it is his Karma and he must bear it!”—Such arguments would be quite a senseless interpretation of the idea of Karma!

In order to have a clearer conception of this great law, you may compare it with the commercial law of debit and credit. Even as the merchant is subjected to this law in all his actions, so life is subjected to Karma, Your items in life are marked off on the debit or credit side, according to the good or bad actions which you have done during your past life. All your good qualities are booked on the credit side, and all your bad ones on the debit side of Karma.

But we should, not say: “I have no right to interfere!” This would be just as foolish as when a merchant balancing his accounts says: “I must not do any more business, for in that case I should alter my balance sheet.” Even as the merchant improves his balance sheet with good business, so I improve my Karma with every good action. And even as the merchant is always at liberty to enter a debit or a credit item in his account, so the human being is always free to do likewise in his account book of life. Not in spite of the law of Karma, but just because of it, man is free in regard to his actions. Just because he knows that everything he does—and he does this in full freedom—has an effect upon his account book of life, he cannot agree with those who do not help a man in need. It would be the same as if a merchant facing bankruptcy were to ask us for a loan of 5000 pounds. Would you not give him the money if you knew that he is a good business man who would work his way up again? It is the same with man in need: You help him to better his Karma so that his destiny takes a turn for the better, and at the same time you improve your own Karma through this good action.

The law of Karma consequently induces us to take an active part in daily life. A right understanding of the law of Karma, particularly from this aspect, is of special importance if we consider it in relation to Christianity. In this connection there are serious misunderstandings, particularly on the part of theologians. Modern theologians say: We teach that sins were forgiven us through Christ's death upon the Cross, and you teach the law of Karma, but this contradicts the former.

Yet the contradiction is only apparent, because the law of Karma is simply misunderstood. On the other hand, there are theosophists who declare that they cannot accept Christ's death of atonement—but these theosophists misunderstand the law of Karma just as much as the others.

Take the following case: You help a man, interfere in his destiny and turn it to the good. If you could help two men, this would just as little contradict the law of Karma. Assume that you are an individuality called upon to blot out evil in the world by a certain deed: would this contradict the law of Karma? The Christ-Being has, in the largest measure, done something analogous to the above example, like a man who helped not only a hundred or a thousand other men through his own deed, but the whole of mankind. The death of redemption, Christ's death of atonement, therefore harmonizes completely with the law of Karma—indeed, it can only be understood in the light of this law. A contradiction can only be seen by those who do not understand this law. Christ's death contradicts the law of Karma just as little as when I help a man in his need.

When looking upon the law of Karma you must think of the future, for with everyone of our actions we enter into our account book an item which will bear fruit. Only as long as one is passing through the illnesses of childhood in theosophy can a contradiction be found between Christianity and the law of Karma.

Many things become clear to us through an insight into this law. In the first place, we can accurately prove the connection between the individual bodily development and earlier lives. A life full of love prepares for the next life a course of development whereby the human being preserves his youth for a long time; a premature ageing is on the other hand caused by much antipathy during the past life. In the second place: A particularly selfish sense of grasping and hoarding things produces in the next life a disposition to infectious diseases. In the third place, it is of special interest that pains, and particularly certain illnesses through which we pass, produce a beautiful body in our next life. This insight enables us to bear many an illness more easily.

An insight into such connections of destiny enabled one of the greatest Bible students of our time, Fabre d'Olivet, to use an image which clearly shows us how things are linked up in life. He says: Behold the pearl in the shell! The animal in it had to pass through an illness, and the beautiful pearl arises through this illness. Thus illness during this life is in fact often connected with things which render our next life more beautiful.

How these things may be further developed in various directions, will be shown tomorrow.