The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Among the many spiritual endeavors of the present day, which those who are interested in them can find in literature or elsewhere in the world, is also the theosophical one, which can also be called the spiritual-scientific one. Its task is to educate human thinking, feeling and perceiving in a special way. Someone who reads about this world view in articles and books or hears something about it can easily develop a prejudice against it. Many believe that Theosophy is nothing more than a rehash of old superstitions and that it contradicts all healthy scientific sense. Others approach Theosophy with a certain fear, because they believe that this school of thought is behind the founding of a religion, a sect. Others believe that Theosophy leads people away from practical life, into a dreamy, fantastic realm, alienating them from the everyday. Still others believe that Theosophy wants to introduce an oriental religion here.

Today's topic may give cause to show, by considering a question of interest to humanity in the broadest sense, how Theosophy is able to raise the question to a higher point of view, but also to provide the means to solve the question. This touches on something that, in the deepest sense of the heart, concerns our contemporaries. Theosophy cannot be mixed up in all the fanaticism that is so often displayed when considering such questions. Of course, when considering such questions, one might think that Theosophy leads away from life. But those who think so do not take into account that the point of view that stands above party politics is a match for every position in life, every standpoint in life.

We must point out a little of what Theosophy wants in more detail, what it strives for. Theosophy wants to work quite differently from other spiritual endeavors, differently in terms of its content, and differently in the way it approaches people. Theosophy rests on two firm pillars. One of these pillars is that behind the external physical world, which is perceptible only to the external senses, there is a supersensible, spiritual world, and the other of the pillars is that there are dormant abilities in man, through which he can, if they are developed, get to know the spiritual world. When this is stated, we often hear the objection on the one hand that the idea of a supernatural world belongs to a childlike way of thinking that humanity had in earlier ages, because they did not yet know anything about scientific law. Today, however, when humanity has come to penetrate the world of law, it is no longer appropriate for people to believe in a world of supernatural facts. A simple comparison needs only be made. It is so easy to say today that science has shown us that, to a certain extent, man does not need spiritual beings that confront him. It is true that science cannot yet explain everything, but the ideal is to penetrate this world with its methods and tools.

Theosophy would have no prospect of really intervening in the spiritual life of humanity if it wanted to go against the facts of science. But even if the facts of science are true, it does not contradict the fact that spiritual processes are behind them. A clock can be explained on the basis of mechanical processes, but does this mean that because we can explain the clock from within itself, the clockmaker, the spiritual power behind it, is dispensable? No scientific explanation can explain the spiritual beings behind the phenomena. No scientific explanation can make the consideration of the spiritual background, of the supersensible in the world, superfluous.

The objection that the human capacity for knowledge is insufficient to penetrate the supersensible world cannot be taken seriously either. Theosophy speaks of a supersensible world in exactly the same way as the great German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte spoke to his audience in 1813 of a spiritual world. He said that this world requires a completely different sensory tool. Then he compares the knowledge of the spiritual world with the world of colors and light, which is inaccessible to the blind-born because he lacks the organ for it.

We can expand Fichte's example of the blind-born. We imagine a blind-born being operated on in this space and suddenly becoming sighted. A new, previously unknown world of colors and light would open up for him. Now, Theosophy says: Just as a new world appears for the operated blind person after he has received the organ to see, it is also possible for the organs that Goethe called spiritual eyes to be awakened in a person.

If we look around at our literature today, we encounter what could be called the man's point of view or the we's point of view. How often do we read the assertion: One can recognize, we can recognize, or one cannot know, we cannot know anything about it, etc., etc. People do not realize the profound illogicality of claiming such things. Logically, everyone should only claim that they can say something about what they know. Only perception decides, only experience decides, about what is present.

There have always been people who could see into the spiritual worlds. They were called initiates or seers. There is something, an experience, which can be compared to what the blind person experiences when he is operated on successfully, only in a much more magnificent way, where organs are awakened in man for the spiritual worlds, which he then perceives himself. To explore these spiritual worlds requires seership, initiation, awakening.

But when someone who knows something about the higher worlds recounts the facts, then anyone who brings with them a healthy sense of truth can understand them. Today, there are already many people who recognize the truth of this theosophical worldview from spiritual intuition, from a healthy sense of humanity, from a sense of truth. In this sense, Theosophy speaks of the spiritual worlds as being all around us, just as light and color and radiance are around those born blind, who simply cannot see them. The facts that the seer shares with the world today are drawn from this spiritual world. The theosophist does not want to secure anything from agitation or from any kind of teaching profession. Theosophy does not approach the world as a worldview sometimes does, in the sense that it assumes that those who cannot see it are stupid. No, the theosophical researcher only wants to be a storyteller, and he is aware that it is best to use persuasion as little as possible. Those who are persuaded to accept Theosophy are of no value to it. Truth must arise from the human soul itself. If Theosophy brings the truth, each soul must agree with it of its own free will.

In accordance with these prerequisites, let us first consider the nature of man in general, and then, from the spiritual world of facts, recognize the nature of man and woman. What the senses perceive of man is only one aspect of the human being. If we apply this to man and woman, we may ask ourselves: Does materialistic thinking recognize everything about man and woman? Could there not also be something hidden in them that cannot be observed externally?

It is precisely with such a question that the practical application of the theosophical world view must come to our minds. Who would deny that in the last century, research into sensual things has reached a peak that must be admired even by the theosophical world view? But let us review what those who claim to be scientifically educated have said about the relationship between men and women in the last century. I will cite only a few judgments as examples of what one arrives at when one does not know the spiritual.

A naturalist said: If we consider everything in a woman, then the basic character of a woman is gentleness. — Another said: If you know everything that comes to us in a woman, then you have to summarize it in one word – that is, anger-fortitude. Another, an anthropologist, summarized his view of women in the word: Women are characterized by feelings of devotion. Another said: Those who really understand women know that the most prominent thing in a woman's character is the desire for power. Yet another tries to sum it all up in one word: Women form the conservative element in human development. Another says: He who really understands history will find that all revolutionary ideas originate with women. In philosophy, this kind of thinking that summarizes everything and takes individual points of view is called synthetic thinking. One philosopher says: All of a woman's thinking is reduced to synthetic thinking. — An English philosopher, on the other hand, says: Women only possess analytical thinking.

This should show us how much consensus and certainty there is in the judgment of science. These contradictory judgments cannot satisfy people. But in reality, people long for the answers of spiritual science to the great questions of existence. Today, some people already have important intuitions about what lies behind external facts. Recently, a book by a young man caused a great stir: 'Gender and Character' by the unfortunate Weininger. In fact, there is already substantial good scientific research today, which Weininger, for example, published in a tumultuous and amateurish manner. A strange view confronts us here, one that contains a hint of the truth. Weininger says: Actually, there is something masculine in every woman's character and something feminine in every man. — That is a hint of something true, but it is completely corrupted by being immersed in a materialistic worldview. Weininger distinguishes between a masculine and a feminine substance, which are mixed up in all human beings. He comes to a strange conclusion about the feminine. Weininger characterizes the female as having “no ego, no individuality, no freedom, no character.” But he sees the masculine in every woman and the feminine in every man. So these things are mixed up in everyone. We see, then, that here it is like with Munchausen, who takes himself by the scruff of the neck; it is a view that dissolves itself.

Through Theosophy we see that what the senses perceive in man is only a part of man; it is the physical body that man has in common with all visible beings around us. More strictly than any science, Theosophy stands on the ground that what man has in the physical body of matter and forces is the same as the matter and forces of all physical nature. But these substances and forces are so composed in man that they would disintegrate if they were left to themselves. The crystal is maintained by its own substances and forces. But in man and in every living being, the etheric body or life body lives as the second link in his being. What is it? It is a constant fighter against the disintegration of the physical body. The moment a person passes through the portal of death, the physical body is abandoned to chemical and physical substances and forces. Together with all plants and animals, the human being has the second link of his being, the etheric or life body.

But there is still a third link of the human being, which spiritual science recognizes through its methods. Much closer than the bones, muscles and nerves that are enclosed in the human skin, there is a sum of joy and pain, urges, desires, passions and sensations, up to the highest ideals. Spiritual science calls the carrier of all this the astral body. Man only shares this astral body with the animal world.

Then there is a fourth element of the human being that makes man the crown of earthly creation. There is a word in the German language that man can only say about himself, that no one else can say to him. Anyone can say “chair” to a chair and “table” to a table, but there is only one thing that each person can say about themselves: that is the little word “I”. This is something so important that all school psychology has no idea of the importance of this fact. This name cannot be spoken to me from the outside like the name of any other thing in the world. Everyone can only pronounce the name themselves. That is what is special about the name that is referred to by the little word “I”. The name “I” can never sound to our ears when it refers to ourselves. Sensitive natures have always felt this. Jean Paul recounts how, as a child, he first realized: “I am an I”. He says that he looked into the most hidden holy of holies of his being. All religions, all world views that have looked into the essence of things have recognized the importance of this fact. That is why religions have named this the unspeakable name of God. The God himself lives on in the soul when man says “I” to himself; shivers of awe went through the assembly of the Hebrews when the Old Testament priest pronounced this name: “I am in the innermost soul, I am, Yahweh.”

It is easy to reproach Theosophy with making man into a god. But anyone who claims that a drop taken from the sea is the sea itself is saying something nonsensical. The drop is not the sea, but it contains sea substance. Therefore, we do not make the ego of man into a god, but into a drop or spark of the divine essence.

When this ego works on the other parts of the human being, the astral body, the etheric body and the physical body, higher parts of the human being arise from it. What condenses at the center of the being, what enables the soul to make the word “I am” resound from the human breast, that is what makes the human being the crown of the other beings.

Let us now consider the state in which we all find ourselves during the night, the state of sleep. Sleep is also called the brother of death. As Voltaire says, all truths that emerge into the world for the first time are treated like the envoys of educated states at the courts of barbarians. They only gradually gain recognition. Let us compare the state of consciousness during the day with the state of sleep, where all joy and all suffering sink into an indeterminate darkness. This is because when a person falls asleep, the astral body with the ego is lifted out of the human being. In sleep, the four members of human nature are separated in twos. In death, it is different, for then not only does the I separate with the astral body, but also the etheric or life body separates from the physical body. In death, it also leaves the physical body, which is then a corpse. The etheric body or life body is the fighter against the decay of the physical body. During the night, the I is lifted out with the astral body. What is it that enables a person to see through the eyes and to hear through the ears during the day? Eyes and ears are the instruments of the astral body. The moment a person awakens, the astral body and the ego descend into the etheric body and the physical body. In the morning, when he wakes up out of the darkness, he recognizes the world around us in form, sound, color, shine and light.

Why does man not perceive the world during the night in which he lives during the night? Today it is already possible for individual people to perceive this world, the actual home of the soul in which it lives at night. From this world, the human being returns to the physical world in the morning.

In everyday life, the human being takes on such an appearance that his I and the part of his being that is the carrier of pleasure and suffering submerges into the two sheaths, which give him a set of instruments for perceiving the physical world. This is also how man appears to us when we consider the question of the nature of man and woman from this point of view. When we observe the human being as he stands before us, with his physical body, etheric body, astral body and I, then for spiritual science the matter presents itself in such a way that the physical body only has the outwardly determined characteristics in man and woman. The etheric body has the polar, opposite characteristics. For man the etheric body has feminine characteristics; for woman the etheric body has masculine characteristics.

If we are good observers, we see that the man who shows masculine qualities for sensory perception also shows precisely the opposite qualities. When the corresponding qualities appear in a woman, they appear with a distinctly masculine character. Because every man has female qualities in his etheric body and every woman has male qualities, these terms, “male” and “female”, are not exhaustive in their sensory meaning. Those who believe that if you know the physical body of a person, you know everything about that person will not be able to explain why you sometimes find anger in a woman, sometimes docility.

If we now consider the human being as a whole, we see that the sexual is only linked to the physical and etheric bodies, and that when we wake up in the morning, we take it on as our tool just like the other organs of the physical body. We can look into the nature of the human being with the help of spiritual science and see where the sexual begins. It is only present in the physical and etheric bodies. It leaves the person during sleep at night.

At the moment when the I leaves the person with the astral body, the terms male and female completely lose their meaning. The opposition that manifests itself in the physical world as male and female does not exist. In the spiritual world, this opposition is the opposition between life and form, indeed between life and death. When we penetrate into the spiritual worlds, this contrast is ever present: the contrast between the ever-advancing life and the perpetual inhibition of life; the sprouting tree is one and the bark the other.

We can consider this using an example from artistic creation. Let us imagine the Juno Ludovisi, that wonderful image of a woman. In the wonderfully broad forehead, in the peculiar expression, in all the flatness of the face of this Juno, something is expressed that makes us say: In this form, the spirit is fully developed. But it has become entirely form. Everything has flowed into the form. The spirit, which otherwise flows away, the life, had to be captured in a moment. That is the one extreme of existence, where the form becomes so solid that it captures life in a moment. The other extreme is the sculpted work of art, which is close to this Juno Ludovisi, the Zeus, with the peculiar forehead, the peculiar mouth. It is a characteristic form, not really a beautiful form. We can say to ourselves, life is still in it; the form can be different at any time.

These two opposites of life flowing forth and life unfolding and dying into form, are, in the higher world, the male and the female. From the female comes form, which strives towards sculpture; in the male lies the form that makes change possible. Here we see how what meets us externally in man and woman is a reflection of the supersensible. Only when this is understood can full understanding, unclouded by any antagonism, arise between the two sexes. This transsexual understanding is only given through a view like the theosophical one.

Our culture to date has been a male culture. Why have we ended up in today's science, in which everything stems from the external sense perception, from the passive devotion to external experience? Today, people are forbidden their own inner spirituality. This is because this culture is a male culture, because science has become so feminine. It was that which arose from the female etheric body of man. In Theosophy we have a world view. We must find the strong source of certainty in our inner abilities. Theosophy is masculine. And the strange thing is: today it is mainly women who are interested in Theosophy. This is because women have an active male etheric body. Theosophy wants to raise humanity to a higher level than that on which these questions about man and woman are usually negotiated. Today, these questions are usually only discussed from the lowest point of view. And this will be taken to extremes the more sensual ideas gain influence. Only Theosophy can bring people salvation and truth in this area. Genuine cooperation between the sexes will bring it about.

Real insight and true knowledge can only come from elevating ourselves above the everyday. Theosophy aims to be a remedy for human culture. It will have proven itself when it helps people. Theosophy must prove itself in real life. Schiller expresses in beautiful words the uplifting of the human being above the everyday:

Only the body lends itself to those powers
That weave the dark fate;
But free from every temporal power,
The companion of blessed natures
Walks above in the corridors of light
Divinely among gods the form.

It has been some time since it has been possible to have a branch meeting here in Mannheim, and today we are once again able to fulfill such a task. In recent times, you, my dear friends, have attentively and eagerly acquired the knowledge that can be called the more important ideas and insights of our spiritual scientific worldview. Therefore, it is perhaps not inappropriate for us to speak today about something that, on the one hand, turns our gaze to the whole of our spiritual scientific movement and, on the other hand, also gives us the opportunity to utilize what we have acquired in spiritual knowledge, namely about the human being and his development , to utilize it, so to speak, in the service to which every human being should be devoted, and which, for anthroposophists in particular, should take on a special form through their insights, through the perceptions they can gain from the spiritual-scientific world view. You know, my dear friends, that the development of humanity is progressing, that epoch follows epoch, age follows age, and each age has its special task. We can distinguish between larger and smaller ages in the historical development of humanity, and in each age there are very special moments when it is necessary not to fail to penetrate the actual task, the actual mission of that age. We may note that in the successive periods of time, tasks are set for people from the spiritual worlds, tasks that are very special for this or that age, and for us humans it is then a matter of doing the right thing, of knowing something about these tasks, of absorbing into our soul a realization of these tasks. We really live in an age in which it is urgently necessary for a number of people to gain knowledge again of what is to be done today or in our presence, preferably in the spiritual realm. I would like to begin by bringing two periods of time that are very close to us to your mind's eye, two periods of time that are close to us because one of them belongs to the past and much of its spiritual wealth and products still extends into our present; but the second period has hardly begun. We are standing at the beginning of a new period, a smaller cycle or period of humanity, standing, so to speak, at the boundary. Therefore, it is of very special importance to understand these two periods a little. The one period covers approximately that epoch which began with Augustine and ended with the approach of the 16th century. In occult science it is said that this period covers the time from Augustine to Calvin. Then, following this, we have another period that covers the time from Calvin to the last third of the 19th century. And we are again at the starting point of a period with new tasks, the observance of which is extremely important for the immediate future of humanity. Let us now try to form a rough idea of what happens at the beginning of a new period. When one period ends and another begins, something is ending and something is beginning. Something is decaying and something is germinating, as if rooted, like a new dawn for a sunshine that is preparing as the sunshine of a new age. And the peculiarity of such a transitional age – you know that people speak of transitional ages in different senses, but we are really dealing with a transitional age today in a very meaningful sense – is that new forces of culture must be added to humanity.

To characterize this, I will consider a great task for all of humanity; that is the advent of Christianity. If we form an idea of the way in which Christianity arose, we have to say: Actually, it was rejected by precisely those who were at the forefront of culture. But at the same time, those who were at the forefront of culture had reached a state of decline. Try to imagine Roman culture in decline and try to imagine the communities to which Paul preached. These were people who, so to speak, naively but with fresh energies faced the culture, with a lively sense of what was to come, which one did not really count among the highest blossoms of the culture of the time. These were the new forces, but sometimes even born from the lowest layers of the people. Because the complicated social life of the upper leading circles, when it has developed for a time, must come down, but especially because science, with its concepts, ideas and so on, arrives at a point where it cannot develop further, something new, something popular, must intervene. We have put a major turnaround in front of us. In a sense, we are facing another turning point today. What has been achieved with great dedication as scientific thoughts and ideas has actually reached a point where everyone who is insightful must say: it really cannot go any further – the scientific concepts and ideas that are being pursued today in official currents are on the verge of decay. And the whole way in which spiritual life is approached, where the great currents of this spiritual life flow, is in full decline. I would like to describe with a few stark words how this decline could actually be observed with relatively rapid steps by those who observe such things at all.

If you took part in this life, as it was expressed in literature, through books and the like, in science, then you grew up with a seriousness, with a seriousness that is now regarded as old-fashioned, that is no longer understood. The tone of weekly magazines, for example, was quite different in the 1970s than it is today. It was, if we may use the expression, much, much more dignified. Back then, there were very specific views within this intellectual current regarding how to relate to drama, poetry, and so on. That has changed, as one thought back then. In those days there was also a certain way of writing poetry, in which one satisfied less strict demands, for example, writing plays for small festive occasions, more for fun, for a joke. Sometimes there was quite a bit of talent in it. In particular, the students at their assemblies performed plays in which there was quite a bit of talent. Now one got a little older and could look around at the literary currents, and one found among them esteemed products that were, however, exactly the same as what had previously been considered only good for the day. That became literary maturity for the intellectual movement. In order not to cause too much offence, I do not want to mention any names. Today we are already at the point that we have nothing but printed trivialities in the broadest sense – entire bookstores are filled with them. Just thirty to forty years ago, one would have been sorry for the ink to write them down. When a person is going through such a change, they do not judge things starkly enough, but this is how cultural history will have to characterize our late 19th century. Indeed, we are facing a decline of traditional intellectual life, and this could easily be demonstrated by the decline of scientific theories. Therefore, we should not be surprised if what is to emerge as a new spiritual movement, what is to bring something new to human development, finds little support among what is today called the official intellectual life; if the members of these circles say: There are such associations of half-wits who call themselves Theosophists, who are basically quite uneducated people mostly — and so on. These are necessities that are present in every transitional age. Fresh forces must come from below, and what springs up in this way will then become necessary for the later age in order to really create an ascending movement. Now I said: we have seen two ages go by. The age from Augustine to Calvin, for example, was an age that sought to internalize all the soul forces of man, all the forces of man. This tendency to introspection was to be seen in all fields during this time; external natural science was less practised, people's attention was less directed to the outer laws and phenomena of nature. In the starting point of Augustine himself, in which we see our spiritual-scientific structure of the human being prefigured in a certain way, we find the idea of the influence of supersensible powers that make use of the human being as an instrument. As this epoch continued, what strange phenomena we encounter: the mysticism of Meister Eckhart, Suso, Johannes Tauler and many others. Although outer science receded into the background during this epoch, we find in it another remarkable way of embracing nature with a genius-like intuitive gaze. We see how this is elevated in such people as Agrippa von Nettesheim, for example. Phenomena such as Paracelsus and Jakob Böhme present themselves to us as the fruits of this deepening of the human soul in those centuries. Such a current can only last for a certain length of time. It has an ascending direction, a culmination, a high point and a descending line. As a rule, such a direction is replaced by something that appears to be a counter-image in a certain way.

In fact, the following centuries are a counter-image to this trend. The internalized image of the human soul is gradually forgotten. Times are coming when natural science has achieved such infinite triumphs. The great phenomena of a Copernicus, Kepler, Galilei occur, right up to those of the 19th century such as Julius Robert Mayer, Darwin and so on. A vast amount of external facts is brought to light.

And yet, people at the beginning of the new epoch were different from those of later times. A man like Kepler, for example, who had such a significant impact on physical science, was a pious man, a man who felt deeply, deeply connected to Christianity in his innermost being. And Kepler, the discoverer of Kepler's three laws, which are basically nothing more than time and space laws clothed in mathematical formulas, something quite mechanical, oh, this Kepler - he spent much more time than on such explain how things were in the great world at that time, when the mystery of Palestine took place on earth; how Saturn, Jupiter and Mars were related to each other when Christ Jesus was born. Kepler's great thoughts were directed towards this. He was able to give mankind what he had to say about the science of the stars in purely mathematical terms. What he carried in his heart, in his deepest heart, remained his property in an age that only served the outer life.

Or take Newton. Where would you not refer to Newton as the discoverer of the laws of gravity? But where would it also be emphasized - when Haeckel, for example, talks about the epoch-making phenomenon of Newton - where would it be emphasized that Newton was so Christian that in his quietest and most sacred hours he wrote a commentary on the Apocalypse in his own way? But he could not give it to humanity. He was able to give humanity the purely mechanical law of gravity in the age dedicated to the external summarization of natural phenomena. And this age has just expired with the last third of the 19th century.

Now an age is beginning that must necessarily be a counter-image to the previous one. And the task of preparing this counter-image, which is to continue to work in such a way that everything we have often spoken of can come to pass, is the spiritual-scientific world view, which in turn must bring a deepening of the human soul. But each age must work differently than the one before. It would be wrong to simply study as it was done correctly from Augustine to Calvin. We may let such phenomena have their effect on us, but we must know that today, after such an age of natural science, we must seek the spiritual world differently than in the past. Is there anything else, apart from what man can think in the abstract, from which one can recognize that man is really compelled and forced to grasp the world anew in every age?

If you study Paracelsus today, for example, you will find that he is an unfathomable spirit for today's trivial external research, a spirit who has particularly looked deeply into the secrets of healing and medicine. And anyone who delves into what he had to say about healing this or that form of illness will be able to learn something quite tremendous and magnificent from Paracelsus. Let us assume that a physician who is at the level of the real level of the spiritual life of our time would delve so deeply that he would want to apply what would result from Paracelsus' instructions. For certain great things, quite correct things would arise, but the physician of the present day could no longer acquire some of them. For if he were to apply some of the remedies indicated there, it would not help, because human nature has changed since the 16th century, because everything in the world changes and everything progresses. Things outside do not obey our arbitrary knowledge, which moves in steps. They move forward, and we have the task of investigating with our knowledge, our insight. We must learn anew, as Paracelsus learned. And if we most faithfully do as he did, we will find something quite different in many respects. Thus, we have very special spiritual tasks in our time.

Now I would like to characterize in a few broad strokes how it is written in the stars that human culture must progress in the near future. It is not left to the hand of man alone to give this culture a direction. The old views would not fit the change in the real circumstances. Things take their course, and spiritual science has the task of saying what course things are taking, it gives us the guidance to understand our time.

We are standing at the dawn of a completely new human life and thinking. Three things are of particular importance and significance in human spiritual life: firstly, religion; secondly, science; and thirdly, the way people live together, the feelings and perceptions that people develop for each other, and what takes place in the social sphere. These three are the most important, so that it is of particular importance to follow in the successive epochs what forms these three must take, that which comes into consideration as religion, as science or social life. And there are certain demands that man simply must understand, that are beyond his control.

Why must religion, science and social life change from epoch to epoch? Simply because human nature changes. We do not learn that human nature consists of different parts for the sake of learning that. We do not learn that the human being consists of a physical body, a life body and an astral body with sentient, intellectual and conscious soul so that a few people can have something to do with it and can acquire these classifications. We learn these classifications because they have a far-reaching significance for human life. And you can sense this far-reaching significance if you think back to the culture that was Egyptian-Chaldean, for example, when it was the sentient soul that was primarily important. There, the higher beings primarily worked through this. And in the Greco-Latin period, in the time of the emergence of Christianity, everything that came from the divine-spiritual heights and worked into humanity worked on the mind soul. And today it works on the consciousness soul. We understand nothing at all about the relationship between the human being and the great forces of the world if we do not know how this human nature is structured. What are we preparing today by devoting ourselves to spiritual-scientific insight? In our time, it is especially the consciousness soul that is cultivated. All external thinking and knowledge, all useful thinking, this thinking according to the principle of usefulness, is based to a certain extent on the development of the consciousness soul. But something like the light of the spirit self is already pushing its way into this. Now the remarkable thing is that in our time we have two parallel currents, one that rushes down into decay and one that rises to future glory. The one that rushes down into decay has not yet arrived at that decay. At the same time, it is the source of great discoveries that still have a tremendous future. This too has its beneficial effects. Certainly, for a long time to come mankind will benefit from that which is, after all, heading towards decay. But the kind of thinking that invents balloons is the thinking of decay. And the thinking that deals with the structure of humanity is the thinking of the future of humanity.

But these two do show a common transition. We can see that in all fields. I would like to start by giving you a very practical example: the field of monetary transactions. This changed quite considerably in the 19th century. A tremendous turnaround has taken place. If you follow the period immediately preceding the last third of the 19th century, all monetary speculation was tied to the individuality, to the personality. It was the purely financial and speculative genius of the Rothschilds that introduced money everywhere and led it back again to and from the money centers. And if we follow the history of the great banking houses, we have examples everywhere of how monetary transactions took place entirely out of the nature of the human being, based on the consciousness soul, on the individual human being. This has changed. We just do not talk much about it yet because it is only just beginning. Today, the consciousness soul no longer exclusively rules in monetary transactions; today, something of a kind of grouping prevails: the share capital, the company, the association, that which is supra-personal.

Try to follow what is only just beginning to emerge today and what will come more and more. Today it is almost irrelevant who stands as a personality here or there. What human beings have worked into the circulation of money is already working without personality, is already working by itself. In a descending current, you have the spread of the consciousness soul to the spirit self.

Here we have it in the current of decay; and we have it in the current of ascending life, where we seek that which the individual capable personality has achieved, where we seek to gain the help of those powers through inspiration, which will give us the inspirations from the spiritual world again. There, too, we go from the personal to the superpersonal. Thus, there are common characteristics for the ages with regard to both the declining and the ascending currents. In particular, however, one must be careful not to take into account in any age what authority is present in that age. As long as one does not have spiritual insight, one can go very far astray.

This is particularly the case in one area of human culture, in the area of materialistic medicine, where we see how exactly that is decisive, which the authority has in its hands and more and more lays claim to, where that wants to lead to something much, much more terrible and dreadful than any rule of authority of the much-criticized Middle Ages. We are already living in it, and it will become ever stronger and stronger. When people mock so terribly at the ghosts of medieval superstition, one might well ask: Has anything changed in relation to that? Has the fear of ghosts gone away? Don't people fear many more ghosts today than they did back then? It is much more terrible than is generally believed what goes on in the human soul when it is presented with the fact that there are 60,000 germs on the palm of the hand. In America, it has been calculated how many such germs are in a single male mustache. Should we not, then, decide to say: These medieval ghosts were at least decent ghosts, but today's bacillus ghosts are too puny, too indecent ghosts, to justify the fear that is only just beginning and that makes people, especially here, in the field of health, fall into a terrible belief in authority. We must say that we see the character of the transition period everywhere. We must only look at the phenomena in the right way, and we see this character everywhere.

Now we ask ourselves: What do the stars, the teachings and revelations of theosophy tell us about further development in these three most important areas of life? What must it become in the future and how must we work so that the creative, fruitful spirit self can be guided over into the consciousness soul in the right way in the spiritual sense? The prophetic stars, that is, the teachings of spiritual science, tell us the following about this future form: According to the whole way in which people have tried to bring religion into the currents of humanity, in the past centuries, religion is an amalgamation of two things, one of which, in the strict sense of the word, cannot actually be called religion; the other is religion.

What then is religion in reality? It is something that we must characterize as an attitude of the human soul: an attitude towards the spiritual, towards the infinite. Basically, we can characterize it well if we start with the basics of these attitudes, which then only have to be developed to the highest degree. If we walk across a meadow and have an open soul for what is green and blooming there, we will feel something joyful for the glories that reveal themselves through the flowers and grasses, through that which is reflected in the landscape, which glistens in the dew. If we can muster such an attitude, if our heart opens up, then it is not yet religion. It can only become religion when this feeling intensifies for the infinite that is behind the finite, for the spiritual that is behind the sensual. When our soul feels in such a way that it senses communion with the spiritual, then this mood corresponds to what is alive in religion. The more we can intensify this mood for the eternal within us, the more we foster religion in ourselves or in other people.

But now the necessary development of the times has brought about a situation in which what should basically be impulses that direct human feeling and perception from the transitory to the non-transitory has been combined with certain ideas and views of what it is like in the realm of the supersensible. But through this religion has become connected in a certain sense with what is actually spiritual science, with what must actually be regarded as science. And today we see how religion in this or that form can only be maintained in this church belief if very specific dogmas are maintained at the same time. But this produces what can be called the rigid dogmatic adherence to certain ideas about the spiritual world. Such conceptions should naturally progress as the human mind progresses. And it is this progress that should give the truest religious feeling the greatest joy, for it shows the greater the glories of the divine spiritual world and the greater their significance.

True religious feeling would not have consigned Giordano Bruno to the stake, but would have said: Oh, it is great for God to send people of this kind down to earth and to reveal such things through them. - In this way, the field of scientific research would necessarily have been recognized alongside the religious field, a field that extends to both the external and the spiritual world. This must progress, it must be suited from epoch to epoch to the human spirit, which progresses. In regard to this scientific research, a great change occurred when the 16th century approached. Before the age of Copernicus, Kepler and Galilei, things looked very strange at the teaching institutions and universities. Aristotle is certainly a great sage, but what he did was the greatest thing for his time. What the Middle Ages did with him was a very strong misunderstanding of his spirit, and in the end they no longer understood it at all, had no more idea of what he meant. Nevertheless, they always taught according to him.

In order to show you how knowledge must change from epoch to epoch as the human spirit progresses, so that misunderstandings do not arise, I would like to go into more detail about an event connected with Aristotle. Aristotle worked from a time when there was still an awareness that a body of ether was present in human nature, not just blood, nerve cords and so on. If one were to draw the etheric body, for example, one would get a very different drawing from what today's anatomists find and draw of this human being. How one draws it today was not given much importance in the time in which Aristotle created, because the etheric human being was still known. If you wanted to draw that, you would have to see a center here where the heart is, and draw rays emanating from there, important rays, but then going to the brain and having to do with the whole way a person thinks. Thinking is regulated when we look at the etheric body, from a center near the physical heart. Aristotle described this to illustrate the peculiar nature of thought. Later, people no longer understood what Aristotle meant, and they began to confuse the word for 'nerve' with the material nerve. It was believed that Aristotle meant the physical nerve cords when he described the etheric currents. With the transition to the materialistic period, Aristotle was no longer understood. So you can see that something completely wrong was learned. It was said that the main nerves emanate from the heart. Now came the scientific materialistic research, as inaugurated by Copernicus and Galileo, and then people came to the conclusion that the nerves emanate from the brain, namely the physical cords. And then they began to say: Aristotle is wrong. Thus Copernicus, Galileo and Giordano Bruno were opponents of Aristotle. The medieval Aristotelians did not adhere to the teachings of Aristotle, but to what they dreamt up about Aristotle. Thus it could happen that when Galileo showed a friend of his, who was an Aristotelian, the nerves running to the brain on a corpse, this friend preferred to trust Aristotle rather than his own observations. He believed in what he had imagined from the teachings of Aristotle. We see, then, how the stream of spiritual science was diverted in Aristotle's time into material science, the merits of which are not to be denied, and which has worked and continues to work for the benefit and salvation of humanity. But now we are in a time when we have to come up into the spiritual.

We are on the threshold of a time when science will again have to learn to understand the spiritual reality, when science will have to become what is called pneumatology in occultism, that is, spiritual teaching. What was science in the past century? The teaching of abstract ideas and natural laws that no longer had any connection with real spiritual life. Science is on the verge of becoming pneumatology, of returning to the spirit. This is written in the stars of theosophy. And since religion must always create an atmosphere for the spiritual, only in those ages can science and religion work in harmony when science works the spirit into pneumatology. Then science can be the right interpreter of spiritual life and support the mood that should in turn live in religion.

What is beginning is in such stark contrast to what has passed. Take, for example, what has passed in the various Protestant religious denominations: how they have tried not to let any scientific thinking into the area that should be dedicated to faith. Think of Luther and Kant. Kant said that he had to suspend knowledge so that he could have free rein for faith in freedom, immortality and God.

At that time, science was directed towards the external, sensual physical, it knew no interpretation of the supersensible, the spiritual. Therefore, what had been handed down in sacred documents had to be preserved as unadulterated as possible. This had its good justification. Now we are facing a different age, where theosophy guides us into the spiritual world, and now we will see how, little by little, a time is approaching when what is emerging is to be achieved by science being supported and enlightened precisely by theosophy. Religion and science will work together again in the next age. Science will become something that must gradually apply to all people. It will become understandable for everyone. Therefore, what is emerging as a parallel course of religion and science will, in the broadest sense, produce what could be called individualism in religion: every single heart will find its way into the spiritual world in an individual religious way. It is preordained for our age that that which can be common science in the spiritual will serve as an interpreter and guide in the religious realm in the most individual and personal way.

Again, it is shown in a remarkable way how, even here in decline, the personal moment points to something super-personal. The signs of decline also show this. And how does this pointing to a super-personal reality show itself in certain church conditions? What was it, then, when in a certain church those who are its custodians appealed to inspiration? [...] The things must be seen in relation to their spiritual character. Much of what is evident today, particularly in the religious life of the various denominations, points to this shining of the spirit self into what we call the consciousness soul, in both the ascending and descending sense.

This is particularly evident in the third of the three areas of human spiritual life. There will be a spreading of knowledge, knowledge of which today's practice of life has no real idea. One principle of this realization will be that the happiness of an individual human being can never be bought at the expense of the lesser happiness of others. In the future, the personal moment will be transferred into the transpersonal, and the egotistical into the trans-egotistical, into that which connects people. Gradually, a person will not want to be happy without knowing that others are equally happy. This mood, which is the opposite of our current way of life, is being prepared. There is only one way to create this mood, and that is through the realization of the real human essence and its composition, as spiritual science gives it to us. One must know man if one wants to be man.

We see these three things at the starting point of their development. What is the purpose of spiritual science? It should teach us to understand everything that must come. Now I want to say radically how people can relate to this. I will hypothetically assume for a while that what is today Theosophy and still represents a very small current would be seen by those who come into contact with it as a fantasy and reverie, and that it would be suppressed. Those who hold the anti-theosophical point of view would simply make it impossible for theosophy to flourish, because anti-theosophy is heading towards science. Then it would be impossible to gain an understanding of what has been described to you as the necessary development of science, religion and human life practice, written in the stars. Then people would exclude themselves from understanding these things. In which case, what would people be like? People would then be on Earth like a herd of some kind of animal that had ended up in completely alien climatic conditions that it cannot adapt to. The consequence of this would be that the animals would wither away and gradually perish. In this way, people would all fall prey to decay, decadence, premature destruction. Not through extinction, for instance. They would become more beast-like, which would be much worse than extinction, so that only the base passions and instincts and desires would really still be alive; that people would only desire to eat this or that, and they would use all their thinking to be able to produce that food. They would build factories to produce the best flour and the best bread, ships and balloons to bring fruit from the most distant regions and to deliver the products they want to enjoy. They would use tremendous ingenuity for the “rise of culture” – that is what they would call it. They would use infinite intelligence and mental power for this, but only to set the table in the end. Just think about what the phrase “rising culture” means from this point of view! Isn't the essential thing that infinite mental power is applied to it? If we only use it to telegraph: I need so many sacks of flour - then great intellectual power is used to produce something that ultimately only serves what we might call the animal in man. Materialism has led to a peak of intelligence and intelligent culture. But that has nothing to do with spirituality. Let us assume that people would be eliminated. What would the gods have to do? They would say to themselves: Now we have had a generation that did not understand the mission on earth. So we have to send down another generation, a generation of souls that will accomplish the mission on earth.

But small circles will already find understanding for what spiritual life of the future must be, and therefore the earth mission will be completed by people, and that which our fifth post-Atlantic culture, dedicated to the consciousness soul, will replace as the sixth, will already be achieved by a small circle of people who will spread throughout the rest of humanity. But this can only be achieved if people's free will intervenes. For once the ego has taken hold in human nature, man must also develop free will for the development of the ego. So it depends on each individual whether he wants to show understanding for spiritual development, or whether he wants to steer the descent that humanity is taking today.

A way of life must be developed that is based on the principle that the happiness of the individual cannot be attained at the expense of the happiness of another. If man does not want to understand this, he promotes the downward, withering, brutalizing development of humanity. Today we as human beings stand before this decision in a certain respect: to want or not to want spiritual science, and that means to want either the ascent or the decline of humanity. We should feel this in everything we do, we should feel that through our karma we have been placed like a new material in the development of humanity, like those who are to give up their powers as elementary powers, who must work their way up.

When we feel this way, we already have a practical sense of theosophy, a practical feeling, and we are aware of what we are actually doing when we develop the seemingly insignificant activity that we develop in such anthroposophical branches. Not as a hobby, a quirk of individuals, but as an understanding of the deepest needs of a newly emerging age.

I wanted to show you how things are interrelated so that we can truly understand the progress of humanity. Think for a moment about the sentence that man is a self-conscious being, that he must therefore know what he is, and only by knowing himself in his essence can he fulfill his destiny in the world; that therefore all those who do not want to know anything about the essence of man do not have the will to place themselves in the world in the right way. Do you remember how a spirit spoke that had an inkling of much of what is emerging today as Theosophy? Johann Gottlieb Fichte once spoke of his lofty ideas in the lectures 'On the Destination of the Scholar'. When he wanted to write a preface to these lectures, it occurred to him that now this will reach people who will just say: Yes, very nice ideas, but impractical. How can one introduce into life what is being said here? Yet Fichte was well aware that life is constantly guided by ideas.

Let us point out one example here. Who built the Simplon Tunnel? No engineer today can work without differential and integral calculus. Leibniz, who invented differential and integral calculus, is basically building all the tunnels and bridges in our time. The spiritual is everywhere the guiding force in all of life, and we can learn from what Fichte wrote, learn to strengthen ourselves in our theosophical consciousness when people say, “Oh, those are such eccentric ideas, nothing practical.” Fichte says in response: We know that ideas cannot be directly translated into life, and so do those who hold this against us. Perhaps we know it even better. But the fact that others do not want to know anything about ideas at all merely proves that the wise world government, the divine world government, will not be able to count on them. May a benevolent Nature, in which they believe, give them, at the right time, rain and sunshine, good digestion and, if possible, some good thoughts. In a way, we can strengthen ourselves by saying: we do know that, as Theosophists, we must cultivate an understanding for what must come. May a kind nature give them what Fichte said, but also what they need in spirit, what they believe they do not need. May the spirit give them ever wiser and wiser thoughts, so that they too will see spiritual science not as a reverie, but as an important impulse for humanity!

The first result of our meditation is that we get a feeling for the fact that we strive for and make a connection with beings of the higher hierarchies, and that this should express itself in such a way that we feel that we're entering higher worlds, that we've arrived at the place where we originated; that's the way we should experience it. This feeling of being taken into the spiritual world should be warm and alive. One who wants to enter this spiritual world must tell himself: Everything must change in an esoteric—his concepts, feelings and knowledge must change. Let's take men's egoism—it's Luciferic beings who gave us memory. And while we're frugal in physical life, we waste an awful lot of soul and spiritual forces. We must become economical with these forces and transform them into perception forces. To do this, we must practice self-knowledge. We spray out our feelings and sentiments too selflessly from morn to eve. Therefore we must first go through egotism in soul and spiritual things. An esoteric is in danger of increasing his egoism here, and so a moral and intellectual catharsis of a man must accompany all true esoteric work.

We must realize that something impossible is being demanded of us esoterics, and that we're striving towards this impossible thing. For all striving is a striving towards the impossible, and it's also impossible to be unegoistical.

We must try to have the right feeling about all developmental striving. A craving for knowledge and progress is not the right thing. We should earnestly feel that it's our duty to develop, for the divine spirit has placed forced in us that he develops without help from us, but he has also placed active forces in us that a man must develop through deeds. It's the greatest sin against the divine spirit not to develop these forces that the Godhead has placed in us for the benefit of human evolution and progress These forces in us are so strong that they lead us up into the spiritual world, although it may take a long time. Therefore an esoteric should tell himself: “I'll wait, because I know that the forces in me will sooner or later lead me up into the spiritual world.” They do this if we're devoted to the spiritual world in the right way.

The accessory exercises develop the qualities in us that are necessary for the physical plane; these are controlled thinking, actions one chooses oneself, equanimity, etc. That way we'll gradually have a chamber in our heart, in our soul, in which we keep our most sacred things, in which we're esoterics, whereas as men we stand outside in the life. And so conflict with ourselves can be taken for granted; we must become fighters when we become esoterics.

Meditators complain that thoughts storm in and disturb them, and to this one can reply that it's beings fluttering around who storm in on us ever more strongly. Here one can only say: Be glad that this is so; this is the result of meditation and it shows you that thoughts are a spiritual power. Courage, fearlessness and confidence are qualities that an esoteric needs on his path.

One result of meditation is that we get a feeling that we're making contact with beings in the higher hierarchies; we experience this as a warm, vital feeling of being taken into higher worlds, as an arrival at the place where we originated. The feeling of being admitted to the spiritual world must be warm and vital.

All concepts, feelings and knowledge must become different in an esoteric.

Memory was given to us by Luciferic beings.

People who are thrifty in physical life are often very wasteful in their soul-spiritual life. We should be economical with these forces and transform them into seeing forces. Only self-knowledge can lead us to this. We spray out our feelings and emotions too selflessly from morn to evening.

We must first pass through egoism in the soul-spiritual domain There is a danger that by trying to enter the spiritual world one will also become egotistical in the physical world. That's why moral and intellectual purification go hand in hand in a correct training.

We should realized that the impossible is being demanded of us esoterics and that we're striving for the impossible. All such striving is impossible, and being unegotistical is also impossible.

Greed for knowledge and progress is not the right thing for an esoteric. The right thing is an earnest feeling that it's our duty to develop, for the Divine Spirit has placed forces in us that he develops without our help; these are passive forces. But the Godhead has also placed active forces in us that a man must actively develop himself. And it's the greatest sin against the Divine spirit to not develop the forces that the Godhead has placed in us for the good of the evolution and progress of mankind. These forces in us are so strong that they lead us into the spiritual world—though it may take years and so we mustn't get impatient, but should tell ourselves: I'll wait, for I know that these forces do this—if we're just devoted to the spiritual world in the right way.

Accessory exercises develop qualities that are necessary for the physical plane, such as thought control, equanimity, etc.

Eventually we'll have a place in our heart or soul in which we preserve our most sacred things, in which we're esoterics, whereas in outside life we stand on the physical plane. Of course this doesn't happen without a battle. As esoterics we must become fighters.

Thoughts that storm in on us are the spiritual world's beings who flutter around us, and the more we try to keep them away, the more they storm in on us. We shouldn't complain about this. One can tell a pupil to be glad that this is so, for it's a result of meditation that shows that thoughts are a spiritual power. Courage, fearlessness and confidence are what an esoteric needs.

Dear attendees! When people of the present reflect on today's plight, today's misery, they first ask about the causes of this plight, this misery. And he also asks: How can we escape from the confusion, from the chaos of social human development that we have fallen into? Such questions will usually be directed towards the particular inclinations of today's man and towards the most immediate external causes, which lie in the terrible events of the last five to six years. Or their thoughts will be directed to measures that address the external factors in order to alleviate the suffering and chaos in which we find ourselves. However, many people will not be satisfied with what the very last few years can tell them. He will turn his attention to a longer period of time, to the last decades, perhaps centuries, during which, albeit less vividly for humanity, what has come to expression so terribly in recent years has prepared itself, as, figuratively speaking, a thunderstorm prepares itself over a long period of sultriness, and then suddenly discharges. But even here, we get stuck in seeking external causes and in seeking external measures to alleviate the misery. In a way, one-sidedly, with such thinking, with such a feeling, one is quite right. And to what extent one is right, what can fruitfully arise from an understanding of our world situation with regard to the external, I will take the liberty of talking about in more detail the day after tomorrow, ladies and gentlemen. Today, however, I would like to speak of those causes that were at work in the human inner life and that present humanity will have to consider changing if it wants to escape from the chaotic situation in which it finds itself.

Is it not, then, readily apparent to any observer who takes a somewhat closer and benevolent look at what is going on in humanity today, that we are in this age, in which we hear from so many hearts, from so many souls, we hear the call for a more social organization of our conditions than those we have had so far, is it not strange that, despite hearing this call, we see intense anti-social impulses prevailing everywhere in our present humanity? Yes, that is precisely the difficulty that confronts the serious observer of our world situation: the fact that one is supposed to direct one's energies towards a more social organization of our human life at a time when, from the depths of the soul, anti-social drives are rising up throughout our entire civilized world. This emergence of anti-social instincts is connected with the fact that it is very difficult for today's human being to fulfill a longing that is not even consciously, but more or less unconsciously, in his soul, but which, even if unconsciously, asserts itself so strongly in today's humanity that it often comes to the fore in a pathological way, both morally and even outwardly physically. The longing — as I said, it is not easily recognized, because for many people today it still expresses itself unconsciously — the longing is this: in a new way, in the way that people have been educated over the past decades, and even through the last three to four centuries, in the way of gaining a relationship to that which, as an inkling at least, if not as a fully articulated consciousness, lives in every soul, as an inkling of a superhuman being in our transitory, in our sensual human existence. One could say that today's human being is in search of the supersensible human being. And anyone who looks more deeply into the needs of our present time will, above all, feel that it is the first duty of the spiritual aspirant to meet this yearning and longing of contemporary humanity.

One of the most important tasks of our time is to satisfy this inner soul longing, which expresses itself in this yearning and longing. But the way in which people in the broadest circles still want to meet this longing today is not how I will speak to you this evening. What I will have to say to you is spoken from a point of view that I have been presenting for years now as anthroposophical spiritual science.

The task of anthroposophical spiritual science is to seek a path into the supersensible world for people who have absorbed the ideas, sensations, feelings and will impulses of modern times that have emerged from the scientific worldview. From this point of view, what can be said about present-day humanity is either found incomprehensible or unnecessary in the broadest circles today. The spiritual researcher is told: “You are offering something understandable; well, yes, but I won't be able to offer you anything that is so easy to understand, as many still offer today's people, who start from the inner comfort of the soul, which, with regard to the highest goals of spiritual human striving, exists in today's people. Everyone today admits that one must make some effort if one wants to get to know the scientific work that leads to knowing something, say, about the mountains of the moon or the moons of Jupiter; or about the cells of the organism. But when it comes to knowing something about the supersensible world, one rejects out of inner laziness the idea of going a similar difficult path. Today many still say: Man must come to the supersensible foundations of the human being and the world through simple confession or through simple, simple belief in the Bible. What anthroposophical spiritual science has to say is considered too complicated. But this is precisely one of the main problems of our time; one of the problems that underlie our confused social aspirations.

Those who are familiar with human life know that it is insufficient to remain at this simplicity of faith and confession; insufficient because if one cannot regard to the supersensible, if one remains in this comfort zone, then one cannot master the great questions of social life that are confronting humanity in our present time. We do not yet see it, but we will soon see how those who always want to remain with the “simple faith of the confession” cultivate the kind of thinking in humanity that is now manifesting itself in the social turmoil across Europe and in the civilized world in general.

They are calling on people to return to the simple faith of the confession, because they do not know that remaining with this simple faith has produced what appears today as chaos and confusion.

Therefore, anthroposophical spiritual science regards it as a first duty to speak to the present human being about these things from its very different point of view. When the present human being hears the intimation in his heart, in his soul, about the supersensible human being, then he looks up at himself in a kind of self-knowledge, away from the world. What presents itself to the human being, according to the state of the present consciousness? Today, when a person reflects on his own being, he expresses what presents itself to him when he reflects on his own being by saying: This human being consists of body and soul. And then the person believes that he gets to know his body by observing it with his senses; by then seeking to grasp the sensory observation with the thinking mind. And for that which man cannot attain by this path, he turns to current science, to natural science, to that which biology, physiology and so on have to say about the human body. And then man believes that he really knows something about the one part of the human being, about the human body, when he has taught himself in this way. And then he may also reflect on what lives in the depths of his soul as thinking, feeling and willing. But when he brings to consciousness what is in the depths of his soul, he is immediately confronted with the great mystery of the human being. For he must find that Yes, that which appears to me externally as my body is something quite different, something radically different, from that which reveals itself within my soul as thinking, feeling and willing. And then the human being asks: What is the relationship between what reveals itself to me inwardly as soul and what is external to me as body? And underlying this human puzzle lies something great and powerful in human nature. At the root of it lies the great question of the meaning of life; the question: How can I, if I believe that life should have a meaning, ever believe that what lives in what appears to me as the transient, sensual human body can arise and disappear with this external, sensual body? What is the relationship between the soul and this external, sensual body?

When this question confronts him, in most cases man cannot perceive it as anything other than a comprehensive mystery. And if he turns from his own, as a rule impotent, thinking about this question to those who, in accordance with today's thinking, want to scientifically determine the relationship between body and soul, he usually finds that they have no more to say than what he has already encountered in such a mysterious way: Philosophical and other worldviews leave the serious questioner in this field truly quite unsatisfied.

Spiritual science, as it is meant here, therefore takes completely different paths to the supersensible, and it cannot speak about this supersensible in any other way than in a way that is very different from the way of external science. For hardly anyone becomes a true spiritual researcher who has not learned, learned in his own way, how impossible it is to recognize anything about the supersensible human being through ordinary reflection and ordinary external science. Not only must one speak differently when discussing these things from the standpoint of anthroposophical spiritual science than what the senses and the mind offer to man, but one must also speak in a different way. And that is precisely why one is still little understood today because this way is unfamiliar. What is understood better, at least one believes this, is simple, unadorned faith. But this no longer satisfies humanity, which has been educated over the last three to four centuries. If you want to hear the spiritual researcher talk about the very first starting points of his spiritual science, you will hear something different from him than you hear from those who have gone through the external science of nature today.

Isn't it the case that when someone who has become a “specialist” in some field, as they say, tells us about what he has gone through in the laboratory, in the clinic, in the observatory, that he he speaks about everything he is talking about with a certain calmness, so that one can see that his state of mind was quite even while he was working on this or that scientific subject in the laboratory or in the clinic or in the observatory. The spiritual researcher cannot speak to you in this way about his way of knowing. Ask him how he arrived at his insights, and he will not be able to speak to you of that indifferent research that is of the kind I have just characterized. Instead, the spiritual researcher will have to speak to you of the inner soul struggles, the suffering and pain that his soul went through in surmounting them before he could take any step towards the insights we will be talking about this evening. The spiritual researcher who has come to real knowledge of the supersensible has repeatedly faced inner abysses in the face of which it seems as if the soul must plunge into nothingness. And he knows how to tell what it means to muster all one's strength in order to develop that in the soul which carries the soul into those regions in which the real supersensible human being, not just an illusion, can be seen.

This is what the spiritual researcher really has to go through within himself. For he must have a different relationship to external nature and to himself than the ordinary researcher. I do not wish to be misunderstood, my dear audience, so I will say from the outset: the one who has become a spiritual researcher in the sense meant here does not disdain the natural science of the present day, which has achieved such great triumphs. On the contrary, he regards it as the fundamental condition for his spiritual research that he has first familiarized himself with the great and powerful results of natural science of the last few centuries. And he fully recognizes this natural science. For only in this way does he know how to look beyond this natural science in order to penetrate into the spirit to which the human being also belongs.

The natural scientist is right to speak of certain limits to his knowledge of nature. And it is precisely the most cautious natural scientists who have said that natural science always leads people to concepts and ideas that cannot be taken further in the study of nature. Hasty people then speak of such limits as a restriction of human knowledge in general. The cautious natural scientist knows that he cannot go beyond these limits with natural research alone. He will therefore, as long as he remains a natural scientist, stop at these limits; let us say, at such concepts that present themselves to natural research as unbridgeable gaps, such as the essence of matter, the essence of force, and many others; the natural scientist stops there. The spiritual researcher cannot do that. The spiritual researcher begins his work precisely where the natural scientist must stop, by fighting out inner struggles with what is the limit of natural science. The whole inner life of the soul must be brought into activity. And while the natural scientist stops at such limits, the spiritual researcher begins to find his way vividly into ideas and concepts and perceptions and feelings of such limits. Then he experiences something by delving ever deeper into that which science cannot or should not say anything about; then he senses what it actually means to live with the limits of natural knowledge.

What I am going to say now, my dear audience, can of course be seen as not being logically provable in the usual sense. For it is not something that has been thought up. It is what spiritual research experiences at a certain point in its development.

In this inner, living experience, the spiritual researcher comes to a great, shattering conclusion by experiencing what can be experienced at the limits of natural knowledge: He has to give himself the answer out of inner experience, out of his own experience, that we as human beings could never become social beings in our physical-sensual life between birth and death if we were to transcend the limits of natural knowledge. In a remarkable way, we are adapted to the way of the world as human beings. We would not have something – this is recognized by the spiritual researcher in experience – we would not have something in our human nature if we were not stopped by limits when we want to explore nature; we would not have something very essential; we would not have that which is a basic condition of our social, human coexistence; we would not have in us the power of love.

You see, dear attendees, that is the first harrowing experience on the path into the supersensible world, that you get to know human nature in such a way that you say to yourself: We must be limited in our view of nature, then from us in looking at nature, the power that submerges into everything without limits; then we humans would pass each other by in physical life, could not develop sympathy and antipathy, could not develop the most diverse nuances of love, without which life cannot be. In order for man to live between birth and death, it is necessary that he be limited with regard to his knowledge of nature. Within this limit, the power of love can then arise. But this also points the way in which the path can nevertheless be followed, which, in a sense, leads to the knowledge of the supersensible world.

We have the power of love in ordinary life because we are physical human beings to a certain degree; and this degree is more or less sufficient for our external social life – admittedly very little in some epochs, as in the present – but when it is fully developed, it is sufficient for our external social life. What is necessary with regard to this power of love and other things in order to take the spiritual path into the supersensible, I have described in detail in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds'; today I can only hint at a few fundamental things, but that shall be done.

Above all, it is necessary that when one has gone through what I have just mentioned, one can be imbued with a certain inner state of mind that a person in ordinary life has only to a very limited extent; I would call this state of mind 'intellectual humility'. If you go through what I have described, you come to say to yourself: No matter how talented you are in terms of ordinary thinking and research skills, you have to admit to yourself: You cannot penetrate into the supersensible world at all with these ordinary thinking and research skills. That is what a person wants. That is why he is intellectually immodest in ordinary life.

But it is precisely this intellectual immodesty that must first be combated. We must be able to say the following, for example. Let us assume that a five-year-old child has a volume of Goethean poems in his hand. With his abilities, he will not be able to do with this volume of Goethean poems what should be done with it by virtue of the essence of this volume of poems. Just as this five-year-old child faces the essence of this book of poems, so — we must admit in intellectual modesty — we face the world and ourselves in relation to the supersensible essence with our ordinary abilities to think, feel and research. Just as a five-year-old child must first develop the abilities that will enable him to approach the essence of a book of poetry, so too, in full intellectual humility, must the human being, if he wants to become a spiritual researcher, first develop ordinary thinking, ordinary feeling and ordinary will. And just as the soul and physical abilities of a five-year-old child are developed from the outside through his education, so anyone who wants to know something about the supersensible world from direct perception must take his soul development into his own hands. But that means, my dear audience, that one must be able to make the confession in a real inner soul modesty: The strength you need to recognize the supersensible must be developed within yourself. And it must be developed in detail.

As a rule, one will not come to this development at all if one is not made aware of it through the experiences I have already described today, that no matter how deeply one has penetrated into the outer world of natural phenomena, that with this thinking, with the achievements about the outer natural phenomena, one can know nothing about what is going on in the human body, in order, for example, to gain a relationship to what we, as thinking, call an important soul activity. There one must first bring this thinking to a completely different level than it is in ordinary life. One must develop this thinking further. This can be done if one performs certain

of the soul that one does instinctively and unconsciously in ordinary life, if one gets into the habit of making these actions more and more conscious. I will pick out two things from the many things that the spiritual researcher has to do in this regard. The first is that the spiritual researcher must develop the powers of attention and interest in a completely different way than they are developed in ordinary life. In ordinary life, we become aware of something when our senses are drawn to it. We then direct our attention to the thing when we are made aware of it by external impressions.

But as a rule we do not exert ourselves out of the innermost power of our soul to strengthen the power of attention; something from outside awakens our interest. In ordinary life, it is always the case with a person that the interest aroused from outside makes his soul attentive. If a person now practices earnestly and worthily to be attentive, to pay constant and long attention to that which he wants to be attentive to only out of the inner power of thought, if he turns his interest to things that do not impose themselves on him, to which he turns out of his very own, innermost initiative , he does such exercises as I have described in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds.” The path into the supersensible worlds is a long one, but if a person practices for a long time, he will finally notice that his thinking becomes quite different from what it is in ordinary life. He notices that this thinking begins to acquire an inner vitality. And he notices that he actually has a completely new kind of inner, living thinking in him, thinking that is set in motion from within. One really sees through what develops as a new thinking through effort, through a development; one really sees this when one patiently and gradually sees it arise in the soul: You have your old thinking; your thinking that more or less passively joins in with things, that continues even when you are not making an effort, when you are not somehow exerting your senses or your mind as the basis of this thinking. This thinking continues, it does not sleep. But as if standing above this thinking, observing it going on beside it, like a kind of dream, there then stands the other, the completely bright, never dreamy thinking, which one develops in the way I have just characterized.

Then one comes to an inner discovery, to an inner experience, which I would now like to describe as the second shattering event on the way into the supersensible worlds: one experiences inwardly that one's ordinary thinking cannot be distinguished from one's outer physical activity; but that the thinking that one develops through one's own power, that proceeds in such a way that one experiences it: It has nothing to do with any external physical activity; it has nothing to do with any nervous or other activity. When you think as I have just described, you know that you are moving in a purely spiritual element with your thinking, and you have your physical self beside you; you have really stepped out of your body. And now you realize that this human being, when it carries out its thinking in this way, when it carries out its inner soul activity, as it is often described in the everyday illusions of human beings. People also believe in many cases, based on today's popular science, that they are indulging in materialistic ideas: we have developed the nervous system into the wonderful brain; in this brain one can see how research in human development is progressing; with each stage of thinking, the brain develops further. And then people say: So thinking, imagining, arises through the activity of the brain, through the activity of the nervous system. And basically, people who know nothing of the independent bodiless thinking that I have just described to you cannot help it, if they are somehow religious, but think of the illusory body.

But the one who gets to know bodiless thinking knows from direct experience another. Let me give you an image: Imagine you are walking along a muddy path; on this path you find furrows; you find impressions in the softened soil that resemble human footsteps. Do you think that someone who now believes that down there, below the surface of the earth, there are forces at work that cause something like impressions of human footsteps to appear on the surface is saying something correct about this fact? No, the person who judges the situation correctly is the one who knows that the furrows have been pressed into the soft soil from the outside. The person who has come to know independent, bodiless thinking knows that the spiritual soul is as independent of the nervous system and the brain as the carriage rolling down the street is independent of the feet of the person walking down the street. Body-free thinking carves furrows into the brain. It is no wonder that, as thinking unfolds in the course of human development, the brain shows imprints of that which develops thinking everywhere. But it is a terrible illusion, one that misleads humanity, to believe that what the brain fears and thereby causes thinking in some way arises from within the nervous system. Only the living, body-free thinking that develops and unfolds out of intellectual modesty can provide insights into that which leads to the immortal human being.

Then, through this body-free thinking, one gets to know the first supersensible part of the human being, that which I have mentioned in my writings - names are not important, but one must have names for things - the etheric body or formative body. This is something that the human being carries within them, just as they carry their physical body, but it is something that cannot be grasped by the external senses and by ordinary thinking; it can be grasped when the human being develops this imaginative thinking - as I call it - which I have been talking about today. Then this imaginative thinking becomes a [mental organ] with which he sees the spiritual human content, the formative forces that permeate the human being, just as the human being has the physical body.

Thus one ascends to the first supersensible aspect of human existence. But one cannot ascend in this way without undergoing other experiences as one ascends to body-free thinking. From the relationship between the limits of knowledge and the power of love in the human being, of which I have spoken to you, you will be able to divine that there are deep, mysterious relationships between the powers of knowledge in the human being and social human life. If a person acquires supersensible thinking, as I have just described it, then he finds a new way in which social life, which takes place between human souls and human beings, is shaped.

We meet people in life. We develop a strong sympathy for some people and a less strong sympathy for others; we may even develop antipathy for some people. But a network of relationships with other people, shaped by the power of love, runs through our entire lives as we interact with others. If one learns to recognize the power of supersensible thinking, then this leads to the realization that the sympathies and antipathies we develop for the people we meet in the physical world come from the fact that we were already connected with these souls before we went through birth or conception. Through the development of thinking, the spiritual view of the world in which we have lived opens up from the physical life – we have lived spiritually and soulfully just as we live here physically and corporally – in which we have lived as in a spiritual world before we descended into the physical world through conception and birth. In our time, it is possible to see into the spiritual world from which we descended before our birth, through a powerful development of thinking out of intellectual modesty. It is neither speculation nor fantasy when we say from such knowledge: How you meet people here in life, soul to soul, is the continuation of how you met them, now entirely in the spirit, in the supersensible world, before those people who enter into relationships here descended into this sensual world. Just as man has been seeking out natural scientific connections in a new way for three to four centuries, so from today onwards he will have to seek them out - otherwise he will never feel his suspicions about the supernatural satisfied - he will have to seek out spiritual connections to the supernatural worlds.

It must be admitted that, when we speak in these terms today, we are still speaking of something quite incomprehensible and incredible to present-day humanity. But anyone who is familiar with the history of cultural development knows the significant way in which people relate to the great cultural advances. It was in the first half of the nineteenth century when a college of physicians and other scholars were asked whether railways should be built. They delivered the verdict – I am not telling a fairy tale, but something that is documented – that railways should not be built because they would undermine the health of those who travel in them due to the great vibrations during the journey. And if they are to be built after all, they said, if people are to be found who will travel in the railways, then at least large, high board walls must be erected to the left and right of the railway so that those who pass the railroad will not suffer from concussion. — Thus fear expressed itself against real progress.

Such fear lives unconsciously in humanity today before the supersensible. We will not be able to fight the anti-social instincts of humanity until we engage in this field, not believing that we get mental concussion when the supernatural is spoken of.

That, dear attendees, is the one link of the human being that looks into prenatal life.

In yet another way, man can take his development into his own hands through the modesty of his soul. This is when, as in the first case I described, he can further develop his thinking if he further develops his will. There is something again that the whole human being develops unconsciously in the course of his life. Let us just admit, my dear audience, that basically we change from week to week, from year to year, from month to month in the purely external development of the human being. We are always learning from life. Just look back at how different you are from ten or twenty years ago. But what we developed in ourselves then, we developed unconsciously. We did not learn to take our further development as human beings, our higher development as human beings, into our own hands. And again, there are methods – you can also read more about this in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds' – by which one can learn continuously from life; whereby one looks at everything that presents itself in life in such a way that we intervene actively; then we say to ourselves: What we have done there – if we ourselves were higher, more maturely developed, we could do it better. If we constantly develop this modesty in relation to the will – our development can go on and on – and take the opportunity to take our will development into our own hands in the same way that we took our thinking development into our own hands in the way described above, then it turns out that we find our way into the supersensible world in a different direction. What we are now developing within us by further developing our willpower is that, as we go through life, we can always become our own spectator. We then become, as it were, as if we were floating above ourselves asleep at night and looking at our body lying in bed from the outside. Thus, through the inner development of the willpower of the soul, we learn to see ourselves in everything we do.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is a strong human power. By immersing yourself in this power, you become independent of your body to a higher degree than simply by developing your thinking. In this way you get to know the higher supersensible being of the human being; that which I would like to call the body of movement, or - don't shudder back, it's just a name - the astral body of the human being. We learn to recognize what is supersensible in us by merely making an effort to move our hands, by working, by developing our will in our own growth, in our own human development. Then, in addition to the etheric body, we get to know the astral body of the human being, which, because we have it, uniquely and solely enables us to truly express the will in the outer world.

But when one experiences within oneself what willpower, developed in this way, actually is, then one looks into the supersensible world in a different direction. Then you first experience: You behave in one of two ways towards people you come into social contact with; you do them good or you do them little good; you do them something purposeful or inappropriate; you act towards them in such a way that they experience the consequences of your action. By developing the powers of will as I have just described, we learn to recognize that we experience what lives through the astral body, through the actual spiritual-soul. The expression 'body' is just an expression. What we develop there carries our supersensible being through the gate of death; and we will experience the continuation of what we have developed in our relationships with people here in the physical world in the manner just described in the spiritual world after death. That is to say, in the spiritual vision, there is an immediate insight into the world that we experience when we have passed through the gate of death. That which connects man with the spiritual world becomes visible when he develops the powers of his soul as I have described. But then, my dear audience, these two powers come together. The power that develops out of thinking, out of living thinking, and the power that develops out of the will, they enter into an inner marriage, as it were. And then, then the contemplation of one's own development becomes something new for man; then something quite new becomes what we call the history of mankind. Oh, the ordinary, external knowledge knows little about this history of mankind, only the external facts. But what is called history today is actually nothing more than a fable convenante. What lives in history, what advances humanity through history, is only really learned in its truth, with the forces that I have just described to you. There one learns to recognize how the spiritual rules in the historical development of humanity.

Now, I do not want to describe to you in abstract terms what I have to say in this field, but I would like to present to you what can have a direct bearing on the great tasks of humanity in the present day. The one who, as I am now doing, looks at more recent human history from the spiritually developed soul forces finds a significant turning point in the development of humanity in the middle of the fifteenth century.

You see, in life, things are often said that are actually illusions or one-sided truths. For example, it is often said that nature – and what is meant is basically the whole of world affairs – nature does not make leaps. In a sense this is true, but in another sense it is completely untrue. Nature is constantly making leaps. Look at a growing plant: the green leaf makes the leap to the colored petal, to the stamens, to the pistil and so on in further growth. So it has also happened in history, leaps and bounds continually; these leaps are not noticed because man does not follow the workings of history in a spiritual way, but only externally. The one who follows the development in history in a spiritual way can clearly see that since the middle of the fifteenth century the human spiritual condition in the civilized world has become quite different than before. We have to distinguish a long period of human development from our own, which began in the middle of the fifteenth century and in which we are still immersed in our developmental epoch. The immediately preceding developmental epoch began around the eighth century BC and lasted from the seventh century BC to the middle of the fifteenth century AD, which external history does not tell. If you look at history as I have described it today, it becomes clear that people were very different in the epoch that began in the eighth century BC and ended in the middle of the fifteenth century. People were so different then that I will briefly illustrate this with an image.

You all know, dear attendees, that today, as he develops in his childhood years, the human being goes through parallel stages with his soul and spirit in relation to his physical development. Just consider – and you can read about what this means in my little booklet 'The Education of the Child from the Point of View of Spiritual Science' – how deeply the change of teeth towards the seventh year intervenes in what is developing in the child. And for those who are able to observe well, how important it is that what intervenes in the life of the child intervenes in the soul and spirit much more intensively than people usually believe. This is the first epoch in which, alongside physical development, the human being undergoes a parallel development in relation to his soul and spirit. Man ends the second epoch with sexual maturity in the fourteenth or fifteenth year. Man develops quite differently between the seventh and fourteenth year. And again differently, but in such a way that he still has parallelism with physical development, up to the twenty-first year. And anyone who is able to observe closely in our time will see that today's humanity still shows a parallelism in terms of the spiritual and soul up to the age of twenty-seven. Then this parallelism ceases. Then, to a certain extent, we emancipate ourselves inwardly from the physical and bodily in relation to our spiritual and soul. Then these developments no longer go hand in hand. But what I am now describing as a characteristic of present human development, and on which everything that happens between human beings, everything in the human totality depends, was different before the middle of the fifteenth century, it was different throughout the whole long period, although it developed from the eighth century BC to the middle of the fifteenth century. For a much longer time, the human being was afflicted with a parallelism. Even into one's early thirties, one could still experience physical changes that corresponded to psychological changes, although not as strongly as during the change of teeth and sexual maturation. And anyone who really wants to understand what was there in the world with Greek culture, what entered human development with Greek culture, must know that what is usually called Greek human nature, what one perceives as the harmony of Greek culture, what has been felt in such a way that the offspring and also the aftermath of Greek culture are carried into our time, that this is based on this longer ascending developmental capacity of the bodily-physical of human nature. This goes parallel with that which the spiritual-soul qualities are. In the case of the Greeks and Romans, the spiritual-soul qualities were such that one can say: The powers of understanding and feeling developed more instinctively; instinctive feeling, instinctive logic, instinctive understanding, instinctive powers of research are found in that period.

Since the middle of the fifteenth century, the instinctive understanding has been replaced by the self-conscious powers of understanding and feeling. Everything in the state and in society, in the social organism, was different in the period from the eighth century BC to the fifteenth century AD than it can be in our age. From the innermost core of human development, that which stands for today's humanity in the outside world developed. The newer natural science with all that lies in the human soul could never have developed, the new industrialism could never have developed if, around the middle of the fifteenth century, something had not happened in human development that can be called the transition from instinctive to independent soul and emotional powers. Since the middle of the fifteenth century, therefore, man has wanted to place himself at the apex of his personality out of his inner nature. From these inner impulses of human development follows that which is outer economic life, which is economic, industrial order, which is also a scientific direction of knowledge; follows that which can be characterized in such a way that one says: Man, because he was to become self-conscious since the middle of the fifteenth century, had to develop a kind of materialism more or less in the realms of the intellect and also in the practical realm. To a certain extent, he had to be abandoned by the instincts of spiritual life. But today the time has come again when man, self-consciously, must also rise from the attainment of orientation in the material to the conscious grasping of spiritual life, as I have described it.

Now, the best way to see what has changed in the development of humanity is to turn one's gaze to the most significant event that has occurred within this development in the course of the entire human evolution on earth, to the event that gives the actual meaning to the evolution of humanity and the earth, when one turns one's gaze to the Mystery of Golgotha, through which Christianity was founded.

What did humanity, which developed its soul and physical powers as I have described from the eighth century BC to the fifteenth century AD, what did this humanity, which also remained capable of physical development, feel until the 1930s in the face of what mysteriously took place at the Mystery of Golgotha? With the powers of the soul that arise from the instinctive mind and instinctive soul, that arise from a body that, like ours, was only capable of development until the end of the 1920s, was capable of development until the 1930s, this humanity of the Greco-Latin age was able to look at the Mystery of Golgotha and feel a supersensible event in the event of Golgotha. This humanity of the Greco-Latin age could look at the mystery of Golgotha and feel a supersensible event in the event of Golgotha, which broke into human earthly development. In those days people instinctively understood that not just any man had lived in Nazareth or in Palestine at all, but that in this man Jesus of Nazareth a supersensible entity had lived, which the human beings before the development of Christianity could not look at because they were not yet connected with the earth. Through the event of Golgotha, a spiritual essence that had not previously been connected with human development on earth entered this human development through the body of Jesus of Nazareth. Humanity, which was capable of development until the middle of the fifteenth century in the way I have described, understood this instinctively.

The development from the mid-fifteenth century to the present should have been different. There was no rule of instinctive understanding or instinctive powers of mind. Unlike the period up to the end of the 1920s, our bodies did not develop into our 30s; but instead of becoming independent today after about the 27th year, we develop the human personality to full freedom through the physical nature. But this education to freedom must find the spirit within itself. Therefore, it must look outward for a while and see only matter. If the spirit were to reveal itself to us through matter, we would have no need to educate ourselves to become spiritual. But under the influence of these human developmental impulses, even the truth of Golgotha has been subject to change. He who, inwardly, does not consider the prejudices of present-day external knowledge, but who inwardly considers the development of humanity's thoughts about Christianity throughout the centuries, knows that in the materialistic age that had to come over humanity since the middle of the fifteenth century, but that must be overcome again from today on, he knows that with that also the views on the mystery of Golgotha had to be materialized. We have already experienced it in the course of the nineteenth century and particularly at the beginning of the twentieth century that people, including theologians, were almost proud no longer to speak of Christ as a supersensible being who lived in the body of Jesus of Nazareth; but they found it better, as they say, for the enlightened man of the present to speak merely of the 'simple man of Nazareth'. They have lost the Christ and describe the man of Nazareth in materialistic terms, as if the Christ had not lived in him as a supersensible, supermundane entity. They describe him only as a highly developed human being, but still only as a developed “human being”.

Modern humanity also had to go through this test. But it is a test, ladies and gentlemen. And by finding our way out of self-conscious reason, out of self-conscious powers of mind, out of intellectual modesty into the supersensible worlds, as I have described it, we will also find our way back to a supersensible understanding of Christianity. We will consciously learn to look at the Mystery of Golgotha as the people of the Greek era did, as people until the middle of the fifteenth century instinctively looked at the Mystery of Golgotha, which broke into human development after the first third of that Greek-Latin period as the earth's actual meaning. It will be a significant event in the more recent development of humanity when, through the conquest of the spiritual world, through the knowledge of the supersensible human existence, man will also find his way to the mystery of Golgotha in a new way.

Then this new knowledge of Christ will be able to take hold in the souls of the whole civilized world. Then this new Christ idea will overcome what today adheres to the conceptions of Christ out of conventional narrow-mindedness, even out of narrow-mindedness of religious creeds. People, however they may otherwise stand in terms of races and nations, if the path to the mystery of Golgotha is confidently found, they will find this path throughout the civilized world. Then, starting from this impulse, something will come that is being sought today, but from a utilitarian point of view. Today we hear of people who cling to the external, to the pursuit of a League of Nations. And one of those people, who unfortunately were also quite overestimated in Germany at a certain time, one of those who lead people into such abstractions, one of those people is Woodrow Wilson. When one speaks as he does about the founding of a League of Nations, one speaks about something for which one does not first create the conditions out of reality. Those who today speak of the fact that a League of Nations should arise from the aspirations of individual peoples speak in such a way that one can see that they have never grasped the great parable of the Tower of Babel. For what does he actually want? He wants to continue building the Tower of Babel. He wants to leave the nations as they are; he wants to found the League of Nations through the very thing by which they have become nations out of the unified whole. This will result in an illusion, in an abstraction. But it is the other way around. Through a new spiritual life, it is necessary to establish that which can be common to all human souls: the realization of the spiritual center of human development; the realization of the supersensible nature of the Mystery of Golgotha in its significance for all humanity, without distinction of religion and race and nationality. From this perception, from this looking to the Christ-event, the unique Christ-event, will come the real power for the new League of Nations. And people throughout the world, throughout the civilized world, will not find harmony until they have found the path to a new Christianity out of a new conquest of the spirit, a new Christianity that can unite people throughout the world. So we see: This provides the insight that I was able to describe to you, that it leads beyond birth and death to the eternal, supersensible nature of the human being. We see that this realization leads at the same time to such a penetration of human development that it must be one of the most important tasks of the present time. And if one grasps human nature at such a depth that one does not merely encounter the outer human being that today's outer scientific knowledge encounters, if one grasps the human being in such a way that one, out of intellectual modesty, the strength to develop further, as one has developed from childhood to the point where one has arrived in ordinary life, then one also finds the words that unite people.

A strong chaos lives over the civilized earth, a terrible confusion. In every soul must arise the longing to find the way out of such confusion, out of such chaos, confusion and chaos are great. The power that must be applied to escape from them must also be great; it must overcome strong, great prejudices. Even today, for many people, the prejudice that must be overcome may seem too strong, the path to the new understanding of the supersensible event of Golgotha must be taken. For humanity today has before it – we will now have to illuminate this from the outside in the next lecture – two paths. One path goes to the left, the other goes to the right. We can take a one-sided approach by letting the pendulum swing between the two, that which has developed in materialism, in the egoistic personality forces, since the middle of the fifteenth century. But we can also go to the right and consciously conquer the spirit again from our industrial and scientific age. If we learn to recognize that social, supersensible life is inherent in the development of humanity, then what many today still consider a superstition or an illusion will become a realization, that which Lessing pointed out, namely, repeated earthly lives. Lessing, the enlightened man, was the first to point out, as in the dawn of modern times, in his 'Education of the Human Race', that human beings go through repeated earthly lives as long as the earth is in its development. Between these repeated earthly lives, he lives in a spiritual-soul world from which he descends into the physical world through birth or conception, and from which he then ascends again through the gate of death. To find one's way into the great that has already begun with such thoughts with Lessing, with Herder, with Goethe and so on, leads in the right direction. And we in Central Europe, we must now, since the time of external adversity and external misery has perhaps begun for us, [that must] already be said in our difficult time, we must learn to tie in again with those steps that were taken in Central Europe by the great German minds that I have just mentioned, into the supersensible world. And we must have the courage to take further such steps, to go further into the supersensible world. Otherwise humanity will fall back into what can be characterized in the following way.

If humanity wants to go only to the left, then it will continue to develop that which had to come over humanity for a time so that the human being could develop his free personality. From a different point of view, I already described this in the early nineties in my book “The Philosophy of Freedom”. In order to achieve freedom, man had to develop what led him into the newer age in such a way that he mechanized his spirit. He only overlooks that which is machine-like in the outer world and comprehends it. If he stops at this, he cannot awaken his soul to what I have described today as awakening out of intellectual and volitional modesty; then, in addition to the mechanization of the spirit, there is the vegetarianization of the soul, the drowsiness of the soul. But then, because the body becomes ignoble if it is not glowed through by the spirit-illuminated soul, animalization occurs for the body in addition to the drowsiness of the soul. Then the social demands arise out of the animal instincts. This can be seen in the present. We have a mechanized spiritual life. But we also have the drowsy, plant-like soul, the vegetative soul, with regard to the supersensible human being. And we have what is currently emerging in Eastern Europe, on the large-scale Russian folk soul, as this folk soul is killing; emerging like a new set of social demands, but which is nothing more than the speech of animalized man. That is the third.

If we really want to find a way out of today's chaos and confusion, then we must look without prejudice at the fact that we in Central Europe, and that Western civilization have developed the mechanization of the mind and the drowsiness of the soul, and that as a result, in the East, the animalized passions , which man today only fears but must learn to understand in order to overcome them, so that he can come out of this illusionary, this corrupt socialism of the East and into a true socialism, which we want to talk about the day after tomorrow, a socialism that is permeated by the spirit and the soul. It is necessary for human beings not to go the way of mechanizing the spirit, of making the soul become like that of a vegetable, of animalizing the body, but to go the way that leads them to a penetration of the supersensible human nature and the supersensible nature of the world in general. That he may receive from his higher developed self-consciousness of modern times in his spirit the light, in his soul the warmth, the spiritual, and thereby in his body the ennobling that will lead to real social love, to genuine brotherhood. Only if we find the way to the illumination of the spirit, to the spiritualization of the soul, to the ennobling of the body, only then will we be able to enter into a better future. Then it will not be external matter, the economic process, but spirit and soul that will lead us into this new order. However, the spirit can only guide man if man meets the spirit halfway; if man allows his intellect to glow with humility through the spirit; if man allows the soul to be permeated by what he can experience as spirit. And do not believe that everyone in our time should become a spiritual researcher themselves, although to a certain extent anyone can become a spiritual researcher today; as I explained in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds'. But while in all other fields one can only look to the belief in authority of scientists in science, what people would like to claim is not true: that supersensible truths, when they are researched, can only be found to be true on the basis of belief in authority. No, human nature is so created that if it only removes the prejudices that the last four centuries have piled up before the human soul, then every single human soul, even if not yet today, will be able to look into the supersensible world and accept what the spiritual researcher has investigated. What the astronomer or the physiologist investigates is accepted by other people. Today, based on common sense, every soul can find the path into this supersensible world through the mere revelation of those who have researched this supersensible world. Then this soul will also find the path into a true social life. Because this social life can never be based on mere natural necessity, on mere external economic or economic necessity. The purified social life can only be based on freedom. But the freedom of external life can only be based on that highest freedom, which must be developed in the innermost part of the human soul. All external freedom may only be in the future, so that humanity may emerge from confusion and chaos. All external freedom may only be the direct announcement of the inner liberation of the human soul.

May man find the way to this inner liberation through the path of the spirit and of soul-searching, so that he can also find it to the outer social liberation.