The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In earlier times man's etheric body was still outside his physical body, and so also, of course, was his Ego-consciousness. His soul worked on the physical body from outside. The horse today has its etheric body still outside.

How did the names of the zodiacal constellations originate?

The whole animal kingdom was once within man; this means that he was at a stage between the human realm and the animal kingdom of today. In order to be able to develop further, he had to separate off from himself those parts which could not go with him. He separated the parts which form the animal kingdom of today. Originally, therefore, the animals were much less sharply differentiated from man than they now are. They have gradually degenerated.

The separating off of the animal kingdom did not occur suddenly, but by slow degrees. First the fishes were separated, then the reptiles and amphibians, then the birds and the mammals. And within each group the separating off was again gradual: thus the beasts of prey, for example were separated earlier than the apes.

When the lions were separated, the constellation in which the Sun then stood was called Lion, and when the bull-nature was separated, the relevant constellation was called Bull. The names of the four apocalyptic creatures in the Revelation of John—Eagle, Lion, Bull, Man—point in the same direction. But the names of all the zodiacal constellations are not thereby explained.

The Moon in earlier times—before the Earth separated from it—consisted of soft plant-substance, like living peat or spinach-stuff, penetrated by a woody structure which has today hardened into rock. In this soft substance lived the Moon-plants, real plant-animals, halfway between the plants and the animals of the present time. Then the Earth separated, bringing into being the four kingdoms of nature—minerals, plants, animals and men. Some of the plant-animals failed to transform themselves completely into present-day plants. The sponges arose in this way.

“Before the voice can speak in the presence of the Masters, it must have lost the power to wound.”
—From Light on the Path, by Mabel Collins.

When we send forth a loving thought, it creates a wonderfully beautiful thought-form, like a flower which gently opens and then surrounds the person to whom the thought applies. Anyone who thinks a thought full of hate creates a sharp-pointed angular form, closed at its apex, designed to wound. That which is here called “the Masters” is the divine voice which speaks in us. It speaks constantly, but we do not always allow it to emerge. The thought-form of love is open; hence the voice of the Masters can sound through it. But the closed thought-form of hate leaves the divine thought-form no way out, so that it has to remain unheard.

In the astral, a lie is a murder

Suppose I think the following thought: I met a man. A quite definite thought-form will be engendered by that. Now to someone else I say it again: I met a man. The same thought-form is again engendered. The two thought-forms meet and strengthen each other. But if I tell a lie and say: I did not meet a man—this engenders a thought-form opposed to the first. The result is an explosion in the astral body of the liar.

How can one protect one's astral body against bad influences?

The best way is to be sure and true oneself. As a special protection you can create through forcible concentration of the will an astral sheath, a blue, egg-shaped mist. You must say to yourself firmly and emphatically: “Let all my good qualities surround me like a coat of mail!”

Why did the first Christians have the Fish as their symbol, besides the Lamb?

Among the fishes, especially Amphioxus, the spinal marrow began to take form. Man was once at the stage when he had the fish nature still within himself; he was wholly a soul-being and worked on his body from outside. Then he separated the fishes from himself. Later on the brain was formed out of the spinal marrow. [Goethe already knew this. Dr. Steiner found the relevant pencil sketch drawn in a notebook while he was working in the Goethe Archives in Weimar.] In this way man becomes a Self. But the Self is ennobled by Christianity and hence the Fish is the symbol for the early Christians. The story of Jonah indicates the same thing. Jonah—man—is at first outside the fishes: this means the soul working on the body from the outside. Then he becomes a Self and enters into the fish—the physical body. Through Initiation the physical body is again left aside.

Can physical objects be seen after death?

After death we see nothing physical, but the corresponding astral images, astral and devachanic counterparts. The mineral realm is absent; it appears as an empty space, like a photographic negative. In Devachan one can see a clock, for a human design enters into it. All human artifacts can be seen there.

The universal flow of life is called Prana. It flows like water; but if it is given form by being poured into the physical body, rather as water is poured into a jug, then one speaks of the etheric body. The general astral substance, desire-stuff, is called Kama. If it is given the form of a body, one speaks of the astral body. The Ego is the centre of the person. Kama plays into it, and Manas also. Thus the Ego comprises a mixture of Kama and Manas. The Kama has to be completely transformed and ennobled, so that Manas may develop from it. If the etheric body is ennobled, Buddhi emerges; and Atma arises from the ennoblement of the physical body.

The continental realm embraces everything physical; the oceanic realm, everything living; the airy sphere, the whole range of feelings; and the etheric sphere, all thoughts. At the boundary of the etheric sphere is the Akasha Chronicle. It contains everything that has ever been thought. On the far side of the Akasha Chronicle lies everything that has not yet become thought. All new thoughts, all discoveries and so on, come from the Arupa region. Anyone who has developed Kama Manas comes after death as far as the etheric sphere, to thoughts that exist independently. The Ego shapes the astral body, so that Manas develops out of it. All Manas which has not yet been drawn into the astral is Arupa.

Denial and affirmation of life

Schopenhauer says that the world has been built by irrational will. Therefore the reason has to destroy the irrational will, so that the world goes to ruin. Schelling, Hegel and Fichte represent a different standpoint which can be expressed in the words: “From God—to God!” Let us consider the denial and affirmation of life through a parable. I show someone a piece of magnetised iron, and I tell him that in the iron resides an invisible force, called magnetism. He replies: I want to know nothing about this force; I affirm the iron. It is much the same if someone, looking only at the things of the world, says that he affirms the world. Certainly he affirms the world, but he denies the invisible forces within it. Life is truly affirmed only by someone who seeks for spiritual realities. Anyone else denies half of life. Many Theosophists say: I don't bother about the world; I am concerned only to develop my higher self. In fact they are seeking only the lower man. The higher man is everywhere outside. If I feel the whole world in myself, then I have found my higher Self. My Self is outside me. Knowledge of the world is self-knowledge!

How does suggestion work?

Suggestion works on the Ego. The higher bodies are drawn out of the physical body, and then the Ego-body, without the physical brain, unconsciously follows the hypnotiser. The physical brain, the controller of actions, is detached. With an Initiate it is different. He retains conscious control without the aid of the physical brain, and so he cannot be hypnotised.

The “Pistis Sophia”

This book, written in the Coptic language, contains much of the discourses of Christ at the initiation of His disciples, and many inner expositions of parables. The thirteenth chapter is especially important. The αιμαρμενη (Haimarmene) is Devachan. The entire super-sensible world is divided into twelve aeons. These are the seven divisions of the astral plane and the five lowest divisions of Devachan. Aberrated spirits can be purified from out of Devachan. The light-bearing purifier before Christ was Melchisedek. He is meant when we read of light coming from the επισχοπος (episkopos). By αρχοντες (Archontes), the powers of evil are to be understood.

Conflict and arguing are not a realm for Theosophy. We should not squander time uselessly on disputes, but should speak only to those who have the heart and mind for Theosophy.

Why does Christ say: “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life”, when previous great founders of religion had already pointed to the Way?

We must first transpose ourselves into past ways of speaking. In former times the spiritual content of speech was perceived at the same time as the words were heard. Then we can reflect on the following: Christ was the embodiment of the Second Person of the Godhead. No previous founder of a religion had embodied in himself the fullness of the Logos. But the divine element that His predecessors had embodied was a part of the Logos, and so of Christ Himself. Therefore Christ embraces everything previous to Him in the words, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life”.

Then one can take these words literally, in yet another sense. The previous founders of religions had shown the Way and taught the Truth, but they did not live out the Mystery of the Godhead in the sight of men. Hence they could say, “I am the Way and the Truth”. Christ alone could say: “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.”

Now Elias means “Way”, and Moses, “Truth”. At the Transfiguration, Elias and Moses appeared with Christ. Hence the Transfiguration says: I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. The passing of Buddha into Nirvana, his death, is the same as the Transfiguration of Christ. At the moment when Buddha brought his working to an end, the real working of Christ, His Life, begins.

It is of the greatest interest to delve into the way in which this remarkable document, the Bible, has been received by people of all times, and what reflection this book of books has evoked in the minds and souls of people. You can learn so much about the developmental history of human souls from the impressions that this book has evoked.

The impression that the writing makes on the human individualities of different periods of time is quite different. Of course, these different stages can only be touched on very briefly, because the material is too vast, and it is done because it is important to recall it to the soul. For example, how the Jewish people at that time had something of the Scriptures from which they learned about their own origin and ancestry, astronomy, the justification of the social order, the legislation, regulations for everyday life. The whole life of the soul and its wisdom were in it. The scholars of late Judaism applied all their ingenuity and all their mental power to understanding this book. And so it was in those times that the highest knowledge was applied to achieve understanding. And with the utmost respect, the Kabbalists can even be mentioned, who sought to interpret it down to the letter. And then later, the New Testament in connection with the Old Testament: In the first Christian century, we again find this deep, sacred earnestness in the search for understanding. In mystical and other communities, everything is geared towards understanding the Bible. The Gnostics and others of that time immersed themselves with the greatest effort in what is given in the Bible in the person of Christ Jesus. We find profound thought in this Bible study. Let's say the 9th century, John, the great Scot — Scotus Erigena. There is no doubt in this man's mind about the truth of the Bible, about the truth of the written word, that it is inspired; man has no choice but to seek to understand. From Thomas Aquinas and John Tauler to Jakob Böhme, a bold philosophy was applied to understanding what is written in the Bible.

Now, however, something very remarkable is happening with regard to the Bible. Whereas everything before – even in the eighteenth century – was explanation, a feeling of the deepest reverence for the Bible, in the nineteenth century what is called Bible criticism emerged. One could almost call the nineteenth century the century of Bible criticism. This sentiment would not have been understood at all in the past. In the past, it was always a case of looking up to the Bible and feeling down about oneself. It was only now that a feeling arose that man felt towards the Bible as he would towards any other book and that he could look down on the Bible. Critics dare to question the Bible, its individual documents and writings, doubt later appearances and so on, and finally even dare to question the person of Christ Jesus.

David Friedrich Strauß is one of those; he resolves everything in the Bible into legends and myths. He says that the facts of Jesus' life are not important; these feelings and ideas were simply in the people and so it was gradually put together. Other criticism and all that today's science has to say about it should be mentioned. Specifically, the seven-day work of creation is widely criticized, as is the narrative of the creation of man in it, how man emerged from the great cosmos. And then his creation is retold a second time. From this, it is concluded that there are two accounts of creation. All the many and incalculable things that have been achieved in it could be mentioned.

The Bible is the book of life for mankind, but all this has changed people's attitude towards it, and those in authority felt compelled to take their present position. And much, much more than one suspects and can know, people's attitude towards the Bible has changed. Only the soul researcher can gauge that. Even the most religious person of today has no idea of the deep fervor and inner bliss that one once had towards the Bible. Anyone who tries to observe the times and the psychology of the soul knows that since materialism has permeated all popular thinking, this is no longer possible. Since then, a change, a fundamental metamorphosis of intimate feelings can be observed. Many noble people among us look back on the days of their youth with a certain wistfulness, conflict or satisfaction, thinking of how they absorbed the stories from the Bible back then. The inner conflict between then and now is in many a soul.

But what violence, what significance this book of books has, emerges from the fact that scholars and scientists are constantly trying to bring the seven-day work into line with it. One must come to terms with the way the creation of the world is presented in the Bible. The power that the content of the Bible has repeatedly had over people is proven by the fact that, for example, in the early days of the Christian era, people turned to Plato for answers to such questions, and gave him the certainly strange name of the Attic-speaking Moses. So Plato's teachings are related to the Old Testament.

The same is said of Pythagoras and other great philosophers. Even Apollo has a very beautiful oracle that proves this: “Steep is the path to the / gap]” — “Steep is the path / gap]”

But there were mortals who did climb this path. The most significant of these were those who lived in Chaldea and those who were called Judean men.

Paracelsus, the great medieval physician, also made a very strange statement about the Bible: “All medicine, all healing can be learned from the Bible.” Of course, this must be thought of in the right way in Paracelsus' sense. He meant how he thought of the relationship of man and his position to the Bible. You must not just open it, read it and retell it, no, the words that are in the Bible are not only to be taken literally, but there are magical powers in them. If you let the words live in your soul, they will fertilize it; the soul will become wise and knowledgeable by letting not the content but the power of the Bible word live in you. No science can or should dissuade you from the Bible.

Take Darwinism, for example. Charles Darwin says: “So we would have fathomed” and so on, - “those whom the Creator once breathed life into.” And a second saying of his, that language is something higher than the animal inarticulate sound: “Language can never have come about through mere natural causes and could never develop in this way. One must assume an intelligent creator who has wisely ordered everything.”

Many sayings of great scholars who, in this respect, do recognize the Creator, could still be cited. Jean Baptiste Biot, who rendered outstanding services to the science of light, said: Moses either knew as much as we do or he was inspired! — All that has been said is not meant as any criticism on our part, but only as an explanation that it had to come in the materialistically thinking present. Even in our time, many great men have honestly endeavored to understand the Bible by interpreting it, but who knows about it? Example: Fabre d'Olivet: “The Mystery of the First Books of Moses”.

In the face of biblical criticism, spiritual research or theosophy yields a different point of view. Theosophy never criticizes, never tears down, but only seeks to understand. One thing is characteristic of theosophy: it is not a thought, not a concept, but an attitude. Everything in theosophy must be imbued with this attitude. We have this attitude towards all of nature. We see regularities and monstrosities in nature, we know that it would be nonsense to criticize nature, we do not do that, we seek to understand it. Understanding is the basic attitude we must have; we must pursue everything in the spiritual life with understanding, pursue everything with love, not with the yardstick of sympathy and antipathy. Understanding everything and everyone – you cannot define it intellectually, it has to be an attitude. If you have this attitude, you will have an experience: that the Bible is a book in the face of which criticism begins to fall silent. What you may have criticized in the past is now seen in a completely different light, it becomes clear.

One must rediscover the key to the Bible through spiritual research, and then biblical criticism will be replaced by an ever deeper interpretation of the Bible. The development of humanity is not considered if one considers only the external aspects of it. What science has brought, theosophy does not question; but it does not only pursue the external material phenomena, which are only the expression of a spiritual phenomenon of the underlying spiritual development. The task of theosophy is to explore the nature of today's man and his position in the universe. It must therefore say something about the creation report. Theosophy regards the whole human being, not just his physical body. Where natural science has to stop, theosophy begins. When it comes to the words “I smell the scent of roses, I hear the sound of an organ”, the natural scientist sees only the movement of atoms in the brain; but he cannot explain what must take place to produce the idea “I smell the scent of roses” and so on. The task of Theosophy is now a completely different one. Du Bois-Reymond ties in with Leibniz's saying: the idea of the soul, why it is that the scent of roses is smelled, you – [the] natural scientists – would not be able to explore.

Du Bois-Reymond ties in with the word: natural science is actually only capable of observing and fathoming the sleeping human being because the soul experience has been extinguished. Precisely that which the natural scientist cannot explain is there in waking. But can we then recognize what is not there in sleep and what is there in waking? Yes, I will give you a comparison that will make it clear to you how spiritual science relates to the other sciences. An example: Imagine a piano being played, with a deaf person sitting next to it. He cannot hear the notes, but there is a way to make them understandable to him if he is otherwise of sound mind. Open the piano and scatter so-called paper riders on the strings. By the jumping of the paper riders, the deaf person can see that something is going on; he can get an idea of the strings and their trembling. But there is a difference between his idea and the real objective, the sense is missing, the open ear.

This is how Theosophy relates to the so-called science of facts. The latter conducts research in the way we have described here the perception of the deaf. To perceive what is going on in the soul, one must have the sense for it. What Haeckel and others, in fact modern science in general, has brought is all true for Theosophy, but there is an awakening of the higher senses to follow the material processes, and to look back with one's higher spiritual organs and follow the spiritual facts of the higher spiritual organs that Theosophy teaches to develop. Thus Theosophy perceives what is present in the sleeping and waking human being. To do this, one must have spiritual eyes and spiritual ears.

What does the sleeping person do at night, what does he work on? He repairs the physical body to remove the fatigue substances from the outside. The other type of activity of the astral body is present in the so-called initiate or initiate.

What is an initiate? We must first realize that we can perceive as much as we have organs. There are as many worlds around man as he has organs, and each time he acquires new organs, he perceives a new world. And there are methods in the secret schools where this is taught, whereby such new organs are formed. An initiate is someone who has developed abilities within himself through which the higher worlds can be perceived.

We divide the human being into four parts: physical body, etheric body, astral body or soul, and I. Now, in the initiate, the astral body is equipped with organs of perception. The initiate sees into other worlds. He feels the need to express himself in a different way. For ordinary language is created only for our physical life, and even the words that have been used for the supersensible are taken from the world of sense perception. The initiates must therefore follow Goethe's dictum:

All that is transitory Is but a parable.

What the initiates see in the higher worlds, they can only express in images from the sensual world in order to be understood by people. Every student of the Rosicrucian school of thought, which has existed in Germany since the 14th century and is the most suitable for modern man, must therefore also learn to express himself in such images. What you find in books about the Rosicrucians is unclear and incorrect; for their secrets were not entrusted to books. He must acquire the so-called imaginative knowledge, that is, the knowledge of how to express in a parable what one beholds in the spiritual world. The initiate feels quite differently about a parable. He sees the immortality of the soul in the parable — doll and butterfly — the permanent in the transitory, which is always behind it. The initiate sees the great connection between all facts, the highest spiritual and the lowest physical facts, he sees the high in all this. And if he tells such a parable to a child, for example, he tries to make it clear to him, then he himself firmly believes in this parable, and feeling flows from him to the child. So he also looks at these little ones with the same fervor of heart.

It is the task of theosophy to make it clear that everything spiritual finds its expression in a material way. Not those who deny matter will penetrate to the spirit, but those who learn to grasp the truth that all matter is condensed spirit. If we recognize this, then we will also understand why the Bible gives instructions about the simplest things in life. With heartfelt love we must then enter into these simplest of processes, into something that goes with the phenomena of everyday life. Such knowledge should spiritualize life, not remove people from it. He is not a true theosophist who claims: Oh, what do I care about the brain molecules and their movements, the spirit is in him, that's enough for me! No, he must learn to understand that the brain is the expression of the spirit. Our goal is not to rise above the appearance to the so-called being, but to understand what lives in the appearance of being. This must be brought home to people again in images, in parables.

The spiritual was there earlier than the physical. The astral body has built up the physical body, structured it out of itself. All material substance has been structured out of the spiritual, and the spirit is the older, the earlier. Before the physical there was the astral; it formed, it created this body — in the likeness of water and ice. The naturalist sees only the time when the ice had already formed in the stream, the theosophist the time when there was no ice yet in the stream, and the one with the ice. The material — the ice — separates from the water, which still comes from something higher. The Bible expresses this process very beautifully: “The Spirit of God moved over the waters.” (Genesis 1:2) Water is the image of all secret schools.

The wisdom in the Bible is given in images and parables, in comparisons. The seven-day work is no different. We are not dealing with external facts here, but with long, long periods of time. There is no document in the world that contains theosophical truths in a more magnificent way than the Bible. Theosophy will offer an explanation of the Bible, an understanding of it again. Even something like the splitting of the creation account will bring it closer to human understanding again. The spiritual man is already contained in the stream of water, when the spirit of God still hovered over the waters. “Male and female” is the literal translation, not ‘a little man and a little woman’ (Gen. 1,27); this is the spiritual man. And then a condensation of the spiritual, asexual man to the physical man - to the egg - takes place, and thus a second creation, a sexual-physical.

“The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life” (2 Cor 3:6); we must understand this saying as Goethe means it when he says, “And as long as you do not have this dying and becoming, you are only a gloomy guest on the dark earth.” That is, the becoming of a higher soul that slumbers in man, but which can be awakened and developed through schooling. You must give birth to a higher human being out of the physical body, so that this physical body becomes a tool for the spiritual human being, but the physical body should not be the one that rules us. When man is free from the physical, the physical body becomes such a tool. Thus one should explore the spirit from the letter. Theosophy wants to build up from what is there; because even the smallest, the most material, is condensed spirit. Therefore, a theosophical attitude also understands that, as in the Bible, there may be rules that relate to simple daily life.

Those who fight the Bible do not understand it; they are fighting their own delusion, which they have created for themselves. It is only in the last four hundred years that this materialistic view of the seven-day cycle, an apparent reproduction of it, has developed. Even today, believers often interpret the Bible too materialistically. The Bible is to be taken literally; but one must learn to understand the letter and grasp the spirit through the letter. Theosophy does not want to found a confession, but to understand what is there; and that, what wisdom has poured into the souls through the millennia. The truths change; but a common original truth runs through all of them, for past, present and future. We find it in the Bible and its effect; it contains words that come from the divine wisdom of the world. Thus the readers found themselves imbued with the magical powers of the Bible, which live in the words. Religious documents and especially ones like the Bible, which in its two parts even points to our division of time, cannot be taken deeply enough. Only by delving deeply into them will people be led to spiritualization again.

Today, my task is to speak to you about the origin of evil in the sense of spiritual science. The fact of evil and its presence in the world is like a great mystery of life in the midst of our existence. And those who think that human development is permeated by divine power and divine providence are confronted with the question: How is it possible that the Divine allows evil? And for those who deny the Divine, the existence of evil is easily one of the reasons for such denial. They say: How can one imagine a world under divine guidance where evil reigns in the most diverse forms? In any case, this question of evil intrudes mysteriously and disconcertingly into our lives.

Since time immemorial, the question of the cause and origin of evil has been an important question. So today we want to deal with the fact of evil; and it should be said and attention should be drawn to individual points of resolution. In doing so, we must above all remember Jakob Böhme, who in his writings repeatedly raises the question: How does evil come into the world and what position does it occupy in the development of humanity?

Schelling draws on Böhme in his reflections on this in order to form a concept of evil and its existence in the world. For Böhme, evil is what darkness is to light. Böhme says: Beings owe their existence to the light of the sun; light is the sustainer, the creator of existence in the world. It is only through darkness that light is recognized, and light only exists when mixed with darkness. If we ask about the cause of darkness or even try to explain the light with darkness, we come to the correspondence of the ungrounded in relation to the primal ground.

If the light is to appear, then it must drive out and overcome that which is there for no reason and yet opposes the light; the divine primal ground of existence, the good, stands out by itself in the process. It is good; it is the pure good; but the light penetrates into the ground of evil in order to be able to fully unfold. This is an explanation of the concept that seems to shed light on our understanding.

In modern times, the question of good and evil seems to be playing a role again, for example in the work of someone who has impressed many, many people, Nietzsche. You all know the book “Beyond Good and Evil”. The modern philosopher Nietzsche juxtaposes good and bad, not good and evil. He says: We do not need to worry about the origin of evil, we distinguish between the weak and the strong, the strong-willed. They rule, the strong-willed; they want to assert themselves, their ideas, and that must naturally lead to a struggle with the weak, to their oppression. Those in power see themselves as the good guys. The oppressed think quite differently. They feel that what the powerful do is to their detriment. Since they are the weak, they come to the conclusion that there is still a good that has not been realized. They regard what the strong do as evil. Therein lies the origin of the contradiction in ideas between the weak and the strong. From this flows what is called slave morality.

Basically, those who have thought more deeply have always taken the position on good and evil relatively; we need only think of Goethe when he says: Oh, if men would only not always speak in the same way, this is good and that is evil, but would go into the motive power of their actions.

In his “Faust”, Goethe described the struggle between good and evil in humanity. In his youth, Goethe had not yet worked out these powerful contradictions in his Faust creation. In the present version, however, the characteristic features of good power and Mephistopheles emerge in Goethe and his Faust as early as the “Prologue in Heaven”. Goethe sensitively perceived the profound impact of good and evil in man; in Faust he seeks to fathom this supremacy of feelings.

Our task today is to fathom the fact of the origin of good and evil according to the new spiritual research or theosophy. We must indeed go back a long way in human development to do this. The Bible goes back very far indeed, almost to the origin of man. One of the most wonderful and greatest allegories on this subject is the “Fall of Man”, even for those who do not believe in the fact. The snake is the seducer of man, who in the beginning was created only for good. Only through an act of free will on the part of man is the difference between good and evil conceived. The animals do much more terrible things than what we call evil in humans; but who would think of speaking of an evil animal in this sense. The animal follows an implanted law in its actions, and there is no sense in speaking of good and evil; this is only the case with humans. In answering this question, spiritual science must go back to the point where man appears as the crown on our Earth planet. Why can we not speak of evil in animals? The animal also has a soul, but not an individual soul, but a group soul. What is a group soul? What a whole group is in the animal, man has for himself alone. To understand this, we need only consider the fact that a person has a biography, whereas an animal does not.

Every person, without exception, has a biographical interest for us and we know that there is no other person with exactly the same biography. With animals, it is only the whole species and type that interests us to the same extent. Like all lions together, we are interested in the individual person. The soul exists for an entire animal species together. Man has only just ascended from a group soul to an individual one. Man is in the midst of this development. We still meet people who appear to be members of the tribe.

But the richer the life of the soul becomes, the less this soul is a soul of the species, the more it takes on its own character in gestures and feelings. Thus man himself is mostly situated between group soul and individual soul; and as we go forward into the future, he becomes more and more individual, and in the past more and more group soul,

right back to the beginning of man's development. When we trace man back, we go back the periods that we call the historical ones. We conclude the historical times with the fifth main race and its five different sub-races.

If we look at the Indian Vedas, we sense a powerful culture that even Max Müller, a very sober researcher, recognizes. So far, then, are the historical times. From these, spiritual science goes back to prehistoric times. The methods of how to go back through the development of the inner senses can be found in more detail in my magazine “Luzifer - Gnosis”. Theosophy assumes that a huge continent once existed between America, Africa and Europe, Atlantis, which was destroyed by natural disasters and of which only small island peaks remain today. Today, modern science is beginning to confirm this. You can read about Atlantis in the magazine “Kosmos”. Spiritual science has always spoken of Atlantis. The living conditions there were completely different; the atmosphere was like billowing masses of fog, hence “Nibelheim”. This home of fog is preserved for us in the folk tales. At that time there was still an ancient human race; but we have to look even further back for the origin of earthly man, to Lemuria, a continent that was located in what is now the Indian Ocean. There we find the first humans of the kind that today's humans are.

So how does spiritual science view the origin of humanity? For spiritual science, humans do not originally descend from a material being; rather, the spiritual is the first. At that time, the physical body was still very imperfect. Spiritual science takes the view that the Lemurian man was very imperfect on the outside, but never descended from the ape, but the other way around; he left the apes behind at a lower level.

The organization of the physical man at that time was at the level of the reptilian organization, and his soul still dwelled outside his body. Today, the waking person has his soul in his body; in the sleeping person, who does not perceive through the doors of the senses, spiritual science knows that his soul is outside his body. The clairvoyant sees the astral body and its work on the physical body at night. The further back we go, the more we see the astral body at work on the physical. For in spiritual science, the spiritual body is the creator of the physical. In Lemuria, we see the physical human being still surrounded by the active astral body. The astral body or the soul has created the physical body; it is the creator of it, and the important point in time is when this soul was completely outside the body, where, after having made it perfect, this soul now passes from purely external activity to the inner being and becomes the I. An important moment, how in the Lemurian time the incarnation takes place. The Bible expresses this in a grand, powerful and meaningful way when it says: “And God breathed into the man the breath of life, and he became a living soul.” (Genesis 2:7) This indicates the moment when the group soul becomes an individual soul in the human being, the moment of the astral body's entering into the physical body. As a group soul it remained in the spiritual world; the religious expression for this would be: As long as the soul rested in the bosom of the Godhead, it was a group soul. Example: the fingers of the hand; they are members, organs; they stand in exactly the same relation to the physical body as the soul was before it entered the physical body, that is, as a group soul. It was a limb in the great Being, which we may now call God or All-Spirit. In these souls it was the Godhead that acted. Example: water and sponges that fill with water. When these souls moved into the physical body, they became individual drops of water.

Thus, in the process of development, the physical body, as it were, snatches the soul from the Divine. What are the consequences of this? Before, the soul does not feel and act independently, but as the Divine inspires it. This Divine is a part of the common Divine substance. All souls therefore knew something of each other; they had a common consciousness; this now ceased. Individual existence now begins. Before, Divine law was their conductor, now no longer. And with that, selfishness now begins to play a role. God's will was previously the will of one's own soul; now it had to come to its own will, to selfishness. Now it had to come to the birth of selfishness, with it at the same time the birth of self-awareness. The replacement of the world order of wisdom by the world order of love occurred now, that is what spiritual science of all time called it. Love and egoism were not there before.

Love demands that the independent comes to the independent, that free devotion is given. Example of the fact that love was impossible before: My right hand cannot love my left hand. — So now love entered the world, and in its most subordinate form, in sexual love. Spiritual science tells us that this was also the time of the separation of the sexes. With physical incarnation, they appear simultaneously as male and female with differentiation; and with that, the first impulse is given to utilize the first power for the body. So we have two epochs: one completely dominated by wisdom, the second completely dominated by the development of love, the higher and the lower human being. At that time the body was less developed, the soul more highly developed.

At today's stage, the soul is far from having the perfection that the physical body has as such. Later, the soul will develop to the same extent. Example of the wonderfully perfect nature of the physical body: the thigh bone, which, with the smallest amount of material, develops such a load-bearing capacity that even the most ingenious engineer could not have conceived. The spiritual researcher knows that this body is the expression of divine wisdom. Example: Contemplation of the heart. — The physical body of man is embodied wisdom. If, on the other hand, we look at the soul, which in the future will far surpass the physical body in perfection, it is now very imperfect. It is the soul that tempts man to do his deeds, not the physical body. The soul is flawed, sins, and goes astray in the body.

In its kind and perfection, the body is superior to the soul today. At that time, when the human body was occupied by the soul, it was already predisposed to this perfection. Today, this entry of the soul has not yet been fully completed. As much of it as is the group soul has been built up by the physical body. The part that has moved into the body still has to go through this. There is no other way for the human being to develop than to go through the physical body. In the Greek mystery teachings, the soul was therefore called a 'bee'. It absorbs light, it hears, it collects by using the body as an instrument. And what the soul gathers down here on this earth, she will take with her and one day lay on the altar of the deity.

In this way she will become perfect and ever more capable of immortalizing the temporal. The temporal passes away, but the fruits of it will be immortalized by the human soul. But all the marvels, the joys, are destined to remain sensations. So the life of the soul is an essence that brings it to spiritual existence.

By going through the physical existence, it has to establish something that is wisely integrated into the wise construction of the cosmos. This did not come about suddenly, but in a long, long process of becoming.

What is wisely constructed today was once not wisely constructed. Let us imagine the same process with love, for example; here the same development can be seen. Likewise, love rises to ever higher and purer aspects and forms, towards the love that will one day make all people brothers. Love will one day be that which glows and drives the whole cosmos. The whole world is permeated by a stream of love, which will then rule everything, as wisdom does now. Wisdom flows from the world to us, and love will flow from the world to them, to the later races. Our work is to impress the love of the world. But that could never be if the opposite were not also possible. Love must be brought independently, freely from person to person, that is why the era of love begins at the same time as that of egoism. Love will work itself out to overcome egoism, that is its goal. The starting point of the cosmos is love; out of it, egoism has also grown all by itself.

The family, the tribe, groups of people were permeated by love; what is related, what has common blood, loves each other. Although there may be raging conflict, humanity is gradually being driven towards love. It spreads from tribe to tribe, from generation to generation, from nation to nation. When the principle of Jehovah or Yahweh gradually spread among the Jewish people, it is recorded in the secret or spiritual science that existed before our era. And now we speak of a force, of a principle that is called evil, of a force in spiritual science that opposes the Jehovah principle.

I will explain this to you with an example. You know that in school there are students who do not move from one class to the next; they stay put; it is the same in the cosmos. The world was then ruled by entities like us; these beings had completed their development in the Age of Wisdom. But there were also forces in this epoch that had not completed their development in the Age of Wisdom; these now continue to work in the Age of Love. That is the retarded, the luciferic principle; this we see as the opposite pole of the Jahve principle. Therefore, so that love can be free, the principle of separation is at work in the world. It tries its effects on the person who loves other people, on the person who wants to be a free, independent personality. In the counter-effect we see the counter-force, evil, which actually, to speak with Goethe's Faust, creates good. This power, which is the egoistic principle, drives people apart; but love must therefore become ever greater and greater in order to unite people. The principle of Yahweh needed blood relationship to assert the principle of love, and then the principle of Lucifer worked alongside it, promoting selfishness and independence. Love and selfishness are constantly growing, and humanity swings back and forth between them; and that is why the presence of good and evil is so natural, the pendulum movement between love and selfishness. With selfishness, evil came into the world; selfishness must now be overcome. He has to accept it because good could not be achieved without evil. It provides the opportunity for the development of love. Spiritual science sees it in such a way that a point in time had to come when an act, the greatest of our earthly development, had to happen that was suitable for bringing people together; and the forerunner of this is John the Baptist, who prepares this, and in Christ Jesus this act is embodied. The words of Christ Jesus: “If anyone does not give up father and mother and brothers for my sake, he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26; Matthew 19:29), are to be understood spiritually.

Christ, through whom one can receive the great love and the independent human being together, who is able to overcome all the impulses of evil, Christ is the embodiment of this great power, which, after overcoming all selfishness, is to become the bond of love from person to person. Through Christ, the bond of love shall link free man with free man.

Christianity is the power that is only at the beginning of its development; it will overcome the necessary evil and the world. Only the free man can become the true Christian; he can see in the Redeemer the power that leads to the fully liberated personality. Thus evil is the background into which the light of love shines; thus light is only recognizable through darkness. “And the light shone in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.”

Love will gradually permeate human development; the stronger the force it has to overcome, the more it will grow. It is this love that explains the meaning of evil, the position of evil in the world.

And so we may compare this with a word from Fabre d'Olivet. “Consider the pearl with its wondrous radiance and delicate beauty; how is it formed? From the disease of a shell."

In the same way, beauty arises from evil. This is how we must see evil and its mission. Love develops as a pearl of the world. Where does it come from? Let us think of the parable of the pearl!

The sermon on the mount (Matthew 5) is the most significant revelation of the Christian faith. It is usually thought of as a sermon Jesus gave to the people, speaking from a mountain. But ‘to go up the mountain’ is an ancient key term found in all occult languages. ‘To love’ is another occult key word. ‘The disciple whom the Lord loved’—and ‘Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus’, ‘See how he loved his friend’.⁹⁴ It always has to be realized that the disciple whom the Lord loved was the writer of John's gospel. His name never appears in the gospel, however, not even at the crucifixion. There we read: ‘When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing there ...’⁹⁵ This term ‘love’ has profound significance. The pupil of a master who has been received and taken most deeply into occult knowledge was called ‘the disciple whom the Lord loved’. To ‘go up the mountain’ means to enter into the deepest mystery and teach words which the disciples will then speak to the people. People do not read the Bible properly but literally skip over the words.

Properly translated, the first verse reads: ‘And seeing the multitudes, he went away and up a mountain and sat down, and his disciples came to him.’ Jesus therefore actually went away from the people and spoke only to his disciples. Jesus Christ always had to speak in two ways. He would speak in parables to the people, and he would explain the occult meaning of the words to his disciples when he was ‘up the mountain’ with them.

Verse 3: ‘Blessed are the souls who are beggars for the spirit, for they will find the realms of the heavens in themselves.’ The words, even the letters, all have deep occult meaning. Our German ich [meaning ‘I’], with the letters I, C, H, contains the initials of Jesus Christ: I-Ch. The great initiates guided the word so that it would be ich, Jesus Christ. Only one nation would be able to find the birth of the name Jesus Christ out of the I—and that is how Christian mysticism developed in Germany. Other words also have profound occult meaning. An example is ‘holy’, to be whole or healthy. To be selig [blessed] is to be full of soul [Seele], finding the content of the soul in oneself. Blessed are those who have the urge, the drive to let the soul come more and more to the spirit. People often say ‘We have to look inside ourselves to find God’, but that is not right. For if we look only inside ourselves we find only whatever there is inside us. We must watch our desire; our individual nature must go beyond itself. This is what the words ‘Know yourself’ mean. The authority given to human beings is to give us a stimulus, not certain knowledge.

Verse 4: ‘Blessed are those who accept suffering, for they will find consolation in themselves.’ Suffering is one of the greatest riddles in the world. The ancient Greeks, an independent, happy people who were greatly attached to earthly existence, with sensual pleasure the breath of life to them, had Silenos the Wise answer, when he was asked what was the best thing for mankind: ‘Miserable race that lives for but one day... The very best is utterly beyond your reach—not to be born, not to be, but to be nothing. The second best things for you is—to die soon.’⁹⁶ On the other hand Aesop said that we learn through suffering.⁹⁷ And Job, having much suffering imposed on him, came to the conclusion: ‘Pain purifies, it takes man to a higher level.’ Why do we leave the theatre feeling contented when we have been listening to a tragedy? The hero overcomes his suffering. There is a connection between man ascending higher and the pain that has to be borne. The soul's suffering and pain are apparent in the physiognomy to one who is able to read it. Man must create an organ that will enable him to bear the pain. Just as the eye was created by light and the ear by sound, so do pain and suffering create organs for themselves. Man bears in him the consolation that comes when he recognizes that suffering can be borne. Man enters into higher development through suffering.

Verse 5: ‘Blessed are those of a gentle spirit, for they will have the earth for their own.’ Two powers are active in the world—on the one hand egotism, and on the other love and compassion. If love is to grow, egotism must wane. Sensual love must develop into a higher love that is of the spirit. This is also expressed in the third sentence in Light on the Path: ‘Before the voice can speak in the presence of the Masters it must have lost the power to wound’.⁹⁸ If our approach to everyone else is a loving one, so that the voice no longer wounds, we are gentle in spirit, which is the meaning of the term in the sermon on the mount. Love is the goal and purpose of earth evolution; it will make the earthly realm its own.

Verse 6: ‘Blessed are those who hunger for justice, for they will have their hunger satisfied out of themselves.’ Here the Christ is presenting the whole significance of the deeper, inmost powers of the human soul to the disciples—to give love to others, not seek love; love will become general if everyone does it himself.

Verse 7: ‘Blessed are the compassionate, for they will gain compassion out of themselves.’ We must enter into the feelings of every individual person, then the compassion we have shown in our doing and giving will shine out to us from the others.

Verse 8: ‘Blessed are those who are pure in heart, for they shall find the power in themselves to see God.’ This is an instruction in mysticism. We must cleanse and purify our hearts. The heart is the eye with which to see God. It is the organ of the future, not the brain. It is to God as unclouded eyes are to the light.

Verse 9: ‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will find the power in themselves to be God's children.’ The soul comes from God, and goes through the human being to God. Souls were peaceable and peace is the way by which we return to the divine spirit.

Verse 10: ‘Blessed are those who suffer persecution for the sake of justice, for the realm of heaven is theirs.’ Christ Jesus asks human beings to demand justice of themselves, and justice will quench their thirst. Things demanded on earth and those demanded by heaven are always kept clearly distinct.

Verse 11: ‘Blessed are you if people revile and persecute you for my sake and say evil things about you in a lying way.’ Christianity must not be confused with other religions. In Buddhism it is important to do everything the Buddha taught. It is the same with the teaching Hennes gave in Egypt, Zarathustra in Persia, and so on. The Christ was there in person. The disciples were called on to bear witness—We have heard him speak, have put our fingers in the imprint of the nails. John the evangelist said most about Christ Jesus in his gospel. Christianity must believe in Christ Jesus himself not only his teaching. The logos came down to human I-beings, the word became flesh in a human being and has truly dwelt among us. All are blessed if they believe in the one and only one in whom the logos itself was embodied. Only one was able to say: ‘Blessed are you if people persecute you for my sake.’

Verse 12: ‘Be of good cheer and wholly comforted; it will bear fruit for you in heaven, for that is how they persecuted the prophets.’ This refers to I-human beings inspired by God.

Verse 13: ‘You are the salt of the earth.’ It is salt which gives the earth wisdom.

Someone might refer to the end of chapter 7, verses 28 and 29: ‘And it came to pass, when Jesus had said these things, that the people were appalled at the things he taught, for he spoke with great power and not like the scripture experts.’ One might think, therefore, that Jesus did speak to the people after all. But these verses do not at all relate to the sermon on the mount, which is actually the opposite of the things which in the meantime had caused uproar among the people. The people were appalled at a talk given by Jesus, but this was a completely different one, not the sermon on the mount, and it had caused tumult and uproar among the people. One has to follow the things that happen in the Bible carefully and know how to read the words correctly. Then new insight is gained for many things which one has so far simply passed over when reading.

Questions and Answers

What can be said about the two evildoers who were crucified with Jesus?

We must above all consider that symbolic interpretation does not mean something did not also happen. Some people want to go by the letter, taking Jesus to have been someone who really lived, and cannot believe that there is also a deeper meaning behind it all. Others, however, want to interpret everything in an occult way and cannot believe in the historical reality. The fact of Christianity can only be grasped if it is taken as something real. The secret of human evolution: the Christ between the two criminals, one who repents and one who remains unrepentant. Again we have the balance between egotism and love. Love is based on blood relationship, and self seeking wants to separate people. The Christ wants to balance this out; that is the meaning of the three crosses on Golgotha. The one is the principle of goodness, the other of evil. ‘Truly I say to you, today you'll be with me in paradise.’⁹⁹ Paradise is a key term, meaning that you'll be with me in a place that lies beyond the ordinary day. Before man fell into sin he was in the keeping of the godhead. How can he regain the right to be God's child again? With peacefulness. How does one move away from it? With selfishness!

Do other nations also have the I-CH initials in their word for ‘I’?

This applies only to the German language. The German ich gives power to the soul. The fact that these letters are the initial of the Christ's name should bring the word alive in us. The Christ is with us all days and alive in all languages. The further east we go the richer the language, the further west, the poorer it is, America is therefore the poorest, its vocabulary being most limited. Prayers in the ancient languages lose their power when they are translated into more modern languages. The Latin words of the Lord's Prayer have much more power in them than our own version. The original language of this prayer was Aramaic. People who said it in Aramaic felt its magic powers. We need to gain the right approach again that will allow the power of words to come alive in language again. The four sentences in Light on the Way do not have the same power in English, for instance, as they do in German. These four sentences sound more beautiful in German than in any other language; the German translation is the most beautiful.

Third question could not be heard.

Those earlier naturalists had a great reverence for the Bible. Pastor X. said that Moses either knew just as much as modern scientists do, or he was inspired. Pastor X altogether has a brilliant, fine way of expounding the Bible. Reverence and respect for the Bible came to be lost when biblical criticism developed. But nothing will ever come of biblical criticism. One thing is characteristic of the science of the spirit, and that is its approach to things. And what is this approach? We have our own particular approach to the natural world, but we do not criticize it. With the science of the spirit we seek to understand things in the world of mind and spirit, doing so without bias and with real understanding, and look at everything in life. Understanding is the keynote in the science of the spirit. If one seeks to use the methods of modern science to study the life of mind and spirit, one learns things.

The Bible should be a book we do not approach in a critical mood. If we read it in the right way and without prejudice, we find that we begin to get a feeling for it that we would not have dreamt of before. We then discover profound wisdom where before we put obstacles in our own way. The science of the spirit must provide the key to reading the Bible in the right way. And we shall find that key. Bible criticism will then give way to deep, profound exposition. Modern science deals only with material phenomena, leaving aside the fact that they have arisen from a spiritual process of evolution. The work that needs to be done in the science of the spirit is to investigate the essential nature of the human being and the evolution of man in the universe. The science of the spirit begins where conventional science stops, for modern scientists see only the outer aspect, they want to study the atoms. But the very things which they cannot explain may be found there. Haeckel's work is the truth for someone working in the science of the spirit in so far as it describes external things. But someone working in the science of the spirit wants to look back to the subtle beginnings, using higher, spiritual eyes, and discover the spiritual realities that go hand in hand with external realities. If you observe with the eyes of the spirit and the ears of the spirit, you perceive the principle of the human being that goes beyond anything perceived with the senses.

What we perceive of the outside world depends on the number of sense organs we have. Someone who objects, saying: ‘Only what I can see with my physical eyes does exist,’ has not yet developed his powers of mind and spirit. Every time we gain a new organ we perceive a new world. Eyes and ears of the spirit can be acquired. Anyone with sufficient energy and patience can become an initiate. Anything an initiate sees with eyes of the spirit has to be expressed in images belonging to the physical world. This is what Goethe, who was an initiate, meant when he said: ‘All things transient are but parables.’¹⁰⁰ To find suitable images for great spiritual truths is a process known as ‘imaginative perception’. The science of the spirit thus does not take us away from the material world. Matter is seen as condensed spirit, which is to matter as ice is to water.

The seven days of creation reflect great spiritual realities. Once you have the key to reading the Bible, you can always take it literally. No other document contains the truths of theosophy more perfectly than the Bible. In the science of the spirit the aim is to explain the Bible and offer a way of understanding it without bias. The division of the story of genesis into two¹⁰¹ can be understood if one learns to distinguish the human being who is sexless—this is the spiritual, astral human being. Then a reversal occurred and the sexless spiritual human being became physical and bisexual. This is why there have to be two stories of creation. You often hear it said that the letter kills but the spirit makes alive, with each person meaning his own spirit. Goethe wrote:

So long as you don't have it, this word: ‘Die and become!’ you're but a miserable guest here on this earth.

This ‘die’ has nothing to do with killing the physical body but with giving birth to a new human being out of yourself who will give you the tool you need for the world of the spirit. It is to be a tool of strength. ‘Die and become’ is something we must also say to the letter. Everything has its value in the science of the spirit, even the smallest thing reflects condensed spirit. Anyone who goes against the Bible does not understand it; he is going against the figment of his own deluded imagination. Many people presume to found a religious confession. It is small and indeed immodest then to stop and say: ‘It's glorious how far we have advanced!’¹⁰² The science of the spirit helps us to go more and more deeply into things, lovingly enter into the letter of the word and open up a path for the soul to the divine world.

• 94. John 11: 1-45.
• 95. John 19:26.
• 96. See Nietzsche, Friedrich, Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik (The birth of tragedy out of the spirit of music). Publications from the literary estate 1869-73, Bd 1, S. 62 f., Leipzig 1924.
• 97. Aesop said: paqhmata maqhmota. Fable no. 232, ‘The dog and the cook.’
• 98. Collins, M. Light on the Path. London: The Theosophical Publishing House Ltd. Rudolf Steiner wrote an exegesis on this book in Steiner R. Guidance in Esoteric Training (in GA 245). Tr. C. Davy, O. Barfield. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1977.
• 99. Luke 23: 43.
• 100. Faust 2, 12
• 101. See also Steiner R. Foundations of Esotericism (GA 93A), lecture of 2 Oct. 1905. Tr. V. & J. Compton-Burnett, London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1982.
• 102. Goethe, Faust 1, 573.

In a retrospect let's place ourselves into what was experienced in such a way that we rightly feel the difference between the soul experience and the real experience in the outer world. The relation between the memory of a landscape and the direct perception of the same with open eyes is the same relation as between memory and retrospect.

Memory gradually disappears in an initiate and is replaced by direct perception of what one wants to remember. One must place a picture of the day's experiences before one, quite exactly and clearly of all details, blouse, face, etc., and so look at the happenings in a picture, how people spoke, what was done, etc. It's very important to recall the little experiences that didn't interest one so much, that are hard for one to remember, because this generates inner forces. Imaginative force is created via the ability to imagine pictures. The clarity of the pictures is the important thing and not the completeness of the experiences. No muscle must be tensed in all of this work. Just as light first created the outer eyes, and the body was stimulated from outside to form other organs, so the astral body's organs are formed through the imagining of pictures.

In the subsidiary exercises we must begin with thinking, and persist until the proper feeling sets in; we must then pour this into our body and do this exercise for a month or more before passing on to the second one, etc. The pouring in gives the astral body consistency, a firm shape, backbone. The more uninteresting the object the better it is for the exercise, for then it's hard to stay focused on it for five minutes. The second is initiative in actions. It must be an action that one must force oneself to do. Thirdly the overcoming of pleasure and displeasure, that is, one should feel joy or sorrow but not let oneself by controlled by them. Fourthly, look for positivity in everything. Fifthly, open-mindedness with regard to all experiences. Sixthly, repeat all five exercises rhythmically. Do each of the subsidiary exercises until one can pour the feeling arising from it into the body and experience it. Only then go on to the next month.

The meditation that was given to you as your first morning work was intended to be an awakener of forces.

A lily is the visible expression of a word that was once spoken by the creator. Much depends on which words and vowels one speaks, which thoughts and feelings one sends out, because they will become visible during the Jupiter Venus, etc., earth conditions. The mineral, plant and animal kingdoms here on earth are likewise the expression of what Moon dwellers once said and thought. That's why mantras and the words of meditations have the letter sequence and the word sounds that they do, because they only have their effect in that particular sequence. What we do and create will be visible on Jupiter, for instance Koeln Cathedral will be visible as a larger formation, Raphael's paintings will surround Jupiter like clouds or a mirage. Our music will resound as music of the spheres over there on Jupiter.

In our exercises we must think that the Gods have something like this in mind for us; that's the purpose of the exercises, and the formula “In the spirit lay the germ of my body ...” explains this to us. The old adepts expressed this briefly in the sacred word AUM. A is the past that sounds loud and clear. U is a dull vowel and represents the present. It has something of the clarity of the past and of the freedom of action of the present in it. M is the indefiniteness of the future, to which every vowel or this or that action can still add something. A correct retrospect awakens a great force in the soul, that a man needs once he can ascend to the astral plane. Thought control is supposed to lead to mastery of thoughts. Initiative in actions is supposed to give rise to an urge for activity and work that that one hadn't felt otherwise. Meditation should be the first work of the day in the morning.

Flooding Colour and the Formative Forces of the Akasha.

These four lectures to be given here in Stuttgart will strike a somewhat more intimate note since it can be assumed that the audience is, for the most part, composed of members who have been acquainted with the fundamental ideas of occult teaching for some time. Hence, they may well wish to learn of more intimate details out of the realm of spiritual science. What will be taken up in these lectures are the occult symbols and signs in relation to the astral and spiritual worlds, and a series of them will be set forth in their deeper meaning. I bid you note that much in the first two lectures will sound unusual and will only be fully explained later in the third and forth lectures. This, of course, lies in the nature of the material because lectures on spiritual science cannot be like lectures in other areas, which are built up mathematically out of simple elements. Much that at first will appear vague will later become clear and understandable.

Symbols and signs, not only in the profane world, but also in the theosophical world, often give the impression of something arbitrary that only “signifies” something. This is not correct. You know, for example, that the various planets of the universe are indicated by signs. You know that a familiar sign in theosophical allegories is the so-called pentagram. Furthermore, you know that in various religions light is mentioned in the sense of wisdom, of spiritual clarity. If you should now ask about the meaning of such things, then you could hear or read that it means this or that—a triangle, for instance, would mean the higher trinity and the like. Frequently also in theosophical writings and lectures, myths and legends are interpreted; they are said to “mean something”. To reach behind the sense, behind the meaning, to recognize the reality of such symbols shall be the task of these lectures. Just how this is meant we can make clear with an example.

Let us consider the pentagram. You know that much abstruse thinking has been spent on it; this is not the concern of occultism. In order to understand what the occultist says about the pentagram, we must at first call to mind the seven fundamental parts of the human being, and it is, above all, the etheric body that is especially relevant in this consideration. You know that the etheric body belongs to the sphere of the occult; it is not to be seen with physical eyes. To perceive it, clairvoyant methods are necessary. Then it will become evident that the essentiality of the etheric body does not consist in its appearing as a fine nebulous formation. It is characteristic of it that it is indeed, the architect, the creator of the physical body. Just as ice forms out of water, so does the physical body fashion itself out of the etheric body, which, like the ocean, is flooded through by many currents flowing in all directions. Among them are five main currents. When you stand with feet apart and arms outstretched, you can accurately follow the direction of these five currents. They form a pentagram.

Everybody has these five currents hidden in him. The healthy etheric body appears so that these currents are, as it were, his bony framework. You must not suppose however, that everything pertaining to the etheric body is only within, because when a person moves, for instance, the currents actually go through the air. This pentagram is as mobile as a man's physical bony framework. Thus, when the occultist speaks of the pentagram as the figure of man, it is not a matter of something that has been thought out, but rather he is speaking of it as the anatomist does of the skeleton. This figure is really present in the etheric body. It is a fact.

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

From these brief considerations we see how matters stand with regard to the real meaning of a symbol. All signs and symbols that we meet in occultism direct us to such realities, and what is most important is the fact that in due course one receives indications in the use of such figures. They then are the means toward reaching cognition or clairvoyance. No one who ponders the pentagram deeply will be unsuccessful if only he does so with patience. He must immerse himself in the pentagram, as it were; then he will find the currents in the etheric body.

There is no sense in thinking out contrived, arbitrary meanings for these signs. One must place them before one's inner eye; then they lead to occult realities. This is the case not only with what can be found in the confines of theosophy, but also with the symbols and signs contained in the most varied religious documents because these documents are based on occultism. Whenever a prophet or a founder of a religion speaks of light and would thereby point to wisdom, this he does not do because he considers it an ingenious picture. The occultist bases his thinking on facts. Hence, it is not important to him to be ingenious, but truthful! As an occultist one must give up lawless thinking; one must not draw arbitrary conclusions and pass judgments. Step by step, with the help of spiritual facts, correct thinking must be developed. This image of the light, therefore, has a deep significance or, rather, it is a spiritual scientific fact. In order to recognize this, let us turn again to the human being.

The astral body is the third member of man. It is the bearer of joy and sorrow and a man's inner soul experiences depend upon it. The plant has no astral body and thus does not experience joy and sorrow as do man and animal. If, today, the natural scientist, probing into nature, speaks of the plant's sensitivity, then what he says rests on a complete misunderstanding of what the nature of sensitivity is. We come to a correct representation of this astral body only when we follow up the development that it has passed through in the course of time. We know that a man's physical body is the oldest and most complicated member of his being; his etheric body is somewhat younger; his astral body younger still; the youngest of all is his ego. The physical body has a long development behind it that has come about during the course of four planetary embodiments. At the beginning of this development our earth itself was in an earlier embodiment called the Saturn condition. At that time man did not yet exist in his present form; only the first germ for the physical body existed on Saturn. He lacked all his other bodies—etheric body, astral body, and so forth. It was not until the second embodiment of the earth, on the Sun, that the etheric body was added. At that time the human etheric body bore most decidedly the form of the pentagram. Later, however, this was somewhat modified because, in the third embodiment of our planet, on the Moon, the astral united itself with it. Then the Moon transformed itself into earth, and to the three bodies of man already formed, the ego was added.

Where, then, were these bodies before they embodied themselves in the human being? Where, for example, was what an etheric body had drawn into the physical body on the Sun? Where was this during the Saturn period? It was in the surroundings of Saturn as the air is in the surrounds of the earth at present. The same was the case with the astral body during the Sun period; it only entered into man's being during the Moon period. Everything that moved in later had been in the environment earlier. You can picture the old Sun thus, not of rocks, plants and animals as is the case of the earth today, but of beings who were men who had advanced only to the human-plant stage. There also existed a kind of mineral. These were the two kingdoms of nature present on the Sun. You must not mix up the old Sun with the present one. The old Sun was encompassed by its mighty astral sheath, which was luminous. There was, as it were, an airy sheath surrounding the Sun, but an airy sheath that was at the same time astral and luminous.

Today, man has a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body, and an ego. When the ego works upon the astral body, ennobling it intellectually, morally, and spiritually, then the astral body becomes the spirit self or manas. That has as of now hardly begun, but when in the future it will have been completed, when man will have transformed his whole astral body, then will his astral body become physically luminous. Just as the seed holds the whole plant within it, so does your astral body hold within it the seed of light. This will stream out into the world of space, its development and continuing formation effected by man as he ever more purifies and ennobles his astral body. Our earth will transform itself into other planets. Today it is dark. Were one to observe it from space, then one would see that it appears bright only through the reflected light of the sun. Someday, however, it will be luminous, luminous through the fact that human beings will then have transformed their whole astral bodies. The totality of astral bodies will stream out as light into world space, as it was also at the time of the old Sun. It had higher beings at their human stage, and these beings had luminous astral bodies. The Bible, quite correctly, calls these beings, Spirits of Light or Elohim.

What does a man work into his astral body? What we call goodness and common sense. If you observe a savage who is still on the level of a cannibal, blindly following his passions, you must say of him that he stands lower than the animals because the animal still has no understanding, no consciousness of his deeds. Man, however, even the lowest, already has an ego. The more highly educated person can be distinguished from the savage through the fact that he has already worked on his astral body. Certain passions he has so understood that he says to himself, “This one I may follow, this other I may not follow.” Certain urges and passions he fashions to more refined configurations, which he calls his ideal. He forms moral concepts. All these are transformations of his astral body. The savage cannot do arithmetic or make judgments. This property man has acquired through work on his astral body from incarnation to incarnation. What develops as man gradually ennobles his present imperfect form to become that being of light of whom we spoke is called the assimilation of wisdom. The more wisdom the astral body contains, the more luminous it will be. The Elohim, those beings who dwelt on the Sun, were wholly permeated with wisdom. Just as our souls relate to our bodies, so wisdom relates itself to light that streams out into cosmic space. You see, the relation between light and wisdom is not an image that has been contrived. It is based on fact. It is a truth. Thus is it to be explained that religious documents speak of light as a symbol of wisdom.

For the student who would develop his capacity for higher seeing, for clairvoyance, it is of great importance to do exercises such as the following. At first, he should picture space as dark, shutting out all light either by the darkness of night or by closing his eyes. Then he should try gradually to penetrate with his own inner forces to a visualization of light. If he does this exercise in the proper way, a visualization can be built up of a fully lighted space. Through inner forces light can be engendered, not physical light, but a precursor of what later will become visible, not to the physical eye, but to finer organs of perception. This inner light in which creative wisdom appears is also called the astral light. When the student engenders light through meditation, the light will truly become for him garments of spiritual beings who are actually present, like the Elohim. These beings of light, such as the human being will one day also become, are even now always present. This is the way all those persons have proceeded who know of the spiritual world out of their own experiences.

Through certain other methods that we shall also discuss in the course of time, the human being can reach a level from which, through his own inner power, as it were, space appears as still something else. When he practices certain exercises, then will space not only be flooded by wisdom's light, but will also sound forth. In the ancient Pythagorean philosophy, as you know, there is mention of the harmony of the spheres. By sphere we are to conceive cosmic space, space in which the stars are hovering. This is usually considered to be a contrived image, but this is again no poetic comparison, rather it is a reality. When one has practiced sufficiently in accordance with instructions, then he learns to hear a real music that wells through cosmic space. When space thus begins to resound spiritually, then it may be said that the person is in devachan. These tones are of a spiritual essence; they do not live in the air, but in a far higher, finer stuff, the Akasha. The space around us is continuously filled with such music, and there are certain basic tones. You can get an idea of this if you follow me into the following consideration, which I am sure will appear to mathematical astronomers as sheer madness. Earlier we mentioned that our earth developed gradually. At first, it was Saturn, then it became Sun, then Moon, and the earth. In time it will become Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan. Now, you may ask, “But today there is still a Saturn in the heavens; in what relation does the first embodiment of the Earth stand to Saturn?” Our present Saturn received its name in ancient times when the wise ones would still give meaningful names to things. It was given its name out of its very nature. Today, this is no longer done. Uranus, for example does not have such a justified name since it was discovered later.

What we see in the heavens as Saturn today stands in relation to our earth as a child to an old man. One day Saturn will become an earth. Just as unlikely as it is that the old man developed himself from the boy who stands next to him, so unlikely is it that the earth has developed itself from the Saturn that stands in the heavens today. It is the same with the other heavenly bodies. The sun is such a body as the earth once was; it has, however, advanced. Just as the boy stands near the old man, so the various planets stand in the heavens. They are at various steps of evolution, which our earth, now in its fourth embodiment, has partly undergone already, and will partly undergo in the future. The planets, however, stand in a certain relationship to each other, and the occultist expresses this relationship differently from the way the astronomer does today.

You know that the earth revolves around the sun, that Mercury and Venus, as sisters of the earth, also revolve, and you also know that the sun itself moves. Now occult astronomy has carried on exact investigations of this relationship. It has investigated not only the movement of the earth and the other planets, but also the movement of the sun itself. Here one comes to a definite point in cosmic space that is a kind of spiritual center around which the sun, and with it our earth and all the planets, turn. The different bodies, however, do not move equally fast. It is just this relationship to the speed of their movements to one another that occult astronomy has determined. It proceeded from the fact that when we view Mars, Venus, and so forth, these heavenly bodies move at a certain speed, but the whole starry heaven is seemingly resting motionless. In the sense of true occult research, this repose is only apparent. In reality, this starry heaven moves a definite distance in one hundred years, and this distance through which the firmament progresses is designated as the basic number. If you assume this movement and compare the planetary movements with it, we find that:

• Saturn's movement is two and one-half times that of Jupiter's;
• Jupiter's is five times that of Mars;
• Mars' twice that of the Moon.
• Saturn's movement however, is 1,200 times that of the whole celestial dome.

Now, when a physical, musical harmony arises, it rests on the fact that different strings move at different speeds. In accordance with the speed with which the single strings move, a higher or lower tone sounds, and the blending of these different tones produces the harmony. Just as you, here in the physical world, receive musical impressions from the strings' vibrations, so does the one who has penetrated to the level of clairvoyance in devachan hear the movements of the heavenly bodies. Through the relationship of the different speeds of the planets, the fundamental tones of the harmony of the spheres arise that sound through the cosmos. The School of Pythagoras was thus justified in speaking of a celestial harmony. With spiritual ears one can hear it. When you spread a fine powder as evenly as possible on a thin brass plate and then stroke the edge with a fiddler's bow, the powder moves into a definite line pattern. All kinds of figures will form depending upon the pitch of the tone. The tone effects a distribution of the material. These are called Chladny figures. When the spiritual tone of the celestial harmony sounded forth into the universe, it organized the planets into their relationships. What you see spread out in cosmic space was arranged by this creating tone of the Godhead. Through the fact that this tone sounded into world space, matter formed itself into a solar system, into a planetary system. You can see that the expression, “celestial harmony”, is thus more than an ingenious comparison. It is a reality.

Now to another consideration. Everyone who has occupied himself for some time with anthroposophy knows that our earth in its present embodiment has undergone several stages of development. In the far-distant past it was in a fiery-fluid condition. What today is stone and metal flowed at that time as today iron flows in an iron works. The objection that at that time there could not have been any living being does not stand up, because the human body was suited to the conditions of that time. The earth transformed itself out of this fiery-fluid condition into what we call the Atlantean epoch. Our forebears then lived on a continent that today forms the floor of the Atlantic Ocean.

Naturally, these ancestors were quite differently constituted from the man of today. In certain respects they were clairvoyant, an echo of higher stages of clairvoyance. The Atlantean man would not have been able to see an outer object spatially limited. In the early days of the Atlantean evolution, seeing was quite different. When one person approached another, it was not the outline of his form that was perceived. Rather, there arose within him a coloured image that had nothing to do with the outer, but reflected an inner soul condition. He might, for instance, have seen the feeling of revenge in the other and fled from it. In an up-surging red picture, the feeling of revenge expressed itself. The outer seeing of objects was developed quite gradually. What man saw earlier was a kind of astral colour, and the transformation occurred in that man spread this colour over the objects, so to speak. Naturally, this other kind of perception was bound up with the fact that man at that time looked quite different from man today. In the later Atlantean period man, for example, had a receding physical forehead, while the etheric body stood out like a mighty globe. Then physical and etheric bodies drew together and when both joined together behind the forehead, between the eyes, man had come to an important moment in his evolution. Today, man's etheric head just fits the physical one. This is still not so with the horse, but as the human head changed, other members also transformed themselves. Gradually man's present bodily form emerged. Think vividly back into the end of the Atlantean epoch. Man still had a kind of clairvoyance; the air was saturated with water vapour. In this dense watery air, sun and stars could not be perceived; a rainbow could never have come into being; thick, heavy mist masses covered the earth. Hence it is that the myth speaks of Niflheim, of a mist-home. Then the waters that were so much spread out in the air, condensed. They covered Atlantis. The Flood signifies the mighty condensation of the mist masses into water. When the water separated itself from the air, our present kind of perception came about. Man was only then able to see himself when he saw other objects around him.

The physical body shows many regularities that have a deeper meaning. One of these is the following. If one were to make a chest the height, width, and length of which were in relation of three to five to thirty, the length corresponding to a body length, then the height and width would also correspond to the body's proportions. In other words, herewith the proportions of a normally organized human body are given. When man emerged from the Flood of Atlantis, the proportions of his physical body corresponded to these measures. This is expressed in the Bible in a beautiful way in the following words:

“And God commanded Noah to build a chest three hundred ells long, fifty ells wide, and thirty ells high.” (I Moses, 6-15). In these measurements of Noah's Ark we have stated exactly the measurements for the harmony of the human body. When we came to explain the reasons therefore, we shall be able to look more deeply into the meaning of these biblical words.

The Symbolism of Certain Animal Forms and Their Relation to the Elements: Snake, Fish, Butterfly, Bee.

Yesterday, we stopped with the indication about Noah's Ark, stating that in the proportions of its height, breadth and length were expressed the proportions of the human body. Now, in order to understand the meaning of this Ark mentioned in the Bible (I Moses 6, 15), we must deepen our knowledge of various things. We must at first make clear to ourselves what it means that a vessel through which man should be rescued has definite dimensions. It will then be necessary to occupy ourselves with that time of man's development in which the actual happenings to which the Noah story refers took place.

When people who understand something of occultism produced some object in the outer world, a quite definite purpose for the soul was always connected with it. Recall the Gothic churches, those characteristic buildings that arose in the beginning of the Middle Ages and spread from Western to Middle Europe. These churches have a definite architectural style, which expresses itself in the arch that consists of two parts joining in a point above. This architectural feature permeates the whole as atmosphere—that peculiar arching consisting of two parts tapering up to a point, the whole reaching upward, the columns with a definite form, etc. It would be quite wrong to assert that such a Gothic cathedral simply came to be out of outer needs, out of a certain longing perhaps, to create a House of God that should express or mean this or that. Something much deeper underlay this. Those who indicated the first ideas for these Gothic buildings were adepts in occultism. They were, to a certain degree, initiates. It was their purpose to see that whoever entered such a House of God was to receive quite definite soul impressions. When one sees these peculiar archings, when one views the inner space in which the columns rise as trees rise in a grove, such a House of God works upon the soul quite differently than does a house, for instance, that is carried by old columns, that has an ordinary Roman or Renaissance cupola. Of course, man does not become conscious of the fact that such forms produce quite definite effects; they occur in the unconscious. He cannot be rationally clear about what is happening in his soul. Many people believe that the materialism of our modern time arises because so many materialistic writings are read. The occultist, however, knows that this is only one of the lesser influences. What the eye sees is of far greater importance, for it has an influence on soul processes that more or less run their course in the unconscious. This is of eminently practical importance, and when spiritual science will one day really take hold of the soul, then will the practical effect become noticeable in public life. I have often called attention to the fact that it was something different from what it is today when one in the Middle Ages walked through the streets. Right and left there were house façades that were built up out of what the soul felt and thought. Every key, every lock, carried the imprint of him who had made it. Try to realize how the individual craftsman felt joy in each piece, how he worked his own soul into it. In every object there was a piece of soul, and when a person moved among such things, soul forces streamed over to him. Now compare this with a city today. Here is a shoe store, a hardware store, a butcher shop, then a tavern, etc. All this is alien to the inner soul processes; it is related only to the outer man. Thus, it generates those soul forces that tend towards materialism. These influences work much more strongly than do the dogmas of materialism. Add to these our horrible art of advertising. Old and young wander through a sea of such abominable products that wake the most evil forces of the soul. So likewise do our modern comic journals. This is not meant to be a fanatical agitation against these things, but only indications about facts. All this pours a stream of forces into the human soul, determining the epoch that leads the person in a certain direction. The spiritual scientist knows how much depends upon the world of forms in which a man lives.

Toward the middle of the Middle Ages there arose along the Rhine that remarkable religious movement called Christian Mysticism. It is linked up with such leading spirits as Master Eckhart, Tauler, Suso, Ruysbroeck, and others. This was a tremendous deepening and intensification of the human feeling life because these preachers did not stand alone but had a faithful audience at that time. The name parson (Pfaff—a derogatory expression for “parson”), in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries did not have the meaning it has today, but was something to be esteemed. Plato used to be called “the great parson”. Because there emanated such a deepening from these great souls, the Rhine was named at that time, “Europe's Great Parson Street”. Do you know where these soul forces were bred that were searching for an inner union with the godly forces of being? They were brought forth in the Gothic cathedrals with their pointed arches, pillars and columns. This had educated these souls. What the human being sees, what is poured into his environment, becomes a force in him. In accordance with it, he forms himself.

Let us put this before our souls schematically against the background of human development. At a given time an architectural style is created, born out of the great ideas of initiates. Human souls take up the force of these forms. Centuries go by. What the soul has absorbed through its contemplation of building forms appears in the mood of his soul. Ardent souls will then come into existence, souls who look up to the heights. Even when the course was not always quite as I have described it, still like effects showed themselves often in human development.

Now let us follow these people some millennia further. Those who absorbed the forces of the forms of these buildings into their souls show the expression of their inner soul configurations in their countenances. The entire human shape forms itself through such impressions. What was built thousands of years ago, appears to us in human countenances thousands of years later. Thus, one recognizes why such arts were practiced. Initiates look out into the far future and see how human beings are meant to become. Hence it is that at a definite time, they form external building styles, outer art forms, on a large scale. So it is that the germ of future human epochs is laid.

When you rightly keep all this in mind, you will understand what occurred at the end of the Atlantean epoch. Air did not exist as it does today; the distribution of air and water was quite different from what it is today. Masses of mist surrounded Atlantis. When you picture to yourself how mist rises, how clouds form, and rain falls, then you have in miniature what happened over enormous expanses of Atlantis during millennia. With the change in the outer living conditions of man, he, too, changed. Formerly then, a country covered with thick mist masses had people living in it who had a kind of clairvoyance. Gradually the rain storms came; gradually the people accustomed themselves to an entirely new way of life, to a new perception, a new awareness. The human bodies had to change. You would be amazed if you were to see pictures of the first Atlantean people. How different they were from people today! Do not believe, however, that this change occurred by itself. Through long periods of time the human souls had to work on these human bodies and bring about effects such as were described by the simple example given of the effects of architectural forms on the feeling life of the soul that later appeared in their countenances.

How was it when the Atlantean epoch passed over into the post-Atlantean epoch? At first, the human soul underwent change and, in accordance with this, the body shaped itself. Let us go into this more deeply! Let us picture an old Atlantean. He still had clairvoyant consciousness and was thus connected with the environment in which he lived, with the mist-filled atmosphere. Because of this atmosphere, things did not show themselves to him with firmly marked contours. Actually, they were rather colour pictures that emerged for him; his perceptions were floods of surging interweaving colours. Into this, outlines gradually appeared. Objects revealed themselves like lanterns in the mist, encircled by rainbow colours, and his spiritual capacities developed accordingly. Had this condition continued, it would have been impossible for man to acquire his present body. Objects had to take on their present contours, the air became free of water. This process went on for thousands of years. Only gradually did things take on distinctness. The human soul had to receive other impressions, new impressions, and form its body correspondingly, for in accordance with what you think and feel is your body formed. What kind of form had the soul to experience when it escaped from the Atlantean watery landscape into the new airy landscape? For the present body to shape itself, the human being had to be surrounded by a form of definite length, breadth, and depth. As a matter of fact, this form was given to him so that the body could form itself thereby. Just as the mood of the mystics modeled itself out of the shape of the cathedral, and as the initiate would be able to indicate which countenances had shaped themselves accordingly, so did the human beings gradually transform themselves since, as a matter of fact, they lived in vessels, under the influence of great initiates, which had been built according to these measurements. Before the time of our present humanity there was a kind of water or sea-life that was lived in vessels, in which humanity gradually accustomed itself to life on land. The life of the Atlanteans was for the most part a life in vessels. Not only were they surrounded by a watery, misty air, but a large part of Atlantis was covered by the sea. This is the deep mystery of Noah's Ark. What is to be found in the original religious documents has an immense depth. A radiance of wisdom and limitless sublimity surrounds these primal records when we immerse ourselves deeply in them.

In Genesis you find the symbol of the snake. In the Roman catacombs you come upon the picture of the fish, which tradition tells us signifies the Christian or the Christ. If someone were to reflect on these symbols, he could, of course, find much that is ingenious, but this would only be speculation. We want to deal only with realities since these things, too, are given us out of the spiritual and astral worlds. If you will follow me for a few moments into the history of man's evolution, you will see what truths are contained in both these symbols.

Let us recall once again that the earth has had as many different embodiments as man. The human form was always present during the different earth incarnations—on Saturn, Sun and Moon. His ego, however, was acquired for the first time on the earth. Now we must turn our attention briefly to the appearance of the earth as it was in its first incarnation, while it was still Saturn. At that time rocks or fields for tilling did not yet exist. The human physical body existed but in a finer state. It was only gradually that it condensed to its present fleshy form.

When you examine the materials around you today, you will find that they exist in various conditions. First, there is the solid, called Earth in occultism; then the fluid, called Water in occultism—not only the water on earth is meant, but all that is fluid. Then all the gaseous matter, called Air in occultism. There is one still finer condition, Fire. Of course, physicists of today do not accept this, but the occultist knows that Fire can be compared with Earth, Water and Air, that Fire is the first etheric condition, that it is finer than Air. Where you find Fire or Warmth, something is present that is still finer than Air. Were we to picture a substance finer than Warmth, we would come to Light. What we, in the occult sense, term Earth, Water, and Air was not yet in existence on Saturn. These bodily states arose on the Sun, Moon, and Earth. The densest condition on Saturn was Warmth or Fire. Man lived within it, his body actually a kind of reflected image. To present this in greater detail would take us too far afield.

Saturn changed into the Sun. Air was added to Fire and was the densest condition on the Sun. When the physical body had reached the airy stage, it was impregnated with the etheric body. There were no other beings but Air beings. As man, one would have been able to penetrate these Air beings because they were just as penetrable as air is today. They could be compared with a Fata Morgana, so light and fleeting were they. To be sure, the air on the Sun was somewhat denser than our present air. The watery condition first arose on the Moon, and all that lived on this Moon was but a condensation of Water. Jelly fish and slimy creatures such as are still to be seen today give us a notion of these water beings. Only physical bodies of this kind were capable of taking up an astral body.

The development gradually proceeded. At the end of the Moon period certain watery parts had densified sufficiently so that a kind of firm ground like turf, slime or spinach was formed. The greatest densification resembled the wood of our present day trees. Then the Moon transformed itself into our present earth; the condition of the solid, the mineral, was added. The outer sheath became firm; accordingly and gradually all beings became denser and firmer. Gradually, man developed into a being of flesh—at first on Saturn a Warmth being, an Air being on the Sun, a Water being on the Moon, and finally, on Earth he became a being of flesh.

Let us now consider the meaning of this development. On Saturn the germinal foundation for the physical body was formed; on the Sun the etheric body was added; on the Moon the astral body. But something additional happened on the Moon. The human being who remained on the Old Moon was then much lower in his development than he is today because the astral body in the Moon period was full of raging passions. Only later, when the ego was added, was the astral body purified. For this a planetary development was necessary. The Moon had again to fall back into the Sun, the bad lunar men had again to unite with the Sun beings. Thus, when the Earth began, the ancient Sun and Moon were again one body. It was the high beings who inhabited the Sun who had to cast out the Moon, and as a result the Moon became a dense mass with all its various impulses. Now all the bad beings who had been expelled with the Moon had to be rescued again, and so the reunion of the Moon with the Sun took place. What would have happened if this reunion had not occurred, if each had gone its own way? Then it would have been impossible for man to appear in his present form, nor would the Sun beings have progressed to what they are today. Had the Old Moon gone its own way alone, and not been enabled through reunion with the Sun to draw on new forces, then the highest being that could ever have been created on the Moon would have resembled a snake. The Sun beings, on the other hand, who were so spiritual that they had no physical body but possessed an etheric body as their lowest member, would have received a physical body whose highest form would have been that of a fish. Naturally, the fish-form would have been only the outer expression for souls who reached a much higher stage of development, just as our present fish group soul is something exalted.

The Moon fell back again into the Sun, and later our earth threw out the present moon, which took with it the worst substances. Thereby it became possible for the beings of our earth to develop themselves beyond the snake stage to that of the human. It was the Sun beings who bestowed upon the beings of our earth the strength to lift themselves above the snake. The material purity of the Sun condition of those high beings expresses itself in the fish form, for this is the highest material form that the old Sun nature could have attained.

The Christos is the Sun Hero who has transplanted all the strength of the Sun upon the Earth. Now you will be able to understand with what deep intuition esoteric Christianity conceived of the fish form, because it signifies the outer symbol of the Sun power, of the forces of the Christ. To be sure, the fish is outwardly an incomplete being but it has not descended so deeply into matter and it is penetrated to a small extent by egotism. The occultist says that the snake is the symbol for the earth as it developed itself out of the Moon. The fish is the symbol for spiritual being as it has developed itself out of the Sun. Our earth, as it stands before us with its solid substances, has its lowest being in the snake. What separated itself as watery substance, as pure water, could manifest itself as fish. To the occultist the fish is something that has been born out of the water.

What is it that, in a similar way, has been born out of air, or out of fire? These are regions that are hard to explain, but at least some indications can be given here.

What were things like on the earth when it had just developed from the Saturn to the Sun stage? Man was then a kind of air being. Death and dying, as understood at present, he did not know because he could transform himself. Let us make it clear to ourselves how man arrived at his present consciousness of death and dying. Man's soul was in the atmosphere of the Sun but it was related to what was there below as body. In our time man's astral body, even when it has slipped out at night, belongs to the physical body, and it was the same on Saturn and Sun except that it never slipped in. At the beginning of the Sun stage the body was below; above was something that as soul belonged to a definite body, that directed this body, that had spiritual consciousness. The body of this soul was subject to other laws of growth and dying off than is the case today. It lost certain parts, but it added new parts. For long stretches of time the soul lived on unchanged while the body changed. To be sure, when the Sun was in a certain condition, man identified himself in a certain way with his body. His body transformed itself into alternate conditions. At first a body of definite form was produced, then this form transformed itself into another, again into another, and then into a fourth. After its last change it came back to its first condition. The human being retained the same consciousness while these forms changed. When the first bodily condition arose again, when the human being came back to the first form, after he had lived through the other three, he then felt himself renewed. This transformation has been preserved for us in the butterfly that develops itself through four forms: egg, larva, pupa, and butterfly. This is the hieroglyph, the sign for the airy condition of the human being on the Sun. In the butterfly today, under our completely changed conditions, this state is, of course, a kind of decadence. The human being evolved beyond this state, but for the occultist the butterfly is the symbol for it. He designates it as the air being, just as he designates the snake as earth being, and the fish as water being. Why the birds are not designated as air beings will be dealt with at some other time.

Now let us go back to the first Saturn condition when the human being was a soul-spiritual being that always had the same body, that knew itself immortal on a lower level and continually changed his body. This condition, too, has been preserved for us in a peculiar being that, when considered as a whole group soul, stands in a certain way higher than man. This is the bee. When you study the whole hive, you have something totally different from the single bee. The whole beehive has a spiritual life that in some ways corresponds to life on Saturn on a lower stage, and that will be reached on Venus on a higher level. The body of the bee, however, has stayed on the old Saturn level. We must indeed distinguish the soul of the whole beehive as no ordinary group soul but a being in itself, and the single bee as having preserved the form that the human body passed through on Saturn. Because the bee is retarded as outer being, it could win a higher spiritual consciousness. Hence the wonderful social composition of the beehive! The bee is the symbol of the spiritual man who does not know mortality. When man was of such spirituality, our planet was in a fiery state. When, as Venus, it will again be quite fiery, man will again be a spiritual being. Thus, in the bee you have the being that is the fire being for the occultist.

It will be interesting to mention here a parallelism about which ordinary science has little to say. What does the man of today have in him of Saturn's warmth? His blood-heat. What at that time was distributed over the whole of Saturn has in a measure freed itself and today forms the warm blood of man and animal. When you investigate the temperature of a beehive, you find it to be about the same temperature as that of human blood. The whole beehive develops a temperature comparable to that of blood because, in accordance with the nature of its being, it goes back to the same source as does the human blood.

So, the occultist designates the bee as born out of warmth. He designates the butterfly as air being and the snake as earth being. Again you see from these considerations how deeply symbols and occult signs are connected with what we know of the evolutionary history of the planets and of man.

The Mystics and the Time of Copernicus. Involution, Evolution and Creation out of Nothingness. The Number Four, the Sign of Creation.

Today we shall first occupy ourselves with a consideration of what is called the symbolism of numbers. When speaking of occult signs and symbols, it is necessary to mention the symbols that are expressed in numbers, even if only briefly. You may recall my elucidations of the day before yesterday in which I spoke of the numerical proportions in the universe, of the speed with which the single planets move and of the harmony of the spheres that comes about through these different speeds. Even from this you can see that numbers and numerical proportions have a certain meaning for the cosmos and the world. It is in numbers, we might say, that the harmony that wells through space is expressed. Now we shall turn our attention to a more intimate numerical symbolism, the meaning of which we can only touch upon, however. Were we really to immerse ourselves in it, many other things would have to be considered. Anyway, you will receive at least an idea of what is meant when it is said of the old occult Pythagorean School that it stressed the necessity of immersing oneself in the nature of numbers in order to gain an insight into the world.

To think about numbers may appear dry and dreary to many. To those who are affected by the materialistic culture of our times it will appear as mere playfulness if it is believed that, through a consideration of numbers, it is possible to gain knowledge of the nature of things. There was, however, a deep reason for the great Pythagoras to tell his pupils that knowledge concerning the nature of numbers would lead to the essence of things. But do not think it sufficient to reflect on the numbers 1, 3, or 7. Real occult teaching knows nothing of witchcraft and magic, nor of a superstitious meaning of some number. Its knowledge rests on deeper things, and from the short sketch I will give you, you will see that numbers can give you a clue to what is called meditation if you have the key to plunge deeply enough.

The number one must be our starting point. Later, in considering the other numbers, it will become clearer how far the number one symbolizes what I shall say. In all occultism the One has always designated the indivisible unity of God in the universe. God is indicated by the number one. We should not believe, however, that anything is to be gained by becoming engrossed in nothing but this number. You will see later how this absorption should rightfully come about, and it will be far more fruitful if we first consider the other numbers.

Two is called the number of revelation in occultism. This means that whatever appears to us in the world, whatever reveals itself, whatever is not in any way concealed, stands as a duality. Thereby we acquire ground under our feet, whereas with the number one we are groping in the unfathomable. Everywhere in nature you find that nothing reveals itself without being related to the number two. Light alone cannot reveal itself. There must also be shadow or darkness—that is, a duality. There could never be a world filled with manifest light were there not corresponding shadow. Thus it is with all things. It would never be possible for good to manifest if it did not have evil as shadow-picture. The duality of good and evil is a necessity in the manifest world. There are infinitely many dualities. They fit all life, but we must look for them at the right spots.

There is one important duality in life about which men might well reflect. Yesterday, we considered various conditions that a man experienced before he became an inhabitant of our present earth. We saw that on Saturn and on Sun he had a certain immortality in that he directed his body from outside, that he broke off pieces of this body and added new ones, so that he perceived nothing of fading and dying. Human consciousness at that time was not as it is today, but was dull. Men have wrestled through to a consciousness for the first time on our earth. It is here that a man first becomes a being who knew something of himself and could distinguish himself from objects. For this to occur, it was necessary not only that he direct his body from the outside, that he broke off pieces of this body and added new ones, so that he perceived nothing of fading and dying. Human consciousness at that time was not as it is today, but was dull. Men have wrestled through to a consciousness that is bound up with self-consciousness for the first time on our earth. It is here that a man first became a being who knew something of himself and could distinguish himself from objects. For this to occur, it was necessary not only that he direct himself from outside, but he also had to slip into this body, perceive himself therein, and say “I” to it. Only because a man finds himself completely in his body has he been able to achieve his full consciousness. Now, however, he also shares the destiny of his body. Earlier, when he still hovered over it, this was not the case. It was only when a man had achieved this degree of consciousness that he came into relation with death. At the moment when his body falls apart, he feels the suspension of his ego because he identifies himself with his body. Only gradually, through spiritual development, will he again achieve the old immortality. The body is here as the school through which to wrestle through to immortality with self-consciousness. Through death a man acquires immortality on a higher level. As long as he had not experienced death, so long was the world unrevealed to him because duality belongs to the revealed world—death and life.

Thus, we could point out dualities at every step in life. In physics you find positive and negative electricity, in magnetism, forces of attraction and repulsion. Everything appears in duality. Two, duality, is the number of appearance, of manifestation.

There is, however, no revelation save that the Divine holds sway behind the scenes. In this way, behind every duality a unity is hidden. Therefore, three is nothing but two and one, that is, the revelation and the existent divinity backing it.

Three is the number of the Divinity revealing itself. There is a statement in occultism that says that two can never be the number for the Divinity. One is a number for God, and also the three. The one who sees the world as a duality, sees it only in its revelation. Whoever claims that this duality is all is always in the wrong. Let us make this clear to ourselves with an example. Even in places where spiritual science is discussed, sinning often occurs against the statement of true occultism that two is the number of revelation but not the number of fullness or completeness. You will often hear it said in popular occultism by people who do not really know, that all development runs its course through involution and evolution, but we shall see the direction this really takes. First, however let's examine a plant, a fully developed plant with roots, leaves, stems, blossoms, fruit, etc. This is an evolution. But now observe the small seed from which the plant has arisen or can arise. In this tiny seed the entire plant is, in a sense, already contained. It is hidden within it, ensheathed, because the seed is taken from the whole plant, which has laid all its forces into the seed. Here we may therefore make a distinction between two processes—the one in which the seed's forces have unfurled themselves and unfolded into the plant, evolution, and the other in which the plant has folded itself up and, as it were, crept into the seed, involution.

The process that occurs when a being that has many organs so forms itself that nothing of these organs remains visible, so that they contract to a tiny part, is called an involution. The process of expansion and unfolding is an evolution. Everywhere in life this duality alternates but always only within the manifest. You can follow this up not only in the plant but also in higher realms of life. Let us trace in thought, for example, the development of European spiritual life from Augustine to Calvin, that is, roughly through the Middle Ages. You will find in Augustine a kind of mystical inwardness. No one can read the Confessions or his other writings without experiencing the deep inwardness of this man's feeling life. When we advance further, we come across wonderful characters such as Scotus Erigena, a monk from Scotland called the Scottish St. John, who later lived at the court of Charles the Bald. He did not get on well with the Church, and it is told that the brothers of his order tortured him to death with pins. Of course, this is not to be taken literally, but it is true that he was tortured to death. A splendid book was written by him, On the Divisions in Nature which reveals a great profundity of thought even though it is found wanting in many ways from the anthroposophical point of view.

Proceeding further, we find the German mystics in the region of the Rhine, through whom an inner warmth poured itself out over great numbers of people. Not only did the highest of the clergy experience it, but also those who worked on the land and in the smithies. They were all picked up by this current of the time. Further along the way we find Nicolaus Cusanus (1400–64), and so we can follow along in time until the end of the Middle Ages. Always we find that depth of feeling, that inwardness, that spreads itself over all strata of the population.

If we now compare this time with that following it, with the period that began in the sixteenth century and extends into our own, we notice a tremendous difference. At the outset, we find Copernicus who, through a comprehensive idea, effected a renewal of spiritual life, whose thought has become so incorporated into human thinking that whoever believes something else today is counted a fool. We see Galileo, who discovered the law of gravity by observing the swinging of a church lamp in Pisa. Step by step we follow the passage of time up to the present, and everywhere we find the opposite, the strict opposite, of the Middle Ages. Feeling steadily declines and inwardness disappears. The intellect comes steadily to the fore and men become more clever.

Spiritual science explains the difference between these two epochs and shows us that this change had to be. There is an occult statement that says that the period from Augustine to Calvin was one of mystical involution. What does this mean? From the time of Augustine to the sixteenth century there was an outward unfolding of mystical life; it was outside. But something else was also there—intellectual life hidden in germinal form. It was, as it were, like a sun buried in the spiritual earth that unfolded later after the sixteenth century. The intellect was involuted as the plant is in its seed. Nothing can come forth in the world that was not previously in such an involution. Since the sixteenth century, the intellect has been evolving, the mystical life withdrawing. Now the time has come when this mystical life must again appear, when through the Anthroposophical Movement it will be brought to unfolding, to evolution. In this way involution and evolution disclose themselves alternately everywhere in life.

Whoever stops here, however, is taking only the outer aspect into account. To reckon with the whole we must include a third aspect that stands behind these two. What is this third aspect? Imagine yourself facing a phenomenon in the outer world. You reflect over it. You are here, the outer world is there, and from within your thoughts arise. These thoughts were not there previously. When, for example, you form a thought about a rose, this thought first arises in the moment you make a connection with the rose. You were here, the rose there, and now the thought arises in you. When the image of the rose arises, something quite new has come about. This is also the case in other spheres of life. Imagine the artist, Michelangelo, arranging a group of models. Actually, he did this in the rarest of cases. Michelangelo is here, what he renders is there. Something new—the image—arises in his soul. This is a creation that has nothing to do with involution and evolution. It is something entirely new that arises from the intercourse between a being that can receive and a being that can give. Such new creations are always generated through intercourse of being with being, and such new creations are a beginning.

Recall what we considered yesterday, how thoughts are creative, how they can ennoble the soul, indeed, even work later on forming the body. Whatever a being once thinks, the thought creation, the concept creation, works and actively carries on further. It is a new creation, works and actively carries on further. It is a new creation and at the same time a beginning because it gives rise to consequences. If you have good thoughts today, they are fruitful into the remote future because your soul goes its own way in the spiritual world. Your body returns to the elements and decays. Even if everything through which the thought arose disintegrates, the effects of the thought remain.

Let us return to the example of Michelangelo. His glorious paintings have affected millions of people. These paintings, however, will one day fall into dust and there will be future generations who will never see his creations. But what lived in Michelangelo's soul before his paintings took outer form, what at first existed as new creations in his soul, lives on, remains, and will appear in future stages of development and be given form. Do you know why clouds and stars appear to us today? Because there were beings in preceding eras who had thoughts of clouds and stars. Everything arises out of thought creations.

There you have the number three! In revelation things alternate between involution and evolution. Behind this is a deeply hidden creation, a new creation born out of thought. Everything has arisen out of thought, and the greatest things in the world have gone forth from the thoughts of the Godhead. From what, then, do things arise since ideas are new creations? They arise out of nothing! Three different things are here connected: Creation out of nothingness, which always occurs when you have an idea; the manifestation of this creation; the course of its development in time through the two forms, involution and evolution. This is what is meant when certain religious systems speak of the world created out of nothingness. If today people deride this, it is only because they do not understand what is to be found in these documents.

In the world of manifestation, to sum it up once more, everything alternates between involution and evolution. At the root of this is a hidden creation out of nothingness that unites itself with the two (involution and evolution) to form a triad. This is a union of the Divine with the revealed.

So you can see how we can reflect on the number three. We should not take off and spin pedantic thoughts about it, but we must look for the duality and triad that is to be met at every turn. Then we consider the numerical symbols in the right way, in the Pythagorean sense, and can draw conclusions leading from one to the other. We could also say that light and shadow appear in the manifest world, and behind these lies a third, hidden element.

We come now to the number four. Four is the sign of the cosmos or of creation. As far as we can determine with our present organs, the present planetary condition of the earth is its fourth embodiment. Everything that is manifest to us on an earth such as ours presupposes that this creation is the fourth stage. This is but a special case for all creations that appear thus. They all stand under the sign of the four.

The occultist says that men today stand in the mineral kingdom. What does this mean? Because a man understands only the mineral kingdom, he can only control this kingdom. Using minerals, he can build a house, a clock, and other things because they are subject to mineral laws. For various other activities he does not have this capacity. He cannot, for example, form a plant from out of his own thinking. To be able to do this he would himself have to exist in the plant kingdom. Some time in the future this will be the case. Today men are creators in the mineral realm. Three other kingdoms, the elementary kingdoms, have preceded this; the mineral kingdom is the fourth. All told there are seven.

Men stand in the fourth kingdom. Only here do they reach their actual consciousness oriented to the outer world. On the Moon they were still operating in the third elementary kingdom, on the Sun in the second, and on Saturn in the first. In the future on Jupiter, they will be able to create plants as today they are able to construct a clock. Everything visible in creation stands in the sign of the four. There are many planets that are not to be seen with physical eyes, such as those in the first, second, and third elementary kingdoms. Only when such a planet within creation enters the mineral kingdom can it be seen. Four is, therefore, the number of the cosmos or of creation. With the entrance into the fourth condition a being becomes fully visible to eyes that can see external things.

Five is the number of evil. This will become clear to us if we again consider human beings. In their development men have become fourfold beings and thereby beings of the created world. Here on earth, however, the fifth member of their being, the spirit self, will be added. Were they to remain fourfold beings, they would be constantly directed by the gods—toward the good, of course—but they would never develop their independence. They have become free through the gift of their germinal fifth member, but it is also from this that they have received the ability to do evil. No being can do evil who has not arrived at “fivefoldness.” Wherever we meet with evil, such that it can actually adversely affect our own being, there a fivefoldness is at play. This is the case everywhere, including the outside world, but people are unaware of it, and our present materialistic world view has no conception of the fact that the world can be considered in this way. Actually, there is justification for speaking of evil only where fivefoldness appears. When, one day, medicine will make use of this, it will be able to influence beneficially the course of illness. Part of the treatment would be to study the illness in its development on the first and fifth days after its onset, on the separate days at the fifth hour past midnight, and again during the fifth week. Thus it is always the number five that determines when the physician can best intervene. Before that there is not much else he can do than to let nature take its course, but then he can intervene, helping or harming, because what can justifiably be called good or evil then flows into the world of reality. It is possible in many areas to show that the number five has meaning for outer events.

A man's life consists of periods of seven years—from birth until the change of teeth; puberty; seven or eight years later; toward thirty, followed by the seven year periods throughout the rest of his life. When, one day, he will take these periods into account and consider what had best come toward or stand aloof from him, he will come to know much about preparing a good old age for himself. He can thus bring about good or evil for the remainder of his life. In the early periods of life a great deal can be done by observing certain laws of education. Then, however, there comes an important turning point. This also may become a regression if he is turned loose in life with complete confidence too early. The accepted principle of today that sends young people out into life early is harmful; the fifth period should be passed before this happens. Such ancient occult principles are of great importance. This is why, in the past, at the direction of those who knew something of these things, the years of the apprentice and journeyman had to be completed before one could be called a master.

Seven is the number of perfection. Observation of man himself will make this clear. Today he is under the influence of the number five insofar as he can be good or evil. As a creature of the universe he lives in the number four. When he will have developed all that he holds at present as germ within him, he will become a seven-membered being, perfect in its kind. The number seven rules in the world of colour, in the rainbow; in the world of tone it is found in the scale. Everywhere, in all realms of life, the number seven can be observed as a kind of number of perfection. There is no superstition or magic in this.

Now let us look back again to the number one. Because we have considered other numbers, what is now to be said about one will appear in the right light. The essence of the number one is its indivisibility. Of course, it can be subdivided, for example, \(\frac{1}{3}\), \(\frac{2}{3}\), etc. but this can only be accomplished in thinking. In the world, especially in the spiritual world, when you take the two-thirds away, the one-third still remains a part of it. In the same sense it can be said that when some part of God is separated from Him and becomes manifest, the remainder exists as something that still belongs to it. In the Pythagorean sense we can say, “Divide the unity, but never otherwise than to have in your underlying thoughts the remainder connected with what has been separated.”

Take a thin golden plate of glass and look through it. The world will appear yellow because that is the colour that will be reflected. But in white light other colours are also contained. What happens to them? They are absorbed by the object. Hence, a red object appears red because it reflects the red rays and absorbs the rest. It is not possible to separate red from white light without leaving the other colours behind. With this we touch the edge of a world secret. You look at things in a certain way. You see, for instance, a red cloth spread out on the table and visualize at the same time that green is hidden in it. In this way you have accomplished what in the Pythagorean sense is called “The division of the One so that the rest is preserved.” If you carry this out meditatively, if you again and again unite separated parts into a unity, you have brought about a meaningful development through which you can attain spiritual heights.

Mathematicians have an expression for this that holds good in all occult schools:

This is an occult formula that expresses how Oneness can be divided and the parts so arranged that the One results. It indicates that, as occultists, we should not think of Oneness simply as One, but as parts that we add together again.

So, in this lecture we have examined what is called number symbolism and learned that when we meditate on the world from the standpoint of numbers, we can penetrate deep world secrets.

To complete these remarks let it be said once more that in the fifth week, on the fifth day, or in the fifth hour we can find important things that can be missed or made good. In the seventh week, on the seventh day, or in the seventh hour (or in a definite relationship, say, 3 1/2 because seven is also in this number), something can happen through the thing itself. On the seventh day of an illness, for instance, a fever will take on a definite character; this might also occur on the fourteenth day. These things are always based on number relationships that point to the structure of the world.

Those who steep themselves in the right way in what, in the Pythagorean sense, we may call the “study of numbers,” will learn to understand life and the world in this number symbolism. Of this the lecture today was meant to give you roughly sketched thoughts.

It's very important for moderns to get a strong dose of esoteric life. Plagues, epidemics and wars would rage among men in a terrible way if the wise masters hadn't decided to give mankind a deepening in the spiritual realm.

There have always been three kinds of esoterics who were developed in initiation schools: initiates, clairvoyants and adepts. In ancient times it often happened that initiates had a full understanding of spiritual truths and laws, although they weren't clairvoyant. Others in the same brotherhood were clairvoyant but couldn't understand what they saw, so the initiates explained it to them. Today there's less of a separation between clairvoyance and initiation. Whereas adepts were able to put what the clairvoyant saw and initiates explained to practical use. Adeptship must retreat almost entirely today. Our egotistical age can't make proper use of such high capacities. The highest adepts often only work into peoples' fates twice in two hundred years. Their strength is saved for special occasions. For men aren't yet mature enough for certain things. It would only have a harmful effect if one wanted to give them out. Even you, my brothers and sisters, couldn't receive some of the highest truths. If I would tell you such a truth this room would be empty in a few minutes. Even people who have reached a certain stage in esoteric training can't stand certain truths. And yet these are the very highest truths, and your training will eventually enable to you to receive them. But one who receives them too soon loses all support in life. Imagine that a narrow plank is laid over a deep abyss. How many of you would be able to walk over it without getting dizzy? Certainly not all. But if someone painted a path as wide as this plank on the floor of a room it would be easy to walk along the strip without going off to the left or right. And yet he's doing the same thing he'd have to do to walk the plank or strip on the ground. The strip's continuation is the physical world, the world of the senses. It gives men certainty, since it continually corrects wrong thoughts, feelings, etc. Now imagine that the physical world's barriers had fallen so that a man really floats in air without outer support. This is an experience that everyone must go through at some point.

You all know that the heart is just at the beginning of its development and that it will later be a very important organ One doesn't have to accept this on faith for simple observation and reflection lets one see this. It's the greatest riddle for modern scientists that the involuntary heart muscle is transversely striped just like the voluntary muscles this tells us that the heart will be a voluntary muscle in the future.

We speak of reincarnation and the law of karma. One can tell oneself: I don't believe in reincarnation, but I can assume that it exists. I'll act as if my assumption is true and wait to see what comes of it. A man who thinks and acts like this will make amazing discoveries. In everything that happens to him he'll think: I caused this in a past life and now bear the consequences of my own deeds. If such a man unconsciously did something foolish and he's punished for it, he'll think: I'll make myself aware of this foolishness, so that I can see that I was the one who brought on these ugly consequences. This is the real meaning of: Whoever hits you on the right cheek, turn the other one to him also.

Anyone who succeeds in looking for the cause of everything that hits him in himself has accomplished a great deal. One who does this will soon notice that it brings him forward, that he begins to loosen karmic chains and increasingly gets control of his life. Such a man treads his life's path freely and surely. One can verify all theosophical teachings in the same way. So let's all try to bring ever more spirituality into life and make the light and life that the great masters stream into us alive. You should all realize that the battles theosophy and especially esotericism will have to fight with the outer world will get ever bigger. There it's a matter of standing fast and being silent, my sisters and brothers, and stand fast, as you look at your goal and at the great masters who stand by us.