The Rudolf Steiner Archive

This lecture is the thirteenth of nineteen lectures in the lecture series entitled, Answers to Universal Questions and Life Questions through Anthroposophy.

Today we will occupy ourselves with an important document of mankind, although it appears far removed from the realm of our present line of study, yet nevertheless stands in an inner relationship to it. It is the Ten Commandments, which we will strive to illuminate from the basis of spiritual science because perhaps through spiritual science the right light may help clarify our understanding of this document.

From the side of learned theology it is often maintained that these Ten Commandments concur with various laws and commandments of other ancient folk and don't really depict anything extraordinary. They are considered at most only noteworthy as part of a collection in which laws and orders are to be found among various ancient peoples, as for example with Lycurgus of Sparta or the law tablets of Hammurabi.

What we have examined in the developmental route of mankind in the post Atlantic time and having allowed this to work on our souls, can become a specific connecting thread allowing an understanding of the revelation regarding the greatness, the enormity, which struck mankind, in the Ten Commandments given in Sinai. Let's remind ourselves about our contemplation of the evolution of mankind during the post-Atlantic time. We saw how the five cultural epochs - the Indian, Persian, Chaldean-Egyptian-Judaic, the Greek-Roman and Germanic cultural epochs - are a gradual conquering of the physical plane by mankind. Now we stand at the end of the third and at the beginning of the fourth epoch which we could call the “Mission of Moses.” Out of what did this Mission exist?

We will strive to direct our souls more precisely to how inspiration of the Initiates actually occurred in the successive time intervals. Yesterday we spoke about the Rishis, the inspirational ones in the ancient Indian time. The Rishis announced that they were mere common people in ordinary life who became however at specific times an instrument, a mouth piece for the inspirations of higher, spiritual beings. This fact was particularly prevalent in the ancient Indian times and these ancient Rishis, these great teachers of the post-Atlantean time could speak of lofty spiritual truths. We can ask ourselves in which spiritual regions these Rishis moved when they wanted to be permeated and surged through inwardly by higher Beings, who spoke through them? The Rishis were raised up while higher forces lived within them, not only to the astral or lower Devachan planes but above, right to the upper Devachan, so their learning originated in upper Devachan. In these ancient times, shortly after the Atlantic catastrophe, the old Indian bodies still gave mankind possibilities to go out of their bodies, and thus step into a relationship with Beings of Higher Worlds.

Now the cultural epochs continued. In the cultural epoch of Zarathustra, the ancient Persian, the highest initiates certainly knew how to speak about the highest spiritual Beings but their rise could not without further ado reach to the upper parts of Devachan. They could only rise to lower Devachan. Despite that however they could be taught about the higher planes because these elevated beings of the lower Devachanic planes knew about the higher planes.

In the world in which the Egyptian initiates were mainly indigenous, they could usually rise to the astral plane and it was not only a small circle which could still rise up to the astral plane in the old Egyptian time. A relatively large number of people, through their own observation, still knew what was happening on the astral plane. At least in certain in-between conditions of life, between waking and sleeping for instance, many experienced community with these Beings who did not descend to the physical plane but were at home on the astral plane. Thus the ancient Egyptian initiates who could enter and exit the astral plane found it easy to reveal things happening in the Higher Worlds.

The more we approach the later cultural epochs, the more the veil in front of the spiritual worlds drew to a close. The number of people who were capable of making observations in the spiritual worlds diminished ever more, and as a result, from the fourth cultural epoch onwards, a particular form of proclamation was required from the Initiates. One of these Initiates, familiar with all the occult arts of the Egyptian Initiates, was Moses; he moved freely throughout the astral plane. Even his people were chosen to behold certain revelations, and were capable of being something to the people even if they could no longer see into the higher worlds. It required Initiates, although diminished in their numbers, who knew directly or indirectly about the higher worlds, because they could consciously live out of their bodies. The largest part of the people however had to restrict their lives to the physical plane. The task which mankind had to fulfil in this time when the mission of Moses began, was this: those people who were completely dependent on the physical plane were to be given a revelation out of the spirit, which stands behind the physical, according to which they could regulate their lives. How could this Mission of Moses be formulated then? Just consider the necessity to clarify to the people that what is around them, what they can see and touch, is the physical plane - here is nothing spiritual. This was not to be looked at as something representative of the spiritual, but there had to be a clear understanding that the spiritual was to be sought in the spiritual, and only a few could do this spiritual research.

In ancient Indian times, when the holy Rishis spoke out of the upper parts of Devachan, images were given which could be seen as outer symbolic pictures in comparisons and indications coming from Upper Devachan. Images and portraits could be given and it was relatively easy for people to understand: we give you as it were images but because you see the outer world as an illusion, as Maya, these images are nothing more to you than images, reflections of the supersensible world.—In no way was there a danger leading to worship of these images. How could it have been with a people where everything sense perceptible was seen as Maya, illusion? These people could never practice worship. That only came much later. Certainly later in the oriental culture symbols and images of God appeared in some places. It was easy however for the holy Rishis to make it clear to the entire Indian people: that which we revealed, originated out of the higher planes of Devachan, while the visible or physical is a symbol for something so high and serene that it can only be taken in as a symbol.

During the Persian cultural epoch however, the students of Zarathustra couldn't proceed in the same way. They could only establish a kind of relationship between the people and the lower parts of the Devachanic planes. They were only capable of talking of images, spiritual images, of the supersensible. They referred to no sensory image. Above all they spoke amongst their people of an actual, spiritual, good being, who they called Ahura Mazdao, the being who had his outer corporeality in the sun and who connected himself with mankind and against the dark spirit: Ahriman. This was presented in a sensory-supersensory image so to speak, to the people. They had to imagine him for themselves as a spiritual light Being. However, not a finished image, not a portrait should they fashion. At most they could imagine this godly Ahura Mazdao as precursor within fire, for example, and not as a stiff, outer, sensory image. Everything which appeared as sensory pictures or idols came at a much later time. The ancient Persian culture had pictorial precursors which had to reveal the super-sensory. That was the progress.

Now we come to the third cultural epoch which we encounter mainly in the Egyptian time. Here stands the form of Osiris, as we know, at the central point of all religious thought and feeling. We can easily understand what now has to be said. What kind of being is Osiris, mainly in his godly form? Consider what the Egyptian cultural leaders said to the people: when you really fulfil your tasks in the physical world, when you have done everything related to your soul striving towards becoming a worthy person, then you will be united with Osiris after death. - On the other hand they are told: Osiris had only a short life on earth, because he was conquered by his brother Typhon - Seth—and has been living for a time in the worlds which are celestial, above the ground. His lower regions are no longer the physical but the astral plane, he will not descend lower. It is no longer possible for Osiris to step on the physical plane. Therefore people can't meet Osiris in life. After death however, when they have become sufficiently worthy, they will be united with Osiris because then they are within the world in which Osiris stays. A person can therefore meet Osiris, either after they have died or if they enter as an Initiate into the astral plane. Through this the disciples of the Osiris religion were prepared: the supersensible to which you are related, should place before your soul nothing other than pictures which your own soul imagines, ‘soul’ as is imagined under the concept of the astral body. Osiris became considered the ideal human form, possessing all possible virtues, and while desires as well as virtues exist in the astral body, so the human astral being was thus represented as the Being of Osiris.

For the Semites who gradually went through the Egyptian schools and who had to prepare the great event through which the spiritual, the Christ, descended into the physical world - not like Osiris to the astral plane, but like Christ, who came right down to the physical plane - they dared to live with God as a parable, a symbol, just like in the ancient Indian epoch they dared worship a god in a sensory-supersensory image, just like in the Persian culture in images of an astral presence, and in the Egyptian culture, now single and alone beneath the non-sensory imagination of the “I” (Ich). All images, originally given in ancient Indian times with which to imagine the spiritual, were of the physical world, borrowed from the mineral kingdom; they were images in distinct physical-mineral forms. The form through which the Initiates of the Persian culture made the supersensible clear to their people was removed from that which also lives in the human astral body, the lively etheric, because Ahura Mazdao also became visible to them as a result of his etheric form, the sun aura, becoming known to them. Osiris was represented by the Egyptians in an astral form. That divinity however, which the Jewish people proclaimed, had to have no other qualities than the “I,” the fourth member of the human being. Under the “I” we grasp something which only we can call “I.”

This is connected to something else. At this point people had to allow the Mission of Moses to flow into them; he had to be the representative of the image of the “I” of God. From that moment onwards people had to be told: Just as an “I” lives in every person and is the ruler of the members of human nature, so you must imagine the Being who weaves in the world as creative Being, who lives, rules and prevails over everything that's been and is created. Nothing sensory, neither etheric nor an astral image can represent this. Merely under the form of the “I,” only under the name “I am the I-am” should you imagine this highest Being. - In the “I am” itself every person should experience a reflection of the godhead. It was the Mission, the proclamation of Moses to say: Look within ourselves, only there will you find the real image of the pure godhead. - As a result all activity amongst people should from this moment onward only be from one “I” to another “I.” This had to be prepared through the Mission of Moses.

Let's place ourselves once more in the Egyptian culture. Much activity took place but it didn't move from one “I” to another “I” but from one astral to another astral body. What is this called? Just think how one of the gigantic pyramids were built. A great army of people was needed to bring such a pyramid into existence. The construction workers of such pyramids followed the order of the master builder and those were the temple priests, the spiritual guides of culture. Don't believe that these orders were given as they are today, from one “I” to another “I.” That was not the case. You will most easily understand what was happening when the word “suggestion” is implied. Physical powers of nature were employed to guide the masses. The Egyptian priests controlled such powers to a high degree. They didn't work on the “I” by saying: Do this or that - but they controlled the masses by managing their physical powers, so that the people meekly followed the priests who bypassed the “I.” These priests stood as Initiates in lofty service. They were incapable of abusing these powers; they placed themselves in service of the Good. Thus it was inspired, physically inspired, through them working; the freedom of the “I” in opposition to the priests of the temple was not in question. If you understand that, then you will also understand how in ancient India the Holy Rishis applied even higher spiritual powers. With them it was as follows: when they appeared and gave meaningful proclamations from the spiritual worlds, it was self-evident that the entire folk would follow meekly. Just as the hand follows the head, so the masses followed their leaders, the Initiates. This diminished ever more, the further humanity sunk into the physical plane, but in ancient Egypt there was still great effectiveness of these physical forces. To withdraw people from this kind of involvement and the predictive manifestation in the ego-opposition, was the Mission of Moses. For each human being to search for the godly fountainhead, the great World-I, that the realm of the surging, wafting “I” can be perceived as the archetypal image of the individual “I,” that was the great call which is linked to the Mission of Moses.

From these viewpoints we will understand how this great World-”I” had to be proclaimed through Moses. In this way we must translate the announcement of the “I”-Laws into everyday language, in order to really go through what was felt, experienced and thought when for instance the First Commandment was heard at that time. All lexicographic translations give the most inconceivable inaccuracies. Now I want to present the first commandment to you as it really needs to be translated, to bring it to such an expression as people then imagined they had heard.

First Commandment: I am the everlasting Divine, which you experience within yourself. I have led you out of the land of Egypt where you couldn't follow me within yourself. Henceforth you will not place other gods above me. You will not acknowledge gods as higher, who show you an image of something which appears above in the heaven, which works out of the earth or between heaven and earth. You shall not worship what is beneath the divine which is within you. I am the everlasting in you and a continual divinity. If you don't recognise Me within you, I will disappear as the divine in your children, parents and grandparents and their bodies will become stultified. If you acknowledge Me within you, I will live forth in you for up to thousands of generations and the bodies of your people would prosper.

This gives us the indication how the single “I” is within the archetypal “I,” how to recognise the after-image of the archetypal divine “I” and also, the indication of how, through acknowledgement of one's own “I” as divine, the way is given to become free from the opposition experienced between people and their leaders in ancient Egypt. “I have led you out of the lands of Egypt, where you can follow Me within you. The will of the Initiate followed you there, and there you were not free.” These Initiates applied their psychic powers which the people followed. The first dawning of this human freedom, which rose as the freedom of mercy in Christianity, shows itself in this reference: “I led you out of the Egyptian lands where you couldn't follow Me within you.” “Henceforth you shall not place other gods above Me.” Therefore, in order for the Jewish people to become the most prepared people for the proclamation in Christendom, it had to be made clear that all other representatives of the divine, the archetypal images of the “I,” had to fall away. Outer representations of the divine, even the signs of the Zodiac or something else, had to fall away. Nothing was to illustrate the divine, because people had to, in order to become free, find the source of everything within them: everything which was to be experienced regarding the divine had to be after-images of the great World-I and experienced in their “I.” “You should not acknowledge anything higher than the Divine, who appears as an image of something which shines above in the heaven, which originates from the earth or is active between the heaven and the earth.” An image-free divine! The only legitimate expression for this is the human “I,” the image of the “I am the I-Am.” “You shall not worship anything which is beneath the godly which is within you.”

We have emphasized: out of the physical body the image was taken in ancient India, out of the ether body in the Persian culture, out of the astral body with the Egyptians. Those all stand below the “I.” From out of this no image should be taken and called divine. We know that the physical body was formed from mineral nature, the ether body from the etheric in nature, and the astral body from that realm where the animal astral body is also formed. From all which exits in the members of human nature, having originated from the rest of nature, from all that which is below the “I,” nothing should be worshipped. “I am the everlasting in you and a continual divinity.” Here we have an important sentence. This was given to the Jews as a commandment, which was previously a fact. We have already remarked that when common blood flows in any people, a particular awareness runs through the generation, how the son feels bound through the blood with his father and grand-father. Common blood felt like a common “I.” This “I” lived through generations. The god who announced himself primarily as an “I” to the Jews, had to announce Himself by saying the He was this, which worked as God through the generations. “When you really understand Me, then you will understand what continues to work from generation to generation.” This has been translated with: “I am a striving God,” or even “I am an angry God,” while the actual meaning is: “I am the god working continually from generation to generation.”

“Don't seek to find an incorrect imagination of Me, protect the truth within you, as an imagination of Me, then you plant within the blood enduring health from gender to gender.” A real medicinal imagination is linked to that which this commandment gave, linked to the imagination that when the human being has a pure imagination of his relationship to the divine, then a healthy “I”-image will flow through the blood and people will remain healthy from one generation to the next. We don't come to a real understanding of the lively form in which Moses presented this to his people when he announced the laws, if we only think abstractly about what he said. No, it was said under the presupposition that correct thoughts are an active reality. “When you create a false imagination of the Divine, then you will, from gender to gender, bequeath it into an expression of disease and infirmity.” Correct thoughts activate health, false ones, illness. This is in the genuine sense an anthroposophic or occult image. This has to be thought about or otherwise no real understanding can be reached, no real picture formed regarding this First Commandment. The Jewish people were instructed: Don't place your God under false images. When they knelt in front of the golden calf, a false image flowed from the gods into them and this false image of god produced, because it works through the blood and goes down the generations, the effectively continuous sin which translates into illness. “If you don't recognise Me within you, I will disappear as the divine in your children, parents and grandparents and their bodies will become stultified.” You produce children, parents, grandparents capable of surviving, when you take up the correct imagination of the Divine, otherwise that which depends on the blood will die out. By truly acknowledging Me within you, the source of the “I,” the power transmits from one generation to the next because I am a continually effective Divinity. I will disappear from the bodies if I live in you as a false image. This is again quite an occult and medicinal indication. “If you acknowledge Me within you, I will live forth in you for up to thousands of generations and the bodies of your people would be purified and therefore would prosper.” Thus the physical will prosper, in the genuine occult sense, when the human being forms the true spiritual imagination. Through this a simultaneous breath of human freedom is drawn in human development: right at the peak, so to speak, of the continual “I” the human being is placed and then formed with the divine “I.” One can't allow comparisons with any other legislation; it is real dilettantism to place the Ten Commandments beside other legislation and compare it one-sidedly, just because they are outwardly similar in words, they can be seen as the same. The legislation of the Ten Commandments from Sinai is unique and only allows illumination through the unique Mission of Moses. As with this First Commandment, so it is with all the other Commandments when they are correctly translated. It becomes clear to us from the spirit of Moses' Mission, with reference to the “I”-impulse, how this now had to be poured into humanity.

Second Commandment: You will not speak in error of Me in you, because every error about the “I”-in-you will corrupt your body. - Thus the necessity for the correct thought process is established, the actual creator of the real healthy body. Errors about the ruler of the highest divine in you produce sickliness in the body to the fullest degree. It is extraordinarily important to have insight into the content of the Second Commandment: “The error about the “I” in you will be spoilt.” There is a further saying: In a beautiful body lives a beautiful soul. - Modern materialistic humanity now and then interprets it as: if I take good care of my body, then I will have a beautiful soul. - It actually means that a soul is inwardly strong because it has brought something from previous incarnations which has inspirationally worked through the soul and is now the correct creator for the sheath of a healthy, vigorous body. The body does not create the soul, exactly the opposite. So we see that sometimes it doesn't at all come down to stating a precise wording. Every time it is according to impulses in your life to find a different interpretations of the same wording. Depending on how you feel or are disposed, so it is interpreted. Accordingly one doesn't always have the correct proof that you are indicating an equivalent wording, but only through penetrating into the soul of the time and thoroughly seeking understanding for this or that word.

Third Commandment: You shall separate the workday from the festive day, so that the image of Your Being becomes the image of My Being. Because, what lives in you as My “I,” has built the world in seven days and lives within it on the seventh day. Thus your actions and your son's activities and your daughter's actions and your servant's activity and your cattle's actions and everything that is with you, is within the outer boundary of the six days, but on the seventh day your gaze should seek My gaze within you. - This is the kind of absolute translation corresponding to the Third Commandment. Not in outer images should the Divine within people be portrayed as the archetypal-”I,” but through what the “I” does, the archetypal-”I” must be portrayed and how this archetypal-”I” had created the world in six world days and on the seventh day found rest, so mankind must separate workdays and festive days, six days for creation and the seventh day to seek the Divine with the help of the “I.” So we see in what a wonderful way This Third Commandment is the portrayal of the archetypal-”I” in us and is placed there as guiding God.

In these three first Commandments we have indications of how the human being related to divinity, during the time of the Mission of Moses, which was revealing itself in a new way. In the fourth Commandment we go out on to the physical plane. The first three Commandments sets out how the human being can relate in the right way towards the higher Worlds through the activities of his “I.”

The Fourth Commandment says: Work forth with your fathers and mothers in mind, so that you retain possession of the property you acquired through the power which I have built in you.

Here you have the meaningless: “Honour father and mother, that you may fare well and live long on earth.” It is about actual outward action which really sprouts from what had been planted spiritually in the “I” within man, as we have understood, how the divine works medicinally, like a drop. This Fourth Commandment is a practical commandment. It says: Observe your descendants as your ancestors; then you as a descendent stand in contrast to them—a peaceful, beneficial, continual development will never take place. Just as you inwardly convey the “I” through the blood, so also must that, which you posses after your “I” has worked through it, be maintained. The strong “I” that was created, flowed from the one side through the blood in the generations; on the other side however had to, in order for the human being to strengthen the “I,” work in the outer world. What had been founded as a strong “I” had to be preserved and evolve continuously, without interruption. Work forth with the fathers in mind in order to maintain coherence in the work your father and mother did in creating your “I.” - This shows you how also the outer rules of conduct are given in order not to destroy from outside the creation of a new culture, given as an inner impulse.

Now we come to the Commandments where your independent “I” is confronted by the “I” of others, and how this should in fact rule in the social world. This is actually a repeat of what Paul said, which the Bible gives as: Love they neighbour as thyself (Gal.5,14).—See in other people the same “I” as in yourself. - In an extraordinary way this old Hebraic folk received the impulse to pursue the godly right into the weaving of the “I” within the human soul. Therefore this people had to preserve the Commandments, which do not only prescribes the protection of their own “I” but also prescribes respect and protection of the “I” in the other.

Fifth Commandment: Murder not.

Sixth Commandment: Don't break the marriage.

Seventh Commandment: Don't steal.

All three expand on the one commandment: Recognise in your fellow men the “I” which you have in yourself!

In this deed the Jewish people were led from the lands of Egypt, enabling them to also recognise the “I” in others through the evaluation of the other's “I,” for in Egyptian lands one didn't work through the respect of others but through the suppression of the “I” through suggestion. Now further:

The Eighth Commandment: Do not undermine the worth of your fellow men by telling untruths about them. - Not only through deeds could one damage and impair the rights of the “I” within the other, but one should not once in a spoken word diminish the worth of his “I.” One should not state untruths about the “I” of another. Whoever states an untruth about the “I” of another, does not realize that the “I” of the other is the same as your own “I.” So it proceeds systematically with the Ten Commandments. Reference is made [to] what you express damagingly in community of life from one “I” to another “I.” A deed penetrates directly, damagingly into the sphere of the “I” of the other, but a word more secretively. However, if you want to earnestly acknowledge the “I” of the other, then you also do not dare intervene from the basis of your wants and desires into the sphere of your fellow man. [It is] Not only through this that you rob him, but already through also desiring something of his, do you penetrate into his “I”-sphere. You acknowledge the full equal evaluation of the other's “I” through not allowing yourself to desire what he has. Now the two last Commandments:

Ninth Commandment: Do not look grudgingly at what your fellow man possesses as property.

Tenth Commandment: Do not begrudge your fellow man his wife nor the helpers and others through whom he gains his earnings.

The only way to find healthy relationships between one person and another is by not resenting what the other person owns. So a person is placed beside others in order for him or her to notice and venerate the divine image in every “I.” Thus the existence of the single “I” amongst others is regulated. This was one of the biggest spiritual impacts which entered into mankind. Yet, what had to come through Christ was not pronounced, yet lay within the words here, that each one can find the interrelation with the Father-God. “No one comes to the Father but through Me.” At this time the legislation was given in relationship to the communal “I” which flowed through the generations. Yet at the same time the earlier proclamation was given, that the “I” is not only an image of the Divine, but that God Himself is a living Being within this “I.” The “I” is substance and Being identical to the Father. “I and the Father are one.”

So we see how the impulse, conveyed through the world's development, follows one after the other. It is easy to say: In the world's development all causes and effects are connected by a wisdom-filled world guidance and world command but nothing is visible. - When we however look back in world evolution, as we have done in this examination, we arrive at the notion that at the right time the right thing always happens to direct human development further, then, I may say, nothing else is left over than to acknowledge the wisdom-filled directing and guidance in world development.

When one sees through occult research how at the exit of the third cultural epoch into the fourth time period the proclamation of the Ten Commandments took place in order for people to have time to prepare for the greatest event, the Mystery of Golgotha, then one sees exactly what a great expression of wisdom this is within world guidance.

In the entire tone of the Ten Commandments, when we really understand them, we see how the Divine reveals itself in an archetypal way in images in preparation for the moment when the Divine Spirit will really be embodied in an individual. In order for people to be steered towards an understanding of God in the flesh, an incarnated God, they must first learn to grasp God's substance and Being within their deepest, innermost soul. Considering this document of mankind, the Ten Commandments, we notice from the entire tone, that God speaks through it to mankind and that this address throughout is in line with the ever further emergence of people on the physical plane and that this can only really happen when the Divine is grasped in the right way. Repeatedly it is pointed out that bodies prosper when the Divine is properly grasped. Indications are given that to venerate the Divine also brings prosperity to outer things on the physical plane. In the correct way it is pointed out that a gradual, healthy development must ensue, in order for the outer social relationships to prosper.

Through the Mission of Moses it is regulated that the Divine remains protected within the Being of man, while man's conquering of the physical plane can be carried out in the right way in the sense of the post-Atlantic development remaining in harmony with the Divine.

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When the words “health issues” are spoken, many of our contemporaries may reflect on how our views, our opinions of everyday life, of life in general, of all its blessings and woe; when the words “health issues” are spoken, however, it is particularly a feeling that may be evoked here that slumbers more or less consciously or unconsciously in every human soul: that man rightly regards health as a precious possession in this physical life.

Not only those who are completely absorbed in this physical life, with all their thoughts and interests, regard health as a precious thing, but also those who focus their minds on the highest ideals of humanity, who focus their minds on the spiritual, must also recognize what a precious thing health is, and even if he says to himself: Above all, this health is valuable to me because it enables me to fulfill my tasks in the world when I have it, because it prevents me from fulfilling these duties, these tasks in life when it is in any way damaged.

What the word “health” encompasses is directly or indirectly related to our highest destiny, to our human goals. Therefore, it may well depress some who reflect on how health and illness are always viewed differently in a certain way, depending on how human views and opinions change; and those who are attentive observers of life in its depths may well have seen many changes in this regard, especially in recent decades.

But what underlies all striving in relation to health and illness, in relation to the healing of the human being, is in turn only that which we must call the science of life, the knowledge of life. What transformations have taken place in relation to the knowledge of life in these last decades, much greater ones than one would usually assume! It could tell the observer of life a great deal if he observed the way in which currents arise from the scientific foundation, from the scientific knowledge of the world, and lead to this or that view health, if he compares these currents and this foundation [with that] of 20, 30, 40 years ago, how it was then and how it presents itself to us today.

What has often been emphasized here in relation to many other areas, namely that our age has taken a significant step towards materialism, can be observed particularly in the area to which our present consideration is devoted.

Those who are able to look back on the scientific knowledge that underlies today's discussion, as it was formed 20, 30, 40 years ago, may come across a venerable personality when they happen to encounter this phenomenon. I myself once encountered this honorable personality, and I may well refer to the character of this personality because it seems symptomatic to me of what has changed over the past few decades.

Those who were lucky enough to study in Vienna quite a long time ago were able to get to know the scientific basis of our current field of study at the medical faculty in Vienna. They got to know the then famous and widely significant anatomist Hyrtl, the man who provided the basis for hundreds and hundreds of young doctors at the time, the basis that every doctor needs, the anatomical foundations... When he stood before his audience and built up the human being from the components of the human organism, which seemingly can only be expressed in the driest of terms for scientific observation, when he built the human being out of anatomical parts, then, listening to him, you had the feeling that behind this description, this explanation of the structure of the human organism, something else was still alive, something lived from a deep understanding of the spiritual, which builds the wonderful structure of the human organism... there was just something... something... there was something in Hyrtl's presentation that can only be expressed as follows: just as the creative power of nature itself, as the spirit of nature, allows the individual structures to sprout and grow into the entire structure of the human organism, so this human organism was anatomically built up before the audience.

Those of you who have often attended these lectures here know that spiritual science tells us that what we call the outer physical body, what the eyes see, what the hands touch and what the ears and the lower senses of the human being can perceive, that this is only part of the human being, only the outer sensual part, that everything that external science can only deal with this outer limb. They also know that the first higher limb in human nature, which truly and really lives for those who can observe human beings with higher abilities, is what we call the etheric or life body in spiritual science: the mysterious master builder who is there and builds up this human organism.

This etheric or life body is something that cannot be seen by the physical eye, but what the open “spiritual eye” of the seer can see as a fact just as much as the external sensual facts can be seen by the physical eye.

One would like to say: Hyrtl stood there as a chaste scientist, as a chaste physician; he said nothing about this etheric or life body, but how he spoke of it,

how the one developed from the other, it was as if that principle of the life body lived in his words; and that was enough, it had an enormous stimulating effect, he influenced his listeners so that something of the mysterious depths of the whole of human nature was awakened in them, that something of that striving was kindled in them, which wants to take hold of man ever more deeply and which does not remain on the surface...

Soon afterwards, one could see that these times were passing, in which this scientific foundation was considered in this way...

Let me make this clear from the outset: it was not just because Hyrtl was a particularly great genius, but because he had grown out of a time that, if not precisely cognizant of the spiritual world, at least had a feeling for it. Anyone who observes life knows that today everything is pieced together, that such a representation no longer exists in broad circles of science... therefore, we must emphasize all the more that it is precisely spiritual science that goes back to the whole, to the spiritual-living behind the sensual, that it has the task of fertilizing and illuminating that which can be offered in the external, sensory realm for the horizons that interest us today, for it is in the external, sensory realm that our admirable science has achieved the most extraordinary things... for there is no lack of individual research, no lack of methods by which one can gain insight into the individual external facts of natural existence and its interrelationships...

But what spiritual science will have to bring to this individual research... that is the overarching spirit of the matter...

Now, the very same Hyrtl made a remarkable statement, a statement that may be our guiding principle today and from which we can start today. It may sound strange to many today, and yet it was made by a brilliant anatomist and physician:

Only a physician can recognize illnesses, but anyone who knows what help is can heal them.

A seemingly rather strange saying; now, let us see how spiritual science can relate to this...

Above all, we must be clear about one thing, because of the brevity that must characterize today's lecture – its subject could take up 20 to 40 lectures without exhausting everything – with this brevity, it is necessary that what is said is understood in such a way that one recognizes the attitude from which it is said. This attitude is basically the same as that on which all spiritual science is based; it can be briefly characterized by saying that spiritual science does not have the vocation of proving one or the other party line right, it has to stand on a higher vantage point and, precisely because it looks into the depths of existence, of life, has to gain a point of view that can have a unifying effect... Those who look around at life know that the shades of opinion that fight each other on the... are not usually so that one can say that one is absolutely right and the other wrong...

As a rule, one must say: Those who fight with slogans, who carry a flag, have gained their views and opinions in very specific areas of life; these areas of life have, so to speak, had a suggestive effect on them, and they actually only say what can be naturally gained as a one-sided view of life from their area of life...

But theosophy is not supposed to agitate for this or that direction, not even in the area that interests us today, in the area of illness and health and healing... Perhaps the humanities scholar in particular might feel tempted to advocate for one or the other... because in how many party divisions do we see today the very area in which the human heart would perhaps most like to sense unity.

Theosophy has the task of saying what is, how things are in life... and then the theosophist has the confidence that man, when he knows through his knowledge what is, will then come to realize through himself what he should. The point of view has not yet become theosophical, which appears and says: I also want to persuade that this or that should be done, and not...

Theosophy or spiritual science should never have anything to do with “should” or demands. It should objectively tell what is and have confidence in the human being that if he knows what is, he will find the guiding principle for his “should” in his own soul...

Now, who could deny that the most diverse, the most varied, the seemingly most opposing party lines confront us precisely in the area of health issues... and with what conviction and sharpness is fought for one's own conviction and with what bitterness is the other conviction fought against! And it should also be mentioned at the outset that Theosophy in particular never wants to do anything against the sciences, against the true scientific work. To put it bluntly: spiritual science or Theosophy must not go along with dilettantism in this field; it would prefer to work in harmony with those who at least have the opportunity to be experts in this field...

Of course, it is impossible to list all the shades of parties in this field here, but even if that is not possible, at least some of them should be roughly characterized. First of all, there is the allopathic healing method, the one that is so heavily opposed by so-called natural healing and what is called homeopathy... Much more could be said, but we have to draw in broad strokes... Not so much should be said for the time being about what the concepts of spiritual science could achieve, but rather what is said, so to speak, in a popular or scientific way as a characteristic of the individual shades of the parties. There we hear that the medical healing method is based on the fact that there are illnesses, damage to health, and that there are specific remedies from certain realms of nature that counteract certain damage that we call illnesses in a certain way . For each disease, this or that remedy is indicated, and science works in a careful and conscientious manner to find the specific remedies for this or that form of disease through experience in the sensory realm...

Naturally, we cannot go into detail here; as I said, we should only point out the characteristic features. But now we hear from many others, who take the same so-called natural healing approach, that everything the so-called allopathic healing approach says is fundamentally based on error... Because it takes too little account of the deeper causes of the disease; it looks at the way the disease manifests itself, but one must go deeper, assume that the causes lie deeper, that where a form of disease occurs, there are deeper disturbances in the organism that can only be remedied by intervening in this organism in the way that nature itself would intervene if it were to direct and guide the organism in a completely normal way.

We hear that, above all, it is not so much a matter of combating the individual diseases, but of investigating those activities in the organism, those functions that have been undermined and as a result of which the disease occurs, and which in turn are to be put back on the right track through appropriate measures, and now various healing methods are indicated, various physical and other remedies...

Above all, the specific remedy is opposed here, which, as experience has shown, is there to combat this or that disease. With bitterness, one side fights against the other.

Now, regardless of how one or the other or I myself think about it, let us briefly characterize how, for example, the homeopathic healing method thinks in turn in its main features; it says: In what we initially encounter in the disease, we do not have what appears to be the primary damage, what appears to be the primary unhealthiness, but we have before us in the phenomena that present themselves to us a kind of force that is called upon in the organism to fight the actual damage that lies deeper. Thus, in what presents itself to us as the symptom of the disease, we have something that the organism brings into the field in order to bring out the actual, deeper damage. We must therefore pay attention to what causes the very symptoms that appear in the disease. We must investigate which remedy we can find in the natural kingdom that causes exactly the same symptoms in a healthy person as we see in the sick person. We then support what nature has initiated...

What appears to us as illness has been initiated by nature, and we should help it by applying the means that cause the same symptoms in a healthy person, in order to support the fight against the actual damage.

One would like to say that with all these party shades, as far as the theories are concerned, on what is given as a logical basis, one would like to say that one can go along a long, long way everywhere and one soon recognizes , after a little insight into the matter, how little the objections of the respective opponents actually apply. And we can actually say that in all these fields, the supporters put forward weighty arguments in favor of their convictions. Or is it not true when today scientific medicine points out, by means of easily compiled statistics, the great successes, especially in external health care, and the improvement in the health situation in cities under the influence of precisely this medical healing method... and how then it is pointed out how much good has been done in this very respect by the research of many a specific remedy in recent decades... Great successes can be pointed out; those who would compare the health conditions in cities about a century ago with today's would be unjust if they did not recognize what medical science has achieved here. On the other hand, however, we hear, and we certainly have to admit it, that even if these conditions have improved, on the other hand it cannot be denied that certain types of disease, heart disease, nervous disorders and the like are increasing at an alarming rate... and that must also be admitted...

And should not the layman sometimes use this or that word, saying that, even if it is correct in a certain respect, that many conditions have improved, many worrying social consequences are emerging...

One need only think, for example, of the fact that in the case of a disease that was only discovered in the last few decades, namely tetanus, attention is drawn to a germ that is rightly said to be carried by people who remain healthy and others then become ill from it...

... Where would it end...

It is, for example, quite possible and a fact that entire schools have been infected with this or that communicable disease and it has been found that teachers who remained healthy were the carriers of the germs; they themselves were not infected by it. What tyranny would result if one were to build dogmatic legislation on such cases?

... How does that grow, what one could call the fear of illness, the fear of the mysterious sources of illness, through a way of thinking that can be very easily based on such attempts that cannot be doubted at all...

You really have to be a party man if you want to fight this or that with certain buzzwords...

Some of the watchwords of natural healing, for example, are as if all specific remedies had to be eradicated, as if one could only go back to the basics of the disease through physical or other methods, and support the functions... one hears the same watchword over and over again: poison; all specific remedies are poisons, but a poison could never be anything useful under any circumstances. And you can see how the word “poison” can have an enormous suggestive effect on entire gatherings. You only have to let these suggestions work and thereby create convictions that are extraordinarily effective. But anyone who knows what poison really is knows that those who use such buzzwords are the ones who are least accountable for what poison is. What is poison? The phenomena, the facts of nature, especially those in human life, are so tremendously complicated that answering this question is not so easy. What is poison in nature?

Belladonna, for example, is a poison for humans; the rabbit can eat it quite well.

Hemlock... Socrates had to drink from the hemlock cup to carry out his death sentence, but for the goat, hemlock is not a poison at all.

Hydrogen sulfide is certainly very toxic to the organism in certain respects; but there are small organisms, so-called sulfur bacteria, a type of split algae, that live almost exclusively on this substance: they build their organism in a very strange way from the sulfur... and if you deprive them of the hydrogen sulfide, they die. This fact provides an example of how the material can be incorporated into the phenomena of life...

So the keyword “poison” should not be the only one that tells us what we are actually fighting...

We will only make progress if we try to approach the whole consideration more and more from the perspective of spiritual science...

What is the actual difference between medical healing methods and naturopathy... in principle? We see a big difference that the spiritual scientist can characterize quite accurately from his point of view without taking sides for one or the other direction...

For those who know the facts, it is simply nonsense to say that there are no specific remedies for this or that disease. But what is healing with such remedies based on?

The fact that there is damage in the disease and the remedy combats this damage, that this can happen, is not disputed. To dispute the positive, that which is gained from experience, is narrow-minded and would not be spiritual science. But what are we dealing with in the human being when we heal by combating some kind of health disorder with external means? We are dealing with the physical human body, the external aspect of human nature. Since the human being has this physical human body, there is no doubt that it can also be treated with such an external remedy.

Natural healing has a certain idea that there is something mysterious and supernatural behind the physical human body, that what makes up the physical body is governed by the etheric or life body... The doctor does not need to believe it, but he does take the view that there is something that lives and moves behind the physical apparatus. The naturopath has an inkling of this etheric or life body and tries, so to speak, not to give so much to what can only be externally determined by physical means, but goes back to what lies behind the physical, what can be determined. This is very important, but the pressure of the materialistic way of thinking is far too strong for him to be able to move towards real spiritual knowledge of human nature. It would be horrifying if anyone who claimed to be a scientist were to speak of the visible having its basis in the invisible, the sensual in the supersensible.

Therefore, one can at most suspect that there is such a thing, but one cannot speak of it as a reality. If one speaks of it and has gained conviction from spiritual science, if one has recognized the inner reasons that lead to this supersensible link of human nature, then one cannot stop there, then one also proceeds to other links of human nature... then one enters with purest spiritual science into the secrets of the invisible, but which is nevertheless very real and real for that reason.

Then you go further and learn that in this physical human body there is not only an ether or life body that distinguishes humans from everything that surrounds us as seemingly inanimate... This ether or life body is a constant fighter against the physical body following its physical substances and chemical forces during life. Because when this life body withdraws from the physical body, then the physical body of the person follows the physical substances and forces, but then it is a corpse. During life, however, the etheric or life body is a constant fighter against the decay of the physical body...

Thus, in the etheric body, we have the creator, the builder of the physical body of man or any living being, who stands behind this physical body.

Then we proceed to what we call the astral body. This is the carrier of lust and suffering, joy and pain, of all the surging feelings and ideas, of everything that is instinct, desire and passion, that is, the instincts. But beyond that, we then also come to a fourth link, the carrier of the actual self-awareness, the carrier of the ego.

These four members make up the whole human being, and if we want to consider the whole human being, we must consider that the higher, the supersensible members are the actual creators of the lower, the more sensual members. Everything that happens in the lower members arises from what happens in the upper members...

Therefore, one should not only proceed to the idea of an etheric or life body, but one must consider that deeper causes, much deeper causes must lie precisely in the astral body and in the soul-spiritual of the human being, if one wants to come to an understanding of illness and health. Here the causes of the illnesses are not so easy to find. This vehicle of pleasure and suffering, instinct, desire and passions, expresses that which is within it in the etheric body and in the physical body. If something unhealthy lives in the astral body, consisting of wrong passions, drives and instincts, then this must have an effect on the etheric body and the physical body:

But, someone might say, let us look at a person; what contradictions can prevail between their healthy perceptions and healthy urges and the illnesses they nevertheless have! In this case, we must fully embrace spiritual science and be clear that what we call the innermost essence of man, the actual individuality of man, is something that is only just enveloped by the physical shell, and that it takes completely different paths in its development than this physical shell. When we look at the core of a person, we say: this person consists of two currents...

The person who comes to us in life, let us look at him. He is first a result of heredity, a result of what comes from father, mother and the ancestors before them...

But in all that continues through the generations, in all that lives something completely different, something that now has to do with the astral body and I. And when we meet a person, we see not only what we have inherited from previous generations, but also what has descended from the spiritual world as the spiritual core of our being. We look at what is called re-embodiment or reincarnation, at the innermost core of our being, which carries over from life to life. This unites with what lies in the line of inheritance, permeating and energizing what is inherited from father and mother. And even if we do not see today how the instincts and drives of individuality affect the physical body in a way that makes us ill or healthy, we would see this if we looked at what the person has been in his or her previous life.

If we recognize this, we can learn to see the passions and instincts and desires in the present life that originate from what we brought with us from these previous lives and that act as causes of illness in this present life, even if they were not acquired in this life.

And this is where the knowledge of the essence of the human being begins, as a proper basis for assessing the healing method.

Can we somehow see how the astral body indicates what it has to say in relation to what makes the physical body healthy or sick?

For example, someone has to raise a child... according to the child's nature, this or that is good, one has the stereotyped view. Instead of strict individualization, also with regard to health, one has the opinion: there are many illnesses, but only one health. But in truth, there are as many healths as there are people. Every person has their own health, their own conditions of being healthy. But with stereotyped concepts, you can ruin everything possible with the child. For example, the child does not want to eat this or that food. This is, of course, naughtiness, one thinks. But it would be much more correct to say: This is proof that sympathy and antipathy is nothing more than the astral body feeling: I must have this if I am to work in the right way on my physical body, and what the child rejects, it cannot use.

What the child's palate rejects or craves expresses what is healthy for it. It is therefore right to observe carefully what the child demands, what it is keen on. When does the astral body perceive something as pleasure, especially in childhood? When what it enjoys has in itself, as it were, the potential to be incorporated into the organism in a beneficial way. Only when something is already corrupted in the order of healthy human nature, then enjoyment is no longer a true guide... That what is healthy for him, he also likes, and what makes him sick, he does not like, that is the only measure of health, that there is an appropriate sense for everything we take into our organism. So it is a matter of making the consciousness of what is good for us as alive as possible within us, of making our astral body, the carrier of pleasure and desire, lively for what is healthy for our organism...

There are now means to achieve a great deal in this regard... Human nature differs from person to person because a different individuality permeates and energizes the exterior.

A case that occurred: there was a person who, from early childhood, had a terrible aversion to all meat; he could not smell meat, so to speak. He could not smell it, so he did not eat it. At first he was in a tolerant environment. But there were aunts and uncles who thought that not eating meat was completely perverse... And so the good man allowed himself to be persuaded to at least start with a little broth, then move on to veal and so on... But he also came to mutton... and he soon ended up with

severe encephalitis because it was absolutely impossible for this person's body to do what was necessary to digest meat using the powers within it. He was so constituted that he knew very well what was healthy for him from an early age...

But if the same food, which was the only right food for this person, were given to another, the latter could suffer the greatest harm from it...

All people must be considered as individuals. And there are countless people who, if they want to continue living as they are living, can no longer possibly become vegetarians without further ado.

It has been said that human nature is not capable of doing the work necessary to convert what we take in from plants into what the human organism needs. With plant-based nutrition, a kind of work must be done internally by the human being that he is unable to muster. The work that has to be done there is partly taken off his hands by the fact that he takes his nourishment from the animal kingdom, where some of this work has already been done and he now has less work to do. However, this does not apply to everyone, only to many people. For many, it would be unhealthy if they could not apply the strong forces of digestion and processing that are necessary to digest plant food...

To understand this, one has to embrace the radical difference between the plant and human kingdoms... the animal kingdom lies in the middle.

It is a contrast between humans and plants... we can characterize this contrast first by saying that something that is purely present in physical nature...

A human being breathes, he inhales the oxygen in the air and exhales carbon dioxide. The plant absorbs the carbon dioxide, breaks down the compound, takes the carbon it contains and uses it to build its organism out of inanimate, purely physical carbon and releases the oxygen again. This is the interaction between humans and plants. This expresses a spiritual interaction in an external parable. Behind the plant stands its spiritual, behind the human being his spiritual. You know that a plant cannot flourish when it is deprived of light. Look at it, how it withers away. That which the plant builds up from inanimate substances, it builds up under the influence of light... Light! How much we owe to it... we take from it as much as we need...

But we must not only see, also in the light, not only pay attention to the physical. In that which is physical in the light, there is also a spiritual element. Behind physical light there is also a spiritual element. This spiritual element, which flows towards us from the sun to the earth in the rays of light, is the same as that which lives in our astral body, that inner light that works and creates in us — in the spiritual light, the spiritual aura. They are nothing other than the spirit of the physical body, the invisible light that works in us as the astral body. And that is what is at work in us! Outside, the physical light of the sun is at work on the plants. And that is the peculiar relationship between the physical light outside, which works on the plants, causing them to grow and flourish... and the spiritual light that is in us as our astral body. That is the relationship, that they are opposed to each other...

That which builds up the plants is removed, decomposed, destroyed by the process that the spiritual light ignites in us. And our life in the physical body as a spiritual being could not exist if we did not, so to speak, set up processes of destruction in everything we take in. We remove what the plants have built up. We continue in the opposite way to what the plants have begun... Thus we are spiritually opposed to the plant. And what is given to us as food from the plant kingdom, that we in truth destroy...

Our thinking is in its physical expression a process of destruction. What we take in must be worn away again, must be shattered again. This is how we maintain an inner life...

What is given to us from the plant kingdom as food is given to us in a virgin state. What is given to us from the animal kingdom is not given to us in such a virgin state... Because the animal stands in between the plant and the human, the animal fulfills that which the human has to fulfill to a certain extent... ... already accomplishes to a certain extent what man would otherwise have to accomplish within himself... and man can only begin his own activity where that which he has received is located. He only gets what the animal has already made out of it...

Let us look at man; he is truly a microcosm, a summary of everything that is going on outside...

His nutritional process is what the expansive plant kingdom elevates and transforms so that this human body can become an instrument of consciousness. In this respect, it is a totality. For the spiritual scientist, the animal is nothing more than a one-sided development of human characteristics. Each animal, each animal species represents certain characteristics for the spiritual scientist, developed in a particular way...

All these characteristics, combined in harmony – the one diminished by the other, the one balanced by the other – give us the human being...

The animal performs the natural process to a certain one-sidedness... We acquire this one-sidedness when we take the no longer virgin food from the animal kingdom...

Now let's assume that we are really organized in such a way that we can muster the necessary strength to process plant food. We have this strong reservoir of strength within us, which is only used when we take plant food. What happens if we don't do it, if we don't carry out this transformation from the vegetable to the human level? Then the unused forces seek other outlets in our organism.

The French abbé I told you about had precisely such forces within him. They are there and they have to work, and if they cannot find a healthy outlet, they will eventually throw themselves at another field of activity. The abbé then died from the effects of the large forces that arose in this improper way.

Let us take, on the other hand, a different person, such as a bank manager, who knows nothing but his profession. If we were to expect him to eat a vegetarian diet, he would not be able to do so. He will not be able to sustain it. He cannot process the plant substances to the point where they can serve him for the functioning of his organism; he must let some of the work be done for him.

We can therefore also see an important difference and contrast between the way plant food and animal food affect people. What does a person who wants to digest plant food have to develop in themselves? What do they do when they eat plant food? They have to muster certain forces that work from below, from the plant. These are forces that are more at the center of his being than those he needs to process animal food. These are forces within him that no one can do for him. By accomplishing this internally, he also has an inner source of independence and strength. His inner life becomes more active and intense as a result. What he consumes from the plant kingdom does indeed make his inner life more active. However, this requires a more comprehensive spiritual life, one that is directed towards contemplation, towards an understanding of the great interrelationships of life... If a person then takes his nourishment from the animal kingdom, then this is only right if he does not have these independent powers. For the nourishment that a person takes from the animal kingdom, he will use inner powers that make him less independent, since he has some of the work done for him...

In spiritual terms, what comes from the animal kingdom stimulates what makes man strong and vigorous without his intervention.

For those who cannot draw strength and energy for life from within themselves, a plant-based diet will be of no use; they will only be weakened by it. They need to have their strength and powers given to them, so to speak, prepared by animal food.

From such contexts, we can easily understand how it comes about that peoples who live on a plant-based diet lead a life more devoted to contemplation... while those who eat animal products show more warlike qualities.

Thus, what must be considered a health issue and a nutritional issue at the same time is definitely linked to the individuality of the person, to what the person can muster internally. And we see in the person whether the person does not partly acquire strong powers of independence in his inner being through a plant-based diet...

Through plant nutrition, we see him acquiring all the forces he needs to become, so to speak, a comprehensive human being, to become a human being who can see the big picture of life. Through what he acquires from animal nutrition, we see him being led to the specialties...

Thus we see from the interaction... through what... the great questions of existence for all details of life are regulated... There we see, so to speak, man's inner nature expressing itself in such a way that there are strong forces within him... or that he must have these strong forces given to him... We see, so to speak, the astral body at work in him... and how this work must be if the balance in the human organism is to be restored...

And once we have understood this, we will no longer doubt that much, much depends on how we are able to act on the astral body... but not only on this, but also how we can act physically on the physical body and ethereally on the ethereal body...

A materialistic view will only want to have an effect on the physical... Let us take the case of a sick person. The materialistically thinking person will look at these symptoms of illness and he will count on this: in this or that area, there is this or that air, there are these or those conditions, which, like one physical on another physical, affect the sick organism...

Those who are grounded in spiritual science will know that in many cases this is a very erroneous conclusion. They will know that it must work more radically and thoroughly if the human being is placed where his inner experiences can be stimulated in the appropriate way, where he can be truly happy, can become truly harmonious within himself. In particular, with certain forms of illness, namely nervous disorders, it will be most important that we work directly on the astral body and through that which can stimulate strong forces in the astral body...

Thus, if someone develops those strong forces within themselves that are developed through plant nutrition, it can be a good remedy for even severe damage to the organism. What works internally, when the inner forces that... must process the virgin plant food, can eliminate serious damage.

You can see from a person whether he also takes the trouble to convert the plant nutrients, in which there is little fat, into fat through his own inner powers, or whether he prefers to have it taken from him by enjoying animal fat... to develop those strong powers within him that make him independent... in other words, whether the person is not too lazy to contribute a little to his own fattening... this looks out of the eye whether it happens or not...

The one who does not overfeed himself with animal fat will also find within himself the possibility of developing the strong forces within him, and these are more and more inclined towards the spiritual...

And now there is a great, comprehensive law... that says: Everything that a person enjoys and looks at only as sensuality, that affects the withering, dying forces within him... and everything that he looks at as spiritual, that affects the invigorating, healing powers of a person... And vice versa, anyone who wants to help themselves in this direction can do so by eating enough plant-based food in addition to meat, and this can help in terms of awakening interest in the supernatural world...

Anyone who is willing to do something to prepare his own fat from low-fat plant foods will be able to become much more spiritual than someone who gets all his fat from animals...

A grotesque confirmation arises from the following incident. There is a so-called nudist culture in Berlin. Someone went there initially out of purely artistic interest, wanted to see what it was like and let the audience and what was presented there take effect on them. Then this person quickly ran away. It was a strange audience, almost all old men...

Where one actually assumes that the sensual has an effect on the sensual, there is an attraction to what is dying in life. And those who merely seek the sensual as sensual will be able to see that the dying parts of their being are particularly affected... whereas the spiritual interest... will particularly affect the germinating, growing parts of the human being.

Spiritual research begins to give people something that is certainly not as comfortable as just describing something... and also not as comfortable as listening to a lecture where images are projected onto a screen. You don't need to do much inwardly.

Spiritual science speaks of the supernatural, and that cannot be taken in as comfortably. It appeals to something in human nature, to which he must work, to which he must put the most active forces within him into cooperation... This spiritual science thus goes directly to the spiritual... to the paths of the soul... It is not there for the eyes... And no one claims that the concepts and ideas of spiritual science are real in the sense that they are tangible. In this sense, they are not supposed to be true. But what is hardly known today in wide circles, these so-called unreal ideas, what are they? These are precisely the healthy, the strong ideas, which, if they only work sufficiently in human nature, are at the same time the strong, the vigorous and effective ideas that make us healthy right into the etheric body.

When spiritual science guides us... it evokes ideas in us that have a healing effect from within in the most eminent sense... organic substance in such a way that it has already left its origins, so to speak, and cannot be repaired by itself again... The higher we ascend in the hierarchy of organisms...

Where internal forces are to be developed for recovery, the strongest force is that which flows out of the spirit of the human being, which is directed towards rejuvenation and growth, and the one who appeals to these forces also has a good foundation in the sense of health... the strong forces within are unleashed up to the higher realms of the health issue... Hardly a beginning has been made though...

We understand little more than a physical effect on the person... Here spiritual science is called upon to address the issue of health in such a way that remedies are found and are available that do not just work on the physical level but directly on the spiritual, that is, on the astral; and that work to restore physical health indirectly through the astral. Here indeed Theosophy has a great task. It will be able to solve it, because it can penetrate deeply into the life that surrounds us daily, into the life of the healthy and the sick person.

And here it is truly to be welcomed with great satisfaction that a good start has been made on the basis of the theosophical research, in that Dr. Peipers in Munich is applying a kind of color therapy that is thoroughly based on the theosophical view, on spiritual science... the secrets of color, its deeper spiritual foundations, have been divined.

Here one does not think of the physical effects... not the light works in these things, the color must first become an idea, must first shine and light up in the astral body... as a color idea, via the detour of the astral body, they work out into the periphery... Even if this can initially only be used for certain forms of illness, a start has been made...

And this theosophical current will, in these and many other things, by penetrating into the depths of things, still create many things of which today's materialistic mind has no dreams. Whatever one may say... the truth, the truth of the spiritual, will prevail. So... few points of view that are connected with this subject. It will have been shown to you how, on the one hand, spiritual science can never be one-sided...

Let us assume that someone has a migraine. What does he take? Migränin, for example. That is nothing! Or some other remedy is prescribed for him. But perhaps he does not have time to do everything that is prescribed for him... It is quite possible for a person to be so strong that he can bear it well if his physical organism is treated physically in certain areas.

But the problem can only be solved on an individual basis. Through a deeper knowledge of human nature, we will come to realize that there is a basis in spiritual science itself for evoking healthy urges and healthy instincts... that spiritual life is what...

Behind all matter lies spirit... and that which shows itself as content... in matter is only an expression of spiritual processes... The same applies to food: it should taste good, because the fact that it tastes good is an expression of the fact that it fits into the organism in a healthy and harmonious way.

In this way, spiritual science will enable you to stimulate feelings and instincts in a healthy way, and the result will be that those who study the spiritual wisdom will become healthy...

Just as the animals graze outside in the meadow and find the right thing in their instincts... so will spirituality and spiritual science, on a higher level, once again implant in man that which shows him, in full consciousness, what serves him, what is healthy for him... so that spiritual science itself is a great healing agent, a great healing agent... because it brings him the right knowledge for what is individually necessary for him in one case or another.

Recognizing illness in its relationship to the human being as a whole will help to bring about knowledge in this field too, and so Hyrtl, who... something very beautiful when he said from his experience:... Only the doctor can recognize illnesses... and he meant: The other is more difficult, he meant: You can't always help if you can recognize illnesses, only the one who knows what helps can heal... Only the one who is able to look deeply, very deeply into the foundations of human nature, can know what helps.

Answering questions [excerpts]

Question: [Not reported.]

Answer: It is important to distinguish between the irregularities that have arisen from external damage and against which he has at most the means to correct through the inner powers within the person, and between internal diseases... an external damage, a broken leg for example... But it is the same if, for example, any harm is done inside the stomach by unsuitable food.... just as little as with a broken leg can such external damage be treated from the astral body... It is nevertheless important that more is said about recovery from within the person than about forms of illness... more about the ways to recovery than about diseases.

Question: [Not handed down.]

Answer: [...] Feuerbach said: Man is what he eats. This is true if he uses the means to get higher by the nature of his food ... He should eat so that he is not what he eats.

On this occasion let me once more call attention to the fact that as the German Section of the Theosophical¹ Society we find ourselves in an epoch of importance. What has been said in different lectures with regard to the cycles which run in sevens is no mere figure of speech, but is in harmony with the laws of existence. And having now completed a 7-years' cycle in the life of the German Section we may do well to pause and look into our whole work and endeavour. This work is only possible if the spiritual Movement, in its development, contains in its inner ordering something of the laws of the great cosmic system. The cosmic system runs its course in cycles which can be reckoned according to the number 7; for we reckon 7 planetary conditions and so on.

In a Movement like our own, the number 7 also has a certain part to play, and after 7 years our striving in a sense turns back again to the beginning, for it has in the meantime incorporated in itself what has been achieved; our striving turns back again to its beginning, but at a higher stage. It is only possible to arrive at this by considering how the whole rests upon an inner law.

If you look back a little at the work we have done in these 7 years, you will be able to notice one thing: there has been a certain order and regularity about this work. Of course you cannot take what I have said as being correct to a day, but if you take it in its essentials, you will see that it is true.

In the first years of our work in the German Section we so to speak laid the foundations. What we did in the first four years was to acquire some knowledge of the paths-which lead to the higher worlds, of the great cosmic connections, and of the examination and testing of what is found in the Akashic Record with regard to the secrets of the cosmos. Those members who joined later have found it necessary—and will always do so—to acquire knowledge afterwards of this foundation of our work. This is indispensable for everybody; for it is not sufficient to assimilate only what has happened in the last three years and has enabled the Movement to progress in the right way. If you look back you will see that the last three years have brought about the development of those truths and facts which have been put before you of late, perhaps in a somewhat astonishing form. If you try to establish the connection with what was done in the first four years of our work in the four-fold foundation, as it were, of the whole, you will see that even those great and all-embracing truths which have been impressing you so deeply, have a very close connection with what happened in the first four years. You will be able to convince yourselves of this if you ponder it well. The younger members must bear written upon their hearts the absolute necessity of acquiring for themselves a firm and sure foundation. Wherever the work is being carried on, we are making it more and more possible for those who join later to pick up for themselves what has been accomplished here in the early days. It is really impossible for them to co-operate without this recapitulation; and the Theosophical Movement must be taken seriously in the deepest sense. In this connection we may perhaps speak to-day on a subject that concerns the theosophical attitude of mind and the whole manner of theosophical thought; and we will relate it to the significant time through which we are passing. I mean the question: “What is the right attitude for the theosophist to take with regard to Theosophy itself?”

What is here meant will be clearer if I put the question in another way: “Why is Theosophy taught to-day at all as it is taught? Why is information given about the higher worlds, information that is the result of spiritual research and clairvoyant consciousness? Could one not perhaps proceed in quite a different way?” Let us suppose, e.g., that we were to begin by giving each person certain instructions as to how he can develop those inner faculties which at present are dormant within his soul, so that by means of these instructions it would be possible for him gradually to penetrate into the spiritual worlds himself, without having first been given any of the facts of the higher worlds, as is done to-day.

This was indeed the custom formerly, to a certain extent: it was so before the Theosophical Movement in the modern sense came into being. For a long time it had been said: It is really not of much use for anyone to stand before the world and communicate the results of spiritual investigation. Such communications were accordingly withheld as far as possible, and only certain maxims were given to people as to how they should develop the faculties dormant within their own souls; as a rule people were not told any more than they had gradually come to see for themselves in the higher worlds. The question might now arise: Why is this path not taken to-day? Why are the results of spiritual investigation communicated to men?

This step has not been taken out of any personal preference or from any personal decision: there are good reasons for it. We shall understand it better if we constantly remind ourselves of what it is that Spiritual Science really tells us. It tells us of facts and truths from the realm of the higher super-sensible worlds; it tells us of that which clairvoyant consciousness can discover in these higher worlds.

Now it is of course true that one who hears of such things and is not himself clairvoyant cannot convince himself of the facts as such through his own immediate vision; it is quite true that he receives them and cannot prove them by clairvoyant evidence. That is true; but it would be quite wrong to imagine that the man who is not clairvoyant cannot in any way prove or have insight into the facts which are now being presented. And it would be wrong to assert that one must merely take in faith and on authority what is given out of clairvoyant consciousness. These communications would be in the highest degree imperfect, would lack something essential, if they appealed only to authority and faith. What is being given out in the right way—this has often been emphasised—can be discovered only by clairvoyant consciousness but when it has once been discovered—if only by one person—when it has once been seen and communicated, everyone can understand it by means of unprejudiced reason, that is to say by those faculties which are accessible to him on the physical plane. And it may well be said: Even if no one of those here present ever has the opportunity of proving everything immediately in the most comprehensive sense, everyone could at any rate make this possible if he had the time and the necessary mental faculties (I mean, faculties of the physical plane). Let us even consider such difficult matters as were treated of here in recent lectures, with regard to the incarnations of Zarathustra, such difficulties as, e.g. that Zarathustra's etheric body passed over into Moses²—let us even imagine that such difficult, far-reaching and significant subjects are being dealt with, even then let no one assert that he who knows these things as the result of spiritual research appeals for blind credulity! That is by no means the case. But suppose someone were to come and say: “I for my part am no clairvoyant. But here is someone asserting these things about Zarathustra and his incarnations. I will now lay hold of everything that is at my disposal on the physical plane, everything that history hands down to us, everything that is contained in the stone monuments, or in ancient religious documents, and I will test all these most carefully.” And suppose he were to say further: “Assuming that what is being said is correct, does it tally with the facts that can be externally corroborated?”—Such a person would then investigate thoroughly what can be confirmed by external means, and he would see that the more closely he investigated the more he would find corroboration for what the clairvoyant has set forth. If the word “fear” had any meaning at all in this connection, then one could say that the research of Spiritual Science might perhaps really feel fear of an inexact examination; but it could never fear those who are ready to follow fully and accurately the paths of material investigation. For such people will see that the more closely they pursue their investigations the more corroboration they will find for the facts which the clairvoyant communicates. But for the things that are not so remote or difficult, things which are connected with karma and reincarnation, and the life between death and a new birth—for these one only needs to observe, in an open-minded way, what ordinary life has to offer. And the more this is done, the more will confirmation be found for the facts communicated by the clairvoyant; that is to say, there are possibilities enough of convincing oneself that what is acquired from super-sensible worlds can be confirmed by the outer physical world. This is something which should not be taken lightly, but which we should look upon as an essential fact. We must in our own lives put to the test the facts that only a few can really investigate, we should not. always be repeating the phrase: That must be taken on trust! Accept as little as possible on trust; examine, test and prove all the time! Only be sure that you do it in an open-minded, unprejudiced way. This, then, is the first thing upon which stress must be laid.

But now you will find that a testing of this kind requires great effort, it demands thought and work. It means that one must really set out to find confirmations in the physical world for what is stated out of clairvoyant research. And here we come to a matter of which we shall do well to speak, a matter that is closely connected with our main question. Is it not necessary, is it not even good, for the man of to-day, besides striving (as he certainly should strive) to penetrate into the spiritual world, also to occupy himself at the same time with an energetic cultivation of the ordinary means of knowledge and the ordinary methods of thought? In other words: Does the theosophist not do well to overcome the indolence that is certainly prevalent in the world to-day, and to develop his world of thought in all earnestness, to lay hold of the means by which man can be comprehended even only on the physical plane, and to turn these to his use? Is it not right that he should learn a great deal, and especially learn how to think?

It is indeed very difficult to make clear to the consciousness of the present day what is meant by this. It once happened that someone who wanted to make progress in theosophical knowledge and at the same time to learn how to think the thoughts with greater exactitude, came and asked me to recommend him what to read. I recommended him to study Spinoza's Ethics, so that he would be able to formulate in clear-cut outlines the thoughts that were being given him. Not many weeks afterwards he wrote to me that he could not see why he should study this book; it was rather voluminous and the whole object was simply to prove the existence of God, which he had never doubted; therefore he saw no need to wade through long trains of thought in order to prove the existence of God!

This is an example of just that kind of indolence with which men approach Theosophy or Spiritual Science to-day. They are very soon satisfied when they have come to some belief or other, and they fight shy of the trouble of building it up for themselves, bit by bit, into conceptions which are, admittedly, troublesome to acquire. But for such persons the only possible result is blind faith, whereas you will find that it ceases to be blind faith if you will really school your thinking and not simply want, out of curiosity, to develop those powers which lead to an elementary stage of clairvoyance. I do not, of course, say that this could not run parallel, but we need to train at the same time the physical powers of thought, those faculties of knowledge that have been given to us here on the physical plane; these must be trained too, even if it is irksome, in order that we may be in a position to form clearly defined ideas and clearly defined concepts of what is communicated to us from out of the higher worlds. It is very easy to imagine that it is better to have clairvoyance in the very smallest degree than it is to understand through the reasoning mind ever so many of the facts of the higher worlds. It might easily be said: “I really do not know why I am a member of this Society; we are always being told things about the higher worlds; all that is quite nice, but I would much prefer it if I could catch the merest glimpse of them myself by means of clairvoyant vision.”—I know a very learned theosophist who had an intense longing to get beyond mere learning to direct vision, and he expressed this longing as follows: “If only I could once be able to see even the tip of the tail of one of these elemental beings!” Such a remark is quite understandable. This particular theosophist would never have been ready to give up his knowledge of theosophical truth in exchange; but there might well be someone ready to do so, if he could gain only a small degree of clairvoyant vision. Such a feeling would, however be wrong from every point of view. For we must consider the age in which we live. It is the age which, in the whole evolution of man, is the epoch when conscious thought must be developed, just as in the ancient Indian period a quite different kind of consciousness was evolved, a consciousness that was reminiscent of a dim, shadowy clairvoyance; the powers of the present day have gradually been developing ever since that time. It is only we in this age, who in conjunction with the development of the Spiritual Soul have brought human thinking into the sphere of earth-evolution. For this reason Theosophy must now, at this time, be brought down out of the super-sensible world and must make its appeal to the reasoned thinking of men.

We need to distinguish clearly between two conditions. Firstly: a man may not be much of a thinker, his thinking may indeed be quite primitive and yet he may at the same time be comparatively far advanced as regards vision on the astral plane, and even, up to a certain point, on the devachanic plane; he may be quite advanced in this respect and able to see a great deal. Or again, the other case is possible: A man who knows a great deal about the theosophical truths may yet be able to see nothing at all for himself, may not be in the position, as we were saying, to see even “the tip of the tail” of an elemental being! This is also quite possible. Now let us ask ourselves: What is really the inner connection between these different faculties of the human soul?

Here it must be emphasised that to have something, and to be conscious of what we have, are two distinct things. It is extraordinarily important to grasp this point. You will understand it rightly if the question is put somewhat differently. You were all once clairvoyant, in primeval times everyone was clairvoyant, and there was a time too when men were able to look back into the far, far past. And now you may ask: But how is it that we do not remember our former incarnations if we were once able to look back through the ages? Then you may ask: If we become clairvoyant now, will that help us in the next incarnation to look back?

This fact you must have clearly before you, that the old clairvoyance is of no use for looking back to-day. You once had this clairvoyance. How is it, then, that the majority of people to-day do not remember their former incarnations? This question is of the greatest importance. People do not remember their former incarnations—although in earlier epochs they were clairvoyant to a greater or less degree—because in those times they had not developed the faculties which are the faculties of the self, of the ego. For the development of clairvoyant faculties in the general sense is not the essential point.

Let me make this clear to you by a comparison. Imagine that when you woke up in the morning you could remember nothing about your experiences of the day before.—Now however clairvoyant people may have been in former times, if they did not pay attention to the development of the faculties of the ego, namely, the faculty of thinking, the power of discrimination, which are the special faculties of the human ego on this earth, then the ego was not actively present in the former incarnations, the self-hood was not there! What, then, is there for people to remember? A self-contained ego must be there in the previous incarnation. That is the whole point! So that to-day it is only those people who in their earlier incarnations have worked through the medium of thought, of logic, of discrimination, who can remember those incarnations. Thus however advanced a man is in clairvoyance, if he has not in former incarnations worked through the power of discrimination, of logical thinking, he cannot remember a former incarnation. For he had not at that time set up the signpost as it were, to which his recollection has to go back. So you will see that when one understands Spiritual Science, one cannot too quickly set to work to acquire just these very faculties of genuine thought.

Now perhaps you will say: But when I am clairvoyant I shall already have mastered the faculty of logical thinking. That is not so! Why have the Gods allowed human beings to exist at all? Because it was only in human beings that they could cause faculties to develop which otherwise could not have been developed at all. The power to think, to picture something in thoughts in which there is the quality of discrimination—this faculty can be developed only on this our earth; formerly it did not exist, it could only come about through the fact of the existence of human beings. We might take the following comparison.—Suppose you have a grain of corn—of wheat, let us say. However long you look at it, no wheat will grow out of it. You must put it in the soil and let it grow, you must let the growth-forces work upon it. That which the divine-spiritual Beings had before the formation of man may be compared to the grain of wheat. If this “grain of wheat” was to come to life in the form of thoughts, it had first to be cultivated by human beings on the physical plane. The only possible means of cultivating thoughts on the earth from the higher world is through human incarnations. So that the thoughts of men on the physical plane have a character which is entirely their own and must lead up to what is possible in the higher worlds. It was necessary for the Gods that there should be men on the earth. The Gods allowed men to come into being in order to preserve through them in the form of thought what they had had in the higher worlds. Thus what comes down from the higher worlds would never have taken form in thought, if man had not been able to give it this form. And he who will not think, on the earth, deprives the Gods of what they have reckoned upon, and he cannot accomplish what is his real human task and destiny upon earth. For he can only attain this in an incarnation wherein he really labours at the development of his powers of thought. If this is realised, all the rest follows from it.

That which brings revelations, real facts about the spiritual world, can enter the human soul in manifold ways. It is certainly possible for men to come to clairvoyant vision without being clear thinkers, and indeed this is very frequently the case to-day. The majority of those who become clairvoyant are not clear thinkers. But those who are clear thinkers and those who are not will have very different experiences in the spiritual world. The difference might be expressed thus: What is revealed from out of the higher worlds impresses itself most clearly into those forms of mental perception which we bring to the higher worlds as thoughts. Thoughts are the best vehicle for the revelations.

But if we are not thinkers, the revelations must seek other forms, e.g. a picture. The most usual way for one who is not a thinker to receive revelations is in the form of a sense-image. And you may often hear those who are visionary clairvoyants without being thinkers, describe in sense-images what they have seen. These may have beauty; but we must at the same time be aware that a thinker has a different. subjective experience from a non-thinker. If you have revelations as a non-thinker, the sense-image is there; this or that figure stands before you. It reveals itself out of the spiritual world. Let us say, you see the figure of an angel, or some symbolic form—perhaps a cross, a monstrance, a chalice. This is present in the super-sensible realm and you see it as a finished picture. You say to yourselves that it is reality—but actually it is a picture. New experiences of the spiritual world will present themselves to the subjective consciousness of the thinker in a rather different way. It will not be the same as for the non-thinker. For the thinker, the things will not suddenly be there before him as though they had been shot out of a pistol; they will appear in a different way. Take a non-thinking, visionary clairvoyant and a thinking, visionary clairvoyant. They may both receive the same revelations. Let us take some particular case. The non-thinking clairvoyant sees this or that phenomenon of the spiritual world. The thinking clairvoyant does not see it yet, but only later; and the very moment he sees it, it is taken hold of by his own thought and he can at once discriminate and know whether it is or is not truth. He sees it somewhat later, but when he does see it, it comes to him in such a form that he has already penetrated it with his thoughts, and can tell whether it is illusion or reality; so that in a sense he possesses something before he actually sees it. The revelation comes to him at the same moment as to the non-thinking clairvoyant, but he sees it later. When he sees it, however, it is already penetrated with judgment and thought, and he knows exactly whether it is an hallucination, i.e. whether his own desires are being objectivised, or whether it is objective reality. That is the difference in the subjective experiences of the two clairvoyants. The non-thinking clairvoyant sees the phenomenon at once, the thinking clairvoyant, later. In the ease of the former the picture will remain as it was; all he can do is to describe it. But the thinking clairvoyant will be able to link it up and bring it completely into line with what is present in the ordinary physical world; for the physical world, no less than the phenomenon which he has seen, is a revelation from out of the spiritual world.

From this you will see that if you approach the spiritual world equipped with the instrument of thought, you will be able to bring reliable judgment to bear upon what is presented to you.

But now something else follows. A person might dispute the value of communications from the spiritual world if he has not seen the phenomena for himself. Let us imagine a third person as well as the two mentioned. This third person is not clairvoyant at all but is informed of the results of spiritual investigation in so far as they have been acquired by clairvoyance combined with clear thinking. He looks upon them as reasonable. Yes, they are facts from the spiritual world. The thinking clairvoyant has acquired them, and anyone who has grasped them with his reason possesses them, even if he is not conscious of it. You do not need to be at all clairvoyant, yet you have the full value in yourself of what has been communicated to you.. There is a difference between having something and being conscious that one has it. The relation of a non-clairvoyant theosophist to a clairvoyant theosophist can become clear by thinking of the following.—Imagine that you had been given a legacy, but had not yet heard about it. If this were the case, the legacy would nevertheless have its value for you. Even if you do not hear about it until later, yet you possess it all the same. So it is with whoever learns of the facts of the spiritual world through Spiritual Science. They are his, if he has grasped them in an understanding way; he possesses them and need only wait for the time when he will become conscious of them. The becoming conscious of them, however, is not of equal significance with their possession. This is particularly noticeable after death. Which is of more use—if we may put it thus trivially, to make the meaning clear—which is of more use to man after death: to see something in a visionary way, without thought, or to receive purely theosophical communications without seeing things in a visionary way?

One could easily imagine that visionary sight would be a better preparation for death than merely to hear of the facts of the spiritual world. And yet the truth is that after death, what a man has simply seen in a visionary way is of very little use to him, while on the other hand an actual reality is immediately present, as soon as he becomes conscious of what he has received in spiritual communications, if he has grasped these with his understanding. It is what has been understood that is of value after death, whether it has been seen or not.

Consider the deepest Initiate. Through his clairvoyance he can behold the whole spiritual world! But this will not enhance his significance after death, if he is not able to express these facts in human concepts. All that will help him after death is what he has possessed here on earth in the form of clear concepts of thought. There are the seeds for the life after death. Of course anyone who is a thinker as well as a visionary clairvoyant can turn his visions to good account. But two non-thinking persons, of whom one is clairvoyant and the other merely listens to the results of the clairvoyance—these two will be in exactly the same position after death. There is no difference between them, for what we take into the life after death is what we acquire for ourselves here by means of clear thinking. This springs up like a seed; but not so, what we have merely already seen on earth of the worlds we now enter. What we receive here from the higher worlds is not given to us as a free gift so as to make it easier for us when we leave the physical plane, but in order that we may translate it into the current coin of the earth. What we have thus translated, just so much helps us after death. That is the essential thing.

Thus it is in regard to the life after death. But here on the physical plane too, the case of the visionary clairvoyant is different from that of the thinking clairvoyant. It is interesting and beautiful to see into the spiritual worlds, but none the less there is a difference when the spiritual worlds are beheld merely in a visionary way. Apart from the fact that it is impossible to be secure from illusions—and the only way to avoid illusions is to apply clear thinking to what has been seen—apart from this, let us suppose that a visionary clairvoyant has perceived this or that; then the form in which he perceives it, and which you can discover from his own account of it, is penetrated by elements of the physical plane. Has anyone ever described to you an angel that was not permeated by elements of the physical plane? He had wings. So have the birds. He had a human-shaped body. So has every human being on the physical plane. The things the visionary clairvoyant describes are, it is true, put together in a fashion that is not to be found on the physical plane, but the pictures are nevertheless composed of elements of the physical plane. This is not without justification; but you will see that such a picture has within it something that belongs to the earth. The forms and pictures in your vision that are taken from the physical plane do not belong to the spiritual world, they only give a picture of the spiritual world in the domain of the senses. This I have set forth clearly in my Occult Science, which has now been completed. I have there shown that present-day clairvoyance must indeed be of a pictorial character in its early stages, but that it must not remain there, it must develop to the point where the last remnant of what is earthly in the visions is cast aside. There is of course a certain danger for the clairvoyant when he thus strips off the last remnant of earth. For example, when he sees the angel and then strips off all that is earthly, he is faced with the danger of seeing nothing at all! What is it that can prevent one from losing the vision altogether on entering actually into the spiritual world? The seed that can spring up out of thinking! Thoughts afford the substance whereby what is in the spiritual world may be comprehended. We acquire the power really to live in the spiritual world by comprehending, in our world of the senses, what is no longer permeated by sense-elements and yet is on the physical plane. Thoughts alone fulfil this condition. The only thing we may bring into the spiritual world is thoughts. With regard to a circle, for example, nothing of the chalk drawing of it, but simply and solely our thoughts about a circle. With these thoughts you can ascend into the spiritual worlds. You must bring nothing of the picture with you.

And now I can describe the above-mentioned subjective process more exactly. Let us suppose, for example, that something is seen in the field of spiritual vision, let us say, a monstrance. I will now characterise the two clairvoyants, the merely visionary and the thinking clairvoyant, by supposing that the one sees the monstrance here (a) and the other, the thinking clairvoyant, only sees it here (b)

It is only from this point onwards that he becomes conscious of it. He receives it, however, immediately with thoughts, he penetrates it with thought. But at the moment when the thinking clairvoyant fills his image with thoughts, it becomes indistinct for the visionary clairvoyant. It becomes black and indistinct here at this point (b) and reappears only after some time. Just at the point where thought can unite with the image, it becomes indistinct for the visionary clairvoyant; he is really never in a position to unite thought with it, therefore he never has the experience: ‘I was there with my ego’. This experience can never come to the merely visionary clairvoyant.

All this takes us more intimately into the whole question, and it is exceedingly important to reflect upon it. It leads us to consider the necessity of developing our thinking, and of overcoming the disinclination to acquire an understanding knowledge for ourselves. It is a thousand times better to have grasped the ideas of Spiritual Science with thought first of all, and then—sooner or later, each according to his karma—to be able oneself to ascend into the spiritual worlds; a thousand times better than to have ‘seen’ straight-away and not to have grasped with thought the knowledge that is imparted in the Movement known as the Theosophical. A thousand times better it is indeed, to know Theosophy and to see nothing as yet, than to see something and not be able to penetrate it with thought, for that is how unreliability is introduced.

You can express the matter even more exactly, as follows.—You say: There are at the present time very clear thinkers who can understand the theosophical view of the world in an intellectual way. How is it that it is sometimes just these people who have such difficulty in reaching clairvoyance?—Those who are not clear thinkers find it comparatively easy to become clairvoyant, and they are then apt to feel themselves superior to the thinkers, whilst the latter find it difficult to become clairvoyant at all. Here is the point—distant by a hair's breadth only—where a certain arrogance in disguise begins to assert itself. There is indeed hardly anything that breeds and fosters pride so much as a clairvoyance which has not been illumined with thought, and that is why it is so dangerous, because the clairvoyant does not as a rule consider himself proud at all, but very humble. He has no notion of the pride that consists in undervaluing the activity of thought and laying the chief emphasis on inspirations. It is a terrible form of pride, a masked pride.

The question is really as follows: How is it that for many a thinker—as experience teaches us—it is so exceedingly difficult to come to the point of being clairvoyant? This is connected with an important fact. What we call power of discrimination, power of judgment in man, in other words the logical thinking of the thinker, brings about a definite change in the whole structure of the human brain. Clear thinking causes a change in the physical instrument of the brain. Scientific research knows little of this, but it is a fact that a physical brain that has been used by a thinker has a different appearance from the brain which belongs to a non-thinker. The fact of being clairvoyant does not change it much. The brain of a non-thinker has very complicated convolutions, but that of a clear thinker is comparatively simple, without any special complications. Thinking actually expresses itself in the simplification of the convolutions of the brain. Present-day research knows nothing of this. Clear thinking is thinking that can survey wide vistas, not the thinking that occupies itself with analysis. Hence the greater simplicity of the brain-convolutions of a clear thinker. Whenever scientific research does condescend in any way to test clear thinking in its connection with material conditions, then it very soon appears that scientific research corroborates the statements of Spiritual Science. The examination of the brain of Mendeleeff to whom science owes the exposition of the periodic system of the elements confirms what Spiritual Science says. His brain-convolutions were simpler than usual. Within certain limits he had the power of comprehensive thinking, and physical examination bore out absolutely the truth of what I have said.—I do not mention this as being of any very special value but only by the way.—Thus, as I have said, a change comes about in the instrument, and this change must be brought about by the activity of thought itself. No one is born with all the faculties he will possess later; he may have tendencies in certain directions, but the faculties themselves he must first develop. So it is a fact that changes take place in the brain in the course of a man's life. After a life of thought the instrument of thinking is different from what it was before.

Now the fact is that our etheric body, which for clairvoyant consciousness must be loosened from the physical brain, becomes more closely bound to the brain through the activity of thought. Thinking chains the etheric body firmly to the brain. If through his karma anyone has not yet the forces necessary to loosen it again at the right time, it may be that he cannot get far in clairvoyance in this incarnation; this depends on his karma. Supposing that in a former incarnation his karma had ordained him to be a clear thinker, then at the present time his thinking will not bind his etheric body so strongly to the brain; he will be able to set free his etheric body comparatively easily, and for the very reason that the elements of thought are the best preparation for ascending into the higher worlds—for this very reason he can investigate the secrets of the higher worlds in the most intimate way. Of course he must first set free again the etheric body from the brain. But if with what one may call the fine chiseling of thought the etheric body has become so caught in the physical brain that it is exhausted, then his karma may perhaps make him wait a long time before he can set it free again. When, however, the etheric body does become free, it will mean that he has passed the point of logical thought. Then what he has acquired can never be lost; no one can take it away from him. That is an essential and important fact, because otherwise clairvoyance can often be lost again after it has been acquired. Let me remind you once again that you were all clairvoyant in earlier times. Why is it that you no longer possess the faculty of clairvoyance? It is because in former times you were not bound to the earth's existence, because you were remote, in spiritual worlds; you did not bring the spiritual world down into your faculties; your visionary clairvoyance was based upon the condition of being remote from the physical world.

This must be clear to us. We must inscribe these fine shades of thought upon our minds and souls; we must be clear that the task of a real occult science to-day is to impart those results of spiritual investigation which are permeated with a thinking content, so that one can always clothe the results of spiritual research in such a way as to be comprehensible through thinking to the man who is not clairvoyant. To this end they must first be combined with thought. This is why there is such difficulty with old books which speak of phenomena of the higher worlds. If you take up old books of this kind and approach them with the attitude of modern Spiritual Science, you will find something lacking in them all. These old books may impart wonderful knowledge, but they are not of much use to the man of to-day unless he is himself clairvoyant and knows how to place the knowledge rightly. In the case of modern Spiritual Science, however, anyone who takes pains is able to make something of what it presents, because he can permeate it with the element of thought he acquires on the physical plane. For the same concepts are used to grasp what is in the spiritual world and what is in the physical world. Present-day Natural Science speaks of evolution; so does Spiritual Science. If you have grasped the concept of evolution you can understand what is set forth in Spiritual Science. You can create a concept of karma, because you can create a picture of it in thought. Of course if you simply say, as many theosophists do: “Every spiritual cause has a spiritual effect and this is karma”, you have then no conception of karma. You can see the law of cause and effect in a billiard ball, but that would be no right comparison for karma. But now take an iron ball and throw it into a vessel of water. If the ball is cold the water will remain as it is. But if you make the ball hot and then throw it in, the water will get warm as a result of what has been done to the ball. Here we have something which may be compared with karma; here we have a later event that is the result of an earlier.

It must be quite clear to us that one who permeates the facts of the spiritual world with thought can also impart them in such a way that everyone who has thoughts acquired here on the physical plane can apply these same thoughts to what is imparted from the spiritual worlds. If he does this he can understand it. Everyone ought to keep this in mind. Everyone ought to understand that the important thing is, not the fact that we receive knowledge from the higher worlds, but how we receive it—that we receive it in a way that is suited to our present earthly conditions. We must see to it that we do not receive knowledge from the higher worlds in any other way. It is tempting just to believe what is told us but this is very wrong. If someone is willing just to believe, it is as though he wanted merely to be told that there is a light; whereas he needs the light to light up his room! He must have the light; mere belief is no use. Thus it is important first of all to understand the nature of thorough, conscientious thinking, so that the knowledge of the spiritual world may be received through this channel. The knowledge can only be discovered if one has the power of clairvoyance; but when it has been discovered and investigated, it can be understood by everyone who receives it in the right way.

If one thinks in this way, then all the dangers which are otherwise bound up with what is called the Theosophical Movement, will be, in the main, averted. These very dangers will however immediately arise if people develop clairvoyant powers and do not see to it that their thinking, and more especially their perception and discernment, are enriched at the same time through their own thinking. Many people have the desire just to seize hold of something out of the spiritual world instead of carefully bringing their perceptive thought to bear upon what has after all to be acquired on the physical plane. Even a God cannot comprehend the world in terms of thought unless he incarnates on this physical earth. He can comprehend the world in other forms and ways, but to comprehend it in this form he must incarnate upon the earth. If you reflect upon this it will be clear to you that there are certain dangers connected with the development of faculties within oneself which are then wrongly used. He who develops a certain visionary clairvoyance and uses it wrongly by cutting off all possibility of convincing the world with it, he who remains on the astral plane alone and does not bring his experiences down on to the physical plane, is laying himself open to the danger that an abyss will open between his visions and the physical plane. Let us suppose that someone has had visions of real significance which belong to the astral plane. They may be true visions of reality—for this may happen even with the non-thinking, visionary clairvoyant. But now between him and the real foundations of the physical plane there opens out an abyss. Imagine for a moment that this cloth were the physical plane. The visionary clairvoyant is standing in front of it; he sees his vision. But behind the physical plane is the real spiritual world; the physical plane is Maya. The visionary clairvoyant does not strip away the physical plane; this can be done only by one who makes use of the means of thought. Then only do you penetrate behind the physical plane; only with thinking clairvoyance can you ever understand it. The physical plane is there, but you do not see the spiritual world, the real spiritual world. The abyss opens before you, and the physical plane remains as Maya. And the impossibility of penetrating through the physical plane rests upon the fact that the brain is not capable of eliminating itself. If you have learnt to think rightly, you do not directly use your brain in thinking. Thinking works on the brain, but the activity of thinking does not directly need the brain; it is nonsense to assert that the brain itself thinks.

About 35 years ago I was once walking along the street with a young student who was then well on the way to becoming an out-and-out materialist. He said “When a man thinks, the brain atoms are vibrating; every definite thought has a definite form”—and then he continued to speak of how it is really nonsense to presuppose anything like a soul which can think, for it is the brain which does the thinking.—I said to him: “Yes, but now tell me, why do you tell such fibs? If this is true you cannot say: I think! You must say: my brain thinks, And you must also say: My brain eats, my brain sees the sun! You would then be speaking the truth.” He would soon see then what nonsense he had been carrying about in his head.

So it is not the brain that thinks. It needs no very serious consideration, to get this point clear, unless one is a thorough-going modern materialist. Unless you are a ‘Monist’ in the modern sense of the word, you can easily be clear on this point. The activity of thinking is not primarily dependent on having the brain as its instrument. When thinking becomes pure, the brain is not involved. It only plays a part when a sense-picture is made. If you have a picture of a chalk circle in your mind, then this picture has been formed by the brain, but when you think of a pure circle apart from all sense-qualities, then the circle is itself the active element that gives form to the brain. Now when a man has visionary clairvoyance he remains in his etheric body and does not reach the physical brain. But the abyss can never be bridged by this method. What is there seen clairvoyantly is connected with what is behind the physical plane. He who scorns the path of thought develops powers which, so to speak, do not attain their object, do not really penetrate into the spiritual world. And the consequence is that there is a false relationship between what is continually being developed in his etheric body, and what he really is as man. The relationship is entirely false; his brain is not developed to the level of his clairvoyant faculties. The brain is crude, for the man has made no effort to ennoble it through thinking. It is crude, it has built up a barrier which it cannot penetrate and which hinders him from reaching spiritual reality in his visions. He goes away from reality, instead of coming nearer to it. And every possibility of making a judgment about the spiritual world is taken away. Such a man may certainly be able to see a great deal; but there is never any guarantee that what he sees will correspond with the reality. He alone is capable of judging who can distinguish between mere vision and reality. It is only the power of discrimination that can discriminate, and if this is lacking, mere vision can never be distinguished from reality. But this power of discrimination can be acquired only by effort on the physical plane. Thus one will be for ever hovering about without firm foundations if one scorns the activity of thinking—hard and troublesome as it is.

This is what we must have clearly in our minds. Then it will be impossible for conditions to arise which otherwise arise so easily and may recur again and again, when by developing visionary clairvoyance men build up a dam against the world of reality and live in their dreams—which comes to the same thing as losing one's bearings in the physical world, as being not quite in one's right mind. Mere visionary clairvoyance easily leads to this. One can acquire the power of thoughtful discrimination. by working in the only sphere where this can be developed, namely in the sphere of thinking, on the physical plane. If you despise the acquisition of this thoughtful discrimination, you will stray far from the path of truth. Discrimination is what we need, otherwise we shall bring about all the ills that are necessarily connected with what is called the Theosophical Movement. He who gives himself up to blind belief, who merely accepts without reasoned thought all the communications from the higher worlds on the authority of another, will be doing something that is pleasant and easy, but in itself is fraught with danger. Instead of working the things out for himself and reflecting upon them, he accepts the knowledge of another, he assimilates the things that another person has seen, and refuses to test by means of his own thought what has been communicated. This is the cause of the ills to which the Theosophical Movement is liable—but of course this should not frighten anyone from attaching themselves to it. It may happen that a person, who has blind belief of this kind loses his bearings altogether and can no longer discriminate between what is true and what is untrue. Nothing can breed untruthfulness as effectively as a certain kind of visionary clairvoyance which is not supported and controlled by thought. And on the other hand, such clairvoyance breeds another quality, namely, a certain haughtiness and superiority which can even lead to megalomania. This is all the more dangerous because it is often not noticed. There is very serious danger of coming to think oneself superior because one sees something that another person does not see. And usually there is no idea of how deeply embedded in the soul this self-importance that borders on megalomania can be. It conceals itself in a certain way, especially when the (clairvoyant swears by his own visions with absolute certainty and suffers no one to take exception to them. So we sometimes find people believing the most ridiculous rubbish, just because it has been communicated to them “from the astral plane”. They would never dream of believing such things if they had been told them as matters belonging to the physical plane; but if they are told them “from the astral plane” they believe them with the most slavish credulity. Whoever has freed himself from this habit will not be led astray by this or that swindle or humbug. But people will fall into the trap unless they develop within themselves the impulse to prove and test, instead of accepting and believing without effort or exertion. We must not make it easy for ourselves; we must consider it one of the most sacred tasks of man to reach a right conviction. If we think of it in this light, we shall spare no effort of real work, and we shall not merely listen to sensational communications from the spiritual world. Of communications from the spiritual world we have, so to speak, enough. It is necessary that we should have them, but it is also necessary to acquire the right attitude and the right kind of thinking to receive these things worthily.

This is what I wanted to say to you to-day. I did not want to say it merely as an admonition or a sermon. I wanted to show the whole basis and for this reason it may have been rather difficult to keep pace with it in your thought; but in the methods I use I always try to adhere to what may be rightly looked for in the Theosophical Society. Many people like pious exhortations. I dislike them! I try to present things in such a way that they can clothe themselves in true forms of thought. When things of the physical plane are expounded, as has been done to-day, it does of course often entail hard thinking; for such things are neither as sensational nor as attractive as communications from the higher worlds. They are nevertheless of extraordinary importance. And you will not undervalue their importance if you say to yourselves: If that is really to come to pass which ought to come to pass, namely, that in the course of ensuing incarnations a sufficiently large number of people have a memory of this present incarnation, then provision for this must be made beforehand. Develop, therefore, your power of judgment; then you are candidates for the memory, in your next incarnation, of the present one. See to it that you are able to follow the world with your thoughts. For however much you can see m a visionary way, it will give you no help in remembering back to the present incarnation. And it is the mission of Spiritual Science to prepare the way for what must needs come—namely, that there may be a sufficiently large number of people who out of their own knowledge can look back to this present incarnation. How many come to the point in this incarnation of accompanying their knowledge of Spiritual Science with clairvoyant powers depends on the karma of each individual. There are certainly many sitting here whose karma will not allow them to see the world clairvoyantly in this incarnation. But all those who acquire what is given in true Spiritual Science, clothed as it is in the forms of thought, will reap the fruits of it in the next incarnation; for in this one they will have laid the right foundation. A man may, so to speak, be a clairvoyant without knowing it; and one who studies Spiritual Science in the right way has the insight and can wait until his karma also allows him actually to behold the things for himself.

• 1. In connection with the use of the words ‘Theosophy’, ‘theosophical’, in this text, it will be remembered that from the beginning of the century until the years 1911 or 1912, Dr. Steiner had been able to work as an independent teacher within the framework of the Theosophical Society and was the General Secretary of the German Section. His teaching of the unique nature and position of the Christ was at variance with the tendencies which had come to prevail in that Society and the statements on this subject made by its leaders, and Dr. Steiner's association with it inevitably came to an end. In 1912 the Anthroposophical Society was provisionally founded and its Headquarters established at Dornach in 1913.
• 2. cp. The Alpha and the Omega. Lecture given in Berlin, 25.V.O9; also lectures 4 and 5 of the Course on The Gospel of St. Luke.

Today we will discuss some topics that have played a certain role in our current development of the spiritual movement within Germany. As you know, and as some of you have already experienced, we have discussed the various spiritual truths and insights based on the Gospels. We have talked about what can be said in connection with the Gospel of John in a wide variety of places, and we have also discussed what can be said in connection with the Gospel of Luke. Now, admittedly, not all of you have heard these things. Nor is it intended to speak today in the sense of presupposing something of what has been said there. Rather, it is intended only to mention to you some of the overall field of this spiritual-scientific field, which must be important for everyone.

It has often been mentioned here in Stuttgart that Christianity, and everything connected with it, has made a deep incision in the overall development of humanity and that what is happening around us today, what the human soul can experience today, cannot be properly understood without considering the full significance of the Christ event within our Earth's history. For every single human soul, it is of infinite importance to become acquainted with the significance of this event.

Now you know that this Christ event for humanity is described in four documents, in the so-called four Gospels. You are all familiar with these four documents and have certainly followed them in a variety of ways. These four documents, the Gospel according to Matthew, the Gospel according to Mark, the Gospel according to Luke and the Gospel according to John, have met with the most diverse fates in the course of human development since the founding of Christianity. Great transformations have taken place in the judgment and position of man regarding these four documents. If we ask ourselves first how these four documents appear to today's man, even to today's theologian, the answer is quite obvious. One says to oneself: First of all, we have the three documents of the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke. They at least agree – so the general opinion today – on some points. But the fourth, the Gospel of John, is quite different from these three documents. At first, this Gospel of John makes such an impression on people that they say to themselves: If we take the first three Gospels as historical documents, as descriptions of the life of Christ Jesus, then the fourth document contradicts the first three so fundamentally that we cannot take this fourth as a description that corresponds to the historical facts. Thus, the opinion exists that this fourth document is merely a writing that arose from the confession of a man who was faithfully devoted to the mission of Christ Jesus, a kind of hymn that arose from the heart to express in an enthusiastic way what the narrator had to say. The other three gospels are also called the canonical gospels because they attempt to provide a kind of historical picture and because it is believed that they reflect the historical facts to a certain extent. However, if one wants to look for contradictions that the external mind, bound to physical conditions, seeks, then the first three gospels truly present such contradictions. For should there be no contradictions in the fact that the Gospel of Matthew tells of the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, tells of the flight to Egypt, of the appearance of the Magi from the Orient, whereas the Gospel of Luke tells of a journey to Bethlehem, but completely omits what is told in the Gospel of Matthew about the Magi, that the flight to Egypt is kept secret and so on? We do not want to go into the details of the three years of Christ Jesus' ministry. We could find contradiction upon contradiction.

Now one could raise the question: How has the development of the judgment about the Gospels actually progressed over the course of Christian times? Was it always the case that people looked at the Gospels and saw contradictions in them above all else? We must be clear about how this development of judgment about the Gospels has taken place. It is not so very long ago that people have had access to the Gospels as they do today. They have only been available to the general public for a short time. Before the invention of the printing press, the Gospels were basically only in the hands of a few people, and truly not of the most ignorant, but of those people who had studied them in the most erudite way, who had made them the subject of their lives. And it is not the case that the further back in time we go, the more and more people said: There are contradictions – but the opposite is true. The further back we go, the more it appears that these contradictions were not perceived, that people had the four gospels next to each other and did not see the contradictions. The whole mood that people had towards the Gospels was quite different in the first Christian centuries. If we wanted to characterize this mood, we would have to say that the people of the first Christian centuries were filled with tremendous reverence for what is described in the Gospels. This whole mood was permeated by looking up to the great figure of Christ Jesus.

So how were the Gospels perceived? How did people perceive the fact that the Gospel of Matthew tells a different story than the Gospel of Luke? They perceived it similarly to how someone today - I have already used the comparison in the various lectures that have been given here and there - photographs a tree from one side. A photograph like this gives a view of the tree. If you went among people with it and wanted to create an impression of the tree based on it, this impression would be highly one-sided. And you could hope to create a more accurate impression of the tree if you photographed it from four sides. Then you would show four pictures of the one tree. These would agree with each other very little, they would be very different. Nevertheless, no one would have the feeling that it could not be that these four photographs were the pictures of a single tree. Everyone would say: I can only get a somewhat complete picture of the tree by having seen it from four sides. That is more or less how people in the early centuries of Christianity felt about the Gospels. They said: the whole great event is described from four sides, and we get a complete picture of it when we really take these four descriptions together and thus, so to speak, get an overall view. But then we must be clear about how these four descriptions from the sides actually relate to each other. The great event is indeed described from four different points of view. If we want to understand what each individual point of view describes, we must first realize the following.

We have before us an enormous individuality, Christ Jesus, an individuality of whom we know from descriptions already given here that he descended from the spiritual world and appeared in Palestine at the beginning of our era. What came to earth as an individuality now appears as a great, all-embracing ideal for every single human being. The individual human being strives upwards, as it were, intuiting that perfection in an individuality that is expressed in the Christ Jesus, and strives towards this ideal. Now, in the beginning, man sees what he can regard as his striving in intellectual, moral and so on. But he sees even more when he enters into what we call the spiritual-scientific movement. There he sees the development into the spiritual world. He knows that man can grow beyond his ordinary self, that he can grow to see into the spiritual world, that he can develop his spiritual senses in order to live up into the spiritual world. That is what man recognizes. In the essay “How to Know Higher Worlds” you have described one side of this upward life, of entering into the spiritual worlds, in which you have described what is called “splitting of the personality”. When a person develops spiritually so that he gradually grows into the spiritual worlds and becomes a seer himself, something similar to a kind of splitting of the personality does indeed occur. Three forces are initially expressed in the personality: thinking, feeling and willing. These three forces are, so to speak, united in the ordinary person; they work together, thinking, feeling and willing. You go out into the meadow, see a flower, that is, you have an idea of the flower; you have thought. You like the flower; you call it beautiful, that is, you have felt. A feeling has connected with thinking. You pluck the flower and take it home, that is, you have desired it. And so the entire outer life of man actually flows. He perceives, thinks, feels and wills, and the three go into each other. Perception gives rise to feeling, feeling to will or abhorrence and the like. When man now develops upward into the higher worlds, develops himself to clairvoyance, to participation in the spiritual worlds, then a splitting of these three forces takes place. In him who has reached a certain level of clairvoyant consciousness, not every thought evokes a feeling, but the thought occurs in isolation, and the feeling can occur in isolation and the will can occur in isolation. And precisely because he is divided into three beings, so to speak, whereas otherwise thinking, feeling and willing are only powers in his soul, man must become all the stronger in his individuality. He must not only then balance three powers, but become master of three beings, of a willing being, of a feeling being, of a thinking being. He must be the leader of a band of these three entities. He must create order; he must rule them, otherwise something evil will happen: the will will pull him in one direction and the intellect in the other, and he will then really be split and no longer find his way. Therefore, man must grow strong within himself, become powerful, so that he can be master in the entities that have become his soul forces. When man therefore develops upwards into the higher worlds, he splits himself, so to speak, into three different entities. When the entities come to meet us from above out of the spiritual worlds and one sees them in their actual entity, which one can only recognize through spiritual vision, then they appear from the outset sharply separated as thinking beings, volitional beings and feeling beings. That is what man develops them into.

This was particularly the case with the great individuality who came to us as the Christ. Therefore, those who first described the Christ said: You cannot describe the Christ by choosing only one point of view; you have to describe him as you first see a thinking, wisdom-filled being, then as you see a willing being, and then as you see a feeling being. He must be described from the point of view of wisdom, from the point of view of will, from the point of view of feeling. That is how one must describe him, people said. And they were especially prepared for this by the whole education that was customary in ancient times. If a person was to be developed at all into the higher worlds - today something different is needed for the first steps of attaining higher knowledge; in ancient times a different approach was taken - when someone was ripe to be led up, so to speak, to be made a citizen of the spiritual worlds, it was said: Well, he is ripe to be led up into the higher worlds. But let us take a closer look at him! Should we particularly develop wisdom or thinking powers or will in him?

In the old secret schools, not all powers were developed equally. Depending on the karma of the person concerned, one person's thinking was developed to the point of clairvoyance, another's feeling to the point of clairaudience, and a third's will to the point of magical power. Therefore, in the old secret schools there were three classes of developed abilities, those pupils who had developed especially the ability to see through illumination, to see the spiritual world with wisdom - these were the people in the mysteries who were asked when one wanted to know how things are in the higher worlds and how they are connected according to law. If we want to use a trivial expression today, we can say that they were the experts of knowledge within the mysteries. Then there was another class of initiates. In these, feeling was particularly developed. In order for this feeling to be particularly developed, they refrained from training in knowledge and will, and developed feeling in itself. When feeling is particularly developed in a person, then, as a result, he becomes a healer, a physician, something that is almost no longer known today. For in ancient times the physician had exerted a spiritual influence proceeding from the spheres of feeling, and had healed the receptive soul by means of a more highly developed feeling than exists today. This was the second class of initiates. They had trained their feeling to the highest willingness to sacrifice, to the surrender of all the powers they had within them. They divided the work among themselves. If someone wanted to know what was wrong with someone, they went to those who had developed the wisdom. They determined what was wrong and what needed to be done. Then came those who could not say what was wrong with the sick person because they had not developed the ability to think; but they came and sacrificed their strength because they had developed the powers of feeling. At the same time, these were the people who also had other functions, who showed their willingness to make sacrifices in the event of accidents or similar occurrences. The third category of initiates were the magicians. These were the ones who had developed the sphere of will. They had to take the external measures. The magicians had developed the powers of will and were able to carry out the task at hand. So there were three types of initiate: initiates of thinking, initiates of feeling, and initiates of willing. And a fourth class or category consisted of those in whom an attempt had been made to develop something of each of the three remaining faculties: something of thinking, something of feeling, and something of willing. Therefore, they did not advance as far as the others in any one sphere, but they showed how, with a certain initiation into the three spheres, things are connected. Thus there were powerful initiates of wisdom, powerful initiates of sacrifice, powerful initiates of magistery, and a fourth category, which had something of each of the first three.

When now the Christ Jesus was to be described, so to speak, from all sides, there were found - this can be explained in more detail another time, today it can only be done in broad strokes - four people who now described the abilities that were naturally united in him from their four points of view. One of them, for example, was particularly initiated into the secrets of thinking. He described the Christ Jesus from the standpoint of the one who could understand him particularly well, an initiate of wisdom. He left out the other sides. Another was an initiate of feeling. He described the Christ Jesus from the standpoint of feeling, as a physician, so to speak, as a healer. A third was an initiate of magisterial power. He described the powers that the Christ could unfold to organize all of humanity. And a fourth was an initiate of the fourth class, in which the powers worked together, working in harmony. He described primarily the human work of Christ Jesus. He did not see the full power of wisdom, of sacrificial service, nor the mighty magic strength of the willpower of Christ Jesus; but he saw how the three powers of thought, feeling and will were harmoniously combined in Christ Jesus. He described the human Christ Jesus.

Thus we have described the Christ Jesus to four initiates. The one who described the Christ Jesus as an initiate of wisdom was the writer of the Gospel of John; the one who described him as an initiate of feeling was the writer of the Gospel of Luke ; the one who described him in terms of magical power, that was the writer of the Gospel of Mark; and the one who described the harmonious synthesis of the lower three human members, that was the writer of the Gospel of Matthew. Thus each described that in Christ Jesus in which he was initiated.

Thus we shall understand that we can gain a complete picture of Christ Jesus through the four Gospels, in that they describe what was particularly close to the four personalities on which they are based. Anyone who has the necessary reverence for such a great individuality as the Christ will say: Precisely because of this I can gain a comprehensive picture, that the writers of the Gospels, each one, gave the best they could give. But that is why it is also necessary that you do not always take what is said in spiritual science in reference to the four Gospels, to the fourth for instance, or the third, or the second, or the first, as if you had the whole truth about Christ Jesus in each such chapter. It could easily have been thought from the various lectures that have been given here and there: Now the Christ Jesus has been described, and at most it would still be interesting to describe him with reference to another gospel. It is not so. One gets only the picture from one side, if one describes the Christ Jesus according to one gospel. We must wait until, in the course of our spiritual movement, the Christ Jesus has been described in connection with all four gospels. Only then will you have all the secrets that can be said about him.

Now we will have to start from a certain one-sided description in order to gather together, so to speak, a picture of Christ Jesus, but in such a way that you really have to keep to what has just been said. You must not go away today from the lecture and say: Well, now we have the truth in these matters - but you must say to yourself: It has now been described from one point of view and the other must be added and must be illuminated with what is said from other points of view.

In the Christ Jesus we actually have a confluence of all previous spiritual currents of humanity and at the same time a rebirth of the same. In the Christ Jesus, all spiritual currents flow together and are reborn, reborn to a higher degree. We could mention many such currents of pre-Christian times that arise from spiritual science in the context of those considerations that tie in with the four Gospels, currents that we see flowing together in the Christ event; but for now we will draw attention to only three currents.

First of all, there is a powerful spiritual current that has been active in Asia since ancient times. This is what we can call Zarathustrianism. A second spiritual current is that which flourished in India and reached a certain high point with the appearance of Gautama Buddha, six hundred years before our era. A third spiritual current is that which found expression in the ancient Hebrew people. So that we have the confluence in Christ Jesus of the ancient Hebrew spiritual current, then that which was realized in Gautama Buddha, and that which was associated with the name Zarathustra. We could mention many more such spiritual currents, but that would make the matter too confusing.

Now, in a certain way, everything that actually happened in Palestine at the beginning of our era comes to light in the four Gospels – if we really understand them correctly. It is not the task of spiritual science to draw from the Gospels what it has to say. Nothing at all of what is said about me is drawn from the Gospels. The only source for the spiritual researcher is what is called the Akasha Chronicle, that which can be observed clairvoyantly. If all the Gospels had been lost due to some catastrophe, everything that is said about the Christ in spiritual science could still be said. It is based on spiritual research. Only afterwards is the result of this spiritual research compared with what is in the Gospels. And that is precisely what gives the Gospels their objective reverence when one sees what is presented in the Gospels. You must never lose sight of this point of view. We are not drawing on the Gospels; therefore what I am going to tell you now is not drawn from the Gospels either. But we can compare it afterwards with what is in the Gospels, and we will find it to be in agreement.

One of the spiritual currents that then flowed into Christianity is the one that reached its peak in the personality that was incarnated in India as Gautama Buddha about six hundred years before our era. What kind of individuality is this? We understand this individuality when we consider the following: Everything that has gradually emerged in the development of humanity is precisely a product that develops and gradually settles in. You would be mistaken if you believed that the abilities of today's human beings have always been there. Today, for example, there is something called the voice of conscience. It has not always existed. We can almost grasp when conscience arose in the course of human development. If you go back to Aeschylus, you will find nothing of a description of conscience in his works. It is only in Euripides that we find a description of conscience. Thus, the Greek consciousness first developed the concept of conscience between these two. What man today calls an inner voice has only just developed. Before that, there was, within humanity, we can say, a kind of clairvoyant consciousness. If a person had done something he should not have done, a picture would appear to him like a vengeful spirit, and it would pursue him. This was what the Greeks called the Furies. He really saw the fruits and the avenging spirits of his evil deeds around him. This phenomenon, which was outside of man, has been drawn into the human soul as the voice of conscience. And so, too, did the other faculties of men come into being only gradually, and it is only short-sightedness on the part of men, who do not see farther than the end of their own noses, so to speak, which outer science amply does, to believe that men have always been as they are today.

Thus, people have not had what we might call the teaching of compassion and love. We have to imagine the teaching of compassion and love in ancient times as being very different from today. Today, people can, so to speak, go within themselves. When this or that happens outside, he can allow the feeling of compassion and love to arise within him, and he knows that this is good. He can find the principles of love and compassion within himself. This was not the case in the past; rather, in the past, it was instilled in people purely by suggestion from those charged with instilling it, and they were told how they should behave. People themselves had to be guided. There were individual leaders and guides for humanity who indicated how people should behave. The guides for humanity dictated what should be done in the way of acts of love and compassion. And those who were the guides in the field of love and compassion were in turn under higher guides and all together under a guide who is called the Bodhisattva of love and compassion. He had the mission to spread the teaching of compassion and love. But this Bodhisattva, who was the leader in terms of compassion and love, was not like an ordinary incarnated human being, in that not his entire being was absorbed in the physical human being. He had, so to speak, a connecting bridge up to the spiritual world.

The Bodhisattva of compassion and love lived only partly in the physical man; for the rest, his spiritual being reached up into the spiritual worlds. There he brought down the impulses he had to instill. If we wanted to describe this spiritually, we would have to say: the clairvoyant saw the image of the person in whom the bodhisattva was partially embodied, and behind him a mighty spiritual-astral figure that rose up into the spiritual worlds and was only partially in the physical body. That was what this bodhisattva was like. This Bodhisattva was the same one who was then reborn as the king's son Gautama Buddha in India, and for this Bodhisattva, so to speak, this was the ascent to a higher dignity. He had earlier, so to speak, allowed himself to be guided from above, had received impulses from the spiritual world and passed them on. But in this incarnation, six hundred years before our era, he was elevated to the dignity of Buddha in the twenty-ninth year of his life. That is to say, in this incarnation he experienced his entire individuality entering the physical body. While he had to remain outside as a bodhisattva with a part of himself in order to build the bridge, it was this progress to the dignity of Buddha that allowed him to be fully incarnated in the body. This enabled him not only to receive the teaching of compassion and love through inspiration, but also to look within himself and receive this teaching as the very voice of his heart. This was the enlightenment of the Buddha at the age of twenty-nine, under the bodhi tree. Then it dawned on him: the teaching of compassion and love, independent of the connections with the spiritual world, as a human soul property, that he could think the teaching of compassion and love, which he pronounced in the eightfold path. And the sermon that followed is the great teaching of compassion and love for the first time from a human breast.

This must happen with every human capacity. At some point in the development of humanity, an ability must first be expressed in an individuality; only then can it gradually develop as a separate ability in people in general. The teaching of compassion and love could only be felt as something that man brings out of himself after it has been brought by an individuality. In Oriental philosophy, this is called “turning the wheel” of dharma, compassion and love. This happened through the full individuality of the Bodhisattva sinking into the king's son Gautama Buddha. From that time on, there are people who can find the teaching of compassion and love within themselves. And it will develop in such a way that more and more people will find the teaching of compassion and love within themselves, and three thousand years after our era, a sufficient number of people will live on earth to develop in their own hearts what Buddha has found. Then the mission of the Buddha in this respect will be fulfilled on earth. For at the time when the Bodhisattva descended to become a Buddha, the dignity of the Bodhisattva was taken over by another. Until then, what we call the Buddha today was a Bodhisattva. The next rank after the Bodhisattva is that of the Buddha. From the Bodhisattva, the ascending being becomes a Buddha.

Oriental philosophy expressed it this way: When the Bodhisattva descended to earth, he handed over the crown of the Bodhisattva to his successor. This successor still lives today as a Bodhisattva. He will only ascend to the dignity of Buddha three thousand years after our present time. This is the one whom Oriental philosophy calls the Maitreya Buddha. This one is a Bodhisattva today and will be the Maitreya Buddha in three thousand years. He has a different mission from Gautama Buddha, which is connected with things that people today cannot yet find within themselves. That is a line of development. So that we can say: That Bodhisattva, who contains within himself the teaching of compassion and love, has indeed advanced to the dignity of a Buddha, and in so doing has given his mission a tremendous impetus. The fact that he was in a human body with his entire being six hundred years before our era earned him the right not to be incarnated in a physical body on earth again. In fact, the incarnation of that time was the last incarnation of this Bodhisattva. He no longer needed to incarnate in a physical body, but only needed to descend to the etheric body. All the following embodiments of the Buddha are therefore not such that he can be seen externally on the physical plane, but such that he can only be seen by those powers that enable people to see the etheric body. In the entire following period, the Buddha therefore only embodied himself in an etheric body. Six hundred years after his presence on earth, Buddha incorporated what he had to bring to humanity into what had been initiated by Christianity. He offered what he had to bring as a sacrifice to the founding of Christianity, so to speak, he let it flow in like a spiritual tributary into the great overall stream. This is the current that reaches its climax in the Buddha. That is the one current.

Another came about in the following way. We can form an idea of it by looking a little at the development of humanity itself. You all know that after the great Atlantic catastrophe, people did not have the same abilities as they do today, but that after the great Atlantic catastrophe they still had remnants of an old, dim clairvoyance. Logical thinking developed only gradually. The culture that we call ancient Indian culture was entirely a culture that emerged from ethereal clairvoyance. The Zarathustra culture was also still one in which people worked with ancient, dimmed clairvoyance, and the Chaldean-Egyptian cultures were not yet cultures in which people thought as they do today. Everything was still inspiration; it was not yet permeated with logic, but everything that came to light in Chaldean astrology and in Hermes wisdom was more or less inspired imagination. The human ability to think logically had not yet developed in these cultures. It was reserved for a completely different current to develop what could be called a logical culture, a culture of thinking. The first post-Atlantean culture was still entirely based on ethereal clairvoyance. The Zarathustra culture was still one of these as well, even if it was no longer as pronounced. Likewise, the Egyptian-Chaldean culture was still based on inspiration. Thought in those days was not yet permeated by logic; it was interwoven with imaginations that are expressed in the astrology of the Chaldeans and in the Hermes wisdom of Egypt in magnificent images.

The post-Atlantean cultures emerged from two streams. Apart from those who went west and populated present-day America, two streams of migrating people poured east under the leadership of their leaders, one in a northerly direction and the other in a southerly direction.

The northern stream, parts of which remained in Europe, penetrated further into Asia. While new cultures were developing and unfolding there, the population of Europe lived through the centuries as if biding its time. Its energies were, as it were, reserved for what was to come. In their essential cultural elements they were influenced by that great initiate who chose this field as his own as far as the Siberian regions and who is called the Scythian initiate. The leaders of the original European culture were inspired by him. This culture was not based on what came into humanity as thinking, but on an ability to absorb an element that was halfway between what could be called recitative-rhythmic language and a kind of singing accompanied by a peculiar music that no longer exists today but was based on an interplay of whistling instruments. It was a peculiar element, the last remnants of which lived in the bards and skalds. Everything that the Greek myths of Apollo and Orpheus tell us has developed from this. In addition, practical skills were developed in Europe through colonization, construction and so on.

The other masses of people migrated under the leadership of the great sun-initiates to Asia. The outpost formed the first post-Atlantean culture under the leadership of the Rishis. Further in Western Asia the most ancient Zarathustra culture developed; but we are not speaking here of the historical Zarathustra. What he brought forth is in some respects opposed to ancient India. The latter was entirely built upon ethereal clairvoyance; Zarathustra turned his gaze to the sun. He saw the spirit of the sun, the “great aura,” Ahura Mazda. Zarathustra was the first to express the peculiarities of northern culture here. All that followed is built upon this.

The other trend that came over, the southern one, formed the basis for the Chaldean-Egyptian culture, which arose from a merging of the one with the other. This can be schematically represented: Indian culture signifies the development of the human etheric body; in Persian culture, the sentient body developed; the Egyptian-Chaldean culture gave the sentient soul; it is essentially an inner culture, going through an inward path. And just as the sentient body and the sentient soul join together, so it is the case for all of humanity. This can be seen particularly in the Egyptian-Chaldean culture. The same will be the case with the consciousness soul and the spirit self. This can only happen through the transition of progressive culture into that region where spirituality has been held back: this can only happen in Europe. There the development towards the intellectual and consciousness soul had still been held back and only developed after the Christ event. It is there that the fusion with the spirit-self qualities will also be able to take place in the future. This can only happen through a spiritual current such as the spiritual-scientific one. This will be brought about by the sixth period of our culture.

While the two currents described were still under the influence of the old, dim clairvoyance, the third current, which merged with the others and prepared the Christ event, was followed by a fourth cultural current, which could be called a logical-intellectual one. To understand each other clearly, you have to realize that all clairvoyance comes about because the etheric body works independently in a certain way, namely the etheric body of the brain. Where the etheric body of the brain and the physical tool of logical thinking are strictly united, clairvoyance cannot come about. Only when the etheric body retains something in order to be independent can clairvoyance come about. When the etheric body of the brain is completely linked to the physical brain, it works out the brain in the finest way; but it also engages in the elaboration of the physical brain and nothing is left over to develop clairvoyance. But it was necessary that precisely this ability, which is connected with brain thinking, with the brain's synthesizing of the world phenomena, should make its appearance in humanity. For this to happen, something had to happen in humanity that can be characterized by saying that it had to be selected from humanity – well, let us take an individuality in whom, so to speak, what was called ancient clairvoyance was least present, whereas the physical tool of the brain was highly developed, chiseled, and carved out. This individuality was able to survey the phenomena of the external physical world in terms of measure, number, order and harmony, to seek unity in the externally manifested phenomena. While all the members of the earlier cultures knew something from the spiritual world through inspiration from within, so to speak, this individuality had to direct its gaze out into the surrounding world of phenomena, had to combine, logically weigh and say to itself: “Out there are the phenomena, everything falls into place in harmony when one sees everything in a large unified picture. That which appears as unity there appeared as unity in the external world, as God behind the phenomena of the physical plane. That was one difference compared to the other views of God. The other views of God said: The idea of God arises from within. But this individuality directed his gaze everywhere, organized the phenomena, looked at the different kingdoms of nature, brought them under one unity, in short, he was the great organizer of the world phenomena according to measure and number, who was chosen from the whole of humanity. This individuality, who was chosen from the whole of humanity, to first survey the external physical world and find the unity in it, was Abraham. Abraham or Abram was the one who was chosen, so to speak, by the spiritual-divine powers to receive this special mission, to convey to humanity the powers bound to the measure and number of external appearances. He emerged from Chaldean culture. Chaldean culture itself had recognized its astrology out of clairvoyance. Abraham, the forefather of arithmetic, emerged to find all this through combination, through the physical brain having undergone a very special process here. Thus a very special mission was entrusted to him.

Now we must bear in mind that the way the mission was to proceed was not to remain with him alone, but was to become the common property of mankind. But since the thinking was bound to the physical brain, how could it become common property? It could only become common property by being transmitted through physical inheritance. That is to say, a people had to come forth from this individuality, in whom this special quality was inherited as long as it was to enter humanity as a mission. A nation had to come forth from it. A nation had to be founded, not just a culture, where something had been taught: what one has received clairvoyantly can be taught. What was now to be received by humanity had to be transmitted to the descendants through physical inheritance, so that it could be realized in all its details. What was to be realized? It should be found through human combination, that order which was first brought into humanity through Abraham. If one looks up at the order of the stars, one can find the order through combination. The wise men of Chaldean astrology have reflected on the thoughts of the gods. Now it was a matter of finding this particular transition to combining, to logically grasping the phenomena, in the external world. Therefore, there had to be an inherited property in the physical human body that resulted from the work of thinking itself, which is spread out in space as order. This is expressed very beautifully when the one who assigns this mission to Abraham says: Your descendants shall be arranged according to the order, according to the number of stars - which the Bible nonsensically translates as: “Your descendants shall be like the sand of the sea.” It means that there should be an order in Abraham's descendants, the descendants should be structured in such a way that there is an image of the stars in the sky. This is also expressed in the twelve sons of Jacob. They are an image of the twelve constellations. This is where the dimensions come in, which are modeled in the sky. In the line of generations there should be an image of the number in the sky. Just as the number is written in the sky, so the order of the number is to be written in the line of generations. This is the profound wisdom contained in these words, which are foolishly translated: “Your descendants shall be as the sand of the sea.”

Thus we see the meaning of Abraham's entire mission. But the symbolism of this mission, which is meant to reflect the secrets of the world, is also expressed in other ways. First of all, we ask ourselves the following: what is meant to be sacrificed, so to speak, is ancient, dimmed clairvoyance. Everything that has been rooted in humanity since the earliest times is to be sacrificed. The innermost conviction in this whole mission is that everything is received as a gift from outside. What is to come into being should come into being through physical descendants. Through them, this mission should enter the world. Abraham must receive this himself as a gift from God. This happens when he is first called upon to sacrifice his son Isaac and then prevented from doing so. What does he actually receive from the hand of God? He receives his whole mission. For if he had really sacrificed Isaac, he would have sacrificed his whole mission. He gets his people back by getting Isaac back. He receives as a gift from the divine order of the world in Isaac what he is actually meant to give to the world. Thus everything that followed Abraham was a gift from God Himself. The last gift of clairvoyance that still existed – you will understand later how the individual gifts of clairvoyance express themselves; each one can be related to one of the constellations – the last gift of clairvoyance to be voluntarily sacrificed is linked to the constellation of Aries. That is why we see the ram in the sacrifice of Isaac. This is a symbolic expression of the sacrifice of the last gift of clairvoyance in exchange for the gift of being able to judge the outer phenomena of the world in terms of number and measure. That is this mission of Abraham.

And how does this mission continue? The last gift of clairvoyance is sacrificed, it must be expelled from this mission, and if it still shows itself as an inheritance, it is, so to speak, not tolerated within the straight line of succession. Joseph shows a relapse. He has his dreams, he has the old gift of clairvoyance. The brothers cast him out. This shows how tightly this entire mission was drawn: Joseph is cast out. He migrates to Egypt to establish the connection that was now necessary, the connection with the other wing of our entire cultural development, with Egyptian culture. Joseph had united within himself that which was general in character within this mission and at the same time remnants of ancient clairvoyance. He brought about a complete revolution in Egypt by correcting the declining Egyptian culture in accordance with his clairvoyant gift. He placed his gift at the service of external institutions. This is the basis of Joseph's cultural mission in Egypt.

And now we see a peculiar spectacle. Now we see that those who were the missionaries for outer thinking in terms of measure and number are no longer on the earlier path, but are seeking the outer connection through Joseph by seeking in return what they could not bring forth from themselves in Egypt. There they go, there they take in — the descendants of Abraham take in what they need in Egypt. That is where they go. What is necessary for the further organization of this mission is given from the outside through the Egyptian initiation, because it cannot be brought forth from within. Moses brings this from the outside and connects Egyptian culture with this special mission of Abraham. And now we see how it is passed on from generation to generation, what is the human comprehension of the outer world, what is the recognition of the outer world in terms of measure, weight and number. A new element has entered. This is transmitted through blood relationship and can only be transmitted in this way, because it is bound to that which must be inherited. This is the second of the currents.

The third stream is the one that connects with Zarathustra, which is what was expressed in ancient Persia and spread to the Near East, as we have already learned in the various lectures. These three streams are what flow together in the Christ Jesus. The individuality that is the Christ Jesus must have had to do with all three currents. They must unite in him. How does that happen? This happens in the following complicated way. First of all, we have to realize that one of the things that was to flow into the general world current took place in India six hundred years before our era. At about the same time, something also happened within the Babylonian-Chaldean culture in that Zarathustra reappeared in ancient Chaldea under the name Zarathos or Nazarathos. There he lived and worked as a great teacher at the same time as some of the chosen teachers and leaders of the ancient Hebrew people were led into Babylonian captivity, because that is also the time when the Jews were led into captivity. There you see how the first contact of the Hebrew people with Zarathos took place at that time and how the Hebrew people, through their members, were under the personal influence of the reborn Zarathustra or Zoroaster. The events took place as described in the Bible. The following happened. At the beginning of our era, there were two sets of parents, both named Joseph and Mary. One of them lived in Nazareth and the other in Bethlehem. The husband of the couple in Bethlehem was descended from the Solomonic line of the House of David. The other couple in Nazareth was descended from the Nathanic line of the House of David. Solomon and Nathan are both sons of David. Both sets of parents have a son. To the Nazareth parents, the Nazareth Jesus child is born, as described in the Gospel of Luke, and to the Bethlehem parents, the Bethlehem Jesus child is born, as described in the Gospel of Matthew. So we have two Jesus children at the beginning of our era.

Let us follow the story of the Bethlehem Jesus Child! How did he actually come into being as a physical child, so to speak? As a physical child, we see in the physical line of descent, which the writer of the Gospel of Matthew traces very beautifully back to Abraham, descended from this line. We have to follow the line from Ur of the Chaldees to the land of Canaan, then to Egypt and back to Canaan again. That would approximately give the line of the Israelite people from Chaldea to Palestine, to Egypt and back again. These were the ancestors of the Bet-lehemitic Jesus-child. And because he carried the blood of these ancestors within him, he went through this journey, so to speak. That individuality, which now wanted to embody itself in this Jesus boy of Bethlehem, quickly passed through the same path, albeit in a shortened form. That individuality had been active as Zarathustra in ancient Chaldea. Thus, at the moment when the Bethlehem Jesus child was born, a spiritual individuality, which exactly imitated the traits of Abraham, came spiritually from Chaldea to Canaan. There it was born into the Bethlehem Jesus child. Then it had to briefly imitate the move to Egypt and later back again, until it settled in Nazareth. There you have the individuality that, so to speak, spiritually went through the whole journey of the people of Israel. You can go through this journey that you have described in the Bible and you will find that it is true. The Bible describes better than any external records. What can be found in the Akasha Chronicle for the clairvoyant eye is confirmed by the Bible: the journey that the Israelite people went through from Chaldea to Canaan, to Egypt and back. And the parallels are wonderful everywhere. Who leads the Jews to Egypt? Joseph's dreams lead them there. Who leads the Bethelehemitic Jesus child to Egypt? Also the dreams of Joseph, his father. These parallels go as far as these details. It is again a special gift of clairvoyance that has remained, that establishes the connection.

So the Jesus child is born in Bethlehem, having received the element that came into humanity through Abraham by inheritance, the individuality of Zarathustra. And those who were connected with Zarathustra in the Chaldean secret schools are now pursuing the path. In the spiritual world, their star leads the way: Zoroaster himself, who is going to be born in Bethlehem. They can follow them, the three magi, they appear in the Bible. They know him, who lives in the Bethelehemitic Jesus child.

This is the one Jesus child, the Bethelehemitic. In the other Jesus child, who was also born in Bethlehem only through a journey, something completely different lives, something that is already announced by the fact that this Jesus child was different in all his qualities from the Bethelehemitic Jesus child. From the very beginning, the Bethlehem Jesus Child showed himself to be an extraordinarily gifted human being beyond all human measure, for he had a powerful individuality within him. He was gifted for everything that humanity had so far conquered in terms of cultural means. He showed himself to be extraordinarily gifted for everything that could be learned from the environment. The Nazarene Jesus Child was not at all gifted for the external things of culture. He had only a deep, deep, emotional inwardness. It was precisely the quality of the soul and mind that was developed in him. But he was not gifted to learn what was externally available in terms of cultural means. He had no inclination for that. He had something that people cannot even imagine in terms of distinguishing good from evil. But what had arisen on earth in the way of culture was foreign to him. It was foreign to him because something had been born in him that had not gone through the whole development of humanity.

We can understand this if we consider the following. In the ancient Lemurian times, what we call the Luciferic influence took place within humanity. Then the Luciferic powers crept into the human being's astral body. As a result, humanity has become what it has become. Now, in those days, the guiding powers of the human being's etheric body had to be held back a little so that it would not be infected by anything that the astral body, which was under Luciferic influence, could give it. Part of the etheric body was withdrawn from the influence of the astral body by the fact that man retained influence only over his etheric body, in so far as he is a thinking and feeling being, but not with regard to everything of a thinking nature. This was, so to speak, withheld and conveyed from the spiritual-divine world from above. Therefore, from the very beginning of their earthly existence, human beings have, so to speak, their individual desires and personal feelings, and they could not have their personal thoughts, nor the expression of personal thoughts, language. Thinking was such that it was guided by a continuous spirituality in all of them. As a result, they all think the same. But even language was at least guided by the folk gods, so that not every person has their own language. That which is expressed in the spirit of language was, with respect to the etheric body, removed from the arbitrariness of the individual personality; it was held back. What was withheld in Lemurian times is related in the Paradise Myth: Man partook of the Tree of Knowledge but not of the Tree of Life; he acquired freedom of will, but what was not given to man at that time was now mysteriously transmitted to this Jesus child, to the Jesus child of Nazareth, whose etheric body it was. There was that which had been withdrawn from humanity in the very beginning, and that prevented the Nazarene Jesus Child from taking an interest in the culture that humanity had acquired. He had something much more original, something that reminded of the time when humanity had not yet fallen into the sin of the arbitrariness of the individual. The author of the Gospel of Luke expresses this by leading the family tree up to Adam. So that in the Nazarene Jesus-child something appears which had sunk in Adam, which had been withdrawn from the Luciferic influence. What mankind was before this Luciferic influence, that was in this Nazarene Jesus-child.

These two Jesus-boys lived side by side. When they were both twelve years old, the following happened: the Zarathustra in the Bethlehem Jesus-boy decided to merge with the Nazarene Jesus-boy. This is hinted at in the Bible in the event known as the loss of the twelve-year-old Jesus, where the parents are amazed to find him again. He was quite different from what he had been before, the Nazarene Jesus-child. Now, all at once, he took an interest in external culture because Zarathustra's individuality was in him. This happened at that moment in time which is described in the Bible as the twelve-year-old Jesus getting lost. Something else had happened as well. At the birth of the Nazarene Jesus Child, that which we can call the later embodiment of the Buddha descended into the astral body. From the time of his birth, the Buddha in his etheric body was connected with this Jesus child of Nazareth at his re-embodiment, so that in the aura of the Jesus child of Nazareth in his astral body we have the Buddha. This is alluded to in a profound way in the Gospel of Luke. The Indian legend tells us that at the time when the royal son Gautama Buddha was born, there was a remarkable sage who was to become the Buddha. His name was Asita. He had learned through his clairvoyant abilities that the Bodhisattva had now been born. He looked at the boy in the royal palace and was full of enthusiasm. He began to weep. “Why are you weeping?” the king asked him. “O king, there is no danger of misfortune. On the contrary, the one who has been born is the Bodhisattva and will become the Buddha. I weep because I, as an old man, will not live to see this Buddha.” Then Asita died. The Bodhisattva became the Buddha. The Buddha descends and unites with the aura of the Nazarene Jesus child, in order to contribute his mite to the great event in Palestine. At the same time, through a karmic connection, the old Asita is reborn. He becomes the old Simeon. And he now sees the Buddha, who had become this from a bodhisattva. What he had not been able to see in India six hundred years before our era, the becoming Buddha, he now saw it when the Buddha floated in the aura of the Nazarene Jesus child, whom he held in his arms, and now he said the beautiful word: “Now, Lord, you let your servant go in peace, for I have seen my master,” the Buddha in the aura of the Jesus child.

Thus we see how the three currents flow together: through the blood, the current of Abraham; through the individuality of the Bethelehemitic Jesus-child, the Zarathustra current; and the third current through the Buddha's etheric body or Nirmanakaya floating down and being seen by the shepherds. Thus we see these three currents flowing together. And how these currents live on within Christianity, and how he who lives in the Nazarene Jesus-child, endowed with the individuality of Zarathustra, carries them forward, can only be described at another time.

It should also be said that after the Zarathustra individuality had passed over into the personality, into the body of the Nazarene Jesus child, that the Bethlehem Jesus child gradually wasted away and soon died.

The important thing is that you understand how this guidance of the Zarathustra individuality into the Jesus child took place. You know that the development of the human being proceeds in such a way that from birth to the age of seven the development of the physical body takes place, from seven to fourteen the development of the etheric body takes place, the special unfolding, and that then the astral body is born. The special I, the egoity, as it was born in man in the Lemurian time, was not at all in the Nazarene Jesus child. If He had developed further without the Zarathustra going over to Him, no I could have been born. He had what had been joined together as the holy three members, as they were before the Fall: physical body, etheric body and astral body, and only then received the gift of the I through Zarathustra. All this joined together in a wonderful way. In the Gospels we have the facts mirrored, which can be found in the Akasha Chronicle.

I have only been able to sketch out a few individual features of the confluence of these great, powerful spiritual currents of the Buddha, Zarathustra and the ancient Hebrew stream in Western Asia, where, at the beginning of our era, Christianity was reborn from these three currents. These are a few lines that we can continue another time.

On a night when the stars are clear and we gaze at the expanse of the heavens, it is a feeling of sublimity that first flows through our souls as we let the innumerable wonders of the stars work upon us. This feeling of sublimity will be stronger in one person, less strong in another, according to his particular individual character. When faced with the appearance of the starry heavens, however, a person will soon be aware of his longing to understand something of these wonders of cosmic space. Least of all in regard to the starry heavens will he be deterred by the thought that this direct feeling of sublimity and grandeur might disappear if he wishes to penetrate the mystery of the starry world with his comprehension. We are justified in feeling that understanding and comprehension in this sphere cannot injure the direct feeling that arises in us. Just as in other spheres it soon becomes evident to a greater or lesser degree that spiritual scientific knowledge enhances and strengthens our feelings and experiences if only we have a healthy understanding (Sinn), so will a person become more and more convinced that, regarding these sublime cosmic facts, his life of feeling will not wither in the least when he learns to grasp what is really passing through space or remaining, in appearance, at rest.

In any presentation it is, of course, possible to deal only with a tiny corner of the world, and we must take time to learn to grasp, step by step, the facts of the world. Today we will concern ourselves with a part, a small, trifling part, of the world of space in connection with the life of man. Although a person may dimly divine it, he will learn with greater and greater precision through spiritual science that he is born out of the totality of the universe and that the mysteries of the universe are connected with his own special mysteries. This becomes particularly evident when we enter with exactitude into certain mysteries of existence.

A contrast is manifest in human life as it evolves on this earth—a contrast to be found everywhere and at all times. It is the contrast between the masculine and the feminine. We know that this contrast in the human race has existed since the time of ancient Lemuria; we know, too, that it will last for a certain period in our earthly existence and ultimately resolve itself again into a higher unity.

If we recollect that all human life is born out of cosmic life, we may then ask, if it is indeed true that what has shown itself in human life since the old Lemurian time as the contrast between man and woman has to a certain extent accompanied evolution on the earth, can we find something in the universe that in a higher sense represents this contrast? Can we find in the cosmos that which comes to birth in the masculine and feminine on earth? This question can be answered.

If we stand on the ground of spiritual science, we cannot proceed according to the maxims of a present-day materialist. A materialist can visualize nothing apart from what lives in his immediate environment and is therefore prone to seek for this contrast of masculine and feminine in everything, whereas it now applies only to human and animal life on earth. This is an offense of our time. We must bear clearly in mind that the designations “masculine” and “feminine” in the human kingdom hold good in the strict sense only since the Lemurian epoch and up to a certain moment in earthly evolution and, in so far as animals and plants are concerned, only during the ancient Moon evolution and the earth evolution.

The question remains, however: are masculine and feminine as they exist on earth born out of a higher, cosmic contrast? If we were able to find this contrast, a wonderful and at first mysterious connection would emerge between this phenomenon and a phenomenon in the cosmos. There are, of course, contrasts everywhere in the cosmos, but one must understand how to discover them in the right way. The first contrast in the cosmos whose significance for human life we can mention is that between sun and earth. In our various studies of earthly evolution we have seen how the sun separated from our earth, how both became independent bodies in space, but we may also ask: how does the contrast between sun and earth in the macrocosm, in the great world, repeat itself in man, the microcosm? Is there in the human being himself a contrast that corresponds to the contrast between sun and earth in our planetary system? Yes, there is. In the human organism—the whole organism, bodily and spiritual—it occurs between all that expresses itself externally in the organ of the head and all that expresses itself externally in the organs of movement, the hands and feet. All that is expressed in the human being in this contrast between the head and the organs of movement corresponds to the contrast or polarity that arises in the cosmos between sun and earth. We shall soon see how this is consistent with the correspondence between the sun and the heart. The point here, however, is that in the human being there is on the one hand the head and on the other what we call the organs of movement.

You can readily understand that, in so far as his limbs were concerned, man was a totally different being during the ancient Moon evolution. It was the earth that made him into an upright being, one who uses hands and feet as he does today; again, it was only on the earth that his head was enabled to gaze freely out into cosmic space, because the forces of the sun raised him upright, whereas during the ancient Moon evolution his spine was parallel with the surface of the moon. We may say that the earth is responsible for man being able to use his legs and feet as he does today. The sun, working upon the earth from outside and forming the contrast with the earth, is responsible for the fact that the human head, with its countenance, has in a sense torn itself free from bondage to the earth and is able to gaze freely out into space. That which in the planetary system is the contrast between sun and earth appears within the human being as the contrast between head and limbs. We find this contrast of head and limbs in every human being, whether man or woman, and we also find that here, in all essentials, men and women are alike, so that we can say that the contrast corresponding to that between sun and earth expresses itself in the same way in men and in women. The earth works to the same extent upon woman as upon man; woman is bound to the earth in the same way as man, and the sun frees the head of woman and of man alike from bondage to the earth.

We shall be able to gauge the profundity of this contrast if we remember that those beings, for example, who fell into dense matter too early, as it were—the mammals—were not able to attain free sight into cosmic space; their countenance is bound to earthly existence. For the mammals, the contrast between sun and earth did not become, in the same sense, a contrast in their own being. For this reason we may not speak of a mammal as a microcosm, but we can call the human being a microcosm, and in the contrast between head and limbs we have evidence of the microcosmic nature of man.

Here we have an example that at the same time shows how infinitely important it is not to become one-sided in our studies. One can count the bones of man and the bones of the higher mammals and also the muscles of man and of the mammals, and the connection that one can draw from this has led in modern times to a world view that places man in closest proximity to the higher mammals. That this can happen proceeds simply from the fact that people have yet to learn through spiritual science how important it is not merely to have truths but to add something to them. Be conscious, my dear friends, that in this moment something of great importance is being said, something that the anthroposophist should inscribe in his memory and in his heart: many things are true, but merely to know that a thing is true is not enough! For example, what modern natural science says about the kinship of man with the apes is undoubtedly true. With a truth, however, the point is not merely to possess it as a truth but to know the importance of it in the explanation of existence as a whole. A seemingly quite ordinary, everyday truth may fail to be regarded as decisive only because its importance is not recognized.

A certain familiar truth, known to everyone, becomes deeply significant for our whole doctrine of earthly evolution if its real importance is only understood: the truth that man is the only being on earth who can direct his countenance with real freedom out into cosmic space. If we compare the human being in this respect with the apes who stand near to him, we must say that, although the ape has tried to raise himself into the upright posture, he has somehow made a hash of it ... and that is the point. One must have insight into the relative weight of a truth! We must feel the importance of the fact that man has this advantage, and then we shall also be able to relate it to the other cosmic fact just characterized: it is not the earth alone but the sun in contrast to the earth—something beyond the earth—that above all makes man a citizen of heavenly space and tears him away from earthly existence. In a sense we may say that this whole cosmic adjustment that we know today as the contrast between sun and earth had to be made in order that man might be given this place of precedence in our universe. This constellation of sun and earth had to be brought about for the sake of man, that he might be raised from the posture of the animals. In the human being we thus have the same contrast that we see when we look out into heavenly space and behold the sun with its counterpart, the earth.

Now the question arises: can we discover in the cosmos the other contrast that is found on earth, that between masculine and feminine? Is there perhaps something in our solar system that brings about, as a kind of mirror-image on earth, the contrast between man and woman? Yes, this higher polarity can be designated as the contrast between the cometary and lunar natures, between comets and the moon. Just as the contrast of sun-earth is reflected in our head and limbs, so in feminine and masculine is reflected the contrast of comet-moon.

This leads us into certain deep cosmic mysteries. Strange as it may sound to you, it is true that the different members of human nature that can confront us in the physical body are in different degrees an expression of the spiritual that lies behind them. In the physical body of man, it is the head, and in a certain other sense the limbs, that correspond most closely in outer form to their underlying, inner, spiritual forces. Let us be clear about this: everything that confronts us externally in the physical world is an image of the spiritual; the spiritual has formed it. If the spiritual is forming something physical, it can form it in such a way that at a certain stage of evolution this physical form is either more similar or less similar to it, or is more or less dissimilar from it. Only head and limbs resemble as external structures their spiritual counterparts. The rest of the human body does not at all resemble the spiritual picture. The outer structure of man, with the exception of head and limbs, is in the deepest sense a mirage, and those whose clairvoyant sight is developed always see the human being in such a way that a true impression is made only by the head and limbs. Head and limbs give a clairvoyant the feeling that they are true; they do not deceive. With regard to the rest of the human body, however, clairvoyant consciousness has the feeling that it is untrue form, that it is something that has deteriorated, that it does not at all resemble the spiritual behind it. Moreover, everything that is feminine appears to clairvoyant consciousness as if it had not advanced beyond a certain stage of evolution but had remained behind.

Diagram 1 Click image for large view

We can also say that evolution has advanced forward from point A to B. If C were a kind of normal development, then we would be at point C as far as the human head and limbs are concerned. What appears in the form of the female body has remained as if it were at D, not advancing to a further point of development. If it will not be misunderstood, we can say that the female body, as it is today, has remained behind at a more spiritual stage; in its form it has not descended so deeply into matter as to be in accord with the average stage of evolution. The male body, however, has advanced beyond the average stage—apart from head and limbs. He has overshot this average stage, arriving at point E. A male body, therefore, has deteriorated, because it is more material than its spiritual archetype, because it has descended more deeply into the material than is called for today by the average stage of evolution. In the female body we thus have something that has remained behind normal evolution and in the male body something that has descended more deeply into the material than have the head and limbs.

This same contrast is also to be found in our solar cosmos.

If we take our earth and the sun as representing normal evolutionary stages, the comet has not advanced to this normal stage. It corresponds in our cosmos to the feminine in the human being. Hence, we must see cometary existence as the cosmic archetype of the feminine organism. Lunar existence is the counterpart of masculine existence. This will be clear to you from what has been said before. We know from before that the moon is a piece of the earth that had to be separated off. If it had remained in the earth, the earth could not have gone forward in its evolution. The moon had to be separated off on account of its density. The contrast between comet and moon out in the cosmos is therefore the archetype of feminine and masculine in the human being.

This matter is exceedingly interesting, because it shows us that whether we are considering an earthly being, such as man, or the whole universe, we must not simply think of one member side by side with others as they appear to us in space; if we do this we give ourselves up to a dreadful illusion. The various members of a human organism are, of course, beside one another, and the ordinary materialistic anatomist will regard them as being at equal stages of development. For one who studies the truth of things, however, there are differences, inasmuch as one thing has reached a certain point of evolution, another has not—although it has made some progress—and another has passed beyond this point. A time will come when the whole human organism will be studied along these lines; only then will an occult anatomy exist in the real sense. As I have told you, things that lie side by side can be at different stages of evolution, and the organs in the human body are only to be understood when one knows that each of them has reached a quite different stage of evolution.

If you recall that the ancient Moon evolution preceded that of our earth, you will realize from what has just been said that although the present moon is certainly part of the ancient Moon evolution, it is not now at that stage of evolution and does not represent it. The moon has not only advanced to the earth stage but has even gone beyond this; it was not able to wait until the earth becomes a Jupiter, and it has therefore fallen into torpor in so far as its material side is concerned—not, of course, in its spiritual relationships.

The comets represent the relationship of the ancient Moon to the sun that prevailed at a certain time in the ancient Moon evolution. The comet has remained at this stage, but now it must express this somewhat differently. The comet has not advanced to the point of normal earthly existence. Just as in the present moon we have a portion of a later Jupiter that was born much too early and is therefore torpid, incapable of life, so in our comets we have a portion of the ancient Moon existence projecting into our present earthly evolution.

I would like to mention here parenthetically a noteworthy point, through which our spiritual scientific ways of studying have won a little triumph. Those who were present at the eighteen lectures on cosmogony that I gave in Paris in 1906 (see Note 2) will remember that I spoke then of certain things that were not touched upon in my book, An Outline Of Occult Science (see Note 3) (one cannot always present everything; one must not write one book but endless books if one wishes to develop everything). In Paris I developed a point bearing more upon the material, chemical aspect of the subject, as it were. I said that the ancient Moon evolution—which projects itself in present cometary existence, because the comet has remained at this stage and, as far as present conditions allow, expresses those old relationships in its laws—I said that this ancient Moon evolution differs from that of the earth in that nitrogen and certain nitrogenous compounds—cyanide, prussic acid compounds—were as necessary to the beings on the ancient Moon as oxygen is necessary to the beings of our present earth. Cyanide and similar substances are compounds that are deadly to the life of higher beings, leading to their destruction. Yet compounds of carbon and nitrogen, compounds of prussic acid and the like, played an entirely similar role to that of oxygen on the earth.

These matters were developed at that time in Paris out of the whole scope of spiritual science, and those who inscribed them in their memories will have had to say to themselves that, if this is true, there must be proof of something like compounds of carbon and nitrogen in today's comets. You may recall (the information was brought to me during the lecture course on St. John and the other three Gospels in Stockholm) that the newspapers have now been saying that the existence of cyanide compounds has actually been proved in the spectrum of the comet. This is a brilliant confirmation of what spiritual research was able to say earlier, and it has at last been confirmed by physical science. As proofs of this kind are always being demanded of us, it is quoted here. When such a striking case is available, it is important for anthroposophists to point it out and—without pride—to remind ourselves of this little triumph of spiritual science.

So you see, we can truly say that the contrast between masculine and feminine has its cosmic archetype in the contrast between comet and moon. If we could proceed from this (it is not, of course, possible to go into all the ramifications) and could demonstrate the full effect of the body of the moon and of the comets, you would realize how great and powerful it is for the soul—how it surpasses all general feelings of sublimity—to experience that here on earth we see something reflected and that this, in its functioning, is an exact expression of the contrast between comet and moon in the universe. It is possible to indicate only a few of these matters. A few are very important, and to these we will allude.

Above all, we must become conscious of how the contrast expressed in comet and moon works upon the human being. We must not think that this contrast expresses itself only in what constitutes man and woman in humanity, because we must be clear that masculine characteristics exist in every woman and feminine characteristics in every man. We also know that the etheric body of man is female and that of the woman, male, and this at once makes the matter extremely complicated. We must realize that the masculine-feminine contrast is thus reversed for the etheric bodies of man and woman, and so are the cometary and lunar effects. These effects are also there in relation to the astral body and the I. Hence the contrast between comet and moon is of deep, incisive significance for the evolution of humanity on earth. The fact that the Moon evolution has a mysterious connection with the relationship of the sexes, a connection that eludes exoteric ways of thinking, you can recognize in something that might seem entirely accidental, namely, that the product of the union of male and female, the child, needs ten lunar months for its development from conception to birth. Even modern science reckons not with solar but with lunar months, because there the relation between the moon, representing the masculine in the universe and the earth, and the cometary nature, representing the feminine in the universe, is decisive, reflecting itself in the product of the sexes.

If we now regard this from the other side, from the comets, we have another important consequence for the evolution of humanity. The cometary nature is as though feminine, and in the movements of the comets, in the whole style of their appearance from time to time, we have a kind of projection of the archetype of the feminine nature in the cosmos. It is something that really gives the impression of having come to a halt before reaching the normal, average stage of evolution. This cosmic feminine—the expression is not quite apt, but we lack suitable terms—shoots in from time to time like something that stirs up our existence from the depths of a nature existing before the dawn of history. In the mode of its appearance, a comet resembles the feminine. We can also express it this way: as what is done by a woman more out of passion, out of feeling, is related to the dry, reasonable, masculine judgment, so is the regular, reasonable course of the moon related to the cometary phenomenon that projects apparently irregularly into our existence. This is the peculiarity of feminine spiritual life. Mark well—I do not mean the spiritual life of woman but the feminine spiritual life. There is a difference. The spiritual life of a woman naturally includes masculine characteristics.

Feminine spiritual life, whether in a man or a woman, projects into our existence something of the primitive, something elemental, and this is also what a comet does. Wherever this contrast between man and woman confronts us, we can see it, because it expresses itself with uncommon clarity.

People who judge everything by externals criticize spiritual science because many women are drawn to it at the present time. They do not comprehend that this is quite understandable simply because the average brain of a man has overstepped a certain average point of evolution; it has become drier, more wooden, and therefore clings more rigidly to traditional concepts; it cannot free itself of the prejudices in which it is stuck. Someone who is studying spiritual science may at times feel it difficult that in this incarnation he must use this masculine brain! The masculine brain is stiff, resistant, and more difficult to manipulate than the feminine brain, which can easily overcome obstacles that the masculine brain, with its density, erects. Hence the feminine brain can more readily follow what is new in our way of looking at the world. To the extent to which the masculine and feminine principles come to expression in the structure of the human brain, it can even be said that for our present time it is most uncomfortable and unpleasant to be obliged to use a masculine brain. The masculine brain must be trained much more carefully, much more radically, than a feminine brain. You can thus see that it is not really so extraordinary that women today find their bearings more easily in something as eminently new as spiritual science.

These matters are of the greatest importance in the history of culture, but one can hardly discuss them anywhere today except in anthroposophical circles. Except in our circles, who will take seriously the fact that to have a masculine brain is not so comfortable as to have a feminine brain? This, naturally, does not imply by any means that many a brain in a woman's body has not thoroughly masculine traits. These things are not as simple as we suppose with our modern notions.

The cometary nature is something elemental; it stirs things up and in a certain sense is necessary in order that the advancing course of evolution may be supported in the right way from the cosmos. People have always had a premonition that this cometary nature is connected in some way with earthly existence. It is only in our day that they reject any such idea. Only think what a face the average scholar of today would make if the same thing happened to him as happened between Professor Bode and Hegel. Hegel once stated bluntly to an orthodox German professor that good wine years followed comets, and he tried to prove this by pointing to the years 1811 and 1819, good wine years that were preceded by comets. This made a fine commotion! But Hegel said that his statement was as well founded as many calculations concerning the courses of stars, that it was an empirical matter that was verified in these two cases. Even apart from such comical episodes, however, we can say that people have always conjectured something in this connection. It is not possible to enter into details now, since that would be an endless task, but we wish to shed some light on one main influence related to human evolution.

The comets appear at great intervals of time. Let us ask: when they appear, is their relation to human evolution as a whole such that they stimulate, as it were, the feminine principle in human nature? There is, for example, Halley's Comet, which now again has a certain actuality. (see Note 4) The same could be said of many other comets. Halley's Comet has a quite definite task, and everything else that it brings with it stands in a particular connection to this task. Halley's Comet—we are speaking here of its spiritual aspect—has the task of impressing on human nature its own special being in such a way that this human nature and essence take a further step in the development of the I when the comet comes near the earth. It is that step which leads the I out to concepts on the physical plane. To begin with, the comet has its special influence on the two lower members of human nature, on what is masculine and feminine; there it joins company with the workings of the moon. When the comet is not there, the workings of the moon are one-sided; the workings change when the comet is present.

This is how the working of the comet now expresses itself: when the human I takes a step forward, then, in order that the whole man can advance, the physical and etheric or life bodies must be correspondingly transformed. If the I is to think differently in the nineteenth century from the way it thought in the eighteenth, there must also be something that changes the outer expression of the I in the physical and etheric bodies—and this something is the comet! The comet works upon the physical and etheric or life bodies of man in such a way that they actually create organs, delicate organs that are suitable for the further development of the I—the I-consciousness as it has developed especially since the imbedding of the Christ impulse in the earth. Since that time the significance of the comet's appearance is that the I, as it develops from stage to stage, receives physical and etheric organs it can use. Just think of it—strange as it may sound and crazy as our contemporaries will find it—it is nonetheless true that if the I of a Büchner, of a Moleschott, (see Note 5) and of other materialists had not possessed, around the years 1850–60, suitable physical and etheric brains, their thinking could not have been as materialistic as it was. Then, perhaps, the worthy Büchner would have made a good, average clergyman. For him to be able to arrive at the thoughts expressed in his Kraft und Stoff, it was necessary not only for his I to evolve in this way but for the corresponding organization to be present in the physical and etheric bodies. If we are searching for the evolution of the I itself, we need only look around at the spiritual-cultural life of the period. If we wish, however, to know how it was that these people of the nineteenth century had a physical brain and an etheric body suitable for materialistic thinking, we must say that in 1835 Halley's Comet appeared. In the eighteenth century there was the so-called Enlightenment, which was also a certain stage in the development of the I. In the second half of the eighteenth century the average human being had in his brain this spiritual configuration that is called “Enlightenment.” What made Goethe so angry was that a few ideas were thrown out and people declared themselves satisfied. What was it that created the brain for this “Age of Enlightenment?” Halley's Comet of the year 1759 created this brain. That was one of its central effects.

Every cometary body thus has a definite task. Human spiritual life takes its course with a certain cosmic regularity, as it were—a bourgeois regularity one could say. Just as a man undertakes with an earthly bourgeois regularity certain activities day by day, like lunch and dinner, so does human spiritual life take its course with cosmic regularity. Into this regularity there come other events, events that in ordinary, bourgeois life are also unlike those of every day and through which a certain noticeable advance occurs. So it is, for example, when a child is born into a family. The cosmic regularity manifesting in the whole of human evolution takes its course under the influence of the moon, of the lunar body. In contrast to these events, there are things that always bring about a step forward, that are naturally distributed over wider spans of time; these events occur under the influence of the comets. The various comets have here their different tasks, and when a comet has served its purpose it splinters. Thus we find that from a certain point of time onward, some comets appear as two and then splinter. They dissolve when they have completed their tasks. Regularity, all that belongs to the common round, is connected with the lunar influence; the entry of an elemental impulse, always incorporating something new, is connected with the influence of the comets. So we see that these apparently erratic wanderers in the heavens have their rightful place and significance in the whole structure of our universe.

You can well imagine that when something new, like a product of the cosmic feminine, breaks into the evolution of humanity, it can cause tumults that are obvious enough but that people prefer not to notice! It is possible, however, to make people conscious that certain events of earthly existence are connected with the existence of comets. Just as something new, a gift from the woman, may enter into the everyday bustle of the family, so it is with the comets. As when a new little child is born, so it is when, through the return of a comet, something quite new is produced. We must remember, however, that with certain comets the I is always driven out more and more into the physical world, and this is something we must resist. If the influence of Halley's Comet were to continue, a new appearance of it might bring about a great enhancement of Büchnerian thought, and that would be a terrible misfortune. A reappearance of Halley's Comet should therefore give us warning that it might prove to be an evil guest if we were simply to give ourselves up to it, if we were not to resist its influence. It is a matter of holding fast to higher, more significant workings and influences of the cosmos than those of Halley's Comet. It is necessary, however, that human beings should regard this comet as an omen; they should realize that things are no longer as they were in earlier times, when in a sense it was fruitful for humanity that it should come under these influences. This influence is no longer fruitful. Human beings must now unite themselves with different powers in order to balance this dangerous influence from Halley's Comet. When it is said that Halley's Comet can be a warning; that its influence, working alone, might make people superficial and lead the I more and more onto the physical plane; and that precisely in our days this must be resisted—this truly is said not for the sake of reviving an old superstition. The resistance can occur only through a spiritual view of the world, such as that of anthroposophy, replacing the evolutionary trend caused by Halley's Comet.

It could be said that once again the Lord is displaying His rod out there in the heavens in order to say to human beings through this omen: now is the time to kindle the spiritual life! On the other hand, is it not wonderful that cometary existence takes hold of the depths of life, including the animal and plant life that is bound up with human life? Those who pay close enough attention to such things would observe how there is actually something altogether different in the blossoming of flowers from what is usually the case. These things are there, but they are easily overlooked, just as people so often overlook the spirit, do not wish to see the spirit.

We may now ask: is there something in the cosmos that corresponds to the ascent to a spiritual life that has just been indicated? We have seen that head and limbs and masculine and feminine have polar contrasts in the cosmos. Is there something in the cosmos that corresponds to this welling up of the spiritual, to this advance of man beyond himself, from the lower to the higher I?

We will ask ourselves this question tomorrow in connection with the greatest tasks of spiritual life in—our time. Today I wished to give the preliminaries, in order that tomorrow we may understand through greater relationships an important question of the present time. Much that has been said today is admittedly remote, but we are living in a cometary year. It is therefore good to say something about the mysterious relationship of cometary existence to our earthly existence. Beginning with this, we will speak tomorrow about the great spiritual meaning of our time.

In the process of human evolution a certain definite connection exists between the past and the future. Study of this connection sheds a great deal of light upon questions such as: What devolves upon us as men belonging to a particular epoch?

When we were together here some little time ago, many things were said about the past evolution of humanity, and to-day I will add something about the connection between the past and the immediate future. At the end of the lecture yesterday attention was called to a significant sign, telling us as it were from the heavens that humanity needs a spiritual impetus, something like a new impulse for the age. [Mysteries of Cosmic Existence. Comets and the Moon, Stuttgart, 5th March, 1910. See also footnote near end of present lecture, p. 79.] Understanding of how this impulse must work is possible only when we study the last millennia prior to the founding of Christianity in a certain connection with the millennia after it, with the millennia, that is to say, in which we ourselves are living.

There is a law in accordance with which certain happenings are repeated in the process of man's evolution, and we spoke of them in the last lecture-course given here in Stuttgart. [Universe, Earth and Man. Eleven lectures, 4th–16th August, 1908.] Today I want only to emphasise that when reference is made in Spiritual Science to these systematic repetitions in the course of human evolution it must not he imagined that they can be worked up by the intellect; they must be investigated in detail and confirmed by spiritual research. Attempts to construct new repetitions according to the pattern of others can lead one very far astray. There is, however, one repetition which does, in fact, resemble another, the form it takes being that happenings of crucial importance before the founding of Christianity come to pass again afterwards in a certain way.

The last three millennia prior to the founding of Christianity belong to an epoch in the history of human evolution called the Dark Age, the lesser Dark Age—Kali Yuga. Kali Yuga began in the year 3101 B.C. With it is connected everything we recognise nowadays as the great achievements of humanity, as the fundamental characteristics of present-day culture. Before this Dark Age, before Kali Yuga, all human thinking, all the powers of the human soul, were in a certain respect differently organised. The year 3101 B.C. is an approximate date, for in the process of development qualities of one kind passed over gradually into others; but before that time the last vestiges of ancient clairvoyance were still present. In the course of evolution the sequence of the ages is: Krita Yuga, Treta Yuga, Dvapara Yuga, Kali Yuga. It is the last that is of particular interest to us to-day. The earlier ages take us back to old Atlantis. In very ancient times, vestiges of the ancient clairvoyance still survived and prior to the Dark Age man was directly conscious of the presence of a spiritual world because he was able to gaze into it. But this consciousness of the spiritual world withdrew more and more from man's vision and speaking generally we can say that the development then begins of those faculties of soul which on the one hand confine his power of judgment to the sense-perceptible world, while, on the other, they promote his self-consciousness; all these powers begin to operate in Kali Yuga. And whereas during this age man was not in a position to look into the spiritual worlds, the firm centre we call the knowledge of self-consciousness developed all the more strongly within him. But do not imagine that even now this knowledge of self-consciousness is already highly developed; it has yet to reach many further stages. But it could never have been experienced by man if there had not been this “Dark Age”.

Thus during the three millennia prior to the founding of Christianity man was losing his connection with the spiritual world to an increasing extent and indeed had no direct perception of that connection.

On the occasion of my last visit here we heard how, at the conclusion of the first millennium of Kali Yuga, a kind of substitute was given for vision of the spiritual worlds. This substitute was made possible through the fact that a particular individual—Abraham—was chosen out because the special organisation of his physical brain enabled him to have consciousness of the spiritual world without the old faculties. That is why in Spiritual Science we call the first millennium of Kali Yuga the Abraham-epoch; it was the epoch when man did, it is true, lose the direct vision of the spiritual worlds, but when there unfolded in him something like a consciousness of the Divine which gradually made its way more and more deeply into his ego, with the result that he came to conceive of the Deity as related to human ego-consciousness. In the first millennium of Kali Yuga—which at its conclusion we can call the Abraham-epoch—the Deity is revealed as the World-Ego.

This Abraham-epoch was followed by the Moses-epoch, when the God Jahve, the World-Ego, was no longer revealed in the form of a mysterious guidance of human destinies, as a God of a single people; in the Moses-epoch this Deity was revealed, as we know, in the burning bush, as the God of the Elements. And it was a great advance when, through the teachings of Moses, the World-Ego as the Deity was experienced in such a way that men realised: the Elements of manifested existence, all that is seen with physical eyes—lightning, thunder, and so on—are emanations, deeds of the World-Ego, ultimately of the one World-Ego. We must, however, clearly understand in what way this denoted an advance.

Before the Abraham-epoch and before Kali Yuga, we find that through the direct vision of the spiritual worlds made possible by the remains of the old clairvoyance, men beheld the spiritual, as indeed was the case in all these ancient times. We should have to go infinitely far back to find anything else. Men actually beheld the spiritual during Dvapara Yuga, Treta Yuga, Krita Yuga, beheld it as a multiplicity of Beings. You know that when we rise into the spiritual worlds we find there the Hierarchies of spiritual Beings. They, naturally, are under a unified guidance, but this was beyond the grasp of consciousness in those ancient times. Men beheld the individual members of the Hierarchies, a multiplicity of Divine Beings. To grasp them as a unity was possible only for the Initiates. But now the World-Ego, grasped for the first time by man himself with the physical instrument of the brain—a faculty that had developed in a specially marked way in Abraham—confronted him, and he conceived the World-Ego as manifesting in the different kingdoms of Nature, in the Elements.

A further advance was made in the last millennium before the founding of Christianity, in the Solomon-epoch. Thus the three millennia before the founding of Christianity can be distinguished by calling the first millennium by the name of the individuality who appears and then works on into the second: the Abraham-epoch. From the beginning of Kali Yuga until Abraham men are being prepared to recognise the One God behind the manifestations of Nature. This possibility begins with Abraham. In the Moses-epoch the One God becomes the ruler of the manifestations of Nature and is sought for behind them. All this is then intensified in the Solomon-epoch, and we are led through this last epoch to that point in evolution where the same Divine Being whom the Abraham-epoch and the Moses-epoch, too, beheld in Jahve, where the same Divine Being takes on human form.

In contemplating this subject from the spiritual-scientific point of view it must be firmly realised that in this respect the Gospels are right: Christ may not be distinguished from Jahve otherwise than that the light of the sun reflected by the moon is to be distinguished from the direct light of the sun. Where is the light that floods a bright moonlit night? It is actual sunlight, only it is reflected back to us from the moon. So we can have this sunlight directly by day or rayed back by the moon on bright moonlit nights. What manifests thus in space also manifests in the following way: what was finally to appear in Christ as a Spirit-Sun was revealed beforehand in reflection. Jahve is the reflection which precedes Christ in time. Just as the moonlight reflects the sunlight, so was the Christ Being reflected for Abraham, Moses, Solomon. It was always the same Being. Then He Himself appeared as the Christ-Sun at the time of the founding of Christianity. The preparation for this great event was made in the Abraham-epoch, in the Moses-epoch, in the Solomon-epoch.

A repetition of these three pre-Christian ages takes place in the Christian era, but now in reverse order. The essential and fundamental trend of the Solomon-epoch is repeated in the first thousand years after Christ, in that the spirit of Solomon lives and is active as an impulse in the most outstanding minds of the first Christian millennium. And fundamentally speaking it was the wisdom of Solomon through which men endeavoured to grasp the nature and essence of the Christ Event. Then, following the Solomon-epoch, came the era that can be called the revival of the Moses-epoch ... and in the second millennium after Christ the best minds of this era are permeated by the spirit of Moses. The spirit of Moses does indeed come to life again in a new form. In the pre-Christian age the spirit of Moses had been directed towards the outer world of physical Nature in order to find the Divine World-Ego as Jahve, the World-Ego manifesting in lightning and thunder, in the great revelation from the Elements of laws for men. Whereas the World-Ego streams into Moses from outside, is revealed from outside, in the second millennium after Christ the same Divine Being announces Himself within the soul. The experience which came to Moses as an outer happening when he withdrew from his people in order to receive the Decalogue this significant happening is repeated in the second Christian millennium in the form of a mighty revelation from within man.

Repetitions do not take the same form but what comes later manifests as a kind of polarity. It was from the Elements, from outer Nature, that the God revealed Himself to Moses; in the second millennium after Christ He reveals Himself from the deepest foundations of the human soul. And how could this be presented to us more impressively than in the story of a great, supremely gifted man of whose preaching it was said that he proclaimed mighty truths from the very depths of his soul! It can be taken for granted that this man was steeped through and through in what can be called Christian mysticism. Then, to the place where he is preaching comes a seemingly unimportant layman who at first listens to the sermons but then turns out to be one who need not be considered a layman but can become the instructor of the preacher—Tauler—and induces him, despite his renown, to suspend his sermons for a time because he does not feel inwardly imbued with what is living in the layman. And when Tauler, after having received the inspiration, ascends the pulpit again, the overwhelmingly powerful impression made by his sermon is described symbolically by saying that many of his listeners fell down as if dead—meaning that everything of a lower nature in them was killed.

This was a revelation of the World-Ego from within—working from within with a power as great as that of the revelation from the Elements to Moses in the second millennium before Christ. Thus we see a revival of the Moses-epoch inasmuch as the spirit of Moses illumined and imbued with life the whole of Christian mysticism, from Meister Eckhart down to the later Christian mystics. Verily the spirit of Moses was alive in the souls of the Christian mystics! This was in the second millennium after Christ when there was a revival of the whole character of the Moses-epoch. Just as in the first millennium of the Christian era the repetition of the Solomon-epoch was responsible for bringing to expression the inner content of the Christian mysteries—for example, the Christian teaching concerning the Hierarchies, the detailed wisdom concerning the higher worlds—so was the second Moses-epoch particularly responsible for the essential character of German mysticism: a deep, mystical consciousness of the One God who can be awakened and resurrected within the human soul. And the influence of this Moses-epoch has persisted in all the endeavours made since that time to fathom the nature of the World-Ego, the Undivided Godhead.

But the course of the evolution of humanity is such that from our time onwards a renaissance of the Abraham-epoch will take place as we pass slowly into the third millennium. In pre-Christian times the sequence is: Abraham-epoch, Moses-epoch, Solomon-epoch; in the Christian era the order is reversed: Solomon-epoch, Moses-epoch, Abraham-epoch. We are moving towards the Abraham-epoch, and this will inevitably bring momentous consequences in its train.

Let us recall what was of essential significance in the pre-Christian Abraham-epoch. It was the fact that the old clairvoyance had disappeared, that there had been bestowed upon man a consciousness of the Divine closely bound up with human faculties. Everything that humanity could acquire from this brain-bound consciousness of the Divine had by now been gradually exhausted and there is very little left to be gained through these faculties. But on the other hand, in the new Abraham-epoch exactly the opposite path is taken—the path Which leads humanity away from vision confined to the physical and material, away from intellectual inferences based upon material data. We are moving along the path leading into the regions where men once dwelt in times before the Abraham-epoch. It is the path that will make states of natural clairvoyance possible for man, states in which natural clairvoyant forces will be in active operation.

During Kali Yuga itself, Initiation alone could lead into the spiritual worlds in the right way. Initiation does, of course, lead to higher stages that will be accessible to men only in the very far distant future; but the first signs of a natural faculty of clairvoyance will become evident fairly soon, as the renewal of the Abraham-epoch approaches.

Thus, after men have acquired ego-consciousness, after they have come to know the ego as a firm inner centre, they are led out of themselves again in order to be able to look with an even deeper vision into the spiritual worlds. The ending of Kali Yuga has to do with this also. Having lasted for five thousand years, Kali Yuga ended in A.D. 1899. This was a year of crucial importance for the evolution of humanity. Naturally, it is again an approximate date, for things happen gradually. But just as the year 3101 B.C. can be indicated as a point of time when humanity was led down from the stage of the old clairvoyance to physical vision and intellectuality, so the year 1899 is the time when humanity received an impetus towards the first beginnings of a future clairvoyance. And it is the lot of mankind, already in this twentieth century before the next millennium—indeed for a few individuals in the first half of this century—to develop the first rudiments of a new faculty of clairvoyance that quite certainly will appear if men prove capable of understanding it. It must, however, be realised that there are two possibilities. It belongs to the very essence of the human soul that natural faculties of clairvoyance will arise in the future in a few people during the first half of the twentieth century and in more and more human beings during the next two thousand five hundred years, until finally there will be a sufficient number who, if they so desire, will have the new, natural clairvoyance. A distinction must, of course, be made between cultivated and natural clairvoyance.

But there are two possibilities. The one is that although men have indeed the aptitude for this clairvoyance, materialism may triumph in the next decades and humanity sink in its morass. True, even then there will be individuals here and there who assert that they see in the physical man something like a second man; but if materialistic consciousness gets to the point of declaring Spiritual Science to be sheer craziness and stamping out all consciousness of the spiritual world, then these incipient faculties will not be understood. It will depend upon humanity itself whether what will then take place turns out to be for the good or ill, because what ought to come about might pass unnoticed.

Or the other situation is possible, where Spiritual Science is not trampled underfoot. Then men will understand how to cultivate such faculties not only in the secret schools of Initiation but also to foster them when, towards the middle of this century, they appear like delicate buds of the life of soul in individuals here and there. They will say, as if from a power that has awakened within them: I see as a reality something that is described in Anthroposophy as the second man within the physical man. But still other faculties will appear—for example, a faculty that a man will notice in himself. After he has performed some deed, there will appear before his soul a kind of dream-picture which he will know to be connected in some way with what he has done. And from Spiritual Science he will realise: When an after-image of my deed appears in this way, although it is essentially different from the deed itself, it reveals to me what the karmic effect of my deed will be in the future.

This understanding of karma will develop in certain individuals during the middle of our century. The explanation is that Kali Yuga has run its course and that from epoch to epoch new faculties appear in men. But if no understanding is developed, if this particular faculty is stamped out, if those who speak about faculties of this kind are put away as if they were insane, disaster is inevitable and humanity will sink in the morass of materialism. Everything will depend upon whether understanding is awakened for Spiritual Science, or whether Ahriman will succeed in suppressing its intentions. Then, of course, those who are choking in materialism may say scornfully: They were fine prophets who stated that a second man will be seen beside the physical man! Nothing will be apparent if the faculties for seeing it are crushed out. But even if these faculties do not become evident in the middle of the twentieth century, this will be no proof that the rudiments of them are not within man, but only that the seed of the young buds has been crushed. The faculties that have been described to-day exist and can be developed, provided only that mankind is willing.

This stage of evolution therefore lies immediately ahead of us. We are, as it were, retracing the path of development. In Abraham, consciousness of the Divine was brought down into the brain; in passing into a new Abraham-epoch, consciousness of the Divine will in turn be brought out of the brain, and during the next two thousand five hundred years we shall find more and more human beings who possess knowledge of the great spiritual teachings of the cosmic secrets yielded by the mysteries of Initiation. Just as the spirit of Moses prevailed in the epoch that is now over, so in our time the spirit of Abraham begins to prevail, in order that after men have been led to consciousness of the Divine in the material world, they may now be led out of and beyond it. For it is an eternal cosmic law that each individuality has to perform a particular deed more than once, periodically—twice at all events, the one as the antithesis of the other. What Abraham brought down for men into the physical consciousness he will bear upwards again for them into the spiritual world.

Thus it is obvious that we are living at a vitally important time and that to disseminate Spiritual Science to-day is not a matter of preference but something that is demanded by our age. To prepare mankind for great moments in the process of evolution is among the tasks of spiritual investigation. Spiritual Science exists in order that men may know what it is they are seeing. Anyone who is true to his age cannot but be mindful of the fact that spirit-knowledge must be brought into the world to prevent what is coming from passing by humanity unnoticed.

These things are connected with others. In certain other respects everything is renewed in similar repetitions. A time is approaching when more and more of what existed in pre-Christian centuries will be renewed for humanity, but everything will now be steeped in what men have been able to acquire through the mighty Christ Event. We have heard that the great impulse experienced by Moses through the vision of the burning thorn bush and lightning on Sinai was experienced again inwardly, in its Christianised form. For men such as Tauler and Eckhart knew with all certainty that when there dawned within them the power known to Moses as Jahve, that power was the Christ, no longer the reflected Christ but the Christ Himself, arising from the depth of the heart. What had been experienced by Moses was experienced by the Christian mystics in a Christianised form, in a form changed through the Christ Impulse. And what was experienced in the pre-Christian age of Abraham—that, too, will be experienced in a new and different form. And what will this be? All things, all events that come about normally in the evolution of humanity cast their lights in advance (instead of the trivial saying, “cast their shadows”, I prefer to say, “cast their lights”). Thus in certain respects a light indicative of future happenings was cast in advance by the event of Damascus, the conversion of Saul into Paul.

Let us be clear what this signified for Paul. Up to then he had acquired a thorough knowledge of the Hebraic secret doctrines. From these teachings he knew that some day an Individuality would descend to the earth, representing to humanity the One who conquers death. He knew: an Individuality will appear in the flesh, showing through his life that the spirit triumphs over death so completely that for this Individuality in his earthly incarnation death has no more significance than any other physical happening. Paul knew this. And he knew something else as well from the ancient Hebraic teachings, namely that when the Christ, the Messiah who was to come, had lived in the flesh, when He had resurrected and had won the victory over death, the spiritual sphere of the earth would be transformed and clairvoyance would undergo a change. Whereas before then a clairvoyant would not have seen the Christ Being in the spiritual atmosphere of the earth, but only when he looked upwards to the Sun Spirit, Paul knew that through the Christ Impulse there would take place in earth-existence a change signifying that, having gained the victory over death the Christ would be found by clairvoyant vision in the sphere of the earth. When, therefore, a man was clairvoyant, he would behold the Christ in the earth-sphere as the living spirit of the earth. But that of which Paul, while he was still Saul, could not be convinced was that the One who had lived in Palestine, had died on the Cross and was said by his disciples to have been resurrected, was indeed the One to whom the ancient Hebraic doctrines referred.

The salient point is that Paul had not been convinced by what he had seen physically of the things narrated in the Gospels. Conviction that the Christ was the predicted Messiah first came to him when the light cast in advance revealed itself to him, when as though by Grace from above he became clairvoyant and, finding Christ in the sphere of the earth, was compelled to say to himself: He has been here in very truth and has risen! It was because Paul himself had beheld Christ in the spiritual sphere of the earth that he knew: Now He is here! And from that moment he was convinced regarding Christ Jesus.

The essence of what happened at Damascus, therefore, was that Paul had discovered Christ Jesus clairvoyantly in the sphere of the earth. Thus, if he had not, for example, heard tell of the deeds of Christ in Palestine, if he had not himself actually heard the stories told in the Gospels but had lived somewhat later, he might have experienced the Christ Event of Damascus only later: but even so he would have arrived at the same conviction. For this event revealed to him the reality of Christ's presence! He knew: He who is now revealed in the sphere of the earth is the One of whom the ancient Hebraic secret doctrine tells.

The Christ Event is not confined to one point of time only. In the case of Paul it came very early, in order that through him Christianity might pursue its course.

Now, as long as Kali Yuga lasted—this was until the year 1899—the evolution of humanity had not reached the stage at which Paul's experience could be repeated without more ado; human faculties were not mature enough for that. Hence there was one who experienced it through Grace; and others, too, experienced similar events through Grace. But we are living now in the age when there is to be a revolutionary change: the first rudiments of natural clairvoyance are developing. We are passing into the Abraham-epoch and are being led out into the spiritual world. This means that it will be possible for a certain number of human beings, and more and more in the next two thousand five hundred years, to experience a repetition of the event of Damascus. The great and momentous feature of the coming era will be that many human beings will experience this event. The Christ, now to be found in the spiritual sphere of the earth, will be perceptible to those faculties which, as we have said, will make their appearance. When men become able to see the etheric body, they will learn to see the etheric body of Christ Jesus, as did Paul. This is what is beginning as the characteristic trait of a new age, and between the years 1930-40-45 it will already become evident in the first forerunners of human beings possessed of these faculties. If men are alert they will experience this event of Damascus through direct spiritual vision and therewith clarity and truth concerning the Christ Event. A remarkable parallelism of happenings will come about.

During the next two decades men will be more and more inclined to abandon the texts of the Gospels because they will no longer understand them. Superficial scholars are everywhere at pains to “prove” that the Gospels are not historical records, that there can be no question of any historical Christ. The historical documents will lose their value and the number of people who deny Christ Jesus will steadily increase. Men who may still believe that these events can be substantiated by history are short-sighted. Those who mean well by Christianity will not reject understanding of the spiritual proof of the existence of Christ Jesus, for this spiritual proof will be provided through the cultivation of the faculties which enable men to behold the Christ as a real Presence in His etheric body. Those who place reliance only on documents may call themselves good Christians, but in point of fact they are destroying Christianity; however vociferously they proclaim the knowledge they have gleaned about Christianity from documentary records, they are destroying it because they are rejecting a spiritual teaching through which, in actual vision, the Christ will become a reality for men in our century.

When the Christian era began, men had been descending into the Dark Age for more than three thousand years, had been thrown back upon the faculties of their outer senses. At that time Christ could not have revealed Himself to the faculties necessary for the evolution of humanity in any other way than through physical incarnation. Because man's physical faculties had then reached the peak of their development, Christ was obliged to appear in a physical body. But no progress at all would be possible unless with higher faculties men were able to discover Christ as a reality in the higher worlds. Just as Christ had once to be discovered with purely physical faculties, men will find him with the newly developed faculties in that world where etheric bodies alone are to be seen. There can be no second physical incarnation of Christ. He came once in a physical body of flesh because it was at one period only that human faculties were dependent upon His presence in such a body. But now, with the higher faculties, men will be able to perceive the etheric body of Christ as an even greater reality.

The momentous event in store for us can be called: the Reappearance of Christ Jesus ... a gradual reappearance, to begin with for a few and then for more and more human beings. It is an event that has significance not only for those who will then still be incarnated in bodies of flesh. A number of human beings living to-day will still be in incarnation at the time of the Christ Event ... they will experience it in the way that has been described. Others will have passed through the gate of death. As we once heard in a lecture here, [This reference is to a lecture given 14th November, 1909: The Tasks and Aims of Spiritual Science.] the Event of Golgotha was an event that affected not only the physical world; its influences reached into all the spiritual worlds. Christ's descent into the underworld was an actual fact and the effects of the Christ Event that is to take place in our century will also work—though not in the same form as on earth—into the world in which man lives between death and rebirth.

But there is one essential. The faculties by means of which men will be able, between death and rebirth, to behold the Christ Event, cannot be acquired in that world; they must be acquired on the physical plane and carried from there into the life between death and a new birth. There are faculties which must be acquired on the earth, for we have not been placed on the physical earth for nothing. It is an error to believe that there is no purpose in living on the earth. Faculties have to be acquired there that can be acquired in no other world—they are the faculties for understanding the Christ Event and the events that will follow it. Those human beings who now develop these faculties on the earth through the teachings of Spiritual Science will carry them through the gate of death. It is not through Initiation only, but through a clear-minded acceptance of spiritual-scientific knowledge, that the faculties are acquired which make it possible also to be aware of the Christ Event in the spiritual world between death and a new birth. But those who turn deaf ears to this knowledge must wait until a later incarnation to acquire the faculties that must be acquired here on earth in order that the Christ Event may be experienced in yonder world. Therefore let nobody imagine that the announcement of the Christ Event—an event which the teachings of Spiritual Science alone can make intelligible—will bear no fruit for him if he has already passed through the gate of death. It will indeed bear fruit.

Obviously, therefore, spiritual research prepares the way for a new Christ Event. But those who receive into themselves the essence of the teaching of the spirit as part of their whole life of soul, as a quickening, vital force, must then grow on to a spiritual understanding of these things, realising that through Spiritual Science they must learn to understand our newly dawning age thoroughly and fundamentally. We must come to realise that in the future the most important events must be sought, not on the physical plane but outside and beyond it, just as Christ must be sought in the spiritual world when He appears in His etheric form.

What has here been said will be repeated again and again in the coming decades. But there will be people who misunderstand it and who will say: So Christ is to come again! Because this view will be tinged with the belief that this is a physical return, such people will support all the false Messiahs who will appear. And in the middle of the twentieth century there will be plenty of them, making use of the materialistic beliefs, the materialistic thinking and feeling of men in order to proclaim themselves as Christ. There have always been false Messiahs. For example, in the South of France, before the Crusades, there appeared a false Messiah whom his followers regarded as a kind of Christ incarnate in a physical body. Before then a false Messiah had appeared in Spain, attracting a large number of followers. In North Africa, a man who announced himself as the Christ created a great sensation. In the seventeenth century a man who appeared in Smyrna, alleging himself to be the Christ, drew a vast crowd of followers; his name was Shabbathai Zewi. Pilgrims journeyed to him from Poland, Austria, Spain, Germany, France, from all over Europe and from wide provinces of Africa and Asia.

In past centuries this kind of happening was not so deplorable, for the demand to distinguish the true from the false had not yet been made of humanity. Only now are we living in the age when disaster might befall if men were not equal to the spiritual test. Those will be equal to it who know that human faculties develop to higher stages, that the faculties on account of which it was necessary for Christ to be seen physically were dependent upon a physical manifestation at the time of the founding of Christianity but that no progress would be made if in this present century men were not to find Him again in a higher form. Those who are striving in the sense of Spiritual Science will have to prove that they are the ones able to distinguish the false Messiahs from the One Messiah who does not appear in the flesh, but appears as a spiritual Being to the newly awakened faculties of men.

The time will come when men will again see into the spiritual world and there behold the land whence flow the streams of true spiritual nourishment for everything that happens in the physical world. Again and again we have heard that it was once possible for men to look with clairvoyant vision into the spiritual world. Oriental writings also contain the tradition of an ancient spiritual land [See note 1 at end of lecture.] into which men were once able to gaze and whence they could draw the super-sensible influences that were available for the physical world. Many descriptions of this land, that was once within reach of men's vision but has withdrawn, are full of sadness. This land was indeed once accessible to men and will be so again now that Kali Yuga, the Dark Age, is over. Initiation has always led thither, and it was always possible for those who had achieved Initiation to guide their steps into that mysterious land which is said to have disappeared from the sphere of human experience. Deeply moving are the writings which tell of this ancient land, whither the Initiates repair ever and again in order to bring from there the new streams and impulses for everything that is to be imparted to mankind from century to century. Those who are connected with the spiritual world in this way resort again and again to Shamballa—the name of this mysterious land. It is the deep fount into which clairvoyant vision once reached; it withdrew during Kali Yuga and is spoken of as an ancient fairyland that will come again into the realm of man. Shamballa will be there again when Kali Yuga has run its course. Mankind will rise through normal human faculties into the land of Shamballa, the land whence the Initiates draw strength and wisdom for the missions they are to fulfil. Shamballa is a reality, was a reality, will be a reality again for humanity. And when Shamballa reveals itself again, one of the first visions to come to men will be that of Christ in His etheric form. Into the land declared by Oriental writings to have vanished there is no Leader other than Christ. It is Christ who will lead men to Shamballa.

We must inscribe into our souls what can come to pass for humanity if the omen [See note 2 at the end of this lecture.] referred to in the lecture yesterday is rightly understood. If men realise that they dare not allow themselves to sink more deeply into matter, that their path must be reversed, that a spiritual life must begin, then, at first for a few and in the course of two thousand five hundred years for a greater and greater number of human beings, there will arise the experience of the land of Shamballa—woven of light, shone through with light, teeming with wisdom. Such is the event which for those who have the will to understand, for those who have ears to hear and eyes to see, must be described as denoting the most momentous turning-point in the evolution of humanity at the dawn of the Abraham-epoch in the Christian era. It is the event through which men's understanding of the Christ Impulse will be enhanced and intensified.

Strange as it may seem, wisdom will thereby lose nothing of its value. The more insight men achieve, the greater and mightier will Christ appear to them to be! When once their gaze can penetrate into Shamballa, they will be able to understand much of what is indeed contained in the Gospels but for the recognition of which they will need to experience a kind of event of Damascus. Thus at the time when men are more sceptical of the original records than they have ever been, the new form of belief in Christ Jesus will arise when we grow into the realm where He will first be encountered: the mysterious land of Shamballa.

Halley's Comet. The following passages are from the lecture to which Dr. Steiner is referring: Mysteries of Cosmic Existence. Comets and the Moon. “... Halley's Comet has a quite definite task and everything else that it brings with it is definitely related to this task. Halley's Comet—we are speaking of its spiritual aspect—has the task of impressing human nature as a whole in such a way that human nature and the human being always take a further step in respect of the development of the Ego when the Comet comes near to the Earth. It is the step in development which leads out the Ego to concepts connected with the physical plane. ... When it is said that Halley's Comet may be an omen, that its influence, working alone, might make men superficial and lead out the Ego more and more on to the physical plane, and that precisely in our days this must be resisted—it is not said for the purpose of reviving an old superstition. The resistance can come about only by a spiritual view of the world like that of Anthroposophy taking the place of the trend of evolution brought about by Halley's Comet ...”

See also, Lecture-Course 17, The Christ Impulse and the Development of the Ego-Consciousness. Lecture 5.

There is a certain connection between the past and the future in the evolution of humanity. When one considers this connection, it throws much light on the question that we can perhaps express in this way: what is our task as human beings in any particular period?

When we came together here some time ago, we said various things about the past in the evolution of humanity. Today, something will be said about the connection in the evolution of humanity between the past and the immediate future. In concluding yesterday's lecture, we were able to point to an important indication that says, as if speaking from heaven, that humanity needs a spiritual impulse, something like a new impulse of the age. We can understand how this new impulse must work only if we consider the last millennia before the founding of Christianity in a certain connection with the millennia following Christ, in which we ourselves live.

There is a law according to which certain events are repeated in the evolution of humanity, and we spoke of such repetitions in human evolution in the last Stuttgart lectures. Today I wish to point out particularly that when such regular repetitions are referred to by spiritual science, one should not believe that such repetitions can be constructed intellectually, because the repetitions must be examined, after all, in detail; they must be established in detail through spiritual research. One can go far astray if one uses one or another of these repetitions as a pattern for constructing new ones. There is one repetition that, as a matter of fact, resembles another, that repetition in which fundamental events, important events that were effective before the founding of Christianity, recur in a certain way after the founding of Christianity.

If one observes the last three millennia before the founding of Christianity, it is seen that these three millennia belong to an epoch in the history of the evolution of humanity that is designated as the so-called Dark Age—the lesser Dark Age—Kali Yuga. This Kali Yuga began in the year 3101 before the founding of Christianity. All that we at the present time designate as the great achievements of humanity, what we call the characteristic feature of present human culture, is bound up with this Dark Age. Before this Dark Age, or Kali Yuga, the whole of human thinking, all human soul forces, were still ordered differently in a certain respect. In the period before the year 3101 BC—this is an approximate date, since evolution moved gradually from one kind of character to another—there existed what one can designate as the last residue of the old clairvoyance. In the course of human evolution these periods follow one another: Krita Yuga, Treta Yuga, Dvapara Yuga, Kali Yuga. The last interests us today most particularly. With the earlier periods we come back to old Atlantis. In ancient times there still existed remnants of the old clairvoyance, so that before the Dark Age man still had an immediate consciousness of the existence of a spiritual world, because he could see into that spiritual world.

This consciousness of the spiritual world gradually withdrew from human view, and we may say that, on the average, the faculties and forces began to be cultivated that confine human judgment to the world of the senses and yet that also cultivate human self-consciousness. These forces all began during Kali Yuga. While man was not in a position to look into the spiritual worlds during this period, that firm point increasingly developed itself within the physical, sensible world, the point that we call knowledge of self-consciousness. Do not suppose, however, that this knowledge of self-consciousness has already been cultivated to a high degree. It must cultivate itself further. It could never have entered human consciousness, however, had there not been this Dark Age. In the 3,000 years before the founding of Christianity, therefore, man gradually lost his connection with the spiritual world. He no longer had this connection through his direct observation.

During my last visit here, we saw how, at the end of the first millennium, a kind of compensation occurred for the lost vision into the spiritual worlds. This was given to man through the fact that a particular individuality, Abraham, was selected, possessing in special degree that organization of the physical brain through which it was possible to attain consciousness of the spiritual world without the ancient faculties. In spiritual science, therefore, we call the first part of Kali Yuga pre-eminently the period of Abraham—that period in which man loses, to be sure, the direct view into the higher spiritual worlds but in which something like a consciousness of God awakens in him. This gradually grows into his I, so that he increasingly conceives this God as being related to the I-consciousness, the human I-consciousness. The Godhead appears as the World-I to that age, the first millennium in Kali Yuga, which we may call, at its conclusion, the age of Abraham.

This age of Abraham was followed by the age of Moses, in which the God Jahve, the World-I, no longer manifested Itself as a mysterious guiding power in human destinies, as a god of one people alone. As we know, this Godhead revealed itself in the age of Moses in the burning bush as the God of the elements. It was a great advance when the World-I, as the Godhead, was experienced in such a way through the teachings of Moses that one said to oneself: the elements of existence—what we see with physical eyes, lightning, thunder, etc.—are, in the last analysis, emanations, deeds of the World-I, of the single World-I.

We must understand quite clearly to what extent this was an advance. When we go back beyond the age of Abraham and beyond Kali Yuga, we find that, through their direct vision into the spiritual worlds resulting from remnants of the old clairvoyance, human beings see the spiritual. They see this spiritual in all ancient times, however. We must go a long way back if we wish to find something different. Human beings see the spiritual during Dvapara Yuga, Treta Yuga, Krita Yuga. They see the spiritual in such a way that it manifests itself as a multiplicity of beings. You know, of course, that when we ascend to the spiritual worlds we find there the hierarchies of spiritual beings. These stand, naturally, under spiritual guidance, a unified spiritual guidance. In those ancient times, however, consciousness did not reach as far as this unified spiritual guidance. One saw single members of the hierarchies, one saw a multiplicity of divine beings. Only the initiates were able to bring them together as a unity. Now, however, the World-I, which man first perceived with the physical instrument of the brain that was especially marked in Abraham, confronted the human being. Man now perceived this World-I as manifesting itself in the various kingdoms of nature, in the various elements.

Then a further advance was accomplished for the last millennium prior to the founding of Christianity, in the age of Solomon. We thus can distinguish the three millennia before the founding of Christianity in this way: we call the first millennium the age of Abraham, after that individuality who appears in it and who affects the second. From the beginning of Kali Yuga until Abraham, human beings prepare themselves to recognize the single Godhead behind the appearances of nature, and this possibility emerges with Abraham. In the age of Moses, the One God becomes the ruler of natural phenomena and is sought behind the phenomena of nature. All of this undergoes an intensification in the age of Solomon. We are led through this latter age up to the point of evolution at which the same divine being who was regarded as Jahve in the ages of Abraham and Moses takes on human form. In a spiritual scientific contemplation of this matter, one must adhere strictly to the fact that in this respect the Gospels are right: we may not distinguish Christ from Jahve other than as we distinguish the direct light of the sun from that sunlight reflected back to us by the moon. What kind of light do we have on a moonlit night? It is real sunlight, except that it is reflected to us from the moon. We thus can have this sunlight directly during the day or sent back from the moon on moonlit nights. What we see occurring here in space presents itself also in time in the way in which what finally appeared as a Spirit Sun, in Christ, manifested itself beforehand as though reflected. Jahve is the reflection that precedes Christ in time. Just as moonlight is reflected sunlight, so did the Christ being reflect Himself for Abraham, Moses, and Solomon. It was always the same being. Then He Himself appeared as the Christ Sun with the founding of Christianity. We thus have the preparation for this great event in the ages of Abraham, Moses, and Solomon.

A repetition of these three ages, as they were before the founding of Christianity, now takes place during the time following Christ, but in reverse order. The repetition occurs in such a way that the essential feature of the age of Solomon is repeated in the first millennium after Christ, and, indeed, the spirit of Solomon lives and weaves in the most outstanding spirits of the first Christian millennium. It was fundamentally the wisdom of Solomon, that which had spread abroad as the wisdom of Solomon, through which man sought to grasp the nature and essential character of the Christ event. It was by means of what man had learned through the wisdom of Solomon that he sought to understand the significance of the Christ event.

Then followed the age that can be called the revival of the age of Moses. The age of Solomon after Christ was followed by the age of Moses. When we come to the second millennium after Christ, it is the spirit of Moses that now permeates the best human beings of this time. Indeed, we can find this spirit of Moses revived in a new form. In pre-Christian times the spirit of Moses directed its glance out into the world, toward outer physical nature, in order to find the World-I, to find the World-God as Jahve, as World-I, to find Him in thunder and lightning, to find Him in what can stream in from without as the great law of human action. Just as the World-I streams in from without to Moses, just as the World-I is revealed, as it were, from without, so we find that, in the second age following Christ, the same being proclaims Himself inwardly within the human soul. The impression that was for Moses an outer event, as when he withdrew from his people to receive the Decalogue—this significant event repeats itself. It repeats itself in the second millennium after Christ through a mighty inner revelation. Things are not repeated in the same way but in such a way that what occurs successively appears as a kind of polarity. If, therefore, God revealed Himself to Moses out of the elements of nature, He revealed Himself now, in the second millennium after Christ, out of the deepest foundations of the human soul.

How, then, could this come before us in a more sublime way than when we hear how a remarkable man of lofty talents preached in such a way that one heard: he proclaims mighty things out of the depths of his soul? One can assume that this preacher was deeply permeated with what one can call Christian mysticism. Then a seemingly insignificant layman came to the locality where he preached and at first listened to his sermons; it afterward turned out, however, that rather than layman he became the preacher's—that is, Tauler's—instructor. Even though he had reached such a lofty level, the preacher Tauler suspending his preaching until he felt himself permeated by what lived in the layman. When, after having opened himself to this inspiration, Tauler once again ascended the pulpit, the powerful impression of his sermon is made clear to us symbolically when we are told that many of his listeners fell to the ground as if dead. This means that everything of a lower nature in them was killed. It was a revelation of the World-I working just as powerfully from within as it had worked out of the elements, with Moses, during the second pre-Christian age. We thus see the age of Moses coming to life again and in such a way that the spirit of Moses permeates and radiates life into the whole spirit of Christian mysticism, from Master Eckhart to the later Christian mystics. It truly lived in these Christian mystics, the spirit of Moses! It was present in such a way that it entered livingly into their souls.

That was the second age following Christ. In it, the whole character of the age of Moses was resurrected. During the first millennium after the Christian era, the second age of Solomon brought shape to the Christian mystery conception, to all that we know as the hierarchies, for example, in the Christian sense; it formed in detail the wisdom, so to speak, of the higher worlds. In the same way, the second age of Moses particularly formed what constituted German mysticism: the deep, mystical consciousness of the One God, Who can be called to life again in the human soul, Who can be resurrected in the human soul. This age of Moses has remained effective in all striving since that time to investigate ever more exactly the World-I, the One God.

According to the course of human evolution, however, a renewal of the age of Abraham will take place, beginning with our times, during which we shall slowly pass into the third millennium. Just as the age of Abraham and the age of Solomon followed each other in pre-Christian times, so they follow each other in the Christian era in reverse order: age of Solomon, age of Moses, and age of Abraham. We are moving toward this age of Abraham, and it must and will bring us mighty things. Let us call to mind the significance of the age of Abraham. It was then that the old clairvoyance vanished, that a consciousness of God was given to man that is closely connected with human faculties. Everything that humanity could acquire from this consciousness of God that is bound to the human brain has gradually been drained off, and only a little still remains for human beings to acquire by means of these human faculties—indeed, little more. On the contrary, we are going in exactly the opposite direction in the new age of Abraham. We are taking the path that will lead humanity away once more from merely physical, sensible contemplation, away from the combining of physical, sensible signs. We are going along the path that will lead human beings back again into those regions in which they once were before the age of Abraham. We are going along the path that allows human beings to enter into conditions of natural clairvoyance, of natural clairvoyant powers. In the age of Kali Yuga, only initiation could lead upward into the spiritual worlds in the right way. Naturally, initiation leads up to high stages to which human beings will be able to ascend only in the distant future, but the first traces of a renewed clairvoyance, which will appear as a natural human faculty, will become manifest relatively soon as we pass into the renewal of the age of Abraham.

After we have won I-consciousness for ourselves, after human beings have learned to know that the I is a firm central point in the inner being, human beings shall again be guided outward, in order again to be able to look more deeply into the spiritual worlds. This is still connected with that age in which Kali Yuga came to its end. Kali Yuga lasted 5,000 years, until the year 1899 AD. The year 1899 was, indeed, an important year for the evolution of humanity. This is once more an approximate year, of course, for these things happen gradually. Just as the year 3101 BC, however, can be designated as the year when humanity was led down from the old clairvoyance to sense perception and intellectual judgment, so was 1899 AD the year when humanity received another sudden thrust forward, so that it could ascend to the first beginnings of a future human clairvoyance. It is allotted to humanity even in this twentieth century, before the next millennium—indeed, for a few human beings during the first half of the twentieth century—to develop the first elements of a new clairvoyance, a clairvoyance that will most certainly appear in humanity when human beings prove themselves capable of understanding it.

We must make clear to ourselves that two things might occur. It is inherent in the fundamental nature of the human soul that such clairvoyant faculties, as natural faculties (we must differentiate between cultivated clairvoyance and what will come into being as a natural clairvoyance), will come into existence for a few human beings even in the first half of the twentieth century, and for more and more human beings during the next 2,500 years, until at last there will be a sufficiently large number of persons who will attain it—that is, the new, natural clairvoyance—if only they win it.

There are two different possibilities of what might happen, however. One is that human beings will have the aptitude for this clairvoyance but, during the coming decades, materialism will triumph and humanity will sink into a materialistic swamp. Isolated human beings will appear who will say that it seems to them as if they saw something in physical man like a second man; yet, if materialistic consciousness goes so far as to declare that spiritual science is folly and to stamp out all consciousness of the spiritual world, people simply will not understand these first capacities. It will depend upon humanity itself whether what then takes place turns out to be a blessing or a curse, since what is really to occur might pass by unnoticed.

The other situation might arise in which spiritual science will not be trampled. Then one will understand that such qualities are not only to be cultivated in the secret schools of initiation but also to be cherished, when they appear toward the middle of our century, as delicate saplings of human soul life in this or that person. Such a person will say, as if from an awakened soul force, “I see something like a reality, just as it is described in anthroposophy as the second man within physical man.” Still other faculties will appear, for instance, a faculty that human beings will notice in themselves. They will perform some deed. When they look up from this action, something like a dream picture will stand before their souls, from which they will know, “This has some connection with my action.” People will know on the basis of spiritual science, “If such an after-image of my deed appears before me—which is essentially different, however, from this deed—it can have no other meaning than to show me the karmic effect of my action that is to appear in the future.”

A few individuals will come to have such karmic understanding in the middle of our century, because Kali Yuga has run its course and because from epoch to epoch ever-new faculties appear in human beings. If understanding is not created, however, if this faculty is trampled to death, so to speak, if one who talks about these faculties is locked up as a fool, it will prove disastrous for humanity. Human beings will decay in the swamp of materialism. All of this will depend upon whether an understanding is awakened for spiritual science or whether the materialistic counter-current succeeds—whether Ahriman succeeds—in repelling what spiritual science does with good purpose. Then, to be sure, those people who are mired and choking in this materialistic swamp may say jeeringly, “Yes, indeed, those were fine prophets who said human beings would see a second man beside the physical man!” Certainly, nothing will manifest itself if the necessary faculties have been trampled to death. If these faculties do not become apparent in the middle of the twentieth century, however, it will be no proof that the human being is not so endowed but will only prove that human beings have crushed under foot the budding young shoots. What has been described today is there and can develop if only humanity wills it.

We stand, therefore, directly before such an evolution. We are retracing our steps, so to speak, along the path of evolution. With Abraham, consciousness of God was led into the brain; as we enter into a new age of Abraham, this consciousness of God is in turn led out of the brain and, during the next 2,500 years, we shall come gradually to know human beings who will have what the exalted secrets of initiation yield as the great spiritual teachings about the mysteries of the universe. Just as the spirit of Moses ruled in the age that has run its course up to our time, so does the spirit of Abraham now begin to reign in order that, having led humanity into a consciousness of God within the world of the senses, he may now lead humanity out again. It is an eternal cosmic law that each individual must perform a particular deed repeatedly. He must, above all, perform the deed twice—one time as though doing the opposite of the other time. What Abraham brought down for humanity into physical consciousness he will carry up again for humanity into the spiritual world.

We thus see that we are living in important, essential conditions in this age, and we understand that to disseminate spiritual science today is not something one does by preference but something demanded by our times. To prepare humanity for great moments in evolution is one of the tasks of spiritual research. Spiritual science exists in order that human beings shall know what they see. Whoever is true to the age in which he lives cannot help thinking that knowledge of the spirit must come into the world so as not to allow what will come in the future to go unnoticed by humanity.

These things are bound up with still others. In certain other respects, everything renews itself in such similar repetitions. We are approaching a time when ever more of what existed in the pre-Christian centuries will be renewed for humanity, but everything will be immersed in what humanity has been able to win through the great Christ event. We have seen that humanity has now experienced again in Christian inwardness the great moment that Moses experienced through his impressions of the burning bush and the lightning-fire on Sinai. Now, the Taulers and the Eckharts know clearly that, when there arises within them what Moses called Jahve, it is the Christ. It is, however, no longer the reflected Christ being but the Christ Himself who rises from the depths of the heart. What had been experienced by Moses was actually experienced again by the Christian mystics but in a Christianized form—in a form altered through the Christ impulse. What was experienced in the pre-Christian age of Abraham will be experienced in a completely altered, new form. What will this be? All things and events that appear normally in human evolution cast their lights ahead, as it were. (I do not wish to repeat the triviality that is often uttered, that events “cast their shadows,” but that they cast their lights.) Thus, in a certain respect, something connected with events of the future is cast ahead in light in what we call the conversion of Saul to Paul—the event of Damascus.

Let us make it clear to ourselves what this event had to signify for Paul. Until this event took place, Paul was acquainted with all that was inherent in the old Hebraic esoteric doctrine. What did Paul know? Paul knew, through his ancient Hebraic esoteric doctrine, that some day an individuality would descend to earth representing for humanity the one who would overcome death. He knew that an individuality would appear once in the flesh. Through His life He would show that the spirit lives beyond death in such a way that death would mean nothing other than another physical event for this individuality, within His incarnation on earth. This Paul knew. He also knew from his ancient Hebraic esoteric doctrine that when the Christ, the Messiah Who was to come, had been present in the flesh, when He had risen from the dead and had won a victory over death, as it were, the spiritual sphere of the earth would be transformed; clairvoyance would experience a transformation. Whereas previously a clairvoyant could not see the Christ being in the spiritual atmosphere of the earth but only when looking up to the Sun Spirit, Paul knew that, through the Christ impulse, such a transformation in earthly existence must occur that after the victory over death the Christ would be found, for clairvoyant consciousness, in the earthly sphere. When, therefore, the human being becomes clairvoyant, he must behold the Christ in the earthly sphere as the active Earth Spirit. What Paul could not convince himself of while he was still Saul, however, was that the one Who had lived in Palestine, Who had died on the cross, about Whom His disciples said that He had risen from the dead, was really the one about Whom the ancient Hebraic esoteric doctrine had spoken. The significant thing is that Paul was not convinced of what is related in the Gospels through what he had seen physically. He began to have the conviction that Christ was the predicted Messiah only when that forward-cast light manifested itself in him, when he became clairvoyant as though through grace and discovered the Christ in the earthly sphere.

“He has, then, already been here; he has already risen from the dead,” he must have said to himself. After Paul himself saw the Christ clairvoyantly in the spiritual sphere of the earth, he knew: now He is here. From that moment on, he felt completely convinced regarding Christ Jesus. The fundamental event was therefore that, through the event of Damascus, he discovered Christ Jesus clairvoyantly in the earthly sphere. If Paul had not been able to hear the accounts in Palestine of the deeds of Christ Jesus, if he had not been able to have the personal experience of hearing the Gospels but had lived somewhat later, it might have happened that he would simply have experienced at a later time this Christ event of Damascus. He would then have arrived, however, at the same conviction, because this event revealed to him the fact that the Christ was there! He who reveals Himself there in the earthly sphere is the one about whom the ancient Hebraic esoteric doctrine speaks!

This Christ event is not limited to one point in time. In the case of Paul, it simply followed quickly in order that Christianity would be able to pursue its course through Paul. Now, to be sure, during the ensuing time of Kali Yuga until 1899, the development of humanity was not such that a person could, without further ado, experience an event such as Paul's; human faculties had not ripened to this extent. It could therefore be experienced by grace, and others also experienced similar events by grace. We are now living, however, in the age in which that mighty, revolutionary change is to occur in which the first seeds of a natural clairvoyance will evolve. We are coming into the age of Abraham; we are being led out into the spiritual world. Through this, the possibility is given that a certain number of human beings, and then more and more, shall experience during the next 2,500 years a repetition of the event of Damascus. The greatness and power of the next age will consist in the fact that for many people the event of Damascus will come to life; that through these faculties of which I have just spoken the Christ will become perceptible in the spiritual sphere of the earth. He will radiate into these faculties. As human beings become capable of seeing the etheric body, they will learn to see the etheric body of Christ Jesus, even as Paul saw it.

This is what is beginning as the characteristic of a new age, and it will become manifest between 1930 and 1940 to 1945 in the first forerunners among human beings who have these faculties. If human beings are attentive, they will experience this event of Damascus through direct spiritual observation, and with it clarity and truth about the Christ event.

A striking parallelism of events will take place, because in the next two decades human beings will gradually fall away from the letter of the Gospels and will no longer understand them. We see even today how trivial scholars “prove” to people everywhere that the Gospels are not historical documents, that one cannot refer at all to a historic Christ. The historical documents will lose their value for humanity; the number of those who deny Christ Jesus will become greater and greater. Those human beings are shortsighted who will still be able to believe that one can preserve Christianity by means of the mere story. Those whose intentions are honest regarding Christianity are not the ones who reject an understanding of the spiritual proof of Christ Jesus. The spiritual proof of Christ Jesus will be provided through nurturing the faculties of human beings, through the fact that they shall behold the truly existing Christ in His etheric body. After all, no matter how much those persons who wish to rely only on documents call themselves good Christians, they destroy Christianity; no matter how much they raise a hue and cry and how loudly they proclaim what they know about Christianity through the documents, they destroy Christianity. They destroy it because they reject a spiritual teaching according to which Christ in our century will become truth for human beings through vision.

When our era began, human beings had been descending into the Dark Age for more than three millennia and were dependent upon their outer faculties. At that time Christ could have revealed Himself to the faculties that were necessary for human evolution in no other way than through physical incarnation. At that time the physical faculties had reached the peak of their development, and Christ had to appear in a physical body. Humanity would not have advanced a single step, however, if it could not become capable of finding the reality of Christ in higher worlds through higher faculties. Just as Christ had to be found with purely physical faculties at that time, so will human beings with the newly developed faculties find Christ in that world in which only etheric bodies are seen, for there is no second physical incarnation of Christ. Only once did He appear in the flesh, for only once were human faculties dependent upon having Christ in a physical body. Now, however, with the higher faculties, human beings will be able to perceive the much more real etheric body of the Christ.

This is what one can call the mighty event that lies ahead of us—the reappearance of Christ Jesus—taking place gradually, at first only for a few, then for more and more human beings. It is an event that has significance not only for those human beings who will then still be incarnated in the flesh. A number of human beings who are incarnated today will still be incarnated at the time when this Christ event takes place. They will experience it as it has been described. Others will have gone through the portal of death. Just as we once learned here that the event of Golgotha was not only an event for the physical world but carried its effect over into all spiritual worlds—just as the descent of Christ into the underworld was a real fact—so will the Christ event, which will present itself in our century, have its effect also in the world between death and a new birth, though in a different form from the one man will find here on earth. One thing will be necessary, however. Those faculties through which one will be able to perceive the Christ event between death and a new birth cannot be acquired between death and a new birth; they must be acquired here on the physical plane and must be carried with one into the life between death and a new birth.

There are faculties that must be acquired on earth, as it is not for nothing that we are placed on the physical earth. Anyone who believes that we have been put on the physical earth for nothing is on the wrong track. We must acquire faculties here that we cannot acquire in any other world. The faculties for an understanding of the Christ event, of which we have spoken, and of the following events, must be acquired here on earth. Those human beings who acquire these faculties now, here on this earth, through the teachings of spiritual science, will carry these faculties through the portal of death. Not merely through initiation but through the understanding acceptance of the teachings of spiritual science one acquires these faculties, the possibility of perceiving the Christ event also in the spiritual world between death and a new birth. Anyone who has deaf ears, however, must wait until a subsequent incarnation to acquire the faculties that one must acquire here, in order to be able to experience the Christ event there, in the spiritual world. No one, therefore, should harbor the belief that the revelation of the Christ event, which can be understood only through the whole of spiritual scientific teaching, will not bear fruit for him if he has already passed through the portal of death at the time when it takes place. It will bear fruit for him.

We thus see that spiritual research is a preparation for a new Christ event. Those, however, who absorb the essence of the teaching of the spirit as the content of their whole soul life—as vital life—should then really grow upward to a spiritual understanding of the matter. They should then make it clear to themselves that they must learn through spiritual science to understand our newly awakening age thoroughly. We must learn to understand that in the future we are not to look on the physical plane for the most important events but outside it, just as we shall have to look for Christ on His return as etheric form in the spiritual world.

What has been said now will be said again and again in the next decades. There will be human beings who will misunderstand this, however, and they will say, “The Christ is to come again!” Since they will carry into this idea the belief that it is a physical return, they will supply nourishment to all those who will appear as false messiahs. There will be many such persons in the middle of the twentieth century who will use the materialistic beliefs of human beings, who will use the materialistic thinking and feeling of human beings to pass themselves off as the Christ. There have always been false messiahs. There was, for instance, the age before the Crusades when a false messiah appeared in the south of France, in whom his followers saw something like a Christ incarnated in a physical body. Before that, a false messiah had appeared in Spain and found many followers. In North Africa one who presented himself as the Christ created a great sensation. In the seventeenth century a man appeared as Christ in Smyrna and gained a huge following. He was called Shabattai Tzevi. People from Poland, Hungary, Austria, Spain, Germany, France—from the whole of Europe and from a large part of Africa and Asia—made pilgrimages to see him.

In the past centuries this was not so terrible, because the demand had not yet been made of humanity to distinguish the true from the false. Only now have we come to the age when it could be disastrous if human beings should fail to pass the spiritual test. Those will pass it who know that human faculties go through a further evolution; that those faculties for seeing Christ in the physical were limited to seeing Him thus only to the time of the founding of Christianity but that humanity would not advance if it did not find the Christ again in our century in a higher form. Those who strive after spiritual science will have to prove themselves to be the ones who can distinguish the false messiahs from the one Messiah, Who will appear, not in the flesh but as a spiritual being for the newly awakened faculties.

The time will come when human beings will again look into the spiritual world and will see the land there from which those streams flow down that give true spiritual nourishment to everything that happens in the physical world. We have, indeed, always seen that it was possible for human beings with the old clairvoyance to look into the spiritual world. The Oriental writings contain in their traditions something like a record handed down about an ancient spiritual land that human beings were once able to behold, from which they could draw all that could flow into the physical world from the super-sensible. Many descriptions of that land, which human beings were once able to reach and which seems to have withdrawn, are full of melancholy. This land was, indeed, once accessible to human beings, and it will now be accessible to them again, since Kali Yuga, the Dark Age, has run its course.

Initiation, however, always led into that mysterious land, which is spoken of as a country that seemed to have vanished out of the sphere of human experience. It withdrew during Kali Yuga, but for those who had received initiation there was always the possibility of guiding their steps into it. The accounts of this ancient country are touching. It is the same land to which the initiates again and again repair in order to fetch from it the new streams and impulses for all that is to be given to humanity from century to century. Again and again those who stand in this relationship with the spiritual world enter this mysterious land, which is called Shamballa. It is the primal fountainhead, into which clairvoyant sight once reached but which withdrew during Kali Yuga. It is spoken of as one would speak of an ancient fairyland, one that will return, however, into the realm of human beings. There will be Shamballa again after Kali Yuga has run its course. Humanity, through normal human faculties, will again grow into the land of Shamballa, from which the initiates bring strength and wisdom for their mission. There is Shamballa; there was Shamballa; Shamballa will come to be again for humanity. Among the first visions that human beings will have when Shamballa shows itself again will be Christ in His etheric form. Humanity has no other leader than the Christ to take it into the land that Oriental writings declare to have vanished. Christ will lead humanity to Shamballa.

It is this that we must inscribe into our souls. It can come to pass for humanity if we interpret in the right sense the omen of Halley's Comet that we mentioned yesterday. If humanity understands that it must not sink deeper into matter, that it must reverse its course, that a spiritual life must begin, there will arise, at first only for a few, then—in the next 2,500 years—for more and more human beings, the light-woven, light-gleaming Shamballa, abounding in infinite fullness of life and filling our hearts with wisdom. For those who wish to understand, for those who have ears to hear and eyes to see, this must be described as the event that signifies the greatest turning point in the evolution of humanity, at the dawn of the age of Abraham following the founding of Christianity. It will be the event through which human beings will understand to a higher degree the Christ impulse. For the peculiar thing will be that, through this, wisdom will suffer no loss. The more visions human beings win for themselves, the greater Christ will appear to them, the mightier He will appear! When once human beings are able to immerse their gaze into Shamballa, then only will they be able to understand various things that are indeed contained in the Gospels. To recognize what is given in the Gospels they will need a kind of event of Damascus. Thus, at the time when human beings will be most unbelieving regarding documents, the new profession of faith in Christ Jesus will arise through our growing into the sphere in which we shall encounter Him, through our growing into the mysterious land of Shamballa.

Notes by Alice Kinkel

The exoteric Christianity that is out there is not the real thing at all; to know this and to feel it in one's soul is important. Contemporary Christianity is only a distortion of true Christianity.

To become personally blessed is what people want today, that is what they want in exoteric Christianity, but in doing so they become highly selfish.

Watch and pray, that you do not fall into temptation. (That was the theme of the hour).

The souls who lived on earth in the 12th, 13th, 14th, 15th, 16th centuries after Christ were embodied on earth at the time of Christ or directly afterwards. We were together with these souls in Devachan. We lived in the 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th century after Christ.

This strong egoistic drive of wanting to become personally blissful, we brought with us into this incarnation. We must practice self-knowledge.

Our esoteric feeling of responsibility must become keener; we must acquire theosophical conscientiousness. It's seldom found in the outside world. Examples: 1. A gentleman who want to write a big book and wants to incorporate something about theosophy in it asks R. Steiner to tell him what it's about since he doesn't have time to study it. 2. an American goes to lectures by R. Steiner here, summarized them—to the extent that he understands them—and prints them as his own publications in America.

We must acquire theosophical tact and only speak about the school and esoteric things in the right place, and never at meals.

Our physical body is tightly fused with the etheric body. There's two ways to loosen them: 1. In an exoteric way through physical exercise and a vegetarian diet. 2. In an esoteric way through training, meditation, etc. This works on the astral body and that works on the etheric body, so that it gets loosened. One could say that a front cord with lotus flowers is built up by meditation, concentration, etc., as a counterpart to the physical spinal cord in the rear and the brain. That's the right way which permits no injury to the physical body. Whereas if one only uses outer means of loosening of the etheric body occurs, but it hasn't been strengthened by meditation or an influx of theosophical truths. The result is diseases of the physical body or confusion, etc., when the etheric brain becomes loosened from the physical one.