The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Zurich, April 14, 1904

Dearest Mrs. and Dr. Paulus!

Before the 16th approaches, I would like to write you a few lines about the next days of meditation. So I ask you to fill in the part indicated in my remarks with the “Voice of Silence” in such a way that during the first fortnight the first two sentences of the writing are in the field of vision of consciousness. I mean (omitting the very first sentence) the following:

"He who wants to understand the voice of the spirit apart from itself must first experience the nature of his own spirit. When the seeker no longer wants to hear the world of the senses alone, he must seek out that which produces this world; he must live in thoughts that make the world of the senses into an illusory world.

It is not a matter of speculating about these sentences, but of spending a few minutes living with them. To do this, one must have previously appropriated their content in such a way that one can survey it with a spiritual gaze, place it spiritually before oneself, and let it take effect without over-analysing it. Only by letting the thoughts to be meditated flow over you in complete calm will meditation bear fruit.

Should anything be unclear or amiss, I request that you ask me about it, and I will answer immediately. From Lugano, I will write to you about the promised interpretation of the Seven Voices, which cannot be done for another fortnight.¹

I will also write to you immediately upon my arrival regarding the Bresch remarks.²

Today I just want to tell you both that I am deeply gratified by your interest in Theosophy. When one is aware of the worldwide reputation of Theosophy, one comes to appreciate the interest of deeper natures. I will have much to write about in the next few days regarding the messages from Dr. [Marie] von Martens. In Munich, every hour was filled, and here in Zurich, too, the Theosophists from here and the surrounding area have gathered. But the train is leaving soon.

So for the time being, warm greetings to you both and Arenson's

from your

Rudolf Steiner

Temporary Address:
Dr. Rudolf Steiner
at Mr. Günther Wagner's
Lugano Castagnola (Switzerland)

• 1. Done in a letter dated August 11, 1904.
• 2. It is not known

Report in the “Züricher Post”, November 24, 1905

Theosophy and the “world riddles”. We request the following lines to be included:

Th. S. On the evening of November 13, in front of a large audience of around 250 people, Dr. phil. Rud. Steiner from Berlin spoke about Theosophy and “The World Riddles” by E. Haeckel in the courtroom of the Schwurgericht (court of assizes). The speaker explained that the worldview called “Theosophy” (the wisdom of God) originated about thirty years ago. It is a spiritual movement that encompasses and unites religion, science, philosophy and ethics and answers questions about the origin, nature, purpose and goal of human beings. The world riddles are solvable; but only Theosophy is able to solve them, and in a way that satisfies all people, learned and unlearned. It is Theosophy that creates peace between the different worldviews, sciences and religions, all of which have a kernel of truth. But above all, Theosophy does not contradict the achievements of the natural sciences.

The lecturer now turns specifically to Haeckel's work “Die Welträtsel” (The Riddle of the World), whose widespread popularity is a testament to humanity's great interest in the most important questions. Many Theosophists speak out very sharply against Haeckel. I, the speaker continues, do not want that. Rather, I want to contribute to an understanding of Haeckel's world view. Haeckel's importance lies in the continuation of Darwinism, in the expansion of the evidence that all living things are based on a unified organization and that humans are also a link in the one great series of the animal world. But all this was recognized long before Darwin, for example by Goethe. However, his thoughts were in too lofty regions to be accessible and comprehensible to all people. Darwin's and his epigones' most significant work consists mainly in the fact that they drew the ideas of the unified context of all organisms (including humans) down to a level accessible to all of humanity, proved them to be true, and thus made them understandable to the mind. In this respect, Haeckel's “Welträtsel” (World Mysteries) is an astonishingly great achievement.

But great men also have great faults. From a theosophical point of view, there is nothing to be said against Darwin's theory of the origin of species. However, a distinction must be made

between Darwin's Darwinism and Haeckel's Darwinism, because in his writings, Darwin speaks of the “Creator” and the “Omniscient and Almighty, who foresees everything”. However, the original Darwinism occurred during a materialistic era and therefore received a thoroughly materialistic interpretation and explanation from its followers and developers. And it is only against this interpretation and explanation that Theosophy is directed.

The material and visible world is based on a transcendental and invisible one. If Darwinism had come into a spiritualistic-idealistic age instead of a materialistic one, it would undoubtedly have been interpreted and explained in a spiritualistic-idealistic way. But in an age when even the smallest living creature, the cell, can be seen by the armed bodily eye, the materialistic world view – and especially materialistic biology – is understandable. The “habits of thought”, whether religious, idealistic, materialistic and so on, play a major role. But thinking purely materialistically is a mistake; for there are perceptions (for example, the perception of the color red, the scent of roses, the sound of an organ) that cannot be conceived and explained in a materialistic way. They are based on material impulses, but these are not the deepest, ultimate cause. Materialism cannot solve the riddles of the world; this was also recognized, for example, by Du Bois-Reymond in his famous Ignorabimus speech. Haeckel's mistake, then, is that he brought his materialistic thinking habits into Darwinism, and that he also wants to explain mental and spiritual processes in material terms. But Theosophy does not want to criticize Haeckel's explanations of the physical or sensual, but to recognize them.

Steiner now turns specifically to Theosophy, which recognizes two entities in man, one soul or spiritual and one physical or material, and claims, for example, that these two entities are separate in the sleeping person. The fact that the soul or spirit does not express itself and does not feel in deep sleep is only because it lacks the organs to do so. Therefore, it is the task of every human being to recognize this and to decide to provide his soul with certain means corresponding to the sensory organs of the supersensible. The moment this happens is what the theosophist calls “rebirth”. Through the continued use of these means (which, however, were not mentioned), the soul or spirit develops into an organized supersensible, true or divine human being, to whom the dream world is also an entity and who can see the spirits with the “inner eye” just as the sensual human being can see the bodies with his outer eye. The body is transitory, the spirit or soul is eternal, an ineradicable unity. Therefore, theosophy is monism in the highest sense.

Will the newly formed “Theosophical Society Zurich” prosper and turn us all into Theosophists? The author of these lines does not think so. He believes it is a mistake to consider that what we call mind or spirit is not physical or natural, and finds it curious that we need to obtain organs for it. The theosophical identification of the terms soul and spirit is also unlikely to fall on fertile ground. Although today's state of science allows for certain differences, it no longer allows for sharp boundaries between what we call spiritual, mental and physical. Of course, theosophy has its merits in that it opposes crude materialism and seeks to give the spiritual side of man its due. But the theosophical degradation of the physical side of man, which, after all, also – to quote Darwin – originates from the “almighty and omniscient Creator” as his material and spiritual product, cannot stand up before the judgment seat of true science, such as natural science.

In recent years it has been possible to speak in Swiss places about a highly significant topic in spiritual science, a topic that is fundamentally the highest for spiritual science: the Christ-problem. And if many people of the present time, who are quite outside the spiritual science movement, believe that this is basically the simplest topic that can be discussed, then from their point of view these people of the present time are right. What is greatest for the development of the earth and of humanity, the power of Christ, the Christ impulse, has certainly worked in such a way that the simplest, most naive mind can somehow understand it. But on the other hand, this impulse has worked in such a way that no earthly wisdom is sufficient to truly understand what happened in Palestine at the beginning of our era, what happened for humanity and, in fact, for the whole world.

Now, in recent years, the Christ problem has been discussed, and perhaps I may point out in a few words that the German Section has just completed its first seven-year cycle. It was founded seven years ago; at that time there were few branches, hardly ten. Now the number has grown to over forty. The number seven is so often mentioned when we speak of anthroposophical wisdom and world view, and a certain lawfulness is also expressed in it, so that this development is taking place in seven successive cycles of time. We need only recall what we have already touched on here, the development of our earth; it is passing through seven planetary states. The law of seven also applies on a smaller scale, to every single fact of world evolution as well as to a movement such as the development of spiritual science. Those who look more deeply into our movement can see that in a certain respect this seven-year cycle has unfolded quite regularly, and that we are at a decisive point where what was laid seven years ago is repeated at a higher level and at the same time returns to itself in a cycle; but this could only happen because we really worked in a spiritual sense, that we did not work arbitrarily and randomly, but according to the law.

Then you remember that we distinguish seven aspects to the human being: first the physical body, then the etheric body, the astral body and the I; then, when the I reworks the astral body, the spirit self or manas arises; when it reworks the etheric body, the life spirit or buddhi arises; when it finally reworks the physical body, the highest link, the spirit man or atma, arises, so that we first distinguish four links and then three more, which arise as a transformation from the first three.

If you now want to implement something in the world so that a spiritual law is embodied in it, then this great law must be followed everywhere. If you, as a young branch, so to speak, want to enter into spiritual life in the appropriate way, it is good to see how the organization of the whole work has progressed. For the young branch will recognize that it is necessary to catch up on this process of development on its part, to follow it. We have followed this process exactly in the German movement: in the first four years we gathered together everything necessary to gain a concept of the world from which spiritual science begins. First of all, we presented the sevenfold nature of the human being, the doctrine of karma and reincarnation, the great cosmic laws, the evolution of Saturn, Sun and Moon, and the laws of the individual course of life, so that this is available in our literature and in various branch works. This was done in the first four years.

In the last three years, we have basically gained nothing new in any systematic way, but have instead planted the higher wisdoms in what has been achieved in the first four years, and have then ascended to the comprehension of the highest individuality that has walked our earth, the individuality of Christ Jesus - which we would not have been able to do if it had to be done with nothing but unknown ideas. We could only speak about Christ after we had spoken about the nature of man in general. We could only comprehend how this Christ event occurred if we understood human nature and its entire sequence of stages. Those who heard the lectures on the Gospel of Luke in Basel, and also the others who heard something here and there, know that very complicated processes took place. But how could it have been understood that, for example, something significant happened to one of the Jesus-boys in the twelfth year of his life if we had not known what actually takes place between the ages of twelve and fifteen? We prepared systematically and then, in deep reverence for the greatest truths of our earthly cycle, we tried to grasp what is associated with the name of Christ Jesus. It was like ascending to ever greater heights. Thus it came about that one could contemplate the Christ Jesus in connection with the Gospel of John and the Gospel of Luke. Even then in Basel it was emphasized that no one should believe that, having heard all the truths in connection with these two Gospels, he then knew what the nature and essence of that high spiritual entity is. He has learned this only from one side. One should not believe that it is unnecessary, or only like a renewal, to hear the truth from another side as well. The gospels are images of this great event, each evangelist presenting from a certain point of view what happened in Palestine.

Now, the day before yesterday in Bern, I demonstrated what is now happening in various branches. For very specific reasons, I tried to sketch out a reference to Christ in connection with the Gospel of Matthew. There are very specific reasons for this. Spiritual science should be a way of looking at life, not a theory or a doctrine; it should transform our innermost soul life. We are to learn to look at the world in a new way. And there is a quality that we must acquire, that man acquires more and more, learns more and more, precisely through the wisdom of anthroposophy. There is no single word in any language that properly describes this quality, but spiritual science will still find the word for this new feeling of the heart. And until then we can only use the word that is there for this quality: humble modesty is what is to take ever deeper root in our soul, especially with regard to those documents that, as gospels, bring us tidings of that most significant event in the evolution of the earth. For there we learn that basically we can only approach very slowly the truths and wisdoms that are necessary to fathom the Christ-problem. We learn to develop a completely different feeling in us than that which today's people have, who are so quickly finished with their judgment of the event. We learn to be careful in presenting the truth, and we know that when we have considered it from any one side, we only perceive one side, never the whole at once.

This is connected with the fact – and only gradually will we gain an understanding of it – why there are four Gospels at all. Today, the fact of the matter is that even theology is intellectual, materialistic, and that the intellect, when applied merely to the four documents, will compare them externally. And that is when contradictions are perceived. First of all, the Gospel of John was examined. What it presents to the intellect, they say, is so contrary to the other three Gospels that the best way to understand this Gospel is to say that the writer did not want to describe real events, but wanted to present a kind of hymn, a kind of confession, a rendering of his feelings. In the Gospel of John, one sees a great, comprehensive poem, and thus it is dismissed as having no documentary value. But only the external, materialistic mind does this. Then the other three Gospels are considered. Certain contradictions are also found there; but these are explained by the fact that the Gospels were written at different times. In short, people today are well on the way to picking these documents about the great event apart, so that they no longer mean anything to humanity. But spiritual science is called upon to show why we have four different documents about the event in Palestine and to reconquer these documents for spiritual science. Why are there four documents?

People have not always thought as they do today. There were times when the Gospels were not in the hands of everyone, but only of very few people, precisely those who were in charge of spiritual life in the first centuries of Christianity. Why do people today not ask themselves: Were these people not complete fools that they did not see that the Gospels contradict each other? Or were they so benighted that they did not see these contradictions? The best of their age accepted these documents in such a way that they looked up humbly and were glad that we have four gospels, of which today's people say they cannot be documents because they contradict each other!

Now, without dwelling on this any longer, we want to draw attention to how the Gospels were received in the first centuries of Christianity, and how they must be received. They were received in those times in such a way that one can compare it to this: If we take a photograph of the bouquet of flowers standing here from four sides, we get four photographs. If we look at them individually, they differ from each other, but if you look at a photograph like this, you can get an idea of the bouquet. Now someone comes along and takes a photograph from a different side. You compare the two pictures and find: Yes, these are two completely different pictures ; they cannot represent the same thing. And yet, one will then have a more complete picture of it; and only when one has taken pictures of the bouquet from four sides and compares all four pictures with each other, will one obtain a complete picture of the real bouquet. — So one has to take the four Gospels as characterizing the same fact from four different sides.

Why is the same fact now characterized from four different sides? Because it was known that each of the writers of these Gospels was imbued with a great, modest humility, a humility that told him: This is the greatest event of earthly evolution; you dare not fully describe it, but you may only describe the side that you, according to your knowledge, are able to describe. In humble modesty, the writer of the Gospel of Luke refrained from describing any other side than the one that was close to him because of his special spiritual education, which told him that Christ Jesus was the one individuality in whom the greatest development of love lived, a love to the point of sacrifice. How does this love reveal itself? The writer of the Gospel of Luke describes it, saying to himself: I am unable to describe the whole event; therefore I will limit myself to describing only this aspect, this love.

We can only understand this limitation of the Gospel writers to a particular area if we gain a little insight into the initiation process of the ancient mystery service. Only from this point of view can we understand the attitude of the Evangelists. They know that initiation is the leading of human beings to the higher, supersensible worlds, the living into the higher, supersensible worlds, the awakening of the soul powers, the awakening of those powers and abilities that otherwise remain hidden and slumber in the soul. Such initiations have always existed. In pre-Christian times, the ancient mysteries of the Egyptians and Chaldeans existed, in which people who were ready were led up into the higher worlds. Only there the work was done in a very special way, in a way that can no longer be fully carried out today. Today, as you know, human beings have three soul powers: thinking, feeling and willing. In everyday life, the human being applies these three soul forces in such a way that they are all three active, so to speak, in his dealings with the outside world.

An example will make clear how these three soul powers are active. You are walking across a meadow. You see a flower. You form an idea about it: you think. You like the flower: you feel that the flower is beautiful; feeling has joined with thinking. And then you desire to pick the flower: you thus activate the will. Thus thinking, feeling and willing were active in your soul. And now survey the whole life of man: insofar as it is soul life, it is a confusion of thinking, feeling and willing. And man gets through life by these three forces interacting. The soul lives in thinking, feeling and willing.

When a person is led up into the higher worlds, this is an expression of these three powers as they are in ordinary life. One can develop thinking higher, so that it becomes vision. And in this way one can also raise feeling and willing into the spiritual world. This is what initiation consists of.

Those who have looked around a bit in “How to Know Higher Worlds” will have read about what happens when a person develops thinking, feeling and willing up into the spiritual worlds. What is called “splitting of the personality” occurs. The three forces are usually organically connected: a person thinks, feels and wills in one personality. But in the process of evolution upward into the higher worlds, these three powers are torn apart. While they are otherwise powers, they now become independent entities when man evolves upward into the higher worlds. Three independent entities arise: a thinking, a feeling and a willing entity. This is what is meant by the danger that man's soul life could be torn apart. If a person does not proceed in the right way when treading the path of higher knowledge, it may happen that he raises his thinking to the higher regions. Then he may indeed see into the higher worlds, but he stops there; he can kill the will, or it can take quite different paths. Today it happens that the I rises above itself, that the I can become a ruler, that it can reign as king over the three soul powers, namely over thinking, feeling and willing.

In ancient times this was not the case. In the pre-Christian mystery schools, the principle of division of labor prevailed. For example, a person was accepted into the initiation sites and it was said: This person is particularly suited to develop the power of thinking. - Then his thinking was developed, raised to a higher level; he was made a sage who sees through the spiritual connections that lie behind all sensual events. That was one category of initiates from the ancient mystery sites: the sages.

Other people were trained in the mystery schools in such a way that the forces of feeling slumbering in them were developed higher, while thinking and willing were left at their original level. Feeling was thus elevated. When a person's feeling is particularly developed, he acquires special qualities. There is an essential difference between a person whose feeling had been developed in an ancient mystery center and a person of today. The influence of such a developed person, the soul-psychic influence, was much stronger than it is today. This development of the powers of feeling meant that the soul of such a person could exert a powerful influence on the souls of those around him. Thus those who had particularly developed the sphere of feeling became the healers of their fellow human beings. By developing their feeling through the sacrificial service, they were called upon to have a healing effect on other people.

The third level of initiates were those in whom the will had been developed. These were the magicians. Thus there were three types of initiates: the magicians, the healers and the wise. These were people who received their training in the mystery schools of antiquity. Today it would no longer be possible to develop one of these qualities in a one-sided way because today it is no longer possible to achieve such a high degree of harmony between individuals as was possible in the mystery schools of antiquity. Those who were wise in the ancient mystery schools, so to speak, renounced it. That is how it is. Those who were healers carried out the instructions of the wise with the greatest obedience, renounced higher wisdom, and used their powers of feeling as directed by the wise.

Besides these, there was still a fourth category of people in the mystery temples. These were necessary. There were cases in these temples where it was not possible for the three categories of initiates to have the right effect in the outside world. Some things could not be done by the initiate of one of these three categories, but only by the presence of a fourth category of people. This consisted in admitting certain individuals who were suitable for it into the mystery centres and saying to themselves: those high degrees of initiation that can be developed in the wise men, healers and magicians cannot be developed in the people of this fourth category. But one could go so far with them that one could raise each individual ability of the other three categories to a certain degree. No ability was as strongly developed as in the one-sidedly developed initiates who were sages, healers or magicians; but in return, a certain harmony of all three qualities was present in this fourth. Such an initiate represents in himself the harmony of the other three initiates. And now it is necessary for certain tasks to abandon all sense of one's own individuality and to rely entirely on the word of someone who is in a certain respect inferior to oneself. So there were cases in the ancient mystery schools where neither the wise nor the healers nor the magicians made the decisions, but they simply placed their powers at the service of those who were not as advanced as they were. Nevertheless, they placed their powers at the service of this fourth initiate. It always turned out that world evolution progressed better when the higher one obeyed the lower one in such cases.

This was the case in the Oriental mystery centers, where those of higher station applied their powers as the fourth one directed, whom they obeyed blindly. In the mystery centers of Europe there were colleges of twelve who were initiated, and at the head of them was a thirteenth who was not initiated; they obeyed him. Whatever should happen, he should indicate. He relied on his instinctive will and the others, who were higher than he, carried out what he indicated. You can only understand this if you look back to those times when there was still great trust in a being in the world that was not bound to human thinking and willing. Today man considers himself to be the cleverest being in the world. But it was not always so. There were times when man said to himself: Yes, it is actually true that I can develop to a high level. I have the ability to do so, but I must not assume that just now I am already the creature in the world that has progressed furthest in its development.

We can see from a simple example that this is a truth. Let us remember that it was only in the course of historical development that people gradually invented paper, namely, that activity by which certain substances are formed into paper. The wasp has been able to do this for a long time! Now man would have to say to himself: I had to acquire my knowledge only at a relatively late time. The wasp could not have learned its art from man; divine art rules in its ability. In what the wasp does, it is interwoven with divine wisdom.

Similar feelings inspired such initiates, who came together in groups of twelve in pre-Christian times. They said to themselves: “We have certainly developed great powers within us, but with all our powers and abilities we achieve only that which is prescribed at a lower level in less developed individualities by higher divine beings.” They look to a thirteenth, who, in comparison to them, had remained at a childlike, naive level. They said: He does not have human wisdom within him as we do, but he is still imbued with divine wisdom. The oriental wise men, healers and magicians also said: We follow the one who is not as far along as we are, but who is at a stage where he still has divine wisdom within him. This renunciation spread like a magic breath over the ancient mysteries that had known this. And now you will remember Goethe's poem “The Mysteries”, where a thirteenth member is introduced into the circle of important men, Brother Mark. Here we have an apparition that is deeply rooted in human nature, even if it is far removed from today's man, consisting in the fact that an initiate of the fourth category, who does not reach such a high level through the development of his own powers as the others do, is nevertheless so respected that he leads the other twelve.

We therefore have four types of initiates: healers, sages, magicians and the fourth type, which was called “human being” in a special sense. Four such initiates set out to describe the greatest event in the evolution of the earth: a sage, a healer, a magician and a human being in the sense of the initiates of the fourth category. One described it from the standpoint of the ordinary man, one is the magician who had a special understanding of the willpower of the Christ and enshrined it in his Gospel, and one is the healer who wrote the Gospel of Luke. That is why you find the tradition in which Luke is seen as a physician, and that also corresponds to the facts that Luke stands by his fellow human beings in sacrificial love. Then there is a wise man who has written what constitutes the wisdom of the nature of Christ.

These are the four initiates who, renouncing to describe the whole, said to themselves: We can only describe what is close to our soul. Indeed, the humble modesty of these four people, who refrained from giving the whole picture of Christ, but only what they could see, could perceive according to their particular individuality, appears as something lofty and powerful compared to the consciousness of today's man, who does not doubt that he can grasp even the highest things with his intellect in every respect.

Having already examined two sides of this momentous event in Basel in the lectures on the Gospels of Luke and John, today I would like to say a few words about the Gospel of Matthew. We could just as easily link to the Gospel of Mark. But there are certain reasons why I have chosen to describe this great event from a spiritual point of view after taking over, and why I have now chosen the Gospel of Matthew after the Gospels of Luke and John. The reason for this is that one should develop a feeling for how to approach the understanding of this world event in humble modesty. We learn great truths in the Gospel of Luke and in the Gospel of John. But what we encounter in the Gospel of Mark is so harrowing in part that if one has not yet heard the various things that tie in with the Gospel of Matthew, one would, so to speak, believe that there are profound contradictions between the Gospel of Mark and the other Gospels. One would not be able to cope with the Gospel of Mark, because it is in this gospel that the greatest, the most harrowing truths of the world are communicated; not the highest, these are contained in the Gospel of John. Therefore, today I will speak about the Gospel of Matthew.

In our study of the Gospel of Luke, we saw that the most diverse spiritual currents in the world merged to form a common stream at the time of the Christ event. It has been shown how, on the one hand, the teaching of compassion and love from the Buddha flows into Christianity; and on the other hand, it has been shown how the teaching of Zarathustra has flowed into Christianity. But all pre-Christian spiritual currents have also flowed into this significant event. And the Gospel of Matthew shows particularly how the ancient Hebrew spiritual current, the spiritual current of ancient Judaism, has flowed into it, so that in order to understand the Gospel of Matthew, one must speak of the actual mission of the ancient Jewish people.

As you know, spiritual research draws not only from the Gospels, but also from the spiritual world, from the imperishable Akasha Chronicle. If all the Gospels had been lost due to some cataclysm on earth, what spiritual research has to say about the events in Palestine could still be said from the pure sources available to spiritual research. When we have this from the pure sources available to spiritual research, we compare it with the great records, the Gospels, and then that wonderful agreement appears, which instills in us a great reverence for the Gospels, to which we look, and from which it becomes clear to us what high source they must come from. For the writers of the Gospels tell us what we can only understand if we are schooled in the way spiritual science gives us to look.

What is the mission of the Hebrew people? To understand this, we must look back a little on the course of human development. You know that human abilities have developed. Only materialistic science, which sees no further than the tip of its nose, believes that these human abilities have developed by themselves. At the most, it still believes that humanity has developed from animality, but it is not able to go back to real soul abilities. Spiritual science, however, knows that the soul abilities thousands of years ago were different from today. Thus, in ancient times, people had what is called a dull, dim clairvoyance. It was only in later times that today's consciousness gradually emerged from this clairvoyance; and this development began at a very specific point in time, when this kind of imagination began to affect humanity.

If we look back to ancient Indian culture, we find a kind of clairvoyance there. Today's man must look at the things around him if he wants to get to know them. The ancient Indian did not get to know things in the way he looks at them now. There was no science like the one taught to children today. A wise man in ancient India received his knowledge through inner inspiration when he turned his inner self completely away from the outer world, when he rested in himself or in his higher being. He called this his union with Brahma. He thus received the knowledge through inner inspiration. It was knowledge based entirely on clairvoyant inspiration. External knowledge, on the other hand, was maya for him.

But this clairvoyance increasingly receded. Even in the ancient Persian culture there was a strong admixture of external observation, even if inner knowledge still prevailed. Similarly, in the third cultural epoch, inner inspiration was still present, even though people had already progressed in grasping external things. In ancient Chaldea, there was what is called astrology today; it was a kind of star science. Today, in the outer sciences, no one knows anything about the essence of astrology. Today, no matter how closely you examine the stone records, you know nothing about the actual essence of astrology. No one today can evoke the feeling that astrology evoked for the ancient Chaldeans. It was not knowledge born of observation of the starry heavens. The Chaldean did not study the physical planet Mars by turning his gaze up to it, but what was known of it by inwardly allowing the clairvoyantly inspired knowledge to shine forth. This is not an external process of combining, and there is no full awareness of what this knowledge reveals about the outer space of the heavens. In the ancient places of initiation, only the first concepts of knowledge of the world of the stars arose. In what is communicated there about the evolution of the Earth and the connections between the Earth and Mars, and so on, we still have knowledge born out of the inner being. Similarly, Egyptian geometry was knowledge born out of the inner being and applied only to the measurement of the outer field. It was only through the development of other powers that the ancient Chaldeans were able to arrive at external knowledge. This mission of bringing humanity to an external, combining knowledge was assigned by the spiritual leaders of world evolution to the Hebrew people. All the knowledge of the Indians, the Persians, the Chaldeans, the Egyptians, however significant it was, did not require a physical brain. This knowledge was stored in the etheric body, which is not bound to the physical brain and functions freely. When man works freely in the etheric body, the picture arises that constitutes the knowledge of those ancient peoples; just as even today all clairvoyant knowledge arises when man is able to lift the etheric body out of the physical body, not to use his physical brain.

Mankind should acquire the ability to perceive through its brain. For this purpose, the personality had to be chosen that had the most suitable brain, that was least predisposed to clairvoyant inspiration, but that could use the brain. Here we have another point where reading the Akasha Chronicle confirms the facts of the Bible. What is written in the Bible is correct to the letter. Indeed, a personality had been chosen who, by virtue of her physical organization, had the most suitable brain to establish what made spiritual work possible through the brain. This personality was Abraham. He was chosen to fulfill that mission which was to enable people to perceive the outside world through their physical brain. It was a personality that was least likely to have any kind of inspiration, but who logically explored the external phenomena in terms of measure, number and weight. An older tradition regards Abraham as the inventor of mathematics, and it has more right than today's outer world-sense.

Now it is important that this mission be properly introduced into the world. Let us consider how a mission was transmitted in the past. How was it propagated in humanity? It was transmitted from teacher to pupil. He who had an inspiration transmitted it to his successor. But that which was transmitted to the ancient Hebrew people was bound to a physical tool that could not simply be passed on to descendants if they did not have the appropriate brain. Therefore, it had to be bound to physical inheritance, had to be inherited through generations. It was not a group of disciples that followed Abraham, but a people to whom this brain could be inherited through generations. Therefore, Abraham became the progenitor of his people.

It is wonderful to see from the Bible how the leading spiritual powers entrusted this mission to Abraham. What was to be given to humanity through the mission of Abraham? What had been known earlier through inspiration was to be rediscovered; it was now to be achieved again through mere combination on a different level. Through this, what had been found through combination had to be modeled according to the law. Therefore, Yahweh said: This mission should be an image of the highest lawfulness that we know. He said: Your descendants shall be organized as the number of stars in the sky. It is a complete misunderstanding to translate this passage from the Bible as if Yahweh had said that Abraham's descendants should be as numerous as the stars in the sky, but that they should reproduce in a lawful manner, so that the lawfulness is expressed as the lawfulness of the firmament.

Abraham had a son Isaac and a grandson Jacob. We see how the twelve tribes of the Jewish people descended from him. These twelve tribes are a reproduction of the lawfulness of the twelve signs of the zodiac. A new organization of the people was to be ordered in Abraham like the stars in the sky. So we see how spiritual science extracts the real meaning from the documents of the Bible, and there we get a correct idea of this deepest document of humanity. What is old clairvoyance should be renounced. No longer should existence take place in such a way that one keeps one's gaze averted from the outer world, but man's gaze should penetrate and search the outer world. But this mission was a gift that was to come to mankind from outside. Abraham had the mission to pass on the ability of the brain to his descendants. It was to be a gift, and so we see that Abraham receives all the Jewish people as a gift. What could a spiritual power have given to Zarathustra? A teaching, something one-sidedly spiritual; but to Abraham there had to be a gift of his people, a real gift based on the reproduction of the physical brain. How were these people given to him? By his willingness to sacrifice his son. If he had done that, there would have been no Jewish people. By receiving his son back, he received the entire Jewish people as a gift from outside. In the moment when Abraham receives back Isaac, whom he was supposed to sacrifice, he receives the entire Jewish people, his descendants, back as a gift. This is a gift from Yahweh to Abraham. And so the last of the gifts of clairvoyance was also given. The individual gifts of clairvoyance are divided into twelve, and they are represented by the twelve constellations, for they are gifts of heaven. The last of these gifts of clairvoyance was sacrificed by Abraham in order to receive the people of Israel. The ram that Abraham sacrificed in place of his son is the image of the last of the gifts of clairvoyance. Thus the Jewish people received the mission to develop the ability to combine, to get to know world phenomena through their own abilities, which are contained in the brain, to a certain unity, which is presented as Jahve. And this mission is so exacting that everything inherited from the earlier form of perception is eliminated from the Jewish people, namely, the old form of clairvoyance. Joseph still had dreams of the old clairvoyant kind. He still used the old form of clairvoyance; but he was cast out of the community because the Jewish people had the mission to eliminate this old ability of clairvoyance from its development. And so Joseph is sent away. But this makes him the mediator between the Jewish people and that which they must accept in order to fulfill their cultural mission. Abraham's sons had renounced the inspiration that comes from within; so they had to receive from without what would otherwise have come to them as inspiration, as a message from within. When they are led to Egypt, they receive it through Moses, they who are now the missionaries of external physical thinking. What the other peoples have received through inspiration, they now receive from outside as law. It is indeed the case that what we call the Ten Commandments is the same as what other people have received through inner inspiration. From Egypt, through Moses, the Jews received from outside as commandments what should actually have been heavenly inspirations.

After receiving the inspirations from Egypt, this people settled in Palestine. This nation was destined to give birth to the one bearer of the Christ out of its own ranks. These qualities, handed down from generation to generation, were to produce the physical body of Jesus; therefore all the abilities that were present in Abraham in the first instance must add up. The entire Jewish nation had to mature and develop to such an extent that what was present in Abraham as an inclination was brought to its highest peak in one descendant. To understand this, we must draw a comparison with the development of an individual human being. During the first seven years, it is mainly the physical body that develops. From the seventh to the fourteenth or fifteenth year, i.e. in the second cycle of life, it is the etheric body that develops, then the astral body; only then does the I emerge. What is present first as a predisposition only comes out when these three bodies have developed. This also applies to an entire nation. The Abraham predisposition first had to be incorporated into the physical, etheric and astral bodies before it could be taken up by the ego. We have to divide the development of the Jewish people into three epochs. What takes seven years in the development of an individual human being is spread over seven generations in the development of a nation. Or, as you know, in inherited traits a son does not resemble his father so much as his grandfather. Therefore, two times seven, or fourteen generations, are actually necessary to allow a people to mature, which unfolds in an individual human being between birth and the change of teeth. Fourteen generations developed the qualities that were present in Abraham in his physical body; fourteen more generations in the etheric body and fourteen more in the astral body. Only then was it possible to allow such a human being to mature as was needed by the Christ-being.

This is described by Matthew in the first chapter of his Gospel, where he says that from Abraham to David fourteen generations passed, from David to the Babylonian captivity fourteen more generations, and from there to Jesus fourteen further generations, thus three times fourteen or six times seven generations had to pass. The writer of the Gospel of Matthew based his book on this profound wisdom. That which was Abraham's specific mission was also to flow into the body of Christ Jesus; but this could only happen through the succession of generations in a lawful manner. Then this child Jesus, who derived from Abraham through forty-two generations, was able to complete the mission of the patriarch. Matthew describes to us the wonderful lawfulness with which this happened.

When a cycle of development is complete, a brief repetition of the earlier facts at a higher level must take place, and indeed we find this repetition wonderfully described in the Gospel of Matthew. Abraham comes from Ur in Chaldea, migrates to Canaan, then goes to Egypt and back to Canaan again. That is his journey. The reborn Zarathustra was incarnated six centuries before our era as a great teacher of the Chaldean mystery schools under the name Zarathos. That was his last incarnation before he was reborn in Jesus. Now he walks the same path that Abraham came by. He starts from roughly the same place that Abraham began his journey. And in the spiritual world he also follows the route that Abraham took, all the way to Bethlehem. So the path that Abraham covered physically is taken spiritually by Zarathustra. And the successors of those who were his students six hundred years ago follow him again in the star that shows them the way to Bethlehem. They retrace the steps of Zarathustra as he takes incarnation. Then he arrives there and is reborn in Canaan.

In the Old Testament, we see Joseph being led to Egypt as a result of a dream; now we see another Joseph being led to Egypt physically as a result of a dream. And so the boy is physically led back to where the Jewish people await the Redeemer. The ancient Jewish people also received food from Joseph during the famine in Egypt. If you draw on a map the same route taken by the Magi, and further compare the route that Joseph, the son of Jacob, was led to Egypt with that traveled by the Solomonic Christ Child, you will find that the corresponding routes are almost exactly the same. There are some slight deviations, but these are due to different circumstances. The writer of the Gospel of Matthew describes the route so precisely.

It is precisely from such facts, which we can know even if all the written Gospels were to be lost, that we get the great reverence for the Gospels. Mankind could come to ever higher truths and achieve ever greater wisdom, of which perhaps very little is suspected even today; and when, after millions of years, we know much, much more about the mighty event, we can also draw this wisdom from the Gospels. This, again, is a piece that can lead us further to an understanding of the Christ event. Just as the teaching of Buddha and of Zarathustra, so also the nature of the Hebrew people has been incorporated into the nature of Christ Jesus. All that had appeared on earth before was reborn in a higher form through Christianity. All that was previously on earth in the way of spiritual culture came to earth through the great leader of earthly development, 'Christ, who sent to earth those to whom he had first given the mission of preparing on earth what he had to do. He was still in the heights of heaven and sent the messengers down. And they, the great founders of religions, had to prepare people for his coming. The last of these messengers was the Buddha, who brought the teaching of compassion and love. But there were other Bodhisattvas before, and after Christ there will be other Bodhisattvas who will have to expand what came to earth through Christ Jesus.

It will be good if people listen to the Bodhisattvas who come afterwards, because they are his servants. Every time a Bodhisattva appears in the future, for example after three thousand years, people will understand the Christ, who outshines everything, a little better. Christ is the one who is the deepest essence, and the others are there so that Christ may be better understood. Therefore, we say that Christ has sent the bodhisattvas before to prepare humanity for him; and he sends them after so that the greatest act of earth evolution can be better and better understood. We are only at the beginning of our comprehension of this Entity, and the more Sages and Bodhisattvas come to earth, the better we shall understand the Christ. Through all this wisdom that is pouring down upon the earth, we shall be able to recognize the Christ more fully.

So we stand on earth as seeking human beings. We have begun to struggle to understand the Christ. We have applied what we have recognized about him and will apply everything the bodhisattvas teach in the future to better understand the Master of all bodhisattvas, the center of our system. In this way, humanity will become ever wiser and will come to know the Christ ever better. However, it will only understand him fully when the last of the Bodhisattvas has done his duty and brought the teaching that is necessary to enable us to grasp the deepest essence of earthly existence, the Christ Jesus.

Originally published in Anthroposophical Quarterly, Volume 21, Number 4, Winter 1976.

In a public lecture such as the one given yesterday on Spiritual Science and the Future of Man, account must always be taken of the very limited receptive capacity of the world today. In our time, data of knowledge that are essential for humanity do indeed flow down from the spiritual worlds but can be accepted open mindedly only by very few people. To most individuals who have not prepared themselves adequately for the reception of such knowledge, the deeper aspects of our Spiritual Science prove to be something of a shock, something that seems fantastic or dreamlike.

All the more it behoves us to deepen our feeling for the most significant questions that arise in the course of fairly lengthy study in a Group. And now I want to speak of the need for a closer study of the great truth of the implanting of the Ego, the ‘I’, in man and to indicate that the subject is more complicated than it is usually thought to be at the present time.

We have heard that during the period of Old Saturn man was endowed with the rudiments of the physical body, during the period of Old Sun with that of the etheric body, during the period of Old Moon with that of the astral body, and that the essential task of our Earth evolution is the incorporation of the Ego into the other members of man’s constitution. Not until the end of Earth’s evolution will the human being be completely permeated—as is possible—by the Ego. If we study the man of Earth as such, we can say that the actual centre of his being is the Ego, the ‘I’ But then it must occur to us that in each of the different periods of our present life this Ego is connected with us differently, by no means always in the same Way. We must realise above all that the different members of our being are not understood when we simply enumerate them as physical body, etheric body, astral body and Ego. Now let us consider in what different ways the members can be connected with each other both during the various epochs of mankind’s evolution and during the single life of the human being.

Let us think, to begin with, of a child. We know that it is not until a comparatively late period that he learns to say ‘I’ of himself. This is very indicative. Although modern psychology, in its endeavours to be a bona tide science, does not grasp the fact, it is deeply significant that the inner experience, the mental conception of the ‘I’ wakens in the child comparatively late. In the very earliest years, until the age of 3 or 3½, although now and then the child babbles the sound ‘I’, he has no real experience of Egohood. You may come across a book by Heinrich Lhotzky entitled Die Seele deines Kindes (Your Child’s Soul) which contains the curious statement that the child learns to think before he learns to speak. This is nonsense, because it is by speaking that the child learns to think. Those who strive to grasp Spiritual Science must be cautious of what purports to be Science today. It is approximately) after the third year of life that a child learns for the first time to experience and be cognisant of the ‘I’.

This is connected with another fact, namely that in normal consciousness—not in higher, clairvoyant consciousness—we have no remembrance of our life before a certain point of time. If you think back over the past, you will realise that remembrance ceases at a certain point and does not extend as far as birth. What others have told us can often be confused with what we ourselves have experienced, but the thread breaks at approximately the point when the ‘I’ is experienced for the first time. A very young child has no such experience; it arises later on and it is then that a very dim kind of remembrance begins.

We now ask ourselves: if the experience of ‘I’ was not present during the first three years of life, was the ‘I’, the Ego, itself also not there in the child? The question to put to ourselves is this. Are we cognisant of something that is actually within us or is it within us without our knowledge? The Ego is indeed within the child only he is unaware of it, just as during sleep a person is connected with the Ego but is not cognisant of it. The fact is that we know of something, but that can be no criterion for us. We must say: the ‘I’ is present in the child but the child is not conscious of it.

What, then, is there to be said about the Ego? It has its own task to perform. If you were to investigate the human brain purely physically, you would find that just after birth it looks very imperfect compared with its later structure. Many of the finer convolutions have to be elaborated and moulded later on, during the subsequent years. This is what the ‘I’ achieves in the human being and because this is its task it cannot itself become conscious of it. The Ego has to elaborate the brain into a more delicately complicated structure, in order that later on the human being will be able to think. During the first years of life the Ego is very active.

When the Ego becomes conscious of itself, we could ask in vain: how have you managed to construct this brain with such artistry?—you will admit that during the whole span of life between birth and death the Ego does not develop consciousness on a par with that by which the brain is elaborated. Nevertheless we can ask ourselves the question. And the answer is that in its activity the Ego is under the guidance of the Beings of the higher Hierarchies. When we observe a child clairvoyantly, his Ego—as Ego-aura—is certainly there, but streams go out from this aura to the higher Hierarchies, to the Angels, Archangels, and so on; the forces of the Hierarchies stream in. Therefore when naive consciousness speaks of a child having a Guardian Angel, this is a very real truth. Later on this closer connection ceases; the ‘I’ experiences itself more in the nerves and can therefore become conscious of its own existence. A kind of detachment takes place. In the child a sort of ‘telephonic connection’ exists, inasmuch as the ‘I’ extends into the divine-spiritual Hierarchies. The statements of Spiritual Science must be taken seriously. I once said that the very wisest person can learn a great deal from a child. He can also learn a great deal because he need not look only at the child himself but also through him into the spiritual world, because in the child there is the ‘telephonic connection’ with the spiritual world—the connection that is ultimately severed.

Hence during the first three years of life we have before us a being quite different from the one who is there later on. Under the guidance of the Beings of the higher Hierarchies a childhood Ego works at the development of man’s instrument of thinking. This ‘I’, this Ego, then passes into the instruments themselves and can no longer work at them. Man’s instruments of thinking must then already have developed. Certainly they can develop to further stages, but the ‘I’ can no longer be working at this development.

The human being may therefore be thought of as twofold: the one we see during the first three and a half years, and the one which represents the rest of his life. In the language of esotericism, the first being is called the divine man, or the Son of God, because he is connected with the higher Hierarchies; the other is called the Son of Man. In the latter the Ego is present, moves the limbs and works—as far as it is possible to work—from within outwards. A distinction must therefore be made between the Son of God and the Son of Man.

The Son of God who is preeminently active for the first three and a half years of life embraces all the vitalising forces, stimulates the human being to pour these life giving forces in greater and ever greater measure into his organism. In comparison with those in an older person these forces are also health giving, strengthening factors. If we are not content in later life to be human beings who have to rely entirely on the senses and on the instrument of the physical body for our connection with the surrounding world but determine in our later years to strive upwards to the spiritual world, then we must contrive by some means to awaken these forces within ourselves; we must evoke the forces that are within us in earliest childhood, but with the difference that now we awaken them consciously, whereas a child awakens them unconsciously. In this respect too, therefore, it is obvious that man is a twofold being.

What is it, in reality, that is brought to light by these forces during the first three and a half years of life? In these forces—which are active under the direction of the higher Hierarchies—what is working over from earlier incarnations is asserting itself. You can easily convince yourselves of this by handling the human skull, where you find individual mounds and depressions. No skull is exactly similar to another, hence there is no universally valid Phrenology. Each case must be studied individually. The forces working in the formation of the human skull come over from earlier incarnations and their impetus ceases after the first three and a half years of life. During these years everything is still pliable and the spirit is still able to work in it. Later on, everything has become solid and the spirit can no longer come into play.

What, then, is responsible for the fact that in later life we are no longer able to work with these forces? To what is this due? It is due to the essential character of our Earth evolution. When the ‘I’ has become conscious of itself in the body, this presupposes that the body is very firmly knit and can no longer be elaborated by the forces just described. There are also forces which essentially belong to man as a generic being, which mould him in accordance with the architectural principles of the human form. Were we to work in the physical body with the forces of early childhood for more than the three and a half years which are the appropriate period, the physical body could not .survive. It would be rent asunder, shattered, for now the forces by which the physical body is attached to the line of physical heredity become operative. If the action of the other forces did not cease, the body would break up, disintegrate. The Son of Man within us brings about our destruction; the Son of God within us cannot offer resistance to the Son of Man after a period of three years. For all that, we bear this Son of God within us. These forces work within the physical body throughout life but they cannot participate directly in the up-building process. If we look within our own inmost being, however, we can nevertheless find the continuation of the Ego with the ‘telephonic connection’. It is only that the physical body has become too coarse, too solid, too wooden to enable the Son of God to mould it any further.

Thus the best forces are present in us during the first three to three and a half years of childhood. The whole of life is nourished by them but they are obscured. In an entirely different form they are nevertheless present in the later years of life. We are permeated by these forces but cannot allow them to come to direct expression. When through Spiritual Science we endeavour to acquire ideas and conceptions of the higher worlds, this will be all the easier, the more forces have remained in us of those that were within us during the first three years when our ‘I’, our Ego, was within us but without self-consciousness. The fresher, the more flexible these forces have remained, the less time-worn they have become in advanced age, the more easily we can bring about transformation in ourselves through these spiritual forces.

It is the very best part of manhood that we have within us during these early years, only the solid physical body prevents us from using these forces then to the fullest extent. Even if someone in his later years succeeds in developing them to a special extent, he cannot transform his physical body which is by no means as pliable as wax. But if through esoteric wisdom he is able to use these forces to the full, their power streams through the tips of his fingers, and he acquires the gift of healing, of health-bestowal, through the laying on of hands—if, that is to say, these spiritual forces are still active. They can no longer transform his body but when they stream out from him they bring about healing.

The goal of Earth evolution is to enable these forces—the best that are within us—to take effect. When the evolution of the Earth is at an end and we have lived through our many incarnations, we must consciously have permeated our whole being with the forces that are within us unconsciously during the first years of childhood. There is a difference between bearing these forces unconsciously and bearing them consciously. At the end of Earth evolution human beings must be completely permeated by this childhood consciousness. And then, because the process of expansion will be slow, the body will not burst asunder.

In world-evolution a prototype of penetration of the forces of childhood into mankind was necessary. Needless to say, this prototype could not be a child. It was necessary that an individual of a certain age should be permeated in full consciousness by the same forces by which all human beings are permeated unconsciously in earliest childhood. Suppose we were to remove his Ego from a human being, empty his Ego and pour into him the forces that are active in a child during the first years of life, he would become conscious of these forces with his developed brain. What had been active within him during the first years of childhood would become a conscious experience in him. For how long is a human life on Earth able to endure this? For no longer than three years, for then the body would be shattered. If there can be no transformation—in the case of man this takes place in the process of ordinary evolution—the human body can endure this state of things for no longer than three years. Were it possible for any being to bear the forces of early childhood consciously within himself, the karma of that being must be so adjusted that the physical body involved is shattered.

It is conceivable that what man attains through all the incarnations leading to the goal of Earth evolution can be brought to the notice of the world by a prototype, by an individual whose bodily nature makes it possible for his Ego to depart and be replaced by another Being. In such a case the human body would not tolerate the presence of the other Being for longer than three years. It would be the karma of the body to be shattered. And this actually happened. At the baptising by John in the Jordan we see this human body which made it possible for the Ego, the Zarathustra-Ego, to depart. A Being, the Christ Being, came down into this body, indwelt it for three years but could remain in it no longer. After three years the body broke up when the Mystery of Golgotha took place.

What was able to live for three years in a human body at that time must be tended and cherished by man and gradually, in the course of incarnations, made a living reality in his soul, in order that at the end of the incarnations it may be present in full strength.

A remarkable connection is apparent between the Son of God in man and the Christ Event. Everything to be found in the domain of occultism can be illuminated from different sides. Proofs such as are demanded by conventional science cannot satisfy occultism. Proofs must convince by virtue of truths being gathered together from all sides, truths which sustain and support each other. We can study the Christ Event from still another side by deriving it, as has been done today, from the very nature of man. We realise that the best way to understand the Christ is to develop the attitude of soul arising from such a truth. We must realise too that in a fully evolved human body, there was present in Jesus of Nazareth through the Baptism in Jordan a Being who is present in every human body, but unconsciously only, during the first three years of life. And then we must contemplate the three years when this child has become conscious. That is how understanding of the Christ can best be acquired.

Ancient utterances have different meanings. One such meaning is disclosed by the words: Unless you become as a little child you cannot enter into the Kingdoms of Heaven. There we have a glimpse of the deeper meaning often contained in single sentences of the religious texts.

Let us contemplate this life of childhood especially in the period when it is actually developing. Science today does not know much about what can contribute to the study of the true nature of man. In the first place we must realise clearly that from the very beginning man differs quite radically from all other beings. Take an example near at hand, let us say, an ape. Its gait is determined from the very outset because the characteristic equilibrium is established by the arrangement of its limbs. The human being cannot, to begin with, walk at all, for he must first bring about equilibrium in his body. Through the work of his Ego his limbs must be brought into the positions which enable him to stand upright and walk. Thus in the first years of childhood the Ego must work not only at moulding the brain but must also bring about the equilibrium that is not, from the beginning, established in the human being as it is in the animal. The bones of the human being must first be arranged in the angles necessary for the main-tenance of his centre of gravity, in order that he may be able to walk and make his way about. This capacity is implanted from the beginning in every animal, up to those of the highest species, whereas in the human being it must be acquired gradually though the work of the Ego. Before then he crawls about or falls down. He would be fettered to the same spot on the ground if his Ego was not at work during the first three years of his life.

We have already heard that the Ego works at man’s brain, sculps and moulds it into a form that enables him later on to become a being possessed of intelligence. Thus it can be said that we acquire the capacity to recognise the truth in life as a result of the Ego having moulded its instrument. It must become obvious to us that there can be no further life unless we bring it about by work and activity.

What further distinguishes man so radically from all other things is his speech. That capacity too must be acquired through the work of his Ego. Man is not, from the beginning, organised for speech. Cows utter the sound ‘moo’ but that is not speech. The acquisition of speech depends upon the Ego sojourning among other human Egos. If a human being were transported to a remote island he would not learn to speak. The coming of the second teeth is due to heredity; so too is the fact that we grow. The teeth would come even if we were on a lonely island. But it is through the Ego that we acquire the faculty of speech. These differences are important. Thus in human life, speech is the third faculty acquired through the Ego.

Through the activity of these forces the human beings finds his way on Earth, he recognises the truth and lives his life in common with the surrounding world. If a child were able to express what he thus acquires, he could say: the Ego within me transforms me in such a way that I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. Think of this translated into a higher, spiritual reality, and let us ask: what will be said to man by a Being who with fully conscious forces of childhood lives for three years in a human body? Such a Being will say: “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.” In very fact, when the forces of childhood rise to a higher, fully conscious stage, there we have the great prototype of what is revealed at a lower stage in the child. Through Christ Jesus it becomes a basic, fundamental truth. Not only is the utterance “Except ye become as little children, ye cannot enter into the kingdoms of Heaven” incomprehensible without a knowledge of what Spiritual Science has to say about the connection with the life-giving forces of early childhood, but it is also true that we can best understand the radical utterance, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life” when we recognise its prototype in what the Ego achieves by its activity in the body of early childhood.

Such truths make it possible for us to generate—if not for the body at least for the soul—some measures of the life-giving forces we need on the Earth. The man of today who does not acknowledge the reality of the spiritual world has no genuine feeling for such facts. If you go to a number of individuals in outer life and tell them something of what has been said here today: ‘Unless you become as a little child you cannot enter into the kingdoms of Heaven’—you will find that these people say: “Well, yes, these are quite clever analogies, but what use can be made of them?” They consider it more advantageous to go to some blood-curdling drama, if not anything worse! Those who have no feelings that these facts are significant will regard them as unjustifiable because it is in the feeling for such things that there lies the power to instil the gift of childhood into life. If we lack enthusiasm for the idea of Christ being compared with the activity of the human Ego during the first years of life, if we reject such a comparison as unjustifiable, then we have no faculty for kindling to life the forces of earliest childhood. Wizened scholars have so little power to awaken these forces and thereby to approach the reality of the spiritual world! But if we have the enthusiasm to concern ourselves with such truths, we can permeate our whole being with these forces.

Thereby something is given to an individual which enables him to uphold the principle of universality in his Christianity. Have I not often said that we are only at the beginning of a true conception of Christ? Until the twelfth or thirteenth century there was no possibility of hearing the Bible read. Christians were obliged to rely upon preaching and the proclamations of evangelists. Then came the Christianity which adhered strictly to the Bible, deriving its knowledge from that one source. We are not mindful of Christ’s power if we ignore His words: “I am with you until the end of the ages.” We are Christians when we realise that after Christ had once revealed Himself He will do so again, for anyone who has eyes to see Him. The content of the Gospels by no means represents all that Christ has to say. We should not constantly be quoting the words: “You could not bear it now”. Humanity must become mature enough to understand Christ’s declaration.

It also follows that we ought to be able to adopt the right attitude to what is revealed through the Baptism by John, namely, the manifestation of the health-giving, fertile forces of early childhood. That in itself would be a fruitful conception. Even if there were no human being who knew anything about the name of Christ or about the Gospels—we do not overstress the importance of names—what is all-important is the Being Himself. We leave it to others to say that an individual who does not swear allegiance to Buddha is no true adherent. What matters to us is the reality, not the name. This is the principle we follow when, for example, we recognise that during the first years of life there are within the human being forces which once streamed down into the body of Jesus of Nazareth.

Think of a remote, lonely island to which no single record of the Mystery of Golgotha has ever found its way. If human beings there through their spiritual life consciously draw the powers of earliest childhood into themselves until they reach old age, then they are Christians in the true sense of the word. In such circumstances there is no need for them to search in the Gospels, for Christianity in itself is a living power and will evolve to further and further stages.

There is a difference here that must be strictly remembered. We shall realise ever more clearly how intimately Christ’s mission is connected with the very being of the Earth. We shall be able to say that the mission of Christ is something that can be understood by contemplating man as he is today. The need to be filled with the power of Christ, to make a reality of Paul’s affirmation “Christ in me”, is confirmed when we say that the whole of our life must be dedicated to the transformation of what is present within us during the first years of childhood. Then the Christ is in us in very truth.

This realisation makes it possible to have a wide understanding of Christianity and reveals the prospect that it will take quite different forms. Times will come when Christ will be referred to in an entirely different way, when sources of an essentially different character will be in existence, when there will be no reference to the external history of the existence of such a Being, but when this fact will be revealed by the actual consciousness of mankind.

These matters are brought forward because they show how deeply Spiritual Science can influence man’s life of feeling and must become actual practice. It is only then that what we find in original sources becomes really intelligible to us. For many human beings, however, these original sources are verily a book with seven seals. At the end of the Earth’s existence, a man of today will have reached the stage where his soul is inwardly Christian in the truest sense. Today he is only at the beginning of this development. Nevertheless Christ lives within him and will do so in an ever wider sense through all the following incarnations.

What was the state of things before Christ came to the Earth, before He revealed Himself on the Earth? The Ego was then only in the preparatory stage, for it is by Christ that the Ego is given its very purpose and meaning. When the mission of a Being is in the preparatory stage, his predecessors must help him. Until the Mystery of Golgotha, man’s Ego was still at the stage of preparation. Until then it was necessary for other Beings to help man, Beings who had reached the human stage previously, namely, during the

Old Moon embodiment of the Earth. We know that these are the Beings of the Hierarchy immediately above us—the Angels. Their evolution has reached a stage higher than that reached by man. It was chiefly these Beings who took over the guidance of humanity before man was in a position to say: Christ gives my Ego purport and meaning. Man could not lead himself to Christ but had perforce to be led to Him by the Beings who are his elder Brothers.

The Bible records this with wonderful accuracy. Let us think of John, the forerunner of Christ Jesus. The true forerunner could not have been the Being who is presented in external history, for as we now know man had as yet no Ego. Therefore it cannot be strictly true to say that John the Baptist himself was Christ’s forerunner. Remarkably, the Gospel of St. Mark begins at once with the words: “I send my Angel before thee, who shall prepare thy way.” We must pay attention to something that theologians have, it is true, noticed in a very abstract form but ignored as a concrete reality. The external world is primarily maya. We must learn to see it in the right way and then it is no longer maya. The narration of the external events connected with John the Baptist on the physical plane, is maya. We do not understand them. The biblical picture of John the Baptist is maya. The truth is that an Angel lives in John, takes possession of his soul, and it is this Being who leads men to Christ. John is the sheath in which the Angel is revealed. The reborn Elijah was able and ready to receive into himself the Angel who entered into and spoke out of him, using him—John—simply as an instrument. The story given in the Bible is accurate in every detail.

It can therefore be said that it was only because the Beings who had reached the human stage on the Old Moon embodiment of the Earth became the leaders of man in the pre-Christian era that he could be prepared to receive the Ego. In point of fact, all the leaders of humanity in the pre-Christian era could be leaders because Angels were working through them. What would happen in the case of a man of the modern age? In pre-Christian times the Angel could work in a man because he had no Ego of his own. Since the Christ has come, man can turn to Him and a power enters into him instead of the Angel, as formerly. Man today must take the Christ into himself through devotion and reverence. John could still say: Not I but the Angel in me has been sent and uses me as the instrument for preparing the way. Man must say as did St. Paul: ‘Not I, but Christ in me.’ Man must learn to understand Christ in the light of the teaching of Spiritual Science.

What has been said today about the first three years of childhood can, for example, usefully be emphasised. Man is ‘christianised’ when the truth is brought home to him that the forces at work during the age of earliest childhood shed their sunlike radiance over the whole of life. Modern science, on the other hand, is ultimately responsible for the onset of senility, for resistance to the sunlike forces in early childhood, for ossification of parts of the brain, and a great deal else besides.

From such truths we realise that it is possible to understand the living truth of Christianity even when original records are left out of account and we simply study the nature and being of man. If our understanding of Spiritual Science is such that we do not simply say, ‘now I know that man consists of four members—physical, etheric, astral bodies and Ego’ but realise that what matters is to know how these single members are interconnected in his constitution—then we can become aware that the Ego working in early childhood is related to another entity, that the first Ego is like a sheath and that after about three years its connection with all the members of the rest of man’s nature changes entirely.

This knowledge acquires genuine value when it becomes a power within us and when we say to ourselves that because in the future many incarnations lie ahead of us we can develop what is in us to further and further stages of consciousness, that we can enable the forces of the higher man, The Son of God within us, to be victorious over the Son of Man, thereby rising higher in each succeeding incarnation until the Earth reaches its goal. The Earth then becomes a corpse just as the individual human being becomes a physical corpse; the corpse sinks into the Earth and the soul rises into the spiritual world. This is what will also happen to the Earth as a whole.

If we think of the Earth as the body of all humanity, we can say: the Earth dies as a corpse, dissolves into the substance of the Universe, is pulverised in order to be used in a new material form. But man rises into spiritual worlds in order to pass over into the next planetary existence. It behoves us to remember that these are no abstract words.

Strange to say, there are people who believe that our Earth, together with the Sun and the other planets, was once a great nebula and nothing else, that then Sun, Earth and man himself, through the consolidation of matter, came into existence, that he will evolve to further and further stages and will eventually be entombed in the Earth the whole process being an aimless episode!

In future histories of civilization great efforts will have to be made to understand this patho-logical fantasy, to grasp how it could have been possible for man’s imagination to become sickly enough to accept this as a serious conception. To uphold the Kant-Laplace theory is exactly the same as to think that man can be explained by studying the dust produced by his cremation. Such science is pernicious, incapable of engendering living power in the soul.

The aim of Spiritual Science is to kindle the power to develop our stature as human beings to higher and higher stages, no longer connecting ourselves with the dust of the Earth but evolving towards a new planetary existence.

The series of lectures we are having today and tomorrow could perhaps be used to discuss things that are similar; except that they are discussed one time as they should be discussed for members and for those friends who have spent a certain amount of time within a branch to base their world view on the points of view from which we start, while tomorrow, at the public lecture, similar things and similar starting points are to be considered, but in a way that is more suitable for those who, so to speak, come to the movement directly from the outside world, still little acquainted with spiritual science.

Today, we will take as it were the starting point of what is a well-known demand for all those who not only want to advance in spiritual science alone, but perhaps also in the development of their inner being. It is emphasized time and again that for a person's inner development — so that it may lead to his having experiences in the spiritual world — purity and loving aims and intentions are of the utmost importance. We could perhaps say, even if it is somewhat one-sided (for everything one says must be one-sided), that a spiritual researcher, or anyone who wants to ascend into the spiritual worlds and somehow find something of these spiritual worlds for themselves, must above all have a certain soul quality. This quality of the soul must be such that he sympathizes, and indeed strongly sympathizes with what is good, noble, and beautiful, and that he feels a kind of repulsion for what is evil and ugly. The purity of the soul's moral nature is repeatedly called for in relation to the path into the spiritual worlds, and we could well say: For an ascent into the spiritual worlds that is truly in line with our present time, it is absolutely necessary that the soul be completely imbued with true, moral intentions and goals. We shall hear later that it is indeed possible to develop clairvoyant powers without these basic conditions; but to acquire clairvoyant powers without the just characterized basic conditions, always has something dubious.

To understand this, let us now try to understand what we actually mean by the moral nature of man. We are led to speak of the moral nature of man when we consider, on the one hand, the impulses that come to man from the outside world to act, to will or to desire. When man is moved by some natural need, such as hunger or thirst, to perform this or that action, or even to desire or will this or that action, we do not say that such desires or wills are moral actions. Of course, that does not mean that they are immoral. But when a stone falls to the ground, that is not a moral act either, and we do not feel at all inclined to apply morality as a standard. Nor do we feel inclined to speak of morality when a person satisfies the natural demands of his organism by eating and drinking. Nor do we feel compelled to speak of morality when a person sees a beautiful flower or something else beautiful somewhere and, because it makes a beautiful, pleasant impression, is prompted to desire it. Here, too, we do not speak of morality.

When do we actually speak of morality in human nature? But only when it is not such external inducements as hunger and thirst or the sense of well-being that some object arouses in us that are the inducement to do this or that, but when the inducement arises from the innermost core of our being, like a command from within us that is independent of external inducement. We become particularly aware of the difference between this moral and what I am not saying is immoral, but morally indifferent, when we consider how we might do this or that through external inducement, but do not do it because of the inner command, which we call a moral impulse.

Take, for example, the very obvious and trivial case of someone having a powerful tendency to drink too much. Then, if he were able to do so, he would just drink. Or he can also follow an inner voice that has nothing to do with the inclination, but is opposed to this external inducement and says: What this external inducement wants to happen should not be! - Here we see that something can speak in us that contradicts the external inducement. Now, anything that amounts to such a contradiction and inner condemnation of our actions, we call a moral thing. We can only speak of a moral action if we disregard all external impressions, everything we are forced to do by external circumstances, and only look at what speaks from within us. It is precisely this ability to hear something within ourselves that goes beyond external inducement and can even contradict this inducement from outside that makes us human and sets us apart from animals.

We must feel that we have something in morality that is true in itself. This is the essential feature of all moral impulses: that they are true in themselves, and that external circumstances can contribute nothing when any action is to be designated as moral or immoral. When we do seem to designate something as moral in response to external circumstances, we are often indulging in an illusion when we make such a designation. If, for example, we were to say that a person organizes his life in such a way that he does not merely follow hunger and thirst with regard to eating and drinking, but follows the principle that it is necessary to take care of his organism in order to sustain himself in the outside world, so that we can see the external requirements of life as the decisive impulses, then that would be an illusion. Morality can only be established if we can add to the external impulse the internal impulse that it is right and good for man to sustain himself on earth, and not only for the sake of the external task, but for the sake of the internal task that can follow from it. Otherwise it is only an apparent one. The hallmark of what is moral is therefore that the impulse is not caused by the outside world, but arises purely from the powers of our soul. Now, of course, someone might say: But there are also evil voices within us; we often follow impulses that we clearly recognize as inner impulses and that are certainly not ones that we can describe as moral. One could say, however, that we cannot discuss this chapter in detail today because we have set ourselves a different task today: when a person follows such seemingly inner impulses that are bad and evil, he is not truly following himself, but rather he is following impulses whose origin he does not know and which he confuses with those that come from within. We all know the luciferic forces from our spiritual scientific considerations. These do not come from within, but, so to speak, from without, in that the luciferic entities have taken hold in our astral body and not in our I. Thus, if we define morality in this way, we are exposed to numerous contradictions. If we look at this more closely, we find that the characteristic of the moral is that all moral impulses must arise from our innermost core of being. We can then present what we, so to speak, morally like, what arouses our moral approval, and can fill us with delight and enthusiasm, as an ideal, so to speak, for which the human being is so completely at one with himself, so completely at home within himself. And if it is extremely useful and necessary in ordinary life for a person to realize that he is only completely himself when making moral judgments, or judgments that arise in a similar way, then this is an absolute basic requirement for practical occultism. It must be recognized as a principle of the occultist. It is important that all events in his life should follow the pattern of moral impulses, that nothing should happen in the soul when one enters the higher path of knowledge that does not follow the pattern of a real moral impulse.

It is important that the person who wants to become a practical occultist, who wants to follow the path of knowledge, should not undertake anything that he cannot say: If I compare it with what is in the human soul, what I call moral, the two must be similar. The path of knowledge must not deviate at any stage from that which proves similar to the moral behavior of man. The similarity of the path of knowledge to moral impulses even extends to the details. This will be illustrated by a very specific example.

As people are in the present day, morality is something very special. Basically, the Ten Commandments are still the most important of our laws. The Ten Commandments are constructed in a very special way. Of the ten, only three are constructed in such a way that they say: You shall do something. The other seven are constructed in such a way that one says: You shall not! It follows that the world powers see much more necessity in giving people moral laws that say: You shall not do something - than in giving them laws that say: You shall do something. For not doing what is commanded is in the ratio of seven to three to doing what is commanded. We may therefore say: Morality in general must work in human nature in such a way that it particularly takes the standpoint of saying, “Thou shalt not.”

We can compare this ratio of seven to three in the Ten Commandments in more detail. If we look at the seven commandments that say, “You shall not do something”, they all refer to things of the external world, to what one should not do in the physical world; whereas the three commandments that contain the “You shall” actually refer to that which goes beyond the physical world. There it says: You shall believe in one God, you shall not take the name of this God in vain, and so on. From this we see that in relation to the actual spiritual matters of the soul, the commandments are positive; on the other hand, all commandments that relate to actual moral behavior in the outer physical life have a “you shall not”. Even if we believe that the fourth commandment, “Honor your father and your mother, that you may live long on earth,” is positive, we still feel that it is fundamentally very negative, like the other six commandments. It is a kind of transitional commandment that, although it refers to the physical world, nevertheless leads from this physical world up into the spiritual world. We can prove this in minute detail, I might add, for in all ancient peoples the so-called ancestral service of religion was based on the fact that there was something divine in the ancestors, the forefathers. In this respect, the veneration of the ancestors, of whom the immediate ancestors are only a special case, was a kind of transition from the sensual world to the higher world. But this fourth commandment was especially related to the immediate physical world, to the relationship between children and parents. In relation to parents we can fulfill this commandment, we can feel that the fourth commandment is given in a positive way, that it is set up over man to prevent something from happening. In the case of the first commandments, the object to which they point does not yet exist in the physical world.

The structure of the nature of the Ten Commandments points to what constitutes an essential feature of morality in the world of the senses: that moral impulses may contradict what a person would do if he were to follow only the impulses of the physical world. This makes it clear for the path of knowledge, which must be built according to the pattern of moral impulses: We must moralize our entire knowledge on the occult path of knowledge, our otherwise merely theoretical laws of knowledge must become inner moral laws. Thus, what primarily relates to the physical plane must be so organized that it extinguishes what is directly before it, that it says: I extinguish it, just as lower inclinations are extinguished when the moral “Thou shalt not” calls. Indeed, for this reason, every true description of the path of knowledge points out that it is by refining the moral impulses that one most surely lifts the powers of knowledge up into the higher world. This is expressed in all its details. Let us assume we have some kind of plant. What can we initially identify as an external impulse that emanates from it? Let us take the plant's leaf. We can identify as an external impulse that the leaves appear green to us. Thus, for example, rose leaves are green in the physical, sensual world. Now, let us assume that someone who really wanted to attain higher knowledge as a practical occultist was required to educate himself according to the pattern of moral knowledge. Most images would have to arise in such a way that he holds up this green leaf and, in the face of the greenness of the plant, the inner impulse awakens: You shall not be green. It should be possible to look at the green leaf with such vision that the external impulse does not work, that just as the bad inclination disappears before the moral judgment, the green color of the leaf disappears through another, let's say clairvoyant power. In fact, when man develops his clairvoyant powers in the right way, as described in “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds”, he learns to look at the green leaf and, just as moral judgments extinguish bad inclinations, so the greenness of the leaf, which applies only to the physical plane, is extinguished. And where green would otherwise appear, we have a light pink or peach-like color in relation to the clairvoyant ability in this case. This color appears when we can remove through our clairvoyant power what is in the Maja, what is on the physical plane. Thus, through the clairvoyant power, we remove what is on the physical plane and trigger what, as a supersensible element, underlies the sensible. We can say that entering the path of knowledge really happens in the same way as a person's moral experience. The confrontation of the supersensible and the sensory world works in just the same way as the moral impulse works on immoral inclinations. If, on the other hand, one were to look at the roses themselves, for example this rose here, which has such a rich red color on the physical plane, one would see a bright, transparent green for this rose, and for the lighter rose a kind of rich green with a slight blue nuance.

Thus we have seen in a single case that occult judgments, which correspond to clairvoyant vision, are built up psychically, like the moral judgments that extinguish what is immoral. From this we can conclude that what we said at our starting point is confirmed. In order to arrive at higher knowledge, we must learn to extinguish all immediate impressions of the physical, external world, to make maya disappear, so that something else takes the place of maya. Now, as is well known, the best way to learn something is to memorize it through things that are similar to what is being learned. No one will practice things that have nothing to do with the subject in question in order to learn. I have never heard that someone became a mathematician by going for a walk, simply because it is not similar. Thus, we can acquire such abilities of the soul that are similar to moral impulses only by practicing on what a person already has in ordinary life. He does not yet have clairvoyance, which is something that must be acquired slowly and laboriously. But man always has the opportunity to reflect in his soul, asking himself: Which things do I find morally good and which morally reprehensible? Most people do not act immorally not because they do not know what is moral, but only because their inclinations, drives, desires or passions contradict their moral knowledge. Then, when we have examined ourselves in this way, we can go back to what we discover in ourselves, such as agreement with what we can call moral. And if we now practise this meditation by asking ourselves: How can we imagine this or that in the world according to our moral judgment? — and create images for ourselves and immerse ourselves in them, we will experience things and emotional habits in our soul that are akin to clairvoyant powers.

So the next thing a person can do to awaken their clairvoyant powers is to become one with morality and action. This is the best training for clairvoyant powers. That is why it is always emphasized that one should actually only come to have clairvoyant powers by improving one's moral character.

If we consider this, we will indeed have to ask ourselves the question: Are there perhaps no other ways to develop clairvoyant vision? We often see people develop high levels of clairvoyant ability who do not make a particularly good moral impression on us, so we cannot assume that they first cultivated their morals, their approval and disapproval, and their enthusiasm for moral judgment. We see that people who have developed clairvoyant powers through all kinds of other things show certain bad qualities that they did not have or hardly had before; for example, they become real liars when they begin to develop clairvoyant powers. Yes, sometimes it becomes a very dangerous thing for a person's character, especially when they develop clairaudience. Clairvoyance is not yet as dangerous as clairaudience. How does that fit in with what has been said? Well, as you may recall, in my writing “How to Know Higher Worlds,” it is pointed out everywhere at the crucial points that the path to knowledge of the higher worlds, as it has been characterized today, must be followed. But it is equally certain that there are other paths as well. This path must be studied in the right way, then one will soon see why qualities can arise as they have just been characterized. We must be clear about the fact that we first have within us the spiritual-soul core of our being, which we summarize in its center when we say “I” or “I am”. This spiritual-soul core of our being is embedded in the astral, etheric and physical bodies. Just as the human being lives in the world now, we actually live when we live inwardly, in our I; for all soul activities in the awakened human being are in some way connected with the I, and all appear, as it were, in the background of the I.

I have often given the example of a schoolmate of mine who, even as a young pupil, was a thoroughly materialistic thinker and said: When we think and when we feel, we are only dealing with processes in the brain; we think and feel by virtue of the movements of our brain. Even then he developed quite materialistic theories: How can one speak of the self, of the essence of the being? It is the brain that feels, wills and thinks! – I replied: Yes, but why do you then keep lying and always say: I think, I feel, I will, when you know that your brain does that? – Of course one could say that this is a cheap, trivial objection; but what matters is that it is correct, significant and immediately valid. We live in connection with our ego from the moment we wake up until we fall asleep, and we cannot separate our ego from anything we think, feel or want. Now, what we experience inwardly and what is so linked to our ego is embedded in the astral, etheric and physical bodies. We do not experience these bodies directly in normal life. All kinds of hidden, inexplicable things emerge from the astral body, but what happens in it is unknown to the person, just as what happens in the depths is unknown to someone who only looks at the upper wave of the sea. A person should just observe life and see how little is known about what goes on in the hidden depths of life.

For example, we have a child who, in the seventh year of his life, experienced only once being treated unfairly by his father or mother. This resulted in a certain agitation in the child, but it was not noticed because it apparently disappeared very quickly for the outside world. But it only descended into the astral body; down there it surges and drifts. The child lives on until the age of sixteen or seventeen. He is at school. Something happens, the teacher does this or that. Another child would just have been upset about it, but this child commits suicide! Anyone who looks at this child's life only superficially will talk about all kinds of reasons that led him to commit suicide. Only he who looks at life in its depths, where it surges and drives, in the astral body, will know that one of the most important causes was the experience of injustice in the seventh year. This lives on down there in secret and is only brought to the surface by the incident at school; if that had not happened, the suicide would not have occurred.

What happens just below the threshold of consciousness, when the astral body has experiences in the immediate present, we cannot even be certain about that, much less about how the astral body is structured, formed, composed, what its elements, its beings are. We are embedded in what the spiritual and soul powers, which we know as the hierarchies, have organized for us. Down there in the astral body there are many forces, just as there are many in the depths of the sea that cannot be seen, only the ripples on the surface. And just as the ripples on the surface are related to what is below in the depths of the sea, so is the conscious I related to what is going on in the astral body. Only a diver who can submerge himself in this world of the astral body can do this, and this diver is precisely the clairvoyant.

This applies to an even greater extent to the etheric body; there we have even more hidden depths. And only with the physical body! Although the human being has it in front of him from the outside, he has the least control over it and can only do what the stomach wants. If he had to choose between fighting an upset stomach or immoral tendencies, he would set aside all moral efforts and strive for a healthy stomach. The physical body is subject to laws that man does not have in his conscious ego, but which he acquires from outside in maya. The astral, etheric and physical bodies are permeated with forces from the beings of the higher hierarchies. But this does not prevent these from playing up into the conscious ego, that forces flow from the hidden depths of the human being into the conscious ego, as we saw in the case of the child that really happened. From the age of seven, a force had been released in the astral body through the injustice that had occurred. This force then played itself into consciousness when the teacher took the cloth used to wipe the blackboard and, when the boy, who had since turned sixteen, had given him a slap in the face. He leaves the classroom, happens to find the chemistry room open, goes in and takes poison. With all the means of psychological science, one could prove how the violence of what was down there in the astral body brought this about.

But what is present down there in the human being can also be drawn up into the conscious I through certain behavior. We could pump up forces from the astral body through the conscious I and thereby come into possession of clairvoyant, that is, supersensory powers in consciousness. But in doing so, we are pumping up forces from what the gods have given us. This is indeed something that is often recommended in books that give instructions on how to enter a path of knowledge. It is very often the case that those who write such books also have no idea of the true process, because these things are not done with the conscientiousness with which they must be done. But it is to be understood that the forces that are instilled by higher hierarchies into our astral, etheric and physical bodies belong there. If we pump them up, we withdraw something from our organization; we take away something from what the gods have given us, and we weaken ourselves as a result. The weakening can show itself in such a way that the truthfulness instilled by the gods is damaged. These powers, which previously prevented people from lying, are pumped up to such an extent that they now begin to lie. Here is the great difference between this way of acquiring clairvoyant powers and the one described above, which you find consistently carried out in my writing “How to Know Higher Worlds”. What is this way based on? Exactly on the fact that nothing is developed on the path of knowledge that is not carried out according to the pattern of purely moral judgment. But this never flows from the astral body, but must be acquired as something that arises in the conscious ego like an inner voice. For we cannot regard as a moral being that which has no consciousness. We speak of morality only in relation to a being that is capable of allowing impulses to arise out of the core of its nature, which is connected with its inner being.

But now, in addition to moral forces, there are also those that lead the soul up into the higher world. If these are not to come from our astral body, then they cannot come from within ourselves at all. They cannot possibly come from within ourselves, because what comes from within ourselves would have to come from the conscious ego. But apart from moral impulses, at most aesthetic judgments, which decide on beauty, and, in a sense, mathematical judgments arise from the conscious ego. But the astral body should not be pumped up; so where can they come from? From the supersensible world, in which we are placed and which has indeed produced our three bodies. But these forces do not have to come from these three bodies themselves. So it is not the detour through the three bodies that must be chosen, but a path that brings us directly into contact with the spiritual realms, with the beings of the hierarchies, so that these forces of the higher world flow directly into us. We must therefore have access to these worlds through which higher forces can flow into our souls. For this it is necessary that all higher knowledge is connected with something other than with ordinary knowledge. With ordinary knowledge one does not enter into the higher worlds. To enter into the higher worlds, a very specific basic mood of the soul is necessary. This is the first thing that even the ancient Greek philosophers emphasized: Someone who can only think well, who only wants to grasp things intellectually, through mere thinking and philosophizing, cannot enter the spiritual worlds. One must start from something else. Before one can confront a thing cognitively, one must confront it in a different way.

All knowledge begins with wonder, and only those who start from a place of wonder are on the path to true knowledge. Nothing that we do not first face in wonder can lead to the path of knowledge at all. Let all pedagogy declaim that one must start from observation; if wonder is not there first, it remains mere intellectual cognition. Wonder is the first thing one must have.

The second thing that allows us to enter the spiritual world is to learn to worship. To worship that which works through the object. Knowledge that is not so connected with the soul that the soul walks the path of knowledge in the sense that it first lives in awe and in worship of that which manifests itself through the object, does not go beyond intellectual knowledge.

The third is to feel in harmony with world events. The spiritual teaching provides many means for this, in particular by carrying the idea of karma within us with all the seriousness of life. It is a long way from being convinced of karma in human life to the point where it becomes a true seriousness of life. If we are truly convinced of karma, then when someone slaps us, we must not say, “I don't like you slapping me!” Instead, we should ask ourselves, “Who actually slapped me? I myself, because in my previous life I did something that caused the other person to give me this slap, and I have not the slightest reason to tell him that he is doing me wrong, but in a sense I have set up an automaton for myself. — Not being in contradiction but in harmony with world events is the third thing. The Gospel itself gives a corresponding teaching: If someone strikes you on the right cheek, then offer the other one as well. If one knows that through karma one has to look for the cause within oneself, if one recognizes how one only lives out what one has brought about through one's own arbitrariness, through one's own guilt, then one comes to know oneself in harmony with the world process. That is the third.

And the fourth is: complete surrender to the process of the world, seeing oneself as if one were actually only a part of it. So that we can list four qualities with which we can relate to the outside world, to the outside of life: first, admiring, marveling; second, venerating; third, knowing ourselves to be in harmony with the world process; fourth, completely surrendering ourselves to this world process.

By developing these qualities, we open our soul, open it so that those forces can flow into it that flow out of the spiritual world in a virginal state, as it were. We inhale these forces like fresh mountain air, after having previously inhaled air that has been consumed by other organisms. Thus we see what a great difference there is between what can be given, as it were, by grace through the higher hierarchies themselves, and what we acquire by pumping up something out of the forces they place in our organization. By such a consideration we learn truly to distinguish between two paths that both lead to real clairvoyance. But one path leads to clairvoyance through the fact that man himself encounters the beings of the higher hierarchies directly.

Man has not always been a moral being. As long as man had only developed the astral body, the etheric body and the physical body, one could not speak of moral impulses. We speak of ancient sun-men who appropriated the etheric body, and of moon-men who acquired the astral body. But there was nowhere a realm of morality during these periods of development. The mission on earth is that morality is added to what man can otherwise experience. This is the task for the acquisition of such powers that lead to the spiritual world: man must develop beyond what he has acquired in the course of Saturn, Sun and Moon evolution. From all this it can be seen that, because it can be directly proven by reason, one cannot say that man can entrust himself to the offered paths of knowledge without judgment, to black magic as well as to moral impulses. One must only be willing to test everything through reason. If you try to respond to it correctly through today's description, what has been said will prove to be true, so that if you apply such standards to the description of paths of knowledge, you can really distinguish them without further ado. And it is important that man learn to say to himself: For me, the description of a path of knowledge in which not everything is patterned after a moral impulse is suspect from the outset. A person who does not consider a path that contradicts what one can actually feel as a moral impulse to be suspicious, who cannot feel the necessity of moral impulses, would have to ascribe it to himself if he were to get into danger. Therefore it was not at all unnecessary to include this consideration among the reflections that can be cultivated, because it is indeed right and good that someone who is interested in spiritual science today not only accepts the things that have been researched, but also, to a certain extent, familiarizes themselves with how things are found. Let us assume that someone wants to accept spiritual science but does not want to enter the path of knowledge for this incarnation. It is also useful for him to get an idea of how the knowledge is gained. He can gain an understanding of it, just as a chemist accepts a truth because he is told the experiment by which the knowledge in question is gained, even if he has not done the experiment himself.

Now, in our time, it is especially necessary for those who want to follow the path to higher knowledge to observe the things that have been characterized today; for we live in an age in which man is called upon by higher powers to become more and more independent and self-reliant. In the times that have passed until the Mystery of Golgotha, it was the case that man, without his doing, was in a certain way imbued with clairvoyant powers; this was like an inheritance from primeval times. But since the Mystery of Golgotha, man lives in such a way that he must consciously face things. Therefore, it is necessary that man learn to appropriate that very mood in the soul that is achieved through the four virtues, through the four powers: marveling, admiring, venerating, feeling harmony with the process of the world, and to devote himself to the process of the world, and that he may open himself freely to those influences that may come to him from the higher hierarchies precisely through the development of these virtues.

Now there is a possibility, so to speak, of moving out of the most fundamental soul impulses into such an attitude towards the world as in these four virtues: If we repeatedly and again and again devote ourselves to the thought in our souls that we, as we stand in the world, as we are interwoven in the world of Maja, the great illusion, have sprung from the divine forces with this Maja, this illusion, which always has its origin in the spiritual world. The fact that we live in the world of Maja, of illusion, does not prevent us from surrendering to the spiritual forces in the world of Maja and illusion, from which they have arisen. Maya is like the life in the play of waves on the sea, but it is still raised by the sea and is formed from the substance of the sea. Just as the play of waves comes from the world of the sea, and the foam is a formation from the substance of the sea, so the world of Maya arises from the spiritual underground, so that we can say: Even though we are wrapped up in this world of illusions, we have emerged from the Divine. This is expressed in Western esotericism by the words: Ex deo nascimur – we are born of the Divine.

And a second fundamental feeling is that we must not pump up the forces that the divine powers have placed in our astral, etheric and physical bodies, but that we must devote ourselves directly to the spiritual world, dying to the world. We do this through the four virtues: awe and wonder, reverence, harmony and devotion to the cosmic process. These are the things that bring us ever deeper into the mood that Western esotericism expresses as follows: In Christus morimur — in Christo morimur.

Then we can hope that we are heading towards awakening in the spiritual world, that we are opening up to the forces that are being newly bestowed on us there, as they were once bestowed on the astral body. Through the Holy Spirit we will be awakened again, we will be transported back into the spiritual world, so that man can ascend again into the higher world: Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus.

We should know that any esoteric teaching that is correct for today's world must banish all methods that pump forces from the lower bodies up into the ego that are supposed to lead to higher knowledge; for we are healthy when these forces remain below. It is a false esoteric path when we befog ourselves in this or that way and then consider certain things to be right simply because we have pumped up the forces that would not allow us to think these things are right if they remained in their place. These are serious matters, leading to a true understanding of why, in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds,” the powers for developing clairvoyant abilities are localized directly in the area of our larynx. They are, in the highest sense, moral faculties, and are also presented in the Buddha's teaching as the eight-fold path. To a certain extent they are moral; in the broader sense they lead man upwards to a thorough moralization of our knowledge as well, to an impregnation of it with that which otherwise is only in our morals.

When one wants to meditate, one must order oneself to exclude all thoughts and to only have the soul content of the mediation in one's soul. After that, soul quiet must set in, emptiness must begin, and then wait to see whether something flows in from the spiritual world, wait with patience and perseverance. Then one may have an experience that's like a dream that flits by. Then one has the feeling: “Something is thinking in me,” “An angel touched me,” “I raise myself into his kingdom.”

Our relation to our thoughts is like that of an angel to the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit doesn't think like we do—he lets his angels rush through the world as his messengers.

Such an experience is the first step into the spiritual world, and one should watch for it.

One should feel and experience: It thinks me with piety.

One can now raise oneself further to the divine principle that vitalizes and weaves through the world and to which we owe our existence. Then one has an experience such as: It weaves me.

Thereby, we touch the hem of the clothes of beings whom we call Spirits of Movement.

Even in ordinary life, we must dive down or bump into something in order to develop consciousness. We bump into our physical body and wake up. We also bump into something after death, into Christ-substance. We must wake up in it, dive down in it to become aware of the spiritual world, so that we're not asleep there.

But having consciousness doesn't mean that one has ego-consciousness yet. We also have consciousness in the experience that something thought in us, but it's only when we remember that something has thought in us that we connect the experience with our ego.

So we lose our ego at death, and we dive down dead as a soul to find ourselves and to gradually become conscious in the Christ-substance.

Then we come to sublime beings whom we feel we should call Thrones or Spirits of Will, and the mantra for this is: It works me. Here one should feel reverence and devotion.

If we have a luminous moment in the spiritual world we see our body down below, but it takes a high stage of vision to see it as in a mirror. At the beginning of such experiences we see an image of a coffin with a man in it, or a bathtub filled with hot water, or we stand before a door that doesn't open. All of these images are in the physical body that doesn't let us in.

When we experience the image that we're looking at our physical body down there, and that we're born out of the divine-spiritual world, then we express this in the words:

Ex Deo nascimur.

When we imagine how we dive down into the Christ-substance to die, then this is:

In Christo morimur.

And how we reemerge from the trickling water in a fine body and move up into the spiritual world:

Per Spiritum Santum reviviscimus.

Notes from memory of 120 [123] esoteric lessons that Rudolf Steiner gave in 1904-1912 and meditation texts and exercises he wrote down in Aus den Inhalten der esoterischen Stunden, bibl. No. 266, vols. 1 and 2.