The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The world appears in bewildering variety to the human being looking around at first, both the external nature and the human life. He directs his look up to the starry heaven and tries to fathom the sense of the marvellous, but at first mysterious variety of the stars of the luminous sky. The thoughtful human being will probably try to recognize the sense of the ways of the stars and the elements working during the day.

If we look down at our earth,

If we try to understand our mountains with their coloured variety of rocks, woods and vegetation,

If we try to understand the things that surround us as plants, animals, and human beings, and try to see in the phenomena of nature that approach us more or less dark, briefly,

If we try to see reason and sense in everything,

Then we probably feel a kind of faint at first towards all bewildering, which faces us. However, the most bewildering is that for us which faces us in the real life of the human being, in the historical development of the human being since millennia. Science, religion, and other human striving, feeling, intellect, and reason have always tried to introduce sense and coherence into the coloured variety of the stars, into life and into the activities of the beings on our earth.

Who could deny that the human mind has brought it so far in this respect and that it can hope to go farther and farther. However, also a legitimate sense, a kind of spiritual coherence is included in it what we call human development in history. Nevertheless, this seems to somebody rather doubtful, if he looks at the course of destiny with all misery which single human beings, tribes and peoples experience undeservedly, with all luck which meets the single or also many apparently undeservedly, with all sequences of historical experiences of the single peoples, races and nations. If we look into all that, then it probably appears to us as the pure chaos sometimes. There some people probably believe to look in vain for sense or coherence, believe to be unable to understand all that.

Great, astute spirits never doubted that the human mind is able to find sense and reason, lawful necessity also in the course of the historical events. I need to draw your attention only to the fact that our great German poet and thinker, Lessing (Gotthold Ephraim L., 1729-1781), in the testament of his life, in his last work, explained this human development as an education of the human race. He represented the antiquity as the childhood of humanity with the Old Testament as the first elementary book, the following age as a kind of youth from which we have the possibility to look at the future that should bring us something mature and male. I would still like to remind you that another great German thinker whom, admittedly, only a few know, even those who are destined to study him, the great German philosopher Hegel (Georg Friedrich Wilhelm H., 1770-1831) called history an education of the human being to become conscious of freedom. We could still add a hundred examples, and we would see everywhere that those human beings who look ingeniously into this activity, in this bewildering, apparently chaotic activity never doubted that there is also a lawful necessity, above all a higher order than outdoors in nature, in the world of the stars, plants, animals and physical beings generally.

If we let our eyes wander over the development of humanity, one thing faces us that is no longer felt with that liveliness with which it should be felt: a duality, a drastic division in two parts. It is this apparently something quite trivial that it seems so trivial, however, because the human beings are used to it. We reckon with the long period before Christ's birth and with the long period after Christ's birth. One no longer feels this as anything significant because humanity is used to it. However, is it not anything significant in the highest sense that our whole history was split after this sole event in two parts? That anything must have worked so incredibly as a strength that it was recognised by a big part of humanity? The fact that this could happen shows us that something of the consciousness of the unique, immense significance of the action of Christ Jesus is deeply hidden in the human breast. Who could deny, however, that today this significance has become somewhat questionable to many people, so that few of those who count themselves to the most sophisticated persons can really account to themselves why this is in such a way from which infinite depth, actually, humanity was induced to this division of history?

This question should occupy us today, the Christian doctrine of wisdom from the point of view of a detailed spiritual worldview. Among other things, the theosophical movement that spreads out more and more since thirty years in the educated world also tries to deepen the Christian doctrine of wisdom. Those who have already occupied themselves a little bit with the anthroposophic spiritual science know that the second principle of the spiritual-scientific movement is to search for the core of wisdom in all great religions. Just concerning the anthroposophic view of Christianity there are the conceivably biggest misunderstandings, and among those who are called to teach and explain Christianity are just only a very few who show real understanding of the anthroposophic striving. One said repeatedly, anthroposophy wants to transplant some Eastern teachings, a new Buddhism to Europe. This would be the most un-anthroposophic that one can imagine. If we mean it sincerely with the principle of searching for the core of wisdom in all religions, then we must be aware that we have to search for this core of wisdom in Christianity above all, in the religion by which the whole culture of Europe was created and from which the noblest currents of the West originated.

Who does not understand Christianity today, does not understand himself, and if Christianity has to perform anything great for Europe in the future, it has to be deepened. If spiritual science shall have a share of this big achievement, it has the task to penetrate into the depths of Christianity and to search there for those springs which are able to flow in the future which are able to wake cultural hopes for the future.

When I spoke in a city of South Germany some time ago (Colmar, 21st November 1905, no transcript) about the teaching of wisdom of Christianity, about our subject today, also various Protestant pastors and Catholic priests were there. After the talk, the Catholic priests said to me, what you have said to us is the choicest Christianity, but it is only for the choice ones who want to have Christianity in such detailed way. However, we announce Christianity in a form in which everybody understands it and which it is accessible to all.—There I said, if you were right, you could be sure that it would never have occurred to me to speak about the core of wisdom of Christianity, because I would consider it as superfluous in the world. If you were right, could then there be a human being who felt compelled to secede from the way you teach? Then the number of those people could not increase with every day who find no satisfaction with the way you teach. Indeed, there are many for whom you can speak today. However, the fact that it is possible that numerous human beings do no longer find their satisfaction with you proves that there are human beings to whom one has to speak differently. It does not depend on the fact that we imagine that we find the way to everybody. We can do this easily and mean that we communicate in such a way that we find the way to everybody. However, it does not depend on it which opinions we have about what we regard as the right way. It depends not on our imaginations, but on the facts. If you observe this and let not speak what you put as your subjective confession, then you realise that you do no longer speak to many people. To those one has to speak in a new form. They are those to whom the spiritual scientist speaks.

However, spiritual science has not only to speak to those. It will also speak to those who remain in full Christian devoutness in old Christian traditions, and to those it will be a deepening, a spiritualisation of the truthful teachings of Christianity. The spiritual-scientific saying, nothing is higher than truth, is surely often misunderstood by such like the priest whom I have quoted. One believes, it is sufficient if one only has the belief that something is true. No, that is not enough that we have the subjective conviction and imagine we would have the right way. Just the spiritual-scientific world movement should overcome this. Truth is not in our opinion, but in the facts. The observation of the facts must be higher for us than our belief. This is the sense of the saying. What we believe is our personal affair. Transpersonal is that which speaks to us by the world of the facts. We have to submit to it, we have to follow it.

Indeed, it is true that the human development was split by the appearance of Christ Jesus on earth, and, hence, we have to look a little deeper into this way of the human development. Who penetrates only somewhat into a spiritual investigation of existence will soon recognize how vapid and superficial any materialist worldview is, that any material is only the expression of the spiritual, that the spiritual is the origin and spring of any external sensuous existence.

The earthly human being as this sensuous being, who developed since the times about which history, the human thinking generally reports, is only the expression of a supernatural spiritual being. I do not have the time today to explain these great thoughts in a complete, possibly scientific way. This has oftener happened here in these talks. Today I can show it only figuratively, and Christian and pre-Christian thinkers showed it always figuratively in such a way that the supersensible human being who was not yet touched by the matter descended and embodied himself in the sensuousness. We consider that human being who comes from other spiritual worlds into this sensuous world as the Adam Kadmon of the Jewish secret doctrine, the kabbalah. This coming in is called “fall.” However, you must not misunderstand this. Great Christian authors understood this as a fall, and the action of Christ Jesus was understood as a rise from this fall to a new spiritual height. We shall still see how Paul's remark that Christ Jesus is the reverse Adam has a deep spiritual sense (1 Corinthians 15:44ff). If we understand the human being quasi—I ask you not to tip the scales at the word “quasi” because it should be only an indication of the true relation—quasi descended from spiritual heights and embodied in the sensory world, then we also understand which task the human being had initially in the first times of historical development.

What had the human being to do on this earthly scene in the first times of historical and prehistoric development? His sensuous members were the tools whose use he had to learn in the first times. Now the high spiritual human being was embodied in the sensory world. He learnt there in the first epoch of his existence, which I would like to call the instinctive epoch of human development, to use his own tools. This was the first task of the first quarter of human development—we do not want to go back to the very old times.

The human being gradually learnt to use his hands and the remaining limbs; he learnt to fit into the world and nature surrounding him. He needed no intellect for that; this was an instinctive empathising and settling in existence. When humanity learnt to control itself and acquired the use of the limbs as tools, it lived in the tribal history. The people were that within which the human being lived. It was a natural coherence, which was given by blood relationship. A sort of an animal instinct kept humanity together. Only the great masters were beyond the instinctive life. In the most different way, the human beings learnt to use their limbs, according to the state of the countries, regions, and times in which the peoples lived. The development generated a big variety in the human structure. That which was given to the human being developed most diversely. We can go back everywhere: we find this instinctive epoch of development with all peoples.

Then we find the second epoch. There the human being learns something that the Bible and other worldviews comprise with a certain word, with a word that is exceptionally important to understand properly. We understand this word properly if we realise what the first period of human development preferably had to produce. The instinct had taught the human beings most diversely to use their limbs, in one area in this way, in the other that way. People developed in the hot zone with a rampant plant growth where without effort the food was supplied, another developed in a cold, inhospitable area where it had to produce his food and create the conditions of existence with big trouble and that is why the human being had to form his limbs with big trouble. Because the human beings had so little intellect, they faced each other as it resulted from the different instinctive development. Something new took place due to the law, which the intellect created. The instincts of the peoples are different, the intellect is the same, and at the moment, when the uniform intellect was applied to the human living together, that appeared in the world which also the Bible calls the law.

The human being learnt to control his whole body as his tool first. Then the lawful period occurred where the human being tried to harmonise and order his community where he tried to compensate the instincts in the mutual action where he wanted to create conditions on this earth as they correspond to the intellect. The intellect was introduced by the way how the human being lived together. Thus, humanity developed in the first two quarters of existence. However, humanity was there not without guidance. The instinct developed to bigger and bigger brightness, until the law took on the form of the intellect widespread in the farthest circles.

Where from did all that come? Humanity would never have come so far without such brothers who were way ahead of their fellow men. At all times, always and everywhere there have been human beings, who developed the stages of existence faster to be able to lead the other human beings. Spiritual science calls such personalities, such individualities the guardians of wisdom, the guardians of human progress. There were always such guardians of human progress. Even today, there are some. These great persons, these personalities who have arrived at a stage of existence today where the majority of humanity will come only in a very distant future existed also in the pre-Christian times, in the first two quarters of human development.

They led the world; they were the shepherds of humanity and introduced order and coherence into humanity. Where from did those leaders of the human race get their knowledge, their wisdom? What did this wisdom consist of?—One led the visible by the invisible, the sensory by the extrasensory. One led the material connections by that which slumbers invisibly in the material. Does it slumber invisibly in the material? A simple reflection can convince you. Look up at the cloud. It appears bright and dark to you. It announces a thunderstorm. Moreover, while you are still looking upwards, the flash streaks through the cloud, the thunder rumbles. Where was the flash, where was the thunder? They slumbered; they slept as concealed material forces. As well as flash and thunder slumbered, a lot of concealed forces slumber in the visible as something invisible, in the sensory as something extrasensory. As well as our external civilisation has reached its present state, because the human being has learnt to wake up forces and abilities slumbering in the matter, the great spiritual culture comes from the fact that the guardians of humanity are able to wake up the supersensible forces slumbering in the sensuous and to control the lower by the higher.

As well as the master builder uses the force of gravity to lay the beam on the column, so using a force slumbering in the matter to erect our buildings by the different combination of columns and beams,

As the electrician controls our engines and other electric apparatuses with the invisible electric power,

The guardians of wisdom and human progress control the earthly forces by that which is not perceptible by the senses.

The visible is controlled not by the visible, but by the invisible. None is unworldly who rises by the invisible above the visible, but someone who is stuck in the visible. The true realist is that who controls the world by that which slumbers in him, so that he forms and builds up reality and introduces it into the service of human progress. As well as the master builder and the electrician use the forces slumbering in the matter to build houses, to create mechanical civilisation, the great guardians of wisdom and human progress use the forces existing in humanity to lead the human beings to their aim to order that which whirls chaotically in the outside world and to give it significance. Never was the advancement sensory from the instinctive, then lawful periods up to ours.

However, the wise guardians of humanity had to find out and to experience this at first; they had to be steeped in it completely, not due to blind faith, not due to vague convictions, but due to spiritual experience. They had to be clear in their mind

That there is something extrasensory, something extrasensory inside and outside the human being

That that which happens between birth and death is only one side of our existence and

That an essence outreaches birth and death

That there is something in the human being that is more comprehensive than all sensuous and is the creator of the form and the preserver of everything sensuous, and this not based on a supposition, but based on the immediate extrasensory, everlasting view.

Out of this view, the guardians of humanity had to act, then out of the knowledge that death is to be defeated, that a consciousness is to be gained that there is something that lets death appear as an event like other events of life. Only from such an experience the force arises to the human being to control the sensory from the extrasensory, the visible from the invisible. Had I to say with few words what the big secret of the great guardians of humanity is, I would say, these guardians of wisdom and human progress knew that there is something in the human being that defeats death.

They had to go behind the scenery of existence, to look behind the regions of existence, which the human being enters after death. What exists behind the sensuous had to be accessible to the students by experience. They learnt to know that in the temples of initiation of the ancient Egyptian priests and teachers of occultism, in the Eleusinian and other Greek schools or temples of initiation. Those who were mature to acquire these convictions were initiated into these secrets. Only with few words—I explain the other matters in the next talks—I can indicate what was imparted to the human beings in these temples of initiation, in these high schools of spiritual life.

There the human being went through death at first; he already experienced within this life that rise which takes place in the human being if he passes the gate of death. If he passes the gate, which leads to the other world with his natural death, he enters another land, the land on the other side of existence. One can enter it also already during this life, one can enter it by another state of consciousness, awakening the abilities which slumber in the human breast, which enable us not only to experience the unconscious state during sleep in the spiritual environment, but to enter the beyond using the spiritual qualities, to be a citizen of the spiritual world. One called this death, resurrection, and ascension.

They experienced the great initiates. If I may express myself in such a way, they experienced death with the living body, for three and a half days, they were dead, so to speak, they came out of their physical bodies and experienced the facts of a higher world, a spiritual world, that world to which the human being belongs according to his deeper nature. This happens to that part of the human being that enters the extrasensory existence. After the human being had passed this higher world, those who were already initiates recalled him to his earthly existence. Then he was a new human being whom one called a risen one. As a symbol of it, he got a new name that had a deeper meaning. Such a human being who had come into the mysteries and the temples of initiation to behold spoke a new language, and in his words, the spiritual world sounded which he had experienced during his initiation. He was a messenger of higher worlds, his words had wings because of the experiences in the spiritual world, and he spoke another language. He was one of those who talk the language of the gods, as one said, he talks the wisdom which the gods know. This is fundamentally theosophy, the divine wisdom.

One called such a human being a blessed (German: selig) one if one translates the word in German. The words have a deep meaning if one understands them in the right sense; they did not originate by chance. About such a man, who felt sympathy for the spiritual world because he had beheld it, one said, he is blessed. Those who know something about that great bliss, about those marvellous experiences of another world tell about it, even if they write profane writings about it. The most important of these matters was never written down and can never be written down.

However, those who tell and write down something of it write about it in tones that sound quite different from those who say something about a sensuous existence. Those who knew something of initiation speak of a renewal of the whole human being. One of them said, that only has become a human being in the true sense of the word who was blessed with his everlasting essence in the mysteries, while the others have still to wait, until they also get this mercy.—Plato, the unique Greek philosopher, says: those walk in the mud who got to know nothing of the divine of initiation.

Thus, we could still state many voices of antiquity and of the pre-Christian time, which emphasise the holiness, the power, and greatness of initiation, so that it resonates in our souls. Only a few, choicest ones could be blessed with the higher spiritual life in such a way, immediately beholding. The crowd received nothing but the announcements of such initiates.

Then Christianity appeared and changed these conditions completely. The depth of this change of humanity is expressed in a powerful saying, and that is: “Happy (Blessed) are they who find faith without seeing me” (John 20:29). The secret of Christianity is contained in this saying, and we understand it only if we take it as literal as possible. What does it mean? We know that somebody who had experienced initiation in the temple knew that he defeated death that he took part in the entombment and was blessed by the vision. Now a great individuality came who carried out this great event on the external plane of history in front of all, as far as they wanted to see it or could take up it by faith, by the union with the unique personality. That happened once on the historical plane, which had often happened to the initiates in the deep darkness of the mystery temples. This event took place in Palestine in the year 33.

What was received and protected till then more or less symbolically in the depths of the temples had become historical truth, historical reality on the big stage of life. One must understand this, because this is important. I entitled my small writing about Christianity really with full care not Mysticism of Christianity but Christianity as Mystical Fact (CW 8). I wanted to show not the mysticism of Christianity, but Christianity itself should be understood as a mystical fact. It should be understood that the event in Palestine is a fact of deep symbolism and at the same time something that is actual reality, actual truth. We should understand each other just concerning this point, because it belongs to the most important points of the knowledge of Christianity. If one speaks of the fact that in Palestine the event of death, resurrection, entombment and ascension took place as a historical event in 33 and says that this event has happened also before so and so often in the mystery temples, then one does not regard that as something real, then one does not believe in the real Christ. On the other side, other people who believe in Christ think that death, entombment, and resurrection are profound symbols. It is hard to understand that something can be fact and symbol at the same time.

Somebody never understands who explains history “really” and considers it indifferently that a fact also has deep symbolic significance. He has never grasped that there are high and low mountains in history, high mountains that outreach the high that they are facts and symbols at the same time. That is the point. Now we have put an event before all human beings, which pronounces before them that death can be defeated and that there is a spiritual life, which outreaches death, because the only One had defeated death. In front of all human beings, he had experienced what the initiates experienced in the mysteries. Now, one did no longer need to go into the mysteries to behold, now, one could believe and feel connected with Him who experienced the great event of the victory of life over death in the physical world. Now, one could believe even if one did not behold. That understands the religious books correctly who brings himself to a literal understanding again. Beholding means literally the beholding in the mysteries, and faith is the faith in the fact that death was defeated by Christ's life. Hence, we are allowed to say that the greatest teaching of wisdom of Christianity is that the teachings of wisdom of the various religions became fact in Christianity.

What were the teachings of wisdom of the various religions? Deepening really in the spiritual-scientific teachings you can convince yourselves that the religions comply with each other concerning their teachings. Take the teachings of Hermes, Pythagoras, and Zarathustra or also of other religious founders: in that which they expressed and taught one can find a deep consistent core of wisdom. All teachers who announced the great teachings of wisdom could say, I am the way and the truth.—For truth flowed out of their mouths; that truth which they had experienced in the mystery temples, they had become messengers of the divine truth. With Christ Jesus, it was another matter.

He could say more of himself. He became that which is expressed in the great and beautiful saying: I am the way, the truth and the life (John 14:6). He taught that in front of everybody, which the other religious founders said, living concealed to the rest of humanity in the twilight of the mysteries. The life by which experience was won inside of the mystery was invisible. It became visible because of the event in Palestine.

Thus, Christianity outranks the old pre-Christian religions. That wisdom which was won by the concealed life of the initiate came out to the public, and we have in the newer time in Christianity the truth that became person, life, and existence. Hence, it does often not depend with the old religions on telling how the religious founders lived. We do not hear telling, how the Egyptian Hermes, the Indian Rishis, how Zarathustra, how Buddha lived. If we receive the teachings and raise our hearts and our senses in them, the blessing flows from them to us. However, if we want to understand Christianity, we have to consider that Christ did not speak only that way, but also that he went his own way. Hence, no book by him, but only books about him are preserved. The good news, the Gospels, is not the wise language of Jesus. They are the stories of the life of Jesus. Others spoke about him. If the disciples of Buddha and Hermes spoke, they would say, we have heard this, these are his holy words, and we want to echo them to you.—However, if the disciples of Jesus moved into the world, they emphasised that He was there that they were connected with Him that they were His companions. They attempted to keep up the tradition, to reproduce it from generation to generation: we ourselves heard the word on the holy mountain together with Him; we laid our hands in His wounds.—It was the truth element of the living together that should transfer the liveliness to the future generations. This is somewhat different from that which existed before in the other religions. This is new.

If we want to imagine the whole significance of this new, we have to realise the difference that existed between the first quarter of human evolution and what happened now. What happens now? What does Christianity prepare humanity for, actually? Why had somebody to experience the great event in such a way that the human beings could look at him, could look up at him as evidence of the victory of life over death? One needed such evidence because now another historical epoch of humanity began, because now the intellect, the strength of mind was used for something different for centuries, even for millennia. With the propagation of Christianity, that approximately begins which we can call the triumphal procession of humanity about our material world. Christianity had to prepare for it first. In the middle of the Middle Ages, the material victory of humanity begins, the laws become more and more perfect with which the human beings found it. The human being becomes the master of nature by the perfection of his mechanisms, establishes a big system of, traffic and trade. The human intellect wins over our earth.

That did not exist in the pre-Christian times. Try to realise how our science begins in the times when also Christianity arises. You know that Thales (~624-~547 B.C.) was the first philosopher. Then Christianity prepares the ground for the use of the human strength to control the external nature. It was necessary that the conviction of a spiritual life comes from quite a different side so that humanity is not completely isolated from spiritual life. Now the efficient personality had to be used to conquer the globe in a material respect. Hence, science had to separate from the feeling, from faith. It was the characteristic feature of those who were initiated into the mysteries that science and faith, feeling and faith were one. For that who comes out of the material there is no separation between faith and knowledge, between truth and feeling. The forms in which the stars were arranged were the letterings of the godhead with the Chaldean initiates. This had to change in the new time. At first, the human being directed his look up at the starry heaven, and a science divested of divine feelings encompassed the skies and the earthly existence in all its phenomena. The knowledge of the world could no longer go the same way as faith and wisdom.

Because both had to separate, an event had to take place that guaranteed faith that founded such a firm feeling in humanity that faith could found itself besides the material science and that faith lived on throughout the material time. Thus, we have the firmly founded faith and science side by side, which does not have faith, but looks at the personality, at Christ. A personal relationship to the only One establishes itself besides the material striving. Thus, that which was put in Palestine in 33 was the bulwark to preserve the everlasting, the consciousness of the spiritual during the development of humanity towards materiality. Those had to be blessed who could believe in the only One, while they had to use their looking for the achievement of the material life. Thus, the second epoch of antiquity points prophetically to Christ Jesus. Not without good reason the teachings of the Old Testament are interpreted as predictions of Christ Jesus. Any initiation was such a prediction. What the initiate experienced, he experienced it spiritually first, then symbolically, then it was there in the world. Then it was a fulfilment, the fulfilment of the Old Testament was the New Testament. In addition, this word appears to us in its full significance if we grasp it in its depth. Thus, I have described three epochs of human evolution that go side by side, of faith, knowledge, and wisdom.

Let us carry our mind back to the times in which the poor Egyptian slaves dragged the big, massive boulders and worked themselves to blood on huge stone giants. The modern worker cannot imagine that labour. Bliss and contentment were the feelings, which penetrated the soul of the wretched slave. However, this slave knew one thing. He knew that the life that he lived in such a hard work was one life of many. The initiate often said it to him to make humanity aware of the fact that the human being embodies himself repeatedly and that he experiences that which he prepared himself, and that he is recompensed in future lives. Thus, the riddle of human destiny is solved for him really. Among the hard working slaves, bliss and religious feeling prevailed. The slave said to himself, he who commands me today was once as I am and I become once, as he is if I carry out all that now.—The prudent men who conquered the material world later, who dealt with the merely material science would not be able to achieve this, as overwhelming the teachings of Galilei and Copernicus, the teachings of the modern investigation of the sensory material existence may be.

Indeed, nothing should be said against these teachings and nobody can estimate its greatness and power more than I do. Nevertheless, it is true and one has to say also that the materialistic researchers could not find those fiery words, that spirit which opens the souls which gives the human being hope forever which gives the human beings the certainty of the mental-spiritual life. However, this certainty came from the personal connection with the unique Christ. The external science was also gradually deepened again. Science became wisdom bit by bit again, and the result of the fact is that this external science claimed to appear again as founder of a religion. What then are the enlighteners, the freethinkers? What do they want? They are, actually, religious natures. They want to found a religion; they want to conjure up such a religion from the modern science. In particular, Moleschott (Jacob M., 1822-1893, Dutch physiologist and philosopher), Haeckel and others with their books which founded a kind of materialistic Gospel for many are nothing else than founders of a materialistic religion. Because the worldly-sensuous has won such an immense strength and authority that the human being wants to gain the highest by science and its wisdom, the scientists have turned away from Christ Jesus, also those who feel only a bit of the power of science and have something to inform of the greatness and the power of science. Thus, we have the separation of science. However, Jesus spoke a word, a word that we cannot grasp deeply enough, and this is, I will be with you always, to the end of time (Matthew 28:20).

We do not need to borrow this wisdom only from traditions and books, but if we rise into the higher worlds, we have the greatest experience in ourselves again, which can be experienced only in the higher worlds beyond the gate of death. Then He speaks again to us, then He shows us that He is there today that we can hear Him immediately in the present. Hence, we need such a deepening of humanity again that the human being has the experience of Christ in himself and that the human being can find out something similar like the initiates in the ancient mysteries again in himself. At least a reflection of the great, significant experience of the mystery temples should be delivered gradually to those who turn to anthroposophy. They enter the spiritual region, the other side of life already here during this life. Thus, they can experience what Goethe expressed significantly in his poem, which begins: “Tell nobody except the wise, because the mob is immediately scornful,” and closes: “And so long as you don't have it, this “Die and be transformed!,” you will only be a gloomy guest on the dark earth.”

Today it concerns this passing away and becoming. There are methods of spiritual development with which we can wake the inner divine essence in ourselves, with which we can outgrow into the spiritual world. Our eyes are opened there for the spiritual world; our ears become active, so that we hear something higher speaking. We are able to become citizens of a higher world; we find that Christ is with us to the end of the world. Then we can also hear that language again, which spoke to the disciples on the mountain. This is indicated in the deepest mystery of Christianity.

Let us consider this great mystery at the end. Christ had initiated pupils too; he also led them away from the crowd. When he wanted to explain what he had said to the crowd in parables, he led his three initiated disciples: Peter, James, and John on the Mount Tabor. They beheld the transfiguration there (Matthew 17). Who understands the transfiguration recognizes the deepest mystery of Christianity. The disciples are translated from the sensuous existence. What faces them? Elijah and Moses. Elijah is the word meaning way or aim, Moses is simply the esoteric word meaning truth, and Jesus is life. While eternity appeared to them in temporality, while those who are dead long since appeared to them, before their spiritual eyes, it means that they had ascended to the spiritual world. Peter says to Jesus, it is good that we are here. Would you like me to make three shelters...? You can read the expression “make shelters” where a pupil attains the second stage of chelahood. One says of him that he makes shelters in the beyond.

The great truth in the religious documents is recognized everywhere by that who recognizes the so-called key words. The saying “I am the way, the truth and the life” faces you there. When they descended from the mountain, Jesus forbade them to tell anyone about the vision, until the Son of Man has been raised from the dead. They questioned themselves: what is “rising” from the dead?—They said to Jesus, the scribes say that Elijah must come first.—He answered, Elijah is to come and set everything right.—The disciples, in the most intimate sanctum, speak here about reincarnation as about something that is a matter of course to them. The Lord Himself spoke about it like about a matter of course, saying, Elijah has already come, John the Baptist is Elijah, but they failed to recognise him.—This is the testament on the mountain. “Mountain” is the key word for initiation. Where initiation is concerned, the term “on the mountain” is applied. What means: do not tell anybody that I come again? That is, until I speak again to you, until you yourselves are there again in such figure that humanity can again perceive the word of truth. Christ Jesus was as a deputy on earth. Looking at his death, humanity should feel the victory of life over death. The faith by which even the Egyptian slave knew of the beyond should be substituted by the faith that the everlasting is in the essence, which passes through the physical. Now they had to start the triumphal procession through the world. Nothing material remains to us of that which is wisdom, immediate knowledge of the beyond. Nothing of reincarnation should be taught to humanity during the following two millennia. Jesus determined this as his testament. Not before the human beings have gone through the third epoch of development, they have gained this material victory over the globe; they will have applied intellect and reason to the external civilisation. Then only a new epoch is permitted to begin, then wisdom can understand that again which lived uniquely. Then Christ appears again on earth, so that He can be grasped immediately.

Then the human being does no longer need the life on Tabor, and then he experiences the initiation in himself, finds the divine human being in himself. Then he will look up again at the divine life that was common property of humanity in the pre-Christian times. The anthroposophic teaching has introduced this new epoch. What Christ left on the mountain Tabor, the spiritual-scientifically striving human beings feel this as their mission, as their vocation. Christian mystics of the Middle Ages already indicated this. You find it expressed by Angelus Silesius, the great Silesian initiate: “If Christ is born a thousand times in Bethlehem and not in you, you still are lost forever.” As the blind person experiences the awakening of light, somebody who arrives at the new condition can experience the apparition like that on Tabor. This is the future. Thus, we had a Christianity of faith in the third epoch of humanity, and we shall have a Christianity of wisdom in the fourth epoch. What did humanity perform in the third epoch? The instinctive period is the pre-Christian time. We have had the period of the external material civilisation, and now we enter the fourth period of human development.

The human being has encompassed the world with industry and trade; without distinction of nation and race industry and trade work. The machine prepares the same goods in Japan, Brazil, and Europe. The same railways cross the globe in all areas without distinction of race, nation, and class. The differences within humanity have fallen in our civilisation. The cheque, which is written here in Berlin, can be redeemed in Tokyo. Everything in our civilisation has taken place in such a way that we can put up as a principle of the third period what no one could have put up as a principle in the starting point of our civilisation: we want to found a civilisation that encompasses the globe, without distinction of race, gender, occupation, and confession. This material civilisation has encompassed the world under this motto. This civilisation must receive soul. It is the task of the fourth epoch of humanity; it is the task of anthroposophy and of our lifestyle to introduce this cultural soul into humanity. We have a material civilisation, and we need a spiritual culture with the same qualities. The human beings are strong where they founded the moral connection. The Japanese trader understands the traders of all other countries. The human beings must understand each other in their souls.

This will be if these achievements are also made fruitful for the human science. The cultural body has three epochs. It needs a soul. The fourth epoch has to bring cultural spirit. This is the great basic idea, the big aim, which the big cultural movement must have, if it wants to be something else than a mere play for those who deal with nothing but brooding over mystic thoughts. If the Theosophical Society continues to exist, it manages this. Hence, it has to understand Christianity in its deepness. It has to understand its deepest teachings of wisdom and must also have the strength to practice these teachings of wisdom not in old traditional form, but to reshape them so that they live on usefully at all times. With it, Christianity is not anything past, but has the living strength to work on future more and more. Thus, anthroposophy, the anthroposophically understood Christianity is no doctrine, no dogma, no sectarianism, but it is something else. It is something that makes hearts leap for joy in the best sense of the word; it is something that raises the soul to the biggest tasks of the present because the biggest tasks can only correspond to the beneficial hope for the future.

Then we have understood Christianity if it gives us life for the future. Then we understand the high spirits correctly if they become our future teachers. We are their right pupils if we do not want to reproduce authoritatively what they themselves had said, but if their words, their actions have become the energy for the new that we create. This is the great secret, the big lawfulness and necessity that shall fulfil us in the progress of human evolution and that shall constitute our life in the highest sense of the word. This is the true education of humanity that we receive the strength of creating in the future and the hope for a beneficial effect in the future from a real knowledge of the great actions of our ancestors.

As our subject is arousing the very widest interest everywhere, it seems justifiable to approach it from an anthroposophical standpoint. The manner in which it is being discussed and brought to public notice is, of course, very far removed from this point of view. If it is true that Anthroposophy is little understood and liked to-day, it may be said at once that the treating of this theme in an anthroposophical manner presents peculiar difficulties.¹ It is unusual in our age for the feelings to be so attuned as to appreciate anthroposophical truths bearing on the more obvious matters of spiritual life, and it is directly repugnant to our present-day consciousness when a topic has to be discussed which calls for the application of Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science to the most difficult and holiest subjects.

It may be safely affirmed at the outset that the Being around Whom our thoughts are about to centre has been for many centuries the turning point of all thought and feeling, and moreover that He has called forth widely differing judgments, emotions and opinions. Countless as are those who for centuries have held firmly as a rock to all that is connected with the Name of Christ and of Jesus, beyond number also are pictures of Him which have moved souls and occupied thoughtful men ever since the Event in Palestine. Always the picture has been modified according to the general views of the times, to what was felt and considered true at any given period. Thus, when the way had been prepared by the intellectual currents of thought of the eighteenth century, it came about in the course of the following century that what could be intellectually grasped as “Christ” withdrew into the background as compared with what was called later the “Historical Jesus.” It is around the “Historical Jesus” that the widely extended controversy has arisen, and which has here in Carlsruhe its most important protagonists and its most vigorous combatants. For this reason it is as well to give a short indication of the actual position of the controversy before entering on the subject of “Christ Jesus.”

We might say that the Historical Jesus of nineteenth century thought originated under the influence of the intellectual current that takes a merely external view of spiritual life and judges it by means of external documents: that there is evidence of His having lived at the beginning of our era in Palestine, that He was crucified and, according to the faithful, rose again. It is quite in line with the character and nature of the present era, now approaching its termination, that in the case of theological research, faith limited itself to what it was thought could be confirmed by historical documents in the same way as any ordinary event is confirmed by independent writings. It may be said that all the historical written traditions elsewhere than in the New Testament could, in the opinion of one of the most important judges, be “easily contained in a quarto page.” All the other references to the historical Jesus in any documents whatever, such for example as in Josephus or Tacitus, may be put out of court, for they can never be used from the standpoint of that historical science which holds good to-day. Beyond these there are only the Gospels and the Pauline Epistles. How did the historical research of the nineteenth century examine the Gospels? Regarded purely externally how do they appear? If taken like other records, such as those of military engagements and so forth, they seem to be very contradictory documents of the physical plane, the fourfold presentation of which cannot be brought into harmony. In face of what we call historical criticism these records fall to pieces. For it must be allowed that everything which the earnest and diligent research of the nineteenth century collected out of the Gospels themselves, in order to gain a true picture of Jesus of Nazareth, has crumbled away through the presentation of the kind of research brought forward by Professor Drews. As to all that can be said against the Gospels as facts of history, it is evident that nothing can come to light about the Person of Jesus of Nazareth if we apply the methods whereby accurate science and strict criticism ratify other historical facts. We can only be considered very dilettante scientists if we do not make this concession to the science of the day.

Is it not the case that those who in the nineteenth century presented the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth, and wanted to arrive at an historical portrait of Him, had an entirely false conception of the Gospels? Were the Gospels really intended to be historical records in the sense understood in that century?

Whatever was to be said on this subject I endeavoured to state many years ago in my work, Christianity as Mystical Fact, and our present question, as to what was the real object of the Gospels, was intended to receive its answer not merely through the contents of that book but through the tide itself. For the title was not ‘The Mysticism of Christianity,’ nor ‘The Mystical Contents of Christianity:’ its object was rather to show that Christianity in its origin and its whole being is not an external fact but a Fact of the Spiritual world, and one that can only be comprehended by an insight into a realm lying behind the world of sense and behind what can be corroborated by historical records. It was shown that the forces and causes which brought about the Event of Palestine were not to be found in that region wherein external historical events take place, and thus that possibly not only may Christianity have a mystical content but that Mysticism—the actual gazing into the spiritual—is necessary to disentangle the threads that were woven behind the Event in Palestine and made it possible.

In order to realize what Christianity is, and what it can and must be in the soul of man to-day if he is to understand it aright, let us see how deeply grounded in the spiritual facts of human development were the words of St. Augustine: “That which we now call the Christian Religion already existed among the ancients and was never absent from the beginning of the human race up to the time when Christ appeared in the flesh, from which time forward the true religion which was already there received the name of the Christian Religion.” Thus does a standard authority point to the fact that it was not something new which came into humanity with the events of Palestine, but that in a certain sense a transformation had taken place in that which from time immemorial the souls of men had sought and striven for as knowledge. Something was given to humanity which had always been in existence, though hitherto along other lines than the Christian. If we wish to test the other way in which the preceding ages could come to the truths and wisdom of Christianity, we are referred by the historical development of humanity to the Mysteries of Antiquity or the Ancient Mysteries. What is meant by these expressions is little understood to-day, but it will become clearer the more men grasp the conception of the cosmos as presented by Spiritual Science.

Not merely upon the external religions of the people of antiquity must attention be focused, but upon what was practised in pre-Christian times in those mystic abodes designated by the name of the Mysteries. In the book Occult Science is to be found an explanation from the aspect of Spiritual Science, and there are also numbers of secular writers who have declared publicly what was the secret of mankind in antiquity. We read that only a few were admitted to the schools which were designated “The Mysteries,” and that these schools were the homes of the cults. Also there was a small circle of men admitted to the Mysteries by the priestly sages, and for them this meant a kind of retirement from the outer world: they realized that if they were to reach what was to be attained they must lead a different life than they had so far lived openly, and above all that they must accustom themselves to another way of thinking. These Mysteries existed all over the world, among the Greeks and Romans and other peoples, as may be confirmed by referring to extensive literature which still exists. The pupils admitted to the Mysteries were taught something comparable with what is now called science or knowledge, but they did not receive it in the same way, for by what they experienced they became quite other beings. To them came the conviction that in every man there lives, deeply hidden and slumbering so that the ordinary consciousness knows it not, a higher man. As the ordinary man looks through his eyes upon the world and with his thought-power thinks over what he experiences, so can this other man—at first unknown to external consciousness, but capable of being awakened in the depths of his nature recognize another world unattainable by external sight and thought. This was called “The birth of the inner man.” The expression is still used, though in these days it is dry and abstract in character and regarded lightly, but when the disciple of the Mysteries applied it to himself it stood for a tremendous event to be compared in some measure with being born in the physical sense. As man in the physical world is born out of a dark substratum (be it one of nature according to the materialistic idea, or a spiritual sub-stratum in the view of Spiritual Science) so, physically speaking, there was really born through the processes of the Mysteries a higher man who previously had been as little present as was the human being before birth or conception. The disciple was a new-born being. The present view of knowledge, as given everywhere in answer to a deeply philosophic question, is exactly the opposite of that which formed the central point of the whole idea and outlook of the Mysteries. It is now asked in the sense of Kant and Schopenhauer, “Where lie the limits of knowledge? What is it in the power of man to know?” We need only take up a newspaper to meet the answer that here or there lie the limits and that beyond them it is impossible to go. Certainly it was admitted in the Mysteries that there were problems which man could not solve, but it would never have been held in the sense of Kant or in Schopenhauer's Theory of Cognition that “Man cannot know” this or that! What would have been appealed to was man's capability of development, to the powers lying dormant within him which must be evoked so that he might rise to higher capacities of knowledge. The question in those times resolved itself into what was to be done in order to get beyond that which in normal life is the boundary of knowledge; how to develop deeper powers in human nature.

Something more is needed if we are to feel the whole magic charm of the Mysteries that, like a breath, pervades the works of the exoteric writers, Plato, Aristides, Plutarch and Cicero. Here we must be clear that the kind of mental comprehension present in the forming of the disciples of the Mysteries was quite different from that of the men of to-day when they confront scientific truths. What we now call science is open to anybody and everybody in any condition of receptivity whatever. It is just here that we recognize the characteristic of Truth, that it is independent of mood and feeling. For the pupil of the Mysteries the most necessary thing was that, before he was brought to the great Truths, he should go through something whereby his soul was transformed in his feelings and impressions. What to-day appears as a simple scientific truth would not have been put to him so that he could grasp it externally with his understanding, but his natural temperament would have been prepared beforehand so that he could draw near with reverential awe to what could approach him. Consequently his preparation was not one of learning; it was a gradual and radical transformation and education of his soul. The question was how the soul approached the great Truths and Wisdom and how it reacted to them, and hence arose the conviction that through the Mysteries man was bound up and united with the very foundations of the Cosmos and with what flowed from the springs of all cosmic beginnings. Thus was the disciple prepared for the experiencing of something which is described by Aristides. He who, according to what is to be found in my Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment has lived through what these disciples experienced can himself bear witness. He knows that the words of Aristides correspond with the truth when he writes, “I seemed to be approaching God, I seemed to feel His Presence, and I was in a state between waking and sleeping; my spirit was quite light—so light that no one who was uninitiated could describe or understand it.” There was a way, therefore, to the divine foundations of the Universe which was neither Science nor one-sided Religion, but consisted in a thorough preparation of the soul for the realization of the ideas about the Evolution of the Universe so that it might draw near to God and those spiritual foundations. As we take in the external air with our breath and make it a part of our body, so did the disciple of the Mysteries receive into his soul that which pulsates spiritually through the Universe until he was united with it and so became a new man permeated by the Divinity.

Now, however, Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science shows that what was then possible was only an historical phenomenon in human evolution, and when the question arises as to whether the Ancient Mysteries of pre-Christian times are still possible in the same way it can only be said that historical research verily proves that what has just been described did really exist but that it exists no longer in the same form. The pre-Christian method of Initiation is not now possible. A man must indeed be short-sighted if he believes that the human soul is the same in all epochs, or that the spiritual path of the olden times holds good for the present. The path to the divine and primal sources of the world has now become another, and intellectual historical research shows that it did so in its very essence at the time ascribed by tradition to the Events of Palestine. These Events made a deep incision in the evolution of man. Something entered into human nature in the post-Christian period which entirely differed from what was there before. Such a method of thinking as is possible nowadays—the method of drawing nearer to the Universe through scientific thought—did not exist in pre-Christian ages. The Mysteries did not conduct man in the manner described to the very highest treasures of Wisdom in order that he might do something in secret, or acquire something special for himself as a member of a small circle, but because our modern way of combining thoughts through logic was not possible at that time. A glance at the history of humanity will show that in the course of two centuries, during the time of the Greek philosophers, the present mode of thinking was gradually prepared, and that only now has it reached the point of embracing external nature so wonderfully. Thus the entire form our consciousness takes and the way we create our conceptions of the Universe differ entirely from pre-Christian times. For the moment we are only concerned with this fact as showing that human nature has changed. A careful review of human evolution makes it clear that the entire consciousness has altered in the course of evolution (the results arising from research are to be found in my Occult Science. The men of old did not regard things and think about them as we do with our senses and understanding; they had a kind of clairvoyance, but this was of a dim and dreamlike nature (not such as is described in my The Way of Initiation). Herein lies the import of evolution, that an old clairvoyance which in primitive times was spread over all humanity gave way to that form of thought which we possess to-day. The ordinary inhabitants of every country had this kind of clairvoyant power, and a path leading from that to higher stages was provided in the Mysteries. Thereby development was given to the normal soul-faculties of man.

Observation of the world by what we call reasoning and logic having displaced the old clairvoyance, the latter is no longer a natural faculty, but it lasted right through the historical period and reached its culmination in the Greco-Roman era during which the Appearance of Christ occurred. At that point of time collective humanity everywhere had come so far in its evolution that the old clairvoyance had passed away and the old Mysteries were no longer possible. What then took the place of the old Mysteries and what did man acquire through the Mysteries?

These were of two kinds: the one proceeded from that centre of civilization which was afterwards occupied by the ancient Persians, and the other was to be met with in its purest form in Egypt and Greece. They were entirely different throughout those times. It was the endeavour of all the Mysteries to produce in man an extension of his soul-powers, but this was achieved in a different way in Greece and Egypt, than in Persia. In the two former, which agreed essentially, the object was to effect in the disciples a transformation of their soul-powers. This transformation took place under a certain supposition which must be understood before anything else. It was that in the depths of the soul there slumbers another, a divine man; that from the same sources whence the rock forms into crystal and the plants break forth in the Spring the hidden man originated. Plants, however, had already utilized all that was contained within them, whereas man, in so far as he had understood himself and worked with his own powers, had remained an imperfect being, and that which was within him had only come to the fore after much endeavour. Appeal, therefore, in the Egyptian and Greek Mysteries was made to a spiritual, a divine inner man, and when this was referred to, allusion was made also to the powers within the Earth. For according to the views held the Earth was not regarded as the lifeless cosmic body of modern astronomy, but as a spiritual planetary being. In Egypt reference was made to the wonderful spirit-forces and nature-forces, called by the names of Isis and Osiris, when it was desired to contemplate the origin and source of what could be experienced as manifestation in the inner man. In Greece this primal source was referred to under the name of Dionysos. As a consequence of this, profane writers asserted that the nature and being of things were the objects sought for, and in the Greek Mysteries they called what was found of the forces of human nature the “sub-earthly” portion of man, not the “super-earthly.” The Nature of the great “Daemons” was spoken of, and under this tide was represented all that worked on the Earth of the nature of spiritual forces. The nature of these daemons (in a good sense) was sought for through that which man was to bring forth from himself. Then the disciple had to go through all the feelings and perceptions that were possible for him in the course of evolution. He had to experience what was meant by “going down into the depths of his soul;” to learn that a fundamental feeling so dominated all soul-being that in ordinary life no conception of it could be formed, and that that feeling was a deep egoism—the almost unconquerable selfishness lying within the inner recesses of a human being. By means of struggling against and conquering all selfishness and egoism the disciple had to go through something for which we have to-day only an abstract expression, i.e., the feeling of all inclusive love and sympathy for men and beings. Sympathy, in so far as the human soul was capable of it, was to take the place of selfishness. It was clearly understood that if the disciple evoked this sympathy, which belonged in the first place to the hidden forces of the world of feeling, it could draw out from the depths of his soul the divine powers slumbering therein. It was held moreover that as he looked out upon the world with his ordinary understanding he must soon become aware of his powerlessness as a man with reference to the Cosmos, and that the further he projected his conceptions and ideas the stronger this feeling grew until in the end he was led to doubt what indeed could be called knowledge, i.e., Gnosis. Arrived at that point he must then overcome this feeling of emptiness in his soul whenever he desired to encompass the Cosmos with his ideas. This consciousness of a void was accompanied by fear and anxiety, and consequently the Greek disciple of Mysticism first filled himself with a dread of the unknown and then by coupling this with sympathy drew forth the divine powers lying within him. So did he learn to transform fear into awe and reverence, and to realize how the highest kind of awe and reverential devotion for all the phenomena of the Universe was able to penetrate every substance and conception that lay beyond the scope of ordinary knowledge.

Thus the Greek Mysteries, as also those of Isis and Osiris in the Egyptian Mysteries, worked outwards from the inmost nature of man and sought to lead him into the spiritual worlds. It was a living apprehension of the “God in Man.” A real acquaintance was formed between man and God, and immortality ranked not as mere abstract theory and philosophy but as something known, something as firmly grounded as the knowledge of external colours, and this was experienced as an intimate connection with external things. With no less certainty was this experienced also in the Persian or Mithraic Mysteries. Whereas man was led in the Greek and Egyptian Mysteries through the unfettering of his soul-powers, he was confronted at once with the Universe itself in the Mithraic Mysteries; not only did the Universe work upon him through the great and mighty Nature which is overlooked by those who regard the world in its external aspect, but by gaining a deep intimacy with Nature, he could gaze upon phenomena that lay outside the limits of the human understanding. By the methods then used the most terrible and magnificent powers were brought before the pupil from Universal Space. Whereas the Greek disciple was affected by a deep feeling of reverence, to the Mithraic disciple alone was given the knowledge of the terrible and awe-inspiring powers in Nature so that he felt himself infinitesimally small in comparison. So powerful was this impression, consequent upon his alienation from the primal source of being, that he felt that in its vastness the Universe could at any moment overwhelm and annihilate him. The first impulse came from his being led through a comprehensive astronomy and science away from external things to the greatness of the phenomena of the Universe, and what he further developed in the Mysteries was then more a consequence of the Truth in all its ramifications when Nature in her details (science in the old sense of the word) worked upon his soul. The Greek disciple became fearless through the setting free of his powers. The Mithraic disciple was brought so far that he drank in the greatness of Cosmic Thought, and thereby his soul also became strong and courageous. A knowledge of the dignity and value of a human being was gained, and with it a feeling for truth and fidelity; the disciple learned to recognize that man must always hold himself under control during his earthly existence.

Such were the benefits obtained especially through the Mithraic Mysteries, and whereas the Greek and Egyptian Mysteries are to be found spread over Greece and Egypt, the Mithraic are diffused from Persia as far as the Caspian Sea, along the Danube into Germany, and even to the South of France, to Spain and to England. Europe was indeed permeated by the Mithraic Mysteries, and everywhere it was seen clearly that something streamed into man from the Universe if only he could learn to understand it, and this that could be received was Mithra, the God that streams through the world in all worlds. It was through this power of action that courage was aroused: the warriors, the Roman legionaries, were filled with the Mithraic service or cult of Mithra. Both leaders and men were initiated into the Mysteries. Thus was God sought on the one hand by the freeing of the individual soul-powers, and it was quite evident that through this process something streamed out from the depths of the soul. On the other hand, however, it was equally evident that when man sought God by devoting himself to the great cosmic phenomena, something streamed into his soul as the essence, the finest life-sap contained in the world. There were found the primordial forces of the Universe. God came as it were into human souls through this development which was attained in the Mystery schools. A veritable process is to be seen here: each soul became a door for the entrance of the Godhead into human evolution on earth. Few were able to undergo such a development, and a special preparation for it was necessary. The teaching consisted in showing that what was hidden in external nature (Mithra) as also in the inner man of the Greek, poured through the world as a stream of divine consecration.

The evolution of man has now changed, and the entire method of Initiation is different. Here we touch upon what must be called the Mystical Fact of the Christ Event. To penetrate deeply into history is to see that the early Christians were more or less dimly conscious that the same force which entered the soul only through devotion to the Mysteries, to the Divine Principle of the Universe (streaming forth from Cosmos as the Mithra or out of the depths of the soul as the Dionysos), was as the deed of a unique Cosmic Divinity in one single Fact in the evolution of the Earth. That which was sought for beyond this, and was not to be found except by those who alienated themselves from outer life in the Mysteries, was at a given time incorporated into the Earth by the Divinity. No human effort was needed, for the Divinity once and for all permeated the Being of the Earth, and henceforth even those who had lost the power to penetrate to the Divine Principle of the Cosmos could meet Him in another way. The God Who could now penetrate into the human soul (neither as Mithra from without nor Dionysos from within) was Himself a fusion of Mithra and Dionysos, and also was related to human nature in its depths. He was embraced and encompassed by the Name of CHRIST. Mithra and Dionysos were united in the Being Who entered humanity in the Event of Palestine, and Christianity was the confluence of both Cults. The Hebrews, who were chosen that they might provide the necessary body through which this Event might take place, had become acquainted with the Mithraic and Dionysian Cults, but they remained far removed from either. The Greek thought of himself as a weak man who must develop deeper powers before he could penetrate into the depths of his soul, while the follower of Mithra felt that by letting the whole surrounding sphere of the air work upon him he might become united with the divine qualities of the Universe. The Hebrew, on the other hand, held that the deeper human nature, with all that was hidden within it, was already there in the first Man, and the ancient Hebrews called this Primal man Adam. According to old Hebraic ideas that which man could seek, and which joined him with the divine, was present originally in Adam, but in course of evolution the descendants of each generation became further and further removed from the Source of Existence. Being “subject to original sin,” as they put it, meant that man had not remained as he was and had been ejected from the sphere of the Divine; regarding himself as standing below Adam he sought the reason in original sin. But though less than that which lived in the depths of human nature, he could unite himself with the deeper powers and thereby be raised again. This point of view, that once man had stood higher and that through the qualities connected with the blood-ties he had lost something, was an historical one. What the adherent of the Mithraic Mysteries saw in humanity as One Whole the Hebrew saw in his own nation and was conscious that its original source had been lost. So that while among the Persians there was a kind of training of the consciousness, there was among the ancient Hebrews a consciousness of a historical development; Adam, by falling into sin, had fallen from the heights where he once stood. Consequently the Hebrews were the best prepared for the thought that that which had happened at the initial point of evolution (and which had brought about a deterioration in humanity) could only be raised again through an historical Event, i.e., by something actually taking place in the spiritual sub-strata of the Earth's being. The ancient Hebrew who rightly understood evolution felt that the Mithra God, equally with the God Who is evoked from the depths of the human soul, could come down without man going through a development in the Mysteries.

Thus in these people, and above all in the case of John the Baptist, there arose a consciousness of the fact that the same which the Mysteries had handed down in the form of Dionysos and Mithra was born at one and the same time in One Man. Those of them who felt this in a deeper sense held that even as through Adam the descent of man into the world was brought about (all men having descended from one forefather and inherited from him all the deeper forces that lead to sin and error) so, through One Being Who descends from the spiritual worlds as the union of Mithra and Dionysos, must the initial point be formed to which men can look when they have to rise again. As in the Mysteries human nature was developed through the setting free of the deeper soul forces or through a view of the Cosmos, the Hebrews now saw in the God Who came down into physical being Him on Whom the soul must look and believe, for Whom it must develop the deepest love, and Who as the Great Example could lead them back to their divine origin.

He who had the profoundest knowledge of this fact of Christianity was Paul. The Apostle recognized that as men looked to Adam as their physical progenitor they could, through the Christ Impulse, look to the Christ as the Great Example, and so attain to what was striven for in the Mysteries and must be born again if they were to know their own original nature. The knowledge that was kept within the recesses of the Temples, and could only be attained after ascetic training, was set forth neither in mundane document nor as some external fact but as having been accomplished as a mystical fact, the God Who pervaded the world having actually appeared in one single Form. What the disciples of the Mithraic Mysteries acquired through looking upon the Greatest Model had now been attained through Christ. The courage, self control and energy acquired by those disciples had also to be acquired by those who could no longer be initiated in the old Mithraic sense; through the Model of the historical Christ and the gazing upon Him the impulse towards this fortitude was now to pour itself out upon the soul. In the Mithraic Mysteries, as has been shown, the whole Universe was in a certain sense born in the soul of the disciple, and the courageous soul was fired with all the inner forces of initiative. In the Baptism of John something was poured down from above of which human nature could be the vehicle; when a man was permeated with the thought that his nature was capable of assimilating the profoundest harmony of the Universe, the view of the Baptism aroused within him the understanding that Mithra could be born in human nature. Those, therefore, who grasped the original meaning of Christianity, acknowledged that the end of the Mysteries had come: the God Who formerly had poured Himself into the Mysteries had now flowed directly into the being of the Earth through the Personality Who stood at the beginning of a new era (our present one).

The connection with the Greek or Dionysian Mysteries has now to be considered. Through the fact that the human gaze was guided to Jesus of Nazareth in Whom Mithra lived and Who then passed through death, an indication was given that Mithra (the bestower of courage, self control and energy) had Himself died with the death of Jesus. It was further seen that because Mithra had so vanished that which man found in his deepest nature, and had attained earlier through the Dionysian Mysteries, had now become in Jesus of Nazareth the immortal conqueror over death. Herein lies the true Christian meaning of the Resurrection if it is grasped in its spiritually scientific sense. The Baptism by John in [the] Jordan demonstrated that the old Mithra had entered into man, that thereby human nature had won the victory over death, and that by the example so created the soul could unite itself in the deepest love in order to come to that which lived in its own depths. In the Risen Christ was seen the fact that man, by living according to the event that had taken place in history, could rise above the level of ordinary humanity.

Thus in the centre of the history of the world was set an historical event in the place of that which had been sought in the Mysteries times without number. The great revelation that came to St. Paul was that human nature had thereby become different, and this was concealed within what is known as “The Event of Damascus.” Writing of what he experienced before Damascus, the Apostle relates how he learned to understand, not from external documents but through a purely spiritual clairvoyant experience, that the moment when the Incarnation itself should take place in an historical personage had already passed. The existence of Christ as a real man could never be experienced by Paul through an external fact, and what he could learn in Palestine did not convince him that the Union of Mithra and Dionysos had lived in Jesus of Nazareth. But when, before Damascus, his spiritual sight was opened, it became clear that a God Who could be called by the Name of Christ not only worked through the world as a super-sensible Being but had actually come to earth and conquered death. Henceforth he preached that what for the Initiates had previously been a streaming substance was now to be found as continuous historical fact. This lies at the basis of his words, “If Christ be not risen then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.”

Such was the path by which Paul came to Jesus by the indirect way of Christ, it being clear to him that something had taken place in Palestine which previously could only be experienced in the Mysteries. And this still applies to-day. Because Christ is the focus of all human development and the highest example for the inmost powers of the soul the bond established with Him must be of the most intimate kind. To become a disciple it is required of a man that he set little value upon his own life, and so it must be regarded as of small importance to lay aside all documentary evidence and historical traditions in order to come to Christ. Indeed there is cause for thankfulness that the fact that there ever was an historical Christ Jesus cannot be established, for no document could prove that He was the most significant of all that has passed into humanity.

The connection between Christ and the ancient Mysteries is therefore quite clear. The disciples of the latter had to go through what may be called intimate soul experiences in order to come to God; their inner feelings and sensations were more lively and intense than those of the ordinary man, and so they became aware that they were set fast in a lower nature which hindered them from arriving at the Sources of Being. This lower nature was indeed a seducer leading them away from the upward path, and that which so allured them had also become their own lower nature, and herein lay the “Temptation” that came to every disciple of the Mysteries. At the moment when God awoke within them they became aware also of their lower or sensual natures. It was as though some strange unknown being were urging them not to follow the unsubstantial and airy heights of the spiritual world, but to seize the coarse and material things that lay close at hand. Each disciple had to pass through a time when everything spiritual seemed unreal in comparison with the ordinary way of looking at things, and all that was connected with the senses appeared alluring as against the stress of spiritual effort. At another stage in mystic development these lower forces were overcome, a higher outlook being attained with the growth of invigorated powers of courage and so forth. All this teaching was clothed in certain instructions that may be verified from the writings of exoteric authors, as also in the methods of Initiation given by Spiritual Science and set forth in Occult Science. There were various methods both in the Greek and the Mithraic Mysteries. Finally the disciples experienced the “at-one-ment” with Him Who was the Divine Man, but here the methods were different and varied widely in the many countries where Initiation existed.

In my Christianity as Mystical Fact the purpose is to show that in the Gospels nothing is to be met with but a rebirth of old Initiation instructions. What took place externally had already taken place similarly in the course of the Mysteries, and therefore the Divine Being Who was in Jesus of Nazareth after the descent of the Mithra Being had to experience the “Temptation.” As the Tempter came on a small scale to the pupil of the Mysteries so did he also confront the God become man. All that was true in the Mysteries is to be found repeated in the Gospel records which were new versions of the old inscriptions and instructions given in the Initiations. The writers of the Gospels saw that once that which hitherto had lain only in the Mysteries had been enacted on the plane of Cosmic History, it was permissible to describe it in the same words as those in which their directions for Initiation were recorded. It is for this very reason that the Gospels were not intended to be biographies of Him Who was the vehicle for the Christ. This is just the mistake of all modern criticisms of the Gospels. At the time they were written the sole object was to lead the human soul to a real love for the Great Soul, the Source of the world's existence. Strangely enough a clear consciousness of this prevailed almost to the end of the eighteenth century. It is pointed out in isolated writings of remarkable interest that through the Gospels the soul can be so transformed as to find the Christ. Old Meister Eckhardt writes, “Some people want to look at God with their eyes as they look at a cow, and want to love God as they love a cow. They love God as an outward possession and an inward comfort, but these people do not love Him aright ... Simple folk imagine they ought to see God as if He stood there and they here; it is not so; God and I are One in recognition.” In another passage he writes, “A Master says, ‘God has become man, and thereby the whole human race is raised in dignity. We may rejoice that Christ our Brother has through His own power passed beyond the choir of angels, and sits at the right hand of the Father.’ This Master has spoken rightly, but verily I do not pay much attention to it. What help would it be to me if I had a brother who was a rich man, and I was at the same time a poor one? How would it help me if I had a brother who was a wise man, and I myself a fool? ... The heavenly Father begat His only Son in Himself and in me. Why in Himself and in me? I am one with Him, and it is not possible for Him to exclude me. In the same work the Holy Ghost received His Being, and is from me as from God. Why? I am in God, and if the Holy Ghost does not receive His Being from me neither does he receive it from God. I am in no way excluded.”

That is the point: that man through mystic development, without external mysteries but through the simple evolution of the soul, will in later times be able to experience that which was once experienced in the Mysteries. This, however, will only be possible because the Christ Event took place. Even if there were no Gospels, no records and no traditions, he who experiences the Christ in himself along with the being filled with Christ has the certainty, as St. Paul had it, that at the beginning of our era Christ was incarnated in a physical body. An historical biography of Jesus of Nazareth can never be gathered out of the Gospels, but through the right unfolding of his soul powers man can and must raise himself up to the Christ, and through the Christ to Jesus. Thus only can be understood what was the aim of the Gospels and what was lacking in the whole of the nineteenth century researches on the subject of Jesus. The picture of the Christ was allowed to recede into the background in order to present a tangible Jesus quite externally from the historical records. The Gospels were misunderstood, and consequently the methods of investigation crumbled to pieces.

Herewith the way is at the same time made clear to Spiritual Science. Its object is to show what are the deeper powers that have lain in man since the coming of Christ, and which he can develop. Not in the depths of externally appointed Mysteries, but in the stillness of his room, man can attain by devoting himself to what happened in Palestine that which was attained by the disciples of the Mysteries. By experiencing the Christ within himself he gains in courage and energy and in a consciousness of his dignity as man, and comes to the knowledge of how he has to take his place in humanity in the right sense. And at the same time he experiences, as could the adherent of the Greek Mysteries, the Universal Love which lives in Christ and embraces all external creatures. He learns never to be afraid or to despair in face of the world, and in full freedom and at the same time humility is sensible of devotion to the secrets of the Universe.

All this comes to the man who permeates himself with the Mystical Fact of Christianity, the successor of the old Mysteries. Simply through a cognitional development of these fundamental thoughts the Historical Jesus becomes a fact for those who have a deep knowledge of Christ. In Western philosophy it was said that without eyes none could see colour nor hear without ears; the Universe would be without light and sound. True as this is with regard to seeing and hearing, it is equally true that without light no eye could have come into existence nor could man have had any perceptions connected with it. As Goethe says, “If the eye were not born of like nature to the sun it could never look upon the sun,” and “The eye is a creation of the light.”

The Mystical Christ, spoken of by those whose spiritual sight is opened and who behold Him as Paul did, was not always in man. In pre-Christian times He was unattainable in any development through the Mysteries in the way in which He was to be found after the Mystery of Golgotha. That there might be an inner Christ and that the higher man could be born an historical Christ was needed, the Incarnation of the Christ in the Jesus. As the eye can originate only through the effect of light, so in order that there could be a Mystical Christ the historical Christ must have been there. Had there been no documents containing a biography of Jesus of Nazareth this could still be said and felt, for Jesus is not to be recognized through external writings. This fact was long known in the evolution of the West and will again be known. Spiritual Science will so formulate that it can draw together from out its various spheres what will lead to a real understanding of the Christ, and thereby to an understanding of Jesus. It has come about that Jesus has been actually alienated from the world and the methods of the Jesus investigations have melted away, but the deepening of ourselves in the Christ Being (in the Christ as a Being) will lead to a recognition of the greatness of Jesus of Nazareth.

This path, by which the Christ is first recognized through inward soul experience, leads through what really has developed out of the soul to the understanding of the Mystical Fact of Christianity, and of the gradual development of humanity, as being such that the Christ Event must take place within it as the most significant point in the evolution of man. The way leads through the Christ to Jesus. The Christ Idea bears fruitful seed that will bring humanity not merely to the apprehension of a general pantheistic Cosmic Spirit, but the individual man to the understanding of his own history; as he feels his Earth to be bound up with all cosmic existence so will he recognize that his past is bound up with a super-sensible and super-historical Event. This Event is that the Christ Being stands as a super-sensible Mystical Fact at the middle point of human evolution, and that so will He be recognized by the humanity of the future apart from all external historical research and documents. Christ will remain the strong cornerstone of mankind's evolution. Man will bring the forces out of himself to renew his own history, and therewith also the history of the evolution of the world.

• 1. Theosophy was the original term, but in later lectures Dr. Sterner changed the word to Anthroposophy.

Dr. Steiner: Perhaps Mr. Molt would say a few words.

Mr. Molt thanks the teachers for their work in the past school year and gives particular thanks to Dr. Steiner. He recalls Dr. Steiner’s words about strength, courage, and light at the beginning of the course in 1919.

Dr. Steiner: I too must think of the time when we began our course last fall. It is certain that what we attempted to bring from spiritual life into our own spirits has had an effect upon our souls. I would like to recall that moment and again ask those good spirits who are watching over our deeds to bless us and give us strength for our work.

I would like to continue with what I briefly touched this morning. I said that it was particularly valuable at this important moment in human evolution to believe we need to use all our deeds and being in working toward the intent of the Waldorf School. I spoke of this at the beginning of the pedagogical course in Basel. At that time, I said that many teachers have done an enormous amount of work toward providing principles of education, and it is not our task as anthroposophists to replace everything people such as Pestalozzi or Fröbel right up through Diesterung and Dittes have done. I mentioned that the abstract foundations that have come down from the great pedagogues of the nineteenth century will certainly stand up to a didactic pedagogical critique and that people can justifiably criticize us when we speak of a renewal of pedagogy.

In reality, something quite different concerns us. If you read Pestalozzi, or Fröbel’s works, if you read from Herbart right up to Dittes, you will find they speak of many beautiful things in regard to pedagogy. However, if you look deeply at what the educational system does, if you look into what actually goes on in the Pestalozzi schools, you will recognize that the spirit active there does not correspond to those principles you can accept abstractly. You need only look at the critical remarks Fröbel wrote about the Pestalozzi schools. If you follow the development of education in the nineteenth century, you will see that, in spite of the fact that people often thought properly, the proper thing was not taken up, was not done. Why is that? There can be but one answer. Regardless of which realm of culture you look at, it is always the same. Namely, the entire nineteenth century was under the influence of materialism. If we formulate educational principles from our anthroposophical standpoint, they can sound identical to what the nineteenth-century pedagogues said. We must, therefore, mean it differently. We speak from the perspective of the spirit, whereas they spoke from the overwhelming impulse of the materialistic worldview. Regardless of how idealistic those things may sound, those thoughts nevertheless arise from the position of materialism. It is not important that we discover some new abstraction, but that we find a new spirit.

Today, I want to present you with something I have recently said repeatedly in various places, something we must take into account in our times. Modern people think, when you speak of materialism, that it is a false view of the world, that we lay it aside because it is not right. Unfortunately, things are not so simple. The human being is a being of soul and spirit and also a physical, bodily being. But, the physical body is a true reflection of the spirit and soul, to the extent that we live between birth and death. When people are as blinded by materialistic thoughts as they became during the nineteenth century and right into the present, the physical body becomes a copy of the spirit and soul living in materialistic impulses. In that case, it is not incorrect to say that the brain thinks. It is then, in fact, correct. By being firmly enmeshed in materialism, we have people who not only think poorly about the body, soul, and spirit, but people who think materially and feel materially. What that means is that materialism causes the human being to become a thinking automaton, that the human being then becomes something that thinks, feels, and wills physically. The task of Anthroposophy is not simply to replace a false view of the world with a correct one. That is a purely theoretical requirement. The nature of Anthroposophy is to strive not only toward another idea, but toward other deeds, namely, to tear the spirit and soul from the physical body. The task is to raise the spirit-soul into the realm of the spiritual, so that the human being is no longer a thinking and feeling automaton. I will say more about this tomorrow in my lecture, but human beings are in danger of losing their spirit-soul. What exists today in the physical as an impression of the spirit-soul, exists because so many people think that way, because the spiritsoul is asleep. The human being is thus in danger of drifting into the Ahrimanic world, in which case the spirit-soul will evaporate into the cosmos. We live in a time when people face the danger of losing their souls to materialistic impulses. That is a very serious matter. We now stand confronted with that fact. That fact is actually the secret that will become increasingly apparent, and out of which we can act fruitfully. Such things as the pedagogy of the Waldorf School can arise from a recognition that humanity must turn toward spiritual activity, and not simply from a change in theory. We should work out of that spirit.

We should all treasure having found ourselves here in this circle due to a feeling that we must so act, some of us more clearly, some of us less. You need only compare the seeds we have laid in the Waldorf School with all the terrible things giving rise to such a hostile storm.

The school was founded out of the echoes of our work in Stuttgart since April of 1919. Since that time, so many wonderful things have occurred. Nevertheless, we should not forget that what we intended in forming the Cultural Commission last year completely fell in the water. You can see why it failed by looking at the terrible scandals at the Goetheanum. The obvious demise of German cultural life reveals itself as a symptom through the things occurring at the Goetheanum. We will now have to use our strength very differently than we did before in order to counter that demise. That cannot, of course, occur only at the Waldorf School. Through the understanding that the Waldorf teachers have shown, through their dedication to their work, they are now called upon to act in a general anthroposophical cultural direction.

That struck me in such a living way today at the closing of the first school year, and was what I meant with the words I spoke in the presence of the children this morning. The children will not have understood those words, but that is unimportant. We know it is not so important that the children understand what we say to them, but that later many things brighten in their souls. I also received in the name of the spirit who is to permeate the Waldorf School the words of thanks given by Mr. Molt. That spirit will need to become more and more the spirit of Middle European culture. Those people who make themselves more materialistic, who lose their souls so that civilization will become materialistic, could still be saved today if what we have here in the spirit of the Waldorf School spreads out into the world.

Of course, we must protect the Waldorf School from every kind of false appearance. We should be clear that we must become increasingly reticent with those people who have heard of the founding of the Waldorf School, and now see it as their task to extend their world of loafing about into it. They also want to participate in the Waldorf School, to take part in what we offer, and to take some of that with them in order to make it into something similar elsewhere. We should be clear that we do not find it important to offer these loafers respite here, but that the anthroposophic spirit must be a part of the basis of any schools following the Waldorf School.

A few months ago someone came to me who wanted to found something similar to the Waldorf School in France, and asked if I could give some advice. She wanted to know if she could observe in the Waldorf School. I told her I could recognize what she wants to form in Paris as being in the spirit of the Waldorf School only if they formed the school in exactly the same way that we formed the Waldorf School. Thus, these friends in France would first have to be ready to call me there to hold a course, and they would also need to declare that their school arose from the same spirit. Otherwise, I would have to strictly deny that it was comparable.

You should not think that such answers are egotistical. You need to be clear that we will not move forward if we do not stand upon a firm anthroposophical viewpoint, that is, if we do not keep ourselves free from desires for compromise. If we take a clearly delineated standpoint, then it is not impossible that we would ourselves form a Waldorf school in Paris. What is important is that we cannot be moved to make any compromises. Today, you get the furthest if you have a clearly spoken standpoint. You can be outwardly conciliatory, but inwardly what is important is that you have basic principles, and that you stand by them. For that, you will need the strength to look at things in a radical way and not give in to a tendency for compromise. As you know, at least in the spirit of our endeavor, we have tried during this first year to work from such a firm position. I hope that will become clearer. As teachers in the Waldorf School, you will need to find your way more deeply into the insight of the spirit and to find a way of putting all compromises aside. It will be impossible for us to avoid all kinds of people from outside the school who want to have a voice in school matters. As long as we do not give up any of the necessary perspective we must have in our feelings, then any concurrence from other pedagogical streams concerning what happens in the Waldorf School will cause us to be sad rather than happy. When those people working in modern pedagogy praise us, we must think there is something wrong with what we are doing. We do not need to immediately throw out anyone who praises us, but we do need to be clear that we should carefully consider that we may not be doing something properly if those working in today’s educational system praise us. That must be our basic conviction.

To the extent that I feel in a very living way what it means to you to have devoted your entire person to work of the Waldorf School, I would like to say something more. As Waldorf teachers, we must be true anthroposophists in the deepest sense of the word in our innermost feeling. We must be serious about an idea often mentioned as a foundation of Anthroposophy, one of importance for us. We should be aware that we came down from the spiritual worlds into the physical world at a particular time. Those we meet as children came later and, therefore, experienced the spiritual world for a time after we were already in the physical world. There is something very warming, something that strongly affects the soul, when you see a child as a being who has brought something from the spiritual world that you could not experience because you are older. Being older has a much different meaning for us. In each child, we greet a kind of emissary bringing things from the spiritual world that we could not experience.

A consciousness of the message that the child brings is a positive feeling that can be, and in fact, is, taken seriously by the Waldorf faculty. This awareness counteracts the decline of our civilization. It also counteracts the traditional religious beliefs preached from all the pulpits about eternity, that eternity following death toward which people look with that clever soul egotism because they do not want to cease to exist. People do not cease to exist, but what is important is how you arrive at the conviction of the eternal soul, whether you come to it through egotism or whether you have a living perspective and comprehension of the eternal human soul. A living comprehension will lead you to see the pre-existence of the soul, to see what the human being experienced before birth, to see that human life in the physical world is a continuation of previous experiences. Traditional religions strongly oppose preexistence, which can make a human being selfless. They strongly oppose those things that do not strive toward a murky and numbing uncomprehending belief, but toward knowledge and the clear light of comprehension.

Such things become practical when we say a child came down from the spiritual world later than we did. From the child’s life before me, I can perceive what happened in the spiritual world after I left. To carry such a living inner feeling is a genuine meditation for teachers, one of tremendous value and significance. By enlivening anthroposophical nature in such a specific way, we will truly be teachers working from the anthroposophical spirit. The best we can develop in Anthroposophy is not what the lazy people of the world want to coax out of us. The best is what develops in your feelings and in your souls as the spirit of the Waldorf School. During this first year, that spirit has truly come alive in your souls. In the future, we will need to direct our efforts toward taking care of that spirit. That is what I wanted to say to you this morning.

We want to undertake all individual activities in that spirit. I am really very sorry that I could only come here today, and that I could not have been here for the preparation of the children’s reports. We must further develop what I said about the practical and pedagogical aspects of psychology. I can see how difficult it was for you to develop that psychology as a strength. We will continue to try because now that we have decided to be Waldorf teachers, something that arose from a cosmic impulse entering world history, out of that same impulse, we want to remain so.

Dr. Steiner, who had been standing until this time, sat down.

Dr. Steiner: We now want to continue our discussions. We need to discuss some things that have recently occurred and then see how to continue in our teaching.

A teacher reports about the year-end report meetings. Questions arose about whether some children were in the proper classes for their age and knowledge.

Dr. Steiner: That is an important question. We also need to take into account that the solution will not be very easy. If you came to particular impressions during your discussion about writing the school reports, then perhaps we need to go into those in detail. The question takes on a quite different aspect depending upon whether the situation concerns only some individuals, or whether a large number of the students are not in the proper class. We need to have an idea of how many children we should not move into the next grade, but keep in the lower grade. We need to go into detail about the numbers involved. Of course, a large redistribution of the children will reflect the inadequacy of our considerations at the beginning of school when we placed children in classes according to the information presented by their former school. We may need to disavow ourselves of things in that regard.

We will need to consider that in detail. I would ask that the teachers who have such children whom they believe were not properly placed say something about that. Can someone please begin?

A teacher mentions G.T. in the fourth grade who is too old.

Dr. Steiner: In regard to G.T., the question is not whether we should place him in another class, but whether we can bring him up to his grade next year. He is nearly twelve and I think we should try to do that. We can handle the question of French and English separately. He learns very well, and keeping him in the fourth grade would certainly be unjustified. We will need to do something about these differences.

(Speaking to Dr. von Heydebrand) Have you been able to accomplish anything with F.R.?

A teacher: He is very well behaved in class, but he does not know as much as the other children.

Dr. Steiner: He is, however, mature enough and will certainly come along. It was therefore not a mistake.

In that regard, could we perhaps go into the question that I heard gave you many headaches. I can certainly imagine how terribly difficult it would be, but we must objectively weigh whether we should form another sixth grade, given all the psychological peculiarities of the present fifth grade. We need to consider whether it might be better to create an additional class. We would not need to split the class down the middle. We can certainly arrange it so that you, as the present teacher, would have full say. Now, there are fifty-one children, so I think we could arrange it so that you could select your sixth grade class, which would then consist of thirty, and we would move twenty. I would certainly think that everyone has absolute freedom in that regard. You should choose fifteen boys and fifteen girls.

A teacher: I have a list of twenty-six for me.

Dr. Steiner: As you wish. The choice lies entirely with you. However, it seems we should do it this way since the class was somewhat too large.

Do you have something against dividing the class? I know that you like them all so well that you do not want to give up any. Still, it would be better. You could certainly achieve the sixth grade goals if you had no more than thirty. If you could keep those you believe should stay, and then split off a class of twenty, would you agree? That would be the right thing to do. Then it will be easier to work with children like G.T. Is there another child we should consider? A teacher: I had A.S.K. in the sixth grade. He is epileptic and had to stay away from school for several months.

Dr. Steiner: He must certainly repeat the sixth grade. He could go into the new sixth grade class. We need to be careful with those children we are holding back. We should speak about him with his parents.

A teacher: This is a tricky thing. The parents will not understand. They do not have a very positive attitude. There are always problems with the boys.

Dr. Steiner: Well, that is certainly no reason. Certainly not. The father is a reasonable person, though not a strong person; he is certainly reasonable. It would be best to speak with him and not with his wife. The boy is neglected, and it would certainly not matter if we kept him in the sixth grade. The question is whether he should be removed from school and whether we should let it come to that. If he really is removed, then that will be the end for him. If he remains, he will at least not sink further.

According to his report, there is really not much possible other than leaving him in the sixth grade. For the time being, I would suggest that you speak with his father, but that only needs to happen at the beginning of the new school year. There are advantages in having the boy do the sixth grade again. I would simply present that to the father objectively. From the way you judge him, it appears that he hears things only intermittently, and if he were to hear them again, that might be good. If you see that the father is going to remove him, then we will put him in the seventh grade. This is certainly difficult. Are there only these few cases?

A teacher asks about F.M. in the fourth grade.

Dr. Steiner: There is no real reason not to put him forward. He is a weak student and difficult to handle. For the time being, we will need to put him forward and try to do some things so that he learns and catches up. Otherwise, we would contradict ourselves too strongly.

A teacher asks about K.A. in the fifth grade and suggests that he be placed for a quarter of a year in the remedial class.

Dr. Steiner: (speaking to Dr. Schubert) Perhaps you could take him on for a quarter year and bring him along. It appears that there is a kind of mental weakness in the family. I would advise you to work with him.

H. will remain with you in the remedial class, and then you can decide when you think she has caught up enough and should go into a class. The remedial class will remain as it was.

I thought that M.G. would not move on to the second grade. She was in the remedial class quite a long time, but one beautiful day the light will go on in that girl. It may happen. Let’s keep her in the remedial class and decide later. If she wants to, it would harm nothing if she participated in the lowest grade. She can also do that, so let her participate in the lowest grade. In general, we do not need to make any major changes. We can resolve the cases we have. We do not need a complete revision.

In teaching foreign languages, it will be less difficult because we do not have to divide the children so strictly according to grade. We should not teach foreign languages so strictly according to grades. Things have developed that way; in general, we do not need to arrange the foreign language classes according to the grades.

In teaching foreign languages, there is a tremendous difference between speaking in chorus and individual speech. The children can all easily speak in chorus, but individually they cannot. We should use that fact. We will discuss that in the pedagogical questions next year, namely, that we should try to have the children speak individually immediately after they have said something in chorus. That should become a basis of learning, without doubt.

A teacher mentions that it will be difficult to carry out the class schedule if children from one class have foreign language with other classes.

Dr. Steiner: It would be best, but this is not possible practically, if we had groups of two different ages together, so that one child could learn from another. It is good when the younger children learn a language from older ones. It helps when weaker and better children are together. For now, we cannot do that, but when it becomes possible, we should mix the weaker and better children together in the language class.

A teacher: What should we do with the new children in the language classes? Should we tutor them?

Dr. Steiner: We will need to tell the parents immediately that there will be a lesson in the afternoon. There is nothing else we can do other than simply to push harder. Are there really so many new children?

A teacher: Since Christmas, I have fourteen new students.

Dr. Steiner: We certainly do not want to set up any rules in this regard, but look into each case separately. In general, if there is no particular reason, it would be best to advise people to remain at their present school until the end of the year, but we do not want to be completely unfriendly.

We must form an extra class in foreign languages for such children. That is absolutely necessary since otherwise we cannot take children into the upper grades. If only that is possible! We need to do what needs to be done. In general, we can say that in the language classes it may be possible to have older and younger children since the younger children will learn from the older ones, and the older children will move forward by helping the younger ones. We can certainly mix up the ages.

A teacher asks about increasing the number of hours of language.

Dr. Steiner: You want more hours, but on the other hand, we really have the children in school long enough. We cannot increase the number of hours. I don’t think we can do anything there. Later, in the higher grades, we can think about it. Perhaps in the ninth and tenth grades we could do some more language. We cannot take any time away from the main lesson, not one half hour can be removed. We cannot keep the children in school even longer; they are already here most afternoons.

A teacher: What is the maximum number of hours we can teach children during elementary school? In the first grade, we have them for twenty-six hours, but in the higher grades there are already many more hours, due to Latin.

Dr. Steiner: We cannot increase the number of hours. Why didn’t you present eurythmy as a separate subject in the reports, instead of combining it with music? I see that as a shortcoming.

Dr. Steiner: With music it is certainly possible that we can do something. It is certainly true that there are not enough hours. Do you want to make a specific proposal about how many hours you want in each class?

A teacher: We could do that differently. We could arrange things so that we have separate classes for choral singing and for practice in listening, or we could give choral instruction at particular times around the times of the festivals. That would be my preference. I assume I will have the classes as they now are. In classes that are too large, I cannot meet each of the children adequately.

Dr. Steiner: How many hours would you need for music in the first grade? We already have twenty-six-and-a-half hours there.

A teacher: One hour.

Dr. Steiner: Then you could also meet each child individually. We still need to do much with the class schedule. Certainly this one hour is possible, also in the second and third grades. The question is whether we should always have choral instruction in the upper classes. That is something we could do from case to case. I think that you could divide the time you have for teaching music into individual and choral instruction.

Then there is also the deportment class. That is not a problem, and we can certainly add that, I mean, add it to the other hours, but it should not detract from music. What you want when we have the new teachers is to have individual students by class and not combined. We must do that.

In addition, as soon as we have the capacity, we will need to add some gymnastics. We can certainly include gymnastics so that we can say “gymnastics and eurythmy.”

That would be quite good. We could bring them together so that we have physiological gymnastics alongside psychological eurythmy. If anyone asks, we can say we have not ignored it, it is included. We cannot have less eurythmy, we must have a special period for it. It would probably be enough if we had a half hour of gymnastics per week connected with eurythmy, or if we mixed the exercises in both. We need exercises with standard gymnastic equipment.

There is a problem with gymnastics. We cannot put the boys and girls together. The division is a space problem. We cannot have the boys and girls together when we work with the gymnastic equipment. With the floor exercises, we could certainly put them together if the children have gym clothes. That would certainly be possible, everything else is simply prejudice.

An objection is made.

Dr. Steiner: Why do you think so? Often the girls do not do what the boys can do. You could form groups and work with them alternately. In the one case, the girls could work on the parallel bars and the boys with the high bar. The girls would need to have gym shorts. We would need to have decent pants made down in the factory.

The question now is, who could take over the gym class so that you are not overburdened? Already, everything in the school concerning singing, eurythmy, and music lies with you. In general, much depends upon you.

A teacher (who had previously done some gymnastics): If we have eleven classes, there is a question whether that is possible. Could the class teachers also provide some instruction in gymnastics? Not always, but here and there?

Dr. Steiner: The class teachers are already burdened. The lower three grades do not need any gymnastics. We can take care of the first and second grades with eurythmy alone. Afterward, however, we will need to have gymnastics. It would also be good to do it. It would be quite nice if we could connect it with eurythmy, so that the children first have eurythmy and then do gymnastics.

Gymnastics would be a little too much for you. I had not thought of that. There must be a way to give someone else that period. Actually, two need to be there. The eurythmy teacher needs to be there also, but that is not difficult.

Well, we need to look at that. Either we can let gymnastics go, or we find a way to have a gym teacher. It would be enough to have an hour of eurythmy and then, right after, a half hour of gym. But, then, we would have too many hours.

(Turning to Mrs. Baumann) Now you have two hours of eurythmy. Wasn’t that too much?

A teacher: I often had fifty-one children at once. In the third grade, I had forty-eight. I handled that by having half of them watch while the others did the eurythmy.

Dr. Steiner is in agreement with that.

A teacher wants to divide the classes.

Dr. Steiner: We will do that when we see what the other classes need. That is something we need to determine at the beginning of the next school year. The size of the classes is not yet clear, but there are more children coming. How many children do you think will be in the first grade next year?

A teacher: Fifty-six.

Dr. Steiner: Of course, we must make two classes of that. For the second grade, we don’t need to consider it. The future fourth grade is also so large, it has over fifty children. There are so many new children. I also thought of giving the youngest children to Miss Lämmert for singing, as it will be too much for Mr. Baumann. It would also be too much for gymnastics. We have to see how we can work with the faculty we have.

We must also discuss the question of the faculty. The number of new classes is increasing, and we need new teachers. There are now two temporary buildings under construction, which we hope to complete by the beginning of the new school year. If they are ready, we will have just enough room. There may even be enough when we divide the future second and fourth grades since they are both more than fifty children. It will, however, be tight with the rooms. All we can do is keep the number of specialty classrooms down. We will have to put this off. We could just make it with the structures we now have. However, we are missing, at least for the time, a room for singing. A room is missing for the kindergarten, and we are also missing the rooms for the additional classes we will have in the following years. We do not have a library or a gymnasium. We lack rooms for the continuation school, but perhaps we can leave the continuation school aside for now. We still need a room for the physician, as we discussed before. We are missing a whole number of things. These are all things that we recently discussed. Perhaps we should try to solve these things by adding an extra floor.

A teacher: We can’t do that.

Dr. Steiner: Why is that impossible? Why did we want to add a floor and now we can’t do that?

A teacher: The foundation is inadequate.

Dr. Steiner: I don’t understand. What does the architect say? Didn’t he know that already? It is terrible when ideas come up that turn out to be impossible. Of course we can, we are told, and then afterward everything has to be changed. The building code should have been thought about earlier. In Dornach, I would never allow anyone to present a plan if we were not absolutely certain we could complete it. We only lose time with such things. We go around with ideas, and then nothing comes of them. We had counted upon having the eurythmy room upstairs. I mean, we counted upon it. You told me about that in Dornach.

A teacher: Not as a fact, but as a possibility.

Dr. Steiner: I don’t want to know about possibilities. If someone tells me about something, I assume it to be real. Otherwise, it is nothing. You should always get a definite answer from the Building Department first, and then the architect must know he can count on it.

Now the only possible plan is to build a gymnasium and attach the other rooms I mentioned to it. That would then be the first part of a rationally designed school building. Our concern now is where we should build it.

That is something we need to consider carefully. Is there enough money? The main question is whether we have enough money. We need to spend the money, even if the purchase is not entirely necessary. It is there, people have given ten million marks. Now everyone wants to do things without risk. This is entirely a question of courage. We must build upon that basis. The spiritual value will certainly come from the school, and not from other things. As a result, we must have the courage to undertake risky projects. However, we should not do more shaky things than we can balance with solid things.

We will need to travel around in the next six weeks to raise the money. The question is how we should do that. We need to see how we can find some way of doing it. We need to get some money, so it will be necessary to enlarge our plan for the school association. It is easily possible that we could get some money if we form a World School Association, that is, a general association for such schools, one that is international. Now everywhere we go, people say that Berlin has no interest in paying for the Waldorf School. If we form a World School Association, it might be possible to use some of the income for Stuttgart. It is unlikely that we would get very much if we ask people to pay for the Stuttgart Waldorf School. We need to see to it that we find some way to get some money. A number of things are in progress, but they are not going very quickly. We have something very promising in Dornach, a shaving soap and the hair tonic, “Temptation,” but we can’t get that going quickly enough. We cannot invent things fast enough to have a gymnasium, a eurythmy room, and a music room in the fall. Before we have that, all the baldies would have to grow hair.

A teacher: At the risk of my wife not recognizing me, I want to try it.

Dr. Steiner: Our eurythmy ladies have already decided to try the hair tonic so that their mustaches grow. Then they will shave them off with the shaving soap. The thousand-mark bills will grow on peoples’ heads. There is still some money. The members of the Anthroposophical Society do not know how important the Waldorf School is. I recently spoke with some women, and they had no idea it was so pressing. Everywhere people are saying we should form schools. All that we need to do is to ask people, but we should not give the impression that we want to spend everything here. For that reason, I said that we don’t want to center everything here in Stuttgart, but instead travel around to various cities and prepare people. We don’t want to send things out and dictate to people. That was how the thought arose of creating a school in Berlin. We should not try to have people put off their school plans. What is important is that we do not offend people, so we will have to travel. We could go to The Coming Day for capital we would then pay interest on. We could afford the interest for four hundred thousand marks, so what we need to do to keep things moving, we should do immediately. Enlarging the school further is another thing. If we want to continue the school beyond next year, and want it to continue to grow as it has, then we will need a great deal more room.

A teacher: Perhaps it would help if we used one of the larger classrooms as a music room in the afternoon.

Dr. Steiner: Perhaps we could work that way until we build the gymnasium. We have now come to a question that we have to solve in some way, as otherwise the school cannot continue. We must solve the problems of classroom space and future teachers.

There is a discussion about the need to build housing for the teachers.

Dr. Steiner: The whole problem of space remains unresolved. We have resolved the space question only to the extent that we have room for the classes. The other rooms we need are to a large extent insufficient or not there at all.

How many new classes will we have? A first grade, a sixth, a ninth. We are also missing the gymnasium and an art room. The gymnasium would be the eurythmy room. We will need to make ends meet, only it must be large enough for eurythmy. We will have to see how we can build the gymnasium and the other additional rooms.

It seems to me that today we have made a list of only what is absolutely necessary. We can see from this situation that we will not move forward if we think only about the minimum. If we were to begin with the gymnasium now, the situation would improve so much by Christmas that we would really have acceptable conditions. Everything is hanging in the air, and no one knows if it will be different two weeks from now. We need specific information about what things cost. We cannot negotiate the way things are now.

A meeting with the architect was set up for the following day.

A teacher: It is our own fault, because we have only taken care of the present. There have been so many new enrollments that the situation completely changed within three weeks.

A teacher: We must look at what we must do, and in addition, we must raise the money. The question of money must be secondary. We haven’t yet had any personal discussions with the parents who certainly have a real interest in the continuation of the Waldorf School. Some of the them have given loans, but we need to work with them personally. What we cannot get together in that way we will have to borrow from The Coming Day. We need to create a comprehensive plan for raising money in the next few days. In my opinion, the progress of the Waldorf School should not depend upon financial things.

Dr. Steiner: Yes, we need something concrete. We cannot negotiate anything when we see that the architect says he can make the hall, and then says he can’t. To work in that way is terribly inefficient. We already discussed in our last meeting that we need a eurythmy hall. We have known that for some time. We based our plan upon that impression, namely, that the architect had said we could build it. In any event, we have lost three weeks since the architect claimed we could add a new floor, and today that is no longer true. We do not want any temporary structures. We must see that we build the new things with an eye toward a longer period. We definitely need to meet again tomorrow.

You could also inquire at the Building Department before you officially present something whether they might approve what we want to do. In any event, we cannot discuss it further until we have a plan. That is the main thing I wanted to say.

Dr. Steiner is asked to say something about the problem of the faculty housing.

Dr. Steiner: It is difficult for me to say anything since I am not in a position of putting up the money. That is the first thing you need to know. As long as we do not have the money, the question of teachers’ housing remains purely academic. Apart from teachers’ housing, there are other things we need to do. Either we will carry things out or they will not be done. It is important to avoid making the mistake of planning only for the minimum. We need to do things as they should be done, independent of the financial situation.

I am certain, since the self-sacrifice of the teachers has so elevated things, that things will move forward spiritually, that there will be no spiritual fiasco. The events of the first year have shown that we can hold on. Whether the world will give us money? I hardly believe anymore that the world will give money for such things. People have no understanding for them. That is something that causes me tremendous distress. What I said at the beginning of this meeting is certainly correct for the spiritual realm. We need to place material questions upon a reasonable foundation.

What can we do? How far we can expand the school is an important question. Somehow we must find a limit, or we must have people behind us who can give millions. The situation is impossible because we have accepted every enrollment. For that reason, I would propose that, in the sense of my introductory remarks, we declare we will continue the school as it was, and that we will not accept new children if we cannot build a gymnasium. We can tell people that we receive no support. We need to do that in the most effective way. We will continue the school as we did in the previous year, but we must, unfortunately, reject those children we have already accepted. The world should know what the situation is. We should tell people about this. We can say, hypothetically, that if we do not receive the finances we need, if we are not able to build a eurythmy hall and gymnasium for the fall, then we must limit the school to its present size. If we do not state things this radically, we will not move forward. We will also not be able to pay the teachers.

A teacher: Could we raise money by traveling around and giving lectures?

Dr. Steiner: We can certainly do that. However, I do not believe that your work will be fruitful if we don’t draw people’s attention to it. I also do not believe that we will be able to work if things stay as they are. I certainly think it will make an impression if we keep the children we now have, but do not enroll anyone new and turn away the new enrollments we have. If we tell people this, I think it would help. If we remain in this difficult financial situation, no one knowing where the money will come from, we will not move forward. It should be a “back against the wall” declaration that indicates what the work of the faculty can achieve here, and that the world has failed to provide the financial support that it should.

A teacher: People ask why they should give everything to Stuttgart. People in Hamburg and Berlin have no interest in what we are doing here in Stuttgart.

Dr. Steiner: The important thing is for the spiritual movement to continue. We cannot say that what is important is that we are creating something here that is for everyone. We certainly cannot say that people should give for the work in Stuttgart and ignore other things. We should certainly not imply that we are forming a central organization in Stuttgart and demand that people give to it.

A teacher: Should we put an announcement in the newspapers that the number of students has grown unexpectedly, so that we now need to employ more teachers in order to continue the school in its original spirit? Also, that we depend upon their support?

Dr. Steiner: We should say in a positive way that we are ready to continue the school as it has been, but that we can no longer accept new enrollments if people do not help to support us. We need to say a radically serious word. We will not consider the formation of new classes with regard to new enrollment.

I must ask my audience to be considerate with me today, because I have just arrived after a very tiring journey and probably will not feel able to speak to you adequately until tomorrow.

I want this first lecture to be a kind of introduction to the series I am to deliver here. I had not really intended to speak during this medical conference, because I think the stimulus given by anthroposophical research to medicine and to natural scientific thinking ought to be worked out by those who are specialists in the various domains. Indeed, all that comes from anthroposophical investigation regarding medicine and, for instance, physiology, can be no more than a stimulus that must then be worked out empirically. Only on the basis of this empirical study can there arise valid and convincing judgments of the matters in question—and this is the kind of judgment that is needed in the domain of therapy.

These lectures, however, are given at the special request of our doctors here, and I shall try to deal with those points where anthroposophy can illuminate the realm of medicine. I shall endeavor to show, first of all, that an understanding of the human being in both health and disease can be enriched and deepened through the anthroposophical view.

By way of introduction perhaps you will permit me to speak of the sense in which the anthroposophical approach should be understood today, in our own age. People so readily confuse what is here called anthroposophy with older traditional ideas about humanity. I have no wish to waste words about the value of these old conceptions or to criticize them in any way, but it must be emphasized that the conceptions I am putting forward are founded on a very different basis from that of the various mystical, theosophical, and gnostic ideas that have arisen traditionally in the course of human history. In order to make myself clear, I need mention only the main points of difference between the conceptions that will be presented here and those of earlier times.

Those earlier conceptions arose in human thought at a time when there was no natural science in our sense; mine have been developed in an age when natural science has not only come into being but has reached a certain—albeit provisional—perfection. This must always be remembered if we wish to understand the meaning and significance of our studies, for it applies to everything that may be said and discovered by anthroposophy about the most varied branches of human knowledge and ability.

You all know—and I don't need to enlarge upon it for you—that in those earlier times man had a non-scientific (in our sense) conception of the super-sensible world. Medicine, too, was permeated with super-sensible conceptions, with conceptions of the human being that did not originate, as is the case today, from empirical research. We need go back only to the age shortly before that of Galen, and if we are open-minded enough we shall find everywhere spiritual conceptions of the being of man on which medical thought, too, was based. Permeating these conceptions of the form of the human being, the form of his organs and of human functions, were thoughts about the super-sensible. According to our modern empirical way of thinking, there are no grounds for connecting anything super-sensible with the nature and constitution of the human being, but in those older conceptions the super-sensible was as much a part of human nature as colors, forms, and inorganic forces now seem to us bound up with the objects in the outer world.

Only a person with preconceptions will speak of those earlier ages in the development of medicine as if its ideas were merely childish, compared with those that have evolved today. Nothing could be more inadequate than what history tells us in this connection, and anyone who has the slightest understanding of the historical evolution of humanity, who does not take the point of view that perfection has been reached and that everything earlier is mere foolishness, will realize that even now we have arrived only at relative perfection and that there is no need to look back with a supercilious eye upon what went before. Indeed, this is obvious when we consider the results that were achieved. On the other hand, an individual concerned with any branch of knowledge today must never overlook all that natural science has accomplished for humanity in this age. And when—to use the Goethean expression—a spiritual way of considering the human being in sickness and health wishes to become active today, it must work with and not against natural scientific research.

After what I have said I hope you will not accuse me of wishing to cast aspersions on the concepts of natural science. Indeed, I must emphasize at the beginning that such a thing is out of the question and for a very fundamental reason. When we consider the medical views that were held in an earlier period of civilization, we find that although they were by no means as foolish as many people believe nowadays, they did lack what we have gained through natural science, for the simple reason that man's faculty of cognition was not then adapted to see objects as we see them today by means of our senses and the products of empirical thought. The doctor (or I might just as well say the physiologist or biologist of ancient times) saw in an entirely different way from the way modern man sees. In the times that really come to an end with Galen, medical consciousness had quite another orientation. What Galen saw in his four elements of the human organism, in the black and yellow gall, in the phlegm and in the blood, was utterly different from what the human being sees today.

If we understand Galen's words—as a rule, of course words handed down from ancient times are not understood—then what he describes appears nebulous today. He saw as a reality what to us appears nebulous; in what he called phlegm he did not see the substance we call phlegm. To him phlegm was not only a fluidity permeated with life but a fluidity permeated with soul. He saw this. He saw this as clearly as we see something as red or blue. But precisely because he was able to see something outside the range of modern scientific consciousness, Galen was not able to see many things that are brought to light today by our scientific consciousness.

Suppose, for example, that a man with slightly abnormal vision looks through glasses, and by this means the contours of objects become sharper than they would otherwise appear to him. In the same way, as the result of modern empiricism all that was once seen hazily, but nonetheless permeated by spirit and soul, has disappeared and been replaced by the sharp contours of our modern empirical observation. The sharp contours were not there in ancient times. Healings were performed out of a kind of instinct that was bound up with an intense development of human compassion. A sort of participation in the patient's disease, which could even be painful, arose in the doctor of ancient times, and on the basis of this he set about his cure. The sharp boundaries that we perceive today through our empiricism based in the senses were not seen at all.

Because the advance to this sense-oriented empiricism is rooted in the evolution of man, we cannot merely brush it aside and return to the old. Only if we develop certain atavistic faculties will we perceive nature as the ancients perceived her, in all domains of knowledge, including that of medicine. In our modern civilization, when we grow up equipped with the kind of training given in our lower schools—not to speak of higher education—it is simply impossible to see things as the ancients saw them; moreover, if a person did see things in this way he would be regarded as being if not gravely, at any rate mildly psychopathic, not quite “normal.” Indeed, this would not be altogether unjust, for there is something psychopathic today in all instinctive “clairvoyance,” as it is called. We must be quite clear about this. What we are able to do, however, is to work our way up to a perception of the spiritual by developing inner faculties otherwise latent in the soul, just as in the course of evolution the eye has evolved itself from indefinite vision to sharply contoured vision.

Today, then, it is possible to develop faculties of spiritual perception. I have described this development in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and How to Attain It, and in my other writings. When an individual has developed these faculties, he sees, to begin with, a world not previously visible to him, a world encompassing a kind of spiritual cosmos beyond the cosmos revealed to sense perception today, including the discoveries and calculations of astronomy. To the sense-perceptible cosmos that is permeated by natural law, a spiritual cosmos is added. And when we seek to discover what exists in this spiritual cosmos, we also find the human being. We take hold of a spiritual universe, a universe permeated with soul and spirit, and we see the human being as a member of this universe.

If we pursue ordinary natural science, we begin either with the simplest living being or with the simplest form of life—the cell—and then trace the simple on into the more complex, ascending thus from what most resembles purely physically organized substance to the highly intricate human organism. If we are seriously pursuing spiritual science, we begin at the other end. We descend from a comprehension of the spiritual in the universe, regarding this as complex, and we look at the cell as the simplest thing in the organism. Viewed in the light of spiritual science, the universe is the summit of complexity, and just as we gradually elaborate the elements of our own cognition in order, let us say, to pass from the cell to the human being, so we progressively simplify what the cosmos reveals and then come to the human being. We follow an opposite path—that is to say, we begin at exactly the opposite starting point—but when we pursue spiritual science today in this way, we are not at first led all the way into the regions encompassed by modern material empiricism. I wish to stress this point strongly and hope that there will be no misunderstanding particularly regarding these fundamentals. This is why I must ask you today to forgive these somewhat pedantically formed concepts.

It is quite conceivable that someone might think it useless to adopt the methods of empirical thought in physiology or biology. “What need is there for any specialized branch of science?” he might ask. “One develops spiritual capacities, looks into the spiritual world, arrives at a view of man, of the being of man in health and disease, and then it is possible to found a kind of spiritualized medicine.” This is just the kind of thing many people do, but it leads nowhere. They abuse empirical medicine, but they are abusing something they do not understand in the least. We should not even consider writing off ordinary sense-oriented empirical science as worthless and taking refuge in a spiritualized science brought down from the clouds. That is quite the wrong attitude to adopt.

Spiritual scientific investigation does not lead to the same things that are examined under the microscope. If anyone tries to pretend that with the methods of spiritual science he has found exactly the same things he finds under a microscope, he may safely be summed up as a charlatan. The results of modern empirical investigation are there and must be reckoned with. Those who seriously pursue science also in the sense of spiritual scientific anthroposophy do not simply depart from sense-oriented empiricism; it is necessary to take such empiricism into account. One who might be called an expert in an anthroposophical spiritual science must first concern himself with the phenomena of the world in the sense of ordinary empiricism.

From spiritual science we discover at first certain guidelines for empirical research, certain ruling principles, showing us, for instance, that what exists at a particular place in the organism must be studied also in reference to its position. Many people will say, “Yes, but a cell is a cell, and purely empirical observation must determine the distinguishing feature of this cell—whether it is a liver cell or a brain cell and so on.” This is not the case. Suppose, for example, I walk past a bank at nine o'clock in the morning and see two men sitting there side by side. I look at them and form certain judgments about various things in relation to them. At three o'clock in the afternoon it happens that I again walk past the bank. There are the two men, sitting just as before. The empirical state of affairs is exactly the same in both cases, allowing for very slight differences. But now, think of it: one of the men may have remained sitting there for the whole six hours. The other may have been sent out on quite a journey right after I first passed the bank and may have just returned. This essentially alters the picture and has nothing to do with what I actually perceive with my senses. As far as my senses are concerned, the same state of affairs presents itself at nine o'clock in the morning and three o'clock in the afternoon, but the state of affairs determined by sense observation must be judged in accordance with its constituents.

In this sense our conception of a liver cell must differ essentially from our conception of a cell in the brain or the blood. Only if it were correct to say, for the sake of example, that the basis of everything is a primeval germ cell that has been fertilized and that the whole organism can be explained by a process of simple division and differentiation of this primeval germ cell—only then could we proceed to treat a liver cell exactly the same as a brain cell in accordance with the purely empirical facts. Yes, but now suppose that this is by no means correct, that by virtue of its very position in the organism the relation of a liver cell to forces outside man, outside the bounds of the skin, is not at all the same as the relation of a brain cell to these forces. In that case it will not be correct to look on what is happening merely as a continuation of the process of division and subsequent location in the body. We must rather assume that the relation of the brain cell to the universe outside is quite different from that of the liver cell.

Suppose someone looks at the needle of a compass, finds it pointing from South to North, from North to South, and then decides that the forces that set the needle in the North-South direction lie in the needle itself. He would certainly not be considered a physicist today. A physicist brings the needle of the compass into connection with what is called earthly magnetism. No matter what theories people evolve, it is simply impossible to attribute the direction of the needle to forces lying within the needle itself. It must be brought into relation with the universe.

In studying organic life today, the relationship of the organic to the universe is usually regarded as quite secondary. But suppose it were indeed true that merely on account of their different positions the liver and the brain are actually related quite differently to universal forces outside the human being. In that case we could never arrive at an explanation of the human being by way of pure empiricism. An explanation is possible only if we are able to say what part the whole universe plays in molding the brain and the liver, in the same sense as the earth plays its part in the direction taken by the needle in the compass.

Suppose we are tracing back the stream of heredity. We begin with the ancestors, pass on to the present generation, and then to the offspring, both in the case of animals and of human beings. We take into account what we find—as naturally we must—but we reckon merely with processes observed to lie immediately within the human being. It hardly ever occurs to us to ask whether under certain conditions in the human organism it is possible for universal forces to work in the most varied ways upon the fertilized germ. Nor do we ask: Is it perhaps impossible to explain the formation of the fertilized germ cell if we remain within the confines of the human being himself? Must we not relate this germ cell to the whole universe?

In orthodox science today, the forces that work in from the universe are considered secondary. To a certain limited extent they are taken into consideration, but they are always secondary. And now you may say: “Yes, but modern science leads us to a point where such questions no longer arise. It is antiquated to relate the human organs to the universe!” In the way in which this is often done, it is antiquated, but the fact that generally such questions do not arise today is due entirely to our scientific education. Our education in science confines us to this purely sense-oriented empirical mode of research, and we never come to the point of raising questions such as I have posed hypothetically by way of introduction. But the extent to which man is able to advance in knowledge and action in every sphere of life depends upon raising questions. Where questions never arise, a person is living in a kind of scientific fog. Such an individual is himself dimming his free outlook upon reality, and it is only when things no longer fit into his scheme of thought that he begins to realize the limitations of his conceptions.

I believe that in the domain of modern medicine there may be a feeling that the processes taking place in the human being are not wholly reconcilable with the simple, straightforward theories upon which most cures are based. There is a certain feeling that it must be possible to approach the whole subject from another angle. And I think that what I will have to say in this connection will mean something especially to those who are specialists in their particular branches of science, who have practical experience of the processes of health and disease and have realized that current conceptions and theories are everywhere too limited to grapple with the complexity of the facts.

Let us be quite honest with ourselves in this regard. During the entire nineteenth century a kind of axiom was put forward by nearly every branch of scientific and practical thought. With a persistence that was enough to drive one to despair, it was constantly being said, “Explanations must be as simple as possible.” And that is just what people tried to do. But if facts and processes are complicated, it is prejudging the issue to say that the explanations must be simple. We must accustom ourselves to deal with complexities. Unspeakable harm has been done in the realms of science and art by the insistent demand for simplification. In all her manifestations, small and great, nature is not simple but highly complicated. We can really grapple with nature itself only if we realize from the outset that the most seemingly comprehensive ideas are related to reality in the same way that photographs of a tree, taken from one side only, are related to the tree. I can photograph the tree from every side, and the photographs may be very different under different circumstances. The more photographs I have, the more nearly will my mental image approach the reality of the tree.

The prevalent opinion today is this: such and such a theory is correct. Therefore some other theory—one with which we do not happen to agree—must be wrong. But that is just as if a person were to photograph a tree from one side only. He has his particular photograph. Someone else takes a photograph from another side and says to the first person, “Your photograph is absolutely false; mine, and mine alone, represents the truth.” He claims his particular view to be the correct one. All controversies about materialism, idealism, realism, and the like have really taken this form. The squabbles in such realms are by no means different from the seemingly trivial example I have given as a comparison. At the very outset of our studies I ask you not to take what I have to say as if it were meant to tend in the direction of materialism, idealism, or spiritualism, but merely as an attempt to go straight for reality to the extent to which the capacity of human thought permits. If we wish to master what is real, we can occasionally achieve tremendous results with materialistic conceptions if we are then able to introduce the opposite aspect into our considerations. If it is impossible to keep the various aspects separate, our ideas will appear as if we took many different photographs all on the same piece of film. Indeed, many things are like this today. It is as if photographs from many different aspects had been taken on the same piece of film. Now when the forces lying latent in the soul of man are realized by the methods outlined in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and How to Attain It, we rise above the ordinary standpoint of knowledge—to which the latest phase in biology pays special attention—and reach what I have described as Imaginative cognition or knowing. A still wider standpoint is that of Inspired knowing, and the highest, if I may use this expression, is that of the Intuitive, of real Intuitive knowing. In Imaginative cognition, I receive pictures of reality, knowing very well that they are pictures, but also that they are pictures of reality and not merely dream-pictures. In Imaginative cognition I do not have reality yet, but I have pictures of a reality. At the stage of knowing by Inspiration, these pictures acquire a certain consistency, a viscosity, something lives within them; I know more through the pictures than the pictures alone yielded me. I know by means of the pictures that they are related to a spiritual reality. And in the acts of Intuitive knowing I stand within this spiritual reality itself. This is the ascent through the three stages described in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and How to Attain It.

Now these three modes of higher knowledge give us, to begin with, knowledge of spiritual worlds, a knowledge that goes beyond ordinary, sense-oriented factual knowledge. They give knowledge of a spiritual universe and of man as a soul-spiritual being; they do not, in the early stages, reveal to us today's findings of empirical research in the realm of, say, biology. When Imagination, Inspiration, or Intuition is used to gain understanding of the being of man, a different approach is applied.

Take, for instance, the structure of the human brain. Perhaps it does not strike physiologists and doctors as very extraordinary, but to those who call themselves psychologists it is remarkable. Psychologists are a strange phenomenon in our civilization because they have managed to develop a science without subject matter—a psychology without a soul! For the psychologist this structure of the brain is very remarkable. Think for a moment of a psychologist who takes his start purely from empirical science. In recent times it has been impossible to distinguish whether a philosopher knows something or not. Natural scientists, however, are always supposed to know something, and so in modern times certain scientists who dabble in philosophy have been given Chairs of Philosophy. Current opinion has been this: natural scientists must have some knowledge, because although it is quite possible in philosophy to talk around and around a subject, it is not possible in natural science to spout hot air about something that has been observed under a microscope, through a telescope, or by means of x-rays. All these things can be tested and proven, but in philosophy it is not so easy to prove whether or not a man is speaking out of the clouds.

Think of how Theodor Ziehen speaks about the structure of the brain. In this connection I once had a very interesting experience, and perhaps I can make the point more concrete by telling you an anecdote. Many years ago I attended a meeting where an eminent doctor was lecturing about the life of soul in connection with the brain and its structure. The chairman of the meeting was a follower of Herbart, and he, therefore, was not concerned with analyzing the structure of the brain but the conceptual life, as Herbart, the philosopher, had once done. The chairman then said, “Here we have something very remarkable. The physiologist or the doctor makes diagrams and figures of the structure of the brain. If I, as a Herbartian, make drawings of the complicated association of ideas—I mean a picture of the ideas that associate and not of the nerve fibers connecting one nerve cell with another—if I, as a genuine Herbartian who does not concern himself with the brain as a structure, make symbolic diagrams of what I conceive to be the process underlying the linking together of ideas, my drawings look exactly the same as the physiologist's sketches of the physical structure of the brain.”

This comparison is not unjustified. Natural science has taught us more and more about the structure of the brain. It has been proven in ever greater measure that the outer structure of the brain does, indeed, correspond in a marvelous way with the organization of our conceptual life. Everything in the conceptual life can be found again in the structure of the brain. It is as if nature herself—please take this with a grain of salt—had intended to create in the brain a sculptural image of man's conceptual life. Something of the kind strikes us forcibly when we read statements like those of Meynert (which nowadays are already considered rather out of date). Meynert was a materialist but an excellent neurophysiologist and psychiatrist. As a materialist, he offers us a wonderful contribution to what is discovered when the actual human brain is left out of account and we deal only with the way in which mental images unite, separate, etc., and then sketch these symbols. In short, if anything could make a person a materialist it is the structure of the human brain. In any event it must be conceded that if the spirit and soul do indeed exist, they have an expression so perfect in the human brain that one is almost tempted to ask why the spirit and soul in themselves are necessary for the conceptual life, even if people do still long for a soul that can at least think. The brain is such a true mirror-image of the soul-spiritual—why should the brain itself not be able to think?

All these things must of course be taken with the well-known grain of salt. Today I only wish to indicate the tenor of our studies as a whole. The human brain, especially when we undertake detailed research, is well calculated to make us materialists. The mystery that really underlies all this clears up only when we reach the stage of Imaginative knowledge, where pictures arise, pictures of the real spiritual world not previously visible. These pictures actually remind us of the configurations in the human brain formed by the nerve fibers and nerve cells.

What, then, is this Imaginative cognition, which naturally functions entirely in the super-sensible world? If I attempted to give you a symbolic representation of what Imaginative knowledge is, in the way that a mathematician uses figures to illustrate a mathematical problem, I would say the following: imagine that a person living in the world knows more than sense-cognition can tell him because he can rise to pictures that yield a reality, just as the human brain yields the reality of the human soul. In the brain, nature itself has given us as a real Imagination, an Imagination perceptible to the senses, something that is attained in Imaginative knowledge at a higher level.

This, you see, leads us more deeply into the constitution of the human being. As we shall see in the next few days, this marvelous structure of the human brain is not an isolated formation. Through Imagination we behold a world, a super-sensible world, and it is as though a part of this world had become real in a lower world; in the human brain we behold a world of Imagination in concrete fact. I do not believe that anyone can speak adequately about the human brain unless he sees in its structure an Imaginative replica of the life of soul. It is just this that leads us into a dilemma when we take our start from ordinary neurophysiology and try to pass to an understanding of the life of soul. If we confine ourselves to the brain itself, a life of soul over and above this does not seem necessary. The only individuals with a right to speak of a life of soul over and above the structure of the human brain are those who have knowledge of it other than what is acquired by customary methods in this world. For when we come to know this life of soul in the spiritual world, we realize that it has its complete reflection in the structure of the human brain, and that the brain, moreover, can do everything that the super-sensible organ of soul can do by way of conceptual activity. Down to its very function the brain is a mirror-image. With neurophysiology, therefore, no one can prove or disprove materialism. It simply cannot be done. If the human being were merely a being of brain, he would never need to say to himself, “Over and above this brain of mine, I possess a soul.”

In contrast to this—and I shall now describe in an introductory way something that will be developed in the following lectures—let us turn to a different function of the human being, not the conceptual life but the process of breathing, considered functionally. Think of the breathing processes and what comes into human consciousness with regard to them; with these you will not come to something similar in the organism, as you did regarding the conceptual life. When you say to yourselves, “I have an idea that reminds me of another idea I had three years ago, and I link the one to the other,” you may well be able to make diagrams (especially if you take a series of ideas) that bear a great resemblance, for instance, to Meynert's sketches of the structure of the brain. Now this cannot be done when you try to find an expression in the human organism for what is contained in the breathing processes. You can find no adequate expression for the breathing processes in the structures and formations of the physical organs, as you were able to for the conceptual life in the brain. The breathing processes are something for which there is no adequate expression in the human organism, in the same sense as the structure of the brain is an adequate expression for the conceptual life, the perceptual life.

In Imaginative knowledge pictures arise before us, but if we rise to knowledge by Inspiration, reality streams through the pictures from behind, as it were. If, then, we rise to Inspiration and gaze into the super-sensible world in such a way that the Imaginations teem with spiritual reality, we suddenly find ourselves standing in something super-sensible that has its complete analogy in the connection between the breathing processes, the structure of the lungs, the structure of the arachnoidal space, the central canal of the spinal cord, and the penetration of the impulse of the breath into the brain. In short, if you rise to Inspiration, you learn to understand the whole meaning of the breathing process, just as Imaginative knowledge leads to an understanding of the meaning of the structure of the brain. The brain is an: Imagination made concrete; everything connected with breathing is an Inspiration made real, an Inspiration brought down into the world of the senses. One who strives to reach the stage of Inspired knowledge is transplanted into a world of spirit and soul, but this world lies there tangibly before him when he observes the whole breathing process and its significance in the human organism.

Imagination, then, is necessary for an understanding of the structure of the brain; Inspiration is necessary in order to understand the rhythm of breathing and everything connected with it. The relation of the breathing rhythm to the universe is quite different from that of the brain's structure. The outer, sculptural structure of the brain is so completely a mirror-image of the spiritual that it is possible to understand this structure without penetrating deeply into the super-sensible world. Indeed, we need only rise to Imagination, which borders quite closely on ordinary cognition. The breathing process cannot be understood by means of Imagination; here you must have Inspired knowledge, you must rise higher in the super-sensible world.

To understand the metabolic process one must rise still higher in the super-sensible world. The metabolic process is really the most mysterious of all processes in the human being. The following lectures will show that we must think of this metabolic process quite differently from the way in which it is thought of today in empirical physiology. The changes undergone by the substances as they pass from the tongue to the point where they bring about something in the brain cells, for instance, cannot, unfortunately, be followed by means of merely empirical research but only by means of Intuitive knowledge. This Intuitive knowledge leads us beyond the mere perception of the object into the object itself. In the brain, the spirit and soul of man create for themselves a mere image of themselves but otherwise remain outside this image. Spirit and soul permeate the breathing rhythm but constantly withdraw again. In the metabolism, however, the human spirit and soul immerse themselves completely so that as spirit and soul they even disappear. They are not to be found—nor are they to be found by empirical research.

And now think of Theodor Ziehen's subtle descriptions of the structure of the human brain. It is also possible, in fact, to make symbolic pictures of the memory in such a way that their physiological-anatomical counterparts in the brain can be pointed out. But when Ziehen comes to the sentient processes of feeling, there is already a hitch, and that is why he does not speak of feelings as independent entities but only of mental images colored with feeling. And modern physiologists no longer speak about the will at all. Why? Of course they say nothing! When I want to raise my arm—that is to say, to enact an act of will—I have, first of all, the mental image. Something then descends into the region that, according to current opinion, is wholly “unconscious.” Everything that cannot be actually observed in the life of soul, but is nonetheless believed to be there, is thrown into the reservoir of the “unconscious.” And then I observe how I move my hand. Between the intention and the accomplished fact lies the will, which plays right down into the material nature of the physical organism.

This process can be followed in detail by Intuition; the will passes down into the innermost being of the organism. The act of will enters right into the metabolism. There is no act of will performed by physical, earthly man that cannot be traced by Intuitive knowledge to a corresponding metabolic process. Nor is there any process of will that does not find its expression in disintegration or dissolution—call it what you will—within the metabolic processes. The will first removes what exists somewhere in the organism in order that it may unfold its own activity. It is just as if I were to burn up something in my arm before being able to use this limb for the expression of my will. Something must first be done away with, as we shall see in the following lectures. I know that this would be considered a terrible heresy in natural science today, but nevertheless it will reveal itself to us as a truth. Something substantial must be destroyed before the will can come into play. Spirit and soul must establish themselves where substance existed. This is the essence of Intuitive knowledge, and you will never be able to explain the metabolic processes in the human being unless you investigate them by means of this knowledge.

These three processes—the nerve-sense process, the rhythmic processes (processes of breathing and blood circulation), and the metabolic processes—encompass fundamentally every function in the human organism. Man is really objective knowledge, knowledge made real—regardless of whether we merely observe him from outside or dissect him. Take the human head. We understand what is going on in the head when we realize that it yields Imaginative knowledge; the processes in the rhythmic system become clear when we know that it yields knowledge by Inspiration; we understand the metabolic processes when we know what Intuitive knowledge is. Thus the principles of reality interpenetrate in the human being. Take, for example, the specific organs of the will—they can be understood only by Intuitive knowledge.

As long as we apply a uniformly objective mode of cognition to the human being, we shall not realize that, in fact, he is not at all as he is usually assumed to be. Modern physiology knows, of course, that to a great extent the human being is a column of fluid. But now ask yourselves quite honestly whether physiology does in fact reckon with the human being as a column of fluid, or whether it does not proceed merely as if he were a being consisting of sharply contoured solid forms. You will probably have to admit that little account is given to the fact that he is essentially a fluid being and that the solids have merely been inserted into this fluid. But the human being is also an airy, gaseous being, and a being of warmth as well.

The solid part of the human being can well be understood by means of ordinary objective knowledge. Just as in the laboratory I can become familiar with the nature of sulphide of mercury, so by chemical and physical investigation of the human organism I can acquaint myself with all that is solid. It is different with the fluids in the human being. The fluids live in a state of continual integration and disintegration and cannot be observed in the same way as the stomach or heart are observed and then drawn. If I make drawings of these organs as if they were solid objects, a great deal can be said about them, but it is not the same if we really take seriously this watery being of man. In the fluids something is always coming into being and disappearing again. It is as if we were to conceive of the heart as continually coming into being and disappearing, although the process there is not a very rapid one. The watery being of man must be approached with Imagination.

We must also consider what is gaseous, what is aeriform in us. It is known, of course, how the functions that take place in the aeriform are greatly significant in the organism, it is known how to and from everywhere the aeriform substances in the human organism are in movement, how everything connected with the aeriform is in circulation. When one region of the aeriform interacts with another, however, it follows precisely the pattern of Inspiration. Only through Inspiration can the airy part of the human being be understood.

And now let us pass to the warmth realm in the human being. Try to realize that the human being is something very special by virtue of the fact that he is a structure of warmth, that in the most varied parts of his structure warmth and cold are found present in the most manifold ways. Before we can realize how the human being lives with his ego in his own warmth, we must ourselves live into the process. There must be an act of Intuitive knowledge.

Before you are able to know the whole human being, in his totality—not as if he were simply a mass of solid organs with sharp contours—you must penetrate into the human being from many different angles. Just as we are led from Imagination to Inspiration to Intuition as we pass from the brain to the other organic structures, so it is when we study the different aggregate states of matter within the human being. The solid part of the human being, his solid bodily nature, hardly differs at all within the human organism from the state in which substances exist outside the human organism. There is an essential difference, however, in the case of what is fluid and gaseous, and above all in the case of the warmth. This will have to be considered in the next lectures. But it is indeed a fact that only when our study of the human being widens in this way do we come to know the real significance for knowledge of the organs within human nature.

Sense-oriented, empirical physiology hardly enables you to follow the functions of the human organism further than the point where the chyle passes from the intestines into the lymphatic vessels. What follows is merely a matter of conjecture. All ideas about the subsequent processes that take place with the substances we take in from the outside world, for instance the processes in the bloodstream, are really nothing but fantasy on the part of modern physiology. The part played in the organization by the kidneys, for example, can be understood only if we observe the catabolic processes side by side with the anabolic processes, which today are almost invariably regarded as the only processes of significance for the human constitution. A long time ago I said to a friend, “It is just as important to study those organs which are grouped around the germ of the human embryo, and which are later discarded, as to study the development of the human germ itself from conception to birth.” The picture is complete only when we observe the division of the cells and the structure arising from this division, and also trace the catabolic processes that take their course side by side with the anabolic processes. For we do not have this catabolic process around us only in the embryonic period; we bear it within us continually in later life. And we must know in the case of each single organ to what extent it contains anabolic and to what extent catabolic processes. The latter are, as a general rule, bound up with an increase of consciousness. Clear consciousness is dependent on catabolic processes, on the disintegration, the destruction, the removal of matter.

The same must be said about the processes of elimination. The kidneys are organs of elimination. But now the question arises: although from the point of view of sense-oriented empiricism the kidneys are primarily organs of elimination, have they no other significance in the constitution of man beyond this? Do they not, perhaps, play a more important part in building up the human being by virtue of something other than their functions of elimination? If we then follow the functions still further, passing from the kidneys to the liver, for example, we find this interesting phenomenon: the kidneys ultimately excrete outward, the liver inward. And the question arises: How is the relation of the kidney process to the liver process affected by the fact that the kidneys send their products of elimination outward and the liver inward? Is the human being at one time communing with the outer world, as it were, and at another time with himself?

Thus we are led to a gradual penetration of the human organization, but to assist us in this penetration we need to consider matters that are approached in the ways of which I have given only hints today. I will proceed from this point in the next lecture, showing how these things lead to a real understanding of pathology and therapy, and to what extent they may become guiding principles in the empirical research acknowledged today. This does not imply an attack on such research. The only object is to show that guiding principles are necessary for it to attain its true value.

I am not out to attack natural scientific research or scientific medicine in any sense. My aim is simply to show that in this natural scientific medicine there is a mine of opportunity for a much wider knowledge than can be attained by modern methods and above all by the current outlook of the world. We have no wish to scoff at the natural scientific mode of observation but on the contrary to give it a true foundation. When it is founded upon the spirit, then, and only then, will it assume its full significance.

Tomorrow I will speak further on this subject.

Emil Bock: There are a number of technical questions regarding the Mass and other services, namely: Should the Mass be spoken freely or read? — What role should freely composed speeches play in the rituals? — At what point should the sermon be in the Mass and what should its length be within the Mass? — Then the question has been raised as to how to arrive at a new selection of sermon texts. What role should congregational singing play? ¹

Rudolf Steiner: Well, my dear friends, we will first address the question: can the new mass also be read or is a free recitation possible with it and with the other acts? What needs to be said first is this: I naturally had to present the essence of the mass to you and essentially had to present the texts for the four main sections. In a complete mass, the idea is that certain parts and the whole structure of the mass are constructed in a similar way – as I will show – to the sequence of breviary prayers. So you have the complete text of the mass, varying according to the time of year. However, the main things always remain the same, so that if you have to say Mass, you will have to refer to the Missal, which is of course available, and according to common usage there is actually no other way of saying Mass than reading it. Of course, it is perfectly conceivable to know the Mass by heart, but it is not usually done. There is basically no real reason to think that it would be necessary to either read the mass or recite it by heart. It says here: Is the new mass also to be read or is extemporaneous delivery to be aimed for with it and with the other acts? — Extemporaneous delivery is not necessary for the other acts either; it can be read quite well. It is always very nice when our Waldorf school celebrant delivers the free speech in essence, but I have rarely seen anything in the Roman Catholic Church that was part of the liturgy delivered freely.

The next question: the meaning and use of church music in the mass. - Well, an ordinary silent mass can certainly be performed in such a way that one is only dealing with a kind of reading, but originally a mass is actually associated with the recitative of the text, so that at the real liturgical mass one is dealing with a recitation of the mass according to notes. In the missal, you will therefore also find notes if the mass is to be celebrated in a truly liturgical manner. So the text itself is to be read in a recitative-like manner, but in addition, the mass is to be thought of as thoroughly musical, so that in a truly solemn mass, the motifs can also be set to music and the organ music, as well as other music and singing, should play a role.

Regarding the question of congregational singing, choral singing, antiphony: these things, congregational singing, choral singing, antiphony, should not actually disappear from the action; on the contrary, they should be further developed. Congregational singing as such is essentially designed to increase the sense of community, just as the musical and vocal element should not be underestimated. We are too accustomed to regarding language merely as a means of expressing something. When we speak as we are accustomed to doing today, language is essentially only suitable for expressing abstract or sensual things, but it is not really an instrument for expressing the supersensible. You will notice when I express in my lectures that which is to be expressed directly through language as supersensible, that I then try to shape the language and approach a matter from different sides. Rhythm, musicality in general, and the musical-thematic element in particular, is what actually leads us into the supersensible world. In a poem, the prosaic, literal content is basically not what one should look at if one wants the artistic element. Recitation and declamation — I always say this with reference to our eurythmy performances — is completely misunderstood today. The art of recitation and declamation does not lie in emphasizing the content of the prose, but in bringing in the rhythmic and musical and musical-thematic, and thus basically also in the painting of the sound and so on. We should therefore work towards ensuring that this treatment of language and this elevation of the linguistic to song, to the musical, should not only not disappear, but should be developed more and more.

A participant: Could we not already have a new selection of sermon texts, even if it is only for half a year, that would specifically correspond to the situation from a spiritual science point of view, given to us by Dr. Steiner?

Rudolf Steiner: Well, my dear friends, it is not quite so easy to put together a collection of sermon texts in this way. But apart from that, it does not seem to me to be something desirable in the end, that such prescribed sermon texts are handed out. It would perhaps even be good, I think, if you want to build community in such a way that not only the individual communities build community, but that you build a community of pastors, if you were to swear, by some means to be agreed upon, never to adhere to such prescribed sermon texts. By doing so, you would make a significant contribution to revitalizing what you are actually supposed to do. Because you can be quite sure of this: anyone who needs prescribed sermons, who absolutely must have them, should actually be considered a bad preacher, and anyone who can write their own sermons but still likes to use a sermon text as a leader is forgetting how to preach and becoming lazy. It is really a matter of understanding the sermon in a different way, which is not how I have often seen it. You see, in preaching, it is important to be familiar with the Christian doctrine, but also to have a certain command of symbols and images, in the sense that I mentioned last week, and in this way to actually do the work in such a way that you can draw on what can enliven the sermon. Of course, one cannot expect everyone to speak about everything under inspiration, but one must at least strive for the following kind of preparation for preaching: the point is to have the text as such, but one should actually have found it alive, so that the task is then to address the topic; then the preparation should be a kind of meditation. It should consist in devotion to the subject, not in the elaboration of the individual word, but in devotion to the subject. If we really develop this devotion to the subject, then we grow much more together with the matter than if we try to chisel out the word and the like.

Of course, there are all sorts of gradations. Dr. Rittelmeyer recently told the story of how two preachers once discussed whether they delivered their sermons under inspiration. One said: “Well, I deliver all my sermons under inspiration.” The other said, ‘No, I don't do that anymore; the only time I waited for the Holy Spirit was when He said, ’You're a lazy slut!'

Now, these things are of course different according to human abilities. But it is certainly true that we learn to do our preaching better and better if we do it the way I have just indicated.

The next question: The word of Jesus: Why callest thou me good? There is none good but one, that is, God. This saying should be considered in connection with another Bible saying, namely, “Be ye good, as your heavenly Father is good.” You see, these two sayings are only really understandable in context, although they seem to contradict each other. Why, no one is good but God alone. But now, “Be ye perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.”

Now, if you want to grasp the aspiration, the tendency in man that leads to the good – and with regard to the good, of course, the Christ must be the guide – if you want to understand this tendency, this leading to the good, then you must really grasp that the idea that one can be good impairs being good through and through. Nothing detracts so much from real goodness or at least from the pursuit of goodness as the opinion that one can achieve the good. The good is something that man can only aspire to by presenting it in such a way that, to a certain extent, the model of goodness is unattainable for him. While Christ actually wants to awaken the mood of striving for the good with such words, He presents it in such a way that one should not call Him good, but that one should call the origin of the world good as united in God, thus in Father, Son and Spirit, but not Him as He walks around on earth, even if He lives and is inspired by Christ. He rejects the idea of simply calling that which is walking around on earth good, no matter how strongly it is inspired by the spiritual, because only the pursuit of the good actually constitutes the good, and one cannot truly pursue the good if one does not move it away from oneself into an objective.

Therefore, subjective ethics, the autonomy of ethics, subjective autonomous ethics, is never really a real instruction for the good. So let us understand this connection of the two sayings: Man should strive for a perfection as the Father in heaven is, but never imagine that he can be good. Only the Almighty God is good. So it is a practical instruction for the practice of good deeds. You see, this is a very broad subject. It becomes especially clear when people want to have an explanation of what is called repentance for sins in religious practice, especially in Catholic religious practice. Repentance for sins very often has an extremely selfish coloring, and people should be instructed to bring this selfish tendency out of repentance. What does the feeling of repentance often consist of? It consists in wanting to have been a better person than one actually was. This “wanting to be a better person than one actually was” contains something that, in essence, contradicts a morality imbued with Christ. One must, in essence, take responsibility for one's sins and not want to be considered a better person than one really was. Repentance only makes sense if it strives for an unprejudiced recognition of one's imperfections, if one is inclined to reproach oneself for the full severity of one's imperfections, and if this full recognition gives rise to the resolve — but one that leads to action — to abandon these imperfections. Thus, the essence must lie in the soul's work for itself in the future. Repentance is the intention to discard these imperfections through a precise realization of them. In practice, this can be seen as a teaching that arises from such sayings as the one quoted here.

Another question: could we learn something about textual corruption in the New Testament? Yes, I am not sure what is actually meant by this, if not what I have already discussed in various ways. But perhaps the questioner would be so kind as to say what he actually means.

A participant: For me, it was simply a matter of perhaps getting a few more examples from which one can see even more clearly from which source and with which intention this corruption of the text was undertaken.

Rudolf Steiner: I could, of course, look for specific examples. In general, I would just like to say this: I do not think that much can be gained by looking for intentions behind the corruption of the text. The corruption of the text has basically come about through a more or less self-evident development of humanity. Over time, the fully substantive, most ideal, spiritual substances for the words are simply lost, and the things that can still be fully felt in one generation are basically already pushed towards the words in the next generation. This is how corruptions arise, and they are the most important ones. You can still study this today. You see, today, when we do not have such, I would like to say, inwardly living text in the individual branches of science, we notice exactly the same thing in some of them, if we take a little what in any science tends towards a world view, as was the case with Haeckel, in whom the scientific tends towards a world view; that satisfied him in the highest sense. Even a student of Haeckel, just any student, who simply takes over the subject, who reads what Haeckel himself observed, can no longer have the same thing in the words and can no longer find satisfaction in the world view. And then there are the many descriptions that are given today of embryology, from the first germ cell back to the first. People believe, of course, that by reading about things they can form some idea of them, but very few of those who have written books have had any kind of direct experience of what they are describing; they have only seen pictures. For example, there are very few specimens of the earliest stages of the human germ cell, and even fewer people have been able to see them. Producing such a specimen is, of course, a very difficult matter.

So we can observe the removal of the word from the thing in external science when it is to become a world view; and it is actually this removal of the word from the thing that essentially matters. I would like to say that this is precisely the historical aspect of text corruption. It is the case, for example, that almost all of the oriental texts cannot be used, as can the biblical text if it is taken as we usually have it. It is good to occasionally ask ourselves how what we have today as a text should actually force us to search for a living text. Of course, it will take a lot of work and effort to create the text of the Gospels in such a way that it can apply to the present day. For you, it is enough to first understand that the search for the text is absolutely necessary, and I think that with what I have presented here, you will often come to understand something like this earlier, and if you take the whole of anthroposophy, you will perhaps find a kind of key to understanding in anthroposophy, at least to begin with. Take, for example, such a sentence – I will pick out something, it is not easy, without preparation, to find a characteristic example – take the eighth verse of the seventh chapter of Paul's Letter to the Romans – you of course know the context: 'Sin, seizing the opportunity, aroused through the commandment all kinds of covetous desires in me, for without the law sin is dead.'

Now, I do believe that many people think they understand such a statement without further ado. But those who sense something quite profound in such a statement and believe that one really has to go deeper than the interpretation that is often given in a very superficial sense are better off. Because people look at you very strangely when you tell them that something like this has to be taken literally. And the literal interpretation of such a sentence always has a very definite consequence, my dear friends. It has the consequence that normal people today — anthroposophists are not considered normal, but rather crazy — think of you as anarchistic. It is then difficult to make them understand that they must also consider the Apostle Paul an anarchist, because the fact is that the sentence says nothing less than: Sin will not be present if, for example, you abolish state laws. Abolish all state laws, and then there can be no sin. Where there are no state laws, there is no sin. — Let us say, for example, in a flock of sheep, we have no laws, and there is no sin. So when we look after a herd of sheep or a herd of cows, when we look after those creatures that live together in nature simply out of instinct, without intellectually formulated laws being present, then we cannot speak of sin. Sin arises, that is, it shows itself, reveals itself, at the same moment that the law is given, and sin is only the other pole of the law. Sin is thus revealed through the law. But it is not merely a one-sided effect, but rather there is a reciprocal effect; the law produces sin in that human nature works against it. And whereas the animal has no laws, and so can indeed abandon itself to instinct, man's actions are inconceivable as sinful if the law is there. Only when instinctive life is permeated by the power of Christ, which stands as far above nature as instinct stands below nature, is there again that relationship which needs no law. So take this here (see drawing on the board) as the level of the law, any law; that which lies below it in terms of instinct has no law. Where there is law, there is sin. Sin absolutely accompanies the law; but that which lies so far above it is what arises in us as a spiritual-soul impulse through the Christ. There we stand above the law and hold the Christ within us. Then we may dispense with the law. To dispense with the law altogether — that is what people consider to be true anarchism.

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But that is exactly what the Apostle Paul meant. He meant that the law is overcome by the body of Christ. I must confess that an example such as this makes it particularly clear to me that today the actual living aspect of Christ's activity is not even considered, because otherwise one would see with full seriousness that the Christ actually had to present the law as that which is to be gradually overcome by him. Not abolished, but overcome, should be the law that is accompanied by sin. It would not be enough just to say what I have just said, but we must go further. We must also realize that the Apostle Paul spoke from a consciousness that also contained the following: He asks himself: Is the law — which can only ever be grasped in abstractions — enough? Is the law enough to banish sin? No, it is not enough to banish sin. Socrates might have believed that the doctrine of virtue was enough, but it is not enough to know what is right; rather, there must be a Christ-power present that counteracts sin, whereas the law can do nothing but make sin recognizable. It makes no sense whatsoever to think of the law in any other way than that it makes sin recognizable. This verse 8 should be translated as I always try to translate it: The tendency to sin was brought about by the legal prohibition, because where there is no law, sin as such cannot be alive. If only the law—the 13th verse should read—if only the law existed about what is good, I would still fall prey to moral death, because only through the law should sin become recognizable. And so on.

Another example: Now then, my brothers, by living in Christ, we are not obliged to the flesh, for he who lives in the flesh alone must perish. But if you receive the Spirit within you and overcome the flesh, you may live, for all who bear the living Spirit within them are destined to be children of the Godhead.

Of course, someone can come today and say that such a translation would be tendentious. But in this sense, one must strive to find the original text of the Gospel, and one will see that there is still truly great in it. But the rule of the spiritual-scientific method is that one must also really produce the text and also allow that to flow into the interpretation, which one can gain by producing the original text.

Now, there is still the question here: The Saints and the Belief in Saints, Invocation of Spiritual Entities. — It is obviously meant to convey the significance of invoking spiritual entities. Now, the fact is that, according to modern consciousness, one cannot, of course, limit oneself to saints established by some church, without one's own conviction leading one to do so. One can therefore only speak in relation to those Christian ancestors whose particular personal value one has recognized. As far as these are concerned, one cannot but say that leaning towards them in order to work in the sense of their power does indeed have a certain meaning, that it gives strength. It must not go so far as to somehow impair the basic feelings one has towards the Divine, towards the Christ, through these things. In the Catholic Church, the veneration of saints often takes on the character of idolatry. This is what must naturally be avoided.

Now comes the question of the immaculate conception of Mary. — Here it is really a matter of truly understanding the Gospel in relation to these things. Let us first take the Gospel of Matthew: “Now the birth of Christ was on this wise: When as his mother Mary was espoused to Joseph, before they came together in the flesh, she was found with child of the Holy Ghost. But Joseph, her lover, that is, her beloved, who was a righteous man and did not want to accuse her of evil, decided to treat the whole matter as a secret.

This is more or less what was translated into the sentences that are usually found at this point today. So it actually means: Joseph, who understood how to live in the sense of righteousness – you could also say – wanted to treat the whole thing as a mystery. As he was visualizing this in his mind, the image of an angel appeared to him, and the angel said to him: Joseph, son of David, consider Mary your wife, for what is happening is happening through the determination of power in the sense of the Holy Spirit. Call the son she will bear Jesus, for it will be he who will take away the burden of sin from men.

Of course I have to tell you the truth about such things, because there is no other way, but some of you may be shocked by what has to be said as the truth in this case. You know that I have described the time on Earth that lies roughly behind the year 8000. What is concluded in today's geology through analogies and all sorts of things is pure nonsense compared to reality. We have received many fairy tales, but the strongest fairy tales are the things that geologists tell about the Alluvial, Devonian, Tertiary, Silurian, and so on; especially when they get into calculating numbers, then things are certainly interesting, but somehow a realistic thinking is not in it at all. It is sometimes downright funny how that true science deals with such things. For example, there are physicists today who calculate what the earth will be like in a million years, if we imagine certain physical analogies. They then describe, for example, how egg white, if spread on a wall, will glow wonderfully. But on an earth where egg white glows so wonderfully, humans will no longer be able to exist, everything would be extinct. I might say, people always take isolated little facts and then paint the rest of the picture around them. But things are not really like that. When they are seen in the light of spiritual science, they look quite different.

If we go back further than 8000 years, we come to a certain catastrophe on Earth, which I always call the Atlantean catastrophe. Before this catastrophe, the distribution of land and water was essentially different in the areas that we now call the areas of Western civilization. Where the waves of the Atlantic Ocean are today, Atlantis was above. Much of present-day Europe was sea and alluvial land, as was still the case with a large part of America. We are dealing here with the old Atlantis, but in this old Atlantis the physical conditions of life on earth were essentially different from what they were later, after this catastrophe had passed. The conditions were such that, for example, the air was always present with a certain greater intensity in a watery state; man could not have lived there with a substance with which he lives today. In relatively recent times man was still endowed with a substance very similar to the present-day fish substance. And when we come more to the beginning of Atlantis or even to the middle, man was such that he could not be seen better with physical eyes than the transparent jellyfish of the sea. Man was therefore relatively quite different from how he is presented by those who today believe they are pursuing exact science. But he was also different in soul. You know that when spiritual science traces development back, it must go back to about the eighth century BC. That is around the time of the founding of Rome. Until then, we can follow the age in which the intellectual soul or soul of mind was developed. But there was a time when the human soul was very different. The remains of it are still present in a few writings, but these are little understood because people no longer understand this remarkable development of the sentient soul, which was much more directed towards an understanding of the extra-sensory than of the sensory present on earth. If we go back to after the fifth millennium, we come to the time when a culture prevailed that can no longer be compared to today's at all - in my “Occult Science” I called it the ancient Persian culture - and we then come back to the ancient Indian culture and with this to the eighth millennium BC. There we approach the Atlantean catastrophe and then return to Atlantean civilization. However, the use of this word is particularly unusual, because the development of the soul was still a completely, completely different one. For example, it is quite true of ancient Atlantis that, in the case of procreation, there could never have been any awareness of the act in humans, that is, in the human ancestors. Procreation had always been carried out in complete unconsciousness; at most, in the later days of Atlantis, what had happened began to be experienced in the imagination, but this was essentially subjectively colored. But all these things are preserved in the image atavistically, only one must not grasp them roughly, but one must be clear about the fact that these things must be grasped extremely delicately. So the one who wrote the Gospel of Matthew rejected the idea that at that time feelings of procreation had somehow flowed into Mary, and he also rejected the idea that they were present in Joseph. Those who do not know that such things were a natural possibility until the fourth century of the Christian era and that it only stopped then cannot understand this matter even in its outward meaning. So we are dealing with a pure, immaculate procreation because it was unconscious. This is not a means of providing information, but, as I said before, you may or may not be shocked by it, but that is just the way it is. In Atlantis, it was taken for granted that one never spoke otherwise than that the children of men were sent by the gods, and that still extends into the post-Atlantean period and lives on in legends and myths. I advise you to study the Hertha legend in all its profound significance. There is something tremendously significant about the way in which this Hertha saga is connected with the whole spiritual development of humanity in this direction. It is shown how Hertha appears at a certain time of year, [...]² But the slaves who serve her are immediately thrown into the sea, must be killed. The man became aware of the act of procreation earlier than the woman, and those who had become aware of it in this age – this is hinted at in this saga – even had to be killed. These things must be handled with great delicacy; one must not hint at them with crude concepts. One must know something about the development of mankind, then one will be far removed from belferting like Haeckel, who says that the immaculate conception, which is asserted in the Gospel, is an impudent mockery of human reason. Human reason as such has nothing to do with the immaculate conception; according to what man justifiably calls human reason, the immaculate conception could of course not exist in the grossest sense. Yes, of course, people talk about it today as if it were a mystery, even though the words are by no means appropriate: Joseph, who was a righteous man, decided to treat the whole matter as a mystery. — No consideration is given to what led to this sentence, namely that Joseph wanted to direct the whole matter, which has happened, precisely into the mystery, that is, into what can only be perceived in the spirit, thus into what can be perceived in innocence; he really wanted to make a mystery out of it.

The concept of a miracle, as it is often understood today, is not mentioned at all in the Gospels. Rather, the Gospels are concerned with a time when the effect of soul on soul and thus from body to body was much more intense than it is today, and when, let us say, miracles are mentioned, we must understand that this is said entirely from the factual world of the time. These are the things that we must take into account when considering the Gospels. In my cycles on the Gospels, you will find numerous examples of how the concept of a miracle, as understood today, is not present in the Gospels at all. What is a miracle, as it is understood today? I have tried to reveal the resurrection of Lazarus in my book 'Christianity as a Mystical Fact'. If you read there how the so-called miracle of Lazarus is revealed, you will find that it is only possible to penetrate the mystery through supersensible cognition, but that one must simply penetrate the mystery through it.

Miracles are — I do not say this out of some kind of prejudice, but I can say this from the real knowledge of the facts — miracles are what arise in the consciousness of modern man. A miracle is a process that today's man no longer understands, but that could have taken place in the course of human development as a process. It is only because things are no longer understood that they are thought to be miracles. On the one hand, people today help themselves by thinking of things as miracles, but on the other hand, they help themselves by extending what has taken place over the course of a few millennia to 20 million years, whereby the funny thing is that with respect to geological periods, one [researcher] differs from the other by the trivial fact that one calculates some period as being 20 million years in the past, while the other calculates it as being 200 million years in the past. It is only that they are not noticed because one is usually taught only from one side. If you read about some geological period, Devonian or Alluvium, and according to some teaching 20 million years are claimed for their length, then you do not immediately read another geological writer, but you may read it only after ten years, and when he then writes that this geological period dates back 200 million years, then you have long forgotten the other. These things abound in humanity, and today, in all seriousness, everything should be paid attention to. And so, when faced with a mystery such as the Immaculate Conception, it is necessary to understand things in the right way. I have already told you that in addition to the actual dogma of the Immaculate Conception of Mary, [the Catholic Church has also] established [the dogma of] the Immaculate Conception of St. Anne, and of course this should go further back, but that is not possible; I have already spoken about this.

Perhaps we can discuss one or two more questions, because some of you are leaving, so that we cover as much as possible. [Here is the question from Pastor Neuhaus:] The Roman concept of transubstantiation is different from that in Dr. Steiner's new mass formula. Would you (to Pastor Neuhaus) perhaps be so kind as to comment personally.

Constantin Neuhaus: The consecration, the transubstantiation formula, which is in your mass formula, is: Receive with the bread my body, receive with the wine my blood. And in my opinion, these words can only be understood in the sense of Lutheran theory, that the body and blood are expressed symbolically, while the Roman Catholic Church assumes actual transubstantiation, the disappearance of the substance of the bread, and in return the substance of the body of Christ is given. I would ask for a little clarification, but perhaps the question is only interesting for Catholics.

Rudolf Steiner: Well, I don't know why you have concluded from the formula I gave this morning that the matter is as you assume.

Constantin Neuhaus: I think that yesterday, when you said mass, the actual consecration formula was the following: Receive my body with the bread. Now Thomas Aquinas did expound this doctrine, that the substances do change in transubstantiation. That has also become part of the people's consciousness. So according to the teaching of Thomas Aquinas, there is no bread at all, only the accidents, only the form of bread... In your mass it says: Receive my body with the bread.

Rudolf Steiner: Is your question based on the fact that I used the expression “with the bread my body”, “with the wine my blood”?

It is, of course, necessary to bear in mind that linguistic usage itself determines what needs to be said. It is not the case that when a Roman Catholic theologian wants to explain transubstantiation philosophically, he needs to explain that the accident is not inextricably linked to the substance. Therefore, you will find in the approved Catholic philosophies that when the concepts of substance and accident are discussed, the corresponding chapter concludes by stating that it is indeed possible to connect the concept of accident with the fact that substance changes and becomes a different substance through the accident. That is the case there. So it is only necessary to understand the matter philosophically for those who want to find their way into the Catholic version. I have expressly pointed out that I have met Catholic priests who have taken everything possible back to Aristotle to help them to understand transubstantiation at all as something conceivable.

Now, you have seen how I meant today how necessary it is to formulate the words in such a way that one can grasp the correct meaning with the sentence. It is something else to simply formulate the sentence “This is my body” or “Receive with the bread my body”. In fact, there is actually no difference, but for today's people it is more vivid to feel the matter if one does not give them direct preparatory instruction in the way that it is actually only treated in the approved Catholic philosophies in the discussions about substance and accident. Perhaps such arguments are also present among the Old Catholics, but in any case they are modeled on the Roman Catholic scholastic philosophies.

If you simply stipulate: This is my body – hoc est corpus mei – then you can cause all the misunderstandings that you could possibly encounter. People don't understand that. But let me present the following image: Let us say I have a friend; I received a note from this friend saying that he had had a son, but due to some obstacles I was unable to see him for three or four years, until the boy could already walk. Now my friend brings him to me, since the opportunity has arisen, and as he enters through the door he says: “Take, I show you my son” or ‘Receive this, this is my son.’

With these words, ‘with what I bring you I show you my son,’ a perfectly possible figure of speech is given to modern man, for I really show him the body when I say: Receive with the bread my body. It is not possible to express it in any other way [that the body is received] than in connection with the bread, not the substance of the body, of course, but that which in the bread passes over into the communicant. It is not a matter here of discussing the concept, but merely of whether the formulation is useful. This formulation was chosen simply to make it clear to today's people — who do not want to get involved in the abstraction that the accident can separate from the substance — with the formula: If I show him something and he sees bread on the outside, then that is not ordinary bread, but it is the body of Christ. That should already be in the formula. This, of course, eliminates the second part of your question: “What is the sacrificial character of the Mass according to Dr. Steiner?” — That is something, as I said, that I wanted to avoid with my formula. Merely this phenomenon, which I have characterized, that the host acquires an aura, that the transformation also becomes outwardly visible, I wanted to express that in some formula that can be grasped more vividly. But I can hardly imagine that the Lutheran interpretation could be heard in this and that it could be taken as the Lutheran view. What must be avoided, of course, is the kind of nonsense that prevails there. I ask you, what does the communicant of today basically imagine, if he has not studied scholasticism, what is actually at the root of it? What does the person imagine today, who communicates as a Catholic or receives the communication, that transubstantiation takes place in the sacrifice of the Mass? What does he really imagine? He may imagine many things. But what does he really imagine?

Constantin Neuhaus: I am of the opinion that the well-informed Catholic has a certain clarity. Because in Catholicism, this point is emphasized to such an extent that the Catholic says to himself: when I communicate, I receive not only the smell and taste of the bread, but also the essence of Christ. He believes that he understands something about communion, and it is remarkable that even primary school children struggle with the concept of transubstantiation. For example, I have to teach in a totally Protestant area, and I experienced just when I had to give communion lessons and was very much concerned with the fact that this point of accident and substance has already been somewhat understood even by children.

Rudolf Steiner: Yes, to a certain extent that is true, certainly. I think it is true that these things are right, and it lives in Catholicism. But can one really say that what lives in this way, for example when it is emphasized in Catholicism, leads to a possible clear conception? I have actually hardly found such clear ideas, and I have met theologians with great capacities and discussed a lot with them. I admit that the discussions are very lively, but the great liveliness stops when you enter the theological faculty. As long as you are a second-year student, you admit that you can have a say without getting close to the matter with a real idea. But then, when they enter the theological faculty, people usually become quieter, and I have met an extraordinary number of those who have resigned themselves to not understanding the subject at all. Isn't it true that it is relatively easy to discuss with someone who is not very far along in the formation of such concepts, but with the trained theologians, the discussion will take on a completely different form. I must confess that a conversation I had with one of the most important theologians at the Vienna Theological Faculty about the nature of Christ, which is connected with everything that led up to it, will remain significant to me for a long time. He simply said when I tried to develop my idea of Christ: “Now we come to a point where I need concepts that I am forbidden to think.”

Yes, that is what must be brought into the formulation of the matter and what underlies it: that one takes the process of transubstantiation as a real one, that something does indeed happen through transubstantiation; then it is something different from merely getting stuck in the formalities. I have, after all, characterized in detail what happens there. I have characterized how the process that takes place there is the outer process for an inner developmental process, how it is, so to speak, the polar opposite of it. So I have tried to characterize the matter from the real, and I had to do that because I believe that the concepts I have given here cannot actually be encompassed in any way by the traditional concepts. But that will be the case if a religious renewal is based on anthroposophy. Then it is impossible that one can be required, for example, by anthroposophy itself to lean towards a Catholic or a Protestant or any other confession, but one must just recognize the matter.

Constantin Neuhaus: All this makes a lot of sense to me and I personally like it, because I don't really understand the term transubstantiation either. But the term transubstantiation implies that something is transubstantiated, and I think that what is at issue then is that the substances actually change.

Rudolf Steiner: Because of the use of the word transubstantiation? It is quite right that the word transubstantiation is used, of course, in reference to the word that was mainly used in the tradition of the Mass. It is just a common word that has been taken historically [from tradition]. But I believe that I mainly used the word when I wanted to approach the historical tradition of the Mass in the sense of Catholicism. I believe that I have said “conversion” when I meant the real process. When I myself developed these things, I believe that I used the word “conversion”. But if I say, for example, “I was in a church in Italy and saw the aura after transubstantiation,” then I can of course say that, because the expression “transubstantiation” applies there. But I would never want to force it, because it is quite natural that the expression can be used to characterize a situation. I believe that for those who have been sitting here, the term “transubstantiation” is something perfectly common.

Constantin Neuhaus: Is the sentence in 1 Corinthians 11:30, “Therefore many of you are weak and sickly, and many sleep,” connected with illness and healing through Communion?

Rudolf Steiner: Well, it is not true that today the two concepts of sin and illness, of sanctification and healing, are very far apart because we have an abyss between the moral world order and the physical world order. But it is absolutely the case that these concepts actually belong together, so that one must say that sin is, in physical terms, quite literally illness, and the healing process is a process that takes place within the soul. At most, one could perhaps take offense at the fact that one process looks more like an objective one and the other more like a subjective one.

Constantin Neuhaus: I remember that it is said: Receive the body of the Lord, which preserves you from sickness of body and soul. There is a connection with the healing of the soul through Communion. Now I wanted to point out the passage in 1 Corinthians, chapter 11, verse 28: “But let a man examine himself, and so let him eat of that bread and drink of that cup.” Now it continues: “For he who eats and drinks unworthily eats and drinks judgment to himself, if he does not discern the Lord's body from common food. For this reason many are sickly among you, and many sleep.” Is there also a connection here?

Rudolf Steiner: I have already hinted at this. I once said: One must, of course, be aware that someone who, let us say, comes from a weak constitution to a very healthy area, which the robust person experiences as a delight, may be ruined by this healthy area. That means that the unprepared person, that is, the one who does not approach healing in the right way, is, well, I would say, destroyed, is ruined by being given something as a cure that can only help him when he can experience it in the right way. That is it. Basically, there is only a slight difference between illness and death. We are constantly dying. We begin to die the moment we are born, and the moment of dying, of actually dying – what one calls dying – is really nothing more than, I would say, the integral of all the differentials of dying between birth and death. We collect all the individual deaths in every moment of our lives. That is what must be considered right away, that in such a sentence “therefore many are sick among you and a part have fallen asleep” the same cause is present, depending on one's state. Because dying is only quantitatively different from being sick. We experience as illness that which is partial dying, if these are partial dying processes that intervene only in such a way that we can overcome them. We experience them as death if we cannot overcome them.

• 1. Editor's note: The questions were apparently submitted to Rudolf Steiner in writing, because he reads them again in the course of the following remarks.
• 2. The transcript contains a gap here. For more on the Hertha saga, see Rudolf Steiner's lecture of December 21, 1916 in the volume “Zeitgeschichtliche Betrachtungen” 1. Teil, GA 173.

The lecture presented here is the 12th of 12 lectures in the series entitled: The Sun Mystery ... Death, Resurrection. This lecture is also known as: Anthroposophy, a Striving for Spiritual Understanding of Nature Permeated by Christ.

Mankind unfolded its intellectual life in the course of many centuries. This intellectual life gradually led it away from spirituality. The intellect itself is spirit, but its content is no longer a spiritual content. Indeed, the intellect is spiritual, but it seeks as its content external Nature, the external life of Nature. Hence the intellect is spirit, but it fills itself with something which cannot appear to it as spiritual. The great tragedy, the modern tragedy of the world, is that man may look into himself and that he must say to himself: When I am intellectually active, I am spiritually active, but at the same time my intellect, which is pure spirit, cannot absorb in a direct way the spiritual. I fill the spirit in me only with things pertaining to Nature.

This is what devastates and rends the human soul to-day. Even though we do not wish to admit this torn and devastated condition, it nevertheless exists in the spiritual regions of the human soul and constitutes the fundamental evil and the fundamental tragedy of our age.

If we wish to express in habitual terms what I have explained to you just now, we must draw attention to all the spiritual powers that are still active in the whole life of Nature; they enter into us because we fill our own spirit with the life of Nature, and we may designate these powers as the Ahrimanic powers.

Our intellect is thus exposed to the great danger of falling a prey to the Ahrimanic powers. During the past centuries, when the intellect was still unfolding and still possessed the inheritance of an old spiritual life, these Ahrimanic powers did not have that great influence on man which they have now. The life of Nature is apparently spread out round about us; but this is only apparent: for Ahriman lives in Nature. And by absorbing Nature, by believing that it is only controlled by neutral laws of Nature, we really absorb spiritual powers, even though we are not aware of this; we absorb Ahrimanic spiritual powers, who took over a special task in cosmic life, in the whole evolution of the world.

When we speak of the task of these spiritual powers, some people are easily inclined to say: But why does the divine guidance of the world admit these powers?—To this we must reply: All that exists in the earthly sphere may be grasped with the ordinary understanding; but when it is a question of grasping in a spiritual-scientific way that which transcends the earth, we must do this through spiritual vision (Anschauung).

Consequently we must say: These powers exist,—but the way in which they are connected with the divine-spiritual powers pertaining to man, can only be grasped in the course of long epochs; indeed, the powers belonging to the super-human sphere are perhaps quite inaccessible to the human understanding. We can therefore only say: These powers exist, they show themselves to those who have spiritual knowledge.

The tasks of the Ahrimanic beings is the following: To prevent the earth from continuing to develop as it should develop in accordance with the intentions of the divine-spiritual powers with whom man is connected from the very outset, inasmuch as he is a human soul. (You will find all these things mentioned in my “Occult Science”). In my “Occult Science” I have spoken of the future development of the earth, of the Jupiter and Venus phases of evolution: The aim of the Ahrimanic powers is to prevent this course of development.

Their aim is to harden and freeze up the earth, to shape it in such a way that, together with the earth, man remains an earthbound creature. He becomes hardened, as it were, within earthly substance and continues to live in the future ages of the world as a kind of statue of his past. These powers thus pursue definite aims, which undoubtedly appear as part of their own individual striving.

The earth could not reach its goal if the Ahrimanic powers were to gain the victory, if man were alienated from his beginnings, from the powers who supported him at the beginning of his evolution. Outwardly, the human being would develop in a way entirely in keeping with the earthly sphere, but by suppressing his innate disposition, which must lead him beyond the earth.

The Ahrimanic powers could not touch man while the intellect was still rooted in the spiritual through an old inheritance, as was the case during the past three or four centuries. But this has changed since the beginning of the 20^th century. The ancient Indian wisdom knew this, and fixed the end of the 19^th century as the end of the “Dark Age,” of Kali-Yuga. Thus it had an intimation of a new age. This new age was to indicate that from the beginning of the 20^th century, our deepest concern should no longer be that of clinging to an old spiritual inheritance, but of absorbing the new light, the pure light, in our earthly life.

During the first half of 1910, Rudolf Steiner gave lectures that marked a new development in the movement of spiritual science (later known as anthroposophy and founded at the turn of the century).

Earlier, he had repeatedly spoken of the dawn of the Light Age in 1899, following a period of spiritual darkness known as Kali Yuga, which had lasted 5,000 years. Now in 1910 a new dimension was added: a change of consciousness regarding man's relationship to the Christ being would gradually occur.

In the lectures of 1910, published here together for the first time in English, Rudolf Steiner, traveling from Scandinavia via the major cities of Germany to Rome and Palermo, and returning to Hamburg via Hannover, spoke to small groups of prepared listeners concerning the advent of the appearance of the Christ in the etheric life-element of the earth. To begin with, He would only be seen by a few, but as the century progressed He would be perceived by an ever greater number of human beings on earth, bestowing comfort and strength to people. Steiner pointed quite specifically to the period between 1930 and 1940 (he also mentioned 1950) in this respect. The years 1933 and 1935 are singled out in some lectures—years that later marked the beginning of events precipitating the Second World War, which led to appalling suffering for countless human beings. Steiner had warned, however, that opposing powers would conspire to darken the consciousness of humanity so that the second coming of the Christ, His appearance in the etheric, might go unnoticed. He further foretold that powerful attempts would be made on the part of certain groups to proclaim false messiahs to whom people would flock, convinced that the Christ could reappear in physical form in our time. Various other occult efforts to obscure the new Christ revelation are described in the four lectures of 1917, included in this book.

The main thrust of the present collection of lectures which also includes Steiner's key 1911 lecture, “The Etherization of the Blood,” lies in helping to raise the individual consciousness of those souls seeking to find the new Christ event in our age. This means learning to understand and experience the etheric world, a super-sensible sphere closely bordering on the physical, permeating all the kingdoms of nature and human beings with a life-giving element. This etheric realm is where Christ now lives, accessible to the whole of humanity.

Although what Rudolf Steiner brings with such variety and strong images in these lectures was the result of actual spiritual perception, the New Testament contains a number of well-known prophetic passages referring to the second coming and the new spiritual consciousness that will dawn in the future. In the opening of the Acts of the Apostles, written by Luke, a pupil of St. Paul, the event of Ascension is described. It is related how Christ vanished in the clouds and, just as he disappeared from the gaze of the Apostles into this airy, water-filled garment of the earth, from which all things receive their life, so out of the clouds He would reappear (Acts: I).

In several of these lectures, Rudolf Steiner refers to the experience of Saul (later Paul) who, having crossed the desert, was drawing near to the gates of Damascus. Not having known Christ on earth, Paul suddenly experienced in the spirit His mighty presence through the light, the word, and the fullness of His being. This initiation event—unusual at that time—would now in the dawning Age of Light, so Steiner proclaimed, become more and more wide-spread. Paul may, therefore, be considered a precursor of a new form of consciousness of the spiritual world.

In conclusion, it should be mentioned that the first eight lectures, spanning a period from January to Easter 1910, were followed by the writing and premiere of the first of Rudolf Steiner's four Mystery Dramas, The Portal of Initiation, performed in August of the same year in Munich. In the opening scene of this mystery drama, the character Theodora announces in artistic form the impending appearance of Christ in the etheric, which will not depend on faith but rather on a newly won, light-filled spirit vision. In the second part of Theodora's speech, addressed to a number of friends engaged on a spiritual path, she says,

A human being
emerges from glowing light.
It says to me,
You shall proclaim to all
who have the will to hear
that you have seen
what human beings soon will experience.
Christ once lived on earth,
and from His life it follows
that as soul He embraces
human growth on earth.
He is united with the spiritual part of earth,
but human beings cannot yet behold Him
in the form in which He reveals Himself;
because they lack the eyes of spirit
that will be theirs.
Now the time draws near
when with new power of sight
human beings on earth will be endowed.
What once the senses could behold,
when Christ lived on the earth,
will be perceived by human souls.

Readers seeking renewal in their active relationship to the Christ being will find in these lectures an elaboration of the substance poignantly and concisely expressed in the words of Theodora.

René M. Querido

In my last lecture I tried to show how it is due to misunderstandings if there is so little understanding between those who direct their research and attention to the soul and its processes and those who direct their attention to the material processes in the human organism, which proceed — well, as one will call it — as accompanying phenomena or also, as materialism maintains, as necessary causes for the psychic events. And I tried to show what the reasons for such misunderstandings are. Today I would like to draw attention to the fact that wherever real, true knowledge is sought, such misunderstandings, and also misunderstandings in a different direction, must necessarily arise if one does not take into account in the process of knowledge itself, which, in the course of more intimate, especially longer research, imposes itself more and more on the spiritual researcher as a direct experience, as an inner experience. It is something that at first seems very strange when it is expressed: In the field of world-views, that is to say in the field of knowledge of the spiritual-real or in general the knowledge of the sources of existence, if one, I might say, is too entangled in certain conceptions, in certain concepts, then one must of necessity enter upon such a view of the human soul that can absolutely be refuted, and just as well be proved.

Therefore, the spiritual researcher will increasingly deviate from what is otherwise customary in matters of world view, namely, to present this or that in support of one or the other view, which would be similar to what is called proof or even refutation in ordinary life. For in this field, as I said, everything can be proved with certain reasons, everything can be refuted with certain reasons. Materialism can be rigorously proven in its entirety, and it can be rigorously proven when it engages in individual questions of life or existence. And one will not be able to simply knock out of the field that which a materialist can cite in support of his views, if one simply wants to refute his view from opposite points of view. It is the same for someone who represents a spiritual existence. Therefore, anyone who really wants to research spiritual matters must not only know the arguments in favor of a particular worldview, but must also know all the arguments against it. For the remarkable result emerges that the actual truth only emerges when one allows what speaks for a matter and what speaks against a matter to take effect on the soul. And anyone who allows his mind to be fixed, I might say, on any web of concepts or images of a one-sided world view will always close his mind to the fact that the opposite can also assert itself in the soul, that the opposite must even appear right to a certain degree. And so he will be in a situation, like someone who wanted to claim that human life could only be sustained by inhalation. Inhalation presupposes exhalation; the two belong together. But this is always the case with our concepts and ideas that relate to questions of world view. We can put forward a concept that affirms something, we can put forward a concept that denies it; the one demands the other, like inhalation demands exhalation, and vice versa. And just as real life can only appear, can only reveal itself through exhalation and inhalation, when both are present, so can the spiritual only come to life in the soul when one is able to respond in an equally positive way to both the pros and cons of a matter. The affirmative concept, the affirmative idea, is within the living whole of the soul, so to speak, like an exhalation; the negative concept, like an inhalation; and it is only in their living interaction that that which relates to spiritual reality is revealed. Therefore, it is not at all appropriate for spiritual science to apply the usual methods that one is so accustomed to in everyday literature, where this or that is proved or refuted. The spiritual scientist realizes that what is presented in a positive way can always have a certain justification when it relates to questions of world view, but so can the opposite phenomenon. But when one advances in matters of world-conception to that direct life which lives in positive and negative concepts, just as physical life lives in inhalation and exhalation, then one comes to concepts which really take in the spirit directly, to concepts which are equal to reality. One must then, however, often express oneself differently than one expresses oneself according to the habits of thinking in ordinary life. But the way in which one expresses oneself arises out of the living, active inner experiencing of the spirit. And the spirit can only be inwardly experienced, not outwardly perceived in the way of material existence.

Now you know that one of the most important questions of our world view, and one that was also treated in the first lectures I gave here this winter, is the question of substance, of matter. And I would like to touch on this question today from the point of view I have just hinted at, as an introduction.

We cannot come to terms with the question of substance or matter if we keep trying to form ideas or concepts of what matter actually is; if we want to understand, in other words, what matter is. Anyone who has really wrestled with such questions, which are remote for many people, knows what such questions are all about. For if he has wrestled with it for a time, without yielding to any prejudice, then he comes to a completely different point of view regarding such a question. He comes to a point of view that makes him consider more important the way one behaves in one's soul when forming such a concept as that of matter. This wrestling of the soul itself is raised into consciousness. And then one arrives at a view precisely on these riddle-questions, which I could express in the following way.

He who wants to understand matter, substance, in the way it is usually understood, is like a person who says: I now want to get an impression of darkness, of a dark room. What does he do? He lights a light and regards this as the right method to get the impression of the dark room. It is, in fact, the most absurd thing one could do. And it is equally absurd — but one must become aware of this through a marked struggle — to believe that one will ever be able to cognize matter by setting the spirit in motion to illuminate matter with the spirit, as it were. Only where the spirit can be silent in our body itself, in the sensation of the senses, where the life of representation ends, only there does an external process penetrate into our inner being. There we can - by letting the spirit be silent and experiencing this silence of the spirit - have matter, substance, truly represented in our soul, so to speak.

One does not arrive at such concepts through ordinary logic; or if one does arrive at them through ordinary logic, then they turn out, I might say, to be much too thin to evoke real conviction. Only when one wrestles in the indicated way in one's soul with certain concepts, then they lead one to such a result as I have indicated.

Now the opposite is also the case. Let us assume that someone wants to grasp the spirit. If he seeks it, for example, in the purely external material form of the human body, he is like someone who, in order to grasp the light, extinguishes it. For the secret of the matter is that the external sensual nature itself is the refutation of the spirit, the extinguishing of the spirit. It reproduces the spirit just as illuminated objects reflect light. But nowhere can we, if we do not grasp the spirit in living activity, ever find it from any material processes. For that is precisely the essence of material processes: that the spirit has transformed itself into them, that the spirit has been transformed into them. And if we then try to recognize the spirit from them, then we misunderstand ourselves.

I wanted to say this by way of introduction so that more and more clarity can come about what the cognitive attitude of the spiritual researcher actually is, and how the spiritual researcher needs a certain breadth and mobility of the life of ideas in order to penetrate the things that are to be penetrated. With such concepts it is then possible to illuminate the important questions, which I also touched on last time here, and which I will only briefly mention in order to move on to our considerations today.

I said: As things have developed in the newer formation of the spirit, a one-sided view of the relationship between the soul-spiritual and the bodily-physical has increasingly come about, which is expressed by the fact that today the soul-spiritual is actually only sought within that part of the human body that lies in the nervous system or in the brain. In a sense, the soul-spiritual is assigned to the brain and nervous system alone, and one regards the rest of the organism more or less as an adjunct to the brain and nervous system when speaking of the soul-spiritual. Now I have tried to explain the results of spiritual research in this field by pointing out that one can only arrive at a true understanding of the relationship between the human soul and the human body if one places the whole human soul in relation to the whole physical body. But then it becomes clear that there is a deeper background to the structure of the human soul as a whole, into the actual life of perception, into the life of feeling and into the life of will. For only the actual life of perception of the soul is bound to the nervous organism in the way that modern physiological psychology assumes. On the other hand, the life of feeling — and here I must make it clear that I do not speak of it as it is presented to us, but as it arises — is related to the breathing organism of the human being, to everything that is breathing and is connected with breathing, in the same way as the life of presentation is related to the nervous system. So we must allot to the breathing organism the life of feeling of the soul. Then further: that which we call the life of will is in an equal relationship to that which we must call metabolism in the body; naturally right down into its finest ramifications. And by taking into account the fact that the individual systems in the organism are intertwined — metabolism naturally also takes place in the nerves —, I would like to say that at these outermost ends things interpenetrate. But a true understanding is only possible if we look at things in this way, if we know that the impulses of will can be attributed to metabolic processes in the same way as imaginative experiences can be attributed to processes in the human nervous system or in the brain.

Of course, such things can only be hinted at at first. And for the very reason that they can only be hinted at, objections are possible over and over again. But I do know one thing for certain: if we approach the subject with the whole range of anatomical and physiological research, that is, if we consider everything that anatomical and physiological research is, then there will be complete harmony between the spiritual scientific assertions I have made and the natural scientific assertions. On a superficial examination — let me just put forward the objection as a particularly characteristic one — objections can, of course, be raised against such a comprehensive truth. Someone might say: Let us first agree that certain feelings are connected with the respiratory organism; for the fact that this can be shown very plausibly for certain feelings cannot actually be doubted by anyone. But someone might say: Yes, but what about the fact that we perceive melodies, for example, that melodies arise in our consciousness? The feeling of aesthetic pleasure is connected with melodies. Can we speak here of some kind of relationship between the respiratory organism and that which quite obviously arises in the head and which, according to physiological findings, is so clearly connected with the nervous organism? As soon as we look at the matter properly, the correctness of my assertion immediately becomes completely clear. Namely, one must then take into consideration that with every exhalation an important process in the brain occurs in parallel: that the brain would rise during exhalation if it were not held down by the skullcap – breathing propagates into the brain – and vice versa; during inhalation the brain sinks. And since it cannot rise and fall because the skullcap is there, what is known to physiology occurs: the change in the blood flow occurs, what is known to physiology as brain breathing takes place, that is, certain processes that occur in parallel with the breathing process in the nerve environment. And in this encounter of the breathing process with what lives in us as sounds through our ear, what happens is that feeling is also connected to the respiratory organism in this area in the same way as the mere life of thinking is connected to the nervous organism.

I will only hint at this because it is something particularly remote and therefore provides a close objection. If one could agree with someone on all the details of the physiological results, no such details would contradict what was presented here last time and what has been presented again today.

Now it is my task to continue our discussion in a similar way to the last lecture. And for that I must go into a little more detail about the way in which the human being develops sensory perception in order to show what the actual relationship is between the sensory perception that leads to representations and the life of feeling and will, and indeed the life of the human being as soul, as body and as spirit.

Through our sensory life, we come into contact with our sensory environment. Within this sensory environment, natural science distinguishes certain substances, or, to be more precise, forms of substance, for it is these that are important here. If I wanted to speak in terms of physics, I would have to say aggregate states: solid, liquid, gaseous. But now, as you all know, physical and scientific research adds something else to these material forms. When science wants to explain light, it is not satisfied with just accepting the material forms that I have just mentioned. Instead, it reaches for what appears to it to be more subtle than these types of matter; it reaches for what is usually called ether. The concept of ether is, of course, an extraordinarily difficult one, and it can be said that the various thoughts that have been formed about what should be said about ether are conceivably diverse and manifold. Naturally, all these details cannot be discussed here. It should only be noted that natural science feels compelled to establish the concept of ether, that is, to think of the world not only as filled with the denser substances that can be perceived directly by the senses, but as filled with ether. The characteristic feature is that natural science cannot use its methods to determine what ether actually is. This is because natural science always needs material foundations for its actual work. But the ether itself always eludes material foundations, so to speak. It appears in connection with material processes, it causes material processes; but it cannot be grasped, so to speak, by the means that are tied to the material foundations. Therefore, a peculiar concept of ether has emerged, especially in recent times, which is actually extraordinarily interesting. The concept of ether that can be found among physicists today tends to say: ether must be that which, whatever else it may be, in any case has none of the properties that ordinary matter has. Thus, natural science points beyond its own material foundations by saying of the ether that it has what it cannot find with its methods. Natural science comes precisely to the assumption of an ether, but not to filling this ether concept with any content with its methods.

Now, spiritual research yields the following. Natural science starts from the material basis, spiritual research starts from the basis of soul and spirit. The spiritual researcher, if he does not arbitrarily stop at a certain boundary, is driven to the concept of ether in the same way as the natural scientist, only from the other side. The spiritual researcher attempts to include in his knowledge that which is active and effective within the soul. If he were to stop at what he can experience inwardly in ordinary soul life, then in this field he would not even go as far as the natural scientist who accepts the concept of ether. For the natural scientist at least formulates the concept of ether and accepts it. The student of the soul who does not arrive at a concept of ether on his own initiative is like a natural scientist who says: What do I care about what else is alive there! I assume the three basic forms: solid, liquid, gaseous bodies; I do not concern myself with what is supposed to be even thinner. This is indeed how the science of the soul usually proceeds.

But not everyone who has worked in the field of soul research does it this way; and particularly within that extraordinarily significant scientific development, which is based on German idealism that became established in the first third of the nineteenth century, — not in this idealism itself, but in what then developed out of it —, we find attempts to approach the ether concept from the other side, from the spiritual-soul side, just as natural science ascends from the material side to the ether. And if you really want to have the ether concept, you have to approach it from two sides. Otherwise you will not be able to come to terms with it. Now, the interesting thing is that the great German philosophical idealists, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, despite their insistent thinking and conceptualizing, which I have often characterized here, still did not have the ether concept. They could not, so to speak, strengthen their inner soul life, could not so energize it that the ether concept would have presented itself to them. On the other hand, in those who allowed themselves to be fertilized by this idealism, who, so to speak, allowed the thoughts that were generated at that time to continue to work in their souls, although they were not as great geniuses as their idealist predecessors, this ether concept arose out of this soul research. We find this concept of ether first in Immanuel Hermann Fichte, the son of the great Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who was also a disciple of his father, in that he allowed what Johann Gottlieb Fichte and his successors, Schelling and Hegel, had done in their souls to continue to work within him. But by condensing it, as it were, to greater inner effectiveness, he came to say to himself: When one looks at the soul-spiritual life, when one, I might say, measures it on all sides, then one comes to say to oneself: This soul-spiritual life must run down into the ether, just as solid, liquid, and gaseous matter runs up into the ether. The lowest part of the soul must, as it were, open into the ether in the same way that the highest part of the material opens into the ether at the top. And Immanuel Hermann Fichte formed certain characteristic ideas about this, through which he really did come from the spiritual-soul to the boundary of the ether. We read in his “Anthropology” 1860 - you will find the passage quoted in my last book “Vom Menschenrätsel” -:

“In the material elements....the truly enduring, that unifying form principle of the body cannot be found, which proves effective throughout our entire life.” “So we are pointed to a second, essentially different cause in the body.” “In that it contains that which is actually enduring in metabolism, it is the true, inner, invisible body, but one that is present in all visible materiality. The other, the outer appearance of the same, formed from incessant metabolism, may henceforth be called 'body', which is truly not enduring and not one, but the mere effect or afterimage of that inner corporeality, which throws it into the changing material world, just as, for example, the magnetic force prepares a seemingly dense body from the parts of iron filings, but which atomizes in all directions when the binding force is withdrawn.

Now, for I. H. Fichte, an invisible body lived in the ordinary body, which consists of external matter, and we could also call this invisible body the etheric body; an etheric body that brings the individual particles of matter of this visible body into their forms, shapes them, and develops them. And I. H. Fichte is so clear that this etheric body, to which he descends from the soul, is not subject to the processes of the physical body, that for him it is enough to have insight into the existence of such an etheric body to get beyond the riddle of death. For I. H. Fichte says in his “Anthropology”:

I have shown with I. H. Fichte how he advances to such an invisible body of the soul. It is interesting that in many places in the heyday of German idealistic intellectual life, the same thing emerged. Some time ago I pointed out a solitary thinker who was a school director in Bromberg and who dealt with the question of immortality: Johann Heinrich Deinhardt, who died in the 1860s. He initially approached the question of immortality like the others, by trying to get behind this question of immortality through ideas and concepts. But for him, more emerged than for those who merely live in concepts. And so the editor of that treatise on immortality written by J. H. Deinhardt was able to cite a passage from a letter that the author wrote to him in which Deinhardt says that although he had not yet communicate the matter in a book, but that his inner research had clearly shown him that during his life between birth and death, man works on the development of an invisible body, which is released into the spiritual world at death.

And so many other phenomena of German intellectual life could be cited in favor of such a direction of research and contemplation. They would all prove that in this direction of research there was a desire not to stop at what mere philosophizing speculation, mere living in concepts can yield, but to strengthen the inner soul life in such a way that it reaches the density that reaches the ether.

Of course, the real mystery of the ether will not yet be solved from within by following the paths these researchers have taken, but it can be said, so to speak, that these researchers are on the path to spiritual science. For this mystery of the ether will be solved as the human soul undergoes those inner processes through practice, which I have often characterized here and which are described in more detail in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. Man does, however, gradually attain to really reaching the ether from within by going through these inner soul processes. Then the ether will be directly there for him. But only then is he capable of grasping what a sense perception actually is, what is actually present in sensory perception.

In order to present this today, I must, so to speak, approach the question from a different angle. Let us approach what actually takes place in metabolic processes for humans. Roughly speaking, we can think of the metabolic processes in the human organism as taking place in such a way that they essentially have to do with the liquid element of substance. This will be easy to see if one is even slightly familiar with the most viable scientific ideas in this field. What is a metabolic process lives, so to speak, in the liquid element. What breathing is, lives in the airy element; in breathing we have an interaction between inner and outer air processes, just as in metabolism we have an interaction between material processes that have taken place outside our body and those that take place inside our body. What happens when we perceive with our senses and follow it with our imagination? What does that actually correspond to? In the same way that fluid processes correspond to metabolism and airy processes to breathing, what corresponds to perception? Perceptual processes correspond to etheric processes. Just as we live, as it were, with metabolism in the liquid, we live with breathing in the air, we live with perception in the ether. And inner etheric processes, inner etheric processes that take place in the invisible body, of which has just been spoken, touch with external etheric processes in sensory perception. If one objects: Yes, but certain sensory perceptions are obvious metabolic processes! — it is particularly striking for those sensory perceptions that correspond to the so-called lower senses, smell, taste — a closer look would show that what is material belongs to the metabolism itself, and that in every such process, even in tasting for example, an etheric process takes place through which we enter into relationship with the outer ether, just as we enter into relationship with the air with our physical body when we breathe. Without an understanding of the etheric world, an understanding of the sensations is not possible. |

And what actually happens? Well, what happens there can basically only be understood when one has brought the inner soul process so far that the inner etheric-physical has become a reality. This will be the case when what I have recently called imaginative visualization in my lectures here has been achieved. When the images have been strengthened by the exercises that you can find in the book mentioned above, so that they are no longer abstract images, which we otherwise have, but are images full of life, then they can be called imaginations. When these images have become so full of life that they are imaginations, then they live directly in the etheric, whereas when they are abstract images, they only live in the soul. They spread into the etheric. And then, when one has so far brought it in one's inner experimentation that one experiences the ether as a living reality within oneself, then one can experience what happens in the sense perception. The sensation consists in this – I can only present this today as a result – that, as the external environment sends the etheric from the material into our sense organs, it creates those gulfs of which I spoke the day before yesterday, so that what is outside also becomes internal within our sense realm; for example, we have a sound, so to speak, between the sense life and the external world. Then, as a result of the outer ether penetrating our sense organs, this outer ether is killed. And as the outer ether enters our sense organs in a deadened state, it is revived by the inner ether of the etheric body counteracting it. This is the essence of sensory perception. Just as in the breathing process, death and life come into being when we inhale oxygen and exhale carbonic acid, so there is an interaction between the quasi-dead ether and the living ether in the sense of feeling.

This is an extraordinarily important fact for spiritual science. For that which cannot be found through philosophical speculation, on which the philosophical speculation of the last centuries has so often failed, can only be found through spiritual science. Sensory perception can thus be recognized as a fine interaction between external and internal ether; as the animation of the ether killed in the sensory organ from the inner etheric body. So that what the senses kill in us from the environment is inwardly revived by the etheric body, and we thereby come to what is precisely perception of the external world.

This is extraordinarily important, for it shows how, even when he is giving himself up to sense perception, man lives not only in the physical organism but also in the ethereal supersensible, and how the whole life of the senses is a

life and weaving in the invisible etheric. This is what the deeper researchers have always suspected in the characterized time, but it will be raised to certainty through spiritual science. Among those who recognized this significant truth, I will mention the almost completely forgotten J.P.V. Troxler. I have already mentioned him in earlier lectures here in earlier years. In his Lectures on Philosophy, he said:

"Even in the past, philosophers distinguished a fine, noble soul body from the coarser body... a soul that has an image of the body, which they called a schema, and which was the higher inner human being... In more recent times, even Kant in Dreams of a Spirit-Seer seriously dreams, in jest, of an entire inner spiritual human being who carries all the limbs of the outer one on his spirit body; Lavater also writes and thinks in the same way... ."

These researchers were also aware that the moment one ascends from mere material observation to the observation of this supersensible organism within us, one has to pass from ordinary anthropology to a kind of knowledge that comes to its results by way of inner observation. It is therefore interesting that both I. H. Fichte and Troxler are clear about the fact that anthropology must be elevated to something else if it is to grasp the whole human being. I. H. Fichte says in his 'Anthropology':

"Sensual consciousness... with the entire, also human, life of the senses, has no other significance than to be the site in which the supersensible life of the spirit is realized, in that through free conscious deed it introduces the otherworldly spiritual content of the ideas into the world of the senses... This thorough grasp of the human being now elevates “anthropology in its final result to ‘anthroposophy’.”

We see from this current of German intellectual life, which, I would say, drives idealism from its abstractness to reality, the inkling of an anthroposophy. And Troxler says that one must assume a super-spiritual sense in conjunction with a super-sensible spirit, and that one can thus grasp the human being in such a way that one no longer has to deal with an ordinary anthropology, but with something higher:

"If it is now highly gratifying that the latest philosophy, which... . in every anthroposophy.. . must reveal itself in every anthroposophy, it cannot be overlooked that this idea cannot be a fruit of speculation, and that the true individuality of man must not be confused either with what it sets up as subjective spirit or finite ego, nor with what it juxtaposes to it as absolute spirit or absolute personality.

With Anthroposophy, something is not presented that emerges, as it were, out of arbitrariness, but something that inevitably leads to that spiritual life, which once it is engaged in, experiences concepts and ideas not only as concepts and ideas, but condenses them to such an extent - and I would like to use the expression again - that they lead into reality, that they become saturated with reality.

But, and this is the defect of this research, if one merely rises from the physical to the etheric body, one still does not get along; but one only comes to a certain limit, which must be exceeded, however, because beyond the etheric only the soul-spiritual lies. And the essential thing is that this soul-spiritual can only enter into a relationship with the physical through the mediation of the etheric. Thus, we have to look for the actual soul of the human being in that which now works completely super-etherically in the etheric, so that the etheric in turn shapes the physical as it is itself shaped, permeated, and lived through by the soul.

Let us now try to grasp the human being at the other pole, the will pole: We have said that the life of the will is connected with the metabolism. Inasmuch as the impulse of the will expresses itself in the metabolism, it lives, not merely in the external physical metabolism, but, since the whole human being is within the boundaries of his being, the etheric also lives in what develops as metabolism when a will impulse proceeds. Spiritual science shows that the opposite of sensory perception is present in the will impulse. While in sensory perception the outer ether is, as it were, animated by the inner ether, so that the inner ether pours into the dead ether, in the case of the will impulse, when it arises from the soul spiritual, then through metabolism and everything connected with it, the etheric body is loosened and driven out of the physical body in those areas where the metabolism takes place. So here we have the opposite: the etheric body, as it were, withdraws from physical processes. And therein lies the essence of acts of will, in that the etheric body withdraws from the physical body.

Now those revered listeners who have heard the earlier lectures will remember that, in addition to imaginative knowledge, I have distinguished between inspired knowledge and the actual intuitive knowledge. And just as imaginative knowledge is the result of such a strengthening of the soul life that one comes to the etheric life in the way indicated earlier, so intuitive knowledge is given by the fact that one learns, so to speak, in one's soul life to participate through powerful impulses of will, even to evoke what one can call withdrawal of the etheric body from physical processes. Thus in this area the soul-spiritual extends into the physical-bodily. When a volitional impulse originally emanates from the soul-spiritual, it finds the etheric, and the consequence is that this etheric is withdrawn from some metabolic area of the physical body. And from this working of the soul-spiritual through the etheric upon the bodily, there arises what may be called the transmission of a volitional impulse to some bodily movement, to some bodily activity. But it is only when we consider the human being as a whole in this way that we arrive at his actual immortal part. For as soon as we learn to recognize how the spiritual-soul element weaves in the ether, it also becomes clear to us that this weaving of the spiritual-soul element in the ether is independent of those processes of the physical body that are included in birth, conception and death. And in this way it is possible to truly rise to the immortal in the human being, to that which connects with the body that one receives through the hereditary current and which is maintained when the human being passes through the gate of death again. For the eternal spiritual is connected with that which is born and dies here, indirectly through the etheric.

It has become clear that the concepts presented by spiritual science are very much at odds with today's thinking habits and that it is difficult for people to find their way into these concepts. It may be said that one of the obstacles to this finding one's way in, besides others, is that so little effort is made to seek the real connection between the spiritual and soul life and the bodily in the way suggested today. Most people long for something quite different from what spiritual research can actually provide. What is it actually that takes place in man when he imagines? An etheric process that only interacts with an external etheric process. But in order for a person to be in this direction in a healthy mental and physical way, it is necessary for that person to become aware of where the boundary is where the inner and outer ether touch. This mostly happens unconsciously. It becomes conscious when the human being rises to imaginative knowledge, when he experiences inwardly the rain and movement of the ether, and his coming together with the outer ether, which dies in the sense organ. In this interaction between the inner and outer ether, we have, so to speak, the outermost limit of the effectiveness of the ether in general on the human organism. For that which is in our etheric body, for example, primarily affects the organism in terms of growth. There it is still active within the organism, forming it. It gradually organizes our organism so that it adapts to the outside world, as we see when a child grows up. But this inwardly formative grasp of the physical body by the ether must reach a certain limit. If it goes beyond this limit through some morbid process, then what lives and moves in the ether, but which should maintain itself in the etheric, encroaches upon the physical organism, so that what should remain as ether movement is, as it were, interwoven into the physical organism. What then happens? That which should actually only be experienced inwardly as an image, occurs as a process in the physical body. Then it is what is called a hallucination. When the ether process crosses its boundary into the physical, because the body, through its disease, does not offer the right resistance, then what is called a hallucination arises. Now, many people who want to enter the spiritual world actually desire hallucinations above all. Of course, the spiritual researcher cannot offer them that, because hallucination is nothing more than the reproduction of a purely material process, a process that takes place in relation to the soul beyond the boundaries of the body, that is, in the body. On the other hand, what leads to the spiritual world is that one goes from this boundary back into the soul and instead of hallucinations, one comes to imagination, and imagination is a purely mental experience. And because it is a purely mental experience, the soul lives in the spiritual world in the imagination. But in this way the soul also lives in fully conscious penetration of the imagination. And it is important to realize that imagination, that is, the right way to gain spiritual knowledge, and hallucination, are opposites and also destroy each other. He who hallucinates through a diseased organism blocks the path to true imagination; and he who has true imagination is most safely guarded from all hallucination. Hallucination and imagination are mutually exclusive and mutually destructive.

But the same is true at the other pole of the human being. Just as the etheric body can encroach upon the physical body, can sink its formative power into the physical body, and thereby cause hallucinations, that is, purely physical processes, so on the other side, through certain morbid formations of the organism or through induced fatigue or other conditions of the organism, the etheric, as it was characterized in the act of will, can emerge in an irregular manner. Then it may happen that instead of the etheric really being withdrawn from the physical metabolic region in a correct act of will, it remains within, and the purely physical activity of the physical metabolic region encroaches upon the etheric , so that the etheric becomes dependent on the physical, whereas in normal will-manifestation the physical is dependent on the etheric, which in turn is determined by the soul-spiritual. When this happens through such processes as I have indicated, then, I might say, the compulsive act, which consists in the physical body with its metabolic processes forcing its way into the etheric, so to speak pushing itself into the etheric body, gives rise to the morbid counter-image of hallucination. And if the compulsive act is evoked as a pathological phenomenon, then one can again say: it excludes what is called intuition in spiritual scientific knowledge. Intuition and compulsive behavior are mutually exclusive, just as hallucination and imagination are mutually exclusive. This is why there is nothing more soulless than, on the one hand, hallucinators, because hallucinations are just hints at bodily conditions that should not be; and, on the other hand, for example, the whirling dervishes. The dance of the dervish comes about through the physical body pushing into the etheric, so that it is not the etheric that brings about the effect from the spiritual-soul, but basically only regular compulsive actions occur. And anyone who believes that they can find revelations of the soul in the dancing dervish should first of all study spiritual science in order to realize that the dancing dervish is proof that the spirit, the spiritual-soul, has left its body; that is why he dances in this way.

And, I would like to say, only a little more extensive is that which is not dancing, but which, for example, is automatic writing, mediumistic writing. This also consists in nothing more than first driving the spiritual-soul out of the human being completely, and allowing the physical body, which has been pushed into the etheric body, to unfold as it does when it has become empty, as it were, of the inner ether and now comes under the control of the surrounding outer ether. All these subjects lead away from spiritual science, not toward it, although nothing should be objected to them from the standpoint of those from whom they usually meet with so much opposition. In the dancing dervish one can study what a danced art, a truly artistic dance, should be. The artistic dance should consist precisely in the fact that each individual movement corresponds to a volitional impulse, which can also become conscious to the person concerned, so that one is never dealing with a mere intrusion of physical processes into ethereal processes. Only spiritualized dance is artistic dance. The dancing of the dervish is only the denial of spirituality. Some will object: But it does show the spirit! It does, but how? You can study a shell if you take in and look at the living shell; but you can also study it when the living shell is gone, by looking at the shell: the shape of the shell is reproduced in the shell, the shape born out of life. But in a similar way, we also have a reproduction of the spiritual, a dead reproduction of the spiritual, when we are dealing with automatic writing or with a whirling dervish. That is why it resembles the spiritual as much as the shell resembles the mussel, and why it can be so easily confused. But only when we truly penetrate into the spiritual can we have the right understanding of these things.

If we start from the bodily, through the sensation of the senses, and ascend to the realm of the imagination, which then transfers itself into the soul-spiritual, we come to recognize in this way, in a spiritual-scientific way, that what is aroused by the sensations of the senses is, as it were, deposited at a certain point and becomes memory. Memory arises from the fact that the sensory impression continues in the body, so that not only can the etheric work from within in the sensory impressions themselves, but the etheric can now also be active in what the sensory impression has left behind in the body. Then what has gone into memory is brought up again from remembrance.

Of course, it is not possible to go into these things in more detail in the short time of a one-hour lecture. But one will never come to a real understanding of what imagination and memory are, and how they relate to the soul and spirit, if one does not advance in the spiritual-scientific sense on the path that has been indicated.

At the other pole, there is the whole current that flows from the spiritual-soul of the will impulses down into the physical body, through which the actions are effected. In the ordinary life of man, the sense life comes to remembrance and remains, as it were, in the act of remembering. Remembrance is placed before the soul-spiritual, so that the latter is not aware of itself, of how it creates and is active through the sensations of the senses. Only a vague, confused notion arises that the soul lives and weaves in the etheric, when this soul, living and weaving in the etheric, is not yet so strengthened in this etheric weaving that all etheric weaving breaks at the boundary of the physical. When the soul-spiritual interweaves the etheric body in such a way that what it expresses in the etheric body does not immediately break at the physical body, but is so sustained in the etheric that it reaches the boundaries of the physical body, but is still noticed in the etheric, then the dream arises. And the life of dreams, when it is really studied, will become proof of the lowest form of supersensible experience of man. For in dreams man experiences that he cannot unfold his soul-spiritual, because it seems too powerless, in will impulses within that which is present in the dream images. And because the will impulses are lacking, because the spirit and soul intervene so little in the etheric in the dream that the soul itself becomes aware of these will impulses, the chaotic fabric that the dream represents arises.

What dreams are on the one hand, on the other hand there are those phenomena in which the will, coming from the soul-spiritual, intervenes in the outer world through the etheric-physical , but is just as little aware of what is actually happening there as he is able to become aware in the dream, due to the weak activity of the spiritual-soul, that the human being is living and breathing in the spiritual. Just as the dream so to speak represents the attenuated sense perception, so something else represents the intensified effect of the spiritual-soul, the intensified effect of the will impulses; and that is what we call fate.

We do not see the connections in fate, just as we do not see in the dream what is actually weaving and living there as the real thing. Just as material processes always underlie the dream, surging into the ether, so the soul and spiritual anchored in the will surge towards the outer world. But in ordinary life the soul and spiritual are not organized in such a way that the spirit itself can be seen in its activity in what happens to us as the succession of so-called fateful experiences. At the moment we grasp this succession, we learn to recognize the fabric of fate, we learn to recognize that just as in ordinary life the soul obscures the spiritual through ideas, in fate it obscures the spiritual through affect, through sympathy and antipathy, with which it takes in the events that come to it as life events. In the moment when one sees through sympathy and antipathy in a spiritual-scientific way, when one really grasps the course of life's events objectively and calmly, one notices how everything that happens in our lives between birth and death is either the after-effect of previous lives on earth or the preparation for later lives on earth. Just as, on the one hand, natural science does not penetrate to the spiritual and soul, not even to the etheric, when it seeks the relationships between the material world and the imagination, so at the other pole, natural science cannot cope with its efforts today. Just as it clings to material processes in the nervous organism in the life of the imagination, so at the other pole it clings to something unclear, which, I might say, hovers nebulously between the physical and the soul.

These are precisely the areas where one must become fully aware of how world-view concepts can be both proven and refuted. And for those who insist on proof, the positive has much to recommend it; but one must also be able to experience the negative inwardly, in keeping with one's insights, as with exhalation one inhales. Recently, what is called analytical psychology has emerged. This analytical psychology is, I would say, inspired by good intuitions. For what does it want? This analytical psychology, or as it is usually called today, psychoanalysis, wants to descend from the ordinary soul life to that which is no longer contained in the ordinary present soul life, but is a remnant of earlier soul experience. The psychoanalyst assumes that mental life is not exhausted in the present mental experience, in the conscious mental experience, but that consciousness dips down into the subconscious. And in much of what appears in the mental life as a disturbance, as confusion, as this or that defect, the psychoanalyst sees an effect of what surges down in the subconscious. But what the psychoanalyst sees in this subconscious is interesting. When you hear what he lists in this subconscious, it is first of all deceived hopes in life. The psychoanalyst finds some person who suffers from this or that depression. This depression does not have to originate in the present conscious mental life, but in the past. Something occurred in mental experience in this life. The person has since emerged from it, but not completely; a residue remains in the subconscious. He has experienced disappointments, for example. Through education and other processes, he has come to terms with these disappointments in his conscious mental life, but in the subconscious they live on. There they surge, as it were, to the very edge of consciousness. There it then produces the unclear mental depression. The psychoanalyst thus searches in all kinds of disappointments, in deceived hopes of life that have been drawn down into the subconscious, for that which determines the conscious life in a dark way. He also searches for this in what colors the soul life as temperament. In what the soul life colors out of certain rational impulses, the psychoanalyst seeks a subconscious that, as it were, only strikes against consciousness. But then he comes to a broad area — I am only reporting here — which the psychoanalyst grasps by saying: 'The animalistic mud of the soul is playing up into conscious life'. Now, it is not at all denied that this basic sludge is present. In these lectures I myself have already pointed out how certain mystics have experiences in that something, be it for example the erotic, is subtly brought up and plays into consciousness, so that one believes to have particularly exalted experiences, while only the erotic, “the animalistic basic mud of the soul,” is brought up and sometimes interpreted in a deeply mystical sense. One can still see in such a poetically delicate mystic as Mechthild of Magdeburg how erotic feeling goes into the details of the images. These things must be clearly grasped so that no errors are made in the spiritual-scientific field. For anyone who wants to penetrate the spirit must be particularly aware of all the paths of error, not to avoid them, but to avoid them. But anyone who speaks of this animalistic basic mud of the soul, who only speaks of disappointed hopes in life and the like, does not go deep enough into the life of the soul: he is like a person walking across a field in which nothing can yet be seen and who believes that it contains only the soil or even the manure, whereas in fact this field already contains all the fruits that will soon come up as grain or other things. When speaking of the basic mud of the soul, one should also speak of what is embedded in it. Certainly, there are disappointed hopes contained in this basic mud; but at the same time, what is embedded in it contains a germinating power that represents what – when the human being has passed through the gate of death into the life that between death and a new birth, and then enters into a new earth-life, makes something quite different out of the deceived hopes than a depression, that makes out of them that which then in a next life leads to disillusionment, to hardening. What the psychoanalyst seeks in the disappointed hopes of life in the depths of the soul, if he delves deeply enough, is what is being prepared in the present life in order to intervene fatefully in the next life.

Thus, if we dig around and search through the animalistic mud of the ground without dirtying our hands, as is unfortunately so often the case with psychoanalysts, we find the spiritual and mental weaving of fate that extends beyond birth and death with the spiritual and mental life of the soul. Analytical psychology is precisely the kind of psychology that can be used to learn how everything is right and everything is wrong when it comes to questions of world view, namely from one side or the other. Nevertheless, there is an enormous amount that can be said in support of the one-sided assertions of the psychoanalysts; therefore a refutation will not greatly impress those who are sworn to these concepts. But if one learns to recognize what speaks for and against with the attitude of knowledge that was characterized at the beginning of this lecture, then it is precisely from the pros and cons of the soul that one will experience what really works. For, I might say, between what can be observed in the soul, as psychologists do, who only go to the level of consciousness, and what the psychoanalyst finds down in the animalistic mud of the soul, lies the realm that belongs to the spiritual-soul-eternal, which goes through births and deaths.

The exploration of the human soul also leads to a correct relationship with the external world. Modern science has not only spoken about the ether in an indeterminate way, but it is also spoken about in such a way that the greatest mysteries of the world are actually attributed to it: what then took on solid forms, became planets, suns and moons, and so on. In this view, the soul and spiritual processes at work in man are regarded as no more than a mere episode. There is only dead ether, back and front. If one gets to know the ether only from one side, then one can come to such a construction of the becoming of the world, to which the subtle Herman Grimm — I have quoted his saying before, but it is so significant that it can always be brought before the soul again — says the following words. By familiarizing himself with how one thinks that the dead etheric mist of the cosmos has given rise to that out of which life and spirit are now developing, and by measuring it against Goethe's world view, he comes to the following saying:

What appears here again within German intellectual life as a feeling born out of a healthy soul life is shown in a true light by spiritual science. For, as one learns to recognize, how the animation of the dead ether through the soul, through the living ether, comes about, then through inner experience one comes away from the possibility that our world building could ever have arisen from a dead etheric. And this riddle of the world takes on a quite different form when we become acquainted with the corresponding riddle of the soul. We now recognize the ether itself in its living form, we recognize how the dead ether must first arise out of the living. So that by going back to the beginning of the world, we must come back to the soul and see in the spiritual-soul the origin of that which is developing today. But while this spiritual-soul substance remains a mere hypothesis, a mere figment of the imagination, in relation to the outer riddles of the world, so long as one does not learn about the whole life and weaving of the etheric through spiritual science in the encounter of the living ether from within with the dead ether from without, it is precisely through spiritual science that the cosmic fog itself becomes a living, spiritual-soul substance.

As you can see, the riddles of the soul also open up a significant perspective for the riddles of the world. I must pause on this perspective today. You can see that a true contemplation of outer and inner life from the point of view of spiritual science leads across the ether into the spiritual-soul realm, both in the soul itself and in the outer world.

On the other hand, there is the attitude of knowledge such as I have described in the case of a man whom I mentioned last time. Today we can at least surmise that from the corporeal as conceived by spiritual science, the bridge leads directly up to the spiritual-soul, in which ethics, morality, and morals are rooted, which originate in the spirit, just as the sensual leads into the spiritual. But in its study of purely external material things, science has arrived at a point of view that denies that ethics is rooted in the spiritual at all. Today, people are still too embarrassed to deny ethics itself, but they say the following about ethics, which is at the end of Jacques Loeb's lecture, which I presented last time with reference to the beginning. There he says, who comes to a brutal denial of ethics through scientific research:

“If our existence is based on the play of blind forces and is only a work of chance, if we ourselves are only chemical mechanisms, how can there be an ethic for us?” The answer to this is that our instincts form the root of our ethics, and that instincts are just as hereditary as the formative components of our body. We eat and drink and reproduce, not because metaphysicians have come to the conclusion that this is desirable, but because we are mechanically induced to do so. We are active because we are mechanically compelled to do so by the processes in our nervous system, and, if people are not economic slaves, the instinct of “successful triggering or successful work determines the direction of their activity. The mother loves her children and takes care of them, not because metaphysicians had the idea that this was beautiful, but because the instinct of brood care, presumably through the two sex chromosomes, is just as firmly determined as the morphological characters of the female body. We enjoy the company of other people because we are forced to do so by hereditary conditions. We fight for justice and truth and are willing to make sacrifices for them because we instinctively want to see our fellow human beings happy. That we have an ethic is due solely to our instincts, which are chemically and hereditarily laid down in us in the same way as the shape of our body."

Moral action leads back to instincts! Instincts lead back to physical-chemical action! The logic is, however, very threadbare. Of course, one can say that one should not wait for the metaphysicians to work out some metaphysical principles before acting ethically, but that is the same as saying: should one wait for the metaphysicians or the physiologists to discover the laws of digestion before digesting? I would therefore recommend to Professor Loeb not to investigate the physiological laws of digestion in the same brutal way as he attacks the metaphysical laws of ethical life. But one can say: one can be an important natural scientist today – but the habits of thought are such that they cut you off, as it were, from all spiritual life, that you no longer have an eye for this spiritual life at all. But this always goes hand in hand with the fact that you can, as it were, prove a defect in thinking, so that you never really have everything that goes into a thought.

One can indeed have strange experiences in this regard. I have already presented such an experience here some time ago; but I would like to present it again because it ties in with the ideas of a very important contemporary natural scientist, who is also one of those whom I attack precisely because I hold him in high esteem in one field. This naturalist has made great contributions in the field of astrophysics and also in certain other fields of natural science. But when he wrote a book summarizing the world view of the present and the development of this world view, he makes a remarkable statement in the preface. He is, so to speak, enchanted by how wonderfully far we have come in being able to interpret everything scientifically, and with a certain arrogance, as is common in such circles, he points to earlier times when this was not the case. Goethe, saying: “Whether one can really say that we live in the best of times is not clear; but that, in terms of scientific knowledge, we live in the best of times for knowledge compared to earlier times, we can refer to Goethe, who says:

It is a great delight
to place oneself in the spirit of the times,
to see how a wise man thought before us,
and how we have then finally come so gloriously far.

With this, a great naturalist of the present day concludes, that is, with a confession that he takes from Goethe. He has only forgotten that it is Wagner who makes this confession and that Faust says to this confession when Wagner has left:

How can the mind not lose all hope,
When it is always stuck with stale evidence,
Digging for treasure with a greedy hand
And happy when it finds earthworms!

This great researcher forgot to reflect on what Goethe actually says the moment he refers to Wagner to express how wonderfully far we have come. One can, I would say, see where thinking leaves off in the pursuit of reality.

And we could cite many more examples if we were to delve a little deeper into contemporary scientific literature. Since I hold the aforementioned natural scientist in high regard, as I have said, it will certainly not be taken amiss if I were to assert the true Goethean attitude in the face of such natural science, which puffs itself up by also claiming to be able to provide information about the spirit. For although we can forgive many a monist for being unable to grasp the spirit due to the weakness of his thinking, it is dangerous when the attitude that appears in Jacques Loeb and in the characterized natural scientist, who characterizes himself as Wagner but believes he is characterizing himself as Goethe, spreads more and more into the widest circles through the belief in authority. And it does. Those who penetrate into what spiritual science can give in terms of attitude may, if they follow the example of the natural scientist, even if it may not seem reverent enough to some, come to the genuine Goethean attitude by taking up Goethe's words, with which I would like to conclude this lecture:

It is a great horror
to put oneself in the shoes of souls like that,
how greedily they touch the material
and rush past the spirit!

We have been dealing with the various force currents that shape the human organism and give it form in a manner enabling us to comprehend it. If we really learn to know these formative forces, we must perceive that they could not function otherwise, that our heart, our eyes, inevitably had to become exactly what they are. We have traced the sense image of ourselves back to those super-sensible currents that flow back and forth in different directions, from above downward, from right to left, from the back forward, and so forth. At this point someone may try to catch me out by objecting that while dealing with the currents I had failed to explain a certain significant phenomenon in the human organism, that in addition to the asymmetrical organs (heart, liver, stomach, etc.) there are those that are arranged symmetrically. You might say that my description could at a pinch be accepted if the whole organism were laid out asymmetrically, but not in connection with the symmetrical organs. This objection, however, can be cleared away, too, as follows.

We have learned that the physical and etheric bodies stream from left to right and from right to left respectively, that is, in the plane in which the human being is formed symmetrically. Spiritual science teaches us that the physical body is an ancient entity, stemming from the old Saturn, while the germs of the etheric body, the astral body, and the ego were prepared on the old Sun, the old Moon, and the Earth respectively. In its first appearance on Saturn the physical body was asymmetrical, conditioned by a current corresponding to the one active today from left to right, and the first germ of the etheric body was also asymmetrical, with a current from right to left. Thence development proceeds; the physical body is further formed on the old Sun, the old Moon, and so on. Had this not occurred, the physical body would have remained lopsided, asymmetrical. As it actually happened, however, the further development of the physical body and of the other members continued on the old Moon and on the Earth, during which something occurred that altered the whole previous development and brought about a turnabout, so to speak, a reversal of the direction. If the physical body were to be formed, not into a lopsided but into a symmetrical structure, the Saturn current running from left to right had to be opposed by one running from right to left. How was this brought about? By the separation of the old Sun from the old Moon. The Sun forces, which hitherto had worked on the physical body from within, acted henceforth from without, that is, from the opposite direction. The physical body, as it was constituted up to the time of the old Moon, was then influenced by the Sun from without.

The etheric body experienced a similar transformation. You might ask why it is that this other side of the physical body, the result of Sun forces acting from without, is not much smaller, in a sense stunted, in comparison with the first, the older portion? It is because those beings that left the Moon and passed over with the Sun could develop stronger influences from their new sphere of action, owing precisely to this separation that meant a higher development for them. They had a more difficult task than the Saturn beings, for they had to counteract what was already developed in one direction. This condition obstructed the whole process of formation, so they had to become more powerful if they were to fulfill their task. This, in turn, necessitated their acting from the Sun during the Moon period, whereby their influence was intensified. In this way these younger but more powerful currents—from right to left—balanced the weaker ones—from left to right—and the physical body became a symmetrical structure.

We will now examine more closely some important details of the effects of those force currents, remembering that the sentient body sends its forces into the human organism from the front backward, but that the emanations of the sentient soul run forward from the back. Given the existence of the physical and etheric bodies and the general background, we ask in what manner these forces proceed to build the human organism?

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By being dammed up, stopped by the physical body, the backward-flowing currents of the sentient body could now bore into the human organism and build divers organs into what was already there. At the same time the sentient soul works in the organism from the back toward the front. The currents of the sentient body are dammed by the physical organism and bore their way in. In this way they are obstructed by the physical body, so they really had to bore holes, as it were.

In front (cf. sketch) we have the currents of the sentient body boring their way in. They form the sense organs. In the rear the formative forces are active that build the brain over them; this gives us the diagram of the human head seen in profile. The openings represent the eyes, ears, organs of smell, etc., and the brain is superimposed behind and above them. If spiritual science tells the truth, it is clear that the human head could not possibly appear different from the way it actually does. If a human head were ever to come into being at all it would have to look as it does. It does look that way, and that is evidence proffered by the world of outer phenomena itself.

In that connection there is another point to mention. The work of the sentient body proceeds inward, that of the sentient soul outward, or at least, it has that tendency. As a matter of fact, it is obstructed before emerging; it remains in the physical body of the brain and emerges only at those points where previously the sentient body had, so to speak, bored the holes for the sense organs in the front of the physical body. What we find, then, is that a part of our inner life flows outward as sentient soul.

The intellectual soul would not be capable of this. It is completely dammed up within, and no currents come to meet it from the opposite side. That is why human thinking takes place wholly within. Objects don't think for us; they don't show us the thoughts from without, nor bring them to us. That is the great secret of the relation of human thought to the outer world. With our sense organs we can perceive outer objects, and if these organs are healthy they do not err. The mind, on the other hand, which cannot directly contact objects, is the first inner member of the human being that can err, because its activity is completely dammed up within the brain and does not emerge. From this it follows that our thoughts about the outer world cannot be correct without an inner tendency to permit right thoughts to arise within us. What the outer world can give us is correct sense perception but not right thoughts. Thought is subject to error, and the power of right thinking is something we must have within ourselves.

For the thinker this fact alone points to an earlier, prehistoric existence of man. It is incumbent upon him to form right thoughts concerning the wisdom of the outside world, but his thoughts cannot emerge or come in contact with what he perceives. Nevertheless, that wisdom must be within him as well as without; it must permeate him just as it does in what surrounds him. The two currents, therefore, belong together, though they are now separated.

At some time, however, they must have been united. That was before the human ego had begun to dam up the currents within us, at a time when it still received the wisdom of the world directly. There was a time when the currents of the mental soul were not held up but flowed out, and that was the time when man directly envisioned the wisdom of the world. What is now relegated to the brain as thinking was once in contact with the outer world, like our sense perception, so that man could look at his thoughts. That was a form of clairvoyance, though not a conscious one irradiated by the ego. Man must have passed through earlier stages in which he possessed a dim clairvoyance, and again it is the human physical organization itself that shows us that in bygone times he was differently constituted.

Something important for practical life follows from the foregoing. In all cases involving the sense world, sense perception (apart from illusions) can be taken as truth, for there the human being is in direct contact with the outer world. But concerning all that is within him, his knowledge is limited to what he acquires by thinking. Now, the separation that exists between our intellectual soul and the objects in space, and that makes it possible for our thinking about those objects to err, does not apply to the ego. When the ego streams into us it is within us, and it is natural that we should have a voice in its activity. The meeting of the intellectual soul and the ego is what produces the purest thinking, the thinking that is directed inward. This form of thinking, having itself as the object, cannot be exposed to error in the same way as can the other kind, which is occupied with outer objects and roves about in an endeavor to form judgments by observing them. The only thing they can yield is sense perception. What we must do is meet them with concepts, as though holding up their mirrored reflection to them. Thinking is herein free from error only in so far as it is attracted to the tendency to truth. Out of a right tendency to truth we must let concepts of things, thoughts about things, rise up in us.

In the first instance we can form a judgment only of such things in the outer world as are encountered by the senses. The senses themselves cannot judge what is beyond their reach; no such judgment can be arrived at from the physical plane. If the intellectual soul nevertheless does just that, unless it be guided by the inner tendency to truth, it must inevitably fall into all sorts of errors.

To clarify these conditions by an illustration, let us turn to the various doctrines of the descent of man. Here we distinguish between two kinds of ancestors. You are familiar with one of them from theosophical research, which tells us of the different forms we passed through in former periods, such as the Lemurian. That is disclosed by spiritual science. We have seen how wonderfully comprehensible everything perceived by the senses becomes when we have made this teaching our very own, and it will reveal more and more.

In contrast, we will now consider material research, the materialistic doctrine of descent, the crux of which is the so-called biogenetic law. According to this, man in his germinal states passes through all forms recalling animal stages, thereby repeating, in a sense, the various forms of the whole animal kingdom. At the time when this doctrine was rampant the conclusion was drawn that man really passed through these forms that thus appear in the germ state. In itself that is not erroneous because in prehistoric times man actually did develop through such forms. Fortunately, as we can say in view of the materialistic doctrine of the descent, the foresight of the gods kept this fact secret until such time as the opinions regarding it could be corrected by spiritual science. The development of man before he became outwardly perceptible on the physical plane could not have been observed. It was shrouded by the gods and withdrawn from observation, otherwise people would have evolved even wilder theories regarding it than they do now. The facts are there, but they are frequently misinterpreted because the senses that speak the truth cannot perceive them. In reasoning, however, the power of the intellectual soul becomes active, and this cannot reach what is imperceptible to the senses. In reality, the facts referred to prove the exact opposite of what people try to infer from them. Here we have a striking example of the way the power of judgment can plunge into a sea of errors when its approach to external matters is purely by way of the mind.

What is shown by the fact that on a certain plane man resembled a fish? Precisely that he never was a fish; indeed, that he had no use for the fish nature, that he had to expel it before entering upon his human existence, because it in no way pertained to him. This he did in turn with all the animal forms, because they were not of his nature. He could not have become a human being if he had ever appeared on earth in one of those animal forms. He had to discard these in order to become what he did. The fact that in the germ the human being resembles a fish is the very proof that never in his whole line of descent was he like a fish or any other animal form. He had to expel all these forms because they were inadequate and he therefore must never resemble them. He had to slough off these forms, eject them. They are images he never resembled. All these forms of germinal life show shapes he never bore. Thus we can find out precisely through embryology how prehistoric man never looked. He cannot be descended from something he had expelled. To infer that he passed through these forms would be the same as to imagine that the father is descended from the son. The father is not descended from the son, nor the son from himself, but the son is descended from the father.

That is one of the cases in which the mind has proved wholly incapable of thinking the facts of reality through to the end. It has exactly reversed the order of development. Certainly these pictures of the remote past are extraordinarily important, because they show us how we never looked. But that is something that can be learned even more readily in another way, namely, through realms that lie open in the sense world, that are not hidden from us. There we have all those forms—fishes and so forth—and they can be properly studied with the ordinary means of human observation. As long as men restricted themselves to observing outer objects with the senses, and did not occupy their minds with matters concealed from sense perception, they avoided arriving at false conclusions; they were rightly guided by their natural sense of truth. They would look, for instance, at a monkey and doubtless experience the queer sensation that every normal human being would have, a certain sense of embarrassment. This judgment expressed through feeling means that the monkey is really a retarded being, having remained behind in the evolution of man. This feeling is nearer the truth than is the later judgment of the erring mind because it embodies the realization that the monkey is a being that dropped out of the human current, that had to be divided off from man if the latter was to achieve his goal. The moment our fallible mind approached this fact it inverted it; instead of realizing that the monkey was eliminated from the evolutionary human current it concluded that the monkey was the starting point of human descent.

Here the error comes to light. In judging external things accessible to the senses we should never forget that they are built up from within, through the agency of spiritual currents. Suppose we are observing those parts of the human being that are accessible to perception proper, or we observe part of another person that the eye can see—his face, for example. In studying this face we must not imagine it as having been built up from without. On the contrary, we must realize the need to distinguish between two currents flowing into each other, the current of the sentient body running backward from the front, and that of the sentient soul running forward from the rear. In so far as we perceive the human countenance by means of the senses, the sense image is true. That is given us by sense perception and we will not go astray there. But now the human mind joins in, at first subconsciously, and is at once misled. It regards the human countenance as something merely fashioned from without, whereas in reality, this fashioning occurred from within, through the agency of the sentient soul. What you see is not really outer body; it is the outer image of the sentient soul.

Disabuse your mind of the notion that the human face might be outer body, and you will see that in truth, it is the image of the soul. A fundamentally false interpretation results from reasoning in a way that ignores the true nature of the countenance as being the outer image of the sentient soul acting outward. Every explanation of the human countenance based solely on physical forces is wrong. It must be explained through the soul itself, the visible through the invisible. The deeper we penetrate into theosophy the more we will see in it a great school for learning to think. The chaotic thinking that today dominates all circles, particularly science, finds no shelter in theosophy, which is therefore able to interpret life correctly.

This ability to interpret phenomena correctly will further stand us in good stead when, in the course of our investigations, we come to phenomena that lead us out of the region of individual anthroposophy into the realm of the anthroposophy that concerns the whole of mankind.

Returning once more to the sense of sound and the sense of visualization, let us ask ourselves which of these came into being first in the course of human development? Did man learn first to understand words or to perceive and understand the conceptions that came to him? This question can be answered by observing the child, who first learns to talk and only later to perceive thoughts. Speech is the premise of thought perception because the sense of sound is the premise of the sense of visualization. The child learns to talk because he can hear, can listen to something that the sense of sound perceives. Speech itself is at first mere imitation, and the child imitates long before he has any idea of visualization whatever. First the sense of sound develops, and then, by means of this, the sense of visualization. The sense of sound is the instrumentality for perceiving not only tones but also what we call sounds.

The next question is how it came about that at one time in the course of his development man achieved the ability to perceive sounds and, as a result, to acquire speech? How was he endowed with speech? If he was to learn to speak, not just to hear, it was necessary not only that an outer perception should penetrate, but that a certain current within him should flow in the same direction as that taken by the currents of the sentient soul when they press forward from the rear. It had to be something acting in the same direction. That was the way in which speech had to originate, and this faculty had to appear before the sense of visualization, before man was able to sense the conception contained in the words themselves. Men had first to learn to utter sounds and to live in the consciousness of them before they could combine conceptions with them. What at first permeated the sounds they uttered was sentience.

This development had to take place at a time when the transposition of the circulatory system had already occurred, for animals cannot speak. The ego had to be acting downward from above with the blood system in a vertical position. As yet, however, man had no sense of visualization, consequently no visualizations. It follows that he could not have acquired speech through the agency of his own ego, but rather, he received it from another ego that we can compare with the group ego of animals. In this sense speech is a gift of the gods. It was infused into the ego before the latter itself was capable of developing it. The human ego did not yet possess the organs needed to give the impulse for bringing about speech, but the group ego worked from above into the physical, etheric and astral bodies, and as it encountered an opposing current, a sort of whorl came into being at the point of contact. A straight line drawn through the center of the larynx would indicate the direction of the current employed by the speech-giving spirits, and the larynx itself represents the physical substance, the dam, that resulted from the encounter of the two currents. That accounts for the peculiar shape of the human larynx.

It was under the influence, then, of a group soul that man had to develop speech. In what manner do group souls operate on earth? In animals the current of the group soul passes through the spinal cord horizontally, and these force currents are in continual motion. The force currents running downward from above move constantly around the earth, as they did around the old Moon. They don't remain in one spot but move around the earth retaining their vertical direction of influence. If men were to learn to speak under the influence of a group soul, they could not remain in one place, they had to migrate. They had to move toward the group soul. Never could they have learned to speak if they had remained in one spot.

What direction, then, would men have to take if they were to learn to speak? We know that the etheric currents flow from right to left and the physical ones from left to right, and this is the case not only in man but on the earth as well. Now, where are the group souls that endow man with speech? Let us look at the earth in its peculiar development. Man learned to speak at a time when his outer structure was already complete. Strong currents were therefore needed because the larynx had first to be transformed from a soft substance that in no way resembled a larynx. This called for special conditions on earth. Suppose we stand facing east. There flow in us from left to right the currents connected with the formation of the physical body. This current exists outside us as well; it was present during the formation of the earth. Running from north to south are those strong currents that produce solid physical matter. From the other direction, from the south, flow the etheric currents that lack the tendency to solidify the earth. This explains the lopsidedness, the lack of symmetry on the earth. In the northern hemisphere we find the great continents, in the southern, the vast oceans; the tendency of the earth was asymmetrical.

From the south the current acts that is of the same nature as the one that runs from right to left in man, but while the current from back to front streams outward, the one from front to back originates in the sentient body and enters the sentient soul. With all this in mind we understand why the attainment of speech called for a current passing outward from within; this current had to encounter a group soul current in order that the two could be dammed up in man's own organism. Man had to move toward a current that could act upon his astral element. He could therefore go neither toward the north nor toward the south, but had to take a direction at right angles to these. It was latitudinally that man had to proceed when he was acquiring speech, that is, from east to west. At that time he inhabited ancient Lemuria, where today we have the ocean lying between Asia and Africa. Thence, in order to learn to speak, he migrated westward into old Atlantis, to meet the group soul that was to engender speech in him. There he had to develop the organism suitable for speech, and thus it was in old Atlantis that he learned to speak.

The next step was to develop the sense of visualization by means of the speech man had acquired, but in order to do this he could not continue in the same direction. He had to proceed in a way that would cause the same current to act from the opposite direction. Recall here what was said in the last lecture concerning the origin of sound and of visualization. Sound comes into being when we subconsciously convert a melody into a harmony, ignore the fundamentals themselves, and mentally hear only the harmony produced by the harmonics (overtones); visualization arises when we push back and disregard this harmony of the harmonics as well. So, if we are to develop the sense of visualization, we must destroy on the one hand what we had built up on the other. We must face about and proceed in the opposite direction. One element of speech has to be suppressed, the harmonics must be pushed back, if we are to develop visualization. The old Atlanteans had to face about and migrate eastward; by doing this they were able effectively to develop the sense of visualization. This could not have been accomplished if they had continued westward. It was the tragic fate of the American aborigines to migrate in the wrong direction. They could not hold their ground, but had to yield to those who had migrated properly and returned to them only later.

In this way a great deal becomes clear. When we know the secret of those currents that fashion man and the earth we can understand the organization of the earth, the distribution of oceans and continents, the migrations of men. Anthroposophy leads us into that life through which the outer world becomes transparent and comprehensible.

Evolution proceeds. Humanity was not destined to stop at visualizations but to achieve concepts as well, and in order to accomplish this it had to ascend from mere visualizations to the soul life proper. After the sense of visualization, the sense of concepts had to be developed, and again a new direction had to be taken. In order to gain the life of visualizations, humanity—or as much of it as comes into consideration—moved eastward, but pure concepts could be acquired only by returning in a westward direction. We could similarly present the migrations of peoples in the four post-Atlantean periods from an anthroposophical viewpoint, and you would see a wondrous interplay of spiritual forces at work upon the whole shaping of man, and of what comes to expression in forming the earth.

But this is not the end. We have dealt with the currents running downward from above, forward from the rear, etc., but in a sense we now appear to have reached a dead end. Spiritual science, however, discloses higher forces holding sway above the capacity for visualization and forming concepts, that is, the imaginative, the inspirative, and the intuitive senses. We have learned that as a rule these stream inward, but in clairvoyants, outward. All these currents must operate too, and for that purpose must develop the necessary organs. So we ask how they do this? How do they live and operate in the physical human being?

In order to answer this question we will first consider a force possessed only by the human being, not by animals: the inner soul force of memory. Animal memory is a pure figment of the scientists' imagination. Animals have no memory; they merely manifest symptoms to be explained by the same principle as those of human memory. In order to produce human memory, the main position of animals would have to be raised to the vertical, so that the ego could stream in. Since their principal position is horizontal, they can have no ego. But in certain animals the forward part of the body is in the same position as that of the human being, hence it can act intelligently, although this intelligence is not permeated by an ego.

This is the beginning of a vast region of misconceptions. When an animal manifests a capacity similar to that of memory and acts intelligently, nothing more is proved by these facts than that a being can be guided by an intelligence without being intelligent itself. Phenomena resembling memory can appear in the animal world, but not memory itself.

In memory we see something special, something quite different from what we find in mere intelligent thinking, for example, or in visualization. The essence of memory lies in the retention of a visualization we have had; it is still present after the act of perception has passed. The repetition of an action previously performed is not memory. A clock would in that case be endowed with memory, for it does today exactly what it did yesterday. If memory is to come about, the ego must seize a conception and retain it.

If the ego is to seize a conception in this way, an organ must be formed for the purpose, and this is accomplished as follows. Out of its own essence the ego must engender special currents and must pour and bore these into the various horizontal currents already active minus the ego. The ego must overcome currents. When a current appears running inward from without, the ego must be able to produce within itself a counter-current.

That the ego was originally not capable of this we learned when studying the origin of speech; then the group ego had to co-operate. But when the soul life proper commences, beyond visualization, when a higher faculty such as memory is to be developed, the ego must activate new currents independently, currents that bore into others already there. Of this process the ego is clearly aware. In developing the senses up to and including visualization, this activity of the ego is not required, but when a higher activity is to be brought about, the ego must oppose the currents already functioning. This becomes manifest through the addition of a fourth phenomenon to the three currents at right angles to each other in space. This boring in of the ego becomes perceptible in the consciousness of time, and that is why memory is linked with temporal conceptions. We do not follow time in any spatial direction, but into the past. The direction of the past is bored into the directions of space. That is what occurs in all that the ego develops out of itself. Through spiritual science we can even indicate the current that comes into play when the ego evolves memory. It runs from left to right, and when habits are developed by the ego, the currents run from left to right as well. The ego bores its way into the opposing currents, those that were formed without the ego. Here the law is exemplified that tells us that the higher activities of the soul always have currents running in the opposite direction from that of the next lower activity.

To gain inner contact with the ego, the intellectual soul had to develop up to the ego plane. Now we ascend to the consciousness soul. When this functions consciously its active current runs in the opposite direction from that of the intellectual soul, which is still able to function subconsciously. Under certain earthly conditions the following law in human evolution can be proved. Learning to read is an intelligent activity, but one that does not necessarily proceed from the consciousness soul. The idea of learning to read and write occurred to men before the consciousness soul was developed. Reading by means of the intellectual soul had its inception in the Greco-Latin epoch. Then followed the ascendancy of the consciousness soul, and the direction of the current had to be reversed. Arithmetic could only develop with the consciousness soul. The European peoples read and write from left to right, but they figure from right to left, as in adding. It will be seen from this how the currents of the intellectual soul and of the consciousness soul overlap, and we can actually understand the nature of the European peoples by pondering the matter.

But there have been other peoples with other missions. They were advance guards, so to speak, and their task was to develop, or at least prepare, the feature of the intellectual soul that the European peoples, who had postponed their cultural development, did not evolve until after the consciousness soul had become active. Those were the Semitic peoples, who write from right to left. They were the peoples who were to prepare in advance the later period of the consciousness soul.

In such considerations we find the means for comprehending all cultural phenomena on earth. We shall learn to know everything of that sort, down to the letter formations of the various languages. The reason why peoples write from top to bottom, from right to left or from left to right follows from an understanding of the underlying spiritual facts. It is the mission of spiritual science to see that light dawns in the minds of men, and that the obscure becomes clear.

The more deeply we penetrate into the occult records of the various ages and peoples, that is to say, into the truly occult records, the more we are struck by one feature of them which meets us again and again. I have already indicated it in discussing the Gospel of St. John, and again on a later occasion in speaking of the Gospel of St. Mark. I refer to the fact that on looking deeply into any such occult record it becomes ever clearer that it is really most wonderfully composed, that it forms an artistic whole. I could show, for instance, how St. John's Gospel, when we penetrate into its depths, reveals a wonderful, artistic composition. With remarkable dramatic power the story is carried up stage by stage to a great climax, and then continues from this point onward with a kind of renewal of dramatic power to the end. You can study this in the lectures I gave at Cassel on St. John's Gospel in relation to the three other Gospels, especially to that according to St. Luke.

Most impressive is the gradual enhancement of the whole composition while the super-sensible is placed before us in the so-called miracles and signs; each working up in ever-increasing wonder to the sign that meets us in the initiation of Lazarus. It makes us realize how we can always find artistic beauty at the foundation of these occult records. I could show the same for the structure of St. Mark's Gospel. When we regard such records in their beauty of form and their dramatic power, we can indeed conclude that just because they are true such records cannot be other than artistically, beautifully composed, in the deepest sense of the word. For the moment we will only indicate this fact, as we may come back to it in the course of these lectures.

Now it is remarkable that the same thing meets us again in the Bhagavad Gita. There is a wonderful intensification of the narrative, one might say, a hidden artistic beauty in the song, so that if nothing else were to touch the soul of one studying this sublime Gita, he still could not help being impressed by its marvelous composition. Let us begin by indicating a few of the outstanding points—and we will confine ourselves today to the first four discourses—because these points are important both for the artistic structure and the deep occult truths that it contains.

First of all Arjuna meets us. Facing the bloodshed in which he is to take part, he grows weak. He sees all that is to take place as a battle of brothers against brothers, his blood relations. He shrinks back. He will not fight against them. While fear and terror come over him and he is horror-stricken, his charioteer suddenly appears as the instrument through which Krishna, God, is to speak to him. Here in this first episode we already have a moment of great intensity and also an indication of deep occult truth. Anyone who finds the way, by whatever path, into the spiritual worlds, even though he may have gone only a few steps—or even had only a dim presentiment of the way to be experienced—such a person will be aware of the deep significance of this moment.

As a rule we cannot enter the spiritual worlds without passing through a deep upheaval in our souls. We have to experience something which disturbs and shakes all our forces, filling us with intense feeling. Emotions that are generally spread out over many moments, over long periods of living, whose permanent effect on the soul is therefore weaker—such feelings are concentrated in a single moment and storm through us with tremendous force when we enter the occult worlds. Then we experience a kind of inner shattering, which can indeed be compared to fear, terror and anxiety, as though we were shrinking back from something almost with horror. Such experiences belong to the initial stages of occult development, to entering the spiritual worlds. It is just for this reason that such great care must be taken to give the right advice to those who would enter the spiritual worlds through occult training. Such a person must be prepared so that he may experience this upheaval as a necessary event in his soul life without its encroaching on his bodily life and health, because his body must not suffer a like upheaval. That is the essential thing. We must learn to suffer the convulsions of our soul with outward equanimity and calm.

This is true not only for our bodily processes. The soul forces we need for everyday living, our ordinary intellectual powers, even those of imagination, of feeling and will—these too must not be allowed to become unbalanced. The upheaval that may be the starting-point for occult life must take place in far deeper layers of the soul, so that we go through our external life as before, without anything being noticed in us outwardly, while within we may be living through whole worlds of shattering soul-experience. That is what it means to be ripe for occult development: To be able to experience such inward convulsions without losing one's outer balance and calm. To this end a person who is striving to become ripe for occult development must widen the circle of his interests beyond his everyday life. He must get away from that to which he is ordinarily attached from morning to night, and reach out to interests that move on the great horizon of the world.

We must be able to undergo the experience of doubting all truth and all knowledge. We must have the power to do this with the same intensity of feeling people generally have only where their everyday interests are concerned. We must be able to feel with the destiny of all mankind, with as much interest as we usually feel in our own destiny, or perhaps in that of our nearest connections of family, nation, or race. If we cannot do this, we are not yet completely ready for occult development.

For this reason modern anthroposophy, if pursued earnestly and worthily, is the right preparation in our age for a true occult development. Let those who are absorbed in the petty material interests of the immediate present, who cannot find sufficient interest to follow the anthroposophist in looking out over world and planetary destinies, over the historical epochs and races of mankind—let them scoff if they will! One who would prepare himself for an occult development must lift up his eyes to the heights where the interests of mankind, of the earth, of the whole planetary system become his own. When a person's interests are gradually sharpened and widened through the study of anthroposophy, which leads even without occult training to an understanding of occult truths, then he is being rightly prepared for an occult path.

In our time there are many who have such interests for the whole of mankind. More often they are not to be found among the intellectuals but are people who appear to lead quite simple lives. Yes, there are many today who have a humble place in life and as if by natural instinct feel this interest in the whole of mankind. That is why anthroposophy is in such harmony with the spirit of our age.

First, then, we must learn of the mighty upheaval of the soul that has to come at the beginning of occult experience. With wonderful truth the Bhagavad Gita sets such a moment of upheaval at the starting-point of Arjuna's experience, only he does not go through an occult training but is placed into this moment by his destiny. He is placed into the battle without being able to recognize its necessity, its purpose, or its aim. All he sees is that blood relations are about to fight against each other. Such a soul as Arjuna can be shaken by that to its innermost core, for he has to say to himself, “Brother fights against brother. Surely then all the tribal customs will be shaken and then the tribe itself will wither away and be destroyed, and all its morality fall into decay! Those laws will be shaken that in accordance with an eternal destiny place men into castes; and then will everything be imperiled—man himself, the law, the whole world. The whole significance of mankind will be in the balance.” Such is his feeling. It is as though the ground were about to sink from under his feet, as though an abyss were opening up before him.

Arjuna was a man who had received into his feeling something that the man of today no longer knows, but that in those ancient times was a primeval teaching of tradition. He knew that what is handed on from generation to generation in mankind is bound up with the woman nature; while the individual, personal qualities whereby a man stands out from his blood connections and his family line are bound up with the man nature. What a man inherits as common, generic qualities is handed on to the descendants by the woman, whereas what forms him into a unique, individual being, tearing him out of the generic succession, is the part he receives from his father. “Must it not then have an evil effect on the laws that rule woman's nature,” says Arjuna to himself, “if blood fights against blood?”

There is another feeling that Arjuna has absorbed, on which for him the whole well-being of human evolution depends. He feels that the forefathers of the tribe, the ancestors, are worthy of honor. He feels that their souls watch over the succeeding generations. For him it is a sublime service to offer up fires of sacrifice to the Manes, to the holy souls of the ancestors. But now what must he see? Instead of altars with sacrificial fires burning on them for the ancestors, he sees those who should join in kindling such fires assailing one another in battle. If we would understand a human soul we must penetrate into its thoughts. Above all we must enter deeply into its feelings because it is in feeling that the soul is intimately bound up with its very life. Now think of the great contrast between all that Arjuna would naturally feel, and the bloody battle of brother against brother that is actually about to take place. Destiny is hammering at Arjuna's soul, shaking it to its very depths. It is as though he had to gaze down into a terrible abyss. Such an upheaval awakens the forces of the soul and brings it to a vision of occult realities that at other times are hidden as behind a veil. That is what gives such dramatic intensity to the Bhagavad Gita. The ensuing discourse is thus placed before us with wonderful power, as developing of necessity out of Arjuna's destiny, instead of being given us merely as an academic, pedantic course of instruction in occultism.

Now that Arjuna has been rightly prepared for the birth of the deeper forces of his soul, now that he can see these forces in inward vision, there happens what everyone who has the power to behold it will understand: His charioteer becomes the instrument through which the god Krishna speaks to him. In the first four discourses we observe three successive stages, each higher than the last, each one introducing something new. Here in these very first discourses we find an accent that is wonderful in its dramatic art, apart from the fact that it corresponds to a deep occult truth. The first stage is a teaching that might appear even trivial to many Westerners in its given form. Let us admit that at once. (Here I should like to remark, especially for the benefit of my dear friends here in Finland, that I mean by “Western” all that lies to the west of the Ural Mountains, the Volga, the Caspian Sea and Asia Minor—in fact the whole of Europe. What is to be called Eastern land belongs essentially in Asia. Of course, America too forms part of the West.)

To begin with then we find a teaching that might easily appear trivial, especially to a philosophical mind. For what is the first thing that Krishna says to Arjuna as a word of exhortation for the battle? “Look there,” he says, “at those who are to be killed by you; those in your own ranks who are to be killed and those who are to remain behind, and consider well this one thing. What dies and what remains alive in your ranks and in those of the enemy is but the outer physical body. The spirit is eternal. If your warriors slay those in the ranks over there they are but slaying the outer body, they are not killing the spirit, which is eternal. The spirit goes from change to change, from incarnation to incarnation. It is eternal. This deepest being of man is not affected in this battle. Rise, Arjuna, rise to the spiritual standpoint, then you can go and give yourself up to your duty. You need not shudder nor be sad at heart, for in killing your enemies you are not killing their essential being.”

Thus speaks Krishna, and at first hearing his words are in a sense trivial, though in a special way. In many respects the Westerner is short-sighted in his thinking and consciousness. He never stops to consider that everything is evolving. If he says that Krishna's exhortation, as I have expressed it, is trivial, it is as though one were to say, “Why do they honor Pythagoras as such a great man when every schoolboy and girl knows his theorem?” It would be stupid to conclude that Pythagoras was not a great man in having discovered his theorem just because every schoolboy understands it! We see how stupid this is, but we do not notice when we fail to realize that what any Western philosopher may repeat by rote as the wisdom of Krishna—that the spirit is eternal, immortal—was a sublime wisdom at the time Krishna revealed it. Souls like Arjuna did indeed feel that blood-relations ought not to fight. They still felt the common blood that flowed in a group of people. To hear it said that “the spirit is eternal” (spirit in the sense of what is generally conceived, abstractly, as the center of man's being)—the spirit is eternal and undergoes transformations, passing from incarnation to incarnation—this stated in abstract and intellectual terms was something absolutely new and epoch-making in its newness when it resounded in Arjuna's soul through Krishna's words. All the people in Arjuna's environment believed definitely in reincarnation, but as Krishna taught it, as a general and abstract idea, it was new, especially in regard to Arjuna's situation. This is one reason why we had to say that such a truth can only be called “trivial” in a special sense. That holds true in another respect as well. Our abstract thought, which we use even in the pursuit of popular science, which we regard today as quite natural—this thinking activity was by no means always so natural and simple.

In order to illustrate what I say, let me give you a radical example. You will think it strange that while for all of you it is quite natural to speak of a “fish,” it was by no means natural for primitive peoples to do so. Primitive peoples are acquainted with trout and salmon, cod and herring, but “fish” they do not know. They have no such word as “fish,” because their thought does not extend to such abstract generalization. They know individual trees, but “tree” they do not know. Thinking in such general concepts is by no means natural to primitive races even in the present time. This mode of thinking has indeed only entered humanity in the course of its evolution. In fact, one who considers why it was that logic first began in the time of ancient Greece, could scarcely be surprised when the statement is made on occult grounds that logical thinking has only existed since the period that followed the original composition of the Bhagavad Gita. Krishna impels Arjuna to logical thought, to thinking in abstractions, as if to a new thing that is only now to enter humanity.

But this activity of thought that man has developed and takes quite for granted today, people have the most distorted and unnatural notions about. Western philosophers in particular have most distorted ideas about thought, for they generally take it to be merely a photographic reproduction of external sense reality. They imagine that concepts and ideas and the whole inner thinking of man simply arises in him out of the external physical world. While libraries of philosophical words have been written in the West to prove that thought is merely something having its origin in the stimulus of the external physical world, it is only in our time that thought will be valued for what it really is.

Here I reach a point that is most important for those who would undergo an occult development in their own souls. I want to make every effort to get this point clear. The medieval alchemists used to say—I cannot now discuss what they really meant by it—that gold could be made from all metals, gold in any desired amount, but that one must first have a minute quantity of it. Without that one could not make gold. Whether or not this is true of gold, it is certainly true of clairvoyance. No man could actually attain clairvoyance if he did not have a tiny amount of it already in his soul. It is generally supposed that men as they are, are not clairvoyant. If that were true they could never become clairvoyant at all, because just as the alchemist thought that one must have a little gold to conjure forth large quantities, so must one already be a little clairvoyant in order to be able to develop and extend it more and more. Now you may see two alternatives here and ask, “Do you think then that we all are clairvoyant, if only slightly, or, do you think that those of us who are not clairvoyant can never become so?” This is just the point. It is most important to understand that there is really no one among you who does not have this starting-point of clairvoyance, though you may not be conscious of it. All of you have it. None of you is lacking in it. What is this that all possess? It is something not generally regarded or valued as clairvoyance. Let me make a rather crude comparison.

If a pearl is lying in the roadway and a chicken finds it, the chicken does not value the pearl. Most men and women today are chickens in this respect. They do not value the pearl that lies there in full view before them. What they value is something quite different. They value their concepts and ideas, but no one could think abstractly, could have thoughts and ideas, if he were not clairvoyant. In our ordinary thinking the pearl of clairvoyance is contained from the start. Ideas arise in the soul through exactly the same process as what gives rise to its highest powers. It is immensely important to learn to understand that clairvoyance begins in something common and everyday. We only have to recognize the super-sensible nature of our concepts and ideas. We must realize that these come to us from the super-sensible worlds; only then can we look at the matter rightly.

When I tell you of the higher hierarchies, of Seraphim and Cherubim and Thrones, right down to Archangels and Angels, these are beings who must speak to the human soul from higher spiritual worlds. It is from those worlds that concepts and ideas come into the human soul, not from the world of the senses. In the 18th century what was considered a great word was uttered by a pioneer of thinking, “O, Man, make bold to use thy power of reason!” Today a great word must resound in men's souls, “O, Man, make bold to claim thy concepts and ideas as the beginning of thy clairvoyance.” What I have just expressed I said many years ago, publicly in my books Truth and Science and The Philosophy of Freedom, where I showed that human ideas come from super-sensible, spiritual knowledge. It was not understood at the time, and no wonder, for those who should have understood it were—well, like the chickens! We must realize that at the moment when Krishna stands before Arjuna and gives him the power of abstract judgment, he is thereby giving him, for the first time in the whole of evolution, the starting-point for the knowledge of higher worlds. The spirit can be seen on the very surface of the changes that take place within the external world of sense. Bodies die; the spirit, the abstract, the essential being, is eternal. The spiritual can be seen playing on the surface of phenomena. This is what Krishna would reveal to Arjuna as the beginning of a new clairvoyance for men.

One thing is necessary for men of today if they would attain to an inwardly-experienced truth. They must have once passed through the feeling of the fleeting nature of all outer transformations. They must have experienced the mood of infinite sadness, of infinite tragedy, and at the same time the exultation of joy. They must have felt the breath of the ephemeral that streams out from all things. They must have been able to fix their interest on this coming forth and passing away again, the transitoriness of the world of sense. Then, when they have been able to feel the deepest pain and the fullest delight in the external world, they must once have been absolutely alone—alone with their concepts and ideas. They must have had the feeling, “In these concepts I grasp the mystery of the worlds; I take hold of the outer edge of cosmic being,”—the very expression I once used in my The Philosophy of Freedom! This must be experienced, not merely understood intellectually, and if you would experience it, it must be in deepest loneliness. Then you have another feeling. On the one hand you experience the majesty of the world of ideas that is spread out over the All. On the other hand you experience with the deepest bitterness that you have to separate yourself from space and time in order to be together with your concepts and ideas. Loneliness! It is the icy cold of loneliness. Furthermore, it comes to you that the world of ideas has now drawn together as in a single point of this loneliness. Now you say, I am alone with my world of ideas. You become utterly bewildered in your world of ideas, an experience that stirs you to the depths of your soul. At length you say to yourself, “Perhaps all this is only I myself; perhaps the only truth about these laws is that they exist in the point of my own loneliness.” Thus you experience, infinitely enhanced, utter doubt in all existence.

When you have this experience in your world of ideas, when the full cup of doubt in all existence has been poured out with pain and bitterness over your soul, then only are you ripe to understand how, after all, it is not the infinite spaces and periods of time of the physical world from which your ideas have come. Now only, after the bitterness of doubt, you open yourself to the regions of the spiritual and know that your doubt was justified, and in what sense it was justified. For it had to be, since you imagined that the ideas had come into your soul from the times and spaces of the physical world. How do you now feel your world of ideas having experienced its origin in the spiritual worlds? Now for the first time you feel yourself inspired. Before, you were feeling the infinite void spread around you like a dark abyss. Now you begin to feel that you are standing on a rock that rises up out of the abyss. You know with certainty, “Now I am connected with the spiritual worlds. They, not the world of sense, have bestowed on me my world of ideas.”

This is the next stage for the evolving soul. It is the stage where man begins to be deeply in earnest with what has today come to be a trivial, commonplace truth. To bear this feeling in your heart will prepare you to receive in a true way the first truth that Krishna gives to Arjuna after the mighty upheaval and convulsion in his soul: The truth of the eternal spirit living through outer transformations. To abstract understanding we speak in concepts and ideas. Krishna speaks to Arjuna's heart. What may be trivial and commonplace for the understanding is infinitely deep and sublime to the heart of man.

We see how the first stage shows itself at once as a necessary consequence of the deeply moving experience that is presented to us at the start of the Bhagavad Gita. Now the next stage.

It is easy to speak of what is often called dogma in occultism—something that is accepted in blind faith and given out as gospel truth. Let me suggest to you that it would be quite simple for someone to come forward and say, “This fellow has published a book on Occult Science, speaking in it about Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions, and there is no way of controlling these statements. They can only be accepted as dogma.” I could understand such a thing being said, because it corresponds to the superficial nature of our age; and there is no getting away from it, our age is superficial. Indeed, under certain conditions this objection would not be without foundation. It would be justified, for example, if you were to tear out of the book all the pages that precede the chapter on the Saturn evolution. If anyone were to begin reading the book at this chapter it would be nothing but dogma. If, however, the author prefaces it with the other chapters, he is by no means a dogmatist because he shows what paths the soul has to go through in order to reach such conceptions. That is the point, that it has been shown in the book how every individual man, if he reaches into the depths of his soul, is bound to come to such conceptions. Herein all dogmatism ceases.

Thus we can feel it natural that Krishna, having brought Arjuna into the world of ideas and wishing to lead him on into the occult world, now goes on to show him the next stage, how every soul can reach that higher world if it finds the right starting-point. Krishna then must begin by rejecting every form of dogmatism, and he does so radically. Here we come up against a hard saying by Krishna. He absolutely rejects what for centuries had been most holy to the highest men of that age—the contents of the Vedas. He says, “Hold not to the Vedas, nor to the word of the Vedas. Hold fast to Yoga!” That is to say, “Hold fast to what is within thine own soul!”

Let us grasp what Krishna means by this exhortation. He does not mean that the contents of the Vedas are untrue. He does not want Arjuna to accept what is given in the Vedas dogmatically as the disciples of the Veda teaching do. He wants to inspire him to take his start from the very first original point whence the human soul evolves. For this purpose all dogmatic wisdom must be laid aside. We can imagine Krishna saying to himself that even though Arjuna will in the end reach the very same wisdom that is contained in the Vedas, still he must be drawn away from them, for he must go his own way, beginning with the sources in his own soul. Krishna rejects the Vedas, whether their content is true or untrue. Arjuna's path must start from himself, through his own inwardness he must come to recognize Krishna. Arjuna must be assumed to have in himself what a man can and must have if he is really to enter into the concrete truths of the super-sensible worlds. Krishna has called Arjuna's attention to something that from then onward is a common attribute of humanity. Having led him to this point he must lead him further and bring him to recognize what he is to achieve through Yoga. Thus, Arjuna must first undergo Yoga. Here the poem rises to another level.

In this second stage we see how the Bhagavad Gita goes on through the first four discourses with ever-increasing dramatic impulse, coming at length to what is most individual of all. Krishna describes the path of Yoga to Arjuna. We shall speak of this more in detail tomorrow. He describes the path that Arjuna must take in order to pass from the everyday clairvoyance of concepts and ideas to what can only be attained through Yoga. Concepts only require to be placed in the right light; but Arjuna has to be guided to Yoga. This is the second stage.

The third stage shows once more an enhancement of dramatic power, and again comes the expression of a deep occult truth. Let us assume that someone really takes the Yoga path. He will rise at length from his ordinary consciousness to a higher state of consciousness, which includes not only the ego that lies between the limits of birth and death but what passes from one incarnation to the next. The soul wakens to know itself in an expanded ego. It grows into a wider consciousness. The soul goes through a process that is essentially an everyday process but that is not experienced fully in our everyday life because man goes to sleep every night. The sense world fades out around him and he becomes unconscious of it. Now for every human soul the possibility exists of letting this world of sense vanish from his consciousness as it does when he goes to sleep, and then to live in higher worlds as in an absolute reality. Thereby man rises to a high level of consciousness. We shall still have to speak of Yoga, and also of the modern exercises that make this possible. But when man gradually attains to where he no longer, consciously, lives and feels and knows in himself, but lives and feels and knows together with the whole earth, then he grows into a higher level of consciousness where the things of the sense world vanish for him as they do in sleep.

However, before man can attain this level he must be able to identify himself with the soul of his planet, earth. We shall see that this is possible. We know that man not only experiences the rhythm of sleeping and waking but other rhythms of the earth as well—of summer and winter. When one follows the path of Yoga or goes through a modern occult training, he can lift himself above the ordinary consciousness that experiences the cycles of sleeping and waking, summer and winter. He can learn to look at himself from outside. He becomes aware of being able to look back at himself just as he ordinarily looks at things outside himself. Now he observes the things, the cycles in external life. He sees alternating conditions. He realizes how his body, so long as he is outside himself, takes on a form similar to that of the earth in summer with all its vegetation. What material science discovers and calls nerves he begins to perceive as a sprouting forth of something plant-like at the time of going to sleep, and when he returns again into everyday consciousness he feels how this plant-like life shrinks together again and becomes the instrument for thinking, feeling and willing in his waking consciousness. He feels his going out from the body and returning into it analogous to the alternation of summer and winter on the earth. In effect he feels something summer-like in going to sleep and something winter-like in waking up—not as one might imagine, the opposite way round. From this moment onward he learns to understand what the spirit of the earth is, and how it is asleep in summer and awake in winter, not vice versa. He realizes the wonderful experience of identifying himself with the spirit of the earth. From this moment he says to himself, “I live not only inside my skin, but as a cell lives in my bodily organism so do I live in the organism of the earth. The earth is asleep in summer and awake in winter as I am asleep and awake in the alternation of night and day. And as the cell is to my consciousness, so am I to the consciousness of the earth.”

The path of Yoga, especially in its modern sense, leads to this expansion of consciousness, to the identification of our own being with a more comprehensive being. We feel ourselves interwoven with the whole earth. Then as men we no longer feel ourselves bound to a particular time and place, but we feel our humanity such as it has developed from the very beginning of the earth. We feel the age-long succession of our evolutions through the course of the evolution of the earth. Thus Yoga leads us on to feel our atonement with what goes from one incarnation to another in the earth's evolution. That is the third stage.

This is the reason for the great beauty in the artistic composition of the Bhagavad Gita. In its climaxes, its inner artistic form, it reflects deep occult truths. Beginning with an instruction in the ordinary concepts of our thinking it goes on to an indication of the path of Yoga. Then at the third stage to a description of the marvelous expansion of man's horizon over the whole earth, where Krishna awakens in Arjuna the idea, “All that lives in your soul has lived often before, only you know nothing of it. But I have this consciousness in myself when I look back on all the transformations through which I have lived, and I will lead you up so that you may learn to feel yourself as I feel myself.” A new moment of dramatic force as beautiful as it is deeply and occultly true!

Thus we come to see the evolution of mankind from out of its everyday consciousness, from the pearl in the roadway that only needs to be recognized, from the particular world of thoughts and concepts that are a matter of everyday life in any one age, up to the point from where we can look out over all that we really have in us, which lives on from incarnation to incarnation on the earth.