The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Yesterday I spoke of how we find within the human being a kind of source of destruction. I showed that as long as we remain within ordinary consciousness we retain memories only of the impressions of the world. We gain experience of the world, and we have our experiences through the senses, through the intellect, through the effects generally upon our life of soul. Later we are able to call up again our memory of the afterimage of what we have experienced. We carry as our inner life these afterimages of sense experiences.

It is indeed as though we had within us a mirror, but one that works differently from the ordinary spatial mirror. An ordinary mirror reflects what is in front of it, whereas the living mirror we carry within us reflects in quite another way. It reflects in the course of time the sense impressions we receive, causing one or another impression to be reflected back again into consciousness, and so we have a memory of a past experience.

If we break a spatial mirror, we see behind the mirror; we see into a realm we do not see when the mirror is intact. Correspondingly, if we carry out inner exercises of the soul, we come, as I have often suggested, to something like a breaking of the inner mirror. The memories can, as it were, cease for a brief time—for how long a time depends upon our free will—and we can see more deeply into our inner being. As we look more deeply into our inner being behind the memory-mirror, then what I characterized yesterday as a kind of source of destruction meets our gaze.

There must be such a source of destruction within us, for only in such a source can the I of man solidify itself. It is actually a source for the solidification and hardening of the I. As I said yesterday, if this hardening of the I, if this egoity, is carried out into social life, evil arises, evil in the life and actions of human beings.

You may see from this how truly complicated is the life into which man is placed. What within the human being has a good purpose, without which we could not cultivate our I, must never be allowed outside. The evil man carries it into the outer world; the good man keeps it inside him. If it miscarried outside, it becomes wrong, it becomes evil. If it is kept within, it is the very thing we need to give the human I its rightful strength.

There is really nothing in the world that would not, in its place, have a beneficial significance. We would be thoughtless and rash if we did not have this source within us, for this source manifests itself in such a way that we can experience in it something we would never be able to experience in the outer world. In the outer world we see things materially. Everything we see, we see materially, and following the custom of present-day science we speak of the conservation of matter, the indestructibility of actual matter. In this source of destruction about which I spoke yesterday matter is truly annihilated. Matter is thrown back into its nothingness, and then we can allow, within this nothingness, the good to arise. The good can arise if, instead of our instincts and impulses, which are bound to work toward the cultivation of egoity, we pour into this source of destruction, by means of a moral inclination of soul, all moral and ethical ideals.Then something new arises. Then in this very source of destruction the seeds of future worlds arise. Then we, as human beings, take part in the coming into being of worlds.

When we speak, as one can find in my Outline of Occult Science, of how our earth will one day face annihilation, and of how through all kinds of intermediate states of transformation the Jupiter existence will evolve, we must say the following. In the Jupiter existence there will be only the new creation that already is being formed today in the human being out of moral ideals, within this source of destruction. It is also formed out of his anti-moral impulses, out of what works as evil from his egoity. Hence the Jupiter existence will be a struggle between what man on earth is already bringing to birth by carrying his moral ideals into his inner chaos and what arises with the cultivation of egoity as the anti-moral. When we look into our deepest selves,therefore, we are gazing upon a region where matter is thrown back into its nothingness.

I went on to indicate how matters stand with the other side of human existence, with the side where sense phenomena are spread out around us. We behold these sense phenomena spread around us like a tapestry, and we apply our intellect to combine and relate them in order to discover within these sense phenomena laws that we then call the laws of nature. With ordinary consciousness, however, we never penetrate through this tapestry of the senses. With ordinary consciousness we penetrate the tapestry of sense impressions just as little as we penetrate with ordinary consciousness the memory-mirror within. With a developed consciousness, however, one does penetrate it, and the human beings of ancient Oriental wisdom penetrated it with a consciousness informed by instinctive vision. They beheld that world in which egoity cannot hold its own in consciousness.

We enter this world every time we go to sleep. There the egoity is dimmed, because beyond the tapestry of the senses lies the world where, to begin with, the I-power, as it develops for human existence, has no place at all. Hence the world conception of the ancient Oriental, who developed a peculiar longing to live behind the sense phenomena, used to speak of Nirvana, of the dispersing of the egoity.

Yesterday we drew attention to the great contrast between East and West. At one time the Oriental cultivated all that man longs to behold behind the sense phenomena, and he cultivated the vision into a spiritual world that is composed not of atoms and molecules but of spiritual beings. This world was present for the ancient Oriental world conception as visible reality. In our day the Oriental, particularly in Asia but also in other parts of the world, is living in the decadent stages of development of this inner yearning to reach the world behind the sense phenomena, while the human being of the West has cultivated his egoity, has cultivated all that we have characterized as the hardening and strengthening taking place within the source of destruction in man's inner being.

In saying this we are already on the way to suggesting what it is that must necessarily be absorbed into man's consciousness, now and in the near future. If the pure intellectualism that has been developing since the middle of the fifteenth century were to continue, humanity would fall entirely into decline, for with the help of intellectualism one will never penetrate beyond either the memory-mirror or the tapestry of the world of the senses spread out before us. Man must, however, acquire once more a consciousness of these worlds. He must acquire a consciousness of these worlds if Christianity is again to be able to become a truth for him, for Christianity actually is not a truth for him to-day. We can see this most clearly when we look at the modern development of the idea of Christ—if indeed modern times may be said to have any such development at all. The truth is that for modern man in the present stage of evolution it is impossible to arrive at an idea of Christ as long as he makes use only of the concepts and ideas that he has been cultivating as natural science since the fifteenth century. In the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries he has become incapable of forming a true idea of Christ.

These things must be regarded in the following way. The human being beholds the world all around and uses the combining faculty of his intellect, which he now has as his modern consciousness, to build up natural laws. Following a line of thought that is perfectly possible for the consciousness of the present day, he comes to the point at which it is possible for him to say, “This world is permeated with thought, for the laws of nature are apprehended in thoughts and are actually themselves the thoughts of the world.” If one follows the laws of nature to the stage at which one is bound to apply them to the coming into existence of man himself as physical being, one has to say, “Within that world which we survey with our ordinary consciousness, beginning with sense perception and going on as far as the memory-mirror, a spiritual element is living.” One must actually be ill, pathological, if, like the ordinary atheistic materialist, one is not willing to acknowledge this spiritual element. We live within this world that is given for ordinary consciousness; we emerge into it as physical man through physical conception and physical birth. What is observable within the physical world can only be contemplated inadequately if one fails to see as its foundation a universal spiritual element.

We are born as physical beings from physical stock. When we are born as little babies, we are actually, for outer, physical perception, quite similar to a creature of nature. Out of such a creature of nature, which is basically in a kind of sleeping condition, inner spiritual faculties gradually develop. These inner spiritual faculties will arise in the course of future evolution. If we learn to trace back these emerging spiritual faculties in the same way that we trace the gradual growth of the limbs, we find that we must look for their source beyond birth and conception. Then one comes to the point of thinking in a living and spiritual way about the world, whereas before, in one's consideration of outer nature, one built up only abstract laws. One comes, in other words, to an affirmation of what may be called the Father God.

It is very significant that scholasticism in the Middle Ages maintained that knowledge obtainable by ordinary observation of the world through ordinary human reason included knowledge of the Father God. One can even say, as I have often expressed it, that if anyone sets out to analyze this world as it is given for ordinary consciousness and does not arrive at gathering up all the natural laws in what is called the Father God, he must actually be ill, pathological in someway. To be an atheist means to be ill, as I have said here once before.

With this ordinary consciousness, however, one cannot go farther than this Father God. This far one can go with ordinary consciousness, but no further. It is characteristic of our times when such a significant theologian as Adolf von Harnack⁵ says that Christ the Son does not really belong in the Gospels, that the Gospels are the message of the Father, and that Christ Jesus actually has a place in the Gospels only insofar as He brought the message of the Father God. Here you may see quite clearly how with a certain inevitability this modern thinking leads people to recognize, even in theology, only the Father God and to understand the Gospels themselves as containing no more than the message of the Father God. In the sense of this theology, Christ has worth only insofar as He appeared in the world and brought to human beings the true teaching concerning the Father God.

Two things are implied in this. First, the belief that the message of the Father God cannot be found by an ordinary study of the world. The Scholastics still maintained that it could. They did not imagine that the Gospels were to speak of the Father God; they assumed that the Gospels were to speak of God the Son. That people can come forward with the opinion that the Gospels actually speak only of the Father God is proof that theology, too, has fallen into that way of thinking which has been cultivated as the peculiarly Western method.

In early Christian times until about the third or fourth century A.D., when there was still a good deal of Oriental wisdom in Christianity, human beings occupied themselves intently with the question of the distinction between the Father God and God the Son. One could say that these fine distinctions between the Father God and the Son God, which so engaged people's attention in the early Christian centuries, under the influence of Oriental wisdom, have long ceased to have meaning for modern man, who has been occupied in cultivating egoity under the influences I described yesterday.

A certain untruth has thus found its way into modern religious consciousness. What man experiences inwardly, through which he arrives at his analysis and synthesis of the world, is the Father God. From tradition, he has God the Son. The Gospels speak of Him, tradition speaks of Him. Man has the Christ; he wants to acknowledge Him but through inner experience no longer actually has the Christ. He therefore takes what he should apply actually only to the Father God and transfers it to the Christ God. Modern theology does not actually have the Christ at all; it has only the Father, but it calls the Father “Christ,” because at one time it received the tradition of the Christ being in history, and one wants to be Christian, of course. If one were honest, one would be unable to call oneself a Christian in modern times.

All this is altogether different when we go further East. Already in Eastern Europe it is different. Take the Russian philosopher of whom I have frequently spoken—Soloviev.⁶ You find in him an attitude of soul that has become a philosophy and speaks with full justification, with an inner justification, of a distinction between the Father and the Son. Soloviev is justified in speaking in this way, because for him both the Father and the Christ are experiences. The human being of the West makes no distinction between God the Father and Christ. If you are inwardly honest with yourselves, you will feel that the moment you wish to make a distinction between the Father God and Christ the two become confused. For Soloviev such a thing is impossible. Soloviev experiences each separately, and so he still has a sense for the battles, the spiritual battles, that were fought during the first Christian centuries in order to bring to human consciousness the distinction between the Father God and God the Son.

This, however, is the very thing to which modern man must come again. There must again be truth in calling ourselves Christians. One must not make a pretense of worshipping the Christ, attributing to Him only the qualities of the Father God. To avoid this, however, one must present truths such as I indicated yesterday. That is the only way we can come to the twofold experience, the experience of the Father and the experience of the Son.

It will be necessary to change the whole form of our consciousness. The abstract form of consciousness with which modern man is raised, and which actually does not permit the recognition of more than the Father God, will have to be replaced by a much more concrete life of consciousness. Needless to say, one cannot present such things before the world at large today in the way I have described them to you here, for people have not yet been prepared sufficiently by spiritual science and anthroposophy. There is always the possibility, however, of pointing out even to modern man how he carries in his inner being a source of destruction and how in the outer world there is something in which the I of man is, as it were, submerged, where it cannot hold itself fast—just as in earlier times people were told about the Fall of Man and similar things. One must only find the right form for these things, a form that would enable them to find their way into ordinary consciousness—even as the teaching of the Fall of Man used to give instruction concerning a spiritual foundation of the world, a form that would have a different authority from our teaching concerning the Father God.

Our modern science will have to become permeated with ways of looking such as those we have expounded here. Our science wishes to recognize in the inner being of man only the laws of nature. In this source of destruction, however, of which I have often spoken here, the laws of nature are united with the moral laws; there, natural law and moral law are one. Within our inner being matter, and with it all the laws of nature, is annihilated. Material life, together with all the laws of nature, is thrown back into chaos, and out of the chaos a new nature is able to arise, saturated with the moral impulses we ourselves lay into it. As we have said, this source of destruction is below our memory-mirror. If we let our gaze penetrate far below this memory-mirror, there at last we observe what actually is always within the human being. A human being is not changed by knowledge: he merely comes to know what he is like, what his normal condition is. Man must learn to reflect on what he is and how he lives.

When we are able to penetrate into this inner core of evil in the human being and are able also to become conscious of how into this inner evil, where matter is destroyed and thrown back into its chaos, moral impulses can find their way, then we have really found in ourselves the beginning of spiritual existence. Then we perceive the creating spirit within us, for when we behold moral laws working upon matter that has been thrown back into chaos, we are beholding a real activity of the spirit taking place within us in a natural way. We become conscious of the concrete, spiritual activity that is within us and that is the seed for future worlds.

What can we compare with what is announced in our inner being? We cannot compare it with what our senses at first convey to us of outer nature. We can compare it only with what another human being communicates when he speaks to us. Indeed, it is more than a metaphor when we say that what takes place in our inner being speaks to us when moral and anti-moral impulses unite themselves with the chaos inside us. There actually is within us something that speaks to us. There we have something that is not mere allegory or symbol but actual fact. What we can hear outwardly with our ears is a language toned down for the earthly world, but within our inner being a language is spoken that goes out beyond the earth, because it speaks out of what contains the seeds of future worlds. There we truly penetrate into what must be called “the inner word.” In the weakened words that we speak or hear in conversation with our fellow men, hearing and speaking are separate and distinct, whereas in our inner being, when we dive down below the memory-mirror into the inner chaos, we have a substantiality where speaking becomes at the same time hearing. Hearing and speaking are once more united. The inner word speaks in us, the inner word is heard in us.

We have at the same time entered a realm where it no longer makes sense to speak of subjective and objective. When you hear another human being, when he speaks words to you that you perceive with your sense of hearing, you know that this being of another person is outside you, but you must give yourself up, must surrender yourself, as it were, in order to perceive the being of another person in what you hear him saying. On the other hand, you know that the actual word, the audible word, is not merely something subjective but is something placed into the world. Hence we find that even with the toned-down words that we hear and speak in our conversation with other human beings, the distinction between subjective and objective loses meaning. We stand with our subjectivity within objectivity, and objectivity works in us and with us in that we perceive. It is the same when we dive down to the inner word. It is not merely an inner word; it is at the same time something objective. It is not our inner being that speaks: our inner being is merely the stage upon which speaks the world.

It is similar for one who has insight to see, behind the tapestry of the senses, a spiritual world, a world wherein spiritual beings of the higher hierarchies rule and weave. To begin with, he perceives these beings through an imagination; for his vision, however, they become permeated with inner life in that now he hears the Word, apparently sounding to him through himself but in reality from out of the world.

By means of love and devotion man therefore penetrates the tapestry of the senses and sees beyond; and the beings who reveal themselves to him when he thus offers up his own being in full devotion—these beings he comes to perceive with the help of what he recognizes in his inner being as inner word. We grow together with the outer world. The outer world begins to resound cosmically, as it were, when the inner word is awakened.

What I have been describing to you exists today in every human being, but he has no knowledge of it and therefore no awareness, no consciousness of it. He must first grow into such a knowledge, into such an awareness. When we learn to recognize the world with the ordinary consciousness that provides us with our intellectual concepts, we really come to recognize only the passing and the past. When we behold in the right way that with which our intellect provides us, we basically have a view back upon a world that is passing away. We can, however, find the Father God with the intellect, as I have said. What sort of consciousness,then, do we develop in relation to the Father God? The consciousness that the Father God lies at the foundation of a world revealing itself to our intellect in the course of passing away.

Yes, it is indeed so—since the middle of the fifteenth century man has developed through his intellect a special faculty for studying and observing what is perishing in the world. We analyze and test the world-corpse with our intellectual, scientific knowledge. And theologians such as Adolph Harnack, who hold to the Father God alone, are really expounders of that part of the world that is perishing and that will pass away with the earth and disappear. They are backward-pointing individuals.

How is it then, finally, for a person who has entered so much into the spirit of what from childhood has been crammed into him as the modern natural scientific way of thinking? He learns that out there in the world are outer phenomena that arise and pass away but that matter persists, matter is the indestructible thing, and that if the earth comes to an end matter will never be destroyed. Certainly, he is told, a time will come when the earth will be one vast cemetery, but this cemetery will be composed of the very same atoms and molecules, or at least the same atoms, as are already there today. One thus applies all one's attention to what is perishing, and even when studying what is unfolding, one really studies only how what is perishing plays into what is unfolding.

It would never be possible for an Oriental to participate in this; we can see this even in the European Orient, in Eastern Europe, in the subdued philosophical feeling of Soloviev. He does not bring it to expression clearly—at least as clearly as it will have to be expressed in general consciousness in the future—but it is evident that Soloviev has still enough of the Oriental in him to see everywhere, within what is perishing, crumbling, dissolving into chaos, what is unfolding anew, the birth of what shall be in the future.

If we wish to see the reality, the actuality, we must envision it in the following way. All that we see with our senses, all that we also see of other human beings with our senses, will no longer exist one day; whatever makes itself known to eye, ear, and so on, will at some time in the future cease to be. Heaven and earth will pass away, for what we see of the stars by means of our senses also belongs to the things that are transient. Heaven and earth will pass away, but the inner word that is formed in the inner chaos of the human being, in the source of destruction, will live on after heaven and earth are no longer there; it will live on just as the seed of this year's plant will live on in the plant of next year. In the inner being of man are the seeds of world-futures. And if into these seeds human beings receive the Christ, then heaven and earth may pass away, but the Logos, the Christ, cannot pass away. Man bears in his inner being what will one day exist when all he sees around him will have ceased to be.

He must be able to say to himself: I look up to the Father God. The Father God lies at the foundation of the world that I can see with my senses. The world of the senses is His revelation, but it is nonetheless a perishing world, and it will drag the human being down with it if he is completely absorbed in it, if he is able to develop a consciousness only of the Father God. Man would then return to the Father God; he would be unable to evolve any further. There is also a new world unfolding, however, and it takes its beginning from man himself. When man ennobles his ethical ideals through the Christ consciousness, through the Christ impulse, when he forms his ethical ideals as they should be formed through the fact that the Christ has come to earth, then something comes to life in the chaos within him, seed is sown for the future, which is now not a perishing but an unfolding world.

One must have a strong feeling for the perishing and the unfolding worlds. One must feel how there is in nature a perpetual dying. Nature is colored, so to speak, by this death. In contrast to this, however, there is also in nature a continual unfolding, a continual coming to birth. This does not color nature in a way visible to the senses; yet if we approach nature with open hearts it is perceptible there.

We look out into nature and see the colors, all the colors of the spectrum, from the red at one end to the violet at the other, with all the shades in between. If we were now to mix these colors in a certain way—make them “color” one another—they would receive life. They would together become the so-called flesh color [Inkarnat], the color that emanates from man. When we look at nature, we are looking in a certain sense at the outspread colors of the rainbow, the sign and symbol of the Father God. If we look at man, however, it is the flesh color that speaks out of the inner being of man, for in man all the colors interpenetrate, thus taking on life, becoming living in their interpenetration. When we turn to a corpse, however, this power to take on life is entirely absent. There, that which is man is thrown back again into the rainbow, into the creation of the Father God. For the source of what makes the rainbow into the flesh color, making it into a living unity, man must look into his inner being.

Yesterday and today I have tried to lead you, perhaps in a complicated way, to an understanding of this inner being of man in its true significance. I have shown you how outer matter is thrown back into nothingness, into chaos, so that the spirit may become newly creative. If one looks at this new creativity, one realizes that the Father God works in matter, bringing it to its completion (see drawing below, bright). Matter confronts us in the outer world in the greatest variety of ways, so that it is visible to us. Within our inner being, however, this matter is thrown back into its nothingness and then permeated with pure spiritual being, with our moral ideals or anti-moral ideas (red). There new life springs up.

The world must appear to us in its double aspect. We see first the Father God, creating what is outwardly visible; we see how what is outwardly visible comes to an end in man's inner being, where it is thrown back into chaos. We must feel intensely how this world, the world of the Father God, comes to its end; only then will we be able to reach an inner understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. It will become clear to us through this how the very thing that comes to an end, the creation of the Father God, is endowed with life once more by God the Son; a new beginning is made.

Everywhere in the Western world it can be seen how since the fifteenth century there has been a tendency to study and investigate only the perishing, the corpse-like part of nature, which is all that is accessible to the intellect. All so-called education or culture [Bildung] has been formed under the influence of a science that concerns itself only with what is dead. This kind of culture is directly opposed to real Christianity. Real Christianity must have a feeling for what is living but must also be able to separate this feeling of what is reviving from what is passing away. Hence the most important idea that must be connected with the Mystery of Golgotha, is the idea of the Risen Christ, the Christ Who has vanquished death. What matters is to comprehend that the most important idea is that of Christ Who passes through death and rises again. Christianity is not merely a religion of salvation; the Oriental religions were also that. Christianity is a religion of resurrection, a religion that awakens again to life what would otherwise be nothing but matter crumbling away into nothingness.

Out in the cosmos we have the crumbling away of matter in the moon, and in the sun we have a perpetual coming into being, forever new and fresh. Seen spiritually, seen through spiritual vision—when we get beyond ordinary sense perception and reach the point where Imagination is active—we can see in the moon a continuous process: it is continuously splintering and scattering itself abroad. There, where the moon is situated, its matter splinters and disperses like dust into the world. The matter of the moon is perpetually being gathered from its environment and then splintered and scattered (see drawing, above). If one looks at the moon in the consciousness of Imagination, one sees a continuous convergence of matter in the place where the moon is; it gathers there, and then it splinters and is scattered like dust into the world. The moon is actually seen like-this (drawing, below): first a circle, then a smaller, narrower circle, becoming ever narrower until the circle becomes the moon itself. Then it dissolves, splinters; it is strewn out over the entire world. In the moon, matter cannot tolerate a center. Matter concentrates toward the center of the moon but cannot tolerate it;it stops short there and disperses like cosmic dust. It is only to ordinary, sensory vision that the moon appears peaceful.It is not peaceful. It is continuously gathering matter together and scattering it.

When we come to the sun, we find it is all quite different. Already in Imagination we are able to see how matter does not splinter in this way at all; true, it does approach the center, but then it begins to receive life in the rays of the sun that stream out from the center. It does not splinter and disperse; it becomes living and spreads out life from the center in every direction. Together with this life it develops astrality. In the moon there is no astrality; there the astrality is destroyed. In the sun, astrality unites itself with all that streams forth. The sun is in truth something that is permeated with inner life, where the center is not only tolerated but has a fructifying influence. In the center of the sun lives the cosmic fructifying activity. In the contrast between sun and moon we thus see a cosmic manifestation of two opposite processes: in the moon matter is thrown back into chaos, while in the sun it is perpetually unfolding, springing and welling up with renewed life.

When we dive down into our inner being, we look into our inner chaos, into our own moon nature. That is the inner moon. Matter is destroyed there, as in the outer world it is destroyed only where the moon is. Then, however, the radiance of the sun penetrates our senses; the sun's radiance enters our inner moon nature. The matter inwardly dissolving there into dust is renewed by the sun's radiance. Here, in the inner being of man, matter is continuously falling under the moon influence, and just as continuously man absorbs through his senses the radiance of the sun (see drawing, left). Such is the relationship in which we stand to the cosmos, and so one must have the capacity to perceive these two opposite activities in the cosmos: the moon nature directed toward splintering and scattering, and the quickening, life-giving radiance of the sun.

Through both these experiences one comes to behold, in what is splintering and crumbling to dust, the world of the Father God, which had to be there until such time as the world changed into the world of God the Son, which basically has its physical source in what is sun-like in the world.What is of the moon nature and the sun nature relate to one another as Father God to Son God.

During the early Christian centuries these things were seen instinctively. Now they must be known again with full presence of mind if the human being wishes to be able to say of himself in all honesty: I am a Christian. This is what I wished to present to you today.

• 5 . Adolf von Harnack, church historian, 1851–1930.
• 6 . Vladimir Soloviev, Russian philosopher, 1853–1900.

We saw yesterday how the human being in his consciousness approaches the world from two sides, as it were: when he is active from within and when he is active from without. The ordinary consciousness, however, is not able to grasp what lives within the human being, because consciousness strikes up against it. We have seen, moreover, how karma also lives in man from two sides between birth and death. On the one hand there is the moment of awaking when man plunges into his etheric body, where, while he is submerged, he can have the reminiscence of dreams in ordinary consciousness. Then he passes, as it were, the space between the etheric body and the physical body—he is in the physical body only when he has full sense perception—and there he passes through the region of the living thoughts active within him. These are the same thoughts that actually have taken part in building up his organism and that he has brought with him through birth into existence; they represent, in other words, his completed karma. On falling asleep, however, man strikes up against that which cannot become deed. What enters into deeds as our impulses of will and feeling is lived out during our lifetime. Something is always left behind, however, and this is taken by the human being into his sleep. Yet it is also present at other times. Everything in the soul life that does not pass into deed, that stops short, as it were, before the deed, is future karma, which is forming itself and which we can carry further through death.

Yesterday I sought to indicate briefly how the forces of karma live in the human being. Today we will consider something of the human environment to show how the human being actually stands within the world, in order to be able to give all this a sort of conclusion tomorrow. We tried yesterday to examine objectively the human soul life itself, and we found that thinking develops itself in that region which is in fact the objective thought region between the physical body and the etheric body. We also found that feeling develops itself between the etheric and astral bodies, and willing develops itself between the astral body and the I or ego. The actual activity of the soul thus develops itself in the spaces between—I said yesterday that this expression is not exact, yet it is comprehensible—the spaces that we must suppose are between the four members of human nature, between the physical body, etheric body, astral body, and I. If we wish to view the spaces between objectively, they are the interactions among the members of the human being.

Today we wish to look at something of the human environment. Let us bring to mind clearly how the human being is in a fully living dream life, how he has pictures sweeping through the dream life. I explained yesterday that the Imaginative consciousness can perceive how these pictures descend into the organization and how what works in these pictures brings about our feelings. Our feelings are therefore what actually would be grasped if one were to look more deeply into man's inner being as an approach to dream pictures. Feelings are the waves that mount up from the day's dream life into our consciousness. We dream continuously, as I said yesterday, beneath the surface of the conceptual life, and this dream life lives itself out in feelings.

If we now look into the environment of the human being and consider first the animal world, we find in the animal world a consciousness that does not rise to thinking, to a life of thought, but that is developed actually in a sort of living dream life. We can form a picture of what reveals itself in the soul life of the animal through a study of our own dream life. The soul life of the animal is entirely a dreaming. The animal's soul life thus is much more actively at work on the organism than the soul life of man, which is more free of the organism through the clarity of the conceptual life. The animal actually dreams. Just as our dream pictures, those dream pictures that we form during waking consciousness, stream upward as feelings, so is the soul life of the animal based mainly on feeling. The animal actually does not have a soul life penetrated by the clear light of thought. What therefore takes place in us between the etheric body and the astral body is essentially what is taking place in the animal. It forms the animal's soul life, and we can understand animal life if we can picture it as proceeding from the soul life.

It is important to form a certain image of these relationships, for then one will comprehend what actually takes place when, let us say, the animal is digesting. Just watch a herd lying in a field digesting. The whole mood of the creatures reveals the truth of what has come to light through spiritual research, namely, that the aroused activity taking place essentially between the etheric body and astral body of the animal presses upward in a living feeling and that the creature lives in this feeling. The animal experience consists essentially of an enhancement and a diminishing of this feeling, and, when the feeling is somewhat subdued, of a participation in its dream pictures, the picture taking the place of feeling. We can say, therefore, that the animal lives in a consciousness that is similar to our dream consciousness.

If we seek for the consciousness that we ourselves have as human beings here on earth, we cannot look for it within the animal; we must seek it in beings who do not come to immediate physical existence. These we call the animal species-souls, souls that as such have no physical, bodily nature but that live themselves out through the animals. We can say that all lions together have such a species-soul, which has a spiritual existence. It has a consciousness such as we human beings have, not like that of the single animal.

If we now descend to the plant world we find there not the same sort of consciousness as an animal's but a consciousness similar to the one we have between sleeping and awaking. The plant is a sleeping being. We also, however, develop this consciousness between the astral body and the I in willing. What is active in the plant world is of essentially the same nature as what lives in our willing. In our willing we actually sleep even when we are awake. The same activity that prevails in our willing actually prevails over the whole plant world. The consciousness that we develop as sleep consciousness is something that actually continues as an unconscious element inserted into our conscious element, forming gaps in our memory, as I described yesterday. Our consciousness is dull during sleep, however, indeed altogether extinguished for most people, just as is the case in plant consciousness.

If we then look in plant life for what corresponds to animal life, we cannot seek it in the individual plant but must seek it in the whole earth-soul. The whole earth-soul has a dreaming consciousness and sleeps itself into the plant consciousness. Only insofar as the earth takes part in cosmic becoming does it flicker up in such a way that it can develop a full consciousness such as we human beings have in the waking state between birth and death. This is chiefly the case, however, in the time of winter, when there is a kind of waking of the earth, whereas the dull dream consciousness exists during the warm time, in summer. I have often explained in earlier lectures that it is entirely wrong to conclude that the earth awakes in summer and sleeps in winter. The reverse is true. In the stirring vegetative activity that develops during the summer, during the warm time of the year, the earth exists in a sleeping, or rather in a dreaming, state, while the waking state exists in the cold time of the year.

If we now descend to the mineral realm we must admit that the consciousness there is still deeper than that of our sleep, a consciousness that indeed lies far from our ordinary human experience, going out even beyond our willing. Nevertheless, what lives in the mineral as a state of consciousness lies far from us only apparently, only for the ordinary consciousness. In reality it does not lie far from us at all. When, for instance, we pass from willing to real action, when we perform some action, then our willing cuts itself off from us. That within which we then swim, as it were, that within which we weave and live in carrying out the deed (which, in fact, we only picture [vorstellen]—our consciousness does not penetrate the action, we only picture it) but what penetrates the deed itself, the content of the deed, is ultimately the same as what penetrates the other side of the surface of the mineral in mineral nature and that constitutes the mineral consciousness. If we could sink still deeper into unconsciousness we would actually come to where the mineral consciousness is weaving. We would find ourselves, however, in the same condition as that in which our action itself is also accomplished. The mineral consciousness thus lies for us on the other side of what we as human beings are able to experience. Our own deed, however, also lies on the other side of what we human beings can experience. Insofar, therefore, as our deed does not depend on us, does not lie in the sphere of what is encompassed within our freedom, our deed is just as much an event of the world as what takes place in the mineral kingdom. We incorporate our deed into this event and thus actually carry man's relation to his environment to the point where man with his action even comes over to the other side of his sleeping consciousness.

In becoming aware of the mineral world around him and seeing the minerals from the outside, the human being hits upon what lies beyond his experience. We could say that if this (see drawing) represents the circumference of what we see within the human realm, the animal realm, and the plant realm, and then we come here to the mineral realm, the mineral realm shows us only its outer side in its working upon our senses. On the other side, however, where we can no longer enter, the mineral realm develops—turned away from us, as it were—its consciousness (red). It is the consciousness that is developed there that is received from the inner contents of our deeds, that can work further in the course of our karma.

Now let us pass on to the beings who do not stand beneath the human being in the ranks of the realms of nature but who stand above the human being. How can we receive a certain mental image of these beings; how, for the consciousness that we must establish through spiritual research, through anthroposophy, can a mental image of such higher beings be formed? You know from the presentation in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment, and from lectures I have given on the subject that we can ascend from the day consciousness, which we call the objective consciousness, to Imaginative consciousness. If we ascend to Imaginative consciousness in a healthy way, we first become free of our bodily nature. We weave in the ether life. Our mental images will thereby cease to have sharp contours, they will be Imaginations flowing into one another. Moreover, they will resemble the thought life that I characterized yesterday and that we find on awaking between the etheric body and the physical body. We become accustomed to such a thought life. In this thought life to which we become accustomed in Imagination, we do not link one thought to another in free will; rather, the thoughts link themselves to one another. It is a thought organism, a pictorial thought organism to which we grow accustomed. This pictorial thought organism possesses, however, the force of life. It presents itself to us as being of thought substance, but also as actually living. It has a life of its own: not the individual life possessed by physical, earthly things but a life that fundamentally lives and weaves through all things. We live into a world that lives in imagining, whose activity is imagining.

This is the world that is first experienced above the human being, this weaving world, this self-imagining world. What is woven in us between our etheric and physical bodies, which we can find on awaking and know to be identical with what enters through conception and birth into this physical world from the spiritual world, this we find only as a fragment, as something cut out of this weaving, self-imagining world. That world which is the self-imagining world finally dismisses us, and then it works still further after our birth in our physical body. There a weaving of thought takes place that is unrelated to our own subjective thought-weaving. This weaving of thought takes place in our growth. This weaving of thought is active as well in our nourishment. This weaving of thought is formed out of the universal thought-weaving of the cosmos.

We cannot understand our etheric body without understanding that we have this universal thought-weaving of the world (see drawing, bright) and that our etheric body (red) is woven, as it were, out of this thought-weaving of the world through our birth. The thought-weaving of the world weaves into us, forms the forces that underlie our etheric body and that actually manifest themselves in the space between etheric body and physical body. They are drawn in, as it were, through the physical body, separated from the outer world, and then they work in us with the help of the etheric body, the actual body of formative forces.

We thus can picture what is behind our world. The cognition next to ours is the Imaginative, and the next state of being that is in our environment is the self-imagining one, expressing itself in living pictures. Such an expression in living pictures underlies our own organization. In our etheric body we are entirely formed and fashioned out of the cosmos. As we have to ascribe to the animal in the realm below us a consciousness like our dreaming consciousness, so in rising upward we find what we then have subjectively in Imagination. What we cultivate inwardly as a web of Imaginations exists for us outwardly; we behold it, as it were, from outside. We imagine from within. The beings just above man imagine themselves from without, revealing themselves through Imagination driven outward, and we ourselves are formed out of this world through such an Imagination driven outward. Thus in fact a weaving of thoughts, a weaving of picture-thoughts, underlies our world, and when we seek the spiritual world we find a weaving of picture-thoughts.

You know that in the development of our cognitional capacities the next stage is the stage of Inspiration. We can experience Imagination from within as a process of cognition. The next world beyond the world of self-imagining, however, is one that weaves and lives in the same element we hit upon with Inspiration, only for this world it is an “exspiration,” a spreading out of oneself, as it were. We inspire ourselves with knowing. What the next world does, however, is to “exspire” itself; it drives outward what we drive inward in Inspired cognition.

By beholding from the reverse side what we experience inwardly as Inspiration, we thus arrive at the objectivity of the next higher beings, and so it is also with Intuition, with Intuitive cognition. I must first say, however, that if as human beings we were merely spun out of the thought-weaving of the world, we would not bring with us into this life the element of our soul that has gone through the life between the last death and this birth. What is spun out of the universal thought-weaving of the world has been assigned to us by the cosmos. Now, however, the soul element must enter it. The entry of the soul element is through such an activity of “exspiration,” through an activity that is the reverse of Inspiration. We are thus “exspired” from the soul-spiritual world. Inasmuch as the cosmos weaves around us with its thought-weaving, the soul-spiritual world permeates us in “exspiring” with the soul element. First, however, it must receive this soul element, and here we come to something that can be comprehended correctly only through the human being.

You see, as human beings living in the world between birth and death we continuously receive impressions of the outer world through our sense perceptions. We form mental images about these and permeate our mental images with our feelings. We pass over to our will impulses and permeate all these. This forms in us at first, however, a kind of abstract life, a kind of picture life. If you look from within, as it were, at what the sense organs have formed inwardly as soul experience of the outer world, you find, in fact, the content of your soul. It is the soul content of the human being that in the higher waking consciousness presents what the outer world gives him between birth and death. His inner being receives it, as it were. If I sketch this inner being, in perception the world as it were enters (see next below, red), becomes inwardly penetrated by the forces of feeling and will, and presses itself into the human organism. We actually bear within us a view of the world, but we bear this view of the world through the effects, the impressions, of the world pressing into us. We are not able to understand fully in our ordinary consciousness the destiny of what actually goes on in us with these impressions of the world. What presses into us and—within certain limits—what is a picture of the cosmos is not only permeated by feelings and inner will impulses, which enter us in consciousness, but is pulsed through by all that otherwise,lives within the human being. In this way it acquires a certain tendency. For as long as we live, right up until death, it is held together by the body. In penetrating the portal of death, it takes with it from the body what one can call a wish to continue what it became in the body, a wish to accept the being of man. When we carry our inner soul life through death it acquires the wish to accept the being of man.

That is what our soul life bears through death: the longing for the being of man. And this longing for the being of man is particularly strongly expressed in all that is dreaming and sleeping in the depths of our soul life, in our will. Our will, as it incorporates itself into the soul life, which arises out of the impressions of the outer world, bears within it as it goes through death into a spiritual world, into the weavings of a spiritual world, the deepest longing to become man.

Our thought world, on the other hand, that world which can be seen in our memories, for example, which is reflected from us ourselves into our consciousness, bears within it the opposite longing. It has indeed formed a relationship with our human nature. Our thoughts have a strong relationship to our human nature. They then bear in themselves, when they go through death, the most intense longing to spread out into the world—to become world (see 1st diagram this lecture).

We therefore can say that as human beings going through death our thoughts bear within them the longing to become world. The will, on the other hand, which we have developed in life, bears within it the longing to become man.

Thoughts: Longing to become world.
Will: Longing to be come man.

This is what goes with us through death. All that rules as will in the depths of our being bears in its deepest inner being the longings to become man. One can perceive this with Imaginative consciousness if one observes the sleeping human being, whose will is outside him, whose will with the I is outside him. In what is to be found outside the human body, the longing is already clearly expressed to return, to awake again, in order to take human shape within the extension of the human physical body itself. This longing, however, remains beyond death. Whatever is of a will nature desires to become man, whereas whatever is of a thought nature and must unite with the thoughts that are so near to the physical life, with the thoughts that actually form our human tissue and bear our human configuration between birth and death—that acquires the longing to be dispersed again, to disintegrate, to become world. This lasts until approximately the middle of the time that we spend between death and a new birth.

The thought element in its longing to become world then has come, as it were, to an end. It has incorporated itself into the entire cosmos. The longing to become world is achieved, and a reversal comes about. Midway between death and a new birth this longing of the thoughts to become world slowly changes into the longing to become man again, again to interweave itself so as to become the thought-web that we can perceive next to the body when we awake. We can say, therefore, that in the moment that lies midway between death and a new birth—which I called the Midnight Hour of Existence in my Mystery Dramas—we have a rhythmic reversal from the longing of our thoughts to become world, now that it has been fulfilled, into the longing to become man again, gradually to descend in order to become man again.

In the same moment that the thoughts receive the longing to become man again, the reverse appears in the will. The will at first develops the longing to become man in the spiritual element where we live between death and a new birth. It is this longing that predominantly fills the will. Out there between death and a new birth the will has experienced a spiritual image of the human being; now there arises in it the most vivid longing again to become world. The will spreads out, as it were; it becomes world, it becomes cosmos. By reason of this spreading out it extends even to the vicinity of the stream of nature that is formed through the line of heredity in the succession of generations. What works as will in the spiritual-physical cosmos and begins in the Midnight Hour of Existence to have the longing again to become world already lives in the flow of generations. When we then embody ourselves in the other stream that has the longing to become man, the will has preceded us in becoming world. It lives already in the propagation of the generations into which we then descend. In what we receive from our ancestors the will already lives, the will that wished to become world after the Midnight Hour of Existence. Through what in our thoughts has desired since the Midnight Hour of Existence to become man, we Meet with this will-desiring-to-become-world, which then incorporates itself into what we receive from our ancestors.

Thoughts: Longing to become world—longing to become man.

Will: Longing to become man—longing to become world.

You see, therefore, that when we thus follow with spiritual vision what lives on the one hand in the physical and what lives on the other hand in the spiritual, we really picture man's becoming. Since we incline downward to our physical existence through the thought-web that longs to become man, however, we are there related to all the beings who live in the sphere just above man, beings who imagine themselves. We pass through the sphere of the beings who, as it were, imagine themselves. At the very moment when this reversal takes place, our soul, permeated with the I, also finds the possibility of living on in the two streams. They diverge, it is true, but the soul lives with them, cosmically lives, until, when the longing to become man again has been fully realized, it incarnates and becomes indeed an individual human being. The life of the soul is very complex, and here in the Midnight Hour of Existence it passes over the abyss. It is inspired, breathed in, out of our own past, that past at first lying between our last death and the Midnight Hour of Existence. We pass this Midnight Hour of Existence through an activity that resembles, experienced inwardly, an inspiring, and that outwardly is an “exspiration,” proceeding from the former existence. When the soul has passed the Midnight Hour of Existence we come together with those beings who stand at the second stage above man and who live, as I have said, in “exspiration.”

The third stage in higher cognition is Intuitive cognition. If we experience it from within, we have experienced it from one side; if we experience it from without then we have an intuiting, a self-surrender, a true surrender of self. This self-surrender, this flowing forth into the outer world, is the nature of the hierarchy that stands at, the third stage above man, the “intuiting.” This intuiting is the activity through which the content of our former earthly life is surrendered to our present one, streams over, pours itself into our present life on earth. We exercise this activity continually, both on the way to the Midnight Hour of Existence and beyond it. This activity permeates all else, and through it, in going through repeated earthly lives, we participate in that world in which are the beings living in real Intuition, the self-surrendering beings. We, too, out of our former earthly life, surrender ourselves to the earthly existence that follows.

We can thus gain a picture of the course of our life between death and a new birth in the environment of these three worlds. Just as here between birth and death we live in the environment of the animal, plant, and mineral worlds, so between death and rebirth we live in that world where what we otherwise grasp in Imagination lives in pictures formed from without. Hence what we carry out of the spiritual cosmos into our bodily form we can also grasp through Imagination. Our soul element, which we carry through the Midnight Hour of Existence, which lives in us principally as the activity of feeling, though dulled into the dreamlike, we can grasp through Inspired cognition, and this is also, when it appears as our life of feeling, permeated by such beings.

In fact, we live fully as human beings only in our outer sense perception. As soon as we advance to thinking, something is objective for this thinking, which is given for Imagination in picture form. We raise into our consciousness only the abstract thoughts out of the picture-forming. Immediately behind our consciousness there lies the picture-weaving of thoughts. As human beings between birth and death, we come to freedom through the fact that we can raise the abstract thoughts out of this picture-weaving. The world of Imaginative necessity lies behind, and there we are no longer alone in the same way as we are here. There we are interwoven with beings revealing themselves through Imagination, as we are then in our feeling nature interwoven with beings revealing themselves through “exspiration,” through inspiring turned outward. In going from earthly life to earthly life we are interwoven with those beings who live by Intuition.

Our human life thus reaches downward into the three realms of nature and reaches upward into the three realms of the divine, soul-spiritual existence. This shows us that in our view of the human being here we have only man's outer side. The moment we look at his inner being he continues toward the higher worlds, he betrays to us, reveals to us his relationship to the higher worlds. We live into these worlds through Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition.

With this we have gained some insight into the human environment. At the same time, however, we have discovered the world that stands as a world of spiritual necessities behind the world of physical necessities. We learn then to appreciate all the more what lies in the center: the world of our ordinary consciousness, through which we pass in the waking condition between birth and death. There we incorporate into our actual human nature what can live in freedom. Below us and above us there is no freedom. We bear freedom through the portal of death by taking with us the most essential content of the consciousness that we possess between birth and death. Indeed, the human being owes to earthly existence the mastery over what in him is the life of freedom. Then, at all events, it can no longer be taken from him, if he has mastered it by passing through life between birth and death. It can no longer be taken from him if he carries this life into the world of spiritual necessities. This earthly life receives its deep meaning precisely by our being able to insert it between what lies below us and above us. We thus rise to a grasp of what can be understood as the spiritual in the human being.

If we wish to know about the soul element, we must look into the spaces between physical body, etheric body, astral body, and I; we must look into what is weaving there between the members of our being. If we wish to acquaint ourselves with man as a spiritual being, we must ask what man experiences with the beings who imagine themselves, with the beings who reveal themselves outwardly through Inspiration, or actually through “exspiration,” with the beings who reveal themselves through Intuition. If we therefore wish to examine the life of the soul we must look for the interaction developed among our human members, and if we wish to study man as a spiritual being we must look for the intercourse with the beings of the hierarchies.

When we look down into nature and wish to view the human being in his entirety, then this human being unveils itself to spiritual vision the moment we can say from inner knowledge: the human being, as he is today, bears in himself physical body, etheric body, astral body, and I. One thus has learned to recognize what man is within nature. Now we become aware—at first in a subjective way through inner experience—of the weaving of the soul. We do not behold it, we stand within it. In rising to a view of the soul we must search between the members that we have discovered as the members of man's being in natural existence. What these members do with one another from within unveils itself for us as the objective view of the soul's life.

Then, however, we must go further and must now not only seek the members of man and the effect of these members upon one another, but we must take the whole human being and see him in interaction with what lives in the widest circumference of the perceptible world environment, below him and above him. Then we discover what lives beneath him, as though sleeping in relation to what is above him, and what proves itself to be the actual spirituality of the human being—spirituality as experience of our activity with the beings of the higher hierarchies. What is experienced above as the actual spirituality and what is experienced below in nature is experienced as an alternation, a rhythmic alternation between waking and sleeping. If we go from the human consciousness, which is the waking consciousness, down to the animal consciousness, which is the dreaming consciousness, down to the plant realm, the sleeping consciousness, and if we go still deeper, we find what is deeper than sleep; if we go upward we first find Imagination as reality fulfilled. Therefore there is a further awakening in relation to our ordinary consciousness, a still further awakening with the higher beings through Inspiration and a fully awakened condition in Intuition, a condition of such awakeness that it is a surrendering to the world.

Now I beg you to follow this diagram, which is of the greatest significance for understanding the world and man. Take this as the central point, as it were, of ordinary human consciousness. It first descends and finds the animal's dreaming consciousness; it descends further and finds the plant's sleeping consciousness; it descends further and finds the mineral's deeply sleeping consciousness.

Now, however, the human being rises above himself and finds the beings who reveal themselves in Imaginations; he goes further upward and finds the beings who reveal themselves in Inspirations, actually through an “exspirating” being; he finally finds the beings who reveal themselves through Intuition, who pour themselves out.

Where do they pour themselves? The highest consciousness pours itself into the deeply sleeping consciousness of the mineral realm. The mineral realm spread around us reveals one side to us. If you approached this one side and were really able to penetrate it—though not by splintering it into atoms—on the other side you would find, raying in from the opposite direction, that which, in Intuitive consciousness, streams into the deeply sleeping consciousness of the mineral realm. This process that we can fmd there in space we, as human beings, go through in time in our evolution through different earthly lives.

We will speak further about these relationships tomorrow.

Considerations such as those we embarked on yesterday are, of course, not necessarily set out for the purpose of inviting anyone to start practising what is needed for attaining super-sensible knowledge. To a certain extent this intention is, of course, also present. But the main reason is to make known what kind of higher knowledge can be attained by such means. A declaration stating that one thing or another is possible in man's development is, at the same time, a declaration about the intrinsic nature of the human being. It can be stated that the human being seeking initiation is capable of extricating his soul and spirit element from his physical body, either by the means described yesterday with reference to the ancient Mysteries, or by means suitable for today, which I am about to discuss briefly. A statement such as this shows that the element of soul and spirit is an independent entity which has its own existence over and above that of the body. So a discussion about higher knowledge is, at the same time, a revelation about the being of man; this is, in the first instance, what is important for the dissemination of anthroposophical wisdom.

Yesterday I described how in the ancient Mysteries the bodily nature of man was treated so that it became able to free its soul nature in both directions. I said that the two main aspects of this in the ancient Mysteries were, on the one hand, the draught of forgetfulness, and, on the other hand, the occasioning of states of anxiety, fear, shock. The draught of forgetfulness, I said, wiped from memory everything pertaining to ordinary earthly life. But this negative effect was not the main point. The main point was that during the process of coming to Mystery knowledge the brain was actually made physically softer, as a result of which the spiritual element which is usually held off was no longer held off by the brain but allowed through, so that the pupil became aware of his soul and spirit element and knew that this had been in him even before birth, or rather, even before conception.

The other aspect was the shock which caused the organism to become rigid. When the organism grows rigid it no longer absorbs the soul and spirit element in the way it usually does with regard to its expression in the will. On the one hand the rigid bodily organism withdraws from the element of soul and spirit, and on the other hand the element of soul and spirit becomes perceptible to the pupil. Through the softening of the brain the thought aspect of the soul became perceptible to the pupil of the ancient Mysteries, and through the rigidifying of the rest of the organism the will aspect became perceptible. In this way, initiation gave the pupil a perception, a picture of the element of soul and spirit within him. But this picture was dreamlike in character. For what was it that was freed on the one hand towards the thought aspect, and on the other hand towards the will aspect? It was that part which descends from realms of spirit and soul to unite with the physical, bodily nature of man. Only by taking possession of the body can it become capable of making use of the senses and of the intellect. It needs the body for these things. Without the use of the body these things remain dreamlike, they remain dull, twilit. So by receiving his detached soul and spirit element as a result of the processes described, the pupil received something dreamlike, which, however, also contained a thought element.

As I said yesterday, if people were to follow these procedures today, the condition induced in consequence would be a pathological condition. For since the Mystery of Golgotha human beings have progressed in such a way that their intellect has become stronger by comparison with their earlier, more instinctive manner of knowing. This strengthening of intellectual life has come over mankind particularly since the fifteenth century. It is extremely significant that throughout the Middle Ages people still knew that in order to attain higher knowledge, or indeed to lead a higher kind of life, it was necessary to extricate the soul from the body.

If Schiller had managed to write a great drama he had planned, Die Malteser (The Knights of Malta), German literature would probably have been all the richer for a work on this medieval knowledge about the super-sensible world, a work on the relationship of the Middle Ages to super-sensible matters. It is a most interesting aspect of German culture that, precisely in the years when Napoleon destroyed the Order of the Knights of Malta,¹ Schiller was planning to write a drama about them, about the siege of Malta by the Turks and its defence by the grand master of the Order, de La Valette. Schiller was obviously prevented from writing this drama. He left it on one side and wrote Wallenstein (Wallenstein's Camp) instead. The Order of the Knights of Malta originated at the time of the Crusades. Schiller's drama would have shown clearly that the members of such an Order, which had the external task of working for the community and caring for the sick, considered that they could only do such work if they at the same time strove towards the attainment of a higher life.

At the time when the Order of the Knights Templar and the Order of the Knights Hospitaller of St John—which later became the Order of the Knights of Malta—were founded, and indeed throughout the Middle Ages, people had the certain feeling that human beings must first transform themselves before they can undertake such tasks in the right way. This is a feeling about the nature of the human being which has become entirely lost in more recent times. This can be put down to the fact that the human intellect has grown so much more intense and strong, with the result that modern man is totally intellectual because the intellectual aspect predominates entirely.

Now, in our own time, there is once more a great longing amongst mankind to overcome the intellectual aspect. Though literature and, above all, journalism, still express the opposite, nevertheless amongst the broad masses of mankind there is a longing to overcome the intellectual element. One thing that shows this especially is the fact that talks about spiritual matters are extremely well received in the widest circles. Another thing, even though it is not yet fully understood, is the way our eurythmy impresses the widest circles—not intellectually, but in what comes from the imaginative foundation of human beings. This became very obvious during my more recent lecture tours and especially the recent eurythmy tour. Eurythmy makes a very strong impression, even in circles where it cannot be understood in its deepest sense when it is seen for the first time. Nevertheless, it is felt to be something which has been called up out of the profoundest foundations of human nature, something that is more than what comes out of the intellect.

Now what is this intellectual element which is so much a part of the human being today? Let me draw you another diagram. As I said yesterday, with regard to the human brain (white), we can imagine how, as a result of the draught of forgetfulness, the element of spirit and soul, which usually came to a halt before penetrating too far inwards, now penetrated the brain (red). In the pupil of the ancient Mysteries the element of spirit and soul then rose up through the brain which had been thus prepared. Compared with ancient times, let us say prior to the Mystery of Golgotha, today's intellectual faculties are as they are because the element of soul and spirit is inwardly much stronger and more intense. The people of ancient times were far less intellectual. Their soul and spirit element was not etched with such sharp lines of thought as is the case today. Intellectuals think in straight lines, which is not how people thought in more ancient times. In those days thoughts were more like pictures, they were dreamlike and softer. Now, thoughts are endowed with sharp edges, clear contours. Yet, even though the element of soul and spirit is much stronger than it used to be, human beings today are still nevertheless incapable of grasping these thoughts with their soul and spirit element.

Please do not misunderstand me, my dear friends. Human beings today are considerably stronger in their soul and spirit than were people of old. They dream less than did people of old, and their thoughts are firmer. But their thoughts would be just as dull today as they used to be, if the element of soul and spirit alone were at work in them. Even today, human beings cannot think out of their soul. It is their body which relieves them of the power of thought. Sense perceptions are received by the element of soul and spirit. But to think these sense perceptions we need the help of our body. Our body is the thinker. So nowadays the following takes place: The sense perception works on the human being; the element of soul and spirit (red, top) penetrates and mingles with the sense perception; but the body acts like a mirror and keeps on throwing back the rays of thought (arrows). By this means they become conscious. So it is the body which relieves human beings of the effort of thinking, but it does not relieve them of the effort of perceiving with their senses. So today, if human beings want to strive for initiation with regard to the thought aspect, they must turn their exercises towards strengthening their element of soul and spirit even more. We know these exercises from Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and from the second part of Occult Science. Thus will they gradually make their soul and spirit element so independent that it no longer needs the body.

So let us understand one another: When we think in ordinary life today, our element of soul and spirit does participate. Above all it takes in the sense perceptions. But it would be incapable by itself of developing the thoughts which are developed today. So the body comes along and relieves us of the effort of thinking. In ordinary life we think with our body, our body is our thinking apparatus. If we pursue the exercises described in the books mentioned, our soul will be strengthened to such an extent that it would no longer need the body for thinking but would itself be able to think. This is, basically, the first step on the path towards higher knowledge; it is the first step when the soul and spirit element begins to dismiss the body as the organ that does the thinking so far as higher knowledge is concerned. And it cannot be stressed often enough that a person who ascends to higher knowledge—that is, to Imagination—must remain at his own side with his ordinary good sense, keeping a watch on himself and being his own critic. In other words, he must remain the same person he always is in ordinary life. But out of the first person that second one develops, capable now of thinking without the help of the body, instead of with it.

The element of spirit and soul which revealed itself to the pupil of the ancient Mysteries came out of the body and penetrated through the brain, and as it oozed forth the pupil perceived it. Today what is perceived in initiation is a strengthened thinking which does not in any way make use of the brain. The pupil in ancient times drew what he saw in the way of spirit and soul out of his own bodily organization. Today the human being perceives the soul and spirit element, as far as thoughts are concerned, in such a way that they penetrate into him in the same way as sense perceptions penetrate into him. In taking this first upward step towards higher knowledge the human being must accustom himself to saying: I am beginning to perceive myself with regard to my eternal element of soul and spirit, for this comes in through my eyes, it comes in from outside in every way.

In a public lecture² in the Bernoulli Hall in Basel I said: Anthroposophical spiritual science has to regard perception through the senses as its ideal. We have to take our start from perceiving with our senses. We must not return to dreamlike perception, but have to go forward to even clearer perception than that of perceiving with our senses. Our own being must come towards us, just as colours and sounds come towards our senses.

I showed two things in the last diagram. Both this (top) and this (bottom), the element of soul and spirit, are supposed to be one and the same thing. And they are one and the same, but seen from different sides. When a human being descends from the world of spirit and soul to physical incarnation, his element of soul and spirit, in a way, dies from the point of view of the soul and spirit world. When a human being is conceived and prepares to be born he dies as regards the spiritual world. And when he dies here in the physical world and goes through the portal of death he is born in the spiritual world. These concepts are relative. We die in respect of the spiritual world when we are born. And when we die in respect of the physical world we are born in the spirit. Death in the physical world signifies spiritual birth, birth in the physical world signifies spiritual death. Birth and death, then, are relative concepts. There is something which makes its appearance when the soul is on its way to birth, something that would not be capable of surviving in the spiritual world; it would disintegrate in the spiritual world, and so it streams towards a physical body in order to preserve itself.

In a diagram it can be depicted like this: The element of spirit and soul (red coming from the left) descends from the spirit and soul world. It arrives, you might say, in a cul-de-sac; it can go no further and is forced to equip itself with physical matter (blue). But the physical matter actually only works in the way I have described—from the brain, but not from the rest of the organism. As regards the rest of the organism the spirit and soul element does indeed travel onwards, having recovered through not being allowed to pass by the brain, through finding resistance and support in the brain. It is able, after all, to come to meet itself (red, right) throughout the rest of the organism, especially the system of limbs and metabolism. This blue part in the drawing is the head organism. Here (yellow) is the system

of limbs and metabolism; under normal conditions it absorbs the element of soul and spirit, but only to a certain extent.

As we grow up from childhood our spirit and soul element keeps making an appearance. At the moment of conception, and all through the embryonic stage in the mother's womb, the element of spirit and soul descending from the spiritual world is absorbed into matter. But because it finds a support it recovers again. Because of the shape of the embryo, at first that of the head, the element of spirit and soul finds a support (see drawing). Then the rest of the organism begins to grow, and once again the element of spirit and soul oozes through, as I have shown in the diagram.

As we grow up through childhood our element of spirit and soul gradually becomes ever more independent. I have often described this in detail and also shown how at major points of transition, such as the change of teeth and puberty, the element of spirit and soul becomes increasingly independent. As we grow up our physical body recedes more and more as we attain an independent spirit and soul element. This independent element is more intense today than it was in ancient times. But it would still be incapable of thinking. As I have said, it needs the help of the body if it wants to think. If this were not there, whatever grew towards us would remain forever dreamlike.

Initiates in ancient times strove to make their brain porous, so that what was then the element of spirit and soul could ooze through as it descended; in a certain way they could still see their life before birth through their softened brain. Today initiates are not concerned with that; they are concerned with what evolves during the course of life. This awakens a higher intensity with regard to the thought aspect. Initiates in ancient times would not have been capable of this. They would have been unable to take such a firm hold of the new spirit and soul element that begins to develop in the child—to begin with in an unclear way, and which later passes through the portal of death. In a way they slew the physical aspect, they paralysed it, so that the element of spirit and soul could emerge that had existed before conception.

Today we take a firmer hold of what we develop—at first in a weak way—through childhood and into adulthood, strengthening and reinforcing the new element of spirit and soul that has been developing since birth. We endeavour to achieve independence of our spirit and soul element over against our physical body, as far as our thought life is concerned. The pupil in ancient times made manifest the element of spirit and soul belonging to him before birth by toning down his physical body. We today endeavour to make manifest that element of spirit and soul which develops more and more from birth onwards. But we do not make it manifest to a degree which would be necessary in order to be able to see independently into the spiritual world. This is the difference.

As regards the will, the situation is as follows. The initiate in ancient times endeavoured to paralyse his will organization. This made it possible for him to perceive the element of spirit and soul he had from before his birth and which was normally absorbed by his will organization. If the body is rigid it does not absorb the element of spirit and soul, and so it is revealed independently. As modern initiates we do not do this; we do it differently. We strengthen our will by transforming the power of will in the manner described in the books already mentioned. It would be quite wrong to bring about a cataleptic condition by means of shocks or anxiety states as was the case in the ancient Mysteries. For modern man, with his highly-developed intellect, this would be something quite pathological. This must not be allowed to happen. Instead we use retrospective exercises—remembering backwards what has happened through the day—and also other will exercises to transform our will in a way which might be described as follows:

Consider the human eye. What must be its constitution if we are to be able to see? A cataract comes about when the physical matter of the eye makes itself independent so that it dresses itself up in physical matter which is not transparent. The eye must be selfless, it must be selflessly incorporated in our organism if we are to use it for seeing; it must be transparent. Our organism is most certainly not transparent for our will. As I have often said, we can think that we want to raise our hand. We form the thought: I want to raise my hand. But what then happens in our organism as this thought slips over into it and performs the action—this is as obscure for us as are the events which take place between going to sleep and waking up. The next thing we see is our raised hand, another perception. We perceive something at the beginning and we perceive something at the end, but what lies in between is a state of sleep. Our will unfolds in the unconscious just as much as the events of sleep unfold in the unconscious. So we can rightly say that for ordinary consciousness our organism is as untransparent as regards perceiving how the will functions as is an eye afflicted with cataract.

Of course I do not mean that the human organism is ill because of this. For ordinary, everyday life it has to be untransparent. This is its normal condition. But it cannot remain so for higher knowledge; it has to become transparent, it must become transparent for soul and spirit. This is achieved by means of the will exercises. Our organism then becomes transparent. We then no longer look down into something indeterminate when our will works, for our organism becomes as selfless as the eye, which is set selflessly into our organism so that we may perceive external objects properly. Just as the eye is in itself transparent, so our organism becomes transparent with regard to the element of spirit and soul; our whole organism becomes a sense organ. Thus, with regard to the will, we perceive the spiritual beings as objectively as we perceive external physical objects through our external eyes. Our will exercises are not aimed at making our body rigid in order to free our element of spirit and soul. They are aimed at developing the element of soul and spirit to such an extent that it becomes capable of seeing through the physical body. This is the main point. We see into the spiritual world only if we look through ourselves. We see external objects with our eyes only by looking through our eyes. And we do not see into the spiritual world directly, but only by looking through ourselves.

This is the other side: development with regard to the will. The whole of evolution in recent times depends, firstly, on our developing our thinking to an extent which makes it independent of the brain, and secondly, on our developing our will to an extent that the whole human being becomes transparent. It is impossible to see into the spiritual world through a vacuum, just as it is impossible to see the world of colours without looking through the eye. We have to look through ourselves, and this is brought about by means of the will exercises.

This, then, is for modern man what can be carried out by initiation. On the one hand, with regard to thinking, the element of soul and spirit can be made independent of the body, and on the other hand the material nature of the body can be overcome so that it becomes transparent for spirit and soul. Thus the element of spirit and soul has become independent through its own strength. This is the great difference between ancient and modern initiation. Ancient initiation transformed the physical body—the brain on the one hand, and the rest of the organism on the other—and, because the body was transformed in this way, the element of soul and spirit became faintly perceptible. Modern initiation transforms the element of spirit and soul, strengthening it with regard to the thought aspect on the one hand, and the will aspect on the other; thus it becomes independent of the brain, and at the same time so strong that it can see through the rest of the organism.

What the initiate saw in olden times appeared in ghostly form. Whatever beings of the spiritual world were able to reveal themselves when the procedure had been completed, appeared in a ghostly form. I could say that the spiritual world was seen in etheric shapes. The great anxiety of the teachers in the ancient Mysteries was that the pupils, despite the fact that what they saw of the spiritual world was ghostly, would learn to disregard this ghostly aspect. Ever and again they warned their pupils: What you are seeing appears to be material, but you must regard it as a picture; these ghostly things that you are seeing are only pictures of the spiritual world; you must not imagine that what you see around you in a ghostly form is actual reality. In a similar way, when I draw on the blackboard the chalk marks are not reality but only an image. Of course this expression was not used in olden times, but in modern terms it is a good way of putting it. It was the great concern of the teachers in the ancient Mysteries that their pupils should regard as pictures what they saw in a dreamlike, ghostly form.

In modern initiation there must be anxiety on a different score. Here, knowledge of the higher worlds can only be achieved at all by means of Imagination. Here we have to live in a world of pictures; the pictures have a picture character from the start. There is no danger of mistaking them in their picture character for anything else. But we have to learn to assess them correctly. In order to know how to relate these pictures to the spiritual reality they represent, we have to apply to them the exact thought processes we have acquired as modern human beings. We really have to think within this world of pictures in the very way we have learnt to think in the ordinary physical world. Every thoughtless glance is damaging to modern initiation. All the healthy ways of thinking we have developed as modern human beings must be brought to bear on higher knowledge. Just as we can find our way about the ordinary physical world if we can think properly, so can we only find our way about in the world of the spirit—which we enter through modern initiation—if we are able to penetrate with the thinking we have gained here in the physical world into all the knowledge we attain through Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition. In my book Theosophy,³ as well as in Occult Science and Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, I have always stated categorically that this is a characteristic of modern initiation.

That is why it is so important that anyone who desires to enter into the higher worlds in a modern way should learn to think with exactitude and practise thinking with exactitude. This is not as easy as people suppose. To help you understand what I mean let me say the following: Think of something really startling: Suppose our present respected company were to be surprised tomorrow here in the Goetheanum by a visit from, say, Lloyd George⁴ of course this is only hypothetical, but I want to give an extreme example. If Lloyd George were to turn up here tomorrow you would all have certain thoughts and certain feelings. These thoughts and feelings would not be the result of simply observing all that went on from the moment of his appearance until the moment of his departure. In order to simply follow all this, you would not need to know that it was Lloyd George. If you did not know who it was, you would simply note whatever can be noted with regard to somebody who is entirely unknown to you. Until you learn to disregard everything you already know and feel from elsewhere about something you are observing, as long as you cannot simply follow what is going on without any of this, you are not thinking with exactitude. You would only be thinking with exactitude if you were capable—should Lloyd George really appear here tomorrow—of entertaining thoughts and feelings which applied solely to what actually went on from the moment you first noticed him to the moment when he disappeared from view. You would have to exclude every scrap of prior knowledge. You would have to exclude everything that had irritated you and everything that had pleased you about him and take in only whatever there was to take in at that moment. Only in this way is it possible to learn to think in accordance with reality.

Just think how far human beings are from being able to think with exactitude as regards reality! Only let something stir in your soul and you will see what feelings, living hidden and unconscious in your soul, you allow to rise up. It is extremely difficult to confine oneself solely to what one has seen. Read a description of something and then ask: Is the writer merely describing what he saw or is he not also calling up hundreds and hundreds of prejudices, both in feeling and in thinking, which are bound up with it? Only if you are capable of restricting yourself solely to what you have seen will you be in a position gradually to attain to thinking with exactitude.

It is necessary to lay aside everything we have been taught or have learned from life with regard to what we see, and follow solely what life presents to us. If you consider this and meditate on it a little you will gradually come to understand what I mean by thinking with exactitude. In ordinary life we have little opportunity under today's conditions to practise thinking with exactitude except in geometry or, over and above that, in mathematics. Here we really do restrict ourselves to what we see.

We have not many prejudices about a geometric form, a triangle for instance. Here is a triangle. Let me draw a parallel line here. This angle equals that angle, and the other one is equal to this one, and the one in the middle equals itself. This is a straight angle, so all three

angles of the triangle equal a straight angle. I am simply taking account of what I see before me, without applying the colossal prejudices I would bring to bear if Lloyd George were to arrive here tomorrow and I were to know about it in advance. In saying what I have just said, I was, of course, merely endeavouring to point out that thinking with absolute exactitude is a good preparation for seeing properly in the higher spiritual world. A kind of thinking in which you have firm control of the beginning of the thought, as well as a clear view of every step of thought along the way, is necessary in order to enter the higher worlds, that is, in order enter there with understanding. Above all a clearly-defined conscientiousness in thinking is necessary, a calling-oneself-to-account about one's thoughts. Ordinary life is very remiss in this, too. In most cases, people have no interest in thinking with exactitude; they prefer to think in a way in which they can enjoy the thought and feel comfortable with it.

For a Catholic priest, for instance, it is frightfully uncomfortable to entertain the thought that there might be something right about Anthroposophy. In such a case there can be no question of developing any exact thoughts. Instead, the matter is approached with all sorts of misconceptions and prejudices, and judgements are formed on the basis of these. Most things in life are decided on the basis of prejudices. Consider, for instance, what a strange impression is created sometimes when a simple attempt is made to describe something entirely objectively. Here we live in the Goetheanum. Nobody would consider me to be less of an admirer of Goethe than anyone else, and yet have I not said a good many things against Goethe? How often have I not attempted to describe Goethe from a narrow, overseeable point of view, whereas usually when Goethe is mentioned a whole host of prejudgements arises in response to his name alone. Merely to mention the name of Goethe sets up an excitement in the soul. It is impossible to approach any new phenomenon without prejudgement if one brings along a colossal collection of prejudices before even starting.

For the most part these things are not taken into account, and people therefore frequently say: Oh well, we can't get any further with our project of entering the spiritual worlds! Indeed, if elementary matters are not attended to first then, naturally enough, there is no way of entering those worlds. People just feel that unreasonable demands are being made of them if it is suggested that they take account of even the most elementary things.

Here is an example: In the nineties⁵ I happened to be in Jena when Bismarck gave a grand speech after his forced resignation. He appeared on the platform in the wake of Haeckel and Bardeleben and other Jena professors. Imagine the huge crowd in the market square in Jena. They were expected to follow Bismarck's speech as they would a speech made by someone they had previously never heard of! Such a thing is unthinkable under normal conditions. And yet for someone who really desires to undergo a kind of initiation it is certainly necessary to develop an impartiality which enables him to take everything he sees as something entirely new, however many prejudices his soul might previously have harboured in that respect. Everything must be treated as though it had arrived like a bolt from the blue. For it is a special characteristic of the spiritual world that we have to win it afresh at every moment if we desire to enter it. And to do this we have to prepare ourselves in a suitable way.

It can be said that the general drift of civilization indicates that mankind is indeed headed in this direction. But for the moment this still appears in a light that is not all that pleasing, namely, in opposition to any kind of authority, and to any kind of received judgement, and so on. These things will have to be ennobled. But meanwhile mankind is indeed moving in the direction of impartiality and freedom from prejudice. But, for the moment, the more negative, the uglier sides of this are more prevalent. We must, therefore, judge the evolution of civilization with regard to the future in the very manner I have just been describing.

• 1 . Order of the Knights of Malta: In 1798 Napoleon seized and occupied Malta on his way to Egypt.
• 2 . See the lecture of 2 November 1921 in Rudolf Steiner, Anthroposophie und Wissenschaft, Dornach GA 75 (not yet published).
• 3 . Rudolf Steiner Theosophy, Anthroposophic Press, New York 1986.
• 4 . David Lloyd George, 1863-1945. British Prime Minister from 1916 to 1922.
• 5 . On 16 February 1894 Ernst Haeckel celebrated his sixtieth birthday. Rudolf Steiner was one of the invited guests. Bismarck, much admired by Haeckel, was also present. He had been forced to resign his office in 1890.

The Christian consciousness of to-day is still aware—or can, at least, still be aware—of two poles, representing as it were the outermost extremes of world-outlook. The two poles to which I refer are the Christmas secret and the Easter secret. To begin with—even if you only compare them outwardly—it will strike you at once that the Christmas secret is really the secret of birth; it represents the birth of Christ Jesus, and therewithal attaches itself to the secret of birth in general, the Easter secret is connected with the secret of death, inasmuch as it is a festival associated with the death of Christ Jesus. Now birth and death are the two boundaries of human life, as it runs its course within the physical body. Thus, in truth, we may say: over against what stands before man as the visible part of his being, birth and death veil from his sight the invisible part; they are the two gateways to the invisible world.

In the festivals of Christmas and Easter, two gateways to the invisible world are thus made the basis of the Christian year; and inasmuch as this is so, the Christian world-conception is indeed connected with the Mysteries of all the World. Wherever we may look—among all peoples and in the most varied regions of the Earth, we find Mysteries everywhere associated either with the secret of birth or with the secret of death, Not that it lies so patently at hand in every case; the inner connections are not always visible at once. Thus, certain Mysteries (I am only referring now to post-Atlantean time) were connected with the secret of birth in a more indirect way. I refer to those Mysteries which place into the very centre of their life what the profane world calls the Sacred Fire; ‘Sacred Fire’ is very different from what the profane world can understand. It is essentially Man himself—the super-sensible Man who underlies the human being of the sense-world. What is it that the profane world knows as the Sacred Fire (or, as we might also call it, the Sacred Warmth)? What is it in reality, when they revere this Fire? It is a symbol of the super-sensible Man. It is that which descends through birth from spiritual heights to grow and evolve in it physical body. It is the invisible or super-sensible Man—perceptible, however, to an old atavistic clairvoyance!

This, then, is the type of the Mysteries which takes its start from the super-sensible Man who underlies the man of the sense-world—the super-sensible Man who passes through birth to clothe himself with a sensely garment. This is the type of Mystery which afterwards passed over into the secret of Christmas; it is essentially the Mystery of birth.

Less hidden, we may truly say, is the other kind of Mystery,—that which belongs to the secret of death. While the former is associated with Fire, this kind of Mystery is associated with the Light. Here too, however, as in the case of Fire, something quite different is meant by ‘the Light.’ ‘The Light’ refers to that which speaks to man at night-time when the star-lit sky sends him its language of Light. All astrological Mysteries in ancient time were in reality Mysteries of Light,—in the times, I mean, before the arrival of the Mystery of Golgotha. Only, here again we must remember that the ancient Astrology was not pursued with the abstract calculations of to-day, but with an atavistic clairvoyant power. Man did not merely observe the mineral-physical world of stars above him; in those most ancient times, he had an organ with which to behold the secret of the constellations. It was, especially, a customary art in certain Mysteries of olden time, to observe the Moon establishing its various positions through the constellations of the Zodiac. They knew that when the Moon was shining from the region of the Pleiades, or from Taurus, it signified something quite different than if it were shining from some other region of the sky. Likewise the other planets in their several constellations were brought home to the consciousness of men. It was, however, a very different consciousness from what has remained to us in this materialistic epoch. They knew, moreover, that the Mystery of human death is connected with what is thus spoken to man by the starry constellations. Throughout the ever-changing association of the fixed stars with the several planets, they saw the expression, as it were, of a language which he who sojourns in the body hears from the Earth, while at the same time the souls of the dead perceive it from the other side. They were clearly conscious of the fact that when a man gives himself up with devotion to the language of the stars, he lives in that element which receives the human being when he passes through the Gate of Death.

They looked on birth as on a Question, in those ancient times; and the old kind of Mysticism—that is, the experience in consciousness of the invisible or super-sensible Man—was intended as an answer to this question. What the stars were speaking through their constellations,—they did not regard it as a mere outer fact, to be summed-up as we are wont to do. No! in the times of the old Mysteries—the Mysteries of the Stars, the Mysteries of Light—they regarded the starry constellations as a Question, and human death as the real answer thereto. (Even as birth was associated with the super-sensible Man, so was death associated with the constellations. Hence we may truly call the ‘Mysteries of Fire’ the Mysteries of Birth, the Christmas Mysteries; and the ‘Mysteries of Light’ the Star-Mysteries—the East Mysteries, the Mysteries of Death. And we may add: those Mysteries which afterwards merged into the real secret of Christmas, are the ones which really underlie all that humanity possessed by way of Mystery secrets, before Golgotha, in ancient India and Egypt. Chaldea and Western Asia was more the soil for Easter Mysteries—that is to say, for a Science of the Stars.

In Western Asia, especially among the so-called Iranian peoples and notably in the 3rd post-Atlantean epoch, the Science of the Stars was well developed. Only we must conceive that in the earliest times man had an exact super-sensible vision of the entity which clothes itself at birth with the physical body, just as he had on the other hand a direct vision and perception of the language of the stars. As I have often said, when ancient charts depict all manner of Beings in the Heavens, such Beings are no mere figment of human fancy. They are the image of what the old atavistic clairvoyance actually saw in the starry sky; for the old atavistic consciousness did really see the human being in connection with the entire Universe. This consciousness was thoroughly aware of the truth that the cosmos is a self-contained organism—in which organism we, as Man, do live and move and have our being.

This consciousness, needless to say, has been lost. It must be regained by mankind in course of the 5th post-Atlantean epoch; and that, in all essentials, by the two streams aforesaid—the streams of Star-wisdom and of Mysticism—finding one another once more. In ancient times they could appear distinct—two separate poles, as it were. In our time it must be possible to unite the Christmas and the Easter Mystery in one; to see them as the two sides of one and the same Being.

When we transplant ourselves into ancient times of human knowledge, we find a clear awareness of the fact that the Zodiac is not only to be found up yonder in the Heavens, but that man too carries within him the same law and principle as is represented for example by the Zodiac,—that is to say, by the farthest circumference of the Universe of the fixed stars.

You know that in olden times not only certain places in the Heavens were thus named, as Aries and Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, etc., but the human being too was membered thus: head = Aries; neck = Taurus; the two sides of man in their lateral symmetry = Gemini; the chest and ribs = Cancer; the heart as Leo, and so on, Man bears microcosmically within him the several regions which are also the fundamental places of the Heavens. This connection of microcosm and macrocosm was deemed most essential in those ancient times. Man, as it were, bore within him the Heavens of the fixed stars, by virtue of the Zodiac which represents it. It was said, of old time: When a man uses his larynx in speech, there sounds forth from him the same cosmic stream which flows down to us from the cosmos when the Moon is shining from the Pleiades. They felt the kinship of the Light and of that which the Light carries down when the Moon is shining from the region of the Pleiades,—they felt the kinship of this macrocosmic stream with that which issues from man when he makes use of his larynx. So too with the Sun. So too, they felt Man penetrated with the same law and principle that works in the planetary system, yet with this difference:—They knew that the system of the fixed stars corresponds to fixed places in Man, namely, the Ram to the head, the neck to the Bull, and so on. Fixed portions of the human being were thus associated with the heaven of the fixed stars. Those organs on the other hand which represent, as it were, the mobile element in man, sending the saps and fluids throughout man's nature, were connected by them, and rightly, with the planetary system. Man is himself, as it were, a heaven of the fixed stars, and he carries a planetary system within him. Thus in the oldest Mysteries they conceived an intimate relationship as between Man and the whole cosmos.

To perceive the full scope and range of this matter, must, however, also bear the following in mind. In man we have the several constellations like fixed places—Aries the head, Taurus the neck, and so on. Thereby, man stands in a certain relation—a quite individual relation—to the starry heavens. Assume for a moment that a man is born to-day in the Spring, when the Sun rises in Pisces. Pisces will be quite especially determined by his inner system of fixed stars. Now Pisces is associated with the feet,—that is to say, with what man experiences through his feet, inasmuch as he is born in the Spring, when the Sun rises in Pisces, a man is born with that part of his being which corresponds to this particular constellation to the Sun. If he were born at another season of the year, his constellation would be less in accordance with the cosmic constellation. Nowadays, this attunement or non-attunement of the human being is determined according to certain hard-and-fast schemes. In the ancient Mysteries they felt in a very living way the peculiar unison, the sounding-together of the human constellation after birth with the heavenly constellation.

Now you will bear in mind that a very special constellation existed in the age of Aries, precisely in the Mystery of Golgotha. For at that very time the whole of mankind, with that portion of the human being which corresponds to the head, was in harmony with the constellation of Aries in the Spring. Here was another reason why those who knew the Mysteries felt something quite peculiar in this correspondence of the human constellation of the head with the constellation of the Cosmos. Man is related, through the head, not with the Earth but with the Cosmos. Through the head, therefore, he is especially adapted to receive the forces of the Cosmos. With his head—that is to say, with his Aries—he reaches out into the Cosmos. What constellation will therefore be the most favourable one, of all that can exist in the Cycle of 25,920 years in which we are now living? Precisely that, in which the constellation of the Ram is with the rising Sun in Spring. In short, I wish to indicate this fact. They studied Man in his whole being, in his attunement with the macrocosm. They studied this especially because they were well aware how much depended, even for earthly events, on this attunement of Man with the macrocosm.

They perceived the manifold secrets of these constellations of the stars; and they always knew that with every secret of a starry constellation a human secret is connected. More and more, they tried to express how each secret of the stars is connected with an inner secret of Man. It is remarkable how far they got in this direction with their ancient science. We see it in the Pyramids. Even if crudely studied, the structure of the Pyramids proves to contain all manner of secrets. Take the length of the four basic sides, forming the plan of the Pyramid; compare it with the height. It corresponds exactly to the proportion of the diameter of a circle to its circumference. It is a true correspondence to a large number of decimal places. But it not only applies to things like this. Certain sub-divisions in the Pyramids correspond to the Zodiacal sub-divisions of the macrocosm. The weight of the Pyramids—it has only been calculated approximately—is a certain fraction of the weight of the whole Earth. Certain measurements of the Pyramids, multiplied by a power of 18, give you the distance from the Earth to the Sun. In short, such are the measurements of the Pyramids that they can only be the result of a marvellous and intimate knowledge of the relationships of the stars and the Heavens.

These Pyramids were not really the work of the Egyptians, Whenever conquerors came into Egypt from Iranian countries, from Western Asia, they created Pyramidal structures, The Egyptians learned to build Pyramids from these peoples, peoples who possessed Star-Mysteries; their own Mysteries were not Star-Mysteries, but rather a kind of Christmas Mysteries.

The study of the Pyramids had led to this result, even during the 19th century. Men like Carus declared that the pure study of the Mysteries was enough to show us that there was a Science in ancient times which has since been lost, and which is calculated to make the civilisation of to-day blush for shame. These are Carus' own words, not mine. The humanity of to-day are not very prone to believe that there existed in primeval human times a science—acquired by somewhat different means, it is true—but a true science none the less, able to shed its light into deep secrets of the Cosmos.

But the most important thing is not the mere fact that the Wise Men of those Mysteries were acquainted with such distant cosmic measures or secreted them into the structure of the Pyramids. The most remarkable is quite another thing. It was by no means an abstract knowledge which they had, of man's relation to the Universe of stars. It was a very concrete knowledge—a knowledge whereby Man could feel himself within the whole Cosmos. He knew that with his head, which he turns freely to the Cosmos, he is directly related to the Heaven of the fixed stars. All that appeared to the human being as the secret of the head—the Wise Men of the Mysteries perceived it as the secrets of the heaven of the fixed stars. And it is perfectly true the human head is formed by the heaven of the fixed stars. It is but a materialistic prejudice of to-day to suppose that everything is inherited from the ancestors,—that everything comes from the germ. The germ itself—in so far as it is the germ of the head—is informed and filled with forces, within the human mother, by the heaven of the fixed stars. According to his head, Man is connected with the fixed stars. His head is an image of the whole heaven of the fixed stars. You may read of it from another point of view in my booklet, The Spiritual Guidance of Mankind, where I have also touched upon this matter. Likewise on the other side, the rest of the human organism corresponds to all that is connected with the secret of the Sun. Even in this direction, Man is really of a twofold nature; and this was well known to those Wise Men of the ancient Mysteries who were the keepers of the Star-Mysteries, or Easter Mysteries. Man is a twofold nature: his head is assigned to the heaven of the fixed stars; and the rest of his body, with the centre in the heart, to the Sun.

Now these ancient astronomers (or you may call them astrologers, if you will) knew something else as well. When we observe the stars in their relation to the Sun, we see the Sun gradually remaining behind as against the movement of the fixed stars. Thereby the vernal point keeps on appearing at a different place; the Sun is always being left behind a little. The stars seem to go a little quicker in their annual movement than the Sun. And the strange thing is (though for the old astronomers it was not strange at all—it was a deep and significant Mystery for them) that after 72 years the fixed stars in their movement have sped on exactly a day ahead of the Sun—one day in 72 years.

What does this signify, transferred to Man; For the old astronomers it was fraught with meaning, though for the clever people of to-day, no doubt, it may seem nonsense. It meant that among all other things we also have in us this twofold, fixed-star and solar nature. With our head we go quicker than with the rest of our body. And when we have lived for 72 years (these things, of course, arc only to be taken approximately), our head has gone ‘ahead’ of the rest of our body by a whole day of stars. That is why the average—as I have often explained from other points of view—human life lasts for 72 years. It can be much longer, of course, or shorter as the case may be; but on the average, the span of human life is 72 years. All this is connected with the duality between the course of life in the head, and in the rest of the human body. It corresponds exactly to the duality of the movements of the heaven of the fixed stars and of the Sun.

So does Man stand as a microcosm in the macrocosm. In those olden times, Man was indeed able to feel himself within the macrocosm, just as our little finger now feels itself to be part and parcel of the organism as a whole. Man was really able to feel himself a member of the whole.

And they considered this the most important thing: to perceive how human life is connected with the secret of the stars. Therefore especially the Mystery of death, the Easter Mystery, was associated with the Star-Mystery.

The Christian World-conception now had the task of connecting the two together. This must essentially be contained in the concrete development of Christian World-conceptions. The Mystery of birth, the Christmas Mystery, the Mystery of super-sensible Man on the side of birth, must be connected with the Mystery of death, the Easter Mystery, the Mystery of the super-sensible Man on the side of death.

That which is generally known as Science nowadays, concerns itself with birth; that which is generally known as Religion, concerns itself with death. The Religion of to-day lacks any inclination to turn to the super-sensible Man. It sounds a strange thing to say; but the mere fact that Religion still talks of the super-sensible Man does not imply that it has any strong inclination to concern itself with super-sensible Man in any real way. For we can only concern ourselves with the super-sensible Man if we take our start from what was felt most strongly in the ancient Mysteries of Christmas—that is to say, if, taking our start from birth, we find our way through birth into human pre-existence. Therefore the Mysteries of birth laid the greatest stress on the pre-existence—the existence before birth—of super-sensible Man. The other Mysteries—those that then culminated in the Easter Mysteries—laid especial stress on the post-existence, on the existence of Man beyond death. It is to this latter side that the Religions have inclined, at the same time rejecting the Science that is connected therewith, namely the wisdom of the stars. Meanwhile the Science of to-day, which concerns itself chiefly with problems of descent—with all that belongs to birth—has rejected what leads to the super-sensible Man and to the conscious experience of him, which is true Mysticism.

Thus it has come about that Science on the one hand, by rejecting the super-sensible Man, has become materialistic; while on the other hand Religion, by declining to study the super-sensible Man, has become unscientific. In our time the two are standing side by side, without any bridge between them. Those who seem to represent Religion—though in reality, broadly speaking, they only want to “guard their pounds and talents”—those who call themselves official representatives of the religious faiths, are most annoyed when you speak of the pre-existence of the soul, that is, of super-sensible Man in his reality.

Needless to say, I have been speaking of all this only in the briefest aphorisms. I only wished to emphasise how we must try once more to widen out man's vision, beyond what is immediately present in the physical world. Inasmuch as we have pointed to the two directions in the Mysteries, our outlook has indeed been widened in the two directions in which the sense world must he transcended. For on the one hand we must seek again for the true inner Man, who can only be found within us by the path described in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment. That is the one side; and the other is, to seek in a new form for what the stars can say to us. But we shall only find it in its new form if we are able once again to bring into direct relation to the Macrocosm what is there in Man himself. Such is the inner composition a book like Occult Science. Here the attempt is made once more to build the bridge between Man and the Macrocosm. What can be found in man himself, the evolution of man, is connected with that in the macrocosm to which man's evolution belongs. Definite stages in the evolution of man are connected with definite processes in the macrocosm. Thus, in our anthroposophical Spiritual Science we have begun again to look in both directions—to look for the super-sensible man and for the secrets of the Macrocosm. This also means the building of it bridge, once more, between Religion and Science.

Religion has become void of science. Any one who will, can see that it is so. And, that the science of to-day has become void of Religion, is still more obvious. Quite unconnectedly, the two stand side by side in the so-called civilisation of our time. In this way alone was it possible for such strange errors to arise as I described in these lectures,—errors of which the sharp-witted intellectual theories of Dupuis are a particulate example. Dupuis, as I said, considered the ancient Mysteries mere error and deceit. He believed that in those ancient Mysteries certain tales were invented merely in order to delude the people, while in reality they had nothing else in view than the mere movements of the stars. Dupuis made the simple mistake of believing that the Ancients could see nothing else in the star-lit sky than a modern astronomer can see; whereas in reality, what the modern astronomer sees in the star-lit sky is precisely equivalent to what the modern anatomist sees in the human body. Just as the corpse is not the man, so too, the content of modern Astronomy is not the real heaven of the stars. Natural-scientific Astronomy is only in its initial stages; it has experienced no more, as yet, than a mere mathematical, mechanical and summary description of what goes on in the great Universe outside us. Study what is afforded by the Astronomy of to-day; you will find mathematical and mechanical relationships; it is the mere expression of an immense celestial machinery. Meanwhile, all that takes place on Earth (with the exception of the coarsest physical processes), the scientist only seeks to investigate on the Earth itself. Wherever a plant arises, wherever a human being or an animal is born, it is all supposed to be due to “inheritance.” For it goes without saying, you can in no way apply to man what the modern astronomer finds in the stars. But in real fact there is a mutual interplay between the starry Heavens and the Earth. No seed or germ can arise on the Earth—neither the germ of a plant, nor of an animal or man—unless it be prepared and laid down by the whole macrocosm.

What does the scientist of to-day say? Here is the hen, and in the hen, the egg. It goes without saying: from the egg a new hen is derived, and from the hen an egg again, and thence again a hen. Therefore the scientist follows it up from hen to hen. Whereas the truth is: Here are the starry heavens, here is the hen. The whole of the heavens send their forces, from all the constellations, into the hen; and the germ inside the hen is an expression of the entire heaven of the stars.

It is strange to look into the course of evolution in this respect. A science existed, once upon a time, which might well make the people of to-day blush for shame. It has been lost and ruined. We must be conscious that we are living to this day in the age of a lost science. The first beginnings of a science have been planted again in a new form, and they must be developed. What is admired so much, in the progress of science during the last four centuries, can only justly be admired if looked upon as a beginning. It is only when the bridge is built from this beginning to the real Mysteries of Christmas and Easter—only when this bridge is built, at least for human feeling—that something real will have been achieved.

We should make this thought living in our soul, for this thought alone is prone to unite the man of to-day, in his soul, with the Universe. Every seed is united with the macrocosm; the seeds of the Spirit likewise. Man unites himself with the macrocosm when he tries to receive into his soul a macrocosmic science. To begin with at least in the idea, in the intuition thereof, this consciousness of the macrocosmic connections of Man and the Earth needs to be carried into all branches of life. Our time is far remote from such a consciousness. In this respect, our time is indeed in a certain sense in the reverse position, as compared with a certain epoch of the past. For we may ask: How could a primeval wisdom of mankind—so great and so far-reaching that this present time could blush for shame to contemplate it,—how could such a science have been lost? We need not wonder very much that it was lost. We must remember that in the evolution of humanity the positive is most certainly connected with the negative aspect. We have often spoken of the progress humanity has undergone by the spread of Christianity; let us not, however, forget that the spread of Christianity—the positive aspect—is also connected with the negative aspect of the same, namely the laying-waste of an ancient culture. Let us not forget that tens of thousands of works of ancient culture were destroyed while Christianity was being spread abroad. Thousands and thousands of symbols in which the Ancient Wisdom had been handed down, were destroyed. People to-day have little conception of the ruthless work of destruction which culminated in the third and fourth centuries of our era. Julian the Apostate still tried to some extent to stem this work of destruction; but the time was against him. He did not succeed. Humanity to-day ought to be well aware how many things were destroyed and lost and ruined in those centuries.

Precisely from such things, we can learn that evolution, so-called, is by no means simple. Suppose for a moment that Christianity had not gone on its way through the world as an appalling destroyer. Mankind would have had to remain in their old state of un-freedom. For the attainment of freedom is after all, only possible by that Impulse which is also the Impulse of the Mystery of Golgotha.

On the other hand, the negative side must not be allowed to get the upper hand. For there exists a certain spirit which has preserved far more the negative aspect of Christianity. It appears in this form to-day: it wants to destroy—this time, in the soul-life—all that arises towards the re-conquest of the Ancient Wisdom. This ought not to be allowed to happen. To-day, again and again—wherever they have the opportunity—the so-called official representatives of Christianity bring forward this idea: “At the time of Christ,” they say, “in the apostolic age, there were Revelations. To-day no such thing is permissible. Today it is sin or swindle or deceit; it is anti-Christian.” To see clearly in these matters is also one of the tasks of today, for every human being who strives for the truth. The striving for clarity is one of the essential tasks for to-day. Alas! in other matters too, clarity has grown befogged by all manner of feelings which people associate with mere empty phrases. I do believe the healthy feeling of the truth can only be sought and found again along the paths of the Spirit.

Words are terribly misused to-day. Think of all the words that are sounding through the world to-day, and taken seriously as though there were anything contained in the empty words. In this domain, Spiritual Science is no less important as an educator than by its immediate contents. If it claims to be true Spiritual Science, it can never feed men with mere words. Why not? For the very simple reason that you can talk of anything nowadays if you remain at the mere words, if you remain at the mere words, you can talk much about Natural Science. Fritz Mauthner proves, in his dictionary that Natural Science, whenever it claims to become a “Science,”—whenever it goes beyond the mere notification of facts,—becomes a science of mere words. And in the science of History there is nothing else than words, for—as I told you—everything else is passed-through by man in a dreaming condition. And so it is in other spheres. In Politics,—go to work uprightly and honestly, and you will probably find still less behind the words than in the other spheres of life. If you hold to the mere words, you can talk a lot nowadays about Nature and History and Politics and Economics. But you can not talk of the Spirit if you hold fast to the mere words for the Spirit, to-day, is nowhere contained in the words. I mean this in all earnestness. Yet the converse is also true. Namely, in compensation for this, the Spiritual Science of to-day is a real education, for men to grow beyond the prevailing attachment to words.

It is the paramount task of those who believe in Anthroposophy to go beyond the words to the real things; and—as the “thing” of Spiritual Science is the Spirit itself—this means to go beyond the words to the Spirit. This will be fruitful; this will endow us with new purposes and aims in all domains of life One fruit, above all, it will bear. It will liberate—all those who are willing to be liberated—from the belief in authority; from that credulity and superstition which is so widespread in the humanity of to-day—so widespread that they even fail to notice its existence. Alas! many a bitter experience will still be necessary for poor mankind of to-day to find its way, more or less, on to the path to which I here refer.

The poor humanity of to-day!—it prides itself on the very thing which it most lacks, namely, on freedom from faith in authority, freedom from idol-worship. In the eyes of him who knows the Spirit, many an idol of the past is worth more than the idols of the present. As to the idols of the present... The conscious man, no doubt, has fallen out of the habit of prayer; but the unconscious man prays to the idols of the present all the more fervently. For in the eyes of him who sees through the evolution of the world, the Woodrow Wilsons and the rest are far more perilous idols of superstition than any idols of the past. The humanity of to-day is far more attached to its idols and superstitions than ever primeval humanity were attached to theirs. Even the clearest signs will scarcely avail the humanity of to-day. Precisely in these things, they are extraordinarily difficult to bring on to the oaths of truth.

The earnestness of the moment does indeed require it again and again.—Even when we bring forward truths that reach out into such far and wide perspectives, we must conclude with such remarks as I have made just now. It is essential to Spiritual Science to serve real life; and that which claims to be serving life nowadays is serving it least of all.

In a recent lecture held here I spoke of the possible relations of the incarnate to the discarnate human souls—the so-called dead;—relations not only possible but which really always exist. To-day I shall add a few remarks to what I have already said.

From various facts presented to our souls by Spiritual Science, we know that in course of the earth's evolution, the spirit of man passes through an evolution of its own. We know that man can only understand himself by a fruitful consideration of the question: What is man's attitude in any one incarnation, in his present incarnation, to the spiritual world, to the spiritual realms? To what stage of evolution has mankind in general attained in the time when we ourselves live in a definite incarnation.

We know that outer observation of this general evolution of mankind allows of the opinion that in earlier times, earlier epochs, a certain ‘atavistic clairvoyance’ was poured over mankind, the human soul was then, as it were, nearer to the spiritual worlds. But it was also further from its own freedom, its own freewill, to which in our age we are nearer while more shut off from the spiritual world. Anyone who knows the real nature of man at the present time must say: in the unconscious self, in the really spiritual part of man, there is, of course, the same relation to the whole spiritual world; but in his knowledge, in his consciousness, man in general cannot realise it in the same way as was possible to him in earlier epochs, though there are exceptions. If we enquire into the reason why man cannot bring to consciousness the relation of his soul to the spiritual world,—which is, of course, as strong as ever though of a different kind—we find that it is due to the fact that we have passed the middle of the earth's evolution and are now in the ascending stream of its existence, and our physical organisation (although, of course, this is not perceptible to external anatomy and physiology) has become more ‘physical’ than it was, so that in the time we spend between birth or conception and death, we are no longer organised to bring fully to consciousness our connection with the spiritual world. We must clearly understand that no matter how materialistic we are we actually experience in the subconscious region of the soul much more than the sum of our general conscious knowledge.

This goes even further, and here we come to a very important point in the evolution of present humanity. In general, man is not able to think, perceive and feel all that could really be thought, perceived and felt within him. At the present time he is gifted for far more intensive thoughts and perceptions than are possible through the coarse material components of his organism. This has a certain consequence, namely, that at the present epoch of human evolution we are not in a position to bring our capacities to complete development in our earthly life. Whether we die young or old has very little influence upon that. For both young and old it is the rule that, on account of the coarse substance of his organism, man cannot fully attain to what would be possible were his body more finely organised. Thus, whether we pass through the gate of death old or young, there is a residue of unexercised thoughts, perceptions and feelings which, for the above reason, we could not elaborate. We all die leaving certain thoughts, feelings and perceptions unexercised. These are there, and when we pass through the gate of death, whether young or old, these occasion an intense desire to return to earthly life for further thinking, feeling and perceiving.

Let us reflect upon the bearing of this. We only become free after death to form certain thoughts, feelings and perceptions. We could do much more for the earth if we had been able to bring them to fruition during our physical life, but we cannot do this. It is actually true that every man to-day could do much more for the earth with the capacities within him than he actually does. In earlier epochs of evolution this was not so, for when the organism was finer there was a certain conscious looking into the spiritual world, and man could work from the spirit. Then he could, as a rule, accomplish all for which his gifts fitted him. Although man is now so proud of his talents, the above is true.

Because of this, we can recognise how necessary it is that what is carried through the gate of death unused should not be lost to earth-life. That can only be brought about by cultivating the union with the dead under the guidance of Spiritual Science, in the sense often described, by rightly maintaining the connection with the dead with whom we are united by karmic ties, and endeavouring to make the union a conscious, a fully conscious one. Then these unfulfilled thoughts of the dead pass through our souls into the world, and, through this transmission, we can allow these stronger thoughts—which are possible to the dead because they are free from the body—to work in our souls. Our own thoughts we cannot bring to full development, but these thoughts could work within us.

We see from this that what has brought us materialism should also show us how absolutely necessary at the present time and for the near future is the quest of a true relation to the spirits of the dead. The only question is: How can we draw these thoughts, perceptions and feelings from the realm of the dead into our own souls?

I have already given certain hints as to this, and in the last lecture spoken of the important moments which should be well observed: the moment of falling asleep and that of waking. I shall now describe with more detail a few things connected with this.

The dead cannot directly enter this world of ordinary waking life, which we outwardly perceive, in which we act through our will and which rests upon our desires. It is out of their reach, when they have passed through the gate of death; yet we can have a world in common with them if, spurred on by Spiritual Science, we make the effort—which is difficult in our present materialistic age—to discipline the world of our thinking as well as our outer life, and not to allow our thoughts the customary free course. We can develop certain faculties which introduce us to a ground in common with the spirits who have passed through the gate of death. There are, of course, at the present time a great many hindrances to finding this common ground. The first hindrance is one to which I have but little referred, but what is to be said thereon follows from other considerations already discussed here. The first hindrance is that we are, as a rule, too prodigal with our thoughts, we might even say we are dissipated in our thought-life. What, exactly, is meant by this?

The man of to-day lives almost entirely under the influence of the saying: ‘Thoughts pay no toll.’ That is, one may allow almost anything to flash at will through the mind. Just consider that speech is a reflection of our thought life; and realise what thought-life is allowed free course by the speech of most people, as they chatter and wander from subject to subject, allowing thoughts to flash up at will. This means a dissipation of the force with which our thinking is endowed! We continually indulge in prodigality, we are wholly dissipated in our thought-life. We allow our thoughts to take their own course. We desire something which occurs to us, and we drop that as something else occurs; in short, we are disinclined in some respects to keep our thought under control. How annoying it is, sometimes, for instance, when someone begins to talk; we listen to him for a minute or two, then he turns to quite a different subject, while we feel it necessary to continue the subject he began. It may be important. We must then fix our attention and ask ourselves, ‘Of what did we begin to talk?’ Such things occur every day, when subjects of real earnestness are to be brought into discussion, we have continually to keep in mind the subject begun. This prodigality, this dissipation of thought-force, hinders thoughts which, coming from the depths of our soul-being, are not our own, but which we have in common with the universal ruling spirit. This impulse to fly at will from thought to thought does not allow us to wait in the waking condition for thoughts to come from the depths of our soul-life; it does not allow us to wait for ‘inspirations,’ if we may so express it. That, however should be so cultivated—especially in our time, for the reasons given—that we actually form in our souls the disposition to wait watchfully until thoughts arise, in a sense, from the subsoil, which distinctly proclaim themselves as ‘given,’ not formed by ourselves.

We must not suppose that the formation of such a mood is able to appear on swift wings—it cannot do so. It has to be cultivated; but when it is cultivated, when we really take the trouble to be awake and, having driven out the arbitrary thoughts, wait for what can be received in the mind, this mood gradually develops. Then it becomes possible to receive thoughts from the depths of the soul, from a world wider than our ego-hood. If we really develop this, we shall soon perceive that in the world there is not only what we see, hear and perceive with our outer senses, and combine with our intellect, but there is also an objective thought-texture. Only few possess this to-day as their own innate knowledge. This experience of a universal thought-tissue, in which the soul actually exists, is not some kind of special occult experience; it is something that any man can have if he develops the aforementioned mood. From this experience he can say: In my every-day life I stand in the world which I perceive with my senses and have put together with the intellect; I now find myself in a position in which I am as though standing on the shore, I plunge into the sea and swim in the surging water; so can I, standing on the brink of sense-existence, thus plunge into the surging sea of thought. I am really as though in a surging sea. We can have the feeling of a life—or, at least, we have an inkling of a life, stronger and more intense than the mere dream-life, yet having just such a boundary between it and outer sense-reality as that between dream-life and sense-reality. We can, if we desire, speak of such experience as ‘dreams,’ but they are no dreams! For the world into which we plunge, this world of surging thoughts which are not our own, but those in which we are submerged, is the world out of which our physical sense-world arises, out of which it arises in a condensed form, as it were. Our physical world of sense is like blocks of ice floating in water: the water is there, the ice congeals and floats in it. As the ice consists of the same substance as the water, only raised to a different physical condition, so our physical world of sense arises from this surging, undulating sea of thought. That is its actual origin. Physics speaks only of ‘ether,’ of whirling atoms, because it does not know this actual primordial substance. Shakespeare was nearer to it when he makes one of his characters say: ‘The world of reality is but the fabric of a dream.’ Men lend themselves too easily to all kinds of deception in respect to such things. They wish to find a great atomic world behind physical reality; but if we wish to speak of anything at all behind physical reality, we must speak of the objective thought-tissue, the objective thought-world. We only arrive at this when, by ceasing the prodigality and dissipation of thought, we develop that mood which comes when we can wait for what is popularly called ‘inspiration.’

For those who study Spiritual Science it is not so difficult to develop the mood here described, for the method of thought necessary for the study of anthroposophical Spiritual Science trains the soul for such development. When a man seriously studies Spiritual Science he comes to the need of developing this intimate thought-tissue within. This thought-tissue provides us with the common sphere in which are present we ourselves on the one hand, and on the other hand the so-called dead. This is the common ground on which we can ‘meet with’ them. They cannot come into the world which we perceive with our senses and combine with our intellect, but they can enter the world just described.

A second thing was given in the observation of finer, more intimate life-relationships. I spoke of this last year and gave an example which can be found in psychological literature. Schubert calls attention to it; it is an example taken from old literature, but such examples can still often be found in life. A man was accustomed to take a certain walk daily. One day, when he reached a certain spot, he had a feeling to go to the side and stand still, and the thought came to him whether it was right to waste time over this walk. At that moment a boulder which had split from the rock fell on the road and would certainly have struck him if he had not turned aside from the road on account of his thought.

This is one of the crude experiences we may encounter in life, but those of a more subtle kind daily press into our ordinary life, though as a rule we do not observe them; we only reckon with what actually does happen, not with what might have happened had it not been averted. We reckon with what happens when we are kept at home a quarter of an hour longer than we intended. Often and often, if we did but reflect, we should find that something worthy of remark happened, which would have been quite different if we had not been detained.

Try to observe systematically in your own life what might have happened had you not been delayed a few minutes by somebody coming in, though, perhaps, at the time, you were very angry at being detained. Things are constantly pressed into one's life which might have been very different according to their original intention. We seek a ‘causal connection,’ between events in life. We do not reflect upon life with that subtle refinement which would he in the consideration of the breaking of a probable chain of events, so that, I might say, an atmosphere of possibilities continually surrounds us.

If we give our attention to this, and have been delayed in doing something which we have been accustomed to do at mid-day, we shall have a feeling that what we do at that time is often—it may not always be so—not under the influence of foregoing occurrences only, but also under the influence of the countless things which have not happened, from which we have been held back. By thinking of what is possible in life—not only in the outer reality of sense—we are driven to the surmise that we are so placed in life that to look for the connection of what follows with what has gone before is a very one-sided way of looking at life. If we truly ask ourselves such questions, we rouse something which in our mind would otherwise lie dormant. We come, as it were, to ‘read between the lines’ of life; we come to know it in its many-sidedness. We come to see ourselves, so to speak, in our environment, and we see how it forms us and brings us forward little by little. This we usually observe far too little. At most, we only consider the inner driving forces that lead us from stage to stage. Let us take some simple ordinary instance from which we may gather how we only bring the outer into connection with our inner being, in a very fragmentary way.

Let us turn our attention to the way we usually realise our waking in the morning. At most, we acquire a very meagre idea of how we make ourselves get up; perhaps, even the concept of this is very nebulous. Let us, however, reflect for a while upon the thought which at times drives us out of bed; let us try to make this individual, quite clear and concrete. Thus: yesterday I got up because I heard the coffee being made ready in the next room; this aroused an impulse to get up; to-day something else occurred. That is, let us be quite clear, what was the outer impelling force. Man usually forgets to seek himself in the outer world, hence he finds himself so little there. Anyone who gives even a little attention to such a thought as this will easily develop that mood of which man has a holy—nay, an unholy—terror,—the realisation that there is an undercurrent of thought which does not enter the ordinary life. A man enters a room, for instance or goes to some place, but he seldom asks himself how the place changes when he enters it. Other people have an idea of this at times, but even this notion of it from outside is not very widespread to-day. I do not know how many people have any perception of the fact that when a company is in a room, often one man is twice as strongly there as another; the one is strongly present, the other is weak. That depends on the imponderabilities. We may easily have the following experience: A man is at a meeting, he comes softly in, and glides out again; and one has the feeling that an angel has flitted in and out. Another's presence is so powerful that he is not only present with his two physical feet but, as it were, with all sorts of invisible feet. Others do not, as a rule, notice it, although it is quite perceptible; and the man himself does not notice it at all. A man does not, as a rule, hear that ‘undertone’ which arises from the change called forth by his presence; he keeps to himself, he does not enquire of his surroundings what change his presence produces. He can, however, acquire an inkling, a perception of the echo of his presence in his surroundings. Just think how our outer lives would gain in intimacy if a man not only peopled the place with his presence but had the feeling of what was brought about by his being there, making his influence felt by the change he brings.

That is only one example. Many such can be brought forward for all situations in life. In other words, it is possible in quite a sound way—not by constantly treading on his own toes—for a man so to densify the medium of life that he feels the incision he himself makes in it. In this way he learns to acquire the beginning of a sensitivity to karma; but if he were fully to perceive what comes about through his deeds or presence, if he always saw in his surroundings the reflection of his own deeds and existence, he would have a distinct feeling of his karma; for karma is woven of this joint experience. I shall now only point to the enrichment of life by the addition of such intimacies, when we can thus read between the lines, when we learn to look thus into life and become alive to the fact that we are present, when we are present with our ‘consciousness.’ By such consciousness we also help to create a sphere common to us and to the dead. When we in our consciousness are able to look up to the two pillars just described: a high-principled course of life, and an economy, not prodigality of thought,—when we develop this inner frame of mind it will be accompanied by success, the success that is necessary for the present and the future when, in the way described, we approach the dead. Then, when we form thoughts, which we connect not merely with a union in thought with one of the dead, but with a common life in interest and feeling; when we further spin such thoughts of life-situations with the dead, thoughts of our life with him, so that a tone of feeling plays between us—when we thus unite ourselves, not to a casual meeting with him but to a moment when it interested us to know how he thought, lived, acted, and when what we roused in him interested him,—we can use such moments to continue, as it were, the conversation of the thoughts. If we can then allow these thoughts to lie quiet, so that we pass into a kind of meditation, and the thoughts are, as it were, brought to the altar of the inner spiritual life, a moment comes when we receive an answer from the dead, when he can again make himself understood by us. We only need to build the bridge of what we develop towards him, by which he on his side can come to us. For this coming it will be specially useful to develop in our deepest soul an image of his entity. That is something far from the present time because, as we said, people pass one another by, often coming together in most intimate spheres of life and parting again without knowing one another. This becoming acquainted does not depend on mutual analysis. Any one who feels himself being analysed by those living with him, if he is of a finely organised soul, feels as though he received a blow. It is of no moment to analyse one another. The best knowledge of another is gained by harmony of heart; there is no need to analyse at all.

I started with the statement that cultivation of relations with the so-called dead is specially needed to-day, because not from choice but simply through the evolution of humanity, we live in an epoch of materialism. Because we are not able to mould and fashion all our capacities of thought, feeling and perception before we die, because something of it remains over when we pass through the gate of death, it is necessary for the living to maintain the right intercourse with the dead, that the ordinary life of man may be enriched thereby. If we could but bring to the heart of men to-day the fact that life is impoverished if the dead are forgotten! A right thinking of the dead can only be developed by those in some way connected with them by karma.

When we strive for a similar intercourse with the dead as with the living (as I said before, these things are generally very difficult, because we are not conscious of them, but we are not conscious of all that is true, and not everything of which we are conscious is on that account unreal)—if we cultivate intercourse with the dead in this way, the dead are really present, and their thoughts, not completed in their own life will work into this life. What has been said makes indeed a great demand on our age. Nevertheless, it is said, because we are convinced by spiritual facts, that our social life, our ethical religious life, would experience an infinite enrichment if the living allowed themselves to be ‘advised’ by the dead. To-day man is disinclined to consult even those who have come to a mature age. To-day it is regarded as right for quite a young man to take part in councils of town and state, because while young he is mature enough for everything—in his own opinion. In ages when there was a better knowledge of the being of man, he had to reach a certain age before being in any council. Now people must wait until others are dead in order to receive advice from them! Nevertheless, our age, our epoch, ought to be willing to listen to the counsel of the dead, for welfare can only come about when man is willing to listen to their advice.

Spiritual Science demands energy of man. This must be clearly understood. Spiritual Science demands a certain direction; that man should really aspire to consistency and clearness. There is need to seek for clearness in our disastrous events: the search for it is of the utmost importance. Such things as we have been discussing are connected, more than is supposed, with the great demands of our time. I have tried this winter, and many years before this world-catastrophe, in my lectures on the European Folk-Souls, to point out much which is to be found to-day in the general relations of humanity. A certain understanding of what plays its part in present events can be derived from reading the course of lectures I gave in Christiania on ‘The Mission of the Several Folk Souls.’ It is not too late, and much will still take place in the coming years for which understanding can be gained from that series of lectures.

The mutual relations of man to-day are only really comprehensible to one who can perceive the spiritual impulses. The time is gradually approaching when it will be necessary for man to ask himself: How is the perception and thought of the East related to that of Europe—especially of Mid-Europe? Again, how is this related to that of the West, of America? These questions in all their possible variations ought to arise before the souls of men. Even now man should ask himself: How does the Oriental regard Europe to-day? The Oriental who scrutinises Europe carefully, has the feeling that European civilisation leads to a deadlock, and has led to an abyss. He feels that he dare not lose what he has brought over of spirituality from ancient times when he receives what Europe can give him. He does not disdain European machines, for instance, but he says—and these are the actual words of a renowned Oriental: ‘We will accept the European machines and instruments, but we will keep them in the shops, not in our temples and homes as he does.’ He says that the European has lost the faculty to perceive the spirit in nature, to see the beauty in nature. When the Oriental looks upon what he alone can see—that the European only holds to outer mechanism, to the outer material in his action and thought—he believes that he is called upon to reawaken the old spirituality, to rescue the old spirituality of earthly humanity. The Oriental who speaks in a concrete way of spiritual things says: (as Rabindranath Tagore a short while ago) Europeans have drawn into their civilisation those impulses which could only be drawn in by harnessing Satan to their car of civilisation; they utilise the forces of Satan for progress. The Oriental is called upon—so Rabindranath Tagore believes—to cast out Satan and bring back spirituality to Europe.

This is a phenomenon which, unfortunately, is too easily overlooked. We have experienced much, but in our evolution we have left out of account much that might have been brought in if we had, for instance, a spiritual substance like that of Goethe, livingly in our civilisation. Someone might say: The Oriental can look towards Europe to-day and know that Goethe lived in European life. He can know this. Does he see it? It might be said: The Germans have founded a Society, the ‘Goethe Society’. Let us suppose the Oriental wished to be well-informed about it and to look into the facts. (The question of East and West already plays a part, it ultimately depends on spiritual impulses.) He would say to himself: Goethe worked so powerfully that even in 1879 the opportunity presented itself to make Goethe fruitful to German civilisation in an unusual way, so to say, under favourable circumstances. A Princess, the Grand Duchess Sophia of Weimar, with all those around her, in 1879 took over Goethe's library of writings in order to cultivate it as had never been done for any other writer before. That is so. Let us, however, consider the Goethe Society as an outer instrument. It, too, exists. A few years ago the post of President fell vacant. In the whole realm of intellectual life only one, a former Minister of Finance, was found to be elected as President of the Society! That is what is to be seen outwardly. Such things are more important than is usually supposed. What is more necessary is that the Oriental, aflame with spirituality and wise in it, should come to know that there is in European civilisation a Spiritual Science directed by Anthroposophy; yet he cannot know of this. It cannot reach him, because it cannot get through what exists—because the President of the Goethe Society is a retired Minister of Finance. But, of course, that is only one phenomenon symptomatic of the times.

A third demand, we might say, is an incisive thinking bound up with reality, a thinking in which man does not remain in want of clearness, in vague life-compromises. On my last journey someone put into my hand something concerning a fact with which I was already acquainted. I will only give a short extract from a cutting from a periodical:—

‘To any one who has ever sat on a school bench, the hours when he enjoyed the conversations between Socrates and his friends in “Plato” will ever be memorable; memorable on account of the prodigious tediousness of these speeches. He remembers, perhaps, that he found them absolutely idiotic, but, of course, he did not dare to express this opinion, for the man in question was indeed Socrates, the Greek Philosopher. Alexander Moszkowski's book, “Socrates the Idiot,” (publisher, Eysler and Co., Berlin), duly does away with this wholly unjustifiable estimate of the great Athenian. The multi-historian, Moszkowski, undertakes in this small, entertaining book nothing less than almost entirely to divest Socrates of his dignity as a philosopher. The title “Socrates, the Idiot,” is meant literally. One will not go astray in the assumption that scientific discussions will be attached to this work.’

The first thing which strikes a man when he is made acquainted with such a matter makes him say: How does so extraordinary a thing come about, that a person like Alexander Moszkowski should wish to furnish proof that Socrates was an idiot? This is the first impression; but that is a feeling of compromise which does not arise from a clear, incisive thinking, a confronting of actual reality.

I should like to compare this with something else. There are books written on the life of Jesus from the standpoint of psychiatry. They examine all that Jesus did from the standpoint of modern psychiatry and compare it with various abnormal actions, and the modern psychiatrist proves from the Gospels that Jesus must have been an abnormal man, an epileptic, and that the Gospels can only be understood at all from the Pauline point of view. Full particulars are given on this subject.

It is very simple to lightly overlook these things; but the matter lies somewhat deeper. If we take the stand of modern psychiatry, if we accede to it as officially recognised, on thinking over the life of Jesus, we must come to the same conclusion as the authors of these books. We could not think differently or we should be untrue; in no sense a modern psychiatrist. Nor should we be true modern psychiatrists in the sense of Alexander Moszkowski, if we did not regard Socrates as an idiot. Moszkowski only differs from those who do not regard Socrates as an idiot, in that they are untrue;—he is true—he makes no compromise. It is not possible to be true and to take up the standpoint of Alexander Moszkowski without regarding Socrates as an idiot. If a man wishes to be at the same time an adherent of the philosophy of life held by modern science and yet to esteem Socrates without regarding him as an idiot, he is untrue. So, too, is a modern psychiatrist who holds to the life of Jesus. Modern man, however, does not wish to go so far as this clear standpoint, or he would have to put the question differently. He would have to say to himself: I do not regard Socrates as an idiot, I have learned to know him better; but that demands the rejection of Moszkowski's philosophy of life; in Jesus, too, I see the greatest bearer of ideas who has at any time come in touch with earthly life; but this demands the rejection of modern psychiatry; they cannot agree!

The point in question is: clear thinking in accordance with reality, a thinking that makes none of the ordinary idle compromises which can only be removed when one understands life. It is easy to think—or be filled with indignation, if one is asked to allow that according to Moszkowski, Socrates is an idiot; yet it is consistent with the modern philosophy of life to regard Socrates as an idiot. People of this age, however, do not wish to draw these logical conclusions, they do not wish to relinquish anything like the modern philosophy of life lest they come into a still more troublesome position. One would then have to make compromises, and perhaps admit that Socrates was no idiot; but suppose it then appears that—Moszkowski is an idiot? Well, he is not a great man; but if this were applied to much greater men, many and various untoward things might happen!

To penetrate into the spiritual world, a thinking in accordance with truth is necessary. This requires, on the other hand, a clear recognition of how things stand. Thoughts are real entities, and untrue thoughts are evil, obstructing, destructive entities. To spread a veil of mist over this avails nothing, because man himself is untrue if he wishes to give to Moszkowski's philosophy of life equal weight with that of Socrates. It is an untrue thought to place the two side by side in his soul, as the modern man does.

Man is only true when he brings before his soul the fact that he either stands with Moszkowski, at the standpoint of the pure mechanism of pure natural science, regarding Socrates as an idiot, in which he is then true; or, on the other hand, he knows that Socrates was no idiot, and then in order to think clearly, the other must necessarily be firmly rejected. The ideal, which the man of to-day should set before his soul, is to be true; for thoughts are realities, and true thoughts are beneficial realities. Untrue thoughts—however well they may be enwrapped with the cloak of leniency as regards their own nature,—untrue thoughts received into man's inner being, are realities which retard the world and humanity.

MY DEAR FRIENDS! Movements such as our spiritual scientific movement have always been fostered in such a way that something that was to be impressed upon the spiritual culture of the times, or on culture in general, was first cultivated on the level of some formal social organization or society. And since the conditions of human interaction are the same today as they have been throughout history, it is also necessary for us, to a certain extent, to cultivate our spiritual scientific strivings within the framework of a formal organization.

Now, it has been the experience of almost all such organizations that it is difficult, at least in actual practice, to understand the concept of the society needed to foster a particular spiritual current like this. Time and again we're presented with evidence that there are very many people who actually do not like having to join a society. They admit that they feel uncomfortable about joining such a society; they would prefer to absorb its spiritual wealth through reading or listening to lectures not bound to any organized society, or through still other means. Only this morning, for example, I received a letter to that effect.

The kinds of reasons people give for taking this position have to be taken seriously. But let me emphasize again that a spiritual movement like this one is of necessity very different in its impulses and its whole way of thinking, feeling, and doing from the thinking, feeling, and doing of the other people around it. Therefore, to introduce such a movement to humanity with no help from a formal organization would be much more difficult than to do this by means of a society whose members are preparing, through their interactions and their ongoing absorption of spiritual scientific thoughts and concepts, to be a kind of tool or instrument for disseminating our spiritual science. As a consequence, however, the concept of a society of this kind has to be taken extremely seriously, because in quite practical terms this society has to become a vehicle for the spiritual current in question.

You need only look at our own Society as an example and examine how different it is from other societies, associations, or organizations that people have called into existence. This difference will be particularly noticeable if you keep one thing in mind. Just suppose that recent events confronting us had made us entertain the thought of disbanding the Anthroposophical Society as such. Let's assume hypothetically that we wanted to dissolve the Society because of problems within it. Now, if the Anthroposophical Society were simply an organization like many others, of course it would be possible to simply dissolve it, set something else up in its place, and eliminate the disgraceful circumstances in the process.

However, our Anthroposophical Society is different in a very significant respect from other organizations or societies founded on the basis of some program with a certain number of points and statutes. That kind of society can be dissolved at any moment. If we were to dissolve the Anthroposophical Society, however, it would not be dissolved in actual fact. As the Anthroposophical Society, as a society existing on behalf of a spiritual scientific movement, we are different from other societies in that our Society is founded, not on a program of abstract and therefore unreal points, but on something very real. Our basis is a real one.

Just look at the fact that each member of the Anthroposophical Society is entitled to have access to our lecture cycles, while other people are not.¹ That's a very real basis, because dissolving the Anthroposophical Society would do so in name only; it would not do away with the fact that a certain number of people are in possession of these cycles. And it is an equally real fact that a certain number of people are carrying a specific wealth of wisdom in their heads. I cannot tell exactly how great the percentage is of people who have the things we talk about in their heads—in contrast to those who only have them in “visions”—but that's not the important thing as far as the Society is concerned. It remains a reality that a certain wealth of wisdom, a sum total of things that really exist, are present in the hearts and minds of people who have belonged to the Anthroposophical Society until now. That cannot be taken away from them even by dissolving the Society.

So the Anthroposophical Society is different from other societies in that it will not tolerate any figments of the imagination in its organization, but is constructed on the basis of reality. Thus, dissolving it would have absolutely no immediate effect on its continued existence as far as reality is concerned. Our Society compares to other societies and organizations as something real compares to things that are merely thought out. We must keep this weighty difference in mind in order to understand the concept of our Society in the right way. And it is only because a large number of members have counted, more or less consciously, on our Society's solid grounding in reality, on its basis in something more than programmatic points, that we see an institute of higher learning for spiritual science being built on this hill, a building that will further enhance our connection to something real.

It would be possible for some group of dreamers to get together and decide not to wear collars and ties, to wear only sandals on their feet, and perhaps to simplify life in other ways by disregarding certain other social conventions or “prejudices,” as they might call them. (I have chosen a hypothetical example so that no one present needs to feel put on the spot.) Disbanding a group like that would not change anything significant. But we are not simply a group of dreamers; we are different in that we are fully aware of the weight and importance of our grounding in reality.

Without getting into splitting hairs, we also need to distinguish between the concept of a society such as the one in which we develop a specific spiritual teaching, and that of a club or similar organization. We have to admit that the appropriate concept of a such a society eludes many of us when we think about the conditions of our life in this Society, and we are left contemplating the concept of a club or similar organization. In that kind of organization, statutes and conditions are set up that have to be met. In a Society like ours, however, that is not enough. It is different from a club in much more than name only.

In our Society, the important thing, as I have explained several times in the last few weeks, is that the concept of the society really be taken seriously.² This means that all members must be aware that belonging to the Society involves more than simply receiving membership cards and being entitled to call themselves members of the Society. In fact, they are all organs of the Society. Because of that, something subtle and yet very specific has to live among the members, something for which each member should feel a certain responsibility. As individuals, they must be aware of both the obvious and subtler needs and well-being of other members of the Society, and experienced members must be ready and willing to use their experience in supporting those who have joined more recently. These more experienced members do not necessarily have to reveal their experience; after all, what matters is how they apply their experience in daily life.

The word “trust” often comes up in this connection. In the course of a lecture I gave a few weeks ago, I explained that we do not need to have trust in our teachings, because these teachings will try to justify our confidence in them through every single practical measure they give rise to.³ However, we do need to try to have trust in each other and to make sure that trust is justified. We must try to bring about real connections between members. It goes a long way toward developing the kind of “ideal aura” necessary in a Society such as ours if each experienced member, without snooping around like a spy or a detective—that is, without violating anyone's privacy—can really keep an eye on the ups and downs of only ten other members, and do it without having to tell them they are considered less experienced. Of course, it's impossible to legislate trust; it has to be earned. Our more experienced members need to make a concerted effort to win the trust of those who have been in the Society for only a short time.

Such things have been mentioned often in the course of our Society's years of activity, but it has never been as necessary to speak about them as it is here and now. When members of the Anthroposophical Society were scattered among the rest of the population in various cities, that was a very different state of affairs from so many of us living here on top of each other, on display for everyone else, so to speak. This situation makes it imperative that we take a long and serious look at the basic premises of how we live together in the Society.

Of course, a society such as ours will never be able to please all the people living outside it. It will never be able to prevent some of these people from indulging in all kinds of slander, ridicule, unjustified attacks, and so on. But that's not the point; what I am going to say now is independent of all that. The important thing is that the members of the Society really do everything possible in each single instance to show up the attacks as unjustified and lacking any basis in fact. To do this, we have to look at details, my friends. It's not enough to just pay attention to the major issues in our outer life. We have to be equally aware of the little things.

For instance, if some of our members are sitting among other people on the trolley on the way back to Basel at night, and they talk loudly about every little twinge in their ether body, that is not exactly a crime. If someone criticizes them for it, we might well reply, “So what? Is it all that important?” In fact, however, it is really very important because it puts the dignity and seriousness of our movement in question. Thus, even though such incidents are only trifling matters, they ought to be avoided. We ought to start reforming ourselves wherever that change can have a real effect. Above all, we have to realize that when we talk in front of other people about things only we can understand, those people will not be able to avoid getting wrong impressions.

We can assume that we know what we are talking about when we speak about the ether body, but the people who may be listening do not. They may be in the same situation as a maid whom some of my closer acquaintances know well. This woman worked for anthroposophists, and because she was interested in finding out what anthroposophy was all about, she attended an introductory course given by one of our members, and came home saying, “Well, I learned that I have four bodies, not just one. But I have this tiny little room and a very narrow bed, and now I don't know how all those bodies are going to fit in!” This is a true story. It took place in the house of people I know quite well. So you see, people who hear you talking about all the little twinges of your ether body will naturally think that you're talking about the ether body as if it were a physical body; thus, you are actually leading them astray and keeping them from developing any closer connection to our movement.

That's why it is important for us to learn to take the things we talk about seriously and precisely. Even if they are only minor matters in themselves, they can raise a virtual wall of prejudices around us, and that can and should be avoided. In a society like this, it is important for us to learn to speak really precisely, or else it may gradually become impossible to foster what should be fostered within this Society.

Today I feel compelled to mention a number of things that will probably seem totally superfluous to most of you, simply because the natural response is, “Well, what is that supposed to mean—we need to be precise in our way of speaking? Of course we do.” But just keep your eyes and ears open next time something happens somewhere or other, when something has been said and one person passes it on to the next. If you really pay close attention to whether or not things are being presented accurately, in many instances you will easily notice the deviation from what is strictly accurate. When something someone has heard or seen gets passed on to the next person and then to the next, and so on, what comes out can be a monstrous caricature of what actually happened or was actually said. This experience is all too common in our Society.

We have to take into account that, in a spiritual scientific movement, we can work constructively only if we get used to being exact, to really understanding things precisely. Spiritual science forces us to focus spiritually on things that have nothing to do with the outer physical world, and in order to develop the right relationship to them, we need a counterbalance of some kind. The only suitable counterbalance is to approach things on the physical plane as realistically as possible. After all, accuracy belongs to reality.

Some time ago I gave a public lecture in Munich that really startled a number of people.⁴ Its subject was the nature of evil. In that lecture, I explained that the forces at work in evil on the physical plane are in a sense nothing else but forces that have been transferred from higher planes of existence to the physical plane. Certain forces that can lead us to recognize and master the spiritual if applied up there in the spiritual world can turn to evil down here in the physical world.

The force that enables us to understand the spiritual world belongs only in the spiritual world; this same force causes all kinds of harm if it is directly and thoughtlessly transferred to the physical plane. For what is the nature of this force? It consists in making one's thinking independent of the physical plane. When this capacity is applied to the physical plane itself, it turns into deceit and dishonesty. Thus, people who were called upon to disseminate spiritual science have always seen great danger in doing so, because what is needed for understanding higher planes of existence is harmful when applied directly to the physical world.

That is why a counterbalance is needed: in order to keep our ability to understand the spiritual world suitably pure and beautiful, we must develop our feeling for truth and exactitude in the physical world as thoroughly as possible. If we do not count on exactitude on the physical plane, then in a so-called occult society certain tendencies developed through spiritual scientific practices immediately mingle inappropriately with the very lowest aspects of the physical plane.

Let's look at ordinary materialistic society in a broader sense of the word. As you know—or you may have heard about it even if you have no firsthand knowledge of it—there are certain social circles where gossip prevails. At least from hearsay, you will be aware that this gossip or tittle-tattle is going on, that it prevails in ordinary materialistic bourgeois society. The quality of this gossip is usually not very high and much can be said against it, but at least for the most part no esoteric contents get mixed up with it. But when gossip is the general rule in an occult society, esoteric ideas are the first to get drawn into it.

I hope it is possible to really talk about things like this in our circle, because it should be possible to say something within our Society without having it immediately spread abroad in places where it is then misunderstood. Our experiences in this regard, however, are also not the best, and if they continue, we will indeed have to organize our Society differently. Things that are said within the Society have to remain in the Society in the strictest sense of the word, because it really must be possible from time to time to say things that could not simply be said casually outside our Society.

Of course, in our Society we often have to talk about the karmic relationships between people. It may well be that such relationships exist—in fact, of course they exist—but if we continually get our views on karma mixed up with our ordinary everyday relationships, we are not taking the concept of truthfulness literally enough, and the result is not only nonsensical but also harmful. Truthfulness is a concept that has to be applied extremely strictly.

I can think of any number of cases in esoteric circles, both inside and outside our Society, where subjective matters that take place as a matter of course on the physical plane have been studded and embellished with esoteric truths. Let me mention one extreme example that may not happen very frequently in our Society, but it is one of the things that can be experienced. Indeed, it has happened numerous times.

Many people have learned about reincarnation, and they have also learned that Christ was alive on Earth at a certain point in time. I have experienced more than once that women who have become aware of these two spiritual facts—reincarnation and Christ's incarnation—have in all seriousness imagined that they have been chosen to give birth to the Christ and have attempted to arrange their lives to make this possible. It is unpleasant to have to mention these things and call a spade a spade, but we must do it to protect the Society, which we can do only if we don't close our eyes to the harm people can cause by applying occult truths on the physical plane.

Granted, the case I just mentioned is extreme, but it has happened not only once, but over and over again. I have described it drastically because things like this happen very frequently on a smaller scale, and it is important to notice the minor instances as well as the more blatant ones. Of course, it is a major issue if someone thinks she is going to give birth to the Christ, because the consequences can be extremely unfortunate. On a smaller scale, however, things like this are happening again and again.

Now, in ordinary bourgeois life, it happens that people fall in love, that a man falls in love with a woman. People simply call it “falling in love,” and that's the plain and simple truth. In esoteric societies men and women also fall in love; the possibility cannot be ruled out, as some of you know from experience. But in that case, what you hear about it is not as simple as, “X has fallen in love with Y.” Ordinary people just say that they're going together, which is usually a very accurate description as outward observation goes. But in esoteric societies, what you hear about it often goes something like this: “Having thoroughly examined my karma, I find that another personality has entered it, and we have realized that karma has destined us to be with each other and to intervene in the destiny of the world in a particular way.”

People fail to notice how much deception has crept in between this assertion and the simple matter of falling in love. This deception has developed in the following way: In bourgeois materialistic society, it's considered quite normal for two people to fall in love. But in an esoteric society, this is often not considered normal; instead, it is something people feel slightly ashamed of. But people do not like to feel ashamed. We don't need to go into why that is the case; there can be any number of reasons. People simply do not like to feel ashamed, so instead, they say that karma has spoken and has to be obeyed. Of course they are not acting out of pure selfishness or pure emotion—far from it; karma has to be obeyed! But if they were truthful, they would just admit that they have fallen in love, and having admitted it, they would find their way through life much more readily than by getting the truth mixed up with all kinds of karmic nonsense. The basic mischief of embellishing personal matters with esoteric truths leads to ever greater harm because it makes people lose their inner sense of limits, the limits we have to accept when we adopt a spiritual scientific philosophy.

This is not to say that we should introduce the worst principles of uncultured circles into our Society. In certain social circles, it is said that being human begins with being a baron. We must not establish our own version of this by saying that being human begins with being either a spiritual scientist or an anthroposophist—with being an “anthropop,” as others are starting to call it. We must not do that. We have to admit that even before we became spiritual scientists, we were people with certain ways of looking at things, people who would have done certain things and abstained from others.

In the very early days of our movement, I pointed out how important it is that we do not use our spiritual scientific views to sink down below our earlier level of moral standards, but that we must rise above it in all respects. That is why I said many years ago that when we entered the Society, each of us was equipped with a certain stock of moral standards and habitual ways of doing things, and that we should allow these habits to remain as they are until some clear and incontrovertible inner necessity compels us to change them. Generally, this happens only much later on. It can be extremely detrimental if, after having learned a little bit from spiritual science, we take what we have learned and use it to excuse or embellish what we do in life. You have to be perfectly clear on one point, my friends, namely that the outer circumstances of our life also come about through karma of a certain kind. And how people out in the world think and act is also a matter of karma.

Now, as you know, I prefer to talk about concrete cases because they are the most telling. For example, the following once happened to me: Not long ago, I was sitting in a barber shop—excuse me for talking about things like this, but what I'm going to tell you is not all that indiscreet or intimate. I was sitting in front of the mirror, so I could see the people as they came and went. The door opened, and in came a man who had on some kind of shoes that were nothing more than pieces of soft leather tied together; above that, he was wearing leggings and some kind of cape-like garment draped at a coquettish angle. In addition, his hair was swept back with some kind of a headband. Coincidentally, as it were, I knew the man very well.⁵

The barber let go of the razor he had just started to apply to my face and bought something from the man for five pennies. He showed it to me once the man had gone out—it was a poem he had composed himself. It was a simply terrible poem, but that man was going around the streets and stores in that get-up, selling the thing and imagining himself to be infinitely superior to all the people around him. He thought he was following some great ideal, but in reality he was only following an exaggerated and hysterical form of vanity. The basic impulse behind his conduct, his whole way of being, was nothing more than a gross exaggeration of the principle at work among the vainest and most superficial ladies.

But just consider how many among us might once have been tempted—for courtesy's sake, I will not suggest that they might still be tempted today—to say that in his own way, that man was only trying to do the right thing. True enough, but it was still absolute and total nonsense, and bound to make a mess of a person's life if he made it the principle of a lifetime. We have to realize to what extent vanity can be a motivating factor in what people do, and how difficult it is to notice it. If we take seriously what we can gain from spiritual science and accept it with respect, we have to admit that vanity is a very strong force in that man. If we do something or other out of vanity, not to mention other drives and impulses, other people are offended, though not necessarily for the reasons we might suspect. Nonetheless, there is a connection between ourselves and what other people say about us, a connection that is very easy to find if we look carefully. And we can only get beyond things like that if we develop a strict sense of exactitude as a counterbalance, an attitude we also need for understanding esoteric truths.

Although it's only a detail and no major issue, in esotericism it is extremely important to know and to observe, when people are recounting things, whether they are recounting their own observations and thus have a right to be talking about them as facts, or whether they are passing on things they heard from someone else. We must be able to tell the difference. But in hundreds of cases, people say things to others who in turn tell someone else, but in such a way that the person third in line gets the impression that they are not simply passing on something they've heard, but are talking about their own direct experience and have a right to be talking about it as if it were actual fact. This lack of precision is less important in ordinary materialistic society than it is among us. In materialistic circles, it may be pedantic to be so precise in how one speaks, but in our Society, more so than anywhere else, we need to observe such things strictly and exactly. And above all, we need to make a practice of being precise about ourselves.

If any of you need to be convinced of the implications of what I am saying, you are welcome to make the following experiment: Choose some topic—vegetarianism, for example—and observe how certain adherents of spiritual science talk about this topic in the outside world. Make a chart, and each time you hear spiritual scientists telling other people that they are vegetarians, jot down the reasons they give. It will soon become clear that on the subject of vegetarianism, adherents of spiritual science often say absolutely scandalous things to people in the outside world. When the outside world then comes to the conclusion that we are a society of fools, it should come as no great surprise.

In anthroposophical circles, I have frequently mentioned a very simple way of responding to the question of why you are a vegetarian without antagonizing people around you. If someone asks why you are a vegetarian, and you know that person would never eat horsemeat, you simply respond with the question, “Well, why don't you eat horsemeat?” Now the two of you are on the same footing, and the person who has to give a reason for not eating horsemeat will probably not come up with any highly theoretical reasons, but will say something like “The thought of it makes me sick.” Then you can say, “That's just how any meat makes me feel.” And as long as you say this in an appropriately conciliatory way, people will understand your point of view. The main thing is not to let the other person get the impression that you feel superior because of not eating meat. You might still want to add, although only if you can honestly admit it to yourself, that you are too weak to eat meat; you're handicapped when it comes to eating meat. When this question has come up, I myself have often said that a lot of things are simply easier to get through if you don't eat meat. Meat weighs people down, and if you need to use your brain in a precise way, it is simply easier to do if you don't eat meat. In the end, it all comes down to the question of what is easier and more convenient.

I have often emphasized that it is impossible to eat your way into the higher worlds, either through what you eat or through what you abstain from eating. Achieving access to spiritual worlds is a spiritual matter, and both eating and abstaining from food are physical matters. If this were not the case, people might get grotesque ideas about what would happen if they did or did not eat certain foods. It might occur to them to eat salt one week and no salt at all the next week in order to descend to the depths of the elemental world during the week when they were eating salt and come back up again in the course of the week when they were doing without. It's quite possible for people to get stupid ideas like that. In our Society, of course, people will not get ideas that are as stupid as that, but similar things might still occur to them.

But to get back to the subject of vegetarianism, if we are as modest as possible in how we discuss it in the presence of outsiders, we will find that eventually no one will hold the fact that we are vegetarians against us. On the other hand, if we consider vegetarianism to be something to our credit, the outside world will never forgive us for it. And in fact, being vegetarian is not a credit to anyone; it is simply an easy way out.

There are many other similar examples, and we really have to talk about things like this, not to preach morality, but to establish certain basic principles for our life in an esoteric society vis-à-vis the outside world. What it all comes down to is that we need to seriously consider how we relate to the outside world, and the result of our deliberations must be both a bridge and a protective wall between us and the outside, especially in the case of a society like ours. It happens again and again, for instance, that members say to people on the outside, “Dr. Steiner said this and such.” Just put yourself in the place of the person you're talking to, and imagine what it feels like!

For example, if someone says that Dr. Steiner is taking so-and-so's spiritual development in hand, how are outsiders supposed to understand that? What can they possibly imagine except a society of fools who all subordinate themselves to a single individual? That kind of thing really does happen. I cannot even pretend that it does not occur. And just imagine what it means to the outside world. We really must talk about these things from the point of view of how a society should be set up if a spiritual scientific movement like ours is to inhabit it. First and foremost, we must take this spiritual scientific movement seriously, and we must not do anything that could be detrimental to it in the eyes of the outside world.

I will go into this subject more deeply tomorrow, and you will see how intimately this all relates to certain specific impulses of spiritual science. I do not want to simply lecture you sternly; I want to explain how these things relate to the central impulses of spiritual science.

• 1. In Stuttgart on September 4, 1921, at the first Members' Assembly after World War I, Rudolf Steiner addressed the question of the lecture cycles as follows: “Actually, every member has taken on the responsibility of seeing that the cycles stay within the Society. I am not so concerned about the cycles being read outside the Society; what matters to me is that these cycles in the form in which they were printed stay among people who understand the circumstances, because lack of time kept me from correcting the proofs.” (Mitteilungen des Zentralvorstandes der Anthroposophischen Gesellschaft, Stuttgart, November 1921, No. 1, p. 27). And in The Course of My Life, GA 28, (Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1986): “I would have preferred it if the spoken word could have been left in that form, the members wanted to have the lectures printed privately, and that is why the talks now exist in print. If I had had time to make corrections, there would have been no need for the 'for members only' restriction right from the beginning.” (Chapter XXXV, Anthroposophic Press, 1986).
  
  However, since the members did not feel bound by this responsibility and Steiner's opponents in their writings often showed themselves to be better informed about the lecture cycles than the members themselves, Rudolf Steiner was obliged to lift all restrictions and declare the printed lecture cycles available to the general public at the Christmas Foundation Meeting of the Anthroposophical Society in 1923.
• 2. See the explanations Steiner gave on August 21 and 22, 1915, printed in Part Two of this volume.
• 3. August 22, 1915, in Part Two of this volume, p. 144.
• 4. “The Origin of Evil in the Light of Spiritual Science,” Munich, March 29, 1914. Only incomplete notes of this lecture are extant.
• 5. Gustav Gräser, 1879–1958, who became well known as an apostle of nature in the 1920s. Cf. Ulrich Linse, Barfüssige Propheten. Erlöser der zwanziger Jahre, Berlin, 1983. (“Barefoot Prophets: Redeemers of the Twenties”) Rudolf Steiner mentioned Gräser in a letter to Marie von Sivers on January 6, 1906 (in Rudolf Steiner/Marie Steiner-von Sivers, Correspondence and Documents 1901–1925, GA 262, (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1988), saying that Gräser had attended a lecture of Rudolf Steiner's and taken part in the discussion afterward.

IN 1913 on the hill in Dornach near Basel, Switzerland, construction had begun on the building then known as the Johannesbau and later to be called the Goetheanum, the central headquarters of the anthroposophical movement. Members of the Anthroposophical Society from all parts of the world had been called upon to work on the building, and they were joined by a growing number of others who moved to Dornach, either permanently or temporarily, on their own initiative. Thus a unique center of anthroposophical activity developed in Dornach, a center that was, understandably enough, burdened with the shortcomings and problems unavoidable in such a group.

In the summer of 1914, these difficulties escalated when World War I broke out, since people from many different nations, including those at war, had to work together and get along with each other. Isolation from the rest of the world and, last but not least, both local and more widespread opposition to the building and the people it attracted, further complicated the situation. In spite of all obstacles, however, the building continued to grow under the artistic leadership of Rudolf Steiner, who was well-loved as a teacher and felt by all to be a bulwark of constancy. But in the summer of 1915 all this changed as a result of incidents that threatened to test the Dornach group, and thus the Anthroposophical Society as a whole, to the breaking point.

Rudolf Steiner's marriage to Marie von Sivers at Christmas of 1914 had provoked not only general gossip, but also some bizarre mystical behavior on the part of a member named Alice Sprengel. [ Note 1 ] Heinrich Goesch (see below) and his wife Gertrud seized upon her strange ideas and made use of them in personal attacks on Rudolf Steiner. Since this was done publicly in the context of the Society, Rudolf Steiner asked that the Society itself resolve the case. This resulted in weeks of debate, at the end of which all three were expelled from the Society. Rudolf and Marie Steiner did not take part either in the debates or in the decision to rescind their membership.

The documents that follow reconstruct the events of the case in the sequence in which they occurred.

Alice Sprengel (b. 1871 in Scotland, d. 1949 in Bern, Switzerland) had joined the Theosophical Society in Munich in the summer of 1902, at a time when Rudolf Steiner had not yet become General Secretary for Germany. She joined the German Section a few years later. In a notice issued by the Vorstand of the Anthroposophical Society in the fall of 1915 informing members about the case, Miss Sprengel is described as having undergone unusual suffering in her childhood. At the time of her entry into the Society, she still impressed people as being very dejected. In addition, she was unemployed at that time and outwardly in very unfortunate circumstances. For that reason, efforts were made to help her.

Marie Steiner, then Marie von Sivers, sponsored her involvement in the Munich drama festival in 1907 and arranged for her to be financially supported by members in Munich. In order to help her find a means of supporting herself in line with her artistic abilities, Rudolf Steiner advised her on making symbolic jewelry and the like for members of the Society. It was also made possible for her to make the move to Dornach in 1914. She, however, interpreted this generous assistance to mean that she had a significant mission to fulfill within the Society. Having been given the role of Theodora in Rudolf Steiner's mystery dramas fed her delusions with regard to her mission, as did the fact that toward the end of the year 1911, in conjunction with the project to construct a building to house the mystery dramas, Rudolf Steiner had made an attempt to found a “Society for Theosophical Art and Style” in which she had been nominated as “keeper of the seal” because of her work as an artist. She imagined having lived through important incarnations and even believed herself to be the inspirer of Rudolf Steiner's spiritual teachings. In addition, having been asked to play Theodora gave rise to the delusion that she had received a symbolic promise of marriage from Rudolf Steiner, and she then suffered a breakdown as a result of Rudolf Steiner's marriage to Marie von Sivers at Christmas 1914. Her letters to Rudolf Steiner and Marie Steiner, reproduced below, clearly reveal that she was deeply upset.

Letter from Alice Sprengel to Rudolf Steiner
(undated; received December 25, 1914. Cf. p. 159.)

“Seven years now have passed,” [ Note 2 ] Dr. Steiner, since you appeared to my inner vision and said to me, “I am the one you have spent your life waiting for; I am the one for whom the powers of destiny intended you.”

You saw the struggles and doubts this experience occasioned in me; you knew that in the end my conviction was unshakable—yes, so it is. And you waited for my soul to open and for me to speak about this. Yet I remained silent, because my heart was broken. Long before I learned of theosophy, but also much more recently, I had had many experiences that made me say, “I willingly accept whatever suffering life brings me, no matter how hard it may be. After all, I have been shown by the spirit that it cannot be different.” But this is something that seems to go beyond the original plan of destiny; I lack the strength to bear it, and so it kills something in me, destroys forces I should once have possessed. These experiences were mostly instances of people deliberately abusing my confidence, and all in the name of love. But I had the feeling that this was not only my own fault; it seemed as if the will of destiny was inflicting more on me than I could bear.

I had some vague idea of why that might be so. Once, some years ago, I heard a voice within me saying, “There are beings in the spiritual world whose work requires that human beings sustain hope, but they have no interest in seeing these hopes fulfilled—on the contrary.” At that point I was not fully aware of what we were later to hear about the mystery of premature death, of goals not achieved, and so forth.

Then, however, I bore within me a wish and a hope that seemed like a proclamation from the spiritual world. This wish and this hope had made it possible for me to bear the unbearable; they worked in me with such tremendous force that they carried me along with them. My soul was in such a condition, however, that it could neither relinquish them nor tolerate their fulfillment, or, to put it better, it could not live up to what their fulfillment would have demanded of it. Thus I could not come to clarity on what the above-mentioned experience meant for me as an earthly human being. Neither the teaching nor the teacher was enough to revive my soul; that could only be done by a human being capable of greater love than any other and thus capable of compensating for a greater lack of love.

I can no longer remain silent; it speaks in me and forces me to speak. Years ago I begged you for advice, asked for enlightenment, and your words gave me hope and comfort. I am grateful for that, but today I would no longer be able to bear it. Why did you say to me recently that I looked well, that I should persevere? Did you think I was already aware of the step you are taking now, and that I had already “gotten over it”? I was as far from that as ever.

In conclusion, I ask that you let Miss von Sivers read this letter.

Alice Sprengel

* * *

Letter from Alice Sprengel to Rudolf Steiner

Arlesheim
February 3, 1915

Dear Dr. Steiner,

This will probably be my last letter to you; I will never turn to you again, neither in speaking nor in writing. I only want to tell you that I see no way out for myself; I am at my wits' end. As the weeks gone by have showed me, it is inconceivable that time will alleviate or wipe out anything that has happened; it will only bring to light what is hidden. Until now I have more or less managed to conceal how I feel, but I will not be able to do so indefinitely. I feel a melancholy settling in on me; being together with others and feeling their attentiveness is a torment to me, but I also cannot tolerate being alone for any length of time. I feel that everything that was to develop in me and flow into our movement through me has been buried alive.

My life stretches ahead of me, but it is devoid of any breath of air that makes life possible. And yet, in the darkest hour of my existence, I feel condemned to live—but my soul will be dead. Desolation and numbness will alternate with bouts of pain. I cannot imagine how the tragedy will end. It is likely, though, that I will show some signs of sorrow in weeks to come, and it may well be that I will say and do things that will surprise me as much as anyone else. I do not have the feeling that my words will arouse any echo in you. I feel as if I were talking to a picture. Since that time early on in those seven years when I stood bodily in front of you and you appeared to me as the embodiment of the figure that had been revealed to my inner vision, you have become unreal to me. Then, your voice sounded as sweet and comforting as my own hopes. You restored my soul with mysterious hints and promises that were so often contradicted in the course of events. And when my soul wanted to unfold under that radiant gaze of yours in which I could read that you knew what had happened to me, something looked at me out of your eyes, crying “This is a temptation.”

The most terrible thing was to have what stood before me in visible human form become unreal to me. And yet, I had the feeling that there was something real behind all this. I do not know what power makes your essential being a reality for me. You know that I have struggled for my faith and will continue to do so as long as there is a glimmer of life in me. You also know how I have pleaded with that Being whose light and teachings you must bring to those who suffer the terrible fate of being human, pleaded that whatever guilt may flow on my account may not disturb you in your mission, and I have the feeling that I have been heard. Nevertheless, the shadow of what has happened to me will fall across your path, just as it will darken my future earthly lives. That shadow will also fall across the continued existence of our movement and upon the destiny of our building. If the mystery dramas are ever performed again, you will have to have another Theodora, and since I will never be able to come to terms with what has happened, the very doors of the temple are closed to me in future. I wonder if, under these circumstances, there will ever again… I do not need to finish the sentence.

I sense that, on an occult level, this is a terrible state of affairs. Is there no way out?

Only a miracle can help in this case.

I am well aware that deliverance is possible, and if it were not to come, it would be terrible, and not only for me.

Let me tell you a story by way of conclusion, the story of the “sœur gardienne.” [ Note 3 ]

During the preparations for the plays during the summer of 1913, I noticed that you were not satisfied with me, and when it was all over I felt like a sick person who knows the doctor has given up on her. That feeling never left me from then on, and I could tell you of many instances, especially in recent months, when I felt a deathly chill come over me although your words actually sounded encouraging. The feeling grew stronger whenever I encountered anyone who knew what lay ahead. Why do I feel as if someone had slapped me in the face? Don't they all look as if they were part of a plot? That's what came to mind on many occasions, but I was relatively cheerful then and put it out of my mind. But all this is just a digression.

Two summers ago, shortly before the rehearsals began, I read La Sœur Gardienne. I had always assumed that Miss von Sivers would play the title role. On reading it, however, I began to doubt that the role would suit her; in fact, it seemed to me that she would not even want to play that part. And then I noticed how the figure came alive within me—it spoke, it moved in me. It was my role. If only I were allowed to play it! I saw what it would mean to me, and it was too beautiful to be true. Then invisible eyes looked at me, and I heard, “They will not give you that part, so resign yourself.” In my experience, that voice had always been correct. In view of the existing situation, I said to myself, “Dr. Steiner knows as well as I do that I had this experience; he must have good reasons for arranging things this way in spite of it—and as far as Miss von Sivers is concerned, I must have been mistaken—the whole thing must simply be another one of the incomprehensible disappointments that run like a red thread through my life.”

My soul collapsed; I behaved as calmly as I could, but that did not seem to be good enough. Your behavior as well as Miss von Sivers' was totally incomprehensible to me. They were looking everywhere for someone, anyone, to take the title role, and no one seemed to think of me; anyone else seemed more desirable. And yet people were making comments about how strange it was that I had nothing to do in that play. I held back, because at one point I was really afraid I would have to play a different role. Performances have been more or less the only occasions in my life where I could breathe freely, so to speak, where I could give of myself. But that was only true when I played parts that lived in me, like Theodora and Persephone. But when a role didn't sit well with me, it increased the pressure I was living under for quite some time. That is why I was not as unconcerned about these things as others might be; for me it was a matter of life and death. In the midst of all this tension something befell me that I had already experienced countless times before in many different situations and against which I have always been defenseless. My soul crumples as soon as it happens. Once again, “it” looked at me and said, “This is a lesson for you!” (or sometimes it said “a test” or “an ordeal”).

I felt the effects in my soul of countless experiences, repeated daily, hourly, going back to my earliest childhood. I do not know why my surroundings have always been tempted to participate wrongfully in my inner life. Only here and only very recently have I been able to ward this off, but it has forced me into complete isolation. What my foster parents, teachers, playmates, friends, and even strangers used to do to see what kind of a face I would make or to guess at how I would react! And much more than that. As I said, these experiences were so frequent that I could not deal with them; they suffocated me. Mostly I took it all calmly, thinking they didn't know any better. Now, however, in the situation I described, these semi-conscious memories played a trick on me—and I was overcome by anger. And then this summer, a year later, I had to relive the whole thing. And it occurred to me that I should have told you about what went before it.

As I said, those words “This is a lesson for you” always made me stiffen and freeze. When I look back on my life, it seems as if a devilish wisdom had foreseen all the possibilities life would bring to me in these last few years, and as if this intelligence had done its utmost to make me unfit for them. I could watch it at work, and yet was powerless to do anything. Much could be said about why that happened. But nothing in my own soul or in any single soul could ever help me over this abyss. Only the spark leaping from soul to soul, the spark that is so weak now, so very weak, can make the miracle happen now…

February 5

I have just read over what I wrote, and now I wonder, is it really all right for everything to happen as I described? That is how it would have to happen if everything stays as it is now. But don't we all three feel how destiny stands between us? Can it really be that there is one among us who does not know what has to happen next? That will bring many things to light; the course of events to come depends on what had been one person's secret. This is truly a test, but not only for me. What was hidden shall be revealed.

I still have one thing to say to you, my teacher and guide: even though the tempter looks out of your eyes, there have been times when I experienced with a shudder that what was revealed to me also meant something to you, something that has not been given its due. However, this must happen and will happen—you know that well, and so does

The Keeper of the Seal

* * *

Excerpt from a letter from Alice Sprengel to Marie Steiner
(undated; received on August 21, 1915. Cf. p. 139 and p. 160.)

I know that people who have “occult experiences” are a calamity as far as the people in positions of responsibility in our movement are concerned, and understandably so, but still, that is what our movement is there for—to come to grips with things like that.

The relationship between you and Dr. Steiner is not the point right now; no, it is the relationship between you and myself. However, your civil marriage unleashed a disaster for me, one that I had feared and seen coming for years—not in its actual course of events, you understand, but in its nature and severity. That is to say, for years I had seen something developing between my teacher and me, something to which we can indeed apply what we have heard in the last few days, though not for the first time. It has a will of its own and laws of its own and cannot be exorcised with any clever magic word. As I said, I had sufficient self-knowledge to know what had to come if nothing happened to prevent it.

Three years ago, like a sick person seeking out a physician, I asked Dr. Steiner for a consultation. There was something very sad I had to say during that interview, and I have had to say it frequently since then: Although I could follow his teachings, I could not understand anything of what affected me directly or of what happened to me. I must omit what brought me to the point of saying this, since I do not know how much you know about my background and biography. I was not able to express my need, and Dr. Steiner made it clear that he did not want to hear about it. The following summer, however, we were graced with the opportunity to perform The Guardian of the Threshold; in it a conversation takes place between Strader and Theodora, a conversation that reflected in the most delicate way the very thing that was oppressing me. Perhaps Dr. Steiner did not “intend” anything of the sort; nevertheless, it is a fact. Perhaps it was meant as an attempt at healing. I do not understand…

* * *

The next letter, written by an Englishwoman who was living at the Goetheanum at the time, characterizes Alice Sprengel from a different point of view:

Letter from Mary Peet to Alice Sprengel [ Note 4 ]

Arlesheim,
October 1915

Dear Miss Sprengel,

I cannot let the time pass without writing to tell you how greatly shocked I am at your disgraceful behavior to Doctor Steiner—and also to Mrs. Steiner.

I have truly always thought of you as a rather delicate and hysterical looking [sic] person, but I little imagined to what depths your evidently hysterical nature could lead you.

Your illusive hope of becoming a prominent person in our society not having been realized has been too much of a disappointment for your nature. This kind of thing happens every day, in that disappointed young women fall into all sorts of hysterical conditions, which give rise to all sorts of fantastical dreams. In this case the most holy things have been mixed with false illusions arising from much vanity, self-pride, and the desire for greatness!

To one who pictures herself to be the reincarnation of David, and of the Virgin Mary, very little can be said, for if one starts with such suppositions, one necessarily places oneself almost beyond the pale of reason and logic.

A dog will not bite the hand that has fed it for years—you have not shown the fidelity of a dog in that you have turned all your hatred and spite against the one who has given you all that has brought life into your existence, both spiritually and physically, for you have been beholden to him and his friends for your subsistence.

And now, because you are thoroughly disappointed, you have tried and are trying your best to injure him with every subtle untruth and insinuation, engendered by those thoughts which have entered your imaginative brain.

Doctor Steiner is beloved, revered, and respected; his life is an example to all. He has been able through his power of logic and clear and right thinking to feed us with the bread of Wisdom and Life, and has truly been a Light-bringer to us all.

I implore you to listen to reason before it is too late! Try to examine yourself for one hour and perceive the cause of all the fearful self-deception from which you are suffering. Beware of the awful figure of HATE, called up by your jealousy and consequent disappointment!

You cannot undo the past, but you can try to redeem the lost opportunities you have had by refraining from showing more and more clearly the picture that many can see—to which you are apparently quite blind up till now—namely, that of jealous woman suffering from ingratitude, disappointment, and hysterical illusions!

O Man! Know Thyself!

Truly,

[signed Mary Peet]

* * *

Heinrich Goesch (b. 1880 in Rostock, d. 1930 in Konstanz) was a man of many talents and interests who was already a Ph.D. and LL.D. at age twenty. His name also appeared once in December 1900 on the list of those present at a meeting of the Berlin literary society Die Kommenden. Financial support from parents and relatives enabled him to lead a life that allowed him to pursue numerous interests. Except for the last years of his life, when he lectured on art at the Dresden Academy of Arts and Crafts, he had never actually practiced a profession, presumably for reasons of health. According to a report by the psychiatrist Friedrich Husemann, Goesch had suffered from a very early age from epilepsy or seizure substitutes (absences). An expert witness reports having experienced one of Goesch's heaviest seizures. [ Note 5 ]

Goesch had come into contact with psychoanalysis in 1908 or 1909 while living with his wife (a cousin of Kathe Kollwitz) and his brother Paul, a painter, in Niederpoyritz near Dresden, where they were engaged in studying architecture, aesthetics, and philosophy. Paul Fechter, a journalist who was a friend of the Goeschs at that time, reports the following in his memoirs: [ Note 6 ]

Such was the world that greeted the dawning of psychoanalysis. One day Heinrich Goesch made the acquaintance of one of its earliest adepts, the son of a professor in Graz, who had made the teachings of Sigmund Freud, which at that time had not yet been widely popularized, the basis of his whole life. Goesch took him along to Niederpoyritz, where in endless nightly sessions the young doctor initiated the two brothers into the secrets of the new doctrine. As a result, Heinrich and Paul Goesch, consistent and logical in all their intellectual pursuits, were not content with the theory, but set about putting it into practice. They not only listened to what their guest had to offer, they tried it out on themselves and anything else they could get their hands on. They analyzed themselves and others and staged complex-resolutions by night until Niederpoyritz rebelled and their reputation rivaled that of young Schlegel in Jena.

All that would have made no difference; rumors get started and then fade away again. The effect on Paul Goesch, however, was disastrous—his thin-skinned psyche cracked under these experiments. Analysis, it seems, had eliminated certain inhibitions he needed in order to maintain a secure hold on life. Shortly after the doctor's visit, he entered a mental hospital for the first time…

The “doctor” whose name Fechter does not reveal was Otto Gross, private lecturer in psychopathology at the University of Graz and one of Freud's first pupils. Unlike Freud, who used psychoanalysis simply as a method of medical treatment, Gross, by applying it in social and political contexts as well, tried to make it the underlying basis of everyday life. His efforts eventually brought him into conflict with all existing social structures. As a drug addict, he became a patient of C. G. Jung at the Burghoelzli in Zurich and in that capacity played a certain role in the professional disagreements between Jung and Freud. Later, at the instigation of his father, Hans Gross (professor of criminology at Graz), he was declared legally incompetent and spent most of the rest of his life in mental hospitals. [ Note 7 ]

In his obituary of Heinrich Goesch, Fechter has this to say about Goesch's relationship to psychoanalysis:

When Otto Gross first introduced him to the as yet relatively unknown psychoanalytic method of Sigmund Freud, Heinrich Goesch recognized it immediately as a means of extending his personal experience into unfathomed depths. He took up this new subject passionately, not as a theoretical, conceptual, or abstract object of study and experience, but plunging with his whole being and all the strength he possessed into this stream that opened up before him and led into new depths. He did not study psychoanalysis, he experienced it through and through, making himself the object of his own analysis, descending into the shocks and ecstasies of the darkness that opened up in front of him with a total disregard for how it might affect his everyday existence. At once, he began to pull the theory out of the realm of science and into his immediate personal experience. It was a very dangerous experiment… [ Note 8 ]

Goesch became acquainted with Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophy around 1910. Shortly thereafter, he became a member of the German Section of the Theosophical Society, led at that point by Rudolf Steiner as General Secretary. He had been recommended by the physician Max Asch, who wrote to Rudolf Steiner on April 27, 1910. [ Note 9 ]

For the last two weeks or so, I have been involved in a lively and personal exchange of ideas with a Mr. Heinrich Goesch, Ph.D., who seems to me predestined for occult training. He is one of the most highly gifted people I have ever met, and about one year ago had unusual inner experiences that occurred as part of a state of ecstasy lasting about a week, which leads me to assume that his case would be of particular interest to you, too. He has recently immersed himself in the study of your works Theosophy, An Outline Of Occult Science, etc.), and the unbelievable quickness with which he grasps these things leads me to suspect that he has undergone some form of occult schooling in an earlier incarnation—apparently a specifically Christian one, given the nature of his ecstatic experiences. Mr. Goesch will attend your lecture tomorrow evening; if you wish, I will introduce him to you. He wants to become a member of the Theosophical Society immediately.

The lecture in question took place on April 28, 1910, in the Berlin House of Architects. Its title was “Error and Mental Disorder.” [ Note 10 ] On April 30, 1910, Asch wrote to Rudolf Steiner again:

Heinrich Goesch, Ph.D., about whom I wrote to you, would be very grateful if you would find an opportunity to speak with him soon. He would like to attend your lectures in Hamburg, since they are related to an area he has researched with particular interest in the last few years. Therefore, he would like to become a member of the Theosophical Society as soon as possible. Mr. Goesch lives in Charlottenburg…

A short time after Heinrich Goesch and his wife Gertrud became members, the construction of a building to serve as its central headquarters became a focal point of the Society's activity. Goesch was very interested in architecture and in 1912 made some suggestions about the design of the building. This interest, it seems, was also what led him to come in the spring of 1914 to Dornach, where work on the Johannesbau (first Goetheanum) had begun in fall of 1913.

These facts from the biography of Goesch, who, as Paul Fechter puts it, displayed “a personal and unique combination of logic and mysticism,” make it somewhat understandable why he would jump into the Sprengel case with typical passionate energy. According to the psychiatrist Friedrich Husemann, epileptics characteristically combine egocentricity with a disproportionate sensitivity to personal affront and a tendency to complain. On the basis of these changes in their affective life, it is easy for them to develop delusions, and a certain affinity must have developed between Goesch's delusions and those of Alice Sprengel. Goesch formulated his thoughts in a long and elaborate letter (dated August 19, 1915) to Rudolf Steiner, who read it to the Dornach circle on August 21, 1915, in place of his usual Saturday evening lecture.

Karma is best understood by contrasting it with that other impulse in man—the impulse which we indicate by the word freedom. Let us first, in a very crude way, I should say, place the question of karma before us. What does it signify?

In human life we have to record the fact of successive earth lives. By feeling ourselves within a given earth life, we can look back—in thought at least, to begin with—and see how this present earth life is a repetition of a number of previous earth lives. It was preceded by another, and that in turn by yet another life on earth, and so on until we get back into the ages where it is impossible to speak of repeated earth lives as we do in the present epoch of the earth, for in going farther backward, we reach a time when the life between birth and death and the life between death and a new birth become so similar that the immense difference which exists be- l ween them today is no longer present. Today we live in our earthly body bet ween birth and death in such a way that in every-day consciousness we feel cut off from the spiritual world. Out of this every-day consciousness, men speak of the spiritual world as a “beyond.” They even speak of it as though they might doubt its existence, as though they might deny it altogether, and so forth.

This is because man's life within earthly existence restricts him to the outer world of the senses, and to the intellect; the latter does not look far enough to perceive what really is connected with this earthly existence. Out of this, countless arguments arise, all of which actually are rooted in something unknown. No doubt, you will have often stood among people and experienced how they argued about monism, dualism, and so forth. It is, of course, quite absurd to argue about these catch-words. When people argue in this way, we are reminded of some primitive man, let us say, who has never heard that there is such a substance as air. It will not occur to anyone who knows that air exists, and what its functions are, to speak of it as something belonging to the beyond. Nor will he think of declaring: “I am a monist; air, water, and earth arc one, and you arc a dualist, because you regard air as something that extends beyond the earthly and watery elements.”

All these things are pure nonsense, as, indeed, are mostly all arguments about concepts. There can, therefore, be no question of our entering into such matters, but it can only be a question of drawing attention to them. For just as the air is not present for the one who knows nothing about it, but for him is something belonging to the “beyond,” so for those who do not yet know the spiritual world, which also exists everywhere just as the air, this spiritual world is something belonging to the “beyond;” but for those who take the matter into consideration, the spiritual world is something that belongs very much to this side. Thus, it is simply a question of our acknowledging the fact that at the present earth period the human being between birth and death lives in his physical body, in his whole organism, in such a way that this organism gives him a consciousness whereby he is cut off from a certain world of causes which, none the less, affects this physical earth existence.

Then, between death and a new birth he lives in another world, which we may call a spiritual world in contrast to our physical world; in this spiritual world he does not have a physical body which can be made visible to human senses, but he lives in a spiritual nature. And in this life between death and a new birth the world through which he passes between birth and death is just as alien, in turn, as the spirit world is now alien to every-day consciousness.

The dead look down onto the physical world just as the living that is the physically living—look upward into the spiritual world, and only the feelings are, so to speak, reversed. While the human being here in the physical world between birth and death has a certain aspiration toward another world which grants him fulfilment of much of which there is too little in this world, or of which this world affords him no satisfaction, he must between death and a new birth on account of the multitude of events, and because too much happens in proportion to what a human being can bear, feel a constant longing to return to earth life, to what is then the life in the beyond; hence, during the second half of the life between death and a new birth, he awaits with great longing the passage through birth into a new earth existence. Just as in earth existence the human being is afraid of death, because an uncertainty prevails about what happens thereafter—for in earth life a great uncertainty prevails for ordinary consciousness about what happens after death—so in the life between death and a new birth the condition is just the reverse, there prevails an excessive certainty about earth life. It is a certainty that stuns the human being, that makes him literally faint, so that he is in a state resembling a fainting dream, a state which fills him with the longing to descend again to earth.

These are only a few indications of the great difference prevailing between the earthly life and the life between death and a new birth. If, however, we now go back, let us say, even only as far as the Egyptian period, from the third on up into the first millennium before the founding of Christianity—and, after all, if we go back into this epoch, we go back to those human beings who were none other than ourselves, in a former earth life—indeed, then, at that time during earth existence, life was quite different from our so brutally clear consciousness of the present day. At present human beings have, indeed, a brutally clear consciousness; they are all so clever—I do not at all intend to be ironical—the people of today are, indeed, all very clever. In contrast to this brutally clear consciousness of today, the consciousness of the human being of the ancient Egyptian period was much more dream-like, a consciousness that did not, like ours, strike against outer objects. It passed through the world, as it were, without striking against objects. Instead, it was filled with pictures which, at the same time, revealed something of the spiritual existing in our environment. The spiritual still penetrated into physical earth existence.

Do not ask: How could a man with this more dream-like consciousness, not the brutally clear consciousness of today, have performed the tremendous tasks which were actually achieved, for instance, in the ancient Egyptian or Chaldean epochs? You need merely call to mind the fact that mad people at times, in certain states of mania, possess an immense increase of their physical forces; they begin to carry things which they could not carry when in a completely clear state of consciousness. It was, indeed, a fact that the physical strength of the human beings of that time was correspondingly greater, although they were perhaps of slighter build than men of today. For, as you know, it does not always follow that a stout man is strong and a thin man weak. But they did not spend their earthly life in observing every detail of their physical actions; their physical deeds went parallel with experiences into which the spiritual world still extended.

And again, when the people of that time were in the life between death and a new birth, then far more of this earthly life extended upward into the life beyond—if I may be allowed to use the expression “upward.” Nowadays it is exceedingly difficult to communicate with those who are present in the life between death and a new birth, for languages have gradually assumed a form no longer understood by the dead. Our nouns, for instance, soon after death are absolute gaps in the dead's comprehension of the earthly world. They understand nothing but the verbs, i.e. the words of motion, of action. And while we here on earth have our attention constantly drawn by materialistically minded people to the fact that everything should be defined in an orderly manner, and every concept be limited and sharply defined, the dead no longer know anything of definitions; they only know what is in motion, not what has contours and is limited.

But in more ancient times that which lived on earth as speech, that which lived as usage and habit of thought, was still of such a nature that it extended up into the life between death and a new birth, and the dead still heard an echo of this long after their death, and also an echo of what occurred on earth even after their death.

And if we go still farther back into the time following the catastrophe of Atlantis—the eighth and ninth millennium before the Christian era t lit* difference between the life on earth and the life in the beyond, if I may so describe it, becomes even more insignificant. And then, as we go backward, we gradually reach the ages when the two lives are similar. We can then no longer speak of repeated earth lives.

Thus, repeated earth lives have their limit as we look backward, just as they will have their limit when we look forward into the future. For what begins quite consciously with Anthroposophy—the extension of the spiritual world into the ordinary consciousness of man—will have the consequence that this earth world will extend, in turn, into the world through which we live between death and a new birth; but, in spite of this, our consciousness will not grow dream-like, but clearer and ever clearer. The difference will once again grow less. So that this living in repeated earth lives is limited by outermost boundaries, which then lead into quite another sort of human existence, where it is meaningless to speak of repeated earth lives, because the difference between the earthly and the spiritual life is not so great as it is today.

If we now assume, however, for the long stretch of the present period of the earth age that behind this earth life there lie others—we must not say countless others, for they can even be counted by exact spiritual- scientific research—if we say: behind our present earth life there lie many others, then we have had certain experiences in these previous earth lives which represented certain relationships between human beings. And the effects of these relationships between human beings, which at that time lived themselves out in what we then underwent, extend into this present earth life in the same way as the effects of what we do in this present earth life extend into our next lives on earth. Thus, we have to seek in the former earth life the causes of much that now enters into our present life. Then it is easy for the human being to say: “Thus, what I experience now is conditioned, caused. How can I, then, be a free human being?”

Now, this question is, indeed, a rather significant one, if we consider it in this way. For all spiritual observation shows that in this way the subsequent earth life is conditioned by the earlier ones. On the other hand, the consciousness of freedom absolutely exists. And, when you read my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, you will see that we cannot understand the human being at all, if we are not clear about the fact that his whole soul life tends, is directed, is oriented toward freedom, but a freedom which we have to understand correctly.

Now, it is precisely in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity that you will find an idea of freedom which it is very important to grasp correctly. The point is that we have developed freedom, to begin with, in thought. The fountainhead of freedom is in thought. Man has an immediate consciousness of the fact that he is a free being in his thought. You may rejoin: “But there are many people today who doubt the fact of freedom.” Yes, but this only proves that the theoretical fanaticism of people today is often stronger than their direct experience in reality. Because he is so crammed full of theoretical concepts the human being no longer believes in his own experiences. Out of his observations of the processes of nature, he arrives at the idea that everything is conditioned by necessity, every effect has a cause, all that exists has its cause; thus, if I conceive a thought, this has also a cause. He does not at once think of repeated earth lives in this connection, but he imagines that what wells forth from human thinking is caused in the same way as that which comes out of a machine.

As a result of this theory of universal causation, as it is called, the human being blinds himself frequently to the fact that he bears very clearly within himself the consciousness of freedom. Freedom is a fact which we experience, as soon as we really reflect upon ourselves.

Now, there are also those who are of the opinion that the nervous system is just a nature system, conjuring thoughts out of itself. According to this, then, the thoughts would—let us say—be necessary results, just like the flame which burns under the influence of a fuel, and there could be no question of freedom.

These people, however, contradict themselves in talking at all. As I have often related here, I had a friend in my youth, who had a fanatical inclination, at a certain period, to think materialistically. Thus, he said: “When I walk, for example, then it is the nerves of the brain, infiltrated by certain causes, which bring my walking into effect.” This led, at times, to quite a long debate with him. I finally said to him on one occasion: “Now, look here, you always say: ‘I walk.’ Why do you not say: ‘My brain walks?’ If you really believe in your theory, you ought never to say: ‘I walk, I take hold of things,’ but: ‘My brain walks, my brain takes hold of things.’ Why do you tell a lie?”

These are the theorists, but there are also the practical men. If they observe any nonsense in themselves which they do not wish to stop, they say: “O, I cannot get rid of that; it is just a part of my nature. It is there of its own accord, and I am powerless against it.” There are many such people; they refer to the immutable causation of their own nature. But, as a rule, they do not remain consistent. If they happen to be showing off something they rather like about themselves for which they need no excuse, but on the contrary are glad to receive a little flattery, they then abandon the aforesaid view.

The fundamental fact of the free human being—a self-evident fact can be directly experienced. Now, even in the ordinary, everyday earth life it is a fact that we do many things in complete freedom which, nevertheless, are of such a kind that we cannot easily leave them undone. And yet we do not feel our freedom in the least impaired through this fact.

Let us suppose, for a moment, that you now resolve to build yourself a house. It will take about a year to build it. In a year you will live in it. Will you feel that your freedom has been curtailed through the fact that you then have to say to yourself: “The house is now there, and I must move in, I must live in it; it is a case of compulsion?” No, you will surely not feel your freedom impaired through the fact of your having built a house for yourself. You see, therefore, even in ordinary life these two things stand side by side: You have committed yourself to something. It has thereby become a fact in life, a fact with which you have to reckon.

Now think of all that stems from former lives on earth, with which you have to reckon, because it is due to your own deeds—just as the building of the house is caused by you. Seen in this light, you will not feel your freedom impaired through the fact that your present life on earth is determined by former ones.

Perhaps you will say: “Very well. I will build me a house, but I still wish to remain a free man. I will not let myself be compelled. If I do not like it, I shall, in a year, not move into the new house; I shall sell it.” All right! We might also have our opinion about such a procedure; we might, perhaps, have the opinion that, if you do this, you are a person who does not know his own mind. Indeed, we might well have this opinion; but let us disregard this. Let us disregard the fact that a man is such a fanatical upholder of freedom that he constantly makes up his mind to do things, and afterwards out of sheer “freedom” leaves them undone. We then might well say: “That man has not even the freedom to enter upon the things he himself resolves upon. He constantly feels the goad of the will to be free and is positively persecuted by his fanatical worship of freedom.”

It is really important that these things not be taken in a rigid, theoretical manner, but be grasped in fullness of life. Let us now pass over to a more complicated concept. If we ascribe freedom to man, surely we must also ascribe it to the higher beings who are not hampered in their freedom by the limitations of human nature. If we rise to the beings of the higher Hierarchies, who certainly are not hampered by the limitations of human nature, we must, indeed, seek a higher degree of freedom with them. Now someone might propose a rather strange theological theory to the effect that God must surely be free; He has arranged the world in a certain way;

He has, however, thereby committed Himself; He certainly cannot change the world-order every day; thus, after all, He would in that case be unfree.

You see, if in this way you place in antithesis inner karmic necessity and freedom, which is a fact of our consciousness, which is simply a result of self-observation, you cannot then escape a continuous circle. In this way you cannot escape from a circle. For the matter is as follows: Let us take once more the illustration of the building of a house. I do not wish to press this example too far, but at this point it can still help us along the way. Someone builds himself a house. I will not say: I build myself a house—I shall probably never build one for myself—but, let us say, someone builds himself a house. Well, by this resolve he does, in a certain respect, determine his future. Now, when the house is finished, and he takes his former resolve into account, no freedom apparently remains for him, so far as the living in the house is concerned. He himself has certainly set this limitation to his freedom; nevertheless, apparently no freedom remains for him.

But just think, how many things still remain for you to do in freedom within this house, Indeed, within it you are even free to be stupid or wise, you are free to be horrid or lovable to your fellow men. In the house you are free to get up early or late. Perhaps, you may be under other obligations in this respect; but so far as the house is concerned, you are free to get up early or late. You are free to be an anthroposophist or a materialist within this house. In short, there are innumerable things still at your free disposal.

Likewise, in an individual human life, in spite of the presence of karmic necessity, there are countless things at your free disposal, far more than in a house, countless things fully and really in the domain of freedom.

Here you may, perhaps, be able to rejoin: “Very well, we do then have a certain domain of freedom in our life.” Indeed, that is so: a certain enclosed domain of freedom surrounded by the karmic necessity (see Figure III). Now, looking at this, you may assert the following. You may say: “Well, I am free in a certain domain; but I now reach the limits of my freedom. I then feel the karmic necessity everywhere. I walk around in my room of freedom, but everywhere at the boundaries I come up against my karmic necessity and sense this necessity.”

Indeed, my dear friends, if a fish thought likewise, it would be extremely unhappy in the water, for as it swims in the water it reaches the water's boundary. Outside of the water it can no longer live. Hence it refrains from going outside of the water. It does not go at all outside of the water; it remains in the water, it swims around in the water, and it just lets alone the other element which lies beyond, be it air or something else. And because the fish does this, I can in assure you that it is not at all unhappy over the fact that it cannot breathe with lung«. It does not occur to it to be unhappy. But, if ever it did occur to the fish to be unhappy because it breathes only with gills and not with lungs, then it would have to have lungs in reserve, then it would have to compare the difference between living down below in it lie water, and up in the air. Then the fish's whole way of feeling itself inwardly would be different. It would all be quite different.

If we apply this comparison to human life with respect to freedom and karmic necessity, then it is a fact, in the first place, that the human being in the present earth period has the ordinary consciousness. With this ordinary consciousness he lives in the sphere of freedom, just as the fish lives in the water, and with this consciousness he does not enter at all the realm of karmic necessity. Only when he begins really to perceive the spiritual world—this would be similar to the fish having lungs in reserve—only when he really finds his way into the spiritual world, does he acquire a perception of the impulses living in him as karmic necessity.

He then looks back into his former lives on earth and does not feel, does not say, on finding the causes of his present experiences in a previous earth life: “I am now under the compulsion of an iron necessity, and my freedom is impaired,” but he looks back and sees how he himself has fashioned what now confronts him, just as someone who has built himself a house looks back on the resolve which led him to build it. And we generally find it more reasonable to ask: “Was it, at that time, a sensible or foolish resolve to build this house?” Well, naturally, we can come later on to all sorts of opinions on the matter, if the things turn out in a certain way; but, if we find that it was an enormous stupidity to build the house, we can, at best, say that we were foolish.

Now, in earth life it is an awkward matter in regard to anything which one has inaugurated to have to say that it was stupid. We do not like this. We do not like to suffer from our own follies. We wish we had not made the foolish decision. But this really applies only to the one earth life, because between the foolishness of the resolve and the punishment we suffer in having to experience its consequences there lies the same earth life. It always remains thus.

But this is not so between the individual earth lives. For between them always lie the lives between death and a new birth; and these lives between death and a new birth change many things which would not change if earth life were to continue uniformly. Just suppose that you look back into a former earth life. There you did something good or ill to another human being. The life between death and a new birth took place between this previous earth life and the present earth life. In this life, in this spiritual life, you cannot think otherwise than that you have become imperfect by having done something evil to another human being. This takes away from your value as a human being. It cripples you in soul. You must repair the crippling, and you resolve to achieve in a new earth life what will make good the fault. Thus, between death and a new birth you absorb by your own will that which will compensate for the fault. If you have done good to another human being, you then know that the whole of human life is there for the whole of mankind. You see this most clearly in the life between death and a new birth. You then realize that when you have helped another human being, he has thereby achieved certain things which, without you, he would not have achieved in a former earth life; but, as a result, you feel again united with him in the life between death and a new birth, in order now to live and to develop further what you have achieved together with him in regard to human perfection. You seek him out again in a new earth life in order, in this new earth life, to work further with him through the way you have already helped him perfect himself.

The fact is not at all that we might abhor such necessity, when we, through a real insight into the spirit world, now perceive the scope of this karmic necessity all around us, but the fact is that we look back upon this necessity and see how the things were which we ourselves had done, and then behold them in such a way that we say: “What occurs out of inner necessity has to happen—out of complete freedom also it would have, to happen.”

We shall never have the experience of possessing a real insight into karma without being in agreement with it. If things result in the course of karma which do not please us, then we ought to consider them from the point of view of the general laws and principles of the universe. And we shall then realize more and more that, after all, what is karmically conditioned is better than our having to begin anew, better than our being a book of blank pages with every new earth life. For, as a matter of fact, we are ourselves our karma. We are ourselves that which comes over from previous earth lives. And it has no sense at all to say that something in our karma—alongside of which there exists definitely the realm of freedom—that something in our karma ought to be different from what it is, because it is not at all possible to criticize the single detail in an organically connected totality. Someone may not like his nose; but it is senseless to criticize merely the nose, as such, for the nose a man has must actually be as it is, if the whole man is as he is. The one who says: “I should like to have a different nose,” actually says that he would like to be an utterly different man. But in so doing he really eliminates himself in thought. This we cannot do. Thus, we cannot wipe out our karma, for we are ourselves our karma. Nor does it at all confound us, for it runs its course alongside the deeds of our freedom, and in no wise interferes with the deeds of our freedom.

I should like to use still another comparison to make the point clear. As human beings, we walk; but the ground on which we walk is also there. No one feels interfered with in walking by having the ground underneath his feet. Indeed, he ought even to know that, were the ground not there, he could not walk at all; he would fall through everywhere. It is thus with our freedom; it needs the “ground” of necessity. It must rise out of a foundation. And this foundation—we ourselves are.

As soon as we grasp in the right way the concept of freedom and the concept of karma, we shall be able to find them compatible, and we then need no longer shrink from a detailed study of the karmic laws. Indeed, in some instances we may even come to the following conclusion:

I now assume that someone, by means of the insight of initiation, is able to look back into former earth lives. He knows quite well, when he looks back into former earth lives that this and that has happened to him which has come with him into his present earth life. Had he not attained to initiation science, objective necessity would impel him to do certain things. He would do them quite inevitably. He would not feel his freedom hampered by it; for his freedom lies in his ordinary consciousness with which he never penetrates into the realm where this necessity acts, just as the fish never penetrates into the outer air. But when he has initiation science within him, he then looks back and he sees how things were in a former earth life, and he regards what now confronts him as a task which is consciously allotted to him for this present earth life. This is, indeed, a fact.

What I shall now say may sound paradoxical to you, yet it is true. In reality, a man who possesses no initiation science practically always knows through a kind of inner urge, through an instinct, what he is to do. O, indeed, people always know what they ought to do, feel themselves always impelled to this thing or that. For the one who begins with initiation science, matters become somewhat different in the world. As he faces life, quite strange questions arise in regard to the individual experiences. If he feels impelled to do something, he immediately feels also impelled not to do it. The obscure urge which drives most human beings to this or that is eliminated. And, actually, at a certain stage of initiate-insight, if nothing else were to intervene, a man could really come to the point of saying to himself: “After having reached this insight, I now prefer to spend the entire remainder of my life—I am now 40 years old, which is a matter of indifference to me—sitting on a chair doing nothing. For such pronounced urges to do this or that are no longer present.”

Do not believe, my dear friends, that initiation does not have a reality. It is strange, in this connection, how people sometimes think. In regard to a roast chicken, everyone who eats it believes that it has reality. In regard to initiate science, most people believe that it has only theoretical effects. No, it has effects on life. And such a life effect is the one I have just indicated. Before a man has attained to initiation, under the influence of an obscure urge, one thing is always important to him and another unimportant. The initiate would prefer to sit in a chair and let the world run its course, for it really does not matter—so it might appear to him whether this is done and that is left undone, and so forth. It will, however, not remain so, for initiation science also offers something else besides. The only corrective for the initiate's sitting on a chair, letting the world run its course, and saying: “everything is a matter of indifference to me,” is to look back into former earth lives. He then reads there from his karma the tasks for his present earth life, and he does consciously what his former earth lives impose upon him. He does not abstain from doing it because he believes that thereby his freedom is encroached on, but he does it. He does it, because by his discovery of what he had experienced in previous earth lives he becomes aware, at the same time, of what his life between death and a new birth has been, how he then realized the performance of the corresponding consequential actions as something reasonable. He would feel himself unfree if he could not come into the position of fulfilling the task which is allotted to him by his former earth life.

Thus, neither before nor after the entry into initiation science is there a contradiction between karmic necessity and freedom. Before the entry into initiation science, there is none, because with every-day consciousness the human being remains within the realm of freedom, while karmic necessity takes place outside, like a process of nature. He has nothing that feels different from what his own nature inspires in him. Nor is there any contradiction after the entry into initiation science, because he is then quite in agreement with his karma and simply considers it reasonable to act in harmony with karma. Just as you do not say, if you have built yourself a house: “the fact that I must now move in is hampering my freedom,” but just as you will probably say: “well, on the whole it was quite sensible to build myself a house in this neighborhood and on this site; now, let me be free in this house!” so likewise the one who looks back with initiate knowledge into former earth lives knows that he becomes free by fulfilling his karmic task, by moving into the house which he built for himself in former earth lives.

Thus, my dear friends, I wanted to explain to you the true compatibility of freedom and karmic necessity in human life. Tomorrow we shall continue, going more into the details of karma.

Karma is best understood by contrasting it with the other impulse in man—that impulse which we describe with the word Freedom. Let us first place the question of karma before us, quite crudely, if I may say so. What does it signify? In human life we have to record the fact of reincarnation, successive earthly lives. Feeling ourselves within a given earthly life, we can look back—in thought, at least, to begin with—and see how this present life is a repetition of a number of former earthly lives. It was preceded by another, and that in turn by yet another life on earth, and so on until we get back into the ages where it is impossible to speak of repeated earthly lives as we do in the present epoch of the earth. For as we go farther backward, there begins a time when the life between birth and death and the life between death and a new birth become so similar to one another that the immense difference which exists today between them is no longer there at all. Today we live in our earthly body between birth and death in such a way that in everyday consciousness we feel ourselves quite cut off from the spiritual world. Out of this everyday consciousness men speak of the spiritual world as a “beyond.” They will even speak of it as though they could doubt its existence or deny it altogether.

This is because man's life in earthly existence restricts him to the outer world of the senses, and to the intellect; and intellect does not look far enough to perceive what is, after all, connected with this earthly existence. Hence there arise countless disputations, all of which ultimately have their source in the “unknown.” No doubt you will often have stood between, when people were arguing about Monism, Dualism and the rest ... It is, of course, absurd to argue around these catch-words. When people wrangle in this way, it often seems as though there were some primitive man who had never heard that there is such substance as “air.” To one who knows that air exists, and what its functions are, it will not occur to speak of it as something that is “beyond.” Nor will he think of declaiming: “I am a Monist; I declare that air, water and earth are one. You are a Dualist, because you persist in regarding air as something that goes beyond the earthly and watery elements.”

These things, in fact, are pure nonsense, as indeed all disputes about concepts generally are. Therefore there can be no question of our entering into these arguments. I only wish to point out the significance. For a primitive man who does not yet know of its existence, the air as such is simply absent; it is “beyond,” beyond his ken. Likewise for those who do not yet know it, the spiritual world is a “beyond,” in spite of the fact that it is everywhere present just as the air is. For a man who enters into these things, it is no longer “beyond” or “on the other side,” but “here,” “on this side.”

Thus it is simply a question of our recognising the fact: In the present earthly era, man between birth and death lives in his physical body, in his whole organisation, so that this very organisation gives him a consciousness through which he is cut off from a certain world of causes. But the world of causes, none the less, is working as such into this physical and earthly life. Then, between death and a new birth he lives in another world, which we may call a spiritual world by contrast with this physical. There he has not a physical body, such as could be made visible to human senses; he lives in a spiritual form of being. Moreover, in that life between death and a new birth the world through which he lives between birth and death is in its turn as remote as the spiritual world is remote and foreign for everyday consciousness on earth.

The dead look down on to the physical world just as the living (that is, the physically living) look upward into the spiritual world. But their feelings are reversed, so to speak. In the physical world between birth and death, man has a way of gazing upward, as to another world which grants him fulfilment for very many things which are either deficient or altogether lacking in contentment in this world. It is quite different between death and a new birth. There, there is an untold abundance, a fulness of events. There is always far too much happening compared with what man can bear; therefore he feels a constant longing to return again into the earthly life, which is a “life in the beyond” for him there. In the second half of the life between death and a new birth, he awaits with great longing the passage through birth into a new earth-existence. In earthly existence man is afraid of death because he lives in uncertainty about it, for in the life on earth a great uncertainty prevails for the ordinary consciousness about the after-death. In the life between death and a new birth, on the other hand, man is excessively certain about the earthly life. It is a certainty that stuns him, that makes him actually weak and faint—so that he passes through conditions, like a fainting dream, conditions which imbue him with the longing to come down again to earth.

These are but scant indications of the great difference now prevailing between the earthly life and the life between death and a new birth. Suppose, however, that we now go back, say, no farther back than the Egyptian time—the third to the first millennium before the founding of Christianity. (After all, the men to whom we there go back are but ourselves, in former lives on earth.) In yonder time, the consciousness of man during his earthly life was quite different from ours today, which is so brutally clear, if you will allow me to say so. Truly, the consciousness of the men of today is brutally clear-cut, they are all so clever—I am not speaking ironically—the people of today are clever, all of them. Compared to this terribly clear-cut consciousness, the consciousness of the men of the ancient Egyptian time was far more dream-like. It did not impinge, like ours does, upon outer objects. It rather went its way through the world without “knocking up against” objects. On the other hand, it was filled with pictures which conveyed something of the Spiritual that is there in our environment. The Spiritual, then, still penetrated into man's physical life on earth.

Do not object: “How could a man with this more dream like, and not the clear-cut consciousness of today, have achieved the tremendous tasks which were actually achieved, for instance, in ancient Egypt?” You need not make this objection. You may remember how mad people sometimes reveal, in states of mania, an immense increase of physical strength; they will begin to carry objects which they could never lift when in their full, clear consciousness. Indeed, the physical strength of the men of that time was correspondingly greater; though outwardly they were perhaps slighter in build than the people of today—for, as you know, it does not always follow that a fat man is strong and a thin man physically weak. But they did not spend their earthly life in observing every detail of their physical actions; their physical deeds went parallel with experiences in consciousness into which the spiritual world still entered.

And when the people of that time were in the life between death and a new birth, far more of this earthly life reached upward into yonder life—if I may use the term “upward.” Nowadays it is exceedingly difficult to communicate with those who are in the life between death and a new birth, for the languages themselves have gradually assumed a form such as the dead no longer understand. Our nouns, for instance, soon after death, are absolute gaps in the dead man's perception of the earthly world. He only understands the verbs, the “words of time” as they are called in German—the acting, moving principle. Whereas on earth, materialistically minded people are constantly pulling us up, saying that everything should be defined and every concept well outlined and fixed by clear-cut definition, the dead no longer know of definitions; they only know of what is in movement, they do not know that which has contours and boundaries.

Here again, it was different in ancient times. What lives on earth as speech, and as custom and habit of thought, was of such a kind that it reached up into the life between death and a new birth, and the dead had it echoing in him still, long after his death. Moreover, he also received an echo of what he had experienced on earth and also of the things that were taking place on earth after his death.

And if we go still farther back, into the time following the catastrophe of Atlantis—the 8th or 9th millennium B.C.—the difference becomes even smaller between the life on earth and life in the Beyond, if we may still describe it so. And thence, as we go backward, we gradually get into the times when the two lives were similar. Thereafter, we can no longer speak of repeated earthly lives.

Thus, our repeated lives on earth have their limit when we go backward, just as they have their limit when we look into the future. What we are beginning quite consciously with Anthroposophy today—the penetration of the spiritual world into the normal consciousness of man—will indeed entail this consequence. Into the world which man lives through between death and a new birth, the earthly world will also penetrate increasingly; and yet man's consciousness will not grow dream-like, but clearer and ever clearer. The difference will again grow less. Thus, in effect, our life in repeated incarnations is contained between two outermost limits, past and future. Across these limits we come into quite another kind of human existence, where it is meaningless to speak of repeated earthly lives, because there is not the great difference between the earthly and the spiritual life, which there is today. Now let us concentrate on present earthly time—in the wide sense of the word. Behind our present earthly life, we may assume that there are many others—we must not say countless others, for they can even be counted by exact spiritual scientific investigation. Behind our present earthly life there are, therefore, many others. When we say this, we shall recognise that in those earthly lives we had certain experiences—relationships as between man and man. These relationships as between man and man worked themselves out in the experiences we then underwent; and their effects are with us in our present earthly life, just as the effects of what we do in this life will extend into our coming lives on earth. So then we have to seek in former earthly lives the causes of many things that enter into our life today.

At this point, many people are prone to retort: “If then the things I experience are caused, how can I be free?” It is a really significant question when we consider it in this way. For spiritual observation always shows that our succeeding earthly life is thus conditioned by our former lives. Yet, on the other hand, the consciousness of freedom is absolutely there. Read my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity and you will see: the human being cannot be understood at all unless we realise that the whole life of his soul is oriented towards freedom—filled with the tendency to freedom.

Only, this freedom must be rightly understood. Precisely in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity you will find a concept of freedom which it is very important to grasp in its true meaning. The point is that we have freedom developed, to begin with, in thought. The fountain-head of freedom is in thought. Man has an immediate consciousness of the fact that he is a free being in his thought. You may rejoin: “Surely there are many people nowadays who doubt the fact of freedom?” Yes, but it only proves that the theoretical fanaticism of people nowadays is often stronger than their direct and real experience. Man is so crammed with theoretical ideas, that he no longer believes in his own experiences. Out of his observations of Nature, he arrives at the idea that everything is conditioned by necessity, every effect has a cause, all that exists has a cause. He does not think of repeated earthly lives in this connection. He imagines that what wells forth in human Thinking is causally determined in the same way as that which proceeds from any machine.

Man makes himself blind by this theory of universal causality, as it is called. He blinds himself to the fact that he has very clearly within him a consciousness of freedom. Freedom is simply a fact which we experience, the moment we reflect upon ourselves at all.

There are those who believe that it is simply the nervous system; the nervous system is there, once and for all, with its property of conjuring thoughts out of itself. According to this, the thoughts would be like the flame whose burning is conditioned by the materials of the fuel. Our thoughts would be necessary results, and there could be no question of freedom.

These people, however, contradict themselves. As I have often related, I had a friend in my youth, who, at a certain period had quite a fanatical tendency to think in a “sound,” materialistic way. “When I walk,” he said, “it is the nerves of' the brain; they contain certain causes to which the effect of my walking is due.” Now and then it led to quite a long debate between us, till at last I said to him on one occasion: “Look now. You also say: ‘I walk.’ Why do you not say, ‘My brain walks?’ If you believe in your theory, you ought never to say: ‘I walk; I take hold of things,’ and so on, but ‘My brain walks; my brain takes hold of them,’ and so on. Why do you go on lying?”

These are the theorists, but there also those who put it into practice. If they observe some failing in themselves which they are not very anxious to throw off, they say, “I cannot throw it off; it is my nature. It is there of its own accord, and I am powerless against it.” There are many like that; they appeal to the inevitable causality of their own nature. But its a rule, they do not remain consistent. If they happen to be showing off something that they rather like about themselves, for which they need no excuse, but on the contrary are glad to receive a little flattery, then they depart from their theory.

The free being of man is a fundamental fact—one of those facts which can be directly experienced. In this respect, however, even in ordinary earthly life it is so: there are many things we do in complete freedom which are nevertheless of such a kind that we cannot easily leave them undone. And yet we do not feel our freedom in the least impaired.

Suppose, for a moment, that you now resolve to build yourself a house. It will take a year to build, let us say. After a year you will begin to live in it. Will you feel it as an encroachment on your freedom that you then have to say to yourself: The house is ready now, and I must move in ... I must live in it; it is a case of compulsion. No. You will surely not feel your freedom impaired by the mere fact that you have built yourself a house. You see, therefore, even in ordinary life the two things stand side by side. You have committed yourself to something. It has thereby become a fact in life—a fact with which you have to reckon.

Now think of all that has originated in former lives on earth, with which you have to reckon because it is due to yourself—just as the building of the house is due to you. Seen in this light, you will not feel your freedom impaired because your present life on earth is determined by former ones.

Perhaps you will say: “Very well. I will build myself a house, but I still wish to remain a free man. I shall not let myself be compelled. If I do not choose to move into the new house after a year, I shall sell it.” Certainly—though I must say, one might also have one's views about such a way of behaving. One might perhaps conclude that you are a person who does not know his own mind. Undoubtedly, one might well take this view of the matter; but let us leave it. Let us not suppose a man is such a fanatical upholder of freedom that he constantly makes up his mind to do things, and afterwards out of sheer “freedom” leaves them undone. Then one might well say: “This man has not even the freedom to go in for the things which he himself resolves upon. He constantly feels the sting of his would-be freedom; he is positively harassed, thrown hither and thither by his fanatical idea of freedom.”

Observe how important it is, not to take these questions in a rigid, theoretic way, but livingly. Now let us pass to a rather more intricate concept. If we ascribe freedom to man, surely we must also ascribe it to the other Beings, whose freedom is unimpaired by human limitations. For, as we rise to the Beings of the Hierarchies, they certainly are not impaired by limitations of human nature. For them indeed we must expect a higher degree of freedom. Now someone might propound a rather strange theological theory—to this effect: God must surely be free. He has arranged the world in a certain way; yet he has thereby committed Himself, He cannot change the World-Order every day. Thus, after all, He is un-free.

You see, you will never escape from a vicious circle if you thus contrast the inner necessity of karma and the freedom which is still an absolute fact of our consciousness, a simple outcome of self-observation. Take once more the illustration of the building of the house. I do not wish to run it to death, but at this point it can still help us along the way. Suppose some person builds himself a house. I will not say suppose I build myself a house, for I shall probably never do so!—But, let us say, some one builds himself a house. By this resolve, he does, in a certain respect, determine his future. Now that the house is finished, and if he takes his former resolve into account, no freedom apparently remains to him, as far as the living in the house is concerned. And though he himself has set this limitation on his freedom, nevertheless, apparently, no freedom is left to him ... But now, I beg you, think how many things there are that you would still be free to do in the house that you had built yourself. Why, you are even free to be stupid or wise in the house, and to be disagreeable or nice to your fellow-men. You are free to get up in the house early or late. There may be other necessities in this respect; but as far as the house is concerned, you are free to get up early or late. You are free to be an anthroposophist or a materialist in the house. In short, there are untold things still at your free disposal.

Likewise in a single human life, in spite of karmic necessity, there are countless things at your free disposal, far more than in a house—countless things fully and really in the domain of your freedom.

Even here you may still feel able to rejoin: Well and good. We have a certain domain of freedom in our life. Yes, there is a certain enclosed domain of freedom, and all around it, karmic necessity. Looking at this, you might argue: Well, I am free in a certain domain, but I soon get to the limits of my freedom. I feel the karmic necessity on every hand. I go round and round in the room of my freedom, but at the boundaries on every hand I come up against limitations.

Well, my dear friends, if the fish thought likewise, it would be highly unhappy in the water, for as it swims it comes up against the limits of the water. Outside the water, it can no longer live. Hence it refrains from going outside the water. It does not go outside; it stays in the water. It swims around in the water, and whatever is outside the water, it lets it alone; it just lets it be what it is—air, or whatever else. And inasmuch as it does so, I can assure you the fish is not at all unhappy to think that it cannot breathe with lungs. It does not occur to it to be unhappy. But if ever it did occur to the fish to be unhappy because it only breathes with gills and not with lungs, then it would have to have lungs in reserve, so as to compare what it is like to live down in the water, or in the air. Then the whole way the fish feels itself inside, would be quite different. It would all be different.

Let us apply this comparison to human life with respect to freedom and karmic necessity. To begin with, man in the present earthly time has what we call the ordinary consciousness. With this consciousness he lives in the province of his freedom, just as the fish lives in the water. He does not come into the realm of karmic necessity at all, with everyday consciousness. Only when he begins to see the spiritual world (which is as though the fish were to have lungs in reserve)—only when he really lives into the spiritual world—then he begins to perceive the impulses living in him as karmic necessity. Then he looks back into his former lives on earth, and, finding in them the causes of his present experiences, he does not feel: “I am now under compulsion of an iron necessity: my freedom is impaired,” but he looks back and sees how he himself built up what now confronts him. Just as a man who has built himself a house looks back on the resolve which led him to build it ... He generally finds it wiser to ask, was it a sensible or a foolish resolve, to build this house? No doubt, in the event, you may arrive at many different conclusions on this question; but if you conclude that it was a dreadful mistake, you can say at most that you were foolish.

In earthly life this is not a pleasant experience, for when we stand face to face with a thing we have inaugurated, we do not like having to admit that it was foolish. We do not like to suffer from our own foolish mistakes. We wish we had not made the foolish decision. But this really only applies to the one earthly life; because in effect, between the foolishness of the resolve and the punishment we suffer in experiencing its consequences, only the self-same earthly life is intervening. It all remains continuous.

But between one earthly life and another it is not so. For the lives between death and a new birth are always intervening, and they change many things which would not change if earthly life continued uniformly. Suppose that you look back into a former life on earth. You did something good or ill to another man. Between that earthly life and this one, there was the life between death and new birth. In that life, you cannot help realising that you have become imperfect by doing wrong to another human being. It takes away from your own human value. It cripples you in soul. You must make good again this maiming of your soul and you resolve to achieve in a new earthly life what will make good the fault. Thus between death and new birth you take up, by your own will, that which will balance and make good the fault. Or if you did good to another man, you know now that all of man's earthly life is there for mankind as a whole. You see it clearly in the life between death and new birth. If therefore you have helped another man, you realise that he has thereby attained certain things which, without you, he could not have attained in a former life on earth. And you then feel all the more united with him in the life between death and new birth—united with him, to live and develop further what you and he together have attained in human perfection. You seek him again in a new life on earth, to work on thus in a new life precisely by virtue of the way you helped in his perfection.

When therefore, with real spiritual insight, you begin to perceive this encompassing domain, there is no question of your despising or seeking to avoid its necessity. Quite the contrary; for as you now look back on it, you see the nature of the things which you yourself did in the past, so much so that you say to yourself: That which takes place, must take place, out of an inner necessity; and out of the fullest freedom it would have to take place just the same.

In fact it will never happen, under any circumstances, that a real insight into your karma will lead you to be dissatisfied with it. When things arise in the karmic course which you do not like, you need but consider them in relation to the laws and principles of the universe; you will perceive increasingly that after all, what is karmically conditioned is far better—better than if we had to begin anew, like unwritten pages, with every new life on earth. For, in the last resort, we ourselves are our karma. What is it that comes over, karmically, from our former lives on earth? It is actually we ourselves. And it is meaningless to suggest that anything in our karma (adjoining which, remember, the realm of freedom is always there), ought to be different from what it is. In an organic totality you cannot criticise the single details. A person may not like his nose, but it is senseless to criticise the nose as such, for the nose a man has, must be as it is, if the whole man is as he is. A man who says: “I should like to have a different nose,” implies that he would like to be an utterly different man; and in so doing he really wipes himself out in thought—which is surely impossible. Likewise we cannot wipe out our karma, for we are ourselves what our karma is. Nor does it really embarrass us, for it runs alongside the deeds of our freedom it nowhere impairs the deeds of our freedom.

I may here use another comparison to make the point clear. As human beings, we walk. But the ground on which we walk is also there. No man feels embarrassed in walking because the ground is there beneath him. He must know that if the ground were not there, he could not walk at all; he would fall through at every step. So it is with our freedom; it needs the ground of necessity. It must rise out of a given foundation. And this foundation—it is really we ourselves!

Therefore, if you grasp the true concept of freedom and the true concept of karma, you will find them thoroughly compatible, and you need no longer shrink from a detailed study of the karmic laws. In fact, in some instances you will even come to the following conclusion:

Suppose that some one is really able to look back with the insight of Initiation, into former lives on earth. He knows quite well, when he looks back into his former lives, that this and that has happened to him as a consequence. It has come with him into his present life on earth. If he had not attained Initiation Science, objective necessity would impel him to do certain things. He would do them quite inevitably. He would not feel his freedom impaired, for his freedom is in the ordinary consciousness, with which he never penetrates into the realm where the necessity is working—just as the fish never penetrates into the outer air. But when he has attained to Initiation Science, then he looks back; he sees how things were in a former life on earth, and he regards what now confronts him as a task quite consciously allotted for his present life. And so indeed it is.

What I shall now say may sound paradoxical to you, yet it is true. In reality, a man who has no Initiation Science practically always knows, by a kind of inner urge or impulse, what he is to do. Yes, people always know what they must do; they are always feeling impelled to this thing or that. For one who really begins to tread the path of Initiation Science it becomes very different. With regard to the various experiences of life as they confront him, strange questions will arise in him. When he feels impelled to do this or that, immediately again he feels impelled not to do it. There is no more of that dim urge which drives most human beings to this or that line of action. Indeed, at a certain stage of Initiate-insight, if nothing else came instead, a man might easily say to himself: Now that I have reached this insight—being 40 years old, let us say, I had best spend the rest of my life quite indifferently. What do I care? I'll sit down and do nothing, for I have no definite impulses to do anything particular.

You must not suppose, my dear friends, that Initiation is not a reality. It is remarkable how people sometimes think of these things. Of a roast chicken, every one who eats it, well believes that it is a reality. Of Initiation Science, most people believe that its effects are merely theoretical. No, its effects are realities in life, and among them is the one I have just indicated. Before a man has acquired Initiation Science, out of a dark urge within him one thing is always important to him and another unimportant. But now he would prefer to sit down in a chair and let the world run its course, for it really does not matter whether this is done or that is left undone ...

This attitude might easily occur, and there is only one corrective. (For it will not remain so; Initiation Science, needless to say, brings about other effects as well.) The only corrective which will prevent our Initiate from sitting down quiescently, letting the world run its course, and saying: “It is all indifferent to me,” is to look back into his former lives on earth. For he then reads in his karma the tasks for his present earthly life, and does what is consciously imposed upon him by his former lives. He does not leave it undone, with the idea that it encroaches on his freedom, but he does it. Quite on the contrary, he would feel himself unfree if he could not fulfil the task which is allotted to him by his former lives. For in beholding what he experienced in former lives on earth, at the same time he becomes aware of his life between death and a new birth, where he perceived that it was right and reasonable to do the corresponding, consequential actions. (At this point let me say briefly, in parenthesis, that the word “Karma” has come to Europe by way of the English language, and because of its spelling people very often say “Karma” (with broad “ah” sound.) This is incorrect. It should be pronounced “Kärma” (with modified vowel sound.) I have always pronounced the word in this way and I regret that as a result many people have become accustomed to using the dreadful word “Kirma”. For some time now you will have heard even very sincere students saying “Kirma.” It is dreadful).

Thus, neither before nor after Initiation Science is there a contradiction between karmic necessity and freedom.

Once more, then: neither before nor after the entry of Initiation Science is there a contradiction between necessity—karmic necessity—and freedom. Before it there is none, because with everyday consciousness man remains within the realm of freedom, while karmic necessity goes on outside this realm, like any process of Nature. There is nothing in him to feel differently from what his own nature impels. Nor is there any contradiction after the entry of Initiation Science, for he is then quite in agreement with his karma, he thinks it only sensible to act according to it. Just as when you have built yourself a house and it is ready after a year, you do not say: the fact that you must now move in is an encroachment on your freedom. You will more probably say: Yes, on the whole it was quite sensible to build yourself a house in this neighbourhood and on this site. Now see to it that you are free in the house! Likewise he who looks back with Initiate-knowledge into his former lives on, earth: he knows that he will become free precisely by the fulfilling of his karmic task-moving into the house which he built for himself in former lives on earth.

Thus, my dear friends, I wanted to explain to you the true compatibility of freedom and karmic necessity in human life. Tomorrow we shall continue, entering more into the details of karma.

If we now continue our studies of karma, it is necessary for us in the first place to perceive how karma enters into man's development. We must perceive, that is to say, how destiny, interwoven as it is with the free deeds of man, is really shaped and moulded in its physical reflection out of the spiritual world.

To begin with, I shall have to say a few things concerning the human being as he lives on earth. During these lectures we have been studying earthly man in relation to the various members of his being. We have distinguished in him the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and the organisation of the Ego. But there is yet another way of perceiving his several members, namely when we direct our gaze upon him, simply as he stands before us in the physical world.

In today's lecture—independently of what we have already been discussing—we shall therefore approach a different distinction of the members of the human being. Then we shall try to build a bridge between what we discuss today and that which is already known to us.

Observing the human being as he stands before us on the earth—simply according to his physical form—we can recognise in this physical form and configuration three clearly distinct members. If they are not generally distinguished, it is only because that which counts as science nowadays looks at the facts in a merely superficial way. It has no feeling for what reveals itself when these things are observed with a perception that is illumined from within. There, to begin with, is the head of man. Even outwardly considered, we can perceive that this human head appears quite different from the remainder of the human form. We need but observe the origin of man out of the embryo. The first thing we can see developing as human embryo is the head organisation. That is practically all that we can see to begin with. The whole human organisation takes its start from the head. All that afterwards flows into man's form and figure and configuration, is, in the embryo, a mere system of appendages. As physical form, man to begin with is head, and head alone. The other organs are there as mere appendages. In the first period of embryo existence, the functions these organs assume in later life—as breathing, circulation, nutrition and so on—are not undertaken as such from within the embryo. The corresponding functions are supplied from without inward, so to speak: provided for by the mother-organism, through organs that afterwards fall away—organs that are no longer attached to the human being later on.

Man, to begin with, is simply a head. He is altogether “head,” and the remaining organs are only appendages. It is no exaggeration to say that man, to begin with, is a head. The remainder is merely an appendage. Then, at a later stage, the organs which to begin with were mere appendages, grow and gain in importance. Therefore, in later life, the head is not strictly distinguished from the rest of the body. But that is only a superficial characterisation of the human being. For in reality, even as physical form, he is a threefold being. All that constitutes his original form—namely the head-remains throughout his earthly life as a more or less individual member. People only fail to recognise the fact,—but it is so.

You will say: Surely one ought not to divide the human being in this way—beheading him, so to speak, chopping his head off from the rest of his body. That such is the anthroposophical practice was only the fond belief of the Professor, who reproached us for dividing man into head-, chest-organs and limb-organs. But it is not so at all. The fact is rather this: that which appears outwardly as the formation of the head is only the main expression of the human head-formation. Man remains “head” throughout his whole earthly life. The most important sense-organs, it is true—the eyes and ears, the organs of smell and organs of taste—are in the actual head. But the sense of warmth, for example, the sense of pressure, the sense of touch, are spread over the whole human being. That is precisely because the three members cannot in fact be separated spatially. They can at most be separated in the sense that the head-formative principle is mainly apparent in the outward form of the head, while in reality it permeates the whole human being. And so it is too, for the other members. The “head” is also there in the big toe throughout man's earthly life, inasmuch as the big toe possesses a sense of touch or a sense of warmth.

Thus we have characterised, to begin with, the one member of the human being as he stands before us in the sense-world. In my books I have also described this one organisation as the system of nerves and senses; for that is to characterise it more inwardly. This, then, is the one member of the human being, the organisation of nerves and senses. The second member is all that lives and finds expression in rhythmical activity. You cannot say of the nerves-and-senses system that it finds expression in rhythmic activity. For if it did, in the perception of the eye, for instance, you would have to perceive one thing at one moment and then another, and a third and a fourth; and then return again to the first, and so on. In other words, there would have to be a rhythm in your sense-perceptions; and it is not so. Observe on the other hand the main features of your chest-organisation. There you will find the rhythm of the breathing, the rhythm of circulation, the rhythm of digestion and so forth ... There, everything is rhythmical.

This rhythm, with the corresponding organs of rhythm, is the second thing to develop in the human being; and it extends once more over the whole human being, though its chief external manifestation is in the organs of the chest. The whole human being is heart, is lung; yet lung and heart are localised, so to speak, in the organs, so-called. It is well known that the whole human being breathes; you breathe at every place in your organism. People speak of a skin-breathing. Only here, once more, the breathing function is mainly concentrated in the activity of the lung.

The third thing in man is the limb-organism. The limbs come to an end in the trunk or chest-organism. In the embryo-stage of existence they appear as mere appendages. They are the latest to develop. They however are the organs mainly concerned in our metabolism. For by their movement—and inasmuch as they do most of the work in the human being—the metabolic process finds its chief stimulus.

Therewith we have characterised the three members that appear to us in the human form. But these three members are intimately connected with the soul-life of man. The life of the human soul falls into Thinking, Feeling and Willing. Thinking finds its corresponding physical organisation chiefly in the organisation of the head. It has its physical organisation, it is true, throughout the human being; but that is only because the head itself, as I said just now, is there throughout the human being.

Feeling is connected with the rhythmic organisation. It is a prejudice—even a superstition on the part of modern science to suppose that the nervous system has anything directly to do with feeling. The nervous system has nothing directly to do with feeling at all. The true organs of feeling are the rhythms of the breathing, of the circulation ... All that the nerves do is to enable us to form the concept that we have our feelings. Feelings, once more, have their own proper organisation in the rhythmic organism. But we should know nothing of our feelings if the nerves did not provide for our having ideas about them. Because the nerves provide us with all the ideas of our own feelings, modern intellectualism conceives the superstitious notion that the nerves themselves are the organs of our feeling. That is not the case.

But when we consciously observe our feelings—such as they arise out of our rhythmic organism—and compare them with the thoughts which are bound to our head, our nerves-and-senses organisation, then, if we have the faculty to observe such things at all, we perceive just the same difference between our thoughts and our feelings as between the thoughts which we have in our day-waking life, and our dreams. Our feelings have no greater intensity in consciousness than dreams. They only have a different form; they only make their appearance in a different way. When you dream, in pictures, your consciousness is living in the pictures of the dream. These pictures, however, in their picture-form, have the same significance as in another form our feelings have. Thus we may say: We have the clearest and most light-filled consciousness in our ideas and thoughts. We have a kind of dream-consciousness in our feelings. We only imagine that we have a clear consciousness of our feelings; in reality we have no clearer consciousness of our feelings than of our dreams. When, on awaking from sleep, we recollect ourselves and form wide-awake ideas about our dreams, we do not by any means catch at the actual dream. The dream is far richer in content than what we afterwards conceive of it. Likewise is the world of feeling infinitely richer than the ideas, the mental pictures of it, which we make present to our conscious mind.

And when we come to our willing—that is completely immersed in sleep. Willing is bound to the limbs—and metabolic and motor organism. All that we really know of our willing are the thoughts. I form the idea: I will pick up this watch.

Think of it quite sincerely, and you will have to admit: You form the idea: “I will take hold of the watch.” Then you take hold of it. As to what takes place, starting from the idea and going right down into the muscles, until at length you have an idea once more (namely, that you are actually taking hold of the watch) following on your original idea—all this that goes on in your bodily nature between the mental picture of the intention and the mental picture of its realisation, remains utterly unconscious. So much so that you can only compare it with the unconsciousness of deep, dreamless sleep.

We do at least dream of our feelings, but of our impulses of will we have no more than we have from our sleep.

You may say: I have nothing at all from sleep. Needless to say, we are not speaking from the physical standpoint; from a physical standpoint it would of course be absurd to say that you had nothing from sleep. But in your soul too, in reality, you have a great deal from your sleep. If you never slept, you would never rise to the Ego-consciousness.

Here it is necessary to realise the following. When you remember the experiences you have had, you go backward—as along this line (see diagram). Beginning from now, you go backward. You generally imagine that it is so—that you go farther and farther backward along the line. But it is not so at all. In reality you only go back until the last time you awakened from sleep. Before that moment you were sleeping. All that lies in this intervening part of the line (see diagram) is blotted out; then from the last time you fell asleep until the last time but one when you awakened, memory follows once more. So it goes on. In reality, as you look back along the line, you must always interpose the periods of unconsciousness. For a whole third of our life, we must insert unconsciousness. We do not observe this fact. But it is just as though you had a white surface, with a black hole in the centre of it.

You see the black hole, in spite of the fact that none of the forces are there. Likewise it is when you remember. Although no reminiscences of life are there (for the intervals of sleep), nevertheless you see the black nothingness—that is, the nights you have slept through. Your consciousness impinges on them every time, and that is what really makes you call yourself: “I.” If it went on and on, and nowhere impinged on anything, you would never rise to a consciousness of “I.”

Thus we can certainly say that we have something from sleep. And just as we have something from our sleep in the ordinary sense of earthly life, so do we have something from that sleep which always prevails in our willing. We pass asleep through that which is really going on in us in every act of will. And just as we get our Ego-consciousness from the black void in this case (referring to the diagram), so likewise our Ego is inherent in that which is sleeping in us during the act of will. It is, however, that Ego which goes throughout our former lives on earth.

That is where karma holds sway, my dear friends. Karma holds sway in our willing. Therein are working and wielding all the impulses from our preceding life on earth; only they too, even in waking life, are veiled in sleep.

Once more, therefore: when we conceive man as he stands before us in earthly life, he appears to us in a threefold form: the head-organisation, the rhythmic and the motor-organisation. The three are diagrammatically divided here, but we will always bear in mind that each of the members belongs in its turn to the whole man. Moreover, Thought is bound to the head-organisation, Feeling to the rhythmic organisation, Willing to the motor-organisation. Wide awake consciousness is the condition in which our ideas, our mental presentations, are. Dreaming is the condition in which our feelings are. Deep sleep (even in waking life) is the condition in which our volition is. We are asleep in our impulses of will, even in waking life.

Now we must learn to distinguish two things about the head, that is, about our life of ideation. We must divide the head, so to speak, more intimately. We shall thus be led to distinguish between what we have as momentary ideas or mental pictures in our intercourse with the world and what we have as memory. As you go about in the world, you are constantly forming ideas according to the impressions you receive. But it also remains possible for you subsequently to draw the ideas forth again out of your memory. Moreover, the ideas you form in your intercourse with the world in the given moment are not inherently different from the ideas that are kindled in you when memory comes into play. The difference is that in the one case they come from outside, and in the other from within.

It is indeed a naïve conception to imagine that memory works in this way: that I now confront a thing or event, and form an idea or mental presentation of it; that the idea goes, down into me somewhere or other, as if into some cupboard or chest, and that when I afterwards remember it, I fetch it out again. Why, there are whole philosophies describing how the ideas go down beneath the threshold of consciousness, to be fished out again in the act of recollection. These theories are utterly naïve. There is of course no such chest where the ideas are lying in wait. Nor is there anywhere in us where they are moving about, or whence they might walk out again into our head, when we remember them. All these things are utterly non-existent, nor is there any explanation in their favour. The fact is rather as follows:

You need only think of this. When you want to memorise something, you generally work not merely with the activity of forming ideas. You help yourself by quite other means. I have sometimes seen people in the act of memorising; they formed ideas, they thought as little as possible. They performed outward movements of speech—pretty vehement movements, repeated again and again, like this (with the arms), “und es wallet und woget und brauset und zischt” (a line of Schiller's poem: The Diver). Many people memorise in this way, and in so doing, they think as little as possible. And to add a further stimulus, they sometimes hammer the forehead with their fist. That, too, is not unknown.

The fact is that the ideas we form as we go about the world are evanescent, like dreams. It is not the ideas which have gone down into us, but something quite different that emerges out of our memory. To give you an idea of it, I should have to draw it thus—

Of course it is only a kind of symbolic diagram. Imagine the human being in the act of sight. He sees something. (I will not describe the process in any greater detail; we might do so, but for the moment we do not need it.) He sees something. It goes in through his eye, through the optic nerve into the organs into which the optic nerve then merges.

We have two clearly distinct members of our brain—the more outer peripheric brain, the grey matter; and beneath it, the white matter. Then the white matter merges into the sense-organs. Here is the grey matter (see the diagram); it is far less evolved than the white. The terms “grey” and “white” are, of course, only approximate. Thus, even crudely, anatomically considered it is so: The objects make an impression on us, passing through the eye and on into the processes that take place in the white matter of the brain. Our ideas or mental presentations, on the other hand, have their organ in the grey matter, which, incidentally, has quite a different cell-structure, and there the ideas are lighting up and vanishing like dreams. There the ideas are flickering up, because beneath this region (compare the diagram once more) the process of the impressions is taking place.

If it depended on the ideas going down into you somewhere, and you then had to fetch them out again in memory, you would remember nothing at all. You would have no memory. It is really like this: In the present moment, let us say, I see something. The impression of it (whatever it may be) goes into me, mediated by the white matter of the brain. The grey matter works in its turn, dreaming of the impressions, making pictures of them. The mental pictures come and go; they are quite evanescent. As to what really remains, we do not conceive it at all in this moment, but it goes down into our organisation, and when we remember, we look within; down there the impression remains permanent.

Thus when you see something blue, an impression goes into you from the blue (below, in the diagram), while here (above, in the diagram) you yourself form an idea, a mental presentation of the blue. The idea is transient. Then, after three days perhaps, you observe in your brain the impression that has remained. Once more you form the idea of blue. This time, however, you do so as you look inward. The first time, when you saw the blue from without, you were stimulated from outside by a blue object. The second time—namely now, when you remember it—you are stimulated from within, because in effect the blueness has reproduced itself within you. In both cases it is the same process, namely a process of perception. Memory too is perception. In effect, our day-waking consciousness consists in ideation, in the forming of ideas; but there—beneath the ideation—certain processes are going on. They too, rise into our consciousness by an act of ideation, namely by our forming of ideas in the act of memory. Underneath this activity of ideation is the perceiving, the pure process of perception. And, underneath this in turn, is Feeling.

Thus we can distinguish more intimately, in our head-organisation or thought-organisation—the perceiving and the activity of ideation. What we have perceived, we can then remember. But it actually remains very largely unconscious; it is only in memory that it rises into consciousness. What really takes place in man is no longer experienced in consciousness by man himself. When he perceives, he experiences in consciousness the idea, the mental presentation of it. The real effect of the perception goes into him. Out of this real effect, he is then able to awaken the memory. But at this place the unconscious already begins.

In reality it is only here, in this region (see the diagram)—where, in our waking-day consciousness we form ideas—it is only here that we ourselves are, as Man. Only here do we really have ourselves as Man. Where we do not reach down with our consciousness (for we do not even reach to the causes of our memories), where we do not reach down, there we do not have ourselves as Man, but are incorporated in the world.

It is just as it is in the physical life—you breathe in; the air you now have in yourself was outside you a short while ago, it was the-air-of-the-world; now it is your air. After a short time you give it back again to the world. You are one with the world. The air is now outside you, now within you. You would not be Man at all, if you were not so united with the world as to have not only that which is within your skin, but that with which you are connected in the whole surrounding atmosphere. And as you are thus connected on the physical side, so it is as to your spiritual part: the moment you get down into the next subconscious region—the region out of which memory arises—you are connected with that which we call the Third Hierarchy: Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai. Just as you are connected through your breathing with the air, so are you connected with the Third Hierarchy through your head-organisation, namely the lower head-organisation. This, which is only covered over by the outermost lobes of the brain, belongs solely to the earth. What is immediately beneath is connected with the Third Hierarchy: Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai.

Now let us go down into the region, psychologically speaking, of feeling: corporeally speaking, of the rhythmic organisation, out of which the dreams of our Feeling life arise. There, less than ever do we have ourselves as Man. There we are connected with what constitutes the Second Hierarchy—spiritual Beings who do not incarnate in any earthly body, for they remain in the spiritual world. But they are continually sending their currents, their impulses, the forces that go out from them., into the rhythmic organisation of man. Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes—they are the Beings whom we bear within our breast.

Just as we bear our own human Ego actually only in the outermost lobes of the brain, so do we bear the Angeloi, Archangeloi, etc. immediately beneath this region; yet still within the organisation of the head. There is the scene of their activities on earth; there are the starting-points of their activity. And in our breast we carry the Second Hierarchy—Exusiai and the rest. In our breast are the starting points of their activity.

And as we now go down into our motor-organism, the organism of movement, in this the Beings of the First Hierarchy are active: Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones.

The transmuted food-stuffs, the food-stuffs we have eaten, circulate in our limbs. There in our limbs, they undergo a process. It is really a living process of combustion. For if we take only a single step, there arises in us a living process of combustion, a burning-up of that which is, or was, outside us. We ourselves, as Man, are connected with this combustion process. As physical human beings with our limbs and metabolic-organism, we are connected with the lowest. And yet it is precisely through the limb-organisation that we are connected with the highest. With the First Hierarchy—Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones—we are connected by virtue of what imbues us there with spirit.

Now the great question arises (it may sound trivial when I clothe it in earthly words, but I can do no other), the question arises: What are they doing—these Beings of the three successive Hierarchies, who are in us—what are they doing?

The answer is: the Third Hierarchy, Angeloi, Archangeloi, etc.—concern themselves with that which has its physical organisation in the human head, i.e. with our thinking. If they were not concerning themselves with our thinking—with that which is going on in our head—we should have no memory in ordinary earthly life. For it is the Beings of this Hierarchy who preserve in us the impulses which we receive with our perceptions. They are underlying the activity which reveals itself in our memory; they lead us through our earthly life in this first sub-conscious, or unconscious, region.

Now let us go on to the Beings of the Second Hierarchy—Exusiai, etc. They are the Beings we encounter when we have passed through the gate of death, that is, in the life between death and a new birth. There we encounter the souls of the departed, who lived with us on earth; but we encounter, above all, the spiritual Beings of this Second Hierarchy—the Third Hierarchy together with them, it is true, but the Second Hierarchy are the most important there. With them we work in our time between death and a new birth—we work upon all that we felt in our earthly life, all that we brought about in our organisation. Thus, in union with these Beings of the Second Hierarchy, we elaborate our coming earthly life.

When we stand here on the earth, we have the feeling that the spiritual Beings of the Divine World are above us. When we are in yonder sphere, between death and a new birth, we have the opposite idea—the Angeloi, Archangeloi, etc., who guide us through our earthly life, as above described, live, after our death, on the same level with us—so to speak. And immediately beneath us are the Beings of the Second Hierarchy. With them we work out the forming of our inner karma. All that I told you yesterday of the karma of health and illness—we work it out with these Beings, the Beings of the Second Hierarchy. And when, in that time between death and new birth, we look still further down—as it were, looking through the Beings of the Second Hierarchy—then we discover, far below, the Beings of the First Hierarchy, Cherubim, Seraphim, and Thrones.

As earthly man, we look for the highest Gods above us. As man between death and a new birth, we look for the highest Divinity (attainable for us human beings, to begin with) in the farthest depths beneath us. We, all the time, are working with the Beings of the Second Hierarchy, elaborating our inner karma between death and a new birth: that inner karma which afterwards comes forth, imaged in the health or illness of our next life on earth. While we ourselves are engaged in this work—working alone, and with other human beings, upon the bodies that will come forth in our next life on earth—the Beings of the First Hierarchy are active far below us, and in a strange way. That one beholds. For with respect to their activity—a portion, a small portion of their activity—they are actually involved in a Necessity. They, as the creators of the earthly realm, are obliged to follow and reproduce what the human being has fashioned and done during his life on earth. They are obliged to reproduce it—though in a peculiar way.

Think of a man in his earthly life: in his Willing (which belongs to the First Hierarchy), he accomplishes certain deeds. The deeds are good or evil, wise or foolish. The Beings of the First Hierarchy—Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones—are under necessity to form and mould the counter-images thereto in their own sphere.

You see, my dear friends, we live together. Whether the things we do with one another are good or evil; for all that is good, for all that is evil, the Beings of the First Hierarchy must shape the corresponding counterparts. Among the First Hierarchy, all things are judged; yet not only judged, but shaped and fashioned. Thus between death and a new birth, while we ourselves are working at our inner karma with the Second Hierarchy and with other departed souls, meanwhile we behold what Seraphim, and Cherubim and Thrones have experienced through our deeds on earth.

Yes, here upon earth the blue vault of the sky arches over us, with its cloud-forms and sunshine and so forth; and in the night, the star-lit sky. Between death and a new birth the living activity of Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones extends like a vault beneath us. And we gaze down upon them—Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones—even as we here look up to the clouds, and the blue, and the star-strewn sky. Beneath us, there, we see the Heavens, formed of the activity of Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones. But what kind of activity? We behold among the Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, the activity which results as the just and compensating activity from our own deeds on earth—our own, and the deeds through which we lived with other men. The Gods themselves are obliged to carry out the compensating action, and we behold them as our Heavens, only the Heavens are there beneath us. In the deeds of the Gods we see and recognise the consequences of our earthly deeds—whether this deed or that be good or evil, wise or foolish. And, as we thus look downward, between death and a new birth, we relate ourselves to the mirrored image of our deeds, just as in earthly life we relate ourselves to the vault of heaven above us.

As to our own inner karma, we ourselves bring it into our inner organism. We bring it with us on to the earth as our faculties and talents, our genius and our stupidity. Not so what the Gods are fashioning there beneath us; what they have to experience in consequence of our earthly lives comes to us in our next life on earth as the facts of Destiny which meet us from without. We may truly say, the very thing we pass through asleep carries us in our earthly life into our Fate. But in this is living what the corresponding Gods, those of the First Hierarchy, had to experience in their domain as the consequences of our deeds during the time between our death and a new birth.

One always feels a need to express these things in pictures. Suppose we are standing somewhere or other in the physical world. The sky is overcast; we see the clouded sky. Soon afterwards, fine rain begins to trickle down; the rain is falling. What hitherto was hovering above us, we see it now in the wet fields and the trees, sprinkled with fine rain. So it is when we look back with the eye of the Initiate, from human life on earth into the time we underwent, before we came down to this earth, that is to say, the time we underwent between our last death and our last birth. For there we see the forming of the deeds of the Gods in consequence of our own deeds in our last life on earth. And then we see it, spiritually raining down, so to become our destiny.

Do I meet a human being whose significance for me in this life enters essentially into my destiny? That which takes place in our meeting was lived in advance by the Gods as a result of what he and I had in common in a former earthly life. Am I transplanted during my earthly life into a district—or a vocation—which is important for me? All that approaches me there as outer destiny is the image of what was experienced by Gods—Gods of the First Hierarchy—in consequence of my former life on earth, during the time when I was myself between death and a new birth.

One who thinks abstractly will think: “There are the former lives on earth; the deeds of the former lives work across into the present. Then they were the causes, now they are the effects.” But you cannot think far along these lines; you have little more than words when you enunciate this proposition. But behind what you thus describe as the Law of Karma, are deeds and experiences of the Gods; and only behind all that is the other ...

When we human beings confront our destiny only by way of feeling, then we look up, according to our faith, to the Divine Beings or to some Providence on which we feel the course of our earthly life depends. But the Gods—namely those Gods whom we know as belonging to the First Hierarchy, Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones—have, as it were, an inverse religious faith. They feel their Necessity among men on earth—men, whose creators they are. The aberrations human beings suffer, and the progressions they enjoy, must be balanced and compensated by the Gods. Whatever the Gods prepare for us as our destiny in a subsequent life, they have lived it before us.

These truths must be found again through Anthroposophy. Out of a consciousness not fully developed, they were perceived by mankind in a former, instinctive clairvoyance. The Ancient Wisdom did indeed contain such truths. Afterwards only a dim feeling remained of them. In many things that meet us in the spiritual history of mankind, the dim feeling of these things is still in evidence. You need but remember the verse by Angelus Silesius which you will also find quoted in my writings. To a narrow religious creed, it sounds impertinent:

I know that without me God can no moment live; If I come to naught, He needs must give up the Ghost.¹

Angelus Silesius went over to Roman Catholicism; it was as a Catholic that he wrote such verses. He was still aware that the Gods are dependent on the world, even as the world is dependent on them. He knew that the dependence is mutual; and that the Gods must direct their life according to the life of men. But the Divine Life works creatively, and works itself out in turn in the destinies of men. Angelus Silesius, dimly feeling the truth, though he knew it not in its exactitude, exclaimed:

I know that without me God can no moment live; If I come to naught, He needs must give up the Ghost.

The Universe and the Divine depend on one another, and work into one another. Today we have recognised this living interdependence in the example of human destiny or karma.

• 1. From The Cherubinic Wanderer. Book I. 8.