The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Many friends have come here to-day for the first time since the Christmas Foundation Meeting and I must therefore speak of it, even if only briefly, by way of introduction. Through this Christmas Foundation the Anthroposophical Society was to be given a new impulse, the impulse that is essential if it is to be a worthy channel for the life which, through Anthroposophy, must find embodiment in human civilisation. Since the Christmas Foundation an esoteric impulse has indeed come into the Anthroposophical Society. Hitherto this society was as it were the administrative centre for Anthroposophy. From its beginning onwards, Anthroposophy was the channel for the spiritual life that has been accessible to mankind since the last third of the 19th century. Our conception of the Anthroposophical Movement, however, must be that what takes its course on earth is only the outer manifestation of something that is accomplished in the spiritual world for the furtherance of the evolution of humanity. And those who wish to be worthily connected with the Anthroposophical Movement must also realise that the spiritual impulses are also at work in the sphere of the Anthroposophical Society itself.

What does it really amount to when a man has a general, theoretical belief in a spiritual world? To believe in theory in a spiritual world means to receive it into one's thoughts. But although in their own original nature thoughts represent the most spiritual element in modern man, the thoughts themselves are such that in their development as inner spirit during the last four to five centuries, they are adapted only to receive truths relating to material existence. And so people to-day have a spiritual life in thoughts, but as members of contemporary civilisation they fill it with a material content only. Theoretical knowledge of Anthroposophy also remains a material content until there is added to it the inner, conscious power of conviction that the spiritual is concrete reality; that wherever matter exists for the outer eyes of men, not only does spirit permeate this matter, but everything material finally vanishes before man's true perception, when this is able to penetrate through the material to the spiritual.

But such perception must then extend also to everything that is our own close concern. Our membership of the Anthroposophical Society is such a concern; it is a fact in the outer world. And we must be able to recognise the spiritual reality corresponding to it, the spiritual movement which in the modern age unfolded in the spiritual world and will go forward in earthly life if men do but keep faith with it. Otherwise it will go forward apart from earthly life; its link with earthly life will be maintained if men find in their hearts the strength to keep faith with it.

It is not enough to acknowledge theoretically that spiritual reality hovers behind mineral, plant, animal and man himself; what must penetrate as deep conviction into the heart of every professed Anthroposophist is that behind the Anthroposophical Society too—which in its outward aspect belongs to the world of maya, of illusion—there hovers the spiritual archetype of the Anthroposophical Movement. This conviction must take real effect in the work and activity of the Anthroposophical Society. Such a conception will in the future contribute in many ways to the provision of the right soil for that spiritual Foundation Stone which was laid for the Anthroposophical Society at the time of the Christmas Meeting.

And this brings me to speak of what I shall have to say to you in the coming days, for which this introductory lecture is intended to provide guiding lines. I want to show how at this serious point in its existence the Anthroposophical Movement is actually returning to its own germinal impulse. When at the beginning of the century the Anthroposophical Society came into being out of the framework of the Theosophical Society, something very characteristic was foreshadowed. While the Anthroposophical Society—then the German Section of the Theosophical Society—was in process of formation, I gave lectures in Berlin on Anthroposophy. Therewith, at the very outset, my work was given the hallmark of the impulse which later became an integral part of the Anthroposophical Movement.

Apart from this, I can remind you to-day of something else.—The first few lectures I was to give at that time to a very small circle were to have the title, “Practical Exercises for the Understanding of Karma.” I became aware of intense opposition to this proposal. And perhaps Herr Guenther Wagner, now the oldest member of the Anthroposophical Society, who to our great joy is here to-day and whom I want to welcome most cordially as an Elder of the society, will remember how strong was the opposition at that time to much that from the beginning onwards I was to incorporate in the Anthroposophical Movement.

Those lectures were not given. In face of the other currents emanating from the Theosophical Movement it was not possible to proceed with the cultivation of the esotericism which speaks unreservedly of the reality of what was always there in the form of theory.

Since the Christmas Foundation, the concrete working of karma in historical happenings and in individual human beings has been spoken of without reserve in this hall [The temporary lecture-hall in the “Schreinerei” (workshop) at the Goetheanum.] and in the various places I have been able to visit. And a number of Anthroposophists have already heard how the different earthly lives of significant personalities have run their course, how the karma of the Anthroposophical Society itself and of the individuals connected with it has taken shape. Since the Christmas Foundation these things have been spoken of in a fully esoteric sense; but since the Christmas Foundation, also, our printed Lecture-Courses have been accessible to everyone interested in them. We have thus become an esoteric and at the same time a completely open society.

Thus we return in a certain sense to the starting-point. What must now be reality was then intention. As many friends are here for the first time since the Christmas Foundation, I shall be speaking to you in the coming lectures on questions of karma, giving a kind of introduction to-day by speaking of things which are also indicated, briefly, in the current News Sheet for members of the society.

As is clear from our anthroposophical literature, the development of human consciousness is bound up with the attainment of those data of knowledge which point to facts and beings of the spiritual world and with penetration into these facts. We shall hear how this spiritual world, the penetration into which has become possible through the development of human consciousness, can then be intelligible to the healthy, unprejudiced human intellect. It must always be remembered that although actual penetration into the spiritual world requires the development of other states of consciousness, the understanding of what the spiritual investigator brings to light requires only the healthy human intellect, the healthy human reason that endeavours to put prejudice aside.

In saying this, one immediately meets stubborn obstacles in the modern life of thought. When I once said the same thing in Berlin, a well-meaning article appeared on the subject of the public lecture I had given before a large audience. This article was to the following effect: Steiner maintains that the healthy human intellect can understand what is investigated in the spiritual world. But the whole trend of modern times has taught us that the healthy human intellect can know nothing of the super-sensible world, and that if it does, it is certainly not healthy!

It must be admitted that in a certain sense this is the general opinion of cultured people at the present time. What it means, translated into bald language, is this: If a man is not mad, he understands nothing of the super-sensible world; if he does, then he is certainly mad! That is the same way of speaking about the subject, only put rather more plainly.

We must try to comprehend, therefore, how far the healthy human intellect can gain insight into the results of spiritual investigation achieved through the development of states of consciousness other than those we are familiar with in ordinary life. For centuries now we have been arming our senses with laboratory apparatus, with telescopes, microscopes and the like. The spiritual investigator arms his outer senses with what he himself develops in his own soul. Investigation of nature has gone outwards, has made use of outer instruments. Spiritual investigation goes inwards, makes use of the inner instruments evolved by the soul in steadfast activity of the inner life.

By way of introduction to-day I want to help you to understand the evolution of other states of consciousness, first of all simply by comparing those that are normal in present-day man with those that were once present in earlier, primitive—not historic but prehistoric—conditions of human evolution.

Man lives to-day in three states of consciousness, only one of which, really, he recognises as a source of knowledge. They are:

Ordinary waking consciousness;

Dream consciousness;

Dreamless sleep consciousness.

In ordinary waking consciousness we confront the outer world in such a way that we accept as reality what can be grasped through the senses, and allow it to work upon us; we grasp this outer, material world with the intellect that is bound to the brain, or at any rate to the human organism, and we form ideas, concepts, emotions and feelings, too, about what has been taken in through the senses. Then in this waking consciousness we grasp the reality of our own inner life—within certain limits. And through all kinds of reflection, through the development of ideas, we come to acknowledge the existence of a super-sensible element above material things. I need not further describe this state of consciousness; it is known to everyone as the state he recognises as pertaining to his life of knowledge and of will here on earth.

For the man of the present time, dream consciousness is indistinct and dim. In dream consciousness he sees things of the outer world in symbolic transformations which he does not always recognise as such. A man lying in bed in the morning, still in the process of waking, does not look out at the rising sun with fully opened eyes; to his still veiled gaze the sunlight reveals itself by shining in through the window. He is still separated as by a thin veil from what at other times he grasps in sharply outlined sense-experiences and perceptions. Inwardly, his soul is filled with the picture of a great fire; the heat of the fire in his dream symbolises the shining in of the rising sun upon eyes not yet fully opened.

Or again, someone may dream that he is passing through lines of white stones placed along each side of a roadway. He comes to one of the stones and finds that it has been demolished by some force of nature or by the hand of man. He wakes up; the toothache he feels makes him aware of the decayed state of a tooth. The two rows of teeth have been symbolised in his dream-picture; the decayed tooth, in the image of the demolished stone.

Or we become aware of being, apparently, in an overheated room where we feel discomfort. We wake up: the heart is thumping vigorously and the pulse beating rapidly. The feverish movement of the heart and pulse is symbolised in the overheated room. Inner and outer conditions are symbolised in dream; reminiscences of the life of day, transformed and elaborated in manifold ways into whole dream-dramas, absorb the sleeper's attention. Nor does he by any means always know to what extent things are elaborated in the miraculous arena of his life of soul. And concerning this dream-life, which may play over into waking life when consciousness is dimmed in any way, he often labours under slight illusions.

A scientist is passing a bookshop in a street. He sees a book about the lower animal species—a book which in view of his profession has always greatly interested him. But now, although the title indicates a content of vital importance to a scientist, he feels not the faintest interest: and then, suddenly, as he is merely staring at what otherwise he would have seen with keen excitement, he hears a barrel-organ in the distance playing a melody which at first entirely escapes his memory ... and he becomes all attention.—Just think of it: the man is looking at the title of a scientific treatise; he pays no attention to it but is gripped by the playing of a distant barrel-organ which in other circumstances he would not have listened to for a moment. What is the explanation? Forty years ago, while still quite young, he had danced for the first time in his life, with his first partner, to the same tune; he is reminded of this by the tune which he has not heard for forty years, played on the barrel-organ! Because he has remained very matter-of-fact, the scientist remembers the occasion pretty accurately.

The mystic often comes to the stage of inwardly transforming a happening of this kind to such an extent that it becomes something entirely different. One who with deep and sincere conscientiousness embarks upon the task of penetrating into the spiritual life must also keep strictly in mind all the deception and illusion that may arise in the life of the soul. In deepening his life of soul a man can very easily believe that an inner path has been discovered to some spiritual reality, whereas in fact it is no more than the transformed reminiscence of a barrel-organ melody! This dream-life is full of wonder and splendour, but can be rightly understood only by one who is able to bring spiritual insight to bear upon the appearances of human life.

Of the life of deep, dreamless sleep, man has in his ordinary consciousness nothing more than the remembrance that time continues to flow between the moment of falling asleep and the moment of waking. Everything else he has to experience again with the help of his waking consciousness. A dim, general feeling of having been present between the moments of falling asleep and waking is all that remains from dreamless sleep.

Thus we have to-day these three states of consciousness: waking consciousness, dream consciousness, dreamless sleep consciousness. If we go back into very early ages of human evolution—not, as I said, in historic times but prehistoric times accessible only to those means of spiritual investigation of which we shall be speaking here in the coming days—then we also find three states of consciousness, but essentially different in character. What we experience to-day in our waking hours was not experienced by the men of those primeval times; instead of material objects and beings with clear shapes and sharp edges, they saw all the physical boundaries blurred.

In those times a man who might have looked at you all sitting here would not have seen the sharp outlines demarcating you as human beings to-day; he would not, like a man to-day, have seen these contours bound by so many lines, but for his ordinary waking consciousness the forms would have been blurred; they would have lacked definition. Everything would have been seen with less precision, would have been pervaded by an aura, by a spiritual radiance, a glimmering, glistening iridescence extending far beyond the circumference that is perceived to-day. The onlooker would have seen how the auras of all of you sitting here are interwoven. He would have gazed into these glimmering, sparkling, iridescent auras of the soul-life of those in front of him. It was still possible in those days to gaze into the life of soul because the human being was bathed in an atmosphere of soul-and-spirit.

To use an analogy: if in the evening of a bright, dry day we are walking through the streets, we see the lights of the street-lamps in definite outlines. But if the evening is misty, we see these same lights haloed by all sorts of colours—colours which modern physics interprets quite wrongly, regarding them as subjective phenomena, whereas in truth they give us an experience of the inmost nature of these lights, connected with the fact that we are moving through the watery element of the fog. The men of ancient times moved through the element of soul-and-spirit; when they looked at other men they saw their auras—which were not subjective phenomena but a real and objective part of the human being. Such was one state of consciousness in these men of old.

Then they had a state of consciousness which linked on to this, just as with us the sleep that is invaded by dreams links on to the waking state; again it was not the same as our present dream condition, but everything that was material around it disappeared, vanished away. For us, sense-impressions become symbols in the state of dream consciousness: sunshine becomes fiery heat, the rows of teeth become two lines of stones, dream-memories become earthly or also spiritual dramas. The sense-world is always there; the world of memories remains. It was different for the consciousness of one who lived in primeval times of human evolution—and we shall realise by and by that this applies to all of us, for those sitting here were present then in earlier earthly lives. In those times, when the sun's light by day grew weaker, man did not see symbols of physical things, but the physical things vanished before his eyes. A tree standing before him vanished; it was transformed into the spiritual and the spirit-being belonging to the tree took its place.—The legends of tree-spirits were not the inventions of folk-fantasy; the interpretation of these legends, however, is an invention of the fantasy of scholars who are groping in a morass of fallacy.—And it was these spirits—the tree-spirit, the mountain-spirit, the spirit of the rocks—who in turn directed the eyes of the human soul into that world where man is between death and a new birth, where he is among spiritual realities just as here on earth he is among physical realities, where he is among spiritual beings as on earth he is among physical beings.—This was the second state of consciousness. We shall presently see how our ordinary dream consciousness can also be transformed into this other consciousness in a man of modern time who is a seeker for spiritual knowledge.

And there was a third state of consciousness. Naturally, the men of ancient times also slept; but when they awoke they had not merely a dim remembrance of having lived through time, or a dim feeling of continuous life, but a clear remembrance of what they had experienced in sleep. And it was precisely out of this sleep that there came the impressions of past earthly lives with their connections of destiny, together with the knowledge, the vision, of karma.

Modern man has waking consciousness, dream consciousness, dreamless sleep consciousness. Early humanity had also three states or conditions of consciousness: the state of consciousness in which he perceived reality pervaded by spirit; the state in which he had insight into the spiritual world; and the state in which he had the vision of karma. In primeval humanity, consciousness was essentially in a condition of evening twilight.

This evening twilight consciousness has passed away, has died out in the course of the evolution of mankind. A morning dawn consciousness must arise—into which modern spiritual investigation has already found its way. And by strengthening his own soul-forces man must learn to look at every tree or rock, every spring or mountain, or at the stars, in such a way that the spiritual fact or spiritual being behind every physical thing is revealed to him.

It can become an exact science, a source of exact knowledge (although people scoff at it to-day as if it were craziness or sheer delusion) so that when a genuine knower looks at a tree, the tree, although it represents a physical reality, becomes a void, as it were leaving the space free before his gaze, and the spirit-being of the tree comes to meet him. Just as the sun's light is reflected to our physical eyes from all outer, physical objects, so will humanity come to perceive that the spiritual essence of the sun, pervading the world with its life, is also a living reality in all physical beings. As the physical light is reflected back to our physical eyes, so from every earthly being there can be reflected back as a reality to our eyes of soul, the divine-spiritual, all-pervading essence of the sun. And as man now says: “The rose is red” ... the underlying truth being that the rose is giving back to him the gift he himself receives from the physical-etheric sun-nature ... he will then be able to say that the rose gives back to him what it receives from the soul-and-spiritual essence of the sun which streams through the world with its quickening life.

Man will again find his way into a spiritual atmosphere, will know that his own being is rooted in this spiritual atmosphere. He will come to realise that within the dream consciousness, which to begin with can yield only chaotic symbolisations of the outer life of the senses, there lie the revelations of a world of spirit through which we pass between death and a new birth; furthermore, that in the consciousness of deep sleep there weaves and lives in us as an actual and real nexus of forces that which, after waking, leads us into connection with the working out of our destiny, of our karma. What we live through in our waking hours as destiny, notwithstanding all freedom, is spun during our life of sleep, when with the soul and spirit, which have left the physical and etheric, we lead a life together with divine Spirits; with those divine Spirits, too, who carry over the fruits of earlier lives into this present life. And one who through the development of the corresponding forces of soul succeeds in penetrating with vision into the life of dreamless sleep, discovers therein the connections of karma. Moreover it is only in this way that the historical life of humanity acquires meaning, for it is woven out of what men carry over from earlier epochs, through the life between death and rebirth, into new life, into new epochs. When we look at some personality of the present or some other age, we understand him rightly only when we include his past earthly lives.

During the coming days, then, we shall be speaking of that spiritual investigation which, while concerning itself first with personalities in history but then also with everyday life, leads from the present life, or a life in some other age to earlier earthly lives.

You have come to this Youth Conference with all the questions and problems in your hearts that assail young people today everywhere in the world—some more, some less—ever since the turn of the century, the time which those who can see deeply into human evolution call the end of Kali Yuga and the beginning of an epoch of light.

We don't see much light yet. You can even say that events in these last two decades have become even darker and more chaotic than before. But just as in ordinary natural phenomena there is resistance in an object to changing either its motion or its lack of motion, inertia is also a property of human beings. We can observe this in the many people who don't seem to belong at all to the 20th century; sometimes we feel we must have seen them a hundred years ago or even earlier. Not only have they remained at a certain age but they are still (however ridiculous this sounds) at the same standpoint where they were before they were born.

Nevertheless we should look at the divine forces concerned with the destiny of the earth. Then we will discover that we have emerged from an epoch in time when we were unconsciously guided by creative spiritual forces that led our souls with supernatural strength. Now we have matured into a new era; certain spiritual beings have withdrawn, while others, whose central impulse is the growing freedom to be allotted to human beings, have begun to influence our development. Young people born since the turn of the century feel this in their unconscious, feel it inwardly, like an earthquake shaking human evolution. But people merely say, “It's the same as always. Youth continually rampages against everything their elders or traditions have brought about.” The clever ones put it like this: “The emperor's enemy is the crown prince.” Certainly in every epoch the young have rebelled against the old.

However, what is living and working today in young people, more or less unconsciously, has never before been experienced. And one must say, there has never been such a discrepancy, such a total contradiction, between what comes to the surface in response to this inner experience they are having and the actual inner experience itself. We have already seen the various groups and the movements young people are taking up—Wandervögel¹ and other youth groups—we've seen them all; they were attempts to escape from what older people call civilization, a flight to the powers which cannot yet be identified.

You see, it's been clear to me from the very beginning that in the deep subconscious of most of today's young people there is the peculiarly solid realization: that an earth-shaking change must take place in human evolution. Sometimes you can observe this quite intensely, as happened to me in Norway. A very young high school lad wanted to see me but was being discouraged away; people in the house thought such a young fellow would only bother me. (In these matters it's usually just the opposite.)

However, fate decreed that I should step out of my door just at that moment, and I realized that even though he was so young, in ninth or tenth grade, I should listen to him. “All of us High School students want to begin something our High School doesn't have, a publication for young people, doing everything ourselves. Couldn't you help us?” “I will help in every way possible,” I told him, “if you can get things started.” We talked together and what he said showed clearly that subconsciously in him was what older people call “the adolescent crisis” they can hardly understand.

I have asked many of these older people what they think about adolescence; their answer was usually, “Young people have always been rebels.” I have also asked many young people about the “adolescent crises” some of them claim to be taking part in—but they, too, haven't had much of an answer for me. Yet I know that many of them know very well this youth experience in their subconsciousness but are not able to describe it. Even though young people can say very little about it, it is clearly present within them. What they feel clearly and very strongly emerges, for one thing, on looking at a beautiful landscape. People in the past have always admired “scenery,” but not in the same way as the younger generation does today. Perhaps they go at it less perfectly but as they look out at nature, their distinct feeling is, “We are helpless. Even to come to a primitive kind of appreciation for nature, we should develop the most elementary forces within us!”

You see, when you are aware of such an attitude, you will feel deeply, very deeply indeed, the inner meaning of these youth movements. We all remember the powerful claims for nature and the natural order, for instance, by Rousseau and his disciples. That was also a youth movement, one that burst out like an explosion, much more alarming than any in our own time. What was the result of that early 19th century rebellion? Imagine! It was followed by the greatest amount of narrow-mindedness and pedantry than at any time in the last century. Its result was the loneliness that young people feel today within modern civilization. They feel that the world has grown old. The young feel this strongly. They feel even much more. (However, in this regard I put greater value on the mind than on feelings).

Today there is a lot of revolution and too much horrible willingness thereby to commit suicide. Young people born around the turn of the century find this sort of thing, if they are honest with themselves, not altogether what they are looking for. They feel that they did not grow up, even as children, alongside older people who could have helped them develop a really joyful enthusiasm for nature. Actually, we have had to see souls maturing alone into something quite wild. Therefore their urge: Away! Get away—anywhere! Leave behind everything the centuries have piled up on us!

Indeed, you notice that I'm speaking about these matters rather indecisively. Sometimes this is necessary in life—but at the same time one must be warmly concerned, even though indecisive. It's better not to falsify the issue by spelling it out with ordinary narrow-minded logic.

I saw this “youth crisis” in its very dawning; now it is already noonday. I observed it in its first misty light, when the youth of the 1870s were also full of enthusiasm and later kept their enthusiasm into what they regarded as grey middle age, still acting like the young people they had been. Such a young person—to put it concretely—I met in the 1880s, giving vent to his enthusiasm in an oration on the death of a workman killed in the 1848 revolution. As I listened to the oration, I thought to myself, “There is a conservative attorney general stuck inside that young man,” and this he really did become some years later. On the other hand, I knew several in that period who were not able to grow into the traditional professions awaiting them. I saw young people in those years die early when it seemed impossible to them to step into the human conditions of the time. There seemed to be an unconscious youth movement that I'd like to describe—please don't misunderstand the phrase—as filled with shame. Young people were not able to reveal what they felt. What was underneath did not rise to the surface. Rather than appear in daylight it turned sick inside. Above all, it could not be brought into the stream of ordinary life.

Years went by, decades even, and one could say the vessel was full and spilling over. The feeling of shame could no longer continue. Young people had to ask themselves the reason for their suffering and what they were actually longing for. This has been moving them into the various youth groups of our time.

Not so long ago a number of these young people came also into the anthroposophical movement. A singular understanding came about between the anthroposophical movement and what was living in their hearts. Today, although it's been only a short time, many of them have grown into the various activities of the movement. However, what we need from young persons is first and foremost the will to try to understand other people in the most human way. Otherwise we won't get beyond the endless unproductive discussions. The will to understand human beings humanly! All the subjects of the discussions we have with each other are downright unimportant; the essential thing is that our hearts recognize what the others are feeling. In this way we can find some agreement, can always discover how much we really agree. What is so necessary is that we fully and heartily understand others; it is also necessary that the individual leaders within the youth movements acquire more confidence in the integrity of the anthroposophical movement and its principles. Otherwise we will not be able to accomplish very much with our Youth Section.

This Section, I originally believed, I had to found for all those who clearly and honestly perceived in themselves “hunger for a truly modern life style.” If they can actually find their way to the anthroposophical movement, we will be able to achieve everything I wrote about in the Mitteilungen [Anthroposophical Newssheet] concerning youthful sagacity, something that should not be at all pedantic but rather distinguish itself through heartfelt action and heartfelt efforts at human understanding. You see, it was an attempt to search out and explore warmly what is alive in the young today. We tried first of all sending around a questionnaire to find out what young people imagined a Youth Section should be; we hoped to hear what thoughts were emerging or if not thoughts, even better, what strong, “balled-fist” feelings, what spade-thrusts of will. We were ready to accept anything like this—but there was no response. Now I have gone at it more rigorously and have sent out the following question to young people, which you yourselves may have read by now: “How do you imagine the world and humanity should be by 1935, if what you are now hoping for shall have a rightful place in it?” If someone could take this question seriously it would require plenty of good solid thought and sensitivity. How we are to proceed depends actually on our honest efforts, without a lot of blather.

What is this old world steering towards? If we're comfortable in it, we're not living in the three dimensions revealed by the threefold nature of the world order. Instead, we're living in clichés, in convention, in routine, and habit. Cliché, convention, routine—we find them everywhere in every sphere of life. We hear from childhood on how we are to relate to other people—just so or so, one particular way or another. But a young person can't agree to that, for since the turn of the century there has been a completely new impulse entering our souls.

Routine is what can be learned very quickly, for it remains just on the surface of things. Leave everything else for later on, people say. What, however, is very much needed in the world, is something that I could feel emerging many years before the end of Kali Yuga [The “dark ages” up to 1879, when the regency of the Archangel Michael began.]: one cannot be pressed into a profession or work in the old, traditional way. I took this very seriously. I myself never entered any specific profession. Had I done so, there would be no anthroposophical movement today, for this had to be created entirely free from tradition. Even the smallest link to something from the past would have made it impossible. Anyone who cannot understand this is an enemy of what we have tried to do from the very beginning.

The anthroposophical movement is therefore one of pure youthfulness. Shouldn't youth find its way to youth? If this anthroposophical movement is sincere and if young people find it necessary to be honest, what is needed above all?—Courage! Something one learns very fast or not at all. Real courage! The courage to say: the world as it is today must get a new foundation underneath it. This is clearly inscribed in the subconsciousness of the young; I have never seen anything different but what is written there: the world must be changed to its very foundation.

But you can cover up this inscription with negation, argumentative remarks and lots of discussion; you can cover it up and pervert what lies there in the subconscious that wants to be completely honest and courageous. The anthroposophical movement can well be the school par excellence to develop courage, since for many people today anthroposophy is not given first place but is rather something incidental. You can observe this at our lecture series and other events. It seems to be becoming more and more fashionable (and one has to get used to it somehow) to be invited to take part in workshops and seminars held in the country, as though on a holiday trip. And why shouldn't one have a bit of anthroposophy while there instead of band concerts?

But it is a symbol—not bad in itself but nevertheless a symbol—of the lack of thoroughgoing courage in grasping the living substance of anthroposophy, the spiritual essence of anthroposophy in its full reality, not just the shadow of anthroposophy. It is really a matter of our feeling life. I am not criticizing but rather pointing out symptoms.

The youth movement must be able to find its way to unite with what I have described as the great task of the century, the spur to action of the Archangel Michael. To do this, however, young people should learn to descend more deeply into themselves, while giving up all their abstract kind of dreaminess. Then the big problems will turn up. No narrow-minded man on the street will understand what you mean when you say: Michael has lost the cosmic intelligence; he himself has remained in the cosmos; now human beings must rise up and win back with Michael what he once had under his dominion. Young people will begin to understand this when they begin to understand themselves. To others, today, it will sound like abstractions dressed up in a poetic costume. But this it certainly is not. We must realize that the spirit is alive and real; we must learn how to deal with it. We have also to begin to feel how everything spiritual is different in our time than it was in any earlier time.

A century ago the morning sunrise, shining mistily, was an image of the spiritual world. Behind the glimmering image like a curtain one saw the spirit, alive and luminous. But during the 19th century up into our time this was changing. The sunrise has become flaming red. Out of the shining sun, flames break forth. If we describe for modern times the kind of sunrise Herder or Goethe wrote about we would be guilty of untruthfulness—for it has become altogether different. In Herder and Goethe's time it was a shining glimmer; today it is fiery. Out of the flames comes a summons to active, fervent spirituality. The spiritual world has taken on a new gesture towards our physical world.

If we can begin to understand these gestures of the spiritual world we can perhaps prevent the youth movement of the 20th century from becoming the sort of middle-class narrow-mindedness and pedantry that came after Rousseau. If today's youth can become enthusiastic about what is truly young, if today's youth, with understanding, can lay hold of the real spiritual world that is here, then Michael's time will come. If today's youth cannot do this, the middle-class narrow-mindedness and pedantry will be infinitely greater in our century than that which followed Rousseau. In all the many centuries before, there were never better or more proper citizens than in the 19th century; people in the earlier times never knew Rousseau or his ideas.

We have been talking a good deal here in Arnhem about the new education and the principles of Waldorf education.² The most important principle is to continue growing. Every day there's danger that things will get sour. We have to make sure that when we have to plan something new or get something done, we don't fall asleep sticking to our old habits. Let us try to divide our sleeping and waking, to keep a clear gulf between them. We must be able to sleep in the right way but also to be awake in the right way. Unfortunately we're continually sleeping when we should be awake. It is just not in our nature to tell ourselves over and over to wake up, otherwise all the reform movements and revolutions will be useless; it is almost always the best endeavors that suffer the most when they are taken over by narrow-mindedness and pedantry: a strong light produces a strong shadow. What should we do?—not think out something to be done one way or another, but rather to feel how different the sunrise is now in our time and how nature with its flaming color speaks to us of the spirituality that surrounds us.

Our hearts, too, have changed. We have a different kind of heart in our body. Our physical heart has become hard, but our etheric heart is more flexible. We must find the way to make use of this supersensible heart of ours. It then will help us to understand spiritual science. To put it plainly, just about everybody and his uncle are talking about spiritual science but only because most science can be taken in lazily. We have to be quite clear about it: spiritual science must come alive in our hearts. And the hearts of young people are perfectly formed to feel what is true in this sphere—if there's enough courage for such thoughts.

Friedrich Schiller³ with his warm enthusiasm had much to give the world. He died in very peculiar circumstances. There was an autopsy. His heart was examined; it was found to have become an empty pouch, completely dried up, burned out.

All our hearts will burn out like this if we can lay hold of them and make them new. And if we are to be serious about spirituality we will have to tell ourselves with a certain amount of courage: “Whenever we seem not to be able to live with the rest of the world, it is because we need to have a new kind of heart!”

However, this should not be just a phrase. Let us be awake to the fact that our new hearts should be aware of the world in quite a different way from the old hearts. If wetake this very seriously the youth movement will become something like a flame blazing towards the flames of the sunrise. This will not result from discussions about being young or from talk about inner feelings; in this regard peculiar things can happen. In Breslau the elderly members in their welcome called me “Papa”; in the youth group there they said I was the youngest of all, though I was three times older than most of them.

Indeed it is important to be able to admit this about oneself. The flames from within, the flames from outside, the two flames must strike against each other. It is not at all important to decide or define anything. It is important that we bring about a new kind of enthusiasm. It comes down to this: we should not only learn to sit down but we should learn to stand up. Nietzsche had an apt phrase for Carlyle, who impresses many people with his talent for enthusiasm. “Carlyle's enthusiasm,” said Nietzsche, “is the kind that takes off its coat.” In other words, Carlyle always had time to take off his coat whenever he was seized by enthusiasm. Carlyle always had time as he got warmly enthusiastic, without hesitation, to take off his coat. One can imagine how this fellow would pull on a silk vest after he has had time to get fully into his enthusiasm and slowly to take off his coat.

But the right enthusiasm is the kind that doesn't give you time to take off your coat; it makes you sweat, wearing your coat, and you don't even notice how you're perspiring! This is the right enthusiasm, my dear friends! It should overpower us so completely that we keep our coats on.

That enthusiasm we should feel compelled to bring into being out of the fullness and immediacy of life itself. We need today to overcome our heavy, sticky tiredness. It is actually lazy to insist on “being clear.” There may well be no time to become clear in the old sense of the word. But there is the real necessity to become enthusiastic—for enthusiasm will be able to accomplish everything. The word itself will then reach its true meaning. The German word Begeisterung carries Geist, spirit, in itself. That is self-evident: we need spirit. The English-Greek word enthusiasm has the divine within it (Gr. Theos). A god is in the word.

Grow inwardly with the flame that is kindled in you today, for then the Michael impulse will be achieved! Without fire, it cannot be achieved. But if you are to live and work, glowing through and through, you yourself will have to become a flame. The only thing not burned up by flames is a flame; when we can begin to feel we are becoming one, and cannot be burned up by other flames, we can safely let our physical heart remain behind as an empty pouch, for we have an etheric heart. It is our etheric heart that will understand that humanity is moving into a new epoch, into a life in the spirit. Our growing into this life in the spirit will form the youth movement, the youth experience, in all its strength.

• 1. we call them hippies today. Tr.
• 2. In these July days of 1924, Dr. Steiner was giving the course published in English as Human Values in Education, Rudolf Steiner Press, London 1971
• 3. Poet and dramatist 1759-1805. See also Rudolf Steiner, The Karma of Human Vocation, Lecture 2, Anthroposophic Press 1944.

I would like to address the younger friends in the Anthroposophical Society once more regarding the reasons for the founding of the Youth Section. It seems that two opinions are facing each other within the circles of our youth. One feels that being young is something that must be sought. They feel drawn to anthroposophy because they hope to find satisfaction for their search there. They have realized that this search must go to the depths of the soul, and that contemporary civilization cannot lead to these depths. There is a youth that searches for esotericism in this way because they have intuitively discovered that the true content of the human being can only be experienced in esotericism.

These young people will easily find the way to what the board of the Anthroposophical Society is striving for with the Youth Section. And this board will not interfere with anyone's independent striving. It will have a heart for this independence. But it will also be mindful of the fact that the cultivation of esoteric life has become its task. This concern will be his first. He will lead the Youth Section in such a way that esotericism is given its due, and he believes that he can also find true “youth wisdom” from true esotericism.

But there is another youth opinion. This is easily tempted to take being young in such an absolute sense that even the pursuit of esotericism seems to them like the absorption of a foreign body. They want above all, unperturbed by anything that comes from outside, to immerse themselves in their own youth and to understand it.

In the Anthroposophical Society, young people who hold this opinion also hope to find something. Otherwise they would not be there at all. But they believe that they must first bring Anthroposophy to life by activating their youth. The leadership of the Anthroposophical Society is far from criticizing this part of the youth in a philistine way. But it could easily happen that its intentions are seen in a false light by some young people. For it cannot deviate from its gained insight that the stream of eternity flows through the esotericism attempted by the Anthroposophical Society, towards which the youth aspires. He cannot fall into the error of believing that esotericism must first take on its true form through youth, since he knows that in esotericism youth will find the right paths to be able to be truly “young”.

I am saying this not because I want to point out a contradiction between part of the youth and the board. I do not see any antagonism; and in view of a practical world-conception such antagonism could not arise. The Executive Council is conscious of the fact that its tasks proceed from the spiritual world; and in all its activities it must follow the paths indicated to it from that source. There can be no antagonism in the field of its activity.

But it would be possible for youth itself to be drawn into contradictions if one part emphasized its striving one-sidedly in relation to the other. And that could do immeasurable harm to the anthroposophical youth movement. However, this will not happen if youth pays more attention to something it has learned from the “all-too-old” civilization than it often does. There is a certain tendency towards abstraction, towards speaking in mere concepts. I have already mentioned in the previous reflection how little good this abstraction does to youth. In truth, no one in the youth movement wants this either. But in talking about being young, about the ideals of youth, it is still there. There is even a considerable amount of “age” in today's youth. If, on the other hand, young people reflect on their true experiences, they will find that these are like questions, and that the esoteric side of the Anthroposophical Society at least offers them attempts at answers.

On the basis of such practical insight, an understanding will certainly arise between the various opinions in our youth movement. Through contact with esotericism, young people themselves can have an experience. If this happens, young people will realize that it is precisely through this contact that they can realize what they often have in mind in an indeterminate way. If this does not happen, it could easily be that some of the young people, not out of innate but externally absorbed “old talk”, will draw a theoretical curtain over the suggested experience.

If the young people understand each other, they will also understand the leadership of the Anthroposophical Society.

Dear attendees! First of all, I would like to apologize for not giving this lecture in the language of your country. However, since I do not use this language, I must ask you to allow me to make the following comments in the language I do use.

Anyone who wants to talk about the spiritual nature of man and how we can get to know it today will indeed meet with a certain interest within our contemporary educated society. The fate has befallen wide areas of modern civilized life that people today can often be thrown into confusion and a sense of loss when faced with what the external world throws at them. And so many people today seek that which was once sought in the external world in the inner human soul itself, seeking the strength to sustain themselves, seeking the security that the human soul needs for a strong life. On the other hand, if one wishes to speak in the spirit of the present age about the realization of the supersensible human being, as I intend to do today, then one immediately encounters resistance from precisely that world and world view that should actually be the most valuable to us today must be the most valuable to us. We meet with the opposition of the scientific world, which, from the most diverse foundations of its own mode of knowledge, must assert that ascent into the supersensible, into the spiritual worlds, is not possible by means of the methods which are habitually employed in scientific life.

Nevertheless, modern civilization has approached man in such a way that he has become accustomed to viewing everything in the light that comes to him in some way from scientific knowledge. And so it is that in the sense of today's education, people no longer want to seek satisfaction for their spiritual life in the sense of old traditional beliefs, but they do have the need to strive for such knowledge with regard to the spiritual world, which can still be justified in the face of the scientific needs of the present. And it is this kind of knowledge of the spiritual essence of the human being that is sought by the anthroposophical world view, which I would like to speak about today and next Friday, today more about the knowledge of the spiritual essence of the human being, and next Friday about the knowledge of the spiritual essence of the world.

When one speaks of the spiritual essence of the human being as the deepest mystery of existence, what does one actually mean, dear ladies and gentlemen? Actually, one does not think that there can be any doubt about the spirit and its activity in the human being; because anyone who reflects on himself, even a little, will see precisely in what is spiritual in him that which gives man his actual dignity, which elevates him above the other beings in the world. And it can be said that not even the convinced materialist will actually doubt the value and the existence of the spiritual life in man. He will only raise objections against the independence, against the own entity of this spiritual life within human nature. He will say: That which you acknowledge as human being as your spiritual entity, that goes out of the physical, like the flame from the candle; that arises out of this physical; that extinguishes with this physical-physical.

Is it then, as one should believe, since man must once see the spiritual as his actual, peculiar dignity, is it then really grounded in ordinary life, that man, if not about the existence and the existence of the spiritual, so can be driven into deep doubt about the fate of his spiritual being? Yes, he can. He can do it through everyday life. And basically there are no other doubts in the science of the spiritual than those that unconsciously exist in the everyday life of man, that confuse man, that make man uncertain when he wants to have clarification about the nature of his own spirit.

And these doubts come from the most diverse sides. They are particularly strong in those who receive a scientific education in the present day. Of the various doubts that arise in a person, I will mention the two main ones, which a person does not really realize in everyday life, but there is indeed much, my dear audience, that sits unconsciously or subconsciously in the depths of the human soul, which surfaces into consciousness, not as clear concepts and not as clear doubts either, but as uncertainties, as something that, from the very bottom up, constitutes a person's inner happiness or inner instability. The one thing that — I emphasize it again —, not with complete clarity, but all the more strongly emotionally, gives rise to doubts about the fate of the spiritual, we actually encounter as human beings in every course of fate.

With each passing day, we sink into the life of sleep, through which the spiritual life, which is active during the day, gradually fades and finally extinguishes completely, until it arises again when we wake up and fills our consciousness. It is this extinguishing, this everyday disappearance of spiritual life, that repeatedly makes people uncertain when they ask themselves: Does the spirit have an independent existence? Doesn't it arise, this spirit, in the human physical life, just as it develops from childhood from the dull to the brighter more and more, like the flame from the candle when it is lit? Does it not go out again, this spirit, does it not go out, this soul life, when the body passes through death, as the flame goes out when the fuel is exhausted?

From this [night experience] everything that one seeks to eliminate and solve deep doubts and life's riddles actually emerges. But basically, and this will be the other side of the matter that I have to emphasize, basically it is no different in the waking life of the day. If we see the spirit extinguished in our sleep, then in our waking life we see it, as it were, immersed in the darkness of our own body in relation to its activity.

What is it then that we entertain in clear consciousness as our thoughts? Certainly, we have them. But if we only ask ourselves how our soul works in the simple movement of the hand when this primitive expression of the will comes about, we can only say to ourselves: Yes, we grasp the thought; the hand is to be raised. But the thought disappears into the darkness of our own organism. In our everyday consciousness we have no idea what our soul accomplishes within our organism in order to send its power through muscles and tendons in a flash, as it were, to actually bring about the act of will. We see, finally, how the hand moves – so again a mental image – and we see an external action as a result of going from mental image to mental image. But how the soul and spirit descend into our own body, that actually remains in darkness for us.

This darkness and this extinguishing, as I have just characterized them, is what anthroposophy, as a modern spiritual knowledge, now seeks to overcome, just as these doubts have been overcome at all times in the development of the human soul. What Anthroposophy strives for, ladies and gentlemen, is, I would say, exact clairvoyance, and by this term I would distinguish the knowledge of Anthroposophy from all the nebulous mystical views to which people in our time of uncertainties so often turn. It is this exact clairvoyance, this exact seeing-through, that aims to take full account of the requirements of modern science.

What, then, are these requirements of modern science? Well, they are that one can, with an inner clarity in observation and experiment, survey that which presents itself to the senses, and the genuine, as he calls himself, the exact modern scientist, in pursuing that which his senses observe, that which he wants to achieve through the experiment, he wants to have such clarity, such inner necessity in it, as he has in mathematics. That is why mathematical thinking is so readily applied to the natural sciences. One would actually like to apply this mathematical thinking everywhere, because it brings about exactness, that is, transparency, inner necessity. Now, anyone who speaks of exact science in this sense today seeks to bring this exactness into the way he follows external things and processes, or, for that matter, if he wants to be a psychologist, into the way he follows his own soul processes.

Anthroposophy, as it is meant here, also applies this exactitude. But it does not apply it to the external world, not to the observation of sensual things and to external sensual experiment. It applies this exactness to something that is not initially available to human consciousness. It applies this exactness to the development of soul forces that are initially hidden in the human being, but that can be evoked in it. Anthroposophical spiritual science has certainly learned from natural science how, through external sensory observation, through external experiment, through the methods by which natural science has achieved such triumphs, as they are also fully recognized by spiritual science, that through all this one cannot penetrate into a spiritual, not into a supersensible world, that the soul forces of man, as they are in everyday life and also in ordinary science, are unsuitable for penetrating into the supersensible. The human soul must first be made suitable for this, and the hidden powers deep within it must be brought forth. In doing so, one can proceed in an inward, mystically unclear way. Anthroposophical spiritual science specifically rejects this. But it wants to bring hidden soul forces out of the nature of man. And by adhering to this bringing forth, it observes a method that is as clear and inwardly necessary in the same sense as the research of external science in sensory observation and in experiment.

What exact science does to the finished outer nature by introducing clarity and exactness, that is what anthroposophy does to the development of the human soul forces. Nothing is done in the human soul that is not done with the same inner clarity, comprehensibility and necessity as the strict mathematician does with his investigations. In this way, the method of this exact clairvoyance seeks to develop the human soul in such a way that, to a certain extent, one's own development initially becomes a mathematical problem. I wanted to start by characterizing how the anthroposophical spiritual science that we are talking about here does not believe that one can research the spirit in the same way that one conducts external research in the natural sciences. Rather, it carries the scientific spirit that is present in the natural sciences into spiritual research in the truest sense. So the first step in anthroposophy is to work on oneself, on those forces of one's soul that then lead to insight into the supersensible world.

From this you can see, my dear attendees, that the person who wants to penetrate to the knowledge of the spiritual essence of the human being, let us call him a spiritual researcher, must, so to speak, turn back to himself in order to, first of all, I would say, illuminate his soul inwardly. It is a process of illumination and strengthening.

We shall most easily be able to understand what this modern way of observing the soul is to become if I remind you, my dear audience, of how such spiritual knowledge was sought in the more ancient times of human spiritual development. They were, I might say, striven for in a somewhat more material way. And since that which I have to describe to you later as today's method is more spiritual and soul-like, we shall be able to present this spiritual and soul-like more easily if we start, I might say, from the coarser, more material older methods.

But to do this, we must first take a look at how, in earlier periods of human development, people related to their environment. It is easy to believe that the human race has always been the same in its state of mind as it is today, since historical times. But this is not correct. Those who have an inner view of the human soul life will find that, even if they go back only a few centuries, people thought, felt and wanted quite differently, indeed, their whole soul mood, their whole soul condition was different than it is today. And if we go back thousands of years in human development, it becomes significantly different. The external historical monuments can only tell us a little about this, because, firstly, even if we look at the oldest times, for example, Egyptian monuments, they do not go back very far. Secondly, however, it depends on how the present-day person interprets these monuments. And according to that, he then finds one thing or another, which is basically only a reflection of his own state of mind, which he dreams into the souls of older humanity.

The spiritual science itself, of which I want to speak to you today and next Friday, sees the soul life of an older humanity in a different way than ordinary history. It looks at what has been preserved in significant, let us say, poetic or other monuments and can form an idea of how what is preserved in such monuments basically breathes from a completely different kind of spirit than that of today's human beings and she gradually comes to recognize that primitive humanity already had a kind of clairvoyance, a clairvoyance that was, however, dreamy, a clairvoyance that, compared to today's demands for clarity of consciousness, must appear to us as something foggy, as something dreamy. But this dreamy clairvoyance of ancient times looked deeper into the inner structure of the world, into the spirituality of the world, than today's sensory consciousness can. Fundamentally, the older person's relationship to the world was quite different.

It is easy to say that this older person saw all kinds of things in the things around him, that he saw a spiritual being in every plant, in every tree and bush, in every wave and ripple, and that he dreamt spiritual entities into clouds and winds. Yes, his consciousness was dream-like. But he did not simply project his own imagination onto the spiritual and soul-like beings he saw in water, in the spring, in the clouds, in the rain and in the wind. Rather, his state of soul was such that he saw all the spiritual beings in the world so naturally, with such elementary power, as we see the red or yellow color in the environment today, as we hear the sound in the environment, as we feel the warmth. We only perceive the senses and their contents; the older person experienced a spiritual element in the whole natural environment through the same elementary world, but in return he did not feel such an I, such a distinct self-reliant I as the modern person.

This feeling of a solid ego only developed over time in the course of human development, and only with it did the experience of human freedom arise. For this experience of freedom, this ego experience, to come about, the older dream-like, clairvoyant way has faded away. Man has been limited to the external sense world. In it he acquired his freedom. But today we have again reached a point where we, in our position as humanity within the sense world, must long to find the connection with the spiritual world again, where we are dependent on regaining a kind of clairvoyance. For the reasons already mentioned, however, this cannot be an old, dream-like clairvoyance; it can only be an exact clairvoyance, a clairvoyance that is modeled on modern scientific requirements. The older person had a dream-like clairvoyance; but just as we cannot be satisfied with external science today, so he was just as little satisfied with his clairvoyance, even though he found everywhere in the plant, in the bush, in the tree, in the cloud, in the wind , in the wind, he found a spiritual essence everywhere. He was not satisfied with this, and he turned his gaze to those personalities who, in those older times, represented what scholars represent today, what priests represent today. He directed his gaze to those personalities in older times who can be called initiates, initiates, for they were perceived as such, and who, through the development of special soul powers, but in a more material way than we are to do today, came to a kind of spiritual knowledge of man.

Yes, this kind was more material than our present-day one may be. I would like to describe such a kind of ancient spiritual knowledge first. I would like to describe to you what has actually come down to us, more or less distorted, in the external literature from the ancient Orient, and was practiced in the oldest times of the Orient by individual personalities in order to gain knowledge of a higher, spiritual world and to be able to communicate it to the broad masses of humanity, who lived with their state of soul as I have characterized it.

I know, esteemed attendees, that what I am about to describe as the so-called yoga method of that oldest oriental spiritual development has then come into decadence, that it has fallen into decay, and that even in many descriptions of that yoga method, because they actually describe periods of decay of this kind of spiritual research, something very bad is given.

But I would like to give you a little description of the genuine ancient yoga method, so that we can then get some orientation about what modern man can strive for as exact clairvoyance. It was a special kind of breathing that was aimed for through that yoga method. How does breathing actually work in the ordinary person? He doesn't really know much about it. He breathes in, he breathes out. Only when our breathing becomes irregular during illness do we actually feel our breathing. We do not pay attention to it in ordinary life. It fulfills our corporeality, but it fulfills our corporeality in such a way that its activity basically remains unconscious. Nevertheless, this breath plays - we can also prove this physiologically today, I can only hint at it in this lecture - but this breath nevertheless plays a significant role in our entire human life.

We breathe in. The breath does not just take the path into the inner cavities of our body, only to be exhaled again in a different form, but, for example, it passes through our spinal canal, flows into our brain, and we have , within our brain, while we are awake, we do not merely have nervous activity, but we have this nervous activity continually vibrated, radiated, and permeated by the breaths, by the rhythm of the breathing process. And we can say that even in our thinking, in our imagination, the breathing process has the greatest conceivable share.

But just as we pay little attention to the breathing process in the rest of our organism, we are just as unaware of it in our head organization. The ancient yogi changed the breathing, that is, he shifted the breathing into a different respiratory rhythm than the usual one. The ordinary breathing is not noticed. By breathing in differently, slower or faster, holding it longer or shorter than one does in ordinary life, breathing out longer or shorter, the yogi brought himself into a different rhythm. This made him aware of the breathing process. This allowed him to follow the course of the respiratory flow from inhalation through the lungs, how it spread throughout the entire organism, and how it ran through the spinal canal into the brain. In this way, the person pervaded the organism with his consciousness. He followed the respiratory flow everywhere. In this way he got to know his own organism. And this getting to know one's own organism, my dear ladies and gentlemen, means that all mere material experience comes to an end. In ancient times of human spiritual development, anyone who consciously radiated through their own humanity with an altered breathing rhythm would have seemed foolish if they had said that only material things were circulating through their body. No, the breathing current appeared to those old yogis, so to speak, as an internal scanning of the organism. And what arose for them through this scanning was the inner soul and spiritual being of the person. The method was material. What was discovered was the inner soul and spiritual being. What was discovered was how one feels, how one thinks. They proceeded materially and discovered a spiritual being. They examined themselves inwardly, so to speak, feeling their way. And what the ancient yogi strove for on the one hand was precisely the sense of self that he did not yet have through his natural knowledge, which he tried to acquire in this way.

You just have to look at such things not with the dry, philistine way that is often applied today, you have to put yourself with all the full human feeling in that, what is one, so if you scan his inner human.

Then, my dear audience, you feel what is described in the wonderful Bhagavad Gita as the true human self, which flows into the spiritual and soul world as the eternal in man. One feels that what is described as the ego in a wonderful world poem is the result of a process such as I have just described as yoga breathing.

Now, my dear attendees, we cannot proceed in this way as modern people, because after all, it is the case that the one who, on this path, through the change of breathing, or also because one wanted to support all of this wanted to support this by means of special postures, by means of the position of the person in relation to the physical body, because by doing so they made the physical body particularly intense, because they made themselves hypersensitive as a person in general, it happened that they had to withdraw from life. But that was entirely in keeping with the old habits of knowledge of mankind. Those who, in this way, made themselves overly sensitive as seekers of the spiritual world sought solitude, for it was not appropriate for them to always be in relation to the harsh rest of the world, to come into contact with it. But on the other hand, those who wanted to know something about the fate of human souls sought out such lonely personalities. People trusted these hermits. They were considered to be able to give sound advice on the temporal fate of the human soul in relation to the eternal.

We cannot proceed in the same way today, because humanity has come to a point in its development that it can no longer trust the one who, in order to explore the truth, to explore the spiritual, withdraws from life, but that it can only trust the one who fully cooperates with life, who, like every other person, engages in the practice of life, in the needs and demands of the day. Today we need methods that do not make the human body overly sensitive, but that strengthen the human soul. These methods can be attained, and they can lead to a truly exact clairvoyance.

First of all, there are intimate processes of the human soul life to which one must devote oneself: meditation, concentration of the life of imagination. In a similar way, I have described in my books, for example in “How to Know Higher Worlds” or in my “Occult Science”, what the human being must devote himself to. I have pointed out what today's modern man must do in order to enter the spiritual world in a similar way, but now according to his needs, as was given to the ancient yogi.

Shall I now give you a brief definition of meditation? Meditation is a specific training of the life of thought, which is not present in ordinary existence. And through this training of the life of thought, one first comes to the development of such soul powers that lead into the spiritual world, into the supersensible. But what is this meditation?

Now, dear audience, you will find more detailed descriptions in the books mentioned above of what this meditation is, what these modern methods of clairvoyance are. But you will also find more detailed descriptions there of how the modern person must undertake, what the modern person must undertake to achieve such exact clairvoyance. But here I can only state the principles.

And if I were to describe to you in a single word what the soul has to do, I would put it like this: when we develop our imaginative life in other ways, we are immersed in our ideas with a certain indifference; in our ordinary lives we are often immersed in intense warmth or deep antipathy. Our whole inner being can be stirred up in hot passion or wild repulsion when we are immersed in ordinary life. But the images, they are, I would like to say, a cold current in our everyday life; they accompany this everyday life.

However, anyone who wants to progress to meditation must do something other than the coldness of the imaginative life that one otherwise deals with in ordinary daily life. One must be able to call thoughts into one's soul, thoughts that one may have guessed at from someone who is already a spiritual researcher, or thoughts that one otherwise finds out in the world, but which should work in the soul in such a way that they calmly fill the soul life. One tries to distract one's soul life from everything else in the world. One seeks to direct one's attention to such images and to dwell on such images; one seeks to devote oneself entirely to the imagination, to individual images. But there is something necessary in this devotion to the images: that we can love these images at the moment when we thus devote ourselves, when we disregard all the rest of the world and live in complete inner peace in one image or one complex of images.

Yes, my dear attendees, the development of inner love, the development of inner warmth of soul when resting on ideas – ideas that we ourselves have first placed in the life of the soul – these are what make it possible for ordinary imagining to become meditation. When we can love our own thinking with the same inner love with which we love our objects or fellow human beings, when we can love our own thinking universally, when we can merge completely in it with love, when we can remain in him, then this life of imagination receives that inner power which is indeed something quite different from yogic breathing, but which works in the same way, only producing somewhat different results than yogic breathing. While yogic breathing attempts to send the breathing process into the head in order to scan and illuminate the whole person inwardly and to recognize their spiritual and soul essence, we gradually develop gradually develop an inner, true power of thought, by means of which we can scan and examine ourselves inwardly, not in the same way as with the modified breath, but still to a certain extent.

And so, in modern man, exact clairvoyance can be evoked by strengthening and energizing the soul life, while in more physical terms, dreamy clairvoyance was sought in the earlier periods of human development.

But then, when we really come to examine ourselves inwardly in this way, through intensified, strengthened thinking, we become aware of something different from what we have in ordinary life; then, my dear audience, we have developed a power of knowledge in us that leads us out, initially, beyond the ordinary life of memory. What do we have in this memory life? We look back from the present moment of our existence on earth to some time after our birth. Thoughts of experiences emerge from memory. There is a continuous stream, but it remains in the subconscious; memories arise, either freely, as they are said to do, or evoked by ourselves. These memories are abstract thoughts of experiences that we may have gone through in all the heat of life. These abstract thoughts remain with us. But then, when we apply meditation or concentration, loving thoughts and repeatedly thinking loving thoughts to our soul life – whether it takes a short time or many years for each person depends on their destiny, depending on the nature of their destiny, can attain such exact clairvoyance. When we use it to illuminate our inner life, our past soul life since birth lies before our spiritual gaze like a unified, temporal panorama. But not as memories, but as creatively active in us what can be called an ethereal human existence.

We do not just look at how we have had external experiences that have remained in us in abstract thoughts, we look at our previous life, how we ourselves have worked on our organs from a spiritual and soul perspective since our childhood. We look at how we have shaped our still untrained brain in a plastic way in our early childhood. We look at how we have taken in external substances into our organism, how they have worked in us in terms of growth force, how we still work on ourselves daily in the forces of nutrition. We look at the outer organism as that which we ourselves are working on. After all, we do not have a spatial organism, a spatial body, in front of us, but we do have a temporal body in front of us.

All at once there stands that which is our whole life, but which only underlies the external appearances, which works on our outer organism, a time body - anthroposophy calls it the etheric body - a time body that cannot be drawn or painted, just as a flash of lightning cannot be drawn or painted, but can only be captured for a moment.

That is the first thing that one discovers through this exact clairvoyance: a time body that we carry within us, which is a unity like our spatial body, just as –– in our physical spatial body a unity is to be thought with the arms or with the hand, a unity is to be thought with the head, how the one is not to be thought without the other, how the one stands in reciprocal interaction with the other – we look at our time body when we turn 50 years old, just as we formed our physical body out of our etheric soul at the age of 30, we look back at our 28th year, we look back at our 18th year, we look back at that which is as interconnected as the individual limbs of our physical body. We look at an etheric element that underlies us. This etheric element remains in us throughout our entire life on earth, from birth to death. While we remove the substances that make up our body from our physical body after a relatively short time and replace them with others, what we see as the time body is a unity from our birth or conception to our death , a unity that is continually active within us, which, like a vast panorama of time, now stands before the soul life as that which we have acquired through meditation, through concentration, through the loving life of thought.

But we can go further. Those who remain for weeks or months, or for years in such meditative, that is, loving thought, even if only for a very short time each day, will eventually come to see how their thought life is strengthened. And because it is strengthened, it works in them as forces of growth, as realities, not just as abstract thoughts. He takes hold of those forces in his thoughts that have brought about his growth, that bring about his nourishment, that work in his inner being as nourishing forces. He transfers himself, so to speak, from the passive, abstract, dead life of thought into the world of living thoughts. And he first learns to recognize in this world of living thoughts his own etheric body, which has been building him up since his birth or conception and which is still working on him today.

Oh, it is as if, one day, something happened in our inner being through this loving introduction, through this loving thinking, through the attainment of this exact clairvoyance, as if something arose in our inner being which seems to us, as when we have gone through a dark night and see the morning sun come up and see it light up around us; so we experience for a moment in our inner being something like an inner soul sunrise. Our inner being, which was previously dark and we had to say to ourselves, we do not penetrate down to where our soul works on our body, we do not even penetrate down to those depths where, as I said before, the soul twitches like lightning through the muscle to move the arm through the thought, to raise the arm. Now we look into our organism through loving imagination. What we otherwise have only when we look into ourselves, thoughts, we now have as living forces; these are we ourselves as we have been in every hour of our earthly existence since our birth.

But by continuing our meditations, we come to the point – I have described it again in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” or in my “Occult Science” or in other books – we finally come to the point of perceiving other exercises as necessary, because we learn to recognize that even if we always work on our soul life with the same inner awareness as we otherwise only have in mathematical work, when we work with such inner awareness, with absolute inner clarity and lucidity on our soul life, we come to see that it is now becoming more difficult to remove from our consciousness those thoughts that are now living forces, yes, that are ultimately what we recognize as ourselves, these living thoughts. It is as if they become fixed, because in the end we ourselves are what these living thoughts are. But just as we first learned to live lovingly in these ideas, so now we must turn to something else with all our inner effort. To do this, we must be able to remove the ideas from our consciousness of our own free will.

This is more difficult for us than in ordinary life, especially when we have previously lovingly placed them there. Therefore, as a rule, someone who has meditated for a while and is then advised by the spiritual researcher to move on to removing the ideas will say: Oh, the thoughts rush in like swarms of bees; I can't get rid of them. But the effort must be made to bring about an artificial forgetting within, a suppression of thoughts. And one can actually achieve this by making an effort, practising inner self-discipline, suppressing thoughts again, and finally, after first strengthening and reinforcing thoughts, creating an empty consciousness. One can then rest in this empty consciousness. One is actually now in a state that is only awake. One is awake, but one has no content of waking.

That this is difficult, my dear audience, you will see from the fact that most people immediately fall asleep when they have no content in their everyday consciousness. But that is precisely what must now be developed for the purpose of gaining knowledge of the higher worlds: to have a completely empty consciousness at the same time as an alert consciousness. If one really succeeds in this, then, as light and color effects stream into the eye and sounds stream into the ear from the physical world, so, when this has been prepared, the spiritual worlds stream into the empty consciousness. And now, for the first time, one becomes aware not only of what I have described before, seeing one's own life as an ethereal-spiritual world, but one now becomes aware of a spiritual world around oneself. I will say more about this next Friday, but now I want to talk about the spiritual essence of man and show that one can go further.

In the same way that one can come to discard ideas that one previously sought to gain with all one's strength, one can, by increasing one's strength of this discarding, come to finally discard the whole overview of one's own life. Everything that one sees there, what works inwardly on one's own organism, what growth and nutrition brings about, what allows us to develop from small children into fully grown adults, everything that is at work within, what stands before us like a spiritual panorama, one can remove it; just as one can abstract from one's own perception, one gradually learns to disregard one's own life. Just as it is otherwise difficult to achieve an empty consciousness, so now one can achieve an empty consciousness by having removed one's own consciousness in life. Then one stands there with an empty consciousness in full wakefulness. One stands beyond one's own life.

Now, a spiritual life flows into this soul, which has removed its own life between birth and death from consciousness. We learn to recognize this spiritual life by seeing it more and more as our pre-earthly existence. And now we are looking into a spiritual world that has nothing of what is otherwise around us in the material world, which is a purely spiritual world. But in this spiritual world we ourselves are in it, we are in it as we were before we descended as spiritual-soul beings into the physical-sensual world and united with what was given to us by father and mother as our physical body. Now we do not need to believe; now we have acquired, through the appropriate exercises, a real, exact knowledge, an exact observation of what we were in the spiritual and soul world before our birth or conception. How we worked, thought and willed in the spiritual world, how we work after we have clothed ourselves with our physical body between birth and death in earthly existence, how we bring about everything in earthly existence through our bodily organization , and even the thought we conceive can only be conceived through the medium of the nervous system, so we see ourselves in our spiritual-soul existence through a truly exact clairvoyance before we descended to our earth.

We see ourselves surrounded by spiritual beings, just as we see ourselves surrounded by physical beings here in the physical world. What leads us back a little in the physical world, but not out of the physical world, is our memory. We have abstract thoughts in the present moment. They bring into our soul the experiences we had years ago; but now, through the processes I have described, we not only have before us the ordinary experience on the physical earth, now we have before us – albeit in an image, but in an image of a reality – we have before us our pre-earthly existence with all its essence, with all its activity.

I could only describe to you, dear audience, the paths that the soul must take to penetrate the transitory, which the soul has as thinking, feeling and willing, to that which was creatively at work in the human body, what was there before this human body united with it, what belongs to a spiritual world, what does not come into being with the body, but rather first takes place in the body and actually makes its existence as a human body possible. Through such exact clairvoyance, we gradually advance from the physical existence into the super-physical, into the spiritual. We do not speculate, we do not philosophize in abstract terms, we seek experiences of the spiritual world, and seek to come to an understanding of the spiritual nature of man through experience.

In this way we arrive at discovering the eternity of the human soul. On the other hand, we can now train in a modern form for an exact clairvoyance, which an older time, which had more of a dreamy clairvoyance, trained in so-called asceticism. Let us again make clear in asceticism what was sought in a more material way, while we must seek it in a more spiritual way in modern times: the ascetic tried to paralyze his body, to kill it, even to make it ill in a certain way. Now, as a modern person, I will certainly not advocate the weakening or mortification of the body in any way; but in those older times, people knew exactly what they were doing when they systematically mortified their bodies. What happened to the person in the process? To the same extent that people systematically mortified their bodies, to the same extent did their soul come to life. It is precisely through this mortification that the body became, I would say, more and more transparent and more and more transparent. It was an experience of these ancient ascetics that by paralyzing the body, the soul became more and more alive and more and more alive. And in this way they attained a knowledge of that which man experiences unconsciously during the ordinary state of sleep.

In this way I have described to you, in the one way, in the yoga philosophy, and in the other way, in the modern way, through modern meditation, how man can consciously, that is, clairvoyantly, penetrate into that which is otherwise in the darkness of his own organism. I said that this is what touches us most closely in relation to the fate of our own spirit: that we cannot see how the soul and spirit work down there in the human organism, that we move, as it were, into the darkness of the human body while keeping watch, that we do not even know what the soul is doing by moving a hand.

The ancient yogi got to know this inner realm by scanning it with his breath, as it were. The clairvoyant person of today x-rays himself with exact thinking that has become clairvoyant, and in so doing penetrates into the darkness of his own body. This brings certainty instead of the insecurity that arises because otherwise, in ordinary daily life, one only plunges into the darkness of one's own body. But on the other hand, doubt arises from the fact that one sees the spiritual-soul dawning down in the process of falling asleep and finally one sees that it only dawns again when one wakes up. One must ask oneself: Can this soul then exist independently if it can be extinguished every day in this way by the needs of the body?

That was precisely what the old ascetic achieved: To the same extent that he systematically weakened his body, tuned it down, and in some respects even made it sick and weak, to that same extent his soul became more conscious, no longer completely permeating his life between falling asleep and waking up, but sinking down into the unconscious during sleep, experiencing dreams that were realities, more and more certain things coming up. To the same extent that the body was subdued, a soul life shone forth that was similar to the sleeping soul life, but which was conscious, and thus in turn opposite to the sleeping soul life. One had to say to oneself: You can therefore also live with this soul in the way you otherwise only live during sleep. So this soul can maintain itself in relation to the body even when it is not in this body. By reducing the life of the body, the ancient ascetic, as it were, drew out the independent life of the soul, and from that, in those ancient times, knowledge came to him, albeit in a dream-like way. When your body finally falls away from you, when it has reached the highest degree of dullness, which you have achieved to a small degree during your asceticism, when it falls away from you in death, then the highest moment will occur, which you have already experienced in a diminished way here in earthly life. And from the practice of ancient asceticism, the old clairvoyant person gained that knowledge, which he was also able to communicate in a different way: that the soul has eternal life in the spirit, even in the face of death. In ancient times, through a kind of exercise, yoga exercises, and today through meditation exercises, one saw into the pre-earthly existence, thus into the eternity of the soul on one side. The old clairvoyant person sees through the gate of death, sees how the soul overcomes death, precisely through the mortification, the paralysis of the body.

Again, this is something that we modern people cannot do, because again it turned out that the old ascetic was not up to life: his body, which had been weakened for asceticism, that is, for higher knowledge, could not meet the demands of everyday life. In those ancient times, people had confidence in such hermits and sought knowledge from them that they did not want to have themselves. Today one would not have it. But just as the yoga exercises can be modified for today's life, for today's sense of time, so too can the ascetic exercises be modified. The ancient ascetic attuned his body to awaken the soul life, as it was in the face of eternity, in his death. He thus weakened the body in order to allow the unaltered soul life to become relatively stronger in relation to the weaker body, so that he might recognize it. The modern person must take the opposite path. He leaves the body as it is and strengthens the soul life. This is achieved in a special way through exercises.

I will highlight some of the things I have described in detail in the books mentioned. One exercise is particularly effective. We are so immersed in our ordinary lives that we let our thinking, our inner soul life, passively follow the events of the outer world every day. We think about things that happen earlier in the day earlier, and think about things that happen later later. And when we follow life in reverse, as we do in legal, logical thought, we do nothing but imagine the correct course of events in our minds. Those who want to systematically strengthen their inner life must work day after day, even if only for a few minutes, but if they want to achieve something serious, they must work as diligently as in a laboratory or an observatory or a clinic; but what they have to do are intimate inner processes. Let us say, for example, that he first reviews his day in reverse order, for example, from seven o'clock; he reviews what happened first between seven and six o'clock, then between six o'clock and five o'clock, and thus follows his day backwards. It is best to follow the events of the day in full detail. Let us say, for example, that one went up a staircase. First you were on the bottom step, then on the next one, and so on. In this reconstruction, which should not be a mere reminiscence but a reconstruction, you are first on the top step, imagine how you go down to the penultimate, last step and so on. You do the whole process again. The same applies to other things. You can also do this with other years of your life, going back from the age of eighteen to the age of fifteen, but preferably in great detail. This is more difficult than is generally believed. In doing so, you actively resist the external course of events within yourself. You no longer merely surrender to the external course of events. You oppose it. In doing so, you tear your thinking away from the succession of the external sense world. By tearing one's thinking away from the succession of the outer sense world, one gets accustomed to a completely different inner hold on thinking. Thinking must become more powerful, more independent, by tearing itself away from the outer world.

Likewise, one can do other exercises. You know, my dear audience, that life is constantly changing. Anyone who is honest in their self-examination will have to admit that they are now quite a different person than they were ten or twenty years ago. But how did we become this way? Yes, we have actually only surrendered to life, we have become what life has made of us, what heredity, upbringing and so on has made of us.

Anyone who wants to become a spiritual scientist in the way meant here must take their own life into their own hands, must put as much inner energy into it as they have put into strengthening their thoughts in meditation, and must do the same in terms of strengthening their will. For example, at a certain point in his life, he must say: “For the next three years, you set yourself the task of equipping your soul life with inner habits in a certain way. You take into your own hands what life would otherwise have done to you. Life makes you different with each passing year. Now you take this power of the life stream into your own hands. You consciously change certain habits within you that life would otherwise have changed. It will be seen that especially small habits that have crept into life, when they are done with ever more conscious and conscious soul practice, work wonders in inner self-education – for example, someone who has had a certain handwriting up to this moment in their life, who now changes this handwriting out of this power. And so you can imagine that there are countless smaller or larger habits that one can take in hand, so that one can become, as it were, one's own inner guide, that one can become the director of one's will more and more.

And anyone who then continues the exercises related to the will from “How to Know Higher Worlds” and other books, anyone who continues these exercises, in other words, practices that which can be practiced both through that backward and by this self-discipline; anyone who practices self-conquest strengthens the life of the soul, just as the old ascetic weakened his body and left the life of the soul, so that it became relatively stronger than the weakened body. The body remains as it is, but the soul life is strengthened in this way. And we see something peculiar in our own human existence. I can describe it to you by using a comparison.

Take the human eye. How does the human eye see? Well, because it is transparent itself, because it allows light to pass through it. In the moment when the eye, let us say, becomes clouded, asserts its own materiality, in that same moment, vision ceases. The eye, so to speak, completely forgets itself. Thereby it becomes the servant of the human organism in relation to seeing. By not asserting its own materiality, it becomes the sense organ for the external physical world.

Our soul life, when we strengthen it in the manner described by overcoming ourselves, will ultimately prevail over the human organism in such a way that the latter is not only illuminated from within by meditation exercises, but that the body, like the eye in relation to sensory light, becomes transparent to the soul and spirit. Just as we do not see the eye, but the objects outside, so we learn through our body, which is now not physically but spiritually transparent, and which now does not drive out any desires, longings or passions, in the moments when we want to use it as a higher spiritual sense organ, through this organism we learn about the spiritual world as through a soul transparency. And in this way we attain the possibility of saying to ourselves: We see into a spiritual world through our organism. It has become our soul eye, our spirit eye. Now, like the ancient ascetic, we gain knowledge of the eternal nature of the human soul beyond death.

And by learning to live with the spiritual world around us, after our own organism has become a selfless sense organ, a life of the soul outside the physical body becomes clear to us. And we now have the opportunity to leave the body untouched by our soul life, as it is during sleep. But we have strengthened our soul life. We can separate the soul from the physical body and from the etheric body in the same way as it is separated during sleep. We experience a state similar to sleep, but which is in fact the opposite of sleep. We learn to recognize that we have not extinguished our soul life with sleep, that our soul life was just too weak to develop consciousness from falling asleep to waking up. Through the intensified soul life, we shine through an artificially induced sleep, we illuminate it. We know that we can develop a spiritual-soul life without the body. We therefore know, through the fact that this image is before us, this image of dying, of life after death, we know that the soul, beyond death, that is, on the other side from the one I described earlier, is endowed with eternal life.

Thus, through our meditations, we learn to think of our soul life, for our pre-earthly existence, the one side of eternity, and through the training of our will, through self-transcendence, through the strengthening of our soul life, we come to know eternity as extending beyond death, and we gain a vivid sense of the eternity of the human soul, of the spiritual essence of the human being.

You see how this is attempted. It is not attempted, as the spiritualist does, by means of experiments that are the same as those in the external world, no, but rather, the human soul life itself is developed in such a way that the muscles grow up to this soul life in order to look into the spiritual world. Anthroposophical spiritual science does not want to sin against the spirit of modern exact science. But it cannot initially research an external environment exactly, because it is not there at all, just as colors are not there for the blind, but the spiritual eye, the power of vision, must first be developed. This happens through meditation, through willpower.

But by proceeding with this meditation, with this discipline of the will, in the same way that the scientist otherwise proceeds with the external world, we can speak of bringing the spirit, the meaning of modern scientific civilization, into those areas where, ultimately, our scientific life merges into religious experience, where we ultimately recognize what the spiritual essence of man is. And this spiritual essence of man, my dear audience, lives just as much as the physical human being here with a physical world, lives with a spiritual world.

And how man can find his way into this spiritual world, how he can find the spiritual essence of the world, will be the subject of next Friday's lecture, so that we can understand not only the spiritual essence of man through the method of supersensible knowledge, but also the spiritual essence of the world. But then it will become clear to us how, through the intimate coexistence of the spiritual essence of man with the spiritual essence of the world, a deepening of religious life can arise out of real modern clairvoyance, how man can perhaps what he has lost through modern science, can regain in such a way that he can now combine the deepest religion with strict science.

That is what modern civilization is actually striving for. Because modern civilization has lost the spirit, it has also come to such bitter outer destinies. Perhaps it will also be possible to show what exactly the present dire fate of the times is when we next look at the spiritual essence of the world. Today, I just wanted to show, by way of preparation, how man recognizes himself as a spirit, so that he can then also find the spirit within the world and connect with it in a religious way, in bright, clear clarity. For perhaps it will emerge from the discussions that I have allowed myself to engage in before you today, my dear audience, that what is here called exact clairvoyance and which should lead to a knowledge of the eternal essence of human nature, that this should not conflict with the spirit of modern science, whose triumphs within modern civilization are to be and can be fully recognized by anthroposophy.

But something must be sought that this modern science, as it develops in external observation and external experiment, cannot give. This modern science is no more denied or criticized away in its justification by anthroposophical spiritual science than it is a criticism of human existence when we stand before people and say: There we have the physiognomy of the face, the person's gestures, their forms, the color of their skin; but in all that we see with our outer senses, there is something soulful, spiritual. And only when we see the soul speaking through the incarnate parts – through the skin color – through the gestures, through the whole form of the human being, when we see the soul speaking through the gaze, only then do we have the whole human being. And in just the same sense, when we know the outer world through the outer science of observation and experiment, we have, as it were, the outer gesture of the world, the outer physiognomy of the world, but not yet the soul, not yet the spirit of the world. But just as we only know people half way and cannot gain a proper relationship with them if we only look at the outside, at their color and form, we can only gain a relationship if the soul and spirit speak to us through all of this, so we can only recognize the world in the great and the essence of people if all that true, genuine natural science gives us — especially when it keeps within its limits — gives us of the world's physiognomy and gestures, if we allow all this to be valid, even recognized, and if we progress from this to an exact clairvoyance, to an exact seeing of the world's soul through the outer physical gestures of the world, and to an exact seeing of the human spirit through the outer physical gestures of the human being, so that we may recognize the spirit of the human being.

In this way, anthroposophy does not seek to rebel against science; on the contrary, it seeks to bring science into a realm that modern science cannot enter. It does not want to become something that seeks spirituality in a combative way, I might say; it wants to become something through full recognition of natural science, yes, through a higher evaluation of natural science than is often possible for the latter itself; it wants to become something in relation to what we know as soul and spirit in the world of materialism, in the world of physiology; it wants to become this anthroposophy itself, soul and spirit of modern science. And this modern scientific approach needs soul and spirit to complement the science, it needs warmth of the human soul, the inner light of the human soul, the true religious need. Only in this way can the modern human being revive in a new way from his soul, from his spirit, and move towards a more hopeful future than would otherwise be possible with a more materialistic world view.

[ 1 ] How does Man stand to-day, at his present stage of evolution, with regard to Michael and Michael's Company?

[ 2 ] Man stands over against a world which once was wholly divine, spiritual Being—divine spiritual Being, of which he himself was a living part. The world therefore, in those times when World and Man belonged together, was a world of divine spiritual Being. In a following stage of evolutionary progress, this had ceased. The world was then, the cosmic Revelation of Divine spirit; the Divine Spirit in its essential Being hovered behind the Revelation. Yet still it weaved and lived in this, its revealed glory. A world of stars was there; in their shining and their motion Divine Spirit weaved and lived as revelation. One may say, that in the place of a star's standing, in those days, or in the manner of its moving, might directly be seen the action of Divine Spirit.

[ 3 ] In all that here went on—the manner in which the Divine Spirit wrought within the Cosmos—the life of Man, as he grew up in every way a product of divine-spiritual action in the Cosmos—in all of this, Michael was still in his own element unopposed. He was mediator in the relations of the Divinity to Man.

[ 4 ] Other times came. The star-world ceased to be the immediate and present bearer of the divine-spiritual action. Its life and motion was but the persistent continuation of the same form of action which had once worked within it. Divine Spirit lived no longer in the Cosmos as Revelation, but only as Workings. A marked distinction had now taken place between the Divine-Spiritual and the Cosmic: they had become two against the Ahrimanic Powers, which will save us from falling into their snare.

Michael, from his own fundamental being, remained with the Divine-Spiritual. He endeavoured also to keep Man as close to it as possible. And he continued to do so. It was his purpose to preserve Man from living all too intensely in a world which was only the workings—not the being, and not the revelation—of Divine Spirit.

[ 5 ] Michael accounts it a matter of deepest satisfaction that he has succeeded, through Man, in keeping the star-world still directly connected with the divine-spiritual element, and in the following manner:—When Man has accomplished his life between death and new birth, and is on his way down to take up a new existence upon Earth, he himself endeavours, as he comes down towards this new existence, to establish a harmony between the course of the stars and his own earth-lives. This harmony was a matter of course in times of yore, since Divine Spirit was at work within the stars, and Man’s life had its source in them. To-day, when the stars merely continue in their courses to carry on the Divine Spirit’s workings, this harmony would not exist, unless Man sought for it. Man brings his own divine-spiritual element, that has been conserved from earlier times in him, into relation with the stars, in which the divine-spiritual element only exists as after-effect of an earlier time. Thus a divine element is introduced into Man’s relation with the world, which corresponds to earlier times and yet appears in later ones. That this is so, is the act of Michael; and this act gives him such deep satisfaction, that a great part of his life-element, his life-energy, his radiant, sun-like life-will, lives in this satisfaction.

[ 6 ] To-day, however, when he looks with a spirit’s eye at the earth, he sees there another and essentially different state of things. Man, during his life now in the physical sphere between birth and death, has all round about him a world which is no longer directly even the workings of Divine Spirit, but only something left behind from these workings,—what one can only call the work wrought by Divine Spirit. This wrought work is in its forms altogether of a divinely spiritual kind. The Divinity manifests itself to human perception in the forms, in the natural processes, of this wrought world. But Divinity is no longer within it as a living presence. Nature is this divinely wrought work of the Divinity, and everywhere the moulded likeness of the divine workings.

[ 7 ] In this sun-brightly divine, but not livingly divine world, lies the life of Man. But owing to Michael’s work upon - him, he has conserved as Man his connection with the essential being of Divine Spirit. He lives as a God-pervaded being in a non-God-pervaded world.

[ 8 ] Into this God-voided world, Man will introduce what is in himself—what his own being has come to be in this age.

[ 9 ] Mankind will take its place in a world-evolution, and expand its own form there. The Divine Spirit-Being from which Man first sprang, spread abroad as Man-Being throughout all the worlds, will then have power to fill with light that Cosmos, which now exists only in the wrought likeness of Divine Spirit.

[ 10 ] It will no longer be the same Being, which once was Cosmos, which will then shine forth in light through Man. Divine Spirit, in its passage through Mankind, shall realise a quality of being, which it had not brought to manifestation before.

[ 11 ] Against the progress of evolution in this direction, the Ahrimanic Powers turn all their force. They do not want the Divine-spiritual Powers of its origin to illumine the Universe on its further course. Their aim is that the whole of the new Cosmos should be lit by the cosmic intellectual light which they have absorbed into themselves, and that Man should live on henceforth in this intellectualised and Ahrimanised cosmos.

[ 12 ] In a life of this kind, Man would lose the Christ. For Christ came into the world with an Intellectuality which is in every way the same as it was, when once it lived in the Divine Spirit, when Divine Spirit in Being still informed the Cosmos. If, to-day, we speak in such a manner that our thoughts can also be the Christ’s, then we set something against the Ahrimanic Powers, which will save us from falling into their snare.

[ 13 ] To understand the meaning of the Michael-Mission in the Cosmos, means the ability to speak like this. One must be able in these days to speak about the world of Nature in the way demanded by the present stage of the Spiritual Soul's development. One must be able to make one's mind familiar with the purely scientific, naturalistic mode of thought.

But one must also learn to speak—which means, to feel—about the world of Nature too in a manner befitting the Christ. Not only about redemption from Nature, not only about the soul and things divine, but about the Cosmos, we must learn the Christ-language.

[ 14 ] That our human link with our first divine-spiritual origin may be so preserved, that we may know how rightly to speak the Christ-language about the Cosmos—this is something to which we shall in the end attain, if with inward sincerity of heart we learn to feel and ever more fully enter into all that Michael and Michael's Company are amongst us—in their mission, in all that they perform. For to understand Michael, means, to-day, to find the way to the Logos, as lived by Christ amongst men on earth.

[ 15 ] Anthroposophy sets due value upon all that the naturalistic form of scientific thought has learnt to say about the world during the last four to five hundred years. But Anthroposophy has another language to speak besides this one, about the Being of Man, the Evolution of Man, the Growth of the Cosmos. Anthroposohy would speak the Christ-Michael language.

[ 16 ] For if both languages are spoken, then the continuity will remain unbroken, and evolution will not pass over to Ahriman, before finding again its first, divine, spiritual origin. The language of the natural sciences, by itself alone, in a manner of speech that befits the detachment of the intellectual force from the Divine Spirit of its origin. It may become the language of Ahriman, if Michael's mission be neglected. It will not do so, if, through the might of Michael's great example, the freed and detached intellect comes to itself once more in that Cosmic Intellectual power of the beginning, which, severed from Man, has become objective to him, but which lies at Man's source, and appeared in its living essence in Christ within the realm of human kind, after having left Man for a while, in order that he might unfold his freedom.

Leading Thoughts

[ 17 ] 1. Divine Spirit manifests itself in various ways in the Cosmos, in the following stages: 1. In its own primal and essential Being. 2. In the Revelation of this Being. 3. In its Workings—when the Being withdraws from the Revelation. 4. In its Wrought Work, when in the Universe, as this appears, no longer the Divine itself but only the Forms of the Divine are there.

[ 18 ] 2. Man's present view of the natural world gives him no relation to the Divine but only to this finished Work, wrought by the Divine. The effects communicated to the human soul by this view of the natural world are such that Man may use them, either to ally himself with the Christ-Powers, or with the forces of Ahriman.

[ 19 ] 3. Michael's whole aim and effort is, that the pristine relation to the Cosmos, which has been conserved in Man from the ages of the divine manifestation in Being and Revelation, should by the free effect of Michael's own example, become incorporated in the further human and cosmic evolution. For then the present naturalistic view, which tells only of the Image or empty Form of the Divine, will be able to pass over into a higher view of Nature, more befitting the Spirit. This higher view of Nature will have present existence in Man; but it will be a human after-realization of the God's relation to the Cosmos during the first two stages of cosmic evolution. While giving assent, in this manner, to the view of the natural world which belongs to the Age of Consciousness (Age of the Spiritual Soul), Anthroposophy supplements and completes this view by another—the result of observation with the awakened eye of the Spirit.

Wherever we, as human beings, have striven for knowledge, whether as mystics or realists or in any way at all, the acquisition of self-knowledge has been demanded of us. But as has been repeatedly emphasised on other occasions, self-knowledge is by no means as easy to achieve as many people believe—anthroposophists sometimes among them. The anthroposophist should be constantly aware of the hindrances he will encounter in his efforts. But the acquisition of self-knowledge is absolutely essential if we are to reach a worthy goal in world-existence and if our actions are to be worthy of us as members of humanity.

Let us ask ourselves the question: Why is the achievement of self-knowledge so difficult? Man is a very complicated being. If we mean to speak truly of his inner life, his life of soul, we shall not begin by regarding it as something simple and elementary. We shall rather have the patience and perseverance, the will, to penetrate more deeply into the marvellous creation of the Divine-Spiritual Powers known to us as Man.

Before we investigate the nature of self-knowledge, two aspects of the life of the human soul may present themselves to us. Just as the magnet has North and South poles, just as light and darkness are present in the world, so there are two poles in man's life of soul. These two poles become evident when we observe a person placed in two contrasting situations. Suppose we are watching someone who is entirely absorbed in the contemplation of some strikingly beautiful and impressive natural phenomenon. We see how still he is standing, moving neither hand nor foot, never turning his eyes away from the spectacle presented to him, and we are aware that inwardly he is picturing his environment. That is one situation. Another is the following: a man is walking along the street and feels that someone has insulted him. Without thinking, he is roused to anger and gives vent to it by striking the person who insulted him. We are there witnessing a manifestation of forces springing from anger, a manifestation of impulses of will, and it is easy to imagine that if the action had been preceded by thought no blow need have been struck. We have now pictured two contrasting situations: in the one there is only ideation, a process in the life of thought from which all conscious will is absent; in the other there is no thought, no ideation, and immediate expression is given to an impulse of will. Here we have examples of the two extremes of human behaviour. The first pole is complete surrender to contemplation, to thought, in which the will has no part; the second pole is the impelling force of will without thought. These facts are revealed simply by observation of external life.

We can go into these things more deeply and we come then into spheres in which we can find our bearings only by summoning the findings of occult investigation to our aid. Here another polarity confronts us—that of sleeping and waking. From the elementary concepts of Anthroposophy we know that in waking life the four members of a man's being—physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego—are organically and actively interwoven, but that in sleep the physical and etheric bodies remain in bed, while the astral body and ego are outpoured into the great world bordering on physical existence. These facts could also be approached from a different point of view. We might ask: what is there to be said about ideation, contemplation, thinking—and about the will and its impulses on the one hand during waking life and during sleep on the other?

When we penetrate more deeply into this question it becomes evident that in his present physical existence man is, in a certain sense, always asleep, Only there is a difference between sleep during the night and sleep during the day. Of this we can be convinced in a purely external way, for we know that we can wake in the occult sense during the day, that is to say, one can become clairvoyant and see into the spiritual world. The physical body in its ordinary state is asleep to what is then and there happening and we can rightly speak of an awakening of our spiritual senses. In the night, of course, we are asleep in the normal way. It can therefore be said: ordinary sleep is sleep as regards the outer physical world; daytime consciousness at the present time is sleep as regards the spiritual world.

These facts can be considered in yet another light. On deeper scrutiny we realise that in the ordinary waking condition of physical life, man has, as a rule, very little power or control over his will and its impulses. The will is very detached from daily life. Only consider how little of all you do from morning to evening is really the outcome of your own thinking, of your personal resolutions. When someone knocks at the door and you say “Come in!”, that cannot be called a decision of your own thinking and will. If you are hungry and seat yourself at a table, that cannot be called a decision made by the will, because it is occasioned by your circumstances, by the needs of your organism. Try to picture your daily life and you will find how little the will is directly influenced from the centre of your being. Why is this the case? Occultism shows us that in respect of his will man actually sleeps by day, that is to say he is not in the real sense present in his will-impulses at all. We may evolve better and better concepts and ideas; or we may become more highly moral, more cultured individuals, but we can do nothing as regards the will. By cultivating better thoughts we can work indirectly upon the will but as far as life is concerned we can do nothing directly to it, for in the waking life of day, our will is influenced only in an indirect way, namely through sleep. When we are asleep we do not think; ideation passes over into a state of sleep. The will, however, awakes, permeates our organism from outside, and invigorates it. We feel strengthened in the morning because what has penetrated into our organism is of the nature of will. That we are not aware of this activity of the will becomes comprehensible when we remember that all conceptual activity ceases when we ourselves are asleep. To begin with, therefore, this stimulus shall be given for further contemplation, further meditation. The more progress you make in self-knowledge, the more you will find confirmation of the truth of the words that man sleeps in respect of his will when he is awake and sleeps in respect of his conceptual life when he is asleep. The life of will sleeps by day; the life of thought sleeps by night.

Man is unaware that the will does not sleep during the night because he only knows how to be awake in his life of thought. The will does not sleep during the night but it then works as it were in a fiery element, works upon his body in order to restore what has been used up by day.

Thus there are two poles in man, the life of observation and ideation, and the impulses of will; and man is related in entirely opposite ways to these two poles. The whole life of soul moves in various nuances between these two poles, and we shall come nearer to understanding it by bringing this microcosmic life of soul into relation with the higher worlds.

From what has been said we have learnt that the life of thought and ideation is one of the poles of man's life of soul. This life of thought is something which seems unreal to materialistically minded people. Do we not often hear it said: “Oh, ideas and thoughts are only ideas and thoughts!” This is intended to imply that if someone has [a piece] of bread or meat in his hand it is a reality because it can be eaten, but a thought is only a thought, it is not a reality. Why is this said? It is because what man calls his thoughts are related to what thoughts really are as a shadow-image is to the actual thing. The shadow-image of a flower points you to the flower itself, to the reality. So it is with thoughts. Human thinking is the shadowing forth of ideas and beings belonging to a higher world, the world we call the Astral plane. And you represent thinking rightly to yourself when you picture the human head thus—it is not absolutely correct but simply diagrammatic. In the head are thoughts but these thoughts must be pictured as living beings on the Astral plane. Beings of the most varied kinds are at work there in the form of teeming concepts and activities which cast their shadow-images into men, and these processes are reflected in the human head as thinking.

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As well as the life of thought in the human soul, there is also the life of feeling. Feelings fall into two categories: those of pleasure and sympathy and those of displeasure and antipathy. The former are aroused by good deeds, benevolent deeds; antipathy is aroused by evil, malevolent deeds. Here there is something more than and different from, the mere forming of concepts. We form concepts of things irrespectively of any other factor. But our soul experiences sympathy or antipathy only in respect of what is beautiful and good, or what is ugly and evil. Just as everything that takes place in man in the form of thoughts points to the Astral plane, so everything connected with sympathy or antipathy points to the realm we call Lower Devachan. Processes in the Heavenly World, or Devachan, are projected, mainly into our breast, as feelings of sympathy or antipathy for what is beautiful or ugly, for what is good or evil. So that in our feelings for the moral-aesthetic element, we bear within our souls shadow-reflections of the Heavenly World or Lower Devachan.

There is still a third province in the life of the human soul which must be strictly distinguished from the mere preference for good deeds. There is a difference between standing by and taking pleasure in witnessing some kindly deed and setting the will in action and actually performing some such deed. I will call pleasure in good deeds or displeasure in evil deeds the aesthetic element as against the moral element that impels a man to perform some good deed. The moral element is at a higher level than the purely aesthetic; mere pleasure or displeasure is at a lower level than the will to do something good or bad. In so far as our soul feels constrained to give expression to moral impulses, these impulses are the shadow-images of Higher Devachan, of the Higher Heavenly World.

It is easy to picture these three stages of activity of the human soul—the purely intellectual (thoughts, concepts), the aesthetic (pleasure or displeasure), and the moral (revealed in impulses to good or bad deeds)—as microcosmic images of the three realms which in the Macrocosm, the great Universe, lie one above the other. The Astral world is reflected in the world of thought; the Devachanic world is reflected in the aesthetic sphere of pleasure and displeasure; and the Higher Devachanic world is reflected as morality.

 Thoughts: Shadow-images of Beings of the Astral Plane (Waking) Sympathy and Antipathy: Shadow-images of Beings of Lower Devachan (Dreaming) Moral Impulses: Shadow-images of Beings of Higher Devachan (Sleeping) 

If we connect this with what was said previously concerning the two poles of the soul-life, we shall take the pole of intellect to be that which dominates the waking life, the life in which man is mentally awake. During the day he is awake in respect of his intellect; during sleep he is awake in respect of his will. It is because at night he is asleep in respect of intellect that he is unaware of what he is happening with his will. The truth is that what we call moral principles, moral impulses, are working indirectly into the will. And in point of fact man needs the life of sleep in order that the moral impulses he takes into himself through the life of thought can become active and effective. In his ordinary life today man is capable of accomplishing what is right only on the plane of intellect; he is less able to accomplish anything on the moral plane for there he is dependent upon help coming from the Macrocosm.

What is already within us can bring about the further development of intellectuality, but the Gods must come to our aid if we are to acquire greater moral strength. We go to sleep in order that we may plunge into the Divine Will where the intellect does not intervene and where Divine Forces transform into the power of will the moral principles we accept, where they instill into our will that which we could otherwise receive only into our thoughts.

Between these two poles, that of the will which wakes by night and of the intellect which is awake by day, lies the sphere of aesthetic appreciation which is continuously present in man. During the day man is not fully awake—at least only the most prosaic, pedantic individuals are always fully awake in waking life. We must always be able to dream a little even by day when we are awake; we must be able to give ourselves up to the enjoyment of art, of poetry, or of some other activity that is not concerned wholly with crass reality. Those who can give themselves up in this way form a connection with something that can enliven and invigorate the whole of existence. To give oneself up to such imaginings is like a dream making its way into waking life. Into the life of sleep you know well that dreams enter; these dreams in the usual sense, dreams which permeate sleep-consciousness. Human beings need also to dream by day if they do not wish to lead an arid, empty, unhealthy waking life. Dreaming takes place during sleep at night in any case and no proof of this is required. Midway between the two poles of night dreaming and day dreaming is the condition that can come to expression in fantasy.

So here again there is a threefold life of soul. The intellectual element in which we are really awake brings us shadow-images of the Astral Plane when by day we give ourselves up to a thought—wherein the most fruitful ideas for daily life and great inventions originate. Then during sleep, when we dream, these dreams play into our life of sleep and shadow-images from Lower Devachan are reflected into us. And when we work actively during sleep, impressing morality into our will—we cannot be aware of this actual process but certainly we can of its effects—when we are able to imbue our life of thoughts during the night with the influence of Divine Spiritual Powers, then the impulses we receive are reflections from Higher Devachan, the Higher Heavenly World. These reflections are the moral impulses and feelings which are active within us and lead to the recognition that human life is vindicated only when we place our thoughts at the service of the good and the beautiful, when we allow the very heart's blood of Divine Spiritual life to stream through our intellectual activities, permeating them with moral impulses.

The life of the human soul as presented here, first from external, exoteric observation and then from observation of a more mystical character is revealed by deeper (occult) investigation. The processes that have been described in their more external aspect can also be perceived in man through clairvoyance. When a man stands in front of us today in his waking state and we observe him with the eye of clairvoyance, certain rays of light are seen streaming continually from the heart towards the head. Within the head these rays play around the organ known in anatomy as the pineal gland. These streamings arise because human blood, which is a physical substance, is perpetually resolving itself into etheric substance. In the region of the heart there is a continual transformation of the blood into this delicate etheric substance which streams upwards towards the head and glimmers around the pineal gland. This process—the etherisation of the blood—can be perceived in the human being all the time during his waking life.

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The occult observer is able to see a continual streaming from outside into the brain, and also in the reverse direction, from the brain to the heart. Now these streams, which in sleeping man come from outside, from cosmic space, from the Macrocosm, and flow into the inner constitution of the physical body and etheric bodies lying in the bed, reveal something remarkable when they are investigated. These rays vary greatly in different individuals. Sleeping human beings differ very drastically from one another, and if those who are a little vain only knew how badly they betray themselves to occult observation when they go to sleep during public gatherings, they would try their level best not to let this happen!

Moral qualities are revealed distinctly in the particular colouring of the streams which flow into human beings during sleep; in an individual of lower moral principles, the streams are quite different from what is observable in an individual of noble principles. Endeavours to dissemble are useless. In the face of the higher Cosmic Powers, no dissembling is possible. In the case of a man who has only a slight inclination towards moral principles the rays streaming into him are a brownish red in colour—various shades tending toward brownish red. In a man of high moral ideals the rays are lilac-violet in colour. At the moment of waking or of going off to sleep a kind of struggle takes place in the region of the pineal gland between what streams down from above and what streams upward from below. When a man is awake the intellectual element streams upwards from below in the form of currents of light, and what is of moral-aesthetic nature streams downwards from above. At the moment of waking or of going off to sleep, these two currents meet, and in the man of low morality a violent struggle between the two streams takes place in the region of the pineal gland. In the man of high morality there is around the pineal gland as it were a little sea of light. Moral nobility is revealed when a calm glow surrounds the pineal gland at these moments. In this way a man's moral disposition is reflected in him, and this calm glow of light often extends as far as the heart. Two streams can therefore be perceived in man—the one Macrocosmic, the other, Microcosmic.

To estimate the significance of how these two streams meet in man is possible only by considering on the one hand what was said previously in a more external way about the life of the soul and how this life reveals the threefold polarity of the intellectual, the aesthetic and the moral elements that stream downwards from above, from the brain toward the heart; and if, on the other hand, we grasp the significance of what was said about turning our attention to the corresponding phenomenon in the Macrocosm. This corresponding phenomenon can be described today as the result of the most scrupulously careful occult investigation of recent years, undertaken by individuals among genuine Rosicrucians. These investigations have shown that something similar to what has been described in connection with the Microcosm also takes place in the Macrocosm. You will understand this more fully as time goes on.

Just as in the region of the human heart the blood is continually being transformed into etheric substance, a similar process takes place in the Macrocosm. We understand this when we turn our minds to the Mystery of Golgotha—to the moment when the blood flowed from the wounds of Jesus Christ.

This blood must not be regarded simply as chemical substance, but by reason of all that has been said concerning the nature of Jesus of Nazareth it must be recognised as something altogether unique. When it flowed from His wounds, a substance was imparted to our Earth, which in uniting with it, constituted an Event of the greatest possible significance for all future ages of the Earth's evolution—and it could take place only once. What came of this blood in the ages that followed? Nothing different from what otherwise takes place in the heart of man. In the course of Earth evolution this blood passes through a process of “etherisation.” And just as our human blood streams upwards from the heart as ether, so since the Mystery of Golgotha the etherised blood of Christ Jesus has been present in the ether of the earth. The etheric body of the Earth is permeated by the blood—now transformed—which flowed on Golgotha. This is supremely important. If what has thus come to pass through Christ Jesus had not taken place, man's condition on the Earth could only have been as previously described. But since the Mystery of Golgotha it has always been possible for the etheric blood of Christ to flow together with the streamings from below upward, from heart to head.

Because the etherised blood of Jesus of Nazareth is present in the etheric body of the Earth, it accompanies the etherised human blood streaming upwards from the heart to the brain, so that not only those streams of which I spoke earlier meet in man, but the human blood-stream unites with the blood-stream of Christ Jesus. A union of these two streams can, however, come about only if a person is able to unfold true understanding of what is contained in the Christ Impulse. Otherwise there can be no union; the two streams then mutually repel each other, thrust each other away. In every epoch of Earth evolution understanding must be acquired in the form suitable for that epoch. At the time when Christ Jesus lived on Earth, preceding events were rightly understood by those who came to His forerunner, John, and were baptised by him according to the rite described in the Gospels. They received baptism in order that their sin, that is to say, the karma of their previous lives—karma which had come to an end—might be changed; and in order that they might realise that the most powerful Impulse in Earth evolution was about to descend into a physical body. But the evolution of humanity progresses and in our present age what matters is that people should recognise the need for the knowledge contained in Spiritual Science and be able so to fire the streams flowing from heart to brain that this knowledge can be understood.

If this comes to pass, individuals will be able to receive and comprehend the event that has its beginning in the Twentieth Century: this event is the appearance of the Christ as an Etheric Being in contradistinction to the Physical Christ of Palestine. For we have now reached the point of time when the Etheric Christ enters into the life of the Earth and will become visible—at first to a small number of individuals through a form of natural clairvoyance. Then in the course of the next three thousand years, He will become visible to greater and greater numbers of people. This will inevitably come to pass in the natural course of development. That it will come to pass is as true as were the achievements of electricity in the nineteenth century. A number of individuals will see the Etheric Christ and will themselves experience the event that took place at Damascus. But this will depend upon such men learning to be alert to the moment when Christ draws near to them. In only a few decades from now it will happen, particularly to those who are young—already preparation is being made for this—that some individual here or there has certain experiences. If he has sharpened his vision through having assimilated Anthroposophy, he may become aware that suddenly someone has come near to help him, to make him alert to this or that. The truth is that Christ has come to him, although he believes that what he saw is a physical man. He will come to realise that what he saw was a super-sensible being, because it immediately vanishes. Many a human being will have this experience when sitting silent in his room, heavy-hearted and oppressed, not knowing which way to turn. The door will open, and the etheric Christ will appear and speak words of consolation to him. The Christ will become a living Comforter to men. However strange it may as yet seem, it is true nevertheless that many a time when people—even in considerable numbers—are sitting together, not knowing what to do, and waiting, they will see the Etheric Christ. He will Himself be there, will confer with them, will make His voice heard in such gatherings. These times are approaching, and the positive, constructive element now described will take real effect in the evolution of mankind.

No word shall be said here against the great advances made by culture in our day; these achievements are essential for the welfare and the freedom of men. But whatever can be gained in the way of outer progress in mastering the forces of nature, is something small and insignificant compared with the blessing bestowed upon the individual who experiences the awakening soul through Christ, the Christ who will now be operative in human culture and its concerns. Men will thereby acquire forces that make for unification. In very truth Christ brings constructive forces into human culture and civilisation.

If we look into early post-Atlantean times, we would find that men built their dwelling places by methods very different from those used in modern life. In those days they made use of all kinds of growing things. Even when building palaces they summoned nature to their aid by utilizing plants interlaced with branches of trees and so on, whereas today men must build with broken fragments. All the culture of the external world is contrived with the aid of products of fragmentation. And in the course of the coming years you will realise even more clearly how much in our civilised life is the outcome of destruction.

Light itself is being destroyed in this post-Atlantean age of the Earth's existence, which until the time of Atlantis was a progressive process. Since then it has been a process of decay.* What is light? Light decays and the decaying light is electricity. What we know as electricity is light that is being destroyed in matter. And the chemical force that undergoes a transformation in the process of Earth evolution is magnetism. Yet a third force will become active and if electricity seems to work wonders today, this third force will affect civilisation in a still more miraculous way. The more of this force we employ, the faster the earth will tend to become a corpse and its spiritual part prepare for the Jupiter embodiment. Forces have to be applied for the purpose of destruction, in order that man may become free of the Earth and that the Earth's body may fall away. As long as the earth was involved in progressive evolution, no such destruction took place, for the great achievements of electricity can only serve a decaying Earth. Strange as this sounds, it must gradually become known. By understanding the process of evolution we shall learn to assess our culture at its true value. We shall also learn that it is necessary for the Earth to be destroyed, for otherwise the spiritual could not become free. We shall also learn to value what is positive, namely the penetration of spiritual forces into our existence on Earth.

* See also the section at the end of the text, containing answers given by Dr. Steiner to questions.

Thus we realise what a tremendous advance was signified by the fact that Christ lived for three years on the Earth in a human body specially prepared in order that He might be visible to physical eyes. Through what came to pass during those three years men have been made ready to behold the Christ who will move among them in an etheric body, who will participate in earthly life as truly and effectively as did the Physical Christ in Palestine. If men observe such happenings with undimmed senses they will know that there is an etheric body that will move about in the physical world, but is the only etheric body able to work in the physical world as a human physical body works. It will differ from a physical body in this respect only, that it can be in two, three, nay even in a hundred, a thousand places at the same time. This is possible only for an etheric, not for a physical form. What will be accomplished in humanity through this further advance is that the two poles of which I have spoken, the intellectual and the moral, will more and more become one; they will merge into unity. This will come about because in the course of the next millennia men will become aware of the presence of the Etheric Christ in the world; more and more they will be influenced in waking life too by the direct working of the Good from the spiritual world. Whereas at the present time, the will is asleep by day, and man is only able to influence it indirectly through thought, in the course of the next millennia, through the power which from our time onwards is working in us under the aegis of Christ, it will come about that the deeds of men in waking consciousness too can be directly productive of Good.

The dream of Socrates, that virtue can be taught, will come true; more and more it will be possible on Earth not only for the intellect to be stimulated and energized by this teaching but for moral impulses to be spread abroad. Schopenhauer said, “To preach morality is easy; to establish it is very difficult.” Why is this? Because no morality has yet been spread by preaching. It is quite possible to recognise moral principles and yet not abide by them. For most people the Pauline saying holds good, that the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. This will change, because the moral fire streaming from the figure of Christ will intensify recognition of the need for moral impulses. Man will transform the earth by feeling with ever-increasing strength that morality is an essential part of it. In the future, to be immoral will be possible only for individuals who are goaded in this direction, who are possessed by evil demons, by Ahrimanic, Asuric Powers and more-over aspire to be so.

In time to come there will be on Earth a sufficient number of individuals who teach morality and at the same time sustain its principles; but there will also be those who by their own free decision surrender themselves to the evil Powers and thus enable an excess of evil to be pitted against a good humanity. Nobody will be forced to do this; it will lie in the free will of each individual.

Then will come the epoch when the Earth passes into conditions of which, as in so much else, Oriental Occultism and Mysticism alone give some idea. The moral atmosphere will by then have gathered strength. For many thousands of years Oriental Mysticism has spoken of this epoch, and since the coming of Gautama Buddha it has spoken with special emphasis about that future condition when the earth will be bathed in a “moral-ether-atmosphere.” Ever since the time of the ancient Rishis it was the great hope of Oriental Mysticism that this moral impulse would come to the Earth from Vishva-Karman or, as Zarathustra proclaimed, from Ahura Mazdao. Thus Oriental Mysticism foresaw that this moral impulse, this moral atmosphere, would come to the Earth from the Being we call the Christ. And it was upon Him, upon Christ, that the hopes of Oriental Mysticism were set.

Oriental Mysticism was able to picture the consequences of that event but not the actual form it would take. The mind could picture that within a period of 5,000 years after the great Buddha achieved Enlightenment, pure Akashic forms, bathed in fire, lit by the sun, would appear in the wake of One beyond the ken of Oriental Mysticism. A wonderful picture in very truth: that something would happen to make it possible for the Sons of Fire and of Light to move about the Earth, not in physically embodiment but as pure Akashic forms within the Earth's moral atmosphere. But then, so it was said, in 5,000 years after Gautama Buddha's Enlightenment, the Teacher will also be there to make known to men what the nature of these wonderful forms of pure Fire and Light are. This teacher—the Maitreya Buddha—will appear 3,000 years after our present era and will speak of the Christ Impulse.

Thus Oriental Mysticism unites with the Christian knowledge of the West to form a wonderfully beautiful unity. It is also disclosed that he who will appear three thousand years after our era as the Maitreya Buddha will have incarnated again and again on the Earth as a Bodhisattva, as the successor of Gautama Buddha. One of his incarnations was that of Jeshu ben Pandira, who lived a hundred years before the Christian era. The being who incarnated in Jeshu ben Pandira is he who will one day become the Maitreya Buddha, and who from century to century returns ever and again in a body of flesh, not yet as Buddha, but as Bodhisattva. Even now there proceeds from him who later on will be the Maitreya Buddha, the most significant teachings concerning the Christ Being and the Sons of Fire—the Agnishvattas—of Indian Mysticism.

The indications by which the Being who is to become the Maitreya Buddha can be recognised are common to all genuine Eastern mysticism and to Christian gnosis. The Maitreya Buddha who, in contrast to the Sons of Fire, will appear in a physical body as Bodhisattva, can be recognised by the fact that in the first instance his early development gives no intimation of the nature of the individuality within him. Only those possessed of understanding will recognise the presence of a Bodhisattva in such a human being between the ages of thirty and thirty-three, and not before. Something akin to a change of personality then takes place. The Maitreya Buddha will reveal his identity to humanity in the thirty-third year of his life. As Christ Jesus began His mission in His thirtieth year, so do the Bodhisattvas, who will continue to proclaim the Christ Impulse, reveal themselves—in the thirty-third year of their lives. And the Maitreya Buddha himself, as transformed Bodhisattva, speaking in powerful words of which no adequate idea can be given at the present time, will proclaim the great secrets of existence. He will speak in a language that has first to be created, for no human being to-day could formulate words such as those in which the Maitreya Buddha will address humanity. The reason why men cannot be addressed in this way at the present time is that the physical instrument for this form of speech does not yet exist. The teachings of the Enlightened One will not stream into men as teachings only, but will pour moral impulses into their souls. Words such as will then be spoken cannot yet be uttered by a physical larynx; in our time they can be present only in the spiritual worlds.

Anthroposophy is the preparation for everything that the future holds in store. Those who take the process of man's evolution seriously resolve not to allow the soul's development to come to a standstill but to ensure that this development will eventually enable the spiritual part of the Earth to become free, leaving the grosser part to fall away like a corpse—for men could frustrate the whole process. Those who desire evolution to succeed must acquire understanding of the life of the spirit through what we to-day call Anthroposophy. The cultivation of Anthroposophy thus becomes a duty; knowledge becomes something that we actually feel, something towards which we have responsibility. When we are inwardly aware of this responsibility and have this resolve, when the mysteries of the world arouse in us the wish to become Anthroposophists, then our feeling is true and right. But Anthroposophy must not be something that merely satisfies our curiosity; it must rather be something without which we cannot live. Only then are our feelings what they ought to be, only then do we live as building stones in that great work of construction which must be carried out in human souls and can embrace all mankind.

Anthroposophy is a revelation of world-happenings which will confront the men of the future, will confront our own souls whether still in the physical body or in the life between death and a new birth. The coming changes will affect us, no matter whether we are still living in the physical body or whether it has been laid aside. Understanding of these events must however be acquired during life in the physical body if they are to take effect after death. To those who acquire some understanding of the Christ while they are still living in the physical body, it will make no difference, when the moment comes for vision of the Christ, whether or not they have already passed through the gate of death. But if those who now reject any understanding of the Christ have already passed through the gate of death when this moment arrives, they must wait until their next incarnation, for such understanding cannot be acquired between death and rebirth. Once the foundation has been acquired, however, it endures, and then Christ becomes visible also during the period between death and the new birth.

And so Anthroposophy is not only something we learn for our physical life but is of essential value when we have laid aside the physical body at death.

This is what I wished to impart to you today as a help in answering many questions. Self-knowledge is difficult because man is such a complex being. The reason for this complexity is that he is connected with all the higher Worlds and Beings. We have within us shadow-images of the great Universe and all the members of our constitution—the physical, etheric, astral bodies and the ego—are worlds for Divine Beings. Our physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego form one world; the other is the higher World, the Heaven world. Divine-spiritual Worlds are the bodily members of the Beings of the higher spheres of cosmic existence.

Man is the complex being he is because he is a mirror-image of the spiritual world. Realisation of this should make him conscious of his intrinsic worth. But from the knowledge that although we are reflected images of the spiritual world we nevertheless fall far short of what we ought to be—from this knowledge we also acquire, as well as consciousness of our worth as human beings, the right attitude of modesty and humility towards the Macrocosm and its Gods.

Rudolf Steiner's Answers to Questions at the End of the Lecture

Translated by George Adams

Question: How are the words used by St. Paul, “to speak in tongues” (Cor. I: 12), to be understood?

Answer: In exceptional human beings it can happen that not only is the phenomenon of speaking present in the waking state, but that something otherwise present in sleep-consciousness only, flows into this speaking. This is the phenomenon to which St. Paul refers. Goethe refers to it in the same sense; he has written two very interesting treatises on the subject.

Question: How are Christ's words of consolation received and experienced?

Answer: Men will feel these words of consolation as though arising in their own hearts. The experience may also seem like physical hearing.

Question: What is the relation of chemical forces and substances to the spiritual world?

Answer: There are in the world a number of substances which can combine with or separate from each other. What we call chemical action is projected into the physical world from the world of Devachan—the realm of the Harmony of the Spheres. In the combination of two substances according to their atomic weights, we have a reflection of two tones of the Harmony of the Spheres. The chemical affinity between two substances in the physical world is like a reflection from the realm of the Harmony of the Spheres. The numerical ratios in chemistry are an expression of the numerical ratios of the Harmony of the Spheres, which has become dumb and silent owing to the densification of matter. If one were able to etherealise material substance and to perceive the atomic numbers the inner formative principle thereof, he would be hearing the Harmony of the Spheres.

We have the physical world, the astral world, the Lower Devachan and the Higher Devachan. If the body is thrust down lower even than the physical world, it comes into the sub-physical world, the lower astral world, the lower or evil Lower Devachan, and the lower or evil Higher Devachan. The evil astral world is the province of Lucifer, the evil Lower Devachan the province of Ahriman, and the evil Higher Devachan the province of the Asuras. When chemical action is driven down beneath the physical plane—into the evil Devachanic world—magnetism arises. When light is thrust down into the sub-material—that is to say, a stage deeper than the material world—electricity arises. If what lives in the Harmony of the Spheres is thrust down farther still, into the province of the Asuras, an even more terrible force—which it will not be possible to keep hidden very much longer—is generated. It can only be hoped that when this force comes to be known—a force we must conceive as being far, far stronger than the most violent electrical discharge—it can only be hoped that before some discoverer gives this force into the hands of humankind, men will no longer have anything un-moral left in them.

Question: What is electricity?

Answer: Electricity is light in the sub-material state. Light is there compressed to the utmost degree. An inward quality too must be ascribed to light; light is itself at every point in space. Warmth will expand in the three dimensions of space. In light there is a fourth; it is of fourfold extension—it has the quality of inwardness as a fourth dimension.

Question: What happens to the Earth's corpse?

Answer: As the residue of the Moon-evolution we have our present moon which circles around the Earth. Similarly there will be a residue of the Earth which will circle around Jupiter. Then these residues will gradually dissolve into the universal ether. On Venus there will no longer be any residue. Venus will manifest, to begin with, as pure Warmth, then it will become Light and then pass over into the spiritual world. The residue left behind by the Earth will be like a corpse. This is a path along which man must not accompany the Earth, for he would thereby be exposed to dreadful torments. But there are Beings who accompany this corpse, since they themselves will by that means develop to a higher stage.

Reflected as sub-physical world:

Astral World—the province of Lucifer
Lower Devachan—the province of Ahriman
Higher Devachan—the province of the Asuras

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Also known as The Present Crisis in Man's Development and The Science of the Spirit, Education, and the Practical Life. From: Lectures on Spiritual Essence and Its Working. Lecture 13 of 18 from the volume: Man's Responsibility for World Evolution through His Spiritual Connection with the Planet Earth and with the Stars Above.

The times in which we live are so earnest that at present it is not in any way appropriate to think of personal matters. Allow me, first of all, to express briefly my heartfelt thanks to your esteemed president for her kind words and then to pass on to what I believe I must tell you, for it is a long time since we saw one another in Holland.

The times in which we live and its conditions are much more earnest than most people of the present are consciously aware of.

Here we can speak of these conditions of our times from those standpoints which result from a long study of the spiritual science of Anthroposophy. We know that we live in an epoch whose characteristic peculiarity began to be evident in the 15th century. It was then that it slowly began to develop its peculiarities. Those who are initiated into the spiritual conditions of human evolution and can therefore have an insight into this course of development, know that the second half of the 19th century indicates a specially low point of human evolution in the modern and particularly in European culture. This low point may be characterised as the rise of a particular inthrust of egoism in all branches of civilised humanity, an egoism of a kind that was never there before. This wave of a special course of development then sent its ramifications into the 20th century, and now these ramifications undoubtedly continue to hold mankind under their spell.

In saying that a wave of egoism came over the whole modern civilisation, I do not speak trivially of what one generally defines as egoism, but I speak of egoism in a special sense, into which we shall penetrate a little in the course of this morning's considerations, and in a way that will be evident to those who are initiated in the true mysteries of more recent human evolution.

We already know the members constituting human nature. We know that the soul-members of human nature have been engaged for a long time in a special process of transformation, in a special course of development. We know that when we go back to very ancient times of human evolution we have to do with a particular forming of man's etheric body, during a very old time of development in India; a particular forming of the astral body then began, and a certain intermediate course of development took place during that epoch of European development which began about the year 747 in the south of Europe and which closed in the first thirty years of the 15th century. That time was the beginning of that epoch of human evolution in which we are still living. In the year 747 before the Mystery of Golgotha, began that phase of human evolution in which the so-called intellectual and understanding soul (Verstandes und Gemütsseele) unfolded. Everything that humanity still prizes to-day as Greek culture; developed through the fact that at that very time the intellectual or understanding soul was in an ascending line of development. However, while the wonderful Greek culture was unfolding, that which we call intellectual or understanding soul was in an ascending line of development. It had not yet reached its climax. For such points are always in a certain way times of probation for the evolution of humanity. For the sake of their development, the Greeks had to pass through what one might call the youthful freshness of the intellectual or understanding soul. The Greek culture, so much admired by posterity, came into being out of this youthful freshness of an intellect that was not yet permeated by egoism, out of this youthful freshness of the human understanding. Of the characteristics pertaining to the intellectual soul, the Latin and Roman culture then took over something that was in a descending line of development and decadent. Those who have a deeper comprehension for that which lived in Roman culture know: There the intellect already reaches its culmination; there the intellect rises to a high point. On that account the Romans developed such abstract ideas; on that account the Romans developed something that did not as yet exist in the whole ancient East, that did not even exist, in the sense known in Europe, in the Greek culture: The Romans developed the ideas of jurisprudence, the juridical concepts.

To-day we consider the world very superficially and we translate our thoughts on “Jus”, on jurisprudence, which, in reality are the outcome only of the Roman intellectual soul, into something which we assume to have already existed in the ancient East, for instance in Hammurabi, and so forth. But that is not the case. The Decalogue, the Ten Commandments as well as the contents of other documents of that time, were, after all, something quite different from that which constitutes our modern juridical concepts. These are something abstract, something that is no longer so close to the human soul. Everything that thus constitutes the development of the intellectual soul reached its climax during a period in the civilisation of Europe which has really been studied very little from an external historical standpoint, although it is extraordinarily important and significant for those who wish to study human evolution in the meaning of spiritual science.

That striking year to which we can draw attention as being specially significant for European development is the year 333 after the Mystery of Golgotha. The year 333 after the Mystery of Golgotha is the middle of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. It is that point of time when a fluctuating knowledge of the universe lived in Europe simultaneously with a fluctuating knowledge of humanity. These had nothing of the penetrating character of the knowledge of the universe that the Greeks still possessed and no proper comprehension of man's inner world.

We find instead that man sways either towards the longing for an extensive knowledge of the universe, or towards the longing for self-knowledge, knowledge of his own self. The human soul of the European peoples indeed passed through a great deal during the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. Roman life was then entering into its decay; it bequeathed to European humanity nothing but its language; it left behind its more or less fundamental material of culture. The life of humanity thus entered the second half of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, lasting up to the 15^th century, when our present epoch began.

From the preceding epoch, in which most of us in some way passed through one or more earthly lives, we brought over—partly through physical heredity, but particularly through the fact that we ourselves formerly were those incarnated souls—into the fifth post-Atlantean epoch the inheritance of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, and we took over this inheritance. This inheritance of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch lives in everything that constitutes our present civilisation.

We worked the intellect, the thinking, into our consciousness soul. That means a great deal. At the beginning of the fifth epoch, the consciousness soul enabling man to really permeate, really grasp his ego, first took hold of his thinking, his life of representations and his intellect. Humanity thus became intelligent and clever, but clever within the consciousness soul; within the evolution of humanity, this implies the finest possible elaboration of EGOISM.

We should not only rebuke this epoch of egoism, we should not only fall upon it with criticism, but in spite of the fact that it brings with it so many temptations and leads man into great soul-dangers and even into external danger, we should recognise this age of egoism as the one in which ego-consciousness comes to the fore with special incisiveness.

Man can thus take into himself a real feeling of freedom. This feeling of freedom is something that none of us possessed in our previous incarnations, in the earlier epochs of human evolution. We had to pass through egoism, that presents so many temptations, in order to reach that longing for freedom which is the prerogative of modern humanity. One of the most important things in Anthroposophy is the knowledge that we had to take in something in order to climb over an important stage in human evolution: the stage leading to the DEVELOPMENT OF FREEDOM. For this very reason we should be aware that this crossing over is connected, with many temptations, with many dangers of humanity, both soul-spiritually and bodily. A knowledge going in the direction of Anthroposophy must enable us to take in fully the feeling of freedom, but at the same time to ennoble it, to permeate it again with a spiritual knowledge of the universe, which—in spite of the now existing mature ego-feeling, mature ego-consciousness—induces mankind to solve tasks that are not only egoistic tasks, but tasks pertaining to the whole evolution of humanity, indeed to the evolution of the whole earth, to the evolution of the whole universe.

In this connection we are now facing a great turning point in the whole civilisation of more recent times. The time of probation has indeed come! Great tasks confront mankind. But the recognition of these tasks is extremely difficult and is rendered still more difficult through the fact that we have just passed through the age of the great egoism.

We say that we sleep from the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking up. That is right. We are then in a state of dulled consciousness. Most of you know sleep only in its negative aspect, that it dulls consciousness. Yet we do not judge the waking state in the same way. The time of being awake, the time from the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking up, was really quite different in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. To-day people believe that they are awake in the same way in which, for instance, the people living about the time of the Mystery of Golgotha were awake. That is not the case. Their whole soul-constitution was different. Man was then awake in a different way. He was much more strongly conscious of his body.

You see, modern man really knows very little indeed of his bodily processes. The Greeks, not the Greeks of a later time, but the Greeks of the pre-Socratic and pre-Platonic times, still knew a great deal of the processes of their own body. For example, the really cultured Greek looked up to the sun. From the sun he received the light. He received at the same time a feeling that he was drawing in something etheric, that the light was being led on into his inner being. And when he was thinking, he said: The light, the sun thinks within me. The Greek of pre-Socratic times still felt this in a living way. He did not think so abstractly about thinking as we do to-day. He thought: The sun thinks within me: it allows its light to be drawn in by me. The light that shines upon the things outside, that makes the things outside visible, is active within me, by reflecting itself, as it were, within its own being, so that thoughts spring up in me. For the Greek, the thoughts within him were the light of the sun. At the same time, they were for him that element which lived in the macrocosm thanks to the influence of divine-spiritual beings. At the same time, they were for him that which really raised him to the Divine, above his ordinary dignity as a human being. He felt himself lifted above the earthly, when he thus experienced the sun's light within him as thinking. And when a particularly cultured Greek ate, he indeed considered his food, in which he took in something that he did not receive directly from the sun, but that came from the earth, as a necessity of life, yet at the same time he felt himself changing into the food, that became he himself, as it passed through his mouth, his oesophagus and digestive organs. He felt that he was one with the food, in the same way in which he felt that he was one with the sunlight. While he was digesting, he felt the earth's gravity. He felt, as it were, similar to the serpent, that he did not as yet highly appreciate, but that he still observed rather timidly—the serpent that twists away from the earth and digests in a particularly visible way, after having swallowed its food. That is how the Greek experienced what went on in his body: whether he experienced what was thinking within him as the sun's bright light, or whether he experienced within himself what chained him to the earth; i.e. the taking in of food. Through the intimate way in which his understanding was connected with his body the Greek felt with particular energy that which also lived within him as physical human being. You may also deduce this from the following:

When we paint human beings to-day in the ordinary way, as numerous painters of the present generation have done year after year, decade after decade in painting portraits, we really lie. We look at people outwardly and believe that then we bring forth something of what we experience. It is not true at all that we can experience something in that way! We could experience it only if we were able to conjure up within us the whole way of identifying ourselves feelingly with the whole of Nature as human beings, as it was the case with the Greeks. First of all, we must learn this anew, along an entirely different path than that of the Greeks.

Since the middle of the 15th century, we have acquired in an abstract-theoretical way a soul-constitution that no longer allows us to really penetrate livingly into our body, but that lives instead in concepts that do not stand visibly before us, because we have conquered thinking for the egoity, for the ego. We should realise this. And we should realise that we must once more take in spirituality from an anthroposophical spiritual science, so that the ego may once more be filled with something, and so that that which really lives within us may once more—but now in a different way—enter our life: that which the Greeks experienced in an immediate, elemental way; but that could not continue.

When the Greek walked, he walked as if led by a necessity of Nature, like the lightning flashing through the clouds, or the rolling thunder! He knew nothing whatever of freedom, but he knew man! Indeed, he knew more about man than we think he did. For instance, he knew how to coin words clearly indicating that man still knew something of the connection between the soul-spiritual and the bodily-physical. The Greek words, or those derived from the Greek, indicate even to-day far more than those based on our therapeutic or pathological conceptions, that are no longer able to understand anything. Hypochondria for instance, means cartilaginosity of the abdomen. It is a name that the Greeks found through their full knowledge of the fact that in hypochondric people the activity of the soul-spiritual gives rise to cartilaginous formations in certain parts of the body. These names mean far more than modern men suppose, and more than can in any way be grasped through modern medicine, with its abstract way of thinking, even though it experiments, dissects, etc. We must first take up again everything that is real, that once more enables us to have an insight into the world! It is the task of a spiritual scientific deepening to reach once more real facts, realities.

You see, during the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, in which the human beings passed through what constitutes, as it were, a physical self-knowledge, an insight into the human body, during that time—one might say approximately, during the first third of that time, occurs the greatest event of the earth's evolution: the Mystery of Golgotha.

What is the condition of the time in which the Mystery of Golgotha occurred?—The further we go back, the more we find in ancient times—in the Greek epoch, the Egyptian-Chaldean, the Persian and the ancient Indian epoch—this immediate knowledge of the whole human being. Then, this knowledge of the whole human being disappears. The last remains of that knowledge may be found at the time when the Mystery of Golgotha appeared. Something of that instinctive, ancient knowledge of man still existed at that time. For instance, the personalities described in the Gospels as the Apostles, or the Disciples of the Lord, still possessed something of that old instinctive knowledge, which lived in their souls altogether instinctively, not clearly. Others too possessed such a knowledge. At that time it was to a great extent decadent, but at any rate it still existed. It was dying away, burning out, but enough remained of that ancient knowledge to enable a great number of men of that time to grasp the Mystery of Golgotha accordingly. This is particularly evident when the apostle Paul entered the evolution of the times, the apostle Paul who was initiated by divine powers and to whom the spiritual world became visible.

All this gave rise to conditions of time which still enabled man to understand the Mystery of Golgotha in a certain naive, instinctive way. Many people had already entered a later phase of development. Particularly the cultured Greeks and the cultured Romans had concepts that were already far too abstract in order [to] grasp the Mystery of Golgotha in a really living way. Yet certain people had preserved the last remains of an old clairvoyant knowledge, particularly clairvoyant traditions, and they were still able to grasp that a super-earthly power, the Christ, had connected Himself with an earthly man, Jesus of Nazareth.

The year 333 after the Mystery of Golgotha, was, as it were, the year in which last stragglers of those who were still able to have a real understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha could be found in Europe. But these stragglers could not understand it, for instance, through our anthroposophical spiritual science, for this did not, of course, exist at that time. They grasped it through an old knowledge that had remained from the Gnosis, and such like. A certain spiritual knowledge still existed. An ancient human inheritance lived in the human soul and this enabled man to grasp the Mystery of Golgotha.

What has remained of the Mystery of Golgotha? Intellectual traditions!—The Gnosis became theology, a mere logical way of grasping the divine. Theo-Logy: a mere logical way of grasping the divine, no longer a contemplation of the divine!

Since the year 333, the capacity of contemplating the Mystery of Golgotha in a direct way became more and more decadent, until the fateful time of the 9th century, when, in the year 869, the Eighth General Oecumenic Council at Constantinople gave out the dogma that man does not consist of body, soul and spirit, but that it is instead a Christian's duty to acknowledge that man consists only of body and soul, and that the soul possesses a few spiritual qualities. At that time, the trichotomy, as it was called, the only possible knowledge of the human being, according to which man consists of body, soul and spirit, was done away with dogmatically, and a dogma was enforced, according to which a Christian who truly believes must acknowledge that man only consists of body and soul.

Modern philosophers frequently state that their philosophy is based on an unprejudiced knowledge, and they speak on the one hand of the body, and on the other of the soul. They speak of the spirit in a very phraseological manner at the most, for they do not know the spirit. They would only know it, if they recognised the spiritual science of Anthroposophy. The “impartial philosophy” that is now being taught to such an extent—what is it, in reality?—It is the result of the dogma pronounced by the Eighth Oecumenic Council in the year 869.

We must see through this. We must be quite clear that when the modern civilisation arose, and even in the second half of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, it was considered as dangerous to speak of the spirit and to draw attention to it. But at the present time it is necessary that we should draw mankind's attention to the spirit,—the spirit that has been declared to be the devil for a long, long time, within the civilisation of Europe! After the year 333, nothing but traditions remained of the old Christological knowledge—nothing but traditions!

Everything that constitutes art shows us even more clearly that it has remained tradition! Observe, for instance, Cimabue's paintings; there you will see a world that took on a completely different aspect in Giotto's paintings. In Cimabue's paintings lived something that may also be seen in Dante, something that could no longer be experienced by the human beings of a later time! Later on, this living within a spiritual world, that may still be seen in Cimabue, ceased. Later on, it was a hypocrisy to paint a golden background, but for a Cimabue this was quite natural. And now observe a Russian icon; it is not in any way painted after a model, for it is something in which the old traditions are still alive, traditions that come from a clairvoyance still existing at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha and enabling man to understand the Mystery of Golgotha.

Then came the time in which the traditions were maintained by using external instruments of power. And then came the 19th century, in which the ordinary soul-activity that brought forth such significant results in natural science and technology, was also applied to theology. But what became of theology through this? Christ-Jesus, the incarnation of a Being that does not belong to the earthly became “the simple man of Nazareth,” looked upon indeed as the most perfect man, but not as the bearer of a super-earthly Being. Theology became naturalistic. The more our modern theologians look upon Jesus of Nazareth as a human being, the less they feel induced to pursue Christological ideas, and the happier they are! Even in theology they do not wish to rise beyond the description of the man, Jesus of Nazareth, they do not wish to rise to an understanding of Christ as a super-earthly Being that dwelt in the man, Jesus of Nazareth.

To-day, those who have an insight into world-events from a spiritual standpoint, must see many things differently from the way in which they are judged by people who only see them outwardly. Central Europe, that is now passing through such a tragic destiny, was able—among other things which cannot be discussed here—to accept Adolf Harnack as a great scientist; the very man who reached the point of saying that God the Son should not be included in the Gospels! They should be read, he says, in such a way as to find in them only the man, Jesus of Nazareth, and this man's teachings concerning God the Father. Harnack's theology was intended to do away with our feelings of reverence for the spirituality of Christ. The theology which Harnack established in Central Europe really signifies the negation of Christianity, the denial of Christianity; it signifies the setting up of a world-conception clearly stating that we do not wish to have anything to do with the spirituality of Christ. It is significant to observe what has thus swept over modern humanity, with the result that the most distorted views now exist concerning the most important ideas of human life.

To-day we know what sleep is, from the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking up. Yet we do not, as a rule, observe the other kind of sleep, in which we live from the moment of waking up to the moment of falling asleep, when we walk about in our everyday life, steeped in illusions and dreams in regard to its most important facts. Indeed, in these modern times, we do not only sleep when we lie in our bed at night (this is actually the better kind of sleep), but we are also asleep in the sphere of egoism, when we lock ourselves up in our inner being, unwilling to know our human body and, at the same time, unwilling to progress to a spiritual self-knowledge. We sleep another kind of sleep during the time from falling asleep to waking up.

In order to understand this, we must indeed observe the nature of sleep from the moment of falling asleep to that of waking up. What does then take place with the human being? Why does the modern intellect believe that as far as the human constitution is concerned sleep is the same for modern man as it was for the ancient Greeks?—The Greeks were not awake in the same way as we, and the Egyptians even less so, nor did they sleep as we do. This soul-constitution in particular should be studied for every epoch of time.

When, during sleep, the human soul, that is to say, the ego and the astral body, loosens itself from the physical and etheric bodies that remain lying on the bed—where does the soul, that is the ego and the astral body, really dwell while we are asleep?

Superficial explanations that a cloud may be seen hovering over the physical body (which is quite true, as far as an altogether external form of clairvoyance is concerned), do not suffice. This is not sufficient, for we must observe what takes place inwardly. We must observe what the soul really experiences from the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking up. In these modern times, the human soul then passes through experiences that are also lived through by the souls that are not as yet incarnated on the earth. Consider the following: Take a case that came to my notice just now, before I began my lecture: A daughter was born to an anthroposophist; one year ago, this little girl lived in the spiritual world as body and soul, and has since then made the endeavour to descend to the physical world. All those decades, that make us so much older than this little newly born girl, during all those years it lived in the spiritual world. And while we were asleep, we lived from the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking up, in the world in which the little girl dwelt before conception, or birth. That is the world in which we dwell, when we are asleep, and there, the souls that are not yet incarnated pass through many experiences. While we are asleep, we pass with them through the fifth post-Atlantean age and through events resembling their own experiences.

From the moment of waking up to the moment of falling asleep, we live, on the other hand, in a world that we sleep away during our waking life; we live in everything that we inherited from our past earthly existences. We live together with what has remained behind from ancient India, Persia, or Egypt; we live with what we have experienced spiritually here on earth, and this is cramped together egoistically in our inner being. We bring it along with us into our present incarnation. During the day, we live with all these things, and sleep away the present. Indeed, the present contains many things that can only be grasped spiritually. We cramp ourselves egoistically in ideas that come from the past and adhere to them obstinately even in our language, in our speech. Languages contain a great store of ancient crystallized wisdom. Yet we rebel against any kind of influence that may be exercised upon our souls by this ancient store of wisdom. For instance, to-day we use the words “Messer”, knife, or “Schere”, scissors. When we use the word “Schere”, scissors, we do not as a rule think that it comes from a kind of “Scheren”, or shearing, that is announced in every barber's shop! And when we use the word “Messer”, knife, we do not think that it is really based on a moral idea, for it is connected with “Maass”, measure, and “Zumessen”, to mete out, or cut to measure. When a knife was used in ancient times, it was really used to “mete out” a gift for someone. A store of wisdom lies crystallized in the words we use, and this ancient spiritual life that is contained in the words now uttered so thoughtlessly, lives in the depths of our being. Whenever we speak, we really experience the life of ancient epochs.

Spiritually, we pass through ancient epochs of the earth, from the moment of waking up to the moment of falling asleep, but we pass through them in a sleeping condition. And from the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking up, we pass through events that are connected with the descent of human souls to their life on earth.

You see, these are realities, these are truths. These realities should be well impressed upon us, if we do not only wish to become acquainted with the forces of decay, but also with the forces of growth and progress. It would be so much better if, before going to sleep in the evening, a greater number of people were to do other things than those which they are accustomed to do! Consider what many people generally do, as last thing, before they go to bed! Yet a modern man should say to himself: I wish to enter the world that contains the forces of growth and progress, it is the world in which I can experience those forces that lead the human souls down to the earth, a world in which I can experience those forces spiritually.

From the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking up we experience the forces pertaining to the future. For that reason, we should have a kind of craving for the teachings that speak of a spiritual world and that enable us to be conscious of the experiences of souls that are in a condition (but consciously) resembling that of souls who are asleep here on earth. The impulses for the progress of civilisation, for the healing of civilisation, must come from that world! The spiritual, political and economic impulses that should unfold as healing powers for our civilisation must come from that world! It is necessary, at the present time, that we should once more acquire the possibility of grasping the Mystery of Golgotha, of grasping it in a spiritual way.

What is the essential, or let us say, one of the essential things (for there are, of course, many essential things in it), in the Mystery of Golgotha?—That a God, a super-earthly Being, took up His abode in the man, Jesus of Nazareth. Beings of His kind have one characteristic quality: they cannot die. All those Beings of the higher Hierarchies, described in my “OCCULT SCIENCE”, the Angels, Archangels, etc. up to the highest Beings, the Cherubim, Seraphim, etc. do not die (read the description of their life's course in my books), they do not die as men die. What did Christ take upon Himself, Christ Who came from the higher Hierarchies?—He died within a human body. You see, here we have significant forces that pass over into the evolution of humanity upon the earth, Christ died in a human body; he passed through the experience of death, an experience unknown to the other gods who are connected with the earth. Up to the year 333, it was still possible to grasp this truth to a certain extent. Now we must learn to grasp it anew! We should grasp anew that a super-earthly Being shared with us the experience of death, thus passing over into the development of the earth. Yet at the same time we should have the great modesty of recognising that the experiences of this Being highly surpass what can be experienced through the soul-constitution of a human being.

The Christ descended from worlds where death is unknown. What Beings serve the Christ?—Among those who serve Him, there is not one who could make the same sacrifice, not one who could have come down to the earth, in order to pass through death. Beings that belong to the hierarchy of the Angeloi, right up to the higher Hierarchies, Beings connected with the evolution of the earth, are Christ's servants. We cannot perceive them, if we do not rise to a super-earthly knowledge of the higher Hierarchies. Through a knowledge of the spiritual worlds we should seek that which leads us to Christ. Spiritual science is needed above all in order to attain a new knowledge of Christ. For Christ is here, upon the earth, and He is surrounded by the world of the higher Hierarchies. Man's great temptation in modern times is the modern natural science with its great triumphs and its admission of purely external forces of Nature. Yet behind all these forces of Nature live the spiritual Beings! The assertions of natural science are certainly right, nevertheless the spiritual Beings that serve Christ live behind the forces of Nature, thinking and directing them. Christ lives in everything that constitutes the development of the earth. Super-earthly Beings serve Him—but these super-earthly Beings can only be recognised through spiritual science. Consequently an extremely important task evolves upon spiritual science: the renewal of Christianity.

All this shows you that to-day we cannot pursue spiritual science merely as a personal concern. To-day spiritual science concerns civilised humanity as a whole. Through an inner necessity, spiritual science was from the very beginning pursued in the circle that afterwards obtained the name of “Anthroposophical Society”, in a different way than in the Theosophical Society. The whole constitution of the Theosophical Society had, from the very outset, a sectarian character, something that reckoned with the egoism of modern times. Anthroposophy therefore had the task of taking into account the consciousness of modern times, that which constitutes the external culture of humanity, and of pouring into it the results of a spiritual manner of contemplation. Little differences and strifes are of no importance whatever in the face of such a task. It was essential for me to maintain the purity of a spiritual movement that reckons with the whole science of modern times. Whether this or that person may or may not accept one or the other truth, is of no importance to me. Even though the whole world may abuse spiritual science and criticize it, I do not consider this as essential, for the essential thing is that the spiritual science that I advance should really harmonize fully, with the modern, scientific mentality, with the moral conscience of modern times. For this reason, I had to publish my “Philosophy of Spiritual Activity” before revealing the truths of Karma. I have often listened with great pain to theosophists who said: If this or that man suffers, if he suffers socially and belongs to a lower class or caste, it is his Karma and he has deserved it. This interpretation of the idea of Karma corresponded to the egoistical requirements of men who lived in the 19th and 20th century. Yet they did not think that we do not only live through our present life on earth, but that we shall also live through a future life. To-day we should not always look back on what we once possessed in past lives on earth, but we should also consider that in future lives on earth we shall be looking back on what we are passing through now—and this will then be an entirely new experience. Freedom fully harmonizes with the idea of Karma ... Everything that appears in the account-book of life is karmically connected.

You see, if I reckon up the debit and credit sides of destiny and strike the balance, I obtain life's balance; but this does not entail that the single items are subjected to the necessity of Nature. Just as the single items of a commercial account book do not depend on diligence, and so forth, and finally enable us to strike a balance, so freedom can very well be connected with the idea of Karma. We should not adopt an easy fatalistic idea when advancing the view of Karma as a fully justified idea. Spiritual science should therefore be in full harmony also with the conscience and the moral attitude of modern humanity. For that reason it was necessary to work more extensively with spiritual science, also during the time in which the catastrophe broke out in regard to everything that has been caused by the egoism of modern humanity, both soul-spiritually and physically.

Would it have been honest and straightforward to continue preaching that spiritual science can help mankind, and yet advance no social ideas at a time when social requirements became as urgent as they are to-day? Would human love not have progressed in the direction of a social knowledge? Shall we content ourselves with declamations on human love? Or should we not rather progress to real social impulses?

The fact that we can only see Christ's ministering spirits, clearly when we look into the spiritual world, is a result and a fundamental knowledge of spiritual science, a result of what I have told you to-day concerning waking and sleeping, concerning sleeping wakefulness and the awakening from sleep through spiritual science. Spiritual science will also enable us to grasp once more the Mystery of Golgotha, in accordance with a modern mentality. And as a result, spiritual science must not restrict itself to some sectarian group, but if must be brought out into the world in the best possible way, according to our capacities and to our place in life! The centre at Dornach was not intended to be a sectarian centre, but one that renders fruitful every branch of science and life, social life and artistic life. Anthroposophy and its spiritual science must become a concern of the great masses of humanity, although its most important things and that which penetrates into the innermost depths of our heart, awakening our inner forces, are pursued within the narrower circles of our Groups. There, in those Groups, we gather forces, in order to develop a certain higher knowledge, which we must first take in there. It is a knowledge that must be developed, for to-day we live in a time in which mankind really does not know what it is seeking; it sleeps away the most important things of life. Nevertheless it is a time in which mankind seeks after a new knowledge of the spirit! Let us feel this deeply, as pioneers, I might say, of a spiritual renewal—as Anthroposophists.

For that reason I so warmly wish that also the Groups in Holland might pursue an earnest, diligent and untiring study of the knowledge that can be obtained in our movement, from out the spiritual worlds. I warmly wish that our Groups should study diligently. These studies should constitute the point of departure for bringing out Anthroposophy into the world—and each one must do this in his own way—so that mankind's longings may be satisfied through a spiritual contemplation directed towards Anthroposophy. For that reason, let us grasp the nature of the longings of modern man. Let us not think that we become materialistic, when we spiritualize matter! And let us clearly realise that mankind would face a great misfortune, if it fails to obtain the true knowledge that is able to avert that misfortune.

The Eighth Oecumenic Council of the year 869 drove away from human knowledge the contemplation of the spirit. Those who have an entirely materialistic mentality seek to prepare the next stage: they also wish to eliminate the soul and to establish the general dogmatic knowledge that man only consists of the body. Certain devilish initiates are now excogitating means of educating the human being materialistically, of preparing him materialistically as a body; they seek to attain their end not by means of psychic influences, but by means of ingredients and substances taken from Nature. They plan an experimental psychology and seek to adopt principles that are not those of the Waldorf School (for the Waldorf School principles are spiritual protests against modern materialism), and they already undertake all manner of experiments in order to test man's capacities. This is but a preliminary stage of what they really aim at. The child is no longer to be educated psychically, but with the aid of external, material means, so that its capacities may develop in a bodily way. Thus man would gradually become an automaton, unless we bear in mind at the right moment that the path that led to the elimination of the spirit must not be continued in the direction of the elimination of the soul as well. We must instead follow the opposite direction of the Eighth Oecumenic Council; we must once more follow the path enabling us to find the spirit anew, and to cultivate in human life, in every sphere of practical human life, only what we can discover through the spirit.

This is what I wish to implant into your souls, what I wish to implant into your hearts, my dear friends, after our long absence. Cultivate spiritual science first of all as a concern of the heart, in the way in which it should be cultivated individually, so that we may progress. Cultivate what you have thus taken in, and then bring it out to humanity in every sphere of life, bring out what you have thus taken in! You will then gradually find the path enabling you, in the present difficult and earnest time of probation, to do the right thing for humanity, according to your place in life.

We have been considering the human being in relation to the cosmos. To people who do not know anything beyond the present-day way of looking at things it must seem rather absurd to hear of a link being made between the essential nature of the human being and the essential nature of the cosmos, and I am certain that the majority of people will consider this to be quite unscientific. Yet when we think of the spiritual streams of today there is an urgent need to draw attention to exactly the kind of thing we have been considering and to do so quite energetically. For these things may fairly be said to be entirely in line with modern thinking. The problem is, modern thinkers are rejecting them with great vehemence, which is doing untold harm to the life of mind and spirit.

To begin with, we’ll sum up what I have been presenting in recent lectures. We have been considering the human form as the outcome of something the causes of which must be looked for among the fixed stars, and particularly the constellations of the zodiac as their representatives. We found that to understand the human form we must first of all look to the zodiac; its twelve constellations make it possible for us to understand the human form in every detail.

To understand the levels of human life we must look to the planetary system for the elements which will enable us to do so.

We then moved on from understanding the levels of life to understanding the soul principle. There we had to go to the human being himself, to the form he has been given and to that which lives in him. We also looked at the thinking, feeling and will aspects of the inner life in relation to the human form and the levels of life. Yesterday we attempted to look for the element of mind and spirit in the inner life. With the soul principle we move from the cosmic periphery to life on earth as such—that is, if we consider the soul principle during life between birth and death. We are able to approach it by considering its true relationship to the human form and to human life.

Yesterday we found that the spirit, which human beings only experience in images, has to be looked for in the sphere of the soul. If I may put it like this, we are coming down to earth from heaven. To consider the human form we have to go as far as the fixed stars; to consider human life, we need to go to the sphere of the planets; to consider the human soul in its relationships between birth and death, we must first of all descend to earth. Thus the human being becomes a whole for us in his relationship to the cosmos.

Now if we really appreciate all this, we shall be able on the basis of it to draw the borderline between animal and human nature. The way it may be done is as follows. If we consider the principle which can be understood in relation to the zodiac and how it is in humans and in animals, a difference emerges. But to see the whole of it we need to consider how the zodiac, the planetary sphere and the earth, with everything presented in yesterday’s lecture, act on human beings and on animals. Outside the human being the physical world does not take the form it does in the human body. We find it in the forms of the mineral world, a world very different from the human physical body. This is because in the human being the physical principle is clothed in an etheric and an astral principle and in I nature, all of which change the physical principle, adapting it to suit their needs. In the physical world outside the human being we see the physical principle as it presents itself when not imbued with etheric, astral and I nature.

The inherent form principle of the mineral is the crystal, a polyhedral form.

To grasp this form we must first of all consider the physical matter which has developed out of the forces which are active in the mineral sphere. We have to visualize that in an elongated mineral specific forces act in this direction to elongate the mineral (see crystal on the right). The forces acting in this direction (horizontal line in the centre) are perhaps less powerful, or we may say they act to make the mineral more slender in this direction, and so on. In short, in order to talk about minerals at all, we have to visualize these forces being at specific angles to each other, acting in specific directions, irrespective of whether they come from inside or outside. And above all we have to visualize these forces as existing in the universe, at least to the point where they take effect in the sphere of the earth.

Being effective, they must also have an effect on the human physical body, which means it, too, must have the inherent tendency to become polyhedral. It does not actually become polyhedral because it still has its ether body and astral body which do not allow the human being to turn into a cube, octahedron, tetrahedron, icosahedron, and so on. The tendency is there, however, and it would be fair to say: In so far as human beings are physical beings, they tend towards becoming polyhedral. So if you are glad that you do not have to walk around as a cube, a tetrahedron or octahedron, the reason is that the powers of the astral and ether bodies act against the forces—octahedral, cubic, or whatever—inside you.

Now we are not only a physical body but also have an ether body. Through it we are in essence at one with the plant world. Through the physical body we represent the mineral, or physical, world around us, through the ether body the plant world around us.

Plants are also part of the physical world and therefore have the tendency to be polyhedral, but they add to it a tendency to be spherical. Circumstances may occasionally cause minerals to occur in spherical form, but this is not their true form. There has to be scree, or something of that kind, if a mineral is to be spherical.

In plants, every single cell seeks to achieve spherical form; in humans only the head goes a little in that direction. We owe this spherical form essentially to plant nature. The fact that not all plants are spherical is in the first place due to their having to fight against polyhedral form, which has its own outcome, and secondly to the plant form having also to fight against a cosmic, astral principle. You will remember from earlier lectures that a cosmic, astral principle presses down on the plant from above. All this modifies the spherical form. You also get spheres imposed on spheres. But the essential plant form is a sphere.

Seeking to achieve spherical form the plant assumes the form of the earth itself. As you know, the earth is a sphere in the cosmos, and so is every drop of water. Only the mineral parts of the earth are polyhedral. As a whole, the earth is spherical. The plant, or the life principle, therefore seeks to attain to the spherical form and in doing so is really trying to recreate the form of the earth.

Let us now go higher and consider what the human being is because of the astral body. Here the human being is something representing the animal nature found in the animal world. In the physical, mineral nature of man we look for the polyhedral form, in human plant nature for the spherical form which reflects the planet earth (Fig. 28). Animal nature can be understood if we do not stop at the spherical form but add something to this form. We have to add pockets, or sacs, to the spherical form, like this:

It is in the nature of the animal form that a pocket element breaks up the sphere, with pocket-like inroads made everywhere. Consider your eye sockets—two pockets coming in from the outside. Consider your nostrils—two pockets. And finally consider the whole of your digestive tract from mouth to stomach. It is possible to arrive at this if you let a pocket develop, starting at the mouth, which goes all the way down.

You always get the pocket form added to the spherical form when the transition has to be made from plant to animal form.

We can come to understand the pocket form if we lift our eyes from the earth to the planetary system. You will find it easy to see that the earth seeks to give its own form to everything that lives on it. But a planet acting from outside counteracts the earth forces and makes pockets in the spherical form given by the earth. The different creatures of the animal kingdom are provided with such sacs, or pockets, in a wide variety of ways. Consider the planets and the different ways in which they act. Saturn makes a different kind of inroad than Jupiter or Mars. The lion is equipped with a different kind of inner sac-nature for the simple reason that the planetary influences on it are different from those on the camel, for instance. So in this case we have sacs being formed.

But in animals—and this means above all in higher animals, for the situation is different with the lower animals—and also in human beings something arises which does not merely come from the planetary realm, so that we are able to say: The essence of both animal and human nature is to have more than just the pocket form. This would be the case if there were only the planets and if the firmament of fixed stars had no influence. Something is added to the pocket form. In many situations people are satisfied when they have not just a pocket but something in it. And it is indeed the case that it is the essence of the animal aspect of human nature to have a pocket with something to fill it. So we have a spherical form with a pocket and the pocket is filled.

You only need to look at the sense organs, the eye. You have first of all a pocket, which is the eye socket, and then something to fill it. And this fulfilment,²⁵ which occurs particularly in the sense organs, relates to the zodiac just as the pocket form relates to the planetary sphere. Human beings have the most complete animal organization in this respect, which is also why they have twelve pockets with their fillings, though this is disguised in all kinds of ways. This is why I had to list twelve sense organs in my Anthroposophy.²⁶

We can now go back and ask: Which cosmic principle relates to the polyhedral quality? You see, if we consider the earth, it has the life form if seen as a whole, and if it consisted entirely of water it would only show this form. But all kinds of disruptions enter into the water. You can observe these disruptions in the tides, for instance. There the water is given configuration. Next, let us look back to earlier stages of configuration for the liquid earth, when it first began to develop solid elements. It is still possible to see today that the tides are connected with the moon, and everything polyhedral which becomes part of the configuration of the earth relates to the moon.

Thus we are able to say: The polyhedral or physical nature of human beings is connected with the moon, their vegetable or etheric nature with the earth, their astral nature, which would produce the pocket form, with the planetary sphere, and the filling of the pocket with the zodiac.

What I have written on the board applies in a different way to humans than it does to animals. You see, with animals it is truly the case that the heavens only have significance as far as the sphere of the zodiac, meaning everything which lies within it. Anything which lies outside it holds no significance for the animal. Ancient wisdom was therefore quite right in calling it the “zodiac”,²⁷ for it was also able to say: Everything outside the zodiac in the universe might just as well not exist, for the animals on earth would still be exactly as they are. Only what lies below the zodiac, together with the earth and the moon, has significance for animals. What lies beyond the zodiac has, however, significance for human beings, for it influences the filling of the pockets.

For the animal we have to say: Everything which lies inside the zodiac influences the filling of the pockets. We therefore have to go into the zodiac itself and then we are able to explain how the filling of the pockets presents itself. With humans, we have to go beyond the zodiac (Fig. 34, brown) if we want to explain what goes on in the sphere of the senses, for example. In this respect, human beings go beyond the zodiac, animals do not.

It is also the case that in animals, the planetary sphere as such has a direct influence on the pockets. As the pockets continue inwards, to form the organs, animal organs are perfect reflections of the principles relating to the planetary sphere. Human beings again go a little further and we are able to say that in human beings, the region closer to the zodiac influences the pockets.

In animals, the earth has a direct effect on everything tending to assume spherical form. This is not possible in human beings, who otherwise would be animals, with a tendency to be spherical. In a sense, animals tend towards the spherical form. Here (Fig. 35) we have the backbone, then the legs. Animals are however prevented from becoming a complete sphere.

The back bone forms part of the sphere. Human beings tend to move away from the earth principle, just as they have moved away from the zodiac, and from the planetary sphere, towards the zodiac. We are able to say that the human spherical form is created by moving towards the planetary sphere. Human beings walk upright, however, and seek to go beyond mere adaptation to earthly principles.

With reference to the polyhedral element we have to say that the moon gives it directly to the animal. Human beings also seek to move out of the influences of the moon, “away from the moon”, as we might say, to receive their polyhedral element from a region between earth and moon. This means, however, that the moon still has an influence. In the fifth place, therefore, we must look to see what the moon, which in animals brings about the polyhedral element, is doing in human beings. It brings about a polyhedral element in humans, but as an image. Animals have the polyhedral element in their configuration; humans lift it out of the organism. Mathematical and geometrical ideas become image, taken out of the living physical body. Today, people primarily visualize and want to understand things in mathematical terms because they are able, under the moon’s influence, to lift their own polyhedral element out of the body, so that it enters into the conscious mind. We are thus able to say that thanks to the moon, we are able to understand the polyhedral element in images.

So you see how by considering the human being’s relationship to the cosmos we not only arrive at the outer form we have been considering in recent years but also understand how human beings gain inner form and structure. We see how they create their nasal cavities, or the stomach, as sacs or pockets. If we were to take this further we would understand the organs altogether and how they take internal form out of the whole cosmos. If we want to understand the human being we must always draw on the cosmos. We have to do so when we ask why we have an organ such as the lung, for instance. Essentially the lung can only be understood if we grasp that initially, in the embryo, a kind of sac forms, going inwards, with physical matter forming a lining. The sac-like form then tears itself free on the outside, and the organ closes itself off as an internal organ. We come to see why there is a lung, or any other organ, inside the human being if we perceive this organ to have originated from a sac, with the inner end of the sac thickening and due to other circumstances taking on a particular configuration. An organ such as the stomach can be seen as a sac extending inwards. An organ such as the lung, the heart or the kidney also starts as a sac, but it thickens here (Fig. 36), tears off here, and you have a closed-off internal organ.

Yet even with these closed-off organs—if we ask ourselves why they are in a particular place in the human organism, or why they have a particular shape or internal structure, we always have to consider the human being in relationship to the whole universe.

If a modern scientist were to hear of anthroposophists wanting to explain the lung, heart, liver, and so on out of the cosmos, he'd say we were quite mad. Members of the medical profession in particular would call this madness. They should not do so, however. It is up to them to realize that anthroposophy is actually trying to meet them half-way as they pursue their course clinging firmly to their accustomed blinkers. Let me give you a small example to prove this.

I have here before me a booklet written by the physician, medical scientist and biologist Moriz Benedikt in 1894.²⁸ I tend to quote this gentleman quite often, though I actually do not much like doing so, for apart from anything else, he shows himself to be terribly conceited, practically on every page he writes. He is also quite inflexible as a Kantian. There is, of course, the mitigating circumstance that he has made up his own Kantian ideas to suit himself, presenting them with some inflexibility. The man is extraordinarily gifted, however. He is not interested in anthroposophical ideas or anything of the kind, but it is fair to say that simply by being involved in medicine and science he has arrived at a reasonably unbiased view as to the value of his scientific outlook. He cannot get out of it; yet in a strange way he peers out. The others are also caught up in their science as if in a prison, but they do not even look at anything outside. He keeps looking at the outside world, and this allows him to arrive at extraordinarily interesting conclusions. His vanity has made him a great many enemies, and he will therefore sometimes say things about enemies who show themselves with their masks off—generally these people are “friends”, maintaining closed ranks. His colleagues have tended to put him down, and he therefore says things about them that are highly typical. He knows nothing about anthroposophy, of course, but still, if we consider anthroposophy in terms of its qualities it would be fair to say that, qualitatively speaking, he is an anti-anthroposophist. However, in the booklet I have before me he says:

The self-righteous ignore or deny anything that does not fit in with their point of view, persecuting not only the teaching, but even more bitterly the teachers. Self-righteousness is a peculiar kettle of fish. It smells sweet to the self-righteous but gives off a sharp, biting odour for others. Self-righteousness is by its very nature closely bound up with the scholars’ trade, so much so that although I hate the self-righteous I often ask myself: How often and in how many instances have you yourself been self-righteous? I’d be most grateful to anyone who would give me an exact answer to the question.

For my part, I am convinced that far from being grateful he would complain like anything if we were to make him aware of his own self-righteousness. Yet in his own peculiar way he has a particularly good eye for self-righteousness in others.

He goes on to speak of his own history, wanting to show that he has become a different kind of medical man from his colleagues. He writes:

Two severe strokes of destiny spelled disaster for my own development and also for the scientific position relative to the subject under discussion.

You’ll immediately be aware of a nice touch of vanity in what follows:

In the first place, I studied mathematics and mechanics before joining the medical profession. In those days we had an eminent mathematician at Vienna University, Professor von Ettingshausen,²⁹ who presented the most difficult problems in the mathematics of physics and caught our interest. I heard him develop the theories of Cauchy³⁰ and Poisson.³¹ Petzval³² taught us to express the problems of mechanics in mathematical formulas. It will be easy to show, however, how disastrous mathematical thinking is for a member of the medical profession, and above all a clinician.

Well, we shall see why it is disastrous, especially if such a person knows something about medicine. Professor Benedikt goes on with his story. You would have thought it to be a good stroke of destiny to be a mathematician, but he calls it a bad one, because it taught him to think. Other clinicians were apparently unable to think, and they hated him for having studied mathematics, for it meant he knew more than they did.

The second stroke of destiny to come in the days of my youth was that I became a student of Skoda.³³ I am still attached to his teachings today. He was the Kant of medical philosophy, and his mind rose to sublime heights not in books but in the discussion of diagnoses, indications for treatment, and particularly in postmortem reviews. Skoda had been a mathematician when young

—clearly another stroke of destiny!—

and had brought the most important and fundamental scientific thinking to medicine, though unfortunately only in isolated instances; the important insight I received from Skoda, having already been firmly convinced of it through my mathematical studies, is that in establishing scientific proof, we must be aware not only of what we know but also of what we do not know.

Benedikt had thus also studied under Skoda. The idea was that when using modern scientific methods—for this was the subject under discussion—we should be aware not only of what we know but also of what we do not yet know. Benedikt really did represent this principle with some degree of fanaticism in numerous treatises. He goes on to say:

This basic rule of medicine is not known to the majority of biologists, and indeed is incomprehensible to them. Some years ago, for example, I sent a manuscript in a foreign language to an anatomist, asking him to correct the language. When it came to the above statement, he wrote in the margin that he did not understand the meaning of it.

Benedikt says here that we should also consider what we do not know, and he wanted the other individual to translate the statement into proper French. The anatomist had written, however, to say he did not understand it.

When I showed the comment written in the margin to a professor at the technical university he smiled. The statement is perfectly clear to anyone involved in the exact sciences.

The man smiled because he understood mathematical thinking; it amused him that members of the medical profession thought they could ignore the things they did not know. An engineer must know what he does not know, for he has studied mathematics.

When I told a famous medical expert in Vienna of the odd reaction from my medical colleague, he said rather naively: Well, how are we to know the unknown?—This historical anecdote casts a sharp light on the method of thinking still prevalent in modern medicine and on the colossal errors made day by day and hour by hour in the medical literature.

These are the words of a medical man! But we now come to a most important point. Moriz Benedikt tells us what happens in medical science, where no account is taken of the unknown:

The problems generally arise with reference to the biology of an organ, its function, for instance. The conditions on which the function is based are partly unknown and still have to be found.

He goes on to give an example:

The liver, for instance, secretes bile. The reason for this secretory process lies mainly in the specific biochemical properties of the cells.

Let us ignore the fact that he is referring to the biochemical properties of cells, which does not really make sense. We are taking the point of view he takes in speaking of the liver.

The reason must be found as to how these differentiated properties evolve;...

He wants to find the reason why the liver is different from other organs; he intends to consider the unknown. It is known that the liver secretes bile. But now we come to the unknown, and mark you well, he produces a considerable list:

The reason must be found as to how these differential properties evolve; how the organ develops from its elements; how it comes to be in its particular place; why it relates to surrounding organs in a specific way; how with the aid of specific haemodynamic forces and haemostatic conditions it maintains the specificity of its cells; how with the aid of the central and centrifugal nervous system it is stimulated to function at the right time and with the necessary intensity; what the conditions are for nutrition in general, to maintain function and timing; which conditions impair function, causing short-term or permanent disorders, etc.

All this is not known and has to be considered. Moriz Benedikt then continues:

In science, these questions come up one after the other over long periods of time.

Just the questions come up, therefore!

The literature, on the other hand, considers only what is known at any time, without enquiring into the unknown, and behaves as if the basic problem had already been fully solved.

That is, makes no mention of the unknown. People like Moriz Benedikt are at least able to list all these unknown elements.

This is why only a small part of the theories which prevail at any given time is true, and they contain a colossal percentage of new and inherited errors which will continue on through generations as original sin.

What is this medical man really saying? He says: We have a medical literature but it only deals with the known. Yet the unknown keeps coming up after long intervals of time. What does Benedikt want? He wants people to be aware of what they do not know. What would happen in the case of the liver, for instance? A member of the medical profession taking the opposite view of Benedikt who gave a description of the liver would try to discover the biochemical properties of liver cells and present the fact that the liver secretes bile. He would be satisfied with this, for he does not talk about anything that is not known. Benedikt would say: Alright, the liver secretes bile; this is due to the biochemical constitution of the liver cells. But as a conscientious scientist I must also say everything I do not know about the liver and the bile. He would therefore write in his book:

This we know, but we do not know how the liver comes to be in that particular place; how the statics and dynamics of the blood, or rather the circulation, affect the liver; how the nervous system relates to the liver, both the system as a whole and the individual nerves; and how the liver contributes to nutrition. Benedikt’s books would therefore be different from those of other authors. As a scientist he would in this respect be extremely modest.

But he says this question as to the unknown comes up in the course of centuries; yet because of the way the questions are put, if we go down to fundamentals, then even taking Benedikt’s point of view, we could go on till Judgement Day, always putting down what is known and then what is unknown and the many questions that arise. Benedikt’s books would only differ from those of other authors in that they also list what is not known. Yet he would never accept that something we do not know has to be taken out into the cosmos, that it will continue to be unknown until we explain it out of the cosmos.

You see, a rational medical practitioner here says, speaking in the terms of his discipline, that we cannot explain the human being with the means at our disposal; all we can do is to list the things we do not know. Unfortunately he persists in his refusal to consider something which does provide answers to these questions, questions he says concern the unknown, and of course the answers can only be provided slowly and gradually.

Thus the questions are there in ordinary science. Anthroposophy offers the answers to these questions. This is the truth. It is something we should stress over and over again, quite emphatically.

Moriz Benedikt believes that the bad habits to be found in his particular science are due to the fact that people know nothing of the unknown, offering to humanity what they know on the basis of facts established in the sense-perceptible world only. He gets quite sarcastic as he goes on to say: This scientific ineptitude flourishes today ... not his ineptitude, but that of his colleagues! as much as it did a thousand years ago; indeed it is worse than ever, since production has become so much faster.

He means to say that in earlier times it was not possible to publish one’s misdemeanours so quickly.

Every short-lived notion or undertaking is published so quickly nowadays that medical journalism only needs a “Hot Wire column”, and perhaps we may see the day when telephone booths are set up just to make sure that scientific “ideas" do not lie fallow even for nine minutes.

Publication took more years in the past than it takes hours today.

Oh, and Moriz Benedikt also knows what he thinks of the public, who listen to the medical profession and swear by them! He puts it simply in the following rhyme:

Miller, Brown, Smith and Read join in every heinous deed.

He then starts to reproach his colleagues again—the heinous deeds are theirs, of course—saying:

These unsatisfactory conditions in biology will not improve until a major reform in education starts with the teachers. Anyone unable to show that he has made a serious study of mathematics and mechanics is not fit to be a thinker or a scientist, let alone a teacher. Individual genius has always achieved much; it limps, however, and will go on limping until it has learned to walk first in the school of mathematics.

Not everyone who wants to listen to something sensible will need mathematics, of course. But to work with genuine science one does need to be trained in mathematical thinking. This is why Plato—Moriz Benedikt is very rude about him, by the way—wrote on the doors to his academy: Admittance only for those trained in mathematics. This does not prevent present-day philosophers, who have not been trained in mathematics, to write about Plato, of course. And we may truly say: Most of the people who write about Plato today would not have gained admittance to his academy if it still existed. You will see, from what I have read to you from Moriz Benedikt’s booklet, how modern scientific minds view something they themselves really ought to desire, and how someone who, whilst not an anthroposophist but a rather vain individual who has got into some conflict with his colleagues, has nevertheless had some faint notion of the harm that is done—how such a person judges the situation. Let us be very clear about this: The situation we have today is exactly as an unbiased observer with insight gained in anthroposophy is compelled to describe it. The proofs are to be found everywhere in the world of modern exoteric science, you must merely want to look for them.

What we must do, however, is to learn how to consider the human being in a way which physicists would consider perfectly sensible. I have already given you the analogy: If you study a compass needle and insist on saying it assumes a particular direction out of its own inherent powers, you will never understand why there are north-and south-pointing forces in the compass needle. We must understand that the whole earth has two forces, that the poles of the two forces are determined from outside. In the same way it is utterly wrong to put a human being on the dissecting table and decide to explain the whole of the human being’s nature on the basis of what lies inside the skin. We need the whole world to understand the outer and inner aspects of the human being.

• 25. Steiner is using a slightly unusual term here, which usually translated as “fulfilment”. For the translation I have largely used terms like “filling”, “that which fills them” or “which are filled”, but I felt the note should be sounded just once in this passage.
• 26. Steiner R. Anthroposophy (A Fragment) (GA 45). Tr. C. E. Creeger. New York: Anthroposophic Press 1996.
• 27. From the Greek “ho ton [long “o”] zodion [long “o”s] kyklos” = the circle of the sculptured figures of animals.
• 28. Benedikt, Moriz (1835–1920), Hypnotismus und Suggestion, Leipzig & Wien 1894.
• 29. Ettingshausen, Andreas, Freiherr von (1796–1857), mathematician and physicist.
• 30. Cauchy, August Louis (1789–1857), French mathematician.
• 31. Poisson, Siméon Denis (1781–1840), French mathematician and physicist.
• 32. Petzval, Joseph (1807–1891), Austrian mathematician and physicist.
• 33. Skoda, Joseph (1805–1881), physician; together with Rokitansky established the high reputation of the Viennese School in its heyday.

My dear friends! I would like to start by adding a few things to what we have discussed. It will certainly be possible for later discussions to present something concrete in terms of both the teaching material and the cult. Today I should like to put before you a few thoughts on the way in which one can find the inner path that binds the teaching together with the cultic, and then the path that leads to our present-day, quite un-cultic thinking science. The things that are at issue need only be understood correctly, but today's consciousness is very far removed from this understanding. I will give you an example, and from this example you will see that today there is an abstract juxtaposition between the material world — which man perceives through his senses and then combines through his intellect into its individual phenomena and entities in order to arrive at so-called natural and historical laws — and what is called the spiritual.

We must always bear in mind that in the development of the Western world, an external clouding has occurred – it was necessary in another respect in the historical development of civilization – a clouding in relation to the relationship between the physical body on the one hand and the spiritual soul on the other, that at the well-known Eighth General Ecumenical Council in the year 869 it was dogmatically established that the trichotomy, which until then had also been valid within Christianity, was replaced by the duality that man consists of body and soul. The dogma was formulated at that time as follows: “The Christian has to believe that man consists only of body and soul and that the soul has some spiritual properties.” So, a dualism was set in place of the trichotomy, and some spiritual properties were attributed to the soul. Present-day philosophy, which claims to be an unprejudiced science and to draw only from experience, does not question that which has come down as a dogmatic definition from the year 869, and speaks only of body and soul, and does not know that in so doing it is merely conforming to the Council's decision. The Council's effect has penetrated even into secular philosophy. This is something that one must know if one wants to look at the fact that the actual Trinity in man was veiled in the 9th century and that since that time difficulties have arisen in the world view in general.

Now, this in particular has brought about the state of affairs that has gradually separated the physical body from the spiritual, that allows people to look at the physical body as if it were completely devoid of spirit and actually speaks of the soul and spiritual as if it were something completely abstract. Just try to realize today what people imagine when the three aspects of the Trinity, namely the soul forces, are presented to them: thinking, feeling, willing. Take today's textbooks on psychology and see the nonsense that is written when ideas of thinking, feeling and willing are presented. And take a look at what has been achieved in this regard by the – as it has rightly been said – “philosopher by the grace of his publisher”, Wilhelm Wundt, who, although he started from a psychology of the will, never revealed any insight into the essence of the will.

It is absolutely true that anyone who is truly able to study the soul sees a division into thinking, feeling and willing in the way it is present when one differentiates between young, mature and elderly people. The three terms refer to three different states of the one spiritual being.

That which exists in thinking or imagining is, as it exists, a legacy from our pre-existent life, our life before conception. That which we can think mentally can be described as the hoary, as that which has become old, which needed the time between death and a new birth, in which the present earth life began, for its development. The oldest of our spirit is thinking. Feeling is the middle one, and the will differs from thinking in that it is only the spirit of childhood. And when we take the human being spiritually, when we describe the human being in terms of soul, then we have to say that he brings with him the old age, which simply involves itself. He gradually develops into the middle, into feeling, and he develops the will, which only becomes so strong at the end of life that it can lead to the dissolution of the body. For it is essentially the will that ultimately, when it has become fully powerful, brings about the dissolution of the body. The will is also the part of man that continually strives for dissolution, that breaks down, which, spiritually, is nothing other than a youthful form of thinking that, as we physically age, prepares to develop further. It can develop further when man goes out of physical existence, between death and a new birth.

In this way, one gradually comes to an interlocking of the soul and the body. The same can be done with the spiritual, so that one comes to an interlocking of the spiritual, the soul and the body. The one who studies things knows that at the moment of waking up, when we wake up from sleep, the spirit is most active in penetrating the body; there the spirit manifests itself, reveals itself most on the outside, because it penetrates the body. In this way man shows the strongest spiritual activity in relation to the physical, the strongest overcoming of the physical when waking up. He shows the strongest flight from physical influence when falling asleep. And no one comprehends human nature who does not take this activity of the spiritual into account.

What must be striven for is that the spiritual, the soul, and the physical are again seen to permeate each other. One should see the spiritual, the soul, and the physical interacting with each other, and not matter without seeing the spirit in it and the spirit without matter. One should see the creative, that which brings forth, that which matter forms out of itself. One should actually see the unified effect of spirit and matter everywhere. When we look at our pre-existent life, at our life before conception, our spiritual self is active in the universe. And anthroposophy teaches that the phenomena that are out there in nature should gradually be interpreted in such a way that they are at the same time revelations of human existence as it is beyond earthly, physical existence.

I am telling you all this only to draw your attention to a phenomenon that you can observe everywhere today, where the Church's dogmatic side is trying to fight anthroposophy, as it is said, “scientifically”.

You see, when the Mystery of Golgotha took place, in the Near East, in Greece, down to the north of Africa and as far as Italy, there was an interaction of matter and spirit everywhere in what was then called science - mathesis. A separate matter was not known; Everywhere you saw spiritual work, which has learned Augustine and no longer understood, and his great struggle we understand only by the fact that we learn to know that Augustine has passed through the decadent Manichaeism. This view, of which Augustine understood nothing more, that which was present at that time in the Near East, in the north of Africa, in Greece, Italy, Sicily, and even further afield, is what was later usually referred to as Gnosticism.

Anthroposophy does not want to be a renewal of what is called gnosis. Gnosis is the last phase of the old atavistic science, while anthroposophy represents the first phase of a fully conscious science. It is a slander to lump the two together. Having said that, I may say that it was Gnosticism that first tried to understand the mystery of Golgotha. And it was a profound spiritual science - albeit of an instinctive, atavistic kind - that tried to understand the mystery of Golgotha in those days. This Gnosticism, which was widespread in those days, was then completely eradicated. It was so completely eradicated that little remains in a positive sense, only a few writings, and they say little about it. The form of Christianity that gradually became completely Roman, which imbued Christianity with Roman state concepts, ensured that everything that was present in the first conception of spiritualized Christianity in Gnosticism was eradicated root and branch. And when theologians speak of Gnosticism today, they only know of it from its opponents. Harnack and others expressed their doubts about what Hilgenfeld and other opponents of Gnosticism bring.

Imagine that all existing anthroposophical literature were to be destroyed, root and branch; then only the writings of [General] von Gleich and so forth and the writings of [opposing] theologians would be available to posterity. If posterity were to reconstruct the matter from the quotations of these people, then they would have the same of anthroposophy as theologians today have of Gnosticism. You must be absolutely clear about the falsehoods that theologians have spread throughout the world. And just as thoroughly false is what is happening today. The hypocrisy is not seen because people constantly tell themselves that the holy people could not do such a thing, that such a thing simply does not exist. But it is there, even though people believe that it cannot be there. They do not even imagine that such immorality can exist.

Only then will you muster the necessary enthusiasm to muster the moral indignation at what is present in this historical research. But what has happened in the development of the world is that the understanding of the interweaving and interworking of spirit and matter has been completely lost, and as a result, much of what existed has become nothing more than an external, quite abstract understanding of words.

Today, my dear friends, the form of the Lord's Prayer as found in the Gospel of Matthew is taught in the communities. One concludes: “... and deliver us from evil; for Thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory forever. Amen.” — No one who teaches about the Lord's Prayer [in today's theology] understands this final sentence of the Lord's Prayer. Through the treatment of Gnosticism, of spiritualized Christianity [by theologians], debris has been thrown over the understanding of this last sentence. What does it mean?

In the mysteries from which it was taken, this conclusion was linked to a certain symbol, to a transition of the whole meaning into the symbolic view. One said thus: If one sets up the symbol for the “kingdom,” then it is this (see plate 3). The limitation, that is the symbol for the kingdom. That which is the kingdom encompasses a definite area. But it makes sense to speak of the “kingdom” only if one represents this area in its limitation, if one represents that to which the kingdom, the area, extends.

But such a “realm” has meaning only if it is permeated with power, if it is not only a limited area, but if this area is radiated through by power. Power must be at the center and the realm must be radiated through by power. So that you have a spreading in the area of the “realm”. The power that radiates from the center, that is the “might”. The radiating power that rules the realm is the “power”. — But all this would take place within. If only this were present, then this “realm” with the “power” within it would be self-contained and would only exist for itself. It is only there for other things in the world, for other beings, when that which radiates out from within penetrates to the surface and from there radiates out into the surroundings, so that that which radiates out into the world is a splendor to be found on the surface, a “glory”. The radiance from within is the “power”, the power stuck on the surface and shining outwards from there, that is the “glory”. If you look at the structure that leads to Mathesis, to a vivid presentation of what can be conceived in the ideas of realm, power, glory, then you have this transition to Mathesis, to a vivid presentation. Then one seeks that which one has had spiritually and soulfully in the contemplation, also outwardly in the real reality. You look at what you had grasped mathematically; you seek that in the external world and find it in the sun, for that is the image. And instead of concluding with the words of the Protestant Lord's Prayer: “... for Thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory”, you can also conclude the Lord's Prayer: “... for Thine is the sun”.

Every being was seen in terms of the Trinity; and anyone who still has some knowledge of the real Gnostic understanding knows that the Lord's Prayer was simply prayed at the end, so that the members of the Solar Trinity were put forward in words, and that one was conscious that by saying the Lord's Prayer one had actually expressed, by concluding the Lord's Prayer, having presented the seven petitions, and having referred to oneself: «deliver us from evil», because Thou who dwellest in the sun art the One who can do it. There was an awareness everywhere that nature outside is not unspiritual, that nature everywhere is spiritualized, and the means to really make this spiritualization present was found by having the Trinity working everywhere.

Look at the objective facts and read all the accusations that are made – even if they are untrue – when people want to prove that anthroposophy is a renewal of gnosticism. Everywhere efforts are being made to blacken Gnosticism and then to say: Those who are Gnostics today are leading humanity back into the fog. What is the aim of theology? To distract people's minds from what existed before the Council of Constantinople, which was particularly strong before the Emperor Justinian closed the last Greek schools of philosophy in the 6th century, so that the last philosophers under the leadership of Damaskios and Simplikios fled with five others to Asia and found a place of refuge in Gondhishapur, where the people worked whose work had also been completely wiped out.

It is absolutely necessary that today we overcome the antagonism that exists between a merely abstract science of words, which is fully recognized as a science today, and the contemplation of the real as something spiritualized. We must come back to this contemplation of the real as something spiritualized. Without this contemplation, a foundation of religion, a foundation of religious work, is absolutely impossible.

And if you want to speak in cultic terms, then you must also gradually advance in your understanding of the external. You must be able to see in the sun that which is the objectification of that which is power, empire and glory. In many cases, you have to understand what is expressed in this way throughout the entire Gospel only in the sense that it is expressed in a language in which the word consciously flows into the forms, into what is created out of the spirit into the world. You will only really understand the Gospel if you can imbue yourself with this awareness.

Now, if we consider this, we will see how far removed from true reality present-day science is, despite believing itself to be completely realistic. Because, you see, after people had thrown debris at the understanding of reality – at such conceptions as that the sun is contained in the final words of the Lord's Prayer – and after they had managed to that today anyone who associates the concept of the sun with the concept of Christ is denounced as an un-Christian, the time came when people no longer understood how what the human soul experiences relates to reality.

You see, in the time when in the 9th century AD certain remnants of earlier knowledge were still preserved by a figure like Scotus Eriugena, in that time, when Eriugena still knew how to find a harmony between what the soul experiences and what is outside in the physical-sensual world, — in this time then [little by little] arose the other [ways of looking at things], in which man made himself concepts of facts and began to brood over whether his concepts have anything at all to do with reality. Then came the time of the scholastics, of Albertus Magnus, of Thomas Aquinas, who still sensed something of the old consciousness in its last echo, that concepts and ideas only have a meaning if they can be found outside in the world as reality; in them lived the realism of [early] scholasticism. But the others, who had lost the awareness of the harmony of ideas with reality, who were the forerunners of today's theology, who considered it heretical to speak of the harmony of the sun with empire, power and glory, they developed nominalism. The great controversy between nominalism and realism arose from the council decision of the year 869, which cast a veil over the view [that man consists of body, soul and spirit]. And today we have come so far that on the one hand we see a polemic unfold when it is pointed out that in the Lord's Prayer, when it says, “Thy is the kingdom, the power and the glory in aeons, Amen,” the Christ is actually meant inwardly in a spiritual-soul sense, and outwardly that which corresponds to him in the surrounding world is meant: the sun. What is meant, when the Trinity – the Kingdom, the Power and the Glory – are summarized outwardly: “... for Thine is the Sun”, if one wants to look at the inner, spiritual-soul, and – addressing the Father, the One subsisting in the world –: “for Thine is the Son, Christ-Jesus, He is with Thee”.

The Protestant Church has reached a state of complete unconsciousness regarding these matters; it knows nothing of these things and does not even know why it knows nothing, because it does not educate itself about the nature of such things. The Catholic Church, which has preserved the tradition, knows a great deal about it, and especially in the bosom of Jesuitism, a great deal is known about these things. But the following religious policy is observed: It is said that if people again come to the conclusion that the spirit also rules alongside body and soul, then they are not far from the path to the supernatural. We must prevent people from knowing anything about the spirit.

Therefore you see that especially in Jesuitism, where an excellent scientific ability is cultivated, a scientific policy is adhered to in the following way. They say to themselves, today the world demands science, it demands it in the sense in which it has been called science since the time of Galileo and Copernicus. The Catholic Church resisted this science until 1829; only then were Catholics allowed ex cathedra to believe in the revolution of the earth around the sun. But since then, a different policy has been pursued, the policy of carrying the Galilean-Copernican natural science into the most extreme materialism. Therefore, you will find everywhere in the literature inspired by the Jesuits that science should only deal with what can be perceived by the senses. Science should stop at what is spatial-temporal, and science cannot move up to what goes beyond the spatial-temporal. Thereby they want to keep humanity from having any science except one that deals with the spatial-temporal, and relegate the rest to the realm of faith, encompassing with faith whatever the infallible Pope prescribes to be believed, or rather, the college advising him. A strict separation between what should be the subject of science and what should be believed is carried to the most extreme degree by Jesuitism. The Jesuits excel in the field where there is materialistic science; indeed, no one has taken materialism as far as the Jesuit science, which trains its pupils to become particularly clever researchers in the field of materialistic science, so that they shine and excel in this field in order to make all the more of an impression when they say: science must never go beyond what Christ handed over to the Roman See as its right to be the representative of spiritual teaching, or, as it is expressed dogmatically: the Christian must see in the head of the Church the holder of the divine teaching office. Now, this is intended more and more to anchor science in the outwardly material and to prevent a spiritualization of science.

You see, my dear friends, there was a Strauß, a Renan, a Büchner, a Bölsche; there was a Haeckel who was not a materialist at heart and can only appear to be one because of the abundance of his writings. There have been many materialists, but they were mere children compared to what has been achieved in the way of introducing materialism in the way I have just explained to you. The real creators of materialism in the scientific field were the theologians of the last four centuries. And it was always very difficult in the church to defend itself against this encroaching scientific materialism.

Just think how little was understood by someone like Oetinger, who coined the phrase: “All material phenomena are the final phenomena of the spirit” — by which he wanted to express that what is outwardly present in creation originally comes from the spirit, that the spirit, in creating, comes to an end, comes to its utmost expression and thereby creates material phenomena. This beautiful presentation, you will only find it mixed with nebulous mysticism, but such erratic blocks of a spiritualized world view still protrude, and when you read people like Oetinger, you have to realize that you cannot accept the whole, but you must be inspired by much of what you find in it. You must see the concepts that appear like flashes of lightning from a spiritualized worldview.

That is what I wanted to tell you, to characterize the relationship between the development of theology and science. Just as the universities emerged from the founding of theological schools, so what our science is today, even if it appears secular, is still the result of the developmental path of theology. And it must be firmly held that people like Strauß, Büchner and so on are mere orphans in the substantiation of materialism compared to what has been achieved by theologians.

On the other hand, another element has worked its way into the scientific movement of modern times, and that is what has come over from the Orient.

And through the confluence of what has survived as feeling Christianity, as mind Christianity, as true Christianity, with theological Christianity, from the confluence of mind Christianity with the power that came from the peoples of the migration of peoples, migration, the one wave of Christianity continues; it does not deliver the outer world-science as the other wave did, which came into being through the bringing of Aristotelian knowledge by the Arabs to Spain and from there took such a great influence on Spinoza. In this was contained that which influenced the newer natural science for centuries. The newer natural science has from the very beginning proceeded from a kind of protest... [Gap in the transcript], who is always in danger of losing God. It can only lose God, never hold on to him, and the new godless science emerged, which, however, is a true science with regard to nature, only just cannot go beyond certain limits as such, but at the same time it has significantly advanced the education of man to freedom. Today we have arrived at the point where, out of this science, spiritualization itself must be sought again, where science must be led up from a merely anthropological [science], from a kind of knowledge that knows nothing of man except the physical, that has only empty words about the soul and knows nothing at all about the spirit, that the path must be made up from such an anthropological science to an anthroposophical science, through which the material in its interpenetration with the spiritual is recognized, especially in man.

And in this way the moment can be brought about in which science and religious life meet, but in no other way than by finding the spirit in all material things, by overcoming the view that there is materiality somewhere without it also leading to the spirit. When you imbibe this consciousness, when it gains such strength in you that you speak out of this consciousness when you preach, then you will find the possibility, especially in your field of work, to seek access to the hearts of men, not only to the intellect. You will gradually have to find the way to people's hearts, even if it does not appear so at first, by speaking out of the strength that comes to you when you raise your consciousness to the point of seeing through the spiritualization of all matter. For without coming to this awareness of the spiritualization of all matter, you will not come to a real living conception of God.

But if you want to speak in the sense in which you have set out, then what you say must be an outward expression of what is meant at the beginning of the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word...” because it is indicated, by pointing to the word, to the Logos, that this Logos existed before matter came into being and that matter emerged from the Logos. You must combine this realization with the other, that it is possible for you, by speaking, to let resound out of your words that which you yourself experience in your mind, in your soul, when you sense the divine within through spiritual knowledge and prepare yourself in God-sensing meditation for your preaching office. In this preparation for speaking, not only in the abstract preparation with regard to the content of the teaching material, but also in the meditative familiarization with each individual sermon, the strength must arise for you through which you can achieve the formation of a community.

That is what I wanted to recommend to you today, and I ask you to take it more as a feeling than as a thought. I hope that when we meet again, we will be allowed to continue these reflections.

Perhaps there was a desire yesterday to tie one thing or another to the debate.

Emil Bock: Yesterday evening I thought that we would be able to present the text of the flyer today. But I don't know if it can remain in this form.

Rudolf Steiner: We will remain in contact in any case, and if you are also leaving today, you will let me know if I should give you advice so that I can give it then. But do you have an idea of what this advertising leaflet will essentially contain?

Emil Bock: As far as we have thought about it, we simply want to take the line of thought that we start from the need of religious life in the face of intellectualism, that we then point to the necessity of a new worldview in which religion is possible, to the necessity of coming to a religious renewal precisely through the renewal of worldview. We will then point out how this is conceived, by reviving the pictorial and so on, and we could then say a word about the fact that it is a particular renewal of Christianity. But we also want to say that we have a project in mind that is specifically related to the work of the church, and then a transition should be made to an appeal for generosity. We can only do this if the free spiritual life is given the opportunity. Spiritual life must be liberated through an act, that is, through a donation. In this way, spiritual life is to be liberated at one point, initially in the religious sphere. That was the train of thought that, as far as I could see, was agreed upon for the time being. However, we were not yet sure whether we had hit the right note.

Rudolf Steiner: It is a collection of thoughts that are certainly the right ones. I just want to point out the following so that you find the right tenor: Everything that comes from anthroposophy in such matters today is firmly grounded in reality and always aims not to leave the ground of reality. The threefolding movement began in the spring of 1919, at a time when a mood of expectation was particularly widespread among large sections of the population in Central Europe. This mood of expectation was, however, present in different ways, but it was there, I would simply put it this way, that a large number of people believed that we had been thrown into chaos and that we had to move forward by reasonably harmonizing the social forces. This mood was widespread when I started working for the threefold order in April 1919.

Now, in those days, the form I gave to my lectures on threefolding very often led me to conclude that what was meant should very soon be put into practice, because it could very soon be too late. You can find this formula “It could very soon be too late” very often in the lectures written down at the time.

The economists are so mired and corrupted in their views that there can be no question of understanding the threefold order; they can never be moved to do so. It is terribly obvious how little the threefold order has been understood in this area. I will give you an example: here in this place, when a threefold order meeting was held at the beginning, a very well-known chairman of a well-known party stood before me — we had brought together a large committee and he was among them at the time — and said to me: “The thing about the threefold order, would be quite nice if we could have it, but for the time being nobody understands it, and you can only understand it if you talk to people' — I am not saying this out of immodesty, but only to illustrate something with this example —, 'and it must not be built on two eyes. We know, of course, that in 15 to 20 years the last remnants of what we have there will come to a decline. Today we could still stop that if we were to carry out the threefold social order. But nobody knows about it, and so we would rather apply the old ideas for these 15 to 20 years than your threefold social order."

This is an example of the understanding that politics has shown for the matter. It is to be hoped that for the time being it will still be possible to gather the last remnants of spiritual impulses in order to attempt this liberation of spiritual life in the religious sphere, in the sphere of art and in the scientific sphere. These are, after all, the three sub-forms; each of the three limbs has three sub-areas. The spiritual area has religion, science and art as sub-areas. If we succeed in achieving the liberation of spiritual life in these areas, then, perhaps sooner than we think, people will find their way to the model of equality in political life and fraternity in economic life from the example of a free and liberated spiritual life. The next step, then, is to work with all our might to achieve the independence of the one limb. For the time being, one thing is important for you: to work for the liberation of the religious sphere; that is what you must do. One should not use the word threefold social order in the abstract, but must use it in the concrete form, by placing the greatest emphasis on the independence of the one sphere that has been particularly ruined by the mendacity. It would be an illusion not to see how frantically we are heading for decline. If you look at the facts, you cannot really imagine that things can go on like this for long. The interest on the debts of the German Reich is 85 billion in the last year 1920/21 - the interest, not the debt. It is pointed out that the tax burden on the inhabitants of Central Europe must be increased threefold. How do you expect to cope? Today there are people who pay 60% tax on their income; if they then have to pay three times as much, they will have to pay 180%, and I ask you to consider how one is to pay 180% tax and what the reality logic is among people who talk about public affairs. We are sliding into the most terrible chaos. Today, it is still the case that one must say that things are still being presented in a distorted way.

Some time ago I gave a lecture to a group of industrialists and pointed out the true fact that the cities are on the verge of bankruptcy with their budgets; they have held out because of a correction on the part of the savings banks, but you can only go so far with such a correction until the coffers are empty. You can still keep a skirt if you don't have the means to buy a new one; then you just keep wearing the old clothes – just as you are now continuing the old economic practices – but one of these days they will just fall off. It is only a delusion when people feel comfortable and talk about progress. We are definitely in a state of decline.

If it is possible to save spiritual life, then civilization is also saved. But it is necessary to be aware of the changing times again today. Don't misunderstand me, I am not saying that threefolding must be abandoned, but the way it was pursued in the past, as it would have been possible by constituting the three coexisting links, is no longer possible today. Today we must save what can still be saved, and that is what is present in human souls. To liberate spiritual life is what we must naturally try to do today.

Then we have probably come to the end.

Emil Bock: Since we are now at the end, I would like to express our sincere and heartfelt thanks to Dr. Steiner on behalf of the course participants. We cannot express this in words, but we believe we have tried to show by our work that we are indeed grateful and that thanks can only be expressed in deeds. And I believe I can speak from the hearts of the participants when I make a certain promise, so to speak, in a small rallying of our forces, that we will do what is within our power.

Rudolf Steiner: I need say no more than that it gives me a deep inner satisfaction that you have come together for this work. May something of value arise out of this work within anthroposophical life. It will be very significant if precisely that part of spiritual life that is yours is stimulated by this anthroposophical life. I hope that we understand each other inwardly and continue to work together and find each other. — Goodbye!

Once again, I would like to address the younger friends in the Anthroposophical Society in particular regarding the reasons for the formation of the Youth Section. It seems that two opinions are facing each other within the circles of our youth. One feels that being young is something to be sought. They feel drawn to anthroposophy because they hope to find satisfaction for their search there. She has realized that this search must go to the depths of the soul, and that contemporary civilization cannot lead to these depths. There are young people who seek esotericism in this way because they have intuitively discovered that the true content of the human being can only be experienced in esotericism.

These young people will easily find the way to what the board of the Anthroposophical Society is striving for with the Youth Section. And this board will not interfere with anyone's independent endeavors. It will have a heart for this independence. But it will also be mindful of the fact that the cultivation of esoteric life has become its task. This concern will be his first. He will lead the Youth Section in such a way that esotericism is given its due, and he believes that from true esotericism he can also find true 'youth wisdom'.

But there is another youth opinion. This is easily tempted to take being young in such an absolute sense that even the pursuit of esotericism seems to them like the ingestion of a foreign body. They want above all, unperturbed by anything that comes from outside, to immerse themselves in their own youth and to understand it.

In the Anthroposophical Society, young people who hold this opinion also hope to find something. Otherwise they would not be there at all. But they believe that they must first bring the right spirit to anthroposophy through the activity of their young selves. The leadership of the Anthroposophical Society is far from criticizing this part of the youth in a philistine way. But it could easily happen that its intentions are seen in such a light by some young people. For it cannot deviate from its gained insight that the stream of eternity flows through the esotericism attempted by the Anthroposophical Society, towards which the youth aspires. He cannot fall into the error of believing that esotericism must first take on its true form through youth, since he knows that in esotericism youth will find the right paths to be able to be truly “young”.

I am saying this not because I want to point out a contradiction between part of the youth and the board. I do not see any; and in the face of a practical world view there could never be any. For the leadership is aware that its tasks come from the spiritual world; and in everything it will have to follow the paths that are shown to it from there. There can be no “contrast” for it in the field of its work.

But it would be possible for youth itself to be drawn into contradictions if one part emphasized its striving one-sidedly in relation to the other. And that could do immeasurable damage to the anthroposophical youth movement. However, this will not happen if youth pays more attention to something they have learned from the “all-too-old” civilization than they often do. There is a certain tendency towards abstraction, towards talking in mere concepts. I expressed it in the last issue of this newsletter how little good this abstraction does to youth. In truth, no one in the youth movement wants that either. But in talking about being young, about the ideals of youth, it is there. There is even a worrying amount of “age” in today's youth. If, on the other hand, young people reflect on their true experiences, they will find that these are like questions, and that the esotericism of the Anthroposophical Society at least offers them attempts at answers.

On the basis of such practical insight, an understanding will certainly grow between the various different opinions in our youth movement.

Contact with esotericism can become an experience for young people themselves. If this happens, young people will realize that it is precisely through this contact that they can realize what they often have before their eyes in an indeterminate ideal form. If it does not happen, it could easily be that some young people, not out of innate, but out of externally absorbed “old talk”, draw a theoretical curtain over the experience hinted at.

If young people understand themselves, they will also understand the leadership of the Anthroposophical Society.

(continued in the next issue).