The Rudolf Steiner Archive

As I said in my earlier lectures, the time has come for humanity to know certain truths concerning the spiritual background to the physical world. If people are not going to be prepared to accept these truths out of their own good will, they will be forced to learn them from the terrible events that will happen as time goes on.

The question may arise as to why now is the time for humanity to learn these truths, some of which are liable to shock people. They have of course existed for a long time, but humanity in general was protected and did not have to accept them. Many of these truths were carefully guarded in the ancient Mysteries, as you know, so that people in the surrounding areas were not exposed to the disturbing effect of these truths. Now, we have often said that it is fear of the great truths that prevents people from accepting them. Those who have this fear today—and there are indeed many of them—could of course say: Why cannot humanity go on in a kind of sleep state where these truths are concerned? As it is, people have grown tense and fearful in recent times, and why should they be exposed to those great and fearsome truths?

Let us go into this question, first of all considering why from now on humanity has to be treated differently, as it were, by the world of the spirit than has been the case so far in this post-Atlantean age.

In my earlier lectures I spoke of the non-physical world which borders directly on our physical world. This is the world humanity will need to know about in the time which lies just ahead. You know, as soon as you enter into a non-physical world, everything is different from the way it is here. You get to know certain entities, and above all things of a special nature which are hidden from the sight of weak humanity—‘sight’ here includes anything conveyed in insights and ideas.

Why has the human eye been deflected from this other world in the post-Atlantean age, right up to the present moment? It is because there are entities in this next-door world—other, higher worlds lie beyond it—which could only be made known to human beings under certain conditions. They have a specific function in the whole universe and especially also in human evolution. There are many different kinds of these entities in the other region.

Today I want to talk to you about one class of such entities, the class whose function in the great scheme of things is connected with human birth and death. You should never believe that human birth and death are actually as they present themselves to the senses. Spiritual entities are involved when a human being enters this physical world from the non-physical, and then leaves it again for the non-physical world. To give them a name, let us call them the 'elemental spirits of birth and death' for the moment. It is true that the individuals who until now were initiated in the Mysteries considered it to be their strict duty not to speak to people in general of these elemental spirits of birth and death. If one were to speak of them, and of the whole way in which these elemental spirits live, one would be speaking of something that would seem like red-hot coals to people, for this is how humanity has developed in the post-Atlantean age. We might also use another analogy. If people get to know more about the essential nature of these elemental spirits of birth and death and do so in full consciousness, they come to know powers which are inimical to life in the physical world.

Anyone with more or less normal feelings, even today, will be shaken to learn the truth that in order to bring about birth and death in the physical world, the divine spirits who guide world destinies have to use elemental spirits who actually are the enemies of everything human beings seek and desire for their welfare and well-being here in the physical world. If everything was done just to suit the wishes of human beings—to be comfortable in this physical world, be fit and well as we go to sleep and wake up again and go about our work—if all spirits were of a kind to see to it that we have such a comfortable life, birth and death could not be. To bring about birth and death the gods need entities whose minds and whole way of looking at the world give them the urge to destroy and lay waste to everything which provides for the welfare of human beings here in the physical world.

We have to get used to the idea that the world is not made as people would really like it to be and that there exists the element which in the Egyptian Mysteries was known as ‘iron necessity’. As part of this iron necessity, entities hostile to the physical world are used by the gods to bring about birth and death for human beings.

So we are looking at a world that is immediately next to our own, a world that day by day, hour by hour, has to do with our own world, for the processes of birth and death happen every day and every hour here on earth. The moment human beings cross the threshold to the other world they enter into a sphere where entities live and are active whose whole conduct, views and desires are destructive for ordinary physical human life. If this had been made known to people outside the Mysteries before now, if people had been given an idea of these entities, the following would inevitably have happened. If people who are quite unable to deal with their instincts and drives, with their passions, had known that destructive entities were present around them all the time, they would have used the powers of those destructive entities. They would not have used them the way the gods do in birth and death, however, but within the realm of physical life. If people had felt the desire to be destructive in some sphere or other, they would have had ample opportunity to make these entities serve them, for it is easy to make them serve us. This truth was kept hidden to protect ordinary life from the destructive elemental spirits of birth and death.

The question is, should we not continue to keep them hidden? This is not possible, and for quite specific reasons, one of which is connected with a great, important cosmic law. I could give you a general formula, but it will be better to use the actual form it is taking now and in the immediate future to demonstrate this law to you. As you know, not long ago growing numbers of impulses came into human evolution which did not exist before and which are quite characteristic of our present civilization. Try and go back in your mind to times not very long ago. You will find times when there were no steam locomotives, when people did not yet use electricity as we do now; times perhaps when only thinkers like Leonardo da Vinci¹ were able to have the idea, theoretically and on the basis of experiments, that humans could create apparatus which would enable them to fly. All this has come to realization in a relatively short time. Just consider how much depends on the use of steam, of electricity, of the changes in atmospheric density which has made airships possible, or the knowledge of statics which has led to the aeroplane. Consider everything which has come into human evolution in recent times. Think of the destructive powers of dynamite, etc., and you can easily imagine, seeing how swiftly this has gone, that new and different fabulous things of this kind will be the goal of future human endeavour. I think you can easily see that the ideal for the near future will be to have not more and more Goethes, but more and more Edisons. This really is the ideal of modern humanity.

Modern people do, of course, believe that all this—the telegraph, telephones, the use of steam Power, etc.—happens without the participation of spiritual entities. This is not the case, however. The development of human civilization involves the participation of elemental spirits, even if people do not know about it. Modern materialists imagine that the telephone and telegraph, and the steam engines driven long distances and also used by farmers, have been constructed merely on the basis of what people produce by the sweat of their brow. Everything people do in this respect is under the influence of elemental spirits. They are always involved and helping us in this. People are not taking the initiative on their own in this field—they are guided. In laboratories, workshops, really everywhere where the spirit of invention is active, elemental spirits are providing the inspiration.

The elemental spirits who have given impulses to our civilization from the eighteenth century onwards are of the same kind as those used by the gods to bring about birth and death. This is one of the mysteries which human beings have to discover today. And the law of world history of which I have spoken is that as evolution proceeds, the gods always rule for a time within a particular sphere of elemental spirits and then human beings enter into this same sphere and use the elemental spirits. In earlier times, the elemental spirits of birth and death essentially served the divine spirits who guided the world; since our day—and this has been going on for some time now—the elemental spirits of birth and death are serving technology, industry and human commerce. It is important to let this disturbing truth enter into our souls with all its power and intensity.

Something is happening in this fifth post-Atlantean period of civilization which is similar to something that happened in Atlantean times, during the fourth Atlantean period. I have spoken of this before. Up to the fourth Atlantean period the divine spirits who guide human evolution used certain elemental spirits. They had to use them because not only birth and death had to be brought about at that time, but also something else, which may be said to be closer to the earth. You will remember some of the descriptions I have given of the Atlantean age, when human beings were still flexible in their physical nature and their souls could make their bodies grow large or remain dwarf-like, with their outer appearance depending on their inner nature. Please call this to mind again.² Today the service certain elemental spirits give to the divine spirits on occasions of birth and death is clearly apparent in physical terms. In those times, when outer appearance was in accord with inner nature, certain elemental spirits were serving the gods for the whole of human life. When the Atlantean age had reached its fourth period, people again began to rule the elemental spirits, which had previously been used by the gods, to govern the growth and general physiognomy of human beings. Human beings gained control of certain divine powers and made use of them.

The consequence was that from about the middle of the Atlantean age it was possible for individuals who desired to harm their fellow human beings to use all kinds of creative powers on them—keeping them dwarf-sized in growth or making them into giants, or letting the physical organism develop in such a way that the individual concerned would be an intelligent person or a cretin. A terrible power was in human hands in the middle of the Atlantean age. You know, for I have drawn attention to this, that this was not kept secret, though not from any kind of evil intent. According to one of the laws of world history, something which initially was the work of the gods had to become the work of human beings. This led to serious mischief in the Atlantean age, so that over the last four or three periods of civilization the whole of Atlantean civilization had to be guided towards its own destruction. Our own civilization was saved and brought across from Atlantis, as I have described elsewhere, and you will recall my descriptions of what happened in the Atlantean age.

In the last three, or two, periods of post-Atlantean civilization in the fifth stage of earth evolution, work now done by the gods will again become work to be done by humanity. We are only in the early stages of the technological, industrial and commercial activities which proceed under the influence of the elemental spirits of birth and death. This influence and its effects will be increasingly more radical. Until now, the elemental spirits of birth and death have been guided by the gods and their influence has been limited to the coming into being and passing away of humans at the physical level. But the civilization of our own and future ages has to be such that these spirits can be active in technology, industry, commerce, and so on.

There is also another, quite specific, aspect to this. As I have said, these elemental spirits are the enemies of human welfare and want to destroy it. We have to see things straight and not have any illusions concerning the radical nature of this. Civilization must progress in the fields of technology, industry and commerce. But by its very nature such a civilization cannot serve the well-being of humanity in the physical world; it can only prove destructive to the human weal.

This will be an unpalatable truth for people who never tire of making great speeches on the tremendous advances made in modern civilization, for they see things in abstract terms and know nothing of the rise and fall which is part of human evolution. I have made brief reference to the causes of destruction in Atlantis. The commercial, industrial and technological civilization which is now in its beginnings harbours elements which will lead to the decline and fall of the fifth earth period. And we only see things straight and face reality if we admit that we are here beginning to work on something which must lead to catastrophe.

This is what it means to enter into iron necessity. Looking for an easy way out people might say: Alright, I won't take the tram. It might even go so far—though even members of the Anthroposophical Society are unlikely to take things this far—that people will not go on trains, and so on. This would be complete nonsense, of course. It is not a matter of avoiding things but of getting a clear picture, real insight into the iron necessities of human evolution. Civilization cannot continue in an unbroken upward trend; it has to go through a succession of rising and falling waves.

There is, however, something else which can happen, something people generally do not want to know about today but which is exactly what modern humanity will have to discover. Insight—a clear picture of the necessity which exists—is what will have to come to all human minds. It will necessarily mean that much will have to change in the frame of mind in which we consider the world. Human beings will need to live with inner impulses which they still prefer to ignore today, for these go against the good life they want. There are many such impulses. Let me give you just one example.

People today, especially if they want to be good people, wanting nothing for themselves but only to be selfless and desire the good of others, will of course seek to develop certain virtues. These, too, are iron necessities. Now, of course, there is nothing to be said against a desire for virtue, but the problem is that people are not merely desiring to be virtuous. It is quite a good thing to want to be virtuous, but these people want more. If one looks to the unconscious depths of the human soul one finds that in the present time people are not really much concerned to develop the actual virtues. It is much more important to them to be able to feel themselves to be virtuous, to give themselves up entirely to a state of mind where they can say: ‘I am truly selfless, look at all the things I do to improve myself! I am perfect, I am kind, I am someone who does not believe in authority.’ They will then, of course, eagerly follow all kinds of authorities. To feel really good in the consciousness of having one particular virtue or another is endlessly more important to people today than actually having that virtue. They want to feel they have the virtue rather than practise it.

As a result, certain secrets connected with the virtues remain hidden to them. They are secrets which people instinctively feel they do not want to know, especially if they are modern idealists who like to feel good in the way I have described. All kinds of ideals are represented by societies today. Programmes are made, and a society states its principles, which are to achieve one thing or another. The things people want to achieve in this way may indeed be very nice, but to find something nice in an abstract way is not enough. People must learn to think in terms of reality. Let us look at the aspect of reality when it comes to people having virtues. Perfection, benevolence, beautiful virtues, rights—it is nice to have them all in the outer social sphere. However, when people say: ‘It is our programme to achieve perfection in some particular way, benevolence in some particular direction, we aim to establish a specific right', they usually consider this to be something absolute which can be brought to realization as such. ‘Surely’, people will say, ‘it must be a good thing to be more and more perfect?’ And ‘What better ideal can there be but to have a programme that will make us more and more perfect?’ But this is not in accord with the law of reality. It is right, and good, to be more and more perfect, or at least aim to be so, but when people are actually seeking to be perfect in a particular direction, this search for perfection will after a time change into what in reality is imperfection. A change occurs through which the desire for perfection becomes a weakness. Benevolence will after a time become prejudicial behaviour. And however good the right may be that you want to bring to realization—it will turn into a wrong in the course of time. The reality is that there are no absolutes in this world. You work towards something that is good, and the way of the world will turn it into something bad. We therefore must seek ever new ways, look for new forms over and over again. This is what really matters.

The swing of the pendulum governs all such human efforts. Nothing is more harmful than belief in absolute ideals, for they are at odds with the true course of world evolution.

A good way of demonstrating things—not to prove, but merely to illustrate—is to use certain ideas. And to some extent, ideas from the physical sciences can be used as symbols to illustrate non-physical ideas. Imagine we have a pendulum suspended here (drawing on the board). Now you see, if you take the pendulum to this point, to one extreme, and then let go, it will go to this point to find its equilibrium. It follows this path. Why does it do so? Because it is subject to gravity, people say. It goes down, but once it has reached the lowest point does not stop there. The downward movement has given it a certain inertia, which it uses to move to the other side. It then goes down again. It means that when the pendulum travels this distance, the downward movement gives it sufficient energy to swing to the other side. This provides an analogy that may be used to give a strong visual image of one thing or another. Thus we may say: A virtue—perfection, benevolence—goes in this direction, but then goes in the opposite direction. Perfection becomes weakness, benevolence uncritical adoration, and right turns into wrong in the course of evolution.

People prefer not to consider such ideas today. Just imagine trying to explain to a solid middle-class citizen who is establishing a society which is to serve certain ideals: You are now setting up an ideal, but in making it part of the process of evolution you will create the opposite effect, and you will do so in a relatively short time. Well, he would think you are not only no idealist, but a real devil. Why should the effort to be perfect not go towards increasing perfection, and why should right not continue to be right for ever and ever? It is extremely difficult for people today to have ideas based on reality instead of ideas that are one-sided abstractions. Yet they will have to learn to have such ideas, for they will not progress without them. They will also have to become used to the idea that progress in civilization will gradually make it necessary for us to use the elemental spirits of birth and death. And in doing so, humanity will have to live with the fact that a destructive element becomes part of human evolution.

Every now and then, people who refuse to familiarize themselves with anthroposophy—which is the only means of finding the right attitude to such things—find the right ideas by themselves, from instinct. What is the significance of all this? The elemental spirits of birth and death are, of course, messengers of Ahriman. The iron necessity of world evolution forces the gods to use Ahriman's messengers to control birth and death. When they ask the elemental spirits to act on their behalf they do not allow the powers of these messengers to enter the physical world. But as civilization goes into its decline, from the fifth post-Atlantean period onwards, this element has to come in again, so that catastrophe may be brought about. Human beings must use these powers themselves. Ahriman's messengers are therefore an iron necessity; they have to bring about the destruction that will lead to the next step forward in civilization. This is a terrible truth, but it is so. And nothing will avail where this truth is concerned but to get to know it and to see it clearly. We shall be discussing this further and you will see how many things there are which call for the right attitude to these truths.

Instinct, I have said, makes some people realize that something is necessary. One such individual is Ricarda Huch,³ who has written a number of excellent books at the present time—though none that somehow comes even close to anthroposophy. Her latest work, on Luther's faith, is remarkable—not so much because of insight, but because of the instinct to be found in this book. If you read the first three chapters of the book you find there a strange cry—I think we may call it such—a cry for humanity to find again what has really been lost since Luther came on the scene. Before his day atavistic clairvoyance still existed. Ricarda Huch says that what humanity needs most of all today is to get to know the devil. She does not consider it so necessary for people to come to know God; it is much more important, she says, to get to know the devil.

Ricarda Huch does not know, of course, why this is necessary, but she has an instinctive feeling that it is so. Hence her remarkable cry for knowledge of the devil in the first chapters of the book. This is highly symptomatic and significant for our time. Her thinking is: People will come to know God again once they know that the devil is all around them. Individuals like this, who still do not want to take up anthroposophy, will always look for a way to apologize for their statements. Ricarda Huch does feel that people must get to know the devil as someone who is very real; but she immediately says, as a kind of apology, that one should not, of course, imagine the devil to be walking around in the street with horns and a tail. Oh, but he does walk around! ‘They never know the devil is about, Not even when he has them by the collar.’⁴ Modern abstract thinking immediately needs an apology, even if someone knows instinctively what is most urgently needed. But there is a good and real instinct for the present time behind this cry for the devil. People should not simply grow blindly, as if asleep, into what iron necessity demands of them in the immediate future, which is to use the messengers of the devil in our work in laboratories, workshops, banks and everywhere else. They have to use them so that civilization may progress; but they must know the devil, they must know that the keys which are used, say, to unlock the vaults have the devil's power in them. Ricarda Huch knows this instinctively, and people need to know it, for only knowledge will take us into the future in the right way. It is of immense importance that there are people who, out of instinct, point to the need which exists to know the devil and not walk past him fast asleep, for he is getting more and more powerful.

Perhaps there is something else that is characteristic—I mention it only in passing: In Paradise, too, it was a woman who instinctively allowed the functions of the devil to enter into Paradise. I think it is not much to the credit of men in our civilization that they are still calling this kind of thing superstition and refuse to have anything to do with it, once again leaving it to a woman. It may indeed be characteristic that a woman, Ricarda Huch, is calling for the devil, just as once in Paradise it was Eve who let in the devil. This merely as a passing comment.

It is the devil who will and must be the bearer of our future civilization. This is a harsh truth, but it is important. It is intimately bound up with the fact that destructive powers will have to enter into the future progress of civilization. Above all—and I will speak of this tomorrow—destructive powers will have to enter into the whole field of education, and especially the education of children, unless the matter is taken in hand with wisdom. Because of the general trend of civilization, and the customary practices and emotions of people, destructive powers will also enter more and more into the whole social sphere. They will above all bring more and more destruction into the actual relationships between people.

Humanity should seek to bring Christ's words to realization: ‘Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.’⁵ Technological and commercial progress will not bring this to realization, but rather: Where two or more want to fight and assault each other in my name, there am I in the midst of them. This will happen more and more in the social life and because of this there is a general difficulty today in presenting truths which will bring people together.

Let us conclude by being clear in our minds, at least for the moment—we shall continue with the subject tomorrow and the day after—about the frame of mind in which people generally receive truths. People do not like to be told truths today because they simply do not believe truth to be something which comes to human beings directly from the world of the Spirit. Modern people believe truth must always be something grown in their own garden. People in their twenties have their own point of view, they do not need to be convinced of a truth, they do not need to have the truth revealed to them, they have their own point of view. And someone who has eagerly fought for the truth, a young fellow of twenty-four, just finished at university where he may have attended lectures on philosophy—he has his point of view and enters into discussion with another who has just as eagerly fought for his own truth. Each of them believes that the absolute certain truth grows in his own garden, even if the soil has not been prepared. People are not inclined to receive truths; they announce themselves the possessors of truth. This is the characteristic element in the present time.

Ricarda Huch has put it rather nicely. She points out that in the period of Enlightenment in Europe, our present state of mind, or call it what you will, which is absolutely awash with chauvinism, was preceded by Nietzscheanism, which was far more sublime than anything connected with native pride and chauvinism. Many, many people became followers of Nietzsche and it was he who set up the ideal of the ‘tawny beast’. People actually had little idea of what this meant. Ricarda Huch says: People who did not even have what it takes to be a decent pet rabbit fancied themselves as ‘tawny beasts’ of the kind Nietzsche presented.⁶ There you have the modern bourgeois point of view. One does not have what it takes to be a decent rabbit, but if someone establishes a high ideal—that is how they like to see themselves! One considers oneself to be this, without doing anything to achieve it. People do not feel they need to develop, for they cannot bear the idea of being something in the future; they want to be something now. This splits them apart into human atoms, each with his own point of view, with no one able to understand anyone else.

There, in this mood where no one can understand anyone else, you see the destructive powers at work in human society. This is driving people apart. It was, of course, the devil who presented people with the temptation to be ‘tawny beasts’. They did not actually become such beasts, but even so, the nineteenth-century impulses which destroy social life in the twentieth century have certainly taken root. We will continue with this tomorrow.

• 1. Leonardo da Vinci, 1452–1519.
• 2. Examples are the chapter on the evolution of the world and the human being in Occult Science. An Outline (trans. by G. and M. Adams; Rudolf Steiner Press, London 1969) and the chapter on our Atlantean forebears in Cosmic Memory (translated by K. E. Zimmer; Steinerbooks, New York 1976).
• 3. Ricarda Huch (1864–1947), German writer: Luthers Glaube, Briefe an einen Freund (Luther's faith, letters to a friend), Leipzig: Insel-Verlag 1916. A new edition of the work appeared in 1964.
• 4. Quote from Goethe's Faust, Part 1, scene in Auerbach's Tavern. Trans. by Philip Wayne; Penguin.
• 5. Matthew 18:20.
• 6. The German term for ‘tawny beast’ is ‘blonde Bestie’. Nietzsche experts are in two minds about the interpretation of the term. It comes from Nietzsche's Zur Genealogie der Moral (1887, I, 11): ‘das Raubtier, die prachtvolle nach Beute lstern schweifende blonde Bestie’ (the predator, that magnificent blonde/tawny beast roaming far and wide lusting for prey). One interpretation is that this refers to the Janissary, a ‘killing order’ of warriors who in their boyhood had been taken from Christian families by the Turks and, thus removed from the humanizing influence of a family, trained to be utterly ruthless and inhuman. Other experts, and clearly also Ricarda Huch, think the term refers to a lion. (Translator.)

When trying to understand the world through a natural scientific interpretation of its phenomena, whether through cognition or through everyday life, people tend to consider conditions only as they meet them in the moment. Such a statement might seem incorrect to those who merely look at the surface of things, but as we proceed, it will become evident that this is indeed true. We have grown accustomed to investigate the human physical organism with the accepted methods of biology, physics, and anatomy, but (though this may appear wrong at first) in the results we find only what the present moment reveals to us.

For example, we might observe the lungs of a child, of an adult, and of an older person, in their stages from the beginning to the end of life, and we reach certain conclusions. But we do not really penetrate the element of time at all in this way, because we limit ourselves to spatial observations, which we then invest with qualities of time. We are doing the same thing, to use a simile, when we read the time by looking at a clock. We note the position of the hands in the morning, for example, and positions in space indicate the time for us. We may look at the clock again at noon and deduce the passage of time from the spatial changes of its hands. We take our bearing in the course of time from the movements of the clock’s hands from point to point in space. This has become our way of judging time in everyday life. But through this method we cannot experience the true nature of time. Yet only by penetrating time with the same awareness we use to experience space can we correctly assess human life between birth and death. I would like to illustrate these theoretical remarks with examples to show the importance of living into the dimension of time, especially if you want to practice the art of education.

Let us take as our example a child who is full of reverence toward adults. Anyone with a healthy instinct would consider such an attitude in a child as something wholesome, especially if such reverence is justified, as indeed it should be on the part of the adult. However, people usually think no further, but merely attribute a feeling of reverence toward adults to certain aspects of childhood and leave it at that. But we cannot recognize the importance of such reverence unless we include the entire course of a human life in our considerations.

As we grows older, we may have the opportunity to observe old people. We may discover that some of them have the gift of bringing soul comfort to those who need it. Often it is not what they have to say that acts as balm on a suffering soul, but just the tone of voice or the way they speak. If now you follow this old person’s life back to childhood, you find that, as a child, that individual was full of reverence and respect for adults. Naturally, this attitude of reverence will disappear in later life, but only on the surface. Deep down, it will gradually transform, only to reemerge later as the gift of bringing solace and elevation to suffering and troubled minds.

One could also say it this way: If a young child has learned to pray and has learned to develop an inner mood of prayer, this mood will enter the subconscious and transform into the capacity of blessing in the ripeness of old age. When we meet old people whose mere presence radiates blessing upon those around them, you find that in their childhood they experienced and developed this inner mood of prayer. Such a transformation can be discovered only if one has learned to experience time as concretely as we generally experience space. We must learn to recognize the time element with the same awareness with which we experience space. Time must not be experienced only in spatial terms, as when we look at a clock. What I have been trying to illustrate regarding the moral aspects of life needs to become very much a part of our concept of the human being—certainly if we are going to develop a true art of education. I would like to elaborate this in greater detail.

If we compare human beings with the animals, we find that from the moment of birth, animals (especially the higher species) are equipped with all the faculties needed for living. A chick leaving its shell does not need to learn to walk and is immediately adapted to its surroundings. Each animal’s organs are firmly adapted to the specific needs of its species. This is not at all true, however, of human beings, who come into this world completely helpless. Only gradually do we develop the capacities and skills needed for life. This is because the most important period in our earthly life is between the end of childhood and the beginning of old age. This central period of maturity is the most important feature of human life on earth. During that time, we adapt our organism to external life by gaining aptitudes and skills. We develop a reciprocal relationship to the outer world, based on our range of experience. This central period, when human organs maintain the ability to evolve and adapt, is completely missing in the life of animals. The animal is born in a state that is fundamentally comparable to an old person, whose organic forms have become rigid. If you want to understand the nature of an animal’s relationship to its surroundings, look at it in terms of our human time of old age.

Now we can ask whether an animal shows the characteristics of old age in its soul qualities. This is not the case, because in an animal there is also the opposite pole, which counteracts this falling into old age, and this is the animal’s capacity of reproduction. The ability to reproduce, whether in the human or animal kingdom, always engenders forces of rejuvenation. While animal fall prey to the influences of aging too quickly on the one hand, on the other they are saved from premature aging because of the influx of reproductive forces until maturity.

If you can observe an animal or an animal species without preconceived ideas, you will conclude that, when the animal is capable of reproduction, it has reached a stage equivalent to that of old age in a human being. The typical difference in the human being is the fact that both old age and childhood (when the child’s reproductive system is slowly maturing) are placed on either end of the human central period, and during this period the human organism remains flexible, enabling human beings to relate and adapt individually to the environment. Through this arrangement, a human being will be a child at the right time, then leave childhood at the right time to enter maturity. And a person leaves maturity when it is time to enter old age.

If you look at human life from this aspect of time, you also understand certain abnormalities. You may encounter people who (if I may put it this way) slip prematurely into old age. I am not thinking so much of the obvious features typically associated with old age, such as grey hair or baldness; even a bald-headed person may still be childish. I am thinking of the more subtle indications, detectable only by more intimate observations. One could call such features the signs of a senile soul life, manifesting in people who should still be in the central period of flexibility and adaptability. But the opposite may also happen; a person may be unable to leave the stage of childhood at the right time and carry infantile features into the central stage of life. In this case, strange things may happen in the life of that person—the symptoms of which we can only touch on today. When we include the time element in our picture of the human being, we can diagnose aberrations in human behavior.

We know that, as we approach old age, we lose flexibility especially in the head. Consequently, all the capacities that we have acquired during life attain more of a soul and spiritual quality. But this is possible only at the expense of the head as a whole assuming certain animal-like qualities. From a physical point of view, an old person goes through conditions similar to those of a newborn animal. To a certain extent one becomes “animalized.” Thus old people gain something that they may preserve for the rest of their lives, provided their education was right. Their spiritual, soul experiences of the outer world no longer enter fully into the human organization. The cranium becomes ossified and fixed. Old people thus depend more on soul and spiritual links with the surrounding world. They are no longer able to transform outer events into inward qualities as well as they once did. Thus, a kind of animalization of the upper regions takes place.

It is possible for this animalization of the head structure to occur prematurely—during the middle period of life—but because we remain human despite such a tendency, we do not encounter external symptoms. Rather, we must look for certain changes in the soul realm. If the characteristic relationship of the older person to the outer world manifests prematurely—and this can happen even during childhood—a person’s experiences is drawn too much into the physical system, since the general flexibility of the rest of the human organization, typical of the younger age, naturally retains the upper hand. In this case, a person will experience inwardly, and too early, a relationship to the outer world typical of old age. Interaction between inner and outer world would thus be linked too much to the physical organization, bringing about soul properties more like that in the animal world than in normal human beings.

One can say (if you want to express it in this way) that animals have the advantage of a certain instinct over human beings, an instinct that links them more directly and intimately to the environment than is true of the normal human being. It is not simply a myth, but completely reflects the peculiarities of animal life, that certain animals will leave a place that is in danger of a natural catastrophe. Animals are gifted with certain prophetic instincts of self-preservation. It is also true that animals experience far more intensely the changing seasons than do human beings. They can sense the approaching time for migration, because they have an intimate and instinctive relationship with the environment. If we could look into an animal’s soul, we would find—although entirely unconsciously—an instinctive wisdom of life that manifests as the animal’s ability to live entirely within the manifold processes and forces of nature.

Now, if a person falls victim to encroaching age too early, this animal-like instinctive experience of the surroundings begins to develop, though in a sublimated form because it is lifted into the human sphere. Lower forms of clairvoyance, such as telepathy, telekinesis and so on—described correctly or wrongly—occur abnormally in human life and are simply the result of this premature aging in the central period of life. When this process of aging occurs at the proper time, people experience it in a healthy way, whereas if it appears in the twenties, a person gains clairvoyance of a low order. The symptoms of premature aging represent an abnormality in life that does not manifest outwardly but in a more hidden way. If these forms of lower clairvoyance were studied from the aspect of premature aging, a people would gain far deeper insight into these phenomena. This is possible, however, only when people observe life in a more realistic way. It is not good enough to investigate what we see with our eyes at the present moment. People must learn to recognize indications in these symptoms of a time shift from later to earlier stages of life.

We will see in the next few days how healing processes can occur through exact insight into human nature. It is possible that a kind of animalization could manifest not as an outwardly visible aging process but as a close, instinctive relationship to the environment encroaching on the lower regions of the human being and otherwise characteristic of an animal. The resulting phenomena of telepathy, telekinesis, and so on do not become less interesting because they are recognized for what they really are—the intrusion of a later stage of life upon an earlier, not manifestations of the spirit world. By developing time consciousness, we can fathom the very depths of human nature. To live in the dimension of time is to survey the course of time until we can see into both the past and future from the present moment.

You can get a sense of how present-day observation (though externally it may appear otherwise) is very remote from this more inward means of observation, which is more concurrent with time and its flow. Inadequate interpretation of what we encounter in life is the result of modern methods of observation. Contemporary scientific explanations and their effects on life are full of anemic interpretations.

Looking at the course of human life, we discover that the opposite of what we just described can also happen when childishness is carried into maturity. It is characteristic of children that they not only experience the external world less consciously than adults, but their experiences are also much more intimately connected with metabolic changes. When children see colors, their impressions strongly affect the metabolic processes; a child takes in outer sensory impressions all the way into the metabolism. It is not a mere metaphor to say that children digest their sensory impressions, because their digestion responds to all of their outer experiences. An old person develops certain animal characteristics within the physical, but a child’s entire life is filled with a sensitivity toward the vegetative organic processes that also affect the child’s soul life. Unless we are aware of this, we cannot understand a child’s nature.

In later years, human beings leave the digestive and metabolic processes more or less on their own; experiences of the external world are more independent of those processes. They do not allow their soul and spiritual reactions toward the outer world to affect the metabolism to the extent that a child does. The response of adults to their surroundings is not accompanied by the same liveliness of glandular secretion as in children.

Children take in outer impressions as if they were edible substances, but adults leave their digestion to itself, and this alone makes them adults under normal circumstances. But there are cases where certain vegetative and organic forces, which are properly at work during childhood, continue to work in an adult, affecting the psyche as well. In this case, other abnormal symptoms are also liable to occur. An example will make this clear. Imagine, for example, a girl who comes to love a dog that has made a deep impression on her nature. If she has carried childishness into later life, this tenderness will work right into the metabolism. Organic processes that correspond to her feelings of affection will be established. In this situation, digestive processes occur not only after eating or as the result of normal physical activities, but certain areas within the digestive system will develop a habit of secreting and regenerating substances in response to the strong emotions evoked by the love for the animal. The dog will become indispensable to the well-being of her vegetative system. And what happens if the dog dies? The connection in outer life is broken; the organic processes continue by force of inertia, but they are no longer satisfied. Her feelings miss something they had gotten used to, and inner troubles and strange disturbances may follow. A friend may suggest getting a new dog to restore the previous state of health, since the inner organic processes would again find satisfaction through external experiences. We will see later, however, that there are better ways to cure such an abnormality, but anyone may reasonably try to solve the problem this way.

There are of course many other examples, less drastic than a deep affection for a dog. If an adult has not outgrown certain childhood forces that absorb external impressions into the digestive system, and if that adult can no longer satisfy this abnormal habit, certain cravings within the vegetative organism will result. But there are other things that may have been loved and lost that cannot be replaced; then a person remains dissatisfied, morose, and psychosomatic. One must try to find the true causes of the seemingly inexplicable symptoms that arise from the depths of the unconscious. There are people who can sense what needs to be done to alleviate suffering caused by unsatisfied emotions that affect inner organic processes. They manage to coax and to bring to consciousness what the patient wants to recall, and in this way they can help a great deal.

Because of the present condition of our civilization, there are many who have not progressed from childhood to adulthood in the normal way, and the ensuing symptoms, both light and serious, have been widely noted. Whereas this led naturally to conversations in ordinary life among helpful, interested people, the situation has stimulated—in many respects rightly so—psychological research, and a new scientific terminology has sprung up. The patient’s psyche is examined through investigation of dreams or by freely or involuntarily giving oneself away. In this way, unfulfilled urges arise from the subconscious into consciousness. This new branch of science is called psychology or psychoanalysis, the science of probing the hidden regions of the soul. However, we are not dealing with “hidden regions of the soul,” but with the remains of vegetative organic processes left behind and craving satisfaction. When thwarted desires have been diagnosed, one can help patients readapt, and here lies the value of psychoanalysis.

When judging these things, anthroposophy, or spiritual science, finds itself in a difficult position. It has no quarrel with the findings of natural science; on the contrary, spiritual science is quite prepared to recognize and accept whatever remains properly within its realm. Similarly, spiritual science accepts psychoanalysis within its proper limits. But spiritual science tries to see all problems and questions within the widest context, encompassing the entire universe and the whole human being. It feels it is necessary to broaden the arbitrary restrictions laid down by natural science, which even today often investigates in an unprofessional and superficial way. Anthroposophy has no wish and no intention to quarrel and only puts what is stated in a lopsided way into a wider perspective. Yet this approach is distasteful and unacceptable to those who prefer to wear blinders, and, consequently, furious attacks are made against anthroposophy. Spiritual science must defend itself against an imbalanced attitude, but it will never be aggressive. This has to be said regarding the present currents of thought, as we find in psychoanalysis.

A person may draw the last period of life too much into middle age and, with it, experience abnormal relationships with the external world, manifesting as lower forms of clairvoyance, such as telepathy. In this case, one’s horizon extends beyond the normal human scope in an animal-like fashion. It is important to distinguish the two opposing situations, since a person may also move in the other direction by pushing what properly belongs to childhood into later periods of life. As a result, one becomes enmeshed too strongly with the physical organism, with the result that organic surges swamp the psyche, causing disturbances and inner abnormalities. Such a person suffers from a relationship that is too close to one’s own organic system. This relationship has been diagnosed by psychoanalysis, which should nevertheless direct its attention toward the human organs to understand the roots of this problem.

If we desire a comprehensive knowledge of the human being, it is absolutely necessary to include the entire human life between birth and death in our considerations. It is essential to focus on the effects of passing time and to inwardly live with and experience those effects. Spiritual science pursues knowledge of the whole human being by penetrating the suprasensory, using its own specific methods and fully considering the time element, which is generally ignored completely in our present stage of civilization. Imagination, inspiration and intuition, which are the specific methods of spiritual scientific work, must be built on an experience of time.

Imagination, inspiration and intuition, the ways leading to suprasensory cognition, should not be seen as faculties beyond ordinary human life but as a continuation, or extension, of ordinary human capacities. Spiritual science dismisses the bias that maintains we can attain this sort of cognition only through some special grace; spiritual science holds that we can become conscious of certain faculties lying deep within us and that we have the power to train them. The usual kind of knowledge gotten through modern scientific training and in ordinary practical life must certainly be transcended.

What happens when we try to comprehend the world around us—not as scientifically trained specialists but as ordinary people? We are surrounded by colors, sounds, varying degrees of warmth, and so on, all of which I would like to call the tapestry of the sensory world. We surrender to these sensory impressions and weave them without thoughts. If you think about the nature of memories rising in your soul, you will find that they are the result of sensory impressions woven into our thoughts. Our whole life depends on imparting this texture of sensory impressions and thoughts to our soul life. But what really happens? Look at the diagram. Let the line a to b represent the tapestry of the sensory world around us, consisting of colors, sounds, smells, and so on. We give ourselves up to our observation, this tapestry of the senses, and weave its impressions with our thinking (indicated here by the wavy line).

When living in our senses, we unite all our experiences with our thoughts. We interpret the sensory stimuli through thinking. But when we project our thoughts into our surroundings, this tapestry becomes a barrier for us, a metaphorical canvas upon which we draw and paint all our thoughts, but which we cannot penetrate. We cannot break through this incorporeal wall with ordinary consciousness. As the thoughts are stopped by this canvas, they are inscribed upon it.

The only possibility of penetrating this wall is gained by raising one’s consciousness to the state of imagination through systematic and regular meditation exercises. It is equally possible to undergo an inner training in meditation as a method of research in an outwardly directed study of chemistry or astronomy. If you read my book How to Know Higher Worlds and the second part of An Outline of Esoteric Science, you can convince yourselves that, if you want to reach the final goal, the methods for such meditative exercises are certainly not simple and less time-consuming than those needed to study astronomy or chemistry. On the other hand, it is relatively easy to read books giving information about such exercises and, using one’s common sense, examine the truths of spiritual scientific research. You do not have to take these on authority. Even if you cannot investigate the spiritual world yourself, it is possible to test given results by studying the specific methods employed.

Meditative practice is based on freeing ourselves from outer sensory impressions. In meditation, we do not surrender to sensory impressions, but to the life of thinking. However, by dwelling again and again in meditation on a given thought or mental image—one that is easily and fully comprehensible—we gradually bring our life of thought to such a strength and inner substance that we learn to move in it with the same certainty we have in our sensory impressions. You have all experienced the difference between the striking effects of outer sensory impressions and the rather limp and pale world of our thoughts during ordinary consciousness. Sensory impressions are intense and alive. We give ourselves up to them. Thoughts, on the other hand, turn pale and become abstract and cold. But the very core of meditating is learning, through regular practice, to imbue thoughts with the same intensity and life that normally fills our sensory experiences. If we succeed in grasping a meditation with the same inner intensity that we experience through the stimulus of a color, for example, then we have enlivened, in the right way, the underlying thoughts of a meditation. But all this must happen with the same inner freedom employed in the normal weaving of thoughts or ordinary sense perceptions. Just as we do not allow ourselves to be taken over by nebulous moods or mystical dreaming, or become fatuous visionaries when observing the external world, we must not lose our firm ground when meditating in the right way. The same sane mood with which we perceive the world around us must also take hold when we meditate.

This attitude of taking outer sensory perceptions as an example for one’s conduct when meditating is characteristic of the anthroposophic method. There are plenty of vague mystics who disparage sensory perceptions as inferior and advise leaving them behind. They claim that, when you meditate, you should reach a state of mystic dreaming. The result, of course, is a condition of half sleep, certainly not meditation. Spiritual science pursues the opposite goal, considering the quality, intensity, and liveliness of sensory perception as an example to be followed until the meditator moves inwardly with the same freedom with which one encounters sensory perceptions. We need not fear we will become dried up bores. The meditative content (which we experience objectively in meditative practice) saves us from that. Because of the inner content that we experience while freeing ourselves from ordinary life, there is no need to enter a vague, trance-like state while meditating.

Correct meditation allows us to gain the ability to move freely in our life of thinking. This in turn redeems the thoughts from their previous abstract nature; they become image-like. This happens in full consciousness, just as all healthy thinking takes place. It is essential that we do not lose full consciousness, and this distinguishes meditation from a hallucinatory state. Those who give themselves up to hallucinations, becoming futile enthusiasts or visionaries, relinquish common sense; on the other hand, those who wish to follow the methods advocated here must make sure common sense accompanies all their weaving thought imagery. And what does this lead to? Though fully awake, we experience the pictorial quality of the dream world. The significant difference between imagination and dream images is that we are completely passive when experiencing the imagery of dreams. If they arise from the subconscious and enter our waking state, we can observe them only after they have occurred. When practicing imagination, on the other hand, we initiate them ourselves; we create images that are not mere fantasy, but differ in intensity and strength from the fantasy as do dream images. The main point is that we initiate the images ourselves, and this frees us from the illusion that they are a manifestation of the external world. Those given up to hallucinations, however, always believe that what comes to them represents reality, because they know that they did not create what they see. This is the cause of the deception. Those who practice imagination through meditation cannot possibly believe that the images they create represent external reality. The first step toward suprasensory cognition depends on freeing ourselves from the illusion that the images we have created—having the same intensity as those of the dream world—are real. This, however, is obvious, because the meditator remains fully aware of having initiated them in complete freedom. Only the insane would mistake them for outer reality.

Now, in the next step in meditation we acquire the ability to allow these images to vanish without a trace. This is not as easy as one might expect, because, unless the one meditating has created them in full freedom, the images become quite fascinating and fix themselves on the mind like parasites. One has to become strong enough to let such pictures disappear at will. This second step is equally important as the first. In ordinary life, we need the ability to forget; otherwise we would have to go through life with the total of all our memories. Similarly, the complete extinction of meditative images is as important as their initial creation.

When we have thoroughly practiced these exercises, we have done something to our soul life that might be compared to the strengthening of muscles through repeated bending and stretching. By learning to weave and form images and then to obliterate them—and all this is done in complete freedom of the will—we have performed an important training of the soul. We will have developed the faculty of consciously forming images that, under normal circumstances, appear only in dreams, during a state that escapes ordinary consciousness and is confined to the time between falling asleep and awaking. Now, however, this condition has been induced in full consciousness and freedom. Training in imagination means training the will to consciously create images and to consciously remove them from the mind. And through this, we acquire yet another faculty.

Everyone has this faculty automatically—not during sleep, but at the moments of awaking and falling asleep. It is possible that what was experienced between these two points in time comes to us as remnants of dreams, often experienced as though they come from the beyond. Naturally, it is equally possible that what we encounter on awaking surprises us so much that all memories of dreams sink below the threshold of consciousness. In general, we can say that, because dream imaginations are experienced involuntarily, something chaotic and erratic that normally lies beyond consciousness finds its way to us. If, while fully awake, we develop the ability of creating and of obliterating imaginations, we may reach a condition of emptied consciousness. This is like a new awakening, then, from beyond the tapestry of the sensory world; spiritual entities pass through the tapestry to reach us on paths smoothed by the meditation content (see the circle in the diagram). While thus persevering in emptied consciousness, we push through the barrier of the senses, and images come to us from beyond the sensory world, carried by inspiration. We enter the world beyond the sensory world. Through imagination, we prepare for inspiration, which involves the ability to experience consciously something that happens unconsciously at the moment of awaking. Right at the moment of awaking, something from beyond our waking soul life enters consciousness, so that something beyond the conscious sensory world enters us if, through imagination, we have trained our soul as described.

In this way, we experience the spiritual world beyond the world of the senses. The faculties of suprasensory cognition are extensions of those naturally given to us in ordinary life. It is one of the main tasks of spiritual science to train and foster the development of these higher faculties. And grasping the time element in human life is fundamental to such development.

If you look at the preparatory exercises for imagination, inspiration, and intuition as given in How to Know Higher Worlds or An Outline of Esoteric Science, you find that everything said there aims at one thing: learning to experience the flow of time. The human being goes through the various stages of experience in the world, first as a child, then as a mature person, and finally as an old person; otherwise, one may suffer from an abnormal overlap of one stage into the other. It is not imagination itself, but the meditative preparation, that should give the possibility of developing the full potential and of learning how to give ourselves to the world out of the fullness of life. To this end harmony must be brought about between the specific contributions to the world of childhood, middle age, and old age. These must flow together harmoniously into a worldview capable of reaching the spiritual world. Human beings in their wholeness, which includes the domain of time, must be actively engaged in work in the world. To achieve a worldview that reaches beyond the barriers of the sensory world, human beings must preserve the freshness of experience proper to youth; the clarity of thought and the freedom of judgment proper to the central period of life; and the power of loving devotion toward life that can reach perfection in old age. All these qualities are a necessary preparation for the proper development of imagination, inspiration, and intuition.

My dear friends,

You have all probably been deeply affected this morning by the news that Miss Maryon* has departed from the physical plane—although it is something long expected and which follows difficult suffering which lasted more than a year.

Tomorrow when the members of the Anthroposophical Society are all gathered here, I will say what I have to say about Miss Maryon's departure from the physical plane. For now it is sufficient to say that the First Class has lost a truly dedicated student, for among those who have devoted themselves to the School with great diligence, Miss Maryon was the best. Despite the serious illness which afflicted her she not only participated in what is being esoterically developed here, but she also let the exercises given here work on her and lived with them in an extraordinarily intimate way.

This was the result of her having been familiar with esotericism before coming to us. She belonged to an esoteric school of a completely different nature before she discovered the Anthroposophical Society and through this esoteric school made the complete transition to anthroposophy quickly. The esoteric was essential to her and she experienced it intensely during the years with us on the physical plane. She has departed from the physical plane but certainly not from anthroposophy.

It would be unseemly to say more now as she has just left the physical plane. Tomorrow, though, when the members, the friends are here, it will be my task to say what is to be said.

My dear friends, in esoteric striving it is necessary to at least envision, to the extent possible, the path upon which real knowledge of spiritual things can be realized. Of course how far one or the other comes along this path depends on his karma, on what conditions he brings along from previous earth lives.

But not only that, it also depends on which physical and environmental conditions the person's destiny places him. Much old karmic residue may exist to be worked out which hinders achieving everything which is otherwise within one's capabilities. Thus much which perhaps could be quickly achieved without these karmic residues takes longer.

My dear sisters and brothers, we should never give up hope, never lose patience or energy, but continue on our way. When the right time has come, we will surely find what has been predestined. For certain lines of every human being's life path are uniquely predestined despite or perhaps because of freedom. Every individual is called to his life's task and can accomplish it with sufficient good will.

Here in this Free School for Spiritual Science everything that existed in the Mysteries in the past when they especially flowered is to be reenacted in the correct form according to our time and to the future. The flowering time of the Mysteries had already passed when the greatest Mystery of all, the one most hidden to world history, took place: the Mystery of Golgotha. After their flowering time, the Mysteries declined, a process in which, just because the Mysteries had declined, humanity could be taken into the stream of world evolution where freedom is possible.

Nevertheless, the time has now come when the Mysteries are to be renewed, in the fullest sense of the word and in the appropriate form. And once these things have been thought about correctly in the future the Goetheanum's work will be appreciated in the world, because the task of this Goetheanum is to renew the Mysteries. And only, my dear sisters and brothers, if we are permeated with the will to understand this School as representing, through us, a renewal of the Mysteries, can we participate in the Mysteries and in the School in the right way.

If you will remember what was presented here in the last Lesson, then what I have just said can live in your hearts. For the transition is made for meditation to really enter directly into the individual's experience so that he frees himself from the narrow limits of his personality.

In the triple-versed structure of the last meditation we saw how we place ourselves in the world process and how in the meditation we confront not only what resounds from our soul but also what resounds to our soul, which in a certain way incorporates itself into a general universal language, a general universal Word. But only when the individual gradually frees himself from the limits of his personality, when he finds himself meditating in an ever more objective way, then will he be able to follow that intimate, subtle path, which is the true path to human knowledge. But for this to happen the objective truths which apply to humanity must become objectively present in him in the most varied ways.

You all know, my dear sisters and brothers, what has often been described as the threefold human nature: the nerve-sensory man, mostly represented by the human head; the rhythmic man, mostly represented by the breast, in which the respiratory and circulatory organs are concentrated. All these organs are everywhere in the organism, are located in other parts of the body as well, but more in certain areas than in others. Then we have the limbs-metabolism-organization, localized downward and outward.

That which can be known theoretically can also be meditatively objective. And when it is meditatively objective it becomes esoteric. Therefore in meditation we must intensively and intimately keep this threefold man in view.

So we have the head-organization, a real replica of the entire cosmos. We have the breast or rhythmic organization, which does not directly show in its form the cosmic image. And least of all does the limbs-metabolism-organization show the image of the cosmos. But man must be intimately conscious of how he places himself in the cosmos through each of these organizations. He must be clear about what takes place in his head. We can feel this directly: when we think, our head is active. We notice that when the head is ailing, thinking is impaired. We sense the head's association to this clearest human earthly activity in both normal and abnormal circumstances. This doesn't mean that the head is really the bearer of the clearest human earthly activity, but it seems so to us.

What is actually going on? When do we see ourselves—in our heads—in the right way? Only, my dear sisters and brothers, when we are aware that this human head would not exist if the star-filled sky did not arch above us. For the moment we will not dispute what the astronomers say about this; we are only taking into account what is visible to the eyes: the sublime starry heavens.

In the previous lesson much was said about this. The stars are there above; their rays of light approach us when we look up at them. But they don't only approach us, we also receive them. And what we receive of the rays of light we enclose in our heads. And out of it sprouts our human activity on earth: our thinking. And so we must imagine: Outside are the stars; our heads receive the effects of the stars' rays. From without it looks as though the stars were sending their rays down to us. Our heads receive these rays; so what has been received is within our heads. From here is looks quite different than from without, but it is the same, the whole starry sky rolled together, so to speak, within our heads.

But only the starry sky? No, not only the starry sky. For—what are the stars? What is in the individual stars which rays toward us? It is the domicile of the gods. They are the places where the gods reside. It is where the gods were sought in the times when instinctive clairvoyance knew where the gods reside, which are the places worthy of the gods.

During the times when such clairvoyance existed, people did not look up at burning points in the cosmos, but at the dwelling places of the gods. And in doing so had a truer idea of what exists in the far reaches of space than do the astronomers of today who observe the points of light and calculate their positions and angles to each other.

But in that man is a threefold being, he speaks and acts through what holds him together: his I—through all three elements of his being, through the nerve-sensory-system, the head; through the rhythmic system, the breast; and through the metabolic-limbs-system. It is held together only because the physical body is a unity. But man always sends his I into the three individual elements and we will learn today the different ways he sends this I into the individual elements.

At first man speaks the I through his thoughts into his head from his innermost being. Truly, it is thus: [draws on the blackboard]: What unfolds without as the shining element of the stars [blue arc, yellow stars], acts in the human head [yellow arc and rays from the stars]. It is also here within [red dots]. Man speaks his I from out of his center of his being into this rolled together cosmic space which is the interior of his head [arrow with the word “Ich”, yellow]. And he should become aware that when he speaks his I into the part of his humanity which is an image of the dwellings of the gods, then the gods themselves who live in these dwellings will act in him. We meditate correctly when we are aware that when we say “I” through the force of our heads, the gods of cosmic space and cosmic time speak in us.

And this is not a teaching given to us on the earth; it is a teaching, my dear sisters and brothers, given to us by the beings of the higher hierarchies themselves, at first from those beings who are with us humans: the angeloi, and in the background the directing archangeloi. This element of human nature—this I—has a relation to the dwelling places of the gods in the radiant stars, from out of which the godly beings themselves speak, and should let itself be taught by the beings we have always referred to as angeloi in our descriptions of the hierarchies.

We correctly accomplish a meditation thus: We look up, allowing ourselves to be impressed by the radiance of the stars, sense that cosmic space itself is sending us words. And these words should be:

Starry-cosmic-spaces,
Dwellings-of-the-gods!

It resounds in the periphery. Thus we imagine that we hear it from cosmic space.

Starry-cosmic-spaces,
Dwellings-of-the-gods!

It becomes an echo in us. We treat it as a call, but a call that excites us, because all heaven resounds in this call. This is how we meditate. And then we will be conscious of what we have to say from the depths of our souls, from whence in the stillness we answer the cosmic trumpet-call:

When human-spirit-radiance
Speaks with head-held-high
The "I am" :

That is what we say. Then the angel who belongs to us answers in our meditation:

Thus you live

—the gods—

in the earth-body
as man's true being.

That is the sense of this meditation. We hear it as a world-spanning trumpet call from all sides:

Starry-cosmic-spaces,
Dwellings-of-the-gods!

We answer in stillness intimately praying:

When human-spirit-radiance
Speaks with head-held-high
The "I am" :

The angel answers, looking upward to the source of the trumpet call:

Thus you live in the earth-body
as man's true being.

And we accept these last two lines which the angel speaks in our meditation as teaching.

[The first verse is written on the blackboard.]

Starry-cosmic-spaces,
Dwellings-of-the-gods!
When human-spirit-radiance
Speaks with head-held-high

—the scrolled together starry radiance, the human radiance—

The "I am" :

The spiritual teacher Angelos:

Thus you live in the earth-body
as mam's true being.

That is the first dialog with the cosmos and with the third hierarchy. Seen this way it is a deeply penetrating meditation on the human spirit, human soul and human body.

Now we go further to the rhythmic organization of man. We think of the lungs and the heart, the wonderful pulsation, the rhythm of breathing which by its very nature reveals that it is the expression of the deepest cosmic laws, the movement of which we sense in us. When we concentrate in meditation on our head, we sense rest. When we meditate on our breast, we feel movement. And this movement is an image of the movement of the planets, of the moon, the sun, of Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn. But a representative of this movement is the sun. It is closest to us. Every day it circles around our earth—in appearance. It can therefore stand as representative. But just as we carry within us the starry-cosmic-spaces, dwellings-of-the-gods, rolled together, so also the movements of the whole planetary system—represented by the sun—in our breathing, in our blood circulation, in everything which is movement in our organism.

Therefore we must imagine that just as the sublimity of the dwellings-of-the-gods was announced by the trumpet calls from all sides of the cosmos, also what the movements of the planets, represented by the sun, have to say through melodious sound courses through our bodies:

Cosmic sun circling
Paths of spirits acting!

That is the second thing: stillness in comparison to the loud trumpet-call of the cosmic surroundings.

Starry-cosmic- spaces,
Dwellings-of-the-gods!

It resounds majestically from all sides. That is what we must meditate on. But following on the path of the sun and the other planets in our breathing and in our blood circulation it resounds joyfully within us:

Cosmic sun circling
Paths of spirits acting!

Now we say intimately from within us, if we take as inducement what resounds melodiously from the star-circles into our own bodies:

Resound in heart's center
Human-soul-weaving
The “I live” :

The Angelos replies, speaking to the gods in the circling planets:

So you stride in earth's course
As humanity's creative force.

Just as the human being lives on the earth by means of what radiates into him from the dwellings of the gods, so does the human creative evolutionary force live by means of the activity of the gods in the planets' movements, which is also received into man's rhythmic system. Thus we have again the threefold verse: objective murmur through our body in the sense of the planets' course; our own intimate speech; the Angelos' reply:

Cosmic sun circling
Paths of spirits acting!
Resound in heart's center
Human-soul-weaving
The “I live”:
Thus you stride in earth's course
As humanity's creative force.

[These lines are now written on the blackboard.]

Cosmic sun circling,
Paths of spirits acting!
Resound in heart's center.

—above “speaks”, here “resounds”; above “head-held-high”; here “heart's center”—

Human-soul-weaving
The “I live”:

—above “I am”; here “I live”—

Thus you stride in earth's course
As humanity's creative force.

Each of these verses must be felt as being threefold in their coming into being: The objective resounding; our own intimate speech as the echo within us; the speech of the Angelos. Then it works correctly in us.

However, when we come to the third element of man—what lives in the arms and legs and continues inward in metabolism—then we do not hear the trumpet calls from the cosmos, then we do not hear the melodiousness of the planets, then we hear the dull rumbling of the world-foundation itself. It is what makes us earth-people. The limbs do not participate in our spiritual being. They are completely shaped according to the earthly forces: the arms and hands are only partly shaped by the air forces, but otherwise all is shaped by the forces that arise from out of the cosmic foundations and flow up through human beings. We must be conscious of this. Just as we hear in the first verse the language of the cosmos itself in the majestic tones coming from the cosmic periphery, as we hear the speech of the periphery in the second verse, we hear the rumbling speech of cosmic foundation from the depths of the earth in the third verse:

Cosmic-foundation-powers,
Creator's luster of love!

It is not a luster of light, it is a luster of love. For in those places where otherwise what is in the periphery is gathered in the center is where the source of the love-forces also lie. Therefore we cannot answer in echo “speaks” and also not “resounds”, here we must answer with the deed, with what flows from the will. We must not “speak”, not “resound”, here we must “create”. Therefore we answer from within pouring will into our words:

Create in the body's limbs
Human-action-streams
The “I will”:

Then the angel answers in that he lowers his eyes to what is rumbling from the cosmic-foundations—“rumbling” not in an antipathetic sense, but only in the dullness of the tone—the active forces answer which resound in the cosmic-foundation's depths:

Thus do you strive in earthly works
as human sensory deeds.

Again the threefold verse:

Cosmic-foundation-powers,
Creator's luster of love!
Create in the body's limbs
Human-action-streams
The “I will”:
Thus do you strive in earthly works
as human sensory deeds.

[This third verse is written on the blackboard.]

Cosmic-foundation-powers,
Creator's luster of love!
Creates in the body's limbs

“speaks”, “resounds”, “creates”—[creates is underlined.]

—“height”, “center”, “limbs”, what strives from the center outwards—[“limbs” is underlined.]

Human-action-streams
The “I will”:

—“I am”, “live”, “ will”—[“will” is underlined.]

Thus do you strive in earthly works

—“earthly-body”, Earthly-path, earthly-works” [the three words are underlined.]

as human sensory deeds.

—“being”, “creative force”, “sensory deeds”, which means: deeds visible to the senses—[the three words in quotation marks are underlined.]

True meditation, true exercise of the soul is not found in the theoretical, intellectual content of a meditation verse, but in its mantric character. The mantric character is present when the meaning dissolves into situation and happening and when we free ourselves from the theoretical, from the intellectual content, go out from ourselves, so that we do not merely have something vague in our thoughts, but have the idea that the sky, that the periphery, that the earthly depths resound; that we reply to these sounds from our own intimate inner self; that the angel interprets and teaches.

We should try to attain such an ideal setting, that is, to make meditation something in which we don't merely think, feel or will, but which also streams and weaves and radiates around us, and from all this something steps back into the life of the heart and in the heart it is streaming, weaving, striving and vibrantly radiating so that we feel ourselves integrated in the life of the world, of the cosmos, so that our meditation is not something that only lives in us, in our feeling, but which lives in us and the world; it extinguishes the world, extinguishes us, and in extinguishing unites us and the world, so that we can just as easily say: “The world is speaking” as we can say “We are speaking”. This gradually enhances the character of the meditation.

If the meditation is practiced in this way,—by extinguishing what has always seemed to be one's ordinary self—it is possible to perceive oneself as spirit.

When, however, we start along this path of knowledge, when we honestly approach such paths of knowledge, we learn that we are not alone in the world, that we are in a dialog with the spiritual world, and through this we approach closer and closer to a renewal of the Mysteries. Of course physical, outer temples stood in places on the earth which today are considered to be uncivilized. Outer temples stood there, and early peoples needed outer temples. But these temples were not the only ones, not even the most important ones. For the most important temples have no place, have no time. One comes to them if one exercises the soul in the way that has been indicated here and in the Mysteries of all times.

In order to be clear, my dear sisters and brothers, if we live in such a mantric formula, it is thus:

Here I stand—each of us says rightly—and all around me is the everyday world. Bourgeois walls and chairs are around me, or perhaps a natural forest, visible trees, or houses. It is all there. I am fully aware that this is my environment; it is there and I see and touch it. But the meditation arises in my soul while I am in the external, sensory world. The meditation arises in me:

Starry-cosmic-spaces,
Dwellings-of-the-gods!
When human-spirit-radiance
Speaks with head-held-high
The "I am" :
Thus you live in an earthly body
Now as a human being.

Welten-Sternen-Stätten,
Götter-Heimat-Orte!
Spricht in Haupteshöhe
Menschen-Geistes-Strahlung
Das “Ich bin”:
So lebt Ihr im Erdenleibe
Als Menschen-Wesenheit.

What do I sense moving? What do I sense arching over me? It is something; it is nothing. I sense walls, I don't see them.

The meditation continues:

Cosmic sun circles
Paths of spirits acting!
Resound in heart's center
Human-soul-weaving
The “I live”:
Thus you stride in earth's course
As humanity's creative force.

Welten-Sonnen-Kreise,
Geister-Wirkens-Wege!
Tönt in Herzensmitte
Menschen-Seelen-Weben
Das “Ich lebe”:
So schreitet Ihr im Erdewandel
Als Menschen-Schöpferkraft.

What I sensed—the moving, the temple dome which arches above, the temple walls. It is all becoming clear for the soul's senses, making the normal world invisible, the world of visible trees, clouds, everything which before was visible. A new visibility appears. The temple, which I only sensed at first, becomes real in the second verse.

And I hear the murmuring, the hissing and rumbling from below:

Cosmic-foundation-powers,
Creator's luster of love!
Create in the body's limbs
Human-action-streams
The “I will”:
Thus do you strive in earthly works
as human sensory deeds.

Welten-Grundes-Mächte,
Schöpfer-Liebes-Glänzen!
Schafft in Leibesgliedern
Menschen-Wirkens-Strömung
Das “Ich will”:
So strebt Ihr im Erdenwerke
Als Menschen-Sinnes-Taten.

The temple is complete. It has acquired its foundation. And in it are those spiritual beings with whom we wish to be in communion. The temple is there, visible to the soul's senses. It has been found.

Our meditation does not contain visions. It leads us into the spiritual world. The spiritual world exists. I am describing, my dear sisters and brothers, how the meditation can proceed: the moving temple dome is sensed after the first verse; see the temple around us with the soul's senses. The temple is complete, and the beings with whom we wish to be in communion as humanity's teachers—the godly teachers—are there. We are within the temple, accomplished by the first, second and third verses of a true mantric meditation.

When we become aware that we are finding the temple, then we correctly understand what the content of this esoteric school is meant to be.

* Miss Maryon: Edith Louisa Maryon (London, 9 February 1872 – 2 May 1924 in Dornach, Switzerland) was an English sculptor. She belonged to the innermost circle of founders of anthroposophy and those around Rudolf Steiner. Maryon met Rudolf Steiner in 1912/13 and after the summer of 1914 she moved to Dornach. She worked with Steiner on the construction of the first Goetheanum, where she along with Steiner worked on the sculpture, The Representative of Humanity. She served as the head of the Section of Fine Arts at the Goetheanum. She died of tuberculosis.

In this lecture I want to speak of certain facts which belong essentially to the ethical and moral domain and help us to understand the mission of Spiritual Science in our time.

We are all deeply convinced of the great truth of reincarnation, of repeated earthly lives, and we must realise that this repetition has its own good purpose in the Earth's evolution. To the question, ‘Why do we reincarnate?’—occult research gives the answer that our experiences differ in each of the epochs during which we are reborn on the Earth. In incarnations immediately following the Atlantean catastrophe the experiences of the human soul were entirely different from those undergone in later pre-Christian epochs and in our own age.

I need only briefly mention that in the times directly after the Atlantean catastrophe, souls were endowed with a certain elementary clairvoyance in the bodies they then inhabited. This clairvoyance, once a natural faculty in man, was gradually lost, mainly as a result of the conditions prevailing during the Græco-Roman epoch of culture. Since then, man has developed in such a way that great progress has been achieved on the physical plane and during the course of the present post-Atlantean epoch clairvoyance will gradually be reacquired.

We are living in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch of culture, the ancient Indian being the first, the ancient Persian the second, the Babylonian-Chaldean the third, the Græco-Roman the fourth; the sixth and seventh epochs will follow our own. And then another great catastrophe will befall the Earth and humanity, as was the case at the end of the Atlantean epoch.

Occult research is able to indicate the characteristic trend of human evolution in each of these post-Atlantean epochs of civilisation—including the fifth, sixth and seventh. The essential characteristic of our present fifth epoch is the development of intellect, of reason. The main characteristic of the sixth epoch will be that very definite feelings regarding what is moral and what is immoral will arise in the souls of men. Delicate feelings of sympathy will be aroused by compassionate, kindly deeds and feelings of antipathy by malicious actions. Nobody living at the present time can have the faintest conception of the intensity of these feelings.

The sixth epoch will be followed by the seventh, when the moral life will be still further deepened. Whereas in the sixth epoch man will take pleasure in good and noble actions, in the seventh epoch the natural outcome of such pleasure will be a moral impulse, that is to say there will be a firm resolve to do what is moral. There is a great difference between taking pleasure in a moral action and the doing of it. We can therefore say: our own epoch is the epoch of intellectualism; the essential characteristic of the following epoch will be aesthetic pleasure in the good, aesthetic displeasure in the evil; and the seventh will be characterised by an active moral life.

At the present time only the seeds of what will become part of mankind in future epochs are contained in the human soul and it can be said that all these aptitudes or predispositions in man—intellectual aptitudes, predispositions leading to feelings of sympathy or antipathy aroused by certain actions, to moral impulses—all these are related to the higher worlds. Every moral action has a definite connection with the higher worlds. Our intellectual aptitudes have a super-sensible connection with the astral plane. Our sympathies and antipathies for the good or the evil are connected with the sphere of Lower Devachan; and the domain of moral impulses in the soul is connected with Higher Devachan. Hence we can also say: In our present age it is mainly the forces of the astral world that penetrate into and take effect in the human soul; in the sixth epoch it will be the forces of Lower Devachan that penetrate more deeply into the soul; and in the seventh, the forces of Higher Devachan will work with special strength into humanity.

From this it is understandable that in the preceding fourth post-Atlantean epoch (the Græco-Roman) it was the forces of the physical plane that exercised the strongest influence upon the soul of man. That is why Greek culture was able to produce such wonderful sculptures, in which the human form was given such magnificent expression on the physical plane. Conditions in that epoch were therefore especially suitable for men to experience the Christ on the physical plane in a physical body. In our own, fifth epoch which will last until the fourth millennium, souls will gradually become able, from the twentieth century onwards, to experience the Christ Being in an etheric form on the astral plane, just as in the fourth epoch Christ was visible on the physical plane in a physical form.

In order to understand the nature of development in the sixth epoch of culture, it is well to consider what will be the characteristic qualities of the soul in future incarnations. To-day, in our intellectual age, intellectuality and morality are practically separate spheres in the life of soul. It is quite possible nowadays for a man to be very clever and at the same time immoral, or vice versa—to be deeply moral and anything but clever.

In the fourth epoch the future juxtaposition of morality and intellectuality was prophetically foreseen by a certain people, namely the Hebrews. They endeavoured to bring about on artificial harmony between morality and intellectuality, whereas among the Greeks such harmony was more a natural matter of course. To-day we can learn from the Akashic Chronicle how the leaders of the ancient Hebrew people strove to establish this harmony between intellectuality and morality. They wore symbols, of which they had such profound understanding that if they concentrated their gaze upon them and made themselves receptive to their influences, a certain harmony could be established between what was good in a moral sense and what was wise. The priests of the ancient Hebrew people wore these symbols on their breastplate. The symbol for morality was called Urim, the symbol of wisdom, Thummim.¹

If a Hebrew priest wanted to discover whether a certain action was both good and wise, he made himself receptive to the forces of Urim and Thummim; the result was that a certain harmony between morality and intellectuality was induced. Magical effects were produced by means of these symbols and a magical link established with the spiritual world.

Our task now is to achieve in future incarnations through inner development of the soul the effect that in earlier times was produced by means of these symbols.

Let us think once again of the phases of evolution through the fifth, sixth and seventh post-Atlantean culture-epochs in order to grasp how intellectuality, aestheticism and morality will come to expression in men's life of soul.

Whereas in the present fifth epoch, intellectuality can remain unimpaired even if no pleasure is taken in moral actions, in the sixth epoch, it will be quite different. In the sixth epoch, that is, from about the third millennium onwards, immorality will have a paralysing effect upon intellectuality. The mental powers of a man who is intellectual and at the same time immoral will definitely deteriorate and this condition will become more and more pronounced in the future evolution of humanity. A man who has no morals will therefore have no intellectual power for this will depend entirely upon moral actions; and in the seventh epoch, cleverness without morality will be non-existent.

At this point it will be well to consider the nature of moral forces in individual souls in their present incarnations. How is it that in our phase of evolution a human being can become immoral? It is because in his successive incarnations man has descended more and more deeply into the physical world and has therefore been impelled more and more strongly towards the world of the senses.

The more forcefully the impulses belonging to the descending phase of evolution work upon a soul, the more immoral it tends to become. This fact is confirmed by a very interesting finding of occult research. You know that when a man passes through the gate of death, he lays aside his physical and etheric bodies and for a short time has a retrospective view of his past life on earth. A kind of sleep then ensues and after a few months, or perhaps years, he wakens on the astral plane, in Kamaloka. Then follows the life in Kamaloka, when the earthly life is lived over again in backward order, three times as quickly.

At the beginning of life in Kamaloka a very significant experience comes to every individual. In the case of most Europeans or, speaking generally, of men belonging to modern civilisation, this experience takes the following form.—At the beginning of life in Kamaloka a spiritual Individuality shows us everything we have done out of selfish motives in the last life, shows us a kind of register of all our transgressions. The more concretely you picture this experience, the better. At the beginning of the Kamaloka period it is actually as though a figure were presenting us with the register of our physical life. The important fact—for which, naturally, there can be no further proof because it can be confirmed only by occult experience—is that the majority of men belonging to European civilisation recognise Moses in this figure. This fact has always been known to Rosicrucian research since the Middle Ages and in recent years it has been confirmed by very delicate investigations.

You can gather from this that at the beginning of his life in Kamaloka man feels a very great responsibility towards the pre-Christian powers for having allowed himself to be drawn downwards, and it is an actual fact in occult life that it is the Moses-Individuality who demands reckoning for the wrongs committed in our time.

The powers and forces which draw man upwards again to the spiritual world fall into two categories: those which draw him upwards on the path of Wisdom, and those which draw him upwards on the path of Morality. The forces to which intellectual progress is mainly due all proceed from the impulse given by a great Individuality of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch who is known to you all, namely Gautama Buddha. It is a remarkable discovery of spiritual investigation that the most penetrating, most significant, thoughts conceived in our present epoch have proceeded from Gautama Buddha. This is all the more remarkable inasmuch as until the days of Schopenhauer—therefore by no means long ago—the name of Gautama Buddha was almost unknown in the West. This is very understandable, for when Gautama Buddha was born as the son of King Suddhodana, he rose from the rank of Bodhisattva to that of Buddha, and to become a Buddha means that the Individuality concerned does not incarnate again on Earth in a body of flesh. The Bodhisattva-Individuality who became Buddha five or six centuries before the beginning of the Christian era has not since incarnated, nor can he incarnate, in a physical body. But instead he sends down his forces from the higher worlds, from the super-sensible worlds, and inspires all bearers of culture who are not yet permeated by the Christ Impulse. Consciousness of this truth was demonstrated in a beautiful legend written down by John of Damascus in the eighth century and well known throughout Europe in the Middle Ages. It is the legend of Barlaam and Joshaphat, which relates how he who had become the successor of Buddha (Joshaphat is a phonetic variation of ‘Bodhisattva’) received teaching from Barlaam about the Christ Impulse. The legend, which was subsequently forgotten, tells us that the Bodhisattva who succeeded Gautama Buddha was instructed by Barlaam and his soul was fired by the Christian Impulse. This was the second impulse which, in addition to that of Buddha, continues to work in the evolution of humanity. It is the Christ Impulse and is connected with the future ascent of humanity to Morality. Although Buddha's teaching is in a particular sense moral teaching, the Christ Impulse is not teaching but actual power which works as such and to an increasing degree imbues mankind with moral strength. (I Corinthians IV, 20)

In the fourth post-Atlantean epoch the Christ Being who descended from cosmic heights had first to appear in a physical body. In our fifth epoch the intense consolidation of intellectual forces will make it possible for man to behold the Christ as an etheric Figure. This is even now beginning in our century. From the thirties to the forties of this century onwards, individuals will appear who have developed in a way that will enable them to see the etheric Form of Christ, as at the time of Jesus of Nazareth they saw the physical Christ. And during the next three thousand years the number of those able to behold the etheric Christ will steadily increase, until in about three thousand years, reckoning from the present time, there will be a sufficient number of human beings on the Earth who will need no gospels or other such records, because in their own life of soul they will have actual vision of the Christ.

We must therefore clearly understand that in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch men were only capable of beholding the physical Christ; He therefore came in a physical body. In our own epoch and on into the third millennium, they will gradually grow capable of beholding the etheric Christ. He will never come again in a physical body.

If we bear in mind the fact that when a man of the present age who unites himself more and more deeply with the Christ Impulse passes into Kamaloka and is called to account by a figure personifying a moral force—by Moses—we shall understand how a transformation of the Moses-figure can be brought about. For what does Moses show us when he confronts us with the register of our sins and transgressions? He shows us what stands on the debit side of our Karma. For a soul of our epoch it is of great significance that through the inspiration of Buddha the doctrine of Karma can be comprehended, but that the reality of the working of Karma after death is revealed to us by the Old Testament figure of Moses.

As the influences of the super-sensible Christ pervade the souls of men to an ever-increasing extent, the figure of Moses will be transformed after death into that of Christ Jesus. This means that our Karma is linked with Christ, that Christ unites with our Karma.

It is interesting to realise that in the teachings of Buddha, Karma is an abstract matter, having an impersonal character. In the future incarnations of men, as Christ comes into ever closer connection with Karma, it will acquire the quality of being, of potential life.

Our earlier stages of evolution, our lives in the past, may be related to the words: Ex Deo nascimur. If we direct our development in such a way that after death, instead of Moses we meet Christ with whom our Karma is then united, this is expressed in the Rosicrucian Christianity that has existed since the 13th century, by the words: In Christo morimur.

Just as Buddha-hood can be attained only on the physical plane, the qualification for meeting Christ in death can likewise be acquired by the human soul only on the physical plane. A Buddha is first a Bodhisattva, but he rises to the rank of Buddha during a physical incarnation and it is then no longer necessary for him to return to the Earth. Understanding of Christ in the sense just explained can be acquired only on the physical plane. Hence during the next three thousand years men will have to acquire in the physical world the power to behold the super-sensible Christ, and it is the mission of the Anthroposophical Movement to create, first of all, the conditions which make understanding of Christ possible on the physical plane, and then the power to behold Him.

In the age when Christ works in the world of men as the etheric Christ it matters not whether we are living in a physical body or between death and a new birth, if on the physical plane we have acquired the power to behold Him. Let us suppose, for example, that because of his earlier death a man had no opportunity of beholding Christ in his present etheric Form. Nevertheless, if during his life in the physical world such a man had acquired the necessary understanding, vision of the Christ would be possible for him between death and rebirth. A man who keeps aloof from spiritual life and acquires no understanding of Christ will remain without such knowledge until he can acquire it in his next incarnation.

What has just been said will indicate to you that as humanity lives on through the fifth, sixth and seventh epochs of civilisation the Christ Impulse will gain increasing power on the Earth. We have heard that in the sixth epoch, intellectuality will be impaired through immorality. The other aspect is that a man who has paralysed his intellectual faculty as a result of immorality must turn to Christ with all the greater strength in order that Christ may lead him to morality and imbue him with moral strength.

What I have told you has been investigated particularly closely by Rosicrucians since the 13th century but it is a truth that has at all times been known to many occultists.

If it were to be asserted that there could be a second appearance of Christ on Earth in a physical body, according to occultism that would be equivalent to stating that a balance works more efficiently if it is supported at two points instead of at one. In very truth the three years' duration of Christ's life on Earth in the body of Jesus of Nazareth constitutes the fulcrum of Earth evolution; and just as there can be only one point at which the beam of a balance is attached, so too there can be only one fulcrum of Earth evolution.

The teaching of moral development is not the same as the impulse for such development.

Before the Event of Golgotha the Bodhisattva who was the successor of Buddha was present on the Earth in order to prepare for that Event and give teaching to those around him. He incarnated in the personality of Jeshu ben Pandira [See Jeshu ben Pandira, two lectures given by Rudolf Steiner at Leipzig on November 4th and 5th, 1911, and references in his later cycle, The Gospel of St. Matthew.], one century before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. Thus we must distinguish between the Jeshu ben Pandira-incarnation of the Bodhisattva who was the successor of Gautama Buddha, and the incarnation at the beginning of our era of Jesus of Nazareth who for three years of his life was permeated by the cosmic Being we call the Christ.

The Bodhisattva who incarnated in Jeshu ben Pandira and in other personalities too, returns again and again, until in about three thousand years from now, he will attain Buddha-hood and as Maitreya Buddha live through his final incarnation. The Christ-Individuality was on the Earth in the body of Jesus of Nazareth for three years only and does not come again in a physical body; in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch He comes in an etheric body, in the sixth epoch in an astral body, and in the seventh in a mighty Cosmic Ego that is like a great Group-Soul of humanity.

When a human being dies, his physical, etheric and astral bodies fall away from him and his ego passes over to the next incarnation. It is exactly the same with the planet Earth. What is physical in our Earth falls away at the end of the Earth-period and human souls in their totality pass over into the Jupiter condition, the next planetary embodiment of the Earth. And just as in the case of an individual human being the ego is the centre of his further evolution, so for the whole of future humanity the Christ-Ego in the astral and etheric bodies of men goes on to ensoul the Jupiter-existence. We therefore see how starting from a physical man -on Earth the Christ gradually evolves as Etheric Christ, as Astral Christ, as Ego-Christ, in order, as Ego-Christ, to be the Spirit of the Earth who then rises to even higher stages together with all mankind.

What are we doing when we teach Spiritual Science to-day? We are teaching what Oriental wisdom so clearly proclaimed when the Bodhisattva who was then the son of King Suddhodana, attained Buddha-hood. In those Oriental teachings was expressed the realisation that it was the task of the next Bodhisattva—who would eventually become a Buddha—to spread over the Earth the knowledge that would reveal Christ to men in the true light. Thus the Bodhisattva who incarnated in Jeshu ben Pandira and again and again in others, became the great Teacher of the Christ Impulse. This is indicated very clearly in the legend of Barlaam and Joshaphat, which tells how Joshaphat (i.e. the Bodhisattva) is instructed by Barlaam, the Christian teacher. The Oriental occult teachings call this Bodhisattva the ‘Bringer of the Good’—Maitreya Buddha. And we know from occult investigations that in this Maitreya Buddha the power of the Word will be present in a degree of which men of the present time can as yet have no conception. It is possible to-day through higher clairvoyant perception of the process of world-evolution to discover how the, Maitreya Buddha will teach after three thousand years have passed. Much of his teaching can also be expressed in symbolic forms. But to-day—because mankind is insufficiently mature—it is not yet possible to utter words such as those that will come from the lips of the Maitreya Buddha.

In the Eightfold Path, Gautama Buddha gave the great intellectual teachings of right speech, right thinking, right action, and so on. The words uttered by the Maitreya Buddha will contain a magic power that will become moral impulses in the men who hear them. And if there should be a gospel telling of the Maitreya Buddha, the writer of it would have to use words differing from those used of Christ in the Gospel of St. John: “And the Word was made Flesh.” The evangelist of the Maitreya Buddha would have to testify: “And the Flesh was made Word.”

The utterances of the Maitreya Buddha will be permeated in a miraculous way with the power of Christ. Occult investigations show us to-day that in a certain respect even the external life of the Maitreya Buddha will be patterned on the life of Christ. In ancient times, when a great Individuality appeared and was to become a Teacher of humanity, signs indicating this showed themselves in the early youth of the child in question, in special talents and qualities of soul. There is however a different kind of development in the course of which a complete change in the personality becomes apparent at a certain point in his life. What happens is that when this human being has reached a certain age, his ego is taken out of his bodily sheaths and a different ego passes into his body. The greatest example of this is Christ Jesus Himself, of whom in his thirtieth year the Christ-Individuality had taken possession. All the incarnations of the Bodhisattva who will become the Maitreya Buddha have shown that in this sense his life will resemble that of Christ.

In none of the incarnations of the Bodhisattva is it known, either in his childhood or youth, that he will become a Bodhisattva. Whenever the Bodhisattva becomes Buddha there is evidence that at the age of 30 or 31, another individuality takes possession of his body. The Bodhisattva will never reveal himself as such in his early youth, but in his thirtieth or thirty-first year he will manifest quite different qualities, because another Being takes possession of his body. Individualities who will take possession of the personality of some human being in this way and will not incarnate as children, are, for example, individualities such as Moses, Abraham, Ezekiel.

So too is it in our present century in the case of the Bodhisattva who later on, in three thousand years time, will become the Maitreya Buddha. It would be so much occult dilettantism to assert that this Being would be recognisable in his early years as the Bodhisattva. It is between his thirtieth and thirty-first years that he first reveals Himself through his own power, without having to be proclaimed by others. He will convince the world through his own power and it would be well to realise that if the Bodhisattva were alleged in some quarters to be revealing himself in a human being under the age of thirty, that very fact would be evidence of the fallacy of such a statement. Claims of the kind have frequently been made. For example, in the 17th century a certain individual proclaimed himself to be an incarnation of the Messiah, of Christ. His name was Sabbati Zewi and hosts of people from all over Europe, from Spain, Italy and France, made pilgrimages to him in Smyrna.

It is certainly true that in our time there is a rooted disinclination to recognise genius in human beings. But on the other hand, mental laziness is very prevalent, with the result that people are only too ready to acknowledge some individual as a great soul, merely on authority. It is important to-day for Anthroposophy to be presented in such a way as to be based to the smallest possible extent on belief in authority.

Much that I have said today can be substantiated only by means of occult investigation. Yet I beg you not to give credence to these things because I say them, but to test them by everything known to you from history—above all by what you can learn from your own experience—and I am absolutely certain that the more closely you examine them, the more confirmation you will find. In this age of intellectualism, I do not appeal to your belief in authority but to your capacity for intelligent examination. The Bodhisattva of the 20th century will not rely upon any herald to announce him as the Maitreya Buddha, but upon the power of his own words; he will stand on his own feet in the world.

What has been said in this lecture may perhaps be summed up as follows.—

In our period of evolution, two streams of spiritual life are at work; one of them is the stream of Wisdom, or the Buddha-stream, containing the most sublime teaching of wisdom, goodness of heart and peace on Earth. To enable this teaching of Buddha to permeate the hearts of all men, the Christ Impulse is indispensable. The second stream is the Christ-stream itself which will lead humanity from intellectuality, by way of aesthetic feeling and insight, to morality. And the greatest Teacher of the Christ Impulse will in all ages be the successor of that Bodhisattva who incarnates again and again and who, in three thousand years from now, will become the Maitreya Buddha. For the statement contained in Oriental chronicles is true: that exactly five thousand years after Gautama Buddha attained Enlightenment under the Bodhi tree, the Maitreya Buddha will incarnate on Earth for the last time.

The succession of Bodhisattvas and Buddhas has no relation as such to the cosmic Being we call Christ; it was a Bodhisattva—not the Christ—who incarnated in the body of Jeshu ben Pandira. Christ incarnated in a physical body once, and once only, for a period of three years. The Bodhisattva appears in every century until his existence as Maitreya Buddha.

The mission of Anthroposophy to-day is to be a synthesis of religions. We can conceive of one form of religion being comprised in Buddhism, another form in Christianity, and as evolution proceeds the more closely do the different religions unite—in the way that Buddha and Christ themselves are united in our hearts.

This vista of the spiritual development of humanity brings home to us the necessity of the impulse of Anthroposophy as a preparation for understanding the progress of culture and happenings in the great process of evolution itself.

• 1. According to the footnote in the German text of this lecture, Urim = Glanz (Radiance or Lustre) and Thummim = Wahrheit (Truth). Most English books of reference give “lights” and “perfections” as the interpretations, while acknowledging uncertainty. The Septuagint translates them as “manifestation” and “truth”. There is no unanimity as to whether the objects in question can be reliably identified, but the biblical references suggest that they were precious stones. Some scholars suppose that they were the twelve stones of the breastplate of the High Priest. What seems to be certain is that on these objects were engraved the names of the twelve tribes and that the High Priest used them as an oracle in order to ascertain the will of God. (See among other biblical references: Exodus 28, 9-30; Leviticus 8, 8.) Robertson Smith wrote in The Old Testament in the Jewish Church: “In ancient times the priestly oracle of Urim and Thummim was a sacred lot; for in I Sam. xiv:41 the true text, as we can still restore it from the LXX., makes Saul pray, If the iniquity be in me or Jonathan, give Urim; but if in Israel, give Thummim. This sacred lot was connected with the ephod, which in the time of the Judges was something very like an idol.” See in the Moffatt translation of the Bible I Sam. xiv. 18-43.
  
  —Note by D.S.O. and M.K.

[ 1 ] This course of lectures will take us into the high spiritual regions we shall be led from the earth, where we live, not only into the wide physical spaces of our universe, but also be uplifted to those spiritual worlds, from which this whole physical universe has derived its origin.

Such a course will show us, that the fundamental object of all knowledge and all wisdom is to solve the greatest problem of all — the problem of humanity. In order to make the human being understandable, explanatory facts have to be brought from far away. Above all it is necessary that those who wish to follow this course should be acquainted with the fundamental conceptions of Anthroposophy; although it is true that all Anthroposophists are acquainted with them in a general way. In these lectures we may rise in spirit to very exalted spheres, but we shall always endeavour to bring those facts which lie so far afield near to you and make them as comprehensible as possible.

[ 2 ] When we have to speak of what we call the Spiritual Hierarchies, it means that our souls' gaze must rise to those beings who, in the sphere of our earth, have a higher existence than man. In the visible world we can only progress to beings that represent four degrees of one hierarchy, i.e., the mineral world, the plant world, the animal world and the human world. Above man begins a world of invisible beings, through the knowledge of the super-sensible world, and man is able (as far as it is possible for him) to rise a certain distance towards those beings and powers, which are the continuation in the invisible world of the four grades found within the realm of the earth. The knowledge and investigation which lead us into those regions has not, as you all know, come into existence only at our present time in evolution. There is what we may call a primeval world-wisdom; — all that man can fathom, all that he can know and realise, all that he has gained in ideas and conceptions, all that he has attained through clairvoyant imagination, inspiration, and intuition, — all has been lived before, and known before, by those Beings who are higher than he. He only follows so to say, in their track. To make use of a trivial example: the watchmaker has first the idea, then he makes the watch according to the idea. A watch is made after the maker's ideas which preceded the watch; afterwards everyone can study and observe for himself from what ideas the watch was made, he can follow up the thoughts of the watchmaker. At the present point of evolution it is indeed only this kind of connection that man can have with primeval world-wisdom and with the spiritual beings that stand above him. Spiritual beings had first those imaginations, inspirations, intuitions, those ideas and thoughts according to which the world, as we see it, was formed. Man finds these thoughts and ideas in the world again; when he rises to clairvoyant vision, he finds the imaginations, inspirations, and intuitions, by the help of which he can penetrate into the world of those spiritual beings. We can, therefore, say that before our world came into being there already existed the wisdom of which we are going to speak: it is the Plan of the World.

[ 3 ] How far must we go back, while still remaining within the limits of reality, if we want to come into touch with that primeval world-wisdom? Must we go back to some time or other in the historical past, when some great teacher was teaching? We can certainly learn a great deal if we do; but to come into touch with true primeval world-wisdom we must go back to the time when there was no outwardly visible earth, when no world visible to the outer senses was as yet in existence. It was from out [of] that wisdom itself that the world came forth. But this wisdom, out of which spiritual beings formed our world, was imparted to man later. Man with his thoughts could see behind those thoughts, could realise the thoughts according to which spiritual beings have built the world. After this primeval wisdom, this wisdom of the creators of the world had worked through many forms, it appeared in a form known to many of you: after the great Atlantean period it appeared in those ancient, holy Rishis, the great teachers of India, during our first epoch of civilisation. [ 4 ] With these sublime Rishis the primeval wisdom expressed itself in a form which the man of the present day can but little understand. The human capacities of feeling and thinking have greatly changed since the times when the great teachers of India taught man in the first epoch of civilisation after Atlantis; and if the words which came from the Rishis were simply repeated as they were said, there would be hardly one soul in the whole earth who could hear anything more in them nowadays than just words and again words. One has need of other capabilities of feeling than those at present existing, in order to understand the wisdom which was given to humanity in the first epoch after Atlantis. For all that is found in the best books regarding primeval world-wisdom, is but a faint echo of what this really is which in many ways is but a deceptive, obscured wisdom. However grand and sublime the Vedas appear to us, however beautiful the songs of Zarathustra sound, and however magnificent the language in which the ancient wisdom of Egypt speaks, so that we can never sufficiently admire it; still, all that has been written down gives us but a dim, dull reflection of the wisdom of Hermes, of the grand teaching of Zarathustra, or of the sublime knowledge which the Ancient Rishis proclaimed. This sublime wisdom has been preserved and guarded for humanity; it was always to be found in certain very limited circles of people who watched over what is called the knowledge of the Mysteries. In the Mysteries of India, Persia, Chaldea, Egypt, and in the Christian Mysteries, all the primeval wisdom of humanity has been safely preserved up to our times. Up to a short time ago it was only in those narrow circles, that not book-wisdom, but living wisdom, could be found. For certain reasons which will be made clear in this course of lectures, our time has been chosen for extending to larger masses of people that which has been kept alive by those little groups. The original wisdom of the Rishis, for instance, has never lost life. It permeated, like the fountain of youth, the age which we regard as the beginning of our era. The very holy wisdom which the Rishis gave to man was continued through Zarathustra and his pupils, through the Chaldean and Egyptian teachers. It also flowed in the words of Moses, and it came forth again with. an altogether new impulse, as from the fountain of life, with the appearance of the Christ upon earth. It then became so deep, so intrinsically internal, that it could only gradually flow again into humanity. Thus we see that since the outward declaration of Christianity, the primeval world wisdom has penetrated but slowly and gradually into humanity from most elementary beginnings. [ 5 ] Its messages are there, they are to be found in the Gospels and in other Christian writings which include the wisdom of the holy Rishis, in a new form; like a new birth out of a new fountain. But how could these messages be understood at the beginning of the era for whose purification Christianity had been created? Through the Gospels it was least of all understood; they only attained very gradually to further comprehension and in many ways to a still further obscuration, and to-day the Gospels are, in truth, the most sealed of all books for the larger part of humanity — books which will only be first understood by a future age which will have refreshed itself at the source of the original world-wisdom. But the treasures hidden in the Christian revelation have been preserved, treasures no other than those of the Eastern wisdom, but renewed by means of fresh forces They have been guarded in narrow circles which were the continuation of Mystery Societies, like the Brotherhood of the Holy Grail, and finally in the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross. These treasures of truth have been kept well hidden and have been accessible only to those who through severe trials had prepared themselves for the living wisdom. Thus the treasures of the Eastern and Western wisdom, through all the centuries of evolution from the beginning of our era, were made almost inaccessible to the larger mass of humanity.

[ 1 ] Only a little trickled through here and there to the outer world: the most part remained a secret of the new Mysteries. [ 6 ] Then came a time when some of the contents of primeval wisdom, treasured in narrow circles, was allowed to be given out to larger masses of humanity in a language comprehensible to them. Since the last third of the nineteenth century or thereabouts one can speak of this world wisdom in a more or less unveiled form. It is only because certain things have taken place in the spiritual worlds that the Guardians of the Mysteries received permission to allow some of the ancient wisdom to penetrate to the outer world. All of you, my dear friends, know the course of development of the Anthroposophical Society. You know how the ice in which its development was bound was, so to say, broken by those words of wisdom, revealed in a way which I am not going to enter into now — the stanzas of Dzyan. Those stanzas of Dzyan, of the secret teaching, contain in truth some of the deepest and most important wisdom; they have in them much of that which coming from the teaching of the holy Rishis has flowed through the sanctuaries of the East. They contain also much of what has streamed into Western Europe since the Christian rejuvenation. For the stanzas of Dzyan do not include only the wisdom which had to be kept exclusively for the East, but also a great deal of that which streamed as a clear light through the centuries of our time, through the Middle Ages into the Mystery Schools of the West. Much that is to be found in the stanzas of Dzyan will only be gradually understood in all its depth. It may well be said here that the wisdom of the stanzas of Dzyan is of such a kind that it cannot yet be understood in the widest anthroposophical circles, or fathomed with the exoteric capabilities of the present day.

[ 7 ] After the first ice had been broken in this way, the time came when one could speak more openly from the sources of Western occultism, which is no other than the occultism of the East transplanted and continued in a way that has adapted itself to new circumstances and conditions of physical and spiritual life.

The time has come when one can speak from those ever living sources of occultism which have been faithfully treasured in the Mysteries of the Rosy Cross. There is no wisdom of the East which has not streamed into Western occultism and into the teaching and investigations of the Rosy Cross; in them is to be found absolutely all that the great teachers of the East ever had in their keeping. Nothing, nothing whatever of that which is to be found in the Eastern wisdom is lacking in the wisdom of the West. The only difference — if it can be called a difference — is that Western occultism has to include the whole of the Eastern wisdom and teaching and, without losing anything, to blend it with the light which has been kindled in humanity through the Christ Impulse. When one speaks of Western occultism, of that which has its derivation from the hidden Western Rishis (whom certainly no eye hath seen) it is impossible to say that in it is wanting one single iota, one single shred of the Eastern wisdom. Only it had all to be brought forth again fresh and new from the fountain-head of the Christ Impulse. All the great treasures of wisdom which were first revealed by the holy Rishis regarding superhuman worlds and super-sensible existence, resound in the description we have to give of the spiritual hierarchies and their reflection in the physical world. Just as the geometry of Euclid has not become something different from what it used to be, because one teaches and learns it with new human capabilities, just as little has the wisdom of the holy Rishis changed because we learn and teach it with the new capabilities which have been kindled in us by the Christ Impulse. Therefore much of what we have to say about the spiritual worlds can be called Eastern wisdom. There must not be any misunderstanding in these things — and misunderstandings happen so easily. [ 8 ] Those who will not free themselves of a misconception, in order to come to understanding, can very easily misinterpret what, for instance, was said yesterday at the Easter lecture. They might assert about the so-called truths of Buddha, that I had said that the Buddha had taught and revealed the truths about life and life's pain as follows: ‘birth is pain, illness is pain, old age is pain, death is pain; to be separated from those one loves is pain, not to be united with what one loves is pain, not to have what one desires is pain’ and that I said: ‘Let us look at those who, in the times after Christ, really understood the Christ Impulse; for all the holy truths of the Buddha about the pain of life have no more their full importance; something has been created by the Christ Impulse that is like a cure for the pain of life.’ The Buddha taught: ‘Birth is pain’; but those who understood the Christ would answer that through birth we enter into a life shared with the Christ, and through the Christ's share in it the pain of life will be extinguished. Illness will also be extinguished through the healing power of the Christ Impulse, and there is no more pain in illness for one who understands Christ, and death also has no more pain for him who understands Christ. Yet someone might reply to this ‘Yes, but I could point to the Gospels to show that also there you will find it said that illness is pain, life is pain’: and one might superficially come to the conclusion: ‘We have those modern religious documents, but what they contain can also be found in Buddhism, therefore religions are not making progress, there is no evolution in them. All religions say the same things, but you have spoken of a progress, you expounded to us how, with the help of Christianity, the old truths of Buddhism would not be true any more.’ If anyone were to say this he would be guilty of a very serious misunderstanding. For that was not said: everything indeed was said with the exception of the last sentence. It is very important that this very subtle question should be rightly understood. A fanatic can never understand with precision, but a man who is objective can. [ 9 ] No one who speaks with knowledge of Rosicrucian wisdom will ever expound anything that would be against any of the writings of the great Buddha, or say that anything in them is untrue. Every man who speaks from the sources of Rosicrucian wisdom shares the conviction of Buddha, no one denies it. ‘Yes,’ such a man says, ‘what thou, great Buddha, through thy inner illumination, hast seen of the great truths about pain and life is exactly true, it is true to its last iota.’ Nothing, absolutely nothing will be taken away from it. All of it remains as it was. And it is just because all of it remains as it was, because all is true of what the Buddha said about the pain of life, of illness, of old age and of death, just because of this, the Christ Impulse is such a powerful and important saving help to us, for it is just this which lifts the pain, because it is true that pain would be there, if the world could not be lifted beyond and above it through that great Impulse. Why could the Christ work effectively? Because the Buddha had spoken the truth. Humanity had to be brought down out of the spiritual heights where the primeval world wisdom is active in its purest form; man had to be led to independence, through physical existence with which life's pain and illness are bound up, and the great healing help had to oppose those unavoidable facts in the course of further evolution. Does that man deny the reality of facts who, while declaring that these realities exist, holds at the same time that remedy has been given us by which the facts, about which those truths have been said, can be brought to a salutary development; does he who says this deny any existing reality? Oh! in those heights of existence where we must look for the spheres of the spiritual hierarchies — there Buddhism is not opposed to Christianity, nor Christianity to Buddhism; there the Buddha gives his hand to the Christ, and the Christ to the Buddha. But every misconception regarding human evolution, every misconception as to its ascending development, is a misconception also of that spiritual act in our earthly evolution which is the Act of Christ.

Thus nothing is denied. of the wisdom of the East, the wisdom which has brought down to us the teaching of the holy Rishis, and with it the primeval world-wisdom, which through such long epochs of time has ever been streaming into humanity. But, all through those very long epochs, large masses of humanity could not penetrate to the sources of that wisdom, could only understand it with great difficulty; it was precisely the understanding of it which came with such difficulty. [ 10 ] In ancient Atlantean times, before the great catastrophe, when the masses of humanity were still clairvoyant with the thin ancient clairvoyance, they beheld something quite different when they looked upwards to the spaces of heaven, to the spiritual hierarchies, from what they saw in the times after Atlantis when the larger part of humanity had lost its clairvoyance and so could gaze only with its physical eyes into the physical distances of the heavens. Therefore, in the times before the Atlantean catastrophe, it would have been quite senseless to speak to them of the heavenly bodies spread out in space as they are to-day. The clairvoyant human eye gazed into heavenly distance and saw the spiritual worlds. In those times there would have been no sense in speaking of Mercury or of Neptune or of Saturn, etc., as our astronomy speaks. The way astronomy speaks of the spaces of the world and what they contain is merely a reflection of what is seen by our own physical sight when it looks into depths of the sky. This did not exist for the ancient clairvoyant humanity of Atlantis; when they looked upwards, they did not see physically-limited stars, what the physical eye sees to-day is but the outer physical expression of the spiritual realities which people then beheld. When looking to-day with one's physical eye through a telescope at the place where Jupiter is, one perceives a physical globe surrounded by moons. What was seen by the man of Atlantis when he lifted his clairvoyant gaze to that same point which we look at to-day with our physical eyes? The Atlantean's eyes would have seen as little of what our sight sees to-day, as we should if we looked at a light through a thick autumn fog. The eye of the Atlantean would not have seen the physical star Jupiter, but he would have seen that which is also united with Jupiter to-day, which the man of the present day does not see: the aura of Jupiter, a totality of spiritual beings, of which the physical Jupiter is only the external expression. Thus did the gaze of man, before the Atlantean catastrophe, sweep round the spaces of the world seeing everywhere its spiritual content. He could speak only of the spiritual, for it would have had no meaning to speak of physical stars, when the physical eye was not yet opened as it is to-day. Looking into the spaces of the universe man saw spiritual beings — the spiritual hierarchies. He actually saw beings. [ 11 ] We can compare the changes that took place with further evolution in this way: let us suppose that we are going out into a thick fog; we do not see separate lights, everything is surrounded by aura or fog. The fog lifts and disperses, the separate lights are visible, but their aura becomes invisible ... This is only a physical process which must serve for an example. But the ancient eye saw the aura of Jupiter, it saw spiritual beings in that aura which at certain points of their evolution were united to Jupiter. Humanity then developed further, to the attainment of physical sight. The aura remained: men could no longer see it, but the physical body in the centre became ever clearer and clearer, spiritually it was lost to sight as its corporeal part became visible. But the knowledge of the spiritual, the knowledge of the beings surrounding the star was kept and guarded in the holy Mysteries.

All the holy Rishis speak of that knowledge. In the times when men already saw only in a physical way, the Rishis spoke to them of the spiritual atmospheres, of the spiritual inhabitants of those spheres which are spread out in the spaces of the world.

[ 12 ] Consider what the situation then was. In the centres of knowledge, spiritual beings were spoken of which surround the spheres of the universe. Outside where the physical eye was growing always sharper, physical matter was spoken of more and more. When the Ancient Rishis said the word Mercury (they did not use that word, but we take it as an example), did they mean by it the physical orb of that name? No! — even the ancient Greeks did not use it in that sense; what they meant was the totality of spiritual beings belonging to that planet. Spiritual world and spiritual beings were spoken of when, in the centres of secret knowledge for instance, the word Mercury was pronounced. When the disciples of that sacred knowledge spoke of the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn pronouncing these words in their different languages, they expressed the gradations of spiritual beings. When those names are used to-day, only the coarsest part is meant of that which was originally understood by Moon, Mercury, Venus. The principal part is just what is omitted to-day; the ancient teacher of wisdom said the word Moon and with that word he evoked the idea of a great spiritual world. When he, pronouncing the word ‘Moon’, pointed to the place in heaven where the moon was, he felt in his consciousness that it was the lowest stage of the spiritual hierarchies, but the man to whom he was showing it, who was getting ever further from that spiritual sight because humanity was growing more and more physical, saw only the physical moon, and called it ‘Moon.’

One single word for two things which, though they certainly belong to each other, call forth quite different ideas in man. It was the same when the sages of the sacred knowledge pointed to Mercury, Sun, or Mars. [ 13 ] Thus we see that the two currents grew always further apart in humanity, the spiritual one describing something quite different from the material current. In the sacred Mysteries these words — which later became the mere names of physical planets — were always understood as descriptions of spiritual worlds and gradations of spiritual realms. The outer world always understood it materially up to the time of modern Mythology — I use the word purposely — which is called Astronomy. And as Anthroposophy has recognised the full worth of all the other Mythologies, it has also, as you will understand, given full value to that Mythology which is called modern Astronomy, which sees only space and in it, the physical world-spheres as physical orbs. But to him who knows, modern Mythology is only a special phase of all Mythologies. What the ancient inhabitants of Europe said in their myths about gods and stars, what the Romans gave in their Mythologies, and what appeared as the obscured Mythology of the Middle Ages, lead up in a straight line to the wonderful and admirable discoveries of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo. A future will come when modern Mythology will be spoken of somewhat in this way: ‘There was a time when people found it right to place a material sun as the middle point of an ellipse and let the planets rotate within it, and spin round themselves on their own axes in different ways; they arranged a world system in that way, as people of earlier times also did. To-day’ — so will that future age think — ‘all that is only legend and fairy tale.’ Yes, that future age will come, although the man of the present who laughs at former Mythologies thinks it impossible that one could ever speak of Copernican Mythology. But this consideration will make clear to us how through the same words something ever more different may be meant. In spite of this the true primeval wisdom has always been cultivated and has always continued; it has however always been less understood exoterically and its spiritual side less seen, the more it has been materially explained.

In the beginning of our era, when there was a rejuvenescence of primeval wisdom, (in order that humanity should not lose all touch with that ancient wisdom), it was said. in sharp, clear words, that when man looks at the outer space of the world and his physical eye sees only what is physical, the space is filled with spirit. It was the most intimate pupil of St. Paul, Dionysius the Areopagite, who said in clear-cut words: ‘There is not only matter out there in space; there is, for the soul which rises consciously into the spaces of universal existence, the spiritual part which stands above man in the evolution of existence.’ And he used words which sounded different from the old ones, for if he had used the old words everybody would have understood them in the material sense. The Rishis spoke of the spiritual hierarchies, they expressed in their language what the Greek and Roman wisdom still described when speaking of the ascending scale of worlds: of the Moon, of Mercury, Mars and Venus, Jupiter and Saturn. Dionysius, the pupil of the Apostle Paul had the same worlds in his mind as the Rishis, he repeated in clear cut words that here one had to do with spiritual realms, and he used words which he could be certain would be understood in their spiritual sense: he spoke of Angels, Archangels, Archai, Powers, Mights, Dominions, Thrones, Cherubim, and Seraphim. For now humanity had completely forgot what it once knew. Had it still been able to understand the connection between what Dionysius and the Rishis had seen, it would have grasped, while hearing on the one side of the Moon, and on the other side of the Mysteries of the Angels, that these were one and the same thing. It would have heard the word Mercury on the one hand and Archangel on the other, and would have known they were the same. The word ‘Archai’ spoken by the one, and ‘Venus’ by the other, were the same. And men. would have understood that with the words ‘Sun’ and ‘Powers’ the same worlds were meant. With the name ‘Mars’ they would have felt that they had to rise to the Mights (Dynamis). When they heard Jupiter mentioned, they would have known that it was the same as when in the school of Dionysius, Dominions were described. Saturn corresponds to ‘Thrones’; [ 14 ] but in wider circles this was not known any more, it could not be known. Thus there was on the one side a science of matter, which became ever more material, and the old names which once signified spiritual forces, were now used in a material sense. And on the other side, there was a spiritual life which spoke of Angels and Archangels, etc. which had lost its connection with the physical designations of these spiritual beings.

Thus we see how the primeval wisdom enters through Dionysius into the school which Paul had inaugurated, and how this new inauguration had to be penetrated by the ancient spirit. It is the task of modern Spiritual Science, or anthroposophy to form once more the bond which must unite the physical to the spiritual, the bond between the earth and the spiritual hierarchies. It is impossible for those who do not know where their ideas about the outer world of the senses come from, to realise the other, the spiritual side of knowledge. [ 15 ] This will be particularly noticeable when we have to deal with those writings which, although they are but a faint echo of the primeval cosmic wisdom, can still be understood in the light of that wisdom.

Let me show you an example of the difficulty there is in understanding writings which come down to us from that primeval wisdom. It is an example out of the Song Celestial, the Bhagavad Gita, where a sentence throws a very significant light on the connection between human life and the hierarchies. It is the following: (8th Chap. beginning with 23rd verse) ‘I will explain unto thee, oh man seeking for truth’ (it is thus generally translated) ‘under what circumstances those who know the Eternal leave the earth through the gate of death, to be later reborn or not. I will tell thee: Behold the fire, behold the day, behold the time of the waning moon, behold the half year when the sun is high — those who die at that time, who die in fire, in the day, in the time of the waxing moon, those enter through the gates of death into Brahma, but those who die in the sign of the smoke, in the night, when the moon is waning, in the half year when the sun stands low, these when they leave the world and pass through the gates of death enter only into the light of the moon, and return again to the world.’ [ 16 ] Here you have, my dear anthroposophical friends, a sentence from the Bhagavad Gita, in which it says that the condition of man's progress and of his reincarnation depends on whether he dies in the sign of the light, by day, with the waxing moon, during the half year when the sun stands high, or whether he dies in the sign of the smoke, by night, when the moon wanes and when the sun is low. It is said that this refers to the material sun. Of those who die in the sign of the fire by day, with the moon waxing, and during that half of the year when the sun is high, it is said that they do not need to return. Those who die in the sign of the smoke, by night, with the moon waning, and when the sun is low, must return into the world. This sentence out of the divine song of the East presents the greatest difficulty to all those who want to explain it within the limits of exoteric life. It can be explained only when it is illuminated by the light of spiritual knowledge, by the light in which it was received and written, the light which streams out of the Mystery schools, which can be increased. which has known its rejuvenescence through Christianity and which shows us how to find the link which binds the names Moon to Angels, Mercury to Archangels, Venus to the Archai and so on. With its help we shall find the key to such sentences as the one we gave as an example. Our course of studies will start from the explanation of this sentence in the Bhagavad Gita, a thing which is impossible in exoteric life; and after we have found the key to it, we shall pass on to further explanations of the spiritual hierarchies.

Animal forms—the physiognomical expression of human passions. The religion of Egypt—a remembrance of Lemurian times. Fish and serpent symbols. The remembrance of Atlantis in Europe. The Light of Christ.

In the last lecture it was shown how a differentiation had arisen in evolution generally, and particularly in human evolution, because human beings, and other beings also, could not await the right point in their evolution; they therefore fell behind and became hardened to a certain degree, while others retained the necessary softness and pliability until the right moment, and were thus able to carry out the changes that were fitting. It was also shown that it was only in the middle of the Atlantean epoch that the true human form appeared. In the previous epoch, and indeed at a very early period, the external form of man was very mobile; not only could he move his limbs as at present, but through inner powers he could elongate or shorten them, etc. To the ordinary consciousness of today it seems a kind of outrage to say such things about past conditions of the earth and of man. Even here among Anthroposophists you may have observed that we endeavour to develop certain truths step by step; we give them forth gradually, in small doses—they are then more easily digested.

Let us turn our attention once more to this early development. Even the Atlantean epoch had a beginning, and it came to an end through mighty water catastrophes of a very complicated kind. The Atlantean epoch lasted for a long, a very long, time. When we go back still further we come to other catastrophes in the course of evolution, these may be called volcanic in nature, when large tracts of land lying south of Asia, east of Africa, and north of Australia were demolished. On these tracts of land humanity had dwelt, and, to borrow a term from natural science, the land was called the Lemurian continent.

At that time humanity had a body much softer and more plastic than it is now; it was a period when man could assume many shapes; if we were to describe them they would seem very grotesque to the consciousness of the present day. We arrive here at a point of time before which no kind of feeling of personality, no feeling of selfhood, had as yet come to man. As he had no consciousness of self, and as the human shape was still very mobile and unfinished, something else happened. The shape which man presented outwardly—and which changed according to his emotions, being one thing at one time and something quite different at another—was in this way a kind of betrayer of his inner being; according as his thoughts and passions were good or bad his external shape assumed a different form. It was impossible at that time to entertain an evil thought and keep it hidden, for the external bodily form immediately expressed it, therefore man appeared in all kinds of shapes.

There were at this time very few of the higher kinds of animals; the earth was peopled by the lower animals and man. And if one were companionable—and such indeed we all were fundamentally—one could find one's fellowman through the expression they gave to this or that thought, or to this or that passion. What really are all such expressions? What are the physiognomical expressions of passions and thoughts? They are the shapes of animals. When we observe the form of animals we see in the higher orders of the animal kingdom nothing but thoughts and passions of all sorts worked into a great piece of tapestry. Everything that moves within the human astral body today, and remains hidden, was such a strong force at that time that it imparted at once to the soft body (which was really only formed out of fire-mist) the shape which was the expression of that passion. A large part of our present higher animals consists of human beings who were so entangled in their passions that they became hardened in these forms and fell behind in evolution. Anyone who looks with really occult perception on his environment can express his feeling approximately as follows: In the course of becoming an ego I have passed through that which I now see in lions and snakes; I lived in all these forms, for in my inner being I experienced the qualities which are expressed in these animal shapes.

Those human beings who were capable of rising, who maintained their inner centre, found a certain balance, so that they have within them only the possibility of these passions, which are, however, of a soul nature only, and take on no external form. This is what man's higher development means. In animals we see our own past, although these have not the same form as that in which they appeared in past ages, for millions of years have passed away since then. Let us suppose that passions such as are now found in lions were made manifest at that time in man's outward form, giving him the semblance of a lion, that this form then hardened, and the genus lion originated. Since that time, however, the genus lion has also passed through further development, and because of this the present lion has no longer the same form as at that time. The present lion is the descendant of a genus that branched off from the human long ages ago. In the various animals we have, in a certain sense, to see our degenerate descendants; this should help us to look with understanding into the world around us.

We must not, however, imagine that all the animal forms we see around us, and which represent certain conditions of hardening, are the result of evil human passions. Passions were necessary; man had to experience them in order that he might absorb from them into his own nature all that was useful; so that when we look back into such periods of the earth's evolution we find in our environment animal shapes that are in a state of material self-metamorphosis.

These are the expressions of passions, and working in them we find those Spiritual beings with whom we have become acquainted in previous lectures. We have to think of the earth as being still of a soft substance, and Spiritual beings working upon this substance, and forming the various animal-like shapes.

Let us now recall how it was said that the Egyptian religion repeated the facts of the third epoch of the earth, preserving the results of it as religious knowledge. The Egyptian form of religion contained as knowledge that which had taken place at one time on earth. You will now wonder no longer that so many animal and animal-headed shapes appeared in Egyptian art. This was a spiritual repetition of what had actually existed on the earth at one time, and was more than a mere simile. In a certain sense it is literally true when we say that the souls who principally incarnated in Egyptian bodies remembered the Lemurian epoch, and that their religion was spiritually a reborn memory of it.

Thus epoch after epoch of the earth is born again within the souls of men in the various religious conceptions through which the world passes. Even at a period later than this the environment of man was absolutely different from what it is now, and, of course, the conditions of consciousness were essentially different.

We must clearly understand that from the Lemurian epoch to the middle of the Atlantean epoch the present human form was only gradually constructed. By the middle of the Atlantean epoch it had reached, in a normal way, to a certain perfection through Jehovah and the Spirits of Form; the totality of what we find in man today was first formed throughout this period, viz., from the Lemurian epoch to the Atlantean epoch. The man of Lemuria, had we been able to see him clairvoyantly, would have presented still further problems, for functions which today are separate were still united in him in a certain way. For example, when the Lemurian evolution was in its prime neither such a breathing system nor such a system of alimentation existed as we have now. Substances were quite different; respiration and nutrition were in a certain sense connected; they performed one common function which was only divided later. Man absorbed a kind of watery, milky substance, and this supplied him at the one time with that which he now acquires separately in the processes of respiration and nutrition.

Another thing was also not as yet separated. We know that in the course of the period with which we are dealing the senses first opened to the outer world. Our present senses did not perceive external objects at that time man was limited to a picture-consciousness; vivid dream pictures rose within him, but there was no external objective consciousness. On the other hand, he received, as the first heralding of outer life—the first inkling of outer sense perception—the capacity to distinguish heat and cold in his environment. This was the very first beginning of sense perception on the earth, for the man of that time still moved within the fluidic element, but he now knew whether he was approaching a warm place or a cold one. This was made possible through an organ which he possessed at that time and which has since become atrophied.

You will have heard that within the human brain there is an organ called the pineal gland; today it is atrophied, but formerly it was open outwardly; it was an organ of force, and sent forth rays. Man moved about in the watery element with a kind of lantern which developed a certain light. This lantern, when the pineal gland was developed, projected from the head, enabling man to distinguish different degrees of warmth. It was the first universal sense organ. Natural science describes it as a degenerated eye. This it never was; it was an organ of warmth, and could in fact perceive not only in its immediate environment, but also at a distance. It had also another duty.

This organ, which closed when the other senses opened, was in certain ancient periods an organ of fertilization, so that sense-perception and fertilization were associated at one time. Through this organ man absorbed into himself from his environment the forces which made him capable of bringing forth his like. At one particular period, when the sun was in a certain position and the moon still one with the earth, the atmosphere of the earth was able to furnish the substance which caused this organ to shine. There actually were periods (and certain fishes which at times develop a light remind us of them) when there was a common fertilization of the human being, who was without sex at that time, and when, because of the sun being in a particular position, he was enabled to bring forth his like. Sense-perception and fertilization, nutrition and breathing, were intimately connected in the primeval past.

The various organs were differentiated gradually, and very gradually man acquired the form he now possesses. Through this he became more and more fitted to be his own master, and to develop what we call ego-consciousness. But all through the period when he moved through the earth's atmosphere guided by his perception of warmth he was under the influence of higher beings. It was principally the forces of the sun (which had already left the earth) working upon the earth's atmosphere that stimulated the organ of self-consciousness. On the other hand, there was another organ which was specially stimulated through the moon-forces (both before and after it withdrew from the earth). This is situated in another part of the brain, and is usually called the pituitary body. Today this organ has no particular duty, formerly it regulated the lower functions, those of nutrition and respiration, which originally were one. With this pituitary body were connected all the inner forces by which man inflated himself and was enabled to assume various shapes—everything by which he could voluntarily alter his form. Those alterations which were less voluntary depended on the other organ, the pineal gland.

From this we see how man has changed, and how, through obtaining a solid, definite shape, he has separated himself from the beings working on him from outside, who had made of him an instinctive being. All this gives us a clearer idea of the processes in human evolution which led at length to that condition when, in the middle of the Atlantean epoch he was sufficiently matured for the outer world to influence him through his sense organs, and he reached a position where he could form an opinion of the outer world. Up till that time judgment had flowed into him from without. What we might call a kind of thinking flowed into him, somewhat as is the case with animals today. We have to bear in mind that humanity progressed irregularly, one portion entered into a condition of hardening earlier, another later, and we have already seen the various kinds of human forms that developed. We saw how certain human beings became stunted in their development by allowing this hardening process to take place too soon, by assuming some particular shape too soon, and how through this different races developed. Only those people, who migrated from their homes in the neighbourhood of Ireland were really mature enough to be receptive of what the earth had to offer to their outward sight; and as they traveled from the West to the East they populated the various countries they passed through in which remnants of those people were found who had gone by other paths. With these they mingled, and from this union the various civilizations originated, while from those who were most backward when migration took place has sprung the European civilizations.

In order to complete our preliminary studies we must first glance into the mighty cosmos and then at the earth itself. We have explained man's evolution in connection with the animals, and shown how he thrust them from him and left them behind at an earlier stage of evolution. There is, of course, a great difference in animals; between the higher and the lower forms there is a certain boundary in development that is of importance.

Remember that as man evolved he gradually thrust aside the animal forms, and that he had only a very fine etheric form at the time when earth and sun were still united. When these separated he thrust from him certain animal forms, and these have remained behind at the stage in evolution which corresponds to the time when the sun was still within the earth. From these entirely different forms have naturally arisen in the course of time, for we are here concerned with a very long after-development. Were we to select a characteristic form which is still to be found today, and which may in some way be compared with those which remained behind when the earth was thrust away by the sun, we must select the form of the fish. This is the form which remained over when the earth was thrown, as it were, on its own resources; it is that which still has within it the last echo of the Sun-Forces. Let us keep this moment before us. There were quite other beings which were more of a plant-like nature, but with these we shall not deal at present.

The beings who represented the first material construction of the human form at the time of the sun's departure have undergone manifold changes, but in fishes is preserved that which reminds us of our separation from the sun; reminds us that at one time we belonged to the sun.

The sun departed from the earth and began to influence it from outside, and it also influenced the earth-man; gradually alternating conditions of consciousness developed—those of waking and sleeping. Gradually the condition developed in which man was more united with his ego and also with his higher principles (his etheric and astral body), and this condition alternated with another in which the astral body withdrew from the physical body. This condition is still preserved today in the alternation between waking and sleeping. Let us for a while study this alternating condition. We all know it, for it belongs to the most elementary teaching of Anthroposophy; we know that when man is awake there is a regular connection between his physical, etheric, and astral bodies, and his ego. When he is asleep the astral body and the ego withdraw from the physical and etheric body.

In the very early epoch with which we have been dealing the ego was not yet present, and in its place part of the etheric body withdrew; this condition may be compared with that of sleep. Now we must clearly understand that when man leaves the physical and etheric body behind on the bed he really bestows on them the value of a plant. Plants have a sleep-consciousness; so has man's physical and etheric body during sleep. But at the present time during sleep the astral body and ego of the normal man have also a kind of vegetable consciousness, for he is not aware of his environment. This was different in olden times, for then when the astral body and ego withdrew the man was dimly conscious of the spiritual world which was around him.

We can now form an idea of another important fact which came to pass through the sun separating from the earth. Before this took place the whole man, as regards his physical, etheric, and astral bodies, was under the influence and the control of the material and spiritual Sun-Forces, but after it depended upon the sun's position; it depended on whether the man in regard to his physical, etheric, and astral bodies came under the sun's influence, and whether it shone on him directly or not. We may now ask: Was there not at this epoch another influence coming from the sun?

Yes; at the time when no physical eye had as yet seen the sun, when the sun did not as yet penetrate the dense atmosphere of the earth, man's etheric and astral body (when outside the physical body) received important influences from the Spiritual Forces proceeding from the sun. He was unable to perceive these influences, for he was not mature enough, but later he became able to do so through receiving a force which enabled him to see that which came to him spiritually from the sun.

What was this event which made man capable of perceiving the forces which dwelt in the sun, those very exalted forces which had to leave the earth and unite themselves with the sun? When did this perception come to him? Gradually these forces streamed into the earth, and the most important point of time, that into which the whole thing resolves itself, was when man received full power to assimilate not only the physical forces, but also the spiritual forces of the sun in full consciousness. This was the moment of Christ's coming to the earth.

One might say therefore: There was a time when man was separated physically from the sun. Among animals the fish directs our thoughts to this time, for it recalls the condition of man before he was obliged to be separated from the sun. Then came the time when the higher forces whose leader is Christ—the great Sun-Spirit—left the earth; after which man gradually matured until able to receive these higher forces in the same way he received the physical Sun-Forces from outside. Inward spiritual power had to appear on earth as a fact, just as earlier the physical sun forces had appeared.

Of what was it the duty of Initiates to remind man when Christ appeared? They had to remind him of his ancient home on the Sun, and the symbol used for this was the symbol of the fish. This is why the fish appears in the catacombs as a true symbol connected with the evolution of humanity, and the disciples of the early centuries, seeing the fish symbol everywhere, received the words of the Initiates which rang in their ears with deep emotion, for spiritually it led them to the inward holiness of the story of Palestine, and at the same time led them forth cosmically into the mighty evolutionary phases of the earth.

Such things as these were studied in the schools of the Initiates, and in outward symbols like that of the fish, which were to be found in many places, we have an expression of these mysteries, just as geologists see in the fossils of plants tokens of a primeval past. But just as the impress of a fossil points to an original reality, so the symbol of the fish is a token of that which was cultivated within the mysteries.

This symbol did not appear suddenly. Long before the coming of Christ the Prophets of the Messiah had directed their pupils to His coming, and everywhere, back to the time of the Druidic Mysteries, the fish symbol played its part.

To proceed: a time came when the moon separated from the earth; previously the earth and the moon had formed one body. Then the threefold formation—sun, moon, and earth—came into being. Mighty were the natural catastrophes which then took place; events were of a very stormy nature. The physical part of man was not then at a very high stage of development, and he left it behind him as an ossified type.

In order to understand this we must keep one thing in mind: when the sun separated from the earth, the earth went back in development, it degenerated; and only after the moon withdrew with the worst constituents did improvement again take place. There was, therefore, for some time an ascending development until the departure of the sun; then a descending one, when everything became worse, more grotesque; then, after the moon withdrew, a re-ascending development again.

From this stage of evolution we have also a form which has degenerated, and which does not by any means appear now as it did then, but it exists; it is the form which belonged to man before the moon withdrew, before he had an ego. The animal form which recalls the lowest stage of earthly devilment, the time when man plunged most deeply into passions and when his astral body was susceptible to the worst external influences, is that of the serpent, a creature in which is preserved the shameful depths of our evolution on this planet, although what we see now has degenerated still further. The symbol of the serpent is also derived from evolution; it has not been thought out, but is rooted in the depth of things.

Fish and snake symbols are derived from the mysteries of our evolution. It is quite natural for a person to experience a feeling of pleasure when he sees the glistening body of a fish in the pure, chaste watery element; it gives him a feeling of peace; just as to those of a pure disposition it gives a feeling of horror to see a creeping snake. Such feelings are by no means meaningless memories of things once passed through. Man likes to see the wonderful living sunny form of a fish in water; he recalls his former innocence when as yet he possessed no ego, but was directed by the best Spirits in evolution; and it is a fact that he remembers the most horrible period in evolution, the time when he was near to falling out of evolution, when a crawling snake approaches him.

One can now understand the unconscious experiences of the human soul which are so puzzling to us, and which appear with such vividness when man is unaffected by culture, when we realize that the feelings we thus experience are connected with cosmic facts. Through this knowledge many things are made clear. Man can certainly overcome his fear of snakes, but this is by culture; but the fundamental feeling of repulsion is in his soul, and it points us back to the ancient times of which I am speaking. They were times when man was physically at the snake stage, when those elemental Beings set to work of whom we said that they prepared man for freedom, prepared him to receive the Christ in His full meaning and grandeur.

We now ask: Who were the elemental Beings who helped man not to sink into the depths? They are those mentioned in the last lecture, those who worked on him when he had descended to the depths, and who led him again to the heights—the Luciferic beings. The Sun-Spirits did not yet work upon him, but those beings did who sacrificed themselves. They moved among the people of the earth in a very remarkable way. Outwardly they had a certain human form, for even the highest spirits have to incarnate in forms which are to be found on earth, so these Beings took upon them the external shape that was man's at that time. They said: In form we are similar to man, but our true home is not on the earth; it is upon the two intermediate planets, Venus and Mercury. The best part of their souls were on these planets, but their outward form, which in fact was a kind of illusion, was on earth.

They gave to man what he needed, namely, guidance and teaching, for the reason that their home was not on earth, which was the first planet to be formed, but upon Venus and Mercury. These beings must be described as the first teachers, the first Initiates of humanity; outwardly they resembled the human beings of that time, but inwardly they possessed lofty and important qualities enabling them to work upon humanity as a whole, and also to work on the more advanced individuals in special schools, which were the first Mystery schools. There were always some of these more advanced individuals who had their home in the stars and who, although connected with the stars, had a human shape and walked among men.

Man himself continued to progress, and now passed on into the middle of the Atlantean epoch; the present human form only began to develop during the first half of that epoch; only then did man begin to feel fully at home in it.

Now, there were some beings in those ancient times who were very low down in the scale of humanity; these became the backward races; there were others who kept themselves plastic; and, again, others who only occasionally inhabited human bodies. What I am now about to describe happened very frequently in the first part of the Atlantean epoch. Imagine a man of that time who for an Atlantean was highly evolved; through certain procedures it frequently happened that such a man was caused to separate his physical body (which was then very plastic) and his etheric and astral bodies from his more spiritual parts, which then withdrew more into the spiritual world so as later to take on another body.

It very frequently happened that, long before the physical, etheric and astral bodies were ready to die, they were willingly vacated by their soul and spirit-principles. These, when they had belonged to especially exalted individuals, were pure and good bodies. Highly spiritual beings then let themselves descend into these bodies; and so it frequently happened during the ancient Atlantean epoch that beings who were otherwise unable to incarnate on earth made use of such advanced bodies in order to descend among men. These were the beings who acted as great teachers in the Atlantean schools of initiation. They worked powerfully with the means available at that time.

When at that time man left his physical body at night he had what may be called a dim clairvoyant consciousness; during the day the outline of objects was still indistinct, and there was no such clearly defined difference between the conditions of sleeping and waking as exists today. It happened, therefore, that the ordinary man beheld such an individual as I have described in an alternating manner—by day he saw him like a man, but at night he saw him quite otherwise, in a spiritual soul-like way, though he knew it was the same being who appeared to him by day in a physical body. These were beings belonging to Venus and Mercury who interposed into human existence and were with man day and night. The remembrance of these beings remained in the souls who incarnated again and again among the peoples of Europe, and they recalled them when they uttered the names Wotan, Thor, etc.

When the inhabitants of ancient Europe spoke of the Gods they were no imaginary figures to them, but memories of forms seen in Atlantis. In the same way, when the Greeks spoke of Zeus, Apollo, and Ares these were forms they had themselves perceived during the Atlantean epoch. Whereas in the Egyptian age memories of ancient Lemuria arose, in the Grecian age memories of the earthly experiences on Atlantis rose within the souls of the people.

We must clearly understand that if everything contained in later religions was a memory of facts connected with the earth at an earlier age some very important event would have to take place when the last of these memories had appeared; this was about the time when the Greeks and Romans recalled the Atlantean epoch. This was also the time when the Christ brought an essentially new Impulse into evolution. We indicated the nature of this Impulse when we spoke about the long intermediate period of evolution in which Luciferic beings were preparing mankind, making him capable of receiving the Christ Impulse, so that the sun should not merely send down its force externally, but that inner forces should also stream into man from it. This period has not nearly come to an end; it is still in its beginning, for with the coming of Christ only the first impulse was given for the inwardly spiritual part of the sun to stream to earth in addition to the physical sunlight. Ever stronger will that light become, which as Spiritual Sunlight, or Christ-light, will irradiate mankind from within as the physical sunlight illuminates him from without.

It will come to pass in the future that man will look upon the sun, not only with his external eyes perceiving its glory, but he will also experience the spiritual side of the sun in his inner being. Only when he is in a position to do this will he fully understand what really dwelt on earth as the Being whom we call Christ Jesus. Only slowly and gradually will man come to an understanding of this; and just as truly as in pre-Christian times he had to understand the pronouncements of those spiritual beings who guided man when he contracted in his descent into the physical world, so by a truly spiritual effort he must henceforth try to understand the Spiritual Power which at one time went forth from the earth with the sun. Man must be able to receive this Power again as an inner spiritual force; he must comprehend this Christ power—this Spiritual power which imparts to him the great impulse for the future.

The object of spiritual science, and of all that can be acquired as spiritual teaching, is to enable us to comprehend this Power of Christ. One cannot say that Anthroposophy is Christianity, but one can say that what has been given to man and to the earth by the Christ Principle will be gradually made comprehensible through the instrumentality of Anthroposophy. When that mighty Impulse is understood it will pour into humanity more and more, for man has need of it in order that, after having contracted and sunk most deeply into matter, he may once more tear himself free and turn again to his spiritual home.

You will understand that only a short and in a sense superficial sketch of a pneumatosophy can be given in the four lectures at our disposal. Obviously, much can only be suggested, some of which, in fact, really calls for elaboration to confirm it. In some cases it will even be difficult to understand the context between the subject matter and what is here termed pneumatosophy. Yesterday, for example, we showed how one transcends the realm of merely psychic phenomena and enters regions that, in view of their whole nature, must be counted among the super-sensible worlds. We recognized this from the simple fact that the province of the soul in respect to such matters ends at a definite frontier, and that even shrewd psychologists, when studying and classifying the realm of the soul, are brought up short at that point.

Now, anthroposophists as such are familiar from another angle with concepts we encountered there, such as imagination, inspiration and intuition; so you will have to take for granted that all this, as set forth, for example, in my Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, can be understood and justified when one goes far enough in showing the threads that lead from the ordinary soul life—the life of visualizations, emotions and reasoning—to imagination, inspiration and intuition. It is natural that in making this transition we should focus our attention principally upon the psycho-spiritual elements that are present in our own soul and spirit, that we should, so to speak, first of all seek enlightenment concerning our own souls and spirits.

In the course of these lectures we pointed out that in Western civilization, right up to our own time, people have had difficulty in recognizing a fact that to us appears fundamental: that man's spirit passes through repeated earth lives, and at the end of the second lecture we cited one who was thoroughly representative in the struggle with such difficulties, Frohschammer. Wrestling with problems of the first rank, he laments, “What would be the consequence if man's permanent element, his spirit, were compelled to immerse itself again and again in a corporeality, in a sort of purgatory, a prison, a dungeon?” “Should one,” asks Frohschammer, “look upon everything connected with the relations of love and the contrast of sexes as a provision for imprisoning the human soul for the period between birth and death?” In view of such an honest objection to the doctrine of repeated earth lives, it behooves us to ask ourselves whether Frohschammer possibly established a certain standpoint in the case, and whether there might not perhaps be another as well.

What we must grant in Frohschammer's attitude is his frank enthusiasm for everything beautiful and glorious in the world, in the face of all that he cites to the contrary. The spiritual life of the Occident imbued Frohschammer with this enthusiasm for the beauty and grandeur of the external world. The doctrine of repeated earth lives seems to him to imply that a spiritual-eternal element is assumed by the human individuality, the human spirit—an element that might be well content and blissful in the spiritual world, but which is forced into and embodied in a world in no way commensurate with the lofty sublimity of the human spirit. Were that the meaning of reincarnation, anyone developing a justified enthusiasm for the beauty and grandeur of God's nature, for historical evolution, and for all the latter has brought forth in the way of exalted human passions and impulses, might well resent the imprisonment of the human soul, as did Frohschammer.

Is that really the only point of view available? It must be admitted that among the advocates of the doctrine of repeated earth lives there are to be found even today those who maintain that the spirit descends from exalted heights into earth life. Such people are really not dealing with matters such as spiritual science is capable of bringing to light out of the spiritual worlds, but merely with general, vague ideas about repeated earth lives. We could ask ourselves, “Might not the condition into which we are born be something beautiful and grand? Might we not recognize that man, as he appears in his physical form, is an image of God in the true Biblical sense?” That would suffice to enkindle our enthusiasm, and then we would admit that man had been transferred, not to a dungeon, but to a beautiful field of action, to a beautiful house.

Does our contentment, our feeling at home, really depend upon the house, upon its beauty and grandeur, or upon the concessions we must make? Does it depend upon the house at all? Possibly its very grandeur and beauty might be oppressive and prison-like for an underdeveloped man, chained to it without knowing what to do with it. He might say, “Yes, the house is beautiful, but it annoys me to be locked up in it.” That is what becomes evident through observation based on spiritual science, observation that ascends by way of imagination, inspiration, and intuition to a genuine cognition of what remains continuous in man throughout his various earth lives.

The first thing man has always experienced when arriving in the imaginative world from the world of visualizations—retrogressing, as it were, in the manner often described—is, to be sure, a world of images. All sorts of people have at all times entered this imaginative world. Considered purely in appearance, this imaginative world, which can open up before the soul either through careful concentration and meditation or through special aptitude, still presents at first the rudiments of the external world of the senses. One sees houses, animals, people; various events unroll in pictures; scenes and beings are there in a living world of images. On the other hand, this imaginative world stamps itself as pertaining, in a certain sense, to the super-sensible world through the fact that it is not within one's arbitrary power to decipher the symbolism of the images, that in determining this or that, one is subject to inner laws, that definite experiences express themselves in definite pictures.

Thus a man can be fairly sure that in any case he is developing certain levels of his soul, that in certain stages certain capacities grow, that he attains to living in certain regions of the super-sensible world, when, for example, a cup is offered him, or he is led through a stream, or he is baptized, and so forth. It can also happen that within this imaginative world, and these are less agreeable experiences, he encounters his various passions and impulses that appear to him symbolically either as huge, frightful animals, or as little squirming, wriggling ones. This plane of the spiritual world, attainable by man, can of course be described only approximately. On the whole, even when this world is highly distasteful and appears altogether hideous and the animals symbolizing his passions seem loathsome, this world appears in most cases quite agreeable. As a rule, people disregard the nature of what they experience and are gratified to be able to see at all in the spiritual world.

That is readily understandable because the spiritual world does not weigh heavily, even when it appears ugly. It is fundamentally a world of images, and only when a man lacks the requisite strength, so that it overwhelms him, crushes him, as it were, does it indeed destroy the health of the soul life. What we can call a feeling of moral responsibility, particularly toward the great world events, need not necessarily result from such seeing; the exact opposite can occur. People who have achieved great skill in penetrating this imaginative world may be morally quite casual, for instance, in the matter of a feeling for truth and falsehood. In this world there is strong temptation not to take truth pertaining to the physical world seriously, and that in a way is deplorable. One is prone to lose the ability to distinguish between what is objectively true and false.

To stand firmly in this imaginative world, to be able to learn its true meaning, is a matter of development. As a human being a man can be quite undeveloped and yet see into this imaginative world; he can see many vision-like phenomena of the higher world without rating at all high as a human being. It is all a matter of development. In the course of time development shows that one learns to distinguish certain imaginations exactly as one learns to differentiate in the physical world, only in the physical world this occurs so early in life that we take no account of it. In the physical world we learn to distinguish between an elephant and a tree frog, and as we learn to differentiate, the world begins to take shape. When a man first faces the imaginative world, it is as though he took the tree frog for the same sort of animal as the elephant.

How uniformly important this imaginative world seems! It is only through development that we learn the relative importance of different things, that something outwardly small may be perhaps more important than another thing outwardly bigger. These things of the imaginative world do not seem big or little to us by reason of what they are, but of what we see in them. Let us suppose a person to be haughty and arrogant. His quality of arrogance will appeal to him, and when he passes into the imaginative world this feeling, his delight in arrogance, is transferred to the size of the beings he sees there. Everything in the imaginative world that appears as arrogance, haughtiness, looks gigantic to him, while everything that to a humble man must seem great appears to him small, like the tiny tree frog. The appearance of this world depends entirely upon individual attributes. Perception of the correct relative sizes, the actual intensities and qualities, is a question of development.

The phenomena are entirely objective, but they can be completely distorted and seen in caricature. The essential thing is for man to pass through in a certain way what he himself is, in this higher cognition as well. He must learn to know himself in an imaginative way. That, indeed, is a precarious matter, because a perspective of what the imaginative world offers is wholly determined, rightly or wrongly, by the person's own qualities. What does that mean, that a man must learn to know himself through imaginative cognition? It means that through the agency of the images he meets in the imaginative world, he must see himself as an objective image. Just as in the physical world he has this bell before him as something objective, so he must meet himself in the imaginative world as the reality he is. This he can achieve in a normal way only by actually ascending through meditation from perception of the outer world to life in visualizations, that is, in certain symbolical visualizations that will free him from perception.

A man must live long and often enough in the pure inner life of visualizations to transmute it into something he passes through naturally. Then he will gradually notice something like a split in his personality. Often during the transition stages he will have to make an effort to prevent a certain condition from growing too strong. When this peculiar condition approaches, he faces a visualization in which he lives, in which he is. It seems to him that that is the way he is; that is he. Then occasionally he notices that the remainder of his being, the part of him not freed, becomes like an automaton. He notices a desire to express something automatically, to gesticulate. Unschooled people will sometimes catch themselves making faces, but that sort of thing should really not be allowed to go beyond an initial experiment. Here he must keep himself in hand. Like other objects, his own being must be kept without.

The possibility of attaining to this imagination as one should depends largely upon having previously developed certain psychic attributes, for in connection with this imaginative self-cognition all sorts of illusions arise. Everything in the way of human pride, in fact, every kind of human susceptibility to illusion, lies in ambush. You can see a great variety of things in the imaginative world. For example, you might mistake something that is really purely a matter of the feelings for yourself. It is a common phenomenon that people hold high opinions of themselves, and a person of this sort, in reflecting on the extraordinary creature he has become, is prone to conclude that he must have been something exalted, royal, or the like—Charlemagne, Napoleon, Marie Antoinette, or the reincarnation of some saint. Because such people tend to consider their individuality so important, the individuality they encounter occupying their body in the sense world, they can only assume that in a previous incarnation they were something exalted.

These matters are indeed serious, for they point to the fact that the manner in which a man's own being confronts him imaginatively depends entirely upon his soul. The point is that we alter our own beings if we really get completely away from ourselves, if we work with all our energy to learn to know all our attributes that we can observe in ordinary life, the attributes we believe to be dreadful and possibly objectionable to other people. We must take serious note of these attributes that we carry about with us but really should not possess. We are naturally not concerned here with saying agreeable things but with speaking the truth objectively. We can rest assured that, if we will only go to work objectively, self-criticism will prove to be a full-time task, and only in the last extremity should we engage, as is rather commonly done by humanity, in criticism or judgment of others. He who occupies his mind much with others and criticizes them freely, can be sure that he is far too little concerned with himself to enable him to clear away what must be cleared away if he is to see his own individuality in its true likeness. The reply to the oft-repeated query of why one does not progress, which by rights a man should answer himself, is obvious. He should refrain from all criticism of others except when outer necessity demands it. Above all, he should never forget what this “refrain” implies. It includes, for example, the occasional acceptance of something disagreeable or baneful. Certainly one must accept such things, but anyone who seriously believes in karma knows, naturally, that he brought all that on himself; karma placed the other man where he was in order that he might inflict the injury. A genuine personal reason for taking the world to task never really exists.

A great deal, then, is required to attain to this imagination, this self-cognition. Having achieved it, you will see why Frohschammer's picture of imprisonment is wrong. You come to realize that, while this incarnation in which you find yourself is indeed wonderfully beautiful and glorious, you yourself are not beautiful, you are not so constituted as to be able to take advantage of all that it offers. You say to yourself, “Here I stand in the world, at a certain point of time and space, surrounded by all that is grand and mighty. I have bodily organs to convey all this glorious and mighty magnificence. I have every reason to believe that we live in a paradise, even when ills befall us because it all depends merely upon whether the dome of the sky towers above us, the stars travel their paths, the Sun rises every morning and sets in the glow of evening.” For full satisfaction, however, we are given our outer world and our bodies with their organs, but great indeed is the difference between what we might derive from the world and what we actually do derive. Why do we extract so little from it? Because something is embodied in our corporeality that is diminutive compared with the world, something that allows us to perceive a trifling sector of it. Just compare what your eyes actually see in the world with what you might see!

When we have learned to know ourselves imaginatively, we realize that we are by no means as well adapted to this world as we would be if we could make proper use of our entire organism. We discover that what we are, in the light of imaginative cognition, must be opposed by something else in the world. Here we arrive at an interesting dilemma that must impress our souls if we would really learn to know the world. We find that in view of all that surrounds him in the world, man, as he learns to know himself in the imaginative world, cannot possibly consider himself great and mighty. It is not a case of coming from a higher world and being imprisoned in this earth body, but of being not at all adapted to it, not able to make use of it all. For this reason the imaginative world is opposed by another, a world that corrects what man does badly as a result of his inability to use his body. As opposed to what man is in the imaginative world we have the whole cultural evolution of man, from the beginning of the world to the end.

Why is this the case? We understand now that in the course of the cultural evolution of the earth man must become, through many incarnations, what he will be able to be in some one future incarnation, and for this reason he has the longing to keep returning. In each incarnation he must long for what is impossible of achievement in a single earth life. He must keep returning; then he can eventually become what it is possible to be in one incarnation. Precisely by acquiring the knowledge of and feeling for what he really should be in one life, but what he cannot be for inner—not outer—reasons, he knows what feeling must predominate in the soul when he passes through the portal of death. The predominating feeling must be a longing to return, in order to become, in the next life and in subsequent ones, what he could not become in one incarnation. This longing for ever new earth lives must be the most powerful force. These thoughts can only be touched upon, but they yield the strongest confirmation of reincarnation.

The accuracy of what I have stated is confirmed by something else as well. We can continue our efforts to reach the spiritual world. In a purely technical way we can achieve perception of the higher world by ignoring external perceptions and devoting ourselves to the life of visualizations. There is a still further possibility of giving a definite turn to meditation and concentration, namely, by endeavoring to let our memories unfold with complete inner faithfulness, with absolute inner conscientiousness. This need only be done for a few hours, but seriously. What is one, really, in life? Well, by means of logic and the theory of knowledge we learn that one is an ego, but in ordinary life one is a very doubtful ego. One is exactly what this ego is filled with at the moment. If you are playing cards, you are exactly what the impressions of the card game provide. Your consciousness is actually filled with the impressions of the card game, or whatever it may be. This is the ego to which consciousness can attain. It is attainable, but it is something highly variable, fluctuating.

We really find out what this ego has been by placing our memories before us. Instead of having them behind us, as is usual, we place them before us. That is an important proceeding. In ordinary life we are the result of our memories. Suppose that on a certain day you had experienced nothing but disagreeable things, horrible things. Just think how all that, concentrated, makes you feel in the evening—cross, unresponsive, carping, and so on. Then again, you may have had nothing but gratifying experiences, again concentrated; you are pleasant, smiling, perhaps cordial. So, at one time we are one thing, at another time another. We are exactly what we have behind us as experiences. When we bring all these as memories and place them before ourselves, at the same time going through them once more, we are then behind them. If you do that seriously—not in a routine, mechanical way, if you really relive it all, even for only a few hours, then something enters your soul, if it is sufficiently observing, which one might call a sort of fundamental tone that you yourself seem to be—a bitter, acid-bitter, fundamental tone. If you then go to work on yourself thoroughly, which again really depends on your development, that process will rarely show you to yourself as a sweet being. You will be able to find a bitter fundamental tone in yourself.

That is the truth, whether we like it or not. One who is capable of applying the requisite attention to himself will in this way gradually arrive at what may be called inspirational cognition of himself. The path leads through bitter experiences, but finally one seems like an instrument badly out of tune in the harmony of the spheres, causing a discord there. Through this further self-knowledge we realize still more clearly how little we are able to make of this glorious divine nature, whereas we could make so much of it if we were equal to it. If we repeat such an exercise many times, then, toward the end of our lives, but beginning as early as the thirty-fifth year, the peculiar character of the tone compels us to realize how much there is to improve upon what we were in life, and that we should long for reincarnation in order to be able to correct our shortcomings. That is one of the most important results of inspirational cognition. When a man learns to know his own fundamental tone, he discovers how ill adapted he is to external nature, and how little opportunity he has to find peace and inner harmony. Those who boggle at the idea of reincarnation only show how incapable they are of understanding themselves in their inadequacy, how egotistical they are in having no wish to develop further so beautiful a gift of God.

The second goal, then, that we can reach in our search for self-understanding is inspiration: the understanding of man as the spiritual tone world reveals him. There, when we have learned to know our own tone, so to speak, we discover how ill adapted we are to what lives in the great realm of nature. Another possible approach would start from the lapse into mere morality of what properly pertains to destiny, taking account of how little we are able to arrive at the peace and inner harmony for which we yearn. Those who have achieved the power of self-knowledge will often have occasion to realize how incapable they are of finding the inner calm and confidence that they are bound to crave. Recall this beautiful passage in Goethe's writings. He is seated on a mountain-top that voices the tranquility of earth's lovely nature. Beneath him lies what earth's eldest son, the granite rock, has spread before his eyes, and he senses the greatness of nature's laws—repose in contrast to delirious joy or frantic misery—the swinging pendulum, the inner tone in the nature of man.

When we study the laws of nature, study what still lives in space as natural laws, we come to see that just as the evolution of culture is the counterpart of imaginative man, so the world of natural laws—the true laws of nature out there in space—are the counterpart of inspired man.

Penetrating maya, the world of spiritual activity reveals itself in the laws of nature with that inner quiet consistency that, through our errors, has become restless discordance, and we recognize it as such when we have discovered the inspired man within us. Then this thought can come to us that when we really understand the essence of nature's laws we know, indeed, that the earth passes from one form to another, but that something in the laws of nature gives assurance that in it, man must find the compensation for what he himself ruins. That is because of the inherent verity of the laws of nature, and it applies even when man passes through his various incarnations, that is, when he receives into himself throughout a long cultural evolution what he must so receive because it lies potentially within the scope of one incarnation.

Thus we find a deep connection between all that is spread out in nature as spirit deeds manifested in natural laws, and what we discover within ourselves, through inspiration, to be our deeper self. That is why in all esotericism, in all mysticism, the inner peace and harmony of nature's laws are always held up as the ideal for man's inner law. It was by no means fortuitous that in the ancient Persian initiation one who had attained to the sixth stage was called a Sun hero. His inner law and sureness were such that he could no more deviate from the prescribed path than could the sun from its course through the universe. If the sun could depart from its course for one moment, untold revolutionary destruction would inevitably result in the cosmos. There is a further step that we can take on our way to self-comprehension. We could ascend to the grasp of man in intuitive cognition, but that would lead us into such exalted regions that it would be extraordinarily difficult to clarify the matter, or to designate that world that appears externally as the counterpart of intuitive man.

From all this you will see that the human being is, in fact, able to observe all that he has the possibility of being, that is, what he might be in that glorious exterior structure of the world in which he is “imprisoned,” surely not because this exterior structure is bad, but because he falls so far short of measuring up to it. This shows us that the important thing is a right evaluation of all world contexts, a proper understanding of the basis of that sort of spiritual cognition, including the nature of man, that is presented by anthroposophy. Most of the objections commonly raised arise out of principles that completely misjudge world contexts.

Finally, we must ask, “Why is it necessary for man to be externally embodied at all?” In order to illustrate still further what little remains to be said, I should like to remind you of Dr. Unger's lectures on the position of the ego and the “I am” in the whole inner life of man; also of what you can find on the subject in The Philosophy of Freedom and in Truth and Science. True, a little thought can show us that a significant being hides behind the ego or the “I am,” but what we experience we experience in our consciousness precisely as our ego-consciousness, our self-consciousness. This is interrupted, even when we fall asleep, and if we were able to keep on sleeping, never awaking, we might still have an ego but we could never be aware of it through our own agency. Our awareness of it depends upon the employment of our bodily organization, our corporeality, while awake. We can experience other things outside of our body, but our ego in the first instance only by confronting the outer world. For if man had never descended to earth in order to make use of a body, he would for all eternity have felt himself to be but a component of an angel, as the hand feels itself to be a member of the organism, and he would never have achieved self-consciousness. He might have become aware of any number of grandiose facts in the world, but never could he have arrived at ego-consciousness without being incarnated in a physical body. That is where he had to turn for his ego-consciousness.

You need only study sleep consciousness in order to see that the human being does not work together with his ego in sleep. Ego-consciousness presupposes imprisonment in a body, employment of the instruments of the senses and of the brain. Now, if during a single incarnation man is able only to a slight extent to make use of all that is given him in this incarnation, it should not seem surprising when clairvoyant consciousness tells us that a thorough search in the human ego, in so far as the latter manifests itself in its true form, discloses as its prime impulse, its predominant force, the longing for ever new earth lives, in order to fill and enrich this ego-consciousness more and more, to develop it to an ever higher state.

In so doing we would be echoing something in our theosophy that the theosophists of the eighteenth century so often maintained, something that can be helpful if expanded into pneumatosophy. How did eighteenth century theosophists like Ottinger, Völker, Bengel, and others express from their monotheistic standpoint the activity of spirit and of divine spirits, or of the Divine Spirit, as they called it? They said, “The bodily world, corporeality, is the goal of God's ways.” That is a lovely concept, “the goal of God's ways.” It means that by virtue of its inherent impulses, divinity passed through many spiritual worlds, then descended in order to arrive at a kind of goal from which it turns back to rise again. This goal is the shaping, the crystallizing, of the bodily, corporeal form. Were we to translate this utterance of the eighteenth century theosophists into more emotional phraseology, we could say, “Ardently longing for incarnation in a corporeality is the way the spirit reveals itself to us when we contemplate it in the higher regions, and it ceases to manifest itself in this longing for incarnation only after it has been embodied and has started back. The Divinity manifests itself as ardently desiring embodiment in the flesh, and not until the re-ascent to the spirit has commenced may this ardor abate.”

That wonderful utterance of the eighteenth century theosophists did more to illuminate and clarify the mysteries of man than much that was said in the philosophies of the nineteenth century, and theosophical activity and endeavor fell off completely in the first two thirds of the nineteenth century. In the eighteenth century genuine theosophy of the older kind was to be found in diverse localities but it lacked the knowledge of incarnation because Christian evolution retarded it in the Occident. Concerning divinity, those eighteenth century theosophists knew that “corporeality is the goal of God's ways.” They knew the goal of God's ways, but not that of man. They did not find it in the case of man, otherwise they would have understood from each incarnation, from the entire nature of man, that there must arise the longing for a new embodiment, until such time as everything that fits man to rise to new forms of existence has been extracted from the life on earth.

At the conclusion of these lectures on pneumatosophy I feel more than ever how sketchy and incomplete everything must be left, and what I said in connection with the first two cycles, Anthroposophy and Psychosophy, applies here as well. The intention has been to provide stimulating suggestions. If you will follow up these suggestions, you will find plenty of material for working out what has been offered. You will need to look about in the world and take account of manifold factors. One cannot escape the fact, however, that spiritual science is so comprehensive that, were we to proceed systematically and in the manner commonly aimed at in other sciences, we would not have progressed to the point where our sections actually stand after ten years of work. We would be about as far along as we might be after the first three months.

Let me say at the close of this cycle that spiritual science depends upon souls that are seriously willing to work out independently what has been merely suggested. In such independent work much will crop up out of regions that have not even been mentioned. Everyone proceeding with an independent spirit will find points of contact for this work. Our communion will become ever closer if we keep intensifying the feeling that we receive something in order to be stimulated, so that our innermost self comes more and more to take part in the worlds that are intended to be revealed to mankind through the spiritual current we have come to call anthroposophy.

It behoves me today to link certain aspects of the knowledge gained from earlier studies—with which most of our friends are already acquainted—to what I said yesterday. But once again I want to draw your attention to the essential content of what was then said, namely, that the knowledge, the passive kind of knowledge cultivated todays is in reality a comparatively recent production. This indifferent knowledge, shown for instance when medicine is set down as just one science among many, has been developed only in course of the last three or four centuries; whereas in olden times the aim of all knowledge was to heal. Knowledge and the firding of means to heal mankind were, in the sense intended yesterday, one and the same.

Now from various indications in my lectures you mill know that in the last third of the nineteenth century an event of spiritual importance took place; that during the seventies of that century, behind the scenes of world-history, of outer, physical world-history, something of great significance happened. We have some name for it but another name might do just as well—we have called it the victory of the archangelic Being, Michael, over opposing spiritual forces. We will look upon this as an event taking place in the spiritual World and connected with mankind's history. It is in the spiritual world that such events are prepared. This particular one could be said to be in preparation already it 1842. It reached a certain climax in the spiritual world about 1879, and from 1914 on the necessity arose for men on earth to establish a harmonious relation with this spiritual event. What has been happening since 1914 is essentially a struggle on the part of narrow-minded humanity against what, in the opinion of the spiritual powers concerned with the guidance of mankind, should come about. Thus we may say: In the second half of the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth, behind the scenes of human evolution, there was taking place something significant—a challenge to men to submit themselves to the will of those spiritual beings. This would entail a change of direction and the bringing about of a new kind of civilisation, a new conception of social life, of the life of art and all spiritual life on earth. In the course of human evolution there have repeatedly been such events, of which external history takes little account. For external history is indeed a fabrication. Things of this kind have nevertheless definitely happened—one of them taking place 300 years, another in the middle of the third millennium, before the birth of Christ.

1842───────────────1879───────────────1914

300 B.C.

Middle of the 3rd Millennium

Regarding mankind, however, there was a great difference between the experiencing of these two events and that of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Most of you have at least partly experienced the events of the second half of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth, and will know that small notice was taken of how a change should actually come about in the spiritual life.

Hardship will compel mankind to realise the neceesity for this. There will be no end to hardship until a sufficient number of human beings have realised this necessity—even in the organising of public affairs. We may indeed ask why no notice has been taken, and whether it was the same in the case of those other experiences, the third millennium and the third century.—But no, it was quite different then. Cculd people only interpret to history of the Greek soul rightly, even that of the more coarse-grained Romans, they would understand that actually both Greeks and Romans were fully aware that something calling for notice was taking place in the spiritual world. Indeed precisely in the case of the event 300 years before Christ's birth, we can quite well see its gradual preparation, how it then reached a climax and lived itself out. The men of the third, fourth century before Christ's birth were clearly conscious: In the world of spirit something is happening that has an echo in the world of men.—What they thus perceived can today be called the birth of human phantasy—man's faculty or imagination.

You see, human beings, as they are constituted today, consider the way they think: and the way they feel to be the same as thinking and feeling have always been. But that is not so. Indeed in the course of time our sense-perceptions have changed—as I showed yesterday. Naturally, three or four centuries before the birth of Christ creative art was already in existence; it did not arise, however, out of what today is called imagination but out of imagination that was clairvoyant. There who were artists could perceive how the spiritual revealed itself, and they simply copied what was thus revealed. The old atavistic clairvoyance, the old imagination, was inherent in the artist. The phantasy which then arose and was developed till, having come to the climax in the works of Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, it started to degenerate—this phantasy did not create as if the spiritual appeared in imaginations, but as if something were ordered from within a man, formed from within him. The gift of this phantasy was ascribed by people at that time to strife among the divine beings ruling over them, at whose orders they carried out their earthly deeds.

In the middle of that third millennium, about 2,500 years before Christ's birth, people perceived as something of still greater significance how their whole being was involved in the events which, out of the spiritual world t, made an impact on physical events. About that time, still in the third millennium before our era, it would have been deemed very foolish to speak of man's earthly pilgrimage without referring to the spiritual beings around him. This would have seemed noneenee to everyone, for then the earth was thought to be peopled by beings both physical and spiritual.

The life of soul that became habitual in the course of the nineteenth century is certainly different from the of those olden days. Men perceived the ordinary secular events on earth but not the underlying, significantv spiritual strife. How came it that this was not perceived?—It was the result of the special character of our present age, the age which began it the middle of the fifteenth century and is called by us the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. In our present epoch the most outstanding, significant force of which a man can avail himself is intellect, and since the fifteenth century people have attained to great heights as intelligent beings. Today they still take pride in this. It should not be thought, however, that in earlier times there was no kind of intelligence—it was a different kind, it is true, but it arose at the same time as a certain perception. This intelligence was endowed, too, with a spiritual content. We, on the other hand, have an intelligence devoid of spiritual content, a formal intelligence; for in themselves our concepts and ideas are empty—they merely reflect something. Our whole understanding is just a mass of reflected images. It is indeed in the nature of this intelligence, which has been particularly developed since the middle of the fifteenth century, to be simply a reflecting apparatus. What is thus merely reflected does not act within man as a force; it is simply passive. And it is characteristic of this intellect—of which we are so proud—to be passive; we just let it work upon us, give ourselves up to it. Very little force of will is developed in it thus. The most outstanding trait in men now is their hatred of intellect that is active. In face of a situation where thinking is required of them—well, they find that very boring. Whel it is a question of real thinking there is a general dropping off to sleep—at any rate for the soul. On the other hand, with a film, a cinematograph, when there is ne need to think and it is thiaking that can go to sleep, when all one has to do is to gaze and passively to give oneself up to what is reeled off, so that thoughts run on of themselves, then there is general satisfaction. It is a passive understanding to which men have grown accustomed, an understanding devoid of force. And what in fact is that? We realise its nature when looking back at the distinction made in human knowledge in the old Mystery schools. There were three categories: first, the knowledge that came from men's physical life, arising out of their common physical experience of the world. Perhaps we could say: First, physical knowledge; secondly, intellectual knowledge, developed by man himself, chiefly in mathematics, knowledge, in effect, in which a man immerses himself—intellectual knowledge; and thirdly, spiritual knowledge, coming from the spiritual and not from the physical. Today, of these three it is intellectual knowledge which is especially cultivated and most in favour. It has become quite an ideal to approach the spiritual life with the passive, unconcerned attitude usually adopted towards mathematics. It is not admitted but all the same true that our present men of learning, for instance our university professors, on leaving the lecture-room like to turn as soon as they can to something quite unconnected with their particular subject. That betrays an abstract relation to knowledge which goes extremely deep.

When I was lecturing in Zurich a few days ago, a workman broke into the discussion. As the Waldorf School and the timetable we have put in place of the usual soul-destroying one had been mentioned, he said: “Your timetable gives too long a stretch for one subject; there should be more change. For when children have gone on with a subject from eight to nine, if they are not to be bored there ought to be something else from nine to ten.” Naturally I could but reply: “It is not the business of the Waldorf School to deal with boredom but to take care that the children's interest is kept alive—and that is the concern of the School pedagogics and didactics.” Thus the idea is very deeply-rooted in people that spiritual life is boring, and easily becomes tiresome as a subject. This is entirely because our intellectual life, consisting as it does merely of pictures, of reflected images, can provide no substance for our spiritual life. And a spiritual life devoid of substance is in a state of isolation—cut off not only from the spiritual world but also from the physical. Actually in the age we live in very little is known either of the physical world or that of the spirit. All that a man knows about is his own imaginings. As a result of intellectuality being just so many reflected images, the man of the nineteenth century was debarred from any knowledge of what was going on spiritually behind the scenes of world-history. He had no share in the experience of that great, momentous change which, behind external world history, came about in the spiritual world during the second half of the nineteenth century. It is through hiP own endeavours that he has to learn how the physical world should follow the lead of the spiritual world. This lesson is forced upon him, for, if not learnt, increasing hardship will prevail and all present civilisation will go down into barbarism. To avoid this it is necessary for people to be aware inwardly that they must experience something in the same way that, 300 years before Christ's birth, the birth of phantasy was experienced. In our day we have to experience the birth of active intelligence—at that time the active force of imagination arose. At that time it became possible to give imaginative shape to what was created in accordance with external form; now, people must turn to the inward, vicsorous creation of ideas, through which everyone makes for himself a picture of his own being—setting it before him as a goal. Human beings must acquire self-knowledge in its widest sense, not just by brooding over what they had for dinner, but ,a self-knowledge which sets their whole being in action. That is the kind of self-knowledge demanded for the evolution of those men whose present task is the bringing to birth of an active intelligence.

Now, it will happen that human beings in ordinary recollection, in their ordinary memory, will discover something very peculiar. Because people today have become rather insensitive and do not notice what is already in their souls, on looking back over their life they still perceive only memories of their ordinary experiences. But that is not the whole picture; actually a certain change has taken place and more and more people are met with who are having a new experience. When these men look back ten or twenty years they come not only to what they have experienced, but out of that, like an independent entity, there rises something they have not experienced. Psycho-analysis, in its foolishness, examines what thus, lies hidden in the soul examines it without realising the nature of our present age. What these foolish psycho-analysts are unable to find, spiritual science must propound, namely, that when we look back—say from our 45th year—and watch our experiences surging past like a stream (see diagram), within them there is not only our past experience; it was so once and even today is all that most of our rather thick-skinned generation perceive. But anyone sensitive to such things will realise that in a backward survey of his life he sees not only the ordinary events but something (red in diagram) he has not experienced, arising from the past experiences of his soul in an almost demoniacal way. And this will increase in intensity. If people do not learn to observe such things they will lose the power to understand them.

Therein lies the danger for future evolution, and deluding oneself is of no avail for it is indeed so. Among the experiences lived through by a man something new will appear, only to be grasped by active intelligence. This is extraordinarily important. Just as in the individual human being something new arises after the change of teeth, then again at puberty, and so on, after a certain period the same kind of metamorphosis occurs in mankind as a whole. This present metamorphosis can be described as follows—if we look back occasionally on our life (and this can also be done in the backward survey over our day) we do not only remember the most obvious experiences, but out of these surge up demonic forms. It almost causes us to say: I have had certain experiences out of which daydreams arise.—This will be quite normal but we have to be alive to it. It will cell for much more inward activity on men's part and the overcoming of that passive attitude which promotes despair in face of the great demands of the age. That passivity must be overcome. People's sleepiness, their inability to rouse themselves and to take things with dignity and in earnest, is certainly terrifying. I have already spoken here of how in our day many people cannot even be angry. Anyone incapable of getting angry over what is bad is incapable of enthusiasm over what is good. When, however, active intelligence takes possession of human beings there will be a change. We may indeed say that they are still afraid of the discovery they will then make. For with the coming of active intelligence they will recognise their cherished intellectuality for what it is—recognise the real nature of these arising images. This can be understood only if we remember something I have often mentioned here—that we can feel, we can will, just being alive; but just being alive does not enable us to think. That, we cannot do. We are able to think only by bearing permanently within us the principle of death.

This great secret about mankind lies in there being a never-ending stream, as it were, flowing from the sense—let us take the eye as representing them (see diagram). Through what we know as nerve, the senses carry into a man something destructive. It is as if—by way of the nerve-fibres—men were filled through their senses with a crumbling material. When you see, when you hear, even when you are conscious of warmth, there is taking place what like the crumbling of some material on its way inward from the senses. This crumbling material has to be taken hold of by what streams out from within a man; it must be, as it were, burnt up. Our thinking necessitates a continual struggle against the forces of death in us. Indeed, because he is conscious of his thinking merely in its reflecting capacity, a man does not realise that, strictly speaking, he is alive only in what has nothing to do with his head, his head actually being an organ always in the throes of death. We should be in constant danger of death were merely that to happen which goes on in our head. This permanent dying is checked by the head being united to the rest of the organism, upon which it draws for its vitality. When the human being will have possessed himself of active intelligeace as he did of active phantasy in the days of the Greeks and Romans—whereas the imagination of the old atavistic clairvoyance was a passive phantasy—with this active intelligence he will be able to perceive how part of his being is always dying. And this will be important. For just today we have to progress to a state of consciousness enabling us to perceive this permanent dying, so mankind in a past age, even up to the time of the Greeks, perceived what was living in the principle of vitality, in the will and its associated metabolism. What fights against the principle of death, what in a man is continuously disabling that principle of death, is living there, it might be said that in this respect the people of old were superior to those who followed them. They perceived the vitality with their instinctive clairvoyance, perceived the life with which the principle of healing is connected. Indeed, we do not die because our head has the will to die, but, owing to our head being the organ of thinking, we permanently carry within us the germs of sickness. Thus it is necessary for us to pay the price of our thinking by setting counter to the head, with its tendency to disease, the healing forces lying in the rest of our organism. Today it is still little noticed, but forms of disease are beaming to appear—as you know, they change—in which the constant process of death coming from the head will be more easily noticed than many of our present illnesses. Then it will be found that in reality the whole healing process in human beings is to counteract the harmful effects of our intellectual life. Whereas people of old could claim healing to be in their science, their knowledge, in future it will have to be admitted that what we are now making of our intellect, what is becoming of this intellect, of which today we are so proud, should it alone be held valid, will show us in future the gradual fall of mankind into complete decadence. To avert this, science will have to become able to carry within it the forces of healing.—I indicated this yesterday from another point of view; today I do so more from the standpoint of the way in which man is constituted. We must reeognise that spiritual science is needed as bearer of a new healing process. For if there be a further development of the intellect of which modern man is so proud, intellect which lives merely in images, then by reason of its predominance all men will become disease-ridden. Measures must be taken to prevent such a thing. I can well imagine some people replying: “But if we discourage this intellectual cleverness, if we do away with intellect”,—and there are indeed those who would like to see the intellect left undeveloped—“then there would be no need to repair the damage it does.”—The true progress of mankind, however, has nothing in common with this Jesuitical principle; rather is it a question of human evolution beinz such that the healing element developing out of man's soul-forces can have effect on the intellect—otherwise thie intellect will take a decadent trend and bring about the downfall of mankind. (See diagram)

As counter-measure to this, what arises from knowledge of spiritual science, and can permanently hinder the forces of decline in the one-sided intellect, must become effectual.

We come here to a point where once again I have to draw your attention to a very special matter. You will certainly realise that during the nineteenth century, when all I am telling you about today—and have frequently pointed out in the past—was taking place, intellectual materialism was assuming great proportions. Men came to the fore—I need only remind you of Moleschott, Vogt, Gifford—upholding, for instance, the proposition: All thinking consists in a metabolism going on in the brain.—They spoke of phosphorescenceopf the brain, and said without phosphorus in the brain there is no thinking. According to this thinking is just a byproduct of a certain digestive process in the brain. And the men saying this cannot be written off as being the stupid ones among their contemporaries. We may think how we like about the theory of these materialists but we can just as well do something else: that is, measure their capacity by that of their contemporaries and ask: Were such people as Moleschott and Gifford the cleverer or those who opposed them out of old religious prejudice and without spiritual science? Was Haeckel the cleverer or his opponents? This question may still be asked today. And when it is not answered in accordance with personal opinion, but with regard to spiritual capacity, naturally it cannot be said that Haeckel's opponents were cleverer than he nor that the opponents of Moleschott and Gifford were cleverer than they. The materialists were very clever people, and what they said was certainly not devoid of significance. How then did all this come about? What was behind it? We must indeed find the answer.

Certainly quite well-intentioned opponents of materialism arose at the time, for example Moriz Carriere whom I have often mentioned. Now he said: If everything man thinks and experiences is merely concocted by the brain, what is propounded by one party is just as much a concoction as what the opposite party says. As far as the truth is concerned there is no difference between a statement of Moleschott or Gifford and what is maintained by the Pope. There is no difference because in both cases they are concoctions of the human brain. There is no way of distinguishing the true from the false. Yet the materialists fight for what appears to them as the truth. They are not justified in doing so but they are astute—capable of a certain quickness of spirit. What then is in question here? You see, these materialists have had to arise in an age when thinking is made up merely of images, lives merely in images. But images are not there without something to act as reflector—which in this case is the brain. Indeed, where ordinary thinking is concerned—the thinking that grew to such heights in the nineteenth century—materialists have right on their side; that is a fact. They are no longer right, however, if they want to maintain that the thinking which transcends that of the intellect is also nothing but images dependent on the body, for that is not so. What transcends the intellect can be acquired only in course of a manes evolution: only by his becoming free of what has to do with the body. The thinking that has come to the fore in the nineteenth century must be explained materialistically. Though composed of images it is entirely dependent on the instrument of the brain, and the remarkable thing is that, for the most part, in face of the life of spirit in the nineteenth century, materialism is actually justified. That life of spirit is bound up with the bodily and material. It is precisely this life of spirit which must be transcended. The human being must rise above it and learn once more to pour spiritual substance into the images. This can be done not only by becoming clairvoyant—as I constantly emphasise there is no necessity for everyone to be so: for spiritual substance can be made to flow into a man's thinking when he reflects upon what another has already investi€ated spiritually,„ This must not be accepted blindfold; once there, it can be judged. Commonsense will suffice for the understanding of what has, been investigated through spiritual science. The denial of this means that commonsense is not given its due; and anyone who denies it is thinking: Commonsense—civilised people have been developing a great deal of that for a long time. Indeed these civilised people are developing a “very assured” judgment! And if this assured judgment is refuted by the facts they take no notice, refuse to take notice. At the suitable motrent such matters—which speak volumes symptomatically—are forgotten.

I will give you just one nice little example. In 1866, at the time of the Prussian victory over Austria, it was said that this was a proof of the superiority of Prussian schools. It gave rise to the saying:¹ “It was the Prussian schoolmasters who won the 1866 victory.” This has been constantly repeated, and it would be interesting to count the times, between 1870 and 1914, that it was said by the qualified and unqualified—mostly the unqualified: “The Prussian victory was won by the schoolmaster.”—I imagine that people today will no longer be so ready to speak anywhere in such a fashion, any more than the truth of this other assertion will be insisted upon in the light of present events. But in this intellectual age, when people are so clever, they are not willing to notice the contradictions to be found in life. Facts play very little part in the intellectual life, but they must do so if the intellect is to be permeated with fresh spiritual content. Then, indeed, it will be manifest that a paralysing process, a decadent process, is appearing in men, which must be overcome by new spiritual knowledge. In the past: men must be said to have sensed, experienced, something of a healing nature in the knowledge surging up from the physical body. In future they will have to learn to see in the development of intellect the cause of disease, and to look to the spirit for healing. The source of healing must indeed be found again in science. This necessity, however, will arise from an opposite direction, when it can be been how external life, even when proficient in knowledge, makes for sickness in men and must be counteracted by the healing principle.

Matters such as these afford us insight into the course of human evolution—in so far as this is a reality. Today history does not give us a real picture of human evolution but merely worthless abstractions. Man today is deficient in a sense of reality, having indeed very little. During the nineteenth century, people in mid-Europe became very proficient at giving out what of a spiritual nature was already there. One of the most arresting examples of this is the case of Herman Grimm who, as a writer about the works of Goethe—such as Tasso or Iphigenie ranks very high. He was, however, quite unable to portray Goethe the man. Although he wrote a biography of him, in it Goethe seems a mere shadow. Spiritual force was not there in the nineteenth oentury; people were living in images.; and images have no power to enforce the reality which is so necessary for the future. We must understand not only what human beings create, but above all the human being himself, and through him nature, in a more all-embracing sense than hitherto. I believe it to be possible for such things to work in all seriousness upon the human heart and soul. It is likely to be some time before a sufficient number of people allow themselves to be fired by the knowledge that, if not permeated by the spirit, mankind will be overcome by disease. At least those should accept this knowledge who have come nearer to an understanding of anthroposophy.

There is one thing which must be recognised—that many who have accepted anthroposophy have come to our Movement out of what I might call subtle egoistic tendencies, wishing to have something for the comfort of their souls. They want the satisfaction of gaining certain knowledge about the spiritual world. But that will not do. This is not a matter of basking in the personal satisfaction of participating in the spiritual. What people need is actively to intervene in tilt) affairs of the material world from out the spirit—through the spirit to gain mastery, over the material world. There will be no end to all the misery that has come upon mankind till people understand this and, understanding, allow it to influence their will.

One would so gladly uee—at least among anthroposophists—this kind of insight, this kind of will, taking effect. Certainly it may be asked: What can a mere handful of human beings do against the blindness of the whole world?—But that is not right. To speak in that way has absolutely no justification. For in saying this there is no thought that what concerns us here is first to strengthen the will-power—then we can await what will come. Let everyone from his own sphere in life do what lies in him; he may then await what is done by others. But at least let him do it—do it above all so that as many people as possible in the world may be moved by the urgent need for spiritual renewal.

Only if we are watchful, and take a firm stand where anthroposophy has placed us, can we ourselves make any progress or set our will to work on what is necessary to ensure the progress of all mankind.

• 1. First said in 1866 by Oskar Peschel—a professor at Leipzig University.

Published in Anthroposophy Today, No. 4, Winter 1975 and/or 1987. It is the second of twelve lectures in the volume The Sun Mystery ... Death, Resurrection, and is also known as Mystery of Golgotha and its Relation to the Sleep of Man.

Spiritual Science cannot hand people something which, once assimilated, is enough for the rest of life. I have often pointed out that there exists no short summary of a world view which can be kept at hand in one's pocket. In place of ready formulas, science of the spirit provides something with which the human soul must repeatedly unite itself, which must be repeatedly inwardly assimilated and digested. External truths such as those provided by natural science we can, if we have a good memory, take in and then possess them once and for all. That is not possible with spiritual-scientific truths, the reason being that the truths of natural science are lifeless concepts. The laws of nature are dead once they have been formulated into concepts, whereas spiritual-scientific truths are living concepts; if we condemn them to lifelessness because we accept them as if they were external truths, then they provide no nourishment; then they are stones the soul cannot digest.
—Rudolf Steiner, Aspects of Human Evolution, Lecture VIII, Berlin 24 July 1917

Waking life is the state of consciousness that is most familiar to mankind, but within this sphere the problems of existence are not unveiled. If this waking consciousness, as it serves us for ordinary life and knowledge, could solve the problems of life without further ado, such problems would no longer exist. Their solution would be a matter of course. Human beings would never come to the point of questioning. The fact that someone asks about the deeper foundations of life and, while not perhaps coming to the point of definitely formulating questions as to the problems of life yet retains the longing to know something that ordinary consciousness cannot yield, proves that from the deepest foundations of the human soul, though in a more or less unconscious way, something arises which indeed belongs to the human being, but which must first be sought if it is to rise up into the light of consciousness.

This leads those who do not observe life sufficiently closely into speculation and into the forming of all kinds of philosophies which eventually prove to be unsatisfying. But anyone who observes the phenomena of life with a certain impartiality will soon realise that, in the sleeping condition, as opposed to the waking condition of consciousness, something is concealed, and that an understanding of life may result from an understanding of the sleeping condition.

We have often spoken of these things, but it is necessary to return to them again and again, for Anthroposophy can only be understood when the attempt is made to approach facts from the most varied points of view.

Out of the state of sleep there emerges first the life of dreams. This dream life consists of pictures, and if one pays attention to this life of dreams, it is easy to observe that its pictures are related to ordinary life and consciousness. Even if it can often be said that things are dreamed of in a way in which the dreamer has never experienced them, I would answer: the parts out of which the dream is made up, the details of the pictures, are all the same taken from ordinary consciousness.

It is different with regard to the dramatic element of the dream, to the way in which the dream, as it grows in intensity, evokes feelings of anxiety, of joy, of compulsion. The meaning of the course taken by these dream pictures lies more deeply within human nature, and we can understand this when we consider the following example. A man may dream, for instance, that he is walking along a road and comes to a mountain. He passes into a cave in the mountain. At first it is dusk, and then it gets darker. An unknown impulse urges him to go farther; he has a sense of uneasiness and this increases till he stands there in a state of terror, let us say, of falling into some inner chasm or the like. He may then wake up in this feeling of terror, for it has lasted until the time of waking.

Again, we may dream that we are standing somewhere and a man is approaching us from a distance. He comes nearer and nearer, and when he is quite close it appears that he is preparing to make an attack. There is an experience of increasing anxiety. The other man comes still nearer and the harmless instrument which he had shown us from afar changes into a murderous weapon. The dream transforms things in this way. Anxiety becomes terror, and once more we awake full of this terror which continues into waking life.

Here we have two entirely different pictures. In the first dream we have a series of pictures which led us into the mountain cavern, and in the second a series of pictures connected with an approaching enemy. The soul-experience has been the same although the picture sequence has been quite different. What the soul has lived through is something entirely different from what is consciously experienced on waking. The pictures in themselves are not the essential thing. The point is the inner drama through which the soul passes; how there was first an impulse—or something that approached the soul in the place of an impulse—how this passed over into feelings of anxiety and terror, and how at last the dreamer came to the point of rousing himself out of sleep and returning to ordinary consciousness. Forces that increase in intensity are there behind the dream and these forces clothe themselves in pictures. The forces are not perceptible but they are the essential factor.

I might multiply these two picture sequences many times, for the same soul content may be clothed in 10, 20 or a hundred different pictures. Thus we must say that here is something that takes place in the soul which the human being does not observe and of which the person knows nothing. Only the pictures are known. These pictures are experienced in dream consciousness, but the essential thing is the process of intensification: first anxiety, then greater anxiety, and lastly actual terror. The dream pictures are more or less taken from ordinary life—the mountain, the cavern, the approaching enemy, his weapon—all these are borrowed from life. The pictures derive their content from life, but this is only the clothing.

But now when, through what I have often described as Imaginative consciousness, we have the power to remain behind this clothing, building no pictures of this kind, but remaining with Imaginative consciousness within the forces of the soul which have given rise to the anxiety, fear and terror, then something quite different happens.

When a person sleeps, the astral body and Ego are outside the physical and etheric bodies. In normal circumstances when human beings awake, they re-enter the etheric and physical bodies very rapidly; but when, in somewhat abnormal circumstances, someone does not immediately penetrate into the physical body, but before entering it penetrates more intensely into the etheric body, then these pictures are formed out of life. For in ordinary consciousness there is no conceptual activity in actual sleep. The dream pictures arise only at the moment when someone is penetrating into the body and passing through the etheric body, or at the moment of falling asleep when, on leaving the physical body, the sleeper lingers in the etheric body. These dream pictures taken from ordinary life are formed only in the intermediate conditions. Imaginative consciousness, however, enables human beings to live in those forces of the soul which stand behind the dream while the person is wholly outside the body. The individual lives then in a different world of reality, a world which is passed through between falling asleep and awaking. Between falling asleep and awaking human beings live in this world without consciousness. You can picture this to yourselves as though a man sank under water, and there, losing all consciousness, can only regain it when the waters bear him to the surface and make him free again. The same thing that there takes place in a physical sense takes place in the soul when people sleep. They dive down into the spiritual world and there lose consciousness. They pass out of the body with their soul and lose consciousness. On waking they rise up again and regain consciousness, and this re ascent is the entrance into the body. When, as has been said, someone does not enter the body immediately, but becomes aware of the passage through the etheric body, there arise the pictures of the dream. But when we reach a stage where the appearance of such dream pictures is no longer allowed and, existing wholly outside the physical body in the spiritual world, we perceive pictures, these are no longer arbitrary pictures but are such as you will find in the description of world-evolution in my Occult Science. All such descriptions as those given in Occult Science originate in the way just characterised.

If it is asked what is to be found in Occult Science, the answer must be: ‘Thoughts are there’. These thoughts can be studied. I have emphasised again and again that the healthy human intellect can reflect upon these thoughts. Thoughts are there, but they are not ordinary thoughts: they are thoughts which are creatively active in the cosmos. Human beings can live in these thoughts when they stand on the other side of the threshold leading into the spiritual world. They can live in these thoughts which are active in the cosmos. This is the first thing that they will find when they enter the super-sensible world.

Picture to yourselves someone asleep. During sleep, processes of the greatest intensity and far-reaching effect take place in the soul. Nothing is known of all this because in sleep the person is without consciousness. In the morning the person re-enters the physical body, diving down instantaneously into it. The eyes are used to perceive light and colour, the ears to hear sounds, and so on. The person becomes conscious. But there is this intermediate state where, before entering directly into the physical body, the person enters the etheric body. Then the dream arises. But should that person become conscious before penetrating into the etheric body, he or she would then be conscious in the outer ether which fills the whole cosmos; there would be consciousness of what is described in Occult Science.

If, for example, you were to become conscious in the middle of the night without returning to your physical body, so that this physical body rose up before you and you were to look upon it—for it would then be visible—you would become conscious of this cosmology, of what I have described in Occult Science. What is there described may be called the formative forces of the cosmos, or cosmic thoughts. Just as people have their own thoughts in waking life, they can now say: ‘The Earth has originated in such and such a way; it has passed through a Moon condition, a Sun condition and a Saturn condition’—as I have described in Occult Science.

This kind of perception in the spiritual world is only one of three existing kinds. When human beings consider their waking condition of consciousness, they know that in this consciousness they can distinguish between thinking, feeling and willing. But just as the waking consciousness has these three states, so also the night consciousness, which in an ordinary way is an unconscious condition so far as the human being is concerned, has its three states. In the period between falling asleep and awaking people are not always in the same condition any more than they are during the period of waking consciousness. A person is awake when thinking or feeling or willing; consciousness can also function in three conditions during sleep. Imaginative consciousness is only able to behold the cosmic formative forces if we have first acquired consciousness and knowledge of them. In sleep we all live within these formative forces of the cosmos, within the cosmic thoughts; just as man is immersed when he jumps into water, so is everyone immersed, in sleep, in the formative forces of the cosmos.

Besides this life within the formative forces of the cosmos there are two other conditions of the life of sleep, just as in waking life the human being not only thinks, but feels and wills. Thinking, the possession of thoughts, corresponds in sleep to the life of the cosmic formative forces. This means that, when we become conscious in the lightest sleep, we are living in the formative forces of the cosmos. It is as though we were swimming through the cosmos from one end to the other, floating through thoughts—thoughts which are, however, forces. In this lightest sleep we float through the thought-forces of the cosmos. But there is also a deeper sleep—a sleep from which nothing can be brought into the waking life of the day unless we have practised special exercises of the soul. A person can bring back something into the waking life through the dream only from the lightest sleep, but, as I have already said, these dream-pictures are not authoritative, for the same dream can be clothed in the most varied pictures. In very light sleep we can always dream, that is, we can always bring something over into consciousness; we can feel that we have had at least some experiences in sleep. This is, however, only the case with the very lightest kind of sleep. Of deeper sleep nothing can be known until we can enter it with Inspirational consciousness, and then we become aware of more than is described in Occult Science. In that work I have, of course, described something of what sounds forth from Inspirational consciousness, but let us make it quite clear—and this is a matter which can only be explained through Anthroposophy—in what way the human being experiences this transition from light sleep to that sleep from which no dreams can be brought back into the ordinary conscious life.

When sleep is so light that dreams can be brought back into ordinary life, then one who is able to look into these worlds perceives the surging, weaving thought-pictures, the cosmic Imaginations which reveal cosmic mysteries showing that human beings indeed belong to a cosmic world just as they belong to the world in which they live consciously from awakening to falling asleep. For what I have described in Occult Science is not as though one merely painted something on a surface, but everything is in perpetual movement, in perpetual activity. At a definite moment, however, pictures begin to appear in this world through which human beings pass in light sleep, though they know nothing of it. The pictures become distinct; their light is enhanced; they reveal certain realities lying behind them. The pictures fade away again, and nothing remains in the consciousness but a kind of feeling that they have died down. Then they rise up again, and in this alternation of activity and withdrawal, something appears which can be called the harmony of the spheres, cosmic music. Thus cosmic music does not reveal itself only as melody and harmony but as the deeds and activities of those beings who dwell in the spiritual world, as the deeds of the Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai, and so on.

The spiritual beings who guide and direct the world out of the spirit are seen, moving as it were through the surging sea of pictures. It is the world that is perceived through Inspiration, the second world. Let me call it the revelations of spiritual cosmic beings. And this world of the revelation of spiritual cosmic beings is the second element of sleep, as feeling is the second element of waking consciousness. Thus during sleep not only does the human being enter the realm of cosmic thoughts, but within these flowing cosmic thoughts there are revealed the deeds of cosmic beings who belong to the spiritual world.

In addition to these two conditions of sleep there is yet a third of which human beings have as a rule no sort of awareness. They usually know that they can sleep lightly, and they know also that dreams emerge from this light sleep. They know that there is a dreamless sleep. But the utmost that they can know of this third condition of sleep is that on awakening they may be conscious of the fact that, during sleep, they had been faced with some difficulty, with something which they must conquer in the first hours after awaking. I am sure that many of you are familiar with this feeling in the morning, where one knows that one has not slept quite in the ordinary way, but that something was there which has left a certain sense of difficulty, that will take some time to overcome when one regains consciousness in the morning. This is an indication of that third condition of sleep, the content of which can be apprehended only through Intuition. It is a condition which is of great significance to the human being.

When they are in the lightest sleep human beings are still actually concerned with a great deal that belongs to the experiences of waking consciousness. In a certain sense they still participate in their breathing processes; they also participate, although not from within but from without, in the blood circulation and the other processes of the body. In the second condition of sleep they do not actually participate in the processes of their bodily life; they are concerned with a world that is common both to the body and to the soul. Some element connected with the body plays over into the soul, just as something passes over from the light into the plant when it is developing in the light of day. But when they are in the third condition of sleep, there is something within them which—if I may so express it—has become mineral, for in this state the salts of the body are especially strongly deposited. During this third state of sleep a very strong storing up of salts takes place in the physical body—with their souls human beings live in the inner being of the mineral world.

Now let us imagine that the following experiment may be made. You lie down in bed and fall into a light sleep from which dreams may emerge into ordinary consciousness. You pass over into a deeper sleep from which no dreams proceed, but in which the soul is still connected with the physical body. You then enter into a sleep in which strong accumulations of salts take place in the physical body. The soul can have no relation to what is thus taking place in the body. However, if you had placed beside your bed a mountain crystal, it would be possible for you to enter with your soul right into the inner being of the crystal; you would perceive it from within outwards. This is not possible either in the first or in the second condition of sleep. In the first state of sleep, the content of which can enter into the dream, you would, had you dreamed of the crystal, still perceive it as some kind of crystal—it would certainly be a shadowy experience, but something of the nature of a crystal would be there. In the second state of sleep the crystal would be experienced in a less definite sense; and if you could then still dream—that is not possible in the ordinary way but we will imagine it to be so—then you would have the experience that the crystal becomes indefinite and forms itself into a kind of sphere or ellipsoid, and then recedes again. But if you could dream in the deepest sleep—that is, if you could bring into it the consciousness of Intuition—then out of this deepest sleep, this third condition of sleep, you would so experience the crystal that it would seem as though inwardly you followed these lines of form to the apex, and back again. You would experience the inner being of the crystal; you would be living within it. And so also in the case of other minerals. Not only would you experience the form, but also the inner forces. In short, the third condition of sleep is one which lifts human beings wholly out of their bodies and places them within the spiritual world. In this third stage of sleep we live with the essential being of the spiritual world itself. That is, we stand within the essence, within the being, of Angeloi, Archangeloi and of all those beings whom we otherwise perceive outwardly, in their manifestations. Between waking and sleeping we see with our sense consciousness, as it were, the external manifestations of the Gods in nature. During sleep we enter either the world of pictures, in the first condition, or into the world of manifestation, the revelation of spiritual beings, in the second condition. And when we reach the third condition we live within the divine spiritual beings themselves.

Thus, just as in our waking consciousness we live the life of thinking, feeling and willing, so during sleep we either flow with the cosmic thoughts, or out of these cosmic thoughts the deeds of divine spiritual beings are revealed, or these spiritual beings so take us up into themselves that we rest within them with our souls. Just as thoughts and ideas are for the waking consciousness the clearest and most definite things of all, while feeling is darker and really a kind of dreaming, and willing the condition of the greatest insensibility—as it were a kind of sleep—so we have these three degrees of the sleeping consciousness. We have the sleep in which ordinary consciousness experiences the dream and a higher clairvoyant consciousness the cosmic thoughts; we have the second state of sleep which for the ordinary consciousness remains hidden, but so appears to the consciousness of Inspiration that everywhere the deeds of divine, spiritual beings are revealed; and we have the third state of sleep, which to intuitional consciousness is life within the divine, spiritual beings themselves. This can be expressed by saying that we dive down, for instance, into the inner being of the minerals. This third state of sleep has, however, yet another element of great significance for the human being.

In the second stage of sleep, as I have said, we find in the surging pictures, alternately appearing and disappearing, the cosmic being of the Angeloi, Archangeloi, and so on. But we find ourselves as well. We find ourselves as beings of soul; not, however, as we now are, but as we were before birth, before conception. We learn to know how we have lived between death and a new birth. This belongs to this second world. And every time we pass through dreamless sleep, we live in this same world in which we lived before we descended into our physical body. But when we pass over into the third condition of sleep and are able to awake there, when the consciousness of Intuition awakes, then we experience our destiny—our karma. We know then why certain capacities are ours in this life as the results of a previous one. We know why in this life we have been led into connection with this or that personality; we learn to know our destiny, our karma. We can learn to know this destiny—and I speak now from another point of view—only when we are able to penetrate into the inner being of the minerals. If we are able to see the crystal not only from without but from within—naturally we must not break it up, for that would still be to see it only outwardly, but we must feel fully within it, in the way I have described—when we thus see the crystal from within, we can understand why this or that blow of destiny has befallen us in life. Take any kind of crystal—take an ordinary salt-cube. We look at it from without. That is how it is perceived in ordinary consciousness. Life then remains impenetrable. But if we are able to penetrate within it—the size in space has nothing to do with it—when we look at it from within, looking around in every direction, we are in that world in which we can understand our destiny. We live in this world every night when we pass into the third condition of sleep.

Before the Mystery of Golgotha, in the period of evolution before the appearance of Christ on Earth, human beings—we ourselves in earlier incarnations—entered very often into this third condition of sleep. But before they sank down into this sleep their Angel appeared and raised them out of it again. This is the significant thing: we can always raise ourselves out of the first state, and out of the second state of sleep, but not out of the third. Before the appearance of Christ on Earth we must have died in this third condition of sleep if Angels, or some other beings, had not raised us out of it. Since the appearance of Christ, the Christ-force has been united with the Earth. Every time that we must awaken out of this third state of sleep, the Christ-force which came to be united with the Earth through the Mystery of Golgotha must come to our aid. The human being can enter into the inner being of the crystal but cannot emerge again without the Christ-Force. When we gaze behind the veils of existence, we see the significance of the Christ Impulse for the earthly life. Once again, then, I emphasise that the human being could enter into the crystal, but could not emerge again.

After the appearance of Christ on Earth, after the Mystery of Golgotha, these things were strongly felt in certain regions, for example in Central Europe, where there was still a vivid, ancient, pagan consciousness but where, nevertheless, the Christ revelation was known. It was realised that many people had died because they had fallen into this deep sleep, and that they need not have died had Christ come to their aid. This was felt, for instance, with regard to Charlemagne and Frederick Barbarossa. In spite of the fact that so far as the outer physical world was concerned Frederick Barbarossa was drowned, this feeling was there, and it was very definitely there with regard to Charlemagne.

What happened to such a soul according to the consciousness of the Middle Ages? It passed into the interior of the crystal, thence into the mountain, and there it must wait until Christ should come to raise it out of its deep sleep. All such legends were connected with this consciousness. The deep connection of the Christ Impulse with the Earth since the Mystery of Golgotha has brought it about that the world of Angeloi, Archangeloi and other spiritual beings is still able to raise human beings from this deep sleep; otherwise, when they sank into this third condition of sleep, they could not be brought back out of it. This is connected with the Christ-force itself, not with belief in the Christ-force. No matter whether a man belongs to this or that religious confession, what Christ accomplished on Earth was an objective fact, and what I am here describing as an objective fact is wholly independent of belief. I will speak of the significance of belief on another occasion, but what I am now stating is an objective fact having nothing to do with belief.

How did these things come about? Into the spiritual world itself there entered a different destiny, a destiny which I will describe in the following way. Human beings here in the physical world are born and they die; the characteristic of the divine, spiritual beings who belong to the higher hierarchies is that they are not born, neither do they die, but only undergo a transformation. Christ, Who until the time of the Mystery of Golgotha lived with the other divine, spiritual beings, resolved to know death, to descend to Earth, to become man, and within the nature of man to pass through death, thereafter to return to consciousness through the Resurrection. In the divine-spiritual world it was an event of the deepest significance that a God should experience death. We can thus say that, in the history of the evolution of the Earth, there came about the mighty event that God became man, and that through this His power manifests as I have described. The God Who became man has such power in earthly life that He is able to raise our souls out of the interior of the crystal when they have passed into it. When we speak of Christ we are speaking of the cosmic Being, the God Who became man. What, then, would constitute the antitype? The antitype would be the man who has become god. This would not, however, be an absolutely good god but, just as Christ descended into the world of men and took death upon Himself, that is, assumed a human form in order to be able to participate in human destiny, so we are led to the opposite pole—to the man who, having freed himself from death, having liberated himself from human bodily conditions, within earthly conditions becomes a god. Such a man would then cease to be mortal. He would wander about the Earth—not, of course, under the same conditions as an ordinary mortal human being who must pass from birth to death, and from death to a new birth. A man who had thus become a god would exist on Earth as a man who had unlawfully become god-like. As the Christ is a God Who has lawfully become man, we must seek His antitype in the man who has become god, who, mortal no longer, has unlawfully assumed the god-nature. Just as in the Christian tradition we have in Christ Jesus the God Who has become man in righteousness, so are we also directed to Ahasueris, the man who has become god in unrighteousness, who has laid aside the mortality of human nature. We have the polar antithesis of Christ Jesus in Ahasueris. That is the deeper foundation, the deeper significance of the Ahasueris legend. This legend narrates something that is a reality, speaking of a man who wanders over the Earth. The figure of Ahasueris is actually there, wandering over the Earth from people to people. This Ahasueris figure exists—the man who has unlawfully become god.

If we wish to gain knowledge of historical truth we must turn our attention to such matters; we should observe how beings and forces from the super-sensible world work down into the physical world; how Christ came from the spiritual world into the physical world; and further how again the sensible world works back into the super-sensible. We must recognise in Ahasueris a real cosmic force, a real cosmic being. A consciousness of this wandering of Ahasueris has always existed, though of course he can be perceived only with clairvoyant vision and not with physical eyes. The legends of Ahasueris have a true objective foundation. We cannot understand human life if we only observe it externally, as it is described in history books.

Since the Mystery of Golgotha, the Christ has dwelt in our inner being. Just as when we look inwards with quickened sight we can perceive Him there, so also when we look at human life and the eye of vision is opened there appears this figure of Ahasueris—and this is the case in most of those in whom clairvoyance arises, as it may happen unawares to the person who steps across the threshold of consciousness. People may not perhaps always recognise him; he may be taken for something different. It is nevertheless possible for Ahasueris to appear to us, as it is also possible when we look into our inner being for the Christ-figure to shine forth.

These things belong to World Mysteries which now, in this age when many Mysteries are destined to be revealed, must be made known.

We have considered a series of karmic relationships in the historical development of mankind, and have observed how one or other relationship flows over from one earthly life into another. We will now pass on to the consideration of karmic relationships from a fresh point of view, and you will find that it is one which leads still more directly into life. For the study of karma has real value only when it flows into the moral character of our life, into the whole mood and tenor of our life and soul; so that in taking our place in the world as human beings we can experience through the study of karma an invigoration as well as a deepening of our life. Life has many riddles, and it is wrong to regard them all as insoluble. If that were so, man would gradually be torn right out of his true being. Were the riddles of the nature of man to remain quite unknown to him, he would have to pass through existence like an unconscious being. But it is the task of man to grow ever more and more conscious. And this he can do only when he learns to penetrate with some degree of insight into all that is connected with him, all that is connected with his soul and his spirit.

As karma is a component part of our whole life and existence, it goes without saying that the study of karma is a study that has directly to do with the very foundations of human life. Nevertheless, it is very difficult for us in our present-day consciousness to undertake a study of karma in its direct application to life. For any at all adequate study of the working of karma in actual life, the life in which we ourselves are immersed, calls for a far more objective outlook than is possible for the kind of consciousness which arises from present-day conditions of living and education. In these conditions there is much that hides karmic connections, makes them invisible; for this reason, the very things that would make life comprehensible from the point of view of karma and destiny are extraordinarily difficult to observe.

Present-day man is very little inclined to detach himself from his own being and to give himself wholly to some other being or object. Modern man lives very strongly within himself. And the strange thing is that when he strives towards the spirit, when he receives into himself the spiritual, he runs great danger of living all the more within himself! For what do we find when someone begins to enter more deeply into anthroposophical life? Many a person who in the course of his life has come into the Anthroposophical Movement will be able to say to himself: As long as I lived in the outside world I had these or those relations with life: they absorbed me and I accepted them as belonging intimately to me. I prized this or that; I believed that this or that was necessary for living. Moreover, I had friends with whom I was on terms of intimacy by virtue of the habits and circumstances of daily life. Then came the time when I found Anthroposophy. Since that moment, much in my life has come to a stop. I have moved right away from many of the old connections; or at least they no longer have the same value for me. Many things that I enjoyed doing have become repulsive to me; I can no longer regard them as things with which I want to remain connected.

And if, having embarked on these reflections, he carries his thought a little farther, and tries to find what it is that has taken the place of these things, he will very quickly discover that his egoism has not decreased. I do not say this reproachfully, no, not even with the faintest shadow of reproach; I merely wish to state it as a fact which anyone is quite well able to observe in himself. His egoism has, in fact, increased; he pays far more heed now to the special way in which he himself is constituted. He asks more than he ever did before: “What sort of impression does my neighbour make on me?” Previously he had been accustomed to take the actions of another person more or less for granted. Now he enquires about the impression they have made on himself. Or, again, he may have been placed within some connection of life which used to seem quite satisfactory. He fulfilled his duties, and so forth. Now his duties become repulsive to him; he would like to quit them because he feels they are not sufficiently spiritual, and so forth.

Thus it is that spiritual endeavour within Anthroposophy may very easily lead into a kind of egoism; a man tends to attach far greater importance to himself than he did before.

But it all rests on the fact that, in such a case, there has been no expansion of interest towards the outside world; on the contrary, interest has been thrust back within. I have often pointed out that one who grows in a true and right way into anthroposophical life, does not take less interest in external life; rather does he, by reason of his Anthroposophy, take far more interest. Everything outside himself begins to be far more interesting to him than before; it has far more value for him. For this, however, it is necessary that he should not withdraw from external life, but perceive, rather, the spirituality in it.

This of course means that certain things begin to show themselves in other human beings which had not been noticed before. But then we must also have the courage to notice these things, and not to overlook them. For consideration of life from the point of view of karma, it is absolutely necessary that we acquire in some measure the power to go out of ourselves and into the other man.

Naturally, this is peculiarly difficult when the other person becomes a means for karmic adjustments in life which are unpleasant, and possibly even painful to us! But unless we are able to go out of ourselves, even in matters which are disagreeable and painful to us, no true and valid study of karma is possible. For let us remind ourselves:—what are the conditions that have to exist in the world for karma to be brought into being?

We are each placed within a certain human life. In the course of it we act, think, and feel in one way or another. We enter into certain relationships with other human beings and within these relationships things happen. We think, feel, will and do things that call for a karmic adjustment. We enter into relationships with other men, and again things happen which demand a karmic adjustment. Try to survey from this point of view one human earthly life and then observe how at the end of it a man passes through the portal of death into the spiritual world. He now lives within the spiritual world. In the spiritual world it is not as in the physical world. In the physical world you stand outside the other man. You stand outside even those people with whom you come in close contact. Between you and the other man there is at least air, and each one has his own skin! So that when you approach another ever so closely, you can always in a certain measure keep yourself to yourself. This, however, is no longer possible when you have gone through the portal of death and dwell in the spiritual world. Let us take a typical case. You have done something to another man which calls for a karmic compensation. You go on living with him, after you have both passed through the portal of death. You live then within the other man; and this not by virtue of your good will or your inner perfection, but compulsorily, if I may put it so.

Suppose A and B go through the portal of death. Afterwards they are in the spiritual world. They confront one another in the spiritual world. Yet, whereas here B lived within himself and A lived within himself, after death A lives in B as well as in himself, and B lives in A as well as in himself. In the spiritual world, men live entirely within one another; and in so doing they are maintained by the forces which they have stored up in their lives on earth. After death we do not enter into relation with just any kind of men; we enter into relation with those with whom we have already established a connection for good or for ill. And it is these connections which bring it about that we live not merely within ourselves but within the other. Now imagine, you have done something to another man,—or, let us say, B has acted towards A in a way which demands karmic compensation. When B passes through the portal of death, then after death, in the passage through the world between death and a new birth, he lives in A. He experiences, within A, what he did to A. And while he is thus living outside himself, he provides for the karmic compensation to be brought about. Thus all that is to be brought to pass as karmic compensation during the next earthly life, you yourself cause by living in the other man. It is only on descending again to the physical world that A makes what you have put into him into his own deed. In the next earthly life he comes to meet you with what you really have willed to inflict upon yourself through him.

When, therefore, in the next earthly life, something is inflicted on me by another man as a karmic compensation, this happens because I laid it into him during the time I lived within him between death and a new birth. At that time it was not his deed at all; it becomes his deed only as he descends again into earth-life. Thus the conditions for the working of karma in the course of evolution arise from the fact that karmically-connected human beings dwell within one another in the time between death and rebirth.

Now when we consider ordinary life on earth, we do not really penetrate very deeply into it. As far as the other man is concerned, we are extraordinarily little aware of him, consciously. For instance, how little we notice any slight difference in the behaviour of another man in relation to ourselves! Suppose we meet a man in life, and he behaves towards us in a certain way. We are aware of it, but we use very little discrimination. We do not observe what entirely different motives and impulses may account for his behaviour. A man, let us say, is antagonistically disposed towards me. This antagonism may be caused by the mere fact that my existence irritates him, because he is attuned to something quite different in life. Therefore he treats me in a certain way. This treatment can be of such a nature that only in the next life is it karmically balanced. In such a case the antagonism can be quite original, not in the least conditioned by preceding earthly lives.

But I may also receive a similar, perhaps even identical, treatment from another man, into whom I myself implanted bit by bit all that comes to me with this treatment, in the time between death and rebirth.

The feeling which can differentiate between two such kinds of treatment, externally similar, is very little developed to-day; it must show itself again, in order that the moral tenor of life may become purer, and man's moral perception stronger. In earlier epochs—in epochs not even very remote from us—such a distinction lay within human comprehension. One felt, e.g. towards one man: He hates me and does this or that out of hate for me; while with another man one had the feeling; he must do something against me, he simply cannot help it, he is inwardly predestined to act in this way.

This feeling, which can be subtly discerned in the facts of life, must again become more general. It will give to life many fine nuances which are of great importance.

There is another difference we must learn to observe. You will readily admit that when a man comes into relation with other men, all manner of things are connected with this relationship, things which do not interest him as much as the relationship itself. Again, I will take a characteristic instance. Suppose you enter a society—I am not thinking now of the Anthroposophical Society; I exclude it for reasons that will emerge in the course of these lectures. The reason why you enter this society may be that you have a karmic link with one or two persons, perhaps with only one person in the society; but you have to participate in everything connected with the society in order to approach this one person as closely as your karmic relations with him demand. While from the point of view of karma the relation to this one man only is important, you share in everything that you come up against in this society, through the people you meet there, etc. So we have to recognise that life confronts us in such a way that the relations into which it brings us are of the most varied shades; quite indifferent relationships may stand side by side with the most significant, in the deepest sense of the word.

But note in this connection, how true it is that external life is frequently only Maya, is in many respects the Great Illusion. Thus it can happen—I will again construct a hypothetical case—that you enter a society, and the relation to the one person, which is well determined karmically, has difficulty in establishing itself. You have to link on to all sorts of people in order to approach that one man. With these other men you make connections which—let us say—appear extremely important to a more rough-and-ready consideration of life; yes, it may be, they make themselves very strongly felt, whereas perhaps the connection which you approach last of all, and which is of real karmic importance, takes its course gently, softly, unobtrusively.

Thus it can really be that the karmically important element in some connection of life appears like a little mount beside giant mountains, which are in reality of lesser importance. To a spiritualised consideration, however, the little hillock reveals itself in its right significance. The events which occur in life cause us many illusions. As a rule we do not know how to judge them if we take only one earthly life into consideration. It is only when we perceive other earthly lives in the background that we can estimate correctly the one earthly life in all its events.

I should like to illustrate this by an example. Strange personalities have appeared in our time. Apart from those of whom I have spoken to you in our studies on karma, a number of quite remarkable personalities have appeared here and there. External study often does not lead at all into karmic connections; we need a study which is able to take note of incisive moments in life. Then we come to see, in all clarity, just those facts which make us realise how illusory external life is unless it is considered on the basis of the spiritual. Recently I mentioned here an example which may have appeared to you very strange, the example of an alchemist of the school of Basil Valentine, who reappeared again as Frank Wedekind.

My starting-point for the observation of this strange karma—the starting-point is not always significant in itself; if afterwards the starting-point has led on to inner clarity, then naturally the whole thing changes—the starting-point in this case was the circumstance that I had hardly ever before seen such hands as Frank Wedekind's, and I saw Frank Wedekind gesticulate with those hands of his when he acted in his own “Hidalla”. The whole apparent chaos of this play (which, as I recently mentioned, is a perfect horror from the ordinary, conventional point of view) connected itself with the impression of his hands that I had had before, and conjured up before my vision the chemical manipulations on which, in a former life, he had been engaged. On the basis of his “Hidalla”, in connection with these strange hands, appeared the earlier incarnation which one could then follow further.

You will see from this how one must develop an eye for what is of real significance in a human being. There are men in whom the countenance is the most characteristic element. But there are also men in whom the most important characteristic is not the face at all, but, for instance, the hands; from the face of such a man one can infer nothing, only from the hands. When you pass on from the individual to the general, precisely in the example which I have just brought forward, you can realise quite clearly how it stands. For these medieval alchemists were of course obliged to acquire extraordinary dexterity with their hands.

In earlier lectures I have spoken of how nothing is suffered to remain of all that man has developed in his head. But that which he bears in the rest of his organism is subsequently brought to expression in the (next) head. Now in childhood the whole forming of the body takes its start from the head. Above all, such expressive organs as the hands are shaped in accordance with the most intimate impulses of the head. We may therefore expect that something very characteristic will appear in the hands or feet of one who has worked in the manner of alchemists.

I say all this to show you how important it is to take one particular thing in its full significance, and to regard as insignificant what frequently presents itself in the sense-world as the most evident, the most essential, the greatest, etc. In our time, as I said, there have appeared many strange and remarkable personalities who stand before us without our being able to arrive at any complete survey of the karmic connections. Just in the case of such personalities it is a question of observing in them what is striking and significant. The fact that somebody was a great artist, for example, is something which may possibly be determined only in the very smallest measure by his karma. But what exactly he does in his art, how he conducts himself in it, these are things that are specially determined in karma. Thus, the very things which, one may say, make life really poetic, reveal themselves to a study of karma.

Let us suppose we can look back on a man's previous incarnations. In respect of the present incarnation they are remarkably illuminating in certain points. But we can never understand how to find our way intelligently in these investigations as long as we make use of the ordinary criteria for understanding and interpreting life. Life becomes a reality in quite a different sense when one resolves to pursue a study of karma in all earnestness.

Let me give you an example. I will in the first place relate quite simply what happened. I was walking one day along a street and I had a picture before me. I see a ship-wrecked man. His ship is far away, and sinking. The man is in a lifeboat, hurrying towards a fairly large island. His gaze is directed strangely, considering that he is still in doubt whether his boat will reach land and his life be safe! He is looking at the bubbling, foaming billows. I am impressed by the fact that he can still gaze at the waves, even though he is liable at any moment to be drowned. A disturbed and shaken soul, but in the shock—and so in a body-free manner—deeply united with Nature.

While still on the same walk—the picture had of course no connection whatever with my surroundings—my way led me to an Art Exhibition where I saw for the first time Boecklin's “Toteninsel” (Island of the Dead). I mention this only that you may see how in approaching these things we must take a wider outlook. It is not simply a matter of meditating upon all one can think and feel about Boecklin from the starting point of his picture, “Island of the Dead”. It need not be so at all; it is quite possible that under certain circumstances one has to revert to something one has seen prophetically, and link that on to one's experience of the picture.

And so, too, when we meet a man in real life. Then, in order to find karmic connections, it is not only important to consider what we experience just in the moment of meeting him; it is often most illuminating to recall some intimate previous experience, for we may find that we understand it only when we see how it connects with what we afterwards perceive in him or through him.

The very things that prove so illuminating for karma are often things that throw their shadows in advance—or, we may also say, their light. We need a fine sense for the intimacies of life, which sometimes means that we not only connect the future with the past, but regard the past as something that elucidates the future. Unless we can learn to look at life in this intimate way, we shall not easily develop that inner mobility of soul which is necessary for a deeper penetration into karmic connections.

It is indeed a fact that when specially significant karmic events enter a man's life, they are connected with inner events in his life which may date from several years previously. We have to acquire in this way an expanded view of life.

For think of the following:—When you look at the thinking element in man, as it exists in ordinary consciousness, you find it related only to the past. When, however, you look at human feeling, with the many shades and nuances it receives from emotional and temperamental depths, then you come upon very strange secrets of life. The course of a man's life can be very little gauged by the way he thinks; but very much by the way he feels. And when you observe such a life, let us say, as Goethe's, and ask yourself: How did Goethe feel in the year 1790?—then, through the peculiar stamp and character of Goethe's feeling in the year 1790 you get the entire later colouring of his life; it is all present as a nucleus in the feeling of 1790. As soon as we descend into the depths of the human soul we really perceive the peculiar colouring—not of course the details—of the subsequent life. A man might gain a great deal of illumination on his own life if he paid more attention to the inexplicable shades of feeling which are not caused from without but from the depths within.

Men will accustom themselves to taking this kind of thing specially into account if they pay attention to the points I have mentioned to-day. I shall have more to say about them: they are important for a consideration of life that intends to take note of karmic connections. And this holds good, whether one is dealing with karmic connections in one's own life, or with karmic connections of those who are dear to one. For you must understand that if one desires to consider karma, it is a question really of looking through a human being in a certain way. When no more than the ordinary physical human being stands in your field of vision, he stands there before you non-transparent. You look at his face, at the way he moves about and behaves, at the way he speaks, or perhaps even also at the way he thinks,—the latter being, on the whole, generally only a conventional reflection of his upbringing and experience. But so long as you look no further than this, the karma of this human being does not stand objectively before you.

When, however, a man becomes transparent for you, then at first you really have the feeling that he is hovering in the air. Gradually it comes about that you no longer think of him as walking or moving his arms and hands. You lose all sense of this. Understand me aright, my dear friends. In ordinary life what a man does with his arms and legs is extremely important. But this loses its importance when one wishes to observe the deeper elements in man. You must take what I am saying in its fullest meaning. Can you look right away from what a man achieves by means of his arms and hands, and see him hovering, as it were, not so much in respect of space as in respect of life? I mean, take no account of journeys he has made, of all his goings and comings, in short, of all he does with his legs; and attach equally little importance to the work he does with his hands. Watch rather his mood, his temperament; watch everything in him in which arms and legs take no part. Then you have, so to speak, the first transparency to which you can attain. And what will this first transparency show? Picture to yourselves, you have here an object. At first you see nothing but the object. Well and good. But then something is drawn upon the object. And now it is again erased. This is how it is with man when you arrive at the first transparency, when you look away from the man of ordinary life and completely disregard his arms and legs. You have to tear him right out of the connections into which he has come through the activity of his arms and legs. If you now observe him, something in him becomes transparent, and you look through to what was previously covered up by the activity of arms and legs.

And what is it you see? You begin to understand that behind the man the Moon appears. I will draw here diagrammatically the threefold man. Now suppose, this (i.e. the lower part) first becomes transparent; we disregard the arms and legs. Then the man no longer appears to us detached from the universe as he otherwise does; he begins to reveal behind him the Moon, with all the impulses which work in man from the Moon. We begin to say: “Yes, man has a certain power of phantasy,—whether it be developed or no, he has this power in him. He cannot help it. Moon forces are behind this. They are hidden from us only by the activity of arms and legs. But now all that has vanished, and in the background appears before us the creative Moon.”

We go on. We try to make man still more transparent. By a kind of suggestion, we think away all that makes man emotional, all that endows him with a certain temperament—in short, those features—of his every-day life in which his soul-nature is chiefly expressed. Still more disappears; he becomes still more transparent. And we can go farther. We can disregard all that exists in man, because he has senses. First, you disregard everything that is in man by virtue of his having arms and legs. Now you ask yourself: what remains over from man, when I ignore the fact that he has ever perceived anything by means of his senses? There remains a certain direction of thought, a certain impulsive force of his thought, a tendency of life. At this point, however, the whole rhythmic system, the breast of man, becomes transparent. It vanishes, and in the background appears before you all that exists there as Sun-impulse (see diagram). You look through man and behold in reality the Sun, when you ignore all that man has perceived by means of his senses. You can try this on yourself. You can ask yourself: what do I owe to my senses? And then, when you look away from all this, you see through yourself and behold yourself as a Sun-being.

And when further you disregard man's thoughts, the direction of his thinking, then the head too disappears. Now the whole man is gone. You look through, and finally behold Saturn in the background. But in this moment, the man's karma, or your own karma, lies open before you. For in the moment when you observe the working of Saturn in a man, when a man has become entirely transparent to you, and you observe him so extensively that you behold him on the background of the whole planetary system—on the background of Moon, Sun and Saturn—in that moment the karma of the man lies open before you. And if one is going to speak of practical karma-exercises—I told you already that I wanted to do it at the beginning of the foundation of the Anthroposophical Society, but did not succeed at that time—then one must really begin in this way. One must say: It is a matter first of all of disregarding—in ourselves or in others—all that we are in life, inasmuch as we are beings endowed with arms and legs. Cut this right out of your thought. All you have ever attained through the fact that you are a being endowed with arms and legs—this you must ignore.

Then you will say: “Yes, but we fulfil our karma just because we have arms and legs!” So you do. So long, however, as you look at your arms and legs, you are not aware of what it is you fulfil through having arms and legs. This you see only when you no longer look at your arms and legs any more, but find in the activity of arms and legs the impulses of the Moon. Then it is a matter of going a step further, and disregarding all that man absorbs by means of his senses, what he has in his soul by means of his senses—whether you are practising the exercise with yourself or with others. You behold man then as Sun-being, you see the Sun-impulse in him. And again, you must disregard the fact that he has a certain tendency of thought, a certain tendency of soul—then you realise him to be a Saturn-being.

Should you arrive thus far, then you have man once more before you, but now—as a spirit. Now the legs move and the arms work, but spiritually, and they show us what they do. But they show us this according to the forces which work and rule in them. This is what we have to learn and experience.

When I do the most trifling thing, when I pick up the chalk here—as long as I merely see this fact, the picking-up of the chalk, then I know nothing of karma. I must do away with all this. I must bring it about that all this can reproduce itself in a picture, can appear again in a picture. Not in the strength that is contained in my muscles—this can explain nothing at all—but in the picture that takes the place of the act, appears the force that induces the hand to move, in order to pick up the chalk. And it appears as something coming from previous incarnations.

This is how it is, when I gradually do away with visible man in the above manner and see behind him his Moon-impulses, his Sun-impulses, and his Saturn-impulses. Then the image or picture of the man comes to meet me again from the cosmos. But it is not the man in his present incarnation; it is the man in one of his preceding incarnations or in several previous incarnations. I must first bring it about that the man who is walking here at my side, becomes transparent for me, ever more and more transparent, in that I put away from my vision his whole life. Then there comes to the same spot, but now proceeding from cosmic distances, the man as he was in his previous earthly lives.

Perhaps what has been placed before you to-day about these connections is not at once altogether clear and comprehensible. But I wanted to point the way prospectively, as it were, and in the coming lectures we shall enter into more and more detailed considerations of the nature of karma as it flows in human life from one incarnation to another.