The Rudolf Steiner Archive

On New Year's Eve it is always fitting to remember how past and future are linked together in life and in the existence of the world, how past and future are linked in the whole life of the Cosmos of which man is a part, how past and future are linked in every fraction of that life with which our own individual existence is connected, is interwoven through all that we were able to do and to think during the past year, and through all that we are able to plan for the coming year.

The thoughts which, almost in answer to an inward need, we call up before our souls in reviewing what we have done during the past year, and what we intend to do next year, should be pervaded with adequate earnestness and dignity, in accordance with the spirit of Anthroposophical Spiritual Science, so that we may illumine these thoughts with the Higher Light which we can receive from Spiritual Science, through contemplation of the great Cosmic events. How does this human life of ours stand with regard to past and future? It is like a mirror. Indeed, comparison with a mirror approaches reality far more than it may seem to do at first. Striving a little to attain self-knowledge is indeed like standing before a mirror. We stand, looking into a mirror and there in that mirror lies the past, of which we know its reflection is in the mirror. Behind the mirror lies that into which at first we cannot look, just as it is not possible to see in space, what lies behind a mirror. Perhaps the question should be raised here: What is it that corresponds in our world-mirror to the silver covering at the back which turns the transparent glass into a mirror? In the ordinary mirror the glass is coated behind so that we cannot see through it. What constitutes the coating of the world-mirror that reflects the past for us, and at first keeps the future hidden from our gaze? The world-mirror is coated with our own being, with our own human being. We have only to bear in mind that with the usual means of knowledge we are really unable to see ourselves, to see what we ourselves are. We cannot see through ourselves, we see through ourselves just as little as we see through a mirror. When we look into ourselves, many things are mirrored back to us, things which we have experienced, things which we have learnt; but our own being remains hidden from us, because we can see through ourselves at first just as little as we can see through an ordinary mirror. Looking at the matter generally, or I might say, in the abstract, we may consider this comparison with a mirror as I have just described it. But when we come to details modifications are needed. Trying to look back on our life through this mirroring process (for looking back on our life, on what our inner soul reflects, is a mirroring process), we must confess: What we see mirrored there, is only a part of our experiences. When you try to look back on your experiences, you will find that these experiences are continually subject to interruptions. You look back on what the day has brought you; but you do not look back on what the preceding night has brought you. The experiences of the night are an interruption. You look back on yesterday, you do not look back on the night before yesterday, and so on. Stretches of nighttime, not filled in by thoughts upon our experiences, are continually inserting themselves. It is an illusion to think that we survey our entire life when looking back upon it; we only piece together to some extent, what the days contain. In reality, the course of our life comes before us with continual interruptions.

We might now ask: Are these interruptions in the course of our life necessary? Yes, they are necessary. Were there no such interruptions in the course of our life, or, to speak more correctly, in the retrospection upon our life's course, then, as human beings, we should be quite unable to perceive our Ego. We should see the course of our life filled merely by the world outside, and in our life there would be no ego-consciousness at all. That we are able to experience, to feel our Ego, depends on the fact that our life's course is continually being broken up piece-wise. It is precisely with respect to this ego-perception, brought about by interruptions in the course of life, that present-day humanity faces a critical period. When a human being of today looks back on life and, as has just been explained, attains his Ego through this looking back, this Ego of present-day man is, in a certain respect, empty, we only know that we have an Ego. In earlier periods of earth evolution men knew more. Just as in ordinary daily life, the dreams of an individual dimly emerge out of his nightly experiences, so the clairvoyant-atavistic perceptions of the human beings of earlier periods emerged out of the Ego. These clairvoyant-atavistic perceptions were dreams only in their form; what they contained was reality. We may say: The Ego of present-day man has been emptied of the clairvoyant-atavistic content which was the support of men of past ages, permeating them with the conviction that they had something in common with a divine element, that they were connected with something divine. Out of these atavistic-clairvoyant visions, there arose in man's sentient life that which condensed into religious feeling and religious veneration towards those beings to whom religious cult and religious sacrifice were dedicated. How does the case stand today? Today the Ego is empty of these atavistic-clairvoyant visions, and when we look back on the Ego it is more or less only a point in our soul-life. The content of this Ego is a firm point of support, but it is nevertheless only a point. Now, however, we are living in an age in which the point must again become a circle, an age in which the Ego must again receive a content. Since the last third of the nineteenth century, the Spiritual World has made a mighty inroad into our Sense-world, in order that the Ego may again receive a content. This is why, ever since the seventies of the nineteenth century, the Spiritual World has willed to re-enter our physical existence through revelations in a new way. What we are striving for in Anthroposophical Spiritual Science is this: To receive with goodwill all that is seeking to enter through spiritual revelation from another world—from a world, however, which bears within it this world of ours—and to clothe these revelations in terms by which they can be communicated to man. These revelations are nothing less than that which definitely (in a certain respect) guarantees the future of mankind. It is not, indeed, a direct glance behind the mirror, but it is a guarantee for this, viz., that when we as human beings, hasten to meet the future i.e., hasten to step behind the mirror—which means facing the future—then that which we have to do in the future will be able to come to pass in full power, if we have first tested our forces, if we have first strengthened them through that, which, by means of Spiritual Science, reveals itself to us out of the Spiritual World.

Just as in the past, man's Ego was filled with an atavistic clairvoyant content, which guaranteed his connection with the divine, so today our Ego must be filled with a new spiritual content, received in full consciousness, a content which gives us again the link uniting our soul with the divine Soul-being. The men of the past possessed an atavistic clairvoyance. The last inheritance of this atavistic clairvoyance is abstract reflection, the abstract power of cognition possessed by modern men. It is a much diluted remnant of the early clairvoyance. The man of today can feel that this dilution, this logical dialectic dilution of a former atavistic clairvoyance, is no longer able to support his soul. Then the longing will arise within him to receive something new into his Ego. But that which has formed the end in the evolution of mankind from primeval times up to the present, must now be made the beginning. In olden times, man had clairvoyant revelations and did not understand them. Today man must first understand, must exert to the utmost his intellectual power, must exert to the utmost his reason. If he so exerts it through that which lies before him in Spiritual Science, then mankind will again develop the power of receiving the Spiritual clairvoyantly. This is certainly something that most people today wish to avoid, viz., to make use of their healthy human reason in order to understand Spiritual Science. Were it possible to avoid the use of man's reason, it would also be possible to avoid altogether the entrance of spiritual revelations into our earthly world.

Thus past and future are linked together on this New Year's Eve, this Cosmic New Year's Day. For today, what is impending is indeed a kind of Cosmic New Year's Day. The future stands before us as a formidable question, not an indefinite abstract question, but as a concrete question. How can we approach that which, as a question put to mankind, in the form of a spiritual revelation, is striving more and more since the last third of the nineteenth century, to enter our earthly world? And how are we to place it in relation to revelations of the past? These questions should be livingly experienced. Then we should feel how important it is to direct our longings towards that which is presented here as Anthroposophical Spiritual Science. Then we should realize the earnestness and the dignity of the striving for Spiritual Science. It is especially needful to have this feeling at the present time. For we are not dealing with any kind of arbitrary human will (“Willkur”); we are dealing with something that as Cosmic knowledge wills to reveal itself to us from out of the world's evolution; we are dealing in very truth with what the gods will to make of man. But here we are faced with the fact that when we on the one hand turn towards the spirit, on the other hand those who wish only to worship the past, are drawn away by the Spirit of contradiction, by the Spirit of opposition. And the more we try with all our might to grasp the spirit of the future state of man, the more surely will the people of the past be possessed by the spirit of opposition. It is to be noticed among people of today that religious feeling is seeking to assume new life. Groping attempts are numerous. The attempts of Spiritual Science must not be groping. Through such attempts the real, concrete world of the Spirit ought to be grasped. Almost like a premonition of what it ought to be, we are faced by those who say: “Mere religious tradition is not enough for us; we want to have an inner religious experience, we do not only want to hear the message that, according to tradition, Christ lived and died in Palestine so many, or so many years ago—we want to experience in our souls the Christ-experience.” In many quarters we find such ideas arising among men, among people who believe that something of the Christ-experience has arisen in the depths of their souls.

These are groping attempts, often even questionable attempts, because at the same time people are content in the egoism of their soul, and then turn away from all inclination to the Spirit. These longings after inner spiritual experience are there nevertheless, and even groping attempts towards such inner spiritual experience, towards a new interest in the spiritual world, should be recognized. But the spirit of opposition will surely arise.

To judge by what he himself has printed, such a representative of the spirit of the past has recently uttered quite remarkable words at Stuttgart, contrasting attempts, groping attempts, to rouse a new religious interest, a new religious experience, with attempts to reach a really new concrete knowledge of the spiritual world, as in the case of Anthroposophical Spiritual Science. In the Shepherd-Play, performed at the Waldorf School, one of the shepherds, who has had a spiritual vision, says that he very nearly lost his power of speech. When I read the last page of Gogarten's Spiritual Science and Christianity, I must say that I very nearly lost my power of speech, for it is indeed surprising that anyone should say such things in the present age. It is things such as this that, on the Cosmic New Year's Eve, should stimulate contemplation of the comparison of the past with the inevitable future. What does this representative of religion really say? I do not know if the full import has been realized. He says: “Today—I ought to say at all times—the chief task is to safeguard the elementary feeling of piety of which I have spoken. It is almost wholly lacking today. We are occupied with religious ‘interests’ with religious ‘experiences’. Since Anthroposophy provides such good material for ‘interest’, and is such a good medium for ‘experiences’, people are helpless and without power of resistance when they meet it. People know even less of that fundamental, elementary bond, the bond brought into life by piety, which drives away every religious ‘interest’, and scatters every religious ‘experience’, the bond between God and creature. And because man knows little of this bond, he knows still less of that other bond, the unconditioned direct union between God and man.”

Here in the name of religion we see every religious interest repudiated, every religious experience scattered. A wholly undefined “bond” which cannot of course be differentiated, and which the speaker does not wish to differentiate, takes the place of religious interest, and of religious experience. We do indeed lose our power of speech when a teacher of religion says: “True piety must drive away every religious interest and scatter every religious experience.” We have gone so far that we are unable to realize what it means when an official representative of religion says: “Away with religious interest! Away with religious experience!” You see, apart from the fact that Gogarten does not know that he himself would be quite unable to speak of religion at all, if in the past there had never been atavistic religious interests and religious experience; apart from the fact that he as official representative of religion, could never have stood before an audience had not religion entered into the evolution of mankind, through religious interest and religious experience; apart from all this, everything I have told you just now proves what I told you before, that in the present day the very people who consider themselves the true representatives of religious life, work for the destruction of all that is essential in religion. Have these men lost every possibility of understanding what pertains to the human soul? Can these men no longer understand that when man turns his attention to anything, attention is guided by interest, and that everything entering the consciousness of man is based on experience? It seems as if human beings no longer speak from such consciousness at all, but only from a spirit of opposition. We should bear this in mind in all seriousness when we look into the mirror which so mysteriously unveils the past and conceals the future—though in a certain way the mirror unveils the future, too, in the way I have described.

It is the aim of Anthroposophical Spiritual Science to serve religious interest, and to give a content to religious experience. With what result? In the course of this year (1919) the question was brought forward before the Holy Roman Congregation whether the teaching that is termed theosophical is in keeping with the teaching of the Catholic Church, and whether it is permissible to belong to theosophical societies, to attend theosophical meetings, and to read theosophical papers and periodicals. The answer was: “No”, in every case, No, “in omnibus”. This is the spirit of opposition, of contradiction, and the Jesuit Zimmermann interprets it more particularly by applying this veto of the Holy Roman Congregation to Anthroposophy also. I need not set Zimmermann's writings before you in detail. You all know the wind that blows from a certain quarter against Anthroposophical Spiritual Science, and that it is the breath of the Spirit of contradiction. The Spirit carried in this wind can be felt in the following words, penned by that same Zimmermann, who for years spread abroad the lie that I was a renegade priest: “Through the defection of their General Secretary, Dr. Rudolf Steiner, who took along with him most of the members, the Theosophical Society picked up again to some extent in the course of years, and now owns about twenty-five lodges, one-fifth of which are certainly somewhat dormant, and publishes at Dusseldorf, as its official organ, Das Theosophische Streben (The Theosophic Endeavour). The followers of Steiner, who named his theosophy ‘Anthroposophy’ after his exit, complained recently that he was becoming unproductive, that he had no new ‘visions’, that he always lectures upon the same things, that he would soon have to throw himself into something new, etc.” This paves the way for another article dealing in the same intelligent fashion with the “Threefold Social Organism”. You see what Spirit of truth backs up this Jesuit? A Jesuit does not merely represent his personal opinion, but the opinion of the Catholic Church. He speaks only as a member of the Catholic Church. What he says represents the opinion of the Catholic Church. We must judge such things from a moral point of view. We must ask whether anyone who deals with truth as this man does—a man, moreover, held in high esteem by a particular religious community, can be held in high esteem by the true spirit of humanity.

As long as questions of this kind are not considered with due earnestness, we have not arrived at the right understanding of the Cosmic New Year's Eve. At the present moment, it is essential to reach this right understanding. It is essential for us to extend our sympathies—alas, our sympathies often arise from egoistic sources—to the great human relations, and to feel for the whole of mankind that human sympathy which impels us to make a spiritual movement like this effectively fruitful for the evolution of mankind. May you experience, my dear friends, at this very time, that it is the Spirit of the Cosmos itself, which for decades has been seeking entrance. May you experience during the coming night, that this Spirit which seeks to enter humanity, shall here so be served that the souls of those, who will to feel with and who will to think with Anthroposophical Spiritual Science, may feel their union with this new Spirit which wills to enter the world—the Spirit which alone can bring to the earthly world, the world that is destroying itself—the new upbuilding impulse out of Heaven. In this hour, a symbolic hour every year, demanding that we experience it as the decisive hour between past and future—in this hour may you unite your souls with the new Spirit; may you so experience in your souls the contact of the past year with the coming year, that the Cosmic Year which is passing away, may contact itself with the dawning Cosmic Year.

But the passing Cosmic Year will still send many an after-effect into the future; destructive forces into the spheres of Spirit, of Equity, of Economics. Therefore it is all the more needful, that as many men as possible shall be seized in the innermost depths of their souls by the New Year of the Spiritual Future, and shall develop a Will which may be the foundation of a new spiritual world, a world to be built into the future evolution of mankind. Those who care for the future of mankind are not those who would kill religious interest, who would do away with religious experience, but those only, those alone who can see how, through the intellectuality of our age, the old religious interest has faded away, the old religious life has been crippled. Those only care for the future, who see how a new interest must seize mankind, how new religious experience must spring up in mankind, so that man may bring into the Cosmos new germs for a future existence.

My dear friends,

For this “Pastoral Medicine” course we are bringing together for the first time the members of two distinct circles of spiritual work. This is of quite special importance. We must inquire, therefore, first of all into the reason for the combination, from the intended content of the course itself. In the first place I would like to point out that perhaps this course will be an example of how ancient traditions must be renewed through a particular form of spiritual activity in our time. For what has so far developed under the name “pastoral medicine” has lost its original content. We will see that this is so in the course of our study. Yet out of the very foundation of this present age there arises a most significant task that as it takes shape may be allowed to bear the name of pastoral medicine. We have made the strict requirement that this course be mainly for real theologians and real physicians, including those who are training to be real physicians, in the sense in which that title can be given them from the standpoint of the Medical Section of the Goetheanum. How this standpoint is to be understood will become clear during the course. We have admitted a few individuals who are exceptions to the general requirement, and these for reasons based on the opinion of the Medical Section of the Goetheanum.

First and foremost, dear friends, there must be an absolutely clear understanding in the part of the theologians and on the part of the physicians what is now going to be made possible by their working together: namely, a new pastoral medicine. Their working together has indeed often been discussed; it has even been pointed out that the anthroposophical movement should try to bring it about. But things have come to light that must be corrected during this course. A proper working together must certainly not be understood to mean any dilettantish interference by one side into the work of the other side. It certainly does not mean that the theologians are to become physicians, or that the physicians are to become in the slightest way theologians. It is purely a matter of the two professions working together hand-in-hand. The course will stress very strongly the importance of preventing any kind of confusion by, for instance, the theologians trying to get their hands into various medical measures that cannot possibly lie in their sphere of work. On the other hand, physicians must be clearly aware of the position they must always hold—in the sense just described—toward theologians. It is tremendously important that this should be thoroughly understood by both sides. A great deal will depend upon it.

Apparently the thought has even been entertained that theologians should actually acquire medical knowledge. Well, of course, it is always good to acquire knowledge. But the important thing here is to realize absolutely clearly that physicians, in addition to the cultivation of their thinking, feeling, and willing, have had specific medical training. People should not play with the idea that they can push their way into the world with bits and pieces of medical knowledge without this specific medical training—even if they are theologians! On the other hand, physicians must develop a special conception of their profession; they must learn through pastoral medicine that something essential is expressed when it is said: The flame of offering belongs to the priest, the Mercury staff to the physician. And only through the working together of the flame of offering and the Mercury staff is a healthful cooperation possible. One must not want to heal with the flame of offering, or to celebrate ritual with the Mercury staff. But one must realize that both are divine service. The more fully this is realized, the better their cooperation will be, with physician remaining physician and priest remaining priest, and the more healing will be their work in the world. Our anthroposophical movement must not be allowed to become an area where everything is thrown together in chaotic fashion: the seriousness that we should be cultivating so strongly within our movement would suffer thereby. One can have knowledge of the general procedure for a foot operation, but one should certainly not think that therefore one can perform the operation. And this holds true for all medical matters. Above all, Anthroposophy must not become propaganda for quackery. Theologians must not be allowed to become quacks.

The Medical Section at the Goetheanum will handle with extreme seriousness whatever is going to give an individual a position out in the world as an anthroposophical physician. But the following must also become an established procedure: that physicians who want to work with the same impulses as the Medical Section at the Goetheanum will have their status and their relation to the Section properly defined by the Section. There will be no progress unless this procedure becomes a complete reality—so complete, in fact, that in the future someone will be acknowledged as a physician if the requirements of the Medical Section at the Goetheanum are filled. From this point of view also, we are justified in not having admitted to this course healers who are not physicians. Those who are here today (with a very few exceptions) can lay full claim in the outside world to membership in the medical profession. Perhaps we have made ourselves clear. I have been speaking more from the administrative angle. But the matter will be the concern of pastoral medicine itself. When the theologians recently raised the question of whether something of a medical nature could be given them, I could not do otherwise than say that I would give a course on pastoral medicine in which theologians could participate. And so the course has been organized by the Medical Section of the Goetheanum, and the theologians are taking part in it. It must be quite clear why we have structured it in this way.

Up to now, pastoral medicine has not been a subject in the medical faculties, but in the theological faculties. And the pastoral medicine that has been taught in the theological faculties has really not contained anything specifically medical. Or perhaps I should ask, have any physicians here who have gone through the academic training had any pastoral medicine in their medical courses? It is not offered in any catalogue of a medical faculty. It hardly appears any more in Protestant theological faculties, but it does have a role in Catholic theological faculties—and for a good reason. Only it contains nothing of a medical nature. In the main it contains, first, the knowledge priests need in order to work as pastors, not only with healthy people who are given into their care, but also with those who are sick. There is a difference in whether one has the care of the soul of a sick person, particularly one who is seriously sick, or of a healthy person. With the sick, perhaps severely sick individuals, the question is how one shapes the soul care, how one relates to it. But I have never yet found a book on pastoral medicine that did not stress repeatedly that the first task of the pastor is to make certain by word and deed that a real doctor is found, and that the pastor should refrain from all medical measures.

A second important subject of pastoral medicine has to do with the hygienic aspects of certain ritual measures. For instance, the healthfulness or unhealthfulness of fasting required for ceremonial reasons is explained for the lay person; also what medical science has to say, for instance, about circumcision and similar matters. For priests themselves—this, of course, has just to do with Catholic faculties—it sets forth clearly what is to be said from a hygienic standpoint about asceticism. This is spoken about very fully.

A further subject has to do with what measures should be taken, for instance, in a parish where there is a doctor, what connection there should be between the medical care and the sacraments. When a religious community bases its activity on the reality of the sacraments, the priest must be prepared to meet the medical treatment that is being given. There is, for instance, the anointing that the priest must perform at the sickbed by the side of the doctor. We have also to consider what significance the earlier pastoral medicine attributed to a person's receiving communion while recovering from a severe illness. Looking at the spiritual aspect, one has to ponder on the working of the sacrament in relation to the processes of healing in a human being.

A further subject examines how the pastor has to relate to the physician in psychopathic cases, cases of mentally handicapped or psychically abnormal individuals. The pastoral work is varied for such cases. This was the principal task confronting pastoral medicine in its earlier days, and it was taken care of through the centuries rather extensively by calling on the authority of the Church Fathers' writings.

That is a field of work that cannot appear in the same light to us who are involved in a renewal of spiritual life. Indeed, from fundamental anthroposophical views we are aware of very important tasks in that field for a new pastoral medicine. And we can discover the extent of such tasks if we consider the subject from two sides.

First, let us consider it from the medical point of view. What are we doing when we apply a therapy? When we give a medicine or apply some healing measure to a sick person, there is always the fact that in the healing process we want to set in motion, whether physical or spiritual or pertaining to the soul, we are going beyond the so-called normal relation of that person to the surrounding world. No matter what therapy we use, in every instance we are going beyond what the person has normally in everyday life, whether it is taking of nourishment, or exposure to light and air, or exposure to soul influences. In every circumstance we are going beyond all of that in our therapy. Even if we simply prescribe a small change of diet, we have gone a small step beyond what the person had permitted in his or her own everyday relation to the surrounding world.

Say we prescribe a medicine. If it's a physical substance, its effect will be that a different process takes place than would take place if the patient were merely eating food. And it is the same with other therapeutic measures. In using any therapeutic measure we are intervening in the life of the patient in a way that is different from the way life usually works upon that person. For what is the normal intervention in human life? How does a person take hold of his or her own life? We can distinguish three kinds of processes that intervene, or can intervene, in human life. First, the process that is active in the person in the same way that physical-chemical forces are active in outer nature. Second, the process that is active in the realm of a person's life forces, in life itself. Third, the process that takes immediate hold of the person in the sphere of consciousness:

1. Physical-chemical
2. Life
3. Consciousness

Here we must grasp an important concept. In ordinary life there are three states of consciousness: waking, dreaming, and sleeping. The moment we apply an active therapeutic measure, we are intervening in the sphere of consciousness to a greater or lesser degree depending on what the measure is. Such intervention never occurs in such a direct way in the so-called normal course of life. A person who is eating, for instance, is surrendering to the usual process of taking nourishment; then, if this has proceeded normally, waking, dreaming, and sleeping follow in normal fashion. At the most, we might vary a diet for the purpose of bringing about better sleep, but there the boundary is already shifted. Therapy has already begun.

It is quite another matter if you intervene with some therapy when, for instance, a patient has a fever. If you were to apply the same therapy to a healthy person you would alter the person's condition of consciousness. Thus a physician has to work fundamentally with the various states of consciousness. A human being's ordinary relation to the outer world has to do with life forces, but in medical work one is intervening in the states of consciousness. You will find this is so in every single therapeutic measure. And it is the specific characteristic of a therapeutic measure that it does enter into what has to do in some way or other with the variability of consciousness. In fact the only effective therapy is one that takes such deep hold of our human constitution that it penetrates to the source from which our various states of consciousness come. But thereby you are intervening as physician, as therapist, directly in the ordering of the spiritual world. Your alteration of someone's condition of consciousness means that you are intervening directly in the ordering of the spiritual world. And when you have a really active cure, through this penetration into the state of consciousness, even though it may be into subconsciousness, you are always drawing the soul of the person into the therapeutic process. You do not remain in the physical sphere. Ordinary consumption of food, ordinary breathing, and other ordinary processes remain in the physical sphere, and the higher members work indirectly through the physical sphere. Higher forces are active through the physical organism. In contrast, when you are working as a physician or therapist you draw the patient's soul directly into his or her physical body. Indeed we can say if physicians understand their profession properly, they realize that they enter directly into the realm of the spiritual. It only seems that therapy is merely a physical or biological process. True therapeutic measures always involve the patient's soul, even though at first this may remain unknown to the ordinary consciousness. You should observe what actually takes place in a patient when, let us say, a fever is suddenly lowered by some therapeutic means. In this event processes are introduced into the innermost depth of the patient's being—just as the illness itself had worked into this depth—beyond the merely physical and biological realm. So we have looked at the picture from the medical point of view. We have seen how doctoring, healing, by its very nature leads from the physical realm into the spiritual.

Now let us examine the priest's profession just as carefully. Priests whose calling is not one of teaching, if they are truly active priests, then they are connected with the ritual, and the ritual includes the sacraments. But the sacraments are not symbols. What are they? They consist of the fact that external events take place, which are not exhausted, in chemical or biological processes. They contain orientations which are embodied in the physical-biological sphere, but which have their origin in the spiritual world. Sense-perceptible actions are performed, and spirit streams into the actions. Spiritual reality is present in the ritual on the level of sense perception. And what takes place there in front of the congregation takes place first of all before their conscious observation. Nothing is permitted to take place except what does take place in that way. Otherwise it would not be ritual, not sacrament, but suggestion. The sacraments—if they are done right—are never allowed to contain any element of suggestion. All the more, therefore, they are able to contain what is spiritual. They take place before the waking consciousness of the participants, but they work into the sphere of the life forces.

In communion a person is not just eating the material substance; in that case it would not be a sacrament. Nor is it a matter of symbols. Rather it has to do with reaching into a person's life, because a sacrament is enacted, is celebrated, through an orientation toward the spiritual world. Therefore one can say therapy leads from life to consciousness; the ritual with its sacraments leads from consciousness to life.

Therapy: life to consciousness
Ritual (sacraments): consciousness to life

There you have the two activities in polarity: therapeutic activity and the celebration of the sacraments. In therapeutic measures, the course leads from life to consciousness, and consciousness becomes a helper, at least (in ordinary consciousness) an unconscious helper, in the healing process. In the celebration of the sacraments life is made a helper for what is enacted before the consciousness. Both of these activities have to be grasped spiritually in deep inwardness—not merely diagrammatically as it is now being presented to you. They require the involvement of the total human being if that individual wants to make one or the other a vocation. In our present civilization therapy has left behind the spiritual element, and theology has left behind the concrete world. In our present civilization therapy has taken a false path into materialism and theology a false path into abstraction. For these reasons their true relationship has become completely veiled. This true relationship must be reestablished. It must become active again.

Again it must become clear that for diagnosis physicians need a trained observation that enables them to see a biological or physical process in the human organism as a spiritual process. For all processes in the human organism are spiritual. For diagnosing, and still more for treatment, physicians need an observation that is trained to see the lighting up of the spirit within the physical. Priests need an observation that is trained to see the lighting up of the physical reflection of a spiritual event. There is a polarity again. But there must always be polarities working together in this world, and these are no exception.

To see how they are to work together will be a task within the sphere of Anthroposophy and based on Anthroposophy, a task also to be fulfilled within anthroposophical spheres of activity. So one can think that out of this gathering for a pastoral medicine course there may actually be created future anthroposophical physicians—physicians who will hold the right relation to priests because of their own relation to the spiritual world. The priests themselves will have come out of the Movement for Religious Renewal. Something quite special will develop out of this course for the physician and the priest so that they will work together in a true way.

For what in this case can it mean that they work together? Surely not that the priest does dilettantish doctoring and that the doctor is a dilettante priest! If their working together were to consist of priests knowing a few medical facts and physicians vesting themselves as priests, then I'd like to know why they should work together. Why should an experienced physician be interested in half priest-half doctor dilettantism? It makes no sense. And why should a priest want to interfere in medical matters except when the physician asks for a pastor? On the other hand, if the physician is a good physician standing squarely within the medical profession, and if the priest is a real priest, they can work together. It means that one offers help to the other out of professional abilities, not that one pushes into the other's professional domain.

Such an association will bring about a profoundly important result for our culture. The physician will truly understand the priest, and the priest the physician. The priest will know as much about being a doctor as is needed to know and the physician as much about the vocation of the priest as is needed to know. And then in time we will see to what extent physician and priest can work with the teacher to accomplish something beneficial to humanity.

In that area, too, people will have to work together—and in the most manifold ways, because education is also something that must be looked at from a fresh point of view. The priest cannot be a physician, nor the physician a priest, but they can both in a certain sense be teachers. But all the details of these new associations will have to be thought out quite concretely. Therefore I would like to ask you from the very beginning to count this earnest request as part of all that this pastoral medicine course is going to present: that everything be worked out on a professional and expert basis. Priests will truly help actual physicians if they reject all thought of medical dilettantism. That will be one of their responsibilities. And physicians will be able to do very much at the sickbed to bring the mission of the priests to proper fulfillment—precisely at the sickbed, where often a priest has to intervene in life in a really essential way.

This volume contains material which for many years was circulated in manuscript form among priests and doctors. The audience to whom the lectures were given was restricted to priests and doctors as they really were intended to serve the esoteric needs of these two professions. In this respect it gives insights into how Steiner went about laying the foundations for an esoteric path connected with a particular vocation. It is reasonable to assume that had he lived longer he would have delivered similar courses to other professional groups. Of particular significance is the giving of a mantric verse for the support of the vocational activity (see last lecture), a verse specific to the vocation. The receiving and working with such a verse would presumably be connected with the task and responsibilities an individual would assume when he or she worked out of one of the Sections of the School for Spiritual Science in the realm of a particular vocation.

Needless to say, the material assumes a certain maturity in anthroposophy which at a minimum means a familiarity with the basic books. Anyone attempting this cycle without such a background is advised to do the necessary studies before trying to read this volume.

[ 2 ] Man is surrounded today by a world which was once of a wholly divine-spiritual nature—divine-spiritual being of which he also was a member. Thus at that time the world belonging to man was a world of divine-spiritual being. But this was no longer so in a later stage of evolution. The world had then become a cosmic manifestation of the Divine Spiritual; the Divine Being hovered behind the manifestation. Nevertheless, the Divine-Spiritual lived and moved in all that was thus manifested. A world of stars was already there, in the light and movement of which the Divine-Spiritual lived and moved and manifested itself. One may say that at that time, in the position or movement of a star, the activity of the Divine and Spiritual was directly evident.

[ 3 ] And in all this—in the working of the Divine Spirit in the Cosmos, and in the life of man resulting from this divine activity—Michael was as yet in his own element—unhindered, unresisted. The adjustment of the relation between the Divine and the Human was in his hands.

[ 4 ] But other ages dawned. The world of the stars ceased to be a direct and present manifestation of Divine-Spiritual activity. The constellations lived and moved, maintaining what the Divine activity had been in them in the past. The Divine-Spiritual dwelt in the Cosmos in manifestation no longer, but in the manner of its working only. There was now a certain distinct separation between the Divine Spiritual and the cosmic World. Michael, by virtue of his own nature, adhered to the Divine-Spiritual, and endeavoured to keep mankind as closely as possible in touch with it.

This he continued to do, more and more. His will was to preserve man from living too intensely in a world which represents only the Working of the Divine and Spiritual—which is not the real Being, nor its Manifestation.

[ 5 ] It is a deep source of satisfaction to Michael that through man himself he has succeeded in keeping the world of the stars in direct union with the Divine and Spiritual. For when man, having fulfilled his life between death and a new birth, enters on the way to a new Earth-life, in his descent he seeks to establish a harmony between the course of the stars and his coming life on Earth. In olden times this harmony existed as a matter of course, because the Divine-Spiritual was active in the stars, where human life too had its source. But today, when ‘the course of the stars is only a continuing of the manner in which the Divine-Spiritual worked in the past, this harmony could not exist unless man sought it. Man brings his divine-spiritual portion—which he has preserved from the past—into relation with the stars, which now only bear their divine-spiritual nature within them as an after-working from an earlier time.

In this way there comes into man's relation to the world something of the Divine, which corresponds to former ages and yet appears in these later times. That this is so, is the deed of Michael. And this deed gives him such deep satisfaction that in it he finds a portion of his very life, a portion of his sun-like, living energy.

[ 6 ] But at the present time, when Michael directs his spiritual eyes to the Earth, he sees another fact as well—very different from the above. During his physical life between birth and death man has a world around him in which even the Working of the Divine-Spiritual no longer appears directly, but only something which has remained over as its result;—we may describe it by saying it is only the accomplished Work of the Divine-Spiritual. This accomplished Work, in all its forms, is essentially of a Divine and Spiritual kind. To human vision the Divine is manifested in the forms and in the processes of Nature; but it is no longer indwelling as a living principle. Nature is this divinely accomplished work of God; Nature everywhere around us is an image of the Divine Working.

[ 7 ] In this world of sun-like Divine glory, but no longer livingly Divine, man dwells. Yet as a result of Michael's working upon him man has maintained his connection with the essential Being of the Divine and Spiritual. He lives as a being permeated by God in a world that is no longer permeated by God.

[ 8 ] Into this world that has become empty of God, man will carry what is in him—what his being has become in this present age.

[ 9 ] Humanity will evolve into a new world-evolution. The Divine and Spiritual from which man originates can become the cosmically expanding Human Being, radiating with a new light through the Cosmos which now exists only as an image of the Divine and Spiritual.

[ 10 ] The Divine Being which will thus shine forth through Humanity will no longer be the same Divine Being which was once the Cosmos. In its passage through Humanity the Divine-Spiritual will come to a realisation of Being which it could not manifest before.

[ 11 ] The Ahrimanic Powers try to prevent evolution from taking the course here described. It is not their will that the original Divine-Spiritual Powers should illumine the Universe in its further course. They want the cosmic intellectuality which they themselves have absorbed to radiate through the whole of the new Cosmos, and in this intellectualised and Ahrimanised Cosmos they want man to live on.

[ 12 ] Were he to live such a life man would lose Christ. For Christ came into the world with an Intellectuality that is still of the very same essence as once lived in the Divine Spiritual, when the Divine-Spiritual in its own Being still informed the Cosmos. But if at the present time we speak in such a manner that our thoughts can also be the thoughts of Christ, we set over against the Ahrimanic Powers something which can save us from succumbing to them.

[ 13 ] To understand the meaning of Michael's mission in the Cosmos is to be able to speak in this way. In the present time we must be able to speak of Nature in the way demanded by the evolutionary stage of the Consciousness Soul or Spiritual Soul. We must be able to receive into ourselves the purely natural-scientific way of thinking. But we ought also to learn to feel and speak about Nature in a way that is according to Christ. We ought to learn the Christ-Language—not only about redemption from Nature, about the soul and things Divine—but about the things of the Cosmos.

[ 14 ] When with inward, heartfelt feeling we realise the mission and the deeds of Michael and those belonging to him, when we enter into all that they are in our midst, then we shall be able to maintain our human connection with the Divine and Spiritual origin, and understand how to cultivate the Christ Language about the Cosmos. For to understand Michael is to find the way in our time to the Logos, as lived by Christ here on Earth and among men.

[ 15 ] Anthroposophy truly values what the natural-scientific way of thinking has learned to say about the world during the last four or five centuries. But in addition to this language it speaks another, about the nature of man, about his evolution and that of the Cosmos; for it would fain speak the language of Christ and Michael.

[ 16 ] If both these languages are spoken it will not be possible for evolution to be broken off or to pass over to Ahriman before the original Divine-Spiritual is found. To speak only in the natural-scientific way corresponds to the separation of intellectuality from the original Divine and Spiritual. This can indeed lead over into the Ahrimanic realm if Michael's mission remains unobserved. But it will not do so if through the power of Michael's example the intellect which has become free finds itself again in the original cosmic intellectuality, which has separated from man and become objective to him. For that cosmic intellectuality lies in the original source of man, and it appeared in Christ in full reality of being within the sphere of humanity, after it had left man for a time so that he might unfold his freedom.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society (with reference to the preceding study)

[ 17 ] 112. The Divine-Spiritual comes to expression in the Cosmos in different ways, in succeeding stages: (1) through its own and inmost Being; (2) through the Manifestation of this Being; (3) through the active Working, when the Being withdraws from the Manifestation; (4) through the accomplished Work, when in the outwardly apparent Universe no longer the Divine itself, but only the forms of the Divine are there.

[ 18 ] 113. In the modern conception of Nature man has no relation to the Divine, but only to the accomplished Work. With all that is imparted to the human soul by this science of Nature, man can unite himself either with the powers of Christ or with the dominions of Ahriman.

[ 19 ] 114. Michael is filled with the striving—working through his example in perfect freedom—to embody in human cosmic evolution the relation to the Cosmos which is still preserved in man himself from the ages when the Divine Being and the Divine Manifestation held sway. In this way, all that is said by the modern view of Nature—relating as it does purely to the image, purely to the form of the Divine—will merge into a higher, spiritual view of Nature. The latter will indeed exist in man; but it will be an echo in human experience of the Divine relation to the Cosmos which prevailed in the first two stages of cosmic evolution. This is how Anthroposophy confirms the view of Nature which the age of the Spiritual Soul has evolved, while supplementing it with that which is revealed to spiritual seership.

The subject we are to discuss this evening is a very broad one and requires a very extensive foundation. It is, of course, extremely difficult to start at just any point, so please allow me to at least suggest, in a few introductory words, how anthroposophy relates to the cognitive problems and the overall state of mind of contemporary people.

In the course of the nineteenth century, in particular, what had already been prepared in principle since the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries came to pass in the fullest measure, and that which, in relation to the development of the problems of knowledge problems and of that which then practically follows on from the cognitive problems: observation and experiment, carried up to the exact level, and on the other hand, intellect, the subsequent conclusion. Today, anyone who has undergone scientific training in any field has no doubt that in order to arrive at a scientific result, one must experiment and think. Indeed, they do not even entertain the idea that it could be otherwise. In particular, such views do not enter the specialized fields. In this respect, one shrinks from speaking to those who have been trained in any particular field about the consequences of anthroposophical research for those fields. Although on the one hand one would have to say: Only those who have mastered scientific methodology should engage in the kind of anthroposophical research I have in mind. On the other hand, however, some of the results for specialized fields are so paradoxical that it is better to remain silent about them than to speak about them. And if I speak of it, it is because I am convinced that you have all come here not to hear something that will convince you, but at least something that can be taken seriously scientifically.

Anthroposophy wants to be a scientific research, but it does not want to stop at that state of mind, which is fed by the outer experiment and the intellect, but it seeks to gain its insights by developing the human soul forces in the same way that a small child has undeveloped powers that develop into a fully-fledged human being, it is equally possible, once one has reached today's level of scientific education, to progress through a special development of the soul powers. The most important power is the power of memory.

The power of recollection is something that even a few unprejudiced philosophers of the present day say points to something spiritual in man. Now, in the development of the soul's powers, it is important to place before the soul a result that is no longer there. One thus evokes from the depths of the soul something that no longer refers to something directly present, but which, in its entire inner constitution, has not an indeterminate but a very definite relation to a reality. The question arises: Is it possible to further develop that which is active in memory, in the same way that the brain structure is developed in the first years of a person's life, so that it not only creates inner soul structures that point to something that has already been experienced through their own structure, but that point to something that not only represents human past, but also extra-human earthly past? Is it possible to shape the power of insight by means of an inner strengthening in such a way that what is created in a stronger way than the memory images points to something that otherwise does not fall within the field of consciousness of the human being?

If you start from this trust, you present it as a postulate, and if you set about the inner exercises in such a precise way that you follow each step with deliberation, like mathematics, you will have new experiences. Here, with these exercises, it is a matter of taking the steps in such a way that a development of one's own arises from them. It is not something mathematical or similar. If one has certain ideas in this regard, which must be easily comprehensible so that reminiscences do not come into play — it is easiest for mathematicians, who are accustomed from the outset to placing comprehensible contents of consciousness at the center of their mental life — and does not tire, but rather, starting from this point of view, strengthens those soul abilities that express themselves in memory in a more passive behavior of the soul, then one comes to realize that one can draw out of the depths of one's soul life a potentized power of remembrance that preserves the true, organically active forces of earthly life, so that one can actually survey in a time tableau — one can even speak of time perspectives, of an inner lawfulness and structure — that which has taken effect in one over time since one entered earthly life.

At first, there is an insight into one's own self. There is the insight that an etheric body rules in the physical body, which, in its inner lawfulness, has nothing physical but everything temporal. It can appear in pictorial form, so that this knowledge can be called imaginative. And one arrives at the point where, while one otherwise only lives in the present, one can transport oneself back to any moment, so that one experiences it as if it were immediately present. One actually comes into the possibility of speaking of time perspective, just as one can go from one place here to another, so one can inwardly make the journey to a place in time that one has lived through. So that this continuously in time unrolling finer bodily existence arises for the first stage of supersensible knowledge.

I need only briefly hint that there is a further stage in the development of the soul, which is attained by imagining the painting of one's own inner strength, so that not only an empty consciousness arises, which is equal to zero, but which corresponds to the negativity of the present degree of consciousness. This other consciousness results in a complete inner silence, inner peace. Now one can imagine: when all external impressions cease, then the rest is a zero; but the stillness one enters into bears a relationship to the former one as a negative bears to a positive. Then one comes to inspiration instead of imagination. Through this one comes to see the pre-earthly existence of man. This is not a realization gained through speculation, but an insight into the eternal in man. In this way one advances to explore the reality of the spiritual and soul just as one would otherwise explore in the physical life what the senses give. But in the end one sees the whole human being as a composite being. There is no need to get involved in all the quibbling between monistic and dualistic views; that is just as foolish as saying that the chemist is a dualist because he explains water as consisting of hydrogen and oxygen. One recognizes that the human being has a physical part and a spiritual-soul part. The formative activity of the brain, which is a reality, can be seen in the embryonic development. I will use a comparison: if there is soft ground here and footprints on it, a being that has never been on earth might come to explain these traces by some kind of force. But just as the footprints are real and were made by a person who walked over the ground, so too are the brain tracks the product of the soul and spirit.

In this way it is possible to recognize the human being: the human physical body, then the body of formative forces, which one recognizes through imaginative knowledge: the finer human being within the human being, who, despite all exchange of physical substances, is a unified, continuous entity in time, a self-contained reality from one point in time to another.

If we proceed from there to the specialized fields, then the matter becomes, so to speak, serious. The body of formative forces is not yet a soul existence, but could at most come to growth, but not to feeling. We come to the astral body, to the actual soul and to the ego organization. Over the last three to four hundred years, knowledge has developed in such a way that more and more has been left out of the spiritual, higher part of the human organization. As a result, we have had to limit ourselves more and more to what can be deduced from the physical structure of the human organism. I always shy away from explaining such things, because I can understand how it makes people angry.

First of all, we have the human organism. We follow the centripetal and the centrifugal, the so-called sensitive and motor nerves. Yes, this fact arises. I can fully appreciate these reasons, and I can also appreciate how the duality of the nervous system is supported by tabes dorsalis and so on.

But when one knows the higher aspects of the being, then the nerves become something unified; one sees the unity of the nervous system. The sensitive nerves are predisposed to convey sensory impressions; the motor nerves have nothing to do with the will, but rather they have the task of conveying the sensations that are in the periphery, the chemical-physiological processes in the legs and so on. The motor nerves are sensitive to the organism's inner processes, while, as paradoxical as it may sound to modern science, one can actually see the will directly in the soul and assume that the soul and spirit have a direct influence on the physical for the emergence of movement and the effects of the will.

I would like to point out to you the path that can lead to finding this view. For as a modern anatomist, the soul-spiritual is something that can lead to all kinds of hypotheses, but it is something that today is more imagined with an abstract content. Ziehen speaks only of an “emotive emphasis” of the ideas. What one imagines as soul is something so abstract and thin that one does not come to understand the intervention of this soulfulness in the physical.

In the moment when one realizes that the physical body goes from being solid to liquid, to air, and to warmth, then one comes closer to the spiritual. It is, of course, impossible to imagine the spiritual as the organism that modern science imagines. But as soon as one assumes a warmth organism, it is not so difficult to imagine that the inner forces of the body of formative forces intervene in the heat differentiations of the human organism. In one respect, we will have to go through a great deal before we can bring to life what has become frozen in knowledge today. We will find the transition from the physical, which has become more subtle, to the soul, which has become more powerful. And we will be able to say: what is a being of will intervenes directly in the warming processes, from there in the air organism, from there in the aqueous organism. And something is present that is quite different from what modern science believes in relation to the motor nerves; there is a spiritual-soul-physical activity that is brought to consciousness through the motor nerves.

The nine lectures that follows were delivered by Rudolf Steiner at the turn of 1922/23 in Dornach, Switzerland. They were directed to an audience containing some professional scientists and others particularly interested in science, mangy of whom were members of the Anthroposophical Society. 1922/23 happens also to have been an historical moment in the life of the Society and indeed of the lecturer. No one reading them would suspect that between Lectures 5 and 6 both parties had been stricken by a crushing blow. On New Year's Eve, 1922, the building named the Goetheanum, in which the first five lectures had been given, was totally destroyed by fire and was indeed still burning on January 1 when Steiner delivered Lecture 6 in his private Studio. The great wooden structure, a temple rather than a mere headquarters or meeting-place, had been designed by Steiner himself, its building supervised by him at all stages, and much of its interior worked with his own hands; but this is not the place to enlarge on his personal tragedy or the courage and determination it must have required to continue with the lecture course on the following day almost as if nothing had happened. The most that critical appraisal might detect as a possible consequence of that grievous interruption is perhaps a certain repetitiveness not apparent elsewhere in either his books or his lectures; and this the translator has taken the liberty of slightly reducing.

One more preliminary observation may be desirable. Most members of the original audience would have been familiar, to a greater or less degree, with the fundamental teachings and thus with the terminology of anthroposophy, or spiritual science, as Steiner also named them. Here and there in the lectures some of that terminology is introduced, for example “etheric” and “astral,” “the Age of the consciousness soul.” Mostly their meaning is briefly indicated when they first appear; but it remains true that some previous familiarity with them is of considerable assistance towards a full understanding, not only of particular passages, but also of the radical message of the whole.

Their basic argument is that modern science, and the scientism based on it, so far from being the only possible “reality-principle” is merely one way of conceiving the nature of reality; a way moreover that has arisen only recently and which there is no reason to suppose will last forever. Many today might admit as much, but in doing so they would be thinking of modern science mainly as a theory or set of theories capable of proof or disproof by accepted methods. For Steiner modern science, including its empirical method, is a stage, and an important stage, in the whole evolution of human consciousness. And that is something different from, though it underlies, the history of ideas. Perception itself is determined by the human psyche, the consciousness which determines perception precedes the formation of thoughts based on that perception, and the human psyche is an evolving one. Only hitherto it has not been conscious of that fact. Certain ideas were formed, and could only be formed, at certain stages in that evolution. Ideas for instance or theories about the nature of the world, or the nature of Nature, are necessarily based on certain “givens”—experiences taken for granted—which are so immediate that no ideas at all can be formed about them. Isaac Newton, as Lecture Three points out, was sufficiently aware of this to declare the “givens” of his own day as the “postulates” from which he started. They were time, place, space and motion. And these remain the givens for our day, even if their slight unsettling by Einstein's relativity should be the first faint breath of coming winds of change. But they were not so for other days and other men. They were not so before at most the fifteenth century. They are given for us, because for us the outer world of natural objects and events is experienced as completely detached from the inner world of our own awareness of them, that is to say, from our humanity. Descartes was the first to formulate this—then comparatively novel—given, when he divided the world into extended substance and thinking substance.

Writing in 1818 an essay on Method, Coleridge prophesied:

“... there will soon be seen a general tendency toward, an earnest seeking after, come ground common to the world and to man, therein to find the one principle of permanence and identity, the rock of strength and refuge, to which the soul may cling amid the fleeing surge-like objects of the sense.”

The abiding thrust of these lectures is Steiner's unshakable conviction that from now on the progress of science will depend on the overcoming of the received dichotomy between man and nature just as from the fifteenth or sixteenth century up to now the progress of science has depended on that dichotomy. Incidental to that progress would be escape from the crudities of popular scientism, but the lectures are only marginally concerned with that. Their content is based on the fact that the understanding, perhaps of any phenomenon but certainly of any phenomenon so basic as to be “given,” entails a patient examination of its provenance, that is to say of the steps by which it came into being. Consequently they are, as the title suggests, lectures not on science, but on the history of science. In sum they tell the story of the origin and then of the growth of that gulf between inner and outer, between subject and object, extending from a time before Pythagoras down to our own day, as it is manifest in the writings and biographies of a selection of well-known thinkers. Particular attention is given to transitional figures, men whose perceptions were still determined by the past, while their thoughts were confronted by what was approaching from the future; and perhaps especially interesting in this regard are the observations of Giordana Bruno's cosmos in Lecture Four and Galen's theory of “fermentation” in Lecture Eight.

The story is at the same time one of the steadily increasing predominance of mathematics in determining scientific method. Perception of this is not peculiar to Steiner. What distinguishes him from other historians of science is the psychological detail into which he pursues the story and, more than that, his account of the origin of mathematics, The Cartesian coordinates are not as abstract as they seem; or rather they were not always so. Steiner sees them as an extrapolation or projection of man's experience of his own body; that is to say, of his physical body. And here is one of the places where some previous acquaintance with anthroposophy and its terminology would be helpful, though it should not indispensable. It is unfortunate that the word “body” has become, for most people, almost synonymous with “lump of solid matter;” Particularly unfortunate, where it is the human body that is at issue, since nine-tenths of that is composed of fluids, and of fluids that are for the most part in motion. “Body” in Steiner's terminology, signifies something more like “systematically organized unit or entity,” as distinct from the matter or substance of which it is composed. Thus, the fact that the frame of a living human being contains, and not at random, fluid and airy, as well as solid, substance, entails the existence of other “bodies” besides the physically organized one. These are especially relevant when the discourse turns from knowledge of quantity (measurement and mathematics) to knowledge of quality, an aspect of nature that is virtually a closed book to the science of today.

The development of that science of today, a purely quantitative one, is the main thread on which the lectures are strung, and the reader will follow it or himself. Not much perhaps would be gained by informing him in advance that, if he does so, he will be shown for example, how the projection of mathematics, and particularly the coordinates, outward from the body and thus from human selfhood, has led to the reification of space—that long-settled mental habit which advanced psychics has only recently begun to question. He will also find an answer to a question which has puzzled many thinkers: why should mathematics, a seemingly artificial construction of the human brain, have been found an effective key to unlock so many of the secrets of nature? How is it that the one has happened to fit so snugly on the other? More generally he will be led down a sort of ladder of “descent,” accompanied throughout by mathematics, from man's original psychic participation in the life of nature to his present detachment from it; to be shown at the end that an understanding of the way of ascent to reunion with that life also begins with mathematics. The last is an aspect of the matter with which Steiner was to deal more specifically in a subsequent course of lectures translated into English as The Boundaries of Natural Science.

“Descent” and “ascent” are of course loaded terms, and their use can be misleading. The same is true of the term “dehumanization” when in these lectures it is applied to the history of science. Steiner was no enemy of science, though he vigorously questioned many of its theories. “Technology” is not a dirty word in his vocabulary. Pointing to a fact is not necessarily abuse. Science has become dehumanized in the sense that it has turned its attention more and more away from human experience and human values. But in doing so it has furthered, if not partly engendered, one supreme human value—that detached, individual self-consciousness that is the pre-condition of freedom. Man has become separated from the world that gave him birth; but he needed that separation in order to become truly man. To draw attention to that separation is, says our lecturer, “a description of the scientific view, not a criticism.” He continues (and I will conclude this Introduction by quoting the closing words of Lecture Six):

Let us assume that somebody says: “Here I have water. I cannot use it in this state.I separate the oxygen from the hydrogen, because I need the hydrogen.” He then proceeds to do so.If I then say what he has done, this is not criticism of his conduct.I have no business to tell him he is doing something wrong, and should leave the water alone. Nor is it criticism when I say that since the Fifteenth Century science has taken the world of living beings and separated it from the true nature of man, discarding it and retaining what the age required. It then led this dehumanized science to the triumphs that have been achieved.

It is not criticism if something like this is said: it is only a description. The scientist of modern times needed a dehumanized nature, just as a chemist needs deoxygenized hydrogen and therefore has to split water into its two components. The point is to understand that we must not constantly fall into the error of looking to science for an understanding of man.

This lecture is the ninth of sixteen lectures from the lecture series entitled Spiritual Relationships within the Human Organism. It is also known as Knowledge of Higher Worlds.

There is no doubt that in the present time a great number of people is longing to know something about the spiritual, supersensible worlds and even scientific men have recently made the attempt to discover paths enabling them to gain knowledge of the supersensible world. But a modern person is continually hampered in all these attempts to penetrate into the supersensible world by the obstacle of judgments based upon modern science, by the authority of modern science. But when one confronts sources out of which it might be possible to draw facts concerning the supersensible world, the following view is generally advanced; It is not possible to obtain exact knowledge of the supersensible worlds, the kind of knowledge which we are accustomed to have in modern science, for all these facts concerning the supersensible worlds do not stand the test.

But the spiritual science of Anthroposophy, which I shall take the liberty to explain to you now and in the following days, strives to reach an exact, a really exact knowledge of the supersensible world. This Knowledge is not “exact” in the meaning that experiments have to be made as is the case in modern science which deals with the external world, but exact spiritual knowledge consists in the fact that inner soul capacities of the human being which in ordinary life and in ordinary science only exist in a dormant state are developed in such a way that in the course, of this development the cle.ar conscious faculties remain throughout in full activity, as they do in exact modern science. Whereas in exact modern science we maintain the state of consciousness which we have in ordinary life and strictly observe the scientific methods while we investigate the external world, the spiritual science of Anthroposophy adopts a different attitude, for we submit to what p might designate as intellectual modesty and say to ourselves; Once upon a time we were children and we then had capacities which did not in the least approach those which we now possess as adults, faculties which we gained through education or through life itself. Even as from childhood onwards we developed certain capacities which we did not have before, so in a grown-up person there are certain dormant capacities which slumber within him in the same way in which his present capacities slumbered within his soul during childhood. These slumbering capacities may be drawn out of the soul with the aid of certain methods.

The spiritual science of Anthroposophy, in the meaning of these lectures, must draw these slumbering capacities out of the human soul in such a way that the methods applied to our development before we attain to supersensible knowledge, manifest every stage of our development, so that it follows a definite course. We therefore prepare ourselves for the perception of the higher worlds by applying first of all these preparatory measures to our own development, measures which in themselves constitute an exact method. As already explained to you in this same hall during my last lectures, an exact clairvoyance can therefore be reached along this path. Clairvoyance is gained in an exact way, whereas in ordinary science, with the aid of the ordinary powers of cognition, we can investigate Nature in an exact way.

To-day I shall not explain in detail how this exact clairvoyance can be acquired, but I shall speak of this more fully in due course. In my last lectures, however, I already spoke to you of the methods by which it is possible to gain exact clairvoyance. Further information on these methods may be obtained above all from the book that is now translated into English: “THE WAY OF INITIATION.”

I wish to point out to you to-day why it is not possible in ordinary life to penetrate into the higher worlds. This is denied to modern people chiefly because they are able to perceive the world only in the present moment. Through our eyes we can only perceive the world and its phenomena in the present moment/. Through our ears we can only hear tones in the present moment. This apples to each sensory organ. To begin with, everything which constitutes our past earthly existence can only be gathered by memory, that is to say, in the form of shadowy thoughts. Compare how living and real were your experiences ten years ago, and how pale and shadowy are the thoughts by which you remember them to-day.

To our ordinary consciousness, everything which transcends the present moment appears in such a form that it can only live in shadowy memories. But these shadowy memories can be stimulated to a higher life. This is possible by methods which, as already stated, will not be explained in detail to-day, by methods which consist of meditation in thought, of concentration upon thoughts, of self-training, and so forth.

Those who apply these methods and thus learn to live in thought just as intensively as they ordinarily live in their sense-impressions, acquire a certain faculty which consists in the fact that they are able to survey the world in a way which transcends the present moment. Such exercises which lead to the result that the world can be observed beyond the present moment, must however be made for a long time, and the time will be in accordance with the individual predisposition of each person, and they must consist of a careful system, that is to say, of exact meditation and concentration. Particularly in our days some people bring with them when they are born capacities which can be developed in this way. That is to say, such capacities are not evident immediately after birth in the form which they may take on afterwards, but at a certain moment of life they emerge from man's inner being and then we know that they could not have been acquired in the ordinary course of existence unless they had been brought into life through birth. These capacities reveal themselves in the fact that we can live in the world of thoughts in the same way in which we ordinarily live in the physical world through our physical body.

Do not take such a statement too lightly. Consider that the existence which we ascribe to ourselves is due to the fact that we are able to take part in the existence of the physical world through our own experience. If we reach the stage in which we are able to unfold an inner life independently of the impressions which we obtain through our eyes, our ears, and our other sense-organs, if we unfold this life which is inwardly just as intensive as the ordinary life of the senses and which does not only weave in shadowy thoughts but in inner living thoughts, so that these are experienced just as livingly as we ordinarily experience sense-impressions we gain the certainty of a second form of existence, we experience a new kind of self-consciousness.

We experience what I might designate as an awakening not outside the body, but within our inner self. A new life awakens within us, although our physical body is just as quiet and inert as when we are asleep in ordinary life, with the senses closed to the impressions which come from outside.

If we cast a glance into our inner self, we find that in ordinary life we are only aware of what we take in through our senses. Through direct perception we know nothing whatever of our own inner being. Our ordinary state of consciousness does not enable us to look into our inner organisation, but when we acquire the new kind or self-consciousness which lives in the sphere of pure thinking, we learn to look into our inner being in the same way in which we ordinarily look out into the physical world.

We then have more or less the following experience: In ordinary life, when we look out info our world, there must be the light of the sun or some other light shedding its rays upon the objects in our environment. This light, which is outside, enables us to perceive the external objects. When we gain consciousness of our inner being in this second state of existence within the activity of pure thought, which is however objectively real with the same intensity, and wealth of colour as the ordinary sense-perceptions, we then feel as it were (not only “as it were,” but in a real sense, meant spiritually of course), we feel an inner light, the existence of a light which sheds its rays upon our own inner being, in the same way in which external lights ordinarily illumine the objects in our environment.

For this reason, the state of human consciousness and experience which we thus acquire, may be designated as a form of clairvoyance. This clairvoyance which exists within the awakened spiritual self-consciousness at first gives rise to a new capacity; We are able to enter again, to live through again, every moment experienced during our earthly existence.

For example, it is quite possible to have the following experience: We were once eighteen years old. When we were eighteen, we experienced this or that thing. Now we do not only remember these experiences, but we live through them again, in a more or less strong and intensive way. We are once more what we were a “Time-body,” in contrast to the spatial physical body, which contains the sense-organs.

This Time-body appears all at once. We do not experience it in successive moments, but it is there all at once. It is there before us, in its inner mobility. We survey our own being within our whole past existence on earth, we survey our whole life, which we ordinarily review in memory, which we can ordinarily survey only in the form of pale thoughts, light falls upon our whole earthly life, but so that we stand within it and can live through every moment of our existence.

If we experience this inner illumination, we know that we do not only have a physical body, a spatial body. We then learn to know that the human being also has a second body, which is less substantial than the physical body, and which is really woven out of the images of our earthly, life. These images, however, are more than pictures, for they are forces which mould our earthly existence in a creative way. They form our physical organism and shape our activities. We thus learn to know of the existence of a second human being within us.

This second human being that now appears to us, is perceived in such a way that it grows aware of its existence. If becomes conscious of itself, even as the physical spatial body is aware of its existence within a physical body, it becomes conscious of its existence within a finer, I might say more etheric world, within a world which is filled with light. The world manifests itself to us in a second form of existence and reveals finer, more etheric shapes. For at the foundation of everything physical lie these finer more etheric forms, which can be perceived in this way.

We then have the strange experience that everything which we experience through this finer body can only be retained for a short time. Generally speaking, people who have acquired exact clairvoyance and can therefore shed light upon their etheric body, or the body of formative forces, as it can also be designated, perceive, the etheric aspect of the world, the etheric part of their own being. At the same time however, they must admit that these impressions vanish very quickly. They cannot be retained. A kind of fear then takes hold of us, and we wish to return as quickly as possible to the perceptions of the physical body, in order to feel an inner sense of firmness as human beings, as human personalities.

When we experience our own SELF within the etheric body, we also experience things pertaining to the higher world, we experience the etheric aspect of the higher world. And at the same time, we discover how fleeting these impressions are, for we cannot retain them for long; we can only retain them by seeking some kind of support.

Let me now give you an example showing you the kind of aid which I must draw in, in order to prevent these etheric impressions from vanishing too quickly. Whenever such impressions arise, I do not only endeavour to see them, but I also try to write them down, so that the activity, which thus sets in, does not only come from the soul's abstract capacities, but is held fast through the act of writing down the impressions. It is not important at all to read these notes afterwards; the essential thing is that a stronger activity should flow into the one which is, to begin with, a purely etheric activity.

By doing this, we pour, as it were, into our ordinary human capacities something which is immensely evanescent and liquid and which vanishes very quickly. This is not done unconsciously, as in the case of a medium, but with full consciousness. We pour our etheric experiences into our ordinary bodily faculties, and are thus able to retain these impressions.

This also enables us to understand something very important: We can now understand how a supersensible etheric world (we shall speak of other supersensible worlds in due course) can be retained. It is a supersensible, etheric world which comprises our own being, the course of our own life and the etheric part of Nature which reaches as far as the starry spheres. We learn to know this etheric world. And we learn to experience our own being within this etheric world, and at the same time we learn to know that unless we come down into the physical body it is impossible to retain the etheric world longer than two or three days at the most. If our clairvoyant faculties are highly developed, the etheric world can be retained for two or three days.

Since certain things, of which I shall speak presently, enable us to have this survey as modern initiates, we are able to form a judgment of what we thus, retain within our etheric body, or within the body of formative forces, without the support of our ordinary bodily capacities. It is the same survey which we obtain from the standpoint of a higher consciousness of self when we pass through the portal of death, after having cast aside the physical bone which decays. But for the reasons stated above, also this post-mortem survey cannot be retained in human consciousness longer than two or three days after death.

The development of an exact clairvoyance thus makes us experience the first conditions which arise after death. We experience them by learning to know them in advance, in a fully conscious state.

Every human being who sheds his physical body when passing through the portal of death, goes through the experiences which an initiate has in advance in a fully conscious state. But the human being would not continue to be conscious (why he has a consciousness after death, in spite of it all, will be explained afterwards) he would have no consciousness throughout the time in which higher knowledge enables him to retain his etheric body, or the body of formative forces, that is to say for two or three days.

Within his etheric body the human being can therefore be conscious of the etheric world for two or three days after death. Then he sheds this consciousness. He feels how the etheric body falls away from him, as it were, in the same way in which his physical body first fell away from him; he feels that it is now necessary to pass over to a new state of consciousness in order to continue to live consciously after death as a human being.

What I have now described to you as the first moments, as it were, after death (for in the face of the life of the cosmos these are only the first moments) can be retained by those who have acquired the above-mentioned capacity to look into the higher worlds. They experience in advance what otherwise takes place only after death. When such a strong consciousness of Self is acquired, so that the support of the physical body is no longer needed, these first moments after death can be experienced in advance within this intensified state of consciousness.

We can then shed light upon our higher existence, and this enables us to recognise within us that light which during the first two or three days after death sheds its rays upon a world which differs from our ordinary physical environment, which we perceive through our senses during our earthly existence between birth and death.

The experiences which follow these first days after death will be explained when the first part of this lecture has been translated.

The inner illumination described to you just now is needed in order to survey the supersensible part of life's course on earth, which, in its character form, continues a few days after death, as already explained. The spiritual light which sheds its rays into man's inner being must be kindled within us. This enables us to go beyond the stage in which we only live in the perceptions of the present moment transmitted by our sense-organs.

If we wish to gain further knowledge of the super-sensible world, not only the perceptive state of consciousness in life should undergo a transformation, but also life itself. Ordinary life generally consists of a state of existence enclosed within our physical spatial body. The boundaries of our skin are at the same time the boundaries of our existence. Our life reaches as far as the boundaries of our body. When we live within this state of consciousness we cannot go beyond that sphere of knowledge of the higher worlds which has been described so far. When we gain knowledge of the higher worlds, we can only transcend our ordinary experiences by acquiring a form of experience which is not closed in by our spatial body, but which participates in the life of the whole world which constitutes our environment in ordinary life.

It is possible to participate in the lit ... of the universe when we gain knowledge of the higher worlds. As already stated, I shall only give a few indications concerning the methods of a modern initiate which enable him to gain an exact knowledge of the higher worlds. Everything else may be found in my book “INITIATION.”

When we acquire the capacity to live not only within a second form of existence that consists in a life of thought still enclosed within the spatial body, but when we acquire the capacity to live outside our body, through the fact that we do not only allow certain thoughts to live intensively within our consciousness, but through the fact that we can also eliminate these thoughts from our consciousness by systematic exercise, we gain this new state of consciousness enabling us to have experiences outside the body. Let me now give you an easy example.

Let us suppose that we are contemplating a crystal. This crystal is there before us, because we see it with our eyes. A person who only wishes to become a medium or to reach a kind of hypnotic condition will stare at this crystal until a dulled state of consciousness arises. But the spiritual science of Anthroposophy has nothing to do with such things. It must draw in quite different exercises. When we look at a crystal, Anthroposophy finally leads us to the point of turning away our attention from the crystal, of abstracting our attention from it in the same way in which we generally abstract our attention from thoughts. We therefore have before us a crystal, but this crystal teaches us to look through it psychically, not physically, so that we do not use our eyes for this kind of contemplation, although our eyes are wide open. This psychical knowledge arises through the fact that we eliminate the crystal from our vision. Such exercises can also be done by eliminating a colour which we have before us, so that we no longer see it, although it is still there before us.

In this way we can above all do exercises consisting in the elimination of thoughts that rise up in the present moment through external impressions. Or we can eliminate thoughts which we have had in some past moment of our life and that now rise up in the form of memories; we eliminate such thoughts, we throw them out of our consciousness, so as to bring about a state of mind which only consists of a waking consciousness and which excludes every impression coming from the external world.

By doing such exercises we discover within us the capacity to transcend the boundaries of our spatial body, so that we no longer live within these boundaries. In that case we participate in the life of the whole world which we ordinarily perceive as our environment from the limited aspect of its physical phenomena.

This gives rise above all to something which can be compared with a recollection of that state of existence in which we live when we are asleep, from the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking up, but it is a recollection which rises up in a completely clear state of consciousness. Even as in our ordinary perceptions we are limited to the present moment, so in our ordinary life we are limited to the experiences which we always have during our waking state of consciousness.

Consider the fact that whenever you remember some portion of your life, the experiences which you have during the hours of sleep remain blanks in your ordinary consciousness. All the soul-experiences from the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking up do not rise up in your memory; in reality, memory is therefore an interrupted stream. But we do not always notice this.

All the experiences of the soul from the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking up confront our awakened higher consciousness as if they were intensified memories. This awakened consciousness arises through the fact that the human being can live consciously outside his body. This leads us to the second stage of knowledge in the supersensible worlds; we can, to begin with, perceive what our soul passes through when our body is in a state of repose, when it has no perceptions and no manifestations of the will, as if the soul were no longer contained within it.

We are thus able to remember in ordinary life our experiences outside the physical body, the experiences which we have whenever we go to sleep, from the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking up. But we should bear in mind that these experiences must be judged in the right way. We learn to know the experiences of the soul outside the body, from the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking up. This can only be perceived if we develop a state of consciousness, a condition of existence outside our body.

At this point we do not only recognise the thing which is illumined, as it were, by that inner light which also sheds its rays over our “time-body” as already explained to you, but within our daytime memory, that has risen to this stage of exact clairvoyance of a higher kind, we now learn to know our real experiences, from the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking up. To begin with, however, these experiences are rather surprising. Even as in ordinary life we live within our ordinary consciousness, within our physical body, and know that we have within us the lungs, the heart, etc., so we have a cosmic, not a personal human state of consciousness, from the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking up. Although this may sound paradoxical, clairvoyant knowledge enables us to perceive that this cosmic state of consciousness contains the living images of the planetary worlds, of the starry worlds. We feel that we live within the universal life of the cosmos. We contemplate the world, as it were, from the standpoint of this universal experience within the cosmos.

Because we now experience within us what ordinarily exists in our environment, we pass through everything that we experienced during our physical life from the moment in which we last woke up to the moment in which we fell asleep; we live backwards through all these experiences, in the real form in which we experienced them during our waking life.

For example, if we live through an ordinary day and then sleep during the night, the experiences which we had just before going to sleep will be lived through backwards; then come the experiences of the afternoon, and throughout the night we live backwards through our daytime existence.

As stated, in exact clairvoyance it is a question of acquiring this retrospective memory within our ordinary daytime consciousness. Even as our ordinary memory can recall experiences of many years ago in our daytime consciousness, so exact clairvoyance enables us to have this retrospective experience of our daytime existence. This exact clairvoyance therefore constitutes a kind of extended memory. We look back upon the experiences which we have when we are asleep. We know that when we are asleep, we have experiences outside the physical, spatial body, we know that we live in a real world, in an essential world, which contains, as it were, within its consciousness an image of the whole universe, and we know that within this universal essence we live backwards through our daytime life.

We then discern that within this retrospective experience our daytime-existence does not last as long as it does here in the physical world. When we investigate this supersensible sphere, that is to say, when we learn to know these things better and better by systematic practice, we gradually recognise that this retrospective experience is three times faster than the physical experience within our ordinary consciousness. During his sleeping life which lasts one third of his waking life, a person who is awake two thirds of his time and asleep one third of his time, also passes through the experiences which he has during the two thirds which constitute his physical existence. We therefore learn to know a life which we develop outside our body and which takes its course backwards with threefold speed.

When by exact clairvoyance we recollect our sleeping life of the night during the ordinary life of the day, we also know that this retrospective experience of sleep has no meaning of its own What exact clairvoyance can call up within our ordinary daytime consciousness is like a memory. But the experiences of sleep which we are thus able to remember, reveal at the same time that they do not have a meaning in themselves, but that they point to something which lies in the future.

This can be explained as follows: If you ask your selves; How do I judge the memory of an experience which I had twenty years ago? you will reply: I experience it like a shadowy thought. Through its very essence, however, this memory offers the guarantee that, we do not have before us an empty fantasy, but the image of something which we really experienced in the past during the course of earthly life. Even as memory in itself guarantees that it refers to something which really existed in the past, so the experiences of the night upon which we look back contain the guarantee that they have no meaning in themselves but point to something which lies in the future.

In regard to memory it is not necessary to prove that it refers to something past. Similarly, when we acquire exact clairvoyance it is just as little necessary to prove that the night-experiences which we survey are not fancies that arise out of the present, moment, for they show in an evident manner that they are related with man's future, with that moment in the future when the human being lays aside his physical body through death, in the same way in which he lays it aside symbolically through exact clairvoyance.

We thus learn to know the experiences of the human being after death, when he has absolved the three days of which we have spoken. Indeed, this process resembling memory also teaches us to recognise, the importance of the two or three days after death, when we have the feeling as if we lived within ä universal consciousness, within a cosmic consciousness, when we survey our etheric being once more from the aspect of the cosmos and look back upon our experiences during our past earthly life. We then learn to know the experiences which follow this stage of existence, namely we learn to know that the event of death is followed by a life which takes its course three times faster than earthly life. It is the same thing which we learned to know by contemplating the experiences which we have at night, when we are asleep.

We know that the contemplation of our etheric part, which only lasts a short time after death, is followed by a life that lasts twenty, thirty years, or even less, according to the age reached during our life on earth. Approximately—for all these things are approximate—this life after death takes its course three times faster than our earthly life. If a person has, for example, reached the age of thirty, he will pass through the existence referred to above three times faster, that is to say, in ten years. If a person has reached the age of sixty years, he will after death live backwards through his earthly life in twenty years;—but everything must be taken approximately.

We perceive all this by exact clairvoyance in the same way in which we perceive past things through memory. We thus learn to know that death is followed by a supersensible life, by a life in the supersensible world, which consists of a retrospective experience of our whole earthly life. Each night we pass through the preceding day. After death we pass through our whole preceding life retrospectively. We once more pass through every experience of our earthly life. By living again through all these things experienced during our earthly life, by passing through them spiritually, we acquire a right judgment of our own moral value.

During the time through which we pass after death we acquire, as it were, a consciousness of our moral personality, of our moral value, in the same way in which here on earth we are conscious of our existence within a body of flesh and blood. After death we live within that part which constituted our moral essence here on earth. By passing once more through all these things in a reversed order, so that the development of a moral judgment is no longer handicapped by our instincts, impulses and passions—for we now survey them spiritually—we learn to acquire a right and true judgment of our own moral quality.

In order to acquire this judgment, we must pass through the length of time of which we have spoken just now. When we have absolved this length of time after death, our inner moral life begins to vanish, the retrospective memory of our moral value on earth disappears, and we must proceed further through the spiritual worlds, equipped with another state of consciousness, which can also be recognised through exact clairvoyance.

This does not only entail that we should live outside our spatial body, but within a state of consciousness which completely differs from the consciousness which we have here, in the physical world. We then perceive that the living experience of our moral worth, which we acquired by passing through one third of the time which constituted our earthly life, is followed by a supersensible life, by a spiritual life. And we learn to know this life. It is a new form of existence, a purely spiritual life. But in order to know it, exact clairvoyance must be able to rise from the ordinary consciousness to a higher state, to a pure state of consciousness, so that it is fully able to recognise this higher state of consciousness.

I have tried to give you a description of two conditions after death. The description of the third condition of existence will follow, when the above has been translated.

If you consider this retrospective experience described just now, which we have when we are asleep, you will see that this is an experience which the human being has outside his physical, spatial body—he is, as it were, outside himself, by the side of his own self,—but this existence is, I might say, of such a kind that one cannot move in it. Essentially speaking, we then reverse the actions which we carried out during our ordinary daytime consciousness. Even a person who attains supersensible insight into these experiences by exact clairvoyance, in the manner explained to you, feels as if he were a captive in a world which he is able to recall in the clear, daytime consciousness of clairvoyance, but in which he cannot move about, for he is chained and fettered in it.

The third condition of higher knowledge and of higher life which we must attain, is therefore the capacity to move about freely in the spiritual world. Otherwise it is impossible to gain knowledge of the purely spiritual, supersensible state of consciousness.

In addition to exact clairvoyance we must acquire what I designate as ideal magic, but this is to be clearly distinguished from the wrong kind of magic which takes on external forms and which is connected with a great deal of charlatanism. The ideal magic of which I intend to speak is to be clearly distinguished from this charlatanism.

By ideal magic I understand the following:

When we survey our life with our ordinary consciousness, we perceive that in a certain sense we underwent a change with the years and decades that passed by. Though slowly, our habits gradually changed. We acquired certain capacities and certain others disappeared. One who observes himself honestly in regard to certain capacities pertaining to his earthly life can say that whenever he acquired a new capacity he became a different person. This is how life transforms us. We completely surrender to life and life educates and trains us and develops the configuration of our soul.

But those who wish to enter the supersensible world with full knowledge—in other words, those who wish to acquire ideal magic must not only intensify thought, as described, so that it enables them to recognise a second form of their existence. But they must also emancipate their will from the physical body on which it depends in ordinary life. We can only activate our will through the fact that we use our physical body, our legs, our arms, our instruments of speech. The physical body is the foundation of our volitional life.

The following can be done, and this has to be done quite systematically by those spiritual investigators who wish to attain to ideal magic in addition to exact clairvoyance. Such a strong will-power should be unfolded, that at a certain moment of life they can say to themselves: I must lose a certain habit and my soul must assume a new habit.

When we apply our will-power strongly in order to change certain forms of experience completely, a few years may sometimes be needed for this—but it can be done. We can be educated as it were not only by life itself, through the means of the physical body, but we ourselves can take in hand this education, this self-training.

Such strong exercises of the will, which are also described in the above-mentioned books, lead those who wish to be initiates in the modern meaning, to new experiences besides those that imply the retrospection of our daytime experiences during sleep.

It is then possible to develop states of consciousness which are not those of sleep, but which are lived through in full consciousness and which nevertheless render it possible to do something and to move about while one is asleep, so that one is not only in a passive state as is ordinarily the case when one is outside the body in the spiritual world, but one is able to act in it, one can be active in the spiritual world. Otherwise one will not be able to progress during the condition of sleeping.

Those who become modern initiates in this meaning are also active within their human being during their sleeping condition; they carry this activity also into the existence which takes its course from the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking up. If the will is thus carried into the human being during the condition of sleep, when the human being lives outside his body, an entirely new state of consciousness can be developed: a consciousness which is really able to perceive what we pass through during the time which follows the post-mortem period that has just been described.

There, this new state of consciousness really enables us to look into our human existence after our earthly life, in the same way in which we look into our prenatal human existence. We then perceive that we pass through an existence which takes its course within a spiritual world, even as our physical-earthly existence takes its course within a physical world. We learn to know our purely spiritual essence within a spiritual world, even as here upon the earth we learn to know our physical body within a physical world. We then obtain the possibility to judge how long this life may last, which constitutes as it were the epoch of moral valuation, as described above!

If through ideal magic we thus carry the will into our soul-life, we gain knowledge of this adult state of consciousness and we learn to compare it in the right way with the dull state of consciousness which we had at the beginning of our earthly life, as infants.

You know that through our ordinary consciousness we cannot remember the first years of our infancy. There we live in a kind of dull consciousness and we enter the world in a kind of sleep. As adults our consciousness is intensive and clear in comparison with this dull, dark consciousness into which we look back and which we had at the beginning of our earthly life.

Those who ascend to ideal magic in the manner described, learn to know the difference between the ordinary waking consciousness of an adult and the dull consciousness of an infant. They learn to know, as it were, that they rise by stages from the dull consciousness of infancy to the clearer consciousness which they have as adults.

The connection which they discover between the child's dreaming consciousness and the consciousness of an adult, teaches them to judge the other connection which exists between the ordinary consciousness of an adult and that illumined consciousness which contains not only exact clairvoyance, but also ideal magic, a consciousness which enables them to move about freely in the spiritual world.

I might say that we learn to move about freely in the spiritual world in the same way in which we learned to move about freely with our physical body in our physical existence on earth, as we passed over from the helpless state of childhood to this more emancipated state. In addition to the connection which exists between the consciousness of early childhood and our ordinary consciousness, we thus learn to know another connection which exists between our adult state of consciousness and the highest purely spiritual state of consciousness.

But this also enables us to know that in the post-earthly life after death we are spiritual beings among spiritual beings; we work together with these spiritual beings and at the same time learn to judge how long this spiritual existence among them will last.

I must again bring in the example of an ordinary experience which we remember. We now realise that even as a memory contains a past reality, so the experiences which we now have contain the right judgment of the fact that in the initiate's higher consciousness there are not only things which have a significance for our earthly life, but things which pertain to the life after death, when we live as a spiritual being among spiritual beings. We also learn to know what connection there is between the purely spiritual life and the earthly life through which we passed between birth and death.

When an initiate looks back upon his earliest childhood, he knows that the older he grows, the easier it will be for him to look into the spiritual world. To be sure there are some people who are comparatively young and who possess the capacity to look into the spiritual world. But this vision gains in exactness and clearness with every year that passes. As we grow older we are more and more capable to pass over into that other state of consciousness. This shows us the relation which exists between the different states of consciousness.

We learn to know the following; We have, for instance, reached the age of forty years, but we are only able to remember our life as far as the third or fourth year. We study the conditions and realise how much more we have at the age of forty, than during the unconscious, dreamlike state of consciousness which we have in childhood. We learn to recognise that the life after death is longer to the same extent as our earthly life is longer than our dreamlike childhood existence; the life after death lasts for many centuries.

After our retrospective experience of a moral character we therefore enter a purely spiritual life, where man is spirit among spirits. This is a life which lasts for centuries. During this spiritual existence the human being faces tasks which pertain to the spiritual world, even as here, during his earthly existence, he faces tasks which pertain to the physical world.

To exact clairvoyance, which is supported, I might say, by ideal magic, or by the capacity to move about freely in the spiritual world, these tasks become manifest through the fact that from the essence of the spiritual world in which we live after death we extract all the forces which then lead us on to a new life on earth. From the very outset of our existence after death, this new life on earth confronts us as a goal, as an aim which we always have before us. And the earthly existence within the body of a human being, which is a real microcosm, is the result of a powerful experience which we have, in the spiritual world after death.

You see, when we speak of a germ here in the physical world, this germ is small and gradually unfolds itself, until it becomes a large tree or a large animal. I might also speak of a spiritual germ which develops after our physical life on earth, after death. Out of the spiritual forces of the universe the human being develops with the aid of the spiritual Beings, a spiritual germ for his next life on earth. This elaboration does not consist in a repetition of his earthly life, but it contains activities and essential forces which are far greater to be sure than anything which can be experienced on earth. During our post-earthly existence, our first experience in the spiritual world is this preparation of our future earthly life, upon the foundation of experiences which we can only have in the spiritual world.

In addition, we have the cosmic consciousness, of which I have spoken. Through the fact that such a cosmic consciousness arises in one human being and also in other human beings ... indeed, it exists every night, though we pass through it in a dull state which is no real consciousness, but, if I may use the paradoxical expression, an unconscious consciousness ... through this fact the human beings live not only as spiritual beings together with other spiritual beings who never come down to the earth, but who dwell in the purely spiritual world, but they also live together with all the souls who are either incarnated in physical bodies, or who have also passed through the portal of death and consequently have the same experiences: the cosmic state of consciousness which is common to them all.

The threads which were spun here on earth from soul to soul, in the family or in other human relationships, the connections which we made while living within a physical body, these threads and all the ties upon the physical plane are now laid aside. We lay aside everything which we experienced as lovers or friends, or in connection with human beings otherwise closely connected with us, we lay aside these experiences which we had through our physical body, in the same way in which we lay aside the physical body when we enter the spiritual world. But family ties, friendships, loves which we experienced here on earth continue spiritually beyond the portal of death. They become spiritual experiences which build-up our next earthly life. We do not work alone, but during the time in which we pass through the moral valuation if our past life we work together with the human souls who were dear to us here on earth.

Through exact clairvoyance and ideal magic these facts appear as something which is not subjected to faith, but as something which constitutes real knowledge. They are facts which penetrate into our direct vision. Indeed, we may say: Here in the physical world a gulf separates one human soul from the other, no matter now dearly they may love each other, for they can only meet within their bodies and they can only cultivate relations which are determined by the fact that they live within physical bodies.

When we live in the spiritual world, the physical body that belongs to a beloved person here on earth no longer constitutes an obstacle and no longer renders it difficult for us to live together with the other soul. Even as the vision of the spiritual world entails the capacity to look right through earthly objects, as already described to you, so a human being who has passed through the portal of death can commune with the souls whom he left behind upon the earth, he can have intercourse with them by passing right through their bodies. All those who were dear to him are experienced by him as living souls, even while they are still living upon the earth, until the moment when they too pass through the portal of death.

I wished to speak to you first of all of these things, as an introduction to the three lectures on exact clairvoyance and ideal magic, for such truths can give us an insight into the real, supersensible life of the human being. I wished to show you that when we strive after exact clairvoyance and ideal magic, it is really possible to speak of the higher worlds in terms of scientific knowledge, in the same way in which one can speak of the physical world in terms of an exact knowledge of Nature.

If we penetrate further and further into the higher worlds—and there will be people who will develop their faculties so that they will be able to do this—we shall see that no branch of science, even in its most perfect form, need be an obstacle which prevents us from accepting the truths revealed by exact clairvoyance and ideal magic. Upon the foundation of a real scientific mentality we can accept the truths relating to experiences through which we pass not only here upon the earth during our existence between birth and death, but also during our existence between death and a new birth, until we return into a new earthly life.

To-morrow I shall speak to you of the repeated lives on earth and indicate how they will terminate, for I shall take the liberty to give you a description of the relation which was brought into human life on earth by the Event of Christ, by the Event of Golgotha.

I shall then be able to show you that the knowledge of which I have spoken, in so far as it concerns us individually sheds light upon the whole development of the human race during its existence upon the earth, so that it can also illumine what really took place when Christ entered the earthly life of humanity.

These lectures are therefore meant to show on the one hand that it is not necessary to reject the exact natural science of modern times when one speaks of spiritual truths. The subject of tomorrow's lecture will be the Event which is of greatest importance also for mankind's life on earth. The Christ Event will rise up before our souls in a new, more radiant aspect, if our souls are willing to take in the truths concerning the spiritual world, as set forth here.

To-morrow's task will therefore be to explain the connection which exists between the spiritual science of Anthroposophy and Christianity.

During this course of lectures we have brought before our souls two remarkable documents of humanity, although necessarily described very briefly on account of the limited number of lectures; and we have seen what impulses had to flow into the evolution of mankind in order that these two significant documents, the sublime Gita and the Epistles of St. Paul, might come into existence. What it is important for us to grasp is the essential difference between the whole spirit of the Gita and that of the Epistles of St. Paul. As we have already said:—in the Gita we have the teachings that Krishna was able to give to his pupil Arjuna. Such teachings can only be given and should only be given to one person individually, for they are in reality exactly what they appear in the Gita; teachings of an intimate nature. On the other hand, it may be said that they are now within the reach of anyone, because they appear in the Gita. This naturally was not the case at the time the Gita was composed. They did not then reach all ears; they were then only communicated by word of mouth. In those old days teachers were careful to ascertain the maturity of the pupil to whom they were about to communicate such teachings; they always made sure of his being ready for them. In our time this is no longer possible as regards all the teachings and instructions which have in some way come openly to light. We are living in an age in which the spiritual life is in a certain sense public. Not that there is no longer any occult science in our day, but it cannot be considered occult simply because it is not printed or spread abroad. There is plenty of occult science even in our day. The scientific teaching of Fichte, for instance, although everyone can procure it in printed form, is really a secret teaching; and finally Hegel's philosophy is also a secret doctrine, for it is very little known and has indeed many reasons in it for remaining a secret teaching; and this is the case with many things in our day. The scientific teaching of Fichte and the philosophy of Hegel have a very simple method of remaining secret doctrine, in that they are written in such a way that most people do not understand them, and fall asleep if they read the first pages. In that way the subject itself remains a secret doctrine, and this is the case in our own age with a great deal which many people think they know. They do not know it; thus these things remain secret doctrine; and, in reality, such things as are to be found in the Gita also remain secret doctrine, although they may be made known in the widest circles by means of printing. For while one person who takes up the Gita today sees in it great and mighty revelations about the evolution of man's own inner being, another will only see in it an interesting poem; to him all the perceptions and feelings expressed in the Gita are mere trivialities. For let no one think that he has really made what is in the Gita his own, although he may be able to express in the words of the Gita itself what is contained in it, but which may itself be far removed from his comprehension. Thus the greatness of the subject itself is in many respects a protection against its becoming common. What is certain is that the teachings which are poetically worked out in the Gita are such that each one must follow, must experience them for himself, if, through them, he wishes to rise in his soul, and finally to experience the meeting with the Lord of Yoga, with Krishna. It is therefore an individual matter; something which the great Teacher addresses to one individual alone. It is a different thing when we consider the contents of the Epistles of St. Paul from this point of view. There we see that all is for the community, all is matter appealing to the many. For if we fix our attention upon, the innermost core of the essence of the Krishna-teaching we must say: What one experiences through this teaching, one experiences for oneself alone, in the strictest seclusion of one's own soul, and one can only have the meeting with Krishna as a lonely soul-wanderer, after one has found the way back to the original revelations and experiences of mankind. That which Krishna can give must be given to each individual.

This is not the ease with the revelation given to the world through the Christ-Impulse. From the beginning the Christ-Impulse was intended for all humanity, and the Mystery of Golgotha was not consummated as an act for the individual soul alone; but we must think of the whole of mankind from the very beginning to the very end of the earth's evolution, and realise that what happened at Golgotha was for all men. It is to the greatest possible extent a matter for the community in general. Therefore the style of the Epistles of St. Paul, apart from all that has already been characterised, must be quite different from the style of the sublime Gita. Let us once more picture clearly the relationship between Krishna and Arjuna. He gives his pupil unequivocal directions as Lord of Yoga as to how he can rise in his soul in order to attain the vision of Krishna. Let us compare with this a specially pregnant passage in the Pauline Epistles, in which a community turn to St. Paul and ask him whether this or that was true, whether this could be considered as giving the right views about what he had taught. In the instructions which St. Paul gives, we find a passage which may certainly be compared in greatness, even in artistic style with what we find in the sublime Gita; but at the same time we find quite a different tone, we find everything spoken from quite a different soul-feeling; It is where St. Paul writes to the Corinthians of how the different human gifts to be found in a group of people must work in cooperation. To Arjuna, Krishna says “Thou must be so and so, thou must do this or that, then wilt thou rise stage by stage in thy soul-life.” To his Corinthians St. Paul says: “One of you has this gift, another that, a third another; and if these work harmoniously together, as do the members of the human body, the result is spiritually a whole which can spiritually be permeated with the Christ.” Thus through the subject itself St. Paul addresses himself to men who work together, that is to say, to a multitude; and he uses an important opportunity to do this-namely, when the gift of the so-called speaking with tongues comes under consideration.

What is this speaking with tongues that we find spoken of in St. Paul's Epistles? It is neither more nor less than a survival of old spiritual gifts, which, in a renewed way, but with full human consciousness, confront-us again at the present time. For when, among our initiation-methods, we speak of Inspiration, it is understood that a man who attains to inspiration in our age does so with a clear consciousness; just as he brings a clear consciousness to bear upon his powers of understanding and his sense-realisations. But in olden times this was different, then such a man spoke as an instrument of high spiritual beings who made use of his organs to express higher things through his speech. He might sometimes say things which he himself could not understand at all. Thus revelations from the spiritual worlds were given, which were not necessarily understood by him who was used as an instrument, and just that was the case in Corinth. The situation had there arisen of a number of persons having this gift of tongues. They were then able to make this or that prediction from the spiritual worlds. Now when a man possesses such gifts everything he is able to reveal by their means is under all circumstances a revelation from the spiritual world, yet it may, nevertheless, be the case that one man may say this and another that, for spiritual sources are manifold, One may be inspired from one source and another from another, and thus it may happen that the revelations do not correspond. Complete harmony can only be found when these worlds are entered in full consciousness. Therefore St. Paul gives the following admonition: “Some there are who can speak with tongues, others who can interpret the words spoken. They should work together as do the right and left hands, and we should not only listen to those who speak with tongues, but also to those who have not that gift, but who can expound and understand what someone is able to bring down from the spiritual sphere.” Here again St. Paul was urging the question of a community which might be founded through the united working of men. In connection with this very speaking with tongues St. Paul gave that address which, as I have said, is in certain respects so wonderful that in its might it may well compare, though in a different way-with the revelations of the Gita. He says (1 Cor. xii. verses 3-31): “As regards the spiritually gifted brethren, I will not leave you without instructions. You know that in the time of your heathendom, it was to dumb idols that you were blindly led by desire. Wherefore I make clear to you: that just as little as one speaking in the Spirit of God says: Accursed be Jesus; so little can a man call Him Lord but through the Holy Spirit. Now there are diversities of gracious gifts, but there is one Spirit. There are diversities in the guidance of mankind, but there is one Lord. There are differences in the force which individual men possess; but there is one God Who works in all these forces. But to every man is given the manifestation of the Spirit, as much as he can profit by it. So to one is given the word of prophecy, to another the word of knowledge; others are spirits who live in faith; again others have the gift of healing, others the gift of prophecy, others have the gift of seeing into men's characters, others that of speaking different tongues, and to others again is given the interpretation of tongues; but in all these worketh one and the same Spirit, apportioning to each one what is due to him. For as the body is one and hath many members, yet all the members together form one body, so also is it with Christ. For through the Spirit we are all baptised into one body, whether Jew or Greek, bond or free, and have all been imbued with one spirit; so also the body is not made of one but of many members. If the foot were to say: Because I am not the hand therefore I do not belong to the body, it would none the less belong to it. And if the ear were to say: Because I am not the eye I do not belong to the body, none the less does it belong to the body. If the whole body were only an eye, where would be the hearing? If the whole body were a sense of hearing, where would be the power of smell? But now hath God set each one of the members in the body where it seemed good to Him. If there were only one member, where would the body be? But now there are truly many members, but there is only one body. The eye may not say to the hand: I do not require thee! nor the head to the feet—I have no need of you; rather those which appear to be the feeble members of the body are necessary, and those which we consider mean prove themselves to be specially important. God has put the body together and has recognised the importance of the unimportant members that there should be no division in the body, but that all the members should work harmoniously together and should care for one another. And if one member suffer, all the members suffer with it, and it one member prosper, all the members rejoice with it. “But ye,” said St. Paul to his Corinthians, “are the Body of Christ, and are severally the members thereof. And some God hath set in the community as apostles, others as prophets, a third part as teachers, a fourth as miraculous healers, a fifth for other activities in helping, a sixth for the administration of the community, and a seventh He set aside to speak with tongues. Shall all men be prophets, shall all men be apostles, shall all be teachers, all healers, shall all speak with tongues, or shall all interpret? Therefore it is right for all the gifts to work together, but the more numerous they are the better.”

Then Paul speaks of the force that can prevail in the individual but also in the community, and that holds all the separate members together as the strength of the body holds the separate members of the body together. Krishna says nothing more beautiful to one man than St. Paul spoke to humanity in its different members. Then he speaks of the Christ-Power, which holds the different members together just as the body holds its different members together; and the force that can live in one individual as the life-force in every one of his limbs, and yet lives also in a whole community; that is described by St. Paul in powerful words: “Nevertheless I will show you,” says he, “the way that is higher than all else. If I could speak with tongues of men or of angels and have not love, my speech is but as sounding brass or a clanging cymbal, and if I could prophesy and reveal all secrets and communicate all the knowledge in the world, and if I had all the faith that could remove mountains themselves and had not love, it would all be nothing. And if I distributed every spiritual gift, yea, if I gave my body itself to be burnt, but were lacking in love, it would all be in vain. Love endureth ever. Love is kind. Love knoweth not envy. Love knoweth not boasting, knoweth not pride. Love injureth not what is decorous, seeketh not her own advantage, doth not let herself be provoked, beareth no one any malice, doth not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoiceth only in truth. Love envelopeth all, streameth through all beliefs, hopeth all things, practiseth toleration everywhere. Love, if it existeth, can never be lost. Prophesies vanish when they are fulfilled, what is spoken with tongues ceases when it can no longer speak to human hearts; what is known ceases when the subject of knowledge is exhausted, for we know in part, and we prophesy in part, but when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away. When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I felt as a child; when I became, a man the world of childhood was past. Now we only see dark outlines in a mirror, but then we shall see the spirit face to face; now is my knowledge in part, but then I shall know completely, even as I myself am known. Now abideth Faith, the certainty of Hope, and Love; but Love is the greatest of these, hence Love is above all. For if you could have all spiritual gifts, whoever himself understands prophecy must also strive after love; for whoever speaks with tongues speaks not among men, he speaks among Gods. No one understands him, because in the spirit he speaketh mysteries.” We see how St. Paul understands the nature of speaking with tongues. His meaning is: The speaker with tongues is transported into the spiritual worlds; he speaks among Gods. Whoever prophesies speaks to men to build up, to warn, to comfort; he who speaks with tongues, to a certain extent satisfies himself; he who prophesies builds up the community. If you all attain to speaking with tongues, it is yet more important that you should prophesy. He who prophesies is greater than he who speaks with tongues, for he who speaks with tongues must first understand his own speaking, in order that the community should do so. Supposing that I came to' you as a speaker with tongues, of what use should I be to you if I did not tell you what my speaking signifies as prophecy, teaching and revelation! My speaking would be like a flute or a zither, of which one could not clearly distinguish the sounds. How could one distinguish the playing of either the zither or of the flute if they did not give forth distinct sounds? And if the trumpet gave forth an indistinct sound, who would arm himself to battle? So it is with you; if you cannot connect a distinct language with the tongue-speaking, it is all merely spoken into the air.

All this shows us that the different spiritual gifts must be divided amongst the community, and that the members as individuals, must work together. With this we come to the point at which the revelation of Paul, through the moment in human evolution in which it appears, must differ absolutely from that of Krishna. The Krishna-revelation is directed to one individual, but in reality applies to every man if he is ripe to tread the upward path prescribed to him by the Lord of Yoga; we are more and more reminded of the primeval ages of mankind, to which we always, according to Krishna-teaching, return in spirit. At that time men were less individualised, one could assume that for each man the same teaching and directions would be suitable. St. Paul confronted mankind when individuals were becoming differentiated, when they really had to become differentiated, each one with his special capacity, his own special gift. One could then no longer reckon on being able to pour the same thing into each different soul; one had then to point to that which is invisible and rules over all. This, which lives in no man as a separate individual, although it may be within each one, is the Christ-Impulse. The Christ-Impulse, again, is something like a new group-soul of humanity, but one that must be consciously sought for by men. To make this clearer, let us picture to ourselves how, for instance, a number of Krishna students are to be distinguished in the spiritual worlds, from a number of those who have been moved in the deepest part of their being by the Christ-Impulse. The Krishna pupils have every one of them been stirred by one and the same impulse, which has been given them by the Lord of Yoga. In spiritual life each one of these is like the other. The same instructions have been given to them all. But those who have been moved by the Christ-Impulse, are each, when disembodied and in the spiritual world, possessed of their own particular individuality, their own distinct spiritual forces. Therefore even in the spiritual world, one man may go in one direction and one in another; and the Leader of both, the One Who pours Himself into the soul of each one, no matter how individualised he may be, is the Christ, Who is in the soul of each one and at the same time soars above them all. So we still have a differentiated community even when the souls are discarnate, while the souls of the Krishna pupils, when they have received instructions from the Lord of Yoga, are as one unit. The object of human evolution, however, is that souls should become more and more differentiated.

Therefore it was necessary that Krishna should speak in a different way. He really speaks to his pupils just as he does in the Gita. But St. Paul must speak differently. He really speaks to each individual, and it is a question of individual development whether, according to the degree of his maturity, a man remains at a certain stage of his incarnation at a standstill in exoteric life, or whether he is able to enter the esoteric life and raise himself into esoteric Christianity. We can go further and further in the Christian life and attain the utmost esoteric heights; but we must start from something different from what we start from in the Krishna-teaching. In the Krishna-teaching you start from the point you have reached as man, and raise the soul individually, as a separate being; in Christianity, before you attempt to go further along the path you must have gained a connection with the Christ-Impulse-feeling in the first place that this transcends all else. The spiritual path to Krishna can only be trodden by one who receives instructions from Krishna; the spiritual path to Christ can be trodden by anyone, for Christ brought the mystery for all men who feel drawn towards it. That, however, is something external, accomplished on the physical plane; the first step is, therefore taken on the physical plane. That is the essential thing. Truly one need not, if one looks into the world-historical importance of the Christ-Impulse, begin by belonging to this or that Christian denomination; on the contrary one can, just in our time, even start from an anti-Christian standpoint, or from one of indifference towards Christ. Yet if one goes deeply into the spiritual life of our own age, examining the contradictions and follies of materialism, perhaps one may genuinely be led to Christ, even though to begin with one may not have belonged to any particular creed. Therefore when it is said outside our circle that we are starting from a peculiar Christian denomination, this must be regarded as a special calumny; for it is not a matter of starting from any denomination, but that in response to the demands of the spiritual life itself, everyone, be he Mahommedan or Buddhist, Jew or Hindu, or Christian, shall be able to understand the Christ-Impulse in its whole significance for the evolution of mankind. This desire we can see deeply penetrating the whole view and presentation of St. Paul, and in this respect he is absolutely the one who sets the tone for the first proclamation of the Christ-Impulse to the world.

As we have described how Sankhya philosophy concerns itself with the changing forms, with that which appertains to Prakriti, we may also say that St. Paul, in all that underlies his profound Epistles, deals with Purusha, that which pertains to the soul. What the soul is to become, the destiny of the soul, how throughout the whole evolution of mankind it evolves in manifold ways, concerning all this St. Paul gives us quite definite and profound conclusions. There is a fundamental difference between what Eastern thought was still able to give us, and what we find at once with such wonderful clearness in St. Paul. We pointed out yesterday that, according to Krishna, everything depended on man's finding his way out of the changing forms. But Prakriti remains outside, as something foreign to the soul. All the striving in this Eastern method of development and even in the Eastern initiation, tends to free one from material existence' from that which is spread outside in nature; for that, according to the Veda-philosophy, is merely maya. Everything external is maya, and to be free from maya is Yoga. We have pointed out how in the Gita it is expected of man that he shall become free from all he does and accomplishes, from what he wills and thinks, from what he likes and enjoys, and in his soul shall triumph over everything external. The work that man accomplishes should equally fall away from him, and thus resting within himself, he shall find satisfaction. Thus, he who wishes to develop according to the Krishna teaching, aspires to become something like a Paramahamsa, that is to say, a high Initiate who leaves all material existence, behind him, who triumphs over all he has himself accomplished by his actions in this world of sense; and lives a purely spiritual existence, having so overcome what belongs to the senses that he no longer thirsts for reincarnation, that he has nothing more to do with what filled his life and at which he worked in this sense-world. Thus it is the issuing forth from this maya, the triumphing over it which meets us everywhere in the Gita, With St. Paul it is not so.

If he had met with these Eastern teachings, something in the depth of his soul would have caused the following words to come forth: “Yes, thou wishest to rise above all that surrounds thee outside, from that also which thou formerly accomplished there! Dost thou wish to leave all that behind thee? Is not then all that the work of God, is not everything above which thou wishest to lift thyself created by the Divine Spirit? In despising that, art thou not despising the work of God? Does not the revelation of God's Spirit dwell everywhere within it? Didst thou not at first seek to represent God in thine own work, in love and faith and devotion, and now desirest thou to triumph over what is the work of God?”

It would be well, my dear friends, if we were to inscribe these words of St. Paul-which though unspoken were felt in the depths of his soul-deeply into our own souls; for they express an important part of what we know as Western revelation. In the Pauline sense, we too speak of the maya which surrounds us. We certainly say: We are surrounded by maya: but we also say: Is there not spiritual revelation in this maya, is it not all divine spiritual work? Is it not blasphemy to fail to understand that there is divine spiritual work in all things? Now arises the other question: Why is that maya there -? Why do we see maya around us? The West does not stop at the question as to whether all is maya: it inquires as to the wherefore of maya. Then follows an answer that leads us into the centre of the soul—into Purusha: Because the soul once came under the power of Lucifer it sees everything through the veil of maya and spreads the veil of maya over everything. Is it the fault of objectivity that we see maya? No. To us as souls objectivity would appear in all its truth, if we had not come under the power of Lucifer. It only appears to us as maya because we are not capable of seeing down into the foundations of what is spread out there. That comes from the soul's having come under the power of Lucifer; it is not the fault of the Gods, it is the fault of our own soul. Thou, O soul, hast made the world a maya to thyself, because thou hast fallen into the power of Lucifer. From the highest spiritual grasp of this formula, down to the words of Goethe: “The senses do not deceive, but the judgment deceives,” is one straight line. The Philistines and zealots may fight against Goethe and his Christianity as much as they like; he might nevertheless say that he is one of the most Christian of men, for in the depths of his being he thought as a Christian, even in that very formula: “The senses do not deceive, but the judgment deceives.” It is the soul's own fault that what it sees appears as maya and not as truth. So that which in Orientalism appears simply as an act of Gods themselves, is diverted into the depths of the human soul, where the great struggle with Lucifer takes place.

Thus Orientalism, if we consider it aright, is in a certain sense materialism, in that it does not recognise the spirituality of maya, and wishes to rise above matter. That which pulses through the Epistles of St. Paul is a doctrine of the soul, although only existing in germ and therefore capable of being so mistaken and misunderstood as in our Tamas-time, but it will in the future be visibly spread out over the whole earth. This, concerning the peculiar nature of maya, will have to be understood; for only then can one understand the full depth of that which is the object of the progress of human evolution. Then only does one understand what St. Paul means when he speaks of the first Adam, who succumbed to Lucifer in his soul, and who was therefore more and more entangled in matter-which means nothing else than this: ensnared in a false experiencing of matter. As God's creation external matter is good: what takes place there is good. But what the soul experiences in the course of human evolution became more and more evil, because in the beginning the soul fell into the power of Lucifer. Therefore St. Paul called Christ the Second Adam, for He came into the world untempted by Lucifer, and therefore He can be a guide and friend to men's souls, who can lead them away from Lucifer, that is, into the right relationship to Him. St. Paul could not tell mankind at that time all that he as an Initiate knew; but if we allow his Epistles to work on us we shall see that there is more in their depths than they express externally. That is because St. Paul spoke to a community, and had to reckon with the understanding of that community. That is why in certain of his Epistles there seem to be absolute contradictions. But one who can plunge down into the depths, finds everywhere the impulse of the Christ-Being. Let us here remember, my dear friends, how we ourselves have represented the coming into existence of the Mystery of Golgotha. As time went on we recognised that there were two different stories of the youth, of Christ Jesus, in the Gospel of St. Matthew and that of St. Luke, because in reality there are two Jesus-boys in question. We have seen that externally—after the flesh, according to St. Paul, which means through physical descent—both Jesus-boys descended from the stock of David; that one came from the line of Nathan and the other from that of Solomon; that thus there were two Jesus-boys born at about the same time. In the one Jesus-child, that of St. Matthew's Gospel, we find Zarathustra reincarnated: and we have emphatically stated that in the other Jesus-child, the one described by St. Luke, there was no such human ego as is usually to be found, and certainly not as the one existing in the other Jesus-child, in whom lived such a highly evolved ego as that of Zarathustra. In the Luke-Jesus there actually lives that part of man that has not entered into human evolution on the earth. *[See also The Spiritual Guidance of Mankind, the Gospel of St. Luke, the Gospel of St. Matthew.]

It is rather difficult to form a right conception of this but we must just try to think how, so to speak, the soul that was incarnated in Adam, he who may be described as Adam in the sense of my Occult Science succumbed to Lucifer's temptation, symbolically described in the Bible as the Fall of Man in Paradise. We must picture this. Then we must picture further, that side by side with that human soul-nature which incarnated in Adam's body, there was a human part, a human being, that remained behind and did not then incarnate, that did not enter a physical body, but remained “pure soul.” You need only now picture how, before a physical man arose in the evolution of humanity, there was one soul, which then divided itself into two parts. The one part, the one descendant of the common soul, incarnated in Adam and thus entered into the line of incarnations, succumbed to Lucifer, and so on. As to the other soul, the sister-soul, as it were, the wise rulers of the world saw beforehand that it would not be good that this too should be embodied; it was kept back in the soul world; it did not therefore take part in the incarnations of humanity, but was kept back. With this soul none but the Initiates of the Mysteries had intercourse. During the evolution preceding the Mystery of Golgotha this soul did not, therefore, take into itself the experience of an ego, for this can only be obtained by incarnating in a human body. None the less, it had all the Wisdom that could have been attained through the Saturn, Sun, and Moon periods, it possessed all the love of which a human soul is capable. This soul remained blameless, as it were, of all the guilt that a man can acquire in the course of his incarnations in human evolution. It could not be met with as a human being externally; but it could be perceived by the old clairvoyants, and was recognised by them: they encountered it, so to say, in the mysteries. Thus, here we have a soul, one might say, that was within, but yet above, the evolution of mankind, that could at first only be perceived in the spirit; a pre-man, a true super-man.

It was this soul which, instead of an ego, was incarnated in the Jesus-child of St. Luke's Gospel. You will remember the lectures at Bale; this fact was already given out there. We have therefore to do with a soul that is only ego-like, one that naturally acts as an ego when it permeates the body of Jesus: but which in all it displays is yet quite different from an ordinary ego. I have already mentioned the fact that the boy of St. Luke's Gospel spoke a language understood by his mother as soon as he came into the world, and other facts of similar nature were to he observed in him. Then we know that the Matthew-Jesus, in whom lived the Zarathustra ego, grew up until his twelfth year, and the Luke-child also grew up, possessing no particular human knowledge or science, but bearing the divine wisdom and the divine power of sacrifice within him. Thus the Luke-Jesus grew up not being particularly gifted for what can be learnt externally. We know further that the body of the Matthew-Jesus was forsaken by the Zarathustra ego, and that in the twelfth year of the Luke-Jesus his body was taken possession of by that same Zarathustra-ego. That is the moment referred to when it is related of the twelve-year-old Jesus of Luke's Gospel, that when his parents lost him he stood teaching before the wise men of the Temple. We know further that this Luke-Jesus bore the Zarathustra ego within him up to his thirtieth year; that the Zarathustra ego then left the body of the Luke-Jesus, and all its sheaths were taken possession of by Christ, a superhuman Being of the higher Hierarchies, Who only could live in a human body at all inasmuch as a body was offered Him which had first been permeated up to its twelfth year with the pre-human Wisdom-forces, and the pre-human divine Love-forces, and was then permeated through and through by all that the Zarathustra ego had acquired through many incarnations by means of initiation. In no other way, perhaps, could one so well obtain the right respect, the right reverence, in short, the right feeling altogether for the Christ-Being, as by trying to understand what sort of a body was needed for this Christ-Ego to be able to enter humanity at all. Many people consider that in this presentation, given out of the holy mysteries of the newer age about the Christ-Being, He is thus made to appear less intimate and human than the Christ-Jesus so many have honoured in the way in which He is generally represented-familiar, near to man, incarnate in an ordinary human body in which nothing like a Zarathustra ego lived. It is brought as a reproach against our teaching that Christ-Jesus is here represented as composed of forces drawn from all regions of the cosmos. Such reproaches proceed only from the indolence of human perception and human feeling which is unwilling to raise itself to the true heights of perception and feeling. The greatest of all must be so grasped by us that our souls have to make the supremest possible efforts to attain the inner intensity of perception and feeling necessary to bring the Greatest, the Highest, at all near to our soul. Our first feelings will thus be raised higher still, if we do but consider them in this light. We know one other thing besides. We know how we have to understand the words of the Gospel: “Divine forces are being revealed in the Heights, and peace will spread among men of goodwill.” We know that this message of peace and love resounded when the Luke-Jesus appeared, because Buddha intermingled with the astral body of the Luke-Jesus; Buddha, who had already lived in a being who went through his last incarnation as Gautama Buddha and had risen to complete spirituality. So that in the astral body of the Luke-Jesus, Buddha revealed himself, as he had progressed up to the occurrence of the Mystery of Golgotha on earth.

Thus we have the Being of Christ Jesus presented before us in a way only now possible to mankind from the basis of occult science. St. Paul, although an Initiate, was compelled to speak in concepts more easily understood at that time; he could not then have assumed a humanity able to understand such concepts as we have brought before your hearts today. His inspiration, however, was derived from his initiation, which came about as an act of grace. Because he did not attain this through regular schooling in the old mysteries, but by grace on the road to Damascus when the risen Christ appeared to him, therefore I call this initiation one brought about by grace. But he experienced this Damascus Vision in such a way that by means of it he knew that He Who arose in the Mystery of Golgotha lives in the sphere of this earth and has been attached to it since that Event. He recognised the risen Christ. From that time on he proclaimed Him. Why was he able to see Him in the particular way he did? At this point we must enter somewhat into the nature of such a vision, such a manifestation as that of Damascus: for it was a vision, a manifestation of a quite peculiar kind. Only those people who never wish to learn anything of occult facts consider all visions as being of one kind. They will not distinguish such an occurrence as the vision of St. Paul from many other visions such as appeared to the saints later. What really was the reason that St. Paul could recognise Christ as he did when He appeared to him on the way to Damascus? Why did the certain conviction come to him that this was the risen Christ? This question leads us back to another one: What was necessary in order that the whole Christ-Being should be able completely to enter into Jesus of Nazareth, at the baptism by John in the Jordan? Now, we have just said what was necessary to prepare the body into which the Christ-Being could descend. But what was necessary in order that the Arisen One could appear in such a densified soul-form as he appeared in to St. Paul? What, then, so to speak, was that halo of light in which Christ appeared to St. Paul before Damascus? What was it? Whence was it taken?

If we wish to answer these questions, my dear friends, we must add a few finishing touches to what I have already said. I have told you that there was, as it were, a sister-soul to the Adam-soul, to that soul which entered into the sequence of human generations. This sister-soul remained in the soul world. It was this sister-soul that was incarnated in the Luke-Jesus. But it was not then incarnated for the first time in a human body in the strictest sense of the words, it had already been once incarnated prophetically. This soul had already been made use of formerly as a messenger of the holy mysteries; it was, so to say, cherished and cultivated in the mysteries, and was sent whenever anything specially important to man was taking place; but it could only appear as a vision in the etheric body, and could only be perceived, strictly speaking, as long as the old clairvoyance remained. In earlier ages that still existed. Therefore this old sister-soul of Adam had no need at that time to descend as far as the physical body in order to be seen. So it actually appeared on earth repeatedly in human evolution: sent forth by the impulses of the mysteries, at all times when important things were to take place in the evolution of the earth; but it did not require to incarnate, in ancient times, because clairvoyance was there. The first time it needed to incarnate was when the old clairvoyance was to be overcome through the transition of human evolution from the third to the fourth Post-Atlantean age, of which we spoke yesterday. Then, by way of compensation, it took on an incarnation, in order to be able to express itself at the time when clairvoyance no longer existed. The only time this sister-soul of Adam was compelled to appear and to become physically visible, it was incorporated, so to speak, in Krishna; and then it was incorporated again in the Luke-Jesus. So now we can understand how it was that Krishna spoke in such a superhuman manner, why he is the best teacher for the human ego, why he represents, so to speak, a victory over the ego, why he appears so psychically sublime. It is because he appears as human being at that sublime moment which we brought before our souls in the lecture before last, as Man not yet descended into human incarnations. He then appears again to be embodied in the Luke-Jesus. Hence that perfection that came about when the most significant world-conceptions of Asia, the ego of Zarathustra and the spirit of Krishna, were united in the twelve-year-old Jesus described by St. Luke. He who spoke to the learned men in the Temple was therefore not only Zarathustra speaking as an ego, but one who spoke from those sources from which Krishna at one time drew Yoga; he spoke of Yoga raised a stage higher; he united himself with the Krishna force, with Krishna himself, in order to continue to grow until his thirtieth year. Then only have we that complete, perfected body which could be taken possession of by the Christ. Thus do the spiritual currents of humanity flow together. So that in what happened at the Mystery of Golgotha, we really have a co-operation of the most important leaders of mankind, a synthesis of spirit-life. When St. Paul had his vision before Damascus, He Who appeared to him then was the Christ. The halo of light in which Christ was enveloped was Krishna. And because Christ has taken Krishna for His own soul-covering through which He then works on further, therefore in the light which shone there, in Christ Himself, there is all that was once upon a time contained in the sublime Gita. We find much of that old Krishna-teaching, although scattered about, in the New Testament revelations. This old Krishna-teaching has on that account become a personal matter to the whole of mankind, because Christ is not as such a human ego belonging to mankind, but to the Higher Hierarchies. Thus Christ belongs also to those times when man was not yet separated from that which now surrounds him as material existence, and which is veiled to him in maya through his own Luciferic temptation. If we glance back over the whole of evolution, we shall find that in those olden times there was not yet that strict division between the spiritual and the material; material was then still spiritual, and the spiritual—if we may say so—still manifested itself externally. Thus because, in the Christ-Impulse, something entered into mankind which completely prevented such a strict separation as we find in Sankhya philosophy between Purusha and Prakriti, Christ becomes the Leader of men out of themselves and towards the divine creation. Must we then say that we must unconditionally give up maya now that we recognise that it seems to be given us through our own fault? No, for that would be blaspheming the spirit in the world; that would be assigning to matter properties which we ourselves have imposed upon it with the veil of maya. Let us rather hope that when we have overcome in ourselves that which caused matter to become maya, we may again be reconciled with the world.

For do we not hear resounding out of the world around us that it is a creation of the Elohim, and that on the last day of creation they considered: and behold, all was very good? That would be the karma to be fulfilled if there were nothing but Krishna-teaching (for there is nothing in the world that does not fulfil its karma). If in all eternity there had been only the teaching of Krishna, then the material existence which surrounds us, the manifestation of God of which the Elohim at the starting-point of evolution said: “Behold all was very good,” would encounter the judgment of men: “It is not good, I must abandon it!” The judgment of man would be placed above the judgment of God. We must learn to understand the words which stand as a mystery at the outset of evolution; we must not set the judgment of man above the judgment of God. If all and everything that could cling to us in the way of guilt were to fall away from us, and yet that one fault remained, that we slandered the work of the Elohim; the earth-Karma would have to be fulfilled; in the future everything would have to fall upon us and karma would have to fulfil itself thus. In order that this should not happen, Christ appeared in the world, so to reconcile us with the world that we may learn to overcome Lucifer's tempting forces, and learn to penetrate the veil; that—we may see the divine revelation in its true form; that we may find the Christ as the Reconciler, Who will lead us to the true form of the divine revelation, so that through Him we may learn to understand the primeval words: “And behold, it is very good.” In order that we may learn to ascribe to ourselves that which we may never again dare to ascribe to the world, we need Christ; for if all our other sins could be taken away from us: yet this sin could only be removed by Him. This, transformed into a moral feeling, is a newer side of the Christ-Impulse. It shows us at the same time why the necessity arose for the Christ-Impulse as the higher soul to envelope itself in the Krishna-Impulse.

An exposition such as I have given you in this course, my dear friends, should not be taken as mere theory, merely as a number of thoughts and ideas to be absorbed; it should be taken as a sort of New Year's gift, a gift which should influence our New Year, and from now on it should work as that which we can perceive through the understanding of the Christ-Impulse, in so far as this helps us to understand the words of the Elohim, which resound down to us from the starting point, from the very primeval beginning of the creation of our earth. And look upon the intention of the course at the same time as the starting point of our Anthroposophical spiritual stream. This must be Anthroposophical because by means of it will be more and more recognised how man can in himself attain to self-knowledge—. He cannot yet attain to complete self-knowledge, not yet can Anthropos attain to knowledge of Anthropos, man to the knowledge of man, so long as this man can consider what he has to carry out in his own soul as an affair to be played out between him and external nature. That the world should appear to us to be immersed in matter is a thing the Gods have prepared for us, it is an affair of our own souls, a question of higher self-knowledge; it is something that man must himself recognise in his own manhood, it is a question of Anthroposophy, by means of which we can come to the perception of what theosophy may become to mankind. It should be a feeling of the greatest modesty which impels a man to belong to the Anthroposophical movement; a modesty which says: If I want to spring over that which is an affair of the human soul and to take at once the highest step into the divine, humility may very easily vanish from me, and pride step in, in its place; vanity may easily install itself May the Anthroposophical Society also be a starting point in this higher moral sphere; above all, may it avoid all that has so easily crept into the theosophical movement, in the way of pride, vanity, ambition, and want of earnestness in receiving that which is the highest Wisdom. May the Anthroposophical Society avoid all this because from its very starting point, it has already considered that the settlement with maya is an affair for the human soul itself.

One should feel that the Anthroposophical Society ought to be the result of the profoundest human modesty. For out of this modesty should well up deep earnestness as regards the sacred truths into which it will penetrate if we betake ourselves into this sphere of the super-sensible, of the spiritual. Let us therefore understand the adoption of the name “Anthroposophical Society” in true modesty, in true humility, saying to ourselves Let all that remains of that pride and lack of modesty, vanity, ambition and untruthfulness, that played a part under the name of Theosophy, be eradicated, if now, under the sign and device of modesty, we begin humbly to look up to the, Gods and divine wisdom, and on the other hand dutifully to study man and human wisdom, if we reverently approach Spiritual Science, and dutifully devote ourselves to Anthroposophy. This Anthroposophy will lead to the divine and to the Gods. If by its help we learn in the highest sense to look humbly and truthfully into our own selves and see how we must struggle against all maya and error through self-training and the severest self-discipline, then, as written on a bronze tablet may there stand above us the word: Anthroposophy! Let that be an exhortation to us, that above all we should seek through it to acquire self-knowledge, modesty, and in this way endeavour to erect a building founded upon truth, for truth can only blossom if self-knowledge lays hold of the human soul in deep earnestness. What is the origin of all vanity, of all untruth? The want of self-knowledge. From what alone can truth spring, from what can true reverence for divine worlds and divine wisdom alone come? From true self-knowledge, self-training, self-discipline. Therefore may that which shall stream and pulsate through the Anthroposophical movement serve that purpose. For these reasons this particular course of lectures has been given at the starting point of the Anthroposophical movement, and it should prove that there is no question of narrowness, but that precisely through our movement we can extend our horizon over those distances which comprise Eastern thought also. But let us take this humbly in self-educative anthroposophical fashion, by creating the will within us to discipline and train ourselves. If Anthroposophy, my dear friends, be taken up among you in this way, it will then lead to a beneficial end and will attain a goal that can extend to each individual and every human society for their welfare. So let these words be spoken which shall be the last of this course of lectures, but something of which perhaps many in the coming days will take away with them in their souls, so that it may bear fruit within our Anthroposophical movement, within which you, my dear friends, have, so to speak, met together for the first time. May we ever so meet together in the sign of Anthroposophy, that we have the right to call upon words with which we shall now conclude, words of humility and of self-knowledge, which we should now at this moment place as an ideal before our souls.

Ladies and gentlemen! What I would like to do on this occasion is not actually to give a lecture, but rather to encourage as widespread an understanding as possible between those who are involved in the leadership and work of the Waldorf School and the parent body. The reason for this is that I really believe that this understanding, this working together of the parents with the teachers and others involved in the leadership of the school is something extraordinarily necessary and significant. Allow me to begin by describing an experience I had not long ago, an experience that will illustrate the importance of the issue I have just pointed out. Several weeks ago it was my task to take part in the festival in Stratford-on-Avon in England, a festival organized to celebrate the birthday of Shakespeare.¹ This Shakespeare festival was one that took place wholly under the influence of education issues. It was organized by people who are deeply interested in the education of children and adults. It can also be said that during this entire festival the world of Shakespearean art merely provided a background, since the actual issues that were being dealt with were contemporary issues in education. On this occasion one of the small effects, or perhaps even one of the large effects, of the pedagogical course that I held at Christmas at our Goetheanum in Dornach became evident.² Some of the people involved in this Shakespeare festival had taken part in this course.

Now, not far from London there is a boarding school which is not very large yet, but which is headed by a person who was present at the Dornach course and who took from there the impulse to introduce what we can now call Waldorf pedagogy, the Waldorf system of education, into this boarding school and perhaps also to apply it in expanding the school.³ We were invited to see this educational establishment, and in the course of the visit various questions were raised regarding how the school is being run at present and what could be done to transplant the spirit of the system of education that is fostered here in the Waldorf School to their situation.

One question in particular came up for discussion. The people in charge said that they were doing well with the children; each year they accept as many children as the small size of the establishment permits. The most difficult thing for them, however, was working together with the parents, and the reason for the difficulty—and this is certainly an international concern—was that nowadays the older generation everywhere has certain very specific views on how education is supposed to proceed. There are many reasons why parents send their children to one boarding school rather than another. But when there actually is a slight deviation from what they are accustomed to, it is very easy for disagreements to arise between the school and the parents. And this is something that really cannot be tolerated in an independent system of education.

The boarding school in question was experiencing especially great difficulties in this regard. What I am attempting to do now is neither to criticize nor to make recommendations, but simply to state the facts. In this school, in spite of the fact that it is a residential facility, there are no domestic employees at all. All the work of maintaining the school is done by the children and teachers. Cleaning the hallways, washing the dishes, planting the vegetables, taking care of the chickens so that they provide eggs—the list could go on and on. The children are involved in all kinds of work, and you certainly get the impression that things are run very differently there than in most other boarding schools. The children also have to cook and do everything else, and this goes on from first thing in the morning until late in the evening. It is also evident that the teachers and residential staff put a lot of energy into doing these things with the children. As I said, my intention is neither to criticize nor to advocate what they are doing; I only want to present it to you. Now it can happen that when the children go home on vacation and tell their parents about everything they have to do, the parents realize that they had not imagined it like that, and they cannot understand it. That is why it is so difficult to sustain harmony with the parents in this case. I describe this case only in order to point out how necessary we feel it to be, if we take a system of education seriously, to work together in complete harmony with the children’s parents.

Now of course our situation in the Waldorf School is different. We have no residential facility, we simply have a school where we naturally have to keep the principles of child-rearing in mind while providing academic instruction. Nevertheless, you can rest assured that working together with the parent body is a fundamental element in what we in the Waldorf School regard as our task. In running the school, an infinite number of questions constantly arise with regard to the weal and woe of the children, their progress, their physical and mental health—questions that can be solved only in partnership with the parents. This is why it will actually become more and more necessary for these parents’ evenings to evolve—and all the circumstances will have to be taken into account—and to become a more frequent event in the running of our school.

Our Waldorf School is meant to be a truly independent school, not only in name but in its very essence, and simply because it is meant to be an independent school of this sort, we are dependent on help from the parent body to an extraordinary extent. It is my conviction that if we have the desire to work together with the parents, this will call forth nothing but the deepest satisfaction on the part of all the parents.

The Waldorf School is an independent school. You see, ladies and gentlemen, what it actually means to be an independent school must be stated over and over again, and it cannot be stated strongly enough for the simple reason that in broader circles today it is scarcely possible to realize the extent of our need for independent schools of this sort. The prejudice of thousands of years is working against us, and this is how it works.

We do not need to look back very far in humanity’s evolution to find a school system, especially a primary school system, that was independent to a very great extent. But at that time independence caused a lot of illiteracy because few people sought out formal education. Then, in the course of humanity’s evolution in civilized areas, the desire began to grow in people to promote a certain educational basis for our interactions in society. At this point I cannot go into how this desire arose, but it came about at a time when people had renounced their allegiance to the old gods and now expected to receive all the blessings of humanity’s evolution and everything needed to advance it from a new god, the god of the State. Central Europe in particular was an area where people were especially intent on seeing the god of the State as a universal remedy, especially in the education of children.

In those times, the principle that was applied as a matter of course was that parliaments and large advisory bodies and so on were gatherings in which geniality could flourish, even if the individuals involved in these representative gatherings were not impressive in their degree of enlightenment. The opinion prevailed that by gathering together, people would become smart and would then be able to determine the right thing to do in all circumstances.

However, some individuals with a very good and profound understanding of these matters, such as the poet Rosegger,⁴ for example, were of a different opinion. Rosegger coined the expression—forgive me for mentioning it—"“One person is a human being; several are people; many are beasts.” Although this puts it a bit radically, it does contradict the opinion that has developed in the last few centuries, namely that all things state-related will enable us to determine what is right with regard to educating children. And so our school system simply continued to develop in the belief that there was no alternative to having everything spelled out for the school system by the political community.

Now, an independent school is one that makes it possible for the teachers to introduce into the educational system what they consider essential on the immediate basis of their knowledge of the human being and of the world and of their love for children. A non-independent school is one in which the teacher has to ask, “What is prescribed for the first grade? What is prescribed for the second grade? How must the lesson be organized according to law?”

A free school is one in which the teachers’ actions are underlain by a very specific knowledge of how children grow up, of which forces of body and soul are present in them and of which ones must be developed. It is a school in which the teachers can organize what they have to do each day and in each lesson on the basis of this knowledge and of their love for children. People do not have a very strong feeling for how fundamentally different a non-independent school is from an independent school. The real educational abilities of the teachers can develop only in an independent school.

That people actually do not have any real feeling for these things at present is the reason why it is so difficult to continue to make progress with an independent school system. We must not succumb to any illusions in this regard. Just a few hours before leaving to come here, I received a letter informing me that after a long time had been spent working to open a school similar to the Waldorf School in another German city, the request for permission had been turned down. This is a clear sign that the further evolution of our times will not favor an independent school system. This is something I want to ask the parents of our dear schoolchildren to take to heart especially: We must lavish care and attention on this Waldorf School we have fought for, this school in which the independent strength of the faculty will really make the children grow up to be allaround capable and healthy human beings. We must be aware that, given the contemporary prejudices we confront, it will not be easy to get something like a second Waldorf School. At the same time, it should be pointed out that this Waldorf School, which has not yet been in existence for three years, is something that is presently being talked about all over the civilized world. You see that it is nonetheless of significance—think about what I said about the school near London—that a group of people have gotten together to bring a Waldorf School into existence there.

We can also look at this issue from the much broader perspective of the need to do something to restore the position of the essential German character in the world. You can be sure, however, that the significance of this German essence will be recognized only when its spiritual content, above all else, is given its due in the world. This is what people will ask for if they meet the world in the right way. They will become aware of needing it.

For this to happen, we really need to penetrate fully into the depths of this German essence and to become creative on the basis of it. This is evident from something such as the vehement, sometimes tumultuous educational movement that could be experienced at the Shakespeare festival, which showed that there is a need all over the world for new impulses to be made available to the educational system. The impossibility of continuing with the old forms is a concern for all of civilized humanity.

The fact of the matter is, the things that are being fostered in the Waldorf School give us something to say about educational issues that are being brought up all over the world. But we also have almost all of the world’s prejudices against us, and we are increasingly faced with the prospect of having our independence taken away, at least with regard to the lower primary school classes. It is extraordinarily difficult to combat these prejudices, and the Waldorf School can do so only by making its children grow up to be what they can beonly as a result of the independent strength of the faculty.

For this, however, we need an intimate and harmonious collaboration with the parent body. At an earlier parents’ meeting I was able to attend, I pointed out that simply because we are striving for an independent school system, we are dependent on being met with understanding, profound understanding, on the part of the parents. If we have this understanding, we will be able to work properly, and perhaps we will also be able after all to show the true value of what is intended with the Waldorf School.

At that time I emphasized that we must strive to really derive our educational content from an understanding of the being of the child and the child’s bodily nature. Since to observe the child is to observe the human being, it is possible to observe children in this way only if we are striving for an understanding of the human being as a whole, as anthroposophy does. We must say again and again that it is not our intention to introduce anthroposophy into the school. The parents will have no grounds for complaining that we are trying to introduce anthroposophy as a world-view. But although we are avoiding introducing anthroposophy into the school as a world-view, we are striving to apply the pedagogical skill that can come only from anthroposophical training as to how we handle the lessons and treat the children. We have placed the Catholic children at the disposal of the Catholic priest and the Protestant children at the disposal of the Protestant pastor. We have independent religious instruction only for those whose parents are looking for that, and it too is completely voluntary; it is set up only for those children who would otherwise probably not take part in any religious instruction at all. So you see this is not something we stress heavily. Whatever we have to say with respect to our world-view is strictly for adults.

But I would like to say that what anthroposophy can make of people, right down to the skill in their fingertips, applies especially to teachers and educators. In dealing with children and with instructional content, what we should strive for is to have the children find their way quite naturally into everything that is presented to them in school, as a matter of course. We should assess carefully in each instance what is right at a particular stage of childhood.

You know that we do not introduce learning to read and write in the same way that is often used today. When the children begin to learn to write, we develop the shapes of the letters, which are otherwise something foreign to them, out of something the children turn to with inner contentment as a result of some form of artistic activity, of their artistic sense of form. The reason why our children learn to write and read somewhat later is that if we take the nature of the child into account, reading must come after writing.

Those who are accustomed to the old ways of looking at things will object to this, saying that the children here learn to read and write much later than in other schools. But why do children in other schools learn to read and write earlier? Because people do not know what age is good for learning to read and write. We should first ask ourselves whether it is altogether justified to require children to read and write with any degree of fluency by the age of eight.

If we expand on these ways of looking at things, more comprehensive views develop, as we can experience in a strange way: Anyone who knows a lot about Goethe knows that if we had approached him with what is demanded academically of twelve-year-olds today, he would not have been able to do it at that age. He would not have been able to do it even at age sixteen, and yet he still grew up to be the Goethe we know of.

Austria had an important poet, Robert Hamerling.⁵ As a young man, he did not set out to become a poet—that was something his genius did for him. He wanted to be a high school teacher, and he took the teacher certification exam. It is written in his certificate that he demonstrated an extremely good knowledge of Latin and Greek, but that he was not capable of handling the German language well and was thus only fit to teach the lowest class. But he went on to become the most important modern poet of Austria. And he wrote in the German language, not in Slovakian.

Our educational impulses must take their standard from actual life. The essential thing about our method of education is that we keep the child’s whole life in mind; we know that if we present the child with something at age seven or eight, this must be done in such a way that it will grow with the child, so that it will still stay with the person in question at age thirty or forty, and even for the rest of his or her life. You see, the fact of the matter is that the children who can read and write perfectly at age eight are stunted with regard to certain inner emotional impulses that lead to health. They really are stunted. It is a great good fortune for a child to not yet be able to read and write as well at age eight as is expected today. It is a blessing for that child’s bodily and emotional health.

What we need to foster must be derived from the needs of human nature. We must have a subtle understanding of this, and not merely know the right answer. It is easy to stand in front of a class of children and to figure out that this one said something right, but that one said something wrong, and then to correct the wrong thing and make it right. However, there is no real educational activity being practiced in that. There is nothing essential to the human development of a child in having the child do compositions and assignments and then correcting them so the child is convinced that he or she has made mistakes. What is essential is to develop a fine sense for the mistakes the children make. Children make mistakes in hundreds of different ways. Each child makes different mistakes, and if we have a fine sense of how different the children are with regard to the mistakes they make, then we will discover what to do to help them make progress.

Isn't it true that our perspectives on life are all different? A doctor does not have the same perspectives on an illness that a patient has. We cannot ask a patient to fall in love with a particular illness, and yet we can say that a doctor is a good doctor if he or she loves the illness. In our case, it is a question of falling in love, in a certain respect, with the interesting mistakes the children make. We get to know human nature through these mistakes. Excuse me for expressing myself radically, but these radical statements are really necessary. For a teacher, keeping track of mistakes is more interesting than keeping track of what the children do right. Teachers learn a lot from the children’s mistakes.

But what do we need in addition to all this? We also need a strong and active inner love for human beings, for children. This is indispensable for teachers. At this point innumerable questions arise. We are concerned about a particular child’s health of body and soul. We see this child for a few hours a day; for the rest of the time we must have confidence, complete confidence, in the child’s parents. This is why the teachers and educators of our Waldorf School always appeal to this confidence, and why they are so eager to work in harmony with the parents for the well-being of the children. As a rule, this is not something that is aspired to in a non-independent school to anywhere near the same extent; there people stick to observing the rules. That is why the very idea of independence in education often meets with very little understanding today.

In some countries, if you talk about independent schools, people will tell you that while things may be like that in Germany, they do not need to found independent schools because their teachers are already free. Teachers themselves will tell you that. It is astonishing that they respond like that, because we can tell that the people who are answering no longer have any idea that they could feel unfree. They do what they are ordered to do. It does not occur to them that it could happen differently, so they do not even feel that things could be different.

Just think of how different your situation is from other people’s with regard to understanding the Waldorf system of education. Other people have to make an effort to understand when we tell them we want to do things in a certain way because we believe it is the only right way. I believe that as parents of Waldorf School children you can see directly, in the beings that are dear to you, what is being done in the Waldorf School and how the relationship of the entire school to the child is conceived. It would be nice if there would come a time when it would be enough for parents simply to be content with what is being accomplished in an independent system of education. Today, however, all of you, who can see results in your own flesh and blood of how this Waldorf School is trying to work, must become strong and active defenders and promoters of the Waldorf system of education.

We have many other difficulties in addition to this. You see, if we really could live up to our ideals, we would be able to say that according to our insight, we should do this particular thing when the children are six, seven and eight, and this other thing when they are nine, ten, eleven and twelve, and so on. The results would be the best if we were able to do that, but we cannot; in some respects we must accept a compromise, because we cannot deny these children, these human beings who are growing up, the possibility to take their place in life.

So we have decided to educate the children from the time when they first enter primary school up to age nine in a way that is free of outer constraints, but while we are doing what human nature requires, at the same time we will support the children in a way that will enable them to transfer to another school [at the end of that time]. The same applies to age twelve and to age fourteen or fifteen. And if we have the good fortune to be able to continue adding grades, we must also make it possible for the young ladies and gentlemen who complete these grades to enter universities and technical colleges. We must make sure that the children will be able to enter these institutions of higher learning. I think it will be a long time before we are given the possibility of granting graduate or undergraduate degrees. We would accomplish much more if we were able to do that, but for the time being all we can do is to enable first the children and then the young men and women to learn what is required in public life in a way that does not inflict great damage upon them.

We find ourselves in very serious difficulties in this regard. You see, if you assess the situation according to human nature, according to what is good for human beings, then you would say that it is simply terrible for young men and women to be in modern college-preparatory and vocational high schools at the age of fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. It estranges them from all of life. We must do what is necessary, whatever we can do, to make sure at least that the body also achieves a degree of skill that makes it fit for life. I often mention that you meet grown men nowadays who are incapable of sewing on a button for themselves if one gets torn off. I say this only by way of example. There are other similar things that people also cannot do, and above all they do not understand anything about the world. Individuals need to stand there in the world with their eyes open so that their hands are free to do whatever is needed. You see, this is why at a certain age we need to introduce the elementary aspects of things like spinning and weaving. Now, however, when students graduate from ordinary schools, they are not tested in weaving and spinning or in other arts that are useful in life, and so we must do these things in addition to all kinds of things that are required for the exam. This means that we must arrange our lessons as economically as possible. There is a special art to this in teaching.

Perhaps I may be permitted to introduce an example that happened to me personally. It was a long time ago. A family had entrusted their children to me for tutoring, and among them was an eleven-year-old boy who had been given up on as far as education was concerned. He was eleven years old, and for my information they showed me a sketchbook in which he had demonstrated his drawing ability. This sketchbook had a gigantic hole in the middle of the first page. He had done nothing but erase; that was all he could do. He had also once taken the test for entry into the first grade, and could do nothing at all. With regard to his other behavior, he often did not eat at the table but went into the kitchen and ate the potato peels, and there were difficulties in many other respects as well. It was a question of accomplishing as much as possible in the shortest possible time. I often had to work for three hours to get the materials together for what I would present to the boy in fifteen minutes. After two years he had progressed to the point where he could enter the Gymnasium. He was a hydrocephalic, with a huge head that steadily became smaller.

I mention this case because it shows what I mean by economy of instruction. Economy of instruction means never spending more time on something with the children than is necessary according to the requirements of physical and mental health. Nowadays it is especially important to practice this economy of instruction because life demands so much. Our Latin and Greek teachers, for example, are in a difficult situation because we have much less time to spend on these things, and yet they still have to be fostered in a way that meets the legitimate demands of cultural life. In all subjects, we must seek the art of never overburdening the children. And I must say that in all these things, we need to be met with understanding on the part of the parents; we need to work together in harmony with the parent body.

Really, the genuine successes that are of the greatest significance for life do not lie in accomplishing something amazing on behalf of one or the other gifted student. Genuine successes lie in strength for life. Thus it is always deeply satisfying to me when it happens that someone says that a certain child should be moved from one class to another so that this or that can be accomplished. The teacher fights for each and every child from time to time. These are real successes that take place within the loving interaction between the faculty and the children. Something can come of this, and things on which such great value is placed, such as whether the children are a little ahead or a little behind, fade into the background in comparison.

We are already being confronted with the fact—again, I would like to put it radically—that we cannot possibly be praised by those who hold the usual opinions about today’s school system, who are coming from these opinions. There is always something wrong in believing that something would be accomplished if people who think like this were to praise us. If that was how things were, if we were praised by today’s school authorities or by people who believe that these authorities are doing the right thing, then we would not have needed to start the Waldorf School at all.

Thus it is a matter of course for us to depend on the parents being in harmony with us and giving their time and attention to a method of education that derives from what is purely human. This is what we need today, and in a social sense, too.

Social issues are not resolved in the way we often imagine today. They are resolved by putting the right people into public life, and this will happen only if people are able to grow up really healthy in body and soul. We can do very little to influence what is specific to an individual, what an individual is capable of learning on the basis of his or her particular abilities, because in order to be of service at all in educating a person to become the best he or she can be—if we had to teach a Goethe, for example—we as teachers would have to be at least the equal of the person we are teaching. We can do nothing about what an individual becomes through his or her own nature; there are other factors determining that. What we can do is to remove obstacles so that individuals find the strength within themselves to live up to their potentials. This is what we can do if we become real educators and if we are supported by our contemporaries.

First and foremost, we can be supported by the parent body. We have found an understanding body of parents. Certainly, what I have to say tonight is filled with a feeling of gratitude. That so many of you have appeared tonight gives me great satisfaction. I hope we will be able to talk about details in the discussion period to follow; our teachers are prepared to answer any questions you may ask. Before that, however, I would still like to point out certain characteristic traits.

Recently the Waldorf faculty and I held a college-level course in Holland.⁶ The afternoon session in which pedagogical issues were discussed was led by Fraulein von Heydebrandt of the Waldorf School.⁷ This was one of the most interesting afternoons because we saw that today’s educational questions are of concern all over the world. Of course we know that we have no right to harp on how wonderful it is that we have come so far; we are not trying to emphasize our accomplishments.

The way things are today, many people recognize the impulse behind our school. What is still lacking, however, is for them to stand energetically behind us so that this cause can win additional support and become more widespread. Of course we realize that the first concern of parents is to have the best for their children. But with things as they are today, the parents should also help us. Going through with this is difficult for us. We need help in every respect; we need the support of an ever growing circle so that we can overcome the prejudice against our method of education. I say the following with a certain reserve; I certainly want to remain convinced that those who are sitting here have done everything they can financially. I am speaking under this assumption so that none of you will think that I want to step on your toes. Nonetheless, the fact remains that if we want to go forward, we need money.

Yes, we need money! Now people are saying, “Where is the idealism in that? What are you anthroposophists doing, telling us you need money and pretending to be idealists?”

Ladies and gentlemen! Idealism does not stand on firm ground if it makes grandiose statements but says, “I am an idealist, and since I am an idealist, I despise my wallet. I do not want to get my fingers dirty; I am much too great an idealist for that!”

It will scarcely be possible to make ideals into reality if people are such great idealists that they are unwilling to get their fingers dirty when it comes to making financial sacrifices. We must also learn to strike the right note in public in suggesting to people that they give us some support in this matter, which is still a great and terrible cause of concern for us.

After all, the Waldorf School is big for a single school; it has enough students. It is almost not possible to maintain an overview any more. This is a concern that has to be taken very seriously. We certainly do not want the school to grow larger in its present circumstances; we are going to give in to the need for physical expansion. But then the number of students will increase, as will the number of teachers. And since teachers cannot live on air, this requires the means to support them.

I am assuming, ladies and gentlemen, that each of you has already done whatever you can. It is now a question of spreading the idea further in order to find the idealists out there. There must be a decision on the part of the parent body to help the Waldorf School with regard to its material basis, or I am afraid that in the near future, if we want to continue to take care of things properly, our worries will become so great that they prevent us from sleeping, and I am not sure that the teachers in the school will be the kind you want to have there if they are no longer able to sleep at night!

Some people may have the feeling that I have been too radical in my choice of some of the things I have pointed out today, but I hope to have been understood on some of these points. I especially hope that I have not been understood merely on details. I would like to be understood on the farreaching issue of our need to be in cordial harmony with the parent body if we are to function effectively in the Waldorf School. T particularly wanted to point out the need for this because it actually already exists to such a great extent, and we will be best able to find possibilities for progress in this area if the groundwork has already been laid.

Out of the details of our aspirations, which can be addressed in the discussion to follow, out of all the details that come up in these parents’ meetings, let us take with us the impulse for cordial harmony among teachers and educators and the parent body. You parents certainly have a profound vested interest in this harmony because you have entrusted the most precious thing you have to the faculty.

Out of this awareness, out of our awareness of the faculty’s responsibility toward what is most precious to the parents who are associated with us, out of this collaboration may the spirit which has showed itself in the Waldorf School to such a satisfying degree continue to flourish. The more this unity thrives, the more this spirit will also grow and thrive. And the more this is the case, the more we will also achieve that other thing, that best of all possible human goals: to educate the young people entrusted to the Waldorf School for their life in human society. These people will need to stand up to the storms of life. If they are capable of finding the right ways of working together with other people, then it will be possible to resolve the individual human and social issues.

From the discussion

A question Is asked about the Abitur:

Dr. Steiner: I myself have only this to say: On the whole, the principle I have already presented applies. Through economy of instruction, we must get to the point where what we can achieve for the children at the most important stages in life will enable them to fit into what is demanded today. We cannot set these standards or decide whether or not we think they are right; we must submit to them. We are not being asked the question of whether or not what the Abiturrequires is justified. This will have to be accomplished through economy, and as of now we are not yet in a position to do this, but I fully believe that it will be possible to achieve this goal, even though it does not yet look like it in the case of the people in question. Our principle, however, is to make the children able to take the exam at the appropriate age. But there are also external difficulties to be overcome; the school must be approached without bias. Naturally, I know that it would be possible for someone to flunk boys or girls even though we had brought them to the point of being able to take the exam. I gave you the example of how it would be easy for me to flunk the commissioners themselves. We are striving to have our students be able to take the exam, regardless of what we think of it. We want our teaching to be in line with real life and not with some eccentric idea. As much as possible, we must try to introduce our students to life in the right way.

Something along these lines is still possible in Central Europe, while in Russia that is no longer the case. We must be glad for what we have. If we introduce it to the children now, more will be possible in the next generation.

I am emphasizing explicitly that we are not crazy characters who say that our children are only allowed to do this thing or that. We will go along with what is asked for in the exams, even if we are not always in agreement with it. Meanwhile, we are still taking everything into account that we deem necessary for the sake of humanity’s salvation.

Question: Would it not be possible to have school only in the mornings?

Dr. Steiner: There is always more than one viewpoint to consider in questions like this, isn't there? It has been said that instruction should take place between seven o'clock and one o'clock. Now let me point out some of the principles involved. In the question-and-answer sessions during my course of lectures at Christmas, the question of fatigue was raised, and I mentioned that the intent of our educational method was to refrain from fragmenting and dissipating the children’s attention by having an hour of religion followed by an hour of zoology and so on. The point is to teach in such a way that the children’s attentiveness can be concentrated. That is why a particular subject is taught for a longer part of the school day and over several weeks on end. This view is derived from specific knowledge of the nature of the child.

It was asked if the children do not get tired. I must draw your attention to the fact that in principle in our way of teaching we do not count on head work at all when dealing with children between seven and twelve years of age. That would be wrong. Instead, we count on the involvement of the rhythmic system and of the emotions connected to the rhythmical system of breathing and circulation. If you think about it, you will realize that people get tired, not through their rhythmic system, but through their head and limb systems. If the heart and lungs were to get tired, they would not be able to be active throughout an entire lifetime. The other systems are the ones that get tired. By counting on the rhythmic system during these years, we do not make the children as tired as they would get otherwise.

Thus, when experimental psychology investigates fatigue and states as a result of its experiments that children are so tired after three quarters of an hour that they need a change, this only proves that the teaching was done in the wrong way, tiring the children unjustifiably. Otherwise, the time limit arrived at would be different. The point is to conduct the lesson in such an artistic way that this kind of fatigue does not set in. We can achieve this only slowly and gradually, because new educational practices along these lines can be developed only gradually.

You see, ladies and gentlemen, it is possible to prevent the children from tiring to a very great extent by teaching in the right way. This is not the case with the teachers, however, because they have to work with their heads. And if we want to do the pedagogically correct thing and keep the instruction in the hands of one person, I would like to know what the teacher would look like who is supposed to teach from seven o'clock in the morning straight through until one in the afternoon. This is the main thing we have to consider. These teachers would be exhausted by ten o’clock if they had been teaching since seven, and it is not a matter of indifference whether or not we would continue to wear them out. That is not desirable, regardless of how much I might wish that the children from out of town would not have to make a two hour trip for one lesson in school. But that is the exception; it is exaggerated. Secondly, there are some things that must simply be accepted for the sake of achieving anything at all. Of course we cannot arrange the lessons for all the children in the way that would be desirable for the ones who live so far out of town. Of course that cannot happen. In such things, therefore, we have to deal with the actual circumstances.

In any case, we have arranged things so that the lessons that address the children in spirit and soul are given in the morning, to the extent that this is feasible. The afternoon is for eurythmy and artistic lessons. Instruction has been integrated into the times of day in a way that corresponds to the children’s age and nature. It would be a mistake to hold school from seven o’clock in the early morning until one in the afternoon, and this mistake would arouse a great deal of discontentment. It would require a complicated and completely different system [of scheduling]. Then, too, I would like to see what would happen if we had the children in the Waldorf School from seven to one and they were left to their own devices for the rest of the day. I would like to see what kind of notes and complaints would come from home because the children were coming back from their afternoons with all kinds of bad behavior. We would have to deal with both sleepiness and bad manners on the part of the children. Add that to the sleepiness of the teachers, and those notes would be full of bad things.

There are several points of view to be considered. I appeal to you to consider as a matter of course that since we could not avoid having school in session in the afternoon, the reasons we took into account took precedence.

A father asks that the students taking the Abitur be tested by a committee of Waldorf teachers.

Dr. Steiner: This is actually not an issue of education, and our work is with educational impulses. The point for us is doing what I mentioned—taking into account what is in accordance with the nature of the human being and making sure that the children are not forcibly excluded from actual life. Given the way things are, there may be certain possibilities for us in the first years. But I ask you to consider that we are exposed to certain risks in assessing whether or not a child will be able to pass the exam.

What do you think would happen if we were to guarantee that no boy or girl who graduates from this school would flunk the exam? In some cases, the parents have anticipated that the child would have difficulties with the exam and sent him or her to us for that very reason.

As teachers attempting what I have indicated, we will continue to make progress toward the possibility of the children passing the exam. Those who do not wish us well, however, would be able to prove systematically that this is not the case.

It is not up to us to make sure that an officially certified commissioner is present at the exam. If the parents want the exam to be administered by Waldorf teachers, then the parents would have to take the initiative to bring this about. It is not something that is inherent in Waldorf education. This is an issue of opportunity that would also have to be resolved as the opportunity presents itself, and perhaps by the parents. It is not that we want to be excluded from issuing valid diplomas, it is only that we will have to look at the matter from the educational point of view. I would like someone to prove to me that it makes sense from an educational point of view to subject the students to a school-leaving exam when you have been together with them for years. I would like someone to prove that it makes sense. We know what we have to say about each of our students when they have reached school-leaving age. If this needs to be officially documented for other reasons, then that can happen, but it is not actually an educational issue. Those who have experience in this field know that we can tell what a student is fit for better without exams than with them. We have no reason to work toward the goal of being allowed to administer the exams because this does not follow naturally from what underlies our educational methods.

A question is asked about discipline and the attitude of respect toward the teachers.

Dr. Steiner: If you ask whether respect exists wherever Waldorf pedagogy is notbeing applied... It is extremely important to have devotion or respect or love for the teachers come about in a natural way. Otherwise it is worth nothing. Enforced respect, respect that is laid down in the school’s regulations, so to speak, is of no value in the development of an individual. It is our experience that when children are brought up in a way that allows their own being to set the standards, they are most likely to respect their teachers. This is no grounds for complaint. Of course it cannot be denied that some individual instances do not exactly give evidence of respect. It all depends on how much the respect that grows out of love is worth, and how much more the other kind is worth if it is only demonstrated to the teachers’ face and not so much when they turn their backs. You must not imagine this as a situation in which each child does what he or she wants. It is a case of the children developing ever greater confidence in the faculty.

The progress in this particular respect is quite extraordinary. Anyone who is in a position to make the comparison will find that our progress with regard to discipline has been extraordinarily great in the past two years. The fact of the matter is that when we first got the children here, we had to think about how we would maintain discipline and so on. Now we have arrived at quite a different standpoint, actually. We have accomplished the most by having the relationship between teacher and child be a natural one. There is a great difference between how discipline is maintained at present and the situation a year and a half ago.

These things cannot be judged from a point of view that is brought in from outside; you must consider the Waldorf School itself. Respect cannot be beaten into someone—by which I do not mean to say that anything else can be. Respect must be won in a different way. In this regard, your apprehensions are understandable, but it is also necessary to break the habit of apprehension and look more closely at the results that are becoming evident in the Waldorf School.

If our school is still in existence after another couple of years, we will talk again about whether we have reached the point where our graduates can take the exams. Let us discuss it then. We are convinced that in principle this should be possible. By then we will also be convinced that there was no reason to fear that our method of education would bring about what is so very evident in the schools where compulsion is strongest, where I have seen in both the lowest and highest grades that things are in a bad way when it comes to respect. I do not think that we can take it as gospel that respect only thrives where there is compulsion in education, and that meanwhile our children are thumbing their noses behind their teachers” backs. If you deal with a child in the right way with a friendly warning, that is better than a box on the ear.

• 1. Rudolf Steiner was invited to address the conference of the “Organization for New Ideals in Education” in Stratford-on-Avon, England, April 1922. He spoke on “Drama and its Relationship to Education” and “Shakespeare and the New Ideals.” Included in Waldorf Education and Anthroposophy 1, Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY, 1995 [Erziehungs- und Unferrichtsmethoden auf anthroposophischer Grundlage, GA 304, Dornach, 1979.]
• 2. Soul Economy and Waldorf Education, Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY, 1986 [Die gesunde Entwickelung des Menschenwesens],16 lectures given in Dornach, 1921-22, GA 303, Dornach, 1978.
• 3. Known at that time as the Priory School, this is now the New School in Kings Langley.
• 4. Peter Rosegger, 1843-1918, Austrian teller of folk tales.
• 5. Robert Hamerling, 1830-1889.
• 6. Six lectures in The Hague, April 7-12, 1922. See Die Bedeutung der Anthroposophie im Geistesleben der Gegenwart, Dornach 1957.
• 7. Caroline von Heydebrandt, 1886-1938.