| 270. Esoteric Instructions: Fourth Recapitulation Lesson
13 Sep 1924, Dornach Translated by John Riedel |
|---|
| This may be confirmed through Michael's Sign and Michael's Seal, this Michael-Sign [The Michael sign was drawn on the blackboard.] and the Michael-Seal, which confirms that the might of Michael is drawn into the true Rosicrucian-Teaching and so combined with what will be taught in the Michael-School. With Michael’s Seal, the Rosicrucian-Endowment sealed in the Rosicrucian-Maxim will be presented by being spoken. |
| 270. Esoteric Instructions: Fourth Recapitulation Lesson
13 Sep 1924, Dornach Translated by John Riedel |
|---|
My dear brothers and sisters! It is not possible each time we meet here to give the corresponding introduction concerning the task and significance of the it school and concerning the nature of membership in the school. Despite the fact that again today there are here present a considerable number of new members, I will nevertheless not give the introduction but will continue from the point where we left off last time. Concerning the members who in the accustomed manner are to give the newly accepted members the mantric verses which have been heard so far, I must require, under the conditions I will mention at the close of this session, that they speak about the conditions which arise from acceptance into this school as they hand on the mantras. We begin once again by letting the words to meander before our souls, that from all beings of the world, out of all processes of the world, the words that speak to each human being who has an impartial sense of it, the words within which lie a demand to seek to live as a human being (to those who are worthy of being called human), a demand to seek through true self-awareness, self-awareness that leads to world-awareness. And we most certainly are called out to from all sides, by all the beings of all the realms of nature and all the realms of spirit, we are summoned to what in the true sense of the word is the obligation to self-awareness, which is the way to world-awareness. Just as all beings of nature and of spirit have demanded of the human being in the past, just so will the human being be demanded of in the future. These demanding words, which press upon the human soul from all sides of the world, from east and west, from south and north, from above and below, if a person will hear them, these words may also today serve to begin what this Michael School should signify for your hearts, for your souls:
We have seen how a person who seeks inner awareness approaches the Guardian of the Threshold, how after the seeker for inner awareness has stood there, shattered under the impressions of the three beasts which represent the true form of his present willing, feeling and thinking as they appear before the countenance of the spiritual world, and how the seeker after inner awareness is raised up, little by little, by the Guardian of the Threshold. We have already taken up what the Guardian of the Threshold says to the one whom he wishes to raise up, how the Guardian, on the one hand, directs one’s attention upward, indicating how light battles with dark powers in that realm out of which thinking’s force streams into our human being. The Guardian of the Threshold thinks that we need this picture. We need it, so that when we are intent on feeling the ultimate source of our thinking, when we seek awareness in the correct manner of the force driving our thinking in our human nature, that we can place ourselves in that realm from which our thinking comes, where, however, a fierce battle rages between the mighty powers of light, light that intends to bring thinking along the right track, and between mighty powers of darkness, that would draw thinking away from the right track, that would lead it along paths of error. Our thinking has its roots in this realm above us. As we push along to become knowers, we must know that our thinking is rooted in the battle between light and darkness. Then we find, if we understand what it means to strive toward the light, we find that evermore we must hold ourselves upright. We must know that we are placed into the battle between light and darkness: the light intends to take us, so to speak, into a spiritual light-filled powerless insensibility, whereas darkness intends to take us and arrange for us to lose our way in matter. We must seek the balance between both conditions. We must not allow ourselves to be taken by light, and we must not allow ourselves to be led astray by darkness into materiality. Instead, we must remain firmly and uniquely self-possessed as we find the balance in our thinking between light and darkness. On the other hand, as we contemplate our feeling, there we must see, in the realm which acts and lives more in the flat horizon of wide world-reaches, we must see how we are placed into the battle between soul-warmth and soul-coldness. In soul-warmth all the Luciferic powers work effectively, including the powers of beauty, the powers of brightness, the powers which want to bestow on all of us divine capacities without effort on our part. We should become dependent and lack freedom were they to catch us up within themselves. On the other side stand the powers of cold, of soul-coldness, which are permeated by Ahrimanic beings, which would like to bring us into coldness and also into loss of self-possession. Once again, we must find the balance between spirit-bliss, into which the powers of warmth, of heat, of fire, would like to take us, and those regions of seductive, persuasive Ahrimanic powers, who would like to lead us with an all-too-tempting intellectual seduction. In turn we must balance ourselves between both powers, in order to find the right feeling for inner awareness. Then, when we look out upon the source of our willing, we must look down. There is the realm of the earth and of massive gravity, out of which initially for our earthly life the force of our willing comes. For the earth not only has within it the force of its mass, it also has within it the force of willing of humanity. Once more we stand confronted by two powers, the powers of life and the powers of death. We can fall prey with our willing to the powers of life. Then it as if the powers of life would like to seize us. They want to will through our will forces in connection with the cosmos. We must maintain our self-possession, upright and alert, finding the balance between these powers of life on the one hand, and on the other hand the powers of death, which would like to confine us eternally by weaving our willing into material formations. The Guardian of the Threshold demands of us at this point that we maintain ourselves in a condition of balance between light and darkness, in a condition of balance between warmth and cold, in a condition of balance between life and death. Allying ourselves with the power of light alone, we would be stupefied, would be blinded. Giving ourselves to darkness alone is also something which we should not do, for then we would lose ourselves in the stuff of darkness. What we must aim for in a spiritual sense is aspired to all over the world . Wherever you look, my brothers and sisters, light and darkness work effectively inter-nested into one another. Look at your hair. Light inserts it for you into your head, but darkness must permeate it, for otherwise hair would be merely rays of light. Look at your entire body. It is woven out of light, but it would not be able to have earthly density if darkness were not woven into it. Look at every object, my brothers and sisters! The blossoming plants, they are created out of light, yet the powers of darkness must press their way upwards out of the ground in order that from light and darkness what the plants represent in their firm consistency as earthly creatures can emerge. Just as balancing between light and darkness is to be found in all of nature, so too the human being must strive toward balance spiritually, through soul activity, if the person really wants to become a seeker after inner awareness. The same thing is also true of striving for balance between warmth and cold, and also with striving toward balance between life and death. So we stand at the yawning abyss of existence, always beholding, always beholding. As we look back on the color-glittering realms of nature, to which we belong with our senses, it becomes ever darker and darker, as it becomes clear to us that in all the radiant realms of sense perception, there does not arise whatever is our own being, whatever leads us to self-knowledge. Before us, like a black wall, is the boundary of that dark domain into which we must enter, in order that it may light up, through the power which we ourselves bring into it. We still stand at the yawning abyss of existence, and yet we have already gained a certain courage, a confidence that through the admonitions of the Guardian, that wings will indeed grow which will enable us to cross the abyss, in order to enter that realm of darkness in confidence, and that the darkness will indeed become light. That is actually one of the final admonitions which the Guardian of the Threshold gives us, which sounds forth:
[The mantra was now written on the blackboard:]
A person will find, my dear brothers and sisters, if one gives oneself over to these mantric words with the right attitude of heart and mind, if one gives oneself to these words in inner quiet of soul, in full inner devotional empathy, in surrender to all that is spiritual, yeah, the person will find that within these words themselves there lies that which brings the soul into equilibrium. We stand at this point as seekers after inner awareness before the Guardian of the Threshold at the yawning abyss of existence. As we attempt to pursue the course between light and darkness, the Guardian of the Threshold instructs us also on how we can find ourselves rightfully within our own innate self between warmth and coldness, and between life and death. We can do this in no other way, my dear brothers and sisters, than by rightly considering the following: in order to genuinely know oneself inwardly, it is necessary to become one with the world, to gain a feeling in relation to the world such as a finger might have, if it could feel on its own, in relation with the whole human body. If the finger were able to feel, of itself, it would say: I am only a finger as long as I am part of the human body, as long as the body's blood is my blood, and the body's pulsation is my pulsation. If one cuts me off, I cease to be a finger. The finger loses its meaning in the separation from the organism to which it belongs and as part of which alone it can be a finger. Just so must the human being learn to feel in relation to the entire world. We are members of the spirit-soul organism of the whole world, and as human beings we only appear to be separate from the spirit-soul organism of the world. We must correctly find our way as part of the spirit-soul-organism of the world, and must know, to begin with, that there, spread out around us, are the elements earth, water, air, fire. We must learn to feel ourselves as one with the elements, as far as our bodily nature is concerned, for it is made up of these elements. The Guardian of the Threshold teaches us how we ought to do this, and how we can achieve it. Consider now exactly what flows into those instructive mantric verses which the Guardian of the Threshold gives us at the point we have now reached in our approach to the abyss of being. My dear brothers and sisters, just think of yourself pressing your finger, in a tentative, groping way, against some object or other. You know that the object is there when you press against it. You feel out the object. You have the sense of being one with this object, it is the sense of touch which unites your finger with the object you are presented with. Now imagine that your whole being is like a finger, like a touching, sensing organ. You stand on the earth, on the element earth. You stand because the earth’s chief attribute is the element of mass. You touch the earth with the soles of your feet, regardless of whether you are standing on the wooden floor a room, or whether you are standing outdoors on the surface of the earth. What is crucial is that in standing you feel the sense of touching, sensing the massive gravity element of earth. Even if you are standing high on a mountain or on a tower, you feel, just as you sense what is hard and what is soft, what is warm and what is cold through the tip of your finger in the process of touching, you sense the unity of your being when you imagine your whole self as a finger and through the soles of your feet experience the massive gravity.1 This is expressed by the Guardian of the Threshold, as he admonishes us, in the following way:
That the forces of earth are our pillars, that the earth element supports us, so that we do not sink down, this is what the Guardian of the Threshold tells us at this point. Then he guides us further, so that we feel not only how we stand below as a whole finger, but rather how we feel what is within the finger. This is, at first, the element of water, the fluid element. For everything which is in man, this can indeed in its external aspect be studied by means of physical science, everything is born out of the fluid element. The solid element is deposited out of the fluid element, as ice is out of water. We must ascend to feeling within ourselves the second element. Everywhere outside us is the liquid element in the world. Within us, our own formative forces are formed out of the fluid element. The formative forces fashion us, give us form. Our lungs and our livers are solid forms, but they take shape out of the fluid element. Just as we feel the earth as our support, similarly we experience our organs, we feel ourselves formed as human beings out of the water element. The fluid forces fashion us, they are our sculptors, and the earth is our support. Therefore, the Guardian of the Threshold admonishes us:
Everywhere we can taste and feel our way through the world, but when we feel in ourselves this tasting:
Now the Guardian of the Threshold admonishes us further. He instructs us how we can unite ourselves also with powers of air. We breathe in the air. If we breathe in the air abnormally, we can experience inner feeling-sensations of anxiety breaking into our coherent flow of existence. Just as the element of water forms and builds us, however, normally the element of air nurtures us. The Guardian of the Threshold instructs us:
Now the Guardian guides us further to the element of warmth. We feel ourselves, indeed, intimately united with warmth. The earth, as support, we still feel to be somehow outside us. In water’s fashioning us, during growth for example, we know but little, for that remains in the subconscious. The powers of air press into our feelings only when they become irregular, when they no longer function in a normal way. But in warmth, when we have it correctly with our human being, we simply feel at one with it. When we feel warmth externally, we become ensouled in warmth in our whole human being. And when we experience coldness externally, we become rigid within ourselves. Warmth and coldness are one with us in a very different way in the elemental world. They are neither supports, nor sculptors, nor nurturers; they are our true helpers in physical existence. The Guardian of the Threshold instructs:
If we follow all that lies in this challenge, we shall find the way consciously to unite our bodily being with the elements. For of course, our bodily being really is one with the elements. Our bodily being is one with the elements in varying degrees, however, initially with the element of earth in an external, mechanical manner. The earth element is a pillar for us, externally, mechanically. The process then grows more inward in regard to water, but still is something which exists in forms and configurations, which does not yet enter the soul realm. Water-beings build us; they are our sculptors.4 The process penetrates fully into the moral sphere, however, when we unite with the element of air. The air element is no longer merely an external sculptor, it is our nurturer, and our feelings become anxiety feelings when abnormal breathing fails to nurture us. The powers of air are nurturers. Helpers, that we actually can be earth beings, helpers are warmth and cold, that are fire-powers. Already this is completely elevated into the moral. The meaning of the admonitions is summarized from the place of the Guardian of the Threshold as the progression, the enhancement of the elements:
[The mantra was now written on the blackboard:]
We have the progression [now underlined on the blackboard]: pillars, sculptors, nurturers, helpers. We have yet another progression. For in a mantric verse each word stands in its rightful place, and no word is there merely to fill out a line. Everything coincides with the inner meaning with which we should unite ourselves as we meditate such a mantric verse. We have a progression [the words were underlined on the board]: touch within, live within, feel within, think within. This is an exceptional progression. So must we also experience, we must in meditating it experience the inner meaningful structure of such a mantric verse. When the Guardian has spoken this, he sums it up once again in a single line: [It was written on the board:]
In this way the Guardian of the Threshold has led us to the inner adventure of the verse, by means of which we can unite everything that belongs to our body with the elements, to which it belongs. He then guides us further upwards into the soul realm. Here he does not direct us to the elements earth, water, air, fire; here he directs us to the planets, to the wandering stars. Here he directs us toward the way in which we should feel that in the circles of the planets, in what through the planets will be drawn as circles around the earth, one or another planet draws each circle. The circles have their relationships and speak with one another, when the human being raises himself soulfully to this secret of the world-guiding planetary powers. Then he himself lives with his soul-nature in the spiritual realm of the cosmos, as he formerly lived with his bodily nature in the realm of the elements. To feel at one with the cosmos soulfully is only possible when we live ourselves into the realm of the wandering stars, of the planets, with their entrainment. This is what the Guardian of the Threshold tells us with these words:
[These two lines were written on the board:]
Once again, the Guardian of the Threshold sums up what lies in these two lines as the direction-giving strength, as the feeling of unity of the mysteries of the soul with the wandering stars, brought together in the line: [It was written on the board:]
That means, make yourself exist,
The world-orbits of the various planets are drawn together into a single world-circling. By this we have felt the unity of body and soul with the world, with the world, the body with the earthly elements, the soul with the wandering stars. If we want the spirit to feel at one with the World-All,5 we can neither look to the elements, nor can we look to the mysteries of the planets. In this case we must lift our gaze up to the fixed stars, to the resting stars. For there is the power with which we must feel our spirit at one out there in the vast World-All, if we in the true sense of the word would feel ourselves to be a member of this World-All. It is at this point that the world begins to sound in the music of world-spheres.6 Therefore, the Guardian of the Threshold admonishes us:
[These two lines were written on the board:]
Once again, the Guardian of the Threshold summarizes what lives in this challenge, in the single sentence:
Our existence as spirit is in every moment a creating of ourselves. [The line was then written on the board:]
We stand encased in this, if we correctly find and feel ourselves taken in before the Guardian of the Threshold. We recall how the word of self-knowledge sounded out to us from of all beings, albeit still in an abstract form, how it rang out to us from all sides of the natural and spiritual realms of existence. But this one saying O Man, know yourself is now laid out in its individual limbs. It now dissociates the single challenge into one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine limbs. The O Man, know yourself we should now see in a certain sense in nine rays. Then it will be filled with what we need for our meditation. So we should feel. And so in a certain sense we should be vow7 to the Guardian of the Threshold, that we will fulfill his admonition:
We take a kind of vow before the Guardian of the Threshold, that we will forevermore allow his admonitions to run as mantras in the soul. And let us look back, ever and again, for with every step forward we feel ourselves pledged8 to remember what takes place on this side of the threshold. For on this side of the threshold every stone, every plant, every tree, every cloud, every spring, every cliff, every stoke of lightning, every thunderclap calls out to us:
When with the full spiritual crafting force of the Guardian of the Threshold the words resound in this room, the words that he, as the serving arm of the Michael-Might, the reigning power of our time, the words that he calls out to us, when these words resound here, then since the might of Michael himself is in place in this esoteric school, then we can be certain that Michael dwells with his force, with his spirit, with his love, that Michael dwells in spirit and soul among us. This may be confirmed, one may responsibly feel that the might of Michael guides this school, so that nothing else streams through this school other than what lies in the holiness of the will of Michael himself. This may be confirmed through Michael's Sign and Michael's Seal, this Michael-Sign [The Michael sign was drawn on the blackboard.] and the Michael-Seal, which confirms that the might of Michael is drawn into the true Rosicrucian-Teaching and so combined with what will be taught in the Michael-School. With Michael’s Seal, the Rosicrucian-Endowment sealed in the Rosicrucian-Maxim will be presented by being spoken.
[The lower seal gesture was drawn on the blackboard.]
[The middle seal gesture was drawn on the blackboard.]
[The upper seal gesture was drawn on the blackboard.] What this means is this:
[This was overwritten onto the lower seal gesture.]
[This was overwritten onto the middle seal gesture.]
[This was overwritten onto the upper seal gesture.] I honor the Father lives as a feeling, goes through our soul as a feeling as we speak the dictum “Ex Deo Nascimur”. I love the Son silently is felt drawing through the soul with the dictum “In Christo Morimur”. I unite with the Spirit is felt silently with the dictum “Per Spiritum Sanctum Reviviscimus”. The dictums of the Guardian of the Threshold come to you, my brothers and sisters, with Michael’s Sign and Seal. [The Michael sign was made, and with the three seal gestures were spoken:]
The verses which are communicated in this School may only be rightly possessed by those who have been rightfully accepted as members in the school. Those who are unable to be present at a lesson, when verses are transmitted, may receive these verses from those who have themselves received them within the school. But, in order to receive the verses in this way, first the express permission must be obtained either from Frau Dr. Wegman or myself. This request for permission from Frau Dr. Wegman or myself can only be made by the one who intends to transmit the verses to someone else. It is, therefore, to be understood from the beginning that it is not the one who wishes to receive them; it would serve no purpose if the responsible person were he who requested them. He or she can go to someone else, and can ask this person to give them to him or her, but the one to give them must ask permission in each case. This is not an administrative regulation, but, rather, an occult procedure, which must be adhered to, because the handing on of the verses must begin with this real act. The request cannot be made in writing. Because this has happened it is necessary for me to mention it here. Unless there are particular reasons for it which would make a verbal understanding impossible, permission may not be requested in writing but must be requested orally. In esoteric matters (less than anywhere else in life) there may creep in even the appearance, the remotest hint, of bureaucratic methods. Everything must be founded in life, just as in all matters which concern the Anthroposophical Society. Then there remains to be said that anyone who writes down anything more than the mantric verses is obligated to keep what has been written down no more than eight days and then to burn it. For it is no good if these things somehow remain around. They can take all kinds of ways. Something that is esoteric must be handled in this way: this is not an arbitrary procedure. In esoteric matters everything arises out of true occult foundations. If esoteric, mantric verses find their way beyond the circle of those members who are entitled to have them, who are genuinely entitled to them by virtue of having received them directly here, or having received them in the rightful manner indicated above, if they come into the possession of others, who have not received them in this correct and rightful manner, the verses lose, for all who have them, their spiritual power. This is an occult law. It is simply a fact that there are laws in the spiritual world, laws which cannot be transgressed against with impunity, without consequences. It is, therefore, not a question of an arbitrary regulation, rather of adhering to an occult law. Now, I have to announce that tomorrow, once again at 9:30, the course on pastoral medicine will be held; at 12 noon, the course on speech formation and dramatic art; in the afternoon at 3:30, the course for theologians, and in the evening, at 8:15, a members' lecture will be given. The eurythmy performance will be given at 5 o'clock. The next esoteric Lesson, which will then round out the Michael Teachings which have been received, will take place on Monday at 8:30. [IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW] [IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]
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| 53. Fundamentals of Theosophy Man and his Future
30 Mar 1905, Berlin |
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| What we spread today in popular talks lived up to the foundation of the Theosophical Society in 1875 in the so-called secret schools. I have pointed to the Rosicrucians repeatedly; also to the fact that one can scholarly find nothing about the real secrets of the Rosicrucians. Goethe was in close contact with the Rosicrucians; in his poem The Secrets he expressed this clearly. We have taken all that from the past talks. |
| 53. Fundamentals of Theosophy Man and his Future
30 Mar 1905, Berlin |
|---|
In the talk on the great initiates fourteen days ago, I allowed to myself to point to the fact that the great initiates are basically the supporters of the future ideals of humanity and that their force, their mode of operation consists in the fact that they entail as their secret, have taken up as their mystery and put it into the ideals in an appropriate way what becomes obvious to the whole remaining humanity only in future. So that the idealism of humanity, the future ideals of our race are expressions of the masters' profound knowledge of the big spiritual world principles. I pronounced at that time that the theosophical ideals which come from the masters themselves differ from the ideals in life and that they come from a real knowledge of the principles of nature and not possibly from sensations such like: it should be that way, it is right that way et etcetera At that time, I pointed to the fact that this is not prophecy in the bad sense of the word. It is a kind of indication of the future as we have it also in the natural sciences. As well as we exactly know from the knowledge of the material laws of hydrogen and oxygen that they combine under certain conditions and yield water, it is also with the spiritual laws, so that we can say which the ideals of the human future are. The developmental law leads the human being into the future. The initiate has to consciously get out of the knowledge of the big world principles what he wants for the future. This was one indication of the present talk given already fourteen days ago. The other indication I gave in the talk about Ibsen's attitude. I showed how Ibsen points brilliantly to the configuration of the personality in our time and how he characterises what has developed in our time and that he points to something higher that overcomes the personality what we call individuality in theosophy. We stand actually at a turning point today. The great results of natural science have shown us how on one side the materialistic observation has brought the biggest fruits, how Darwinism and materialism extend into our time and we have to thank to them for a big cultural progress; but on the other side that also currents assert themselves preparing the future. New ideals arise just in the most excellent spirits. Indeed, these spirits who point to a distant future are not the so-called practical spirits, but the world history advances differently than the practical people fancy it. I have pointed to a pillar of idealism, to Tolstoy before. Today, however, I would still like to point to a western spirit, to Keely (John Ernst Worrell K., 1827–1898, inventor of a motor, based on “vibratory energy”), the great mechanic who furthers us although his mechanical idea is not yet a practical one. Some questions are connected with it which may appear fantastic to the materialist. But at the same time we want to get to know an idealism that is of another type than that of the everyday life. It is the same that lived in the mysteries once. What we spread today in popular talks lived up to the foundation of the Theosophical Society in 1875 in the so-called secret schools. I have pointed to the Rosicrucians repeatedly; also to the fact that one can scholarly find nothing about the real secrets of the Rosicrucians. Goethe was in close contact with the Rosicrucians; in his poem The Secrets he expressed this clearly. We have taken all that from the past talks. We want to occupy ourselves with those big world laws which were announced in the mysteries as the world laws of the future, as those world laws which the human being has to conform to unless he wants to blunder into future in the darkness, but that he is aware to face these or those future events as well as the naturalist who goes to the laboratory knows that if he mixes certain substances and combines them, he receives certain results. This, explained popularly, can be heard only since 1875, since the foundation of the Theosophical Society. That is why it cannot surprise us that the academic literature contains nothing of these ideals of the future. Now the question could arise, and this question has often been put: Are these the unworldly idealists generally who are apparently far away from any practise, who think out the thoughts of future, which support life, first in their heads? Can they be these? Has life not to be born from practise? Nevertheless, they spin out thoughts only, they are daydreamers, and want to bear the future? Only somebody who knows how one has to use the things of the everyday life is able to intervene, and it is to him to intervene in the practical life. Let me pick out examples of the pragmatist and the idealist as a small intermezzo and show that the pragmatists did not cause the great and real progress, but that these were the theorists who created from the plenty of ideas and also brought about the future in the everyday life. Take the discoveries of the 19th century. Wherever we go we can find nothing that does not remind us of the steam power, of the telegraph, of the telephone, of the postal system, of the railway et etcetera But no practitioner has invented the railway. How have the pragmatists faced up to it? An example: when in Germany the first railways should be built, when the railway should be led from Berlin to Potsdam, this made a lot of brainwork to the Prussian Postmaster General von Nagler (1770–1846). He said: I send six to seven mail coaches to Potsdam a day which are not even completely used. Instead of building a railway there, they should rather pour money down the drain. The vote of the Bavarian medical board which was asked about the medical effect of the railway was approximate in such a way: one should build no railways, because people could thereby cause serious impairments to themselves. If one built them, however, one should raise wooden walls at both sides at least, so that those who pass do not become dizzy by the sight of the rapid trains. This was in 1830. Another example is the postage stamp. Rowland Hill (1795–1879), a private citizen in England, had this idea first, not a practitioner of the postal system. When in the parliament in London this proposal should be negotiated, the chief post official argued that the post-office buildings would be too small because of the increasing mail dispatch, and one had to answer to the practitioner that the post-office buildings had to comply with the traffic and not vice versa the traffic with the post-office buildings. The telephone is also no invention of a practitioner. It was invented by the teacher Philipp Reis (1834–1874) in Frankfurt on the Main. Then it is developed further by Graham Bell (1847–1922), a teacher of deaf-mute. It was invented by real theorists. This was also the case of the electromagnetic telegraph. It was invented by two scholars, by Gauss (Carl Friedrich G., 1777–1855, mathematician) and Weber (Wilhelm Eduard W., 1804–1891, physicist) in Göttingen. With some great examples I wanted to show that never the practitioners were those who brought the real progress of humanity. The practitioners cannot assess what belongs to the future. They are the real conservatives who counter all kinds of obstacles to any thought concerning the future. One can feel a certain accentuation of the exclusive skill and sense of authority so easily with the practitioners. I said this in advance to show that the ideals do not arise from the practical, but are supported by those who are imbued with a higher spiritual reality. However, this was only an intermezzo. You remember the lecture about the origin of the human being where we as theosophists ascribed a very early origin to humanity. We search for this origin much farther back than the scientific documents can lead us. May it seem fantastic that this origin was traced back up to the separation of the earth from sun and moon: somebody who becomes engrossed in the method which theosophy makes available finds that these are no fantastic ideas, but concrete realities like the tables and chairs in this room. Who becomes engrossed in the laws of the past that way and sharpens his look with the spiritual development at the same time can get to know the laws from the knowledge of the past which belong neither to the past, nor to the present, nor to the future, but to the all-time. If one has brought it so far that he has attained the initiation up to the degree which I have characterised in the talk on the great initiates, then the world laws appear before the spiritual look, world laws according to which the development takes place which need, however, the human being to be realised. Just as the chemist has to mix the substances first to let play the laws of nature, the human being has also to mix the substances to help the big world laws to the road of success. On the basis of such world laws, two matters should occupy us today: the distant future at which we look so that we do not keep to the few historic millennia and a short interval if we see into the future with the everyday look. We want to see into in the more distant future as we have seen into in the distant past. We also want to understand our task in the future from the theosophical point of view. We have seen that another humanity preceded our present humanity. We went back to the older races which lived under other living conditions and with other abilities. The task of our race is to develop the inferring reason. While we have the logical thinking, counting and calculating, that which enables us to get to know the laws of the external physical nature and to use them in technology and industry, it was substantially different with the Atlantean race. Memory was the basic force of this race. The present human being can hardly imagine which extent memory had with the Atlanteans. They could count only a little. Everything was based on the connection which they formed by memory. For example, they knew three times seven by memory, but they could not calculate that. They knew no multiplication tables. Another force which was developed with them but is to be understood even more difficultly was that they had a certain influence on the life-force itself. By a particular development of the willpower they could win an immediate influence over the living, for example, over the growth of a plant. If we go back even farther, we come to a continent which we call Lemuria. The natural sciences admit this continent which was at the position of the present Indian Ocean, although they do not assume human beings but lower mammals as population on it. We get to quite different stages of development now. Who has followed the lecture about the earth evolution some weeks ago knows that we get to a period when the human being was still a hermaphrodite, when the single being was male and female at the same time. In myths and legends, this original hermaphroditism was still preserved in the consciousness of the peoples. The Greeks originally regarded Zeus as hermaphrodite. One said that he was a beautiful man and a beautiful maiden at the same time. In the Greek mysteries the hermaphrodite human being still loomed large; he was put as a unity of the human being. The uni-sexual human being originated from the process I have described. We follow up the process as it represents itself to the seer in the worlds which give an insight into these matters by the means of practical mysticism to be explained another time. If we follow up the human being in such a way, we see that he goes through that again now only consciously which he already completed unconsciously in former periods. We meet the human being at that time in such a way that his external material cover is thin. At that time, the earth was still in a high temperature state. The substances entered and went out of the human being; it was like a kind of inhaling and exhaling. He lived that way without perception moving through the senses; like pictures surging up and down as with the dreamer, the sensory impressions passed him by. If such a human being who was basically a soul human approached an object or being dreamily, clairvoyantly, he could not perceive this object or this being with the eyes, he could not smell the smell, but he approached the being, and it was by a force which I cannot further describe today that a vision rose in him. A world in his soul answered to the outside events. It was approximate in such a way, as if you have a clock before you, and you do not perceive the clock but the ticking of the clock. Or you topple a chair in sleep and dream of a duel. This is chaotic today, so that it has no significance for us. However, this must be transformed again to clairvoyance, and then it has significance again. If you approached a human being in those days who had a bad emotion in himself, a picture rose in your soul that had dark colour nuances and was a reflection but not a perception of the external reality. The pleasant relation was reflected with bright nuances. Only by the fact that the human being received the gates of the senses the soul pictures changed into perception. He connected his ability to form colour pictures with the outer reality. The physicist says today that nothing else exists than the vibration of matter, and colour is the answer of the soul to vibrations. When the human eye was developed, the human being moved that on the outer objects which surged up and down as pictures in the soul. Everything that he perceived of his surroundings was basically nothing else than a spread of the soul pictures across the outer world. In the further development the human being penetrates the higher worlds consciously and not in fugue states where he perceives the soul-world around him. Nothing else is initiation than developing up to this level. What the mystic can already develop today by certain methods in himself is developed in future with all human beings. This is the nature of the initiate that he already develops what is revealed to all human beings in future, and that he can at least indicate the direction of the future ideals of humanity. The ideals of the initiates thereby have a value that the unconscious ideals can never have. Then the human being moves between the soul things as he moves between tables and chairs today. Again and again I would like to emphasise that it is necessary for that who himself wants to advance to this level that he is absolutely firm concerning the developmental stage of humanity on which it stands now: He must be a person who is able to differentiate between speculative fiction and reality. Nobody can come to the higher world who indulges every fantasy but only somebody who stands firmly on the point of view of development which humanity has attained. Another state is that in which the human being starts spiritually beholding or rather hearing what constitutes the deepness, the nature of the things. This is the so-called inner word where the things themselves say what they are. As well as only the human beings themselves can say to us what they are, there is an inner essentiality of all things. We cannot recognise this inner essentiality of the things with the reason, we have to creep into the things, become one with the things. We are able to do this only with the mind. We must combine with the things spiritually. The world thereby becomes that sounding world of which Goethe speaks and which I have often stated so that the human being rises to the higher regions, to the spiritual world or devachan; to that world in which the human being stays between death and a new birth. These are the worlds between death and a new birth. Our earth is in its fourth cycle or in its fourth round. It has three rounds behind it. Three following rounds develop higher capabilities of the human being. What I have just described forms soon; and the principal race which follows ours has substantially different qualities. In the middle of that period it produces a human race which does not penetrate the physical world as deeply as ours and which casts off the uni-sexuality and becomes hermaphrodite. Then it will higher develop, until the development concludes. This will be in the astral. Then it will go through two cycles again. humanity has still to complete three such cycles. But we can only touch the next two ones. We have to get the task of the present human cycle clear in our mind at first. We progress best of all if we put the question to ourselves: what task does the human being have on earth with his inferring reason? Clairvoyance and clairaudience are states that belong to former and later states of development. The human being now has the task to stand firmly in the physical life, so that humanity can get its goal. Theosophy should not lead us away from the physical basis; theosophy rises from the physical earth because it is also the expression of the astral and spiritual worlds. We do not want to lead to anything uncertain, unclear, we do not want to lead away from the physical reality, but we want to lead this physical reality to the right understanding, to the right comprehension. What stands behind the physical reality points to the task of the human being in the present cycle of development. Consider what happens now. We call the present cycle the mineral one because the human being deals with the mineral world. The naturalist says: we cannot yet understand the plant world and considers the plant as a sum of mineral processes. He proceeds also with the animal that way. Even if this is a caricature of a world view, nevertheless, something forms the basis of the thing. He combines with his reason what is side by side in space and one after the other in time. Everywhere it is the reason which works on the dead, on the unliving and composes the parts. Begin with the machine and lead it up to a piece of art: the human being has this task in the present cycle of development, and he will complete it, so that he transforms the whole earth into his piece of art. This is the task which the human being has for the future. As long as one atom is there which the human being has not worked through with his forces, the human task on earth is not yet completed. Who pursues the newest progress of electricity knows how the naturalist can have a look at the smallest parts of the mineral world because he controls the electric force still almost unknown fifty years ago. His task is to transform the unliving into a big piece of art. Hence, pieces of art existed long before the historical times, long before the Egyptians. Pursue this, and you understand that the present cycle signifies the spiritualisation of the whole mineral nature. Already the sensible naturalist says to us that it is not inconceivable according to our present knowledge that a time comes when the human beings are able to go even deeper into the nature of the material. This is a certain future perspective. To those who have occupied themselves with physics a principle is memorable: future prospects are obtained because a big part of our technical work is performed applying heat, by conversion of heat to work. The theorist of heat shows us that always only a certain part of heat can be transformed into work or into that what is technically useful. If you heat a vapour machine, you cannot use all heat to create forces of locomotion. Imagine now that always heat is used for the work but a part of heat cannot be converted into work and remains behind. This is the state of heat which the heat engineer, the theorist of heat can show as a kind of death of our physical earth. There someone argues who occupies himself with the phenomena of life that then possibly the point in time may have come that life itself intervenes: that living machinery which masters the molecules and atoms quite differently with which we move our arm and set the brain in motion. This force could be able to work deeper on the material nature than the forces of transformation we know today. This shows you an outlook that is not only a picture but something concrete and real for the clairvoyant who can pursue the spirit of development: He sees the whole earth transforming itself to a work of art. If this is achieved, then the human being has no longer anything to do in the mineral world, then he becomes free from all sides, then he can freely move, his soul does no longer stumble against the objects. This is the time when the earth enters the so-called astral state. As today already the engineer masters the outside world if he produces the machine which is filled with his mind, it is also with the human being. All that is there is the immediate product of his actions. We do not need to perceive what is our action what we ourselves formed. The senses have transformed themselves, and the astral state enters. This is the outlook: the mineral world stops with our earth cycle. Hence, we call the next cycle which the human being will finish, the cycle of plant existence. The whole earth will have cast off its mineral nature, and the human being will intervene like now with the mind in the mineral in the living with his soul-force. Then he will be the master of the plant world on a higher level, as he is now master of the mineral world. Then we get to that stage when the human being lives on a quite lively earth. However, we want to take this picture only as an approximate one; we want to be content to have obtained an outlook of the next cycle. With it you have seen that the human being is on a course that leads him to another state absolutely different from ours that in him forces of such a kind are that can take on quite different forms in future. However, at the same time for somebody, who understands this, a feeling, a sensation combines with it which is basic for our whole life: what does the human being become if we consider him as a spring of such future forces? We face the human being quite differently about whom we know that the seed of this future human being slumbers in him. There our attitude toward him changes into the feeling that we have any human being as an unsolved riddle before ourselves. Deeper and deeper we would want to descend into the layers of the human nature because we know that they entail such deep things. The theories are not important, even not that anybody imagines the plant cycle, but that we be in awe of any human individuality. Facing the human being as a god, who wants to leave his cover, we have understood something of the theosophical life, the theosophical life matters and not the theories. If we have certain ideas which show us what the human being can become and what he contains in himself, then our heart fills with that true love of the divine human being that the theosophical world view wants to accomplish. If we think it that way, we only understand the first principle of the Theosophical Society: forming the core of a brotherhood without differentiating sex, colour and denomination. What do these differences mean here? You probably keep on asking: which significance have these images of humanity? How does this great ideal relate to our tasks? Is it not anything that belongs to a cloud-cuckoo-land, because it belongs to a future we do not experience? The human being has to utilise what he develops in himself. It is not without reason whether he lives on with the feelings, which I have just explained, or whether he lives into future only touching in the dark. Just as the plant bears the seed in itself of that which it is next year, the human being has to bear his future as a seed in himself. He can make this seed not full enough of content, not big enough. This applies also in the present. Since you have occupied yourselves with the social ideals and the plans for the near future of humanity, you know that almost anybody who reflects it has his own social ideal. You ask yourselves if you look deeper into these matters: why do these ideals have so little power of persuasion? All the matters do not work and do not fit together. Both those who try to establish ideals of the future in a utopian way and those who want to do it with practical reason are not able to get to really great and radical points of view. All the social ideas, even the belief of big comprehensive world parties one can state this from profound points of view which are pronounced out of the consciousness of the sensuous world will never have any practical value. After fifty years, people will be surprised of these figments of imagination. The social ideal cannot be invented. Our thoughts or that which we obtain from our opinions, from our reason cannot form the basis of any social ideal. One has just to say: no social theory, whatsoever it may be, is fit to serve the welfare of humanity. However, that is hard to verify. On the other side, consider the point in time in which we stand: The present has formed the personality. The personality is the characteristic, the significant of the human being. All the other differentiations, even that of man and woman, are overcome there. There is only the personality without any differentiation. We keep this in mind that humanity had to go through this point and that theosophy calls this personality lower manas: this is the power of thinking relating to the immediate world. The human being is a personality as far as he belongs to the sensuous world, and his combining reason belongs to the sensuous world, too. We have to raise everything to a higher stage that the human being can think with his reason and raises his personality if we want to understand it in its true being. That is why we also make a distinction between personality and individuality, between lower and higher manas. What is, actually, this lower manas? Take the difference that exists between a modern human being and a simple barbarian who grinds the grains between two stones to prepare flour, and bakes bread then from it et etcetera With a very small expense of mental force the barbarian manages what fulfils his bodily needs. But civilisation advances, and what do we do basically in our time? We telegraph to America and let the same products come which the barbarian ground himself. All the technical understanding, what else is it than a detour to satisfy the animal needs? Still consider whether the reason accomplishes a lot of other things than to satisfy the everyday bodily needs. Does the reason become, therefore, anything higher, while it constructs ships, railways, telephones et etcetera if it produces nothing else than things to satisfy the everyday needs of the human being? The reason is only a detour and does not lead out of the sensory world. Where, however, the spiritual world illumines this world: in the great works of art, in the original ideas which exceed the everyday needs, or where something of theosophy shines, then the human mind does not become only a manufacturer of that which is around it, but then it is a channel through which the spirit flows into the world. It brings something productive into this world. Every single human being is a channel through which a spiritual world pours forth. As long as the human being only seeks for the satisfaction of his needs, he is a personality. If he exceeds that, he is an individuality. We can find this spring only in the single individual; the human being is the mediator between the spiritual and sensory worlds, the human being mediates between both. This is the double way we can face the human being. As personalities we all are on a par: the reason is developed somewhat less with the one somewhat more with the other. But that does not apply to the individuality. There the human being becomes a particular character; there everybody brings in something particular for his mission. If I want to know what he has to do as a personality in the world, what he can be on account of his genuineness as individuality, and then I have to wait, until through this channel something pours into this world from the spiritual world. If this influence is expected to take place, we have to regard every human being as an unsolved riddle. Through any single individuality the original spiritual force flows towards us. As long as we consider the human being as a personality, we can control him: if we speak of general duties and rights, we speak of the personality. If we speak, however, of the individuality, we cannot squeeze the human being into a form; he must be the support of his genuineness. The human beings who live out their individualities know what humanity experiences in ten years. I am not allowed for my part to determine the child whom I educate, but I have to start from its mysterious inside that is quite unknown to me. If we want a social order, the single individualities must co-operate, and then everybody must be able to develop in his freedom. If we establish a social ideal, we bind this personality to this place, that personality to that place. The sum of that what exists is simply thrown together: however, nothing new comes into the world. Therefore, individualities have to go in; the great individualities must throw in their impact. There must be not laws, social programs from ideals of reason, but social brotherly attitude has to originate. Only one social attitude can help us, the attitude that we face every being as individuality. We have always to realise that every human being has something to say to us. Every human being has something to say to us. We do need a social attitude, not social programs. This is absolutely real and practical. It is something that one can express in this talk, and it is that which theosophy establishes as a great future ideal. With it theosophy gains an immediate practical significance. If theosophy enters life, we give up squeezing everything into rules and regulations; we give up judging by norms, we accept the human being as a free and individual human being. Then we realise that we fulfil our task if we put the right person to the right place. We do no longer ask: is he the best teacher who masters the teaching substance best, but we ask: which human being is he? One has to develop a fine feeling, maybe a clairvoyant talent whether the human being in question is with his being at his right place whether he is as a human being on his place. Somebody can understand his subjects of instruction completely; he can be a mine of information but unfit to teach, because he does not know what streams out of the human being what elicits the individuality of the other human being. Not until we refrain from rules and regulations and ask which human being is he, and put the best human being to the place where he is needed, we fulfil the ideals in ourselves which theosophy has brought. Somebody can also know a lot as a doctor but, nevertheless, it is crucial in the end facing the sick person which human being the doctor is. If theosophy intervenes directly in life, it must be that way. Answer to Question
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| 266II. From the Contents of Esoteric Classes II: 1910–1912: Esoteric Lesson
05 Nov 1910, Berlin Translator Unknown |
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| Once we've understood this rightly, we'll also understand the esoteric Rosicrucian saying: Ex Deo nascimur, in … morimur, Per spiritum Sanctum revivscimus. An esoteric doesn't say what's left out here. |
| 266II. From the Contents of Esoteric Classes II: 1910–1912: Esoteric Lesson
05 Nov 1910, Berlin Translator Unknown |
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As always, we'll ask the Spirit of the Day for help in our work. (Saturday) Great embracing Spirit, Great embracing Spirit Yesterday we said that a pupil hears a spiritual sound from the east. But if a pupil would now want to say that he knew what the spiritual sounds like, that he had now heard his first spiritual sound, he would be making a big mistake. For this sound is, as it were, the last word out of the physical realm. The spiritual world is for the time being completely colorless, lightless, soundless and so on. Any colors that we might see are nothing spiritual—they come from our own inner life, and, namely, they indicate qualities that we don't have but must acquire. For instance, if we see a red color it means that we don't have love in us, that we must develop it in ourselves. If we see violet, it's telling us that we must acquire devotional piety. If we hear noises, it's nothing spiritual, but something that comes out of us. If someone becomes a vegetarian but his body still has a longing for meat, even if he's unaware of it, then this craving resounds in misleading sounds. All of these noises and sounds are only raven croaks. If a figure from past ages appears to a pupil it's quite wrong for him to want to interpret it right away. He must be able to wait with his interpretation until later. If such an image appears before our soul, it dissipates as soon as we approach it with our thoughts. But if it's a genuine image, it'll rise before us later and remain there in its true form, and we'll know what it means. We must be able to wait and be silent. We should speak about such experiences much less than we think about them. We should look upon and treat our whole spiritual life as something sacred. We must tell ourselves that experiences of sounds, colors, etc. don't come from the spiritual realm but from our own ego that's surged through be a sea of passions an desires, just as Noah's ark had the sea surging around it. As we tell ourselves clearly and relentlessly that these experiences and phenomena are nothing spiritual, we must let our ego go and as it were, let it fly away, just as the dove was released from Noah's ark and didn't return. A pupil then has another occult experience. After we've seen that the spiritual world is empty for us, we then see that these experiences are nevertheless important for us. Colors become warners and advisors. They tell us what we still have to acquire. We realize that sounds reflect our bodily cravings. And when the images that we've let work quietly tell us their significance, our soul becomes enriched by such experiences. That's like the dove that was released the second time and came back with an olive leaf, the emblem of peace. But an esoteric's soul isn't left entirely to its own devices on this difficult path; there's things it can hang on to. The rose cross, for instance. We should let it work on us; we should realize that the wood's black is our corporeality that's hardened and withered, that we must let our lower ego that identifies itself with the body become just as dark and dead as the cross's wood. Then the higher, spiritual ego will work in us in the way that the black of the cross is changed into bright, radiant lines of light. Likewise, the red of the roses will change from the color of love working inwardly, to green, the color of life working outwardly. When we experience symbols it's the ones that make us suffer that are genuine and from the spiritual world, and not the ones that give us joy. We must carry them around with us until we've grasped their meaning. The spiritual from them must be born in us while we suffer. Another thing we must realize is that we can't be unegoistical. We are never ever unegoistical. And even if we imagine that we've done something that's entirely selfless, we're mistaken. We can't act selflessly. It's world karma that lets us act egoistically World karma is God. And if we get to the point where we act in a good and noble way, then it's God in us who's good. As we get more selfless, we'll for instance, notice that we don't get scared or terrified anymore. If there's a sudden loud noise nearby, we won't jump as much as before. The God who lets us act in a good and noble way is our model. Our archetypal model made us into what we are now. And we must become a copy of our archetype again. Once we've understood this rightly, we'll also understand the esoteric Rosicrucian saying: Ex Deo nascimur, in … morimur, Per spiritum Sanctum revivscimus. An esoteric doesn't say what's left out here. When we begin to say this line our feeling must go to what's unutterable. And only when one's feeling comes back can one go on speaking. Anyone who experiences this inwardly with the right feeling will also rightly understand the other esoteric verse: In the spirit lay the germ of my body. |
| 266III. From the Contents of Esoteric Classes III: 1913–1914: Esoteric Lesson
04 Sep 1913, Munich Translator Unknown |
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| Then everything will dissipate and we'll be able to see what's right and true. We should repeatedly place the rosicrucian formula EDN ICM PSSR before us in this sense. |
| 266III. From the Contents of Esoteric Classes III: 1913–1914: Esoteric Lesson
04 Sep 1913, Munich Translator Unknown |
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Verse for Thursday. My dear sisters and brothers! To protect ourselves against the raids of Lucifer and Ahriman we must know them and learn to distinguish between them. Lucifer is in mystical esoterics such as we find in Meister Eckhart, Ruysbroek, Tauler and Suso. Lucifer is in this pure devotion to the divine, in this pure, noble striving towards the spiritual in a good way, and one can say that he was pious in the souls of these mystics. But as soon as a personal note flows into this pure striving and this devotion, as soon as a mystic would enjoy this, it would amount to a luciferic infringement. We must watch that nothing like this comes into our striving. It's relatively easy to be wakeful in mystical immersion, but more difficult in visionary perception. Lucifer is in this too. He puts all kinds of illusions before a mystic that are hard to distinguish from real visions. Something subjective gets mixed into all vision, for instance, someone sees certain apparitions, deceptive figures or the like repeatedly. One has to direct one's attention to this. One must be wakeful here also. If one sees eyes or faces or if one imagines them one isn't exposed to error as easily; one thereby gets the strength to ward off Lucifer. It's no reproach to say that bad qualities live in man's subconsciousness; they must be there, it's something that goes with earth life. A man may already have attained a certain degree of holiness, and yet drives are slumbering in his subconsciousness that would horrify him if he saw them. The greatest watchfulness and wakefulness must hold sway here also. Lucifer is at work in all emotional and visionary things, in mystical immersion, also in all enthusiasm and in artistic activity, in what an artist creates and in what creates in the artist. Some materialists may only express themselves in material things outwardly. Then if one has the good fortune to look into their souls one finds a deep religious striving, a longing for the divine. Lucifer is the instigator here also. Ahriman works in everything that has to do with the will. He approaches us in everything that becomes manifest as gesture in words or writing, in everything that appears as mediumistic writing, whether it's acquired or natural, or if one feels compelled to write something. Whereas Lucifer brings about appearances of figures, heads of light, etc., that are created by a medium. If one feels that one is forced to write something one can counteract this by stopping and by not giving in to the inspirations that one thinks that one is feeling or perceiving; one opposes these whisperings with the firm will not to follow them. One acquires undreamed of forces in occult life through this effort of the will. Ahriman is in what we say, in words that we form and transmit to other men. As soon as the ear hears sounds, the larynx emits sounds and words are put into writing Ahriman comes and hardens the sound, word or writing. That's why it's important to strengthen the soul and to check one's thoughts in the most subtle way. Swedenborg's visions, dreams and world view are permeated with Ahriman and so is what Kant took from Swedenborg's writings. People keep on asking: Should I think that what I see, hear or feel there is of importance? Is it true? Certainly one should attach importance to it, certainly it's true, every little thing in occult life is important and is true. The main thing is to know what's behind it. We should pay great attention to everything and watch and be awake. And we should acquire a certain tact so that we don't chatter about such experiences. One should try to find out whether Lucifer or Ahriman is at work in them. Something that can often happen to us is that as we're walking down the street we see someone in a vision and then a few minutes later we actually run into him. When we have this premonition of his coming we may have something to tell him, so we speed up our steps in order not to miss him. But this isn't permissible; we shouldn't use occult abilities for our own advantage in physical life. If spiritists conjure up Goethe's spirit and thereby want to prove the soul's immortality, since they think that it's the soul as it's living now, then this might not be the case. It could be Goethe's soul as it was in say 1819 and that Lucifer is creating an illusion here. One has to press forward to Goethe's real soul, which has progressed, and then one has a real proof of immortality. People often approach esoteric exercises with much frivolity. Some start to do them but soon stop due to laziness, half-heartedness, etc. But what breathing is for the body, meditations are for the soul. If one would stop breathing Ahriman would immediately intervene as the master of death. A soul must get to the point where it doesn't have to force itself to do meditations; it shouldn't want to live without them. One shouldn't wish and yearn to press into spiritual worlds before the soul is sufficiently strengthened. Quiet and peacefulness in the soul is the main condition. That's the only way that the soul can become strong enough to find the middle path between Lucifer and Ahriman. That's very difficult, my dear sisters and brothers. But then we must remember what's said at the beginning of John's Gospel and later in chapter 8:12-14. When we stand in the tumult and chaos of the spiritual world and visions and figures come from all sides and we don't know how to get in or out and are torn this way and that, then we should place In the beginning was the word before our souls, or I am the light of the world. He who follows me will not walk in darkness but will have the light of life. Then everything will dissipate and we'll be able to see what's right and true. We should repeatedly place the rosicrucian formula EDN before us in this sense. And also we will be increasingly able to find the right thing on this difficult path if we think of the simple but profound verse with which our esoteric lessons are closed: In the spirit lay the germ of my body ... |
| 90a. Self-Knowledge and God-Knowledge I: About Sinnet's “Esoteric Buddhism”
17 Nov 1903, Berlin |
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| The same esoteric teachings also live in the secret teachings of the Rosicrucians. A few have studied Sinnett's book. Eduard von Hartmann wrote a treatise about Sinnett's book at the time. |
| 90a. Self-Knowledge and God-Knowledge I: About Sinnet's “Esoteric Buddhism”
17 Nov 1903, Berlin |
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There are two objections that are often made. They are easiest to grasp right now. Sinnett's book was the first popular [Theosophical] book. This book has acquired many members, who are now well-known, for the society. The book was written under the influence of a master. The master wanted to make these teachings accessible to the West. It was also partly inspired by questions that Sinnett himself addressed to the master. The connection was established through Mrs. Blavatsky. The book first won a great many people who are now leading figures for the cause. The book “Isis unveiled” was much too heavy a book. The “Secret Doctrine” was published much later. This book by Sinnett contains all the questions – at least hinted at – including those I have just mentioned, but not in the form of the explanations I have given. Instead, they are presented in two forms: firstly, from the wisdom itself, the secret knowledge of the masters of our lodge from time immemorial; and secondly, from the other part, the outer form. This form is adapted to the ways of looking at things and the way of thinking in the Occident. The book arose out of these two needs. The book has, to a certain extent, distorted ideas. This is due to the fact that they could not be understood in their full depth at the beginning. The work in detail always depends on the personality of the editor concerned. That which is inspiration is the core of wisdom, a comparison from higher regions. Wisdom is not preserved in the form in which it appears in our books. It is received in the form of arupa. The editor in question has to bring it into form, so that it still differs from what was originally received. Today we may be able to express things even more clearly than they are in the “Secret Doctrine”. The same esoteric teachings also live in the secret teachings of the Rosicrucians. A few have studied Sinnett's book. Eduard von Hartmann wrote a treatise about Sinnett's book at the time. This treatise culminates in the fact that one has to deal with fantasies, and in a sentence that warns against it. But he approaches the book with a certain impartiality that is otherwise not found in the West. Eduard von Hartmann has familiarized himself with the sevenfold division. He has grasped that the higher part of human nature consists of Atma, Budhi, Manas, and that it becomes immortal when it is drawn to a higher one. In this way, it also becomes immortal. Eduard von Hartmann correctly says that only in the course of the third round does a fertilization of the individuality occur, so that one cannot speak of a survival of that which develops from the third round onwards and in the same. He cannot see what it is in man that re-embodies itself when you have not yet developed the sixth part. So they are not immortal. So he cannot see how one can speak of an immortality of the beings from the first, second and third rounds. Then come the fifth, sixth and seventh rounds; from the beginning, that is, from the first epoch of our first earthly developmental series, it is lunar. Then comes the earthly epoch and after our earthly epoch we still have three following ones. In each round we have seven races. Even if the sixth basic part has not yet developed in our humanity – from the very beginning, what is immortal in man was already present and in a much more perfect, more brilliant way. It was there. What has now, so to speak, submerged was also present in an earlier epoch, but in a liberated state, not yet having entered the body. All of us who are now alive may be called thoughts of the divine primal spirit. The physical basis, the etheric and the kamic basis, is developing below. This is the first chain of development. And now imagine that at the beginning of development all individual souls were present as spirits. Imagine this original sphere, which is now scattered, of coarse matter. This sphere was in an atmosphere of a purely spiritual nature, in which the individual souls lived. They were still virginal and untouched by any materiality. These individual souls then still lived in close harmony with Atma. They were still one with Atma. The first stage of soul development is still 'being with Atma'. The formation of matter continues, but the development of the spirit descends. The Budhi comes to meet the physical. The moon epoch develops Manas in the floating atmosphere, so that Atma, Budhi, Manas are already emerging, and have been prepared: body, life force, Kama. In the third round they unite, the two, in Kama and Manas they can devour each other. In the development of our group and our race, two currents have merged. One that descended and one that ascended. Imagine a crowd gathered in a meadow; they are led by a guide. Each individual builds a tent and makes windows in it. The group soul thinks the individuals. The individuals were related to the group soul as my left and right hands are to the human organism. From the very beginning the entities were there. At first the tent is still together and comfortable. Then it changes into physicality. Think again of the lamp reflected in many spheres. The mirror images then become luminous themselves. Each individual sphere becomes luminous and a selfish being. And now something about the purpose of the world process: we have to compare the two concepts of 'intention' and 'achievement'. The intention is what wants to come to the outside, and the end is what the intention has realized in. It is best to look at a specific case to make this clear. Let us take a moon manvantara or an earth epoch and, within it, the pralaya. In the moon manvantara, the following has developed: Kama. How did these people come about? They were put together from the outside by Kama. Kama worked with love in them to bring them into being. They go out of the manvantara with a specific goal. What has been drawn in is universal Kama; what flows out is now love. It is a reversal of the current. In the beginning, Brahma has the tendency to emanate all Kama. This then comes back in a different form. It passes through special beings. Emanated wisdom and emanated love come back to Brahma again. That is the purpose of the world. Hunger is like nourishment, because before saturation the same condition exists as afterwards. Because God gives people the power of creation, they give it back to him. What has been given as a sacrifice is given again as a sacrifice. On the whole, the world can only be understood as an act of love, as freedom and as sacrifice. One should not criticize the world process on one's own initiative. The gift of thought is only given to people of the fifth round, during the fifth round it will still have a completely different development, and in the sixth it will [termination of the transcript]. |
| 90a. Self-Knowledge and God-Knowledge I: On the Migrations of the Races
12 Nov 1904, Berlin |
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| There were five Semitic influences that provided the content. The mold was always prepared. The Rosicrucians guarded the common basis of what diverged into a purely secular science and a materialistic religion. They were the ones who wanted to hold together. The Rosicrucians essentially studied evolution in the concrete within the fifth sub-race, prepared social legislation and will be the actual leaders of the sixth sub-race. |
| 90a. Self-Knowledge and God-Knowledge I: On the Migrations of the Races
12 Nov 1904, Berlin |
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If we want to understand the migrations of the fifth post-Atlantic races, we must be aware that it is difficult to see clearly in this chaos. Descendants of all previous races have settled here, and we are already working in the fourth [root] race with a population that is spreading out in a radiating manner, as it were, and is itself mixed with descendants of other races. In the fifth race, the situation is most complicated. Everywhere we find remnants of populations that once already had a culture. As far as we look at the peoples of the southern Asian continent, we have remnants of the ancient Lemurian population. In the interior of Australia, their descendants can still be found. In western and northern Asia, in Central Asia and southern Europe, we find remnants of the fourth Atlantic epoch. This is the soil into which the branches of the fifth post-Atlantic epoch sink. So here we have the result of two currents: the Lemurian-Aryan on the one hand, and the Atlantean-Aryan on the other. All these cultures, however, have absorbed an even older one; Siberia, Scandinavia, northern Russia, China even have remnants of the Hyperborean culture. These mixtures are difficult to unravel. Let us try to trace the course of the Aryan cultural impact. From a point in Central Asia, near the Gobi and Khamo deserts, this cultivation spread outwards in a radius. It was a decidedly priestly culture that prepared a spiritually highly educated race to enter the chaos of nations, to send out colonies from which new civilizations would arise. This small tribal people emerged from the fifth sub-race, the Ursemites of the fourth Atlantic epoch. We must bear in mind that these Ursemites were given their specific task, which is expressed in the Law of Manu, to offer to people in the broadest sense what is expressed in the words of Jesus: 'The kingdom of God does not come with external gestures, but the kingdom of God is among you'. Everything that came before was only a preparation for this point in time. It was what became the guiding tendency of Christianity: the sanctification of the personality, the full descent to the physical plane. This mission first had to be carefully prepared. From the very beginning, the Manu in the root race placed very little emphasis on what goes beyond birth and death in man. These teachings had played an important role in the past and were now slowly dying out to gradually disappear. The Manu of the fifth post-Atlantic epoch wanted to lead people down to the physical plane in order to understand the physical heart, brain, and lungs. So these teachings, which went beyond birth and death, slowly faded in the first three post-Atlantic cultures. For even a Manu cannot direct fate and events as he wills, but must accomplish everything in accordance with the great laws of nature. Two things were available to him: the culture that still existed from the Lemurian population in southern Asia, and the remnants of the Atlantean culture in Africa. He sent his colonies there with initiated priests. Some to India, others to Africa. He gave them the teaching of non-reincarnation, the teaching [about life] between birth and death. In fact, the oldest Vedas contain nothing of what goes beyond birth and death. He said to himself: “Peoples who know nothing about reincarnation are coming together with those who have a precise knowledge of it. The result will be the right one. In Egypt, they came together with the Atlanteans, who did not have such a sharp doctrine of reincarnation. For while the last Lemurians had trained them to the highest degree, it had already been distorted by the Atlanteans; with them, everything had come to a head in memory; the memory of the Atlanteans was so sharp that it outweighed everything else, that all that was physical lived in them through inheritance. So in this first excerpt we have two branches: the Indo-Aryans and the Hamites. In India, the immigrating Indo-Aryans, who came with the old teaching of the word revealed by God - Veda word - took up the doctrine of reincarnation, and in Brahmanism we have what comes out so beautifully as the doctrine of reincarnation. This was brought about by the Manu. Meanwhile, the subjugated Lemurians became pariahs, and the Indians became the four castes. This is the principle of the initiates: the blending of the new with the old, here the powerful manasic spirituality with the doctrine of reincarnation. In the Hamitic branch – Noah's three sons Shem, Ham and Japheth – the doctrine of reincarnation receded somewhat. It was less clear on the surface. The Egyptians placed more emphasis on the preservation of corpses. The inheritance system was more emphasized, which places the main value on physical continuity. The value of the individual life was emphasized and already transformed the ancient Rishi doctrine. A less decided doctrine of reincarnation mixed here with the doctrine of personality. The second migration consists in the fact that a new branch was sent out, as it were. We can follow it if we first look eastward to the Medes and Persians and then to the tribe that passed through Chaldea and found its historical expression in the migrations of Abraham - from Ur in Chaldea. On the one hand, the tribe that went west also came into contact with the remnants of the Atlantic culture, namely with the fourth sub-race of the Atlanteans, the Turanian population, who had been engaged in agriculture. Thus a peculiar mixture arises. Grafted onto that Turanian branch was the practice of magic – and it had to be grafted on firmly! From here came the teachings of the Medes and Bactrians. Here the first Zarathustras were active, endeavoring to use the external techniques of magical time in the service of external culture. The result is a mighty flourishing of agriculture and viticulture; in them we have the revival of the old magical skills. A colonist branch goes further west and came across remnants of the undrawn Ursemites of the Atlantean race, and these form what is called the ancient Semitic tribe: Chaldeans, Babylonians, Phoenicians, Arabs. They form a new Semitic culture. The most significant events occurred first among the Medes and Persians. They are contained in an ancient saga that has undergone many transformations and finally comes to us in the form of Cyrus: King Astyages had a daughter, Mandane, who married not a Mede but a Persian. The father dreamt that a tree was growing out of his daughter's womb. The dream was interpreted to mean that the Persian tribe would overshadow the Median tribe. The ancient saga of Cyrus has a uresoteric meaning. Cyrus represents the agricultural Persians in contrast to the non-agricultural Medes, and the [peasant] signifies that agriculture will win out: ancient culture will pass to the farmers. How this came about can be seen from the institution of the Persian character. Physically strong they should become. There were no Lemurians here; the Atlanteans had prepared the ground for the development of personality. The Persians emphasized personal virtues above all. It is a remarkable trait that they had lessons in telling the truth; this was a main subject for boys, along with gymnastic exercises. And that is very important. They were preparing for what would lead to personal prowess reaching its peak. Now we come to the point where the original Semitic element mixed with the new. Priest-Rishis migrated over and found decadent Old Semites and also decadent Akkadians. Thus the Manu formed a new branch by combining his immigrants with the decadent Semites, those who had developed arithmetic during their Atlantean heyday. What emerged from this was the Chaldean wisdom. [...] Astrology, astronomy, the observatories, the calendar, weights and measures emerged. The immigrants who had encountered the Akkadians, the ancient trading people, were used to create new colonies in this mixture. These were the Phoenicians. Another excerpt followed: A colony of Rishis with followers went over to Europe. Here he found the old Hyperborean element, and in the south the Atlantic one. The Hyperboreans had already mixed with the Atlanteans; so only a small remnant of them remained. In the south, Hyperborean was almost non-existent. Here, on the soil of ancient Greece, the Pelasgian population arose with a kind of nature service that is reminiscent of Egyptian practices in many ways; only here it is more of a local cult instead of an ancestral cult: we find sacred trees, sacred caves; it is more closely tied to nature. There was a belief that the sacred is more closely tied to the place than to the tribe - Zeus of Dodona and others. The physical place becomes sacred. That was the new formation. In Italy, too, a mixture of ancient Atlantean and Rishi culture is being brought into the physical plan again. Here, what had developed in the Atlanteans as a social being and as an attachment to technical culture penetrated: in the social legislation and technical skill of the Etruscans. In the north, the mixture of Hyperborean and Rishi culture gave rise to the new formation of Celtic culture. What was found was an Atlantean-Hyperborean culture that was of little use. A new influence had to be given, and the result is the Celtic mixture with the Druid culture. This has so much spirituality because it absorbed the highly spiritual, which went beyond the spirituality of the Atlantic and Lemurian. Because it had the Hyperborean element in it, the Celtic could not quite withstand it and was absorbed by the later cultures. We now come to the third sending forth. It is very complicated. It goes partly into what was previously prepared by the first two. We have preserved it in the representations of different peoples. Wherever the strong, powerful people are already in the foreground in the traditions. Thus, above all, a group of initiates went west and fertilized the already fertilized pre-Semitic element once again. Because it is about summarizing everything that was originally poured into the great idea of state-building. The result of this third sending out according to this poetry is Genesis, the Old Testament. Another dissemination was the one that went to Asia Minor and formed what is preserved in Trojan culture and its daughter cultures, one of which is Albalong culture. These initiates had the task of taking over state formation as soon as it suited the various peoples. We have thus become acquainted with three groups of initiates, the first of which had the task of creating the religious culture, the second of creating the material cultural basis - Persia - and the third of forming the state and consolidating the passions. This happens in forms adapted to the different peoples, as in Troy, or Alba Longa, or the theocratic state of Palestine. But essentially these were only preparations, made with peoples who were not called to form states. Among the people who were most called upon to carry the spiritual out onto the physical plane through their culture, the formation of states was least successful: the Greeks are above all the people of art. The highest personal thing brought out onto the physical plane: that is art. The initiate of the third group - in the case of the Greeks - is the hero, the strong man. Over there in Asia, the peoples had already mixed repeatedly. And those who had received the highest legislation, the Jews, had mixed so much that they had already become hypertrophied. In contrast, in Europe, in central Italy, there had been a simpler mixture. We find a very strong Atlantic element there. The Etruscan colony had cooperated with Alba Longa, the priest state, and brought about Rome. Here there was simple racial formation and a great deal of Atlanticism in it. The two traits were enough to establish what is called the Etruscan-Roman culture, with the priestly influence that had to lead to the institution of the Pontifex Maximus. The conditions were simple, and so the people of the Roman Republic emerged, who developed personal bravery purely for themselves. The Roman citizen, the cives, was the fully-fledged human being who felt entirely as a personality. The Greeks had to feel themselves above all as wise men and artists. When they cultivated what most emerges from the personality, oratory and law, they had to perish. Private law and oratory, eloquence, were only developed to perfection in Rome. The Greek first sensed [...] and then developed the perfect personality by representing it in his gods. The Roman represents in his person the perfected personality as a citizen, as a real human being. The works of Greek sculptors, so to speak, arise in the Romans and come to life. Thus, in Rome something was being prepared that the Lodge of the Initiates could use to give a further impetus. The highest peak of spiritual life had to be taken for this purpose. This could only be found where most spiritual impacts had occurred, namely in the Near East. There spirit was grafted onto spirit:
This wonderful mixture is expressed in all branches of intellectual life. The new influence there could only come from a personality who came from far away, not from their own country. The lodge carefully selected the family from which an initiate was to come. The old Rishi culture had prepared, foretold the initiate who must now come. It was written in the Sibylline books. Thus, in secret, away from Judaism, in Galilee, the Messiah of the fourth sub-race was being prepared. There in Galilee, Judaism had never gained a firm foothold; it had not penetrated there. The Galileans are very mixed in racial character. It was important that He should have nothing of the Galilean, that He should come as from the hidden. That is why the apocrypha tell of him as being a son of his mother, and speak of his unchaste birth. This was Jesus of Nazareth, the Galilean. He was initiated to the third degree of a disciple. Now it was a matter of making him the highest initiate for everything that was to be realized on the physical plane. This was done by taking possession of the whole personality by another, who represents the whole fifth root race, by the Christ. In the Greco-Latin culture, the whole fifth post-Atlantic epoch emerged, and this is symbolically represented in the descent of the dove. If one wanted to express the truths at issue here, one could only choose the highest form. The Manu said to himself, “I will make the fourth sub-race into a union of all the previous impacts and endow it with the spirit of the entire fifth root race. The Christ can do this, who is the actual impact of the entire fifth root race. The Manu prepared it, and Christ, as it were, entered into what had been prepared. The revelation of the actual secret of the fourth race was to take place. Earlier it had only been prepared, the highest initiates had seen it, the others prepared. That was the darkness into which the light came. If we survey the development, we have results that are prepared by the fact that the first three sub-races are gradually educated to become personalities - until in the fourth the most profound part of the personality is seized, as the equality of all people before God. Initiates who were sent out were not begotten by the father and mother of the race in question. They were sexless everywhere. This is really said in the Gospel of John:
Christ is the inwardly divine principle; he must pour himself into forms and takes the form of the law from the theocratic state, from Judaism. The Jews could not accept the new forms, they already had their own; that was the highest. But He had to accept them, step by step He had to emerge onto the physical plane. So He expressed His wisdom through the wisdom of ancient Judaism. Now this wisdom had to be understood. This wisdom could be understood where the physical plane had already been conquered, where philosophy existed. That is why the first church fathers came from the Greeks. In their philosophy, they had developed the ability to understand that which emerged on the physical plane. When the will emerged in the personality, they could also understand this personality. The people who had formed a Zeus, who had incarnated a God in their art of sculpture, could also understand the idea of an incarnated God. This idea could only come to life through the Roman people. The human being who had formed the personality could have this idea. That was the Roman. The Christ Himself is formed in the Jewish people, He is understood through Greek gnosis and the Greek apostles: Paul and the Greek evangelist John. But all this could not have led to the spread of Christianity on the physical plane, but at most to an understanding. The Romans, who adopt Greek culture, destroy Jerusalem, go to Asia, become Christians. So: Therefore, Christianity spread only after the destruction of Jerusalem and has a specifically Roman form. In Rome, the physical vessel for the Christ had already been prepared, namely the state, which was already founding the empire, and the priest who could administer it, the Pontifex Maximus. This brings us to the fourth sub-race. We have seen that it was carefully prepared. The fifth sub-race is still in the process of being formed. We have reached the summit or center. The following teachers are therefore those who have to preserve what has been created in order to apply it again on the particular physical. It is a matter of some initiates specifying these summits for the individuals. Thus we have preserved the Christian tradition in the Brotherhood of the Holy Grail. Christianity is constantly degenerating and degenerating. So it is a matter of continually giving new impetus from what is called the Mount Montsalvatsch, the Grail. These impacts take on a different character. Again, it is the Rishis who experience the actual teaching in a Christian way and only ever want to protect original Christianity from degeneration. In this way, the most diverse attempts at regeneration have been made. The first attempt can be traced back to an initiate who cannot yet play a historical role because this is still prehistory. However, he is mentioned in legend. He is the German apostle Boniface. He is the source of the original form in which Christianity came from Ireland to Germany, with a mixture of Druidic culture, Indian influence, and the impact of Dionysius the Areopagite. A new influence was given and a new possibility created by the initiate known as Lohengrin. This initiation proceeded from a very complicated point of view, as all initiations become complicated. For it was necessary to connect the original Christianity, which had developed continuously from Dionysius the Areopagite through Scotus Eriugena up to scholasticism and mysticism. This current could indeed have an effect on peoples through preaching; but gradually it had been lost to the people because it went to the highest heights of thought. Therefore, a fertilization had to be brought from the original spiritual element. A high point had been reached, but it was also an impasse, and in order to have an effect on the initiate Lohengrin, a new fertilization from the Orient had to be brought about through the crusades. The essential thing that emerged from this is the Knights Templar, the actual messengers of the Holy Grail. They build a place of wisdom at the site of Solomon's Temple and after they are prepared there, they become servants of the Holy Grail, are initiated there by the Grail. This happens at the turn of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and is prepared in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Now we are in the preparatory stage of the fifth sub-race, the Germanic-English. From the Temple service we can see that it is about the application of Christianity to a new race. The service of the Temple Knights prepares for the transition of Christianity to full externality [...] in Christianity, which later leads to Protestantism. This helps us to understand the actual confession of the Knights Templar and their secret cult. They said to themselves: The Christ represented by the Western Church means nothing to us, because he is the Christ on the cross. But we proclaim the Christ who walked in Jerusalem and received initiation from the Baptist; our teachers about Christ are therefore not church teachers and church fathers, but John the Baptist, the initiator himself. Therefore, the main ceremony consisted of spitting out the crucifix symbol of Western worship and the unconsecrated wafer. This symbolized the contempt of Roman Christianity, the one that had developed into Catholicism, and it was prepared to turn away from Catholic Christ back to evangelical Christ. That was one principle. Another was:
Out of these two principles the culture of the Anglo-German race has developed: the religious-Protestant on the one hand, the scientific of the physical world on the other. But this was only the vessel. The content came in a roundabout way through the Moors. So here we have a Semitic influence again. There were five Semitic influences that provided the content. The mold was always prepared. The Rosicrucians guarded the common basis of what diverged into a purely secular science and a materialistic religion. They were the ones who wanted to hold together. The Rosicrucians essentially studied evolution in the concrete within the fifth sub-race, prepared social legislation and will be the actual leaders of the sixth sub-race. |
| 68c. Goethe and the Present: The Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily
27 Nov 1904, Cologne |
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| The “higher truths” were only disseminated in a limited society, for example, the Rosicrucians. No one who was not prepared was admitted into this society. But those who belonged to it spoke of it in all kinds of allusions. |
| Between his studies in Leipzig and his stay in Strasbourg, Goethe received an initiation from a personality who was deeply initiated into the secrets of the Rosicrucians. From that time on, he speaks in a mystical, theosophical language. In the first part of “Faust” there is a strange phrase that is put in quotation marks: “the sage speaks”. |
| 68c. Goethe and the Present: The Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily
27 Nov 1904, Cologne |
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It is repeatedly emphasized that Theosophy is not something new, not something that has only come to mankind in our time. But it is particularly interesting that even personalities close to us face it in such a way that we may count them among the spirits we can call “Theosophists”. Alongside Herder, Jean Paul, Novalis and Lessing, Goethe appears as one of the most outstanding Theosophists. Some people, however, might object to this, because there is not much evidence of theosophy in Goethe's works that we know of. In Goethe's time, it was not yet possible to spread esoteric truths throughout the world. The “higher truths” were only disseminated in a limited society, for example, the Rosicrucians. No one who was not prepared was admitted into this society. But those who belonged to it spoke of it in all kinds of allusions. Thus Goethe at the most diverse places of his writings. Only those who are equipped with theosophical wisdom can read Goethe correctly. For example, “Faust” cannot be understood without that. The “Fairy Tale” is Goethe's apocalypse, his revelation, in whose symbolic representation the deepest secrets are contained. That Goethe reveals his theosophical worldview in the “Fairy Tale” can only be understood if one knows the reason for it. Schiller had invited Goethe to collaborate on the “Horen”. Schiller himself had contributed the essay “On the Aesthetic Education of Man” to this journal. It poses the question: How does the person who lives in the everyday arrive at the highest ideals, at a mediation between the supersensible and the sensible? Schiller saw in beauty a descent of the highest wisdom into the sensible. He was able to express in a wonderfully vivid way what seemed to him to be a bridge leading from the sensual to the supersensual. Goethe now says that he cannot express himself in philosophical terms about the highest questions of existence, but he wants to do so in a great picture. At that time he contributed the “Fairytale” to the Horen, in which he attempted to solve these questions in his own way. Goethe also expressed himself in a thoroughly theosophical sense elsewhere. He had already incorporated his views into “Faust” in his early youth. Between his studies in Leipzig and his stay in Strasbourg, Goethe received an initiation from a personality who was deeply initiated into the secrets of the Rosicrucians. From that time on, he speaks in a mystical, theosophical language. In the first part of “Faust” there is a strange phrase that is put in quotation marks: “the sage speaks”. Goethe was already attached to the theosophical idea that there are beings among us today who are already further along than the rest of humanity, that they are the leaders of people from supersensible spheres, although they are also embodied in the body. They have attained a knowledge that goes far beyond what can be understood with the senses. The passage in question reads:
When you get to know Jacob Böhme, you get to know one of the sources from which Goethe drew his theosophical wisdom. [J. Boehme's “Aurora” is the dawn, the astral world.] We can only understand some of Goethe's work if we grasp it in this sense. In the poem “The Divine”, Goethe speaks of the law that we call karma, and also of those exalted beings:
If anyone now wants real proof of Goethe's theosophical way of thinking, let them read the poem under “God and the World”, called “Howard's Memorial”. The first line reads:
— Kama Rupa is the principle of man, the astral body, as we know it from theosophical teachings. When Goethe spoke intimately to those with whom he was united in the lodge, he spoke of ideal divine beings who shine forth as examples for mankind. This was intended for his close circle, for example, what he says in the poem “Symbolum”:
He speaks openly of the masters when he speaks intimately to his fellow masons. But it is the fairy tale of the green snake and the beautiful lily that most profoundly introduces us to his view. In it, we find a depiction of the three realms in which human beings live: the physical, the soul or astral world, and the spiritual world. The symbol for the astral or soul world is water. For Goethe, water always represents the soul. This is the case in his poem about the soul and fate:
He also knew the mental realm that man experiences between two states of embodiment, between death and birth, the Devachan, the realm of the gods. Man strives unceasingly for this realm. He fights here on earth to reach this realm. The alchemists regarded the chemical processes as a symbol for the striving for this spiritual realm. They call this realm: the realm of the lily. Man is called the lion who fights for this realm, and the lily is the bride of the lion. Goethe also hinted at this in “Faust”:
Here Goethe speaks of the marriage of man with the spirit (in the lukewarm bath is in the soul bath. The soul is the water, the red lion is the human being). In the “Fairytale”, Goethe also depicted the three realms: the sensual realm as the one bank; the soul realm as the river; the Devachan — spiritual realm — as the opposite bank, on which the garden of the beautiful lily is located, which symbolically represents the Devachan for the alchemists. Man's entire relationship to the three realms is brought into a symbolically beautiful presentation. We have come over from the spiritual realm and strive back to it. Goethe has a ferryman bring the will-o'-the-wisps from the spiritual realm to the sensual realm. The ferryman can bring everyone across, but not bring them back. We came over without our will, but we cannot go back the same way. We have to work our way back into the spiritual realm. The will-o'-the-wisps live on gold. They absorb this gold. It penetrates their bodies. But they immediately throw it off in all directions. They want to throw the gold at the ferryman as a reward. But he says that the river cannot tolerate the gold; it would foam up wildly. Gold always represents wisdom. The will-o'-the-wisps are people who seek wisdom but do not unite with its essence, instead regurgitating it undigested. The river represents the soul's life, the sum of human instincts, drives, passions. If the gold of wisdom is carelessly thrown into the river of passions, the soul is disturbed, stirred up. Goethe always pointed out that man must first undergo catharsis, purification, in order to become ripe for the reception of wisdom. For if wisdom is brought into unpurified passion, the passion becomes fanatical, and people then remain trapped in their lower ego. The ascent of Kama to Manas is dangerous if it is not connected with a sacrifice of the lower self. Regarding this, Goethe says in the “West-Eastern Divan”:
The human being must be willing to sacrifice himself. The will-o'-the-wisps are still caught in the Ahamkara, in the lower self. Wisdom cannot tolerate this. The soul life must slowly be purified and slowly ascend. In the meadow, the will-o'-the-wisps throw gold around. There they meet the snake. It consumes the pieces of gold. It makes them one with itself. It has the power not to make its ego proud and selfish, not to strive upwards in a vertical, arrogant way, but to move in a horizontal line in the crevices of the rocks and gradually to attain perfection. A temple is depicted, which is located in the crevices of the earth. The snake has already been roaming back and forth through it, groping and sensing that mysterious beings dwell there. But now the old man comes with the lamp. The snake has become luminous because of the gold. The temple is illuminated by its radiance. The old man's lamp has the property that it only shines where there is already light. There it shines with a very special light. So on the one hand there is the snake that has become luminous because of the gold, and on the other hand there is the man with the lamp, which also shines. The light on both sides makes everything visible in the temple. In the corners are four kings, a golden, a silver, a bronze and a mixed king. The snake could only find these by touching them before, but now they have become visible to it through their own glow. They are the three higher principles of man and the four lower ones. The iron king is Atma, the divine Self; the silver king is Budhi, the love through which man can communicate with all men; and the golden king is Manas, the wisdom that radiates out into the world and that can absorb this radiant wisdom. When man has acquired wisdom unselfishly, he can see things in their true essence without the veil of Maya. The snake now clearly sees the three higher principles of man. The golden king is Manas, just as the gold everywhere signifies Manas. The four lower principles are represented, symbolized, by the mixed king. In the lower principles, too, Atma, Budhi and Manas have moved into the sphere of appearance, but disharmoniously. Only when it is purified does something develop that cannot exist in disharmony. The temple is the place of initiation, the secret school that only those who bring the light themselves, who are as selfless as the snake, can enter. The temple is to be revealed one day, rising above the river. It is the realm of the future, towards which we are all striving. The secret places of learning shall be led up. Everything that man is shall strive upwards, dissolve in harmony, strive towards the higher principles. What was once taught in the mysteries shall become an obvious secret. The wanderers shall go over and across the river, from the sensual to the supersensible world and back again. All people will be united in harmony. The old man with the lamp represents where man can already gain knowledge today without having reached the summit of wisdom, namely through the powers of piety, of the mind, the powers of faith. Faith needs light from outside if it is to truly lead to the higher mysteries. The serpent and the old man with the lamp have the powers of the spirit, which already guide [the soul] today and lead into the future. He who already feels these powers today knows this from certain secrets. The old man therefore says that he knows three secrets. But the fourth secret is spoken of in the strangest way. The serpent hisses something in his ear. Then the old man calls out:
The time has come when a great multitude of people will have grasped which is the way. The serpent has said that it is ready to sacrifice itself. It has reached the point where it has recognized that the human being must first die in order to become:
To be in the full sense of the word, man can only through love, devotion, sacrifice. The snake is ready for that. This will be revealed when man is ready for this sacrifice. Then the temple will stand by the river. The will-o'-the wisp have not been able to pay off their debt; they had to promise the ferryman to pay it later. The river only takes the fruits of the earth: three cabbages, three onions, three artichokes. The will-o'-the wisp come to the old man's wife and behave very strangely there. They have licked up the gold from the walls. They want to stuff themselves full of wisdom and give it back. The pug dog eats some of the gold and dies, as all living things must perish from it. It cannot absorb the wisdom as the snake absorbs and transforms it, so it has a killing effect. The old woman has to promise the will-o'-the-wisps to pay off her debt to the ferryman. When the old man comes home with the lamp, he sees what has happened. He tells the old woman to keep her promise, but also to take the dead pug to the beautiful lily because she brings everything dead back to life. The old woman goes to the ferryman with the basket. There she encounters two strange things. She finds the great giant on the way, who has the peculiarity of letting his shadow cross the river in the evening, so that the traveler can then cross the river on his shadow. In addition, the path over is conveyed when the snake arches over at midday. The giant can mediate the transition, but so can the snake when the sun is at its highest, when man elevates his ego to the divine through the shining sun of knowledge. In the solemn moments of life, in the moments of complete selflessness, man unites with the deity. The giant is the rough physical development that man must go through. He also comes into the realm of the beyond through this; but only in the twilight, when his consciousness is extinguished. But this is a dangerous path, taken by those who develop psychic powers within themselves, who put themselves into a trance state. This transition happens in the twilight of the trance state. Schiller also once wrote about the shadow of the giant. These are the dark forces that lead man over. When the old woman passes the giant, the giant steals a cabbage head, an onion and an artichoke, so that the old woman only has part of them, which she wants to use to pay off the debt of the will-o'-the-wisps. The number three is therefore no longer complete. What we need and have to weave into our soul life is taken away from us by the twilight forces. There is something dangerous in giving oneself to these. The lower forces must be purified by the soul. Only then can the body ascend when the soul fully absorbs it. Everything that surrounds an inner core in the form of shells is a symbol for the human being's shells. Indian allegory refers to these shells as the leaves of the lotus flower. The human physical nature must be purified in the soul. We have to pay off, surrender the lower principles to the soul life. We have expressed the paying off of the debt in the fact that the river has to be paid off. That is the whole process of karma. Since the river is not satisfied with the payment of the old woman, she has to dip her hand into the river. After that, she can only feel the hand, but no longer see it. That which is external and sensual to us humans, what is visible about a person, is the body; it must be purified by the soul life. This symbolizes that if a person cannot atone for it in the nature of the plant, he must commit a guilt. Then the actual physical nature of the person becomes invisible. Because the old woman cannot atone for her guilt, she becomes invisible. The I can only be seen in the splendor of the day when it is purified by the soul life. The old woman says: Oh, my hand, which is the most beautiful thing about me. It is precisely that which distinguishes man from the animal, that which shines through him as spirit, becomes invisible if he has not purified it through karma. The beautiful youth had aspired to the realm of the lily – spirituality – and the beautiful lily had paralyzed him. By this, Goethe means the ancient truth that man must first be purified, must first have undergone catharsis, so that he no longer reaches wisdom through guilt, so that he can absorb the splendor of higher spirituality within himself. The youth had not yet been prepared by the purification. All living things that are not yet ripe are killed by the lily. All dead things that have gone through the “Stirb und Werde” are revived by the lily. Goethe now says that one is ripe for freedom who has first freed himself within. Jakob Böhme also says that man must develop out of the lower principles.
Man must first mature, must first be purified before he can enter the realm of the spirit, the lily. In the ancient mysteries, man had to pass through stages of purification before he could become a mystic. The youth must first pass through these stages. They lead him to the lily. The snake signifies development. We see those who are seeking the new path, all those who are striving towards spirituality, gathered around the lily. But first the temple must rise above the river. All move towards the river, the will-o'-the-wisps in front; they unlock the gate. Selfish wisdom is the bridge to selfless wisdom. Through the self, wisdom leads to selflessness. The snake has sacrificed itself. Now one understands what love is, a sacrifice of the lower self for the good of humanity, full brotherhood. The entire assembly moves towards the temple. The temple rises above the river. The youth is resurrected. He is endowed with Atma, Budhi and Manas. Atma, in the form of the brazen king, steps before the youth and hands him the sword. It is the highest will, not mixed with the others. Atma should work in man so that the sword is on the left and the right is free. Before that, man works in particularity, the war of all against all. But now, when man is purified, peace will take the place of struggle, the sword on the left for protection, the right free to do good. The second king represents what is known to us as the second principle, as the Budhi – piety, mind, through which man turns to the Highest in faith. Silver is the symbol of piety. The second king says:
because we are dealing here with the power of the mind. The appearance here is the appearance of beauty. Goethe associated a religious reverence with art. He saw in art the revelation of the divine, the realm of beautiful appearance is the realm of piety. The brazen king signifies – without the lower principles – power, the silver king peace, the golden king wisdom. He says:
The youth is the four-principled man who develops into the higher principles. The four principles are paralyzed by the spirit before they have undergone the purifying development. Then the three higher principles work in harmony in man. Then he will be strong and powerful; then he may marry the lily. This is the marriage between the soul and the spirit of man. The soul has always been represented as something feminine; the mystery of the eternal, the immortal, is presented here.
Goethe used the same image here in the “Fairytale”, when the young man marries the beautiful lily. Now all that is alive passes over the vaulting bridge from the sacrificed human self. Wayfarers pass over and across. All the kingdoms are now connected in beautiful harmony. The old woman is rejuvenated, as is the old man with the lamp; the old has passed away and everything has become new. The ferryman's small hut is now included in the temple in a silver-plated state as a kind of altar. What unconsciously took man across before now takes him across in the conscious state. The composite king has collapsed. The jack-o'-lanterns licked out the gold, for they are still directed towards the low. The giant now indicates the time. What used to be the sensual principle, what led across in the twilight hour, what is sensual, what belongs to the state of nature, now indicates the evenly passing time. As long as man has not developed the three higher principles, the past and the future are in conflict. The giant can then only work in an inharmonious way. Now time has become something harmonious in this ideal state. The thought fastens that which fluctuates in a lasting way, which is expressed in the following words:
What is seen in the Pythagorean school as the rhythm of the universe, the music of the spheres, the sounding of the planets that move rhythmically around the sun, arises through the realization of the divine thought. For the mystic, a planet was a being of a higher order. This is why Goethe also says:
That man has the ability within himself to develop to the highest divine, he says in the words:
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| 68b. The Circular Flow of Man's Life within the World Of Sense, Soul And Spirit: Asceticism and Illness
13 Dec 1909, Nuremberg |
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| Feel this mighty symbol deeply in your soul, do not just stare at it rigidly, but put into it all your perceptions and feelings, put them all into it as they fill you with devotion and devotion; when you compare the whole path of development through plants and humans up to the ideal of man in whom the red blood again flows pure and chastened, as in the red plant-juice in the petals of the red rose, feel and see this symbol, so that the Rosicrucian symbol becomes not merely an idea, a symbol, but a living power. Let all your feelings come to life in you as you contemplate and imagine, and let your heart warm as you do so, let this symbol come to life in you! |
| Through certain exercises, through meditation, through the presentation and contemplation of the Rosicrucian, man can strengthen his abilities and can also achieve certain visionary, clairvoyant abilities; powerful images and so on can be awakened in him, visionary clairvoyance is attained. |
| 68b. The Circular Flow of Man's Life within the World Of Sense, Soul And Spirit: Asceticism and Illness
13 Dec 1909, Nuremberg |
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Today we are to speak about the subject of asceticism. This subject is one that is judged differently from various sides. In asceticism, a spiritual current is usually already seen that, in what it represents in itself, already shows a kind of illness and that cannot at all proceed from healthy foundations of existence. But asceticism is an effective means of perfecting life, of reaching higher levels of existence. Sometimes asceticism is also seen as a withdrawal of human energies that could be used for existence; thus moderation and asceticism are considered to be more or less synonymous. The word is well suited to asceticism:
Asceticism was something quite different in ancient Greece than it was in the Middle Ages. The nuance established by the Middle Ages for asceticism is indeed a questionable one. But spiritual science or theosophy has every interest in putting asceticism in its true light. Asceticism in the sense in which it was meant in ancient Greece and wherever the word was understood in its general meaning has something to do with what underlies Theosophy. Asceticism is something that can lead to the highest heights of existence, but taken to an extreme, it can become idleness or even worse. “Asceticism” means ‘exercising one's powers’ so that one is able to develop and exercise one's highest abilities. ‘Askesis’, the Greek word, is related to ‘athlete’ and means ‘to make oneself strong’. In that the word indicates this in its original meaning, it has to do with the basis of spiritual research in Theosophy. And now we want to go into the distinguishing feature of asceticism in relation to many other scientific currents. The theosophist has a different concept of knowledge than that which many other people have of knowing the world and what underlies it. With the senses one can know the external world, says the intellect; but one cannot explore everything about it, it exceeds the limits of its knowledge. Speaking in this sense means professing the opposite of what theosophy is; it says: reality is unlimited! It would even be able to give man a new sense, a physical sense, of reality if necessary. There are no limits to being, being is infinite. Man's soul is indeed limited in time to one stage of development, but it is up to man to expand this soul within it. Man must not presume to want to exceed the limits of his knowledge, as science says against it. But spiritual science says: Try to expand your spiritual knowledge, your spiritual-scientific knowledge, as much as possible. The goal is the development of the soul, of the cognitive abilities of the human being. It must be admitted that there is something in the soul, something germinal in it. A person should not say, “This is how I am,” and be satisfied with it, but should say, “This is how I am now, and I will achieve new forms of existence to practice my powers.” This is asceticism. Asceticism is something that enriches the human soul and makes a person stronger, opening up true and new realms of reality to them. Usually, asceticism is described as someone who practices it appearing gaunt and hollow-eyed, being idle, hating life and being disgusted by all the joys and demands of life. But an ascetic, properly understood, is akin to an athlete; true asceticism is elevation, expansion, enrichment of the true essence of man. Spiritual science or theosophy makes its knowledge and research accessible to a larger circle of people today. But you need not think that everyone must therefore also do the exercises - meditation and concentration and so on - and that the result will be the same for everyone as for the blind person who would have to be operated on, the opening of the eyes. Not everyone needs to do this, and not everyone will experience it; and not everyone can or needs to become a researcher in the spiritual world. But he, for his work in the spiritual world, needs the clairvoyant consciousness. To understand the messages of the researcher, none of this is necessary, one should just take them in impartially and examine them seriously. Everyone should test them against their own logic and sense of truth, which every person carries within them as a natural thing that they can rely on; this will then teach them to reject what a charlatan says and to agree with what a true spiritual researcher says; it will also teach them to distinguish one from the other. It often happens that messages from the spiritual world arouse interest among listeners, especially those that deal with the subject of what kind of exercises and so on are necessary to enter the spiritual world. We will now begin with such a description today; how far one can follow it will be best seen from the subject itself. The asceticism that is concerned with living in the spiritual world – and this is the only thing that matters for spiritual science – endeavors to develop abilities and perceptions in people that are silent in ordinary human life. Consider that you perceive from morning till evening through stimulation from the outside world; so you have a consciousness of yourself and of what is around you. In the evening, when you are tired, your soul can no longer perceive, your consciousness is silent, it falls silent. While you sleep, you are in the spiritual world, but you know nothing of it; why? Because today's man needs those external stimuli to see, which, as it were, entice perception. If he could give himself this push, which the objects give him as an external stimulus, this impetus from within, then man would have within him a stronger inner power than that which drives him from outside to perceive. But then he could also perceive in a world to which he drives himself from within, while he must perceive through external stimuli. Let us assume that the former would be the case and that man would be blind and deaf to external stimuli, but would be able to receive the impulse to perceive within himself through invisible senses; then man would have awakened inner spiritual abilities in himself. But this can also happen in another way, namely in the sense in which we speak of asceticism in spiritual science. That is, a person commands himself through strong inner strength that he does not want to see or hear the external world; it sinks away for him, but not through fatigue, but through his arbitrariness. It is an inner world that then emerges, the outer one sinks. Now let us turn to what man must do to achieve this. The preparation for this consists in his devoting himself to certain exercises. True asceticism has nothing to do with external means; what happens is an intimate, albeit energetic, process of the innermost of man's spiritual powers. The first thing he has to acquire is an especially heightened, intensified power of imagination! This occurs when a person stimulates his inner powers in such a way that he awakens within himself what had previously been dormant forces within him. ... (As an example of this, Dr. Steiner cites the dialogue that one can imagine between the secret teacher and the mystery student when the student is being instructed in the contemplation of plants and humans. Not to forget, however, that this dialogue never took place in this way. (Description of the dialogue.) This is to tell us: Man can stray, but the plant leads a pure chaste existence. The chaste red plant sap and the passionate human red blood. These thoughts must be transformed into an image and tried to visualize as a real ideal of man. Through this exercise, man will then gradually reach a stage of development through his own arbitrariness, as the plant has already reached a lower stage today. Goethe expresses this beautifully:
In order to understand this ascent of man over himself, man must overcome something in himself, so as not to let it gain mastery over himself in self-aggrandizement. The disciple was told: Imagine that which should die as a withered piece of wood in the shape of a cross, and that which should come to life when man has conquered that which is expressed by his red blood, as a symbol of the purified plant-juice, think of it as the red rose. Imagine this vividly before your soul, surround the wood of the cross with living red roses, and you have before you the “Rose Cross”. Feel this mighty symbol deeply in your soul, do not just stare at it rigidly, but put into it all your perceptions and feelings, put them all into it as they fill you with devotion and devotion; when you compare the whole path of development through plants and humans up to the ideal of man in whom the red blood again flows pure and chastened, as in the red plant-juice in the petals of the red rose, feel and see this symbol, so that the Rosicrucian symbol becomes not merely an idea, a symbol, but a living power. Let all your feelings come to life in you as you contemplate and imagine, and let your heart warm as you do so, let this symbol come to life in you! It is not an object that can be awakened by external perception and stimulation of the senses, nothing that can be seen in external reality, something that cannot awaken an external image in us. Hundreds and hundreds of such symbols could be cited from spiritual science or theosophy. But it is precisely such symbols, which do not come from external reality, that make man strong inwardly, that steel his will so that he can perceive a new world around him. The aim of such asceticism is the inner development of the human being's powers. We have characterized and shown what true asceticism is by the above example, and how through it man can become a citizen of the higher worlds. Asceticism is that which truly opens up a new, spiritual world to man and through which much can be communicated to him from it. At first, man should learn to hear the communications of the secret researcher and not immediately practice them himself. It is better if he first seeks to understand with his logic what the secret researcher says as a message from the spiritual world. So what we call asceticism leads us up into the spiritual worlds; and now let us see how humanity can relate to it. At first there will be those who say that these are fantasists, dreamers; and they will reject these explanations; but they will not always be wrong with us; because those who speak thus should say to themselves, one must first examine before one rejects. And we must say to ourselves that we must first know the reason why they reject, and we must have patience and consider that it is indeed a new world that is being shown to people. Wherever something like this is given, there is something that flows into us; we are to acquire new concepts, new ideas, which is not easy for everyone. For example, someone who initially only has a certain amount of abilities in his or her self cannot absorb this new, spiritual knowledge; for him, absorbing it would be like overeating in a spiritual sense. For him, to reject it is nothing more than his ego showing that he is incapable of absorbing it at first. It is instinct and self-preservation that tempt such people to reject spiritual science. These truths would extinguish their inner being; that is the one extreme where those poor egos of the present reject the truths of the spiritual researchers. Others have a tendency to absorb everything that comes up and can be heard, but they also lack the will to penetrate it with understanding. Out of laziness, they don't want to make an effort, but they have an inclination to absorb, but they don't have the will to grasp what they hear with their will. But only then can harmony arise between the listener and what is heard; because only through receiving and processing does understanding arise. So one part is organized in such a way that it is unable to expand its spiritual abilities; it must reject the truths of Theosophy out of a sense of self-preservation. Others come from a sense of sensationalism, which is even less good; if one only wants to receive and not understand, that gives rise to blind faith in authority. One then hears them say: He said it, and so it must be true! But the one about whom this is said would rather be considered an authority less often, but in return be better understood. (Example: What Lessing says about Klopstock). The same applies to the secret researcher: he does not want to be praised at all and much rather not revered as a master personality, but to be understood and tested! For it is true, as has already been mentioned elsewhere, that if one wants to examine comfortably and not logically, it is then dangerous for the teacher to make the communications from the spiritual world to such people, for they can no longer distinguish truth from humbug and deception. There is only one way for the layman or the disciple to find the truth, and that is to examine everything with the strictest logic. Now, we want to draw the attention of those who just want to absorb everything and who say, “the master said it,” to the danger of just blindly believing and not checking; you lose the strength and the educational result of the truth itself. For what truth is for man, its immense significance lies precisely in the fact that it is established in the innermost being of man. I know that three times three is nine; and if a million people come and claim that it is ten! This makes truth that great, that powerful educational tool, that the guiding principle for it lies within man, in his own inner being. This is why man makes something else the guiding principle of his inner being when it is not only about what comes from external sense perceptions. But whoever only wants to hear new things abandons the educational means of truth, whereby truth is that strict means of education. Those who allow themselves to be overfed with truths allow the lack of judgment to take root in their habits; they allow someone else to be their judge of truth, thereby losing their sense of truth and falling into a habitual attachment to and love of untruthfulness. Out of laziness, true people can develop a tendency towards dishonesty, lying, dishonesty. Man must realize that truth research is a duty; but this realization must spur him on to examine logically and rationally everything he is taught from the spiritual world. What people who are too lazy to examine do to themselves can be compared, in a very good sense, to drowning. The person in question loses their self; this kind of reception of spiritual truths is drowning. Now we want to discuss another thing that is even closer to what we call askesis or spiritual exercise. What does this askesis present itself as? We work on ourselves in order to become stronger for the world. Askesis is the practice of those powers that are not used at the present moment. Askesis can thus be compared to a healthy maneuver. The powers that are to be applied in an emergency are tested, tried and steeled there. Just as a military maneuver is related to war, so is asceticism related to the application of these forces themselves. The purpose of practicing the forces is for the sake of developing the forces; and the development of the forces must be done for the sake of growing the forces, so that they are there when you need them; therefore, you have to train them beforehand. You have to practice them before you need them, otherwise you won't have them when you need them. Example: If you train to be a singer, you have to practice a lot before you can perform and sing. Those who want to practice asceticism must practice and renounce the immediate use of their strength. You have to approach true asceticism as something that you only do to practice. This kind of asceticism can be compared with something else: with children's play; they also practice their strengths now on objective things, which, so to speak, they are not yet touched by, but they practice them in preparation to have them and to be able to develop them in the time when the seriousness of life approaches them. To make one's powers pliable, flexible and mobile is the meaning of asceticism in relation to higher worlds and levels of knowledge; to develop these powers into abilities is the purpose of true asceticism. In the development of spiritual abilities, something else comes into consideration. Through certain exercises, through meditation, through the presentation and contemplation of the Rosicrucian, man can strengthen his abilities and can also achieve certain visionary, clairvoyant abilities; powerful images and so on can be awakened in him, visionary clairvoyance is attained. Now the special thing occurs that the development of such powers can become dangerous if they are not directed towards something real, that is why study is such a necessary and important part of the student's task. One should not develop inner abilities without at the same time devoting oneself to an external, logical, rational understanding of the knowledge of the higher worlds. When a person becomes clairvoyant, a strong awareness must arise in him at the same time, and this is where the inner ability must be directed. Otherwise there is danger for the person. If a person has not previously acquired knowledge logically before entering the spiritual world, then the person does not know what to do with the inner ability. It is then a case of illusory images, of filling oneself with clairvoyant abilities; the process is then like an internal burning. For the awakening of such abilities is linked to the fact that the person feels the transition of abilities into passions, instincts, desires and so on. This is the other danger to which those who practice asceticism and who want to develop themselves in this way into the higher worlds, but without study, are exposed. These are the two dangerous pitfalls – drowning, self-destruction, and burning to death – that await those who do not properly and thoroughly practice the ascent to the spiritual world and do not strictly follow the instructions. Some will say, yes, meditation and all that stuff, that's fatal, I don't do that; but not eating meat, not drinking wine, I could dare to do that. But doing that is not so easy and not so simple and not successful either. Because only for the one who has already prepared his soul through spiritual work, for him the external measures and means are allowed as a relief for the journey. One must realize that they are only a relief, never anything else. Our body forms a resistance for our soul, and man would be able to do many things if he did not have this cumbersome body. Through external measures and aids, man can make this body more docile; he can prepare it as a better servant of the soul. A meat-free diet makes the body more docile in this respect and also more efficient. In our time of true health fanaticism, where sunbathing and all kinds of other natural remedies are used, it happens that precisely those who are passionate about sunbathing, when they have to spend a quarter of an hour in the sun or stay in it, sigh and moan: “Oh, it's unbearable!” But anyone who practices true asceticism can also take a good walk in the sun, because it teaches people to endure life. Preparing oneself, making oneself capable of living, that is true asceticism! Nothing can be achieved by external means alone. This only weakens the body – that is, if one only applies external means one-sidedly and does not regard them as adjuvants – because the body should be attuned to the soul. If the soul is lazy, so is the body. Otherwise the disharmony is too great. Those who apply and want to apply only external means to penetrate the spiritual world are preparing their body for a soul that they should first create. The soul must develop in parallel with the body. Here we have reached the limits of our consideration, where asceticism can lead to the soul and body becoming unhealthy. You have to take care of your body and soul when you start practicing, because higher cognitive abilities are developed that then become realities in our soul; and every reality affects our body and soul. What can be achieved through true asceticism is a reality. A robust person must have a strong connection with the physical world; because there is a certain connection between the external world and the human being. — Example: What Fichte says about ideals, namely that those who have them know very well that they cannot be applied directly in the world, but are nevertheless their driving force. A person who is whole within himself is also healthy when there is harmony between him, his inner self and the outer world. Based on this feeling, many people reject what they are not attuned to, for example, Theosophy. When a person takes in something and is not attuned to it and does not process it, then disharmony arises; this then takes hold of the physical body and what was previously only described as untruthfulness and so on, as the drowning of the soul, that is what then also makes the body sick. We must bear in mind that messages from the external world do not affect us so strongly that they cause such physical disharmony in the body; but messages from the spiritual world are realities, and therefore they affect the physical body; for everything physical is, after all, only an expression of the spiritual. This means that we make ourselves physically ill through the wrong reception and application of spiritual truths from the spirit. This is even worse if the soul has been enriched by clairvoyant abilities without logical study; then the person burns inwardly, and this is transferred all the more as a consuming fire to the outer body, and the body becomes diseased. Therefore, man must strive to remain in balance with soul and body and their inner powers. Study and attainment of inner abilities must go hand in hand. If this is not the case, the consequence is otherwise the soul burning within and a morbid exterior. With correct asceticism, the organism becomes supple and flexible; but if a person digresses in either direction, then through asceticism, misunderstood or misapplied, the person will fall into and pass over into mental and physical illness. This is the great responsibility for those who make communications from spiritual science. And the leaders of the movement must always be aware of the existence of this responsibility in the most serious sense. The greatest caution and care is therefore required when accepting each disciple. But this responsibility must not deter anyone who is called to show the way, to give advice, nor deter anyone from coming. For the saying of Heraclitus applies to every soul, and with this I will conclude:
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| 52. The History of Spiritism
30 May 1904, Berlin |
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| So that within such occult brotherhoods the way to the highest truth was taken like in the mysteries—I mention only that of the Rosicrucians, the deepest and most significant one, founded by Christian Rosenkreutz. This way can be investigated strictly historically till the 18th century. |
| He shows that there are mysterious ways to get to the highest truth. He also speaks of the Rosicrucian Society in such a way that the relationship is clear to any initiate. I would like to present three questions only to you to show you how these questions were discussed in veiled form at that time. |
| The theosophical movement revived the investigation of wisdom as it was nurtured in the mysteries and by the Rosicrucians in mediaeval times. It wants to spread what one has searched for in recent time on other ways. |
| 52. The History of Spiritism
30 May 1904, Berlin |
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Today it is my task to speak about a topic that has millions of enthusiastic followers in the world, on one side, that has found the most violent adversaries, on the other side, not only adversaries who combat this field of the so-called spiritism the sharpest, but also those who ridicule it who lump together it with the darkest superstition or what they call dark superstition; adversaries who want to ignore it only with empty words of joke and scorn. It may be not easy to speak just in our present about such a topic where as a rule with the “pros and cons” the most violent passions are aroused straight away. I would like to ask those listeners among you who may be enthusiastic followers of spiritism not to roundly condemn me immediately, if to you any of my explanations seems to correspond not completely to your views, because we representatives of theosophy, nevertheless, are combined with the spiritists in one matter in any case: we have the intention to investigate the higher spiritual worlds, those worlds which are beyond the everyday sense-perception. We are in agreement on that. However, on the other side, I would like to ask the scientists also to realise that that movement in whose name I myself speak has not chosen the slogan only like a signboard, as a phrase, but in the most serious sense of the word: no human opinion is higher than truth.—I would also like to ask the scientist to keep in mind that he may take into consideration that the views of science were subjected to change in the course of times, and that is why the scientific views of today cannot be regarded as being fixed. Let me now outline the development of the spiritistic movement without taking sides, because no human opinion is higher than truth. I would like to emphasise above all that the founders of the theosophical movement, Mrs. Helena Petrowna Blavatsky, and the great organiser, Colonel Henry Steel Olcott, went out from the spiritistic movement. They were experts of the spiritistic movement and turned to the theosophical movement only, after they had vigorously searched for truth before within the spiritistic movement, but had not found it. Theosophy does not want to combat spiritism, but to search for truth where it is to be found. I would like to emphasise something else that will surprise some of you, however, that will not at all surprise others who are in the know. Allow me to express it: you can never hear the last word about spiritism and similar matters from people like me who are forced to speak about that. You know that there is in any science a rule which is simply justified by the scientific methods, and the rule is that one shows the results of science before a bigger audience in popular way. If one wants to do more intimate acquaintance with these results, if one wants to get to know the more intimate truth, then a longer way is necessary: a way using the different methods in any detail. As a rule the researchers are not able to report in popular talks what takes place inside of the laboratories, of the observatories. That applies to the physical science. On the other side, in the great spiritual movements of the world somebody who is reasonable and allowed to express the words with regard to the spiritual views has to withhold the last word because the last words are still of quite different kind. They are of such a kind that they can hardly be discussed publicly. That is why you can never hear the very last word of this matter from an occultist—unless you are able and want to go his ways most intimately. But to those who are in the know of the matter something becomes clear from the way how a matter is said, what is said not only between the lines, but perhaps also between the words. After this introduction I would like to move on the topic which certainly has a tremendous cultural-historical significance even for somebody who wants to make it ridiculous. I would like to speak about the matter in a sense which really throws light from this point of view: what does spiritism search for today? Does it search for something new, or is it something ancient that it searches? Are the ways on which it looks absolutely novel, or has humankind gone on them since centuries or even since millennia?—If anybody puts these questions to himself, he reaches his goal concerning the history of spiritism the fastest. What the spiritists search for is at first the knowledge of those worlds which are beyond our sensory world, and secondly the significance of these worlds for the goal, for the determination of our human race. If we ask ourselves: were these problems not the tasks of humankind, since it strives on our earth and wants anything?—Then we must say to ourselves: yes. And because they are certainly the highest tasks, it would already appear as something absurd from the beginning if in the world history something absolutely new had appeared with regard to these questions. It seems if we look around in the old and new spiritistic movements, as if we deal with something absolutely new. The strongest adversaries refer to the fact that it has brought something absolutely new into the world, and other adversaries say that the human beings had never needed to combat this movement like nowadays. There a change must have happened in humankind with regard to the way to look at the case. This is illuminated to us like lightning if we get clear in our mind that humankind has behaved in three different ways to the questions which we call spiritistic today. There we have one way which we can find in the whole antiquity, a way which changes only in the Christian times. Then we have the second way to position ourselves to these questions, the whole Middle Ages through, till the 17th century. Only in the 17th century spiritism basically starts taking on a certain form that one can rightly call spiritism today. The questions that the spiritist wants to answer today were the object of the so-called mysteries the whole antiquity through. I try only to characterise with few lines what one has to understand by mysteries. It was not the custom in antiquity to announce wisdom publicly. One had another view of wisdom and truth. One believed the whole antiquity through that it is necessary to train super-sensible organs to the knowledge of the super-sensible truth at first. One realised the fact that in every human being spiritual forces slumber which are not developed with the average human being, that spiritual forces slumber in the human nature which one can wake and develop by means of long exercises, through steps of development, which the disciples of the mysteries describe as very difficult. If the neophyte had developed such forces in him and had become a researcher of truth, one was of the opinion that he is to the average human being in such a way as a sighted is to a blind-born. This was also the goal within the holy mysteries. One aimed to achieve something similar in the spiritual field as today the doctor aims to achieve with the blind-born if he operates him that he becomes sighted. One was clear about the fact that—like with a blind-born who is operated the colours of the light and the forms of the things appear—a new world appears to somebody whose internal senses are woken, a world which the everyday reason cannot perceive. Thus the follower of the mysteries tried to develop a human being of lower level to one of higher level, to an initiate. Only the initiate should be able to recognise something of the super-sensible truth by immediate beholding, by spiritual intuition. The big mass of human beings could get the truth by means of pictures. The myths of antiquity, the legends about gods and world origin, which simply appear today—indeed, in certain sense rightly—as childish views of humankind, they are nothing but disguises of the super-sensible truth. The initiate informed people in pictures of that which he could behold within the temple mysteries. The whole Eastern mythology, the Greek and Roman mythologies, the Germanic mythology and the mythologies of the savage peoples are nothing but metaphorical, symbolic representations of the super-sensible truth. Of course, only somebody can completely understand this who occupies himself not in such a way as anthropology and ethnology do it but also with their spirit. He sees that a myth like the Hercules legend shows a deep inner truth; he sees that the conquest of the Golden Fleece by Jason shows a deep and true knowledge. Then another way came with our calendar. I can indicate only roughly what I have to say. A certain basis of higher, spiritual truth was determined and made the object of the confessions, in particular of the Christian. And now this basis of spiritual truth was removed from any human research, from the immediate human striving. Those who studied the history of the Council of Nicaea know what I mean, and also those who understand the words of St. Augustine who says there: I would not believe in the truth of the divine revelation unless the authority of the church forces me.—Faith that determines a certain basis of the truth replaces the old mystery truth which retains it in pictures. Then follows the epoch when the big mass is no longer informed about the truth of the super-sensible world in pictures, but simply by authority. This is the second way how the big mass and those who had to lead them behaved to the highest truth. The mysteries provided it to the big mass on account of experience; it was provided by faith and fixed by authority in the Middle Ages. But beside those who had the task to retain the big mass by faith and authority were also those in the 12th and 13th centuries—they existed at all times, but they did not appear publicly—who wanted to develop by immediate own beholding to the highest truth. These searched for it on the same ways on which it had been searched for within the mysteries. That is why we find in mediaeval times beside those who are only priests, also the mystics, theosophists and occultists, those who talk in an almost incomprehensible language hard to be understood by modern materialists and rationalists. We find people who had reached the secrets on the ways which avoid the senses. In an even more incomprehensible language those people spoke who had the guidance of the spirit as mystery priests. So we hear from one that he had the ability to send his thoughts miles away; another boasted that he could transform the whole sea into gold if it was permitted. Another says that he could construct a vehicle with which he would be able to move through the air. There were times when people did not know how to do with such sayings, because they had no notion of how they were to be understood. Moreover, prejudices flourished against such a kind of investigation since the oldest times. That becomes clear to us at once where these prejudices came from. When in the first centuries of our calendar the Christian culture spread over the countries of the Mediterranean Sea, it appeared that the cult actions and the ceremonies of Christianity and also most of Christian dogmas agreed with ancient pagan traditions, and were not so different—even if in a watered way—from that which had took place in the old pagan Mithras temples. There said those who had the task to defend the reputation of the church: bad spirits gave the pagans these views; they aped within the pagan world what God revealed to the Christian church.—However, it is an odd imitation which leads the way of the original! The whole Christianity was aped in the pagan mysteries—if we apply the word of the accusers, what the church has later found! It is comprehensible that every other way than that of the authoritative Christian faith, as Augustine characterised it, was wrong and in the course of time it was regarded as such which was not given by good powers; since the church had to provide the good powers. Thus these traditions continued through the whole Middle Ages. Those who wanted to come on their own ways, independently to the highest super-sensible truth were regarded as magicians, as allies of the bad or of the bad spirits. The mark stone is the Faust legend. Faust is the representative of those who want to get by own knowledge to the secrets. Hence, the bad powers must have captivated him. One should only do research in the writings handed down from earlier times, only the trust in authority should lead to the super-sensible powers. In spite of that, initiated minds realised—even if they were defamed as magicians and were prosecuted—that the time must come again when one has to progress to truth on own, human ways. Thus we see occult brotherhoods originating in Europe from the middle of the Middle Ages on which led their members on the same ways as the old mysteries had done this to the development of higher intuitive forces. So that within such occult brotherhoods the way to the highest truth was taken like in the mysteries—I mention only that of the Rosicrucians, the deepest and most significant one, founded by Christian Rosenkreutz. This way can be investigated strictly historically till the 18th century. I cannot explain in detail how this happened; I can only give one example, the great representative of the occult science of the 16th and 17th centuries, Robert Fludd. He shows for those who have insight into these fields in all his writings that he knows the ways how to get to truth that he knows how to develop such forces that are of quite different kind than the forces in us which see any body of light before themselves. He shows that there are mysterious ways to get to the highest truth. He also speaks of the Rosicrucian Society in such a way that the relationship is clear to any initiate. I would like to present three questions only to you to show you how these questions were discussed in veiled form at that time. He says of them that everybody who has arrived at the lowest level must be able to answer them with understanding. These questions and also their answers may appear quite futile to the rationalists and materialists. The first question which anybody must answer who wants to rise in worthy way to higher spiritual spheres is: where do you live?—The answer is: I live in the temple of wisdom, on the mountain of reason.—Understanding this sentence really, experiencing it internally means already to have opened certain inner senses. The second sentence was: where truth comes from to you?—The answer is: it comes to me from the creative , and now there comes a word which cannot be translated at all into German: from the highest ..., mighty all-embracing spirit who has spoken through Solomon and wants to inform me about alchemy, magic and the kabala ...—This was the second question. The third question is: what do you want to build?—The answer is: I want to build a temple like the tabernacle, like Solomon's temple, like the body of Christ and ... like something else that one does not pronounce. You see—I cannot go into these questions further—that one veiled the super-sensible truth in a mysterious darkness for all non-initiates in such brotherhoods, and that the non-initiate should make himself worthy at first and had to get to a moral and intellectual summit. Somebody who had not stood the trials who did not have the force in himself to find the experiences inside was not judged as worthy, was not admitted to the initiation. One considered it as dangerous to know this truth. One knew that knowledge is connected with a tremendous power, with a power as the average human being does not suspect at all. Only somebody is able to possess this truth and power without any danger for humankind who has got to that moral and intellectual height. Otherwise one said: without having reached this height he behaves with this truth and power like a child that is sent with matches into a powder magazine. Now one was of the opinion in these times that only somebody who is in the possession of the highest super-sensible truth can explain the phenomena as they are told everywhere and since millennia in a popular way—phenomena which the modern spiritism shows again. The matters were nothing new but something ancient that spiritism recognises today. In ancient times one spoke about the fact that the human being can have such an effect on the human beings as it is not the case, otherwise: certain human beings cause that knocking sounds are to be heard in their surroundings that objects move, contrary to the laws of gravitation, with or without touch that objects fly through the air without applying any physical force et cetera. Since the oldest times one knew that there are human beings who can be transported into certain states, today we call these states trance states, in which they speak about things about which they can never speak in the waking consciousness that they also tell about other worlds not belonging to our sense-perceptible world. One knew that there are human beings who communicate by signs about that which they see in such super-sensible worlds. One also knew that there are human beings who are able to see events which are far away from them and also to report about that; human beings who could foresee and forecast future events with the help of their prophetic gift. All that—we do not verify it today—is an ancient tradition. Those who believe to be able to accept it as truth consider it as something natural. Such not physical, not sense-perceptible phenomena were regarded as true through the whole Middle Ages. Indeed, they were considered by the church of the Middle Ages in such a way, as if they were caused by means of bad skills, but this should not touch us. In any case, the way to the super-sensible world was not searched for on the way of these phenomena in the time of the 17th and 18th centuries. Nobody claimed till those times that a dancing table, an anyhow appearing ghost which is seen with eyes or in any way in trance could reveal anything of a super-sensible world. Even if anybody told that he saw a blaze in Hanover from here, one believed it; but nobody saw anything in it that could seriously give information about the super-sensible world. Reasonable people considered it as a matter of course that one could not look for the super-sensible world that way. Those who wanted to get to super-sensible perception searched for it by developing inner forces in the occult brotherhoods. Then another time came in the development of the West, in which one started looking for truth scientifically. There came the Copernican world view and the researches of physiology; technology, the discoveries of the blood circulation, of the ovum et cetera. One attained insights into nature with the senses. Somebody who does not approach the Middle Ages with prejudices but wants to get to know the world view of the Middle Ages in its true form, convinces himself soon that this medieval thinking did not imagine heaven and hell as localities in space, but that they were something spiritual to it. In mediaeval times no reasonable human being thought to advocate that world view which one attributes to the medieval scholars today. Copernicanism is nothing new in this sense. It is new in another sense; in the sense that since the 16th century sense-perception became decisive for truth; what one can see what one can perceive with the senses. The world view of the Middle Ages was not wrong as one often shows it today, but it was only a view which was not got with bodily eyes. The bodily sensualisation was a symbol of something spiritual. Also Dante did not imagine his hell and his heaven in the earthly sense; they were to be understood spiritually. One broke with this point of view. The real psychologist of the human development finds out this. The sensuous was raised, and now sensuality conquered the world gradually. However, the human being got used to it without noticing it. Only the searching psychologist rushing behind the development is able to make a picture of it. The human being gets used to such changes. With his feeling, with his senses he looks at everything, and accepts the sensuous only as true. Without knowing it, people considered as a principle of the human nature to accept only what they can see in any way of what they can convince themselves by sensory inspection. People did not think much of such circles that spoke of an initiation and led to super-sensible truth on occult ways; everything had to be sensually shown. What about the super-sensible view of the world? How could one find the super-sensible in the world in which one wanted to seek for truth only in the sensory effects? There were rare, so-called abnormal phenomena which were not explicable by means of natural forces known till then; phenomena that the physicist, the naturalist could not explain, and which one simply denied because one wanted to accept the sensually explicable only. There were these phenomena which were handed down through millennia to which the human being sought refuge now: now one went to them. Simultaneously with the urge to keep only to the sense-perceptible appearance the urge for the super-sensible resorted to such phenomena. One wanted to know what scientific criticism could not explain; one wanted to know how it is. When one started searching for evidences of another world in these matters, the birth of modern spiritism took place. We can give the hour of birth and the place where it happened. It was in 1716; there a book was published by a member of the Royal Society, a description of the western islands of Scotland. Everything was collected in it that was to be found out about the “second sight.” This is that which one cannot perceive with the usual eyes, but what one could find out only by super-sensible research. Here you have the precursor of everything that was later done by the so-called scientific side to the investigation of the spiritistic phenomena. Now we also stand already at the gate of the whole spiritistic movement of the newer time. That person from whom the whole spiritistic movement started is one of the strangest of the world: Swedenborg. He influenced the whole 18th century. Even Kant argued with him. A person who could bring to life the modern spiritistic movement had to be disposed like Swedenborg. He was born in 1688 and died in 1772. In the first half of his life he was a naturalist who stood at the head of the natural sciences of his time. He encompassed them. Nobody has a right to attack Swedenborg as an illiterate man. We know that he was not only a perfect expert of his time, but he also anticipated a lot of scientific truths that one discovered on the universities only later. So he stood in the first half of his life not only completely on the scientific point of view which wanted to investigate everything by the appearance to the senses and by mathematical calculations, but he also was far ahead of his time in this regard. Then he completely turned to that which one calls visionariness. What Swedenborg experienced—you may call him a seer or visionary—was a particular class of phenomena. Somebody who is only somewhat initiated in these fields knows that Swedenborg could only experience this class of phenomena. I only give a few examples. Swedenborg saw a conflagration in Stockholm from a place which was removed sixty miles from Stockholm. He informed the guests, with who he was in a soirée, about this event, and after some time one heard that the fire had happened in such a way as Swedenborg had told it. Another example: a high-ranking person asked for a secret which a brother had not completely told before his death because he died before. The person turned to Swedenborg with the strange demand whether he could not discover him and ask what he wanted to say. Swedenborg ridded himself of the order in such a way that the person in question could have no doubt that Swedenborg had penetrated into this secret. Still the third example to show how Swedenborg moved within the super-sensible world. A scholar and friend visited Swedenborg. The servant said to him: you have to wait for some time, please. The scholar sat down and heard a discussion in the next room. However, he heard always only Swedenborg speaking; he did not hear answering. The case became even more noticeable to him when he heard the discussion taking place in wonderful classical Latin, and particularly when he heard him intimately talking about states of the emperor Augustus. Then Swedenborg went to the door, bowed before somebody and spoke with him but the friend could not see the visitor at all. Then Swedenborg came back and said to the friend: excuse that I let you wait. I had lofty visit—Virgil visited me. People may think about such matters as they want. However, one thing is certain: Swedenborg believed in them, regarded them as reality. I said: only a person like Swedenborg could get to such a kind of research. Just the fact that he was expert naturalist of his time led him to this view of the super-sensible nature. He was a man who got used to accepting nothing but the sensuous, the sense-perceptible in the time of the dawning natural sciences. Everybody knows it who knows him; the reasons become clear in the talk which I hold next time here about the topic “Hypnotism and Somnambulism”—and that is why he also depended on it as such a man who sees the spiritual in the world. As well as he insisted to recognise only as right what he could calculate and perceive with senses, the super-sensible was brought by him into the shape which it had to have for him; the super-sensible world was pulled down to a deeper sphere under the influence of the ways of thinking of natural sciences. Because it approaches us in such way like the views of the sensory world, I cited the reasons. We hear next time how such a thing comes about. However, the preconditions are given by the own spiritual development of the human beings who got used to the sense-perceptible. I do not want to speak now about the significance and core of truth of Swedenborg’s visions, but about the fact that somebody sees—as soon as he enters this field which forms the basis of Swedenborg's views—his dispositions in this area, what he has developed in himself. A proof of it may be a simple example. When the wave of spiritism spread in the second half of the 19th century, one also made experiments in Bavaria. It became apparent there that with the experiments at which also scholars were present and took place at different places quite different spiritual manifestations happened. In such an event one asked whether the human soul is received via heredity from the parents, so that also the soul is hereditary, or whether it is made new with every human being. In this spiritistic séance it was answered: the souls are made new. Almost at the same time the same question was put in another séance. The answer was: the soul is not created, but is passed on from the parents to the children.—One thought that at one séance followers of the so-called creation theory were, and at the other séance some scholars were present who were followers of the other theory. In the sense of the thoughts which lived in them the answers were given. Whichever facts may be there, whichever reasons of these facts may be there, it became clear that the human being receives as a manifestation what corresponds to his view. It is irrelevant whether it faces him only as an intellectual manifestation or as a vision; what the human being sees is founded in his own dispositions. This search for sensuous-extrasensory proofs became just a child of the natural sciences of the materialistic time. The principle was actually drawn up that one had to seek for the extrasensory world as one had to seek for the sensuous one. Just as somebody convinces himself in the laboratory of the reality of forces of magnetism or light, one wanted to convince oneself of the super-sensible world by the appearance to the senses. People had forgotten how to behold the spiritual in purely spiritual way. They had forgotten how to develop the belief in super-sensible forces and how to learn to recognise what is neither sensuous nor analogous to the sensuous, but what can be seized only by spiritual intuition. They had got to be used to get everything on the sensory way, and that is why they also wanted to get these matters on the sensory way. Research moved on this way. Thus we see Swedenborg’s direction going on. What appears offers nothing new to us; spiritism offers nothing new! We take an overview of this later and understand it then also better. All the phenomena which spiritism knows were explained that way. There we see the South German Oetinger who elaborated the theory that there is a super-sensible substance which can be seen as a physical phenomenon. Only, he says, the super-sensible matter does not have the raw qualities of the physical matter, not the impenetrable resistance and the row mixture. Here we have the substance from which the materialisations are taken. Another researcher of this field is Johann Heinrich Jung called Stilling who published a detailed report on spirits and apparitions of spirits and described all these matters. He tried there to understand everything in such a way that he did justice to these phenomena as a religious Christian. Because he had tendencies to be a religious Christian, the whole world seemed to him to manifest nothing but the truth of the Christian teaching. Because at the same time natural sciences made claims, we see a mixture of the purely Christian standpoint with the standpoint of natural sciences in his representation. Esotericism explains the phenomena by the intrusion of a spiritual world into our world. You see all these phenomena registered in the works of those who wrote about spiritism, demonology, magic et cetera in which you can also find something that goes beyond spiritism, like with Ennemoser, for instance. We see even carefully registered how a person can enable himself to perceive the thoughts of others who are in distant rooms. You find such instructions with Ennemoser, also with others. Already in the 19th century you find with a certain Meyer who wrote a book about the Hades from spiritistic standpoint as a manifestation of spiritistic manipulations and stood up for the so-called reincarnation theory. You find a theory there to which theosophy has led us again, and which shows us that the old fairy tales are expressions of the higher truth prepared for the people. Meyer got this view on account of sensuous demonstrations. We find all the spiritistic phenomena with Justinus Kerner. They are significant because of the moral weight of the author. There we find, for example, that near the seeress of Prevorst things—spoons et cetera—are repelled by her; it is also told that this seeress communicated with beings of other worlds. Justinus Kerner registered all the communications which he got from her. She informed him that she saw beings of other worlds which went through her, indeed, but which she could perceive and that she could even behold such beings which came in along with other people. Some people may say about these matters: Kerner fantasised and was fooled a lot by his seeress. However, I would like to say one thing: you know David Friedrich Strauss who was friendly with Justinus Kerner. He knew how it stood with the seeress of Prevorst. You also know that that which he performed goes in a direction which runs against the spiritistic current. He says that the facts of which the seeress of Prevorst reports are true as facts—about that cannot be discussed with those who know something about it, he considered the matters as being beyond any doubt. Even if a bigger number of human beings existed who were still interested somewhat in such things, the interest decreased, nevertheless, more and more. This could be led back to the influence of science. It refused to look at such phenomena as true manifestations in the time of the forties when the law of energy conservation was discovered forming the basis of our physics when the cell theory was drawn up when Darwinism prepared. What came up in this time could not be favourable to the pneumatologists. Hence, they were strictly rejected. That is why one forgot everything that these had to say. Then an event took place which meant a victory for spiritism. The event did not happen in Europe, but in the country where materialism celebrated the biggest triumphs in that time where one had made oneself used to consider only as true what hands can seize. This happened in America, in the country where the materialistic way of thinking intimated by me had strongly developed. It went out from the phenomena which belong in the broadest sense to those which one has to call abnormal but sensual. The well-known knocking sounds, the phenomena of moving tables and the knocking through them, the audibility of certain voices which sounded through the air accompanied by intelligent manifestations for which no sensuous reason existed—they pointed to the super-sensible so clearly in America, in the country where one attaches much value to the outer appearance. Like by storm the view gained recognition that there is a super-sensible world that beings which do not belong to our world manifest themselves in our sensory world. Like a storm this went through the world. A man, Andrew Jackson Davis, who concerned himself with these phenomena, was called upon for explaining these matters. He was, in similar way as Swedenborg, a seer; he only did not have the deepness of Swedenborg. He was an unlearned American grown up as a farmer boy and Swedenborg was a learnt Swede. He wrote a book in 1848 (?): The Philosophy of Spiritual Intercourse. This work arose from the most modern needs which had originated within the modern battle in which one wanted to accept the sensuous only in which everybody wanted to put his personal egoism forward, in which everybody wanted to grab so much to himself, wanted to become as happy as he only was able to. In this world one was no longer able to have sense for a faith which leads beyond the sensuous world, according to the ways of thinking which were tied to the material only. One wanted to see and one wanted to have such a faith which satisfies the needs and desires of modern humankind. Above all Davis says plainly that modern people cannot believe that a quantity of human beings is blessed, another quantity condemned. It was this what the modern could not stand; there an idea of development had to intervene. Davis was informed of a truth which shows an exact image of the sensuous world. It may be characterised by an example. When his first wife had died, he had the idea to marry a second wife. However, he had doubt, but a super-sensible manifestation caused that he gave himself the permission. In this manifestation his first wife said to him that she had married in the sun-land again; that is why he felt to have the right also to marry a second time. In the beginning of the first part of his book he informs us that he was educated as a farmer boy like a Christian, but he realised soon that the Christian faith can deliver no conviction, because the modern human being must understand the what, the why and the where to of the way. I was sent out—he tells—to the field by my parents. There came a snake. I attacked it with the hayfork. But the tooth broke off. I took the tooth and prayed. I was convinced that the prayer must help. But ... [gap in the transcript]. How can I believe in a God who allows that I experience such a thing? He said to himself. He became an unbeliever. By the spiritistic séances in which he took part he got the ability of trance and became one of the most fertile spiritistic writers. He emphasises that the appearance of that world is approximately the same as that of the sensory world. It would be an unbelief that a good father does not care for his children, because the father makes long journeys for this purpose et cetera. You see that the earthly world is transferred to the other world. Therefore, this way of thinking spread like a wildfire all over the world. In short time one could count millions of followers of spiritism. Already in 1850 one could find thousands of media in Boston, and one could also pay 400,000 $ in short time to construct a spiritistic temple. You will not deny that that has a great cultural-historical significance. However, with regard to the modern way of thinking this movement had only prospects of success if science took hold of it, that means if science believed in it. If I held a lecture about theosophy, I could speak in detail of the fact that still quite different powers stand behind the staging of the spiritistic phenomena. Behind the scenery deep occult powers are at work. But this cannot be my task today. I tell another time who is, actually, the true director of these phenomena. But this is certain: if this occult director wanted to presuppose that these phenomena convinced the materialistically minded humankind of the existence of a super-sensible world thoroughly if it should believe in it in the long run, the scientific circles had to be conquered. These scientific circles were not so hard to conquer. Just among the most reasonable, among those who could think thoroughly and logically were many who turned to the spiritistic movement. These were in America Lincoln, Edison, in England Gladstone, the naturalist Wallace, the mathematician Morgan. Also in Germany was a big number of excellent scholars, they were experts in their fields, and were convinced of the spiritistic phenomena by media, like Weber and Gustav Theodor Fechner, the founder of psychophysics. Friedrich Zöllner also belongs to them about whom only those who understand nothing of the matter can say that he became mad when he did the famous experiments with Slade. Then, however, also a personality who is yet underestimated: this is the Baron Hellenbach, deceased in 1887. He presented his experiences in spiritistic fields in his numerous books in such a brilliant way. For example, in his book about biological magnetism and in the book about the magic of figures, so that these books are true treasure troves to study which way this movement has taken—in particular in more inspired heads—in the second half of the 19th century. A European impulse came to the American movement and this went out from a man who stood in the European culture, from a disciple of Pestalozzi, and it originated at a time which is already significant because of its other discoveries. This spirit is Allan Kardec who wrote his Spirits’ Book in 1858, in the same year in which many other works appeared epoch-making for the western education in different fields. We only have to call some of the works to indicate the significance of the mental life in this time. One is Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection; the other is a basic work about the psycho-physical field by Fechner. The third one is a work of Bunsen which familiarises us with spectral analysis and which gives the possibility to discover something of the material composition of the stars for the first time. The fourth one was the work of Karl Marx: The Capital. The fifth one was a work of Kardec, a spiritistic work, but of quite different kind as the American works. He represented the idea of reincarnation, the re-embodiment of the human soul. This French spiritism had as numerous supporters as the American one in short time. It spread over France, Spain and especially also over Austria. It was completely in accord with the ancient teachings of wisdom of theosophy. Also spirits like Hellenbach, an Austrian politician, could accept it. He represented the scientific form of spiritism Kardec had founded. Hellenbach played a prominent role in important political matters of Austria in the sixties and seventies of the last century and proved to be a clear and keen thinker at every step. Spiritism got a scientific form in Germany that way. Also such spirits founded the scientific spiritism in Germany who did not want to speak like Hellenbach or Gladstone, Wallace, Crookes who assumed angelic spirits of the old Christendom but who wanted only to speak about the reincarnation of the human being and the intrusion of beings unknown to us whose forms Hellenbach leaves open. But also those who generally do not want to know anything about a yonder world were no longer able to not accept the facts as such. Even people like Eduard von Hartmann who wanted to know nothing about the theories of the spiritists, however, said that the facts could not be denied. They let themselves not be swayed during the period of the exposures. The most famous one was that of the medium Bastian by the Crown Prince Rudolf and the archduke Johann of Austria. The media, which had convinced our scientific circles, were exposed with the medium Bastian. Everybody who simply has some insight in this field knows that Hellenbach is right when he says: nobody will claim that there are no wigs. Should one also believe that there is no real hair because one has discovered wigs?—To somebody who works in occult fields the sentence applies that one can prove to many a bank that it is a corrupt bank; yes, but did not this bank do also honest banking business once? The assessment of the spiritistic truth hides behind such comparisons. We have seen that the scientific and materialistic ways of thinking since the 18th century—we can call 1716 the natal year of spiritism—have completely adapted themselves to the modern thinking, also to the materialistic views. A new form was sought for to be able to approach the higher, super-sensible truth, and everybody who faced these facts tried to understand them in his way. The Christian faith found a confirmation of its ancient church faith; also some orthodox have accepted it to find favourable proofs of their case. Others also found confirmation from the standpoints of the material thinking which assesses everything only according to the material relations. Also those who were thorough scientific researchers like Zöllner, Weber, Fechner and also several famous mathematicians like Simony et cetera tried to get closer to the case, while they moved from the three-dimensional on the four-dimensional. The philosophical individualists who could not believe that in the spiritual world also an individualistic development exists like in the physical one were led by means of thorough investigation to understand that the human way, this sensory way to be—to see with bodily eyes to hear with bodily ears—is only one way of many possible ways. The representatives of a super-sensible spiritism like Hellenbach found their ideas confirmed on account of the spiritistic facts. If you imagine a person who knew to deal with the peculiarities of every single medium who knew how to adapt himself to the most difficult circumstances, so that it was a relief to meet him, Hellenbach was such a man. Also those who spoke only about a psychic force of which one does not and needs not think a lot also these followers of a psychic force, like Eduard von Hartmann or also spirits like du Prel of whom I will speak next time, they all explained the facts in their ways. There were many theories, from the popular interpretations for the people who looked after the manifesting spirits, after writing media, after communications by knocking sounds et cetera, from these religious seekers in old way up to the most enlightened spirits: everybody explained these phenomena in his way. This was in the time when this lack of clarity prevailed in every field, in the time when the phenomena could no longer be denied—but the minds of the human beings proved to be absolutely incapable to do justice to the super-sensible world. In this time the ground was prepared to a renewal of the mystic way, to a renewal of that way which was taken in former times in the occult science and in the mysteries, but in such way that it is accessible to everybody who wants to go it. The Theosophical Society was founded by Mrs. Helena Petrowna Blavatsky to open an understanding of the ways. The theosophical movement revived the investigation of wisdom as it was nurtured in the mysteries and by the Rosicrucians in mediaeval times. It wants to spread what one has searched for in recent time on other ways. It is based on the old movements, however, also on the newest researches. Somebody who gets a better understanding of the theosophical movement will find that the way of theosophy or spiritual science which leads to the super-sensible truth is on one side really spiritual, on the other side, that it answers the questions: where does the human being come from, where does he go to, what is his vocation? We know that one had to speak in certain way to the human beings of antiquity, in more different way to those of the Middle Ages, and again in another way to the modern human beings. The facts of theosophy are ancient. But you convince yourselves if you seek on the way of theosophy or spiritual science that it satisfies any demand of modern scientific nature if it is understood in its very own figure. He would be a bad theosophist who wanted to give up any of the scientific truths for theosophy. Knowledge on the bright, clear way of true scientific nature—yes, but no knowledge which limits itself to sensory things which limits itself to that which takes place in the human being between birth and death, but also knowledge of that which is beyond birth and death. Spiritual science cannot do this without having the authorisation of it—just within a materialistic age. It is aware that all the spiritual movements must converge at a great goal at last which the spiritists will find in spiritual science in the end. However, it searches the spiritual on other, more comprehensive ways; it knows that the spiritual is not found in the sensory world and also not by arrangements of sensory nature only, maybe by means of a beholding which is analogous to the sensory looking. It knows that there is a world of which one receives an insight only if one goes through a kind of spiritual operation which is similar to the operation of a blind-born that is made sighted. It knows that it is not right if the modern human being says: show me the super-sensible like something sensory.—It knows that the answer is: human being, rise up to the higher spheres of the spiritual world, while you yourself become more and more spiritual, so that the connection with the spiritual world is in such a way as the connection is with the sensuous world by means of your sensory eyes and ears. Theosophy or spiritual science has that viewpoint which a believer of the Middle Ages, a deep mystic, Master Eckhart, expressed, while he characterised that the really spiritual cannot be searched for in the same way as the sensuous. In the 13th, 14th centuries, he expressed meaningfully that one cannot receive the spiritual by sensuous performances, by anything that is analogous to the sensuous. Therefore, he says the great truth leading to the super-sensible: people want to look at God with the eyes, as if they looked at a cow and loved it. They want to look at God as if He stood there and here. It is not that way. God and I are one in recognition. We do not want to behold a higher world by means of events like knocking sounds or other sensuous arrangements. It is called a super-sensible world, indeed, but it is similar to the sensuous world round us.—Eckhart characterises such apparently super-sensible events saying: such people want to behold God as they look at a cow. However, we want to behold the spiritual developing our spiritual eyes like nature developed our bodily eyes to let us see the physical. Nature has dismissed us with outer senses to make the sensuous perceptible to us. The way, however, to develop further in the sensuous to the spiritual to be able to behold the spiritual with spiritual eyes—we ourselves have to go this spiritual way in free development, also in the sense of modern development.
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| 183. The Science of Human Development: Ninth Lecture
02 Sep 1918, Dornach |
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| We also do not go around like that, as in the Rosicrucian pictures, where every woman is painted with a lion's head and every man with an ox's head. That is the Rosicrucian painting of man. The Rosicrucians chose a more average animal and therefore gave the women the head of the animal that most resembles them, the lion, and the man the head of the animal that most resembles him, the ox, the bull. That is why in Rosicrucian figures you see man and woman placed side by side: the woman with the most beautiful lion's head, the man with a bull's head. |
| 183. The Science of Human Development: Ninth Lecture
02 Sep 1918, Dornach |
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The considerations we are currently undertaking concern matters that are treated as mysteries by many people who know something about them in one form or another. And for certain reasons, knowledge of these things is kept away from the world from many sides, because it is believed that the things in question are parts of a comprehensive knowledge of supersensible matters that should not yet be communicated to mankind. I do not consider this view to be correct with regard to certain things that are being discussed here. On the contrary, it seems to me necessary for humanity to make the courageous decision to enter into a real consideration of the supersensible worlds. And one cannot do that otherwise than by directly grasping what is specifically considered in relation to the question in question. Today, I would like to deal with a preliminary question first. Yesterday we spoke about the stages a person goes through between death and a new birth. A very common objection to discussing these things, not on the part of the initiated, but on the part of the uninitiated, is that one simply says: Yes, why is it necessary to know something about these things? One could indeed wait until one passes through the gate of death, and then one will see what it is actually like in the spiritual world. It is something that is said very often. Now, the thing is that we can never answer such questions from a so-called absolute point of view when we talk about reality, but that we, from a spiritual-scientific point of view, must always answer them from the point of view of the time in which we live. We live in the fifth post-Atlantic period, which began in the 15th century of our calendar. It concluded the fourth post-Atlantic period, which, as we know, began in the 8th century BC and came to an end in the 15th century AD. There are seven such cultural periods. From this, however, it can be seen that we have passed the midpoint of the cultural development of the earth, which was in the fourth post-Atlantic period, and that we are simply entering – we are, after all, also in the fifth great earth period – the time when the earth is in a descending development. The considerations we have been making in these days can already draw your attention to the fact that it is important to look at the descending development, at that which is, so to speak, not in evolution but in devolution, which is in retrogression. Our whole evolution on earth is in retrogression. Certain abilities and powers that were present in the previous period of ascending development cease to exist, and others have to take the place of these ceasing powers and abilities. This is particularly the case with certain inner psychic abilities of the human being. It can be said that until the fourth post-Atlantic period, until around the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, people still had the ability to have a certain connection with the supersensible world. We know that these abilities have disappeared in the most diverse ways. They no longer exist as elementary abilities; they have, so to speak, dwindled away. Not only has the life of man on earth changed between birth and death with regard to such abilities, but actually, and even more radically, has the life of man changed between death and a new birth. And it must be said that for this period of time, from death to a new birth, in the present cycle of mankind, which thus already belongs to the descending ones, it is so that men, when they go through the gate of death , they must have certain memories of what they have acquired here in the physical body if they want to find the right attitude and the right relationship to the events to which they are exposed between death and a new birth. It is one of the necessary prerequisites for a right life after death that people here before death acquire more and more certain ideas about life after death, because only when they remember these ideas, which they have acquired here, can they orient themselves in the time between death and a new birth. It is factually incorrect to claim that one can wait until death to have such ideas about the life between death and a new birth. If people continued to live in these prejudices, if they persistently refused to want to gain insights here already about life between death and a new birth, then this life, this life free of the body, would become a dark one for them, one in which they would be disoriented; they would not be able to penetrate their spiritual surroundings in the right way through everything that I described to you yesterday. Until almost the Mystery of Golgotha, it was the case that people brought abilities into their physical life here that originated in the spiritual world. That is why they had atavistic clairvoyance. This atavistic clairvoyance came from the fact that certain spiritual abilities extended from the pre-birth state into this life. That stopped. People no longer have abilities here in physical life that extend from the prenatal life. You know that. But the other thing must be done instead: people must acquire more and more ideas here on earth about the post-mortem life, the life after death, so that they can remember after death, so that they can carry something through the gates of death. That is what I want to comment on in particular regarding this preliminary question. So the comfortable notion that one can wait until death to form such ideas does not apply if one considers in concrete terms at what point in time of the development of the earth we actually are. And this must always be borne in mind. For views that are absolutely valid, that apply at all times, do not exist; there are only views that can guide people for a certain period of time. This is what one must acquire in such an eminent sense through spiritual science. And now I would like to discuss a few things that can bring our considerations to a preliminary conclusion. We started from the assumption that the present human being feels a gulf between what he calls ideals, be they moral or other ideals, which he also calls ideas, and what he feels to be his views on the purely natural order of the world. The concepts and views that man forms about the natural order of the world do not enable him to assume that what he carries in his heart as ideals has real power and can actually be realized like a natural force. The essential thing to consider in this question is now the following: We now know how it is with the structure of the human being here on the physical earth. We also know how it is with the structure of the human being in the spiritual world between death and a new birth. Some time ago I raised a question which actually already comes before the human soul as a concrete question when the human being looks at life, but which is precisely a question to which one cannot say anything when one is faced with the gap just characterized between idealism and realism between idealism and realism, that is the question: How is it that in our world order some people die very young, as children or young people or in middle age, while others only die when they have grown old? What is the connection with the order of the world? Neither idealism on the one hand nor realism on the other, which cannot regard ideals as real powers, can shed any light on such questions, which are, however, questions of life. These questions can only be approached if one has something very definite in mind. And that is to realize that the present human being, as he will one day stand before us as an earthly human being, can cope relatively easily with space, but he does not cope in the same way with time. In this respect, the sum of all existing philosophical views does not really offer any significant insight, and the question of the nature of time has so far only been treated in the narrowest human circles. It is not that easy to speak about time and its essence in a way that is accessible to the general public, but perhaps I can succeed in giving you an idea of what I mean by bringing time into discussion in analogy to space. I will have to tax your patience a little, because the brief consideration I want to give to this subject seems to have a somewhat abstract character. If you simply overlook a piece of the room, you know that what you overlook reveals itself to you in a perspective character. You have to take into account the perspective of the room when you overlook a piece of it. If you now bring the piece of room that you overlook and to which you instinctively ascribe a perspective character onto a surface, then you take the perspective into account. If you look down an avenue, you see the distant trees of the avenue as smaller and closer together. You can express this in perspective, and you can, in a sense, express in perspective on a surface what you see in space. Now it is clear that what you see in space is juxtaposed in a flat surface. In space, it is not juxtaposed; there are two trees in front (see drawing on p. 164), and two trees are far away. But by bringing the visible space into the flat surface, you place what is behind one another next to one another. You have the instinctive ability to transpose what you have painted or drawn on a surface into three dimensions. That you have this ability is due to the fact that man, as he is now as an earthly man, has become relatively detached from space as such. Man has not detached himself from time in the same way. And that is something tremendously important and significant, but something that unfortunately is hardly noticed, hardly noticed by science. Man believes that when he develops in time, he has time. But in reality he does not have real time. He does not have real time at all, but what you experience as time is actually, in relation to real time, something that can be called an image. Just as this image (see drawing) in the plane relates to space, so what the ordinary person calls time relates to real time. The ordinary person does not experience real time, but rather experiences an image of time. And that is very difficult to imagine. [IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW] For example, it is extremely difficult for you to imagine that something that is effective today does not need to be present at the present moment in time, but is real at a much earlier point in time and is not real at the present moment in time. You can, so to speak, project that which is present in a very early period of time into your own time. What I have just said has a very significant consequence. It has the consequence that everything we call nature has a completely different character than everything we have to regard as a certain part of the human being itself. For example, Ahriman also works in nature outside, or rather the Ahrimanic powers work; but the Ahrimanic powers never work in nature outside at the present time. If you look at nature as a whole, Ahriman is at work in nature, but he is working from a distant time. Ahriman works from the past. And whether you look at the mineral, the vegetable or the animal kingdom, you must never say that there is something in what is currently unfolding before your eyes in which Ahriman is active. And yet Ahriman is active in it; but from the past. If I were to describe the matter, I would have to say: Here is the line of development from the past into the future, and here you survey nature. [IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW] Yes, now you have to imagine looking into it. What you see before you in the present contains no ahrimanic powers, but Ahriman works through nature from the past, from a particular past. [IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW] And to you, Ahriman appears in nature, when you become aware of him there, in perspective. If you were to say: Ahriman is at work in the present — then you would be making the same mistake in relation to nature as if you were to say: When I survey a room, the distant trees stand beside the near trees (see drawing on page 164) because they can be placed in perspective within the space. A fundamental requirement for a real view into the spiritual world is this: that one learns to see in perspective in time, that one learns to place every being at its correct point in time. If I said yesterday that after death the I is, as it were, transferred from a fluid state into a kind of solid state, that is not all there is to it. Suppose you lived here on earth with your I from 1850 to 1920, and in 1920 you became aware of your I. I mean: you will become aware of it earlier, but now you look back, with the spirit self through the hierarchies you look back at your ego; there you see your ego always as it was from 1850 to 1920. The ego stays there, stays put. This means that your experiences do not go with you soon after your death, but you look back on them. You now look back from a temporally distant perspective and you see into the length of time, just as you see into the length of space here in the physical world. I can also express it this way: when you die, say, in 1920, you live with all that I described to you yesterday as the members of your being, but then you look back on the stretch of time in which you lived here on earth with your ego. And that stretch of time remains there, and you always see it as you continue to live in perspective, at the point in time where it was. And so you have to imagine that Ahriman is active outside in nature, but from an earlier point in time. This is very important. It is something that is given very little consideration. If one wants to understand the world, if one wants to speak spiritually of time, then one must absolutely imagine time in a spatial way and must consider this connection of the spiritual substance with time. This is very important. Now, what I said to you about the Ahrimanic powers, that they work from the past, is true for nature. But with human beings it is different. For the human being, while he lives here between birth and death, it is different precisely because everything that comes to an end in time becomes maya, deception, for him. While he lives here, the human being lives within the course of time itself, and by living through a certain number of years, he lives through the course of time. As time passes, he himself passes with time. That is not the case with space. When you walk down an avenue, the trees remain behind and you move forward, and you do not take the trees, which are left behind, and your impressions with you in such a way that you would have the impression that the tree image is moving with you when you take a step. You do that with the image of time. Here in the physical body you actually do this – because you yourself continue to develop in time – by allowing yourself to be deceived about time in relation to its perspective. You do not notice the perspective of time. And in particular, the subconscious mind does not notice it. The subconscious mind does not notice this living with time at all, and gives itself over to a complete deception with regard to the perspective of time. But this has a very definite consequence. It has the consequence that Ahrimanic powers can now work as present powers in what happens in man. Ahrimanic powers work in the life of the human soul as present powers. So that man stands in relation to nature in this way: when he looks out into nature, there is nothing Ahrimanic in the present. The Ahrimanic works in him as a presence, precisely as Maja, as deception. But the human being is given over to this deception about the things that I have explained to you, so that through the human being the Ahrimanic powers gain the possibility of creeping into the present, of walking into the present. We can say that the Ahrimanic forces – and the same applies to the Luciferic forces, albeit from a somewhat different point of view, which we will discuss in a moment – work in nature in such a way that they actually have nothing to do with the present, but extend their effects from prehistoric times. These Ahrimanic forces are currently at work in the human being. What are the consequences? The consequence is that, in his deepest soul, man cannot feel related to nature in relation to the point just discussed. He looks at his being, or rather feels himself in his being, senses the nature-based being. Because ahrimanic powers are countervailing powers in him, and ahrimanic powers are past powers in nature, everything that is natural appears to him differently from that which develops within himself. Man does not unravel the difference he perceives between himself and nature in the right way. If he unraveled it in the right way, it would be as I have just explained. He would say: Outside in nature, Ahriman works from the past; in me, Ahriman works as a present power. But because of this, even if he does not know the difference, he behaves in the sense of this difference and perceives nature as spiritless. He does perceive that in the present the Ahrimanic powers are not directly active in nature, but he perceives nature as spiritless because he does not say to himself: Ahriman works from the past – instead, he only looks at present-day nature. Ahriman does not work in it. But Ahriman, however strange it may sound, is the power that the general creation of the world uses to bring forth nature. When one speaks of the spirit of nature, when one speaks of the pure spirit of nature, one should actually speak of the ahrimanic spirit. There it is fully justified, the ahrimanic spirit. The beings of the normal hierarchies make use of the ahrimanic spirit to bring forth what extends around us as nature. The fact that we do not perceive nature in a spiritualized way is precisely because in the present life of nature the spirit is not contained, but works from the past. And that is the secret, I would say, of the world-creative powers, that they make use of a spirit that they have left at an earlier stage to work at a later stage, but let it work from the past. When we speak of nature, we should not speak of matter, nor of forces; we should speak of ahrimanic entities. But then we would have to place these ahrimanic entities in the past. The result is a strange one: suppose some natural philosopher ponders, ponders what is behind the phenomena of nature. Well, he comes up with all sorts of theories and hypotheses about atomic connections and the like. But that is not the case. Behind what is spread out around us in a way that appeals to the senses, there is not actually what the natural philosophers usually assume, but behind all of this there is the sum of the Ahrimanic powers, but not as a presence. So if the natural philosopher is compelled to assume, let us say, that there are some atomic structures behind the chemical elements, then that is wrong; behind the chemical elements there are Ahrimanic powers. But if you could detach what you see from the chemical elements and look beyond, you would see nothing behind them in the present: it would be hollow where you look for atoms, and what is at work there comes from the past and works in this hollow space. That is how it is in reality. Hence the many unsuccessful theories about what the “thing in itself” is; for this “thing in itself” is not there at all in the present. Rather, where the “thing in itself” is sought, there is nothing; but the effect is there from the past. So that one could say that if Kart had sought his “thing in itself,” he would have had to say: Where I want to approach the 'thing in itself', there I cannot approach. — That is what he said. But he did not realize that in the beginning he would have found nothing there at all, and that if he had gone behind the veil of things, he would have had to go far back; then he would have found Ahrimanic powers. In man himself it is different. It is precisely because man is vividly placed in time that it has been possible for the Ahrimanic powers to enter our world through the gateway of humanity and to work within man as such. And the consequence of the Ahrimanic powers working in man is that man detaches what he sees in the present from the spiritual, that man detaches his present existence from the spiritual. This is the consequence of our carrying the Ahrimanic powers within the Maja in us. So that one can say: Just as we view the world materially, detached from the spirit, as a mere natural order that believes it has reached its peak in the law of the conservation of energy and matter — which is an illusion — what we see as a natural order is merely brought about by the fact that we carry the Ahrimanic powers within us, and that they are not present as powers in nature outside us. Therefore, what we think about nature, in that we think of it merely materially, does not correspond to nature, but only to present nature. But this present nature is precisely an abstraction, because the past Ahriman always works in it. Now, not only the Ahrimanic but also the Luciferic is at work in people. This Luciferic, however, has, so to speak, a different tendency in the universe than the Ahrimanic. Let us visualize the tendency of the Ahrimanic as we have now expressed it. The tendency of the Ahrimanic in us is to present the world in materialistic terms. That we conceive the world materialistically, that we think of a mere natural order, is the consequence of the fact that we carry Ahrimanic in us. That we carry ideals within us, which detach themselves from the general nature, according to which we want to orient ourselves in our mutual behavior, but which must appear to us only like dreams within the present world view, which are dreamed out when, according to the natural order, the earth has arrived at its final state , that is the consequence of the fact that the luciferic powers, which, like the ahrimanic ones, live in us, are constantly striving to tear the part of us that is accessible to them completely out of the natural order and to spiritualize it completely. The main tendency of the luciferic powers, insofar as they live in us, is to make us as spiritual as possible, to tear us away from all material life if possible. That is why they present us with ideals that are not natural powers, but that are powerless in the present natural order. And if, in the course of the future period of the earth, man were to fall entirely prey to the influence of Lucifer, so that he would believe that ideals are just imagined things towards which the mind can be directed, then this man would follow the luciferic powers. The material earth, to which we belong, would decay, scatter in the universe, would not fulfill its purpose, and the luciferic powers would lead man into another spiritual world to which he does not belong. To do this, they need the trick of making us believe in ideals that are actually mere dreams. Just as Ahriman, on the one hand, presents us with a world that is a mere natural order, so Lucifer, on the other hand, presents us with a world that consists purely of imagined ideals. This is something very significant. And at present, I would say, a balance is only being struck in those areas that still lie in the human unconscious. But people must become more and more aware of this, otherwise they will not get out of this dilemma, they will not be able to build a bridge between idealism and realism, but this bridge is necessary. What currently still creates a kind of balance is the following. When very young people die, for example children, these children – and the same applies to young people – have just looked into the world; they have not fully lived out their existence here on the physical plane. With a life unlived on the physical plane, they pass over into the other world, which is lived between death and a new birth, as I described yesterday. Because they have only lived part of their earthly life, they bring something of earthly life with them into the spiritual world that cannot be brought across when one has grown old. You arrive differently in the spiritual world if you have grown old than if you die young. If you die young, you have lived your life in such a way that you still have a lot of strength in you from your prenatal life. As a child and as a young person, you have lived your physical life in such a way that you still have a lot of the strength in you that you had in the spiritual world before you were born. In this way, a close connection has been created between the spiritual part that one has brought with one and the physical part that one has experienced here. And through this close connection, one can take something that one acquires on earth with one into the spiritual world. Children or people who have died young take something from earthly life with them into the spiritual world that cannot be taken at all if one dies as an older person. That which is taken along is then over there in the spiritual world, and what is carried over by children and young people gives the spiritual world a certain heaviness that it would not otherwise have, the spiritual world in which people then live together, gives a certain heaviness to the spiritual world and prevents the luciferic powers from completely separating the spiritual world from the physical one. So you see, we are looking at an enormous secret! When children and young people die, they take something with them from here, which the luciferic powers use to prevent us from completely detaching ourselves from earthly life. It is extremely important to realize this. If you get older here on earth, you cannot thwart the luciferic powers in the way described, because after a certain age you no longer have that intimate connection between what you brought with you at birth and physical life on earth. When one has grown old, this inner connection is dissolved and just the opposite occurs. From a certain age onwards we instill our own nature in a certain way into the spiritual substance within the physical earth. We make the physical earth more spiritual than it would otherwise be. So from a certain age onwards we spiritualize the physical earth in a certain way, which cannot be perceived by the outer senses. We carry spiritual into the physical earth, as we carry physical up into the spiritual world when we die young; we squeeze out, so to speak, spiritual when we grow old, I cannot say it any other way. Growing old consists in the spiritual sense from a certain aspect of squeezing out spiritual here on earth. This in turn prevents the reckoning of Ahriman. As a result, Ahriman cannot, in the long run, have such an intense effect on people that the opinion that ideals do have a certain meaning could completely die out. But in today's time frame, we are already very, very close to people falling into the most terrible errors precisely with regard to what has been said. Even well-meaning people easily fall into such errors with regard to what has been said. And these errors will become ever greater and greater and, with increasing earth development, can become enormous. To give you an example: a very ingenious philosopher, Robert Zimmermann, wrote an “Anthroposophy” in 1882. I have already mentioned this in a context. This “Anthroposophy” is not what we now call Anthroposophy, it is more or less a concept jungle. But that is because Robert Zimmermann was not able to see into the spiritual world, he was only a Herbartian philosopher. Now he has written this “Anthroposophy”. But it is precisely in this “Anthroposophy” that Robert Zimmermann deals with the question that I have placed at the top of our considerations these days from his point of view. On the one hand, he sees ideas: logical ideas, aesthetic ideas, ethical ideas; on the other hand, he sees the order of nature. And he cannot somehow find a bridge between the logical, the aesthetic, the ethical ideas and the order of nature, but he does stop at it: on the one hand, there is the order of nature, and on the other hand, there are the ideas. And the conclusion he comes to is extremely interesting, because it is actually typical of a person in the present day. He comes to the conclusion that it is forbidden to man once and for all to populate nature with ideas and to ascribe to ideas the power of nature. The two worlds can actually only be connected in the mind of man. So he says. And so he means at one point, where he summarizes almost everything he says and thinks: “The realization of ideas is neither a fact of the past nor a fact of the present, but a task whose fulfillment lies in the future and in the hands of man. The dream of a “golden age”, of which a sober rationalist like Kant as of that of “eternal peace, as an extreme positivist like Comte as the ‘état positif’, raved about, will be fulfilled when the entire world of ideas has become real and the entire reality is permeated by the ideas, that is to say, when that which Schiller called “the secret of the master's art,” the “consumption” of matter by form, becomes manifest, or, as Schleiermacher put it, “when ethics become physics and physics become ethics.” Yes, but that can never be! It can only be that people realize ideas in their social order. But when the earth has reached its end, the whole dream of ideas will have been dreamt. Nothing else is possible according to such a philosophy. Therefore such a philosophy always remains abstract and must finally confess: “A philosophy which, like the one above, neither takes the theocentric point of view, inaccessible to human knowledge, as in theosophy, and regards the ‘dream of reason’ as a reality that has long since been created, nor, like anthropology, takes the anthropocentric but uncritical standpoint of common experience, in order to view from there a reality filled with ideas as a 'dream of reason', which thus simultaneously wants to be anthropocentric, that is, starting from human experience, and yet philosophical, that is, going beyond it, at the hand of logical thinking, is Arihroposophie.” “Anthroposophy” is therefore here the admission that one can never cross this chasm between unreal ideas and idea-less reality. But in man himself there is a natural being, which thus belongs to the natural order, connected with a spiritual being that can absorb the spiritual. This is not denied by an anthroposophist like Robert Zimmermann. But man cannot be regarded by contemporary science either in such a way that the riddle would be solved through man, through this microcosm. Let us now look back at something we have already mentioned during this stay. We have said that we actually have to divide the human being into three parts, not as conveniently as the skeleton, of course, as I have already explained. But I have also spoken about this in the final notes to my book 'Von Seelenrätseln' (Mysteries of the Soul). We can divide the human being into three parts: the head, the trunk and the extremities, with everything that belongs to the extremities belonging to the extremities, including everything sexual. If we divide the human being in this way and now apply what we already know: that the formation of the head, the shape of the head points to forces of the previous incarnation, the limb man points to the future incarnation and actually only the trunk belongs to the present. So, after what I have explained today, you will no longer find it very incomprehensible when I tell you: insofar as the human being carries his head, this head points back to the earlier incarnation, into the past. The forces of the past, Ahrimanic forces, are at work in the head, and what applies to Ahrimanic forces in general applies to the human head in particular. Everything that is actually formed in the human head does not actually belong to the present, but the forces of the previous incarnation have an effect on the head; and the creative powers make use of the ahrimanic powers to shape our head, to give our head its actual form. If the creative powers did not make use of the ahrimanic spirits to shape our heads, then we would all – forgive me, but it is so – wear a much softer head, but we would all have an animal head: one who is bullish in character would have a bull's head, another who is lamb-like in character would have a lamb's head, and so on. It is due to the influence of the Ahrimanic powers, which the creative forces use to shape us, that this animal head, which we would otherwise wear, does not really sit on us, as the Egyptians drew it on some of their figures; that we do not go around like these Egyptian figures, who have good reasons for this, because in the Egyptian mysteries, too, though from an atavistic point of view, things were taught that can be taught again now. We also do not go around like that, as in the Rosicrucian pictures, where every woman is painted with a lion's head and every man with an ox's head. That is the Rosicrucian painting of man. The Rosicrucians chose a more average animal and therefore gave the women the head of the animal that most resembles them, the lion, and the man the head of the animal that most resembles him, the ox, the bull. That is why in Rosicrucian figures you see man and woman placed side by side: the woman with the most beautiful lion's head, the man with a bull's head. But this is absolutely correct. That metamorphosis – to use a Goethean term – can take place, that our head, which tends towards the animalistic in its form, can be shaped so that it is a human head, comes from the influence of the Ahrimanic powers. If the deities did not make use of Ahriman to shape our bony heads, then we would walk around with animal heads. But the divine powers also make use of the luciferic spirits. If they did not make use of these luciferic spirits, our limbless man would not be able to transform from the present to the next incarnation. The luciferic beings are necessary for this. And it is to the luciferic entities that we again owe the fact that, by dying, the form that the man of the extremities still has now is gradually transformed into the broader form that he is to have in the next incarnation. Then, in the middle of the path between death and a new birth, Ahriman must intervene to take on the other task: to reshape the head in the appropriate way. Just as we would go around with animal heads if we did not owe it to Ahriman that we get a human head, so our nature of the extremities would not metamorphose into the human until the next incarnation, but would pass over into the demonic. We lose our head, as we now have it, under all circumstances through death, not only as matter that unites with the earth, but also as form; in the next incarnation we carry over what will become the head from the extremity of man. But this would become a demonic being if we did not have the luciferic powers, who are connected with us, to thank for the fact that the transformation can take place from a demon, which is merely a spiritual soul, into the human form of the next incarnation. Thus, Ahrimanic and Luciferic powers must participate in our becoming human, and the human cannot be understood without calling upon the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic for help. Humanity cannot be spared the task of truly understanding the activity of Ahriman and Lucifer in the future. The Bible quite rightly says that the Deity of whom it speaks at the beginning breathed the living spirit into man. But the living spirit works in the trunk of the human being. Insofar as we are dealing with the normally functioning divine entities, we are dealing only with the trunk of the human being. Insofar as we are dealing with the head man, we are dealing with an opponent of the powers of Yahweh, and thus also with an opponent of the Christ. And insofar as we are dealing with the man of the extremities, we are dealing with the Luciferic opponent. Therefore, one will only understand the human being if one presents him under these three aspects. In our central group for our building, we therefore have this trinity: the representative of humanity, who is trained in such a way that the forces of breathing, of the trunk, of heart activity and so on are primarily active in him – this is the middle figure; then the figure in which everything main, head-related is active: Ahriman; and the figure in which everything extremity-related is active: Lucifer. We must dissect the human being in this way if we want to understand the human being, because in the human being, the human being as such is united with Ahriman and Lucifer. At the same time, this is an indication that everything that is more or less connected with human thinking, which, after all, is bound to the head in relation to its physical connection to the head — human thinking flows on the basis of perceptions as something external and obvious — that all this has an Ahrimanic character. Through the senses of the head we perceive nature primarily, and we build up an image of nature with the ahrimanic character just described, because we ourselves carry the ahrimanic in the formation, in the shaping of our head. Ideals, on the other hand, have a great deal to do with love, with everything that belongs to the man of the extremities, inwardly, psychologically. I shall come back to this in the near future. That is why the Luciferic power has special access to ideals. Ahriman takes hold of us through our head, Lucifer through our extremities. Through our head Ahriman tempts us to conceive of nature without spirit; through our extremity man Lucifer tempts us to conceive of ideals without the power of nature. But it is the task of the present human being, by surveying such things, to arrive at a correct overview. For you see, there is a certain boundary within us, precisely in our chest-humanity, in our trunk-humanity, whereby the forces of the head, which are Ahrimanic forces, are separated from the luciferic forces that belong to the extremity-humanity. If we were able to see ourselves completely by looking mystically into ourselves, then we would indeed comprehend the natural order through the head, but we would also see into ourselves through the natural order. And if the luciferic powers were to decide in us, then the luciferic powers would also enlighten us about the ahrimanic powers, and in this way we would come to a connection between the natural order and the spiritual order. But for a certain reason we cannot do this, and that is because we have a memory. What we absorb from nature in the way of ideas and concepts, of impressions, we store in our memory. And if here (see diagram on page 179) we have only schematically drawn the head human being, the trunk and torso human being, and the extremities human being, then in the trunk human being there is the septum, which leads to that which we take in through the head, in the natural order, coming back to us as memory material. As a result, we do not see down to the Luciferic, and thus we do not notice the Ahrimanic, as we do not see what is behind a mirror, but rather what is reflected. Here the natural order is reflected in what at the same time separates our Ahrimanic from our Luciferic, and what is the basis for the forming memory, for the forming power of recollection. If we could not remember the things we have experienced, if this partition were not there, if, looking into ourselves, we could see through ourselves, we would look down into ourselves as far as the Luciferic. Then we would also perceive the Ahrimanic. [IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW] But now consider: what appears to us in this mirror is what we live through in the course of our lives, what we look back on after death, what becomes a solid ego from a fluid ego. This is what we look back on. That is what we live with. And Ahriman and Lucifer work with us, working with us in such a way that Ahriman brings us to wearing a human head, and Lucifer brings us to not becoming a demon, but to having the possibility of coming to a next incarnation. I have perhaps tried your patience a little with things that are perhaps a little more difficult to understand, but I wanted to at least evoke a feeling for what actually creates the gap between idealism and realism. It arises from the fact that the Luciferic in us arouses idealism, which is powerless in nature, that the Ahrimanic in us evokes the mere natural order, which appears spiritless to us. Thus idealists, abstract idealists, are actually under the influence of Lucifer, while materialists are under the influence of Ahriman. It is necessary to engage with these things, not just to engage in so-called theosophy in a schematic way, but to engage with these more precise things. For it is necessary that man should become conscious of the fact that he must do something to remain united with the spirit for the rest of his development on earth. It is an uncomfortable truth, one might say, even a hated truth, truly a hated truth, for it contradicts so much that is pleasant to man, that is pleasant to him out of laziness. Nothing is more difficult for people today than when they are told: If you want to maintain your connection with the spirit in the future, you have to do something about it. Most people would like the Mystery of Golgotha to have dissolved into the ground, so that they have nothing to do with their own affairs, so that they can be redeemed from their sins through Christ and go to heaven without having to do anything. And that is why most theologians get so angry about anthroposophy, because the anthroposophical side can never admit that man has nothing to do to maintain his connection with the spirit, that this can also happen in the future of the development of the earth without any action on his part. The connection between the physical and the spiritual, between what the members of man are between birth and death, and what the members of man are between death and new birth, this connection is called into question by the future development of the earth, and it will only not come into disorder if men will really occupy themselves with the spiritual towards the future. Spiritual scientific evidence for this already exists today. This spiritual scientific evidence is highly, highly inconvenient truth, but it sheds light on important and significant matters. I would like to say that the connection between the soul-spiritual and the physical-etheric in the human being of the counterweight has already become very loose, and it is necessary for the human being to be more and more alert to himself, so that nothing happens in the connection between his physical-etheric and soul-spiritual that could, so to speak, suck him dry, that could suck him dry soul-spiritually. For when such prejudices become more and more active, when one does not need to know anything about what happens after death in life, or when the gulf between so-called idealism and pure natural order becomes ever greater, then people are in danger of losing their soul more and more. Today, I might say, this loss is still held in check by the fact that when young people die, a certain heaviness is given to the spiritual world and Lucifer is thwarted, and when old people die, so much spirituality is poured into the physical world that Ahriman is thwarted. But one must not forget that as a result of people turning away from the spiritual realm, the Ahrimanic and Luciferic powers become more and more powerful, and that little by little, as the devolution of the earth goes on and on, this dam could no longer be fully effective. That is what I would like to see emerging from our deliberations as a kind of bottom line, a feeling – and feelings are always the most important thing that can arise from spiritual scientific life – of the necessity of dealing with the spiritual from the present earth cycle onwards. I have emphasized this from the most diverse points of view, that it is necessary from the present point of view that people occupy themselves with the spiritual. And there will be no other way of dealing with spiritual matters in the future than by acquiring understanding and not resisting the process of really absorbing even the more difficult considerations such as we have been discussing in recent days and particularly today. People must come to understand the perspectivity of time. When this understanding of the perspectivity of time comes among people, then they will no longer say: Here is idealism, but it is only a mere dream that has no force of nature, and on the other side lies the natural order. Instead, people will come to recognize that what lives in us as ideals is the germ for the future, and that what is the natural order is the fruit of the past. This sentence is a golden rule: every ideal is the germ of a future natural event; every natural event is the fruit of a past spiritual event. Only by this rule can one find the bridge between idealism and realism. But for this one thing is necessary: any ideal could never become the germ of a future natural event if this future natural event were prevented by the present natural event. We can put any hypothesis before our eyes. Let us assume the possibility that applies today, that through the so-called law of entropy, the evolution of the earth will one day pass into a kind of general warming, and that all other natural forces will cease, then within this final state, of course, all ideals would have died out. This final state follows quite well if one assumes that, according to pure causality, the present physical states will simply continue. If one thinks as present-day physics does, that such a final state will one day exist according to the law of conservation of energy and matter, then there is no room in this final state for an ideal to arise in it as a future natural event, because the future will simply be the consequence of the present natural event. But that is not how it is, that is not how it presents itself to the present study of nature, but it presents itself differently. All the substances and forces that exist today will no longer be there in the future. The law of conservation of matter and energy does not exist. Where we look for substance, we find nothing but the influence of something Ahrimanic that has passed away. And what surrounds us in the world of the senses will no longer be there in the future. And then, when nothing of what is physical now remains, when all this has been completely dissolved, the time will have come when the present ideals will join the natural process of what is now perishing. This is how it is in the great universe. And for the individual human being, it is the case that he will be incarnated again in the next world incarnation when everything that he has grown into with the present incarnation has been partially overcome, when, that is, an environment can be created for him that is different from the present environment, when everything that is keeping him here on earth can be removed from the present environment. If all this has changed so that he can experience new things, then he will be incarnated again. The present ideals that can form in man will be nature, when all that is now nature will no longer be there, but something new will have emerged. But the new that arises is nothing other than the spiritual that has become nature. Behind appearances and ideals we must seek that which forms the bridge over the abyss. But one must discover it. Today one can only discover it if one is not afraid to develop the concepts so powerfully that they themselves can penetrate reality. Therefore, the present time really has the necessity to engage very much in everything that can be experienced spiritually. But — let me add this as a postscript — it will be necessary for people to be able to develop ever greater and greater impartiality towards spiritual considerations. The day before yesterday, I ended by pointing out, as it might seem unnecessary to do for some people, but I do not like to do it, it is never unnecessary, a number of things that stand in the way of fruitful spiritual scientific work, including on the part of the Anthroposophical Society. Above all, what is needed here is real impartiality. Time and again, we see that the dissolving power that actually brought about materialism and destroyed the old spirituality is penetrating into human thinking, especially into the spiritual, into the willed spiritual. I have pointed out how materialistic some theosophical views are. Of course, it is not easy to find the right words when discussing spiritual-scientific matters, because our language today is no longer suitable for the spiritual, because we first have to search again for such a connection between language and the subject that is suitable for the spiritual. But it is necessary that the spiritual-scientific movement is not always corrupted by what is most harmful. One must characterize impartially what takes place in the spirit. Again and again I experience that I am asked: There is someone, there is someone who has spiritual experiences. — The meaning of the questions, which are often asked in this way, is that the actual question is: Is it now possible to surrender to what this or that person sees with blind faith in the truth? And if the answer is in the affirmative, then blind devotion arises; if it is in the negative, then the person in question is immediately denounced as a heretic and it is said: Well, that is atavistic clairvoyance, you don't give anything to that. — Yes, this either-or must be taken quite differently in this field. We must really face up to the statements about the spiritual with all our healthy reason. But if we want to become dogmatists, we cannot become spiritual scientists. If we want to either idolize or condemn, we cannot become spiritual scientists. There will also be infinitely valuable contributions to the characterization of the spiritual world from sides that one does not necessarily want to swear by. On the other hand, there are times when people swear by some esoteric personality. Then it can be shown that this seer personality has at some point – well, maybe even once – retouched a little, or retouched a lot; then that personality is finished. Before, the same people swore by them, and now they have been undone. Yes, you don't get ahead within humanity in this way. You don't get ahead within humanity with the either/or of deification or demonization, but only by facing things with your common sense. For example, it may also be the case that someone, of whom one even knows: Well, he does not disdain to tell a tall tale now and then – something quite true, important, essential comes out of the spiritual world. We would not have the either/or that I am talking about if we wanted to introduce dogmatics, but if we wanted to place ourselves with common sense, precisely within this anthroposophical movement. That is one thing. The other is this: it is extremely difficult, because of the way things are often handled within our circle, to place the Anthroposophical Society in the cultural movement of the present day. This requires discernment on the part of those who are already members of this society. Once you are a member, you have a certain obligation to exercise this discernment. For we will go completely wrong with this Anthroposophical Society if we do not seek to connect with the general spiritual culture of the present, if we repeatedly and repeatedly fall back into the error of being sectarian. That will be the death of our movement if we become sectarian. Just consider that things like the ones we have discussed these days will not seem particularly strange to someone who is currently involved in science and cultural life, if he or she only acquires the necessary lack of prejudice. But in order to achieve something in this way, it is necessary to have the will to distinguish. With us it can easily happen that a question is asked in a stereotyped way when it is a matter of: should someone listen to anthroposophical lectures or should he be given a cycle? So the question is asked in a stereotyped way, without taking into account the level of education, the whole world position of the person concerned. But the stereotyped way is what is absolutely harmful to us. It is the schematic that makes it possible for a person like the one in Holland, around whom a whole bunch of nonsense has crystallized, to swim into the Anthroposophical Society and find protectors there, while people who are capable of judgment are often repelled by it. To mention a specific example: some time ago, Mr. von Bernus appeared within the Anthroposophical Society with the clear aim — which one may find a little better, a little worse, as common sense may speak — of building a bridge between the general cultural life, the literary and scientific life of the present, and our anthroposophical life. Now, Mr. von Bernus, in his own way, has poetically reworked and brought out into the world a number of things, some of which are in my books and some of which are in cycles. He showed me himself: he has received a pile of letters, letters of criticism, because a truly contemporary attempt has been made here! One would not be surprised if someone who perhaps has a lot at stake could be repelled by such behavior as was perpetrated against him by the Anthroposophical Society in the past. Nevertheless, the journal he founded will be of tremendous service to the Anthroposophical Movement. He had, after all, managed to get the Anthroposophical Society represented in Munich in his art gallery. But everywhere one could see certain resistances to something that was as justified as possible! And if one looks at Bernus' experiences, they give a good picture of how the Anthroposophical Society should learn to be a real society. In so far as the Dornach structure came into being, it is a society. But much else, in particular, is left undone, clearly showing that the Anthroposophical Society does not see itself as a society at all, but as a sum of individual sectarian little circles. But we must get beyond this stage of sectarianism. And we will not get beyond it unless some thought is given to the matter. It is so difficult, and it is true that one does not like to say such things, but after all, many things are necessarily said to me because I am personally so closely involved with this anthroposophical movement. If the Anthroposophical Society should gradually develop more and more into a society with an expressed tendency to keep me completely quiet — which is what it is actually developing into and what it has always had as a tendency — then it is not a matter of personal vanity when I emphasize this. It makes me very uncomfortable that I have to emphasize it, but in the Anthroposophical Society there is a tendency to keep quiet about me, and there the personal is linked to the factual. Because of this – because everything that a society otherwise does is not being done – only the venomous words that the apostate members have created bubble to the surface. Yes, these are things that I sometimes have to point out and that must not remain unspoken. I have raised them in the places where I have been able to speak recently, because I really believe that in these catastrophic times it is very important that anthroposophy is represented in the world in the right way. But it is so difficult to get people to reflect more deeply on how one should actually proceed in the anthroposophical field in order to make this Anthroposophical Society a real society. — Individuals have indeed made a start, but as a rule everything gets stuck in the starting blocks. Now, I think that perhaps, by drawing attention to the matter a second time, it will be given a little thought. I am not saying this for personal reasons, but because of certain necessities of the time, as you will indeed gather from what I have just said, from which you will be able to discern many seeds that can serve to help you understand our catastrophic times. [Blackboard writing] September 2, 1918 Every ideal is a germ for a future natural event. Every natural event is the fruit of past spiritual events. |