The Rudolf Steiner Archive

From a conversation with Kurt Englert-Faye

according to his diary entry: Dornach, February 25, 1933

With Dr. Steiner. I asked her to tell me the exact facts about Dr. Steiner's relationship to Freemasonry, since I needed to be clear about this in order to be able to counter the claim from the masonic side: that Dr. Steiner had been a mason and then, after he had come into possession of the “secrets”, had fallen away in order to fight them.

She gave me the following explanation of the context:

In his lectures on the most diverse subjects of anthroposophy, Dr. Steiner also described, among other things, various things that are also contained in the Masonic tradition in a certain way, without regard or reference to it, but out of his own spiritual research; for he only considered the results of his own research work to present. Now, among the many people who gradually found their way into the Society's groups, there were also personalities who were members of Masonic lodges, some of whom even held quite high degrees. These recognized the “maturity” by virtue of which Dr. Steiner spoke and the superiority of his knowledge. They went to him and asked him, as their “master”, to renew the spiritual striving in accordance with today's needs of consciousness, which had been alive as an original impulse in the masonic traditions.

So this demand from the outside world was presented to Dr. Steiner as a karmic task to be solved, no different than his commission at the time to collaborate on the Goethe Archives in Weimar and to edit the scientific writings of Goethe for the great Weimar Edition.¹ And just as Dr. Steiner did not pursue Goethe philology in his Goethe research, but rather further developed the tendencies inherent in Goethe's ideas and thoughts, leading them further in a contemporary and spiritually appropriate “renewal”. He also took the essential core of the former Masonic impulse and allowed its formative forces to unfold further, in accordance with the spiritual laws of our time. Wherever spiritual science takes up an existing tradition, it is never a matter of adopting a tradition, but of realizing spiritual succession. In this case, too, the introduction of renewal took place while observing the given forms, just as it had been the case with the development of Goetheanism into modern spiritual science. On the surface, Dr. Steiner worked in Weimar in the same arena and with the same means as the Goethe philologists, but inwardly something completely different happened. They preserved, but he metamorphosed. Just as Rudolf Steiner was, so to speak, scientifically legitimized for Weimar through the recommendation of Karl Julius Schröer (besides his doctorate), so it was also necessary with regard to masonry to “tie in with what already existed,” as he himself often said later. In this case, this meant that he acquired a charter, the authorization, the external “historical” legitimization to be able to work in this field. (A process comparable, in its way, to acquiring a doctorate from any present-day university in order to obtain all the associated rights.)

The middleman from whom the charter was purchased was now a certain Reuß. It was a providential real-symbolic character that the decadence of historical Freemasonry presented itself personally as this Reuß, who at the time represented the institution as an official representative, fully recognized and authorized. ² It was only later that the Freemasons banned Reuß as a fraud and charlatan.

The only contact between Dr. Steiner and the Freemasons was the acquisition of the charter. Rudolf Steiner himself was never a Freemason and never received any directives from them.

The fact that some Freemasons present a different version of events does not change the facts and may be due to the fact that, as custodians of a traditional “dead” wisdom, the spiritual autonomy and sovereignty of Rudolf Steiner is just as repugnant to them as the Goetheanism, which has been developed into spiritual science, is to the administrators of Goethe's literary estate, who have also taken it upon themselves to discredit Dr. Steiner's achievements as the editor of the scientific writings.

Marie Steiner to C.S. Picht in Stuttgart

the editor of the journal “Anthroposophie”, in connection with the essay “Was Rudolf Steiner a Freemason?”, Dornach, March 11,

... Must all Freemasons be traitors? What about Frederick the Great, Field Marshal Blücher, Wilhelm I and Emperor Frederick, and countless other German princes and generals? Should they all be pilloried, along with the countless still living who have belonged to German Masonic circles?

The first person to destroy the preserved document that gave him the right to work independently was Rudolf Steiner, right at the outbreak of the war. He declared that this work had been irrevocably dissolved. What had it consisted of? In the interpretation of the symbols and some fundamental features of the ceremony from the point of view of spiritual science. In order to be able to do this honestly, he needed to have the right to do so. This right was offered to him by fate, because some Masons thought that it would help them to fill in the gaps in their knowledge. The gentleman bearing the title of Grand Master, who had the right to grant such a document, was not the sort of person with whom Rudolf Steiner would have wished to maintain further relations. So Rudolf Steiner's condition was: no relations of any kind whatsoever, except the payment of the due fees. And that suited the gentleman very well.

But what the detractors want to make of this fact, which is described in Rudolf Steiner's “Course of My Life,” is affiliation with such associations that have political intentions, even those whose goal is the destruction of Germany. It is a shameless, irresponsible lie. But what else can be done in a world where the lie is so powerful than to call it by its own name?

The only time Rudolf Steiner attended a masonic ceremony was the funeral service for Joachim,³ and there were so many military people present, but also ladies, that this is really not enough to be accused of supranational machinations. (...)

Can you refute claims that are plucked out of thin air? In his book, a Mr. Huber calls Mr. Reuß the inspirer of Rudolf Steiner.⁴ If I were to claim that Mephistopheles is the inspirer of Mr. Huber, he could hardly bring me the necessary documents to prove to me that this is not the case. However, it is likely that this is the case to a certain extent, but there was never any inspiration of Dr. Steiner by Mr. Reuss.

Dr. Steiner had to acquire the external right to save a certain spiritual content, which was expressed in time-honored symbols, from complete corruption, in that, let us say, Mephistopheles took possession of these things through people who were subject to his influence and were in Masonic associations. Someone who sees through such things also tries to protect spirituality from being robbed by evil forces, and to do so he makes many sacrifices. Rudolf Steiner was the first to point out certain political intentions behind certain secret societies, and the members of many so-called secret societies, such as the Freemasons, are unsuspecting of them. ⁵ Therefore, objective education was needed, but not fanatical, defamatory agitation that sees ghosts and itself pursues political purposes with it.

Most German Freemasons are certainly quite unsuspecting and incredulous regarding the hidden intentions of a few circles. Their feelings will also turn against Dr. Steiner because he has spoken some serious words of warning about it. Thus, the one who knows must expose himself to the hatred of all circles and let the “crucify him” resound over him.

Freemasonry, too, is accused of blasphemy and denial of Christ. Dr. Steiner's entire life's work is dedicated to the task of bringing the Christ impulse closer to human understanding, to make it come alive again in a time when materialism threatened to suffocate it and the godless movement began. This is indeed proof against many assertions. But one must take the trouble to study such evidence.

The most compelling evidence against everything that is untruthful about him and has been raised by spiteful enemies lies in a serious and conscientious study of Rudolf Steiner's works.

• 1. Cf. Footnote 2) on page 25.
• 2. It should be noted here that Reuß was only recognized by Yarker, but not by regular Freemasonry.
• 3. Cf. footnote 2) on page 97.
• 4. Engelbert Huber, “Freimaurerei. A World Power Behind the Scenes», Stuttgart 1934. This book claims that Rudolf Steiner was commissioned by Theodor Reuß to work out a ritual for the Memphis-Misraim Order in Germany. This is refuted by the documents in the present volume. In addition to this, Rudolf Steiner's remark in the lecture Dornach, October 11, 1915, is worth mentioning: “Occult brotherhoods also made various suggestions to me; and when a very respected occult brotherhood suggested that I participate in the spread of an occult organization that also called itself a Rosicrucian, I left it unanswered.”
• 5. See in particular the lectures from the war years 1916/17 “Zeitgeschichtliche Betrachtungen”, two volumes GA 173/74.

[ 1 ] The magazine Lucifer, edited by Rudolf Steiner in the service of spiritual science, was enlarged in 1904 through the merger with the Austrian magazine, Gnosis. Thenceforth it bore the double name, Lucifer-Gnosis. In it were published Rudolf Steiner's articles that later appeared as the book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, which, with the books, Theosophy and Occult Science, an Outline, belongs to the basic works of the anthroposophically oriented science of the spirit.

A continuation of these articles appeared under the title, The Stages of Higher Knowledge. They were intended, later on, to be formed into a second volume in continuation of Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment. But an overabundance of work and the heavy demands that lecturing made upon his time gradually prevented Rudolf Steiner from devoting the necessary attention to the magazine, although there was a steady increase in the number of its readers. As a result, its publication had to cease, and the further appearance of the articles on The Stages of Higher Knowledge had to be interrupted.

We have often been asked to make them available again through a new edition. The present books complies with this wish. Since the text suddenly breaks off, the book cannot claim the value of completeness. It was, therefore, justifiable to question the advisability of a new edition. The views presented here, but not brought to a conclusion, have been published many times in other written works of Rudolf Steiner in a different form and under different titles. But for the searcher of the spirit the fact remains that the conquest of spiritual reality is possible only by returning again and again to the spiritual contents once worked over but never sufficiently assimilated, and by experiencing ever anew the path that once has shown the direction into the realm of the spirit. The soul life of the person working meditatively must be kept so mobile that the view afforded him by one path makes him all the more receptive to views from other aspects.

[ 2 ] The articles published here are of historical value. They indicate the starting-point of Rudolf Steiner's esoteric instructions; they show us how he has become the pioneer in this very domain in which, through his indications, man for the first time has been allowed freedom. With a world encompassing outlook, and a high sense of responsibility he had to build a basis and create a spiritual attitude through which man—by finding within himself the solid moral support—might still in this freedom avoid falling prey to temptation and aberration. In order to accomplish such a deed at a decisive turning-point in history, in the midst of opposing forces, relying solely upon one's own self, there was needed the tremendous ethical power that permeates Rudolf Steiner's entire life-work, its goals the welfare of mankind, the rescue of the Western world from the threatening collapse. He laid the foundations for his work in a way that corresponded with the demands of the age. To achieve this required the synthesis of all knowledge.

[ 3 ] If one takes up these articles, written at the beginning of an astonishing life work that continued until March 30, 1925, and that, in the first years of this century, had received an impulse willed by destiny through its connection with theosophical groups fed from oriental sources—the question arises: How is it to be understood that Rudolf Steiner, who pointed the way to freedom also in esoteric life, to full self-reliance, and who let the pupil pledge to his own higher ego the obedience he must otherwise pledge to the teacher—how is it to be understood that Rudolf Steiner still urges in these articles the necessity of a strict reliance of the student upon the teacher, making the student as it were dependent upon the teacher?

[ 4 ] In truth, Rudolf Steiner is only describing the pupil teacher relationship as one of trust. From the very beginning he has avoided and rejected the authoritative element. In ancient times, the initiating priests took full responsibility for initiation of the neophyte into the mysteries of spiritual existence and exerted their will upon him. Thus the pupil was at the same time protected and guided, and was able to escape the dangers that otherwise would have overpowered him. His ego still hovered above his physical sheaths; his consciousness of self had not yet awakened. To awaken it more and more was the task of the progressing mystery training.

By drawing attention to the Cosmic Teacher, Christian initiation lessened the dependency upon the personal teacher, without wholly eliminating it. In the Rosicrucian training this dependency gradually loses its personal character and transforms itself into a relationship of trust. The teacher assists the student, shows him the way he seeks but cannot find unaided. The teacher gives him moral support, points out the dangers of vanity and the trickery of deceptive images that he must learn to distinguish from true spiritual reality. Thus the teacher is a helper ready to withdraw when trust is lacking.

At the turning-point of history at which we stand, the teacher working for the present had to point to the past, present, and future of human spiritual striving and, beginning with the education of the individual, had to erect his work so that it constituted a deed for mankind: a newly gained element of life for posterity. Thus, Rudolf Steiner created a science of initiation in which henceforth every serious, morally striving human being can find the fundament that carries him; he will be able to take hold of the elements that sharpen his power of discrimination while new worlds open up to him. He need not grope uncertainly, having received enough instruction to guide him until he finds the leader in the lands of spirit.

[ 5 ] This was not the case before Rudolf Steiner began his spiritual work. His deed is the science of initiation. Through it is revealed what lay hidden in the Mysteries of the ancient temples: namely, alongside the knowledge of cosmic evolution, the knowledge of the imminent descent of Christ, and what was sealed up in the Church: the redeeming deed of the liberation of mankind through the Christ and the gradual permeation of the ego of the individual with His power. Instead of personal guidance, the requirement now is that the human being find the way to the Ego of Mankind, to the Christ, through the forces of the time spirit. The consciousness of the individual human being is made mature for the acceptance of the higher ego force; self-consciousness is raised to spirit self.

[ 6 ] It is the work of the future. But only by standing on the ground of the past and preparing the future can man work fruitfully for the present. By any other course he strives in the void. Here, too, the laws of metamorphosis govern. The future is created through transformation of the present that is rooted in the past. New elements appear, just as the new spring follows the winter. The power of the sun glows through the earth; all that decays, undergoing transformation, is kindled to new life through grace descending from above.

[ 7 ] Also in the esoteric realm happenings unfold in historical continuity, in accordance with the law of ascending evolution and the flood tide and ebb tide of diminishing and flourishing life until the seemingly sudden moment when the rays of grace break forth, like the miracle of the radiant blossom in the green plant world. Yet without this transformation from form to form carried out by wise powers, and the constant enhancement in all domains of life, the new values, the gifts of the spirit, the fiery tongues of the Word would not descend upon us. Without knowledge of such happenings, the recipients of these gifts would not be in a position to grasp what it is that wants to take place among them. The great new power could not become effective, the future could not be saved.

[ 8 ] The souls striving for spiritual knowledge who approached Rudolf Steiner were the human material willed by destiny and led to him by the age with whom Rudolf Steiner had to work. Out of their needs and requirements he had to form the science of initiation, based on cognition. It was his task to tear men away from the indolence of the age in regard to the spirit, so that they could become a bridge for the demands of the future.

[ 9 ] Most difficult was the awakening of a sense for inner freedom, self-reliance, fully answerable to itself. With scrupulous regard for this goal, Rudolf Steiner desired no other role among men than that of instructor and, when so requested, advisor, awakener to spiritual goals of mankind. He was able to present spiritual facts because his thinking and beholding were permeated with life and unfolded, step by step, with the power of an organism of nature. His spiritual work stands before us—the restored unity of science, art and religion.

You have heard of the spirits that reveal themselves to man: “Will, Wisdom, Form”. I would like to say a few more things about these entities.

You must familiarize yourself with them. Those who only consider the physical part know only a little.

All teachings are based on observations with higher organs that do not belong to the physical body, that belong to the higher bodies and are not yet developed in the ordinary human being either. Familiarize yourself with the fact that higher insights are gained.

The names of the [four] stages of perception [are]:

1. Material recognition: It is the subordinate one, only used for everyday life [recognition].

2. Imaginative cognition – recognizing spiritual beings in images: the images of the dream world, surging up and down, are chaotic and disorderly, without meaning. However, the meaning can be developed in the soul. Imago image, with which man surrounds himself. There is the fabric from which knowledge is composed [...]

Through the reality that one recognizes imaginatively, one can grasp and pass through.

3. Voluntaristic - volitional - cognition: We are no longer dealing with images. All image-knowledge belongs to the astral worlds, all volitional knowledge belongs to the mental world.

Beings that are perceived have the same substance as our human will. Volitional expressions.

4. Intuition: Will particularly developed sensitively. The will stirs. When the will becomes sentient, that is the highest kind of knowledge that man can have on the third plan. The highest plan is intuition; the stages lead up to the three worlds, where we have arrived at the limit of what

concerns man.

Intuition is the world of knowledge of the disciple who has attained the third degree.

The third degree, or swan, is the degree that connects the intercourse of ordinary people with the masters - Lohengrin.

Intuition enables a person to perceive objects within. We must learn to understand the meaning of the name “I”. Through meditation, the distinction of the I from other names becomes clear. Then you distinguish the basics of the royal yoga school.

There is an unspeakable difference between the “I” and other names. There is no thing that would have a name that anyone could attach to it, but there is a name that everyone knows, that only one can say to himself, the meaningful I. The “I” must resound from within the person, then the person enters the realm that is supersensible and the path by which he comes only from within. There, man first enters the realm that has no [gap in the transcript]

That is why, in Jewish secret doctrine, the unspeakable name [Yahweh], which means “I am,” is God, who announces himself in the innermost part of the soul, the first of intuition. If you now learn to recognize all things in the same way, if you also elicit the names of things as you do for yourself, if you crawl into things through self-abandonment, through the dissolution of the self, then you will learn all secrets, then every object will say its own ego, then all things will become eloquent. All illusions of one's own self will then have vanished. All things will then proclaim the words within them. [...]

What I am saying to you now is a symbolization of what has been said in all schools. I speak to you, you hear me through the fact that I am able to make the air vibrate in very specific forms, which are a true reflection of my words and sounds. Now you know that all things in the form of air can be liquefied. Now you think that if someone could solidify the air at the moment I utter something, then my words would fall like snow crystals. That is how man, who looked deeper, rightly imagined the world in the first place. Thus the world soul once spoke the primal words into an infinitely fine substance, into the Akasha matter. Everything here on earth is Akasha matter that has fallen down. The crystal is the condensed word of the Primordial Soul. Everything around us is the word of the Primordial Soul that has become rigid. When man ascends to intuitive knowledge, he hears the words that the Primordial Soul once spoke.

The four steps of knowledge lead to the mental plane. These four steps are taught in all Rosicrucian schools and form the content of the first seven degrees of initiation. Freemasonry also had these seven steps before it descended to the three St. John's degrees.

One comes to an understanding of the higher worlds through feeling and through calm, clear research. Trust is necessary and faith, evoked by intuitive feeling. Man is inclined towards truth and clarity; when the occultist tells him something, he finds that there is something right about it.

First of all, I will give a skeleton of the higher world and will proceed quite logically and elementarily. If you consider human development, you will become aware of the four-fold nature of man as he stands before you.

Firstly: the physical body has something in common with the mineral kingdom. When a person stands before us, they are a mixture of the physical and the higher bodies. The eye is a physical apparatus without sensation, but it is animated, endowed with sensation. Outside in the world, the realm of the inanimate is spread out, and man has taken possession of it.

1. The realm of the inanimate: physical body
2. The realm of the plant-like: etheric body
3. The realm of the animal-like: astral body I Manas Budhi [Atma]

Secondly: the etheric body: You can cut a piece of the mineral kingdom and lay it down, and it will be just the same after a year. It is different with plants: if you cut off a leaf, it will wither after a short time.

Thirdly: the astral body or the sentient body.

These three kingdoms of nature are also in man. Then there is the fourth link, the I. The I holds together the essence of the whole world in the human body. Schiller expressed it quite theosophically in what he describes as Goethe's view of nature: “You seek to know nature, but on a difficult path, by combining all three kingdoms to understand the human being.”

Here we have arrived at the point where man is today. We have what the forces of nature have made of him. The physical body is what the deities have made, it is the cleverest. The physical body is constructed wisely, the other bodies are still imperfect. The astral body commits follies against the heart, it intervenes in the wise construction in an unrhythmic and chaotic way.

The ego is the real baby, it is at the very beginning. Through these imperfections, man must first develop upwards. The European knows how to distinguish between 'good' and 'bad', 'true' and 'false'. As much as the ego has of impeccable truth, so much manas is in the ego. There is no need to vote on anything that is manasic. However much a person achieves, together with everyone else, he must recognize the truth for himself.

Becoming dispassionate. The more dispassionate feeling there is in a person, the more Budhi there is in him. As the I develops, it also becomes as rhythmic as the physical body. Two worlds.

The human being lives in three realms, but a new world is opening up for the human being, into which he must learn to live. Just as the baby “I” has risen above the animal kingdom, so it rises into higher realms. All religions have striven to lead the “I” upwards. As we ascend, we gain an overview.

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The old Christian secret doctrine calls the moon beings angels. The asuras are the origin of all kinds of selfishness, otherwise we would not have independence. Selfhood, but also selfishness. The gods of form are the constructive architectural ones. The spirits of form have worked on the physical body. Jehovah is the spirit of form. The moon gods have been particularly active in the etheric body, which is why Helena Petrovna Blavatsky calls Jehovah the moon god. The occultist approaches these beings and says that they did not develop out of nothing.

Supplement from the notes of Alfred Reebstein

The human being, the I, has taken possession of the other realms, formed an extract from them, which it now rules. The physical body is the most perfectly developed in its way; the higher limbs, etheric body and astral body, are much less developed in their way and the I only reach greater perfection in later stages.

The part of man that is completely flawless truth is called: Manas.

Budhi is what is completely independent of sensations and passions. The following are developing simultaneously with the human kingdom:

- Mineral kingdom
- Plant kingdom
- Animal kingdom
- Human kingdom – kingdom of the egos
- Angelic kingdom, lunar Pitris, moon beings, people of the moon
- Archangels, fire spirits, sun beings, people of the sun
- Archai, spirits of time, spirits of personality; Asuras, humans of Saturn
- Spirits of form, Exusiai
- Spirits of movement - activity - Dynamis
- Spirits of wisdom
- [Throne]
- Cherubim
- Seraphim

Jesus ben Pandira and Initiation among the Essenes. The secret of numbers. Reflection of cosmic conditions in human evolution. The secret of the blood in the line of descent, and the secret of cosmic space

Ww have to realize that Jesus ben Pandira was in no way related to the personality or individuality of either the Jesus of the Gospel of Matthew or of the Gospel of Luke, or any other Gospel; he lived a hundred years before the Christ Event, and was stoned and hanged upon a tree. It is most important that he should not be confused with the Jesus of the Gospels.

Of Jesus ben Pandira it need only be stated that neither occult knowledge nor any clairvoyant faculties are necessary to prove his existence, for information in regard to this can be had from the Hebrew Talmud. Confusion with the actual Jesus has occurred at various times, even as early as the second century of the Christian era. Having stated emphatically that Jesus ben Pandira is not to be identified with the Jesus of the Evangelists, it is nevertheless necessary to establish the real historical connection of these two personalities. This is only possible by means of occult investigation; the connection between them only emerges after a study of the evolution of mankind and those who guide it.

Gazing upwards to those beings who lead human development, we come at last to a group of high individualities who, according to Eastern terminology, are called Bodhisattvas—for it is in the East where knowledge of them has been established. There are many Bodhisattvas; they are the great teachers of mankind. From the spiritual worlds they infuse into humanity through the Mystery schools what according to the degree of human ripeness is appropriate to each epoch. Bodhisattvas succeed one another throughout the ages. Two of them are of special interest to present humanity, one, who as son of King Sudhodana became Buddha; and the other, his successor in this dignity, who is still a Bodhisattva. Both Oriental wisdom and clairvoyant investigation agree that the latter's mission will extend over the next two thousand five hundred years, when this Bodhisattva will rise to the higher rank of Buddha as did his predecessor. This, the present Bodhisattva will then be exalted to the dignity of Maitreya Buddha. In the long line of Bodhisattvas we have to recognize the great guiding teachers of evolution, but they should not be confused with the source of their teaching, the source from which they themselves draw what they bestow upon humanity. Rather we have to picture a collegium of Bodhisattvas, and the centre of this collegium is the living source whence this teaching is derived. This living source is none other than He Whom we call the Christ, from Whom all Bodhisattvas receive what in due course they hand on to humanity. A Bodhisattva devotes himself principally to teaching, but upon attaining Buddha-hood he ceases to descend into incarnation, and his mission becomes different. In accordance with all Eastern philosophy it can be said that Gautama Buddha, who, in his last incarnation, was the son of King Sudhodana, has since then only experienced incorporation as far as the etheric body. In the course of lectures on the Gospel of Luke we explained what the next task of this Buddha was.

When the Jesus of the Gospel of Luke was born—the Nathan Jesus of whom Luke tells, and who is not to be confused with the Jesus of the Gospel of Matthew—the Being of the Buddha, who was then incorporated as far as the etheric body, entered into the astral body of the Nathan Jesus. It is therefore possible to say that having incarnated as Gautama Buddha, this Being did not come again as a teacher, but was henceforth present as a living force. He had become an actual force working from the spiritual world into our physical world.

To teach is one thing; to work as a living force with the forces of growth is something quite different. A Bodhisattva is a teacher up to the moment he attains Buddha-hood, from then onwards he becomes a vital force, filling with constructive power everything with which he is concerned. In this way the Buddha entered the organism of the Nathan Jesus as described by Luke. From the sixth century B.C. it is to the Buddha's successor, the coming Maitreya Buddha, that humanity must look for its teacher. His chosen instrument was the circle of the Therapeutæ and Essenes, and he poured down his inspiration especially through his disciple, Jesus, the son of Pandira, the purest, the most noted, the most exalted of them all. Thus we have to realize that the content of this Bodhisattva-teaching streamed forth into humanity through the Essenes.

The actual sect of the Essenes, as regards its profounder teaching, disappeared comparatively soon after the Christ Event, as external history testifies. Hence it need not sound improbable when I say that they were employed as a means for bringing down from the spheres of the Bodhisattvas what was necessary to prepare humanity to grasp the mighty event of the coming of Christ. The most important teaching man had received to aid him in the understanding of the Christ Event had its source in these communities. Jesus ben Pandira was chosen to receive inspiration from that Bodhisattva who was destined to become the Maitreya Buddha, and whose influence was active among the Essenes; he was inspired to impart a teaching that was to make comprehensible the Mystery of Palestine—the Mystery of Christ. External history knows little of the Essenes, more exact information regarding them is only possible with the aid of occult investigation; hence in a society like this I can speak without hesitation of secrets known to the Essenes and Therapeutæ that are needful to an understanding of the Gospel of Matthew.

These communities flourished a hundred years before the Christ Event, and taught how preparation was to be made for it. Their most important feature was the manner of their initiation. It was specially adapted to evoke an understanding, through clairvoyant perception, of the significance of Hebraism and Abrahamism as connected with the Christ Event. This was a mystery peculiar to these communities. The very purpose of their initiation was to impart clairvoyant perception in this connection. A follower of the Essenes had in the first place to attain full appreciation of the significance of what had come to pass in the Hebrew race through Abraham. Through his own individual vision, an Essene had to see in Abraham a true forefather of the race, one in whom a seed had been implanted which then, by means of the blood, percolated from generation to generation, as explained in the last lecture.

To understand how something of such great importance in human evolution could take place through a personality like Abraham, we must keep in mind a most important saying. This saying shows that whenever a man is destined to be a special instrument for human evolution he must be in direct contact with some divine spiritual being.

Those who attended the performance of the Rosicrucian Mystery Play, given at Munich, and those who have read it, know that one of the most important dramatic manifestations occurs where the hierophant informs Maria that her mission will only be possible after such an influx from a higher being has taken place. This was actually accomplished in her. What then took place may be called a separation of the higher from the lower principles, which made it possible for the latter to be possessed by a subordinate spirit. All this is to be found in the Rosicrucian Mystery Play, and if allowed to act on the soul, and not accepted lightly, it directs our attention to mighty secrets of human evolution.

Abraham having been selected for his great mission, the Spirit that had been recognized in early Atlantis as the Spirit who moved and lived in all the surrounding world had to enter into his inner organism. This happened for the first time in the case of Abraham, and therefore a change in man's spiritual perception then became possible for the first time. A divine Being implanted as it were a germ in Abraham's organism that was to enter all the other organisms descending from him in the direct line.

An Essene of that time would have said: The seed which actually formed the Hebrew people so as to fit them to be the vehicle for the mission of Christ, was first implanted in them by the mysterious Being only to be discovered when they looked back through the generations to Abraham. This Being worked as a kind of Folk-spirit from out the inner organism of Abraham in the blood of the Hebrew people. To reach some understanding of the crowning mystery of human evolution, it is necessary to rise to the Spirit who implanted this seed, and seek him where he was before he had entered into Abraham's organization. In order to rise to this Spirit who had organized and inspired the Hebrew people, to know him in his purity, the Essenes felt it to be necessary to pass through a certain training; they felt they must purify themselves from all that had come to human souls from the physical world since the time of Abraham. And further, an Essene would declare: The spiritual being which man bears within him, and all the other spiritual beings concerned with his development, are only to be seen in their purity in the spiritual world. As found in man, they have become defiled by the forces of the physical world.

From the point of view of the Essenes (which in a certain sphere of knowledge is absolutely correct), every single person then living had impurities in his soul from early times which disturbed his free vision of the Spiritual Being who had implanted the attribute in Abraham which has been described. Every Essene sought in his soul to be purified from what had entered him in this way, and which dimmed his vision of the Being who dwelt in the blood passing through the generations, the Being who could only be rightly seen after much purification. All the methods of their training were directed towards freeing the soul from its inherited tendencies and influences that clouded its vision and hid the spiritual inspirer of Abraham. Not only had man a spiritual being within him, but this being had been sullied through these inherited tendencies.

There is a law in Spiritual Science which was perceived by the Essenes through their clairvoyant investigation and spiritual vision: that hereditary influences only cease to be active when a man has passed through forty-two stages in the line of descent; only then has he purged his soul of inherited influences. What is inherited by man from father and mother, from grandfather and grandmother, and so on, becomes feebler the farther back the line is traced; beyond forty-two generations nothing more of this could be found, which means that the influence of inheritance is then lost. By careful training and inner exercises, the Essenes directed their attention towards eliminating the impurities of the forty-two generations. This meant a severe training on a mystical path of forty-two clearly defined degrees or stages. Once these were passed, the Essene knew he was freed from the influences of the world of sense, and had reached the point where he experienced his inner self; where he felt the centre of his being to be united with Divinity. Therefore said he: ‘In going through these forty-two stages I ascend to God—to the God with whom I am concerned.’

The Essenes and the Therapeutæ had a clear vision of man's path to a divine Being who had not as yet descended into matter; they alone knew the truth of the fact which can be described as the ‘Event of Abraham’ they knew it at least in so far as it was concerned with inheritance. They also knew that if a man was to rise to a Being who was to enter the line of inheritance he must reach a place where he was no longer steeped in matter he must pass through forty-two stages of development corresponding to the forty-two generations; then he would find that Being. The Essene knew something more; he knew just as man has to rise through these forty-two stages to reach Divinity, so this Divine Being must descend, in the reverse direction, through forty-two generations if He was to enter into physical humanity. If man required to rise through forty-two stages before attaining to God, God had to descend through forty-two stages in order to become a man among men. So taught the Essenes, and so taught above all Jesus ben Pandira, who was inspired by the Bodhisattva. Having learnt this we know the source whence flowed the knowledge given out by the writer of the Gospel of Matthew, and exactly why he traces back these forty-two generations.

Jesus ben Pandira, who instructed the Essenes in these matters, lived a century before these forty-two generations could be completed. He taught them that advance beyond a certain point on their journey through the forty-two stages was only possible if an historical event were connected with it, that any further achievement could only come by grace from above. A time, however, would come, he told them, when this would be a natural event; a man would be born who, through the power in his own blood, would be able to rise so high that divine Spiritual Forces could descend into him, which he had need of in order that he might make fully manifest the Spirit of the Race—the Spirit of Jahve—in the blood of the Hebrew people. Jesus ben Pandira taught them further; that if Zarathustra, he who would bring Ahura Mazdao, were to incarnate in human form, this could only come to pass if this human form had been so prepared that the Divine Spirit ensouling it had passed down through forty-two generations.

It is now apparent that the teaching concerning the descent through the generations with which the Gospel of Matthew begins had its origin among the sect of the Essenes. If these facts are to be fully understood we must refer to something still deeper in this whole connection.

Everything concerned with human evolution confronts us, as it were, from two sides, for the simple reason that man is a two-fold being. Seen during waking consciousness, when the four members of his being are united, the reason for man's dual nature is not at first discernible. But it is easily seen at night when one part, consisting of physical body and etheric body, remains in the physical world, and the other, composed of the astral body and ego, leaves it. Man is made up of these two parts. The human qualities and attributes of the physical world belong to the physical and etheric bodies alone, although the other members have a share in them during the waking state. When awake, man functions by means of his astral body and ego in the other two members; when asleep he leaves them to themselves. The moment that he falls asleep, however, the beings and forces of the cosmos begin to function in, and to permeate, the forsaken members, so that there is a constant influx from the cosmos into the physical and etheric bodies of man. That part of him, however, which is left sleeping in bed, is actually limited to the forty-two generations, during which time it is under the law of inheritance. Beginning with the first generation and taking all that then belonged to physical nature, we shall find at the end, if we trace this through forty-two generations, nothing of what was the most essential in the first case. Thus in six times seven generations are comprised all the active characteristics of the physical and etheric bodies of a man. The inherited tendencies found in these two bodies must be sought for among his ancestors, but only in the forty-two preceding generations; beyond that time they cannot be traced, all belonging to an earlier generation has disappeared.

Human evolution in time is based on a certain numerical relationship. If we consider this more closely we find everything concerning the physical body is limited to forty-two generations, because everything connected with evolution in time is connected with the number seven. The Essenes knew this. An Essene said to himself: ‘Thou must pass through six times seven stages—that is forty-two—thou wilt then have arrived at the last seven which complete the sevenfold count, making forty-nine stages in all.’ What lies beyond the forty-two stages cannot be attributed to the forces and beings active in the physical and etheric body. The whole evolution of these bodies is finished—in accordance with the sevenfold law—after seven times seven generations, but during the last seven of these a complete change has taken place, and nothing of the first generation remains. What we are now concerned with is something entirely new in the realm into which man enters after the forty-two generations. We are now no longer concerned with a human existence but with a superhuman one. The six times seven generations, therefore, are connected entirely with the earth, and the seven times seven that follows is connected with what is beyond the earth; that is fruit for the spiritual world.

Hence the people from among whom the Gospel of Matthew had its origin, expressed their thoughts somewhat in this way: ‘The physical body used by Zarathustra had to be so ripe at the end of forty-two generations that it was already on the verge of becoming spiritualized; it was at the point where deification could take place.’ This could have taken place at the beginning of the forty-third generation, but it did not; this body allowed itself to be used by another being, who, as the spirit of Zarathustra, incarnated on earth as Jesus of Nazareth. In the events capable of providing a fitting body and fitting blood for the soul of Zarathustra, in Jesus of Nazareth, everything was fulfilled in accordance with this mystery of numbers. Everything relating to the physical and etheric body in human evolution has been prepared in this way.

Now, however, there are in man—and hence too in him who was to be the bearer of the Christ-being—not only a physical and an etheric body, but also an astral body and ego. Preparation therefore had to be made not only for a suitable physical and etheric body, but what was needful had also to be done to prepare a suitable astral body and ego. For such a mighty Event not one, but two personalities were necessary. The physical and etheric bodies were prepared in the case of the personality described in the Gospel of Matthew; the astral body and ego were prepared in another personality—the Nathan Jesus, of whom the Gospel of Luke relates. For the early years this was another personality. While the Matthew Jesus received a suitable physical and etheric organism, the Luke Jesus received the appropriate astral-body and bearer of the ego.

How could this come to pass? We have seen that the forces of the forty-two generations had to be prepared in order that the sheaths might come about which were necessary for the Jesus of the Matthew gospel. The astral body and ego had also to be prepared in order to appear later in the appropriate manner. How this happened we shall now explain.

As an introduction to the understanding of the Jesus of the Gospel of Luke, for whom special preparation had also to be made, let us consider the nature of sleep. The notion, derived from the assertions of lower clairvoyance, that the whole astral and ego-nature of man is contained within the nebulous appearance seen near the body of a sleeping man, is entirely erroneous. For it is a fact that during sleep, when man forsakes his physical and etheric sheaths, he expands, and is spread abroad through the whole cosmos. The mystery of the sleeping state is contained in the fact that the astral body expands through the whole stellar world, attracting towards it the purest cosmic forces; and these forces man brings with him when at the moment of awakening he plunges once more into his physical and etheric bodies. Hence he emerges from sleep strengthened by what he has derived from the whole cosmos.

If man were clairvoyant to-day in the highest sense—and this was the same at the time of Christ Jesus—what must then take place in him? Modern man is normally unconscious during sleep when with his astral body and ego he goes forth from his physical and etheric bodies; clairvoyant consciousness must, however, become capable of perception by means of the astral body and ego, without the aid of the physical and etheric bodies. It will then belong to the world the stars, and will not only perceive this world but actually enter into it. Just as the consciousness of the Essene had to rise through successive stages (at the root of which lay the number seven), so man must surmount the stages which enable him to perceive universal space clairvoyantly.

The dangers attending both courses of development I have often pointed out.

The development of the Essenes was fundamentally a penetration into the physical body and etheric body, that they might find their God. With them it was as if a man on awakening did not see the world around him, but plunged into his physical and etheric bodies in order to realize their forces; therefore to see what was external from within. Man's descent into his physical vehicles on awakening is not a conscious act, for at that moment consciousness is attracted to the environment, and is not directed to the forces within his physical and etheric bodies. The essential fact for the Essene was, that, disregarding his environment, he should dip down into his own physical vehicles and perceive all the forces that in the sense of occult science had their rise in the mystery of the six times seven generations.

Similar and even mightier exertions are necessary if a man is to ascend into the cosmos and discover its secrets. In penetrating into his own inner being he is only exposed to the danger of being overcome by the forces of this being, the desires and passions of its depths, of which he is ordinarily unaware and of which he does not dream. Ordinary training usually prevents knowledge of these forces—his attention being attracted to the emergence of the outer world on awakening, so that he should not be overcome by this. Another danger meets him when he experiences ‘expansion over the whole cosmos.’ He who experiences this moment, by retaining his consciousness during sleep, he who is able to perceive the spiritual world through the instrumentality of his astral body and ego, is confronted by a great danger. Like a man attempting to gaze at the sun, he is blinded and bewildered by the overwhelming grandeur of his experiences.

Just as the different stages of wisdom striven for by the Essenes, in order to learn of the hereditary tendencies in the physical and etheric bodies, were connected with the mystery of numbers (six x seven), so there was a secret number in the Mysteries of the Great World, showing how knowledge of these could be acquired. The best approach to these mysteries is through the stars themselves which, in their movements and groupings into constellations, provide a form of expression—a language. As, by passing through six times seven stages man attains the key to the mysteries of his own inner being; twelve times seven or eighty-four stages are necessary before he can rise to the spiritual mysteries of universal space. When we have surmounted the eighty-four stages we are no longer blinded by the complexity of these spiritual cosmic forces. Beyond these eighty-four stages we have attained that calm wherein a way may be found through the mighty labyrinth.

This was taught to a certain extent among the Essenes. A person having attained clairvoyance during sleep, as just described, could pour his being forth into something that is expressed in the mystery of numbers as twelve times seven. Anyone who has attained to the ‘twelve times seven’ degree is already in spiritual realms, for when he has completed the eleven times seven, he has already reached the verge of the Mysteries. As in the other, the seven times seven, he is already in the spiritual realm; so he is in the twelve times seven. On the latter path the spiritual realm is beyond the eleven times seven stage. Such are the number of the stages to be passed through by the astral body and ego. All this is imprinted in the starry script, seven is the number derived from the planets; they are seven in number; what man has to pass through in cosmic space is derived from the number twelve, the number of the Signs of the Zodiac.

As the seven planets group themselves within, and pass through the twelve signs, so if man is to live into cosmic space he must pass through seven times twelve, or rather seven times eleven stages, to attain spirituality. The Twelve Signs of the Zodiac may be pictured as forming a spiritual periphery in the centre of which is man himself. Now man does not reach the spiritual realm spread around him simply by advancing from a centre outwards; he must expand in spiral form; he must advance, as it were, in seven spiral movements. Each time he completes one spiral turn he has passed through all the twelve signs; he has in this way to pass through seven times twelve points. Man gradually expands in spiral form through the cosmos—this is naturally only an image for what man experiences—and in circling thus, on the seventh journey through the twelve signs, spirituality is reached. Then instead of regarding the cosmos from the central point of his own self; he regards it from the spiritual circumference—from twelve points of view—and from these different aspects he views the external world. It is not enough to see things from one point only, they must be considered from twelve aspects.

He who is in quest of what is divinely spiritual must guide his astral body and ego in this way through eleven times seven stages, and at the twelfth he is in the spiritual world.

If Divinity wished to descend and assume a human ego, it would likewise have to pass down through eleven times seven stages. So when the Gospel of Luke wished to describe the spiritual forces that prepared a human astral body and ego to be the bearer of the Christ, it had to relate how the divine force descended through eleven times seven stages. This is truly told in the Gospel of Luke. Because this Gospel tells of the personality for whom the astral body and ego were prepared, it is not concerned, like the Gospel of Matthew, with six times seven generations, but with eleven times seven successive stages through which is traced down, from God Himself; that which dwelt in the individuality of the Luke-Jesus. These seventy-seven different human stages can be counted in the Gospel of Luke.

Because the Gospel of Matthew describes the mystery of the descent of the divine force which worked constructively within the physical and etheric bodies, the ruling number in it must be six times seven. In the Gospel of Luke, because it describes the descent of the divine force which built the astral body and ego, the number must be eleven times seven. Such is the infinite depth of the origin of these facts as related in the Gospels. These Gospels of Luke and Matthew reveal the secrets of initiation; the descent by certain stages of the Divine Spirit into a human individuality, and correspondingly the successive stages by which an individual can reach forth into the cosmos.

It will be explained in the next lecture how a table of descent is also found in the Gospel of Luke; and why, in an age when the Mystery of Christ was imparted only to a few, it should have been demonstrated that there were seventy-seven generations from God and from Adam, down to the Jesus of this Gospel.

Yesterday we concluded by outlining the three methods of occult development: the Eastern, the Christian and the Rosicrucian. Today we will begin by going more closely into the details which distinguish these three paths. But first I should say that no occult school sees in its teaching and requirements anything like a moral law valid for all mankind. The requirements apply only to those who deliberately choose to devote themselves to a particular occult training. You can, for instance, be a very good Christian and fulfil everything that the Christian religion prescribes for the laity without undergoing a Christian occult training. It goes without saying that you can be a good man and come to a form of the higher life without any occult training.

As I said earlier, the Eastern training calls for strict submission to the Guru.⁴² I will describe briefly the kind of instruction that an Eastern teacher gives. You will realise that the actual instructions cannot be given publicly; I can indicate only the stages of the path. The instructions can be divided into eight parts:

1. Yama includes all the abstentions required of anyone who wishes to undergo Yoga training: Do not lie, do not kill, do not steal, do not lead a dissolute life, desire nothing.

The injunction, Do not kill, is very stringent and applies to all creatures. No living creature may be killed or even injured, and the more strictly this rule is observed, the further will the pupil progress. Whether this rule can be observed in our civilisation is another matter. Every killing, even of a flea, impedes occult development. Whether someone is obliged to do it—that again is a different question.

You will understand the command, Do not lie, if you recall what I said about the astral plane, where to lie is to kill and every lie is a murder. Lying therefore comes into the same category as killing.

The precept, Do not steal, also has to be applied most strictly. A European might claim that he does not steal. But the Eastern Yogi does not look at it so simply. In the regions where these exercises were first promulgated by the great teachers of humanity, conditions were much simpler: stealing was easy to define. But a Yoga teacher would not agree that Europeans do not steal. For example, if I unjustifiably appropriate another man's labour, or if I procure for myself a profit which may be legally permissible but which involves the exploitation of another person—all this the Yoga teacher would call stealing. With us, social relations have become so complex that many people violate this commandment without the slightest awareness of doing so. Suppose you have money and deposit it in a bank. You do nothing with it; you exploit no-one. But suppose now the banker starts speculating and exploits other people with your money. In the occult sense you will be responsible for it, and the events will burden your karma. You can see that this precept requires deep consideration if you are entering on a path of occult development.

With regard to the injunction, Do not lead a dissolute life, take a person with private means whose capital is invested without his knowledge in a distillery; he is just as culpable as the producer of strong drinks. The fact that he knew nothing about it makes no difference to his karma. There is only one way of keeping to the right path with these abstentions: strive to need nothing. Even if you have great possessions, in so far as you strive to have no needs, you will injure no-one.

The injunction, Desire nothing, is especially hard to carry out. It means that the pupil must strive to have no needs, no desire for anything in the world, and to do only what the outer world demands of him. He must even suppress any feeling of pleasure at doing good to someone; he must be moved to help not by any such feeling but simply by the sight of suffering. And if he has to spend money, he must not think of his own wishes or desires but must say to himself: “I need this to maintain my body or to meet the needs of my spirit, as everyone else does. I do not desire it, but am considering only how best to live my life in the world.”

In Yoga training this concept of Yama is, as I have said, taken most strictly; it could not be transplanted to Europe as it stands.

2. Niyama. This means the observance of religious customs. In India, where these rules are chiefly applied, a problem is solved which causes many difficulties in European civilisation. For us it is very easy to say that we have passed beyond dogmas; we hold to the inner truth only and have no use for outer forms. The further a European has got away from religious observances, the more exalted does he imagine himself to be. The Hindu takes the opposite view; he holds firmly to the rites of his religion, and no-one may touch them, but anyone is free to form his own opinion of them. There are sacred rites which have come down from very ancient times and signify something very profound. An uneducated man will have very elementary ideas about them; a more highly cultured man will have different and better ideas, but no-one will say that anyone else's ideas are wrong. The wise and the unlearned observe the same customs. There are no dogmas, only rites. Hence these deeply religious customs can be observed by all, and in them the wise and the simple are brought together. Thus the rites are socially unifying. No-one is restricted in his opinions by conforming to a strict ritual.

The Christian religion has followed the opposite principle. Not customs, but opinions, have been imposed on people, and the consequence is that formlessness has become the rule in our social life. So begins a complete disregard of all observances that could draw human beings together; every form that expresses symbolically a higher truth is gradually rejected. This is a great loss for human development, especially for development in the Eastern sense.

In Europe today there are plenty of people who think they have learnt to do without dogmas, yet it is precisely the freethinkers and the materialists who are the worst fanatics for dogmas. The dogma of materialism is much more oppressive than any other. The infallibility of the Pope is no longer valid for many people, but instead we have the infallibility of the professor. Even the most liberal-minded, whatever they may say to the contrary, are victims of the dogmas of materialism. Think of the dogmas which burden lawyers, doctors and so on. Every university professor teaches his own dogma. Or think how people suffer from the dogma of the infallibility of public opinion, of the newspapers! The Eastern teacher of Yoga does not demand that the ceremonies which unite the learned and unlearned together should be abandoned: these sacred ancient rites are symbols of the highest wisdom. No culture is possible without such formal observances; to believe otherwise is an illusion. Suppose for instance a colony is founded with no forms or accepted customs. Clearly a colony such as that, with no church, no religious services or observances, could exist quite well for a time, because its people would continue to live in accordance with the rules and conventions they had brought with them. But as soon as these were lost, the colony would collapse, for every culture must embody a certain pattern which will give expression to its inner character. Modern civilisation must recover the forms it has lost; it must learn again how to give external expression to its inner life. In the long run social life is conditioned by its pattern, its formal customs. The ancient sages knew this, and hence they held firmly to religious practices.

3. Asanam means the adoption of a certain bodily posture in meditation. This is much more important for the Oriental than for the European, because the European body is no longer so sensitive to the flow of certain subtle currents. The body of the Oriental is even nowadays more delicately organised; it responds readily to the currents which pass from East to West, from North to South, from the Heights to the Depths. Spiritual currents flow through the universe, and it is for this reason that churches are built with a particular orientation. It is for this reason also that the Yoga teacher makes his pupil adopt a special posture; the pupil has to keep his hands and feet in a particular position, so that the currents may flow through his body in the right direction. If the Hindu did not bring his body into this harmony, he would risk losing all the benefits of his meditation.

4. Pranayama is breathing, yoga-breathing. It is an essential and detailed part of Eastern Yoga training. Christian training pays almost no attention to it, but in Rosicrucian training it has regained some importance.

What does breathing signify in occult development? You can find the answer in the injunctions not to kill and not to injure any living creature. The occult teacher says: “By breathing you are slowly, continually, killing your surroundings.” What does this mean? We breathe the air in, use it to furnish our blood with oxygen and then breathe it out again. What does this involve? We inhale the air with its oxygen; we combine the oxygen with carbon and we exhale carbon dioxide, in which no man or animal can live. We breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide, which is a poison; and this means that with every breath we draw we are dealing death to other beings in our environment. Bit by bit we are killing our whole environment: we inhale the breath of life and exhale air which we can make no further use of. The occult teacher is concerned to alter this. If there were only men and animals in the world, all the oxygen would soon be used up and all living creatures would die. It is thanks to the plants that this does not happen, for in plants the breathing process is the reverse of ours. They assimilate carbon dioxide, separate the carbon from the oxygen, and use the carbon to build up their bodies. They liberate oxygen, and men and animals breathe it in again. So do the plants renew the life-giving air; otherwise all life would long ago have been destroyed. We owe our life to the plants, and in this way plants, animals and men are complementary.

But this process will change in the future, and since anyone who is undergoing occult training must begin to do what others will achieve at some time in the future, he must learn not to kill with his breath. That is Pranayama, the science of the breath. Our modern materialistic age places health under the sign of fresh air; but our modern way of achieving health through fresh air is one that terminates in death. A Yogi, on the other hand, will retire into a cave and as far as possible will breathe the air he has himself exhaled—unlike the European, who is always wanting to open windows. A Yogi has learnt the art of contaminating the air as little as possible because he has learnt how to use it up. How does he do it? The secret has always been known to the European occult schools, where it was called the finding of the Stone of the Wise, the Philosopher's Stone.

At the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century a good deal of information about occult development leaked out. The Stone of the Wise was often mentioned in published writings, but one can see that the author understood little of it, even though it all came from the right sources. In 1797 a local Thuringian newspaper printed an article about the Stone of the Wise which included, inter alia, the following: “The Stone of the Wise is something one has only to recognise, for every man has seen it. It is something which everyone holds in his hand for part of almost every day, but without knowing that it is the Philosopher's Stone.” This is an enigmatic way of indicating that the Philosopher's Stone can be found everywhere. Yet this strange expression is literally true.

This is how it comes about. The plant, as it builds up its body, takes in the carbon dioxide and retains the carbon for its body-building purposes. Men and animals eat the plants, take in the carbon, and give it up as carbon dioxide when they breathe out. So we have a carbon cycle. In the future there will be a great change. Man will learn to extend the range of his innate powers and will gradually come to do for himself what at present he leaves to the plant. Just as man passed through the plant and animal kingdoms in the course of his evolution, so will he in a certain sense retrace his steps. He will himself become plant; he will take up the plant-nature into himself and accomplish the whole plant-process within himself. He will retain the carbon dioxide and will consciously build up his body with it, as the plant now builds up its own body unconsciously. He will prepare the necessary oxygen in his own organs, unite it with carbon to form carbon dioxide, and then deposit the carbon again in himself. Thus he will be able to build up his bodily structure. Here is an idea which opens up a great perspective for the future; and when it comes about man will cease to be a killer with his breath.

Now we know that carbon and diamond are the same substance; diamond is more thoroughly crystallised and a more transparent form of carbon. Hence we need not think that in the future people will go about looking like negroes. Their bodies will consist of soft, transparent carbon. At that stage man will have found the Philosopher's Stone and he will transform his own body into it.

Anyone undergoing occult development has to anticipate this process as far as possible He must deprive his breath of the capacity to kill, and must organise his breathing so that the air he exhales is usable and can be breathed again. How is this to be accomplished? You have to bring rhythm into your breathing. The teacher gives the necessary instructions. Breathing in, holding your breath and breathing out again—this must be done rhythmically, if only for a short period. With every rhythmical exhalation the air is improved, slowly but surely. Here the old saying applies drops of water wear away the stone. The chemists cannot yet confirm this: their instruments are too coarse to detect the finer substances, but the occultist knows that breath imbued with rhythm is life-promoting and contains more than the normal amount of oxygen. The breath can be purified also, and at the same time, by meditation. This, too, contributes, if only by a very little, towards bringing the plant-nature back into man, so that he may become a being who does not kill.

5. Pratyahara, the curbing of sense-perception. Nowadays in ordinary life a person receives a continual stream of sense-impressions and allows them all to work on him. The occult teacher says to the pupil: “You must concentrate on a single sense-impression for a specified number of minutes and pass on to another only by your own free choice.”

6. Dharana, when the pupil has done that for a while he must learn to make himself deaf and blind to all sense-impressions; he must turn away from them and try to hold in his thought only the concepts they leave behind. If he thus lives in concepts only, and controls his thoughts and links one concept to another by his own free choice, he has reached the condition known as Dharana.

7. Dhyanam. There are concepts—often disregarded by Europeans—which do not derive from sense-impressions. We have to form them for ourselves—mathematical concepts, for example. No perfect triangle exists in the outer world; it can only be conceived in thought, and the same is true of a circle. Then there is a whole range of concepts which anyone undertaking occult training must study intensively. They are symbolic concepts which are connected with some objects—for example, the hexagram, or the pentagram, symbols which occultism can explain. The pupil must keep his mind sharply concentrated on such symbolic objects, not to be found in the outer world. It is the same with another kind of concept: for example, that of the species Lion, which can be laid hold of only in thought. On these, too, the pupil must focus his attention. Finally, there are moral ideas, such for example as the following, from Light on the Path:⁴³ “Before the eye can see, it must be incapable of tears.” This, too, cannot be experienced outwardly, but only inwardly. This meditation on concepts which have no sense-perceptible counterpart is called Dhyanam.

8. Finally, Samadhi, the most difficult of all. After concentrating for a very long time on an idea which has no sense-perceptible counterpart, you allow your mind to rest in it and your soul to be filled with it. Then you let the idea go, so that nothing is left in your consciousness. But you must not fall asleep, as would then normally happen; you must remain conscious. In that state the secrets of the higher worlds begin to reveal themselves. This state can be described as follows. You are thinking, for you are conscious, but you have no thoughts, and into this thinking without thoughts the spiritual powers are able to pour their content. But as long as you yourself fill your thinking, they cannot come in. The longer you can hold in your consciousness this activity of thinking without thoughts, the more will the super-sensible world reveal itself to you.

These are the eight realms with which a teacher of Eastern Yoga deals.

Now we will speak about the Christian way of occult training, as far as this is possible, and we shall see how it differs from the Eastern way. This Christian way can be followed with the advice of a teacher who knows what has to be done and can rectify mistakes at every step. But in Christian training the great Guru is Christ Jesus Himself. Hence it is essential to have a firm belief in the presence and the life on Earth of the Christ. Without this, a feeling of union with Him is impossible. Further, we must recognise that in the Gospel of St. John we have a document which originates with the great Guru Himself and can itself be a source of instruction. This Gospel is something we can experience in our own inner being and not something we merely believe. Whoever has absorbed it in the right way will no longer need to prove the reality of Christ Jesus, for he will have found Him.

In Christian training you must meditate on this Gospel, not simply read and re-read it. The Gospel begins: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God ...” The opening verses of this Gospel, rightly understood, are sentences for meditation and must be inwardly absorbed in the condition of Dhyanam, as described above. If in the morning, before other impressions have entered the soul, you live for five minutes solely in these sentences, with everything else excluded from your thoughts, and if you continue to do this over the years with absolute patience and perseverance, you will find that these words are not only something to be understood; you will realise that they have an occult power, and you will indeed experience through them a transformation of the soul. In a certain sense you become clairvoyant through these words, so that everything in St. John's Gospel can be seen with astral vision.

Then, under the direction of the teacher, and after meditating again on the five opening verses, the pupil allows the first chapter to pass through his mind for seven days. During the following week, after again meditating on the five opening verses, he goes on to the second chapter, and so in the same way up to the twelfth. He will soon learn how powerful an experience this is; how he is led into the events in Palestine when Christ Jesus lived there, as they are inscribed in the Akashic Record, and how he can actually experience it all. And then, when he reaches the thirteenth chapter, he has to experience the separate stages of Christian Initiation.

The first stage is the Washing of the Feet. We must understand the significance of this great scene. Christ Jesus bends down before those who are lower than himself. This humility towards those who are lower than we are, and at whose expense we have been able to rise, must be present everywhere in the world. If a plant were able to think, it would thank the minerals for giving it the ground on which it can lead a higher form of life, and the animal would have to bow down before the plant and say: “To thee I owe the possibility of my own existence.” In the same way man should recognise what he owes to all the rest of nature. So also, in our society, a man holding a higher position should bow before those who stand lower and say: “But for the diligence of those who labour on my behalf, I could not stand where I do.” And so on through all stages of human existence up to Christ Jesus Himself, who bows down in meekness before the Apostles and says: “You are my ground, and to you I fulfil the saying, ‘He who would be first must be last, and he who would be Lord must be the servant of all’.” The Washing of the Feet betokens this willingness to serve, this bowing down in perfect humility. This is a feeling that everyone committed to occult development must have.

If the pupil has permeated himself with this humility, he will have experienced the first stage of Christian Initiation. He will know by two signs, an outer and an inner, that he has gone thus far. The outer sign is that he feels as though his feet were being laved with water. The inner sign is an astral vision which will quite certainly come: he sees himself washing the feet of a number of persons. This picture rises up in his dreams as an astral vision, and every pupil has the same vision. When he has experienced it, he will have truly absorbed this whole chapter.

The second stage is that of the Scourging. When the pupil has reached this point, he must, while he reads of the Scourging and allows it to act upon him, develop another feeling. He must learn to stand firm under the heavy strokes of life, saying to himself: “I will stand up to whatever pains and sorrows come to me.” The outer sign of this is that the pupil feels a kind of prickling pain all over his body. The outer sign is that in a dream-vision he sees himself being scourged.

The third stage is that of the Crowning with Thorns, and for this he has to acquire yet another feeling: he learns to stand firm even when he is scorned and ridiculed because of all that he holds most sacred. The outer sign of this is that he experiences a severe headache; the inward symptom is that he has an astral vision of himself being crowned with thorns.

The fourth stage is that of the Crucifixion. A new and quite definite feeling must be developed. The pupil must cease to regard his body as the most important thing for him; his body must become as indifferent to him as a piece of wood. He then comes to look quite objectively on the body he carries with him through life; it has become for him the wood of the Cross. He need not despise it, any more than he does any other tool. The outer sign for having reached this stage is that during the pupil's meditation red marks (stigmata) appear at those places on his body which are called the sacred wounds. They do indeed appear on the hands and feet, and on the right side of the body at the level of the heart. The inward sign is that the pupil has a vision of himself hanging on the Cross.

The fifth stage is that of the Mystical Death. Now the pupil experiences the nothingness of earthly things, and indeed dies for a while to all earthly things.

Only the most scanty descriptions can be given of these later stages of Christian Initiation. The pupil experiences in an astral vision that darkness reigns everywhere and that the earthly world has fallen away. A black veil spreads over that which is to come, and while he is in this condition the pupil comes to know all that exists as evil and wickedness in the world. This is the Descent into Hell. Then he experiences the tearing away of the curtain and the world of Devachan appears before him. This is the rending of the veil of the Temple.

The sixth stage is that of the Burial. Just as at the fourth stage the pupil learnt to regard his own body objectively, so now he has to develop the feeling that everything else around him in the world is as much part of what truly belongs to him as his own body is. The body then extends far beyond its skin; the pupil is no longer a separate being; he is united with the whole planet. The Earth has become his body; he is buried in the Earth.

The seventh stage, that of the Resurrection, cannot be described in words. Hence occultism teaches that the seventh stage can be conceived only by a man whose soul has been entirely freed from the brain, and only to such a man could it be described. Hence we cannot do more than mention it here. The Christian teacher indicates the way to this experience.

When a man has lived through this seventh stage, Christianity has become an inner experience of the soul. He is now wholly united with Christ Jesus; Christ Jesus is in him.

• 42. “The form of instruction in oriental schooling.” From the old Indian classic, The Yoga-Sutras of Patanjali.
• 43. Light on the Path, written by Mabel Collins.

Yesterday we spoke in an introductory way of the aim and essence of the spiritual-scientific movement; to-day we shall penetrate more directly into the essence of this science. It has the disadvantage that it may shock those who are not familiar with these things, but we must have patience and realise that many things which seem almost nonsensical at first, will in the course of time appear well founded and comprehensible.

Of the subject which lies before us, we shall first of all consider the nature of the human being.

Let us place this human being before our soul. He is a most complicated being, the most complicated being of all which we encounter in the known world. Those who possessed a deeper insight have therefore always called man a microcosm, in contrast to the macrocosm, the universe. Paracelsus used a very fine comparison expressing man's being in the form of an image. He said: Contemplate Nature around you, and imagine every being in Nature, every plant, animal and stone, as the letter of an alphabet, and if you imagine a word written with these letters, you obtain man.

We find, in this connection, the confirmation of Goethe's words, that we must understand the whole of Nature in order to understand man.

To begin with, my explanations will only be a kind of sketch of man's nature. This will be related to the explanations of the following days in the same way in which a charcoal sketch is related to the finished picture.

If we contemplate man with our physical senses, when he stands before us as an earthly being, if our eyes perceive him and our hands can touch him, we look upon him, from the materialistic standpoint, as complete, as a whole being. Yet a deeper, that is to say, a spiritual contemplation of the world, sees in that which is perceptible to our physical senses only a small part of the human being, that part which the anatomist dismembers and dissects, The anatomist endeavours to understand the human being through the intellect, by dissecting the visible part into cells which can only be perceived through the microscope, and he thinks that he thus obtains an idea of the structure and activity of the single organs.

Ordinary science thinks that all this constitutes the physical body of man. But at the present time, man's physical body is frequently looked upon in the wrong way, for people think that the human being standing before them only consists of a physical body. This is not the case at all, for higher members of human nature are intimately connected with the physical body, are active through it, and it is through these members that this body becomes manifest in the form in which one human being confronts another. The physical body would present an altogether different aspect were we to separate it from the higher members of human nature. Man has this physical body in common with the whole mineral world. All the substances and forces which are active in mineral substances, such as iron, arsenic, carbon, etc, are also active in the substances of the human body and in the physical body of animals and plants.

Our attention is immediately drawn to the higher members of human nature if we once realise the tremendous difference which exists between man's physical body and the other physical substances which surround us in the mineral world. You will know that this wonderful structure of the physical body bears within it what we call inner life, consciousness, desires, joy and pain, love and hate; this physical body does not only contain substances pertaining to the mineral world, but also thoughts. You may indeed perceive the glow upon the countenance, or the colour of the hair, but you do not perceive what takes place within the physical body in the form of inclinations and dislikes, joy and suffering, etc, All this we do not see, nevertheless it takes place within the covering (sheath) of the skin. This is the most evident and irrefutable proof that there is something in addition to the physical body, something besides mere physical substances.

When you watch a tear falling, this tear is but the physical expression of sorrow, which is an inner process, Now look upon the mineral world: these minerals are dumb! You cannot perceive in them any joy or sorrow, nor any other inner life. The stone has no feelings and no consciousness, such as we have. To a spiritual scientist this stone appears like the nails upon our fingers, or like the teeth. Observe one of your finger nails: it has no feeling, no consciousness, nevertheless the nail forms part of your being. There must be something within us which brings about the formation of nails and teeth, and in the same way there must be something in the world outside which produces minerals. The nails themselves have no consciousness, but they form part of something which is endowed with consciousness. If a small beetle creeps over one of our nails, this nail perhaps appears to it as a mineral. This is the case when we creep over the earth, without being aware that behind this mineral earth there is consciousness, even as there is, consciousness behind our nails. Later on we shall see what kind of consciousness lies at the foundation of the mineral world. This Ego-consciousness of the mineral world lies high above us, even as, for instance, the consciousness, of the small beetle creeping over our nail is surpassed by our own consciousness behind the nails.

The Rosicrucian philosophy ascribes this consciousness of the mineral kingdom to a world which it calls the WORLD OF INTELLIGENCE; there lies the consciousness of minerals, and there lies also the foundation of human intelligence, enabling us to form thoughts. Yet the thoughts which live in us are very deceptive, for human thoughts are related to the Beings of the Intelligent World in the same way in which our shadow is related to our real self. Even as the shadow upon the wall is not I, but only my own shadow, so man's thoughts are only shadow-pictures in the world of the spirit. But here on earth we are able to grasp a thought because in the Intelligent World there is a real Being who produces this thought. This is a world in which our thoughts are real beings, whom we encounter in the same way in which we here meet other human beings. This Intelligent World of the Rosicrucians is for an initiate the higher Devachan World, the Arupa Devachan of the Hindoos, or the higher Mental World. When an initiate passes through the physical world, every portion of the earth speaks to him of life, and he experiences everywhere the manifestations of another world. Since in our physical body we are nothing but portions of the physical world, we also have a subordinate physical consciousness, reaching as far as the Intelligent World, that is to say, as far as the consciousness of the mineral world.

Our physical body is therefore, in its substances, of mineral nature, and the consciousness of the physical body lies there where the consciousness of the mineral world is to be found.

What is, however, the difference between our physical body and a mineral—for instance, a rock crystal? If we compare our body with a crystal; we find upon comparison, that
our body is a most complicated thing, Let us picture to ourselves the difference between a mineral and a living being.

In regard to the substances, there is no difference at all, for exactly the same substances can be found in living beings as in minerals, except that the structure is far more complicated.

If you have before you the mineral and its form, you will find that it remains the same; if it only depends upon itself. But this is not the case in a living being, in a plant, an animal, or a human being. As soon as a substance takes on so complicated a form that it can no longer be held together through its own forces, in other words, that it would decay if left to itself, there is something in this substance which prevents it from decaying, and in that case we have before us what we call a LIVING BEING.

Spiritual science therefore says: A living being would decay into the component parts of its substances if it were left to itself, if within it there did not exist something which prevents this decay. That which every moment prevents this living being from decaying, the preventing factor of such a decay, is what we call the etheric or the vital body. This is of an entirely different nature from the substances which constitute the physical body in every living being, and it has the capacity to produce the most complicated physical substances, to maintain them and to prevent their decay. What a living organism thus reveals in a purely external form, is what we call LIFE. This etheric or vital body, or this body of formative forces, cannot be perceived by physical eyes, but it can be perceived through the first degree of clairvoyant vision, and it is the task of a clairvoyant to develop himself so as to be able to perceive this etheric body. Modern natural science does indeed try to discover the etheric body, but it tries to form a conception of it in a purely speculative way, by speaking, for instance of vital force, or vital energy.

How does the etheric body appear to a clairvoyant eye, that is to say, to the clairvoyant?

If you contemplate an object of the mineral world, for instance, a rock crystal, through the eye of a clairvoyant, eliminating for this purpose the physical substance, by deviating as it were, your attention from it you would see nothing in the space occupied by the physical crystal. This space is void. But if you contemplate in the same way a living being, a plant, an animal, or a human being, this space occupied by the physical body will not be empty, for it will be filled up by a kind of shape of light, and this is the above-mentioned etheric body.

The etheric body is not of the same kind in every living being; on the contrary, it takes on very different forms, even as regards shape and size in relation to the physical body of the living being in question; this varies according to the stage of development of the different beings. The etheric body of plants has quite a different shape from the plants themselves; the etheric body of animals has a greater resemblance to the external shape, and the etheric body of man appears as a shape of light which corresponds almost exactly to the form of the physical body. If we contemplate, for instance, a horse from this standpoint, we see its etheric body protruding rather far from the head as a shape of light, but it more or less resembles the shape of the horse's head. But in the case of an average man of to-day we can see his etheric body protruding only slightly above the head and its sides. In regard to the substance of the etheric body, one generally has quite wrong ideas. Even in theosophy people write and talk a lot of confusing nonsense on the etheric body, but this forms part of the “childhood illnesses” of the Theosophical Society, and they must be overcome. To obtain a correct idea of the substantiality of the etheric body, please try to follow my thoughts in this comparison:—

Imagine that you have one hundred pounds and that you spend more and more: Your property will grow smaller and smaller and finally you will have nothing at all. This would be the least possible substantial state of your property. But there is one still less substantial, when you diminish still more the zero-stage of your property by making debts and acquiring a “negative” property. You can therefore reduce your property still more, for you have less than nothing if you borrow, for instance, ten pounds.

Or imagine this applied to something else. Imagine a battle with its tremendous noise; if you go further away from it the noise will grow weaker and weaker; the silence will grow until you finally hear nothing more. If you reduce still further this stage of hearing nothing at all, then it will be more than silent around you, more than soundless ... Such a silence actually exists, and it is in the highest degree blissful, though an ordinary person will not so easily be able to imagine it.

Now imagine these examples applied to the density of substance. At first you will have the three generally known aggregate conditions: the solid, liquid and gaseous conditions; but in accordance with the above-mentioned example of the property, you should not remain by these three conditions. Even as it is possible to dilute the property into a “negative” property, so the substance can also become thinner and thinner, more and more diluted, beyond the gaseous stage. Imagine therefore a kind of substance opposed to the physical substance; this will give you a kind of idea of that which constitutes the etheric body.

A “negative” property has the opposite qualities of a positive one, for a “plus” property makes us rich, and a “minus” property poor; the more money I have, the more I can buy; the less money I have, the less I can buy. In the same way, the cosmic ether, of which the etheric body of every living being is a part, has the opposite qualities of physical substances.
Even as physical substance has the inclination to fall asunder, to decay, so the etheric body has the inclination to hold everything together, preventing the physical body, which it permeates from decaying. As soon as the etheric body abandons the physical body—in other words, when physical death arises—the decomposition into the elemental parts immediately sets in. We have thus traced matter into a world where it has the opposite effect of our physical matter.

When I say that man's etheric body resembles his physical body, I mention a fact which must be borne in mind and which must be mentioned here, for it will give rise to important conclusions in following lectures. This statement must be subjected to an important limitation, for in reality the etheric body differs greatly from the physical body and resembles it only in its upper part, in the head; but it differs from it greatly in regard to the fact that it is of opposite sex: man's etheric body is feminine, and woman's etheric body is masculine. Every human being is therefore bisexual; the sex of the physical body is only an external expression, having its opposite pole in the etheric body. Even as a magnet has a north pole and a south pole, even as a magnet cannot have only a north pole, so we also find two poles in man: the pole and the counter-pole.

The etheric or vital body, also called the body of formative forces, therefore constitutes the second member of man's being, and from birth to death it remains intimately connected with man's physical body, and when the etheric body severs itself from the physical body, this signifies death.

The physical body is first built up by the etheric body; the etheric body is, so to speak, the architect of the physical body. If you wish to have a picture for this, take that of water and ice: When the water cools down, it takes on another shape, it becomes ice. Even as ice is formed out of water through condensation, so the physical body is formed out of the etheric body.

Ice—water, physical—etheric body; this means, that the forces of the etheric body have become tangible, physically perceptible in the physical body. Even as the water already contained the forces which then manifest themselves in the solid ice, so the etheric body already contains, all the forces needed for the structure of the physical body. The etheric body thus already contains a force producing, for example; the heart, or the stomach, or the brain, and so forth. For each organ of our physical body there is a predisposition in the etheric body; these predispositions are not substances, but currents of forces.

Man has the etheric body in common with every plant and animal, that is to say, with every physical being manifesting LIFE,

Now we may ask: Do the plants have a kind of consciousness such as we have found for the world of the minerals? We have already seen that spiritual research discovers the consciousness of minerals in the higher Intelligent World, the origin of our thoughts.

Even as our fingers do not have a consciousness of their own, for the consciousness of the finger forms part of man's consciousness, so the plants form part of a state of consciousness lying on the lower Intelligent World, in the heavenly world (Rupa Devachan), When the spiritual investigator enters this world, he encounters in it the souls of the plants. There, the souls of the plants are Beings, such as we are beings here on earth; and these Beings are related to the plants in the same way in which man is related to his fingers.

The consciousness of plants is therefore rooted in this lower Devachan World. In it are rooted the forces which lie at the foundation of every growth and of every organic structure; in it are also rooted the forces which build up our physical body, that is to say, the forces of our etheric body, which, we have already designated as the architect of our physical body. This consciousness of the vegetable world is far higher and wiser than the consciousness of man,

You will realise this at once if you bear in mind the wise structure not only of man's physical body, but of every being permeated by an etheric body, that is to say, of every living being. What enormous wisdom is needed to build up the simplest physical body of any living being; not to mention the most wonderful structure all living beings on earth; the human body!

Observe, for instance, man's upper thigh bone; how wonderfully and in accordance with every rule of architecture the single little osseous joists and beams are put together! In its upper part, the upper thigh bone is far more complicated than it appears to us externally; for it is composed of a trestle of beams whose angles are arranged so skillfully that the weight of the whole body is borne by the least quantity of matter; truly a far greater work of art than the most complicated bridge construction; no engineering skill in the world could imitate it!

Or contemplate the structure of the heart: it is built so wisely that man with all his wisdom is but a child in comparison to that wisdom which reveals itself in the structure of the heart. How many things does the human heart withstand, though man's foolish attempts to ruin it every day, for instance, through our so-called stimulants—coffee, alcohol, nicotine.

Forces reaching as far as the astral world are needed for the construction of such a wonderful edifice as our physical body; only the Beings of this astral world are, trivially speaking, clever enough to build up such a physical body.

And now we come to the third member of man's being. Plants have a physical body and an etheric body; but they lack something which both man and the animals have; they have no pain, no desires, no sufferings, and no sensations whatever. This is the difference between man and animal on the one side, and the plants on the other. The difference consists therein that inner, processes take place in the animals and in man. From processes observed in plants, modern science even seeks to ascribe sensations to plants. It is a shame to see how concepts are being misused! These are no inner processes, as in the case of a sensation—such sensations might just as well be ascribed to a blue litmus paper. Such mistakes arise if sensations are looked for in the physical world; no sensation can be found in the physical world in a phenomenon of the kind which may be observed in certain plants, for we must rise up to heavenly worlds if we wish to find sensations in plants. To prevent misunderstandings, let me add that in the case of so-called reacting plants, for instance, in the mimosa, the sensitive process of reaction does not reflect itself in the physical world as a sensation, but only in the lower Intelligent World, the seat of the plant's consciousness. Here, in the physical, world, only man and animals have instincts and passions, joys and pains. Why?—Because they have, in addition to the physical and etheric body, also the astral body, the third member of human nature.

To a clairvoyant seer, the astral body appears in such a way as to envelop the whole human being in an egg-shaped cloud, and within this cloud every sensation comes to expression, every instinct and every passion. The astral body is therefore the carrier of desire, pain, suffering and joy. This third member presents a different aspect from the etheric body and the physical body. When man is asleep, only the physical and the etheric body lie upon the bed, whereas the astral body and the Ego are lifted out; but when the astral body and the etheric body go out of the physical body, then death arises, and with it the decay of the physical body.

Why is this third member called astral body?—No more appropriate name could be found for it! Why?—Because this member has an important task which we must bear in mind. At night, this astral body is not inactive, for then it works upon the physical and etheric body, and the clairvoyant seer can observe this. During the day, we use up our physical and etheric body, for everything we do uses up the physical body, and the expression of this is fatigue. Now the astral body repairs what we use up during the day. The astral body really eliminates fatigue while we are asleep. This shows the importance and necessity of sleep. The clairvoyant seer can do this repair-work consciously. The refreshing element of sleep depends on the fact that the astral body has worked in the right way upon the physical and astral bodies. But since the astral body must first return into the physical and etheric bodies, the refreshment of sleep arises gradually, that is to say, about one hour after waking up.

Something else, something important is also connected with the fact that the astral body goes out during sleep. When the astral body enters in connection with the external world during the waking life of daytime, it must live together with the physical and etheric body; but when it extricates itself from the body, that is to say, during sleep, it is freed from these fetters of the physical and etheric body. Then something wonderful arises; the forces of the astral body then reach as far as the starry world, where the soul-Beings of the plants are to be found, and it draws its strength from that world. The astral body reposes in a world where the stars are embedded. This is the world of the Harmony of the Spheres, according to the Pythagoreans. It is a reality and not a mere fancy. If we live consciously in this world, we can hear the harmonies of the spheres, we can hear the stars resounding in their reciprocal forces and relations. In this sense, Goethe was an initiate, and in this meaning we should read the beginning of the Prologue in Heaven of “Faust:—

“Die Sonne tönt nach alter Weise
In Bruderspharen Wettgesang,
Und ihre vorgeschriebene Reise
Vollendet sie mit Donnergang.
Ihr Anblick gibt den Engeln Stärke,
Wenn keiner sie ergründen mag;
Die unbegreiflich hohen Werke
Sind herrlich, wie am ersten Tag.”

(Translation after Latham)

“The sun, with many a sister-sphere,
Still sings the rival psalm of wonder,
And still his fore-ordained career
Accomplishes with tread of thunder.
The sight sustains the angels' prime,
Though none may spell the mystic story;
Thy Works, unspeakably sublime,
Live on, in all their primal glory.”

People do not know Goethe, and as a rule they are not aware that he was an initiate, for they simply say: A poet needs images ... . Yet Goethe knew that the sun stands in the midst of a choir and that it resounds as Spirit of the Sun! Goethe therefore remains by this image and continues:—

“Horchet! Horcht dem Sturm der Horen!
Tönend wird für Geistesehren
Schon der neue Tag geboren.
Felsentore knarren rasselnd,
Phöbus' Räder rollen prasselnd;
Welch Getöse bringt das Licht!
Es drommetet, es posaunet,
Auge blinzt and Ohr erstaunet,
Unerhörtes hört sich nicht.”

(Translation after Latham)

“Hark! The Hours in storm are winging,
And to spirit ears loud-ringing,
Now the new-born day is springing.
Rocky portals clang asunder,
Phoebus' wheels roll forth in thunder,
What a tumult brings the light!
Loud the trump of dawn hath sounded,
Eye is dazzled, ear astounded,
The Unheard no ear may smite.”

During the night, the astral body lives in this world of stars. During the day it comes into a kind of disharmony of wordly things, whereas at night, during sleep, it is once more embedded in the world of the stars. And in the morning it returns with the forces which it brings along from this world. From the astral world we bring with us the harmony of the spheres, when we awake from sleep! The real home of the astral body is the world of the stars, the astral world, and that why it is called astral body.

Now we have learned to know three parts of human nature; the physical body; the etheric body and the astral body.

The fourth part, the Ego, we shall learn to know next time. The Ego is that member which raises man above the animal and makes of him the crown of creation.

The animal does not have man's consciousness, although it has a certain kind of consciousness, just as we have seen it in the case of the plant and of the mineral; but the consciousness of animals lies in the astral world. Man's fourth member, the Ego, constitutes with the other three members, the, “holy fourfold essence” of man, of which all the ancient Schools speak.

Man therefore has the physical body in common with the mineral, the etheric body in common with the plants, and the astral body in common with the animal. He alone has an Ego, and this raises him above the others. In man we find, as it were, the essence of everything which we see spread out round about us. In fact, a microcosm! We must therefore first learn to know our environment, if we wish to know man.

We should therefore think of these three members, of these three bodies, as sheaths, woven in different regions, and we, that is to say, our Ego, lives in these sheaths, together with the higher members of human nature, together with our immortal part.

Yesterday we described the spirit of the Apocalypse of John in a general way. We tried to give a few broad outlines showing that in this Apocalypse is described what may be called a Christian initiation. To-day it will be my task to present to you in general the nature of initiation, to describe what takes place in a man when through initiation he is enabled to see for himself those spiritual worlds which lie behind the sense worlds; and further it will be my task to give in broad outline a description of the experiences in initiation. For only by entering a little more closely into the nature of initiation can we gradually understand this significant religious record known as the Apocalypse.

First of all we must again consider closely the two states of human consciousness, the one lasting from morning when a person awakes until evening when he goes to sleep, and the other which begins when he goes to sleep and ends when he awakes. We have often brought to mind that man as we know him in his present form is, to begin with, a fourfold being; that he consists of the physical, etheric and astral bodies and the “I.” To spiritual vision these four principles appear in their external form as if the human physical body is enclosed in the centre like a kind of kernel. During the day this physical body is permeated by the so-called etheric or life-body which projects very slightly round about the head as a luminous halo, but which also completely permeates the head; further down it becomes more cloudy and indistinct and the more it approaches the lower parts of man the less definitely does it show the form of the physical body.

Now these two principles of the human being are during the day enveloped by what we call the astral body, which projects on all sides like an ellipse, in the shape of an egg, and in its fundamental form it has luminous rays which look as if their direction really were from outside inward, as if they would penetrate from outside to the inner part of the man. Within this astral body are outlined a great number of different figures, every possible kind of lines and rays, many like flashes of lightning, many in curious twists; all this surrounds the human being in the most varied manifestations of light. The astral body is the expression of his passions, instincts, impulses and desires, as also of all his thoughts and ideas. The clairvoyant consciousness sees portrayed in this astral body all that one calls soul-experiences, from the lowest impulses to the highest ethical ideals.

Then we have the fourth principle of the human being, which one might sketch as if something were sending in rays to a point lying about one centimetre (3/8 inch) behind the forehead. That would be the diagrammatic representation of the fourfold man. In the course of these lectures we shall see how the several parts are distinguished in the whole.

This is a picture of man during the day from moving when he wakes, until night when he goes to sleep. Now, when he goes to sleep, the physical and etheric bodies remain on the bed and a kind of streaming-out of the astral body takes place. “Streaming-out” does not express it quite exactly; it is really as if a kind of mist formed. So that in the night we see the astral body which has withdrawn from the physical and the etheric bodies like a kind of spiral mist around the man, while the fourth principle of the human being disappears almost entirely towards one side, that is, it disperses and becomes vague. The lower part of the astral body can only just be seen; it is the upper part which is indicated as the “astral body which has withdrawn.”

Yesterday we emphasized what has to happen to a person if he is to receive initiation. If he occupies himself only with the customary activities of the present day he is unable to receive initiation. He must be so prepared that during ordinary daily life he performs the exercises of meditation, concentration, etc., prescribed for him by the schools of initiation. The effect produced by these exercises is, on the whole, the same in all kinds of initiation. They only differ in that the further we go back into pre-Christian schools of initiation, they are directed more to the training of thought, to the exercise of the power of thinking. The nearer we approach to Christian times the more are these exercises directed to train the forces of feeling; and the nearer we come to modern times the more we see how, in the so-called Rosicrucian training—conditioned by the demands and requirements of humanity—a particular kind of will culture, the exercise of the will is introduced. Although the meditations are at first similar to those of pre-Christian schools, there nevertheless prevails everywhere at the basis of the Rosicrucian exercises a particular training of the element of Will. The chief aim is, so to influence a person during the day—even if only for a short time, perhaps five to fifteen minutes—that the effect continues when the pupil falls asleep and the astral body withdraws. This effect was produced by the exercises given in the Oriental Mysteries, in the Egyptian Mysteries, in the Pythagorean schools, and it also resulted from the exercises of meditation based chiefly upon the Gospel of John. The astral body of a man who performs such, shall we say, occult exercises, gradually manifests many different changes at night. It manifests different light-effects; it shows that plastic formation of the organs of which we have already spoken and this becomes ever more distinct. The astral body gradually acquires an inner organization such as the physical body possesses in its eyes, ears, etc.

Yet this would never lead one to see much, particularly in the case of the man of the present day; the pupil, however, has some slight perception when his inner organs have been developed to a certain extent. He begins to become conscious during sleep. A spiritual environment gleams forth from the otherwise universal darkness. He perceives wonderful pictures of plant life; this was more especially the case in ancient times: to-day it takes place more seldom. These are the most primitive achievements of clairvoyance. Where previously there had been only the darkness of unconsciousness there now arises something of a dreamlike plant structure yet living and real. Much of what is described in the mythologies of ancient peoples was seen in this way. When we read in legends that Woden, Willy and Weh found a tree on the seashore and that from it they created man, this indicates that it was first seen in such a picture. In all the mythologies you may perceive this primitive kind of sight, this vision of plants. Paradise is also the description of such a vision, Paradise with its two trees of knowledge and of life. It is the result of this astral vision. It is not without cause that in Genesis itself is indicated that Paradise, together with all that is described in the beginning of the Bible, was seen in this manner. First we must learn to read the Bible, then we shall understand how closely and significantly it portrays this mysterious condition in its descriptions. In former times they did not teach of Paradise, of the beginning of the Bible, as we do now. The early Christians were told that “Adam fell into a sleep,” and that this was the sleep in which Adam, looking back, perceived the visions described in the beginning of Genesis. It is only in our day that the belief has grown that such words as “Adam fell into a sleep” are just an accident. They are no accident. Every word in the Bible has a deep meaning and only he can understand the Bible who knows how to value every single word.

That is the first thing. Then, however, in the pre-Christian Mysteries something special had to take place. When the pupil had performed his exercises for a long period—and this lasted for a very long time—when he had received what was necessary to produce order in the soul., when he had absorbed what we now call Anthroposophy, then he was at last able to participate in the old initiation proper. In what did this old initiation consist?

It is not sufficient that organs be formed in the astral body. They must be imprinted in the etheric body. Just as the letter of a seal is imprinted in sealing wax, so must the organs of the astral body be imprinted in the etheric body. For this purpose the neophyte in ancient initiations was brought into a particular condition. For three and a half days he lay in a death-like condition. We shall see more and more that this condition cannot and may not be brought about in our day, but that there are now other means of initiation. I am now describing the pre-Christian initiation, in which the neophyte was for three and a half days put into a death-like condition by the hierophant. Either he was laid in a kind of small chamber, a kind of grave where he lay in a death-like sleep, or he was bound in a particular position with outstretched hands on a cross, for this facilitated the arrival of the condition aimed at.

From many different lectures we know that death takes place in a man through the etheric withdrawing together with the astral body and the “I,” and only the physical body remaining behind, At death something takes place which otherwise has never occurred between birth and death in the ordinary course of life. The etheric body never, even in the deepest sleep, leaves the physical body, but is always within it. At death it leaves the physical body. Now during the death-like condition part at least of the etheric body leaves the physical body, so that a part of the etheric body which was within it before, in this condition finds itself outside. This is described, as you know, in more exoteric lectures by saying that the etheric body is withdrawn. That is not actually the case, for we can only now make the necessary fine distinctions. In the three and a half days during which the Priest-Initiate carefully watched over the neophyte, only the lower part of the body of the pupil was united with the etheric body. This is the stage when the astral body, with all the organs formed in it, imprints itself in the etheric body. At this moment illumination takes place. When the neophyte was awakened after three and a half days, what is called illumination had come to him, that which had to follow after purification, which consists merely in the development of the organs of the astral body. The pupil was now a “knower” in the spiritual world; what he had previously seen was only a preparatory stage of vision. This world consisting of forms somewhat resembling plants was now supplemented by essentially new structures.

We have now to describe more exactly what the initiate then began to see. When he had been led to illumination it was clear to him when he was awakened, that he had seen something which he had previously never been able consciously to grasp. What then had he seen? What was he able to call up in a certain sense before his soul as an important memory-picture of his vision? If we wish to understand what he had seen we must cast a glance at the evolution of man. We must remember that man has only gradually gained the degree of individual consciousness he now possesses. He could not always say “I” to himself as he does to-day. We need only go back to the time when the Cherusci, the Heruli, etc., lived in the parts now inhabited by the Germans. The different human beings did not then feel themselves as separate human egos, but as members of the tribe. Just as a finger does not feel itself to be something existing independently, so each Cheruscan did not feel that he could unconditionally say “I” to himself; his “I” was the “I” of the whole tribe. The tribe represented a single organism and a group of men who were related by blood had one “I”-soul in common. In those days you yourselves were members of a great community, just as to-day your two arms belong to your “I.” This may be clearly seen in the case of the people dealt with in the Old Testament. Each single member felt himself to be a member of the race. The individual did not speak of himself in the highest sense when he uttered the ordinary “I,” but he felt something deeper when he said “I and the Father Abraham are one.” For he felt a certain “I”-consciousness which descended from Abraham through all the generations to each member of the race. That which was related by blood was included in one “I.” It was like a common group-soul-“I” which included the whole race and those that understood the matter said: That which really forms our inmost immortal being dwells not in the separate members but in the entire race. All of the several members belong to this common “I.” Hence one who understood the matter knew that when he died he united himself with an invisible being which reached back to Father Abraham. The individual really felt that he returned into Abraham's bosom. He felt that his immortal part found refuge, as it were, in the group-soul of the race. This group-soul of the entire race could not descend to the physical plane. The people themselves saw only the separate human forms, but these were to them not the reality, for this was in the spiritual world. They dimly felt that that which flowed through the blood was the Divine. And because they had to see God in Jehovah they called this Divinity “Jahve” or also his Countenance, “Michael.” They considered Jahve as the spiritual group-soul of the people.

The individual human being on the physical plane could not see these spiritual beings. The initiate, on the other hand, who experienced the great moment when the astral body was imprinted in the etheric body, was able to see first of all the most important group-souls. When we look back into ancient periods of humanity we everywhere find that the present “I” has developed from such a group-consciousness, a group-ego; so that when the seer looks back he finds that the individual human beings flow together more and more into the group-souls. Now there are four chief types of group-souls, four prototypes. If we observe all the various group-souls of the different souls we notice a certain similarity but there are also differences. If we classify them there are four groups, four types. The spiritual observer sees them clearly when he looks back to the time when man was not yet in the flesh, when he had not descended to the earth. We must now consider more exactly the moment when from the spiritual regions man descended into flesh. This can only be represented in great symbols.

There was a time when our earth was composed of very much softer material than it is now, when rock and stone were not so solid, when the forms of the plants were quite different, when the whole was as if embedded like a primeval ocean in water-caves, when air and water were not separated, when all the beings now dwelling on the earth, the animals and plants, were developed in water. When the minerals began to assume their present form, man emerged from invisibility. The neophyte saw it in this way: Surrounded by a kind of shell, man descended from the regions which are now the regions of air. He was not yet as physically condensed when the animals already existed in the flesh. He was a delicate airy being even in the Lemurian epoch and he so developed that the spiritual picture presents the four group-souls: On one side something like the image of a Lion, on the other the likeness of a Bull, up above something like an Eagle and below something similar to Man. Such is the spiritual picture. Thus man moves forth from the darkness of the spirit-land. And the force which formed him appears as a kind of rainbow. The more physical powers surround the entire structure of this human being like a rainbow (Rev. 4). We have to describe this development of man in various realms and in various ways. The above description represents the way it appears to the investigator when he looks back and sees how these four group-souls have developed out of the common Divine-human which descends. From time immemorial this stage has been symbolized in the form represented in the second of the so-called seven seals.¹ That is the symbolic representation, but it is more than a mere symbol.

There you see these four group-souls emerging from an indefinite background, the rainbow surrounding it and the number twelve. Now we must understand what this number twelve signifies. When that which has just been described is seen coming forth, there is a clairvoyant feeling that it is surrounded by something of an entirely different nature from that which emerges from the indeterminate spiritual. In ancient times that by which it is surrounded was symbolized by the Zodiac, by the twelve signs of the Zodiac. The moment of entering into spiritual vision is connected with many other experiences. The first thing perceived by one whose etheric body goes forth is that it seems to him as if he grew larger and larger and extended himself over what he then perceives. The moment comes when the initiate says: “I do not merely see these four forms, but I am within them, I have expanded my being over them.” He identifies himself with them. He perceives that which is symbolized by the constellations, by the number twelve. We shall best understand that which spreads itself around, that which reveals itself, if we remember that our earth has passed through previous incarnations. We know that before the earth became earth it went through the condition of Saturn, then through that of Sun, then through that of Moon, and only then did it become our present earth. This was necessary, for only in this way was it possible for the beings we see on the earth around us to come forth as they have done. They had gradually to work through those changing forms.

So when we look back into the primeval past we see the first condition of our earth, that of ancient Saturn which at the beginning of its existence did not even shine. It consisted of a kind of warmth. You would not have been able to see it as a shining globe, but had you approached you would have come into a warmth space, because it then consisted only of warmth.

Someone might now ask: Did then the development of the world begin with Saturn? Have not perhaps other conditions brought about that which became Saturn? Was not Saturn preceded by other incarnations? It would be difficult to go back before Saturn because only with Saturn begins something without which it is impossible to go beyond Saturn, namely, that which we call time. Previously there were other forms of being; that is to say, we cannot really speak of a “before,” because time did not yet exist. Even time had a beginning! Before Saturn there was no time, there was only eternity, duration. All was then simultaneous. Only with Saturn did it come about that events followed one another. In that state of the world where there is only eternity, duration, there is also no movement. For time belongs to movement. There is no circulation, no revolution; there is duration and rest. As one says in Spiritual Science: there is blissful rest in duration. That is the expression for it. Blissful rest in duration preceded that Saturn condition. The movement of the heavenly bodies only entered with Saturn. The path indicated by the twelve signs of the Zodiac was conceived of as signs, and the time during which a planet passed through one of these constellations was spoken of as a cosmic hour; twelve cosmic hours, twelve hours of day and twelve of night! To each cosmic body, Saturn, Sun and Moon, is reckoned a consecutive number of cosmic hours which are grouped into cosmic days; and of these periods of time seven are outwardly perceptible and five are more or less outwardly imperceptible. We distinguish there-fore seven Saturn revolutions or seven great Saturn days and five great Saturn nights. We might also say five days and seven nights, for the first and last “days” are twilight days. We are accustomed to call these seven revolutions, these seven cosmic days, Manvantaras, and the five cosmic nights, Pralayas. If we wish to have it exactly correspond to our reckoning of time, we reckon two planetary conditions together, that is, Saturn and Sun, Moon and Earth; and we then get twenty-four revolutions. These twenty-four revolutions form important epochs in the representation of the world and we picture these twenty-four revolutions ruled by beings in the universe who are represented in the Apocalypse as the twenty-four Elders, the twenty-four rulers of the cosmic revolutions, the cosmic periods. In the seal (shown by Dr. Steiner) they are typified as the cosmic clock. The numbers on the clock are here only interrupted by the double crowns of the Elders to indicate that these are the Time-Kings because they rule the revolutions of the cosmic bodies. The initiate sees this when he first looks back into the picture of the past.

We must now ask: Why does the initiate see this picture? Because in it are represented symbolically in astral pictures the forces which have formed the human etheric body in its present shape, and corresponding with this the physical body. Why this is so you may easily imagine. Imagine a man lying in bed. With his astral body and “I” he leaves the physical body and etheric body. But now the physical and etheric bodies as they are to-day, belong to the present physical human body; and to the present etheric body belong the astral body and the “I.” This physical and this etheric body cannot exist alone. They have become what they are because the astral body and “I” have been membered into them. Only a physical body which contains neither blood nor nerves can exist without an astral body and “I.” That is the reason why the plant can exist without astral body and “I,” because it has neither blood nor nervous system, for the nervous system is connected with the astral body and the blood with the “I.” There is no being having a nervous system in the physical body which is not permeated by an astral body and there is no human being having a blood system in the physical body into which the “I” has not entered. Think of what you do every night. You callously desert your physical and etheric bodies and leave them with the blood and nervous systems to themselves. If it merely depended upon you, your physical body would have to die every night through your deserting your nervous and blood systems; it would die the very moment the astral body and “I ” left the physical and etheric bodies. But the spiritual investigator sees how other beings, higher spiritual beings, then occupy it. He sees how they pass into it and do what man does not do in the night, namely, take care of the blood and nervous systems. These are the same beings, however, who have created man, in so far as he consists of a physical body and etheric body, not only to-day but from incarnation to incarnation. They are the same beings who caused the first rudiments of the physical body to originate upon ancient Saturn and who formed the etheric body upon the Sun. These beings who from the very beginning of the Saturn and Sun periods have ruled in the physical and etheric bodies, now rule every night while man is asleep and basely leaves his physical and etheric bodies, surrendering them to death, so to speak; they penetrate and take care of his blood and nervous systems.

Hence, too, it is comprehensible that at the moment when the astral body touches the etheric body in order to imprint itself in it, man is then pervaded by those forces which have formed him; he then sees the picture of the forces which are symbolized in the seal. That which upholds him in life and connects him with the whole universe flashes out at this moment of initiation. He sees what has formed the two members of his being, the physical body and etheric body, that which preserves their life every night; but he himself has still no share in it for he cannot yet work into these two principles of his being. If it depended upon man, the physical body and the etheric body, which during the night lie on the bed, would be condemned to a plant existence, for he leaves them to themselves. Hence to man the state of sleep is an unconscious condition such as the plant always possesses.

Now what has happened, in the case of an ordinary man, with that which has withdrawn during sleep? What has become of the astral body and the “I”? These also are unconscious during the night. The ordinary man experiences nothing in his astral body during sleep at night. But suppose a person were passing through the seven stages of the John-initiation—those important stages in Christian initiation—he experiences not merely what has been described up to now; quite apart from the fact that when the astral body touches the etheric body he is able to develop clairvoyant power, something else would come about. He becomes conscious of the soul-peculiarities, the human soul-qualities of the astral and devachanic worlds from which his soul is really born. To this picture is added a still higher symbol which seems to fill the whole world. To this symbol of the old initiation there is added for one who passes through the stages of the initiation of John something else which may best be represented by the first seal. The Christian initiation possessed this as the symbol of the old initiation. We are now presenting these things from the standpoint of Christianity, which, however, has to receive then and change them into something different. He sees a spiritual vision (Rev. i, 12) of the Priest-king with the golden girdle, with feet which seem to consist of cast metal, his head covered with hair as of white wool, out of his mouth a fiery sword flaming and in his hand the seven cosmic-stars, Saturn, Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus.

The form in the centre of the second picture seal was only indicated in the old initiation as the fifth of the group-souls. It is that which only existed germinally in ancient humanity and only came forth as what is described as the Son of Man who rules the stars when he fully appears to man in his true form.

Thus from this symbolical representation we must first of all clearly understand that the separation of the various principles in present-day humanity—physical body and etheric body on the one hand and astral body and “I” upon the other—may be so considered, that each may contribute its part, as it were, to initiation, first of all through the form of initiation when the astral body touches the etheric body, when the four group-souls flash out, and then in the treatment of the astral body so that this too acquires the ability to see. Previously the highest vision in the super-sensible world had only reached as far as a kind of plant experience of the world. Through the Christian initiation a higher stage of initiation is reached in the astral body. Here you have the two things mentioned at the beginning of the Apocalypse described from the principle of initiation itself. The writer of the Apocalypse has, however, described them in the reverse order, and rightly so. He first describes the vision of the Son of Man, the appearance of Him Who is, Who was and Who is to come—and then the other. Both are symbols of what the initiate experiences during initiation.

Thus we have described what happens in certain cases of initiation and what at first is experienced. In our next lecture we shall proceed further to the details of these real, actual experiences and we shall find them reflected in the mighty presentation given in the Apocalypse of John.

• 1. Dr. Steiner is referring to the seven symbolic Seals which had been drawn from his indications. They showed stages of human evolution visible in the astral world to the seer. See Occult Seals and Columns with introduction by Rudolf Steiner.

My dear friends, brothers and sisters! For those who are here today for the first time it must be said once again that it is not possible in every instance, when new members enter the school, to give the introduction which deals with the nature of obligation inherent in the school, and that I must require of those members who have been here before, and who will give the mantric verses to those who have newly entered, that they will convey what is the essential content of this introduction.

And so, we begin again today in this Michael School with those words which contain the basic demand, the fundamental demand to the human being, which resound to him from all realms of nature and from all the hierarchies of the spirit, if he has a sense and a receptivity for them, and which demand that he seeks his own being, but which also demand of him to come to know the world in its spirit-sustained form and structure by penetrating through his own being. They resound out of all that lives and moves in the depths of earth, in water and air, in warmth and light, in all that lives in mountains and springs, in rocks, in all that lives in plants, in animals, in physical human form, in human souls, in human spirits, in all that lives in the dwellers in the stars, in the hierarchies of the spirit. They sound as follows.

O Man, know yourself!
So sounds the word of worlds
You hear it soul-forcefully,
You feel it spirit-powerfully.

Who speaks so world-mightily?
Who speaks so heart-inwardly?

Does it work streaming through space
Into your sense’s self-experiencing?
Does it sound weaving through time
Into your life's evolving stream?

Are you the one, who yourself
In sensing space, in experiencing time
Creates the word, feeling yourself
Estranged in space’s soul-emptiness,
As you lose the power of thinking
In time’s destroying stream?

My dear brothers and sisters! The description of the spiritual path that should lead out of our sun-drenched world, in which we live on earth, which is bright in comparison to what initially appears to us on the other side of the yawning abyss of existence as gloomy night-bedecked darkness, on this path leading us forth when we seek our intrinsic being we become aware that in all that upon the earth lives in the depths, moves in the air, that creeps and flies, but also in all that our senses perceive in the majestic shining of the stars, in the mighty depths of world spaces, in the immeasurable reaches of time moving on, that all this does not contain our existence, the actual source of our human essence. This all becomes dark when we look about us in search of our human essence. The description of this path has led us to the point where it shows us that we must find the way over to the Guardian of the Threshold, who has said so much to us about the significance of the spiritual path, over into what is still night-bedecked, black darkness, in order that it becomes bright and that within this brightness light appears to us that illuminates our own existence, and thereby illuminates existence and being and interweaving of the world, illuminating it for the eyes of our soul.

Yet we must be clear that in the moment, and please note we are still in the description, in the moment in which we are to cross over the abyss of existence, over to the Guardian of the Threshold, that in this moment with the person, therefore with our self, a significant change is taking place.

Let us look, my dear brothers and sisters, at our human existence as it is between birth and death in physical earth-life. We measure the world by thinking, we grasp the world by feeling, we affect the world by willing. But thinking, feeling and willing are profoundly interwoven together in our human existence. When we wish to carry out an action momentarily, first we think it, and whatever we carry out is already present as a seed in our thought. We see it shoot out into impulses of will. We feel that something has value for us. We feel love for this or that being springing up within us. Therefore, in that we are feeling, we make a thought of the being for ourselves. Or else we go about bringing love of this being to fruition. we let love inspire us, stimulate us, which then passes over into willing. But all this, thinking, feeling, willing hangs closely connected in our human nature, in so far as this human being progresses between birth and death here in the physical world. We are a unity in thinking, feeling, and willing.

And it is true, that we are only really awake in our thoughts. They are bright and clear, despite the fact that the Guardian of the Threshold has revealed them as appearance only. They are bright and clear; we are awake in them.

Feeling lives in us darker and less clear. We are nearer to existence in feeling, but the content we feel is like a dream, so that we can only speak from bright awake thinking and therefore only while awake can we speak of dreaming feeling.

Willing, however, as it liberates itself from the nature of our humanity, initially for ordinary consciousness remains fully unclear. The human being has the thought that he wants to do this or that, the thought shoots down and lays hold on the organism, the organism bestirs itself, carries out the thought, and the person sees again with a thought what he has done. But willing itself rests in its own nature as that aspect of our soul that between falling asleep and waking is in deep sleep.

But he who beholds these things as an initiate, sees thoughts in their aliveness, as they were before the human being descended from supersensible worlds into the sensory. He beholds radiant essential being in thoughts. This radiant essential being, however, does not rest in him as do the sheen of thoughts that he has in customary thinking.

We stand beside the Guardian of the Threshold. The abyss of being is there before us. Beyond the abyss, beyond the threshold lies black, night-bedecked darkness, but brightening and gathering itself out of the darkness a formation stirs, a living formation. We say, in that we are catching the scent of, sensing our thoughts, as they were in us as physical human beings, which we have left behind, we say to ourselves that that is our moving, living thinking, that belongs now not to us, that belongs to the world. Light on light the thought casts itself loose from the black darkness. We know that the thought, the thought of all our thinking, is there in the black darkness as the first clarity we come upon.

And then we gaze somewhat further down. We have the feeling, and the Guardian of the Threshold shows us with his admonishing gesture as we look yet further down, how the glow of firelight appears under the darkness. Fire, dark fire, yet fire that we can sense, that we feel with clair-sentience spreads out below us. Across the abyss of being there comes toward us what we know to be our willing. For the initiate gradually learns to recognize how it actually is when thinking passes over into willing. When thinking passes over into willing there the thought becomes willed, is gathered up, but then this thought streams over into the bodily organism, in clair-sentience one observes this, streaming in as beneficent fire. It is warmth that the will brings there into conscious existence. It is warmth, fire as which our intrinsic will encounters us out of the darkness.

And in between this warmth that our will streams out, confronting us – for our will that goes forth from us as man is only the reflex of our intrinsic will as cosmic man that confronts us now streaming beyond the abyss of existence – in between this warm dark minimally bluish-violet out-stream below and the bright gathering thought-lights above, in between the two undulates and weaves warmth rising up and light descending. Light-drenched warmth rising up, warmth-entrenched light streaming down, that is our feeling.

This is a mighty picture which the Guardian of the Threshold shows us. And now we know, that if we pass over from the world of the senses, from the world of physical reality, in which we are between birth and death, into the world of spirit, then in thinking, feeling, and willing we no longer have the unity which we have here. There we are three. In the world-all we are three. Our thinking goes to the light as we cross the threshold, our willing goes to fire, and our feeling goes to light-borne light-interwoven fire.

And we must have the courage to expand, to intensify this self, this “I,” so that it holds the three together when we cross over. We can do this if we correctly infuse ourselves with what otherwise could be for us merely picture-substantiality, if we correctly infuse ourselves with the notion that our head is the wellspring of all our sensory life, of all our life of thought, that although all sense-life and thought-life most certainly spreads throughout the body, but is particularly expressed in the head, that our head in its roundness with its downward opening is formed in accordance with the world-gestalt. If we could say to ourselves earnestly, with inner intensity that our head, within and without, emulates the world-gestalt, we could then feel, by being willing to look at the head to a certain extent as within, how this perspective broadens itself to the world-all, which is infused all-together in our head only for our earthly perspective.

If we could feel then with full intensity how our heart, the physical expression of our soul, does not merely beat through what is in our body, in the skin-confined human being. We breathe in the air, which is the motivator of heart-beating. We breathe it out again. The world in its greatness, in its majesty participates in our heart beating. It is the world beating which will be felt in our heart, not merely what we carry within us.

When we think how our limbs work, running freely in the will, then what gives us this force in willing is not simply what resides in us personally. Just think how the forces of heredity are built into us when we are born, how the forces of karma which we have acquired through many, many lives on earth, how these live in our willing. Think about all that, and feel how we may think, that in our limbs, if we will, world forces live, not merely human forces.

Now think, my dear brothers and sisters, still on this side, hard beside the Guardian of the Threshold, who points across to light gleaming, world living, world weaving thoughts, to what surges up as warmth, light bearing, to what surges down as light, warmth imprinted, warmth permeated, streams down like warm wind over us on this side from over yonder streams toward us, spiritedly streaming as fire of the world-all, that is the primal force of willing.

So, as we stand here, there comes to us, resounding, what the Guardian of the Threshold has to say to us in this situation.

O show the three

—thinking, feeling, willing; the human being is split, has become a trinity—

O show the three
They are the one
When you bear the stamp of man
In existence-awareness upon the earth.

Experience the head’s world-gestalt

The Guardian makes this sign △ so that we halt, so that we feel the head’s world-gestalt in this upwardly-directed triangle. Concentrate on this. [It was drawn on the blackboard.]

Feel the heart’s world-beat

The Guardian makes this sign, ⧖ that we feel in this sign the undulating beat of the world, which crosses itself in the heart.[It was drawn on the blackboard.]

Think the limb’s world-strength

The Guardian of the Threshold makes another sign, ▽ [It was drawn on the blackboard.]

on which we should concentrate along with this line of the mantra, so that we feel the force of the line, the whole mantric force of the whole speech. Then the Guardian of the Threshold reinforces this once again.

These are the three,
The three, that live as one
In existence-awareness upon the earth.

This is the verse through which the Guardian announces how we should prepare ourselves, through strong courage, through enthusiastic striving for awareness, to feel over there how one becomes three. We are a unity in the physical. The three step forth in the imaginative picture, for in the spiritual world we are three. [The mantra and heading were now written on the blackboard.]

The Guardian admonishes:

O show the three
They are the one
When you bear the stamp of man
In existence-awareness upon the earth.

[Next to the first sign on the board was written:]

Experience the head’s world-gestalt

The world-gestalt can be experienced in the head. [Next to the second sign on the board was written:]

Feel the heart’s world-beat

The world's beat can be felt in the heart. [Next to the third sign on the board was written:]

Think the limb’s world-strength

The world's force can be thought inwardly in the movement of the limbs. The intensification is: [The following six words were underlined:] experience, feel, think, gestalt, beat, force. The three lines must be strengthened by concentrating on these figures. [Writing continued:]

These are the three,
The three, that live as one
In existence-awareness upon the earth.

My dear friends, when we stand there in earth consciousness, and we are certainly still standing there, we are only in preparation for crossing over into the spiritual world. When we stand there in earth consciousness, then we ascribe to our head, inasmuch as it contains the thoughts, we ascribe our spirit to it. We certainly have this spirit initially as mere appearance. The thought, however, the thoughts are just the appearance of the spirit. We ascribe thoughts to our head, which means to the spirit, as the spirit lives just in the form of thoughts in earth consciousness.

But we can also do something else, and this we must do, due to the admonition of the Guardian of the Threshold in this situation, where we are preparing to cross over the abyss of existence, we must make the effort, concerning the force we otherwise bring forth when we move one of our limbs, when we walk or stand, when we send the will through our person, we must make the effort to concentrate so fully on this willing that we actually will each individual thought, as if we were pounding it out. We must feel that the thought is pounded out much as we would stretch out our arm. Reality goes through the will into the thought. Then all that lives in our senses, while it previously sent us merely colorful images and tones, for us the entire multi-formed sensory sheen will be presently-streaming cosmic willing.

My dear brothers and sisters, learn to stretch thoughts out into the world just as you learn to stick your hands out by means of the will. Just as you come up against fixed things of the world when you exert your will, and have resistance, so also the spirits resist when you stretch out thoughts, if you send the will through them. If we do this, then we really move in wisdom. Accordingly, the Guardian exhorts us to do it. The ultimate admonition of the Guardian infuses into us. [The first verse was written on the board; the title as well as the words “head” and “will”, were underlined.]

The Guardian's final admonition:

The head’s spirit
You can will it;

Otherwise, we only think it, but now we will it, and if we do this, then willing becomes something else.

And willing

the willing of the thoughts

becomes for you
Sensing’s many-formed heavenly weaving:
You weave in wisdom.

The next instruction of the Guardian of the Threshold concerns our heart, our heart in which is concentrated all that we are as rhythmic human beings. Into the heart we can carry nothing other than feeling, feeling as it is here in the sense world between birth and death. But we must also meet feeling and its content with the heart when we are in the spiritual world.

If we could merely feel the heart with empathy, as if the world is felt in our heart, for we are certainly in the world, then our feeling becomes something else. Just as willing becomes the sensing’s multi-varied heavenly weaving, so will feeling be¬come for us something which yet must be grappled, so we may say see that thinking, therefore the head’s spirit turned to willing, but that feeling remains feeling, but it rays out on one hand toward thinking and on the other hand toward willing, for it is both at once. Therefore, we must accustom ourselves at this point to think a line in which we interweave one into the other, radiating upward and downward.

This line must so sound, “And feeling becomes for you thinking's willing, willing's thinking, seed-awakening world living.” Then one lives in the brilliance. This is no longer an apparent radiance which fades away, but rather the revelation of the world in beauty, which one can therefore call radiance, which can be stated as glory. For brilliance here has the meaning of glory.

The second, therefore, about which the Guardian admonishes, is

The heart’s soul
You can feel it;
And willing becomes for you
Thinking’s willing, willing's thinking germinal waking world living:
You live in glory.

[This second verse was now written on the blackboard, and “heart” and “feel” were underlined.]

The heart’s soul
You can feel it;
And feeling becomes for you

Thinking's seed-awakening world living
Willing's seed-awakening world living:

You live in glory.

You must try, my dear brothers and sisters, as you practice this, to be able to think simultaneously that it interweaves thinking's willing, willing's thinking together, that it passes one-into-another into one, just as it stands there before the world.

The third, about which the Guardian of the Threshold admonishes us, is the force of our limbs. In this we want something else. The Guardian of the Threshold now wishes for us, if we would step out of ourselves and rest peacefully, that we should think our limb’s force, that we should think the spirit of our limbs, by what we do now not feeling the exertion of our force, but rather by looking at it from afar, as if we were standing next to ourselves. Then thinking of willing, the thinking that we deploy here, becomes willing's goal-directed human striving. And we now recognize virtue, in the sense of the human capacity, as what humankind can will in world evolution. The Guardian of the Threshold so admonishes us. [The third verse was now written on the board and “limbs” was underlined.]

The limb’s strength,
You can think it;
And thinking becomes for you
Willing's goal-directed human striving.
You strive in virtue.

The progression is [The following three words were underlined.] weaving, living, striving. The other progression is wisdom, glory, virtue. Now I shall read the lines as they first appear to us, as the Guardian speaks them to us:

The head’s spirit,
You can will it;
And willing becomes for you
Sensing’s many-formed heavenly weaving:
You weave in wisdom.

The heart’s soul,
You can feel it;
And feeling becomes for you
Thinking's willing’s, willing’s thinking’s
seed-awakening world living:
You live in glory

of think-willing.

The limb’s strength
You can think it;
And thinking becomes for you
Willing's goal-directed human striving:
You strive in virtue.

This is the final admonition of the Guardian of the Threshold.

That is the decisive point, which may be indicated by the word, the word most certainly expressed here as the word that Michael himself speaks, as this esoteric school is founded and sustained by Michael and his force. Now the instruction stands at that important point where we have taken everything into ourselves, which, if it will be thoroughly practiced gives us the wings to cross over the yawning deep abyss of existence.

Everything which has been spoken in this Michael School should once again be accompanied by Michael’s Sign and Seal. For everything will be given in such a way that Michael is present while it resounds through the room of this school, which may be confirmed by his sign, [The Michael sign was drawn on the blackboard.] and which may be confirmed by his seal, that he has impressed on the threefold Rosicrucian maxim, Ex Deo Nascimur, In Christo Morimur, Per Spiritum Sanctum Reviviscimus.

The seal is such, that we feel the first part of the maxim in this gesture, [The lower seal gesture was drawn on the blackboard], the second part of the maxim in this gesture, [The middle seal gesture was drawn on the blackboard.], the third part of the maxim in this gesture, [The upper seal gesture was drawn on the blackboard.], and know that the first gesture implies [beside the lower seal gesture was written]

I honor the Father,

which we feel as we say Ex Deo Nascimur, and confirm it with the gesture that is Michael’s Seal.

The second gesture implies [beside the middle seal gesture was written]

I love the Son,

which we feel it as we say In Christo Morimur, impressing the feeling by what lies in Michael’s Seal.

The third gesture implies, [beside the upper seal gesture was written]

I unite with the Spirit,

which accompanies as a feeling Per Spiritum Sanctum Reviviscimus. It is the gesture which is Michael's Seal upon the third part of the Rosicrucian maxim.

In this way Michael's Sign and Seal may marshal the broader way, which here in this school for spiritual development will be undergone. [The Michael sign was made and the three seal gestures were made as the Rosea et Crucis was spoken.] Ex Deo Nascimur, In Christo Morimur Per Spiritum Sanctum Reviviscimus.

Then the moment is present in which the word of the Guardian of the Threshold sounds decisively, the word of the Guardian of the Threshold, sounding as if it came from Michael himself, as if it came from world's far reaches. After the Guardian has told us how we have to prepare ourselves, and we should feel that such preparation must occur, then will his word resound, as if from Michael, as if from world’s reaches.

Enter
The door is opened
You will become
A true human being

We must interweave ourselves in the feeling that we do not speak it ourselves, but rather, as we speak it, it should become objective, so that we hear it as if it were spoken from another place. [The following is written on the blackboard in red diagonally to the mantra “O show the three”:]

Enter
The door is opened
You will become
A true human being

What will subsequently take place in the following lessons, the next which will as usual be on Saturday at half past eight, what will take place in the following lessons shall reflect what resounds over there on the other side of the Threshold.

But now let us consider once again, for all true development leads ever again back to its starting point, how from all beings of the world the challenge sounds to us, which we currently have to experience from the mouth of the Guardian:

O Man, know yourself!
So sounds the word of worlds
You hear it soul-forcefully,
You feel it spirit-powerfully.

Who speaks so world-mightily?
Who speaks so heart-inwardly?

Does it work streaming through space
Into your sense’s self-experiencing?
Does it sound weaving through time
Into your life's evolving stream?

Are you the one, who yourself
In sensing space, in experiencing time
Creates the word, feeling yourself
Estranged in space’s soul-emptiness,
As you lose the power of thinking
In time’s destroying stream?

Once more – confirming all this, confirming Michael's presence – the sign and seal of Michael: [the Michael sign was made and with the three seal gestures was spoken:]

Ex Deo Nascimur
In Christo Morimur
Per Spiritum Sanctum Reviviscimus.

The mantric maxims which are given here to be practiced, and which carry the force to experience in oneself what is here described, may only be possessed by the rightful members of this class, by no one else. He who belongs to this school and cannot be present at a lesson, when he could have received the corresponding verse, can receive it from another member who was present. But for each such handing on of a verse special permission must be obtained either from Frau Dr. Wegman or from me personally. He who wishes to receive the verse, however, may not request permission, but only the one who is to pass on the verse.

When once one has received permission to give the verse to someone, this continues to hold good for that particular person. For every other person the same permission must be obtained either from Frau Dr. Wegman or from me. It is useless to ask permission if one wishes the verses for oneself, for one may ask only in order to hand them on. One must turn therefore, if one wishes to receive the verses, to someone who rightfully possesses them. The rightful possessor must then ask permission, for each person to whom they are to be given.

Also, if someone writes something down as we go along, he or she only has the right to keep it for eight days. Then it must be burned. Except for the maxims, anything else which has been written down here must be burned. For we must, for once, keep to the occult rules. There is an occult rule in everything which I have now said and to which I hold. We must adhere to the occult rule. So, it is not a matter of an arbitrary administrative procedure; rather, if something esoteric comes into the wrong hands, then, my dear brothers and sisters, for those who possess it rightfully, the mantra concerned loses its effective power. This is simply a matter which is founded in occult law.

Tomorrow at 12 noon, the speech-formation course will be given, at 10:45 the course for theologians, at 5 o'clock, the pastoral medicine course, and at 8 o'clock the members' cycle.

The Guardian admonishes:

O show the three
They are the one
When you bear the stamp of man
In existence-awareness upon the earth.

△ Experience the head’s world-gestalt
⧖ Feel the heart’s world-beat
▽ Think the limb’s world-strength

These are the three,
The three, that live as one
In existence-awareness upon the earth.

The Guardian's final admonition:

The head’s spirit
You can will it;
And willing becomes for you
Sensing’s many-formed heavenly weaving:
You weave in wisdom.

The soul of the heart
You can feel it;
And feeling becomes for you
seed-awakening¹ world living:
You live in glory.

The strength of the limbs
You can think it;
And thinking becomes for you
Willing's goal-directed human striving:
You strive in virtue.

Enter!
The door is opened!
You shall become
A true human being.

Ex Deo Nascimur
In Christo Morimur
Per Spiritum Sanctum Reviviscimus
I honor the Father
I love the Son
I unite with the Spirit

• 1. for one's thinking and willing

My dear sisters and brothers,

Once again, I must say that the introduction about the character and the responsibilities connected with the School cannot be repeated for the new arrivals each time. Therefore, I must request that those of you who were already here and have the mantras inform the new members concerning the contents of the introduction.

Today we will once again begin with the words which contain the fundamental exhortation to the human being, which resound to him from all the kingdoms of nature and from all the spiritual hierarchies, if he has the necessary sensibility, to seek his own being, and also exhort him to recognize, through his own being, the world in its true spiritual nature. They resound from all that interweaves and lives in the earthly depths, in water and air, in warmth and light, from what lives in the mountains and springs, in rocks, in the plants and animals, in the physical human form, in human souls, in human spirits, what lives in the residents of the stars, in the spiritual hierarchies—it resounds thus:

O man, know thyself!
So resounds the Cosmic-Word.
You hear it strong in soul,
You feel it firm in spirit.

Who speaks with such cosmic might?
Who speaks with such depth of heart?

Does it work through distant radiant space
Into your senses' sense of being?
Does it ring through weaving waves of time
Into your life's evolving stream?

It's you yourself who,
In feeling space, in experiencing time,
The Word create, feeling foreign
In space's soulless void,

Because you lose the force of thought
In time's destroying flow.

My dear sisters and brothers, the description of the spiritual path which leads from the sunny, light-filled world in which we live on earth appears on the other side of the yawning abyss of being at first as a gloomy, night-cloaked darkness. The path which leads us to where we become aware that, when we seek our own being in all that lives in the depths, flows in the air, all that creeps and flies, in all that our senses perceive in the majestic glow of the stars, in the powerful depths of universal space, in the immeasurably distant flow of time, that all that does not contain our being, the true source of our humanity, that it becomes gloomy when we look here for our humanity. The description has led us thus far to show that we must find the way past the Guardian of the Threshold, who has told us so much about the meaning of the spiritual world, over to what is still night-cloaked, black gloom, so that it can become bright there, and in this brightness the light arises to illumine before the eyes of our soul our own being, and therewith the being and essence and interweaving of the world.

It must be clear to us that in the moment—and we have come so far in the description—when we have crossed over the abyss of being, past the Guardian of the Threshold, in that moment an important change takes place in the human being, that is, in ourselves.

Let us look, my dear sisters and brothers, at our human existence as it is between birth and death on earth: we grasp the world thinking, we grasp the world feeling, we act in the world by willing. But thinking, feeling and willing are interwoven in our human earthly existence. If we want to carry out something in the near future, we consider it first, so what we carry out is already present as a seed in our thoughts. We see it flowing out in impulses of will. We feel that it is worthy. We feel love flowing to this or that being. Because we feel it, we form a thought about it. Or we go beyond that and carry out a deed of love towards the being, we let ourselves grow wings of love, and are urged forward to willing. But all that—thinking, feeling, willing—is closely related to our humanity as it unfolds between birth and death in the physical world. We are at one in thinking, feeling and willing.

And the truth is that we are only really awake in our thoughts. They are bright and clear, although the Guardian of the Threshold had revealed them to be illusory. They are bright and clear, we are awake in them.

Our feeling is darker and less clear. We are closer to existence in feeling, but the content of what we feel is like a dream, so that we can only speak of dream-feeling, even when awake.

The will, however, as it emerges from our being, remains at first completely unclear to our normal consciousness. We have the thought that we want this or that; the thought appears, grasps the organism; the organism acts, carries out the thought; we see what we have carried out, again with thought. But the will itself rests in deep sleep, as do the things in our soul rest between falling asleep and awakening.

But the initiate sees the thoughts in their living state, which they were in before the human being had descended from the supersensible world to the sensory one. He sees radiant being in the thoughts. But this radiant being he sees is not the illusion of thoughts as in ordinary thinking.

We stand beside the Guardian of the Threshold. The abyss of being is there; before us—beyond the abyss, beyond the threshold—is the black, night-cloaked gloom; but from out of the darkness gleaming, living shapes are moving. We say to ourselves—because we sense that the kind of thoughts we had as physical persons have abandoned us—we say to ourselves: There is our flowing, living thinking. It doesn't belong to us now, it belongs to the world. Light on light, thought extracts itself from the black gloom. We know that thought, all our thinking, is there as the first brightness within the black gloom that we are approaching.

And then we see something further down. We have the feeling—and the Guardian of the Threshold points to it with an admonishing gesture—we see how the darkness below is becoming fire-like. Fire, dark fire yes, but fire that we can sensepsychically, spreads out below us. What we recognize as our willing comes towards us over the abyss of being. The initiate gradually learns the following: What happens when thinking merges with willing? The thought—of what is wanted—is grasped; then this thought merges with corporeality as beneficent fire. What brings the will to existence is warmth, which is fire when our own will meets us from out of the darkness.

And between this warmth, from which our willing streams toward us across the abyss of being (for our human will is a mere reflection of our cosmic will)—between this warm, dark out-streaming from below, which has at most a whiff of bluish-violet, and the bright lights of thoughts above, between both there is an interweaving, flowing warmth rising, light descending. Light-enveloped warmth rising, warmth-enveloped light streaming down: that is our feeling.

It is a powerful picture which the Guardian of the Threshold draws. And now we know that when we cross over from the sensory world, from the world of physical reality in which we are between birth and death, into the world of the spirit, then we will be—in thinking, feeling and willing—no longer the unity that we are here; there we are Three. In the universe, we are Three: our thinking merges with light across the threshold; our will becomes fire; our feeling becomes light-enveloped fire.

We must have the courage to expand and intensify the Self, the I, so that it holds the Three together when we cross over. We can do this once we are permeated with what could otherwise be a banality: that our head is the source of all our senses and thinking: All our senses and thoughts are distributed over the whole body, but what is especially expressed in our head is that in its roundness, with an opening below, it imitates the shape of the universe. If we can say to ourselves in all seriousness and inner ardency: my head is inwardly and outwardly an imitation of the world's shape, we feel then, in that we want to view the head from within, how this perspective expands to include the universe, which is only concentrated in our head for our earthly vision.

We should then intensely feel how our heart, the physical expression of our soul, does not only beat because of what is in our body, because of what is enclosed within the skin; we breathe in the air, which is the impetus of the heartbeat, we breathe it out again. The world in all its grandeur and majesty participates in our heartbeat. What is sensed in our heart is not merely what is within us: it is the universal pulse-beat.

If we consider how our limbs work through willing, it gives us the strength to not only will what is within us. Consider for a moment how the forces of heredity are in us when we are born, how the forces of karma, which we have acquired through many, many earth-lives, live in our willing. Let us think of all that, and feel: when we will, world-force lives in our limbs, not merely human force.

Just think, my dear sisters and brothers, while still here at the Guardian of the Threshold's side he points over to the brightly lit, universally living and acting thoughts; to what wells up as warmth, light-bringing, light-filled; to what spiritually wafts over us from below like warm wind—the universe's fire, which is the ur-force of the will.

So we hear, resounding, what the Guardian of the Threshold has to say to us in this situation:

Behold the Three

(thinking, feeling, willing; man is split in three)

Behold the Three,
They are the One,
When you in earthly life
the human imprint bear.

Experience the head's cosmic form

The Guardian makes this sign:

[It is drawn on the blackboard.]

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so that we stop and feel the head's cosmic form in this closed, upward pointing triangle. Let us concentrate on this.

Feel the heart's cosmic beat

The Guardian makes this sign:

[It is drawn on the blackboard.]

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for us to feel in this sign the wave-like pulse of the universe, which crosses in the heart.

Consider the cosmic force of the limbs.

The Guardian of the Threshold makes the other sign:

[It is drawn on the blackboard:]

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We should concentrate on this line in order to sense the mantric force of this line and of the whole verse.

Then the Guardian of the Threshold strengthens it again:

They are the Three,
The Three, which as the One
In earthly being live.

This is the verse by which the Guardian announces how we are to prepare—through forceful courage, through ardent striving for knowledge—to sense the wings which carry us over from the One to the Three. In the physical world, we are the One. In the spiritual world, we are the Three, which we experience in imaginative pictures.

[Written on the blackboard]

The Guardian reminds us:

See the Three,
They are the One,
When you in earthly life
The human imprint bear.

[Alongside the first sign on the blackboard is written:]

Experience the head's cosmic shape
the cosmic shape can be experienced in the head

[Alongside the second sign is written:]

Sense the heart's cosmic beat
the cosmic beat can be sensed in the heart

[Alongside the third sign is written:]

Consider the limbs' cosmic force
the cosmic force can be considered in the movement of the limbs.

The escalation is:

[The following words are underlined:]

Experience
Sense
Consider

Shape
Beat
Force

The three lines must be strengthened by concentrating on these figures.

[Written:]

They are the Three,
The Three, which as the One
In earthly being live.

My dear friends, when we are standing here in earthly existence—and we are still doing so, we are just preparing to cross to the spiritual world—we ascribe to our head our spirit, in that it contains thoughts. At first, though, this spirit is only apparent. The thoughts are the appearance of the spirit. We ascribe the thoughts to our head, that is, we ascribe the spirit to our head, because the spirit lives in the form of thoughts during earthly existence.

But we can do something else, recalling the Guardian of the Threshold's admonition. In this situation, as we are preparing to cross over the abyss of being, we must endeavor to concentrate on the force we normally use when we move a limb, when we walk or stand, when our will pervades us. We must endeavor to concentrate to the extent that we will each thought, as though it were being pushed out. We must sense the thought being pushed out as when we stretch out an arm: thus, reality passes through the will into the thoughts. Then the things perceived by our senses, whereas they came to us previously as the appearance of color or tone, now stream toward us from the multifaceted sensory appearance as cosmic will.

My dear sisters and brothers: Learn to extend your thoughts out to the world as you learn to stretch out your hands through willing. Just as the objects of the world respond when you extend your will to them, offering resistance, so do the spirits offer resistance when you extend your thoughts to them, in that the will permeates them. If we do this, we are interweaving reality in wisdom. The Guardian of the Threshold's admonishes us once again.

The Guardian's last admonition:

The head's spirit,
You can will it;

(otherwise we only think it, now we will it; and when we do so, willing becomes something different)

And willing

(the willing of thoughts)

provides you with
The senses' multi-forming heaven-weave;
You interweave with wisdom.

The next thing the Guardian of the Threshold points to is the heart, in which the rhythm of our humanity is concentrated. We cannot bring anything except feeling into the heart, that is, feeling here in the sensory world between birth and death. But we must also bring the feelings to the heart when we are in the spiritual world.

If we could feel the heart as if the world were feeling our heart, because we are, after all, in the world, then our feeling would be different. Just as willing becomes “the senses' multi-forming heaven-weave”, so feeling becomes something which must be conceived of in a way that we can say—Look: thinking, the spirit's head, becomes the will; feeling remains feeling, but rays out to thinking on one side and willing on the other. It is both at the same time. Therefore, at this point we must get used to concentrating on a line in which we interweave what rays upward and downward.

This line must read as follows: “And feeling becomes your will's thinking, your thinking's will, the awakening seed of cosmic life.” Then you live in the glow. This is not a dying away glow, it is the world's revelation in beauty, which can also be called “glow” in the sense of “gloria”. The glow here means gloria.

Thus, the Guardian's second admonition is:

The heart's soul,
You can feel it;
And feeling becomes for you
The awakening seed of cosmic life:
Will's thinking, thinking's will.
You live in the glow.

[This second verse is written on the blackboard and “heart's” and “feeling” are underlined:]

The heart's soul,
You can feel it;
And feeling becomes for you
The awakening seed of cosmic life:
Will's thinking, thinking's will.
You live in the glow.

You must, my dear sisters and brothers, by practicing this, try to think that—the will's thinking, the thinking's will—flow together in one, because it is so in the world.

The third thing to which the Guardian of the Threshold points is the force of our limbs. The Guardian of the Threshold demands that that our spirit wills our limbs, that we do not feel that what we do is the result of exerting our own force, but that we observe it as if we stepped out of our bodies and were standing beside ourselves. Then the will's thinking becomes the thinking which we unfold here: the will's goal-oriented human striving. And now we recognize the virtue of human diligence, what human will can accomplish in the world's evolution. The guardian of the Threshold admonishes us:

[The third verse is written on the blackboard and “limbs” is underlined.]

The limbs' force,
You can think it
And thinking becomes
The will's goal-oriented human striving.
You strive in virtue.

The escalation is:

[Now the following three words are underlined:]

weave
live
strive.

The other escalation is:

wisdom
glow
virtue.

Now I will read the lines as the appear to us at first when the Guardian speaks them to us:

The head's spirit,
You can will it;
And willing becomes for you
The senses' multi-formed heaven's interweaving.
You interweave in wisdom.

The heart's soul,
You can feel it;
And feeling becomes for you
The will's thinking, thinking will's
Awakening seed of cosmic life.
You live in the glow.

The limbs' force,
You can think it;
And thinking becomes
The will's goal-oriented human striving.
You strive in virtue.

That is the Guardian of the Threshold's last admonition.

That is the decisive point which is indicated by the words which are spoken here as the words Michael himself speaks, because this Esoteric School has been founded and is sustained by Michael and his force. Now we have come to the important point in our instruction where, if we have conscientiously practiced all that we have learned, it gives us wings to fly over the yawning, deep abyss of being.

Everything which has been said in this Michael School shall again be accompanied by the sign and seals of Michael; for all has been given in such a way that while it resounds through the space of this School, Michael is present, which may be confirmed by his sign:

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and which may be confirmed by his seal, which he has impressed on the threefold Rosicrucian verse:

Ex deo nascimur

In Christo morimur

Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus

the seal makes us feel the first line in this gesture:

[The lower seal is drawn on the blackboard.]

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the second line in this gesture:

[the middle seal gesture is drawn on the blackboard]

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the third verse in this gesture:

[the upper seal gesture is drawn on the blackboard]

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As we know, this first gesture means [beside the lower gesture is written:]

I revere the Father

We feel this as we say “Ex deo nascimur” and confirm it by the gesture, which is Michael's seal.

The second gesture means [beside the second gesture is written:]

I love the Son

We feel this while saying “In Christo morimur”, thus expressing the feeling through what lies in the Michael-Seal.

The third gesture means:

I unite with the spirit

It accompanies, in feeling, “Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus”. It is the gesture which is Michael's seal upon the third part of the Rosicrucian verse.

Thus, Michael's Sign and Seal accompany the path onward, which will be followed in this School for spiritual development:

[the Michael-Sign is made]

[The following three lines are spoken, accompanied by the three seal-gestures:

Ex deo nascimur

In Christo morimur

Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus.

Then the moment comes when the Guardian of the Threshold's decisive words resound as though coming from Michael, as though from the cosmic distances. After the Guardian has said how we are to prepare ourselves—and we feel this preparation to be necessary—then his words resound as though coming from Michael, as though coming from the cosmic distances:

Come in.
The door has opened.
You will become
A true human being.

We must create the feeling that we are not speaking ourselves, but that as we are speaking it becomes objective, that we hear it, as if it is coming from the other side:

[Across the mantra “See the three” on the blackboard, the following is written in red chalk:]

Come in.
The door has opened.
You will become
A true human being.

In the following lessons, what resounds on the other side of the threshold will be described.

But now let us again consider—for all real development always leads back to the starting point—how from all the beings of the world the challenge speaks to us about what we have learned from the Guardian's mouth:

O man, know thyself!
So resounds the Cosmic-Word.
You hear it strong in soul,
You feel it firm in spirit.

Who speaks with such cosmic might?
Who speaks with such depth of heart?

Does it work through distant radiant space
Into your senses' sense of being?
Does it ring through weaving waves of time
Into your life's evolving stream?

It's you yourself who,
In feeling space, in experiencing time,

The Word create, feeling foreign
In space's soulless void,
Because you lose the force of thought
In time's destroying flow.

Once more—confirming all, confirming Michael's presence—the sign and seal of Michael:

[the Michael-sign is made]

[The following is spoken together with the seal-gestures:]

Ex deo nascimur

In Christo morimur

Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus.

The mantric verses given here in order to practice contain the force necessary to experience what is described here. Only the members of this Class may possess them, no one else. If someone who belongs to the School cannot attend a lesson during which he would have received the corresponding verse, he may receive it from another member who was present. But for each time this happens permission must be received either from Dr. Wegman or myself. However, the one who is to receive the verse may not request permission, but only the one who is to give it.

Once permission has been granted to give someone the verses, it continues to hold good for that particular person. For every other person, permission must be obtained from Dr. Wegman or myself. It would be useless for the one who wants to receive the verses to request permission; only the one who is to give them should ask. So, if one wants to have the verses, he must go to someone who has them legitimately. The latter should then ask for each individual to whom he wishes to give them.

If someone makes notes of something else, other than the verses, he is only authorized to keep them for one week; after that they must be burned. We must really observe the occult rules. An occult rule is contained in all I have said and insist upon. This is not an arbitrary administrative measure, but because if esoteric things fall into the wrong hands, then, my dear sisters and brothers, the mantras lose their force. It is simply based on an occult law.

*

At twelve o'clock tomorrow is the Speech Formation course; at 10.45 the Theology course; at five o'clock the Pastoral Medicine course and at eight o'clock the lecture for members.

I would like to announce once again that I will take the liberty of giving a lecture tomorrow morning on certain current occult issues related to Freemasonry. And this will be done according to old occult custom, separately for gentlemen and ladies. The lecture for gentlemen will take place at ten o'clock, and for ladies at half past eleven. You may ask why this custom exists, which will only be overcome in the Theosophical worldview. This will become clear from the content of the lectures, and I would also like to take the liberty of noting that the Besant Branch will have its regular meeting tomorrow evening at eight o'clock.

So I would like to talk about the relationship between occultism and the theosophical movement and some other related questions. It has been discussed many times whether the theosophical movement, especially as it is expressed in the Theosophical Society, is an occult movement, or whether one should disregard all occultism in the theosophical movement. The Theosophical movement as such, insofar as it expresses itself in the Theosophical Society, cannot be an occult movement. An occult movement has different prerequisites from those that may be expressed in the Theosophical Society. There have been occult societies at all times. Above all, these had one essential requirement: namely, that they were a kind of hierarchical structure by the very nature of their aspirations. This means that the members of such a society, brotherhood, were organized in degrees. Each degree, from the first up to the ninetieth degree, had its own specific task. Within each degree there were very specific tasks. No one could be promoted to a higher degree until they had fulfilled the tasks of the lower degree.

I can only give a very general indication of why this is so. In fact, we have to talk in general terms about the tasks of such occult brotherhoods. Those revered friends who have heard me speak about such things before will understand me all the better today. Occult brotherhoods are brotherhoods of guides for humanity. Their task is to prepare the things of the future. Everything that is to happen in the future is already being prepared in the present, finding its expression in the present as an idea, as a plan, and is then realized in the future. Even if you look at the development of the human race on the external physical plane, you will still find that things that were later realized first germinated as ideas in the minds and souls of leading personalities and individuals, striving for expression. Take the steam engine, for example. If you trace the matter back, you will find how the steam engine developed from the simplest facts; how even the cooking pot filled with boiling water contains the idea of the steam engine, which then progresses from this simplest form to the most complicated mechanism. But these are trivialities compared to the great structure of humanity that we have before us. The most important things presuppose much larger and much more meaningful perspectives. They presuppose that what is to happen in the distant future is, in a sense, already being prepared today. How can such a thing happen?

By the fact that it is in our hands to lay the forces into the world today that are to take effect in the future. Everything that will happen in the future here on the physical plane is already preparing much earlier on the astral and devachan planes; so that in fact distant future events can be traced in the higher planes and worlds, according to their power. But man cannot work well into the future if he does not prepare this effect from the knowledge of the acting forces. Man is a self-conscious creature and must take his fate into his own hands. Therefore, there have always been advanced brothers of our human race who can see not only on the physical plane, but also on higher planes.

Let us try to understand what it means to foresee on higher planes. Suppose you have a pond of water. You can foresee that when the temperature drops, the pond will be frozen, that there may be skaters on it and so on. Similarly, we are dealing with the relationship between the so-called astral plane and the physical plane, that is, with our world. If one follows the events on the astral plane, then one can indeed see with the help of the astral event what will be there in later time, as it were, as a condensation of it. And so one can see from the astral events what will later appear in condensed form on the physical plane. Physical events are nothing other than such condensed happenings that previously occurred in the higher worlds.

An example: Throughout antiquity there were mysteries. These had the task of accepting individual people and initiating them into the secrets of existence, or - as John the Revelator says - to show what is to happen in the future in brief. When we enter such a temple, we find that instruction is taking place there for those students who are accepted into the first degree. We also find instruction for students who are more highly developed and ever more highly developed. The first step was for the students to purify their astral body. This consisted of them not merely adopting the usual bourgeois ethics. The bourgeois ethic was presupposed; what is considered here had to be followed in strict fulfillment of duty. When the student then ascended more and more to higher ideals, rising from the passions and drives of ordinary life to desires that are above all pettiness of man, and purified his pleasure and displeasure so that the great world-embracing affairs of the human race became his own, when he felt and sympathized with others, then he was on the way to accomplishing what was called the “purification of the astral body.

Then he was allowed to intervene in the denser bodies; he was allowed to work on his etheric body, he was not only allowed to reshape the soft, pliable and flexible astral matter in his spirit and soul bodies, but he was allowed to work into his etheric body. Then he was what is called a chela.

Such a chela is one who not only recognizes higher duties, who has not only purified himself to the point of making human duties his own, but has grown beyond the lower and higher concerns of individual peoples, even of individual creeds. His gaze is directed towards the life of all humanity. And through the more thoroughly organized etheric body, he becomes a participant in the great affairs of the building of the earth. For this to happen, the following had to occur.

The chela had to paralyze all the forces that prevented him from working on his etheric body. When you have a person in front of you, he has a physical body, an etheric body and an astral body. The chela has purified his astral body and can now work on his ether body. You will understand why a person must purify his astral body. What happens when the astral body is purified? What enters the ether body? That which is in the astral body.

The things that live in the astral body are imprinted on the etheric body. As long as you work on the astral body, you can rework the mistakes over and over again: the astral matter is thin and soft. You can always bring that into balance. But once a person has begun to develop the etheric body as a chela, these qualities are imprinted on the etheric body, and it is much more enduring. By making what is defective in the earthly permanent, the person would become a dangerous member of humanity. Hence the constant emphasis on the need for purification. This etheric body is impressed by the forces that act on it. Think of it as separate from the physical body, and it has a completely different elasticity. When it is within, it holds the physical body in shape; but as long as it remains within, it is initially too weak to hold that which has passed through the catharsis as astrality. Therefore, throughout antiquity, one had to do the following.

One had to first remove the forces that prevented the elasticity of the etheric body. This was done by bringing the whole physical body into a state of lethargy. The person lay there, and the etheric body was taken out of the physical body. The physical body then remained as if dead, and the etheric body was formed according to its own forces. This is the 'burial'. The person concerned was put into a state of lethargy for three to three and a half days. And then he could work on the etheric body. And then, after he had shaped the etheric body according to the astral body, he returned to the physical body. Then he had awakened the inner life in himself, then he was a resurrected one, and he was given a new name. This was an act on the astral plane. Everything I have described took place in the astral plane; the physical body had nothing to do with it.

This event was repeated in all the ancient mysteries. Every initiate knew it. Now imagine it in a condensed form, brought down to the physical plane, so that something has happened with this event that used to take place only in the astral. Comparatively speaking, it is as if you now have a piece of ice where you used to have water. Many such astral events must coincide, merge, so that physical condensation will one day be possible. Through the appearance of Christ on the physical plane, that which had so often and repeatedly taken place in the mystery centres on the astral plane, the Mystery of Golgotha has become historically possible. It could be brought down to the physical plane. From this example we learn to understand how the future is actually prepared in occult brotherhoods.

If we now ask ourselves: “What is actually happening there?” the answer is: Certainly, in thoughts, in the idea, one can grasp a great deal. But the idea has no reality. The idea is nothing more than what is brought down from the higher planes to the physical plane. But what man thinks about it is the most ineffective thing, because it is only present on the physical plane. It is different when something is added to this idea that also comes from the higher spheres.

Take, for example, Pythagoras' teaching of the music of the spheres, as he taught it to his students. Philosophers seek to present Pythagoras' occult music as a very simple system. The intellect can grasp this quickly. But for him, it was important that the student only came to it when his mind, his mood, was prepared for it. It is also impossible for someone who has no sense for images that originate in the astral to want to explain the deeper meaning of Raphael's Sistine Madonna: the feeling, the mind, must climb up to it. What otherwise leaves the idea cold appears here in the picture artistically full of life as the divine world thought, as that which the divine forces have created the world after - and a simple line becomes something sacred! By entwining thoughts around the element of the divine, thought is brought to divine influence.

Thus, the aim of such training is to prepare man step by step to approach the great world thoughts, to receive them. Then, by gradually penetrating into these great world thoughts, he connects that effective but otherwise occult power which, in the astral, already prepares the future for the physical plan. If the leading human brother has students who are attached to such spirit-imbued ideas, then these are a force that also helps him to advance in his work for the outer world; the great spiritual centers of spiritual work arise.

So you can see that what I have called occultism actually has a great deal to do with the progress of humanity. And in our time we have a particularly important task. Let us try to hint at how we have come to this task of ours with just a few words.

We are part of the great root race of humanity that has populated this earth. Since the ground we live on today emerged from the depths of the sea, since the Atlantean race gradually began to disappear, the great Aryan root race has been the one that has ruled the earth. If we look at ourselves, we here in Europe are the fifth sub-race of the great Aryan root race. The first sub-race lived in ancient India in the distant past. And today's Indians are descendants of that first sub-race, whose spiritual life is still present in the ancient Vedas of the Indians. The Vedas, however, are only echoes of the ancient Rishi culture. At that time there was no writing; there was only tradition. Then came the second, the third and the fourth sub-races. The fourth sub-race adopted Christianity. Then we see that around the middle of the Middle Ages the fifth sub-race had formed, to which we and the neighboring peoples belong. The ancient Indians of the first sub-race lived under different conditions than we did and were basically organized differently. Even their present-day descendants, the present-day Indians, are organized quite differently from our European peoples. The occultist who studies the differences finds that in the ancient Indian people, the etheric body is much less bound to the physical body, is not as deeply embedded in the physical body, but is much more easily influenced by the astral body.

This is why the Indian race can easily transfer something from the astral body to the etheric body, and why this Indian race can easily work into the etheric body. This means nothing other than that through occult training, it is easier for Indians to arrive at certain higher insights. The more easily the etheric body can be influenced by the astral body, the easier it is to influence the etheric body with pictures, without abstract concepts. It is all the easier for someone who undergoes the yoga training in the astral to relate to the higher realms through pictorial representations. These act on the etheric body, which is still soft. There is no need to work in strict concepts, but with the simplest of images one can work on the soul of an Indian person, and he will be able to reach very high levels of development.

Throughout the various sub-races, the human race has changed. Our etheric body is now much more influenced by the physical body than it was in the case of the ancient Indians. And so it is that we have to work much more strongly and inwardly to influence the etheric body. We cannot resort to half-dreamlike images. We must subject everything to a sharp concentration, work on our inner being through strong soul concentration into the pure supersensible, not merely through pictorial concepts. Such a conception, which brings about a strong concentration of our inner being, can then have a much stronger effect on the etheric body, which is tied to the physical body. In order for the astral body to be able to influence the etheric body, it used to have to be outside the etheric body. But now the etheric body can also be influenced from within the physical body by the astral body. If we were to perform the same experiment that was common in the ancient mystery centers, and induce lethargy, we would be able to act on the etheric body. But when the consciousness of the earth and the mobility of thinking return, these would immediately extinguish what the astral body has impressed in the ether body. We have to strongly influence the ether body if we want it to retain what we have imprinted on it. The occult task today has become a different one, it is now more inward.

And so you can also see how, over time, great differences arise in the occult schools that follow one another. The yoga system of the Indians is different from the schooling of the Rosicrucians. The Rosicrucian schooling is calculated on what I have now explained to you. Furthermore, something else occurs: in order for such progress to occur at all, the power of the intellect had to be influenced. The mind was strained much more than before, and then, through the power of inner concentration, it was able to develop its ability to grasp the supersensible. So in modern times, it had to be taught much more conceptually; emphasis had to be placed on developing the intellect and on abstract imagination. Compare the changes in culture from ancient India to our own time. In ancient India, there was a high level of intuition and little external impact of civilization. Now, in our time, it is the other way around. This means that the position of occultism is also gradually changing. Much of what used to be kept secret has now become common knowledge. Many, many such insights and concepts were formerly kept within the occult brotherhoods, and a person could only gain access to these things if they had completely transformed their hearts. Today, the occultist no longer has this in their hands. Much of what used to be kept for later stages of training must now be recognized as having already been revealed by the culture of the outside world. The mystery initiate must take this into account. And so many truths that were taught in the occult schools had to be gradually brought out onto the physical plane.

Even what is taught in today's elementary schools would lead us away from the spiritual if it were not for the occult background that comes from another side. In earlier times, the student knew that there was something higher behind what he received as teaching material in school and in the world of scholars, and that he himself might one day be able to access this higher knowledge. He knew that he was a link within a spiritual organism; today, in the democratic world, many concepts are adopted that do not lead to such insight. The top of the pyramid had to be added to the structure of external democratic knowledge, as it were. The elementary knowledge of the hidden forces in the world had now been given. The top, leading to a spiritual world view, was still missing. To provide this, a world-embracing movement had to be founded. The theosophical movement was conceived as such. Therefore, in certain brotherhoods, when the popularization of the previously hidden wisdom had gone on and on, it was decided to reveal to the world as much of the secrets behind it as was necessary to harmonize the knowledge of the outer world with the comprehensive occult knowledge of the brotherhoods.

Here we are at the point where we can see the connection between the Theosophical Society and the Theosophical movement and occultism. The Theosophical Society is not an occult movement or an occult brotherhood; it is built on a democratic foundation in which each person is an equal member with the others. However, it is another matter entirely to grasp the task of the Theosophical Society. The task of the Society is on the physical plane. If one wants to grasp this fully, one must be able to see up into the higher worlds. But it is not a matter of the Theosophist already being able to see up into the higher worlds, but rather of the fact that occult powers are also being developed within the movement, so that the Theosophical Society can be a place from which occultism can radiate and be expressed. It is one thing for a society to be an occult brotherhood, and quite another for it to say: We are not an occult brotherhood, but occultism is being discussed again in our society.

Today, when basically all of humanity is looking longingly to the higher worlds, without finding the ways to get there, today an even greater part of occult knowledge must be popularized accordingly. And this task has been given to occultism within the Theosophical Society. Spiritual movements have always had a fruitful effect on the development of culture on the physical plane as well. Their external expression is nothing other than the earthly realization of what has been prepared spiritually. What is it, then, when we consider the works of Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, for example? In these works, they have conjured up something spiritual on the wall in colors and forms: the picture is permeated by that which first lived in the soul of the artist as a spiritual being. The spiritual precedes that which later appears as its expression in the material world.

And materialistic external culture is only the imprint of people's inner attitudes that have become materialistic. Since 1850, purely materialistic city culture has been spreading in civilized countries. We see the great things it has achieved on the physical plane, but we also see what it has not been able to achieve. In the artistic field, for example, it has not produced any real new style, except for one: and that is the style of the department store. This is something that is inwardly true in relation to our outer civilization. Everything else that is taken over from ancient times has no relation to the present time. Only when we have formed a society whose members are seized by a spiritual power, as it used to live in Christianity, and as it still lives in the best Christian souls as a longing and can be regained, then we will have a spiritual culture again. And such a culture will again produce artists in all areas of life.

Let Theosophy live in the souls of people, then it will flow out of the souls again as style, as art, it will be there for our eyes and ears. The outer world will be able to express the spiritual again, which is already being experienced in such a society today. In this sense, the Theosophical Society could serve the shaping of the more distant culture.

When we are together, we must realize that we are like cells that must join together to shape a future culture. In our souls, those forces are being prepared which will in future transform the world in such a way that it will become a physical expression of our present-day moods and views of life. Everything that is revealed and manifested today was once occult. Just as electricity is a manifest force today, it was once an occult force. And what is still occult today is destined to become a driving force for the future. Just as millions of years ago our present human body was prepared from forces that are in our environment, so today a higher body is preparing in us, a body of the future; but only in a distant time will this body of the future be ours.

Let us retrace our path of development a little. What was there once? A dull human consciousness. The world around us looked different and was a dreamlike mirror. People had a dreaming consciousness. And even as the development of their community progressed, they had no parliaments based on the exchange of opinions, nothing of the kind. Everything was merely reflected in the consciousness that arose in the human being. And today's bodily organs: how did they come about? Through the fact that those forces worked on human beings. Just as the animals in the dark caves of Kentucky lost their eyesight because they did not need it, so the external forces also organized what we have as eyes and ears. These have been developed and evolved out of our organism by the forces of sound and light. In the future, our spiritual organism will develop out of what is now living in us. The things that stand before us as expressions of our spiritual culture – the churches and so on, the cultural works that convey beauty and truth to us – will imprint themselves on our higher being. And when these will one day unfold into a life of their own, then what lives as beauty and truth in the outer culture will arise within us. What the eyes and ears perceive now are the building blocks for the organization of a higher future. If we look at the world from this point of view, the human inner life takes on a completely different meaning.

We are thus confronted with a fact that can easily make understandable what is called yoga training or inner occult training. From the words I have spoken, you will be able to see that what once created in the world, what worked and strengthened in the world, has been taken up by our inner being. What is in me today was once outside of me: this is the basic idea of occult training. Before our physical body existed, our etheric body was already present. Our etheric body, in turn, is a structure that was formed by our astral body. And this is the starting point of yoga training. Those who engage in yoga training descend into their etheric body and know that in the etheric body they will find the power that once built them up millions of years ago. The physical body has slowly emerged from the basis of the etheric body.

I can only give a rough description of how the descent into the etheric body takes place. There are certain currents in the etheric body that are the forerunners of the physical body organs. The nervous system, the nerve cords, the sympathetic system that runs up the back, the nerve ganglia of the sympathetic nervous system, these are parts that were formed out of etheric matter in the distant past. This is a process that took place in the dim and distant past. Then, after man had progressed further and further, there was a time when the structure developed within this body, which now had the potential for the physical nervous system, which enables us to develop internal body heat and to prepare warm blood. This is again a later structure of the etheric body, which was then already strongly influenced by the forces of the astral body. And from what we subsequently find as the basis of the brain, the spinal cord has developed - again from the etheric body, as the other pole of the etheric body, which on the one hand developed into the brain, and on the other hand into the inner warmth of the blood. This happened in the past. Not only the forces of nature have worked on this formation of the human being, but also higher spiritual beings.

When the yogi now descends step by step into this etheric body, he penetrates into the times of the past, where his spiritual form of origin was influenced by these forces and beings and brought forth what lives in us today. When man has descended into life in this way, he can reach that point again during the descent. He descends from the head down into the lower regions, which were built up in the most ancient times, and then back again into his head. This is a description of the occult path of knowledge, albeit a scant description. More can be given in the occult schools.

Thus the student of mystery wisdom developed the ability to look into the past; then the time comes when he can undertake the occult pilgrimage. He achieves this by means of a certain practice, through which he overcomes his personal self and thereby ceases to be the small, bound ego. Only then can he make the ascent into the universe. Once more he descends, taking the world power with him, into the sea of the past, in an ascending line. He can then gradually follow the path he has taken. Slowly and gradually, the human being learns to descend into the sea of his formative forces, and finally he arrives at a point near the origin. This must have been the experience of those human beings to whom the eye was first given to direct their gaze into the universe.

Then the disciple realizes the confluence of the I with the great world I. And now he must learn to say to the small I: “I am not you.” It is an important moment when he realizes what this means: “I am not you.” This is a moment when one begins to realize that there are higher forces at work in nature than thinking, that there is something beyond oneself that cannot be expressed in the words of the present, but which has the effect that when two people who can speak about the same thing, the speech of one is clear but dull, while that of the other is pulsating with the warm light that will create the future.

When the student has reached this stage, they can learn in yet another way than they have been able to learn until now. They experience something very special. They encounter a spiritual being in the supersensible world. They meet the individuality that was once connected to them. It is a great and important mystery that certain stages of our existence are repeated. We consciously ascend from the manas to the higher forces. We once descended from spiritual worlds, and at that time the same being descended into us something that we now meet again at the stage corresponding to that point in the past when it was with us then. It is the teacher, the so-called guru. We met him for the first time then; now we meet him again when we can consciously grasp what he has sunk into our souls and we have unconsciously received.

And if we descend further, we meet the spirits who helped to build us eons ago. We meet the twelve spirits: the spirits of will, the spirits of wisdom, the spirits of form, the spirits of movement, the spirits of personality or egoism, the spirits of fire or warmth, the spirits of dawn or twilight, and so on. All this presents itself to our mind's eye on this descent into the universe, on this pilgrimage. And that alone makes it possible for us to glimpse the future, to anticipate what is to happen “in the near future,” as the apostle says.

This is the task of occultism. It is to be solved because this solution is necessary. There are enough movements that are idealistic and ethical. But the movement called Theosophy differs from others in that occultism consciously comes into its own in this movement. This clarifies the relationship between occultism and Theosophy. The Theosophical Society can never aspire to be an occult brotherhood. The strength it needs to fulfill its task, the life it needs, can only come from the currents of occultism. Therefore, the Theosophical Society will flourish when there is an understanding for the cultivation of occult teachings and occult life. This does not mean that the members themselves should be occultists. But if Theosophy forgets that this blood pulsates within it, then it may be an interesting society, but it will not fulfill what was intended by the exalted powers that stood at its starting point.

Anyone who understands this will never want to take away the occult character of the Theosophical Society. But anyone who stands in Theosophical Society in this way is put in a conflicting position. He will have to turn his ear to the side from which the occult truths flow to us, and on the other hand, turn his attention to the outer exoteric life of the Society. These things must be strictly separated; they must never be mixed. But one must not, when speaking of the outer Theosophical Society, speak of the occult personalities who are at the starting point. The Powers that live on the higher plane and those who live outside the physical body for the sake of human development never interfere in these matters. They never give anything but impulses. When we work objectively for the spread of the Theosophical Society, the great individualities we call Masters are always at our side; we may turn to them and let them speak through us. When the subject is the expansion of occult life, the Masters speak. When it is only a matter of organizing the Society, they leave it to those who live in the physical plane. That is the difference between the occult current and the framework of the Theosophical Organization.

Let me express the difference between what goes as an inner spiritual current and what is lived out through the individual personalities in the way that it can perhaps best be expressed: When it is a matter of spiritual life, then the Masters speak. When it is a matter of mere organization, then error is possible, because then the Masters are silent.

From the question and answer session

What is the significance of memory in occult training?

Memory is one of the things that have to be sacrificed in occult training. However, everything that was lost on the descent is reclaimed on the ascent. When you develop occultly, you no longer have any memory at all. The memory has developed into something else. You can read about this in Lucifer issues 14 and 15. This is where real reading in the past occurs. First on the astral plane and then in the Akasha Chronicle. The student's lost memory is replaced by reading power. He will no longer know when Caesar was born, but he will be able to trace back the whole process up to that time.

How are the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount to be understood?

The Sermon on the Mount is a teaching by Christ to his disciples. First of all, one must know what it means to be “on the mountain.” There Christ Jesus explained the great world connections to the disciples. It is extremely interesting from the occult point of view. In the occult world, everything appears to us in a mirror image. They see their own passions wrongly. As a wild animal, the animal in him meets the human being. It is the outpouring of one's own passion that comes back to him in the mirror image. Therefore, we may say that man necessarily evokes the reflection of his actions on the higher plane through himself. The number 126 appears as 621. That this is so, the Christ said to his disciples in the Beatitudes. “To be blessed” means to approach the soul. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit that heals. The first sentence, if translated correctly, would read something like:

Blessed are those who beg for the Spirit, for they find within themselves the Kingdoms of Heaven.

And further:

Whoever is persecuted for My sake finds the kingdom of heaven within himself. [Matt. 5:6]

Then something emerges from the inner being into the outer world, and in the outer world it meets him again in the mirror image. All this can be seen beautifully in a good Greek translation. But the correct meaning can only be understood with occult knowledge.

What is the difference between a highly developed and a less developed person in the occult?

The difference is only a matter of time. Why did the highly developed reach spiritual greatness earlier? Because they traced their origin back to earlier world creations. The occultist speaks from experience, and beyond a certain point, one cannot say anything. After that, there is only speculation. Only after the end of all things will it be possible to speak about those things that go beyond the end of all things.

Are there also dangers in occult striving?

Yes, there are dangers in occult striving. Above all, you have to be alert, awake. Not mediumistic. The occultist does not enter any area of the higher life other than with a clear consciousness, so that he is present, similar to the way he walks in the physical world. I must not lose my physical consciousness. If I do that, then the danger begins. I may not absorb anything in a dull state of consciousness, but only in a completely clear state of consciousness. Persons who enter into twilight states, trance and mediumistic states must beware of approaching their teachers other than in complete freedom. On the whole, the development is not such that the student turns to the astral, but the methods lead to the fact that one only comes to the astral plane when one can have higher experiences on the astral plane, when one is no longer exposed to all the confusing impressions.

The person who is on the physical plane lives in his or her self on the devachan plane. What must be striven for is that the person retains this life, which he has on the devachan plane, just as he retains the physical one, so that the following must not occur.

Suppose the person suddenly gains sight on the astral plane. Then he will go astray because he is accustomed to the outside world entering him. His ego cannot be there because it is unaccustomed to living on the astral plane, because it is only accustomed to having contact with the world through the physical senses. If you put a person unprepared into the astral world, he is exposed to all kinds of dangers. He must be able to reconnect with the world, he must have a base from which to move on. To gain this foothold is called “building a hut”. In the Transfiguration scene, Christ introduced the disciples to the Devachan plain, and there the disciples said, “Let us build huts here”.

If the astral power is developed before the mental center, then it is possible that the disciple exposes himself to all sorts of urges and passions. This should be avoided by the new method.

The question is raised about the occult side of Christianity and whether black magic is possible in this way.

It is true: what is called Christian development is not identical with occultism and also not identical with Eastern philosophies. The matter appears even deeper when one looks at the occult side of Christianity. Christianity emerged in the fourth sub-race. There is a deep significance to the fact that it came into the world in the form it is. But it need not remain so. This Christianity, like every spiritual current, takes on a special form in the dawn of the fourth subrace.

I will only briefly characterize how it emerges there. Imagine yourself back in ancient India and among the people who were the bearers of the ancient Zarathustra culture. Then to the time of the culture of the Semites, Jews, Hebrews, and then we see the fourth race of men coming up. It was the Greek-Latin culture that developed in Southern Europe. The coming up of the Greek-Latin race is expressed in ancient art, for example in the Laocoon group. If you look at this Laocoön Group, you will see Laocoön fighting the snakes. Laocoön was an old priest in Troy. And the culture of ancient Troy was still a priestly culture. As is well known, Anchises fled after the capture of Troy. Then a priestly colony was founded in Italy: Alba longa. Alba longa also means the long chasuble, the garment for a priestly culture. Alba Longa was founded for a new priestly culture, as a branch of the old Trojan one. The snake winds around the priest. This is a symbol for the overcoming of priesthood, which has nothing to do with cunning, but only with spirituality. This is what we see in the Laocoön Group. It is a great document for the transition from the third to the fourth sub-race.

There is a law in the occult that expresses itself in the fact that in a race - I cannot prove this today - in which the leading individuals nourish their organism, that is, the instrument of the spirit, with alcoholic or similar drinks, it is simply impossible to arrive at a knowledge of the higher members of the human being. There are only two possibilities: either knowledge of the higher worlds and no alcohol, or alcohol and development on the physical plane with the prospect that there may be other planes, but that we cannot see into them ourselves. This is why all ancient cultures were influenced by the idea of reincarnation. Even the slave who worked on the Egyptian pyramids knew the truth of reincarnation. He knew that he would also one day take the place from which orders were given, just as he had to obey now. Christianity was an education of humanity for the importance of the physical plane. The fifth sub-race with the culture of authority was then prepared. How does this fifth sub-race prepare itself externally? By taking a completely different direction in the mysteries. Before Dionysus, there is no trace of the later sacrifice. There are ablutions, and the water is the sacrifice. With Dionysus, the god of becoming takes effect. The culture of the ram or lamb appears. Homer. Christ is the individuality that descends from the highest regions. Today, it already contains in its physical being what the other human beings will also contain in the very distant future. If you want to contemplate Christ, he is best described in the Gospel of the intimate disciple John. The Word became flesh, it says there. Man will one day become the Word, and this Word lives in the flesh in Christ. When you contemplate this Christ in the fourth sub-race, then he could say one thing: “In a certain way, I am deeply related to this sub-race, this fourth, but at the same time I am also growing out of this fourth sub-race. I represent that which will appear again and again in the future. This is how he is connected to the development of humanity, to the earthly wave of evolution that makes up the fourth and fifth sub-races and will then make up the sixth sub-race. In this way, he looks at everything that develops as material life on earth.

The life of Christ belongs to this; and how did this body become a member of the fourth sub-race? Because a culture emerged that rejected the teaching of reincarnation. After all, the Christ also taught his disciples about reincarnation. For they themselves asked him: “That should not happen until Elijah has reappeared.” Then he said: “He has reappeared. John was Elijah, but they did not recognize him.

We therefore understand Theosophy as the realization of Christianity. It teaches what Christianity has only hinted at. The ancient sacrifices were water sacrifices. The sacrifices of the fourth sub-race are wine sacrifices. And Christ turns the water into wine. This is to be understood physically and materially. The Christian monks are allowed to drink wine. They are not forbidden to drink wine. This makes Christianity a different kind of development. The Christian development must completely entrust itself to the leader. The disciple is not allowed to see for himself, not allowed because he has drunk wine. This also takes place at the Lord's Supper.

What is present then? The body of the whole earth is present in the Christ. He can say: “This is my body.” And what is the blood? That is what immediately brings forth the passions in the time to come. That is the lifeblood of the Dionysian culture. The wine is the astral element. In its all-encompassing individuality in concentrated physical form. I can only hint at all this now. Take the individualities that have grown out of the Christian life: for them this can apply. They surrender to the one who guides them because they are only walking on the physical plane for a while. This is Christian occult development.

But then there is also a Christian black magic. It really exists and plays a certain role. In conversation, it may be possible to provide specific information about this as well. Take a fully developed occultist of the old world, one in whom the light originally shines from the beginning, and then the modern occultist, who starts from the Rosicrucians and is now developing. That is the one where the light is where one develops with a certain awareness and entrusts oneself to the leader. It is being awake when one wants to develop occultly.

Can you tell us more about Noah and the Flood?

The question about Noah is connected with my very latest occult research. No one will find anything in 'Lucifer' that I did not know at the time I wrote the articles. But now I know a little more about it. Now the climatic conditions have become clear and vivid to me. I have come to understand something that I would have mentioned at the time if I had understood it at the time. I took the position of Noah allegorically at the time. It was a picture for the deep spiritual meaning. But now I know that this rainbow in the Bible corresponds to a literal fact. On the old Atlantis, the climatic conditions were different. The distribution of air and water was different. It is not without reason that German legend speaks of the 'Fogheim'. There is no rain there yet. There is a different distribution in the cycle of water in the air, and different cloud formations are present, so that one finds that on the old Atlantis the formation of a rainbow is not yet possible. Such conditions only became possible when Atlantis was flooded and the new continents rose.

Now we are given a hint as to how the rainbow emerges from the flood. Noah is the biblical representative of a certain tribe that originally came from Atlantis. We speak of the Proto-Semites. All sub-races descend from them in a certain way. This is well known to us from theosophical literature. So it is in a sense correct to say that all descend from the Proto-Semitic race. The fourth sub-race, which developed from the then existing one, is predisposed in the Proto-Semites, so that one tribe, which is presented to us biblically as Noah's, is particularly characterized by its wine drinking.

How is race formation related to Germanic mythology?

There was a center in the Gobi Desert. From there, the northern cultural current flowed, which had a tragic course. It is contained in the Nibelungen, in the twilight of the gods. Druid means oak. The arrival of Christianity forms one of the expectations in all Nordic mysteries. This is expressed in a symbolum. Certain truths are indicated to the initiated by certain symbols. What was it that had to be brought, that was predicted by the old Druid priests? It was the cross.

Now there is a Nordic initiate to whom all these things go back. He is called Sieg. All the names like Siegfried, Sieglinde, Siegmund and so on go back to this Sieg. This Nordic initiate found expression in the later Siegfried. He is described as an initiate. It is stated that he was invulnerable through the dragon blood, but that he was still vulnerable at a certain point on his shoulder blade. And it was taught: There will come another who will overcome this vulnerable spot. From the fertilization of the fourth sub-race with what had remained behind and came over from earlier, the fifth sub-race developed. This provided the impetus for the founding of the fifth sub-race.