The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[ 1 ] Goethe's world view attained its highest level of maturity when there arose for him the view of the two great driving wheels of nature: the significance of the concepts of polarity and of enhancement (Steigerung). (See the essay, “Commentary to the Essay Nature.”) Polarity is characteristic of the phenomena of nature insofar as we think of them as material. It consists of the fact that everything material manifests itself in two opposite states, as the magnet does in a north and a south pole. These states of matter either lie open to view or they slumber in what is material and are able to be wakened by suitable means within it. Enhancement belongs to the phenomena insofar as we think them to be spiritual. It can be observed in processes of nature that fall under the idea of development. At the various levels of development these processes show more or less distinctly in their outer manifestation the idea that underlies them. In the fruit, the idea of the plant, the law of vegetation, is only indistinctly manifest. The idea which the spirit recognizes and the perception are not similar to one another. “In the blossoms the law of vegetation comes into its highest manifestation, and the rose would again be but the pinnacle of the manifestation.” What Goethe calls enhancement consists of the bringing forth of the spiritual out of the material by creative nature. That nature is engaged “in an ever-striving ascent” means that it seeks to create forms which, in ascending order, increasingly represent the ideas of things even in outer manifestation. Goethe is of the view that “nature has no secret that it does not somewhere place naked before the eyes of the attentive observer.” Nature can bring forth phenomena from which there can be read directly the ideas applicable to a large area of related processes. It is those phenomena in which enhancement has reached its goal, in which the idea becomes immediate truth. The creative spirit of nature comes to the surface of things here; that which, in coarsely material phenomena, can only be grasped by thinking, that which can only be seen with spiritual eyes, becomes, in enhanced phenomena, visible to the physical eye. Everything sense-perceptible is here also spiritual, and everything spiritual is sense-perceptible. Goethe thinks of the whole of nature as permeated by spirit. Its forms are different through the fact that the spirit in them becomes also more or less outwardly visible. Goethe knows no dead, spiritless matter. Those things appear to be so in which the spirit of nature gives an outer form which is not similar to its ideal being. Because one spirit works both in nature and in man's inner life, man can lift himself to participation in the productions of nature. “... from the tile that falls from the roof, to the radiant lightning of the spirit which arises in you and which you communicate,” everything in the universe is for Goethe an effect, a manifestation of one creative spirit. “All the workings we take note of in experience, no matter what their nature, are interconnected in the most consistent way, pass over into one another; they undulate from the first ones to the last.” “A tile works loose from the roof: we ordinarily say this happens by chance; the tile, after all, certainly strikes the shoulders of a passerby mechanically; only, not altogether mechanically: it follows the laws of gravity and thus works physically. Ruptured bodily organs cease functioning; at that moment the fluids work chemically, the qualities of the elements emerge. But, the interrupted organic life reasserts itself just as quickly and seeks to re-establish itself; meanwhile the human entity is more or less unconscious and psychically disorganized. The person, regaining consciousness, feels himself ethically wounded to the depths; he laments his interrupted activity, no matter of what kind it might be, for no one wants to endure this patiently. Religiously, on the other hand, he can easily attribute this case to a higher destiny and regard it as saving him from far greater harm, as leading him to a higher good. This suffices for the sufferer; but the convalescent rises to his feet highly gifted, trusts God and himself and feels himself saved, really takes up also what happens by chance, turns it to, his advantage, in order to begin an eternally fresh life's cycle.” All things working in the world appear to Goethe as modifications of the spirit, and a person who immerses himself in them and observes them, from the level of chance happenings up to that of genius, lives through the metamorphosis of the spirit, from the form in which this spirit presents itself in an outer manifestation not resembling itself, up to the form in which the spirit appears in its own most archetypal form. In the sense of the Goethean world view all creative forces work in a unified way. They are a totality manifesting in successive levels of related manifoldnesses. But Goethe was never inclined to picture the unity of the world to himself as uniform. Adherents of the idea of unity often fall into the mistake of extending what can be observed in one region of phenomena out over all of nature. The mechanistic world view, for example, is in this situation. It has a particularly good eye and understanding for what can be explained mechanically. Therefore only the mechanical seems to it to be in accordance with nature. It seeks to trace even the phenomena of organic nature back to a mechanical lawfulness. A living thing is for it only a complicated form of the working together of mechanical processes. Goethe found such a world view expressed in a particularly repellent form in Holbach's Systeme de la Nature, which came into his hands in Strassburg. One matter supposedly exists from all eternity and has moved for all eternity, and now, with this motion, supposedly brings forth right and left and on all sides, without more ado, the infinite phenomena of existence. “We would indeed have been satisfied with this, if the author had really built up the world before our eyes out of his moving matter. But he might know as little about nature as we do, for as soon as he has staked up a few general concepts, he leaves nature at once, in order to transform what appears as something higher than nature or as a higher nature in nature, into a nature that is material, heavy, moving, to be sure, but still without direction or shape, and he believes that he has gained a great deal by this” (Poetry and Truth, second book). Goethe would have expressed himself in a similar way if he could have heard Du Bois-Reymond's statement (Limits to Knowing Nature, page 13): “Knowledge of nature ... is a tracing of the changes in the corporeal world back to the movements of atoms which are caused by their central forces, independent of time, or it is a dissolving of all the processes of nature into the mechanics of the atoms.” Goethe thought the different kinds of nature workings to be related to each other and as passing over into one another; but he never wanted to trace them back to one single kind. He was not striving for one abstract principle to which all the phenomena of nature should be traced, but rather he strove for observation of the characteristic way in which creative nature manifested its general lawfulness in particular forms within every single one of its realms. He did not want to force one thought form upon the whole of nature's phenomena, but rather, by living into the different thought forms, he wanted to keep his spirit as lively and pliable as nature itself is. When the feeling of the great unity of all nature's working was powerful in him, then he was a pantheist. “I for myself, with all the manifold tendencies of my nature, cannot get enough from one way of thinking; as poet and artist I am a polytheist, as natural scientist a pantheist, and am one just as positively as the other. If I need a God for my personality as a moral person, that is also already provided for” (to Jacobi, January 6, 1813). As artist, Goethe turned to those phenomena of nature in which the idea is present to direct perception. The single thing appeared here directly as divine; the world as a multiplicity of divine individualities. As natural scientist Goethe had to follow the forces of nature also into phenomena whose idea does not become visible in its individual existence. As poet he could be at peace with himself about the multiplicity of the divine; as natural scientist he had to seek the ideas of nature, which worked in a unified way. “The law, that comes into manifestation in the greatest freedom, in accordance with its most archetypal conditions, brings forth what is objectively beautiful, which, to be sure, must find worthy subjects by whom it can be grasped.” This objectively beautiful within the individual creature is what Goethe as artist wants to behold; but as natural scientist he wants “to know the laws according to which universal nature wants to act.” Polytheism is the way of thinking which sees and reveres something spiritual in the single thing; pantheism is the other way, which grasps the spirit of the whole. Both ways of thinking can exist side by side; the one or the other comes into play according to whether one's gaze is directed upon nature's wholeness, which is life and sequence out of a center, or upon those individuals in which nature unites in one form what it as a rule spreads out over a whole realm. Such forms arise when, for example, the creative forces of nature, after “thousandfold plants,” make yet one more, in which “all the others are contained,” or “after thousandfold animals make one being which contains them all: man.”

[ 2 ] Goethe once made the remark: “Whoever has learned to understand them (my writings) and my nature in general will have to admit after all that he has won a certain inner freedom” (Conversations with Chancellor F. von Mueller, January 5, 1831). With this he was pointing to the working power which comes into play in all human striving to know. As long as man stops short at perceiving the antitheses around him and at regarding their laws as principles implanted in them by which they are governed, he has the feeling that they confront him a! unknown powers, which work upon him and impose upon hill the thoughts of their laws. He feels himself to be unfree with respect to the things; he experiences the lawfulness of nature as rigid necessity into which he must fit himself. Only when man becomes aware that the forces of nature are nothing other than forms of the same spirit which also works in himself does the insight arise in him that he does partake of freedom. The lawfulness of nature is experienced as compelling only as long as one regards it as an alien power. Living into its being, one experiences it as a power which one also exercises in one's own inner life; one experiences oneself as a productive element working along with the becoming and being of things. One is on intimate terms with any power that has to do with becoming. One has taken up into one's own doing what one otherwise experiences only as outer incentive. This is the process of liberation which is effected by the act of knowledge, in the sense of the Goethean world view. Goethe clearly perceived the ideas of nature's working as he encountered them in Italian works of art. He had a clear experience also of the liberating effect whiM the possession of these ideas has upon man. A result of this experience is his description of that kind of knowledge which he characterizes as that of encompassing individuals. “The encompassing ones, whom one in a prouder sense could call the creative ones, conduct themselves productively in the highest sense; insofar, namely, as they take their start from ideas, they express already the unity of the whole, and afterward it is in a certain way up to nature to fit in with this idea.” But Goethe never got to the point of having a direct view of the act of liberation itself. Only that person can have this view who in his knowing is attentive to himself. Goethe, to be sure, practiced the highest kind of knowledge; but he did not observe this kind of knowledge in himself. He admits to himself, after all:

“How did you get so very far?
They say you have done it all wonderfully well!”
My child! In this I have been smart;
I never have thought about thinking at all.

[ 3 ] But just as the creative nature forces, “after thousandfold plants,” make still one more in which “all the others are contained,” so do they also, after thousandfold ideas, bring forth still one more in which the whole world of ideas is contained. And man grasps this idea when, to his perception of the other things and processes he adds that of thinking as well. Just because Goethe's thinking was continuously filled with the objects of perception, because his thinking was a perceiving, his perceiving a thinking, he could not come to the point of making thinking itself into an object of thinking. One attains the idea of freedom, however, only by looking at thinking. Goethe did not make the distinction between thinking about thinking and looking at thinking. Otherwise he would have attained the insight that one, precisely in the sense of his world view, could very well reject thinking about thinking, but that one could nevertheless come to a beholding of the thought world. Man is uninvolved in the coming about of everything else he sees. The ideas of what he sees arise in him. But these ideas would not be there if there were not present in him the productive power to bring them to manifestation. Even though ideas are the conten1 of what works within the things, they come into manifest existence through human activity. Man can therefore know the intrinsic nature of the world of ideas only if he looks at his activity. With everything else he sees he penetrates only into the idea at work in it; the thing, in which the idea works, remains as perception outside of his spirit. When he looks at the idea, what is working and what is brought forth are both entirely contained within his inner life. He has the entire process totally present if his inner life. What he sees no longer appears as brought ford by the idea; for what he sees is itself now idea. To see something bringing forth itself is, however, to see freedom. In observing his thinking man sees into world happening. Here he does no have to search after an idea of this happening, for this happening is the idea itself. What one otherwise experiences as the unity of what is looked at and the ideas is here the experiencing of the spirituality of the world of ideas become visible. The person who beholds this self-sustaining activity feels freedom. Goethe in fact experienced this feeling, but did not express it in its highest form. In his looking at nature he exercised a free activity, but this activity never became an object of perception for him. He never saw behind the scenes of human knowing and therefore never took up into his consciousness the idea of world happening in its most archetypal form, in its highest metamorphosis. As soon as a person attains a view of this metamorphosis, he then conducts himself with sureness in the realm of things. In the center of his personality he has won the true starting point for all consideration of the world. He will no longer search for unknown foundations, for the causes lying outside him, of things; he knows that the highest experience of which he is capable consists of self-contemplation of his own being. Whoever is completely permeated with the feelings which this experience calls forth will gain the truest relationships to things. A person for whom this is not the case will seek the highest form of existence elsewhere, and, since he cannot find it within experience, will suppose it to be in an unknown region of reality. Uncertainty will enter into his considerations of things; in answering the questions which nature poses him, he will continually call upon something he cannot investigate. Because, through his life in the world of ideas, Goethe had a feeling of the firm center within his personality, he succeeded, within certain limits, in arriving at sure concepts in his contemplation of nature. But because he lacked a direct view of his innermost experiences, he groped about uncertainly outside these limits. For this reason he says that man is not born “to solve the problems of the world but in fact to seek where the problem begins, and then to keep oneself within the limits of what is understandable.” He says, “Kant has unquestionably been of most use in his drawing of the limits to which the human spirit is capable of penetrating, and through the fact that he J unsolvable problems lie.” If a view of man's highest experience! had given him certainty in his contemplation of things, then he would have been able to do more along his path than “through regulated experience, to attain a kind of qualified trustworthiness.” Instead of proceeding straight ahead through his experiences in the consciousness that the true has significance only insofar as it is demanded by human nature, he still arrives at the conviction that a “higher influence helps those who are steadfast, active, understanding, disciplined and disciplining, humane, devout” and that “the moral world order” manifests itself most beautifully where it “comes indirectly to the aid of the good person, of the courageously suffering person.”

[ 4 ] Because Goethe did not know the innermost human' experience, it was not possible for him to attain the ultimate thoughts about the moral world order which necessarily belong to his view of nature. The ideas of the things are the content of what works and creates within the things. Man experiences moral ideas directly in the form of ideas. Whoever is able to experience how, in his beholding of the world of ideas, the ideal element itself becomes content, fills itself with itself, is also in a position to experience the production of the moral within human nature. Whoever knows the ideas of nature only in their relation to the world we behold will also want to relate moral concepts to something external to them. He will seek for these concepts a reality similar to that which is present for concepts won from experience. But whoever is able to view ideas in their most essential being will become aware, with moral ideas, that nothing external corresponds to them, that they are directly produced as ideas in spiritual experience. It is clear to him that neither a divine will, working only outwardly, nor a moral world order of a like sort are at work to produce these ideas. For there is in them nothing to be seen of any relation to such powers! Everything they express is also contained within their spiritually experienced pure idea-form. Only through their own content do they work upon man as moral powers. No categorical imperative stands behind them with a whip and forces man to follow them. Man feels that he himself has brought them forth and loves them the way one loves one's child. Love is the motive of his action. The spiritual pleasure in one's own creation is the source of the moral.

[ 5 ] There are people who are unable to produce any moral ideas. They take up into themselves the moral ideas of other people through tradition, and if they have no ability to behold ideas as such, they do not recognize the origin, experienceable in the spirit, of the moral. They seek it in a supra-human will outside themselves. Or they believe that there exists, outside the spirit world which man experiences, an objective moral world order from which the moral ideas stem. The speech organ of that world order is often sought in the conscience of man. As with certain things in the rest of his world view, Goethe is also uncertain in his thoughts about the origin of the moral. Here also his feeling for what is in accord with ideas brings forth statements which are in accord with the demands of his nature. “Duty: where one loves what one commands oneself to do.” Only a person who sees the foundations of the moral purely in the content of moral ideas should say: “Lessing, who resentfully felt many a limitation, has one of his characters say, ‘No one has to have to.’ A witty jovial man said, ‘Whoever wants to has to.’ A third, admittedly a cultivated person, added, ‘Whoever has insight, also wants to.’ And in this way it was believed that the whole circle of knowing, wanting, and having to had been closed. But in the average case, man's knowledge, no matter what kind it is, determines what he does or doesn't do; for this reason there is also nothing worse than to see ignorance in action.” The following statement shows that in Goethe a feeling for the true nature of the moral held sway, but did not rise into clear view: “In order to perfect itself the will must, in its moral life, give itself over to conscience which does not err ... Conscience needs no ancestor; with conscience everything is given; it has to do only with one's own inner world.” To state that conscience needs no ancestor can only mean that man does not originally find within himself any moral content; he gives this content to himself. Other statements stand in contrast to these, setting the origin of the moral into a region outside man: “Man, no matter how much the earth attracts him with its thousand upon thousand manifestations, nevertheless lifts up his gaze longingly toward heaven ... because he feels deeply and clearly within himself that he is a citizen of that spiritual realm which we are not able to deny nor give up our belief.” “We leave to God, as the all-determining and all-liberating Being, what is totally insoluble.”

[ 6 ] Goethe lacks the organ for the contemplation of man's innermost nature, for self-perception. “I hereby confess that from the beginning the great and significant sounding task, Know thou thyself, has always seemed suspect to me, as a ruse of secretly united priests who wanted to confuse man with unattainable demands and to seduce him away from activity in the outer world into an inner false contemplation. Man knows himself only insofar as he knows the world which he becomes aware of only within himself and himself only within it. Every new object which we really look at opens up a new organ within us.” Exactly the reverse of this is true: man knows the world only insofar as he knows himself. For in his inner life there reveals itself in its most archetypal form what is present to view in outer things only in reflection, in example, symbol. What man otherwise can only speak of as something unfathomable, undiscoverable, divine, comes into view in its true form in self-perception. Because in self-perception he sees what is ideal in its direct form, he gains the strength and ability to seek out and recognize this ideal element also in all outer phenomena, in the whole of nature. Someone who has experienced the moment of self-perception no longer thinks in terms of seeking some “hidden” God behind phenomena: he grasps the divine in its different metamorphoses in nature. Goethe remarked, with respect to Schelling: “I would see him more often if I did not still hope for poetic moments; philosophy destroys poetry for me, and does so for the good reason that it drives me to the object because I can never remain purely speculative but must seek right away a perception for every principle and therefore flee right away out into nature.” He was in fact not able to find the highest perception, the perception of the world of ideas itself. This perception cannot destroy poetry, for it only frees one's spirit from all supposition that there might be an unknown, unfathomable something in nature. But for this reason it makes him capable of giving himself over entirely, without preconceptions, to things; for it gives him the conviction that everything can be drawn from nature that the spirit can ever want from it.

[ 7 ] But this highest perception liberates man's spirit also from all one-sided feeling of dependency. He feels himself, through having this view, to be sovereign in the realm of the moral world order. He knows that the driving power which brings forth everything works in his inner life as within his own will, and that the highest decisions about morality lie within himself. For these highest decisions flow out of the world of moral ideas, in whose production the soul of man is present. Even though a person may feel himself restricted in part, may also be dependent upon a thousand things, on the whole he sets himself his moral goal and his moral direction. What is at work in all other things comes to manifestation in the human being as idea; what is at work in him is the idea which he himself brings forth. In every single human individuality a process occurs that plays itself out in the whole of nature: the creation of something actual out of the idea. And the human being himself is the creator. For upon the foundation of his personality there lives the idea which gives a content to itself. Going beyond Goethe one must broaden his principle that nature is “great enough in the wealth of its creation to make, after thousandfold plants, one in which all the others are contained, and to make, after thousandfold animals, one being that contains them all: man.” Nature is so great in its creation that it repeats in every human individual the process by which it brings forth freely out of the idea all creatures, repeats it through the fact that moral actions spring from the ideal foundation of the personality. Whatever a person also feels to be an objective reason for his action is only a transcribing and at the same time a mistaking of his own being. The human being realizes himself in his moral actions. Max Stirner has expressed this knowledge in lapidary words in his book, The Single Individual and What Is His Own. “It lies in my power to be my own person, and this is so when I know myself as a single individual. Within the single individual even someone who is his own person returns to the creative nothingness out of which he is born. Every higher being over me, be it God or man, weakens the feeling of my singleness and pales only before the sun of this consciousness. If I base my affairs upon myself, the single individual, then they rest upon their own transitory mortal creator, who devours himself, and I can say that I have based my affairs upon nothing.” But at the same time one can tell this Stirnerian spirit what Faust told Mephistopheles: “In your nothingness I hope to find my all,” for there dwells in my inner life in an individual form the working power by which nature creates the universe. As long as a person has not beheld this working power within himself, he will appear with respect to it the way Faust did with respect to the earth spirit. This working power will always call out to him the words, “You resemble the spirit that you can grasp, not me!” Only the beholding of one's deepest inner life conjures up this spirit, who says of itself:

In the tides of life, in action's storm,
Up and down I wave,
To and fro weave free,
Birth and the grave,
An infinite sea,
A varied weaving,
A radiant living,
Thus at Time's humming loom it's my hand that prepares
The robe ever-living the Deity wears,
(Priest's translation)

[ 8 ] I have tried to present in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity how knowledge of the fact that man in his doing is based upon himself comes from the most inward experience, from the beholding of his own being. In 1844 Stirner defended the view that man, if he truly understands himself, can see only in himself the basis for his activity. With Stirner, however, this knowledge does not arise from a beholding of his innermost experience but rather from the feeling of freedom and independence from all world powers that require coercion. Stirner stops short at demanding freedom; he is led in this area to put the bluntest possible emphasis upon the human nature which is based upon itself. I am trying to describe the life in freedom on a broader basis, by showing what man sees when he looks into the foundation of his soul. Goethe did not go as far as to behold freedom, because he had an antipathy for self-knowledge. If that had not been the case, then knowledge of man as a free personality founded upon himself would have had to be the peak of his world view. The germ of this knowledge is to be found everywhere in his works; [ 9 ] it is at the same time the germ of his view of nature. In his actual nature studies Goethe never speaks of unexplorable foundations, of hidden driving Powers of phenomena. He contents himself with observing the phenomena in their sequence and of explaining them with the help of those elements which, during observation, reveal themselves to the senses and to the spirit. In this vein he writes to Jacobi on May 5, 1786 that he has the courage “to devote his whole life to the contemplation of the things which he can hope to reach” and of whose being “he can hope to form an adequate idea,” without bothering himself in the least about how far he will get and about what is cut out for him. A person who believes he can draw near to the divine in the individual objects of nature no longer needs to form a particular mental picture for himself of a God that exists outside of and beside the things. It is only when Goethe leaves the realm of nature that his feeling for the being of things no longer holds up. Then his lack of human self-knowledge leads him to make assertions which are reconcilable neither with his inborn way of thinking nor with the direction of his nature studies. Someone who is inclined to cite these assertions might assume that Goethe believed in an anthropomorphic God and in the individual continuation of that life-form of the soul which is bound up with the conditions of the physical bodily organization. Such a belief stands in contradiction to Goethe's nature studies. They could never have taken the direction they did if in them Goethe had allowed himself to be determined by this belief. It lies totally in the spirit of his nature studies to think the being of the human soul such that, after laying aside the body, it lives in a supersensible form of existence. This form of existence requires that the soul, because of different life requirements, also take on a different kind of consciousness from the one it has through the physical body. In this way the Goethean teaching of metamorphosis leads also to the view of metamorphoses of soul life. But this Goethean idea of immortality can be regarded correctly only if one knows that Goethe had not been able to be led by his world view to an unmetamorphosed continuation of that spiritual life which is determined by the physical body. Because Goethe, in the sense indicated here, did not attempt to view his life of thought, he was also not moved in his further life's course to develop particularly this idea of immortality which would be the continuation of his thoughts on metamorphosis. This idea, however, would in truth be what would follow from his world view with respect to this region of knowledge. Whatever expression he gave to a personal feeling about the view of life of this or that contemporary, or out of any other motivation, without his thinking thereby of the connection to the world view won through his nature studies, may not be brought forward as characteristic of Goethe's idea of immortality.

[ 10 ] For the evaluation of a Goethean statement within the total picture of his world view there also comes into consideration the fact that his mood of soul in his different stages of life gives particular nuances to such statements. He was fully conscious of these changes in the form of expression of his ideas. When Foerster expressed the view that the solution to the Faust problem is to be found in the words, “A good man is in his dim impulse well aware of his right path,” Goethe responded, “That would be rationalism. Faust ends up as an old man, and in old age we become mystics.” And in his prose aphorisms we read, “A certain philosophy answers to each age of man. The child appears as realist; for he finds himself as convinced of the existence of pears and apples as of his own. The youth, assailed by inner passions, must take notice of himself, feel his way forward; he is transformed into an idealist. On the other hand the grown man has every reason to become a skeptic; he does well to doubt whether the means he has chosen for his purpose are indeed the right ones. Before acting and in acting he has every reason to keep his intellect mobile, so that afterward he does not have to feel badly about a wrong choice. The old man, however, will always adhere to mysticism; he sees that so much seems to depend upon chance; what is unreasonable succeeds; what is reasonable goes amiss; fortune and misfortune turn unexpectedly into the same thing; it is so, it was so, and old age attains peace in what is, what was, and will be.”

[ 11 ] I am focusing in this book upon the world view of Goethe out of which his insights into the life of nature have grown and which was the driving force in him from his discovery of the intermaxillary bone in man up to the completion of his studies on color. And I believe I have shown that this world view corresponds more perfectly to the total personality of Goethe than does any compilation of statements in which one would have to take into account how such thoughts are colored by the mood of his youthful period or by that of his old age. I believe that Goethe in his studies of nature, although not guided by a clear self-knowledge in accord with ideas, was guided by a right feeling and did observe a free way of working which flowed from a true relationship between human nature and the outer world. Goethe is himself clear about the fact that there is something incomplete about his way of thinking: “I was aware of having great and noble purposes but could never understand the determining factors under which I worked; I was well aware of what I lacked, and likewise of what I had too much of; therefore I did not cease to develop myself, outwardly and from within. And still it was as before. I pursued every purpose with earnestness, force, and faithfulness; in doing so I often succeeded in completely overcoming stubborn conditions but also often foundered because I could not learn to give in and to go around. And so my life went by this way, in doing and enjoying, in suffering and resisting, in the love, contentment, hatred, and disapproval of others. Find yourself mirrored here whoever's destiny was the same.”

Today's lecture has a close connection with the two succeeding discourses entitled, “The Origin of Evil”; and “Illness and Death.” Yet each lecture is complete and comprehensible by itself.

Someone who contemplates his own life, as well as life in general, encounters at the outset, like an enigmatic figure standing guard before life's portal, the problem of suffering.

Suffering, so closely bound up with evil, illness and death, often cuts deeply into people's lives, and is seen as one of its greatest riddles. When attempts are made to find meaning in life, to assess its value, it is above all pain and suffering that come under scrutiny. In all world views since ancient times, it features as one of the foremost questions.

Suffering appears like an unwelcome intruder; it destroys, in the midst of happiness, enjoyment and hope. People who feel pain and suffering the most are those that measure life's value according to its pleasures, that, as it were, exist solely for the sake of enjoyment. It explains why a people as happy and as full of enjoyment of life as the ancient Greeks had a saying which hung like a dark cloud in the midst of the beautiful stars on the Hellenic firmament. The wise Silenus,¹ a member of Dionysus² retinue, answers the question, What is best for man? by saying: “The best for man is not to be born, and if born the next best for him is to die soon after.”

As you may know, Friedrich Nietzsche³ occupied himself with this saying in his effort to understand the birth of tragedy out of the Spirit of ancient Greece. He wanted to demonstrate, on the basis of Greek art and philosophy, the significant role played by suffering itself, and the sorrow it caused. However, not muck later another saying came to the fore in Greece that shows a dawning understanding for the fact that the significance of pain goes far beyond that of misfortune. We find in Aeschylus,⁴ one of the early Greek tragic poets, the saying, “From suffering knowledge is born.” Two things are here brought together, one of which the greater part of humanity would no doubt prefer to see eliminated, while seeing in the other one of life's greatest benefits.

From time immemorial, the belief has existed that life on this planet is unavoidably entwined with suffering, at least as far as human beings and the higher creatures are concerned—a view we find expressed at the start of the biblical story of creation, where knowledge of good and evil is intimately bound up with suffering. However, we also find in the Old Testament the view expressed that there can dawn, within the bleakest outlook caused by suffering, one filled with hope and light. A closer look at the Old Testament makes it clear that right from ancient times, sin and suffering have always been seen as connected, suffering as being a consequence of sin. The modern materialistic outlook finds it difficult to grasp that suffering may originate from sin. But when one has learned through spiritual research to look back into earlier ages, one recognizes that this view is not without foundation; the next lecture will show that it is possible to connect evil and suffering.

But in one case ancient Judaism found it impossible to explain the origin of suffering. In the midst of views connecting suffering with sin, we find the remarkable figure of Job. The story of Job shows, or is meant to show, that undeserved suffering can exist, that unspeakable pain can come about in a life without sin. In the uniquely tragic personality of Job, we see a dawning consciousness of a different connection, namely, a connection between suffering and ennoblement. Here suffering appears as a testing, as an incentive to greater striving. In the sense of Job's tragedy, suffering need not originate from evil; it may be a first cause from which will result a more perfect phase in human life. This viewpoint is rather remote from the modern way of thinking; most of today's educated people would find it difficult to accept. But if you look back over your life you will realize how often suffering and higher development go together. Furthermore, humanity has always been aware of this connection; and that leads us to today's subject. We shall consider in the sense of spiritual science the connection between suffering and spirituality

In dramas the central figure is often the tragic hero. The hero is faced again and again with suffering and conflict; at last at the climax the suffering ends with the death of the physical body. At this point the onlooker not only experiences compassion for the tragic hero and sorrow that such suffering exists; but he also has Bone through a catharsis, and feels that from death certainty arises, certainty that pain and suffering, and even death itself, are conquered.

No art form portrays more sublimely than the tragedy the greatest human victory, the victory of a person's innermost and noblest forces. On the stage we can often witness the conquest of pain and suffering. It is brought forcefully to our consciousness when we contemplate the event recognized by a large part of humanity as the greatest in history. The event that divides our reckoning of time into two parts—the salvation through Christ Jesus. It may strike us that, precisely through contemplating a suffering of world magnitude, the profoundest hope takes root in human hearts. Christianity reassures us concerning eternity, concerning victory over death. From looking up to a universal suffering preceded by no personal guilt or sin, we derive hope and strength. This indicates a consolatory feeling in the human soul that always asserts itself in the face of suffering.

If we look at human life more carefully, we find phenomena that indicate the significance of suffering. Let us look at one such phenomenon that is symptomatic, although at first sight it may not appear to be connected with suffering.

Think once more of a tragedy. The poet can only create such a work of art if he has the capacity to go out of himself, to widen his soul and encompass the suffering of others. The poet must be able to experience the suffering of others as if it were his own. But now compare this attitude with a very different one–not however with what inspires comedy—that would not be the right comparison. Rather compare it with the attitude that inspires caricature; that too in a sense belongs to the realm of art. The caricaturist distorts what is expressed outwardly of what lives in another soul, perhaps with ridicule and derision. Let us now imagine two persons, one of whom sees an event or a human being as tragic, the other who sees the situation in caricature. It is no mere simile when we say that the artist as tragic poet goes out of himself, allowing his soul to become ever more encompassing. But what is it that individuals attain through this ever widening of their inner being? They attain understanding of the other. Nothing provides greater understanding than experiencing another person's suffering as one's own. But what about the caricaturist? He cannot enter into the other person's feeling; on the contrary, he must reject, must set himself above it. The refusal to consider the other person's inner life is basic to caricature. No one can fail to see that compassion leads to understanding of the other, whereas caricature reveals the nature of the caricaturist. We learn through his work far more about his feeling of superiority, wit, and power of observation and imagination, than we learn about the nature of his subject.

If these examples make it evident that suffering is connected with deeper aspects of human nature, it is to be hoped that an understanding of our essential nature will also make clear how pain and suffering originate.

Spiritual science recognizes that the whole physical world about us originated from the spirit, whereas the materialistic view only sees spirit where it appears as a kind of crown on physical material creation, as a kind of flower growing from physical roots. The materialistic view sees, as it were, the inorganic organizing itself within the living creatures. Consciousness, pleasure and pain emerge from sentient life, the spirit from the corporeal. When the spiritual researcher looks at the way spirit first appears in the natural world, he too sees it emerging from the physical.

We saw in the preceding two lectures that in the light of spiritual science we must think of the human being as consisting not only of a physical or bodily nature, but also of soul and spirit. What materialism regards as the whole of existence, that is, what can be perceived physically, spiritual science maintains is in plan only his first member: the physical body. We know it is built up from the same substances as those that exist in inorganic nature, but we also know that it is called into life by the so-called ether or life body. This ether body is not something merely thought out; it is a reality and can be perceived when the higher senses that slumber in us are developed. The ether body is the second member of our being also possessed by the vegetable kingdom. Our third member, the astral body, is the bearer of pleasure and pain, cravings and passions; animals also possess an astral body. In the human being we see emerging within his physical, ether and astral bodies consciousness of self, that is, the ability to call himself “I.” This is the crown of his nature, which no other earthly being possesses. Spiritual science has often indicated the interrelation of these four members. The Pythagorean fourfoldness is nothing else than that of physical body, ether body, astral body and “I.” Those who have gone more deeply into spiritual science know that the “I” of a human being will develop out of itself what is termed: Spirit Self or Manas; Life Spirit or Buddhi; and Spirit Man or Atma, an individual's essential spirit being. This is all mentioned again today to ensure proper orientation.

Thus, the spiritual investigator sees the human being as a fourfold being. At a certain point spiritual research differs decisively from external research because spiritual perception penetrates deeply into the foundation of existence. However, the spiritual investigator also sees that, as a human being comes before us in the physical world, physical matter and laws constitute the foundation of a person's bodily nature; life constitutes the foundation of sensation; and consciousness the foundation of self-consciousness. But to spiritual research the sequence is seen the other way round. What to physical appearance seems to be the last to emerge from the physical body, that is, consciousness, is seen by the spiritual investigator as the primordial creative element. The conscious spirit is seen as the foundation of all existence. Consequently one cannot ask, Where does spirit come from? That can never be the question, rather, Where does matter come from? Spiritual research shows that matter originates from spirit; it is nothing but condensed spirit.

One might compare the process with water condensing into ice. Think of a vessel with water, part of which has cooled to below freezing so that ice has formed. This ice is nothing but water in solid form. Spirit relates to matter as water to ice. As ice can become water once more, so can spirit emerge again from matter, or conversely, matter can dissolve into spirit.

Thus, we see spirit in eternal circulation. Out of spirit that fills the whole universe, we see material entities arise and solidify; on the other hand material entities continually dissolve again. Spirit has flowed into everything that surrounds us as matter. Everything material is solidified spirit. Just as we only have to add the necessary heat for ice to turn back into water, so it is only necessary to add enough spirit to the physical beings to make the spirit resurrect in them. One speaks of a rebirth of the spirit which, having flowed into matter, has become solidified. Thus, we see that the astral body, the bearer of pleasure and pain, cravings and passions, is something that could not possibly originate from the physical. It is of the same element that permeates the whole world, but in us it lives as conscious spirit. It will be released from matter through the processes that govern human life. The spirit that in the physical world appears as the last is at the same time the first. The spirit brings the physical body and the ether body into existence, and when these have reached a certain point in their evolution, the spirit reappears as if reborn within them.

Physical substance, matter, we always perceive in a certain shape, in a certain form. We speak of material form, of life that arises within that form, and of consciousness arising within the living form. Thus, we speak of the three stages: physical body, ether body and astral body, and also of the three corresponding stages: form, life and consciousness. Not until the stage of consciousness is reached can self-consciousness arise. This will concern us in the next lecture.

The meaning and origin of life have always been subjects of much discussion, not least in our time. Modern natural science has not discovered many points of reference in this field. However, natural science has recently arrived at a conclusion that spiritual science has always maintained, namely, that organic and inorganic substances do not differ as far as the actual substances are concerned. The only difference lies in the fact that organic substances are more complex in their composition. Life can arise only where there are substances of varied and complex structure. As you may know, the basic substance where there is life is a white-of-egg-like substance which could well be called “living albumen.” It has one important characteristic that makes it differ from lifeless albumen; it begins to deteriorate the moment life has left it. That is why eggs, for example, do not stay fresh for long. The essential character of living substance is that it cannot remain a unity once life has departed.

Although we cannot today go into detail about the nature of life, we can consider this one essential characteristic of living substance, the fact that it disintegrates the moment life has gone from it. A complex structure composed of various substances will disintegrate if not permeated with life. That is its most characteristic feature. So what does life do? It preserves, it continuously opposes disintegration. Life has the ability to rejuvenate because it continuously opposes what would otherwise take place in substances it permeates. When a substance contains life it means that disintegration is being fought. Life possesses the exact opposite qualities to those of death; instead of causing substances to fall apart, it continually holds them together. Thus, life becomes the foundation of physical existence and consciousness by constantly preventing disintegration.

This is not just a verbal definition; what it points to happens all the time. You only have to observe the simplest form of life and you will find that substances are perpetually being absorbed and incorporated while bodily particles deteriorate; it is the latter process that life continuously works against. Thus, we are dealing with an actual phenomena.

Life means that new substances are formed and old ones thrown off. But life is not yet either sensation or consciousness. Certain scientists fail to understand sensation and ascribe it to plants that have life but not sensation. This childish notion comes about because there are plants that close their leaves and blossoms in response to external stimuli. One could just as well ascribe sensation to blue litmus paper that turns red in response to external stimuli, or to chemical substance as they too react to certain influences. But that is not enough.

If sensation is to occur, there must be an inner mirroring of the stimulus; only then can we speak of the lower form of consciousness, sensation and feeling. But what exactly is it? If we are to gain insight into this next higher stage of evolution, we must approach it gradually as we did the nature of life. Consciousness arises from life; it can only come into being where life already exists. It reveals itself as higher than life; the latter seemingly arises out of lifeless matter of such complexity that unless seized by life it disintegrates. Consciousness arises at the border between life and death, that is to say, where life constantly threatens to disappear from substance, and where substance is continually being destroyed. Substance disintegrates unless held together by forces of life. Life dissolves unless a new principle, that is, consciousness, is added. Consciousness can only be understood when it is recognized that it constantly renews life that would otherwise dissolve, just as life forces renew certain processes without which matter would decay.

Not every form of life can renew itself from within. It must first have reached a certain higher level. Only when the force of life is strong enough constantly to endure death within itself can it awake to consciousness. To be aware of life that at every moment contains death, you need only look at life within the human being, and bear in mind what was explained in the last lecture, “Blood is a very special Fluid,” and that within human beings, life is constantly renewed through the blood. As a psychologist with insight remarked: “In the blood man carries within him a double from whom he, constantly draws strength.” But blood contains yet another force: it continuously produces death. When it has taken life-giving substances to the organs, it carries away destructive elements back to the heart and lungs. What returns to the lungs is poisonous, destructive to life.

A being whose nature works against disintegration is a being possessing life. If it is able to let death arise, and continuously transform that death into life, then it is a conscious being. Consciousness is the strongest of all forces. Death must of necessity arise in the midst of life; consciousness, or conscious spirit, is the force that eternally wrenches life from death. Life is both an inward and an external process, whereas consciousness is purely an inward one. A substance that dies outwardly cannot become conscious. Consciousness can only arise in substance that can generate death within itself and overcome it. As a perceptive person once remarked: “From death springs not only life but consciousness.”

Once this connection is recognized, the existence of pain becomes comprehensible. It is pain that originally gave rise to consciousness. When the life within a being is exposed to light, air, heat or cold, then these external elements act in the first place an the living being. This influence does not give rise to consciousness in plants because here the effects are simply absorbed. Consciousness only arises when there is conflict between the external elements and the inner life-force, causing a breaking down of tissue. Consciousness can only arise from the inner destruction of life. Unless a partial death takes place in the living being, the process that gives rise to consciousness cannot be initiated; beams of light cannot penetrate to the surface of life, causing partial destruction of the inner substances and forces. It is this that produces the mysterious process that is occurring everywhere in the external world.

You must visualize that the cosmic forces of intelligence had reached a level of evolution so high that the external light and air became alien. There had been harmony for a time, but through the higher perfection of cosmic forces, conflict arose. If you could follow with spiritual sight what happens at the point where a simple living creature is penetrated by a beam of light, you would see alteration in the skin; a tiny eye begins to appear. A delicate form of destruction occurs that is experienced as pain. From this pain consciousness is born. Wherever the element of life meets the external world, a process of destruction occurs; if great enough, the outcome is death. The pain gives rise to consciousness. The process that originally created our eyes could have resulted in complete destruction had it gained the upper hand. But it seized upon only a small part of the human being, and through partial destruction, partial death created the possibility for that inner reflection of the outer world to arise that we call “consciousness.” Thus, consciousness within matter is born out of suffering and pain.

When this connection between pain and the conscious spirit around us is recognized, many things become comprehensible, for example, why thoughtful people ascribe such a significant role to pain. An important philosopher has pointed out that an expression of suffering and pain is to be seen everywhere on the countenance of the world. Indeed, the physiognomy of the higher animals conveys deeply repressed pain.

Thus, we see that consciousness comes into existence through pain, that a being in whom consciousness arises from destruction creates from the annihilation of life something that is higher, and in fact continuously creates itself out of death. If the living could not suffer, consciousness could not arise; if there were no death, the spirit could not exist in the visible world. Herein lies the strength of the spirit: It creates from destruction something higher than life, namely, consciousness. We see the organs serving consciousness develop at different levels of pain. This can be observed already in the lower animal kingdom where the level of consciousness, in defense against the outer world, consists of instinctive reflex movements, comparable to the human eye instinctively closing itself against what might harm it. It is when such instinctive reaction is not enough to protect the element of life in the creature, when in other words the provocation is too strong, that the inner forces of opposition are roused which in turn give birth to senses, to sensation, and to organs like the eye and ear. You may have an instinctive feeling that what I have just explained is the truth. You certainly know it in your higher consciousness, but let me give you an example to make it clearer still. When do you become aware of your inner organs? You go through life paying no attention to your stomach, liver or lungs. You feel none of your organs as long as they are sound. You only know that you possess this or that organ when it hurts, when you feel something is out of order, in other words, when destruction has set in. This illustrates that consciousness always arises from pain.

If the element of life meets with pain, the result is sensation and consciousness. This bringing forth of a higher element is reflected in the consciousness as pleasure. No pleasure exists without prior pain. At the lower level, where life is just emerging within physical substance, no pleasure exists as yet. But when pain has given rise to consciousness, and as consciousness continues to work creatively, what it then produces is on a higher level, and gives rise to feelings of pleasure. Creativeness is the basis of pleasure. Pleasure only exists where there is a possibility for inner or outer creativity. Happiness is always in some way based on creation, just as unhappiness is in some way due to the need to create. Take an example of suffering that is typical on a lower level, that of hunger which can result in destruction of life. Hunger is alleviated by food; the food is a source of enjoyment because it becomes transformed into something that enhances life. Thus, something higher, namely, pleasure is created on the basis of pain. Suffering precedes pleasure. Thus, it must be said that while Arthur Schopenhauer [ Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) was a German philosopher. ] and Eduard von Hartmann [ Eduard von Hartmann (1842–1906) was a German philosopher and poet. ] are right when they state in their philosophic work that suffering is a universal factor of life, they do not go deeply enough into the origin of suffering. They do not go back to the point where suffering evolves and becomes something higher. The origin of suffering is found where consciousness arises out of the element of life, where life gives birth to spirit.

We have shown that from suffering something nobler and more perfect is born. It is therefore comprehensible that an inkling should dawn in human souls for the fact that a connection exists between pain and suffering on the one hand, and knowledge and consciousness on the other.

Those who are acquainted with my lectures will recall references to initiation by means of which a higher consciousness is attained that enables us to perceive the spiritual world. When a person's slumbering soul forces and faculties are awakened, the result is comparable to sight being restored to someone born blind. Just as such a person will experience the whole world differently, so the whole world is transformed for the human being who has attained spiritual sight. Everything is seen in a new light and on a higher level. But for this to come about, the process that has been explained must be repeated at a higher stage. The soul forces that generally speaking from a unity in humans must separate; a kind of destruction must take place in a person's lower nature. Only when this occurs is a higher consciousness and spiritual perception attained.

There are three soul forces in human beings: thinking, feeling and willing. These three forces are bound up with the physical organization. Certain thoughts and feelings will call up certain acts of will. The human organism must function correctly if the three soul forces are to act in harmony. If the connection between them has broken down due to illness, then there is no longer consistency between thinking, feeling and willing. If an organ connected with the will is impaired, the human being will be unable to translate his thoughts into impulses of will; he is weak as far as action is concerned. Although a person is well able to think, he cannot decide on action. Another disturbance may be that someone is unable to link thoughts and feelings correctly; this human cannot bring his feelings into harmony with the thoughts behind them. Basically that is the cause of insanity.

In the normally constituted human being of today, thinking, feeling and willing are in harmony. This is right at certain stages of evolution. However, it must be born in mind that as far as a person is concerned, this harmony is established unconsciously. If a person is to be initiated, if he or she is to become capable of higher perception, then thinking, feeling and willing must be severed from one another. The organs connected with feeling and will must undergo division. Consequently, even if it cannot be proved anatomically, the organism of an initiate is different from that of a non-initiate. Because the contact between thinking, feeling and willing is severed, the initiate can see someone suffering without his feelings being roused; he can stand aside and coldly observe. The reason is that nothing must occur in the initiate unconsciously. An individual is compassionate out of his own free will, not because of some external compulsion. He becomes separated into human beings of feeling, a person of will and a thinking person; above these three is the ruler, the newfound individual, bringing them into harmony from a higher consciousness. Here too a death process, a destructive process must intervene; should this occur without a higher consciousness being attained, insanity would set in. Insanity is in fact a condition in which the three soul members have separated without being ruled by a higher consciousness.

Here too we see a twofold event taking place: a destructive process at work in what is lower, simultaneous with the creation of a higher element. The ordinary person's consciousness lights up between blue, poisonous, destructive blood, and red, life-giving blood; similarly the initiate's higher consciousness is born from the interaction of life and death, and bliss arises from the higher happiness of creating out of death.

Human beings have an instinctive feeling for that mysterious connection between the highest they can attain, and suffering, and pain. This feeling inspires the tragic poet to let the suffering to which his hero succumbs give rise to the conviction that ultimately life triumphs over death; the eternal over the temporal. Thus, Christianity rightly sees in the pain and suffering, in the anguish and misery to which Christ Jesus' earthly nature succumbs, the victory of eternal life over the temporal and transitory. It is also the reason why our life becomes richer, more satisfying, when we can widen it so that we absorb and make our own what lies beyond our own self.

When we, as beings possessing life, overcame the pain caused by the beam of external light, something higher was born, that is, consciousness. Likewise, something higher is born from receptiveness to suffering when we, in our widened consciousness, transform out of compassion the suffering of another into our own. Therefore, at the highest level suffering gives rise to love. For what else is love than widening one's consciousness to encompass other beings? It is love when we are willing to deprive ourselves, to sacrifice ourselves to whatever extent for the sake of another. Like the skin that received the beam of light, and out of the pain became able to create a higher entity: the eye; so will we, through widening our life to encompass the lives of others, become able to attain a higher life. There will then, out of what we have given away to others, be born within us love and compassion for all creatures.

The death on the cross of Christ Jesus bears witness to this truth, for, as Christianity teaches, there soon followed the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. In the light of the process we have explained, which is indicated in the parable of the grain of wheat, we can now understand the coming forth of the Holy Spirit as a consequence of the death on the Cross. Just as the new crop of wheat must rise from the decay, the destruction of the seeds; so from the destruction, the pain endured upon the Cross, that Spirit is born which poured out over the Apostles at the feast of Pentecost. This is dearly stated in the Gospel of John 7:39, where it is said that the Spirit was not yet there, for Christ was not yet glorified. To read the Gospel of John closely is to discover things of immense significance.

Many people say that they would not want to be spared the pain they have endured, for from it they have gained knowledge. This is a truth that those who have died would confirm. If pain did not stand constantly at our side, like a guardian of life, the destruction that goes on within us would lead to actual death. It is pain that warns us we must take precaution to prevent life being destroyed; thus, from pain comes new life. As mentioned, a modern natural scientist describes the mimicry of thinking as the expression of suppressed pain on a thinker's face.

If we learn through pain, if knowledge attained through pain has an ennobling effect, then it explains why in the biblical story of creation pain and suffering are connected with the knowledge of good and evil. This we shall go into in the next lecture. It also explains why knowledgeable people have always emphasized that pain has an ennobling, purifying effect on a person. Through the great law of destiny, karma, spiritual science indicates that a person's pain and suffering in one life point to wrong done in former lives. This is a connection that can only be understood through the deeper aspects of human nature. Baser impulses that in a former life led to external action are transformed into nobler ones. Sin is like a poison that when transformed becomes a source of healing. Thus, sin can eventually contribute to a person's strength and ennoblement. In the story of Job, pain and suffering are shown to lead to greater knowledge and ennoblement.

This is meant only as a sketch, as an indication of the significance of suffering in earthly existence. When we recognize the solidifying, crystallizing effect of pain in physical entities right up to that of human beings, then we begin to realize the reason for its existence—especially when we further recognize that through dissolving what has hardened, the spirit can be reborn through us, that through the transformation of pain and suffering the spirit bestows upon us beauty, strength and wisdom. Fabre d'Olivet used the formation of a pearl when he wished to illustrate that the highest, noblest and purest in human nature is born from pain. The precious and beautiful pearl is created from the illness and pain of the pearl-oyster. The highest and noblest qualities of human nature are attained through suffering and pain.

Thus, we may say, as did the ancient Greek poet Aeschylus, that from suffering knowledge is born, and also that pain, like much else, can be understood only by its fruits.

• 1. Silenus was a drunken attendant of Bacchus and one of the satyrs. He was a personage in Greek mythology.
• 2. Dionysus was the god of wine and fertility.
• 3. Friedrich Nietzche(1844–1900) was a German philosopher, classical scholar and critic of Christianity.
• 4. Aeschylus (c.525–456 B.C.

Today I may begin with an experience of my own. Once I had the opportunity to visit a man in the afternoon, around two o'clock. He was lying on a daybed and at first he seemed so absorbed in his own thoughts that he didn't notice that I and another person had entered. He continues to reflect and seems to pay no attention to those around him. One can get the impression – and I ask you to put every word on the scale – that one is standing before a person who has been intensively occupied with difficult questions and problems all morning, then had lunch and is now using this time to let his soul go over what he has been working on. One can get the impression of this personality, who is covered up to his chest by a blanket, as an extremely fresh person, whose mental freshness is also expressed in the fresh color of his face. One can get the impression of a very rare human forehead, which is actually a combination of a beautiful artist's forehead and a thinker's forehead, the impression of a personality who reflects completely freshly on the great problems of humanity. This personality, who could have impressed the person who saw her in this way, had already been insane for more than three years when she offered this picture. Such moments as the one described alternated with terrible ones, but we want to hold on to this moment.

The personality was Friedrich Nietzsche, whom I had not seen before and could not see again afterward. You can appreciate that such a vision is in itself something profoundly significant from a spiritual-scientific point of view. Because the description actually contradicts the true facts, I said: One could have received this impression. One must bear in mind a peculiar phenomenon: that a contradiction arises between the inner and the outer. At that time Nietzsche no longer knew anything of his work. He did not know that he had written his writings, did not know his surroundings and much more. And yet he looked so fresh, as if imbued with a deep thought, lying on the bed, and one could have carried within oneself a strange sensation, which those who have been dealing with spiritual problems for some time will understand better, namely the sensation: How is it that this soul still hovers around this body?

A deep examination of Nietzsche's personality and his mental work can, to a certain extent, provide an answer to this question. Indeed, in Nietzsche we have a very peculiar personality before us. It will hardly be possible for anyone who somehow takes the position: either I accept or I reject – who cannot selflessly engage with what this personality was in itself. It may be that anthroposophists in particular take umbrage with my writing 'Friedrich Nietzsche, a fighter against his time'. For it is in the nature of our time that it says: Well, anyone who talks about Nietzsche like that must also be a Nietzschean. But I can say: If I had not succeeded in making this fact: to delve into a personality without considering my own experiences, then I would not speak of it today as I can and may speak of it.

There is a point of view of independent objectivity. It is as if one were the mouthpiece of the other being. In the case of Friedrich Nietzsche, this kind of consideration is also necessary for its own sake. It would probably make a strange impression on Nietzsche's personality if he could perceive today within the brain what Nietzsche's followers and opponents write. Both would then touch him in a most peculiar way. He would have a loathing for all his deeds. His words would stand before his soul: “What is the fate of all believers...; only when you have all denied me will I return to you.” And now, after we have presented the feeling that we could have received at Nietzsche's sickbed, we want to try to get an idea of Nietzsche as it appears through himself and through modern intellectual life.

Nietzsche stood at this time quite apart from many other minds. We may grasp the character of his soul best by saying that much of what was concept, representation, idea, conviction for other people became for him sensation, feeling, innermost experience. Let us call up before our minds the images of modern intellectual life over the last fifty to sixty years, which also passed before him. The materialism of the 1950s, which had adherents in almost all civilized countries, said: Nothing is real but matter and its motion. That matter takes on the form we see it in is caused by motion. In the brain, motion causes thought. We remember the time when it was said that language was a development of animal sounds. We also remember that experience and sensation were thought of as higher instincts. We remember that it was not the worst minds that formulated such thoughts. The most worthy and consistent even found a certain satisfaction in them. There was not one who would have thought: I do not see with satisfaction the rule of matter. Most said: I find the highest bliss in the thought that everything should dissolve. - Many could get intoxicated by that. We consider the fact that in this world view a system also came about, and that it reached its highest flowering through it.

And then we paint a different picture, the picture of the soul concept of such a person, who directs his gaze to the great ideals of humanity, who directs his gaze back to Buddha, Hermes, Pythagoras, Plato, who could be uplifted by the figure of Christ Jesus, the bearer of human spiritual deeds, the bearer of all that elevates the human heart. We paint for ourselves the picture of a man who could feel all this. And we realize that this man said to himself: Ah, all the Buddhas, Hermes, Pythagoras, Plato, they all only dreamed of lofty spiritual ideals, of something that could uplift them.

I am not telling you something that I have invented. I am describing the soul of many people in the 1960s. These thoughts were present in people who were overwhelmed by materialism and who considered ideals to be a mere fantasy. And a deep tragedy settled upon the souls of such people. Friedrich Nietzsche lived in such a time as a student and young professor. He educated himself in such a time. He was not related to any of the other spirits. His type was quite different from that of his contemporaries. One can understand him in spiritual scientific terms. If one takes into account that the human being consists of several bodies, then one can know that even the young Nietzsche was exceptional in the way his ether body and physical body were put together. Nietzsche had a much weaker connection between his etheric body and his physical body, so that what this personality experienced inwardly in his soul was experienced in a much more spiritual way, much more independently of the physical body, than is the case with other people.

Now it was first the student Nietzsche who was led into the world of the Greeks. For him, there were now two currents in his soul life. One we call something innate, lying in his karma. This was a deeply religious trait, that was a mood of his being, a trait that must worship something, look up to something. Religious feeling was there; and through the peculiar way in which this etheric body was connected to the physical body, what was a condition for this was present in him: an enormous receptivity for what could be read and heard between the lines of the books and between the words of the teachers, what could be felt and sensed. Thus he formed a picture of the ancient Greek world that completely filled his soul, a unique picture that lived more in feeling than in clear imagination. If we want to visualize it as it was experienced by the young Nietzsche, we have to consider him and his time.

Nietzsche had a loose connection with the materialism of his time. He could understand it, but this materialism was something that hardly touched him. Since his etheric body was only slightly connected to the physical body, the materialistic time touched him only as a floating figure is touched by the hem of the dress barely touching the ground. Only one thing was present in him as a dark feeling, the feeling of the deep dissatisfaction of such a world view. The feeling that a person who has such a world view faces the bleakness, the emptiness of life; that was what touched his soul like a faint hint. Above that arose what lived in his soul as an attitude toward Greek culture. We understand this when we learn to comprehend what lived in his soul. This image was not one in which sharp words could be chosen. We will try to present it as it can reveal itself to us through spiritual science.

The spiritual scientist looks into an ancient human development, of which history no longer knows anything. Only clairvoyance can illuminate these times, when wisdom was very different from later times, when people who were ripe for it were initiated into the mysteries and through the initiates were brought to an understanding of human development. If we want to get an idea of the lower mysteries, we have to imagine a special process. This initiation or teaching did not take place as it does today. Learning consisted of something quite different. Let us assume that the thought, which man today expresses so dryly, that spiritual beings descended into the material, but that the material ascended and developed until it became the present human being, that this thought, which is so sober, was presented in an important image at that time. One could literally see the descent of the spirit and the ascent of the material. This took place literally; and what the student saw there was wisdom to him; it was science to him, but not expressed in concepts, but tangible in intuition. There was something else as well. The picture the student saw was such that he sat before it with great, pious feelings. He received wisdom and religion at the same time. Besides, the whole picture was beautiful. It was true, genuine art. The student was surrounded by art, wisdom and religion combined into one.

It is rooted in the course of human development that what was united was separated: art, science and religion. For there could have been no progress in human development if people had kept all this united. In order for each to be perfected in the individual, what had previously been united had to be separated: science, art and religion, in order to be able to flow together at a higher level of perfection later on. What now presents itself in sharp contours, think of it as shrouded in a veil so that one merges into the other. And think that in Greek cultural life an echo of the ancient development of humanity is being lived out and only a dark inkling, a feeling of it, remains in Greek cultural life.

So you have the feeling that this was alive in young Nietzsche; that was the fundamental sound of his soul. The dullness of sensual existence is suffering; to endure it, art, science and religion are given to us. To spread salvation over this suffering is the basic mood of his soul. The image of Greek art increasingly came into his field of vision. Art became a great means for him to endure life in the sensual. And so he grew up. He was in this frame of mind when he graduated from high school. As is often the case with such natures, he was able to acquire with great ease what others can only acquire with difficulty. It was easy for Nietzsche to acquire the external tools of the philologist and thus bring order into his basic mood. Then came the time when he perfected himself more and more. Now we see how gradually an inkling of the ancient spiritual connection of the various currents of humanity dawns on him. He sensed this connection as an indefinite darkness. He sensed a higher power that ruled in the individual personalities. When he immersed himself in the real Greek way of thinking, in the thoughts of Thales, Anaxagoras and Heraclitus, a remarkable idea formed in him that distinguishes him so much from others. He himself once said: When I immerse myself in Greek philosophy, I cannot do it like others, like others do it; that is only a means for me. Now he is developing what distinguishes him so much from other thinkers. We can best make this clear to ourselves by means of an example. Let us take Thales. An ordinary scholar takes up the teachings of Thales, but for him Thales is more or less a historical example. He studies the spirit of the time in him. For Nietzsche, all the thoughts of this philosopher are only an approach, only a way to the soul of Thales himself; Thales stands before him in the flesh, vividly. He forms a friendship with him, he can associate with him, he has a purely personal relationship of friendship with him. Every figure becomes real for Nietzsche, is truly related to him. Look at what he wrote, look at that essay: “Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks,” 1872/73, and you will find it there. He is there to make friends through philosophy with those he describes. But when you enter into such intimate relationships, it means something completely different for the heart and soul than our dry science. Just think how dull a learned history is! It can only be a learned hypothesis.

Love, suffering and pain, the whole range of the soul's emotions, can only be experienced by ordinary people in relation to the people who surround us in everyday life. Everything from the deepest pain to the highest bliss, the whole gamut of feelings, could be experienced by Nietzsche in relation to the souls that arose for him from the gray depths of the mind. The beings to whom he felt drawn lived in completely different realms than his daily environment. What ordinary people feel in everyday life takes place in Nietzsche in relation to his friends, who have arisen for him out of the spiritual world. Thus, a spiritual world was available to him in which he felt suffering, joy and love. He was always somewhat floating above reality, the world of the senses. This is the great difference that distinguishes him from the other people of his time.

And now let us see how this life was shaped! Above all, we see his great ease of comprehension. He had not yet completed his doctorate when the University of Basel asked his teacher Ritschl, the great philologist, whether he could recommend a student for a professorship. He recommended Nietzsche, and when, in view of Nietzsche's youth, it was asked whether he was really suitable, Ritschl wrote: “Nietzsche will be able to do anything he wants.” So the young scholar became a professor in Basel. He was appointed doctor when he was already a professor, and without an exam, because the gentlemen before whom he was to take the exam said: “But, colleague, we can't examine you.” These things go their easy course, floating above reality, quite understandably.

Then a twofold event happens for him. He gets to know the soul content of a person who has already died and of a living person. He gets to know a soul in Schopenhauer, which he cannot contemplate like a human being whose philosophical system he looks at and admires, and whose teachings he would swear by, but he has a feeling towards him as if he would like to say to him, “Father!” And he gets to know Richard Wagner, who had remarkable experiences of the soul that touched on what Nietzsche felt when contemplating Greek culture. We need only sketch out a few lines to describe Richard Wagner. We need only recall that Richard Wagner said: There must have been a time when all the arts were united. He himself felt the great ideal of humanity to bring the arts together again as an artist, to unite them and to cast a religious, consecrating mood over them. Now we think of how something in Nietzsche came to life that conjured up in his soul that original state of humanity when the arts were still united. We think of his words: “If you want to describe the true human being, you must take into account that something higher lives in every human being. If you want to describe true humanity, you must go to the figures that reach beyond sensuality.” He was always a little suspended over the reality of the sensual world. In his search for that higher, for the figures that reach beyond sensuality, he was led to the “superman,” to the spirit-filled superman. Thus he created his pure, serene, mythical figures.

In this sense, he was led to the higher language, to music, to the language of the orchestra, which could become the expression of the soul. Let us recall what lived in Richard Wagner's soul: Shakespearean and Beethovenian figures stood before him. In Shakespeare, he saw acting figures. He saw figures whose actions take place when they have felt soul, when they have had feelings of pain and suffering and feelings of supreme bliss. In Shakespeare's dramas, according to Richard Wagner, the result of the soul experiences of the characters appears. This is a drama that seeks solely to externalize the inner life. And in Shakespeare, one can sense the experiences of the soul of the characters. Alongside this, the image of Beethoven the symphonist appeared to him. In the symphony, Wagner saw the reproduction of what lives in the soul, in the whole gamut of feelings between suffering and bliss. In the symphony, the soul's feelings are given full rein, but do not become action, do not enter the room. Once, in the conclusion of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, this inner experience in Beethoven's music seemed to him to want to externalize itself with all its might. Wagner wants to step in at this point. He wants to continue Beethoven in a certain sense. He wants to bring about a synthesis, a unification between Shakespeare's and Beethoven's art. Something of that primeval human culture was alive in Wagner. What lived in him as an impulse must have appeared to Nietzsche as the realization of his most significant dreams.

Nietzsche had a different relationship with Schopenhauer. He read Schopenhauer with fervor. As with every school, he also had reservations about Schopenhauer. All the more was the feeling in him to call him “father.” He had a deep relationship with him. Schopenhauer was not as heavy for him as Richard Wagner. He feels the purifying, ennobling influence of Schopenhauer. Thus we see the genesis of his work “Schopenhauer as Educator.” All this arose from the feeling of saying “father” to him. One cannot imagine a picture that could create a more vivid bond between the living and the dead.

But there was something in Nietzsche's question that Schopenhauer did not answer. The question of cultural connections always came to his mind. He had intuitively grasped the original state of humanity, in which great individual spirits, the initiates, taught and led men in the mysteries. Thus he arrived at the concept of the “superman,” who, he believed, must necessarily arise out of the history of natural evolution. That is his concept of the superman, as the sentence shows: “By raising itself to the great human being, nature fulfills its highest goal, the great personality.” Thus, for him, nature and man are linked together. And now everything he experiences becomes something other than theory. It becomes a very personal emotional experience. It becomes something in which his pain, his joy, his desire for action glows. What he says is less important than that what he says points to what was glowing in his heart. And from the fading away of what he experiences in his soul, his first significant work emerges: 'The Birth of Tragedy'. There he almost falls on how Greek culture developed from ancient Greece, from the state of the united arts. And one may say: here something of the deep truth is touched upon. He knows nothing of that primeval culture which one gets to know through spiritual science. He only senses it. He believes that the first beginnings of art would have played themselves out in grotesque, paradoxical forms; that human beings would have indulged in wild, grotesque figures. And he describes it as if it had taken place in an instinctive state, whereas the art of the mysteries was the highest expression of the spiritual. As man stood in the mysteries, Nietzsche felt as if man had made himself a work of art, as if he had imitated the rhythm of the stars, the world event in dance, as if he had wanted to express the law of the world. But Nietzsche considered all this to be instinctive feeling. He did not know that the laws of the world were given to people in the purest and most noble symbolic forms by initiates in the mysteries. That is why all this has such a wild expression in Nietzsche. But it is an inkling of the actual.

But how does Nietzsche view later tragedy? He said that it was all an expression and fruit of a later time; that man had already fallen out of touch with the divine; that he no longer imitated the laws of the world in his dance; he only imitated it in pictures. He saw in it a serene image of the original, but not the original itself. Thus, already in Sophocles we have an Apollonian art that expressed the original in the static image. [Gaps in the transcript.] And through Richard Wagner, Nietzsche was led back into the old Dionysian element. You see how the conclusion of his writing “The Birth of Tragedy” is a mixture of longing, presentiment, and confusion.

But now, more and more, he was confronted with external reality. He became acquainted with what modern culture had put in the place of the old. What he had been unable to recognize in the first period of his life, what modern materialism had produced, he now became acquainted with. And from the mood that I described, that many of the noblest minds found almost a blessing in materialism, he now got to know something in his way. Now all ideals passed from his view. He once said that all these old ideals were 'put on ice' for him. Now they appeared to him as a legitimate evil, arising from human weakness. The writing of “Human, All Too Human” began.

Now comes the second period of his life. He experienced the materialistic world view in such a way that, in his own way, he had to immerse himself in it. It was his fate that he had to lock up everything he wanted to think in his soul. And just from this world view, from Darwinism, something like a release dawned on him, which in turn led him out of materialism. He looked at the development of humanity in a Darwinian way. He said to himself: Man has developed out of animality. But he also drew the consequences of this view. He had to draw them because he wanted to see clearly in relation to materialism. Because he had to live with it. So he came to the conclusion: If I look at the animal forms, I see in them the remains of an earlier culture. If I look at man, I must say that he contains as a possibility the state of perfection of the future. I may call the ape a bridge between man and animal. So what is man? A bridge between the animal and the superhuman. Thus the superhuman slumbers in man. Nietzsche felt, could not help feeling, what it means to live in such a way that what can become appears. That was the lyrical mood of his “Zarathustra”, in the Song of the Superhuman, the song that describes the future. Feeling bound him to this thought; feeling was what filled him.

And now we see how another thought is linked to this. All lyrical moods resonate in “Zarathustra”. But Nietzsche had no such points of reference as we have in Theosophy. That did not exist for him. The idea of reincarnation did not enter his field of vision, the idea that the “superman” lives in man as a higher divine self in the human body. We see the “superman” recurring, so that we see the consoling ascending line of development, not the repetition of the same. Nietzsche knew nothing of this. Yet there is a mysterious connection between what he said and our spiritual-scientific view. For Nietzsche, the idea of the eternal return of the same was now linked to the idea of the superman. The idea presented itself in a strange way and revealed itself to him in such a way that all things had already existed countless times. This thought was Nietzsche's true, very own thought. How you all think and feel, you have thought and felt countless times, and so you will think and feel countless times. This thought now combined with that of the superman. He had to feel his way into both thoughts.

Now imagine Nietzsche's organism, think of the loosening of the etheric body, which was always ready to separate from the physical body. Imagine a man who takes the thoughts he forms terribly seriously, and imagine his mood: as I am, as I feel, so will I be and feel forever. And now consider how he felt the loosening of his etheric body. He felt it in such a way that for a hundred days of the year he had the most terrible headaches. Then you can understand how this came to life in his soul: this was there countless times, it will return countless times. On the one hand, we feel comforted by the thought of the superhuman, on the other hand, we feel desolate at the thought of the eternal return of the same. And we understand moods like this: “Happy the man who still has a home!” We feel much of what is connected with the feeling of home. We feel something of the idiosyncrasy of Friedrich Nietzsche that is connected with the fate of the world view of the 19th century. He had to feel the feeling of homelessness. It is a testimony to how the world views of their time live in a deeply feeling soul, and how longing arises in it for a spiritual home.

Thus we see how it is only through Theosophy that it becomes possible to arrive at a synthesis of wisdom, art and religion, which are to be reunited into a great culture through spiritual science. Imagine the idea of the eternal return of the same developed further, so that it means reincarnation, only in this way does the thought acquire its true content, and you are filled with the hope that the union of wisdom, art and religion will arise anew. It is not the return of the same, but a constant perfecting.

We may say that a great question appears to us in Nietzsche's life, the question: How is it possible for a truly deep soul to live in the materialistic world view? In Nietzsche's soul, we have before us a soul that was unable to find the answers to the anxious questions of our culture. It lacked what we find through the anthroposophical worldview. And let us imagine another soul that has the opportunity to find these answers through anthroposophy, which gives us answers to the questions that the deepest souls must feel. Nietzsche posed these questions, but could not answer them. Longing filled him, and this longing destroyed him. He is proof that the great problems posed by the spirit must be answered by anthroposophy. The answer to longing is the remedy for Nietzsche's cry. And this remedy lies in anthroposophy. Longing was the power of Nietzsche's soul, which remained so alive that it maintained the exterior of this personality as an imprint of inner aliveness. It was as if, beyond the death of the spirit, the soul wanted to remain with the body in order to catch something of the answers that Nietzsche could not reach, that he longed for and that ultimately destroyed him. From Nietzsche's soul we can feel the necessity of anthroposophy. Let us imagine him as the great questioner, as the questioner of the questions of humanity, the answers to which determine the necessity of an anthroposophical spiritual science. ON THE MISSION OF SAVONAROLA Berlin, October 27, 1908

The word 'mission' is perhaps not quite the right one to use when considering this unique phenomenon at the end of the 15th century. And there is perhaps something else associated with the personality of Savonarola that suggests to us that it would be much more important than defining the mission of Savonarola. This other thing would be for those of us who belong to the anthroposophical worldview and world movement to familiarize ourselves with the essence of Savonarola, because there are many lessons to be learned from his activities and character. In a figure like Savonarola, we can see at the dawn of the modern era the point to which the development of Christianity had come by the end of the 15th and beginning of the 16th century. And we can see precisely what kind of activity is not effective. We can see what kind of activity is needed to further human development.

It might also be necessary to show how certain one-sided currents are precisely unsuitable for strengthening and introducing Christianity. We will not take long, but just a few detailed strokes to visualize the effectiveness of Savonarola. And beside him will stand out another figure, that of a very different Dominican friar, a friar who painted the monastery from which Savonarola's earnest words had been silenced with wonderful, delicate paintings: Fra Angelico da Fiesole. He is there at the dawn of this new era, as if to show that Christianity at that time expressed itself in two forms. One could carry within oneself the whole wonderful vision of the Christian figures and events, as they live in the hearts of men. One could also, in a simple way, without worrying about what was going on outwardly, without worrying about what the Church was doing, what the popes were doing, just paint what one experienced as Christianity within oneself. And that is then proof of what Christianity could become in a soul at that time. That is one way, but the other way is – and this is the way of Savonarola – to live Christianity in that period of time. If you were a person like Savonarola, with a certain amount of certainty, a strong will and a certain clarity of mind, you could do what he did: believe at a relatively young age that you could live a truly Christian life within an order like that, where the true rules of the order were to be followed. If you also had what Savonarola had, the deepest moral convictions, you also looked at what was going on in the world. You could compare Christianity with what was going on in Rome, with the truly worldly life of the Pope, the Cardinals, or how it was expressed in the magnificent creations of Michelangelo! One could observe how in all Catholic churches masses were read in the strictest worship, and how people felt that they could not live without this worship. But one could also see that those who were under the gown and stole and chasuble indulged in a liberality in their civil life that what is striven for today as liberality is child's play by comparison. One could see that what is wanted today from a certain side and what is striven for as a tendency is realized up to the highest steps of the altar.

And one could combine an ardent belief in the higher worlds with an absolutely democratic sense: the rule of God and no human ruler! That was one of Savonarola's heartfelt desires. One could admire the Medicis for all they had done in Italy, for all they had brought Italy, but one could also, as Savonarola did, regard the great Medici, Lorenzo de' Medici, as a tyrant.

You could be Lorenzo de' Medici and think about having a quarrelsome Dominican preach as you wished. Lorenzo de' Medici was a man of noble thoughts. He could grasp various things, for one must look at things from two sides. He had invited Savonarola to Florence, and from the very beginning Savonarola went against the grain of Lorenzo as his patron. And when Savonarola became prior of the monastery, he did not even comply with the custom of paying a visit of thanks to Lorenzo. When this was pointed out to him, and also that Lorenzo had summoned him to Florence after all, he said: “Do you believe that it was Lorenzo de' Medici who summoned Savonarola to Florence? No, it was God who summoned Savonarola to this monastery in Florence!”

But Lorenzo, as a nobleman, donated many things to the monastery, and one could believe that one could tame Savonarola somewhat by giving to the monastery. But he gave away all these gifts and declared that the Dominicans were there to keep the vow of poverty and not to collect riches.

Who were Savonarola's enemies, really? All those who had established the configuration, the domination on the physical plane. Nothing deterred Savonarola. He went straight ahead. He said: There is a Christianity. In its true form, it is unknown to people. The church has distorted it. It must disappear, and in its place must arise new organizations, in which will be shown how the true Christian spirit can shape the outer reality. He preached these sentences over and over again. At first he preached with great difficulty, for at first he could only force the words out with an effort. But he became an orator, whose following grew larger and larger, whose oratorical talents increased more and more.

The ruling powers were initially liberal; they did not want to do anything against him. An Augustinian friar was sent to deliver a speech that would sweep away Savonarola's power. And one day an Augustinian friar spoke on the subject: “It does not behoove us to know the day and hour when the divine creator intervenes in the world!” The Augustinian monk spoke with flaming words, and one would like to say, knowing the currents that have flooded through Christian life: the whole confession of Dominicanism stood against Augustinianism. And Savonarola prepared for battle and spoke on the same theme: “It behooves us well to know that things are not as they are. It behoves us to change them and then to know when the day and hour will come!” The people of Florence cheered him as they had cheered the Augustinian monk. He was considered dangerous not only in Florence, but also in Rome and throughout Italy. After tremendous torture and falsified records, he was sentenced to death by fire.

That was Savonarola, who lived at the same time as the other Dominican monk, who painted a Christianity that hardly existed in the physical world. And if we recall a word spoken by a remarkable man, what it means for Savonarola: Jacob Burckhardt, the famous historian of the Renaissance, formed the opinion that at that time the development of life in Italy had reached such a point that one was on the verge of secularizing the church, that is, of making the church a worldly organization, we see that Savonarola represented the eternal conscience of Christianity.

Why was it that Savonarola, who stood up for Christianity with such fire, remained ineffective after all? Because he is an historical figure. This was the reason: that at this dawn of the New Era and at this dusk of the Church, when Savonarola represented the conscience of Christianity, something had to be brought forward against the external institutions of Christianity. The test has been passed that even a figure like Savonarola was not needed to restore Christianity. Those striving in spiritual science should learn from this that something else is needed, something objective, something that makes it possible to tap the deep sources of esoteric Christianity. Such an instrument can only be Anthroposophy. The figure of Savonarola is like a distant sign shining in the future, indicating that anthroposophists should teach not by the means by which one could believe in those days to rediscover Christianity, but by the means of anthroposophical spiritual science. As an anthroposophist, one can learn a great deal from this figure.

Spiritual Science—The Gospel—The Future of Mankind

In the autumn of this present year Nuremberg can celebrate an important centenary, for it was in 1808 that this city received one of the greatest German spirits within her walls. He was one of those spirits of whom we hear little to-day and whose works are understood still less; but he will signify very much for man's intellectual life in the future when he is once understood. He is doubtless difficult to understated and it may be some time before people grasp him again. In the autumn of 1808 Hegel became Director of the Royal Grammar School in Nuremberg.

Hegel made a statement that we may perhaps take as foundation for what we are going to study. He said: The most profound thought is connected with the figure of Christ, with the outer historical figure. And it is the greatness of the Christian religion that every grade of consciousness can grasp the historical external figure, while at the same time it is a challenge to the most earnest labours of the mind and the deepest penetration. The Christian religion is comprehensible at every stage of culture and yet at the same time it challenges the deepest wisdom.—These are the words of Hegel, the German philosopher.

That the Christian faith, the message of the Gospel, can be understood at every stage of consciousness has been taught for a period to be reckoned almost in millennia. To show that it is a summons to the deepest thought, to a penetration into humanity's whole fund of wisdom, will be one of the tasks of Spiritual Science, if this is understood in its true sense and inmost impulse and made the guide of human life. What we are to consider to-day will be misunderstood if it is thought that Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science is in any way a new religion or desires to establish a new religious faith in place of an old one. One might say, not to be misunderstood, if Spiritual Science is grasped aright, it will be clear that though it is a sure and firm supporter of religious life, in itself it is no religion, nor will it ever contradict any religion as such. It is another matter, however, for it to be the instrument to explain the profoundest truths and the most earnest and vital secrets of religions and show how they may be understood.

It may seem somewhat far-fetched if we make the following comparison in order to show the relation of Theosophy or Anthroposophy to religious documents (and to-day we shall be concerned with the religious documents of Christianity). Anthroposophy is related to the religious documents as mathematical instruction is related to the books on mathematics which have appeared in the course of mankind's history. We have an old work which is really of interest only to students of history versed in mathematics, namely, the geometry of Euclid. It contains for the first time in a scholastic form the mathematical and geometrical facts that are now taught to children in school. How few of the children are aware, however, that all that they learn about parallel lines, triangles, angles, etc., stands in that old book, that it was given to humanity then for the first time. It is quite right to make the child conscious that one can realize these things in oneself, that if the human spirit sets its forces in motion and applies them to the forms of space it is able to realize these forms without reference to that ancient book. Yet someone who has never heard of the book and has been taught mathematics and geometry will value and understand it in the right sense if he one day comes across it. He will know how to prize what was given to mankind by the one who set this work for the first time before the human spirit. In this way one might characterize the relation of Spiritual Science to religious documents.

The sources of Spiritual Science are of such a nature that if it is understood in its true impulse it is not to be referred to any kind of document or tradition. Just as knowledge of the surrounding sense-world is given us by the free use of our forces, so can the knowledge of the super-sensible, the invisible lying behind the visible, be given us by the deep-lying spiritual forces and faculties slumbering within the human soul. When man uses the instruments of his senses he can perceive things lying before him and combine them with his intellect. In the same way someone using the means given him through Spiritual Science can look behind the veils of sense-existence to the spiritual causes, to where beings weave and work which are imperceptible to the physical eye and ear. Thus it is in the free use of man's forces, though they are still slumbering as super-sensible forces in the majority of men, that we have the independent source of spiritual knowledge, just as the source of external knowledge lies in the free use of forces directed to the sense-world. And when man possesses the knowledge which introduces him into the super-sensible behind the sensible, the invisible behind the visible, a knowledge as definite as his knowledge of outer objects and events, then he may go to the traditional books and records. Furnished with super-sensible knowledge he may approach the records through which, during the course of evolution, tidings have reached man of the super-sensible world, just as the geometrician approaches the geometry of Euclid. And then he tests them as the modern geometrician tests the geometry of Euclid; he can prize and recognize these documents at their true value. Nor does one who approaches the records of Christianity equipped with knowledge of the super-sensible world find that they lose in value; indeed on the contrary, they appear in a more brilliant light than they showed first to the mere believer, they prove to contain deeper wisdom than had been dreamt of earlier, before the possession of anthroposophical knowledge.

But we must be clear on another point before we can realize the right relation of Anthroposophy to the religious documents. Let us ask ourselves who is better able to judge the geometry of Euclid—one who can translate the words and give the contents without having first penetrated into the spirit of geometry, or one who already understands geometry and is therefore able to discover it in the book? Let us think of a mere philologist, one who knows nothing of geometry, how many incorrect statements would appear if he tried to convey the meaning of the contents. Many have done this with the records of religion, even those who are supposed to be chosen to fathom their true sense. They have gone to these records without first having any independent knowledge of super-sensible facts. And so we have to-day most careful explanations of religious documents, explanations that explore the history of the time and show how the documents originated, and so on. But the explanations resemble explanations of Euclid's geometry by a non-geometrician. Religion—and this we will hold fast—can only be found if one is aided by spiritual-scientific knowledge, although Spiritual Science can only be an instrument of the religious life, never a religion itself. Religion is best characterized through the content of the human heart, that sum of feelings and emotions through which man's sensitive soul sends up all that is best in it to the super-sensible beings and powers. The character of a man's religion depends on the fire of these feelings, the strength of his sensitivity, just as it depends on the warm pulse-beat in the breast and on the feeling for beauty how a man will stand before a picture. True it is that the contents of the religious life is what we call the spiritual or super-sensible world. But just as little as an aesthetic feeling for art is the same as an inner grasp of its laws—though it may assist understanding just as little are the wisdom, the science, that lead into the spiritual worlds the same as religion. This science will make religious feeling more earnest, worthier, broader, but it will not be religion itself. Grasped in its true sense it may lead to religion.

If we wish to understand the force and significance, the real spirit of the Christian religion we must penetrate far into spiritual life. We must look back into times of a primeval past, the pre-religious age of mankind, and try to envisage the origin of religion. Is there a pre-religious age of humanity? Yes, a time existed on earth when there was no religion; this is acknowledged by Spiritual Science though in a very different sense from the assertions of materialistic civilization. What does religion signify for mankind? It was and for a long time will still be that which the word itself signifies. The word “religion” means the uniting of man with his divine element, with the world of the spirit. The religious ages are essentially those in which man has longed for union with the divine, be it out of the sources of knowledge, or from a certain feeling, or because he felt that his will could only be strong if it were permeated by divine forces. Ages in which man had an inner premonition rather than definite vision, in which he rather sensed that a spiritual world was around him, than saw it—these are the religious ages of our earth. And before these ages were others when man did not need such a sense of longing for union with the super-sensible spiritual world, because he knew that world, as to-day he knows things of the sense world. Does man need to be convinced of the existence of stones, plants, animals? Does he need documents or doctrines to prove to him or let him surmise that there are rocks, plants, animals? No, for he sees them round him and needs therefore no religion of the sense-perceptible world. Let us imagine someone from quite another world, possessing quite different senses and organs of knowledge, one who would not see the stones, plants and animals because to him they were invisible. Let us imagine that he was informed through writings or in some other way of their existence, which to you is a matter of direct sight and knowledge. What would that be for him? It would be religion. If he were informed through some book of the existence of stones and plants and animals it would be religion to him, for he has never seen them. There was a time in which humanity lived amongst those spiritual beings and deeds that are recorded in the religious teachings and teachings of wisdom.

The word “evolution” has become a magic word in many fields of thought to-day, but it has been applied by science solely to outer sense-perceptible facts. To one who regards the world from the standpoint of Spiritual Science everything is in process of evolution, and most of all the human consciousness. The state of consciousness in which man lives to-day, through which when he wakes in the morning he is able to grasp the world with his senses, this state has evolved from a different one. We call the present consciousness the clear day-consciousness. But this has evolved from an ancient state which we call the dull picture-consciousness of mankind. There, however, we reach back to humanity's early evolutionary stages of which anthropology tells nothing, since it uses only the instruments of the senses and methods of the intellect. It believes that man has gone through stages in the far past which are the same as the animal creation passes through to-day. We have seen in earlier lectures how the relation of man to the animal is to be understood. Man was never such a being as the present animal, nor is he descended from beings like them. If we were to describe the forms out of which man has evolved they would prove very different in appearance from the present-day animal. These are creatures which have stayed behind at earlier stages of evolution, con-served these stages and hardened them. The human being has grown beyond his earlier evolutionary stages, the animal has gone down below them. So in the animal world we see some-thing like laggard brothers of humanity, who no longer, however, bear the form of those earlier stages.

The earlier stages of evolution took their course when there were different conditions of life on the earth, when the elements were not distributed as they are to-day, when the human being was not encumbered with the kind of body he now bears, and yet was man. He was able to wait, figuratively speaking, within the course of evolution for his entry into the flesh, was able to wait until the fleshly materiality had reached a condition in which he could develop the forces of the present spirit. The animals were not able to wait, they became hardened at an earlier stage, took on flesh earlier than was right. They were therefore obliged to stay behind. We can thus picture that the human being has lived under other conditions and other forms of consciousness. If we follow these back for thousands and thousands of years we shall always find different ones. What to-day we call logical thought, intellect, understanding, has only evolved late in man's history. Much stronger were certain forces in him which are already beginning to decline, such, for instance, as memory. In an earlier age memory was far more developed than it is now. With the growth of the intellect in mankind, memory has stepped essentially into the background. If one uses some measure of practical observation one can recognize that what Spiritual Science relates is not said without foundation. People might assert that if that were true about memory, then a person remaining backward in development by some accident, should be backward least of all in memory. It could also be claimed that if intellectuality were fostered in a person artificially kept back, then his memory would suffer. Here in this city a characteristic case of this very nature is to be found.

Professor Daumer, whom one must hold in the highest esteem, observed this case very thoroughly. It was the case of that human being, so enigmatic for many people, who was once placed into this city in a mysterious way, and who in just as mysterious a way met his death in Ansbach. An author, in order to indicate the mystery of his life, wrote that as he was carried out to burial the sun was setting on the one horizon and the moon was rising on the other. I speak, as you know, of Caspar Hauser. If you disregard all the pros and cons that have been asserted, if you look only at what has been fully verified, you will know that this foundling—who was one day simply there in the street, and who since he did not know whence he came, was called the Child of Europe—could neither read nor write when he was found. At an age of twenty years he possessed nothing of what is gained through the intellect but he had a remarkable memory. As they began to instruct him, as logic entered his soul, his memory disappeared. This transition in consciousness was accompanied by something else. He possessed at first an incredible, an entirely inborn truthfulness and it was precisely in this truthfulness that he went more and more astray. The more he nibbled, so to say, at intellectuality, the more it vanished. There would be many things to study were we to enter deeply into this human soul which had been artificially held back. It is not difficult for the student of Spiritual Science to credit the popular tradition, so unacceptable to the learned people of to-day, which relates that while Caspar Hauser still knew nothing, while he still had no idea that there were beings besides himself of different form, he exercised a remarkable effect upon quite savage creatures. Savage animals humbled themselves and became mild, something streamed from him that made such beasts gentle, although they savagely attacked anyone else. We could in fact penetrate deeply into the soul of this remarkable personality, so enigmatic to many, and you would see how things that cannot be explained from ordinary life are led back through Spiritual Science to spiritual facts. Such facts cannot be learnt by speculation but only by spiritual observation, though they are comprehensible to an unbiased and logical thinking.

All this has only been said in order to show you that the modern consciousness has evolved from another, an age-old-state when man was not in direct touch with outer objects in the modern sense, but on the other hand was in connection with facts and beings of the spiritual world. A human being did not see another's physical form—nor did this form resemble that of to-day. When another being approached him a sort of dream-picture arose and by its shape and colouring he knew whether the other was antagonistic to him or sympathetic. Such a consciousness perceived spiritual facts and the spiritual world. To-day man is among beings of flesh and blood, at that time, when he turned his gaze to himself and himself was soul and spirit, he lived among spiritual beings. They were present to him, he was a spirit among spirits. Although his consciousness was only dreamlike, yet the pictures that arose in him were in living relation to his environment. That was the far distant age when man still lived in a spiritual world. Later he descended from it in order to take on a corporeal nature suited to his present consciousness. Animals already existed as physical creatures while man still perceived in spiritual realms. He lived at that time among spiritual beings, and just as you need no proof to be convinced of the presence of stones, plants and animals, so man in those primeval times needed no testimony in order to be convinced of the existence of spiritual beings. He lived among spirits and divine beings and therefore needed no religion. That was the pre-religious age.

Then man descended, the earlier form of consciousness changed into the modern. Colours and forms are no longer perceived as floating in space, colour is laid upon the surfaces of sense-objects. In the same measure as man learnt to direct his senses to the outer world, did this outer world draw itself like a veil, like the great Maja, over the world of spirit. And humanity had to receive tidings of the spiritual world through this sheath, religion became necessary.

There is also a state, however, between the time preceding a religious consciousness and the time of actual religion: there is an intermediate condition. Thence are derived the mythologies, sagas, folk-stories of the spiritual worlds. It is a dreary arid learning that has no inkling of real spiritual events and asserts that all the figures of Nordic or German mythology, of Greek mythology with its accounts of the deeds of the gods are merely inventions of popular fantasy. They are not inventions, the peasant folk do not indulge in such fancies and if they see a few clouds stretched across the sky, say that they are little sheep. That the people have such fantasies is a fiction of our modern learnedness which abounds in lively fantasy about such things. The truth of the matter is quite different. The old saga and stories of the gods are the last relics, the last memories of the pre-religious consciousness. They are records of what men themselves have seen. Those who described Wotan, Thor, Zeus, etc., did so because they remembered that such things had been experienced once upon a time. Mythologies are fragments, broken pieces of what had once been experienced. The intermediate stage was shown in another way as well. Even when clever men had already—let us say—become very clever, there were still persons who under exceptional conditions (call them states of insanity or being carried away, as you will) could see into the spiritual worlds, who could still be aware of what in earlier times was seen by all. They recounted that they themselves still saw something of the spiritual world. This was linked with the memories and led to a living faith among the people. That was a state transitional to the state of actual religion.

We may ask: what paved the way in mankind to an actual religion? It was because men found a means of so developing their inner being that they were once more able to behold the worlds from which they had sprung, which they used to see in a dull consciousness. And here we touch upon a chapter which to many modern minds contains but little probability, the question of initiation. What are initiates? They were those who so developed their inner nature of soul and spirit through certain methods that they grew again into the spiritual world. There is initiation! In every soul super-sensible forces and faculties lie dormant. There is, or at least there can be, a great and mighty moment when these forces awaken. We can gain some idea of this moment if we picture the general course of human evolution. To speak in the words of Goethe we can say that we look back into the far past when the human body had no such physical eye or physical ear as exist to-day. We look back to times when there were undifferentiated organs, able neither to see nor to hear, at the places where these organs are now situated. A time came for physical humanity when such blind organs evolved to radiant points, gradually evolved until light itself dawned upon them. In the same way a time came when the human ear had developed to such a stage that the former silent world revealed itself in tones and harmonies. The sun's forces worked upon the formation of the human eye. And to-day man can live the life of spirit and thus develop the organs of soul and spirit which are largely undeveloped in present mankind.

The moment is possible and for many has already dawned when the soul and spirit are transformed just as once the external physical organism was transformed. New eyes and ears arise through which the light shines and tones resound out of the spiritually dark and silent world. Development is possible, even to the point of living into the higher worlds. That is initiation. And the Mystery Schools provided methods of initiation as in ordinary life the methods of the chemical laboratory or of biological research are made available. The difference is only this—official science has to prepare instruments and other apparatus for its use, while he who would become an initiate has but one instrument to perfect, namely, himself in all his forces just as the force of magnetism can lie dormant in iron, so there slumbers in the human soul the power to penetrate into the spiritual world of light and sound. And so the time came when normal humanity saw only physical sense-existence and when the leaders were initiates. These could see into the spiritual worlds and give information and explanation of the facts of that world in which man had earlier lived.

To what does the first stage of initiation lead? How does it appear to the human soul? Do not imagine that this development is merely a matter of philosophic speculation, a spinning out, a refinement of ideas. The ideas man has about the sense-world are transformed when he grows into the spiritual world. No longer does he apprehend things through sharply outlined concepts, but through pictures, through Imaginations. For the human being grows into the spiritual process of world creation. The firm definite contours of the physical material world exist, in fact, nowhere else. In the world creative process the animal does not appear with clear outline. One has there something like a basic idea of the animal from which the diverse external forms can originate, a living reality, membered in itself. One must take one's stand strictly on the basis of Goethe's words: “All things corruptible are but a semblance.” The initiate learns at first to know and grasp in pictures, he learns to ascend into the spiritual world. There his consciousness must be more mobile than that which serves us for apprehending the surrounding sense-world. Hence this stage of development is called the Imaginative Consciousness. It leads man again into the spiritual world, but not in a dull twilight state. The initiate consciousness to be gained is clear and bright, as clear as man's consciousness by day. There is thus an enrichment, the spiritual consciousness is added to the day-consciousness. In the first stage of initiation man lives in the imaginative consciousness. The documents of humanity record what the initiates experienced in the spiritual world just as information with regard to the science of geometry was imparted to mankind through Euclid. We recognize what stands in these records when we go back to the sources—the spiritual vision of the initiates.

Those were the conditions prevailing among men up to the appearance of the greatest Being who has trodden upon the earth, Christ Jesus. With his appearance anew element entered evolution. If we would understand the essential nature of the new element bestowed on mankind through Christ Jesus, we must realize that in all pre-Christian initiation the candidate was completely withdrawn from ordinary life, he must work upon his soul in centres of profoundest secrecy. Above all we must realize that when man raised himself again into the spiritual world something of that merely dreamlike picture-consciousness still remained. Man had to retreat from this sense-world to be able to enter the spiritual world. That this is no longer necessary to-day has been brought about through the appearing of Christ Jesus on earth. Through the fact that the Christ-principle has entered humanity, the Central Being, the very Centre of the spiritual world, has once existed historically in a human being on this earth. It is the same Being for whom all these have longed who have developed a religious life, who have beheld in the Mystery Centres, who have left the sense-world in order to enter the spiritual world. The Being of whom it has been proclaimed that man confronts it as his highest nature, this has entered humanity's evolution with Christ Jesus. One who understands something of genuine spiritual science knows that all religious proclamation before the coming of Christ Jesus is a prophecy of him.

When the ancient initiates wished to speak of the highest that was accessible to them in the spiritual world, of that which they were able to see as the origin of all things, then under the most diverse names it was of Christ Jesus that they spoke. We need only remember the Old Testament, itself a prophecy. We remember how when Moses was to lead his people he received the command: “Say to thy people that the Lord God has said unto thee what thou shalt do.” Then Moses asks: “How will the people believe me, how can I convince them? What shall I say when they ask who has sent me?” And he was commanded: “Say the ‘I-am’ has sent thee.” Read it again and compare as exactly as you can with the original text and you will see its significance. The “I-Am,” what does that mean? The “I-Am” is the name for the divine Being, the Christ-principle of man—the Being of whom man feels like a drop, a spark, when he can say “I am.” The stone, the plant, the animal cannot say “I am.” Man is the crown of creation inasmuch as he can say “I am” to himself, he can utter a name which does not hold good for anyone but the one who utters it. You alone can call yourself “I”; no one else can call you “I.” Here the soul speaks within itself in a word to which none other has entrance except a Being which comes to the soul through no external sense, on no outer path. Here Divinity speaks. Hence the name “I-Am” was given to the Godhead whose being fills the world. “Say that the ‘I-am’ has told thee !” Thus was Moses to speak to his people.

Men learn only gradually to understand the true, deep meaning of this “I-am.” Human beings did not feel themselves as individuals at once. You can still find this in the Old Testament, these men did not as yet feel individual. Even the members of the German tribes, right into the time of the Christian Church, did not feel themselves to be individualities. Think back to the Cherusci, the Teutons, etc., the German tribes in whose land modern Germany now lies. The separate members felt the tribal ego, and themselves as a part of it. A man would not have said “I am” in the clear, definite way it is said to-day; he felt himself part of an organism composed of those who were related by blood. This blood-relationship assumes the greatest proportions among the followers of the Old Testament religion. The individual felt himself sheltered in the whole folk which for him was ruled by one Ego. He knew the meaning of “I and the Father Abraham are one,” for he traced the blood-relationship back through the generations to Abraham. If he wished to go beyond his single ego he knew himself to be sheltered in the Father Abraham, from whom flows all the blood through the generations, which is the external bearer of the common Folk-Ego.

Now if this expression, which signified the highest they knew to the people of the Old Testament is compared with what has been brought through Christ Jesus then a lightning-flash illumines the whole advance that has come about through Christian evolution. “Before Abraham was, was the ‘I-am.’” What does this mean? “Before Abraham was the ‘I-am.’” (That is the right rendering of the biblical passage.) It means: Go back through all generations, and you find something in yourself, in your own individuality which is even more eternal than what flows through all blood-related generations. Before the ancestors were, was the “I-am,” that Being which draws into every human being, of which each human soul can directly feel something in itself. Not “I and the Father Abraham,” not I and a temporal Father, but I and a spiritual Father, who has no part in anything perishable, we are one! I and the Father are one. The Father dwells in each separate individual, the Divine Principle lives in him, something which was, which is, and which is to be.

Men have actually only begun after 2,000 years to feel the force of this world-impulse; in future ages, however, they will realize the significance for mankind of this forward step in the remission and evolution of the earth. What the ancient initiates tried to reach could only be realized if one went beyond the individual human being and grasped the spirit of a whole people. If the normal man heard that he would say: That is a transient entity which begins with birth and ends with death. But if he were initiated in the secrets of the Mysteries, he saw as the Folk Spirit, as the actual Being who flows through the blood of the generations, that which was only dimly sensed by the others. He could see what can be reached only in the spiritual realm and not in external reality. He could see a divine Being who flows through the blood of the generations. To stand face to face in the spirit before this God could only take place in the Mysteries.

Those who were round Christ Jesus with full understanding as his intimate pupils were conscious that a Being of divine spiritual nature stood outwardly before them, clothed in the flesh as human personality. They were sensible of Christ Jesus as the first human being to bear a Spirit who otherwise was felt only by interrelated groups, and who could only be seen in the spiritual world by initiates. He was the Firstborn among men.

The more individualized a man becomes the more he can become a bearer of Love. Where the blood links men together they love because they are led to what they should love. When man is granted individuality, when he tends and nurtures the divine spark within him then the impulses of love, the waves of love, pass from man to man out of the free heart. And thus with this new impulse man has enriched the old bond of love that is bound to the blood-tie. Love passes over gradually into spiritual love which flows from soul to soul and which will ultimately encompass all humanity in a common bond of brother-love. But Christ Jesus is the Force, the living Force, once historically and externally present, through whom for the first time mankind has been brought to the bond of brother-love. Men will learn to understand this bond of brother-love as the perfected spiritualized Christianity.

People say very lightly to-day that theosophy should seek the common kernel of truth in all religions, for the contents of all religions are the same. People who talk like that and only compare religions in order to note the abstract resemblance have no understanding of the principle of evolution. World evolution is not without meaning. All religions undoubtedly contain the truth, but inasmuch as they evolve from form to form they evolve to higher forms. It is true that if you search deeply enough you can find teachings in other religions that are also to be found in Christianity. Christianity has not brought new doctrine. The essential element of Christianity does not lie in its teachings. Take the founders of pre-Christian religions, in their case it was a matter of what they taught. If they themselves had remained unknown, their teaching would have been preserved and this would have been enough. But with Christ Jesus that is not the point. What matters is that he was there, that he has lived here on this earth in a physical body. Not belief in his teaching but in his Person—that is the essential thing. The point is that he has been beheld among mortals as the Firstborn; whom one asks: if Thou wert in the position in which I find myself, wouldst Thou feel as I do? Wouldst Thou think as I am now thinking? Will, as I am willing? That is the important thing, that he is the greatest example as Personality, with whom it is not a matter of listening to his teaching, but of looking at him himself, and seeing how he acted. And so the intimate pupils of Christ Jesus speak quite differently from the pupils and disciples of other religious founders. It is said of those: The Master has taught this or taught that. The disciples of Christ Jesus say: We are not telling you invented myths and doctrines; we say to you what our eyes have seen, our ears heard. We have heard his voice, our hands have touched the Source of Life whereby we have community with you. And Christ Jesus himself said: “You shall bear witness for me in Jerusalem, in Judea to the end of the world.” These words contain a very great significance; testimony shall you bear for unto the end of the world. That means that there will at all times be those who, just as the men in Judea and Galilee, could say out of direct knowledge who Christ was, in the sense of the Gospel.

“In the sense of the Gospel”—what does that mean? Nothing less than that he was from the beginning the Principle that lived in all creation. He says, “If you do not believe in me, believe at least in Moses, for if you believe in Moses, then you believe in me, for Moses has spoken of me.” We have to-day seen this. Moses has spoken of him by saying: The “I-Am” has said it to me; the “I-am,” who up to then was only perceptible in the spirit. The fact that the Christ has entered visibly into the world, appearing as man among men, is what distinguishes the Christ-gospel from the divine proclamations of other religions. In all of these religions spiritual wisdom was directed to something which was outside the world. Now, with Christ Jesus, something entered the world which was to be grasped as the sense-perceptible itself. What did the first disciples experience as the ideal of their wisdom? No longer merely to understand the life of the spirits in spirit-land, but how the Highest Principle could have been present on the earth in the historical Personality of Christ Jesus. It is much easier to deny divinity to this Personality than to acknowledge it. Here lies the distinction between a certain doctrine of early Christian times and what we may call inner Christianity—the distinction between Gnosis and esoteric Christianity. The Gnosis certainly recognizes Christ in his divinity, but it could not raise itself to the conception that the Word has become flesh and dwelt among us, as the writer of the John Gospel emphasizes. He says: You shall look upon Christ Jesus; not as something to be grasped purely in the invisible, but as the Word which has become flesh and dwelt among us. You must know that with this human personality a force has appeared which will work into the farthest future, which will encircle the earth with the true spiritual love as a force that lives and works in all that lives into the future.

And if man gives himself up to this force he grows into the spiritual world from which he has descended. He will ascend again to where the initiate's vision can already reach to-day. Man will divest himself of what belongs to the senses when he penetrates into the spiritual world. The candidate who was initiated in ancient times could see in retrospect the far past of spirit-life; those who are initiated in the Christian sense through receiving the impulse of Christ Jesus are enabled to see what becomes of this earthly world of ours when humanity acts in the sense of the Christ Impulse. As one can look back to earlier conditions, so, starting from the coming of Christ, one can look into the farthest future. Consciousness will alter again, there will be a new relation of the spiritual to the sense-world. Earlier initiation was directed to time past, to age-old wisdom; Christian initiation reveals the future to one who is to be initiated. That is a necessity; man is to be initiated not only in wisdom, or in feelings but in his will. For then he knows what he is to do, he can set himself a goal for the future. Ordinary everyday people set themselves aims for the afternoon, for the evening or the morning; the spiritual man is able, out of spiritual principles, to set himself distant aims which pulse through his will and make his forces quicken. To set goals before humanity means in the true, highest sense, in the sense of the original Christ principle, to grasp Christianity esoterically. In this way it was grasped by the one who has written the great principle of the initiation of the will—the writer of the Apocalypse. We misunderstand the Apocalypse, if we do not understand it as the impulse given for the future, for action and deed.

Everything that we have let pass before us to-day can be understood out of anthroposophical Spiritual Science. I have been unable to give more than a slight sketch. When through Spiritual Science one grasps what lies behind the sense-world, one can look with understanding at all that has been given in the Gospels, at what has been proclaimed in the Apocalypse. And the more deeply penetrating is one's approach to the super-sensible worlds, the more profound is what one will find in the Christian documents. The records of Christianity will appear in higher brilliance, with deeper truths when one goes to them strengthened with the spiritual vision that may be gained by the help of Anthroposophy. True it is that the simplest heart can have some feeling of what truths lie hidden in Christianity. But man's consciousness will not be satisfied for ever with a dim sensing, it will evolve higher and wish to have knowledge and under-standing. Yet even when it mounts to the highest teachings of wisdom, there will always be mysteries in Christianity still more profound. It is for the simplest heart but also for the most developed intellectuality. The initiate experiences it again as pictures, and so the naive consciousness may divine what truths are slumbering there. Man, however, will demand knowledge and not faith—and even then he will find satisfaction in Christianity. If the explanations of the Gospels are given him through Spiritual Science he will be able to find the fully satisfying content in Christianity. Hence Spiritual Science will take the place of the highest philosophies of the past. It will bear testimony to the beautiful words of Hegel quoted at the beginning: “Profoundest thought is linked with the historical external figure of Christ Jesus, and every degree of consciousness—therein lies the greatness of Christianity—can grasp it externally. At the same time, however, Christianity demands the deepest and most penetrating wisdom. Christianity is for every stage of culture, but it can meet and satisfy the highest demands.”

[ 1 ] Knowledge of the spiritual science that is aimed at in this book can be acquired by every man for himself. Descriptions of the kind given here present a thought picture of the higher worlds, and they are in a certain respect the first step towards personal vision. Man is a thought being and he can find his path to knowledge only when he makes thinking his starting-point. A picture of the higher worlds given to his intellect is not without value for him even if for the time being it is only like a story about higher facts into which he has not yet gained insight through his own perception. The thoughts that are given him represent in themselves a force that continues working in this thought world. This force will be active in him; it will awaken slumbering capacities. Whoever is of the opinion that it is superfluous to give himself up to such a thought picture is mistaken because he regards thought as something unreal and abstract. Thought is a living force, and just as for one who has knowledge, thought is present as a direct expression of what is seen in the spirit, so the imparting of this expression acts in the one to whom it is communicated as a germ that brings forth from itself the fruit of knowledge.

Anyone disdaining the application of strenuous mental exertion in the effort to attain the higher knowledge, and preferring to make use of other forces in man to that end, fails to take into account the fact that thinking is the highest of the faculties possessed by man in the world of his senses.

To him who asks, “How can I gain personal knowledge of the higher truths of spiritual science?” the answer must be given, “Begin by making yourself acquainted with what is communicated by others concerning such knowledge.” Should he reply, “I wish to see for myself; I do not wish to know anything about what others have seen,” one must answer, “It is in the very assimilating of the communications of others that the first step towards personal knowledge consists.” If he then should answer, “Then I am forced to have blind faith to begin with,” one can only reply, “In regard to something communicated it is not a case of belief or unbelief, but merely of an unprejudiced assimilation of what one hears.” The true spiritual researcher never speaks with the expectation of meeting blind faith in what he says. He merely says, “I have experienced this in the spiritual regions of existence and I narrate my experiences.” He knows also that the reception of these experiences by another and the permeation of his thoughts with such an account are living forces making for spiritual development.

[ 2 ] What is here to be considered will only be rightly viewed by one who takes into account the fact that all knowledge of the worlds of soul and spirit slumbers in the profoundest depths of the human soul. It can be brought to light through the path of knowledge. We can grasp, however, not only what we have ourselves brought to light, but also what someone else has brought up from those depths of the soul. This is so even when we have ourselves not yet made any preparations for the treading of that path of knowledge. Correct spiritual insight awakens the power of comprehension in anyone whose inner nature is not beclouded by preconceptions and prejudices. Unconscious knowledge flashes up to meet the spiritual fact discovered by another, and this “flashing up” is not blind faith but the right working of healthy human understanding. In this same healthy comprehension we should see a far better starting-point even for first hand cognition of the spiritual world than in dubious mystical contemplations or anything of a similar nature, in which we often fancy that we have something better than what is recognized by the healthy human understanding, when the results of genuine spiritual research are brought before it.

One cannot, in fact, emphasize strongly enough how necessary it is that anyone who wishes to develop his capacity for higher knowledge should undertake the earnest cultivation of his powers of thought. This emphasis must be all the more pressing because many persons who wish to become seers actually estimate lightly this earnest, self-denying labor of thinking. They say, “Thinking cannot help me reach anything; the chief thing is sensation or feeling.” In reply it must be said that no one can in the higher sense, and means in truth, become a seer who has not previously worked himself into the life of thought. In this connection a certain inner laziness plays an injurious role with many persons. They do not become conscious of this laziness because it clothes itself in a contempt of abstract thought and idle speculation. We completely misunderstand what thinking is, however, if we confuse it with a spinning of idle, abstract trains of thought. Just as this abstract thinking can easily kill supersensible knowledge, so vigorous thinking, full of life, must be the groundwork on which it is based.

[ 1 ] It would, indeed, be more comfortable if one could reach the higher power of seeing while shunning the labor of thinking. Many would like this, but in order to reach it an inner firmness is necessary, an assurance of soul to which thinking alone can lead. Otherwise there results merely a meaningless flickering of pictures here and there, a distracting display of soul phenomena that indeed gives pleasure to many, but that has nothing to do with a true penetration into the higher worlds. Further, if we consider what purely spiritual experiences take place in a man who really enters the higher world, we shall then understand that the matter has still another aspect. Absolute healthiness of the soul life is essential to the condition of being a seer. There is no better means of developing this healthiness than genuine thinking. In fact, it is possible for this healthiness to suffer seriously if the exercises for higher development are not based on thinking. Although it is true that the power of spiritual sight makes a healthy and correctly thinking man still healthier and more capable in life than he is without it, it is equally true that all attempts to develop oneself while shirking the effort of thought, all vague dreaming in this domain, lend strength to fantasy and illusion and tend to place the seeker in a false attitude towards life. No one who wishes to develop himself to higher knowledge has anything to fear if he pays heed to what is said here, but the attempt should only be made under the above pre-supposition. This pre-supposition has to do only with man's soul and spirit. To speak of any conceivable kind of injurious influence upon the bodily health is absurd under this assumption.

[ 4 ] Unfounded disbelief is indeed injurious. It works in the recipient as a repelling force. It hinders him from receiving fructifying thoughts. Not blind faith, but just this reception of the thought world of spiritual science is the prerequisite to the development of the higher senses. The spiritual researcher approaches his student with the injunction, “You are not required to believe what I tell you but to think it, to make it the content of your own thought world, then my thoughts will of themselves bring about your recognition of their truth.” This is the attitude of the spiritual researcher. He gives the stimulus. The power to accept what is said as true springs forth from the inner being of the learner himself. It is in this manner that the views of spiritual science should be studied. Anyone who has the self-control to steep his thoughts in them may be sure that after a shorter or longer period of time they will lead him to personal perception.

[ 5 ] In what has been said here, there is already indicated one of the first qualities that everyone wishing to acquire a vision of higher facts has to develop. It is the unreserved, unprejudiced laying of oneself open to what is revealed by human life or by the world external to man. If a man approaches a fact in the world around him with a judgment arising from his life up to the present, he shuts himself off by this judgment from the quiet, complete effect that the fact can have on him. The learner must be able each moment to make of himself a perfectly empty vessel into which the new world flows. Knowledge is received only in those moments in which every judgment, every criticism coming from ourselves, is silent. For example, when we meet a person, the question is not at all whether we are wiser than he. Even the most unreasoning child has something to reveal to the greatest sage. If he approaches the child with prejudgment, be it ever so wise, he pushes his wisdom like a dulled glass in front of what the child ought to reveal to him.¹

Complete inner selflessness is necessary for this yielding of oneself up to the revelations of the new world. If a man tests himself to find out in what degree he possesses this accessibility to its revelations, he will make astonishing discoveries regarding himself. Anyone who wishes to tread the path of higher knowledge must train himself to be able at any moment to obliterate himself with all his prejudices. As long as he obliterates himself the revelations of the new world flow into him. Only a high grade of such selfless surrender enables a man to receive the higher spiritual facts that surround him on all sides. We can consciously develop this capacity in ourselves. We can try, for example, to refrain from any judgment on people around us. We should obliterate within ourselves the gauge of “attractive” and “repellent,” of “stupid” or “clever,” that we are accustomed to apply and try without this gauge to understand persons purely from and through themselves. The best exercises can be made with people for whom one has an aversion. We should suppress this aversion with all our power and allow everything that they do to affect us without bias. Or, if we are in an environment that calls forth this or that judgment, we should suppress the judgment and free from criticism, lay ourselves open to impressions.²

We should allow things and events to speak to us rather than speak about them ourselves, and we also should extend this to our thought world. We should suppress in ourselves what prompts this or that thought and allow only what is outside to produce the thoughts. Only when such exercises are carried out with holiest earnestness and perseverance do they lead to the goal of higher knowledge. He who undervalues such exercises knows nothing of their worth, and he who has experience in such things knows that selfless surrender and freedom from prejudice are true producers of power. Just as heat applied to the steam boiler is transformed into the motive power of the locomotive, so do these exercises in selfless, spiritual self-surrender transforms themselves in man into the power of seeing in the spiritual worlds.

[ 6 ] By this exercise a man makes himself receptive to all that surrounds him, but to this receptivity he must allow correct valuation also to be added. As long as he is inclined to value himself too highly at the expense of the world around him, he bars himself from the approach to higher knowledge. The seeker who yields himself up to the pleasure or pain that any thing or event in the world causes him is enmeshed by such an overvaluation of himself. Through his pleasure and his pain he learns nothing about the things, but merely something about himself. If I feel sympathy with a man, I feel to begin with nothing by my relation to him. If I make myself mainly dependent on this feeling of pleasure, of sympathy, for my judgment and my conduct, I place my personality in the foreground—I obtrude it upon the world. I want to thrust myself into the world just as I am, instead of accepting the world in an unbiased way, allowing it to assert itself in accordance with the forces acting on it. In other words I am tolerant only of what harmonizes with my peculiarities. In regard to everything else I exert a repelling force. As long as a man is enmeshed by the sensible world, he acts in an especially repelling way on all influences that are non-sensory. The learner must develop in himself the capacity to conduct himself toward things and people in accordance with their own peculiar natures, and to allow each of them to count at its due worth and significance. Sympathy and antipathy, pleasure and displeasure, must be made to play quite new roles. It is not a question here of man's eradicating them, of his blunting himself to sympathy and antipathy. On the contrary, the more a man develops the capacity to refrain from allowing immediately by a judgment, an action, the finer will his sensitivity become. He will find that sympathies and antipathies take on a higher character if he curbs those he already has. Even something that is at first most unattractive has hidden qualities. It reveals them if a man does not in his conduct obey his selfish feelings. A person who has developed himself in this respect has in every way a greater delicacy of feeling than one who is undeveloped because he does not allow his own personality to make him unimpressionable. Every inclination that a man follows blindly blunts the power to see things in his environment in their true light. By obeying inclination we thrust ourselves through the environment instead of laying ourselves open to it and feeling its true worth.

[ 7 ] Man becomes independent of the changing impressions of the outer world when each pleasure and pain, each sympathy and antipathy, no longer call forth in him an egotistical response and conduct. The pleasure we feel in a thing makes us at once dependent on it. We lose ourselves in it. A man who loses himself in the pleasure or pain caused by every varying impression cannot tread the path of spiritual knowledge. He must accept pleasure and pain with equanimity. Then he ceases to lose himself in them and begins instead to understand them. A pleasure to which I surrender myself devours my being in the moment of surrender. I should use the pleasure only in order to arrive through it at an understanding of the thing that arouses pleasure in me. The important point should not be that the thing has aroused pleasure in me. I should experience the pleasure and through it the nature of the thing. The pleasure should only be an intimation to me that there is in the thing a quality capable of giving pleasure. This quality I must learn to understand. If I go no farther than the pleasure, if I allow myself to be entirely absorbed in it, then it is only myself who lives in it. If the pleasure is only the opportunity for me to experience a quality or property of the thing itself, I enrich my inner being through this experience. To the seeker, pleasure and displeasure, joy and pain, must be opportunities for learning about things. The seeker does not become blunted to pleasure or pain through this. He raises himself above them in order that they may reveal to him the nature of the things. By developing himself in this respect, he will learn to understand what instructors pleasure and pain are. He will feel with every being and thereby receive the revelation of its inner nature. The seeker never says to himself merely, “Oh, how I suffer!” or “Oh, how glad I am!” but always, “How does suffering speak? How does joy speak?” He eliminates the element of self in order that pleasure and joy from the outer world may work on him. By this means there develops in a man a completely new manner of relating himself to things. Formerly he responded to this or that impression by this or that action, only because the impressions caused him joy or unhappiness. Now he causes pleasure and displeasure to become also the organs by which things tell him what they themselves really are in their own nature. Pleasure and pain change from mere feelings within him to organs of sense by which the external world is perceived. Just as the eye does not act itself when it sees something, but causes the hand to act, so pleasure and pain do not bring about anything in the spiritual seeker insofar as he employs them as means of knowledge, but they receive impressions, and what is experienced through pleasure and displeasure causes the action. When a man uses pleasure and displeasure in such a way that they become organs of transmission, they build up for him within his soul the actual organs through which the soul world opens up to view. The eye can serve the body only by being an organ for the transmission of sense impressions. Pleasure and pain become the eyes of the soul when they cease to be of value merely to themselves and begin to reveal to one's soul the other soul outside it.

[ 8 ] By means of the qualities mentioned, the seeker for knowledge places himself in a condition that allows what is really present in the world around him to act upon him without disturbing influences from his own peculiarities. He has also to fit himself into the spiritual world around him in the right way because he is as a thinking being a citizen of the spiritual world. He can be this in the right way only if during mental activity he makes his thoughts run in accordance with the eternal laws of truth, the laws of the spiritland. Only thus can that land act on him and reveal its facts to him. A man never reaches the truth as long as he gives himself up to the thoughts continually coursing through his ego. If he permits this, his thoughts take a course imposed on them by the fact of their coming into existence within the bodily nature. The thought world of a man who gives himself up to a mental activity determined primarily by his physical brain looks irregular and confused. In it a thought enters, breaks off, is driven out of the field by another. Anyone who tests this by listening to a conversation between two people, or who observes himself in an unprejudiced way, will gain an idea of this mass of confused thoughts. As long as a man devotes himself only to the calls of the life of the senses, his confused succession of thoughts will always be set right again by the facts of reality. I may think ever so confusedly but in my actions everyday facts force upon me the laws corresponding to the reality. My mental picture of a city may be most confused, but if I wish to walk along a certain road in the city, I must accommodate myself to the conditions it imposes on me. The mechanic can enter his workshop with ever so varied a whirl of ideas, but the laws of his machines compel him to adopt the correct procedure in his work. Within the world of the senses facts exercise their continuous corrective on thought. If I come to a false opinion by thinking about a physical phenomenon or the shape of a plant, the reality confronts me and sets my thinking right.

It is quite different when I consider my relations to the higher regions of existence. They reveal themselves to me only if I enter their worlds with already strictly controlled thinking. There my thinking must give me the right, the sure impulse, otherwise I cannot find proper paths. The spiritual laws prevailing within these worlds are not condensed so as to become sensibly perceptible, and therefore they are unable to exert on me the compulsion described above. I am able to obey these laws only when they are allied to my own as those of a thinking being. Here I must be my own sure guide. The seeker for knowledge must therefore make his thinking something that is strictly regulated in itself. His thoughts must by degrees disaccustom themselves entirely from taking the ordinary daily course. They must in their whole sequence take on the inner character of the spiritual world. He must be able constantly to keep watch over himself in this respect and have himself in hand. With him, one thought must not link itself arbitrarily with another, but only in the way that corresponds with the severely exact contents of the thought world. The transition from one idea to another must correspond with the strict laws of thought. The man as thinker must be, as it were, constantly a copy of these thought laws. He must shut out from his train of thought all that does not flow out of these laws. Should a favorite thought present itself to him, he must put it aside if it disturbs the proper sequence. If a personal feeling tries to force upon his thoughts a direction not inherent in them, he must suppress it.

Plato required those who wished to attend his school first to go through a course of mathematical training. Mathematics with its strict laws, which do not accommodate themselves to the course of ordinary sensory phenomena, form a good preparation for the seeker of knowledge. If he wishes to make progress in the study of mathematics, he has to renounce all personal, arbitrary choice, all disturbances. The seeker prepares himself for his task by overcoming through his own choice all the arbitrary thinking that naturally rules in him. He learns thereby to follow purely the demands of thought. So, too, he must learn to do this in all thinking intended to serve spiritual knowledge. This thought life must itself be a copy of undisturbed mathematical judgments and conclusions. The seeker must strive wherever he goes and in whatever he does to be able to think after this manner. Then there will flow into him the intrinsic characteristic laws of the spirit world that pass over and through him without a trace as long as his thinking bears its ordinary confused character. Regulated thinking brings him from sure starting points to the most hidden truths. What has been said, however, must not be looked at in a one-sided way. Although mathematics act as a good discipline for the mind, one can arrive at pure healthy, vital thinking without mathematics.

[ 9 ] What the seeker of knowledge strives for in his thinking, he must also strive for in his actions. He must be able to act in accordance with the laws of the nobly beautiful and the eternally true without any disturbing influences from his personality. These laws must be able constantly to direct him. Should he begin to do something he has recognized as right and find his personal feelings not satisfied by that action, he must not for that reason forsake the road he has entered on. On the other hand, he must not pursue it just because it gives him joy, if he finds that it is not in accordance with the laws of the eternally beautiful and true. In everyday life people allow their actions to be decided by what satisfies them personally, by what bears fruit for themselves. In so doing they force upon the world's events the direction of their personality. They do not bring to realization the true that is traced out in the laws of the spirit world, rather do they realize the demands of their self-will. We only act in harmony with the spiritual world when we follow its laws alone. From what is done only out of the personality, there result no forces that can form a basis for spiritual knowledge. The seeker of knowledge may not ask only, “What brings me advantages; what will bring me success?” He must also be able to ask, “What have I recognized as the good?” Renunciation of the fruits of action for his personality, renunciation of all self-will; these are the stern laws that he must prescribe for himself. Then he treads the path of the spiritual world, his whole being penetrated by these laws. He becomes free from all compulsion from the sense world; his spirit man raises itself out of the sensory sheath. He thus makes actual progress on the path towards the spiritual and thus he spiritualizes himself. One may not say, “Of what use to me are the resolutions to follow purely the laws of the true when I am perhaps mistaken concerning what is true?” The important thing is the striving, and the spirit in which one strives. Even when the seeker is mistaken, he possesses, in his very striving for the true, a force that turns him away from the wrong road. Should he be mistaken, this force seizes him and guides him to the right road. The very objection, “But I may be mistaken,” is itself harmful unbelief. It shows that the man has no confidence in the power of the true. The important point is that he should not presume to decide on his aims in accordance with his own egotistical views, but that he should selflessly yield himself up to the guidance of the spirit itself. It is not the self-seeking will of man that can prescribe for the true. On the contrary, what is true must itself become lord in man, must permeate his whole being, make him a copy of the eternal laws of the spiritland. He must fill himself with these eternal laws in order to let them stream out into life.

Just as the seeker of knowledge must be able to have strict control of thinking, so he must also have control of his will. Through this he becomes in all modesty—without presumption—a messenger of the world of the true and the beautiful. Through this he ascends to be a participant in the spirit world. Through this he is lifted from stage to stage of development because one cannot reach the spiritual life by merely seeing it. On the contrary, one has to reach it by experiencing it, by living it.

[ 10 ] If the seeker of knowledge observes the laws here described, his soul experiences relating to the spiritual world will take on an entirely new form. He will no longer live merely within them. They will no longer have a significance merely for his personal life. They will develop into soul perceptions of the higher world. In this soul the feelings of pleasure and displeasure, of joy and pain, do not live for themselves only, but grow into soul organs, just as in his body eyes and ears do not lead a life for themselves alone but selflessly allow external impressions to pass through them. Thereby the seeker of knowledge wins that calmness and assurance in his soul constitution necessary for research in the spiritual world. A great pleasure will no longer make him merely jubilant, but may be the messenger to him of qualities in the world that have hitherto escaped him. It will leave him calm, and through the calm the characteristics of the pleasure-giving beings will reveal themselves to him. Pain will no longer merely fill him with grief, but be able to tell him also what the qualities are of the being that causes the pain. Just as the eye does not desire anything for itself but shows man the direction of the road he has to take, so will pleasure and pain guide the soul safely along its path. This is the state of balance of soul that the seeker of knowledge must reach. The less pleasure and pain exhaust themselves in the waves that they throw up in the inner life of the seeker of knowledge, the more will they form eyes for the supersensible world. As long as a man lives in pleasure and pain he cannot gain knowledge by means of them. When he learns how to live by means of them, when he withdraws his feeling of self from them, then they become his organs of perception and he sees by means of them, attaining through them to knowledge. It is incorrect to think that the seeker of knowledge becomes a dry, colorless being, incapable of experiencing joy and sorrow. Joy and sorrow are present in him, but when he seeks knowledge in the spiritual world, they are present in a transformed shape; they have become eyes and ears.

[ 11 ] As long as we live in a personal relationship with the world, things reveal only what links them with our personality. This, however, is their transitory path. If we withdraw ourselves from our transitory part and live with our feeling of self, with our “I,” in our permanent part, then our transitory part becomes an intermediary for us. What reveals itself through it is an imperishable, an eternal in the things. The seeker of knowledge must be able to establish this relationship between his own eternal part and the eternal in the things. Even before he begins other exercises of the kind described, and also during them, he should direct his thought to this imperishable part. When I observe a stone, a plant, an animal or a man, I should be able to remember that in each of them an eternal expresses itself. I should be able to ask myself, “What is the permanent that lives in the transitory stone, in the transitory man? What will outlast the transitory sensory appearance?” We ought not to think that to direct the spirit to the eternal in this way destroys our careful consideration of, and sense for, the qualities of everyday affairs and estranges us from the immediate realities. On the contrary, every leaf, every little insect will unveil to us innumerable mysteries when not only our eyes but through the eyes of spirit is directed upon them. Every sparkle, every shade of color, every cadence will remain vividly perceptible to the senses. Nothing will be lost, but in addition, unlimited new life will be gained. Indeed, the person who does not understand how to observe even the tiniest thing with the eye, will only attain to pale, bloodless thoughts, not to spiritual sight.

It depends upon the attitude of mind we acquire in this direction. What stage we shall succeed in reaching will depend on our capacities. We have only to do what is right and leave everything else to evolution. It must be enough for us at first to direct our minds to the permanent. If we do this, the knowledge of the permanent will awaken in us through this. We must wait until it is given, and it is given at the right time to each one who with patience waits and works. A man soon notices during such exercises what a mighty transformation takes place within him. He learns to consider each thing as important or unimportant only insofar as he recognizes it to be related to a permanent, to an eternal. He comes to a valuation and estimate of the world different from the one he has hitherto had. His whole feeling takes on a new relationship toward the entire surrounding world. The transitory no longer attracts him merely for its own sake as formerly. It becomes for him a member, an image of the eternal, and this eternal, living in all things, he learns to love. It becomes familiar, just as the transitory was formerly familiar to him. This again does not cause his estrangement from life. He only learns to value each thing according to its true significance. Even the vain trifles of life will not pass him by quite without trace, but the man seeking after the spiritual no longer loses himself in them, but recognizes them at their limited worth. He sees them in their true light. He is a poor discerner of the spiritual who would go wandering in the clouds losing sight of life. From his high summit a true discerner with his power of clear survey and his just and healthy feeling for everything will know how to assign to each thing its proper place.

[ 12 ] Thus there opens out to the seeker of knowledge the possibility of ceasing to obey only the unreliable influences of the external world of the senses that turn his will now here, now there. Through higher knowledge he has seen the eternal being of things. By means of the transformations of his inner world he has gained the capacity for perceiving this eternal being. For the seeker of knowledge the following thoughts have a special weight. When he acts out of himself, he is then conscious of acting also out of the eternal being of things because the things give utterance to him in their being. He, therefore, acts in harmony with the eternal world order when he directs his action out of the eternal living within him. He thus knows himself no longer merely as a being impelled by things. He knows that he impels them according to the law implanted within them that have become the laws of his own being. This ability to act out of his inner being can only be an ideal towards which he strives. The attainment of the goal lies in the far distance, but the seeker of knowledge must have the will to recognize clearly this road. This is his will to freedom, for freedom is action out of one's inner being. Only he may act out of his inner being who draws his motives from the eternal. A being who does not do this, acts according to other motives than those implanted in things. Such a person opposes the world order, and the world order must then prevail against him. That is to say, what he plans to carry through by his will cannot in the last resort take place. He cannot become free. The arbitrary will of the individual being annihilates itself through the effects of its deeds.

[ 13 ] Whoever is able to work upon his inner life in such a way climbs upwards from stage to stage in spiritual knowledge. The reward of his exercises will be the unfolding of certain vistas of the supersensible world to his spiritual perception. He learns the real meaning of the truths communicated about this world, and he will receive confirmation of them through his own experience. If this stage is reached, he encounters an experience that can only come through treading this path. Something occurs whose significance can only now become clear to him. Through the great spiritual guiding powers of the human race there is bestowed on him what is called initiation. He becomes a disciple of wisdom. The less one sees in such initiation something that consists in an outer human relationship, the more correct will be his conception of it. What the seeker of knowledge now experiences can only be indicated here. He receives a new home. He becomes thereby a conscious dweller in the supersensible world. The source of spiritual insight now flows to him from a higher region. The light of knowledge from this time forth does not shine upon him from without, but he is himself placed at its fountainhead where the problems that the world offers receive a new illumination. Henceforth he holds converse no longer with the things that are shaped by the spirit, but with the shaping spirit itself. At the moments of attaining spiritual knowledge, the personality's own life exists now only in order to be a conscious image of the eternal. Doubts about the spirit that could formerly arise in him vanish because only he can doubt who is deluded by things regarding the spirit ruling in them. Since the disciple of wisdom is able to hold intercourse with the spirit itself, each false form vanishes in which he had previously imagined the spirit. The false form under which one conceives the spirit is superstition. The initiate has passed beyond all superstition because he has knowledge of the spirit's true form. Freedom from the prejudices of the personality, of doubt, and of superstition—these are the characteristics of the seeker who has attained to discipleship on the path of higher knowledge. We must not confuse this state in which the personality becomes one with the all-embracing spirit of life, with an absorption into the universal spirit that annihilates the personality. Such a disappearance does not take place in a true development of the personality. Personality continues to be preserved as such in the relationship into which it enters with the spirit world. It is not the subjection of the personality, but its highest development that occurs. If we wish to have a simile for this coincidence or union of the individual spirit with the all-encompassing spirit, we cannot choose that of many different coinciding circles that are lost in one circle, but we must choose the picture of many circles, each of which has a quite distinct shade of color. These variously colored circles coincide, but each separate shade preserves its color existence within the whole. Not one loses the fullness of its individual power.

[ 14 ] The further description of the path will not be given here. It is given as far as possible in my Occult Science, an Outline, which forms a continuation of this book.

[ 15 ] What is said here about the path of spiritual knowledge can all too easily, through failure to understand it, tempt us to consider it as a recommendation to cultivate certain moods of soul that would lead us to turn away from the immediate, joyous and strenuously active, experience of life. As against this, it must be emphasized that the particular attitude of the soul that renders it fit to experience directly the reality of the spirit, cannot be extended as a general demand over the entire life. It is possible for the seeker after spiritual existence to bring his soul for the purpose of research into the necessary condition of being withdrawn from the realities of the senses, without that withdrawal estranging him from the world. On the other hand, however, it must be recognized that a knowledge of the spiritual world, not merely a knowledge gained by treading the path, but also a knowledge acquired through grasping the truths of spiritual science with the unprejudiced, healthy human intellect, leads also to a higher moral status in life, to a knowledge of sensory existence that is in accord with the truth, to certainty in life, and to inward health of the soul.

• 1. One can very well see, precisely from what is stated here, that in the requirement of “unreservedly laying oneself open” there is no question of shutting out one's own judgment or of giving oneself up to blind faith. Anything of that sort would quite obviously have no sense or meaning in regard to a child.
• 2. This open-minded and uncritical laying of ourselves open has nothing whatever to do with blind faith. The important thing is not that we should believe blindly in anything, but that we should not put a blind judgment in the place of the living impression.

The next three lectures of this winter's cycle will have more of an inner connection than the others, that is: Today's upon the origin of suffering, the next upon the origin of evil, and the following: Illness and Death. Yet each of these three lectures will be complete and comprehensible in itself.

When man looks at the life around him, when he examines himself and tries to investigate the meaning and significance of life, he finds before life's door a remarkable figure—in part a warning figure, in part a completely enigmatic one: Suffering.

Suffering, so closely bound up with what we shall consider in the next lectures on evil, illness and death, seems to man sometimes to grip so deeply into life as to be connected with its very greatest problems. Hence the problem of suffering has occupied the human race since earliest times, and whenever there is an endeavour to estimate the value of life and to find its meaning, people have above all tried to recognize the role played by suffering and pain.

In the midst of a happy life suffering appears as a destroyer of peace, as a damper-down of the pleasure and hope of life. Those who see the value of life in pleasure and happiness are those who feel the most this peace-destroyer, suffering. How else would it be explicable that in a people so full of joy and happiness of life as the Greeks, such a dark spot in the starry heavens of the beauty of Greece could arise as the saying of the wise Silenus? Silenus in the train of Dionysos asks: What is the best for man? The best for man is not to be born, and if he is once born, then the second best is to die soon after birth. Perhaps you know that Friedrich Nietzsche in seeking to grasp the birth of tragedy out of the spirit of ancient Greece linked on to this saying in order to show how, on the basis of Greek wisdom and art, suffering and man's sadness over suffering and all connected with it play a role full of significance.

But now we find another, hardly much later, saying from ancient Greece. It is a short phrase which shows how a glimmering arises that the pain and sorrow of the world do not play merely an unhappy role. It is the expression which we find in one of the earliest Greek tragedians, Aeschylos, that out of suffering grows knowledge. Here are two things brought together, one of which no doubt a great part of mankind would like to blot out, whereas it looks on the other, knowledge, as one of the highest possessions of life.

People at all times have believed that they must recognise that life and suffering are deeply entwined—at least the life of modern man and of the higher creatures on our globe. Thus at the beginning of the Biblical story of Creation the knowledge of good and evil and suffering are intimately bound up with one another. Yet we also see on the other hand, in the midst of the Old Testament conception how, out of a dark view of sorrow, a bright light-filled one dawns. When we look around us in the Old Testament and study the Creation story in regard to this question it is clear that suffering and sin were brought together, that suffering was looked on as the consequence of sin. In the modern mode of thinking, where the materialistic concept of the world penetrates everywhere, it is no longer easy to grasp how the cause of suffering can be sought for in sin. But through spiritual research and the power to look back into earlier ages, it will be found to be not so meaningless to believe in such a connection. The next lecture will show us that it is possible to see a connection between evil and suffering. But for ancient Jewry it was impossible to explain the cause of suffering. We see in the centre of this view that brings suffering and sin into connection the remarkable figure of Job. It is a figure which shows us, or is meant to show us, how suffering and unspeakable pain can be connected with a completely guiltless life, how there can be unearned pain and suffering. We see dawning in the consciousness of this unique tragic personality, Job, yet another connection of pain and suffering, a connection with the ennobling of man. Suffering appears to us then as a testing, as the root of a climbing upwards, of a higher development. Suffering in the sense of this Job-tragedy need in no way have its origin in evil, it can itself be first cause, so that what proceeds from it represents a more perfect phase of human life. All of that lies somewhat remote from our modern thinking, and the generality of our modern educated public can find but little connection with it. You need only think back in your life, however, and you will see how perfection and suffering very often appeared together and how mankind has always been aware of this connection. Such a consciousness will form a bridge to what we are to consider today in the light of spiritual investigation, namely, the connection between suffering and spirituality.

Remember how in some tragedy the tragic hero has stood before your eyes. The poet leads the hero again and again through suffering and conflicts full of suffering until he comes to the point where pain reaches its climax and finds relief in the end of the physical body. Then there lives in the soul of the spectator not alone sympathy with the tragic hero and sadness that such sufferings are possible, but it appears that from the sight of suffering man was exalted and built up, that he has seen the suffering submerged in death and that out of death has come the assurance that victory exists over pain. Yes, even over death. Through nothing in art can this highest victory of man, this victory of his highest forces and impulses, victory of the noblest impulses of his nature be brought so sublimely before the eyes as by a tragedy. When the experience of pain and suffering has preceded the consciousness of this victory, and, from the deeds that can again and again take place before the eyes of the spectator in the theatre, we look up to what is still felt by a great part of modern humanity as the highest fact of all historical evolution; when we look up to the Event which divides our chronology into two parts—to the Redemption through Christ Jesus—then it can strike us that one of the greatest upliftings, one of the greatest upbuildings and hopes of victory which has ever taken root in the heart of man has sprung from the world historic sight of suffering. The greatly significant feelings, cutting deep into the human heart, of the Christian world-conception, these feelings which for so many are the hope and strength of life, give the assurance that there is an eternity, a victory over death. All these supporting and uplifting feelings spring from the sight of a universal suffering, a suffering that befalls innocence, a suffering occasioned through no personal sin.

So we see here too that a highest element in the consciousness of humanity is linked to suffering. And when we see how these things, small and great, ever again rise to the surface, how they actually form the elemental part of the whole of human nature and consciousness, then it must indeed seem to us as if in some way suffering is connected with the highest in man.

This was only meant to point to a basic impulse of the human soul which continually asserts itself and which stands as a great consolation for the fact that there is suffering. If we now enter more intimately into human life we shall find phenomena which show us the significance of suffering. We shall have to point here symptomatically to a phenomenon which perhaps seems hardly connected; but, if we nevertheless examine human nature more closely, we shall see that this phenomenon too points to the significance of certain aspects of suffering.

Think once more of a work of art, a tragedy. It can only arise if the poet's soul opens wide, goes out of itself and learns to feel another's pain, to lay the burden of a stranger's suffering upon his own soul. And now compare this feeling not perhaps just with a comedy—for then we should get no good comparison—but with something which in a certain way also belongs to art, with the mood which gives rise to caricature. This mood, perhaps with ridicule and derision, draws in caricature what goes on in the soul of the other and appears in external action. Let us try to put before us two men of whom the one conceives an event or a human being tragically, while the other grasps it as caricature. It is not a mere comparison, not a mere picture when we say that the soul of the tragic poet and artist appears as if it went out of itself and became wider and wider. What, however, is revealed to the soul through this expansion? The understanding of the other person. One understands the life of another through nothing so much as by taking upon one's own soul the burden of his pain. But what must one do if one wants to caricature? One must not go into what the other feels, one must set oneself above it, drive it away, and this driving from oneself is the basis of the caricature. No-one will deny that just as through tragic compassion the other personality becomes deeply comprehensible, what appears in the caricature is what lives in the personality of the caricaturist. We learn to know the superiority, the wit, the power of observation, the phantasy of the one caricaturing rather than the one caricatured.

If we have shown in some way that suffering is nevertheless connected with something deep in human nature then we may hope that through a grasp of the actual nature of man the origin of pain and suffering can also become clear to us.

The spiritual science which we represent here takes its starting point from the fact that all existence has its origin in the Spirit. A more materialistic view sees Spirit only as a crowning of perceptible creation, above all as a fruit of physical nature from which it proceeds.

In the last two lectures (11 and 25th October 1906. The former is not translated. The latter is “The Occult Significance of Blood”.) it was shown how in the light of spiritual research we have to picture the whole man—the physical or bodily, the man of soul and the spiritual man. What we can see with our eyes, perceive externally through the senses, what materialism considers the sole being of nature, is to spiritual research nothing but the first member of the human being—the physical body. We know that in respect of its substances and laws this is common to man with all the rest of the lifeless world. But we know too that this physical body is called to life through what we call the etheric or life-body. We know this because for spiritual research the life-body is not a speculation but a reality which can be seen when the higher senses slumbering in man have become open. We look upon the second part of the human being, the etheric body, as something which man has in common with the rest of the plant world. We regard the astral body as the third member of man's being; it is the bearer of sympathy and antipathy, of desire and passion which man has in common with the animal. And then we see that man's self-consciousness, the possibility of saying “I” to oneself, is the crown of human nature, which man has in common with no other being. We see that the “I” arises as the blossoming of the three bodies, physical, etheric and astral. So we see a connection of these four bodies to which spiritual research has always pointed. The Pythagorean “quadrature” is nothing else than the four-foldness, physical body, etheric body, astral body and I or ego. Those who have occupied themselves more deeply with spiritual science know that the I works out from itself what we call Spirit-Self or Manas, Life-Spirit or Budhi, and the actual Spirit-Man or Atma.

That is once more put before you so that we may orientate ourselves in the right way. Man therefore appears to the spiritual investigator as a four-membered being. Now comes the point where genuine spiritual research, which sees behind the beings with the eyes of the spirit and penetrates to the deeper laws of existence, differs profoundly from a purely external way of observing. It is true that as man stands before us we say too that chemical and physical laws must be the foundation of the body, of life, the foundation of sensation, consciousness, self-consciousness. But when we penetrate existence with spiritual science we see that things are just the reverse. Consciousness, which arises out of the physical body, which in the sense of phenomenon appears to be the last, is to us the original creative element. At the base of all things we perceive the conscious Spirit and therefore the spiritual researcher sees how senseless is the question: Where does the Spirit come from?—That can never be the question. It is only possible to ask: Where does matter come from? For spiritual research matter has sprung from Spirit, is nothing but densified Spirit.

As a comparison, picture a vessel with water in it. Think of one part of the water being cooled down until it turns to ice. Now what is the ice? It is water, water in another form, in a solid condition. This is the way that spiritual research looks at matter. As water is related to ice so is Spirit to matter. As ice is no more than a result of water, so is matter nothing else than a result of Spirit, and as ice can become water again, so can Spirit originate again out of matter, can proceed from matter, or, reversed, matter can again dissolve into Spirit.

Thus we see Spirit in an eternal circulation. We see the Spirit which flows through the whole universe, we see material beings arise out of it, densifying, and we see again on the other hand beings which cause the solid to evaporate again. In all that surrounds us today as matter is something into which Spirit has flowed and become rigid. In every material being we see rigidified Spirit. As we need only bring the necessary heat to the ice to turn it into water again, so we need only bring the necessary Spirit to the beings around us to renew the Spirit in them. We speak of a rebirth of the Spirit which has flowed into matter and is hardened there. Thus does the astral body—the bearer of likes and dislikes, of desires and passions—appear to us not as something which could originate from physical existence, but as the same element as lives in us as conscious Spirit, as what appears to us as the element flowing through the whole world and being dissolved again out of matter, through a process of human life. What appears as last is at the same time the first. It has produced the physical body and likewise the etheric body, and when both have reached a certain degree of development appears to be born out of them anew.

This is how spiritual research looks at things. Now these three members—we only use words for clarifying—appear to us under three distinct names. We perceive matter in a certain form, appearing to us in the outer world in a certain way. We speak of the Form, of the shape of matter and of the Life which appears in the Form and lastly of Consciousness which appears within the Life. So we speak as of three stages: physical body, etheric body, astral body, and also of three stages: Form, Life, Consciousness. Only from Consciousness does Self-consciousness arise. We shall not occupy ourselves with that today but only in our next lecture.

People at all times and particularly in our own day have pondered much over the actual meaning of life and its origin. Modern natural science has been able to give few clues to the meaning and nature of life. One thing, however, the more recent natural science has accepted for some time, something which has been expounded again and again as a fact by spiritual science also. This is namely: Life within the physical world is fundamentally distinguished as to substance from the so-called lifeless only through the manifoldness and complexity of its formation. Life can be present only where a much more complicated structure is found than exists in the realm of the lifeless. You know, perhaps, that the basic substance of life is a kind of albuminous substance for which the expression “living albumen” would not be out of place. This living albumen differs essentially from dead lifeless albumen through one characteristic. Living albumen disintegrates directly it is forsaken by life. Dead albumen, that for instance of a dead hen's-egg, cannot be kept for any length of time in the same condition. It is the essential character of living substance that the moment when life has left it, it can no longer hold its parts together. Although we cannot go further into the nature of life today, yet one phenomenon can point to something that is deeply connected with life and characterises it. And what is this characteristic? It is just this peculiarity of living substance that it disintegrates when life has gone out of it. Think of a substance denuded of life—it decays, it has the peculiarity of dispersing. What then does life do? It sets itself again and again against disintegration; thus life preserves. That is the youth-giving element of life: it ever resists what would take place in its substance. Life in substance means: resistance to decay. Compare with life the external process of death and it will be clear that life does not show what characterises the process of death—the disintegration in itself. Far more does it ever and again rescue substance from decay, sets itself against decay. Thus, inasmuch as life ever renews the substance which is falling to pieces in itself, it is the foundation of physical existence and of consciousness.

This has not merely been a verbal explanation; it would have been one if what it signifies were not continuously carried on. You need, however, only observe a living substance and you will find that it continually takes up matter from outside, incorporates it into itself, inasmuch as portions of itself become destroyed: a process through which life perpetually works against destruction. We have, in fact, to do with a reality.

To throw off old material and form new again—that is life. But life is not yet sensation, not yet consciousness. It is a childish kind of imagination that makes many scientists have such a false idea of sensation. To the plants to which we must ascribe life, they also attribute sensation. If one says that because many plants close their leaves and flowers on an external stimulation, as if they felt it, then one could also say that blue litmus paper, which goes red through outer stimulus, has sensation. We could also ascribe sensation to chemical substances because they react to certain influences. But that is not enough. To have sensation the stimulus must be reflected inwardly. Only then can we speak of the first element of consciousness, of sensation and feeling. And what is this first element of consciousness? When in further investigation of the world we raise ourselves to the next higher stage and try to comprehend the nature of consciousness, we shall not do so immediately, but shall nevertheless feel it dawn a little into the soul, just as we could explain a little the nature of life. Consciousness can arise only where there is life, can spring only from life. If life arises out of apparently lifeless matter, since the combination of the material is so complicated that it cannot preserve itself and must be seized upon by life in order to prevent continual decay, then consciousness appears to us within life as something higher. Whenever life is continually destroyed as life, where a being stands close to the threshold between life and death, where life threatens all the time to vanish again from the living substance, then consciousness arises. And as in the first place substance would have disintegrated if life did not permeate it, so now life seems to us to be dissipated if a new principle, consciousness, is not added to it. We can grasp consciousness only by saying: Just as life is there in order to renew certain processes, for lack of which matter would decay, so is consciousness there to renew again and again the life that would otherwise die.

Not every life can always renew itself inwardly in this way. It must have reached a higher stage, if it is to renew itself from itself. Only a life that is so strong in itself that it perpetually bears death within can awaken to consciousness. Or does no life exist which in every moment has death in itself? You need only look at the life of man and remember what was said in the last lecture: “Blood is a very special fluid”. Human life renews itself continually out of the blood, and a clever German psychologist has said that man has a double (Doppelgänger) from whom he continually draws strength. But the blood, has another power as well: it continually creates death. When the blood has deposited the life-awakening substances on the bodily organs, then it carries the life-destroying forces up again to the heart and lungs. What flows back into the lungs is poisonous to life and makes life continually perish.

When a being works against disintegration and decay then it is a living being. If it is able to let death arise within it and to transform this death continually into life, then consciousness arises. Consciousness is the strongest of all forces that we encounter. Consciousness, or conscious spirit, is that force which out of death, which must be created in the midst of life, eternally makes life arise again. Life is a process which is concerned with an outer world and an inner world. Consciousness, however, is a process which has to do only with an inner world. A substance which can die externally cannot become conscious. A substance can only become conscious that creates death in its own centre and overcomes it. Thus death—as a gifted German theosophist has said—is not only the root of life but also the root of consciousness.

When we have grasped this connection then we need only look at the phenomena with open eyes and pain will appear comprehensible. All that gives rise to consciousness is originally pain. When life manifests externally, when life, air, warmth, cold encounter a living being then these outer elements work upon it. But as long as they only work upon it, as long as they are taken up by the living being, as they are taken up by the plant as bearer of internal life-processes, so long does no consciousness arise. Consciousness first arises when these outer elements come into opposition with the inner life and a destruction takes place. Consciousness must result from destruction of life. Without partial death a ray of light is not able to penetrate a living being, the process can never be stimulated in the living being from with consciousness arises. But when light penetrates into the surface of life, produces a partial destruction, breaks down the inner substances and forces, then that mysterious process arises which takes place everywhere in the external world in a quite definite way. Picture to yourselves that the intelligent forces of the world had ascended up to a height where outer light and outer air were foreign to them. They remained in harmony with them only for a time, then they came to completion and an opposition arose. If you could follow this process with the eye of the spirit, then you could see how when a ray of light penetrates a simple being, the skin becomes somewhat transformed and a tiny eye appears. What is it therefore that first glimmers there in the substance? In what does this fine destruction (for it is destruction) manifest? In pain, which is nothing else than an expression for the destruction. Whenever life comes up against external nature destruction takes place, and when it becomes greater even produces death. Out of pain consciousness is born. The very process which has created your eye would have been a destructive process if it had gained the upper hand over the nature that had developed up to the human being. But it has seized upon only a small part with which out of the destruction and partial death it could create that mirroring of the external world which we call consciousness. Consciousness within matter is thus born out of suffering, out of pain.

When we realise this connection of suffering and pain with the conscious spirit that surrounds us, we shall well understand the words of a Christian initiate who knew such things fundamentally and intuitively, and saw pain at the basis of all conscious life. They are the words: In all Nature sighs every creature in pain, full of earnest expectation to attain the state of the child of God.—You find that in the eighth chapter of Paul's Epistle to the Romans as a wonderful expression of this foundation of consciousness in pain. Thus one can also understand how thoughtful men have ascribed to pain such an all-important role. I should like to quote just one example. A great German philosopher says that when one looks at all Nature around one, then pain and suffering seem to be expressed everywhere on her countenance. Yes, when one observes the higher animals they show to those who look more deeply an expression full of suffering. And who would not admit that many an animal physiognomy looks like the manifestation of a deeply hidden pain?

If we look at the matter as we have just described it then we see the origin of consciousness out of pain, so that a being who builds consciousness out of destruction causes a higher element to arise from the decay of life, creates itself continuously out of death. If the living could not suffer, never could consciousness arise. If there were no death in the world never in the visible world could Spirit exist. That is the strength of the Spirit—that it remoulds destruction into something still higher than life, and so in the midst of life forms a higher state, consciousness. Ever further and further we see the various experiences of pain develop to the organs of consciousness. One sees it in the animals which for an external defence have only a reflex consciousness, just as man shuts the eye as protection against a danger to it. When the reflex movement is no longer enough to protect the inner life, when the stimulus becomes too strong, then the inner force of resistance rises up and gives birth to the senses, sensation, eye and ear. You know perhaps from many a disagreeable experience, or perhaps even instinctively, that this is so. You know indeed out of a higher state of your consciousness that what has been said is a truth. An example will make it still clearer. When do you feel certain interior organs of your organism? You go through life and do not feel your stomach or liver or lungs. You feel none of your organs as long as they are sound. You feel them only when they give you pain, and you really know that you have this or that organ only when it hurts you, when you feel that something is out of order there and that a destruction-process is beginning.

If we take this example and explanation then we see that conscious life is continually born from pain. If pain arises in life it gives birth to sensation and consciousness. This giving birth, this bringing forth of a higher element, is reflected again in consciousness as pleasure, and there would never be a pleasure unless there had been a previous pain. In the life below which just raises itself from physical material, there is as yet no pleasure. But when pain has produced consciousness and works further creatively as consciousness, then this creating is on a higher level and is expressed in the feeling of pleasure. Creation is based on desire and pleasure. Pleasure can only appear where inner or outer creation is possible. In some way creation lies at the base of every happiness, as every unhappiness is based on the necessity of creation.

Take something that expresses suffering on a lower level, the feeling of hunger, for instance, which can destroy life. You meet this with nourishment, and the food taken in becomes enjoyment because it is the means of enhancing, producing life. So you see that higher creation, pleasure, arises on the basis of pain. Thus before the pleasure there is suffering. The philosophy of Schopenhauer and Eduard von Hartmann can therefore say with justification that suffering is a common feeling of life. However, they do not go back far enough, to the origin of suffering, do not come to the point where suffering is to evolve to something higher. The origin of suffering is found where consciousness arises out of life, where spirit is born out of life.

And therefore we can also understand what dawns in man's soul of the connection of suffering and pain with knowledge and consciousness, and we could still show how a nobler, more perfect state is born out of pain.

Those who have heard my lectures fairly often will remember the allusion to the existence of a sort of initiation, whereby a higher consciousness enters and man raises himself from a mere sense-perception to the observation of a spiritual world. It was said that forces and faculties slumber in the human soul which can be drawn out of it, just as the power of sight can be produced through operation in someone born blind, so that a new man arises to whom the whole world seems transformed to a higher stage. As in the case of one born blind, so do things appear in a new light to the spiritually born. Yet this can come about only if the process which has just been described is recapitulated on a higher level, when what is united in the average man becomes separate and a kind of destruction-process enters the lower human nature. Then the higher consciousness, the beholding of the spiritual world, can enter.

There are three forces in human nature: thinking, feeling and willing. These three depend on the physical organisation of man. Certain acts of will appear after certain thought and feeling processes have taken place. The human organism must function in the right way if these three forces are to harmonise. If certain transmissions are interrupted, certain parts diseased, then no proper harmony exists between thinking, feeling and willing. If the organs of will are crippled a man is unable to transform his thoughts into will-impulses. He is weak as a man of action; he can doubtless think, but cannot resolve to put thoughts into reality. Another case is when a person is not in a position to let his feelings be guided rightly through thoughts, to bring his feelings into harmony with the thoughts behind them. Insanity is fundamentally nothing else than this.

A harmony between thinking, feeling and willing is to be found in the normally-constituted man of today as against a sufferer. This is right for certain stages of evolution, but it must be noted that this harmony exists in present-day man unconsciously. If he is to be initiated, however, if he is to see into the higher . worlds, then these three members, thinking, feeling, willing, must be separated from one another. The organs of will and feeling must suffer a division, and therefore the physical organism of an initiate is different from that of a non-initiate. Anatomy could not prove that, but the contact between thinking, feeling and willing is interrupted. The initiate would be able to see someone suffering deeply without being stirred by any feeling, he could remain quite calm and merely look on. Why is that so? In an initiate nothing must be inter-linked unconsciously; he is a compassionate man out of freedom and not because something external compels him to be. That is the difference between an initiate and a non-initiate. Such a higher consciousness creates, as it were, a higher substance and the human being falls apart into a feeling-man, a will-man and a thought-man. Ruling over these three there appears for the first time the higher, new-born man, and from the level of a higher consciousness the three are brought into accord. Here again must death, destruction, also intervene. Should this destruction arise without at the same time a new consciousness springing up, then insanity would appear. Insanity would therefore be nothing else than the condition in which the human entity was shattered without the creation of the higher, conscious authority.

So here too there is a double element: a kind of destroying process of the lower by the side of a creating process of the higher. As poison is created in the blood in the veins, and as in the normal man consciousness is created between the red and the blue blood, so in the initiated man the higher consciousness is created inwardly in the co-operation of life and death. And the state of bliss arises from a higher pleasure, creation, that proceeds from death.

This is what man instinctively feels when he senses the mysterious connection between pain and suffering and the highest that man can attain. Hence the tragic poet, as his hero succumbs to suffering, lets this suffering give rise to the feeling of the victory of life, the consciousness of the victory of the eternal over the temporal. And so in the destruction of the earthly nature of Christ Jesus in pain and suffering, in anguish and misery, Christianity rightly sees the victory of eternal life over the temporal and transitory. So too our life becomes richer, more full of content, when we let it extend over what lies outside our own self, when we can enter into the life that is not our own.

Just as we create a higher consciousness out of the pain stimulated through an external ray of light and overcome by us as living being, so a creation in compassion is born when we transform the sufferings of others in our own greater consciousness-world. And so finally out of suffering arises love. For what else is love than spreading one's consciousness over other beings? When we deprive ourselves, give away, make ourselves poorer to the extent that we give to the other being, when we are able, just as the skin receives the ray of light and is able out of the pain to form a higher being, an eye; when we are able through the expansion of our life over other lives to absorb a higher life, then love, compassion with all creatures, is born in us out of that which we have given away to the other.

This also underlies the expression of the Greek poet: Out of life grew learning; out of learning, knowledge. Here again, as already mentioned in the previous lecture, a knowledge based on the most recent research of natural science touches the results of old spiritual investigation. The older spiritual research has always said that the highest knowledge can proceed solely from suffering. When we have a sick limb and it has given us pain, then we know this limb best of all. In the same way we know best of all what we have deposited in our own soul. Knowledge flows from our suffering as its fruit.

The same too underlies the Crucifixion of Christ Jesus which was soon followed, as Christianity teaches, by the outpouring into the world of the Holy Spirit. We now understand the coming forth of the Holy Spirit from the Crucifixion of Christ Jesus as a process indicated in the parable of the grain of corn. The new fruit must arise from destruction, and so too the Holy Spirit, which poured itself out over the Apostles at the Feast of Pentecost, is born from the destruction, the pain endured on the Cross. That is clearly expressed in St. John's Gospel (7.39) where it is said that the Spirit was not yet there, for the Christ was not yet glorified. One who reads this Gospel more deeply will see for himself that significant things emerge from it.

One can hear many people say that they would have not missed pain, for it had brought them knowledge. Everyone who has died could teach you that what I have now said is true. Would people fight against the destruction going on in them up to actual death if pain had not stood continually beside them like a guardian of life? Pain makes us aware that we have to take precautions against the destruction of life. Out of pain we create new life. In the notes of a modern natural scientist on the expression of the thinker, we read that on the countenance of the thinker something lies like a repressed pain.

When there is the enhancement which flows from knowledge attained through pain, when it is therefore true that from suffering we learn, then it is not without justification—as we shall see in the next lecture—that the Biblical story of Creation brings the knowledge of good and evil into connection with pain and suffering. And so it has always been rightly emphasised by one who looks deeper how the origin of purification, the lifting up of human nature, lies in pain. When the spiritual-scientific world-conception with its great law of destiny, karma, points from a man's present suffering to what he did wrongly in earlier lives, then we understand such a connection only out of man's deeper nature. What we brought about in the external world in an earlier life is transformed from base forces into lofty ones. Sin is like a poison which becomes remedy when it is changed into substance of life. And so sin can contribute to the strengthening and raising of man; in the story of Job pain and suffering are shown to us as an enhancement of knowledge and of the Spirit.

This is meant to be only a sketch which is to point to the connection between earthly existence and pain and suffering. It is to show how we can realise the meaning of suffering and pain when we see how they harden, crystallize in physical things and organisms up to man, and how through a dissolution of what has hardened, the Spirit can be born in us again, when we see that the origin of suffering and pain is in the Spirit. The Spirit gives us beauty, strength, wisdom, the transformed picture of the original abode of pain. A brilliant man, Fabre d'Olivet, made a right comparison when he wished to show how the highest, noblest, purest in human nature arises out of pain. He said that the arising of wisdom and beauty out of suffering is comparable to a process in nature, to the birth of the valuable and beautiful pearl. For the pearl is born from the sickness of the oyster, from the destruction inside the pearl-oyster. As the beauty of the pearl is born out of disease and suffering, so are knowledge, noble human nature and purified human feeling born out of suffering and pain.

So we may well say with the old Greek poet, Aeschylus: Out of suffering arises learning; out of learning, knowledge. And just as in respect of much else, we may say of pain that we have grasped it only when we know it not only in itself but in what proceeds from it. As so many other things, pain too is known only by its fruits.

We have now reached a stage in human development where the study of spiritual matters must be based on the same foundations as the study of nature was three or four centuries ago.¹ Spiritual science intends to achieve similar things for knowledge of the spirit as Copernicus, Galileo, and Giordano Bruno did for the understanding of physical nature in their own time.² Of course, the systematic exploration of the spirit in our age encounters the same kind of resistance and hostility as the study and the concepts of the natural sciences did then. Spiritual science will be assimilated into our culture as slowly and with just as much difficulty as the natural sciences were.

We will investigate the spirit with processes of the human mind that are still unknown today, or at least unpopular with most people. Clairvoyant research, as we can call these processes, provides the foundation for spiritual science, and I am speaking to you today on that basis.

Clairvoyant research is discredited by the countless prejudices people have against it, and also by the widespread misuse of the term “clairvoyant investigation.” That is why I want to say right now that I am not speaking from the standpoint of the occult knowledge so often promoted by charlatans these days, but based on the kind of clairvoyant, esoteric knowledge that can be supported even by people firmly grounded in serious research in the natural sciences who base their knowledge on genuine scientific facts. In terms of its inner logic, its mode of thinking, spiritual science belongs to the stream of modern thinking that includes the natural sciences. The two differ only in the areas they research. The natural sciences examine the world of nature, the physical phenomena around us, while spiritual science studies an area that must necessarily remain hidden to the natural sciences, namely, spiritual experience, and spiritual beings. It is impossible to investigate spiritual facts and spiritual beings with the same abilities and methods that have allowed the natural sciences to celebrate ever greater triumphs in the course of the last few centuries. To investigate nature, we use only those mental powers and abilities we have because of the way we are put into this world, and because other people have taught them to us.

This combination of innate and acquired abilities is totally sufficient for the natural sciences, but it cannot provide knowledge of the spiritual world. For that we must use faculties that slumber, that are latent, to use a scientific term, in the depths of our soul during our everyday life.

We do not immediately apply the methods and procedures used to explore the outer world in our investigations as spiritual researchers. Rather, we work with them on the abilities and forces in the depths of our soul to make them effective in the spiritual world. These capabilities help us to understand the higher worlds only when they have been drawn out by ordinary human efforts.

For example, in everyday life and in conventional science, we learn about the external world through ideas we develop in our soul, but as researchers of the spirit, we first have to work with our thinking deep within us to develop abilities that are quite different from those we normally have. Spiritual science is basically in accord with the natural sciences, as we can see in its attempt to enter the spiritual world through spiritual chemistry. We cannot tell from the looks of it that water can be split into hydrogen and oxygen. Though water is liquid and does not burn, hydrogen is a combustible gas—clearly something quite different from water. We can use this as a metaphor for the spiritual process I am about to explain.

People are a combination of soul-spiritual and material-physical elements, just as water is a combination of hydrogen and oxygen. In “spiritual chemistry,” we must separate the soul-spiritual from the material-physical elements just as water can be separated into hydrogen and oxygen. Clearly, just looking at people will tell us little about the nature of the soul-spiritual element.

The methods we use to separate the soul-spiritual from the material-physical in us—and this experiment of spiritual chemistry can be carried out only within us—are concentration and meditation. Meditation and concentration are not some kind of miraculous mental performance, but the highest level of mental processes whose lower, elementary levels we find also in our everyday life. Meditation is a devotion of the soul, raised to limitlessness, as we may experience in the most joyful religious feelings. Concentration is attentiveness, raised to limitlessness; we use it at a more basic level in ordinary life. By attentiveness in everyday life we mean not allowing our ideas and feelings to range freely over anything that catches our attention, but pulling ourselves together so that our soul focuses our interest on something specific, isolating it in our field of perception. There are no limits to how far this attentiveness can be increased, particularly by voluntarily focusing our soul on certain thoughts supplied by spiritual science. Ignoring everything else, all worries and upsets, sense impressions, will impulses, feeling, and thinking, we can center our inner forces completely on these thoughts for a certain amount of time. The content of what we are concentrating on is not as important as the inner activity and exercise of developing our attentiveness, our powers of concentration.

Focusing, concentrating the forces of the soul in this way is crucial. And regular training, often involving months, years, or even decades, depending on individual predisposition, is necessary for the soul to become strong enough to develop inner forces. Qualities otherwise merely slumbering in the soul are now called up by this boundless enhancement of attentiveness, by concentration. In the process we must develop the capacity in our soul to feel that through this inner activity the soul is increasingly able to tear itself away from the physical body. Indeed, this tearing away, this separation of the soul and spirit from the physical-material element, will happen more and more often as we continue the activities I have described. In the limited scope of a lecture, I can only briefly outline this principle of concentration, but you will find detailed descriptions of the individual exercises in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, translated into French as L'Initiation..³

Through practicing these methods we will learn to understand the meaning of the sentences, I experience myself as a soul-spiritual being. I am active in myself without using my senses or my limbs. I have experiences independent of my body. We have made progress when we can perceive our own body with all its physical attributes as separate and independent of our soul and spirit, just as we see a table or a chair in physical life. This is how we can begin to separate the soul's ability to think and form ideas from its physical tools, namely, the nervous system and the brain. Thus, we learn to live in thinking and the forming of ideas, fully aware that we are outside the nervous system and the brain, the physical instruments we normally use for these processes.

To put it more concretely, let me add that our first experience in this self-development is the realization that in thinking we live as though outside our head. We live in our weaving thoughts just as we do when we use our brain, but we know for sure that these thoughts are outside our head. The experience of immersing ourselves again in the brain and the nervous system after having been outside the head for some time remains indelibly with us. We feel the resistance of the substance of brain and nervous system such that the soul-spiritual that emerged from those physical organs needs to use force to reenter them. This is an unforgettable moment.

The method I have described also allows us to release the feeling and will activities of the soul, which is necessary for true spiritual research. To achieve this, we must raise devotion to the infinite. This enhanced devotion, which is also called meditation, is similar to what happens when we sleep. The sense organs are laid aside in sleep; there is no activity of the senses, and the limbs are at rest. While we sleep, we are given over to the general course of the world without contributing anything through our I, thinking, feeling, and willing to the course of events. We are unconscious in sleep; our consciousness dissolves into general darkness and obscurity. In meditation, we must voluntarily create the state sleep causes as natural necessity. The only difference is that sleep leads to a loss of consciousness, but intensified devotion leads to an enhanced awareness. As spiritual researchers, we must be able to silence our senses at will. We must divert them from all impressions of the external world and suppress the activity of our organs and limbs as we do in sleep. In terms of our body, we have to behave just as in sleep. However, in sleep we sink into unconsciousness, but in enhanced devotion controlled by our will we awaken into the divine-spiritual stream of cosmic forces. To this level of consciousness we then reach, our everyday consciousness is what sleep is to our ordinary state of consciousness.

If we persevere and patiently train our soul, we will be able to separate out, through a kind of spiritual chemistry, another soul capacity, namely, our thinking, so that it continues only in the soul-spiritual sphere. Similarly, through devotion we can gradually separate out that power of the soul we use in language, in speaking. As I am speaking to you now, I am using a soul-spiritual force that flows into my nerves and speech organs and uses them. Through the exercises described above, we can unfold this same power when the entire speech and nervous system are completely inactive. In this way, we discover in the depths of our soul a faculty we know nothing of in our everyday life, because it is employed in speech and the use of our speech organs. When we are not using this faculty, it lies dormant deep within our soul, but in spiritual research, it is drawn up and separated by spiritual chemistry, so to speak, from our physical speaking. If we learn to live in this weaving, hidden activity of language creation, we can recognize what we may call, perhaps inaccurately, the perception of the inner word, the spiritual word. As soon as we can control this hidden power, we can also detach our thinking and feeling from our personality, leave ourselves behind, and enter the spiritual world. Then we can perceive feeling and willing outside ourselves just as we did within us. We begin to know beings of will and feeling in the spiritual world, and we can perceive our own willing and feeling only when they are immersed in these beings.

Clairvoyant perception begins with the emancipation of the power of our thoughts from the physical body and continues with the freeing of our thinking and feeling. Clearly, then, we can know and truly experience encounters with other spiritual beings only by leaving our body and by immersing our own feeling and willing soul in the spiritual world. In view of the widespread opposition to spiritual science in our time, it is risky to give concrete examples; yet it is a risk I am willing to take. I am sure you will not mind that it is an example from my personal experience. After all, our own experiences are the examples we know best since they are the only ones where we are actually present for every detail.

Some time ago I had to solve a problem in my work.⁴ I knew very well that the capacities I can develop in accordance with my constitution in this life would not suffice to perform the task, which was to understand the mentality of a certain historical period. I knew exactly what questions I had to answer, but I also realized that no matter how much I exerted my thinking, my thoughts were not strong enough to gain insight into this problem. It was like wanting to lift a weight but lacking the strength to do so. I tried to define the issue as clearly as possible and to develop the active will to find a solution one way or another. As far as I could, I tried to feel vividly the particular qualities of that period. I tried to get a vivid sense of its greatness, its color, and to project myself completely into that period. After I had repeated this inner soul activity often enough, I could feel a foreign willing and feeling enter my own. I was as sure of its presence as I am that the external object I see is not created by my looking at it, but exists independent of me and makes an impression on me.

From a materialistic point of view, people can easily object that this was nothing but an illusion, a deception, and that I did not know I was drawing out of my own soul what I thought were external influences. To avoid falling prey to illusion, hallucination, and fantasies in this field, we need true self-knowledge. Then we will begin to know what we can and cannot do. Self-knowledge, particularly for the researcher of the spirit, means knowing the limits of our abilities. We can train ourselves in self-knowledge in the way described in my above-mentioned book, and then we will be able to distinguish between our own feeling and will and the external feeling and will entering them from the spiritual world. We will reach the stage where not being able to tell the difference between our own feeling and willing and that from outside will seem as absurd as not being able to distinguish between hunger and bread. Everyone knows where hunger stops and bread begins; just as everyone knows that hunger itself does not make bread appear—desirable as this would be from a social standpoint. True self-knowledge enables us to differentiate between the hunger of our own feeling and willing and what comes to meet them from the spiritual world (as hunger is met with bread). Once the outside feeling and will have penetrated our own, the two will continue to exist in us side by side.

In my case, the close relationship between my feeling and willing and what I recognized as external feeling and willing fertilized my thinking. As a result, thoughts appeared in my mind as gifts of the external feeling and willing and solved the original problem of investigating a certain historical epoch.

What happens there in our spiritual experience runs counter to a similar process in the physical world. When we meet people in the physical world and get together with them, we first see them, then speak to them, and exchange ideas. The opposite happens in the spiritual experience I have described; there we observe thoughts in ourselves and have the feeling that a foreign feeling and will are present. Then we perceive a separate spiritual individuality as a real, separate being, but one that lives only in the spiritual world. Then, we gradually get to know this individuality in a reverse process to meeting someone in physical life. In the spiritual sphere, we approach the individual through the foreign feeling and willing we find within us, and get closer to the personality by being together with it.

I found out that in my case the foreign feeling and willing that fertilized my own thinking came from an individual I had known well and who had been torn from our circle of friends by her death a little more than a year ago.⁵ She had died at a relatively early age, in her best mid-life years, and had taken unused life energy into the spiritual worlds. The feeling and willing that entered my own originated in the intensity of this unused life energy. Generally, people live to a ripe old age and use up their vitality during their lifetime. However, if they die relatively young, this strength remains as unused potential and is available to them in the spiritual world. These life forces that were not used in our friend's short life enabled me, because of our friendship, to solve a problem which required her strength.

What I earlier called “the capacity of the inner word” leads to such revelations of the spiritual world as this one of a dead person. At the same time, this capacity allows us to look beyond our life enclosed between birth and death, or between conception and death, and gain insight into human life extending into infinite periods of time through repeated earth lives. Then we can understand the life of those we were very close to, as I was to our dead friend.

As we get to know ourselves or another person through the soul faculties I have described, we discover not only the physical life between birth and death, but the spiritual human being who structures his own body, lives in repeated incarnations on earth, and between each death and new birth in the spiritual world. Now you will easily understand that I could gain deeper insight into the soul-spiritual being of our dead friend because she stood before my soul as a spiritual being.

The process of getting to know another being in the spiritual world is the reverse of that in the physical realm. At first, we learn how to be together spiritually with the other being, and then we come to know the being itself as a spiritual being. And then entering the spiritual world becomes a reality.

To return to our example, it became clear that during an earlier incarnation in the first Christian centuries, the friend whom we knew in her short life here had taken in much of that Christian culture. However, she had not been able to digest it all because of the restrictions of the time, and entered this life with the undigested material. It burst the confines of this incarnation, but remained present as life energy. And now through my connection with her, I was blessed with insight into the period my work was concerned with, the age in which our friend had lived in a past incarnation.

It doesn't matter that many people in our age make fun of what I have just described and belittle an attitude that guides us thus into the spiritual world. If you have developed yourself along these paths, you know that when you accomplished something you could not possibly have done by yourself, it was because specific spiritual beings helped you. In addition, your view of the world will expand because you will know that you cannot expect hunger to produce bread, and because you know that the power of spiritual beings has entered into your own abilities. As our view into the sphere of the dead widens, our insight into the spiritual world also deepens through the methods I have described and finally encompasses concrete events and beings that are just as real as the physical world around us.

People do not mind our talking about the spiritual world in general terms; they admit there is a spiritual realm behind the sensory one. But they are less tolerant if we talk about concrete beings in the spiritual world whom we perceive just as we do beings of the mineral, plant, animal, and human kingdoms. However, if we do not shy away from developing our slumbering soul forces, we find that it is just as wrong to talk about the spirit in general terms, or in vague pantheistic terms, as to speak about nature in general terms. For example, if walking across a meadow and looking at flowers, perhaps some day lilies here, violets there, and so on, we would point to them and not say their names but instead just “this is nature, that is nature, and there is nature; everything is nature and more nature”—that is no different from talking about spirit, spirit, and more spirit in a vaguely pantheistic way. We can understand the spiritual world only if we really know the individual beings living there and what happens between them.

In objection to the possibility of knowing the spiritual world people often claim that harboring such fantasies about the realm of the spirit simply runs counter to intelligent behavior in the physical world. Although this conclusion seems justified on the basis of the capacities of human intelligence, it can be sustained only as long as one is ignorant of the extensive power of the intellect, that is, the power of human thinking, as we can know it through spiritual research.

To return to our example, imagine someone has the task to develop certain ideas here on earth. He learns how to encounter a spiritual being, in this case, a dead person who adds his or her thinking—now modified by the spiritual world almost into willing that thinks and thinking that feels—to the human individual's thinking and feeling. The intelligent ideas the dead individual wants to produce emerge in the human being on earth. The deceased possesses feeling and willing, just as on earth, as well as other soul capacities not developed on earth. Therefore, the dead have the desire to connect their thinking and feeling with human thoughts. That is why they unite with the person on earth. As the thinking, feeling, and willing of the dead penetrate the living person, ideas are stimulated. Thus, the dead can experience these ideas, something they could not do on their own. That is why they communicate with human beings on earth. However, this communication and stimulation of ideas is possible only if our thinking has been freed from the nervous system and the brain, that is, if we have developed thinking independent of the brain.

As we liberate our thinking from the body, we feel as though our thinking were snatched away from us, as though it expanded and spread out in space and time. Thinking, which we normally say takes place inside us, unites with the surrounding spiritual world, streams into it, and achieves a certain autonomy from us similar to the relative independence of the eyes, which are set in their sockets rather like autonomous organs. Thus, although our liberated thinking is connected with our higher self, it is so independent as to act as our spiritual organ of perception for the thoughts and feelings of other spiritual beings. Its function is thus similar to that of our eyes. Gradually, the thinking processes, normally limited by our intelligence, become independent from our being as spiritual organs of perception.

To put it differently, what we experience subjectively, what is comprised by our intelligence, namely, our outer thinking, is nothing but shadowy entities, thought entities, mere ideas reflecting external things. When thinking becomes clairvoyant and separates from brain and nervous system, it begins to develop inner activity, a life of its own, and to stream out, as our own experience, into the spiritual world. In a sense, we send the tendrils of our clairvoyant thinking out into the spiritual realm and, as they become immersed in this world, they perceive the will that feels and feeling that wills of the other beings in that realm.

After what we have said about self-knowledge as a necessity on the path of spiritual development—and from this it follows that modesty is a must—allow me to comment on clairvoyant thinking, and please do not think me presumptuous for saying this. When we enliven our thinking through clairvoyant development, it becomes independent and also a very precise and useful tool. True clairvoyance increases the precision, accuracy, and logical power of our thinking. As a result, we can use it with more exactness and close adaptation to its subject; our intelligence becomes more practical and more thoroughly structured. Therefore, the clairvoyant can easily understand the scope of ordinary scientific research, whereas conventional science requires bringing out ... [text missing] of the mind. It is easy to see why modern natural science cannot comprehend the findings of clairvoyant research, but those who have developed true clairvoyance can comprehend the full significance of the achievements of the natural sciences. There can be no question, therefore, of spiritual science opposing conventional science; the other way around is more likely. Only clairvoyant development can organize the power of the mind, making it inwardly independent, alive, and comprehensible. That is why the materialistic way of thinking cannot penetrate to the logic that gives us the certainty that clairvoyant knowledge really does lead to perception of the spiritual world.

The example of my clairvoyant experiences with a dead person shows that intelligence and thinking are specific qualities of souls living in a physical body, of human beings on earth. The deceased wanted to connect herself with a human being so that what lived in her in a completely different, super-sensible way could take the form of intelligent thoughts. The dead individual and the living person were thinking their thoughts together in the head of the latter, as it were.

As specifically human qualities, intellect and thinking can be developed only in human beings on earth, and they allow even people who are not clairvoyant to understand the results of clairvoyant research. You see, our independent thinking becomes the spiritual eye, as it were, for the perception of the spiritual world. Supersensible research, which uses this spiritual eye for clairvoyant thinking, has found that this eye is active, that the spiritual feelers are put out in all directions, but our physical eyes only passively allow impressions to come to them. When we as spiritual researchers have taken the revelations of the super-sensible world into our thinking, they continue to live in our thoughts. We can then tell other people about what we have taken pains to bring into our living thought processes, and they can understand us if they do not allow materialistic prejudices to get in the way.

There is a sort of inner language in the human soul that normally remains silent. But when concepts enter the soul, which the spiritual researcher acquires by allowing his or her will and feeling to be stimulated by the spiritual world and its beings, this language responds immediately with an echoing sound. Careful and thorough study of spiritual science will gradually silence the objection that the spiritual researcher's reports of the realm of the spirit can only be believed because they cannot really be understood. People will see that human intelligence is indeed able to understand information from the spiritual world, but only if it is the result of true spiritual experiences and true spiritual research. They will realize that it is wrong to say human intelligence does not suffice to comprehend revelations from the spiritual world and that therefore they have to be accepted on authority. They will come to know that the only obstacle to such understanding is to have preconceived notions and prejudices.

Eventually, people will treat information from the spiritual world as they treat the insights of, say, astronomy, biology, physics, and chemistry. That is, even if they are not astronomers, biologists, physicists, or chemists, they accept the scientists' findings about the physical world on the basis of a natural feeling for truth, which we may call a silent language of the soul.

The harmony between intelligence and clairvoyance will become much more obvious, and then people will admit that clairvoyant research approaches the world of spiritual beings and processes with the same attitude that also motivates the natural sciences. In view of the considerable opposition to spiritual science, it will comfort us to know that our modern culture will eventually come to the point Giordano Bruno did. Looking up to the blue vault of the sky, which people then considered to exist exactly as they perceived it, Bruno declared that they saw the blue dome of the sky only because that was as far as their vision reached. They themselves in a way imposed that limit; in reality space extends into infinity. The limits people saw so clearly, based on the illusion of their senses, were created by the limitation of their vision.

You see, now and in the future, the spiritual researcher will have to stand up before the world and say that there is also a firmament with regard to time, the time between birth and death. We perceive this firmament of time through the illusion of the senses. In fact, we create it ourselves because our spiritual vision is limited, just as in earlier times people “created” the blue firmament of space. Space extends endlessly beyond the blue dome of the sky, and time also continues infinitely beyond the boundaries of birth and death. Our own infinite spiritual life is embedded in this infinite time together with the rest of spiritual life in the world.

The time will come when people will realize that clairvoyant research strengthens and deepens our intelligence, producing a more subtle and refined logic. Such improved understanding will silence many, seemingly justified, current opinions on spiritual science claiming that the philosophical writings of several authors prove that our cognitive and intellectual capacities are limited. After all, aren't the reasons these philosophers present to prove the limits of human cognition convincing? Are they not logical? How can researchers of spiritual science hope to refute these convincing, logical arguments for the limits of our capacity to know?

The time will come when people will see the lack of substance and precision in such logic, when they will understand that something can be irrefutably correct as philosophical argument, and yet be completely refuted by life. After all, before the discovery of the microscope or the telescope people might very well have “irrefutably” proven that human eyes can never see a cell. Still, human ingenuity invented the microscope and the telescope, which increased the power of our eyes. Similarly, life has outdistanced the irrefutable proof of the philosophers. Life does not need to refute the arguments of this or that philosopher. Their proofs may be indisputable, but the reality of life must progress beyond them by strengthening our cognitive capacity and spiritual understanding through spiritual instruments.

In the present state of our culture with its prevailing belief in the incontrovertibility of the philosophers' proofs, these things are not generally or readily accepted. However, as our culture continues to develop, it will reach a higher logic than the one supporting these proofs of purely external philosophy. This higher logic will be one of life, of life of the spirit, of insights based on spiritual science. A time will come when people, while still respecting the accomplishments and discoveries of the natural sciences as much as we do now, will nevertheless realize that for our inner life these marvelous achievements have brought more questions than answers. If you study biology, astronomy, and so on, you will see that they have reached their limits. Do these sciences provide answers? No, they are really only raising questions. The answers will come from what stands behind the subject matter of the natural sciences. The answers will come from the sources of clairvoyant research.

To summarize, let me repeat that the world extends beyond the realm of the senses, and behind the sensory world we find spirit. In spiritual science, the spirit reveals itself to clairvoyant perception, and it is only then that we can see the divine nature of the magnificent sensory world around us. The world is vast, and the spirit is the necessary counterbalance to the physical world. A proper perspective on our future cultural development reveals that in trying to understand the world in its entirety, people will strive not for a one-sided exploration of the natural world, as many now assume. Instead, people will seek to unite science, intellect, and clairvoyant research. Only in this union will people truly come to understand themselves and their own spirit. Only then will they realize solutions to the world's future riddles, never to be solved completely, and feel satisfaction in that knowledge.

Those who have taken the true impulse of spiritual science to heart can sense even now in our culture the yearning and the latent urge in many souls to go beyond the immediate and sensory in science. Through use and inner assimilation of the capacities the sciences have created in recent centuries, these souls long to be strengthened so that they can live in the spiritual worlds from where alone can come true satisfaction for the human soul.

• 1. At the beginning of this lecture, Rudolf Steiner apologized for giving the lecture in German rather than French. His comments were not recorded.
• 2. Nicolaus Copernicus, 1473–1543, Polish astronomer. Made astronomical observations of orbits of sun, moon, and planets. Gradually abandoned accepted Ptolemaic system of astronomy and worked out heliocentric system.
  
  Galileo Galilei, 1564–1642, Italian astronomer and physicist. Advocated Copernican system. Instrumental in laying foundations of modern science.
  
  Giordano Bruno, 1548–1600, Italian philosopher. A critic of Aristotelian logic and defender of Copernican cosmology, which he extended with notion of infinite universe. Arrested and burned at the stake by the Inquisition.
• 3. Rudolf Steiner, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, repr., (Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1986).
• 4. Steiner here refers to his investigation of events in the fourth century on the basis of spiritual science. He presented his insights in a lecture on May 9, 1914 (“Words of Remembrance for Oda Waller”) in Unsere Toten, vol. 261 in the Collected Works, (Dornach, Switzerland: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1963); lecture on May 26, 1914 (Chapter Four, in this volume); lecture of March 23, 1921, in Naturbeobachtung, Mathematik, wissenschaftliches Experiment und Erkenntnisergebnisse vom Gesichtpunkt der Anthroposophie, vol. 324 in the Collected Works, (Dornach, Switzerland: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1972). He also mentioned these investigations and their results in his lecture on August 31, 1923, in The Evolution of Consciousness, (London: Pharos Books, 1979); and in his lecture on April 5, 1924, in Karmic Relationships, vol. 5, (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1966).
• 5. Steiner here refers to Oda Waller, sister of Mieta Pyle-Waller (who took the role of Johannes Thomasius in the Mystery Drama performances in Munich). See also his lecture of May 9, 1914, in Unsere Toten. Oda Waller died in March 1913.

As our friends who are present for the meeting of the Building Association have not heard the recent lectures held here, I will not continue today with the subject that has now occupied us for some time. Instead, I will digress and speak during these days of things that can contribute to a wider understanding of what has already been presented but that can also be understood to some extent by itself. I want to touch quite briefly upon a leading thought that has been brought forward. It is, indeed, somewhat comprehensible from the whole character of spiritual science, but it is deepened when one adds to one's understanding the facts that have been presented in our recent studies. This thought can be expressed as follows. Human history can only be considered in its true reality when one learns to know the individual forms of the actuating spiritual powers that stand behind it, just as one can only get to know nature when one knows in its true form what works and lives behind sense perceptions.

We have frequently emphasized that the science of the spirit is related to what is commonly called science today much in the following way. Modern science, which has been pursued by mankind—rightly and for good reasons—for three or four centuries, resembles a description of single letters that are printed or written on a sheet of paper. At best, it resembles the phonetic or grammatical rules by which these letters are grouped into words or united to form sentences. What we call the laws of nature can be compared with phonetic or grammatical rules. Thus, if we were to examine a printed or written page and say that we can see first a stroke upwards to the right, a stroke going down to the left and so on, and then describe the other letters and perhaps even the rules pertaining to phonetics or grammar, this way of relating ourselves to a printed or written page would resemble what is correctly called science today. But if we were to do no more than observe in this way, our relation to the printed or written page would be completely inadequate because we can also read. Here, we pass on from mere observation and description of what is on the page to the meaning of the words. We can only learn to know this meaning when we advance from describing what meets the eye to what our faculties—our mind and its power—can make of it. By these means, we unite ourselves with the spirit that is ruling and working within these little beings that we call letters.

In contrast to ordinary science, spiritual science seeks to read the facts of the world, not merely to describe what is seen. When we have learned to do so, both the facts of nature and history, inasmuch as they first show themselves to us in forms that we can describe in movements or inner laws, are, figuratively speaking, like letters that can be read. In this domain the meaning of existence is revealed, that is, the meaning of life and all human activity insofar as the revelation is necessary to man. We also seek in this way the meaning of historical evolution and the concrete forces that stand behind it, conjuring it out of itself, as it were, just as a writer conjures forth from his thoughts what we afterward read from the dead characters set down on the written or printed page.

Now, we have tried to study the fundamental meaning of this modern age, which we describe as the fifth post-Atlantean cultural epoch. We know that it begins approximately in the period that is also described by external history as the transition from the Middle Ages to modern times. With the exception perhaps of its very last centuries, but including the fourteenth and perhaps part of the fifteenth, we look upon this period of the Middle Ages as belonging to the fourth post-Atlantean cultural epoch, calling it the Greco-Latin in accordance with the fundamental character of its spiritual and material life. It begins in the eighth century before the event of the Mystery of Golgotha.

If we consider the evolution of humanity only in the way that ordinary history does—this, too, has often been spoken of here and elsewhere—we then easily arrive at the idea that human evolution, to the extent that it can be spoken of at all, has always consisted of man as we know him today and has always progressed more or less in the same way. When one looks back, one imagines that one sees historical evolution in such a way that the human being remains unchanged and just about the same. Such a view does not hold good for a real spiritual observation of history, as we know. The truth is that humanity changes considerably as time passes. The man of the tenth or twelfth centuries of the Christian era differed more radically from the man of the present time than is believed today when people are so little inclined to look into mankind's evolution. If one considers the whole configuration of the social life of the soul, the way of thinking and the very manner of life, then this difference becomes manifest not only among the educated in whom problems of world conception, science and knowledge play a part, but is also seen in the simplest, most primitive men. Although the world knows little of it, the simplest farmer today is, in his whole configuration of soul, an essentially different being inwardly from the man of the eighth, ninth and tenth Christian centuries.

Again, we can say of the modern age also, which, as it has evolved from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, bears essentially the character of the present, that it completed the first small segment of its course approximately in the middle of the nineteenth century. As we have often mentioned, this is an important point in time. I have frequently drawn attention to a saying that is used incessantly, yet is completely false when understood in the way it is usually meant. Nature, it is said, knows no leaps. In reality, however, we see how life makes leaps everywhere. It really only progresses through leaps. Speaking in the Goethean sense, it is a leap when, through metamorphosis, the leaf of a plant develops from the root, the flower petal again from the leaf and the organs of the fruit from the petal. It is, however, conveniently prejudicial to believe that human history proceeds without leaps. Such is not the case. Human history advances in great undulating waves that do not simply follow the one upon the other. Rather, at certain times what comes later places itself abruptly beside the earlier. Men, however, are not accustomed to observe things accurately or it would strike them that in the sphere of evolution powerful forces are to be observed that by means of breaks and periods, with wave-like depressions and elevations, bring evolution forward.

One could say that the conclusion of a particular evolutionary process was reached in the year 1840, that is, in the middle of the nineteenth century. In the period from the fifteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth, humanity was evolving quite distinct faculties that were not present in the same way in an earlier period. One is entirely mistaken if one believes, for instance, that the Copernican world conception or the art of printing could just as well have appeared in human evolution in an earlier century than the one in which they did. The progress of human evolution is just as organic as individual human development. Just as the child of twelve or thirteen lacks the capacity to do things in the world that might be done by a man or woman of thirty five, just as faculties must evolve in the life of an individual in accord with his age, it is also the same with humanity. The special faculties that came to the fore in Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler and later in the scientists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, did not formerly exist. In fact, they correspond to a particular period of human evolution that falls within those centuries. The Greeks or Romans could not have looked at the world similarly because the faculties for doing so were simply not in existence in their time. The individual human would not be perfected if he did not gradually evolve faculties suited to each period of life; neither would humanity become complete in its way if faculties, whose foundations already exist in man's general nature, did not gradually emerge. That these faculties develop, that mankind gradually puts forth what lies within its being is the fundamental fact of human evolution.

Now, what is the nature of these special faculties that evolved in man from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries? They are mainly the forces making possible an intellectual grasp of the world through reason. Nowadays, people on the whole believe that the Ptolemaic world conception belonged to the Middle Ages. Then came the Copernican. We believe we have made wonderful progress. Those in the Middle Ages were really quite foolish to accept anything so imperfect as the Ptolemaic world conception and now we, at last, have the true view.

As a matter of fact, those people think but little in accord with reality who are not willing to admit that when we are as far removed in time from Copernicus as Copernicus was from Ptolemy, men will again have a different concept of the heavens. The development of humanity is in constant flux and by that time, the Copernican system will be regarded just as the Ptolemaic system was regarded by the Copernicans. Even though it gives the impression today of being pure nonsense when one says another world conception, which will differ as much from the Copernican as the Copernican from the Ptolemaic, will replace the Copernican world conception in future, this truth is nevertheless quite evident to those who have an inner comprehension of what lives and weaves in the growth of humanity. The special method of applying merely the intellect to natural phenomena in an external way, which has created the natural science of the last three or four centuries, represents the faculty that belongs to those centuries. It is clear to those who know how humanity advances that mankind was actually ripe from the middle of the nineteenth century on for the gradual development of other faculties. But man must increasingly take his own affairs in hand. More than in any previous age he is given the task today of doing something toward adding fresh faculties to those gained in the last three or four centuries. Why have these faculties arisen that can keenly, penetratingly and logically master the outer surface of phenomena so that they can then be expressed in natural laws? For what purpose have these faculties appeared that penetrate so little below the surface of things, yet observe so meticulously and scientifically all that lies on the surface? They have appeared because only by their means can man go through a certain stage of his development.

In earlier ages man had other faculties. When we go back in historical evolution, we find that the further we go the more possible it was for man to look into the spiritual world. But the faculties he then had were not such that he could use them in freedom. They were more or less involuntary. The force enabling him to reach a certain knowledge came over man in earlier ages somewhat in the way in which the desire for sleep overtakes a man. It was, however, a force that entered the spiritual world. In order for man to take a step forward toward achieving the faculty of making free decisions and developing freedom, he had to be separated from the forces that, in earlier times, brought him nearer the spiritual world but also allowed him less freedom. Man had to pass through a period of development in which he was shut off as by a veil or sheath from the spiritual world so that he might become freer. To be sure, this development is still far from complete but a first stage reached its conclusion in the middle of the nineteenth century. Those who know something of the spiritual life behind the sensory life recognize that since that time it is a growing necessity for other forces to be added to those of observation and knowledge based on mere intellect. These other forces slumber in the human soul and must be developed, even as the forces have evolved that have brought humanity to achieve the great advances of the last three or four centuries.

Thus, it is for the sake of freedom that humanity has gone through the intellectual development of the last three or four centuries. This intellectual development has led to a conception of the world that is materialistic in a far-reaching sense. It is a materialistic conception that is still in full force wherever a conception of the world penetrates extensively or intensively into world affairs. However much it may be said in scientific circles that materialism has already receded, those who imagine it to have withdrawn often do not have the least idea how deeply and firmly they themselves are still held in materialistic concepts. The materialistic outlook, which is in its way admirable, has emerged in the last three or four centuries. It is not to be criticized because man has need of it, but it can, however, never advance beyond a grasp of the dead and lifeless. Were the intellectual conception of the world alone to hold sway in human earthly evolution, man would only understand the dead and lifeless. All understanding of life and the living, to say nothing of the spiritual, would be lost. The lifeless alone can be the object of the kind of scientific study that has made such magnificent progress in the last three or four centuries. Those individuals, however, who know what is necessary for humanity have gradually become fewer during this time. They understand why it is that since the middle of the nineteenth century a certain longing has arisen, as if through some inner process in man, to know something about the spiritual worlds. The peculiar thing is that this longing took a form that was in harmony with the materialistic feeling of the age. Man wanted to learn to know the spirit in a materialistic way, since habits are lost far less rapidly than longings. It was along materialistic lines that man wished to find the spirit, and this materialistic knowledge of the spirit was often fostered and generously bestowed even by those who really know what is necessary for humanity. Hence there arose the various materialistic branches of science that set out to prove that spiritual activity lies behind the sense world. All that has been set going in order to arrive at knowledge of the spiritual through the hypnotic element, the element of suggestion, and even through spiritism or spiritualism, as it is called, is nothing but an attempt to research the spirit by materialistic means.

Humanity had become accustomed to recognize as true only what had been verified by means of investigation in a laboratory or clinic. Now, in the same way, through external operations following precisely the pattern of the natural scientific method, a method was elaborated that should give manifest proof of the spirit. Important results have undoubtedly been attained on this path. In addition, of course, there has been a good deal of charlatanism and swindling. Indeed, we know that certain learned men and scientists who must be taken seriously have devoted themselves to these matters because they have felt it necessary to show man, who must otherwise fall prey to materialism, that a spiritual world exists, surrounding us just as does what we see with our eyes and grasp with our hands. So, in the course of human evolution after the middle of the nineteenth century, we have these efforts to make men understand that there is a spiritual world around us just as there is a world that we perceive with our senses.

We have spoken many times of the value of knowledge that is obtained by dulling the forces of mind and soul that are right for our age, so that man is made into an instrument in a mediumistic way for letting all sorts of spiritual realities and facts enter the sense world. As I say, we have repeatedly spoken of the worth—or lack of it—of these methods. Today I want to make clear what meaning it had for historical evolution for men to wish to kill off and cripple just what it is right for them to possess in this present time; that is, full conscious insight into the spiritual world, and, turning from this, to become an instrument through which what is really around us spiritually emerges in the physical world. It corresponds to a deep necessity in historical evolution because conscious thinking, through what it had to become in the last three or four hundred years, had been one sided in its development. Thought had become attenuated and consequently also powerless because it had to stop short at the surface of things in order to create human freedom. But for this reason thought was quite unable to penetrate below the surface.

It was the intention to drive out thought and to guide the human soul back to its primitive constitution, in this way meeting the difficulty of the thinking that had become powerless in the new age and could no longer find strength to penetrate into the spiritual world. As a result, something arose that is far more widespread than the ordinary person imagines, that is, the search for the spirit along materialistic paths. With the expulsion of conscious knowledge in which, regarding the spiritual world, they had lost confidence, men wished to dip down into the spiritual world through a subconscious knowledge and a lowering of consciousness. There were always, however, other persons who did not enter into this phenomenon of the time merely instinctively as did the ordinary scientists and most spiritists or spiritualists, but who knew, nevertheless, what was going on. Such persons have always existed. They had great expectations of the movement just described. In general, one can say that those persons who have preserved an exact knowledge of the spiritual world during the last three or four centuries, and even up to today, fall into different groups. There are those who expected nothing from such a materialistic way of research into the spiritual world; but there are also those who hoped that from it men would come to the conviction that a spiritual world does exist in our environment. Nevertheless, none of this group was sufficiently knowledgeable to be able to see why this approach must be in vain.

Those students of spiritual science who expected nothing from this materialistic approach had good reasons for this, which have been justified by the consequences that have arisen from this entrance—rather, this hoped for entrance—into the spiritual world. Take all that has come about on this path, go through all that has come to light from the most primitive beginnings of amateur mediums and mediumistic seances to the subtlest things that certain scholars have brought about in this sphere—go through all this and you will find that by far the greatest part of what has happened consists in the fact that experiences have been gathered of which those through whom the experiences were gained said they had received them from the spirits of the dead. Far and away the greater number of the experiences were described as emanating from the spirits of men who had died. Little is to be found that has not been described as originating in this way. This was certainly a great surprise to those acquainted with spiritual knowledge who had looked on this development with good will. That the mediums should say that what they brought to light was obtained from the spirits of the dead was something that must have caused the greatest surprise because it was the last thing one would expect when one really considered the evolution of humanity. Something quite different would have been expected.

What was to be expected was that by these means a knowledge would come about of the spiritual world that, at the present time, surrounds us while we are alive. That is what one might have expected to find by making experiments, for example, as to how one man affects another, how the men of the present are linked together by secret threads invisible to ordinary science, how in one soul things arise that originate from quite another soul. In reality, a network of spiritual connections is drawn from soul to soul. Inasmuch as we stand within the world—if, for instance, we are standing here, then we do not merely see the light, the surroundings, people as they are externally and physically, but inasmuch as we are in the world, spiritual threads or currents pass every moment from soul to soul in the most varied manner. One gets nowhere if one speaks in general terms of some sort of connection between souls that is distinguishable by the senses. The solution is to be found by thinking of individual threads or streams between all the different souls. We are actually surrounded by a spiritual world just as we are by a physical one. That this should emerge is what might have been expected, but little indeed has come out concerning this. Throughout the sixty or seventy years during which attempts have been made to enter the spiritual world by materialistic paths, least of all has been learned about the living connections linking men with one another. The mediumistic manifestations and revelations have always referred to the spirits of the departed. Nor, in truth, could anything else happen by this method. Why? What, then, had actually been happening through this attempt to enter the spiritual world?

As a matter of fact, nothing had been achieved other than the knowledge of what comes to light if one expels the best qualities of the new age from human consciousness and leads man back to earlier times, to subconscious conditions of soul. The remains of this subconscious condition that had carried over into the new age were now laid bare. It was this that was revealed. Just consider, then, that a quite definite consciousness had been prepared and developed in the last three centuries. This consciousness had veiled the spiritual world and by so doing had taken away the power of direct connection with it. But nothing had been done toward developing new forces for new connections with the spiritual world. Nothing had come out but the old connections, which went in the direction of that to which they had been linked earlier. They did not unite with what was living in the contemporary environment but with death, with the lifeless. This was so because the direction of man's evolution in the last three or four centuries and more has so determined the character of his soul that it is really particularly adapted for the knowledge of the dead and lifeless. Here in the material world, through the kind of knowledge that belongs to modern times, one learns about the lifeless. Through the forces that one draws up from the deep underground of the soul, one does not know about the living but the dead. Thus, all these experiments did not open up a path to the living men of the spiritual, but to what is dead, to what one finds as dead in the spiritual world.

What is the nature of this dead element? It is not human beings, that is to say, the souls who, speaking spiritually, are our contemporaries. So, if we take such an experiment as has been described, undertaken in 1870, let us say, it would not, through laying bare the subconscious soul forces, have given a connection with the living present. In fact, it would not have made a connection with the living souls of 1870, but only with what had remained behind from these living, progressing souls—in other words, with the loosened remnants that were gradually disintegrating in earthly existence but that were still active. To be sure, the mediums always interpreted things in such a way that they claimed relationship to the dead who were spiritually still living. That was, however, a misinterpretation. In reality, it was not a matter of the souls as they then were, but of what they had been in ages past, or, respectively, what they had become after these remnants had been long ago loosened from the souls. Recollect how I have explained what Goethe represents in the Lemurs scene and you will know that much of what is released from the soul at death continues to exist. It was only with what is really dead and does not live on with the living soul that one could connect oneself with the spiritual world through that materials [materialistic] pathway.

If, through contemporary science, one reached a knowledge of the material, the lifeless, the dead, so also through this spiritual longing that had to be satisfied along materialistic paths one reached nothing but a knowledge of the dead though, to be sure, it was a knowledge of the super-sensible. Contemporary materialistic science found only the external dead. This apparently spiritual but, from their methods, actually materialistic science found the super-sensible dead. From this one could learn something immensely significant, that in the middle of the nineteenth century an age had closed; that humanity needed new forces of development if it would enter the truly living; that for a period of time only those forces had been brought to their zenith that lead to the dead, lead in all fields to the lifeless and to knowledge and worship of the lifeless.

One only gives such things their rightful place if one does not merely let them work on the soul abstractly and intellectually, but when one receives them in their deep moral significance and lets them make a sort of moral impression on the soul. Indeed, we are shown that although these intellectual powers with which man has made such splendid progress have brought him to a certain summit of attainment. Yet, they are only fitted for approaching the lifeless. The content of human soul life could gradually only be directed to what is dead. To him who can perceive the course of man's evolution, it is unquestionably clear how the foremost currents of modern thought lead more or less directly to a cult and worship of the lifeless; the working that is felt in respect of the outer material natural order where such wonderful progress has been made is but a cult and worship of the dead. Why are people so gripped by the last cantos of Hamerling's Homunculus? Because, after Hamerling has shown how modern mankind is really hastening into a sort of homunculus era, he shows what it signifies for man, in respect of the great cosmic mysteries, to try to lift himself above gravitation through purely mechanical forces. His last canto shows us the dirigible, the Zeppelin before it existed, and all that was still in the future. At the same time, he makes us aware of what is linked with this extreme mechanizing, which is to say, the killing, the homunculizing, of life in the development of human civilization.

Spiritual knowledge, however, has never died out; it is always safeguarded somewhere, and there are individuals in every age who are able to obtain it. It was saved even through the period in which it counted for least, from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, being preserved like a fine thread. Those of whom I spoke as holding no expectations from the materialistic path into the spiritual world perceived something else as well. They were of the opinion that our modern way of feeling and thinking, as it has developed in the last centuries, can be further trained and developed so that out of clear-headed materialistic methods a knowledge then can develop gradually that which can even work in a sufficiently penetrating way to get under the surface of things and into the spirit. That is what the real method of spiritual science ought to be—to enter into the spiritual world along the same path that man has entered into nature during the last three or four centuries. All that is necessary is a further development of the scientific habits that mankind has evolved in this period. The point is that in a corresponding way, through a real exertion and effort, avoiding indolence, man has to develop further the thinking habits already evolved.

But now it may be asked why there are so many who, in spite of knowing something of the spiritual world, have remained silent concerning it. It must be repeatedly emphasized that spiritual knowledge was always there. Although it had to be developed in different ways in different ages, it has always existed. Why, then, have so many people been afraid to impart this spiritual knowledge? It has been disseminated in our circle because the recognition of the need to do so outweighs everything. In fact, however, only certain portions of spiritual knowledge can be imparted, as you know, and that only on quite definite grounds. You see, spiritual knowledge was also in existence in another and more unconscious or subconscious form before the Mystery of Golgotha. Then, man was connected with the spiritual world in a more instinctive way than is possible for him without injury today. Moreover, a great portion of mankind was omitted because the way to the spiritual world was only open to those who received fitting preparation. These individuals were prepared in a way that would not occur to those who speak of a preparation for science consisting of intellectual knowledge.

Today men are of the opinion that the moral qualities of one who is to receive instruction are of secondary importance and that knowledge does not depend on moral qualities. In ancient times, this was absolutely different. Then, when knowledge was communicated through the mysteries, it was imparted only to those who had undergone a special and strict moral discipline. Nothing beyond at most mathematical knowledge, with which one can do but little harm, or literary knowledge could be reached without undergoing strict moral discipline. Things were only imparted to those deemed to be fitted for them after they had undergone a certain severe moral test. First came the training toward virtue and then the communication of wisdom. Training in virtue and, in particular, the training of moral courage was an absolute necessity and it was held to be of paramount importance. Owing to lack of time, I cannot enlarge upon this today, but there was a conviction that knowledge can only benefit the world when what can be done by a man who knows, is done only by one who is good. However improbable it seems to people who look on earlier ages as barbaric and think that nowadays we have made such wonderful progress—so wonderful, in fact, that thousands are bathed in blood every week—in those earlier ages there was a conviction that no one should be allowed to make use of knowledge in what they did until he had undergone the strictest moral discipline. Those who had not were to live merely instinctively, led by those who had undergone the moral training and discipline.

The modern age is not adapted for directly applying such a principle. Just imagine how such a principle might be realized today when everyone says what he knows as soon as possible—or even has it published—and no one can prevent it. It would be illusory to think that anything, social institution or whatever, could stop it. Today is the day of publicity. What, then, must replace this older principle of only allowing men who had undergone moral discipline to attain Knowledge? It must be replaced with the assurance that the imparted knowledge itself must contain a certain force that brings forth good through itself, actually and really to bring forth of itself what is good.

The entire spiritual scientific movement must aim at achieving this. All knowledge entering the world through the science of the spirit must be so ordered that it engenders the good through itself and its own force. You will say that the efforts that have been made in modern times with the treasures of knowledge inherent in the science of the spirit have not yet completely realized this goal. No, because everything has to work its way through its various hindrances. The hidden feeling of the good in spiritual science has, however, been the reason that it has been fought not only with logic but also hatred. You will ask, “But do not all reasonable people really desire the good?” As it is generally understood nowadays, one could say, “Yes, all reasoning people desire the good.” But what really counts is not that someone thinks he would like the good or that he desires it, but that he wills it, that he absolutely will have it. That is the point. If one considers the achievements of modern civilization from the point of view of their moral defects, those moral defects that work in the lifeless, one will find that the world needs a wisdom that, along with being wisdom, also causes good. Materialistic science, however, is indifferent to good and evil. It uses what it creates from matter just as well for good as for evil, serving one just as willingly as the other.

Here, again, we have a point where, if we look at the world as a whole and its course of development, we can perhaps see the necessity for the science of the spirit. It is not enough to shut ourselves away in a little circle and form a world conception. The smallest circles are surrounded on every side by the great network of human evolution. Let us look at the manifest results of European civilization in the last three years. If we do not follow an ostrich policy but with truly throbbing hearts enter lovingly into our surroundings, we shall see these results and grasp what they are bringing us. Because the one or other of us is protected from what rages against Europe today is no reason for turning away from the terrible state into which modern civilization has been hurled. It is there, as present fact.

It may be useful at this point to comment on a new publication. A book, good of its kind, has lately been written that endeavors to judge from the standpoint of human feeling and moral perception the problems that have agitated the world during the last two years. It is a good book, recently published, that tries to show with a certain all embracing survey how man can escape from the evil network of blood and hate in which modern civilization finds itself. It was written by a Chinese author whom I mentioned to some of our friends four or five years ago as an important personality when his first book on European conditions was published. This new book by Ku Hung Ming, a highly cultured Chinese, is good and contains much that is objective. It reveals a man who avoids the mistakes that many make; a man who stands aloof from these errors.

Many people have opinions today; many give vent to one or another opinion about the conditions of our age. The greater part of what is presented, however, is not said in order to give expression to what people really think but to deafen themselves to what actually exists. We see streams of hatred flow over the world. Why are they set going? Why is this or that said? Do you imagine that those who say, “The Pope should excommunicate a whole nation,” and energetically demand it, think that they have really reached this conclusion from objective events? Do you believe that these people possess the calm of objective knowledge? They say it to deafen themselves so as not to have to admit to themselves what should be admitted. A great part of what is said today is intended to close one's ears. Some people will not admit to themselves what they really ought to admit. They say one thing or another merely to avoid saying what they ought to say.

This Chinese, Ku Hung Ming, does not proceed in this way. He says, “When one sees what has developed in Europe, what has happened there and the forces that are at work, one can do nothing but admit that things had to come about as they have. In its one sided cultivation the materialism that developed in the nineteenth century was bound to lead to these consequences and it is bound to lead even further, ending in the final downfall of European culture.” Ku Hung Ming is quite convinced that European culture must go under if Europeans refuse to become like the Chinese and if Chinese conditions do not spread over Europe. The only salvation for European culture, so he says, is for Europeans to become Chinese, that is, become Chinese in their souls. Much of what he says is deeply impressive. One should not take it lightly that a wise man of today can find no way out for European culture other than finally merging it all—everything in it that has led it ad absurdum—in good Chinese principles. I will not elaborate Ku Hung Ming's ideas on the methods for making Europe Chinese. Of course, we should see at once that we cannot become Chinese or return to the position of Chinese culture, but if there were no other way out than the one Ku Hung Ming sees, then that would be better than to continue on the path that European culture has taken. It would definitely be better. It would be better to become Chinese than to proceed further on the course that materialistic civilization has pursued thus far, because disintegration would be inevitable. Do not believe, however, that it can be prevented by any of the old means and methods.

As a matter of fact, spiritual science has always been somewhat in agreement with the opinion of Ku Hung Ming—not regarding Chinese civilization but rather the first part of his statement. It therefore fosters, as its great ideal, drawing knowledge from the spiritual world that leads back into it, and that also can make men good through its own force; that is, a knowledge working morally through its own force and engendering moral impulses. So, as scientists of the spirit our answer would not be, like Ku Hung Ming's, to “become Chinese,” but rather to seek by paths of spiritual science to bring about the fructification of European culture because that is actually the only way it can be brought about. This striving toward new sources of human knowledge and activity is absolutely necessary for European humanity. The bitterest tears could be shed over much that meets one today when a book such as that of Ku Hung Ming is read, for these times of ours are more grave than many believe. There are many things in human life that separate man from man, and it is from this separation of souls that all the frightful conditions we are experiencing come. This separation will only be overcome through a knowledge that conceives of the human being beyond all divisiveness, through a knowledge that is for every single human being. All those divisions upon which men build their feelings today are actually only valid here in the physical world. When one sees the sympathy and antipathy poured out today, and when one sees that they come only from the unspiritual, then in all this outpouring of sympathy and antipathy one also recognizes the denial of the spirit.

All racial hatred, for instance, is really also a fight against the spirit. Because this age of ours is so strongly inclined to fight against the spirit, it therefore possesses this talent for racial hatred. Here is one of the deepest secrets of our present spiritual culture; the only way out is through the living grasp of the spirit.

Just think how, the moment we fall asleep and our ego and astral body leave behind our physical and etheric bodies, we are in a world where all that leads to sympathy and antipathy simply does not exist. In the moment that follows falling asleep we are united with those whom we look upon from the consciousness of our time with the deepest antipathy. We must pass through their souls in the realm of interpenetrability. We can rage as we will and hurl tirades of hatred against this man or that, but as soon as we fall asleep and enter the realm where all interpenetrates, we must pass through the souls of those we hate. The facts concerning such actual realities must now be made known. What I have just said is elementary, but if one enters more and more into the knowledge of actual reality, then the very entering possesses the force to create the impulse of the good. One only learns to know the real significance of hatred and unfounded antipathy in the world when one sees their effects in the spiritual world. He who knows what hate is in the spiritual world ceases to hate lest he put himself straight into the service of certain evil powers.

Since a larger number of friends than usual is gathered here for the meeting of the Building Association, I especially wished to speak about these earnest matters today. Those who have heard my last lectures will be able to connect what has now been said with what we studied before. Even if it has been no more than a digression, it can nevertheless throw light on many impulses that are being enacted in the world historical evolution of the present time.

Let me begin this third lecture with an image Plato used to express what he had to say about the eternity of the human mind.

Socrates facing death stands before his pupils. During the next hours the end of the great teacher must happen. Facing his death, Socrates speaks about the eternity of the spiritual core in the human being. What he has to say about the indestructibility of that which lives in the human being makes a deep impression. In few hours, life will no longer be in the body which stands before his disciples. In few hours, Socrates whom one can see with eyes will no longer be. In this situation, Socrates makes it clear to his disciples that he who will no longer stand before them in few hours whom they will no longer have is not that who is so valuable for them; that this Socrates who yet stands before them cannot be that who transmitted the great teaching of the human soul and the human mind to them. He makes it clear to his disciples that the true sage has made himself independent of the whole sensuous world. Everything disappears that the sensory impressions, that the carnal desires and wishes can supply to him just by means of a really wise world view. That is only valuable to the sage which the senses can never give. If only that disappears which stands before the senses, then this remains unchanged to which no senses can get. Proofs—they may be the sharpest, the most brilliant ones—would hardly have a stronger effect than the conviction which expresses itself in the immediate sensation, which comes from the heart of the sage at the moment when the external sensuous situation seems to be completely contradictory to his words. This is a conviction which is expressed with the consecration of death, a conviction which simply testifies because it is expressed in this situation how powerful this view has become in the sage, so that he defeats the event which befalls him in few hours.

Which effect has this conversation exerted on the disciples? Phaedo, the disciple, says that he was at this moment in a situation in which normally those not are who experience such an event. Neither pain nor joy penetrated his heart. He was above any grief and desire. With peaceful rest and equanimity Phaidon took up the teachings which were handed over to him in view of death.

If we put this picture before our souls, we think of two things. Plato, the great sage of Greece, tries to support his conviction of the eternity of the human mind not only using logical proofs or philosophical arguments, but while he let a high developed human being express it in view of death. This conviction expresses itself as something that lives immediately in the human soul. Plato wanted to suggest this way that the question of the eternity of the human soul cannot be answered in every situation. We can answer it only if we have developed to the height of mind like Socrates who dedicated his whole life to the internal consideration of the soul; a wise man who possessed knowledge of that which reveals itself if the human being directs his look to his inside. He shows us the strength of the immediate conviction that something lives in him about which he knows that it is imperishable because he has recognised it. It depends on that. Every reasonable human being in this field will never say that a proof of the immortality of the human soul can be given in any situation, but the conviction of the eternity of the human mind must be acquired; the human being must have got to know the life of the soul. If he knows this life, if he has become engrossed in its qualities, he knows as exactly as one knows of another object if one knows its qualities, he knows about the human mind, and the strength of conviction speaks in his inside. Not only this, but in an important, essential moment Plato lets Socrates express this conviction: at a moment when any sensory impression seems to be contradictory to the expressed truth.

Why do the disciples understand this great teaching, why does it make sense to them? It makes sense to them because they are lifted over desire and harm by the power of Socrates’ speech; over that which ties the human being to the immediately transient, to the sensuous, to the everyday life. Thus it should be expressed that the human being does not know about the qualities of the spirit in any situation, but only if he rises above that which ties him to the everyday life if he removed desire and harm coming from the impressions of the everyday life, if he can look up to a solemn moment when the everyday life does no longer speak when the events which cause harm or joy otherwise do no longer cause harm or joy. The human being is more receptive for the topmost truth at such moments.

This gives us the sense to understand how theosophy thinks about the eternity of the soul. It does not speak in this sense of immortality that it tries to prove this immortality like another matter. No, it gives instructions how the human being can transport himself gradually into that position and condition of the spirit in which he experiences the mind in his own inside really, gets to know it according to its qualities, while he tries to transport himself into the life of the spirit. Then it realises that from the view of the spirit immediately the conviction of the eternity of this spirit comes to the fore. As well as we do not recognise an object which is before our sensory eye by a proof, but because it shows its qualities simply through perception, the theosophist puts the question of the immortality of the human soul in another form than one normally hears it. He puts the question: how can we perceive internal, spiritual life? How become we engrossed in our inside, so that we hear the spirit speaking in our inside?

At all times and places where one tried to bring up disciples for understanding of these questions, one demanded from these disciples first of all that they go through a preparation time. Plato demanded—as you probably know—from his disciples that they had penetrated into the spirit of mathematics before they tried to take up his teachings about the spiritual life. Which sense did this Platonic preparation have? The disciple should have understood the spirit of mathematics. We heard in the first lecture what this spirit of mathematics offers. It offers truths in the most elementary way which is elated above all sensory truths; truths which we cannot see with the eyes and cannot seize with the hands.

Even if we illustrate the teaching of the circle, the teaching of the numerical ratios to ourselves sensually, we know that we make an illustration with it only. We know that the teaching of the circle, of the triangle is independent of this sensuous view. We draw a triangle on the board or on paper to us, and by means of this sensuous triangle we try to get to the sentence that the sum of the three angles of a triangle is 180 degrees. However, we know that this sentence is true for any triangle whichever shape we may give it. We know that this sentence makes sense to us if we are used to find such sentences disregarding the sensuous impressions disregarding any sensuous view. We acquire the simplest, most trivial truths this way. Mathematics only gives the most trivial super-sensible truth, but it gives super-sensible truth. Because it gives the simplest, the most trivial and super-sensible truth which is got the easiest, Plato demanded from his disciples that they learn in mathematics how one gets to the super-sensible truth. What does one learn by the fact that one gets to super-sensible truth? One learns to conceive a truth without desire and harm, without immediate, everyday interest, without personal prejudices, without that which meets us in life wherever we go.

Why does the mathematical truth appear with such clearness and invincibility? Because no interest, no personal sympathy and antipathy play a role in its knowledge. That means that no prejudices are contributory factors. We do not care completely that two times two are four; we do not care how big the angles of a triangle may be et cetera. It is this freedom of any sensuous interest, of any personal desire and listlessness, which Plato had in mind when he demanded from his disciples that they become engrossed in the spirit of mathematics. After they had got used to looking up to truth without interest, without interference of passion and desire, without interference of everyday prejudices, then Plato considered his pupils worthy to behold the truth of those questions against which people normally have the biggest prejudices.

Which human being could treat other questions at first also uninterested, without desire and harm, as the mathematical truth two times two four, or, the sum of angles of a triangle is 180 degrees? But not before the human being was able to see the highest truth of soul and spirit in a similar, uninterested light free of grief and desire, he was mature to approach these questions. Without desire and grief the human being must treat these questions. He must be beyond that which appears in his soul every day, at every opportunity, wherever he goes. Where desire and grief and personal interest interfere in our answer, there we cannot answer the questions objectively, in the true light. Plato also wanted to say this when he let the dying Socrates speak about the immortality of the human mind. It cannot be a matter of proving immortality in any situation, but it only concerns the question: how does one get the perception of the qualities of the human soul, so that—if one gets it—the strength of conviction flows from our soul by itself?

This also formed the basis of all those teaching sites in which one tried to lead the students to the highest truth in an appropriate way. It is only a matter of course that the questions: does the human mind live before birth and after death? And: which is the destination of the human being in time and in eternity? that these questions cannot be treated by most human beings without interest. It is a matter of course that any personal interest, any hope and fear accompanying the human being constantly are connected with the question of the eternity of the spirit. One called mystery schools in ancient times those sites where the highest questions of the spiritual life were taught and answered to the students.

In such mystery sites the pupils were not taught about such questions in the abstract. Truths were handed down to them only if they were able according to their state of soul, of mind, and of the whole personality to see these questions in the right light. They were in this state beyond desire and harm, beyond fear and hope which tie the human being to themselves day by day, hour for hour. These passions, these contents of feeling had to be removed from the personality at first. Without fear and hope, purified of them, the pupil had to approach the mystery site.

Purification was the preparation which the pupil had to go through. Without this, the questions were not answered to him. The purification of passions, of desire and harm, of fear and hope was the precondition to climb up to the summit on which the question of immortality can be treated. Because one was clear to himself about the fact that then the pupil can look in the eye of spirit as well as somebody who delves in a mathematical field sees in the eye of pure objective mathematics: without passion, without being tormented by fear and hope.

We have seen in the last lecture that desire and harm are the expressions of the human soul above all. The inner experience, the very own experience of the person is desire and harm. Desire and harm must go through purification first, before the soul can get to the spirit. Desire and harm are bound to the everyday impressions of the senses, to the immediate experiences of the person, to the interests concerning his person. What does desire normally do to us, what does harm do to us? That which interests us as a personality. That causes desire and harm which disappears with our death more or less. We must leave this narrow circle of that which causes desire and harm in order to get higher knowledge. Our desire and harm must be separated, must be drawn off from these everyday interests and be taken up to quite different worlds. The human being has to lift desire and harm, the wishes of his soul over the everyday, the sensuous things; he must bind them to the highest experiences of the spirit.

He must look up with these wishes and desires to that to which one attributes a shadowy or abstract existence usually. What could be more abstract for the human being of the everyday life than the pure, unsensuous thought? The human beings of everyday life who stick to their personalities with desire and harm already flee from the simplest, most trivial super-sensible truth. Mathematics is widely avoided just because it is not accompanied by any interest, desire, and harm in the everyday sense of the word. The pupil had to be purified in the mystery schools from this everyday desire and harm.

What lived only as an image of thought in his inside and flitted away like a shadowy formation, he had to be attached to it, and he had to love this like the human being is attached to the everyday with his whole soul. One called the change of the passions and desires metamorphosis. There is a new reality for him afterwards; a new world makes impressions on him. That which leaves the usual person cold which touches him as something sober and cold is the world of ideas. It is this to which his desire and harm are bound now, at which one looks like something real, and which becomes a reality now like table and chairs.

Only if the human being has progressed so far that the world of ideas, usually called abstract, moves, enchants, soaks up his soul, if this shadowy reality of thoughts surrounds him in such a way that he lives and works within this world as well as the everyday person moves in the everyday, sensuous reality which he can see and feel—if this metamorphosis of the whole human being has happened, he is in the state in which the spirit in the environment speaks to him; then he experiences this spirit like a living language, then he perceives the Word that has become flesh and expresses itself in all things.

If the everyday person looks out and sees the lifeless minerals around him, he sees them controlled by physical laws, controlled by the laws of gravitation, magnetism, heat, light et cetera. The human being realises the laws to which these beings are subject using his thoughts. But just these thoughts do not speak to him with the same concrete reality, do not mean that which his hands touch what his eyes see. After this metamorphosis of the human being has taken place, he thinks not only of shadow-images like of the physical laws, then these shadow-images start speaking the living language of the spirit to him. The spirit speaks to him from the surroundings. From the plants, from the minerals, from the different genera of the animals the spirit of the surroundings speaks to the human being who lives without desire and harm.

Theosophy points to a development, not to an abstract truth, to a concrete truth, not to logical proofs, if it speaks about the world of ideas, of the spiritual world. It talks about that which the human beings should become; it does not speak about proofs. Nature speaks to a human being differently who has purified his soul, so that it does no longer stick to the everyday; does not have the everyday pains and joys, but higher pains and higher joy and higher bliss at the same time which flow from the pure spirit of the things. The theosophical ethics expresses that pictorially. It expresses in two marvellous pictures that the human being can recognise the highest truth only at the moment when he has lifted his senses over the everyday pain and the everyday joy of the things. As long as the eye sticks to the things with joy and pain, in the everyday sense of the word, as long it cannot perceive the spirit round itself. As long as the ear still has the immediate sensitiveness of the everyday life, as long it cannot hear the living word through which the spiritual things round us speak to us. That is why the theosophical teaching of development sees the demand in two pictures which the human being has to put to himself if he wants to attain the knowledge of the spirit.

Before the eyes can see,
They must be incapable of tears.
Before the ear can hear,
It must have lost its sensitiveness ...

(Mabel Collins Light on the Path)

The eye which cherishes the spirit can no longer have tears of joy and tears of pain in the everyday sense. Because if the human being has advanced to this level of development, his self-consciousness speaks in a different, in a new way to him. Then we look into the covered sanctuary of our inside in a quite new way. Then the human being perceives himself as a member of the spiritual world. Then he perceives himself as something that is pure and beyond any sensuous because he has taken off desire and harm in the sensuous sense. Then he hears self-consciousness in his inside speaking to him as the mathematical truth speaks indifferently to him, but in such a way as mathematical truth also speaks in another sense. Mathematical truth namely is true and eternal in certain way. What appears to us in the language of mathematics, which is free of sensuality, is true regardless of time and space. Regardless of time and space that speaks in our inside to us which appears before our soul when it has purified itself up to desire and harm of spiritual matters. Then the eternal speaks to us in its significance. The eternal with its significance spoke to the dying Socrates that way, and the current of the immediate spirituality went over to the disciples. From that which he received as an experience from the dying Socrates the disciple Phaedo expresses that desire and harm in the usual sense must do damage if the spirit wants to speak directly to us.

We can observe this in the so-called abnormal phenomena of the human life. These phenomena are apparently far from our considerations of the first part of my lecture. However, considered in the true sense of the word, they are very close to these considerations. These are the phenomena which are called abnormal conditions of the soul, like hypnotism, somnambulism and clairvoyance.

What does hypnosis mean in the human life? Today it cannot be my task to explain the various performances which have to be carried out if we want to transport a human being into the condition similar to sleep which we call hypnosis. Either this happens—I want to mention this only by the way—by looking at a shining object whereby the attention is concentrated in particular, or also by simply speaking to the person concerned in suitable way, while we say: you fall asleep now.—Thereby we can produce this condition of hypnosis, a kind of sleep, in which the everyday waking consciousness is extinguished. The human being who has been transported into hypnotic sleep that way stands or sits before the hypnotist, motionless, without impression in the usual sense of the word. Such a hypnotised person can be stung with needles, can be hit, his limbs can be moved to other positions—he perceives nothing, he feels nothing of that which would have caused pain or maybe a pleasant sensation, a tickle, we want to say, to him under other circumstances, with waking consciousness. In the usual sense desire and harm are eliminated from the being of such a hypnotised person. However, desire and harm are the basic qualities of the soul, the middle part of the human being, as I have explained in the last talk. What does hypnotism eliminate? It basically eliminates the soul of the three parts, body, soul and mind. We have eliminated the middle part of the human being. He is not active, he does not feel desire and harm in the usual sense; it does not hurt him what would hurt him if his soul functioned normally.

How is the being active now in such a person if you speak to such a hypnotised person, if you give him some orders? If you say to him: get up, do three steps, he carries out these orders. You can still give him more intricate, more manifold orders—he carries out them. You can put down sensuous objects to him, for example, a pear, and say to him, this is a glass ball. He will believe it. What lies sensually before him has no significance for him. It is decisive for him that you say to him, it is a glass ball. If you ask him: what do you have before yourself? He will answer to you: a glass ball.—Your mind, what is in you if you are the hypnotist and what you think, what comes as a thought from you has a direct effect on the actions of this person.

He follows the orders of your mind with his body automatically. Why does he follow these orders? Because his soul is eliminated, because his soul does not intervene between his body and your mind. At the moment when his soul is active with its desire and harm again, when it is able to feel pain, to perceive again, at this moment only the soul decides whether these orders are to be carried out; whether it has to accept the thoughts of the other. If you face another person in normal condition, his mind works on you. But his mind, his thoughts work on your soul first of all. It works on you like desire and harm, and you decide how to react to the thoughts, to the will actions of the other. If the soul is silent, if the soul is eliminated, then it does not position itself between your body and the mind of the other, then the body follows the impressions of the hypnotist, the impressions of his mind will-lessly as the mineral follows the physical laws. Elimination of the soul is the essential part of hypnosis. Then the foreign thought, the thought located beyond the person, works with the strength of a physical law on this person who is in a condition similar to sleep. That works like a physical law which inserts itself between this spiritual natural force and the body, and this is the soul. Between your own mind and your own body the soul inserts itself. We carry out what we grasp as a thought what we grasp thinking in the everyday life only because it transforms itself into our personal wishes that it is accepted, is found right from our desire and our harm that, in other words, our mind speaks to our soul at first and our soul carries out the orders of our own mind.

Now one may ask: why does not the highest member of the human being, the mind, face the hypnotist if the soul is eliminated, if the hypnotist faces the hypnotised? Why does the mind of the person slumber, why is it inactive?—We get this clear in our mind if we know that for the human being during his earthly incarnation the interaction of mind, soul and body is essential that the mind of the human being understands the environment, the sensory reality only because the soul provides this understanding. If our eye receives an impression from without, the soul has to be the mediator, so that this impression can penetrate up to our mind. I perceive a colour. The eye provides the external impression for me because of its organisation. The mind thinks about the colour. It forms a thought. But between the thought and the external impression the reagent of the soul inserts itself, and that is why the impression becomes only its own inner life becomes an experience of the soul. The mind can speak only to the own soul, to the personal soul in the earthly human being. If you eliminate the soul by means of hypnosis, then the mind is no longer able to express itself in the hypnotised person.

You have taken away the organ of the mind by which it can express itself by which it can be active. You have not taken away the mind from the person. You have eliminated his soul and made it inactive. But because the mind can be active in the human being only in the soul, it cannot be active in the body. Hence, we say, he is in an unconscious state. That means nothing else than: his mind sleeps. Now we understand why the hypnotised person becomes so receptive to the mental impressions which go out from the hypnotist. He becomes receptive because nothing psychic inserts itself between him and the hypnotist. There the thought of the other becomes an immediate natural force, there the thought becomes creative. The thought is creative, and the spirit is creative in the whole nature. It only does not appear directly.

Eliminating the soul at the same time we have made the consciousness of the hypnotised person inactive like in other similar abnormal states. We have transported the person into an unconscious state. We can get an image of this process, if we imagine that we bring a sleeping person from one room into another and let him sleep there some time. Impressions are round him, but he does not perceive them. He knows nothing about his surroundings. If we bring him, without he has awoken, back into the room in which he has slept before then he has been in another room without knowing it, then he has not perceived anything of the other room. It depends on the fact that we perceive our surroundings if we want to call these surroundings “real.” A lot may be round us, may be real, and may be essential—we know nothing of it because we do not perceive it. We do not comply with it, our activity is not relating to it because we perceive nothing.

In such a state the hypnotised person faces the hypnotist. Forces go out from the hypnotist; forces are effective which are mind-impregnated with the thoughts of the hypnotist. They go out from him and have an effect on the hypnotised. But the hypnotised knows nothing about it. He speaks, but he speaks only according to the mind of the hypnotist. He is active, so to speak, without being his own spectator—like people in the everyday life—without observing the object of his activity at the same time. He is, so to speak, in the same situation concerning the mind of the hypnotist as the sleeping person who was transported into another room and knows nothing of that which takes place round him. The human being can be transported into surroundings time and again where the spirit speaks to him. He can be in surroundings where the spirit speaks to him. Now and at every moment you are also in surroundings in which the spirit speaks to you, because everything round us is done by the spirit. The physical laws are spirit, only that the human being perceives this spirit in the shadowy reflection of the thoughts in the usual view. This spirit is spirit just as the spirit which is active in the hypnotist if he works on the hypnotised person.

Compared with his spiritual surroundings the human being is also in the normal, in the everyday waking state in a state in which his senses and his perception are not open for the spirit, even if he is not in such a mental condition like the hypnotised. If this perception is open for the spirit which is in the environment if the things of the spiritual world which are round us speak a loud, clear language to us, then this can only happen if we are in the normal life in a similar situation like the hypnotised toward the hypnotist. The hypnotised person experiences no pain, he does not perceive needle stings, and he does not perceive a blow. Desire and harm in the usual sense of the word are extinguished.

If we get in our everyday life, in the waking consciousness to that state which I have described in the first part of my lecture—because the theosophical world view should consider a higher developmental state of the human being like Plato, like the mystery priest demanded it from his disciples—If we remove that which touches us as an everyday desire or harm which moves our eyes directly to tears or makes our ears sensitive, which fulfils us with fear and hope—If we remove what constitutes our everyday life, if we make ourselves free from this world and experience the described metamorphosis of the mind then we can get to a similar state toward the spiritual world—but consciously—like the hypnotised toward the hypnotist in the abnormal sense. Then our eyes and ears are active in the same way as before; we have our waking consciousness, but we do not allow to be touched by the everyday objects within this waking consciousness. This metamorphosis must take place with the human being. He has to perceive the spiritual environment, the language of the spirit in this environment without desire and grief like the hypnotised hears the thoughts and words of the hypnotist in his unusual state.

Only experience of this field can be the determining factor. If the great basic principles of the theosophical ethics are fulfilled to a certain degree, if the human being has got to the state where he faces spiritual truth really as the human being faces the mathematical truth in his everyday life, objectively, without desire and grief, then the spirit of the environment speaks to the human being, then the spirit is not engaged to the impressions of his senses, as little as the hypnotised is tied to that which works on his senses. The hypnotist works only on the hypnotised person who does not have desire and grief, and the spirit has the same effect only on the clairvoyant human being who does not have desire and grief. In order to have such sensitivity of the environment with waking consciousness it is necessary to have gone through a development, so that we are able with correctly functioning mind, with correctly active reason to pass between the things and still to let speak the spirit to ourselves. Clairvoyance is called that level the pupil has attained on which he is able to perceive the world round himself free of desire and grief. If the human being has developed so far that his passions and desires are silent in him and loves this state without passion and desire as the everyday human being loves the things round himself, then he has become mature to perceive the spirit round himself. Then he does no longer wish what he wished in the everyday life, and then he wishes in the spiritual world.

Then, however, his thoughts, saturated with his higher wishes, also become effective forces with his purified soul. The thoughts of the human being are only abstract thoughts, because the everyday human being inserts the soul with its personal wishes between himself, between his spiritual inside and everything else.

Only this is the reason why our thoughts must be taken up by the soul, why our thoughts must be transformed into the personality to become effective. Personal wishes approach the thoughts of the individual human being. If I have an ideal, I want to convert this ideal into reality according to my personal wishes. As a personality I must have an interest—it is in the everyday life in such a way—in that which a thought illuminates to me if I should carry out it. As a person I have to consider a thought, a will as desirable. My personal wish binds itself to the thought which would be, otherwise, independent of time and space because what is true in the thought is true at all times. If we go far beyond these personal wishes, we develop in the sense as the mystery priests demanded it from their disciples, then our wishes are transformed in such a way that we bind the whole strength of our soul not to our personal interest, but we follow up that which lives in the spiritual realm more affectionately and more devotedly. Then this thought, the mind which lives in us does not become dull and abstract like in the everyday person, it does not have to penetrate the outside world by means of the soul experiences, then it flows into the outside world, so to speak, from the innermost mind of the human being without being touched by the immediate self, without having to go through the personal self. It does not become dull by the outside world, it moves up to us like a natural force; it moves up to us like the force of crystallisation, like the magnetic force which goes out from the magnet and arranges the pattern of the iron filings. Like these forces which surround us in nature as reality the thought free of wishes works on our surroundings, on the reality around us. Knowledge of our environment, knowledge of our fellow men becomes fertile in quite different sense if we have advanced to such thoughts disregarding our personal wishes. Then that appears which merges as a strength of thought of this developed human being into his fellow men.

Then the thought appears as an organising natural force with really unselfish human beings. About the great, true sages—not only with the scholars, but with those who brought wisdom to humankind , it is told to us that they were healers at the same time that a strength went out from them which provided help, release of physical and mental sufferings to their fellow men. This was the case because they had advanced to such a development through which the thought becomes a strength through which the mind can stream directly into the world. The knowledge which is free of wishes this way which is unselfish knowledge which streams into the human being as the strength which, otherwise, only serves the self, such strength enables the human being to heal spiritually.

Only in principle I can indicate the preconditions of such a spiritual healing. A precondition of the so-called spiritual healing in the theosophical sense can be that the human being goes beyond his limited, everyday self. In a certain sense the human being has to eliminate his own soul-life if he wants to become clairvoyant, a healer, extinguishing what belongs preferably to him as a personality. Such a human being does not become completely insensible and dull that way. O no, on the contrary, such a human being becomes sensitive in a higher sense and more sensitive than he was before. Such a human being develops a susceptibility which is not, however, that which the senses supply in the everyday life, but he develops a susceptibility of a much higher type. Is the susceptibility of the human being lower than that of the lower animal which has a pigmentation mark only instead of an eye by which it can have a light impression at most? Is it different with the human being because he transforms the impression which he receives in the visual purple into the perception of the colour in the environment? As the eye of the human being relates to the pigmentation mark of the lower animal, the spiritual organism of the clairvoyant relates to the organism of the undeveloped human being. The elimination of the personality is the sacrifice. The effacement of the personality releases the voice of spirit in our environment. The effacement of the personality solves the riddles of nature for us. We have to efface our soul-world. We have to overcome desire and grief in the everyday sense of the word. This is necessary to get to a certain knowledge and higher development.

Now, however, an effacement of the own personality in certain sense is also necessary with a single task which has an infinite importance for the everyday human life, with the human educational system. In every adolescent human being, from the birth of the child, through the development years, it is the spirit in the innermost core of the human being which should develop; the spirit is hidden within the body at first, it remains a secret within the movements of the soul of the adolescent human being. If we face this spirit, we make the adolescent human being dependent of our interests—I do not even want to say of our desires and passions, then we let our mind flow into the human being and we basically develop what is in us in the growing human being. But I do not even want to speak of the fact that we let our wishes and desires be active with the education of an adolescent human being, but only that the educator lets speak his mind only too often, yes that it is almost a rule that the educator asks his reason above all what has to happen concerning this or that education measure. But he does not take into consideration that he has a growing mind before himself which can form only according to its nature if it can develop according to this nature universally freely and without restrictions, and if the educator gives it the opportunity of this development. We face a strange human mind. We must allow a strange human mind to work on ourselves if we are educators. As we have seen that in hypnosis, in the unusual state the spirit has a direct effect on the human person, the developing mind of the child works and must work in another form directly on us if we have the child before ourselves. However, we can develop this mind only if we are able to extinguish ourselves, just as with other higher performances, if we are able—without interference of our self—to be a servant of the human mind entrusted to our education if this human mind is given the opportunity to develop freely. As long as we allow our selfish concepts and demands to flow against the mind, as long as we set our self with its peculiarities against this mind, as long we see this mind just as little, as the eye which is still involved in desire and grief sees the spirit of the environment clairvoyantly.

On an everyday level the educator has to fulfil a higher ideal. He fulfils this ideal if he understands the mysterious, but obvious principle of the complete selflessness and understands the effacement of the own self. This effacement of the own self is the sacrifice by means of which we perceive the spirit in our environment. We perceive the spirit in unusual states if we become free of desire and grief in unusual way. We perceive the spirit clairvoyantly if we are without desire and grief in the normal state, with full waking consciousness. We lead the spirit in the right thinking if we lead it unselfishly within education. This unselfish ideal as an attitude which the educator has daily to strive for has to illuminate his work. But just because an immediate necessity of our cultural development is in this field because in this field a true, unselfish attitude must be produced for the purposes of our culture, therefore, it is the field of the educational ideals above all where theosophy can appear as something creative where it can render humankind a most valuable service. Somebody who is devoted to the theosophical life who learns bit by bit to open the senses to the spirit by the development of selflessness has the best basis for a pedagogic activity, and he will work on the educational task of humankind in the theosophical sense. The educator needs to follow only this, above all. Apart from that, he does not need to show theosophical dogmas or principles at every opportunity. It does not depend on dogmas, principles and teachings; it depends on the life and on the transformation of the forces which flow from selflessness and thereby from the perception of the spirit. It depends on it and not on the fact that the educator has taken up the teachings of theosophy. He is theosophist because he sees something like riddles in every developing human life which appears like a being before the soul whom he has to develop as a mind, while he has to train the mind. A riddle of nature which he has to solve should be any growing human being to the educator. If he is an educator with such an attitude, then the educator is a theosophist in the best sense of the word. He is it because he approaches any human being, any adolescent human being with a true, holy shyness and understands the words of Jesus: “anything you failed to do for one of these, however insignificant, you failed to do for me.” You did it to me, to God who has become a human being because you recognised and cultivated the divine spirit in the least of my brothers.

Somebody who penetrates himself with such an attitude faces as a human being other human beings quite differently. He sees the divine spirit, the developing spirit in the least of his brothers. His relation to his fellow men fulfils him in another sense with seriousness and dignity, with shyness and respect if he considers any human being as a riddle of nature, as a holy riddle of nature on which he must not intrude this way and to which he has to establish a relationship, so that from this seriousness the respect of the divine spiritual core may arise in every human being. If the human being has such a relationship to his brothers, he is on the way, even if he is still so far away from the goal. The goal which we set in such a way stands before us in infinite distance. He is on the way which the theosophical ethics indicate with the nice, great words:

Before the eyes can see,
They must be incapable of tears.
Before the ear can hear,
It must have lost its sensitiveness ...

As I have already remarked, we shall consider certain matters during these lectures which will then culminate, tomorrow or the next day, in an exposition of Historical Necessity and Free Will, will culminate by my having to show in what sense an historical event is necessary, and in what sense such an event—as something which, generally speaking, interferes in the soul-sphere of human life—could also be otherwise than it is. Indeed, at the present time—when such important occurrences are interfering in human life—this is a problem which is of very special, deeply penetrating significance; for, in face of the sad, catastrophic events of the present day (the war) every human being must indeed ask himself the question:—in how far are such happenings—and directly this present one—dependent on a certain necessity and in how far could the present occurrence have turned out differently, had it been able to assume a different aspect.

As we indicated, it will be our aim during these lectures to reply to this large, inclusive question with means that we can have at our disposal now in the occult basis that is to be explained in public lectures. But we must proceed from a more inclusive consideration of human life. We must deepen ourselves somewhat, from a certain aspect, in human nature itself For, as you are perhaps able to gather directly from the public lectures held recently, in human life the forces of that world are playing in which the human being finds himself between death and a new birth. Into this life—much more intensely than one imagines—are the forces playing, in which the human being is embedded, as the so-called dead. We are, as human beings, so fashioned—in the last lecture I drew attention more to the physical aspect—that in reality, the threshold between the everyday physical world and the spiritual world, cuts right through our midst. If we hold in mind our everyday life, and what we have considered the last time more from the physical side, today more from the side of the soul, then we may say: While we are incarnated here in the physical body, our human life runs its course in such a way that we have active in us, first, everything that can be experienced through the senses during our life, everything that is outspread around us, so to say, as a tapestry of the sense impressions, and from which we receive knowledge through our senses. Upon this world, then, everything is built which we elaborate out of this sense world, but which we also, independently of it, are able to interpenetrate in our thought life. When, however, we unite sense life and thought life, we have in reality everything in which we live with our usual waking consciousness.

From the moment we awaken in the morning until the moment we fall asleep, we are awake in reality only in our sense impressions and in our thought life. We are not awake at all, in the full sense of the word, in our feelings, in our feeling life. And there, between the thought life and the feeling life, practically unnoticed for the everyday consciousness, lies the threshold. For what interpenetrates our feeling life as a deeper reality does not actually come to consciousness at all in the human being. The feelings themselves do [not?] come to consciousness in him. They surge up and down out of a subconscious world. But the consciousness has really nothing more to do with feeling that we in sleep have to do with our dreams. Therefore it was possible recently to say here in Switzerland in public lectures:—While the human being lives in his feeling life, he is actually asleep and dreaming. The dream life extends itself over into our waking life. We are really continuously in a dream state from the moment of going to sleep to that of awakening, but only those dreams are remembered or enter our consciousness that are most strongly connected with our physical existence; dreaming continues on throughout the entire sleep life. Only in the deeper layers of our consciousness do we sleep, so to say, dreamlessly. But this dreaming and dreamless sleep life goes over into our feeling life, into the life of our affections. And we know no more of the reality, of the actual content of the ordinary consciousness in the non-clairvoyant consciousness of our feeling life, than we know what actually occurs when the images of the dream life run their course before us. Therefore it was also stated in these lectures that the human being does not inwardly experience the content of what is termed “History” with waking consciousness, but dreams it through, goes through it in a dream. History is what may be termed a cosmic dream of the human being. For the impulses that live in history live actually in feeling and emotional impulses. He dreams, while he inwardly experiences, history. Thus the life of feeling lies quite underneath the threshold of the real, waking consciousness. In this soul relationship also the boundary between the conscious and the unconscious life cuts right across the middle of the human being. In his will life the human being sleeps completely. For with his everyday consciousness he knows nothing about what actually lives in the will. His ordinary consciousness lives in the reality that expresses itself in the will in exactly the same way in which he lives in deep sleep. He follows consciously only that which, proceeding out of the will, has gone over into action. In this he awakens; in the execution of the will he cannot awaken. Therefore the philosophers continually quarrel about the freedom and the non-freedom of the will, because they are unable to penetrate into the region that can only be seen into with clairvoyant consciousness, the region out of which the will really draws its impulses.

Thus—I accentuate it once more—in the soul relationship also, the threshold lies between the actual physical world of waking life and the world which remains subconscious for him, lies in the midst of the human being himself, for this human being.

Now everything which the human being experiences and lives with between death and a new birth plays right into his life, insofar as it is the life of the feeling and the will—that is, insofar as it has been dreamt and slept through. What the dead live through is actually in the world in which we are living, in as far as we feel and will. Only we do not know with ordinary consciousness the realities that live in feeling and willing. If we could live through the reality which gives the basis of the feeling life, if we would live through especially the reality giving the basis of the willing life, just as in waking we live through the reality of the sense perceptions and the thought conceptions—the conceptions indeed to a minor degree, nevertheless to a certain degree—then would the departed, the man who has passed through the portals of death, be just as much beside us, in continual association with us, as someone who still walks about with us here on the physical plane, so that we are able to receive impressions from him in our waking consciousness by means of our senses and thought life. What is living in the impulses of the departed dead ascends continually within our feeling life, into the life of our will impulses. And only because we dream and sleep this away do we feel separated from the dead with whom we were associated.

In reality, however, the world in which the so-called dead live is quite different from the world in which we live while we are incarnated in the physical body. For observe, when you ask quite seriously: what then exists for the waking non-clairvoyant consciousness from the time of waking until going to sleep? The answer is: Only that which can be lived through in the world which is spread out as a tapestry of the sense impressions and also in the world we fashion out of it for ourselves by means of our thought conceptions. From this world, in the first place, everything belonging to the so-called mineral kingdom, for which the sense organs are used in perceiving, is not directly existent for the dead. To this mineral world belong, for example, also the stars, the sun and moon; in general everything belongs to it that is perceptible to the senses, and to it belongs also a large region of the plant world. These are regions that primarily do not lie open to the spiritual- and soul-eyes of the dead.

On the other hand there begins to open up already for the soul-eyes of the dead the world of which we are more or less unconscious when we direct our glance toward it—the glance which is of course veiled by the sense world—that is to say the world of impulses, of forces which live in the animals. This is for the dead the lowest world, in exactly the same way that the mineral world is the lowest world for us here in the physical body. Just as for us the plant world, which sprouts forth out of the mineral kingdom, builds itself up, so, for the dead, the human world, as soul world, erects itself upon the foundation that lives in the animal world. And just as the animal world forms the third category, which erects itself upon the mineral and plant world, so the kingdom of the Angels, Archangels, etc., forms a higher kingdom in the world of the dead.

The entire environment into which the departed one is transposed is thereby different from the environment in which we ourselves live in the physical body. For just conceive for a moment how it would be, were everything you perceive with the senses taken out of the world which you perceive with your physical body, about which you, in your physical body, form concepts. There would be something remaining over and above for the non-clairvoyant perception which can only have the appearance of a dream world, a world which can only be dreamed, which cannot live any more strongly in the consciousness than a dream. But the distinction becomes clearer if we hold the difference in mind in yet another way. Just notice that as long as we are incarnated in the physical body, the essential thing that lends character to our lives (the chief characteristic) is that we (although inwardly the matter is difficult as you know from other lectures) are able to have the consciousness that whatever we do with the beings of the mineral and plant kingdoms—as a result of our intercourse with them—remains relatively a matter of indifference to them. We act indeed under the influence of this thought just expressed. We break the stone calmly and have the idea that we do not cause the stone pain, nor also give it any joy. You know that inwardly the matter is somewhat different: but in as far as we human beings are in touch with the surrounding mineral world, we think with a certain justification that joy and pain is not at once aroused when we break a stone to pieces or do something similar.

In a like manner do we relate ourselves to the plant world. The human beings are now very rare who, for example, feel a sort of pain, have a somewhat similar feeling when a flower is plucked. The individuals, who in a certain sense still prefer to have the rose on the rosebush than to have the rose bouquet in the room, are not at all so numerous. It is only with the animal world that we begin to bring our human nature directly into relationship with the surrounding world. And yet let it be said once more:—the human beings are just now quite rare among present day people who have a feeling—only distantly similar to be sure—when plucking roses similar to the one they would have were the heads of animals being torn off in order to bind them together in a nosegay:—even among anthroposophists I have found that not everyone always prefers to have roses on the rose-bush—although indeed the feeling has already progressed so far that there has never been, let us say, a bouquet of nightingale heads presented in a hall! Now we are beginning to feel how the life that extends itself out of us continues on into our surrounding world.

The departed has no such condition. For him nothing exists at all in the environment for which he could not have the feeling that if he were only to stretch out a finger—this is now expressed quite symbolically, in imagery—then what is accomplished—through the sticking out of his finger, indeed, through any action whatever, yes, through everything done by the dead—would not bring about, would not release joy and pain in the environment. He does not enter at all into relationship with his surroundings unless he awakens joy and pain, unless there exists an echo of joy and pain. If you do something after you have passed through the portals of death, then through your action, wherever it may be, pain or joy, tension or relaxation of something is continually occurring which is similar to the feeling life. If we knock on a table we feel that it does not pain the table. The one who is dead can never carry out an action without knowing that he lives and weaves, not only into the living element, but into the living element filled with feeling. The feeling-filled incitement is spread out over his entire environment.

From another aspect you will find that described in the corresponding chapter of my book Theosophy. This world of incitement filled with feeling lives thus upon the lowest level there above in the animal kingdom. And just as we are acquainted with a certain external side of the mineral kingdom by means of our sense perceptions, so is the departed dead familiar, over the extent of his whole world, with the inner side, not with the outer form, but with the inner aspect of animal life. This animal life is the lowest basis upon which he lives, upon which he fashions himself, upon which he erects his existence. And a large amount of work of the dead consists in their placing themselves in direct relationship to the world of living animal creatures. Just as we here on earth, from childhood on, place ourselves in connection with the dead mineral world, so do we after death establish ourselves continually on a broad and expanding, growing relationship to the world of the living animal. This world the dead person learns to know on all sides. This world the departed learns to know through having to penetrate step by step all the secrets which here on earth are concealed from him, just as that is concealed from his soul which slumbers underneath his feeling life, for it is the same thing.

Granted, such a question as the one I now intend to interject cannot be allowed as a proper scientific one. But it can nevertheless point toward something behind which real relationships exist. It can be asked: why then is there so much really concealed from the human being here in the physical world by the governing power of the all-penetrating world wisdom? We can ask, why is that concealed into which the dead must be initiated, the mysteries of the construction of the whole animal world?

Directly when we attempt to answer such a question, we plunge into the deepest of all mysteries of existence. And in these considerations we shall have to try to understand this question also. In the first place, however, we must perceive how this comprehension of the inner side of the animal life really takes place.

Here I might proceed, in order not to become theoretical, from a fact of recent history. You know that in a certain external way human historical consciousness has experienced a change in modern times through so-called Darwinism. There has been an endeavor to find the forces by means of which the organisms evolve from the so-called imperfect condition. The Darwinists have named several kinds:—primarily the principle of special selection, survival of the fittest, the adjustment to environment, etc., I do not intend to come to you with these things which you indeed can read in every handbook on Darwinism, even in every encyclopedia. But I wish to point out that those are external, abstract principles: that for those who look deeper, nothing at all is said thereby. What actually happens is not shown when it is said: the perfection occurs through the selection of the fittest, the others gradually dying out and the fittest surviving. Here nothing is actually said about the forces, about the impulses that actually live in the animal kingdom—in order that these creatures may be able not only first to perfect themselves but also to be able to frame their life correspondingly in the ordinary present-day world. What really acts in the forces of selection, in forces that are put forward by Darwinism as forces of selection, as forces that are of a purely mechanically purposeful character. It is the dead working there. It belongs to the most astonishing and impressive experiences which can be made in the circle of the dead, to discover that just as here there are smiths and joiners and others who work in the world of mechanics, in the handicrafts, and thereby create the physical sensible basis of life here, so in the spirit realm, beginning with the animal kingdom and upwards, do the dead work. While the animal kingdom here in many respects is such that we feel it to be an inferior one—however, the mineral world lies indeed still lower—yet the very basis of the work of the dead is the furthering of the animal kingdom. Therefore, the departed become accustomed to living in all the skillfulness that is concealed from him, through the fact of his world of feeling being plunged down into the life of animal existence, during the life between birth and death.

You see, we come here to the point of view that until our age was held more or less secret by the brotherhoods that believed, partly justly, partly unjustly, that other men were not ripe enough for such things. If you gain the knowledge of what is related to the animal nature in the world of the dead, if you look about, you then see that all this belongs to the living element filled with feeling. The human being has also this living element filled with feeling in his soul. But in what way? Between birth and death he possesses it in such a way that were it not locked up in his subconsciousness he could at every moment employ this living element filled with feeling, which exists in the period between birth and death, for the destruction of the remainder of this element in the world. So just imagine what that really means. You yourself, in your personal life, live as a living-element-filled-with-feeling, which, however, is enclosed in the boundaries that are drawn into the physical human being. If human beings were to have this element generally, freely at their disposal—anthroposophists will already be more cultivated in this regard—then they could, in every instance, employ these concealed forces to destroy the living element filled with feeling that is lying in their environment.

The animal nature in the human being is primarily, even in the most exact meaning of the word, a destructive one. And it is even endowed with the capacity to destroy. And when the individual has passed through death's door, then it is his task above everything to tear out of his soul all the impulses that have then become free in such a way that there is really a very great deal remaining of the desire to destroy the living, to kill the living. And it can be said, that to have respect and reverence for all living things is something that the departed must learn above everything else. This reverence for everything living is something that can be looked upon as the self-evident evolution of the departed. So just as we here with inner participation follow a child which as a matter of course evolves from a small infant onward, gradually from day to day, from week to week, just as we follow up with this child the way the soul takes hold of the fleshly bodily nature, having great joy in what happens without the cooperation of the so-called free will, in what occurs there through the pure organic forces of the soul; so in a similar manner, when we follow up the course taken by the departed from the day of his death onward through his life after death, we again behold the development of the deepest reverence for all living beings in the environment, a development from which free will has been withdrawn.

This is something which, as it were, happens like an external side in the departed, just as with the child this occurs as an external side through its growing up, by its traits becoming more expressive. What increases externally in the child to our joy, in like manner increases in the departed by our discovering something radiating from him, more and more through his holding every living thing sacred in such an exalted way. But in this connection an important difference occurs between the life after death and the life here on earth. The life here has concealed by a veil just that in which the departed must deepen himself. We perceive the world through our senses and form for ourselves certain laws which we call the laws of nature, according to which we then form round about us our mechanical instruments, our tools. What we erect round about us according to the laws of nature is indeed essentially a world of the dead. We must even kill the plant, even the tree, when we wish to place its wood at the service of our mechanical arts. And again it belongs to the most staggering knowledge, that in reality everything which our senses teach us, when we apply it by means of our will, is something destructive and cannot be anything else but something destructive.

Even when we create a work of art we must take part in the world of destruction. What we thus create first arises out of destruction. A beneficent world wisdom has only caused us at first to shrink back, as human beings, from placing what lives (generally speaking, from the animal-world upward) at the service of mechanical art. In a certain higher sense, however, everything lives in the world. You will already realize this from the various accounts given during the course of the year. But what do we do in reality when we place at the service of mechanical art that which we perceive through our senses and combine through our understanding? We continually carry death into life. Even a Raphael painting cannot come into being unless death is carried into life. Before a Raphael painting arises it contains more life than afterwards. In the universe this is compensated only through the fact that souls appear who enjoy the Raphael painting and receive from it an impulse, a strong impression. The impulse, the impression which the creating or enjoying soul receives, this alone can help to overcome the forces of death, even when the highest treasure, the so-called highest spiritual possessions of mankind are created here on the physical plane. Essentially, the earth will be destroyed because through their mechanical acts human beings carry death into the earth in such a strong measure. The earth will no longer be able to live, because the forces of death prevail over that which can be saved and carried over into the world of Jupiter, beyond the decay of the physical earth. But out of what human beings have created by weaving together death and life—out of what they have thus created—they will have regained a soul content which they will then carry over into the world of Jupiter.

Death or the destruction of what is living, continually weaves into life, more than words can say; it weaves in human activity itself, through the fact that between birth and death [unreadable] human activity is intimately interwoven with the sense of [unreadable]. Indeed, consciousness arises because death weaves itself into life. Man would not accomplish his task on earth, as far as consciousness is concerned, were he not called upon to weave death into life. Even within ourselves we kill the life of the nerves the very moment in which we form a thought; for a really living nerve cannot form thoughts. In recent public lectures I have said that—“We enter into the life of our nerves through a constant death-process.”

In this respect the life between death and a new birth is the exact opposite. There it is essential for the human soul to acquire the habit of holding holy all that is living, of permeating the living with ever more and more life.

In this manner the life between birth and death is connected with death; the life between death and a new birth, with the life of the whole. An animal kingdom lives upon the earth only through the fact that man dies and sends his impulses from the spiritual world into the life of the animals.

The second thing which man learns to know after death is the kingdom of the human soul itself, regardless of whether these human souls are embodied here in physical bodies or have already passed through the gate of death. After death, man faces the animal world with the feeling that when he carries out an action, something experiences joy, or another being, at least something possessing being, suffers pain. He knows that he strikes against living reality when his spiritual force alone hits against this. Here it is more a universal living and weaving within living reality. In regard to the familiarity with what exists in our own human sphere after we are dead, it is so, that when another soul enters into a relationship with us, after we ourselves have passed through the gate of death, we become aware that our own life-feeling is either strengthened or diminished, according to the way in which we face this soul. Through our relation to a certain soul, regardless of whether it dwells here upon the earth or in the spiritual world, we feel that we become inwardly strengthened. Our companionship with this soul strengthens us in a certain way; our inner forces become stronger and at the same time more alive. We meet this soul and feel that it makes us more awake than we would have been otherwise. An intimate sense of life streams toward us with a certain intensity, through our companionship with this soul. Instead, the relationship with another soul may weaken us in the direction of certain forces and dim down our life, as it were.

Our companionship with souls consists therein that we feel our own life surging livingly in this relationship with the others. We live out our life of feeling and will as human beings between birth and death without knowing that the souls of the dead live in the waves of this life of feeling and will, which we sleep and dream away. They are always there; they live in the waves of our own feeling and will, and they live there in such a way that they experience this life with us. While we experience the surrounding world through our senses as something external, the dead live in the impulses of our feelings and will; they are far more intimately bound together with us than we, insofar as we are physically embodied, are bound together with our surroundings.

It is so that this life—or better, this experiencing, this inner presence in life—of the dead, develops gradually in accordance with the conditions that have been spun out during our life here. Assuredly we live together with all souls after death; this is true, but we know nothing about it. Relationships set in slowly and gradually; namely, with souls with whom we have formed connections during our life between birth and death. We cannot form new relationships, original connections with other human beings during the life between death and a new birth; we can form no such connections originally and directly. When we have loved or hated someone here, i.e., when we were connected with him either in a positive or in a negative way, this again rises from a gray spiritual depth, in the gradual awakening of the life after death, so that we live within these souls, as I have just described.

Thus, a great part of this experiencing, or this inner life-presence of the dead, consists in the fact that everything that exists in the form of a link with other souls, during our last or earlier incarnations, gradually rises up from a gray spiritual depth. This can widen out—and in the case of many departed souls it widens out very soon after death—but in an immediate way. Someone may die; he may have stood in some kind of relationship to a soul dwelling either on the earth or in the spiritual world. This relationship appears before him once more after death, as I have described just now. But this soul with whom he is linked up has relations with other souls, with whom, perhaps, he has never come into contact during any of his lives between birth and death. But here, after death, such souls can establish an indirect contact with the so-called dead soul, and thus enter into relationship with him.

But, as I have already said, these are never direct connections, for they are always mediated by the souls with whom we are linked up karmically through our physical life. The connection with souls where no relationship has been established during physical life is always quite a different one, and is transmitted through the soul who was connected with us in physical life.

You can easily realize, now, that first there are direct, then indirect relationships. Through the fact, however, that all souls are more or less connected with one another throughout the earth, and that during his long life between death and a new birth, man forms, indirectly at least, many new connections—through this fact, the human being enters a very wide field of mutual experience with other souls, if we also take into consideration these indirect relationships. Even when we are here on earth we have already within us this living-into other souls. In the spiritual world we have lived together with innumerable souls, over and over again. The feeling of being at one with all souls, which an abstract philosophy considers only abstractly, and discusses as an abstract at-oneness, has its quite concrete side. Namely, that souls are scarcely to be found over the whole earth with whom there is not at least a distant and indirect connection. We must grasp this fact as concretely as possible, then this will lead us to something real. What the departed experiences is thus a gradual growing into and awakening into a world based, in a wider sense, on his karma. An inward brightness that increases more and more spreads, as it were, over this world, as our experiences become richer in this second realm, which is based upon the animalic realm, just as our experiences in the plant realm are based upon the mineral realm. Our experiences become ever richer and richer.

Imagine this experience extending in all concrete directions, and you will obtain a great deal of that which permeates the soul of the departed between death and a new birth; for all thoughts that connect us in any way with other souls are bound up with this experience. Herein lies an infinitely rich world. Essentially is it so (you will gather this from the cycle on Life Between Death and Rebirth) that during the first half of this life between death and a new birth, the development is more filled with wisdom, more permeated with wisdom. In a wise way man becomes accustomed to the connections that he gradually draws up again out of the spiritual depth. He becomes familiar with all this in a very wise way. Essentially, the threads leading to all karmic relationships of a direct or indirect nature begin in what I have called in the Mystery Plays “The Midnight Hour of Being.” Then follows the further working out, and then an element of force, similar to the will, but only similar, not exactly the same—enters into the life of the soul. This element of force, similar to the will, makes the human being stronger and stronger. Above all, it strengthens those impulses in him that are added to the wisdom-filled survey of the world, as elements and impulses pertaining to the will, as impulses of force.

A certain form of will becomes active in man during the second half of the life between death and a new birth. If we observe this will (we can do this especially in the case of souls who, through this or that circumstance, have a shorter or a shortened life between death and new birth) we find that the will takes a peculiar direction, which may be characterized by saying—the will arises in order to wipe out in some way the traces of our life, the traces of karma.

Please grasp this quite clearly. Such a will, aiming at the effacement of the traces of karma, becomes more and more evident in man. This effacement of the traces of karma is connected with the deepest secrets of human life. Were man to have a continual and full survey of the wisdom which he can acquire very soon, comparatively soon, after death, then there would be numberless human beings who would prefer to wipe out the traces of their existence, rather than enter into new lives. The elaboration of our earlier lives into a karmic connection, which we achieve, can only be achieved because we are dulled by certain beings of the higher hierarchy during the second half of the life between death and a new birth; we are paralyzed in regard to the light of wisdom, so that we restrict our activity and our will- impulses more and more. And we must say that the aim of this is to restrict them in such a way that we create what can then become united with a physical human body in the stream of heredity, and can live out its earthly destiny in this physical body.

We can only understand these thoughts fully when we consider earthly destiny itself. How dream-like this earthly destiny is for man on earth! As a child he accustoms himself gradually to the conditions of earthly life. What we call destiny comes to him in the form of single life experiences. Out of the woof of these life experiences, something is formed which is in reality man himself. For think what you would be as far as the present day, had you not lived through your own particular destiny! You can indeed say—I myself am what I have experienced as destiny. You would be quite another human being had you experienced a different destiny. And yet, how strange destiny seems to be, how little interwoven with what man calls his ego! In how many countless cases the ego feels itself struck by destiny! Why? Because what we ourselves do towards the molding of our destiny remains hidden in the subconsciousness. What we experience takes up its place in the world of sense-experience and in the world of thoughts. It merely strikes against our feeling life. Our feeling life remains passive to this. What we have in common with the realm of the dead springs forth actively out of our feeling life and out of the life of the will impulses. What springs forth in this way, and what we ourselves do without our consciousness, by dreaming and sleeping through it, this forms our destiny; we ourselves are this. We dream and sleep through all we do toward the molding of our own destiny. We wake in what we experience as our destiny, but only because it remains unconscious. What is it that remains in reality unconscious? That which sounds across as impulses, out of earlier incarnations on earth, and out of the life between death and a new birth in a purely spiritual way—out of the regions where also the dead are to be found—a region which we dream and sleep away. At the same time, these are forces that come also from ourselves. They are the forces with which we mold our destiny. We weave our destiny out of the same region that the dead inhabit in common with us.

Think how we grow together with this world, of which we now know something to a certain extent—how we sleep through it and how we experience it—although we have not yet spoken of the experiences in connection with the beings of the higher hierarchies. This will also be considered. But what I wish to convey in a description of this kind is that we must place the realm of the so-called dead within the same realm in which we ourselves live, and we must become conscious of the fact that we feel separated from the dead (but in reality we are not separated from them) only because we dream and sleep away our feeling-life and will-life, where the dead are. However, something else can be found in this world that we dream and sleep away, something that man as a rule does not follow at all in his usual consciousness. Sometimes he becomes aware of this when it appears before him in specially striking cases; but these are exceptional, outstanding cases, which only draw attention to what is always permeating life and streaming through it. You yourselves will have heard of many cases resembling the following one:—

Someone is in the habit of taking a daily walk; it leads him to a mountain slope. He goes there every day; it is his special pleasure. One day he goes there again as usual. Suddenly, while he is walking, he hears something like a voice, although it is not a physical voice, which tells him:—Why are you taking this walk? Can you really not do without this pleasure? It speaks more or less like this. He begins to hesitate and turns aside, in order to think over what has just happened to him. In this instant a piece of rock rolls down; it would quite certainly have struck him, had he not turned aside.

This is a true story, but one that only points out sensationally something that is always present in our lives. How often you plan to do this or that—and this or that prevents you. Think how many things would have been different, even in the smallest experiences of life, had you started out at an appointed hour, instead of half an hour later, because something detained you. Think what changes have thus come into your life; what changes have also come into the lives of many other people! It is quite easy to picture this. Let us suppose that you have planned to take a walk at 3:30 PM; you were supposed to meet another person and to tell him some news that he, in his turn, would have told to someone else. Because you came too late you do not tell him this news; this was not done, and with a certain right. Here we see a universal order of laws that differs from the one that we describe as a necessity of Nature. It consists therein, that someone is prevented from continuing his walk because he hears a voice that causes him to turn aside, and thus saves him from being struck dead by the falling piece of rock. We feel that here a different world system is at work. But this world system permeates our existence always, not merely when such sensational events take place. Even in such matters, we are used to see only the sensational aspect of things. We do not notice this other world. Why? Because we turn our gaze toward the events that occur in our life and in our surroundings and not toward the events that do not occur, events that are continually being prevented, continually being hindered.

From a certain moment in spiritual experience, that which does not happen is held back from us. That from which we are, as it were, prevented, can rise up in our consciousness in the same way as that which does happen; except that it comes to our consciousness as another world system. Try to place this world system before your souls by saying to yourselves: man is accustomed to look only at what happens and not at what has been prevented from happening. What he does not notice in this case is intimately connected with the realm in which the dead are, in which we ourselves are with our dreamlike feeling and sleeping will. Within us, we cut ourselves off from this other world because dream and sleep play also into our waking life. All that seethes, lives and weaves beneath the boundary which separates our thinking from our feeling contains, at the same time, the secrets that build not only the bridge between the so-called living and the so-called dead, but also the bridge between the realm of necessity and the realm of freedom and of so-called chance.