The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By ideal magic I understand the following:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear attendees! First of all, I would like to express my heartfelt thanks for the kind words of welcome and for your invitation to this lecture. I have taken the liberty of making the relationship between the direction I represent in supersensible knowledge and the science of the present the subject of today's presentation. The objections that are raised against the possibility of supersensory knowledge in general – and in particular against the direction of supersensory knowledge that I intend to present and that works towards scientific methodology – are based primarily on the opinion that supersensory knowledge contradicts the scientific method of research and the actual task of scientific thinking.

Now I would like to point out one thing, first of all historically. I would like to point out that such extrasensory knowledge, as it is sought through anthroposophy, can actually only be a result of our time, of our civilization, and for the reason that this our time — and by that I mean roughly the last three to four centuries up to the present —, because this our time has only produced what can be called a complete way of knowing the world of the senses.

Sensory knowledge as we have it today, as a result of scientific research methods, was not available at all until three or four centuries ago. This sensual knowledge is actually only a result of the endeavors that were initiated by Copernicus, Kepler and others, and they celebrated their greatest triumphs in the course of the nineteenth century, particularly in its last third, and also in the twentieth century. Any kind of world view, any kind of spiritual research that wanted to develop in contradiction to this scientific knowledge and way of thinking today would certainly have no prospect of having any kind of convincing effect on those people who count today, on people with a scientific education.

Out of this conviction, anthroposophical spiritual science, above all, seeks to work in such a way that it becomes aware: It has to work in this scientific age of ours. Not only does it not want to contradict science, it wants to work entirely from the same foundations, the same prerequisites as recognized science. But, precisely because we have come so far within the methods of sensory observation and experimentation, because we have developed exact types of knowledge within these research methods , and because these exact methods of knowledge are directed primarily towards the investigation of the sense world, we need – and I believe I can explain this to you today – we need a knowledge of the supersensible today.

Science itself demands that the unbiased gain knowledge of the supersensible. For let us just visualize for a moment, my dear audience, how knowledge was gained in earlier centuries, or even further back. People were unable to observe that which expresses itself according to its own laws in the external sense world. One need only recall how difficult it was in the course of the nineteenth century to expel from science the so-called life force, a mystical monster that had been created purely through inner speculation, through inner thinking, this life force that was not a result of observation or experimentation, that was purely imagined. In a way, it was the last remnant of the old mystical monstrosities.

Before the actual scientific age, people believed that they had to put as much into their sensory observations through self-opinionated thinking as their external sensory observations gave them. Usually, one does not notice – and it is not necessary for ordinary science – how, let us say, a scientific book looked in the twelfth or thirteenth century. There is just as much in it that a kind of scientific fantasy has put into things from the human being, from what has been inspired in the human being by his emotions, his feelings and so on and so forth, as from external observation.

What observation and experiment can scientifically give to people is provided by the empirical sensory sciences in connection with mathematics. But what this science has become for the education of educated humanity in modern times is what, above all, something like the anthroposophical spiritual science meant here must focus on. For not only have we explored outer nature and man himself, insofar as he is an outer nature, through observation and experiment; not only have we thereby obtained a sum of results that confront us today in the practical application, in the technical practical application of modern natural science, that confront us in natural science, and so on and so forth; not only has humanity gained from this development of natural science, but above all, humanity has undergone a tremendous education through this laborious work, in which man forbids himself to transfer anything of his inner thoughts and dreams into natural objects and natural processes , man has managed to use his thinking only to shape his observation and his experiment in a pure way, so that observation and experiment express their essence and, for this external science, thinking is basically only the servant of that which is to be produced in external science, so that it expresses its lawfulness.

To achieve this, a significant renunciation was necessary in relation to what had previously been incorporated from the human soul into the world view. A moral development is already taking place alongside scientific development and its results, which has brought humanity to the has brought humanity to the point where man renounces seeing anything spiritual in natural objects and natural processes, and applies his own spirit only to the fact that nature expresses itself purely and in accordance with its essence. This was not known in earlier centuries, before about the fifteenth century, to make thinking only a servant of the method, so to speak, so that nature can express itself. What has been achieved in inner human development, what one can go through inwardly in the soul through the scientific method, that is what anthroposophical spiritual science, above all, wants to acquire.

In other words, my dear attendees, anthroposophical spiritual science does not want to conquer any terrain that the other sciences have; anthroposophical spiritual science wants to penetrate into the world of the spiritual from the same attitude that is otherwise used for research today. We need only consider what has brought about our scientific progress; it has been brought about precisely by the fact that man has completely excluded himself, that he, by letting nature speak, does not add anything of himself to his knowledge. But as a result of this, it turns out in the end – people usually do not believe it, but it turns out – that because man does not allow his will, his creative imagination, to flow into nature, because he makes thought only a servant of his research, it turns out that he can get to know everything in the world that is not himself.

By excluding everything that lies within him from the justified objective method of research, man learns to recognize everything except himself. He is ultimately excluded from all that constitutes the very greatness, the triumphs of modern knowledge. Thought has become, so to speak, only a language about natural processes. And in fact, in today's external science, we only apply the mathematical to our full satisfaction in internal experience. But with this mathematical, one stands in a peculiar way to nature, if one does not simply apply it naively, but if one consciously asks oneself: What are you actually doing when you apply mathematics to nature? If one draws the mathematical externally, it is only a drawing. In reality, the mathematical arises entirely from the human being itself. We build something purely spiritual in mathematics, and we actually only find that mathematics has this great justification in nature because we see how we can apply it, because it can be applied, so to speak, everywhere to that which we can observe and which we can experiment with.

And we feel secure in mathematics because we extract this mathematics entirely from within ourselves. When we have a mathematical problem, it does not depend on whether hundreds of people say yes to it. If I understand the matter all by myself, I am secure. I live with my insight; I am completely immersed in it with my soul. And by grasping nature mathematically, by connecting what I develop within myself with natural processes in calculating experimentation and observation, I know that I am proceeding scientifically. I combine what lies within me, but what lies objectively within me, over which my subjectivity has just as little influence as it has over natural processes themselves. I combine the mathematical knowledge gained from within myself with natural processes.

That, dear attendees, is basically the model for what is meant here as supersensible knowledge, except that one does not proceed exactly with external nature, but first proceeds exactly with oneself. One starts from what I would call intellectual modesty. You say to yourself: You were once a small child with dreamy soul abilities. You developed into what you have now become. The abilities through which you can orient yourself in the world have gradually arisen in you. Now you say to yourself: Just as you have developed through life and education from the abilities of a small child to those that you possess today, can you not go further? Could there not also be abilities slumbering in the soul of the adult human being, just as they slumber in the child? And could one not take one's self-education into one's own hands, so that one can go beyond the abilities that we are so proud of in ordinary life, just as one goes beyond those that one had as a child?

But now, people say, scientific education in recent times demands that one does not fumble around in the vague nebulae, the mystical, by extracting human abilities from the soul. We have become accustomed to proceeding exactly in the mathematical-exact treatment of external natural processes, to proceed in such a way that one does not speculate dreamy-mystically, nor, as one says, merely immerse oneself dreamy-mystically, but rather to proceed in such a way that one follows each individual step with full deliberation, with full consciousness, as is the case with a mathematical problem. In this way one can develop one's own soul by awakening its dormant abilities. But the method of doing this is an exact one. One only develops into another soul being insofar as one makes every step one takes to develop these abilities as exact and supernaturally deliberate as one has learned in mathematics.

Please note, my dear audience, that we take as our model what we do with the external world, whereby we do science from the external world, become scientists, and we develop the exact way we have learned to develop our own soul. So while today's science, the science of the present, proceeds exactly in its treatment of the external world, leaving it at the abilities that one acquires through ordinary life and ordinary education, and then proceeding exactly in the external world, one proceeds exactly in one's own development, that is, only those soul abilities that can be directly grasped need to be developed. One develops exactly.

But this leads one to practise what I have characterized in my book, “How to Know Higher Worlds”, or in my “Occult Science”, or in other books, as the meditation and concentration in thinking appropriate to modern education. This includes what is necessary to develop inwardly in the manner indicated, and it encompasses many details. And anyone who believes that the anthroposophical spiritual science referred to here is a casual product of inner experience or fantasy is greatly mistaken. What is striven for in it is truly no easier to attain than what is striven for in any other science; it is only more intimately connected with the deepest longings and needs of the human soul, and concerns not only those who have to pursue botany, astronomy and so on, but concerns every human being as a human being.

You can find more details in the books mentioned. I will only hint at the principles here. What is at issue is this: in modern, exact thinking, one has become accustomed to maintaining this structure of thinking while abstracting from all sense impressions. But one tries to bring the thinking that one has acquired into such activity and energization that, even if one has no external impressions, one can rest in ideas that one brings to the center of one's consciousness.

It does not matter to what extent these ideas initially correspond to external reality, but it does matter that we do something similar with these ideas in our soul as we do, for example, externally and physically with our arm when we work with it or when we exercise it. We strengthen its muscles. Meditation and concentration are concerned only with the exercise of the soul powers. But by strengthening one's soul abilities in thoughts that one freely holds, without passively leaning on an external sensory perception, purely actively internally in thoughts, and by systematizing one's inner life, but proceeding with full deliberation in this one's own inner development and activity , as otherwise only the mathematician does, one finally comes to it - for some it takes months, depending on their abilities, for others it takes years, but everyone can basically achieve it according to the current stage of development of humanity - one comes to develop what can be called with some justification exact clairvoyance, exact clairvoyance. However much the word clairvoyance is frowned upon today, I use it ruthlessly because it has a certain justification. It has its justification for the following reason: Let us reflect on how and why we, when we are in the outer world of the senses, perceive the things around us as seeing human beings. We perceive them when the sun or another light source sends its rays to the things and these things become visible to us under the influence of an external light source. We as human beings are thus within the light-space that is there through an external light source.

By continuing such exercises, which consist of meditation and concentration, as I have indicated in principle, more and more, we ultimately arrive at an inner experience in the soul that is not the same as the external light, but which makes us our own source of soul light. We really experience something, my dear attendees, which I would like to call an inner sunrise, a sunrise that has arisen because, through meditation, forces and abilities within us have been uncovered that previously and we are now able to really illuminate our environment with the soul light that we have kindled, just as the sun previously illuminated things in physical space. The awakening of an inner light justifies speaking of clairvoyance. And because we do not allow ourselves to bring about this clairvoyance in any other way than through exercises that are as straightforward as only the most exact mathematical and scientific problems, that is why this clairvoyance may be called exact.

But as a result of this, my dear attendees, we also develop something more and more within ourselves that is otherwise only presented under the influence of external perception. Try to honestly admit to yourself what a tremendous difference there is between the aliveness in which we are with our whole soul, with our whole human being, while we perceive colors, while we hear sounds, while we expose ourselves to impressions of warmth; try to realize quite clearly how we we live completely as human beings in our soul while we perceive colors, sounds, and differences in warmth, and how gray, how abstract, how lifeless our ordinary thoughts are through which we inwardly envision the external sensory world, how pale these thoughts are.

These pale thoughts, these inanimate abstractions, are inwardly filled with such liveliness through the exercises I have described that what most people run from because it gives them no warmth of soul, the abstract thoughts, becomes so full of life inwardly, so pictorially concrete, as otherwise only the impressions of the external sense world.

This is, so to speak, the first step we have to take in exact clairvoyance: that we, by merely thinking, but having a strengthened, inwardly animated thinking, an energized thinking, that we, without receiving external impressions, are so as we are when asleep, that we thereby develop an inwardly active life in an activity that is otherwise just a thinking one, which is now completely illuminated and energized with real images, but with images that are not stimulated from outside, that arise from the human being itself.

Now, however, we must continue this composure, for the sake of which I was able to call the acquisition of such a level of knowledge 'exact clairvoyance'; we must continue this composure to the extent that we feel completely subjective in this inner glow and image-generating. In the moment when we do not know that the whole tableau of images, the whole world of pictures that we produce as an inwardly self-illuminating one, is only our own being, is a world unto itself, in that moment we are not spiritual researchers; in the moment when we already consider this world of images to be real, we are visionaries, we are perhaps pathological personalities.

A healthy continuation of sensory knowledge into the supersensible world requires that we also bring our composure to the point that I have just described, and know that what we have gained have attained is indeed more inwardly alive, saturated, and concrete than the wonderful structures — I call them that because one can indeed be enthusiastic about mathematics — than the mathematical structures are. They are our product, like the mathematical figures. But still, to be immersed in it with your whole soul, to experience it, while always having your full, level-headed self standing by, with both feet in the real world of the senses, that must be there, otherwise you are not dealing with exact clairvoyance, but with an unreal, fantastic being.

By finding our way into this world of images, we can compare it to mathematical formation. But it is different. In mathematics, we know that we cannot apply it to our soul itself; we produce it from the soul, but we have to apply it to the external world. The external world gives us the content for it. The triangle as such is not a reality. But when I find the lawfulness of the triangle in an external sensual content, I penetrate reality in a certain way. But what one experiences in the way described as an inner world of images, as a result of meditation, in that one nevertheless senses an inner reality. You have to be clear about it as a level-headed person: it is only subjective, but it is an inner reality, it is not just a mathematical one, it is an inner reality. And if you go through this inner reality, you feel it out in your soul, so to speak, you devote more and more inner energy to experiencing inwardly what is contained in the images, then these images take on a very specific form for each person. We do not then live in remembered images, but we do live in a tableau that presents us with the formative forces of our own human beingness since our birth during our physical life on earth.

Let us remember what happens to a person during this physical life on earth. It is so wonderful to observe how, as a small child, the human being pours more and more soul power into his physiognomy, into his gaze, into his speech organs. Observing a child as it brings its physicality to life from within is one of the most wonderful observations one can make. For one can make such observations not only with the one-sided theoretical power of the human being, but with the whole human being.

But if one could also observe in the same way how the child unconsciously works wisely according to its own inner being, then the wonder one experiences would be a hundredfold too little expressed. Just think how little plastic the child's brain is in early years, how in the first seven years of life an unconscious wisdom works in the child's being to make this brain plastic. And the one who can study this in spiritual science, which I can only hint at in principle today, immerses himself in this inner plastic work of the child, full of wisdom, in the whole organism. And what the child initially sends inwards as a force, almost just fidgeting around, and plasticizes its internal organs, this later connects with actions that are performed outwards, through which one grasps things, orientates oneself in the world; this connects with the sense power. And from all that works within, what is received from the outside, what is experienced with the soul, from all this, what permeates the human being emotionally is formed. The memories and mental images we have of our experiences are only weak reflections of what we really live through, including what we live through unconsciously, what is created within us, which ultimately goes back to the growth forces, to the digestive forces, to the forces of nutrition.

When one rises to such an exact inner clairvoyance, one does not merely have a tableau of memories before one, but one has one's own human weaving and shaping, both inwardly in the organism and outwardly in the world. One has oneself before one as a second human being, and one says to oneself from this moment on: you have, in being outwardly in space, your physical spatial body, your physical spatial organization. Everything is interconnected. But you also have a time organization, a time body within you that is not spatially oriented, that is in the process of becoming, that is in the process of shaping, in which the shaping that you send into your inner being grows together with the shaping that you accomplish outwardly under the influence of the other world and of people, which in turn has an effect on you.

You see, the realization of this temporal body – that which cannot be painted any more than lightning can be painted; you can capture it for a moment, but you know that it is a temporal process – the of this creative process, which lies behind memory, memory, the stream of consciousness is like on the surface of what one is now looking at, illuminated by its inner sun, in spiritual scientific research one can call this the human etheric body.

Do not believe that a level-headed spiritual researcher speaks of the human etheric body as if it were a kind of foggy organization that only permeates this physical body. You can see it, albeit through a kind of fog, through a certain clairvoyance. That is not what it is about. That is what the opponents say. Those who really delve into spiritual science know that the first thing one sees in supersensible knowledge is a process, an event, but a real event. One gets to know oneself as a second being within oneself, which represents a temporal organization. The lasting in our soul life is presented to us in the smallest details, as in a comprehensive tableau. The physical substances we absorb and process internally are replaced every seven to eight years. The physical body is actually subject to constant change, to constant metamorphosis. What I am now pointing to, which can only be grasped by looking inwardly, is a continuous process during our earthly lives.

Dear attendees, present-day science worthy of the name proceeds in a precise manner in its external research. The supersensible knowledge that is meant here proceeds in a precise manner in the bringing about of the forces that man needs to see a supersensible world. The development of man is made exact so that, as it were, higher psychic sense organs are obtained, which are precisely manufactured and which can then see the supersensible world. In this way one has not only a theoretical conviction, but a real view of his spiritual being during physical life on earth. One would not yet know anything about the problem of, let us say, the immortality of the soul, which is so close to man. For this a further step is necessary, a further step that demands even more inner soul energy.

You see, when you bring ideas into your meditation that you are grounded in, so that you ultimately come to this inner aliveness, which, I would say, gives birth to an inner sun that then illuminates such images that you have to say, after perceiving them, they are real. You really only find something subjective, namely your own experience. That is what you initially feel as real in the images. You have nothing objective yet, you have your own experience, but as reality. This takes it beyond the mathematical. The mathematical gives form to the environment. It contains no reality in itself. What you achieve at this first level of exact clairvoyance allows us to sense an inner reality. And I said that if you scan the images inwardly alive, then they gradually form themselves into a tableau not only of our inner life, but of the formative, growing forces, even of those forces that we develop to effect nutrition, to effect inner nourishment. We get to know ourselves as a second person.

This is what we first perceive as a reality in our subjective imaginations, which may be subjective because they initially give us the subjective, our own life in forces, but in reality. But once you have devoted yourself to such strong thinking that you have become capable of looking beyond memories, so to speak, it is much more difficult to remove from your consciousness what you have achieved in your concrete, living thinking.

Some people find it difficult to remove images, especially if they are still alive in their soul through emotions, through feelings. Such images, for which one has applied a special effort in order to be able to experience them in the soul, are more difficult to remove. But this too must be learned. Just as one has learned, as it were, to look into a region that otherwise remains completely unconscious, that only brings forth images at the surface of the memory, so one must now learn to develop an inner strength that is more than just forgetting. Then, if I may say so, one must be able to get rid of the strong forces that arise in one through meditation, to be able to erase and remove from one's soul that which one has just first worked into one's soul with all one's strength. One must learn to empty one's consciousness, to empty it completely, so that one only watches.

Dear attendees, this is not actually saying little; it is saying a lot. You just need to remember what most people who are untrained in this regard do when they make their consciousness completely empty – they fall asleep; consciousness ceases. Before that, for the visualization I have just described, you must first eliminate all external sensory impressions. But you make the thinking as strong as I have described. Now you must in turn eliminate this strong thinking. The consciousness remains empty; but it remains empty only for moments. If you remain awake, you develop a state of mind that represents only wakefulness. Then the objective external spiritual world, the supersensible world, enters into this alert and empty consciousness; just as the external air for breathing enters into the lungs, so the spiritual world enters into the empty consciousness, which, however, has first been made empty in the way I have described. And in this moment, the first thing we perceive is the spiritual soul that underlies external nature.

We learn to recognize that just as our time body lies behind our memory and is the creative element in us in our earthly existence, we learn to recognize that spirit beings are hidden everywhere behind the nature that appears to us in sensory perceptions. Just as we enter a sensory world through our eyes, through our ears, through our other sensory organs, so we enter a spiritual world through the soul being that has been prepared in this way, where we become, so to speak, completely soul-eyed for our spiritual surroundings; we enter a spiritual world, a world of spiritual beings and spiritual processes. We really get to know a spiritual cosmos. And we then realize very soon that what we have had earlier as level-headed people in sensory perception, can be brought into a context with what we now know as the spiritual world. The ordinary visionary rises, so to speak, from his ordinary consciousness into another, where he gets to know all kinds of dream-like things, but knows no context.

The person who comes to exact clairvoyance in the way I have described retains his old consciousness alongside the new one he has attained. He can constantly check what he sees in the spiritual world against what he has been given here in the physical world.

This is the difference between the spiritual researcher and the visionary. The visionary, when he lives in his visions, has completely forgotten his ordinary human self, because he would not be a visionary if he saw the outer world of the senses as it is seen by the normal person. But the one who is an exact spiritual researcher sees the spiritual world, and at any moment he can put himself back into it in full composure, because, I repeat it again and again: everything I describe here as human development takes place with mathematical composure, as does this putting oneself into the spiritual world in a different consciousness and putting oneself back into the ordinary composure. So that you are able, my dear audience, to say to yourselves: With my outer eye I see the sun. That which I see with my outer eye in the sensual image of the sun is connected to that which I now see spiritually as certain entities of the supersensible world, it is connected to the sun beings in the spiritual world. The physical sun is the physical image of spiritual sun beings, just as my physical body is the physical image of my soul-spiritual being.

And so one learns to see a spiritual world behind the physical-sensual one. But then one must go further by developing the strength to remove from consciousness what is within, to empty the consciousness, to wait. One must take this so far that one removes from the temporal body the entire tableau that one first discovered, the creative process during one's life on earth, and that one also removes this, that one completely disregards oneself. So after you have come so far as to see how the forces of growth have shaped your body since childhood, how external experiences have affected it, after you have established what, I would say, lives under the surface of memory, you create it away in a radical abstraction, if I may express it thus, so that our consciousness now not only becomes as empty as I have described, but even more thoroughly empty, in that one's own earth-life, including the supersensible part of one's earth-life, is removed. Then, just as in the case I have just described, when beings who are behind the physical image of the sun come to meet one from the spiritual world, so now, when one's earthly life has been , as an inner experience, but at the same time it lives in a kind of cosmic consciousness. One feels at one with the cosmos, with the consciousness of the world. The pre-earthly existence comes to the fore. You get to know yourself as a spiritual being, as you were before you descended to the physical earth, united as a spiritual being with that which comes from your father and mother, which comes to light in the hereditary current and which forms our physical body, with which we unite. We actually look at this pre-earthly existence. In external science, we have given the view: that which we develop mentally as knowledge comes afterwards, the images that we develop inwardly of the outwardly visible existence come afterwards.

If we want to see into the spiritual and supersensible world, we must continue the education we have received in developing scientific concepts by developing our inner soul powers. Then we will be able to turn this development of our inner soul powers into a soul eye. And at the level I have just described, we see into our pre-earthly existence. If I may say so: in present-day external science, things are there first; afterwards comes the theory. What we draw on in forming theories, we bring to inner life. Thus, after the theory, comes the intuition. And we know that it is a reality.

You see, the same objection is raised over and over again: Yes, how can you know that what you are now grasping with the empty consciousness is not also your subjective, just an autosuggestion or something like that? Yes, my dear audience, distinguishing mere fantasy from mere perception of reality, only life can do that. It cannot be defined externally, full of life, what the difference is between an imagined hot iron and a real hot iron. The more precisely we imagine the real hot iron, the better it is, the less we make the difference. But the difference arises when we touch the iron. The real hot iron burns us, the imagination does not. We only have to grasp reality in life, and we have to grasp it in life.

So if, for example, someone comes, as often happens, and says: But there is also this, that when someone has vividly imagined a lemonade, they have the taste of lemonade in their mouth, so if you really imagine an image as a reality. Such objections are frequently made. One can only say that one should just try to imagine what it is like to look into the pre-earthly existence after the earthly life has been eliminated and to feel the reality of the soul, perhaps through the centuries before it descended to the earthly existence ; and one will no longer say: 'You will have the taste of lemonade through the imagination'; but one will then say, 'Yes, you will have the taste through the imagination, but do you also believe that you can really quench your thirst?' You cannot. You cannot. When you see through all the circumstances of reality and enter into the right context, you will know what is reality and what is mere autosuggestion in a corresponding case. So the reality of the supersensible world must be experienced. But it can be experienced when the abilities to do so are first present in the way described.

Now, my dear attendees, I would like to say that we have already presented the one side of the eternity of the human soul, beyond birth or conception. That part of human eternity for which we do not even have a word in the newer languages. We talk about immortality, that is, the duration of the human soul beyond death, but we do not talk about the unborn. We must also talk about it, because one only comprehends eternity when one understands the unborn as well as one understands immortality. But immortality can also be visualized. It can be brought to view by the fact that we now not only train our thinking in meditation, so to speak, to the point of inner energy and concreteness, as I have described it, but also by beginning to train our will.

Now, I will only hint again in principle – the more precise details can be found in the books I have mentioned – how to train the will. Consider, for example, that one grasps the will that lies in thinking itself, because thinking is always, when it is not completely passive, a mere brooding, as one's own body broods, when it is inward activity, thinking is always permeated by the will. But we adhere to the external natural processes with this will. We think of what happened earlier first, then what happened later; and when we think dialectically, logically, it is usually only to arrive at what was earlier and what is later in human nature. He who wants to cultivate the will inwardly must, as it were, tear thought away from its adherence to the succession of external nature. It can be done. I will give an example.

When we imagine our daily life backwards in the evening, when we imagine what was at five o'clock, was at three o'clock and so on, that is, backwards. So we tear thinking away from the course of nature, in which it runs forward, like the course of nature itself. Or we imagine a melody backwards, or a drama, in as much detail as possible. We remember how we climbed a staircase, imagine ourselves first at the top, then on the penultimate step, and so on, in other words, backwards. When we learn to practice a thought process that runs counter to the course of nature, our will is strengthened.

In addition, there may be exercises where we consciously change our habits. Let's be honest, dear attendees, life usually changes us so much that we say to ourselves when we turn 50: we were different when we were 25. But life has taken us over, life has changed us.

But you can also take your own development in terms of will into your own hands by exerting inner willpower, so to speak. You can say to yourself: You have to develop a very specific, radically different habit within three or seven years, and you can then work on your will in the most diverse ways. What do you achieve by doing this? Well, my dear audience, what you achieve by doing this is only real if it goes through a bitter feeling of pain. Without going through a bitter, deep pain, you still can't really come to a higher realization. That is the first experience one has: a terrible pain, as if one had become completely alienated from oneself, as if one had plunged the body only into pain.

From this pain, another area of higher knowledge then emerges. I can characterize this in the following way: When one has lived oneself into pain to such an extent that one has overcome it, then something has emerged from this culture of will that I can call a spiritual transparency of our own body, of our whole human being. I can explain this by using the eye as an example. What makes the eye the sense organ that we can use so easily? Because it is selfless, because it does not assert its own materiality, it is transparent. The other works in it, which comes from outside. The eye denies itself. In the moment when we get the cataract, the eye asserts its own materiality in the eye. Then the eye becomes selfish. But then we can no longer use it for seeing.

Nor can we use our organism for seeing the higher world, just as it is quite right for the physical world. Do not think that I preach asceticism, that would never occur to me. Man should stand with both feet in reality. But he should also allow moments to arise when he makes himself a knower of the supersensible worlds. In such moments, after a person has done such exercises as I have described, the person can make their entire body like a single transparent, but soul-transparent, sensory organ. Otherwise, a person experiences themselves as a human being in their bodily organs. Now, as a result of such exercises of will, one no longer experiences one's bodily organs as one really stands outside one's body with one's experience. The body becomes transparent to the soul. And this separation from the body, this possibility of being outside the body and yet not sleeping, but having a consciousness outside the body, so that one can then see one's own body from the outside, that it is an object, not a subject, this can only be achieved by first acquiring the ability to divest oneself of one's body.

But this can only be achieved through the pain described. You have to go through this pain, then the culture of will leads you not only to have exact clairvoyance, as I have described, but to experience how you can also do something in the spiritual world. You notice this from the following: When a person falls asleep in the ordinary course of the day, his consciousness passes into the unconscious. One cannot say, from external observation, that the physical organism of the person has not simply taken on other functions, which simply, as one extinguishes a flame, extinguish consciousness, because consciousness arises again through another metamorphosis of functions when one wakes up. This cannot be said from ordinary research. But the one who has come to the stage of supersensible seeing, which I have just described, knows that the actual spiritual-soul aspect emerges from the physical body when one falls asleep, only it does not have the strength to perceive one thing or another in the world of the spirit, in which it was now, in ordinary life. Now, after going through a culture of will and, first of all, a culture of thought-images, one also learns to look into the real being that one is outside of one's body every night during sleep. And now one learns to recognize what the soul does with this being. Now one learns to recognize that in everyday life one is unconsciously asleep. And that which sleeps, one looks at with the acquired supersensible knowledge as that which exists in sleep outside of the physical body,

And one now learns to recognize: When you go through the gate of death, then, then this, what you have unconsciously created, remains. It is your actual humanity, your moral deeds. That which you have acquired in your soul in your dealings with the world and with people as a moral quality becomes real in this being, which separates from you in every state of sleep. But this is also something that is independent of your body; because you have learned to experience outside of the body, you also learn to recognize death in the image.

One learns to recognize oneself in what one otherwise is every night and what can exist without the body. And by now having in the supersensible picture of knowledge in real perception what one is without the body, one learns to recognize death, one learns to recognize the overcoming of death by the human soul, one learns to know the other side of the human being, one learns to know immortality in its real contemplation. By making the body transparent to the soul in the way described, one learns to be without the body, one learns to be in the spiritual world through what one has become without the body, and one knows how one has discarded the physical body to be in a spiritual world after death. One has become familiar with the soul's inner work, which is purely spiritual and prepares both the future worlds and one's own future earthly lives. Idealistic magic has been added to exact clairvoyance, the inner work. One consciously learns what is otherwise only unconsciously practiced.

Anyone who, as so many often do in this day and age, speaks of an external magic is simply a charlatan. The one who speaks with inner religious feeling to science of the present day of magic, speaks of exact clairvoyance, of idealistic magic, in that one gets to know that which is created within physical life on earth and what then lives beyond death in further stages of existence in order to prepare later lives on earth.

What I have tried to show with these discussions, dear attendees, is the relationship between supersensible knowledge, as it is meant in anthroposophy, and contemporary science. I wanted to show how this anthroposophical spiritual science is aware that it has to prove its legitimacy to contemporary science every moment.

And let us consider how this science of the present day, in relation to external knowledge, has managed to recognize precisely that which does not include the human being, in that the human being, by making the renunciation described at the beginning of my discussion today, has renounced the need to be objective and initially uses thinking only as a servant. But what one has acquired in serving thinking gives one the attitude to make this thinking so inwardly alive that it fulfills it. For exact clairvoyance, renunciation gives one the powers that the soul has in the will to call upon for real activity, an activity, however, that works in the spirit, that has nothing to do with the physical and sensual existence of man, but that goes beyond death. So that we get to know the eternal part of the human soul, and get to know both the unborn and the immortal, through a realization that really looks like a genuine continuation of what man acquires as sensory knowledge.

But precisely because we get to know what is outside of us through the exact sensory knowledge that has been developed today, we, as clairvoyant human beings, are confronted with a world about which we have to ask ourselves: How does our morality operate in it? Is our morality just a vapor that rises in the purely natural world order, which, according to a modified Kant-Laplacean world creation, transitions to the more complicated, more perfect being, only to sink into heat death, whereby the end of that which arises in us as moral impulses would be given with the general cosmic cemetery?

The anthroposophical supersensible knowledge referred to here describes morality as a creative force and places moral impulses on an equal footing with purely naturalistic ones. Through this supersensible knowledge, the human being knows himself in a real world through his moral impulses, through his human morality. He knows that the real world we see with our eyes today is the result of previous spiritual worlds, and that what man brings into his own soul and spirit today as moral impulses — that separates from him in every sleep, that then passes through the gate of death — that this is now the germ of future real worlds. Man feels that he is placed in a moral cosmic order. And through such spiritual knowledge as I have described, he also has the possibility of feeling religiously. For man cannot feel religiously in the face of the moral nature with its mere natural laws. Super sensory knowledge is made necessary precisely by the perfection of our sensory knowledge.

If the ancients received a spiritual element at the same time as their senses gave them colors and sounds, we only faithfully receive what our senses give us through our observations and experiments, but we stand there as human beings in the face of this perfect science and ask ourselves: What is our position in the world as sentient, as total human beings? Supernatural knowledge gives us the answer. And because it is true and exact knowledge, it leads man up to the moral sense, to the religious sense, and unites science, morality and religion.

Thus, my dear attendees, the necessary acknowledgment of today's science, when unfeignedly and honestly acknowledged, leads to the acknowledgment of genuine supersensible knowledge. And what we gain through supersensible knowledge, we gain, my dear assembled guests, for the human being. The human being has become disinterested in relation to external science, wants to be objective, excludes his subjectivity. This is given back to him just as objectively as external nature is given to us in experimental science, in true exact supersensible knowledge. But with that, our minds are warmed from within by this supersensible knowledge, our wills are made strong. We are imbued with warmth, with strength for life, in which we must have security - if our fate is not to be a sad one - for life, in which we must work powerfully if we are to be right members of the human social order.

That is the significance of real supersensible knowledge, that it does not remain merely a theoretical view, that it permeates our minds so that we know we are united with the world and with other people through it in that warmth of life and love that we need to live, that we feel imbued with that energy which engages us in the work of the day and in the labors that are more lasting within our human life on earth. True supersensible knowledge imbues our humanity with powers from the supersensible world. Just as the world is a creation of the spiritual, so we make our own deeds a creature of the spiritual by first taking the spiritual into our humanity.

In no way does the supersensible knowledge that is meant here detract from the real external, the true external science of the present. It concedes to this science: Yes, you have found the right ways to recognize the extra-human. You recognize your limitations. One often speaks of the limitations of this science. But these limitations are only those that are drawn from observation in the experiment of the senses. The thinking that we develop in us through this observation, through this experiment, can be further developed. Then we will be able to permeate our inner being, as it is permeated with blood in our physical life, with soul and spiritual forces. Then we will become truly human in the true sense of the word through supersensible knowledge that comes from the spirit.

Such knowledge can be investigated if one is only unbiased enough to do so. One need not become a spiritual researcher oneself – which everyone can do to a certain extent, as the books mentioned show – but one need not become one. Just as one does not need to be a painter to feel the beauty of a picture, so one does not need to be a spiritual researcher, but only to surrender to one's unbiased mind, not distracted by any prejudices, not even by science, one will be able to make what the spiritual researcher has to say fruitful for one's life, just as one who is not a painter can understand a picture sensitively. One must be a painter if one wants to paint a picture; one must be a spiritual researcher if one wants to present the truths of the supersensible world. On the other hand, one can understand the picture sensitively, even if one is not a painter. One can understand what the spiritual researcher says if one only devotes one's unprejudiced common sense to it; one will find everything consistent and in harmony with the whole of human life. And supersensible knowledge can be assimilated just as one assimilates astrology or biology or something else, even if one is not oneself an astrologer or a biologist or something of the kind. Supersensible knowledge will lead not only to knowledge of the supersensible and of the outer human, but also to warmth of soul and spiritual power of the human.

Man will be able to add to what he has so perfectly recognized – although perfection only exists in an ideal, in any case – man will be able to add to what is extra-human the contemplation of man, after the relative independence with which he has recognized the extra-human. And in all knowledge, in all essentials, however much we may look around us in the world, understandingly, cognitively, in the end, when we are to work, when we are to be effective, and that is what matters, we must still be right people and place right people in a world that has attained a certain perfection through the science of the present. Supernatural knowledge worthy of the name attempts to place right human beings in this world so that they can work through this present-day science. It does so by educating the human being from the spiritual to become a right human being through life itself.

As our subject is arousing the very widest interest everywhere, it seems justifiable to approach it from an anthroposophical standpoint. The manner in which it is being discussed and brought to public notice is, of course, very far removed from this point of view. If it is true that Anthroposophy is little understood and liked to-day, it may be said at once that the treating of this theme in an anthroposophical manner presents peculiar difficulties.¹ It is unusual in our age for the feelings to be so attuned as to appreciate anthroposophical truths bearing on the more obvious matters of spiritual life, and it is directly repugnant to our present-day consciousness when a topic has to be discussed which calls for the application of Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science to the most difficult and holiest subjects.

It may be safely affirmed at the outset that the Being around Whom our thoughts are about to centre has been for many centuries the turning point of all thought and feeling, and moreover that He has called forth widely differing judgments, emotions and opinions. Countless as are those who for centuries have held firmly as a rock to all that is connected with the Name of Christ and of Jesus, beyond number also are pictures of Him which have moved souls and occupied thoughtful men ever since the Event in Palestine. Always the picture has been modified according to the general views of the times, to what was felt and considered true at any given period. Thus, when the way had been prepared by the intellectual currents of thought of the eighteenth century, it came about in the course of the following century that what could be intellectually grasped as “Christ” withdrew into the background as compared with what was called later the “Historical Jesus.” It is around the “Historical Jesus” that the widely extended controversy has arisen, and which has here in Carlsruhe its most important protagonists and its most vigorous combatants. For this reason it is as well to give a short indication of the actual position of the controversy before entering on the subject of “Christ Jesus.”

We might say that the Historical Jesus of nineteenth century thought originated under the influence of the intellectual current that takes a merely external view of spiritual life and judges it by means of external documents: that there is evidence of His having lived at the beginning of our era in Palestine, that He was crucified and, according to the faithful, rose again. It is quite in line with the character and nature of the present era, now approaching its termination, that in the case of theological research, faith limited itself to what it was thought could be confirmed by historical documents in the same way as any ordinary event is confirmed by independent writings. It may be said that all the historical written traditions elsewhere than in the New Testament could, in the opinion of one of the most important judges, be “easily contained in a quarto page.” All the other references to the historical Jesus in any documents whatever, such for example as in Josephus or Tacitus, may be put out of court, for they can never be used from the standpoint of that historical science which holds good to-day. Beyond these there are only the Gospels and the Pauline Epistles. How did the historical research of the nineteenth century examine the Gospels? Regarded purely externally how do they appear? If taken like other records, such as those of military engagements and so forth, they seem to be very contradictory documents of the physical plane, the fourfold presentation of which cannot be brought into harmony. In face of what we call historical criticism these records fall to pieces. For it must be allowed that everything which the earnest and diligent research of the nineteenth century collected out of the Gospels themselves, in order to gain a true picture of Jesus of Nazareth, has crumbled away through the presentation of the kind of research brought forward by Professor Drews. As to all that can be said against the Gospels as facts of history, it is evident that nothing can come to light about the Person of Jesus of Nazareth if we apply the methods whereby accurate science and strict criticism ratify other historical facts. We can only be considered very dilettante scientists if we do not make this concession to the science of the day.

Is it not the case that those who in the nineteenth century presented the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth, and wanted to arrive at an historical portrait of Him, had an entirely false conception of the Gospels? Were the Gospels really intended to be historical records in the sense understood in that century?

Whatever was to be said on this subject I endeavoured to state many years ago in my work, Christianity as Mystical Fact, and our present question, as to what was the real object of the Gospels, was intended to receive its answer not merely through the contents of that book but through the tide itself. For the title was not ‘The Mysticism of Christianity,’ nor ‘The Mystical Contents of Christianity:’ its object was rather to show that Christianity in its origin and its whole being is not an external fact but a Fact of the Spiritual world, and one that can only be comprehended by an insight into a realm lying behind the world of sense and behind what can be corroborated by historical records. It was shown that the forces and causes which brought about the Event of Palestine were not to be found in that region wherein external historical events take place, and thus that possibly not only may Christianity have a mystical content but that Mysticism—the actual gazing into the spiritual—is necessary to disentangle the threads that were woven behind the Event in Palestine and made it possible.

In order to realize what Christianity is, and what it can and must be in the soul of man to-day if he is to understand it aright, let us see how deeply grounded in the spiritual facts of human development were the words of St. Augustine: “That which we now call the Christian Religion already existed among the ancients and was never absent from the beginning of the human race up to the time when Christ appeared in the flesh, from which time forward the true religion which was already there received the name of the Christian Religion.” Thus does a standard authority point to the fact that it was not something new which came into humanity with the events of Palestine, but that in a certain sense a transformation had taken place in that which from time immemorial the souls of men had sought and striven for as knowledge. Something was given to humanity which had always been in existence, though hitherto along other lines than the Christian. If we wish to test the other way in which the preceding ages could come to the truths and wisdom of Christianity, we are referred by the historical development of humanity to the Mysteries of Antiquity or the Ancient Mysteries. What is meant by these expressions is little understood to-day, but it will become clearer the more men grasp the conception of the cosmos as presented by Spiritual Science.

Not merely upon the external religions of the people of antiquity must attention be focused, but upon what was practised in pre-Christian times in those mystic abodes designated by the name of the Mysteries. In the book Occult Science is to be found an explanation from the aspect of Spiritual Science, and there are also numbers of secular writers who have declared publicly what was the secret of mankind in antiquity. We read that only a few were admitted to the schools which were designated “The Mysteries,” and that these schools were the homes of the cults. Also there was a small circle of men admitted to the Mysteries by the priestly sages, and for them this meant a kind of retirement from the outer world: they realized that if they were to reach what was to be attained they must lead a different life than they had so far lived openly, and above all that they must accustom themselves to another way of thinking. These Mysteries existed all over the world, among the Greeks and Romans and other peoples, as may be confirmed by referring to extensive literature which still exists. The pupils admitted to the Mysteries were taught something comparable with what is now called science or knowledge, but they did not receive it in the same way, for by what they experienced they became quite other beings. To them came the conviction that in every man there lives, deeply hidden and slumbering so that the ordinary consciousness knows it not, a higher man. As the ordinary man looks through his eyes upon the world and with his thought-power thinks over what he experiences, so can this other man—at first unknown to external consciousness, but capable of being awakened in the depths of his nature recognize another world unattainable by external sight and thought. This was called “The birth of the inner man.” The expression is still used, though in these days it is dry and abstract in character and regarded lightly, but when the disciple of the Mysteries applied it to himself it stood for a tremendous event to be compared in some measure with being born in the physical sense. As man in the physical world is born out of a dark substratum (be it one of nature according to the materialistic idea, or a spiritual sub-stratum in the view of Spiritual Science) so, physically speaking, there was really born through the processes of the Mysteries a higher man who previously had been as little present as was the human being before birth or conception. The disciple was a new-born being. The present view of knowledge, as given everywhere in answer to a deeply philosophic question, is exactly the opposite of that which formed the central point of the whole idea and outlook of the Mysteries. It is now asked in the sense of Kant and Schopenhauer, “Where lie the limits of knowledge? What is it in the power of man to know?” We need only take up a newspaper to meet the answer that here or there lie the limits and that beyond them it is impossible to go. Certainly it was admitted in the Mysteries that there were problems which man could not solve, but it would never have been held in the sense of Kant or in Schopenhauer's Theory of Cognition that “Man cannot know” this or that! What would have been appealed to was man's capability of development, to the powers lying dormant within him which must be evoked so that he might rise to higher capacities of knowledge. The question in those times resolved itself into what was to be done in order to get beyond that which in normal life is the boundary of knowledge; how to develop deeper powers in human nature.

Something more is needed if we are to feel the whole magic charm of the Mysteries that, like a breath, pervades the works of the exoteric writers, Plato, Aristides, Plutarch and Cicero. Here we must be clear that the kind of mental comprehension present in the forming of the disciples of the Mysteries was quite different from that of the men of to-day when they confront scientific truths. What we now call science is open to anybody and everybody in any condition of receptivity whatever. It is just here that we recognize the characteristic of Truth, that it is independent of mood and feeling. For the pupil of the Mysteries the most necessary thing was that, before he was brought to the great Truths, he should go through something whereby his soul was transformed in his feelings and impressions. What to-day appears as a simple scientific truth would not have been put to him so that he could grasp it externally with his understanding, but his natural temperament would have been prepared beforehand so that he could draw near with reverential awe to what could approach him. Consequently his preparation was not one of learning; it was a gradual and radical transformation and education of his soul. The question was how the soul approached the great Truths and Wisdom and how it reacted to them, and hence arose the conviction that through the Mysteries man was bound up and united with the very foundations of the Cosmos and with what flowed from the springs of all cosmic beginnings. Thus was the disciple prepared for the experiencing of something which is described by Aristides. He who, according to what is to be found in my Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment has lived through what these disciples experienced can himself bear witness. He knows that the words of Aristides correspond with the truth when he writes, “I seemed to be approaching God, I seemed to feel His Presence, and I was in a state between waking and sleeping; my spirit was quite light—so light that no one who was uninitiated could describe or understand it.” There was a way, therefore, to the divine foundations of the Universe which was neither Science nor one-sided Religion, but consisted in a thorough preparation of the soul for the realization of the ideas about the Evolution of the Universe so that it might draw near to God and those spiritual foundations. As we take in the external air with our breath and make it a part of our body, so did the disciple of the Mysteries receive into his soul that which pulsates spiritually through the Universe until he was united with it and so became a new man permeated by the Divinity.

Now, however, Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science shows that what was then possible was only an historical phenomenon in human evolution, and when the question arises as to whether the Ancient Mysteries of pre-Christian times are still possible in the same way it can only be said that historical research verily proves that what has just been described did really exist but that it exists no longer in the same form. The pre-Christian method of Initiation is not now possible. A man must indeed be short-sighted if he believes that the human soul is the same in all epochs, or that the spiritual path of the olden times holds good for the present. The path to the divine and primal sources of the world has now become another, and intellectual historical research shows that it did so in its very essence at the time ascribed by tradition to the Events of Palestine. These Events made a deep incision in the evolution of man. Something entered into human nature in the post-Christian period which entirely differed from what was there before. Such a method of thinking as is possible nowadays—the method of drawing nearer to the Universe through scientific thought—did not exist in pre-Christian ages. The Mysteries did not conduct man in the manner described to the very highest treasures of Wisdom in order that he might do something in secret, or acquire something special for himself as a member of a small circle, but because our modern way of combining thoughts through logic was not possible at that time. A glance at the history of humanity will show that in the course of two centuries, during the time of the Greek philosophers, the present mode of thinking was gradually prepared, and that only now has it reached the point of embracing external nature so wonderfully. Thus the entire form our consciousness takes and the way we create our conceptions of the Universe differ entirely from pre-Christian times. For the moment we are only concerned with this fact as showing that human nature has changed. A careful review of human evolution makes it clear that the entire consciousness has altered in the course of evolution (the results arising from research are to be found in my Occult Science. The men of old did not regard things and think about them as we do with our senses and understanding; they had a kind of clairvoyance, but this was of a dim and dreamlike nature (not such as is described in my The Way of Initiation). Herein lies the import of evolution, that an old clairvoyance which in primitive times was spread over all humanity gave way to that form of thought which we possess to-day. The ordinary inhabitants of every country had this kind of clairvoyant power, and a path leading from that to higher stages was provided in the Mysteries. Thereby development was given to the normal soul-faculties of man.

Observation of the world by what we call reasoning and logic having displaced the old clairvoyance, the latter is no longer a natural faculty, but it lasted right through the historical period and reached its culmination in the Greco-Roman era during which the Appearance of Christ occurred. At that point of time collective humanity everywhere had come so far in its evolution that the old clairvoyance had passed away and the old Mysteries were no longer possible. What then took the place of the old Mysteries and what did man acquire through the Mysteries?

These were of two kinds: the one proceeded from that centre of civilization which was afterwards occupied by the ancient Persians, and the other was to be met with in its purest form in Egypt and Greece. They were entirely different throughout those times. It was the endeavour of all the Mysteries to produce in man an extension of his soul-powers, but this was achieved in a different way in Greece and Egypt, than in Persia. In the two former, which agreed essentially, the object was to effect in the disciples a transformation of their soul-powers. This transformation took place under a certain supposition which must be understood before anything else. It was that in the depths of the soul there slumbers another, a divine man; that from the same sources whence the rock forms into crystal and the plants break forth in the Spring the hidden man originated. Plants, however, had already utilized all that was contained within them, whereas man, in so far as he had understood himself and worked with his own powers, had remained an imperfect being, and that which was within him had only come to the fore after much endeavour. Appeal, therefore, in the Egyptian and Greek Mysteries was made to a spiritual, a divine inner man, and when this was referred to, allusion was made also to the powers within the Earth. For according to the views held the Earth was not regarded as the lifeless cosmic body of modern astronomy, but as a spiritual planetary being. In Egypt reference was made to the wonderful spirit-forces and nature-forces, called by the names of Isis and Osiris, when it was desired to contemplate the origin and source of what could be experienced as manifestation in the inner man. In Greece this primal source was referred to under the name of Dionysos. As a consequence of this, profane writers asserted that the nature and being of things were the objects sought for, and in the Greek Mysteries they called what was found of the forces of human nature the “sub-earthly” portion of man, not the “super-earthly.” The Nature of the great “Daemons” was spoken of, and under this tide was represented all that worked on the Earth of the nature of spiritual forces. The nature of these daemons (in a good sense) was sought for through that which man was to bring forth from himself. Then the disciple had to go through all the feelings and perceptions that were possible for him in the course of evolution. He had to experience what was meant by “going down into the depths of his soul;” to learn that a fundamental feeling so dominated all soul-being that in ordinary life no conception of it could be formed, and that that feeling was a deep egoism—the almost unconquerable selfishness lying within the inner recesses of a human being. By means of struggling against and conquering all selfishness and egoism the disciple had to go through something for which we have to-day only an abstract expression, i.e., the feeling of all inclusive love and sympathy for men and beings. Sympathy, in so far as the human soul was capable of it, was to take the place of selfishness. It was clearly understood that if the disciple evoked this sympathy, which belonged in the first place to the hidden forces of the world of feeling, it could draw out from the depths of his soul the divine powers slumbering therein. It was held moreover that as he looked out upon the world with his ordinary understanding he must soon become aware of his powerlessness as a man with reference to the Cosmos, and that the further he projected his conceptions and ideas the stronger this feeling grew until in the end he was led to doubt what indeed could be called knowledge, i.e., Gnosis. Arrived at that point he must then overcome this feeling of emptiness in his soul whenever he desired to encompass the Cosmos with his ideas. This consciousness of a void was accompanied by fear and anxiety, and consequently the Greek disciple of Mysticism first filled himself with a dread of the unknown and then by coupling this with sympathy drew forth the divine powers lying within him. So did he learn to transform fear into awe and reverence, and to realize how the highest kind of awe and reverential devotion for all the phenomena of the Universe was able to penetrate every substance and conception that lay beyond the scope of ordinary knowledge.

Thus the Greek Mysteries, as also those of Isis and Osiris in the Egyptian Mysteries, worked outwards from the inmost nature of man and sought to lead him into the spiritual worlds. It was a living apprehension of the “God in Man.” A real acquaintance was formed between man and God, and immortality ranked not as mere abstract theory and philosophy but as something known, something as firmly grounded as the knowledge of external colours, and this was experienced as an intimate connection with external things. With no less certainty was this experienced also in the Persian or Mithraic Mysteries. Whereas man was led in the Greek and Egyptian Mysteries through the unfettering of his soul-powers, he was confronted at once with the Universe itself in the Mithraic Mysteries; not only did the Universe work upon him through the great and mighty Nature which is overlooked by those who regard the world in its external aspect, but by gaining a deep intimacy with Nature, he could gaze upon phenomena that lay outside the limits of the human understanding. By the methods then used the most terrible and magnificent powers were brought before the pupil from Universal Space. Whereas the Greek disciple was affected by a deep feeling of reverence, to the Mithraic disciple alone was given the knowledge of the terrible and awe-inspiring powers in Nature so that he felt himself infinitesimally small in comparison. So powerful was this impression, consequent upon his alienation from the primal source of being, that he felt that in its vastness the Universe could at any moment overwhelm and annihilate him. The first impulse came from his being led through a comprehensive astronomy and science away from external things to the greatness of the phenomena of the Universe, and what he further developed in the Mysteries was then more a consequence of the Truth in all its ramifications when Nature in her details (science in the old sense of the word) worked upon his soul. The Greek disciple became fearless through the setting free of his powers. The Mithraic disciple was brought so far that he drank in the greatness of Cosmic Thought, and thereby his soul also became strong and courageous. A knowledge of the dignity and value of a human being was gained, and with it a feeling for truth and fidelity; the disciple learned to recognize that man must always hold himself under control during his earthly existence.

Such were the benefits obtained especially through the Mithraic Mysteries, and whereas the Greek and Egyptian Mysteries are to be found spread over Greece and Egypt, the Mithraic are diffused from Persia as far as the Caspian Sea, along the Danube into Germany, and even to the South of France, to Spain and to England. Europe was indeed permeated by the Mithraic Mysteries, and everywhere it was seen clearly that something streamed into man from the Universe if only he could learn to understand it, and this that could be received was Mithra, the God that streams through the world in all worlds. It was through this power of action that courage was aroused: the warriors, the Roman legionaries, were filled with the Mithraic service or cult of Mithra. Both leaders and men were initiated into the Mysteries. Thus was God sought on the one hand by the freeing of the individual soul-powers, and it was quite evident that through this process something streamed out from the depths of the soul. On the other hand, however, it was equally evident that when man sought God by devoting himself to the great cosmic phenomena, something streamed into his soul as the essence, the finest life-sap contained in the world. There were found the primordial forces of the Universe. God came as it were into human souls through this development which was attained in the Mystery schools. A veritable process is to be seen here: each soul became a door for the entrance of the Godhead into human evolution on earth. Few were able to undergo such a development, and a special preparation for it was necessary. The teaching consisted in showing that what was hidden in external nature (Mithra) as also in the inner man of the Greek, poured through the world as a stream of divine consecration.

The evolution of man has now changed, and the entire method of Initiation is different. Here we touch upon what must be called the Mystical Fact of the Christ Event. To penetrate deeply into history is to see that the early Christians were more or less dimly conscious that the same force which entered the soul only through devotion to the Mysteries, to the Divine Principle of the Universe (streaming forth from Cosmos as the Mithra or out of the depths of the soul as the Dionysos), was as the deed of a unique Cosmic Divinity in one single Fact in the evolution of the Earth. That which was sought for beyond this, and was not to be found except by those who alienated themselves from outer life in the Mysteries, was at a given time incorporated into the Earth by the Divinity. No human effort was needed, for the Divinity once and for all permeated the Being of the Earth, and henceforth even those who had lost the power to penetrate to the Divine Principle of the Cosmos could meet Him in another way. The God Who could now penetrate into the human soul (neither as Mithra from without nor Dionysos from within) was Himself a fusion of Mithra and Dionysos, and also was related to human nature in its depths. He was embraced and encompassed by the Name of CHRIST. Mithra and Dionysos were united in the Being Who entered humanity in the Event of Palestine, and Christianity was the confluence of both Cults. The Hebrews, who were chosen that they might provide the necessary body through which this Event might take place, had become acquainted with the Mithraic and Dionysian Cults, but they remained far removed from either. The Greek thought of himself as a weak man who must develop deeper powers before he could penetrate into the depths of his soul, while the follower of Mithra felt that by letting the whole surrounding sphere of the air work upon him he might become united with the divine qualities of the Universe. The Hebrew, on the other hand, held that the deeper human nature, with all that was hidden within it, was already there in the first Man, and the ancient Hebrews called this Primal man Adam. According to old Hebraic ideas that which man could seek, and which joined him with the divine, was present originally in Adam, but in course of evolution the descendants of each generation became further and further removed from the Source of Existence. Being “subject to original sin,” as they put it, meant that man had not remained as he was and had been ejected from the sphere of the Divine; regarding himself as standing below Adam he sought the reason in original sin. But though less than that which lived in the depths of human nature, he could unite himself with the deeper powers and thereby be raised again. This point of view, that once man had stood higher and that through the qualities connected with the blood-ties he had lost something, was an historical one. What the adherent of the Mithraic Mysteries saw in humanity as One Whole the Hebrew saw in his own nation and was conscious that its original source had been lost. So that while among the Persians there was a kind of training of the consciousness, there was among the ancient Hebrews a consciousness of a historical development; Adam, by falling into sin, had fallen from the heights where he once stood. Consequently the Hebrews were the best prepared for the thought that that which had happened at the initial point of evolution (and which had brought about a deterioration in humanity) could only be raised again through an historical Event, i.e., by something actually taking place in the spiritual sub-strata of the Earth's being. The ancient Hebrew who rightly understood evolution felt that the Mithra God, equally with the God Who is evoked from the depths of the human soul, could come down without man going through a development in the Mysteries.

Thus in these people, and above all in the case of John the Baptist, there arose a consciousness of the fact that the same which the Mysteries had handed down in the form of Dionysos and Mithra was born at one and the same time in One Man. Those of them who felt this in a deeper sense held that even as through Adam the descent of man into the world was brought about (all men having descended from one forefather and inherited from him all the deeper forces that lead to sin and error) so, through One Being Who descends from the spiritual worlds as the union of Mithra and Dionysos, must the initial point be formed to which men can look when they have to rise again. As in the Mysteries human nature was developed through the setting free of the deeper soul forces or through a view of the Cosmos, the Hebrews now saw in the God Who came down into physical being Him on Whom the soul must look and believe, for Whom it must develop the deepest love, and Who as the Great Example could lead them back to their divine origin.

He who had the profoundest knowledge of this fact of Christianity was Paul. The Apostle recognized that as men looked to Adam as their physical progenitor they could, through the Christ Impulse, look to the Christ as the Great Example, and so attain to what was striven for in the Mysteries and must be born again if they were to know their own original nature. The knowledge that was kept within the recesses of the Temples, and could only be attained after ascetic training, was set forth neither in mundane document nor as some external fact but as having been accomplished as a mystical fact, the God Who pervaded the world having actually appeared in one single Form. What the disciples of the Mithraic Mysteries acquired through looking upon the Greatest Model had now been attained through Christ. The courage, self control and energy acquired by those disciples had also to be acquired by those who could no longer be initiated in the old Mithraic sense; through the Model of the historical Christ and the gazing upon Him the impulse towards this fortitude was now to pour itself out upon the soul. In the Mithraic Mysteries, as has been shown, the whole Universe was in a certain sense born in the soul of the disciple, and the courageous soul was fired with all the inner forces of initiative. In the Baptism of John something was poured down from above of which human nature could be the vehicle; when a man was permeated with the thought that his nature was capable of assimilating the profoundest harmony of the Universe, the view of the Baptism aroused within him the understanding that Mithra could be born in human nature. Those, therefore, who grasped the original meaning of Christianity, acknowledged that the end of the Mysteries had come: the God Who formerly had poured Himself into the Mysteries had now flowed directly into the being of the Earth through the Personality Who stood at the beginning of a new era (our present one).

The connection with the Greek or Dionysian Mysteries has now to be considered. Through the fact that the human gaze was guided to Jesus of Nazareth in Whom Mithra lived and Who then passed through death, an indication was given that Mithra (the bestower of courage, self control and energy) had Himself died with the death of Jesus. It was further seen that because Mithra had so vanished that which man found in his deepest nature, and had attained earlier through the Dionysian Mysteries, had now become in Jesus of Nazareth the immortal conqueror over death. Herein lies the true Christian meaning of the Resurrection if it is grasped in its spiritually scientific sense. The Baptism by John in [the] Jordan demonstrated that the old Mithra had entered into man, that thereby human nature had won the victory over death, and that by the example so created the soul could unite itself in the deepest love in order to come to that which lived in its own depths. In the Risen Christ was seen the fact that man, by living according to the event that had taken place in history, could rise above the level of ordinary humanity.

Thus in the centre of the history of the world was set an historical event in the place of that which had been sought in the Mysteries times without number. The great revelation that came to St. Paul was that human nature had thereby become different, and this was concealed within what is known as “The Event of Damascus.” Writing of what he experienced before Damascus, the Apostle relates how he learned to understand, not from external documents but through a purely spiritual clairvoyant experience, that the moment when the Incarnation itself should take place in an historical personage had already passed. The existence of Christ as a real man could never be experienced by Paul through an external fact, and what he could learn in Palestine did not convince him that the Union of Mithra and Dionysos had lived in Jesus of Nazareth. But when, before Damascus, his spiritual sight was opened, it became clear that a God Who could be called by the Name of Christ not only worked through the world as a super-sensible Being but had actually come to earth and conquered death. Henceforth he preached that what for the Initiates had previously been a streaming substance was now to be found as continuous historical fact. This lies at the basis of his words, “If Christ be not risen then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.”

Such was the path by which Paul came to Jesus by the indirect way of Christ, it being clear to him that something had taken place in Palestine which previously could only be experienced in the Mysteries. And this still applies to-day. Because Christ is the focus of all human development and the highest example for the inmost powers of the soul the bond established with Him must be of the most intimate kind. To become a disciple it is required of a man that he set little value upon his own life, and so it must be regarded as of small importance to lay aside all documentary evidence and historical traditions in order to come to Christ. Indeed there is cause for thankfulness that the fact that there ever was an historical Christ Jesus cannot be established, for no document could prove that He was the most significant of all that has passed into humanity.

The connection between Christ and the ancient Mysteries is therefore quite clear. The disciples of the latter had to go through what may be called intimate soul experiences in order to come to God; their inner feelings and sensations were more lively and intense than those of the ordinary man, and so they became aware that they were set fast in a lower nature which hindered them from arriving at the Sources of Being. This lower nature was indeed a seducer leading them away from the upward path, and that which so allured them had also become their own lower nature, and herein lay the “Temptation” that came to every disciple of the Mysteries. At the moment when God awoke within them they became aware also of their lower or sensual natures. It was as though some strange unknown being were urging them not to follow the unsubstantial and airy heights of the spiritual world, but to seize the coarse and material things that lay close at hand. Each disciple had to pass through a time when everything spiritual seemed unreal in comparison with the ordinary way of looking at things, and all that was connected with the senses appeared alluring as against the stress of spiritual effort. At another stage in mystic development these lower forces were overcome, a higher outlook being attained with the growth of invigorated powers of courage and so forth. All this teaching was clothed in certain instructions that may be verified from the writings of exoteric authors, as also in the methods of Initiation given by Spiritual Science and set forth in Occult Science. There were various methods both in the Greek and the Mithraic Mysteries. Finally the disciples experienced the “at-one-ment” with Him Who was the Divine Man, but here the methods were different and varied widely in the many countries where Initiation existed.

In my Christianity as Mystical Fact the purpose is to show that in the Gospels nothing is to be met with but a rebirth of old Initiation instructions. What took place externally had already taken place similarly in the course of the Mysteries, and therefore the Divine Being Who was in Jesus of Nazareth after the descent of the Mithra Being had to experience the “Temptation.” As the Tempter came on a small scale to the pupil of the Mysteries so did he also confront the God become man. All that was true in the Mysteries is to be found repeated in the Gospel records which were new versions of the old inscriptions and instructions given in the Initiations. The writers of the Gospels saw that once that which hitherto had lain only in the Mysteries had been enacted on the plane of Cosmic History, it was permissible to describe it in the same words as those in which their directions for Initiation were recorded. It is for this very reason that the Gospels were not intended to be biographies of Him Who was the vehicle for the Christ. This is just the mistake of all modern criticisms of the Gospels. At the time they were written the sole object was to lead the human soul to a real love for the Great Soul, the Source of the world's existence. Strangely enough a clear consciousness of this prevailed almost to the end of the eighteenth century. It is pointed out in isolated writings of remarkable interest that through the Gospels the soul can be so transformed as to find the Christ. Old Meister Eckhardt writes, “Some people want to look at God with their eyes as they look at a cow, and want to love God as they love a cow. They love God as an outward possession and an inward comfort, but these people do not love Him aright ... Simple folk imagine they ought to see God as if He stood there and they here; it is not so; God and I are One in recognition.” In another passage he writes, “A Master says, ‘God has become man, and thereby the whole human race is raised in dignity. We may rejoice that Christ our Brother has through His own power passed beyond the choir of angels, and sits at the right hand of the Father.’ This Master has spoken rightly, but verily I do not pay much attention to it. What help would it be to me if I had a brother who was a rich man, and I was at the same time a poor one? How would it help me if I had a brother who was a wise man, and I myself a fool? ... The heavenly Father begat His only Son in Himself and in me. Why in Himself and in me? I am one with Him, and it is not possible for Him to exclude me. In the same work the Holy Ghost received His Being, and is from me as from God. Why? I am in God, and if the Holy Ghost does not receive His Being from me neither does he receive it from God. I am in no way excluded.”

That is the point: that man through mystic development, without external mysteries but through the simple evolution of the soul, will in later times be able to experience that which was once experienced in the Mysteries. This, however, will only be possible because the Christ Event took place. Even if there were no Gospels, no records and no traditions, he who experiences the Christ in himself along with the being filled with Christ has the certainty, as St. Paul had it, that at the beginning of our era Christ was incarnated in a physical body. An historical biography of Jesus of Nazareth can never be gathered out of the Gospels, but through the right unfolding of his soul powers man can and must raise himself up to the Christ, and through the Christ to Jesus. Thus only can be understood what was the aim of the Gospels and what was lacking in the whole of the nineteenth century researches on the subject of Jesus. The picture of the Christ was allowed to recede into the background in order to present a tangible Jesus quite externally from the historical records. The Gospels were misunderstood, and consequently the methods of investigation crumbled to pieces.

Herewith the way is at the same time made clear to Spiritual Science. Its object is to show what are the deeper powers that have lain in man since the coming of Christ, and which he can develop. Not in the depths of externally appointed Mysteries, but in the stillness of his room, man can attain by devoting himself to what happened in Palestine that which was attained by the disciples of the Mysteries. By experiencing the Christ within himself he gains in courage and energy and in a consciousness of his dignity as man, and comes to the knowledge of how he has to take his place in humanity in the right sense. And at the same time he experiences, as could the adherent of the Greek Mysteries, the Universal Love which lives in Christ and embraces all external creatures. He learns never to be afraid or to despair in face of the world, and in full freedom and at the same time humility is sensible of devotion to the secrets of the Universe.

All this comes to the man who permeates himself with the Mystical Fact of Christianity, the successor of the old Mysteries. Simply through a cognitional development of these fundamental thoughts the Historical Jesus becomes a fact for those who have a deep knowledge of Christ. In Western philosophy it was said that without eyes none could see colour nor hear without ears; the Universe would be without light and sound. True as this is with regard to seeing and hearing, it is equally true that without light no eye could have come into existence nor could man have had any perceptions connected with it. As Goethe says, “If the eye were not born of like nature to the sun it could never look upon the sun,” and “The eye is a creation of the light.”

The Mystical Christ, spoken of by those whose spiritual sight is opened and who behold Him as Paul did, was not always in man. In pre-Christian times He was unattainable in any development through the Mysteries in the way in which He was to be found after the Mystery of Golgotha. That there might be an inner Christ and that the higher man could be born an historical Christ was needed, the Incarnation of the Christ in the Jesus. As the eye can originate only through the effect of light, so in order that there could be a Mystical Christ the historical Christ must have been there. Had there been no documents containing a biography of Jesus of Nazareth this could still be said and felt, for Jesus is not to be recognized through external writings. This fact was long known in the evolution of the West and will again be known. Spiritual Science will so formulate that it can draw together from out its various spheres what will lead to a real understanding of the Christ, and thereby to an understanding of Jesus. It has come about that Jesus has been actually alienated from the world and the methods of the Jesus investigations have melted away, but the deepening of ourselves in the Christ Being (in the Christ as a Being) will lead to a recognition of the greatness of Jesus of Nazareth.

This path, by which the Christ is first recognized through inward soul experience, leads through what really has developed out of the soul to the understanding of the Mystical Fact of Christianity, and of the gradual development of humanity, as being such that the Christ Event must take place within it as the most significant point in the evolution of man. The way leads through the Christ to Jesus. The Christ Idea bears fruitful seed that will bring humanity not merely to the apprehension of a general pantheistic Cosmic Spirit, but the individual man to the understanding of his own history; as he feels his Earth to be bound up with all cosmic existence so will he recognize that his past is bound up with a super-sensible and super-historical Event. This Event is that the Christ Being stands as a super-sensible Mystical Fact at the middle point of human evolution, and that so will He be recognized by the humanity of the future apart from all external historical research and documents. Christ will remain the strong cornerstone of mankind's evolution. Man will bring the forces out of himself to renew his own history, and therewith also the history of the evolution of the world.

• 1. Theosophy was the original term, but in later lectures Dr. Sterner changed the word to Anthroposophy.

[ 1 ] The information given in the following chapters constitutes steps in an esoteric training, the name and character of which will be understood by all who apply this information in the right way. It refers to the three stages through which the training of the spiritual life leads to a certain degree of initiation. But only so much will here be explained as can be publicly imparted. These are merely indications extracted from a still deeper and more intimate doctrine. In esoteric training itself a quite definite course of instruction is followed. Certain exercises enable the soul to attain to a conscious intercourse with the spiritual world. These exercises bear about the same relation to what will be imparted in the following pages, as the instruction given in a higher strictly disciplined school bears to the incidental training. But impatient dabbling, devoid of earnest perseverance, can lead to nothing at all. The study of Spiritual Science can only be successful if the student retain what has already been indicated in the preceding chapter, and on the basis of this proceed further.

[ 2 ] The three stages which the above-mentioned tradition specifies, are as follows: (1) preparation; (2) enlightenment; (3) initiation. It is not altogether necessary that the first of these three stages should be completed before the second can be begun, nor that the second, in turn, be completed before the third be started. In certain respects it is possible to partake of enlightenment, and even of initiation, and in other respects still be in the preparatory stage. Yet it will be necessary to spend a certain time in the stage of preparation before any enlightenment can begin; and, at least in some respects, enlightenment must be completed before it is even possible to enter upon the stage of initiation. But in describing them it is necessary, for the sake of clarity, that the three stages be made to follow in order.

Preparation

[ 3 ] Preparation consists in a strict and definite cultivation of the life of thought and feeling, through which the psycho-spiritual body becomes equipped with higher senses and organs of activity in the same way that natural forces have fitted the physical body with organs built out of indeterminate living matter.

[ 4 ] To begin with, the attention of the soul is directed to certain events in the world that surrounds us. Such events are, on the one hand, life that is budding, growing, and flourishing, and on the other hand, all phenomena connected with fading, decaying, and withering. The student can observe these events simultaneously, wherever he turns his eyes and on every occasion they naturally evoke in him feelings and thoughts; but in ordinary circumstances he does not devote himself sufficiently to them. He hurries on too quickly from impression to impression. It is necessary, therefore, that he should fix his attention intently and consciously upon these phenomena. Wherever he observes a definite kind of blooming and flourishing, he must banish everything else from his soul, and entirely surrender himself, for a short time, to this one impression. He will soon convince himself that a feeling which heretofore in a similar case, would merely have flitted through his soul, now swells out and assumes a powerful and energetic form. He must now allow this feeling to reverberate quietly within himself while keeping inwardly quite still. He must cut himself off from the outer world, and simply and solely follow what his soul tells him of this blossoming and flourishing.

[ 5 ] Yet it must not be thought that much progress can be made if the senses are blunted to the world. First look at the things as keenly and as intently as you possibly can; then only let the feeling which expands to life, and the thought which arises in the soul, take possession of you. The point is that the attention should be directed with perfect inner balance upon both phenomena. If the necessary tranquility be attained and you surrender yourself to the feeling which expands to life in the soul, then, in due time, the following experience will ensue. Thoughts and feelings of a new kind and unknown before will be noticed uprising in the soul. Indeed, the more often the attention be fixed alternately upon something growing, blossoming and flourishing, and upon something else that is fading and decaying, the more vivid will these feelings become. And just as the eyes and ears of the physical body are built by natural forces out of living matter, so will the organs of clairvoyance build themselves out of the feelings and thoughts thus evoked. A quite definite form of feeling is connected with growth and expansion, and another equally definite with all that is fading and decaying. But this is only the case if the effort be made to cultivate these feelings in the way indicated. It is possible to describe approximately what these feelings are like. A full conception of them is within the reach of all who undergo these inner experiences.

If the attention be frequently fixed on the phenomena of growing, blooming and flourishing, a feeling remotely allied to the sensation of a sunrise will ensue, while the phenomena of fading and decaying will produce an experience comparable, in the same way, to the slow rising of the moon on the horizon. Both these feelings are forces which, when duly cultivated and developed to ever increasing intensity, lead to the most significant spiritual results. A new world is opened to the student if he systematically and deliberately surrenders himself to such feelings. The soul-world, the so-called astral plane, begins to dawn upon him. Growth and decay are no longer facts which make indefinite impressions on him as of old, but rather they form themselves into spiritual lines and figures of which he had previously suspected nothing. And these lines and figures have, for the different phenomena, different forms. A blooming flower, an animal in the process of growth, a tree that is decaying, evoke in his soul different lines. The soul world (astral plane) broadens out slowly before him. These lines and figures are in no sense arbitrary. Two students who have reached the corresponding stage of development will always see the same lines and figures under the same conditions. Just as a round table will be seen as round by two normal persons, and not as round by one and square by the other, so too, at the sight of a flower, the same spiritual figure is presented to the soul. And just as the forms of animals and plants are described in ordinary natural history, so too, the spiritual scientist describes or draws the spiritual forms of the process of growth and decay, according to species and kind.

[ 6 ] If the student has progressed so far that he can perceive the spiritual forms of those phenomena which are physically visible to his external sight, he is then not far from the stage where he will behold things which have no physical existence, and which therefore remain entirely hidden (occult) from those who have not received suitable instruction and training.

[ 7 ] It should be emphasized that the student must never lose himself in speculations on the meaning of one thing or another. Such intellectualizing will only draw him away from the right road. He should look out on the world with keen, healthy senses and quickened power of observation, and then give himself up to the feeling that arises within him. He should not try to make out, through intellectual speculation, the meaning of things, but rather allow the things to disclose themselves. It should be remarked that artistic feeling, when coupled with a quiet introspective nature, forms the best preliminary condition for the development of spiritual faculties. This feeling pierces through the superficial aspect of things, and in so doing touches their secrets.

[ 8 ] A further point of importance is what spiritual science calls orientation in the higher worlds. This is attained when the student is permeated, through and through, with the conscious realization that feelings and thoughts are just as much veritable realities as are tables and chairs in the world of the physical senses. In the soul and thought world, feelings and thoughts react upon each other just as do physical objects in the physical world. As long as the student is not vividly permeated with this consciousness, he will not believe that a wrong thought in his mind may have as devastating an effect upon other thoughts that spread life in the thought world as the effect wrought by a bullet fired at random upon the physical objects it hits. He will perhaps never allow himself to perform a physically visible action which he considers to be wrong, though he will not shrink from harboring wrong thoughts and feelings, for these appear harmless to the rest of the world. There can be no progress, however, on the path to higher knowledge unless we guard our thoughts and feelings in just the same way we guard out steps in the physical world. If we see a wall before us, we do not attempt to dash right through it, but turn aside. In other words, we guide ourselves by the laws of the physical world. There are such laws, too, for the soul and thought world, only they cannot impose themselves on us from without. They must flow out of the life of the soul itself. This can be attained if we forbid ourselves to harbor wrong thoughts and feelings. All arbitrary flitting to and fro in thought, all accidental ebbing and flowing of emotion must be forbidden in the same way. In so doing we do not become deficient in feeling. On the contrary, if we regulate our inner life in this way, we shall soon find ourselves becoming rich in feelings and creative with genuine imagination. In the place of petty emotionalism and capricious flights of thought, there appear significant emotions and thoughts that are fruitful. Feelings and thoughts of this kind lead the student to orientation in the spiritual world. He gains a right position in relation to the things of the spiritual world; a distinct and definite result comes into effect in his favor. Just as he, as a physical man, finds his way among physical things, so, too, his path now leads him between growth and decay, which he has already come to know in the way described above. On the one hand, he follows all processes of growing and flourishing and, on the other, of withering and decaying in a way that is necessary for his own and the world's advancement.

[ 9 ] The student has also to bestow a further care on the world of sound. He must discriminate between sounds that are produced by the so-called inert (lifeless) bodies, for instance, a bell, or a musical instrument, or a falling mass, and those which proceed from a living creature (an animal or a human being.) When a bell is struck, we hear the sound and connect a pleasant feeling with it; but when we hear the cry of an animal, we can, besides our own feeling, detect through it the manifestation of an inward experience of the animal, whether of pleasure or pain. It is with the latter kind of sound that the student sets to work. He must concentrate his whole attention on the fact that the sound tells him of something that lies outside his own soul. He must immerse himself in this foreign thing. He must closely unite his own feeling with the pleasure or pain of which the sound tells him. He must get beyond the point of caring whether, for him, the sound is pleasant or unpleasant, agreeable or disagreeable, and his soul must be filled with whatever is occurring in the being from which the sound proceeds. Through such exercises, if systematically and deliberately performed, the student will develop within himself the faculty of intermingling, as it were, with the being from which the sound proceeds. A person sensitive to music will find it easier than one who is unmusical to cultivate his inner life in this way; but no one should suppose that a mere sense for music can take the place of this inner activity. The student must learn to feel in this way in the face of the whole of nature. This implants a new faculty in his world of thought and feeling. Through her resounding tones, the whole of nature begins to whisper her secrets to the student. What was hitherto merely incomprehensible noise to his soul becomes by this means a coherent language of nature. And whereas hitherto he only heard sound from the so-called inanimate objects, he now is aware of a new language of the soul. Should he advance further in this inner culture, he will soon learn that he can hear what hitherto he did not even surmise. He begins to hear with the soul.

[ 10 ] To this, one thing more must be added before the highest point in this region can be attained. Of very great importance for the development of the student is the way in which he listens to others when they speak. He must accustom himself to do this in such a way that, while listening, his inner self is absolutely silent. If someone expresses an opinion and another listens, assent or dissent will, generally speaking, stir in the inner self of the listener. Many people in such cases feel themselves impelled to an expression of their assent, or more especially, of their dissent. In the student, all such assent or dissent must be silenced. It is not imperative that he should suddenly alter his way of living by trying to attain at all times to this complete inner silence. He will have to begin by doing so in special cases, deliberately selected by himself. Then quite slowly and by degrees, this new way of listening will creep into his habits, as of itself. In spiritual research this is systematically practiced. The student feels it his duty to listen, by way of practice, at certain times to the most contradictory views and, at the same time, bring entirely to silence all assent, and more especially, all adverse criticism. The point is that in so doing, not only all purely intellectual judgment be silenced, but also all feelings of displeasure, denial, or even assent. The student must at all times be particularly watchful lest such feelings, even when not on the surface, should still lurk in the innermost recess of the soul. He must listen, for example, to the statements of people who are, in some respects, far beneath him, and yet while doing so suppress every feeling of greater knowledge or superiority. It is useful for everyone to listen in this way to children, for even the wisest can learn incalculably much from children. The student can thus train himself to listen to the words of others quite selflessly, completely shutting down his own person and his opinions and way of feeling. When he practices listening without criticism, even when a completely contradictory opinion is advanced, when the most hopeless mistake is committed before him, he then learns, little by little, to blend himself with the being of another and become identified with it. Then he hears through the words into the soul of the other. Through continued exercise of this kind, sound becomes the right medium for the perception of soul and spirit. Of course it implies the very strictest self-discipline, but the latter leads to a high goal. When these exercises are practiced in connection with the other already given, dealing with the sounds of nature, the soul develops a new sense of hearing. She is now able to perceive manifestations from the spiritual world which do not find their expression in sounds perceptible to the physical ear. The perception of the “inner word” awakens. Gradually truths reveal themselves to the student from the spiritual world. He hears speech uttered to him in a spiritual way. Only to those who, by selfless listening, train themselves to be really receptive from within, in stillness, unmoved by personal opinion or feeling only to such can the higher beings speak of whom spiritual science tells. As long as one hurls any personal opinion or feeling against the speaker to whom one must listen, the beings of the spiritual world remain silent.

All higher truths are attained through such inwardly instilled speech, and what we hear from the lips of a true spiritual teacher has been experienced by him in this manner. But this does not mean that it is unimportant for us to acquaint ourselves with the writings of spiritual science before we can ourselves hear such inwardly instilled speech. On the contrary, the reading of such writings and the listening to the teachings of spiritual science are themselves means of attaining personal knowledge. Every sentence of spiritual science we hear is of a nature to direct the mind to the point which must be reached before the soul can experience real progress. To the practice of all that has here been indicated must be added the ardent study of what the spiritual researchers impart to the world. In all esoteric training such study belongs to the preparatory period, and all other methods will prove ineffective if due receptivity for the teachings of the spiritual researcher is lacking. For since these instructions are culled from the living inner word, from the living inwardly instilled speech, they are themselves gifted with spiritual life. They are not mere words; they are living powers. And while you follow the words of one who knows, while you read a book that springs from real inner experience, powers are at work in your soul which make you clairvoyant, just as natural forces have created out of living matter your eyes and your ears.

Enlightenment

[ 11 ] Enlightenment proceeds from very simple processes. Here, too, it is a matter of developing certain feelings and thoughts which slumber in every human being and must be awakened. It is only when these simple processes are carried out with unfailing patience, continuously and conscientiously, that they can lead to the perception of the inner light-forms. The first step is taken by observing different natural objects in a particular way; for instance, a transparent and beautifully formed stone (a crystal), a plant, and an animal. The student should endeavor, at first, to direct his whole attention to a comparison of the stone with the animal in the following manner. The thoughts here mentioned should pass through his soul accompanied by vivid feelings, and no other thought, no other feeling, must mingle with them and disturb what should be an intensely attentive observation. The student says to himself: “The stone has a form; the animal also has a form. The stone remains motionless in its place. The animal changes its place. It is instinct (desire) which causes the animal to change its place. Instincts, too, are served by the form of the animal. Its organs and limbs are fashioned in accordance with these instincts. The form of the stone is not fashioned in accordance with desires, but in accordance with desireless force.” (The fact here mentioned, in its bearing on the contemplation of crystals, is in many ways distorted by those who have only heard of it in an outward, exoteric manner, and in this way such practices as crystal-gazing have their origin. Such manipulations are based on a misunderstanding. They have been described in many books, but they never form the subject of genuine esoteric teaching.)

By sinking deeply into such thoughts, and while doing so, observing the stone and the animal with rapt attention, there arise in the soul two quite separate kinds of feelings. From the stone there flows into the soul the one kind of feeling, and from the animal the other kind. The attempt will probably not succeed at first, but little by little, with genuine and patient practice, these feelings ensue. Only, this exercise must be practiced over and over again. At first the feelings are only present as long as the observation lasts. Later on they continue, and then they grow to something which remains living in the soul. The student has then but to reflect, and both feelings will always arise, even without the contemplation of an external object. Out of these feelings and the thoughts that are bound up with them, the organs of clairvoyance are formed. If the plant should then be included in this observation, it will be noticed that the feeling flowing from it lies between the feelings derived from the stone and the animal, in both quality and degree. The organs thus formed are spiritual eyes. The students gradually learns, by their means, to see something like soul and spirit colors. The spiritual world with its lines and figures remains dark as long as he has only attained what has been described as preparation; through enlightenment this world becomes light. Here it must also be noted that the words “dark” and “light,” as well as the other expressions used, only approximately describe what is meant. This cannot be otherwise if ordinary language is used, for this language was created to suit physical conditions. Spiritual science describes that which, for clairvoyant organs, flows from the stone, as blue, or blue-red; and that which is felt as coming from the animal as red or red-yellow. In reality, colors of a spiritual kind are seen. The color proceeding the plant is green which little by little turns into a light ethereal pink. The plant is actually that product of nature which in higher worlds resembles, in certain respects, its constitution in the physical world. The same does not apply to the stone and the animal. It must now be clearly understood that the above-mentioned colors only represent the principal shades in the stone, plant and animal kingdom. In reality, all possible intermediate shades are present. Every stone, every plant, every animal has its own particular shade of color. In addition to these there are also the beings of the higher worlds who never incarnate physically, but who have their colors, often wonderful, often horrible. Indeed, the wealth of color in these higher worlds is immeasurably greater than in the physical world.

[ 12 ] Once the faculty of seeing with spiritual eyes has been acquired, one then encounters sooner or later the beings here mentioned, some of them higher, some lower than man himself--beings that never enter physical reality.

If this point has been reached, the way to a great deal lies open. But it is inadvisable to proceed further without paying careful heed to what is said or otherwise imparted by the spiritual researcher. And for that, too, which has been described, attention paid to such experienced guidance is the very best thing. Moreover, if a man has the strength and the endurance to travel so far that he fulfills the elementary conditions of enlightenment, he will assuredly seek and find the right guidance.

[ 13 ] But in any circumstances, one precaution is necessary, failing which it were better to leave untrodden all steps on the path to higher knowledge. It is necessary that the student should lose none of his qualities as a good and noble man, or his receptivity for all physical reality. Indeed, throughout his training he must continually increase his moral strength, his inner purity, and his power of observation. To give an example: during the elementary exercises on enlightenment, the student must take care always to enlarge his sympathy for the animal and the human worlds, and his sense for the beauty of nature. Failing this care, such exercises would continually blunt that feeling and that sense; the heart would become hardened, and the senses blunted, and that could only lead to perilous results.

[ 14 ] How enlightenment proceeds if the student rises, in the sense of the foregoing exercises, from the stone, the plant, and the animal, up to man, and how, after enlightenment, under all circumstances the union of the soul with the spiritual world is effected, leading to initiation--with these things the following chapters will deal, in as far as they can and may do so.

[ 15 ] In our time the path to spiritual science is sought by many. It is sought in many ways, and many dangerous and even despicable practices are attempted. It is for this reason that they who claim to know something of the truth in these matters place before others the possibility of learning something of esoteric training. Only so much is here imparted as accords with this possibility. It is necessary that something of the truth should become known, in order to prevent error causing great harm. No harm can come to anyone following the way here described, so long as he does not force matters. Only, one thing should be noted: no student should spend more time and strength upon these exercises than he can spare with due regard to his station in life and to his duties; nor should he change anything, for the time being, in the external conditions of his life through taking this path. Without patience no genuine results can be attained. After doing an exercise for a few minutes, the student must be able to stop and continue quietly his daily work, and no thought of these exercises should mingle with the day's work. NO one is of use as an esoteric student or will ever attain results of real value who has not learned to wait in the highest and best sense of the word.

The Control of Thoughts and Feelings

[ 16 ] When the student seeks the path leading to higher knowledge in the way described in the preceding chapter, he should not omit to fortify himself; throughout his work, with one ever present thought. He must never cease repeating to himself that he may have made quite considerable progress after a certain interval of time, though it may not be apparent to him in the way he perhaps expected; otherwise he can easily lose heart and abandon all attempts after a short time. The powers and faculties to be developed are of a most subtle kind, and differ entirely in their nature from the conceptions previously formed by the student. He had been accustomed to occupy himself exclusively with the physical world; the world of spirit and soul had been concealed from his vision and concepts. It is therefore not surprising if he does not immediately notice the powers of soul and spirit now developing in him. In this respect there is a possibility of discouragement for those setting out on the path to higher knowledge, if they ignore the experience gathered by responsible investigators. The teacher is aware of the progress made by his pupil long before the latter is conscious of it He knows how the delicate spiritual eyes begin to form themselves long before the pupil is aware of this, and a great part of what he has to say is couched in such terms as to prevent the pupil from losing patience and perseverance before he can himself gain knowledge of his own progress. The teacher, as we know, can confer upon the pupil no powers which are not already latent within him, and his sole function is to assist in the awakening of slumbering faculties. But what he imparts out of his own experience is a pillar of strength for the one wishing to penetrate through darkness to light. [ 17 ] Many abandon the path to higher knowledge soon after having set foot upon it, because their progress is not immediately apparent to them. And even when the first experiences begin to dawn upon the pupil, he is apt to regard them as illusions, because he had formed quite different conceptions of what he was going to experience. He loses courage, either because he regards these first experiences as being of no value, or because they appear to him to be so insignificant that he cannot believe they will lead him to any appreciable results within a measurable time. Courage and self-confidence are two beacons which must never be extinguished on the path to higher knowledge. No one will ever travel far who cannot bring himself to repeat, over and over again, an exercise which has failed, apparently, for a countless number of times.

[ 18 ] Long before any distinct perception of progress, there rises in the student, from the hidden depths of the soul, a feeling that he is on the right path. This feeling should be cherished and fostered, for it can develop into a trustworthy guide. Above all, it is imperative to extirpate the idea that any fantastic, mysterious practices are required for the attainment of higher knowledge. It must be clearly realized that a start has to be made with the thoughts and feelings with which we continually live, and that these feelings and thoughts must merely be given a new direction. Everyone must say to himself: “In my own world of thought and feeling the deepest mysteries lie hidden, only hitherto I have been unable to perceive them.” In the end it all resolves itself into the fact that man ordinarily carries body, soul and spirit about with him, and yet is conscious in a true sense only of his body, and not of his soul and spirit. The student becomes conscious of soul and spirit, just as the ordinary person is conscious of his body. [ 19 ] Hence it is highly important to give the proper direction to thoughts and feelings, for then only can the perception be developed of all that is invisible in ordinary life. One of the ways by which this development may be carried out will now be indicated. Again, like almost everything else so far explained, it is quite a simple matter. Yet its results are of the greatest consequence, if the necessary devotion and sympathy be applied.

[ 20 ] Let the student place before himself the small seed of a plant, and while contemplating this insignificant object, form with intensity the right kind of thoughts, and through these thoughts develop certain feelings. In the first place let him clearly grasp what he really sees with his eyes. Let him describe to himself the shape, color and all other qualities of the seed. Then let his mind dwell upon the following train of thought: “Out of the seed, if planted in the soil, a plant of complex structure will grow.” Let him build up this plant in his imagination, and reflect as follows: “What I am now picturing to myself in my imagination will later on be enticed from the seed by the forces of earth and light. If I had before me an artificial object which imitated the seed to such a deceptive degree that my eyes could not distinguish it from a real seed, no forces of earth or light could avail to produce from it a plant.” If the student thoroughly grasps this thought so that it becomes an inward experience, he will also be able to form the following thought and couple it with the right feeling: “All that will ultimately grow out of the seed is now secretly enfolded within it as the force of the whole plant. In the artificial imitation of the seed there is no such force present. And yet both appear alike to my eyes. The real seed, therefore, contains something invisible which is not present in the imitation.” It is on this invisible something that thought and feeling are to be concentrated. (Anyone objecting that a microscopical examination would reveal the difference between the real seed and the imitation would only show that he had failed to grasp the point. The intention is not to investigate the physical nature of the object, but to use it for the development of psycho-spiritual forces.)

[ 21 ] Let the student fully realize that this invisible something will transmute itself later on into a visible plant, which he will have before him in its shape and color. Let him ponder on the thought: “The invisible will become visible. If I could not think, then that which will only become visible later on could not already make its presence felt to me.” Particular stress must be laid on the following point: what the student thinks he must also feel with intensity. In inner tranquility, the thought mentioned above must become a conscious inner experience, to the exclusion of all other thoughts and disturbances. And sufficient time must be taken to allow the thought and the feeling which is coupled with it to bore themselves into the soul, as it were. If this be accomplished in the right way, then after a time—possibly not until after numerous attempts—an inner force will make itself felt. This force will create new powers of perception. The grain of seed will appear as if enveloped in a small luminous cloud. In a sensible-supersensible way, it will be felt as a kind of flame. The center of this flame evokes the same feeling that one has when under the impression of the color lilac, and the edges as when under the impression of a bluish tone. What was formerly invisible now becomes visible, for it is created by the power of the thoughts and feelings we have stirred to life within ourselves. The plant itself will not become visible until later, so that the physically invisible now reveals itself in a spiritually visible way.

[ 22 ] It is not surprising that all this appears to many as illusion. “What is the use of such visions,” they ask, “and such hallucinations?” And many will thus fall away and abandon the path. But this is precisely the important point: not to confuse spiritual reality with imagination at this difficult stage of human evolution, and further-more, to have the courage to press onward and not become timorous and faint-hearted. On the other hand, however, the necessity must be emphasized of maintaining unimpaired and of perpetually cultivating that healthy sound sense which distinguishes truth from illusion. Fully conscious self-control must never be lost during all these exercises, and they must be accompanied by the same sane, sound thinking which is applied to the details of every-day life. To lapse into reveries would be fatal. The intellectual clarity, not to say the sobriety of thought, must never for a moment be dulled. The greatest mistake would be made if the student's mental balance were disturbed through such exercises, if he were hampered in judging the matters of his daily life as sanely and as soundly as before. He should examine himself again and again to find out if he has remained unaltered in relation to the circumstances among which he lives, or whether he may perhaps have become unbalanced. Above all, strict care must be taken not to drift at random into vague reveries, or to experiment with all kinds of exercises. The trains of thought here indicated have been tested and practiced in esoteric training since the earliest times, and only such are given in these pages. Anyone attempting to use others devised by himself, or of which he may have heard or read at one place or another, will inevitably go astray and find himself on the path of boundless chimera.

[ 23 ] As a further exercise to succeed the one just described, the following may be taken: Let the student place before him a plant which has attained the stage of full development. Now let him fill his mind with the thought that the time will come when this plant will wither and die. “Nothing will be left of what I now see before me. But this plant will have developed seeds which, in their turn, will develop to new plants. I again become aware that in what I see, something lies hidden which I cannot see. I fill my mind entirely with the thought: this plant with its form and colors, will in time be no more. But the reflection that it produces seeds teaches me that it will not disappear into nothing. I cannot at present see with my eyes that which guards it from disappearance, any more than I previously could discern the plant in the grain of seed. Thus there is something in the plant which my eyes cannot see. If I let this thought live within me, and if the corresponding feeling be coupled with it, then, in due time, there will again develop in my soul a force which will ripen into a new perception.” Out of the plant there again grows a kind of spiritual flame-form, which is, of course, correspondingly larger than the one previously described. The flame can be felt as being greenish-blue in the center, and yellowish-red at the outer edge.

[ 24 ] It must be explicitly emphasized that the colors here described are not seen as the physical eyes see colors, but that through spiritual perception the same feeling is experienced as in the case of a physical color-impression. To apprehend blue spiritually means to have a sensation similar to the one experienced when the physical eye rests on the color blue. This fact must be noted by all who intend to rise to spiritual perception. Otherwise they will expect a mere repetition of the physical in the spiritual. This could only lead to the bitterest deception.

[ 25 ] Anyone having reached this point of spiritual vision is the richer by a great deal, for he can perceive things not only in their present state of being but also in their process of growth and decay. He begins to see in all things the spirit, of which physical eyes can know nothing. And therewith he has taken the first step toward the gradual solution, through personal vision, of the secret of birth and death. For the outer senses a being comes into existence through birth, and passes away through death. This, however, is only because these senses cannot perceive the concealed spirit of the being. For the spirit, birth and death are merely a transformation, just as the unfolding of the flower from the bud is a transformation enacted before our physical eyes. But if we desire to learn this through personal vision we must first awaken the requisite spiritual sense in the way here indicated.

[ 26 ] In order to meet another objection, which may be raised by certain people who have some psychic experience, let it at once be admitted that there are shorter and simpler ways, and that there are persons who have acquired knowledge of the phenomena of birth and death through personal vision, without first going through all that has here been described. There are, in fact, people with considerable psychic gifts who need but a slight impulse in order to find themselves already developed. But they are the exceptions, and the methods described above are safer and apply equally to all. It is possible to acquire some knowledge of chemistry in an exceptional way, but if you wish to become a chemist you must follow the recognized and reliable course.

[ 27 ] An error fraught with serious consequences would ensue if it were assumed that the desired result could be reached more easily if the grain of seed or the plant mentioned above were merely imagined, were merely pictured in the imagination. This might lead to results, but not so surely as the method here. The vision thus attained would, in most cases, be a mere fragment of the imagination, the transformation of which into genuine spiritual vision would still remain to be accomplished. It is not intended arbitrarily to create visions, but to allow reality to create them within oneself. The truth must well up from the depths of our own soul; it must not be conjured forth by our ordinary ego, but by the beings themselves whose spiritual truth we are to contemplate.

[ 28 ] Once the student has found the beginnings of spiritual vision by means of such exercises, he may proceed to the contemplation of man himself. Simple phenomena of human life must first be chosen. But before making any attempt in this direction it is imperative for the student to strive for the absolute purity of his moral character. He must banish all through of ever using knowledge gained in this way for his own personal benefit. He must be convinced that he would never, under any circumstances, avail himself in an evil sense of any power he may gain over his fellow-creatures. For this reason, all who seek to discover through personal vision the secrets in human nature must follow the golden rule of true spiritual science. This golden rule is as follows: For every one step that you take in the pursuit of higher knowledge, take three steps in the perfection of your own character. If this rule is observed, such exercise as the following may be attempted:

[ 29 ] Recall to mind some person whom you may have observed when he was filled with desire for some object. Direct your attention to this desire. It is best to recall to memory that moment when the desire was at its height, and it was still uncertain whether the object of the desire would be attained. And now fill your mind with this recollection, and reflect on what you can thus observe. Maintain the utmost inner tranquility. Make the greatest possible effort to be blind and deaf to everything that may be going on around you, and take special heed that through the conception thus evoked a feeling should awaken in your soul. Allow this feeling to rise in your soul like a cloud on the cloudless horizon. As a rule, of course, your reflection will be interrupted, because the person whom it concerns was not observed in this particular state of soul for a sufficient length of time. The attempt will most likely fail hundreds and hundreds of times. It is just a question of not losing patience. After many attempts you will succeed in experiencing a feeling In your soul corresponding to the state of soul of the person observed, and you will begin to notice that through this feeling a power grows in your soul that leads to spiritual insight into the state of soul of the other. A picture experienced as luminous appears in your field of vision. This spiritually luminous picture is the so-called astral embodiment of the desire observed in that soul. Again the impression of this picture may be described as flame-like, yellowish-red in the center, and reddish-blue or lilac at the edges. Much depends on treating such spiritual experiences with great delicacy. The best thing is not to speak to anyone about them except to your teacher, if you have one. Attempted descriptions of such experiences in inappropriate words usually only lead to gross self-deception. Ordinary terms are employed which are not intended for such things, and are therefore too gross and clumsy. The consequence is that in the attempt to clothe the experience in words we are misled into blending the actual experience with all kinds of fantastic delusions. Here again is another important rule for the student: know how to observe silence concerning your spiritual experiences. Yes, observe silence even toward yourself. Do not attempt to clothe in words what you contemplate in the spirit, or to pore over it with clumsy intellect. Lend yourself freely and without reservation to these spiritual impressions, and do not disturb them by reflecting and pondering over them too much. For you must remember that your reasoning faculties are, to begin with, by no means equal to your new experience. You have acquired these reasoning faculties in a life hitherto confined to the physical world of the senses; the faculties you are now acquiring transcend this world. Do not try, therefore, to apply to the new and higher perceptions the standard of the old. Only he who has gained some certainty and steadiness in the observation of inner experiences can speak about them, and thereby stimulate his fellow-men.

[ 30 ] The exercise just described may be supplemented by the following: Direct your attention in the same way upon a person to whom the fulfillment of some wish, the gratification of some desire, has been granted. If the same rules and precautions be adopted as in the previous instance, spiritual insight will once more be attained. A spiritual insight will once more be attained. A spiritual flame-form will be distinguished, creating an impression of yellow in the center and green at the edges.

[ 31 ] By such observation of his fellow-creatures, the student may easily lapse into a moral fault. He may become cold-hearted. Every conceivable effort must be made to prevent this. Such observation should only be practiced by one who has already risen to the level on which complete certainty is found that thoughts are real things. He will then no longer allow himself to think of his fellow-men in a way that is incompatible with the highest reverence for human dignity and human liberty. The thought that a human being could be merely an object of observation must never for a moment be entertained. Self-education must see to it that this insight into human nature should go hand in hand with an unlimited respect for the personal privilege of each individual, and with the recognition of the sacred and inviolable nature of that which dwells in each human being. A feeling of reverential awe must fill us, even in our recollections.

[ 32 ] For the present, only these two examples can be given to show how enlightened insight into human nature may be achieved; they will at least serve to point out the way to be taken. By gaining the inner tranquility and repose indispensable for such observation, the student will have undergone a great inner transformation. He will then soon reach the point where this enrichment of his inner self will lend confidence and composure to his outward demeanor. And this transformation of his outward demeanor will again react favorably on his soul. Thus he will be able to help himself further along the road. He will find ways and means of penetrating more and more into the secrets of human nature which are hidden from our external senses, and he will then also become ripe for a deeper insight into the mysterious connections between human nature and all else that exists in the universe. By following this path the student approaches closer and closer to the moment when he can effectively take the first steps of initiation. But before these can be taken, one thing more is necessary, though at first its need will be least of all apparent; later on, however, the student will be convinced of it.

[ 33 ] The would-be initiate must bring with him a certain measure of courage and fearlessness. He must positively go out of his way to find opportunities for developing these virtues. His training should provide for their systematic cultivation. In this respect, life itself is a good school—possibly the best school. The student must learn to look danger calmly in the face and try to overcome difficulties unswervingly. For instance, when in the presence of some peril, he must swiftly come to the conviction that fear is of no possible use; I must not feel afraid; I must only think of what is to be done. And he must improve to the extent of feeling, upon occasions which formerly inspired him with fear, that to be frightened, to be disheartened, are things that are out of the question as far as his own inmost self is concerned. By self-discipline in this direction, quite definite qualities are developed which are necessary for initiation into the higher mysteries. Just as man requires nervous force in his physical being in order to use his physical sense, so also he requires in his soul nature the force which is only developed in the courageous and the fearless. For in penetrating to the higher mysteries he will see things which are concealed from ordinary humanity by the illusion of the senses. If the physical senses do not allow us to perceive the higher truth, they are for this very reason our benefactors. Things are thereby hidden from us which, if realized without due preparation, would throw us into unutterable consternation, and the sight of which would be unendurable. The student must be fit to endure this sight. He loses certain supports in the outer world which he owes to the very illusion surrounding him. It is truly and literally as if the attention of someone were called to a danger which had threatened him for a long time, but of which he knew nothing. Hitherto he felt no fear, but now that he knows, he is overcome by fear, though the danger has not been rendered greater by his knowing it.

[ 34 ] The forces at work in the world are both destructive and constructive; the destiny of manifested beings is birth and death. The seer is to behold the working of these forces and the march of destiny. The veil enshrouding the spiritual eyes in ordinary life is to be removed. But man is interwoven with these forces and with this destiny. His own nature harbors destructive and constructive forces. His own soul reveals itself to the seer as undisguised as the other objects. He must not lose strength in the face of this self-knowledge; but strength will fail him unless he brings a surplus on which to draw. For this purpose he must learn to maintain inner calm and steadiness in the face of difficult circumstances; he must cultivate a strong trust in the beneficent powers of existence. He must be prepared to find that many motives which had actuated him hitherto will do so no longer. He will have to recognize that previously he thought and acted in a certain way only because he was still in the throes of ignorance. Reasons that influenced him formerly will now disappear. He often acted out of vanity; he will now see how utterly futile all vanity is for the seer. He often acted out of greed; he will now become aware how destructive all greed is. He will have to develop quite new motives for his thoughts and actions, and it is just for this purpose that courage and fearlessness are required.

[ 35 ] It is pre-eminently a question of cultivating this courage and this fearlessness in the inmost depths of thought-life. The student must learn never to despair over failure. He must be equal to the thought: I shall forget that I have failed in this matter, and I shall try once more as though this had not happened. Thus he will struggle through to the firm conviction that the fountain-head of strength from which he may draw is inexhaustible. He struggles ever onward to the spirit which will uplift him and support him, however weak and impotent his earthly self may have proved. He must be capable of pressing on to the future undismayed by any experiences of the past. If the student has acquired these faculties up to a certain point, he is then ripe to hear the real names of things, which are the key to higher knowledge. For initiation consists in this very act of learning to call the things of the world by those names which they bear in the spirit of their divine authors. In these, their names, lies the mystery of things. It is for this reason that the initiates speak a different language from the uninitiated, for the former know the names by which the beings themselves are called into existence.

In as far as initiation itself can be discussed, this will be done in the following chapter.

I have often emphasised here that the theosophical movement cannot disabuse us of the immediate reality, of the duties and tasks that the day imposes on us in this time. Now it must become apparent whether this theosophical movement finds the right words if it concerns to give us an understanding of the great spiritual heroes who are, in the end, the creators of our culture and education. During these days, everybody who counts himself among the German education directs his thoughts upon one of our greatest spiritual heroes, on our Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805).

Hundred years separate us from his earthly decease. The last big celebration of Schiller, which was committed not only within Germany, but also in England, in America, in Austria, in Russia, was in 1859, on his hundredth birthday. It was interlinked with jamborees, with devoted words to the highest idealism of Schiller. These were words that were spoken over whole regions of the earth. There will be again jamborees which are celebrated during these days to honour of our great spiritual hero. However, as intimate and sincere and honest as the sounds were, which were spoken in those days in 1859, so intimate and devoted and completely spoken from the heart the words will not be that are spoken about Schiller today. Education and the national view about Schiller has substantially changed during the last fifty years. In the first half of the 19th century, Schiller's great ideals, the great portrayals of his dramas settled down, slowly and gradually It was an echo of that which Schiller himself had planted, an echo of that which he had sunk in the hearts and souls which flowed in enthusiastic words from the lips of the best of the German nation in those days. The most excellent men of this time have exerted their best to say what they had to say. There the brothers Ernst and Georg Curtius, the aesthete Vischer, the linguist Jacob Grimm, Karl Gutzkow and many others united. They joined in the big choir of Schiller celebrations and everywhere it sounded in such a way, as if one heard anything from Schiller himself, anything of that which Schiller himself had planted.

We have to acknowledge to ourselves that this changed in the last decades. The immediate interest in Schiller has decreased because Schiller's great ideals do no longer speak so familiarly and intimately to our contemporaries. Hence, it may be a substitute that we bear in mind clearly and vividly what Schiller can still be for our present and future. It behoves the theosophist above all to take the big theosophical basic questions up and to ask himself whether Schiller has to do anything with these theosophical basic questions. I hope that the course of this evening shows that it is not pure invention if we bring together Schiller and the theosophical movement, if we theosophists feel called in certain way to care for the remembrance of Schiller.

What is our basic question, what do we long for, what do we want to investigate and fathom? It is the big question to find the way to that which surrounds us as sense-perceptible objects and to that which is beyond the sensuous, as the spiritual, the super-sensible that lives in us and above us. This was also an early question which moved our Schiller. I cannot get involved in details. But I would like to show one thing, nevertheless, that Schiller's life and work was penetrated by this basic question: how is the physical with the psycho-spiritual, the super-sensible connected? Schiller wanted to solve this problem from the beginning of his life up to the heights of his work, even through his whole work, which is the artistic and philosophical expression of this question. At that time, he wrote a treatise after he had completed his study of medicine. This treatise, a kind of thesis, which he wrote with the departure from the Karlsschule (elite military academy) addresses the question: which is the interrelation between the sensuous nature of the human being and his spiritual nature?

Schiller treats in this work emphatically and nicely how the spirit is connected with the physical nature of the human being. Our time has already outdistanced what Schiller answers to this question; but that does not matter with such a great genius like Schiller. It matters how he engrossed his mind and how he put up with such things. Schiller understood this in such a way that there no conflict may be permitted between the sensuous and the spiritual. Thus he tried to subtly show how the spirit, how the soul of the human being works on the physical, that the physical is only an expression of the spirit living in the human beings.

Any gesture, any form and any verbal utterance is an expression of it. He investigates at first how the soul enjoys life in the body; then he investigates how the physical condition works on the mind. Briefly, the harmony between body and soul is the sense of this treatise. The end of the treatise is brilliant. There Schiller speaks of death in such a way, as if this is no completion of life, but only an event like other events of life. Death is no completion. He says already there: life causes death once; but life is not finished with it; the soul goes, after it has experienced the event of death, into other spheres to look at life from the other side. However, has the human being already sucked out all experience from life really at this moment? Schiller thinks that it might very well be possible that the life of the soul within the body appears as if we read in a book which we peruse, put aside and take in hand again after some time to understand it better. Then we put it aside again, after some time we take it in hand et etcetera to understand it better and better. He says to us with it: the soul lives not only once in the body, but like the human being takes a book in hand again and again, the soul returns repeatedly to a body to make new experiences in this world. It is the great idea of reincarnation, which Lessing had touched shortly before in his Education of the Human Race like in his literary will, and which Schiller also expresses now where he writes about the interrelation of the sensuous nature with the spiritual nature of the human being. At the very beginning, Schiller starts considering life from the highest point of view.

Schiller's first dramas have an intense effect on somebody who has a feeling heart for what is great in them. If we ask ourselves why Schiller's great thoughts flow into our hearts, then we get the answer that Schiller touches matters in his dramas which belong to the highest of humanity. The human being does not always need to understand and realise in the abstract what takes place in the poet's soul if he lonely forms the figures of imagination. But what lives there in the breast of the poet when he forms his figures, which move there on the stage, we see this already as young people in the theatre, or if we read the dramas. There flows in us what lives in the poet's soul. What lived in Schiller's soul at that time when he out-poured his young soul in his Robbers, in Fiesco, in Intrigue and Love. We must take him from the spiritual currents of the 18th century if we want to completely understand him.

Two spiritual currents existed which influenced the spiritual horizon of Europe at that time. A term of the French materialism calls one current. If we want to understand it, we have to see deeper into the development of the nations. What seethed in Schiller's soul has taken its origin in the striving and thinking of centuries. Approximately around the turn of the 15-th to the 16-th century the time begins when the human beings looked up at the stars in a new way. Copernicus, Kepler, Galilei, they are those who bring up a new age, an age in which one looks at the world differently than before. Something new crept into the human souls relying on the external senses.

Who wants to compare the difference of the old world view of the12th, 13th centuries with that which arose around the turn of the 16th century with Copernicus and later with Kepler must compare what plays in Dante's Divine Comedy with the world view of the 17th, 18th centuries. One may argue against the medieval world view as much as one likes. It can no longer be ours. But it had what the 18th century did no longer have: it arranged the world as a big harmony, and the human being was arranged in this divine world order as its centre, he himself belonged to this big harmony. All things were the outflow of the divine, of the creativity which was revered in faith, in particular that of Christianity. The superior was an object of faith. It had to hold and bear. And this had an effect down to the plants and minerals. The whole world was enclosed in a big harmony, and the human being felt existing in this harmony. He felt that he can be released growing together and being interwoven with this divine harmony. He rested in that which he felt as the world permeated by God, and he felt contented.

This changed and had to change in the time when the new world view got entrance in the minds when the world was permeated with the modern spirit of research. There one had gained an overview about the material. By means of philosophical and physiological research one had received an insight into the sensory world. One could not harmonise what one thought of the sensuous world with faith this way. Other concepts and other views took place. However, the human beings could not harmonise their new achievements with that which they thought and felt about the spirit.

One could not harmonise it with that which one had to believe about the sources of life according to the ancient traditions. Thus something came up in the French Revolution that one can express with the sentence:”the human being is a machine.” One had understood the substances, but one had lost the connection with the spirit. One felt the spiritual in oneself. However, one did not feel how the world is connected with it; one did no longer have this. The materialists created a new world view in which actually nothing but substances existed. Goethe was repelled by such views like Holbach's Systeme de la nature, he found it empty and dull. But this world view of Holbach (1723–1789) was got out of the scientific view. It mirrors the external truth. How should the human being face up to it now who has lost the spirit? He has lost the connection, he has lost the harmony which the medieval human being felt, the harmony between the soul and the material. Thus the best spirits of that time had to strive to find the connection again or were forced to choose between the spiritual and the sensuous.

This was, as we have seen, Schiller's basic question in his youth, this interrelation between ideal and reality, nature and spirit. But the trend had torn up a deep abyss between the spiritual and the sensuous, it pressed like a nightmare on his soul. How can one reconcile ideal and reality, nature and spirit? This was the question.

This abyss had been still torn open by another trend, which issued from Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). Rousseau had rejected the culture modern at that time up to a certain degree. He had found that the human being alienated himself by this culture, that he has torn out himself from nature. He had alienated himself from nature not only by the world view; he also could no longer find the connection with the spring of life. Therefore, he had to long for the return to nature, and thus Rousseau establishes the principle that basically the culture diverts the human beings from the true harmonies of life, that it is a product of decline.

At that time, the question of the spiritual, of the ideal had faced up the greatest of the contemporaries in new form: why should it not be there if they looked at life? In the time in which one felt the ideal of life so much, one had to feel the conflict twice if one looked at the real life as it had developed, and then at that which there was in the human society. Schiller's teens were in this time. All that towered up; and Schiller had to feel that as disharmony. His youth dramas originated from this mood. Back to the ideal! Which is the right social existence which is decreed to us in a divine world order? These are the feelings which lived in Schiller's youth, which he expressed then in his dramas, in the Robbers, in particular, however, also in the court dramas; we feel them if we take in the great drama Don Carlos. We have seen how the young doctor Schiller put the basic question of the interrelation between the sensuous and the spirit, and that he put it as a poet before his contemporaries.

After the hard trials which he was exposed to on account of his youth dramas he was invited by the father of the freedom poet Körner (Christian Gottfried K., 1756–1831) who did everything to support the cultural life. Körner's fine philosophical education brought Schiller to philosophy, and now the question arose philosophically before Schiller's mind anew: how can the interrelation of the sensuous with the spirit be found again? What was spoken in those days in Dresden between Schiller and Körner (1785–1787) and which great ideas were exchanged is reflected in Schiller's philosophical letters. Indeed, these may be somewhat immature compared with Schiller's later works. What is immature, however, for Schiller, is still very ripe for many other people and is important for us because it can show us how Schiller has struggled up to the highest heights of thinking and imagination.

These philosophical letters, The Theosophy of Julius, represent the correspondence between Julius and Raphael; Schiller as Julius, Körner as Raphael. The world of the 18-th century faces us there. Nice sentences are in this philosophy, sentences like those which Paracelsus expressed as his world view. In the sense of Paracelsus that of the whole outside world is shown to us which the divine creativity accomplished in the most different realms of nature: minerals, plants, animals with capacities of the most varied kind are spread out over nature. The human being is like a big summary, like a world like an encyclopaedia repeats everything once again in itself that is otherwise scattered. A microcosm, a little world in a macrocosm, a big world! Like hieroglyphics, Schiller says, is that which is contained in the different realms of nature. The human being stands there as the summit of the whole nature, so that he combines in himself and expresses on a higher level what is poured out in the whole nature. Paracelsus expressed the same thought largely and nicely: all beings of nature are like the letters of a word, and, if we read them, nature represents her being, a word results which presents itself in the human being. Schiller expresses this lively and emotionally in his philosophical letters. It is so lively to him that the hieroglyphics speak vividly for themselves in nature. I see, Schiller says, the chrysalises outside in nature which change to the butterflies. The chrysalis does not perish, it shows a metamorphosis; this is a guarantee to me that also the human soul changes in similar way. Thus the butterfly is a guarantee of human immortality to me.

In the most marvellous way the thoughts of the mind associate themselves in nature with the thought which Schiller studies as that which lives in the human soul. Then he struggles up to the view that the force of love lives not only in the human being, but finds expression in certain stages all over the world, in the mineral, in the plant, in the animal, and in the human being. Love expresses itself in the forces of nature and most purely in the human being. Schiller phrases that in a way which reminds of the great mystics of the Middle Ages. He calls what he pronounced that way the Theosophy of Julius. At it he developed up to his later approaches to life. His whole lifestyle, his whole striving is nothing else than a big self-education, and in this sense Schiller is a practical theosophist. Theosophy is basically nothing else than self-education of the soul, perpetual work on the soul and its further development to the higher levels of existence. The theosophist is convinced that he can behold higher and higher things the higher he develops. Who accustoms himself only to sensuality can see the sensuous only; who is trained for the psycho-spiritual sees soul and spirit around himself. We have to become spirit and divine first, then we can recognise something divine. The Pythagoreans already said this in their secret schools that way, and Goethe also said it in accordance with an old mystic:

Unless the eyes were like the sun,
How could we see the light?
Unless God's own force lived in us,
How could delight us the divine?

But we must develop the forces and capacities which are in us. Thus Schiller tries to educate himself throughout his whole life.

A new stage of his self-development is his aesthetic letters, About the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters. They are a jewel in our German cultural life. Only somebody can feel what mysteriously pours out between and from the words also from Schiller's later dramas who knows these aesthetic letters; they are like a heart- balm. Who has concerned himself a little with the lofty spiritual, educational ideal, which lives in his aesthetic letters, has to say: we have to call these aesthetic letters a book for the people. Only when in our schools not only Plato, not only Cicero, but Schiller's aesthetic letters are equally studied by the young people, one will recognise that something distinct and ingenious lives in them. What lives in the aesthetic letters becomes productive first if the teachers of our secondary schools are permeated with this spiritual life, if they let pour in something of that which Schiller wanted to bring up giving us this marvellous work. In the modern philosophical works you do not find any reference to these aesthetic letters. However, they are more significant than a lot that has been performed by the pundits of philosophy, because they appeal to the core of the human being and want to raise this core a stage higher.

Again, it is the big question which faces Schiller in the beginning of the nineties of the 18th century. He puts the question now in such a way: the human being is subjected, on one side, to the sensuous hardships, the sensuous desires and passions. He is subjected to their necessities, he follows them, he is a slave of the impulses, desires and passions. The logical necessity stands on the other side: you have to think in a certain way. The moral necessity stands on the other side, too: you must submit to certain duties. The intellectual education is logically necessary. The moral necessity demands something else that exceeds the modern view. Logic gives us no freedom, we must submit to it; also the duty gives us no freedom, we must submit to it. The human being is put between logical necessity and the needs of nature. If he follows the one or the other, he is not free, a slave. But he should become free.

The question of freedom faces Schiller's soul, as deeply as it was never possibly put and treated in the whole German cultural life. Kant had also brought up this question shortly before. Schiller has never been a Kantian, at least he overcame Kantianism soon. During the wording of these letters he was no longer on Kant's point of view. Kant speaks of the duty so that the duty becomes a moral imperative. “Duty, you lofty and great name. You have nothing popular or mellifluous in yourself but you request submission, … you establish a law... in front of it all propensities fall silent if they counteract secretly against it...” Kant demands submission to the categorical imperative. However, Schiller renounced this Kantian view of duty. He says: “with pleasure I serve the friends, however, I do it, unfortunately, with propensity” and not with that which kills propensity which even kills love. Kant demands that we act from duty, from the categorical imperative.

Schiller wants harmony between both, a harmony between propensity and passion on the one hand and duty and logic on the other side. He finds it at first in the view of beauty. The working of beauty becomes a big universal music and he expressed this: ”Only through beauty's morning gate you enter the land of knowing.” If we have a piece of art, the spiritual shines through it. The piece of art does not appear to us as an iron necessity, but as a semblance that expresses the ideal, the spiritual to us. Spirit and sensuality are balanced in beauty. As to Schiller, spirit and sensuality must also be balanced in the human being. Where the human being is between these two conditions, where he depends neither on the natural necessity nor on the logic one, but where he lives in the condition which Schiller calls the aesthetic one, passion is overcome.

He got down the spirit to himself, he purified sensuality with beauty; and thus the human being has the impulse and the desire to do voluntarily what the categorical imperative has demanded. Then morality is something in the human being that has become flesh and blood in him, so that the impulses and desires themselves show the spiritual. Spirit and sensuality have penetrated the aesthetic human being that way, spirit and sensuality have interpenetrated in the human being because he likes what he has to do. What slumbers in the human being has to be awakened. This is Schiller's ideal. Also concerning the society, the human beings are forced by the natural needs or by the rational state to live together according to external laws. The aesthetic society is in between where love accomplishes what every human being longs for and what is imposed on him by his innermost propensity. In the aesthetic society, the human beings freely co-operate, there they do not need the external laws. They themselves are the expression of the laws according to which the human beings have to live together. Schiller describes this society where the human beings live together in love and in mutual propensity and do voluntarily what they should and have to do.

I could only outline the thoughts of Schiller's aesthetic letters in a few words. But they have an effect only if they are not read and studied, but if they accompany the human being like a meditation book through the whole life, so that he wants to become as Schiller wanted to become. At that time, the time had not yet come. It has come today where one can notice the large extent of a society which founds the interrelation of human beings on love as its first principle. At that time, Schiller tried to penetrate such a knowledge and such a living together. Schiller wanted to educate the human beings with his art at least, so that they become ripe once because his time was not ripe to create the free human beings in a free society. It is sad how little just these most intimate thoughts and feelings of Schiller have found entrance in the educational life which would have to be filled completely with them, which should be a summary of them.

In my talks on Schiller, which I have held in the “Free College,” I have explained how we have to understand Schiller concerning the present. I tried there to show the thoughts in coherent and comprehensive way. You can read up there in detail what I can only indicate today. In any Schiller's biography you can find basically only little of these intimacies of Schiller. But once a pedagogue, a sensitive, dear pedagogue concerned himself with the content of Schiller's aesthetic letters in nice letters. Deinhardt (Heinrich D., 1805-1867) was his name. I do not believe that you can still buy the book. All teachers, in particular of our secondary schools, had to purchase it. However, I believe, it was pulped. The man, who wrote it, could hardly achieve a poor tutor's place. He had the mishap to pick up a leg fracture; the consulted doctors said that the leg fracture could be cured, however, the man were too badly nourished. Thus he died as a result of this accident.

After Schiller had advanced to this point of his life that way, something very important occurred to him: an event took place that intervened deeply in his life and also in the life of our whole nation. It is an event which is very important generally for the whole modern spiritual life. This is the friendship between Schiller and Goethe. It was founded peculiarly. It was at a meeting of the “Society of Naturalists” in Jena. Schiller and Goethe visited a talk of a significant scientist, Batsch (Johann Karl B., 1761-1802, botanist). It happened that both went together out of the hall. Schiller said to Goethe: this is such a fragmented way to look at the natural beings; the spirit that lives in the whole nature is absent everywhere. Thus Schiller put his basic question again to Goethe. Goethe answered: there may probably be another way to look at nature.

Goethe had also pointed in his Faust to that where he says that somebody who searches in such a way expels the spirit, then he has the parts in his hands “however, unfortunately, the spirit band is absent.” Goethe had seen something in all plants that he calls the archetypal plant (Urpflanze), in the animals what he calls the archetypal animal. He saw what we call the etheric body and he drew this etheric body with a few characteristic lines before Schiller. He realised that something really living expresses itself in every plant. Schiller argued: “yes, however, this is no experience, this is an idea!” Goethe responded: “this can be very dear to me that I have ideas without knowing it, and even see them with my eyes.” Goethe was clear in his mind that it was nothing else than the being of the plant itself.

Schiller had now the task to attain the great and comprehensive view of Goethe. It is a fine letter, which I have mentioned already once; it contains the deepest psychology which generally exists and with which Schiller makes friends with Goethe. “For a long time and with always renewed admiration I have already observed the course of your mind although from considerable distance and the way, which you have marked for yourself. You search for the necessary of nature, but you search for it in the most difficult way, for any weaker strength will probably take good care not do that. You summarise the whole nature to get light about the single; you try to explain the individual in all its appearances. From the simple organisation you ascend step by step to the more intricate one to build, finally, the most intricate one of all, the human being, genetically from the materials of the whole nature. Because you recreate him in nature as it were, you try to penetrate his concealed techniques. A great and really heroic idea which shows well enough how much your mind holds together the whole wealth of its ideas in an admirable unity. You can never have hoped that your life will suffice to such a goal, but even to take such a way is more worth than to finish any other and you have chosen like Achilles in the Iliad between Phthia and immortality.

If you had been born as a Greek, or just as an Italian, and a choice nature and an idealising art had surrounded you already from the cradle, your way would be endlessly shortened, would maybe rendered quite superfluous. Then already in the first observation of the things you would have comprehended the form of the necessary, and with your first experiences the great style would have developed in you. Now, because you are born as a German, because your Greek mind was thrown into this northern creation, no other choice remained to you to become either a northern artist, or to give your imagination what reality refused to it to substitute with the help of mental capacity and to bear a Greece as it were from within on a rational way.” This is something that continued having an effect on Schiller as we will see immediately.

Schiller now returns again to poetry. What had a lasting effect faces us in his dramas. Greatly and comprehensively life faces us in Wallenstein. You do not need to believe that you find the thoughts which I develop now, if you read Schiller's dramas. But deeply inside they lie in his dramas, as well as the blood in our veins pulsates, without us seeing this blood in the veins. They pulsate in Schiller's dramas as blood of life. Something impersonal is mixed in the personal. Schiller said to himself: there must be something more comprehensive that goes beyond birth and death. He tried to understand which role the great transpersonal destiny plays in the personal. We have often mentioned this principle as the karma principle. In Wallenstein he describes the big destiny which crushes or raises the human being. Wallenstein tries to fathom it in the stars. Then, however, he realises again that he is drawn by the threads of destiny, that in our own breasts the stars of our destinies are shining. Schiller tries to poetically master the personal, the sensuous nature in connection with the divine in Wallenstein. It would be inartistic if we wanted to enjoy the drama with these thoughts. But the big impulse flows unconsciously into us which originates from this connection. We are raised and carried to that which pulsates through this drama. In each of the next dramas, Schiller tries to reach a higher level to educate himself and to raise the others with him.

In The Maid of Orleans transpersonal forces play a role in the personal. In The Bride of Messina he tries to embody something similar going back to the old Greek drama. He attempts to bring in a choir and a lyrical element there. Not in the usual colloquial language, but in sublime language he wanted to show destinies, which rise above the only personal. Why Schiller tied in with the Greek drama? We must visualise the origin of the Greek drama itself. If we look back to the Greek drama behind Sophocles and Aeschylus, we come to the Greek mystery drama, to the original drama whose later development stages are those of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. In his book The Birth of the Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1872) Nietzsche (1844–1900) tries to explore the origin of the drama. In the Homeric time, something was annually brought forward to the Greeks in great dramatic paintings that was at the same time religion, art and science truth, devoutness and beauty. What did this original drama thereby become? This original drama was not a drama which shows human destinies. It should show the godhead himself as the representative of humanity Dionysus. The god, who has descended from higher spheres, who embodies himself in the material substances, who ascends through the realms of nature to the human being to celebrate his redemption and resurrection in the human being. This path of the divine in the world was shaped most beautifully in the descent, in the resurrection and the ascension of the divine.

This original drama took place in manifold figures before the eyes of the Greek spectators. The Greek saw what he wanted to know about the world, what he should know as truth about the world, the triumph of the spiritual over the natural. Science was to him what was shown in these dramas, and it was shown to him in such a way that this presentation was associated with devoutness and could be a model of the human lifestyle. Art, religion and wisdom was that which happened before the spectators. The single actors spoke not in usual language, but in sublime language about the descent, the suffering and overcoming, about the resurrection and ascension of the spiritual. The choir reflected what happened there. It rendered what took place as a divine drama in the simple music of the past. From this homogeneous spring flows out what we know as art, as science, which became physical, and as religion, which emerged from these mysteries. Thus we look back at something that links art with truth and religious devoutness.

The great re-thinker of the Greek original drama, the French author Edouard Schuré (1841–1929), attempted in our time to rebuild this drama. You can read up this really ingenious rebuilding in The Holy Drama of Eleusis (Le drame sacré d'Eleusis). Engrossing his mind in this drama he got to the idea that it is a task of our time to renew the theatre of the soul and the self. In The Children of Lucifer (Les Enfants de Lucifer) he tries to create a modern work that connects self-observation and beauty, dramatic strength and truth content with each other. If you want to know anything about the drama of the future, you can get an idea of it in these pictures of The Children of Lucifer. The whole Wagner circle strives for nothing else than to show something transpersonal in the dramas. In Richard Wagner's dramas, we have the course from the personal to the transpersonal, to the mythical. Hence, Nietzsche also found the way to Wagner when he sought the birth of the tragedy in the original drama. Schiller had already tried in his Bride of Messina what the 19th century aimed at. In this drama, the spiritual is represented in sublime language, and the choir echoes the divine actions before us. He says in his exceptionally witty preface of the writing About the Use of the Choir in the Tragedy from which depths he wanted to bear a Greece in those days. This writing is again a pearl of German literature and aesthetics.

Schiller attempted the same that the 19th century wanted to enter the land of knowing through beauty's morning gate and to be a missionary of truth. With the drama Demetrius which he could not finish because death tore him away, with this drama he tried to understand the problems of the human self, with a clearness and so greatly and intensely that none of those who tried it could finish Demetrius because the great wealth of Schiller's ideas is not to be found with them.

How deeply he understands the self that lives in the human being! Demetrius thinks of himself because of certain signs that he is the real Russian successor to the throne. He does everything to attain what is due to him. At the moment when he is near to arrive at his goal everything collapses that had filled his self. He has now to be what he has made of himself merely by the strength of his inside. This self which was given to him does no longer exist; a self which should be his own action should arise. Demetrius should act out of it. The problem of the human personality is grasped grandiloquently like by no other dramatist of the world. Schiller had such a great thing in mind when death tore him away. In this drama, something lies that with those who could not put it in clear words will now find more response. What was built in the human hearts and in the depths of human souls gushed out again in 1859.

1859 caused a change in the whole modern education. Four works appeared by chance round this time. They influenced the basic attitude of our education. One of them is Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life that brought a materialistic movement with it. The second work was also typical, in particular concerning Schiller if we remember his words which he called out to the astronomers: “do not chat to me so much about nebulas and suns! Is nature only great, because she gives you something to count? Admittedly, your object is the loftiest in space; but, friends, the elated does not live in space.” But it became possible to understand just this elated in space by a work about the spectral analysis which Kirchhoff (Robert K., 1824–1887, physicist) and Bunsen (Robert Wilhelm B., 1811–1899, physicist) published. The third work was again in a certain opposition to Schiller. Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–1887) wrote in idealistic spirit: The Preliminaries of Aesthetics (1876). An aesthetics should be created “from below.” Schiller had started it stupendously “from above.” Fechner took the simple sensation as his starting point. The fourth work carried materialism into the social life. What Schiller wanted to found as society was moved under the point of view of the crassest materialism in the work by Karl Marx (1818–1883) A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859). All that crept in. These are things which were far from the immediate-intimate which Schiller poured in the hearts, honestly and sincerely. And now those who are exposed to the modern literature can no longer look at Schiller in such an idealistic way. Recently, in the last decade of the 19-th century, a man wrote a biography on Schiller who had grown together thoroughly with the aesthetic culture. The first word in it was: “I hated Schiller in my youth!” And only by his scholarly activity he was able to acknowledge Schiller's greatness.

Who can listen only a little to what floods in our time sees that there a certain internal coercion prevails. Time has changed. Nevertheless, perhaps some great, enthusiastic words and some nice festivity will be also connected with Schiller. But somebody who has a good ear will not hear anything that still moved through the minds and souls before half a century when we revered Schiller. We must understand it; we do not reproach those who have no connection with Schiller today. But with the immense dimension of Schiller's oeuvre we have to concede to us: he has to become a component of our cultural education again. The immediate present has to follow Schiller again. Why should a society striving for spiritual deepening like the Theosophical Society not take Schiller up? He is still the first pre-school of self-education if we want to reach the heights of spirit. We get to knowledge differently, if we experience him. We come to the spiritual, if we experience his Aesthetic Letters. We understand the Theosophical Society as an association of human beings, without taking into consideration nation, gender, origin and the like, as an association merely on the basis of pure human love.

In the course of his life, Schiller strove for the heights of spiritual being, and his dramas are basically nothing else than what wants to penetrate artistically into the highest fields of this spiritual being. What he sought was nothing else than to develop something everlasting and imperishable in the human soul. If we remember Goethe quite briefly again: with the word “entelechy“ he termed what lives in the soul as the imperishable what the human being develops in himself, acquires experiencing reality, and what he sends up as his eternal. Schiller calls this the forming figure. As to Schiller, this is the everlasting that lives in the soul that the soul develops constantly in itself, increases in itself and leads to the imperishable realms.

It is a victory which the figure gains over the transient corporeality in which the figure only acts. Schiller calls it the everlasting in the soul-life, and we are allowed, like Goethe, after Schiller had deceased, to stamp the words: “he was ours.” If we understand Schiller with living mind, we are allowed to imbue ourselves with that which lived in him with which he lives in the other world, which took up his best friendly and affectionately. We are also allowed as theosophists to celebrate that mysterious connection with him which we can celebrate as a Schiller festival. As well as the mystic unites with the spiritual of the world the human being unites with the great spiritual heroes of humanity. Everybody who strives for a spiritual world view should celebrate such a festival, a “unio mystica,” for himself, still beside the big Schiller jamborees. Nothing should be argued against these big festivals. However, only somebody who celebrates this intimate festival in his heart connecting him with Schiller intimately finds Schiller's work. Aspiring to spirit we find the way best if we make it like Schiller who educated himself all his life. He expressed it, and it sounds like a motto of the theosophical world view:

Only the body belongs to those powers
Which braid the dark fate;
But freely from any force of time,
As playmate of blessed beings,
Strolls above in the light's acres,
Divinely among gods the figure.

The last talk should suggest with a few lines that spiritual science can investigate the deeper profundities and the truth of the biblical documents and that it can read that in the right sense again which is written in this document. With some simple lines should be shown how concerning the Bible such a right penetration is possible into the deeper sense of the Bible in a quite unexpected way and how it can lead many human beings to a recapture of this document of humankind. What could be said in the last talk about the position of our newer time, about its research, its criticism, its worldview compared with the Old Testament someone can also say concerning the New Testament. In addition, here we are able again to point to the fact that in the seventeenth, eighteenth centuries a criticism started which has analysed and cut the Gospel to pieces, a document of such an immense significance for countless human beings for centuries, and attacked its bases. One would have to tell a long story if one paid attention to this biblical criticism of the New Testament in detail. How could it be different, because since that time, after the invention of the art of printing, the Bible has come to all hands, and with it, the materialistic thinking got out of control! How could it happen other than that people recognised clearer and clearer that there are contradictions in the Gospels?

For example, you need only compare the genealogies of Jesus in the Matthew Gospel and the Luke Gospel, if one adheres to the external letter of the matter, and you find that already the first chapters of both Gospels are contradictory. Not only that Luke and Matthew differently give the ancestors; also, the names do not comply. If you compare the single facts of the life of Jesus, you can find contradictions everywhere. In particular, people realise how extremely the first three evangelists, the writers of the Matthew, Mark, and Luke Gospels, on one side, and the writer of the fourth so-called John Gospel, on the other side, contradict. The result was that one tried to produce an accordance of the first three Gospels in a certain way. One believed to find that these three evangelists—even if they differ from each other in many details—give a picture of Jesus which is attractive to the whole view and to all ways of thinking of a newer time, at least to many personalities of our time.

However, many people realised long-since concerning the fourth evangelist that there cannot be talk of a historical document at all. Not only that the writer of the John Gospel, who completely brings the facts differently grouped, above all, concerning the miracles that he describes quite differently; it also becomes apparent that his whole standpoint towards the centre of the whole world history is different. This sight has developed more and more. If we want—we cannot go into the details—to turn again to the sense of this research, it is approximately this that one says that the three Gospels could give the image of the superior Jesus, the founder of the Gospel, if one considers them as portrayals of the brilliant time. The fourth Gospel is a confessional document, a kind of hymn of that which the writer wanted to show concerning his faith in the crucified Jesus. He wanted to give no story, but a teaching writing.

In particular, in the nineteenth century, this view settled in the souls of numerous people more and more due to the so-called Tübingen School, which the great Bible scholar, the brilliant Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792–1860) led. Baur's view is approximately this: the John Gospel is late; it was written very late whereas the other evangelists wrote earlier, still after certain reports of those who, perhaps, themselves had experienced or come to know it from persons who had witnessed the story in Palestine. However, the John Gospel originated only in the second century. Not from the original story, but influenced by the Greek philosophy and by that which had already appeared in the Christian communities, it were written, so that John created a picture of Christ Jesus, which could uplift the human beings in such a way that it is lyrical in certain ways. It teaches how one began to think and to feel like a Christian up to the second century, however, it was no longer able to inform about the events in the beginning of our era.

Indeed, there were also souls who vindicated the opposite viewpoint. If one must say on the other side that Christian Baur and his students proceeded with tremendously critical astuteness, nevertheless, we are not allowed to forget a biblical scholar like the historian and academic Gförer (August Friedrich G., 1803–1861) who asserts that the Gospel is due to the apostle John himself. With diligence he shows how just this Gospel shows almost in each sentence that an eyewitness wrote it or that somebody who had received his message from eyewitnesses wrote it. Gförer goes so far that he says in his Swabian way that anybody who cannot believe in the fact that the Gospel is due to John is out of his mind. He is also out of sorts with those who say that it is not historical and who bear down on this Gospel with all possible arguments.

The question that interests here is this: did really research, history cause this view in spite of all astuteness, in spite of all scholarship, which is never denied a moment?—Someone who can thoroughly explore not only the outside of history, but is able to immerse with his thinking and feeling, and with his whole view in the mental undergrounds of human development, notices something else. It was not only the historical sense, it was not only the so-called objective research, but they were the ways of thinking of the newer time, the beloved views that were spread more and more since the last century.

They did not accept that the confidence and the ideas of the figure of Christ Jesus survived which prevailed for centuries, that not only a superior being was included in Jesus of Nazareth, but a universal being, a spiritual-divine being that is not only related to the whole humanity but to the whole development of the world generally. The confidence and the idea got lost that this spiritual-divine being worked in the mortal body of Jesus of Nazareth, and that we face a unique event there. This contradicts the ways of thinking so much that they had to be directed against such confidence. The critical research slipped in unconsciously to justify what the habitual ways of thinking wanted for the time being. More and more the sense came up, which could not endure that anything topped the normal human-personal, the sense that says to itself, yes, there have been great human beings in the world evolution: Socrates, Plato, or others. Indeed, we have to admit that Jesus of Nazareth was the greatest. Nevertheless, we must remain within this human level.—The fact that something could have lived in Jesus that one can compare to the normal human being contradicts the materialistic mental images, which settled down more and more. We can see this sense slipping in unconsciously and combining with that which the so-called historical research ascertained.

Why did the first three evangelists become more and more the respected ones and the writer of the John Gospel the mere lyricist and confessional writer? Because they could say to themselves, the three evangelists, the Synoptics, describe an ideal human figure that does not top the human level, even if Jesus is an elevated one. It flatters the modern sense if one says what a modern theologian said: if we subtract everything supersensible and spiritual from Jesus of Nazareth, if we take the simple man of Nazareth, we are closest to Jesus.

That is not possible with the John Gospel. It immediately begins with the words: “In the beginning the Word already was. The word was in God's presence,” before a material world existed. What there was in the spiritual primeval grounds became flesh; it walked around in Palestine in the beginning of our calendar.—The writer of the John Gospel applies the highest wisdom to understand this event and to bring it to understanding. In view of this matter, it is not appropriate to speak of the simple man of Nazareth. Hence, he was never allowed to deal with a historical document. These are not only scientific reasons, it is the development of the usual thoughts, emotions and sensations which have found their expression in that which the Bible criticism of the New Testament and the historical research claim today to have the unconditional or at least relative authority of these matters.

However, there emerges another question from spiritual science. Let us position ourselves really on the ground on which some new researchers have positioned themselves. The ones wanted to portray an event that took place in the beginning of our calendar. They added mythical and legendary aspects. Assume that we positioned ourselves on this ground. There we must ask ourselves, is it yet possible to speak about Christianity as such under these conditions? Is it possible to speak about Christianity if we understand the documents, which tell about this Christianity, purely materialistically? Is it possible to behave towards the whole Bible in such a way?—Two things should be stated at first that prove that the question cannot be put different than it was put, and that it can be answered in outlines. Let us assume that Christian Baur's view is right that something took place in Palestine that one has to explain as the external historical, and that in the course of time the writers delivered that out of the prejudices of their time to the future generations what was in them. Let us assume that we have to presuppose such a research while we believe in the descent of a spiritual being from spiritual spheres that lived in Jesus of Nazareth, resurrected, won the victory of life over death—what we regard as the real essence of the Mystery of Golgotha. One has to break this doctrine, Baur says. One considers this view as a dogmatic one. This view must be cancelled. One has to investigate an event in Palestine like another historical event.

Is it then possible to speak generally in the true sense of the word of Christianity, of the Bible as such a work which reports what has to appear? On the other hand, I would like to point to two facts. What is the first big and enclosing effect of the Christian worldview based on, an effect that nobody can deny? What is the sermon of Paul based on? Is it based on the interpretations of the Gospels by a new sober research? Never Paul's strength is based on an announcement of that which is to be exhausted by the means of history. Paul's whole efficacy is based on an event that you can understand only from supersensible, never from sensuous causes. Someone who checks Paul's writings sees that his whole teaching is based simply on the fact that he could win the conviction and the experience that Christ has risen, and that in the Mystery of Golgotha the life in spirit carried off the victory over death.

Wherefrom does Paul take his conviction of the true nature of Christ Jesus? He does not take it, as for example the others who were round Christ Jesus, from an immediate instruction. He takes it, as you all know, from the event by Damascus. He takes it from this fact and he could say, I have seen Him who lived, suffered, and died in Palestine, I have seen Him living.—Paul means nothing but that he has seen Christ in spirit and has won the truth from the spiritual view that Christ lives. He announces Christ, whom he got to know in his spiritual view. In addition, he equates this appearance to the other phenomena, because he says to us, after death, Christ appeared to various persons, to the twelve disciples and others, and in the end to me as a mistimed birth.—With it, he thinks that he really beheld Him in a higher view, who carried off the victory over death, and that he knows since that time that Christ lives for someone who rises in the spiritual world.

Here we already stand concerning the New Testament where the new spiritual science must separate from any only literal view of the Bible. What do you find as a rule in the writings of the so-called new research about the event of Damascus? Saul became Paul in an ecstatic condition, a condition into which one cannot look really. This escapes from the human research. Yes, it escapes from the external human research. We have emphasised this so often in spiritual science that the human being—what we can learn in the following talks—can ascend to the knowledge of a higher world which is round him in such a way, as the colours and the light are around a blind person. The human being can behold this higher world as the operated blind-born can learn to see colours and light. This takes place by the spiritual-scientific methods in the soul of the true pupil of spiritual science and enables him to behold into the spiritual worlds, to behold what is there. What takes place with this pupil, what every pupil can bear witness today and at all time, that took place with Paul. He received it: to hear with ears which are not sensuous ears to see with eyes, which are not sensuous eyes. Then he could also perceive Him who lived in Jesus of Nazareth. So Paul's whole strength extends into the supersensible realm. If you take the whole Paul as he is, you can say, what he said is set aglow by “Christ was raised. Hence, our faith is not futile” (1 Corinthians 15:17).

If one goes just into the effects of Paul's sermons how he spread that form of Christianity, which went through the world, then one can never say, it does not depend on going back to any supersensible facts to investigate the facts about Jesus. One says that one must apply the usual scientific forms. Then one forgets not only the original facts in Palestine not only that which happened during 33 years, but also what happened for the dissemination of Christianity. One forgets that it is based on a supersensible event, and that this supersensible event is to be understood at first.

However, in quite similar way we also find if we consider the matters only seriously and really that the Old Testament, at least its most important document, the Law, is based on something similar. We find that the whole mission of Moses, the whole strength of Moses by which he provided big services to his people is also based on a supersensible event. We had to say the day before yesterday that if the spiritual researcher develops higher, so that he becomes sighted in the spiritual world and is able to behold into the spiritual undergrounds of the things that he can survey the facts of the spiritual world in pictures, in imaginations. Yes, you can express the processes, which happen in you if you ascend to the spiritual fields, only in pictures, however, you must get clear that somebody who speaks in such pictures does not want to speak about the pictures as those, but thinks that one has these pictures as expressions of his supersensible experience.

The supersensible experience by which Moses got his mission was clearly described in the phenomenon of the burning bush. There we see Moses, the leader of the people, facing his God, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, who issued the order to Moses to act for his people what we find happening then as the action of Moses. While we use this, we already face a basic issue of the whole Bible, namely the question: how have we generally to position ourselves in order to penetrate deeper into this document to these two supersensible facts, which make any merely external research impossible? How have we to behave to this basic issue of the Bible in the spiritual-scientific sense? We can penetrate if we bring the contents of the revelation or the experience of Moses home to ourselves.

The most important traits are only cited. Moses faces the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. God gives him the order at the same time to lead the people from Egypt, to increase it to a certain size and to teach it a certain attitude.

If then Moses wants to have something by which he can exculpate himself before the people, so that he can say who he is and who sends him, God reveals his name: “I am the I-am.” Nobody can understand the word who is not able to go into the whole sense and the being of old naming. Old naming is unlike the modern naming. Old naming should absolutely express the being of the personality, the being of that who faces us. In “I am the I-am” the being of the God had to express itself in particular who faced Moses, and who calls himself “the Lord the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.” Why does he call himself the Lord the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? There is a secret hidden behind it, which must be unravelled. We can unravel it only if we move up to it with the help of spiritual science. We have to emphasise it over and over again at various places that the human being consists of the members of his being, that we only face one part of the human being as the physical body, that we have higher members which are supersensible, which are the real bases, the creative principles. We must add the etheric body or life body, then the astral body and as the fourth the bearer of the ego.

The human being has the physical body in common with the apparently lifeless beings, with the minerals, the etheric body with the plants and all living beings, the astral body with the animals, which can have passions and desires. Because of the ego, the human being towers above all sensuous beings, which surround him. Spiritual science has always recognized these four members of the human being.

We have to point to the physical body that also has its spiritual primal ground and is only condensed from the spiritual. As well as ice originates from water, the physical originated from the spiritual. We must go far back in the view of the spiritual development if we want to look for the first spiritual origins of the physical human body. This fourth member is absolutely the oldest of the human members. Today the physical body is the densest. It emanated from the spirit in the distant past. It has become denser and denser, has experienced some changes, and has thereby taken on its physical figure. This is the oldest in the human being. A younger member is the etheric body or life body. It came later; hence, it is less condensed. The astral body is even younger.

The ego is the youngest member, the bearer of the human self-awareness. All these members originated from spiritual primal grounds and spiritual beings, from divine-spiritual beings. We can say, spiritual science shows that this ego, by which the human being became the modern self-conscious being, immersed in the body. It was composed, before he became an ego-being, of the physical, etheric and astral bodies. The Bible also distinguishes those beings now who are the creators of these three human members. The teaching of Moses speaks about the creator of the human ego, of the creator of the bearer of the human self-awareness. Hence, the Bible also sees in the God who let the ego flow into the human being, so to speak, that God who was the last to come concerning the evolution of the human being. The divine beings, the Elohim, whom we have strictly distinguished from the God Yahveh or Jehovah, are the creators of the physical, etheric and astral bodies. They are exactly distinguished in the Bible from the God appearing last in our evolution, from the Yahveh God, from that who brought the ego to the human being.

If we ask, where does the human being find the being of this God, this youngest of the creative gods about which the Bible starts speaking in the fourth verse of the second chapter of the Genesis? Spiritual science shows that where the human being finds his ego in himself, which differs so substantially, already after its name, from all other beings round us, that he there finds a drop of this divine being in himself. This is no pantheistic teaching, also no explanation of the fact that the human being has to find his God in himself. Asserting this would be like someone who asserts that a drop of water is the same being like the sea—and says: this drop of water is the sea.

If we speak in the sense of spiritual science, we speak about something infinite, comprising, universal that is connected with the earthly development and the other things that belong to this earthly development. In our ego, we find a spark of this God Yahveh as we find the same being in the drop of water as in the sea. Nevertheless, it was a very long way the human development had to cover, while the God Yahveh started forming the human being in such a way that he could grasp the ego consciously. The strength of the ego had to work in the human being already well before, before he got the consciousness of the ego. Moses became the great precursor bringing the consciousness of the human being to the ego. However, these forces work and form in the human evolution already long before. They form in such a way that we can recognise their way if we deal with the evolution of the human consciousness itself.

Let us look somewhat back in the development of the human consciousness. One uses the word development very often today, but as drastically, as intensely as spiritual science takes the word development seriously, it is the case with no other science. This human consciousness, as it is today, developed from other forms of consciousness. If we go back far to the origin of the human being, not in the sense of materialistic science, but in such a way, as I have explained it the day before yesterday, then we find that the human consciousness appears more and more different, the farther we go back. The consciousness that connects the various intellectual concepts, the external sensory perception in the known way originated firstly, even if in the far-off past, but it originated firstly. We can find a condition of the consciousness at that time, which was completely different from today because memory was completely different in particular. The memory of the modern human being is only a dilapidated rest of an old soul force, which existed quite differently. In old times when the human being did not yet have the inferring force of his today's mind, when he was not yet able to count in the today's sense, when he had not yet developed his intellectual logic, he had another soul force for it: he had developed a universal memory. This had to decrease, had to withdraw, so that at its cost our today's mind could develop. This is generally the way of development that a force takes a backseat, so that the other can appear. Memory is a decreasing force; mind and reason are increasing soul forces.

For those who hear these talks already for some years, it cannot be something especially miraculous what I say now. For the others it will seem absurd if one speaks about the nature of memory in the following way. What is the appearance of the human memory? It is that which remembers yesterday, the day before yesterday and so on, until the childhood. Then, however, it discontinues once. The memory did not stop in old far-off past, not in childhood, not even at birth; but like the modern human being remembers what he himself has experienced in his personal life, the prehistoric human being remembered what his father, his grandfather had experienced through whole generations. Memory was a soul force through generations that extended really. For centuries, memory survived in the old far-off past, and another kind of naming was connected with the different formation of memory.

We come to the question now: why is talk of individuals in the first chapters of the Bible who become hundreds of years old like Adam, Noah? Because it makes no sense to limit these human beings. Memory reached through generations up to the primal father. One gave this whole generation one name. It would have made no sense to give the name Adam to a single person. Thus, in those days one gave the name to that which remembered, holding on the same recollection, for centuries from generation to generation—Adam, Noah. What was this? It was that which goes through father, son and grandson, but maintained recollection. So faithfully, the biblical document maintains these secrets, which one can understand only with the help of spiritual science.

If we look at the consciousness of the ego with which we comprehend the being of the Yahveh God, we see that the ego lives in us between birth and death, and that it maintains its kind between birth and death. Thus, the ego maintained for generations at that time, for centuries. As we speak today about the ego and know that it goes back as far as we can remember, the human being of primeval times said to himself: it makes no sense to call myself an ego. I recall my father, grandfather, and great-grandfather.

His ego went through generations, and it had even a name. As we find an expression of God in our personal ego if we become engrossed in this ego, the ancient human being said to himself, looking up through the generations: God who lives in the ego lives for generations,—as a divinity which then Moses recognised in the higher worlds. The God was the same who lived as an ego from generation to generation in ancient times. One declared as ego, in the parlance of the past, what reproduced as an expression of the Yahveh God, with the Yahveh word “I am the I-am.” Moses learnt to recognise this in his spiritual revelation. In contemplating the burning bush this was revealed for the first time. The same God once lived from generation to generation, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He was the force, which lived in the memory and brought everything at the same time that founded the human order. Thus, we look up at the predecessors of Moses. In the biblical sense, we look up at the patriarchs, at those, in whom the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob lived.

These times needed no external commandments, no external laws. For that lived on with the lively memory, quite different from ours, which one had to do. According to what did one act in these primeval times? If you understand the Bible correctly, you find that the human beings did not act after commandments. One acted after that which memory said to one, what the father, the grandfather et cetera had done. With his blood, the human being got the direction to that which he had to do. In these ancient generations was something like a spiritualised instinct that one can compare with “acting instinctively” as we call it today. Not after a commandment the ancient human being acted, no, he acted after the character of his being, after his type. How did Abraham, Isaac and Jacob act? They acted in such a way as the blood running through generations induced them. They had brought down the God Yahveh with their egos, whether they waged war whether they lived in peace. They had no commandments; they had no law. The spiritualised instinct of God lived in them.

At the time when Moses appeared, the human personality was on the first level of its development. There its consciousness broke away from this common generational consciousness. There the generational memory had already stopped quite thoroughly. There one did no longer have the spiritualised instinct of action. There something else had to replace it. The God of Abraham, of Isaac and Jacob—who in his spiritual physical figure gave Moses the law, the commandments because one did no longer have the spiritualised instinct—had to regulate the external order, the social living together by commandments, by laws. It is the same God who worked before as a natural force, who is now efficient as legislator to found the external order with laws. We see that it has a deep sense to read the words at this point: the God of Abraham, of Isaac and Jacob. The God who calls himself the God “I am the I-am” is the same as the fourth member of the human being, the same who let flow the ego into the human being. However, the human beings could not take up the spiritual nature of the ego in their consciousness. A longer preparation was necessary to it, and this takes place at the time, which is portrayed in the Bible as the Old Testament, at the time of Moses up to the Mystery of Golgotha. Hence, this time is a time of promise, which the new Gospel shows, the beginning of the “time of fulfilment.” The God announces himself to Moses as the “I am the I-am.”

He announces himself in such a way that he orders the external order of the human beings, their living together by laws indirectly by Moses's vision. Humankind lived this way in the pre-Christian time in which the God was creating, in which the Yahveh God was forming, in which the “I am the I-am” lived, in which, however, humankind could not yet live consciously but according to the external law coming from the Yahveh God. More and more the time approached when humankind should become completely aware of the ego. For the whole antiquity, there was only one means for the human beings who could not yet behold, could not yet face God in the physical world. There was only one way how this God could become effective for them. This was the law, the order. This applied to the external world.

Moreover, there was a supersensible way to get to know this God, and these were the mysteries or initiation. What was initiation? Everything that was delivered to certain personalities which were regarded as suitable to apply the methods of spiritual-scientific research to develop the forces and abilities slumbering in the human being, so that they could behold into the spiritual world. Hence, for the confessors of the Old Testament it would be in such a way to behold God spiritually from face to face who lives in the “I-am.” If they applied this method, they were able to see and to hear with spiritual eyes and ears independently what Moses had seen, when the God, the “I-am” gave him his mission. Only in the mysteries, only by initiation this was possible.

However, there were also those who recognised the “I am the I-am,” but they had to go through the procedures, the methods with which the human being is transformed into an instrument of the higher vision, the vision in the spiritual world. So the God who already lived in Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was concealed to the physical world. He ordered the world by law. To the initiate, the secret of the mysteries becomes visible in thinking. Then the time came when the Mystery of Golgotha should take place. What happened there, actually? Imagine what the initiate experienced in the old times. Only sketchily, I can describe the process of initiation by meditation, concentration and the other exercises. The soul of the neophyte was prepared for a long time. Then the processes of initiation were finished during three and a half days. There the sages of initiation prepared the neophyte prepared so far, so that he was transported to a state in which his physical body was completely sleeping. It was not only sleeping but it was like dead, so that the neophyte could not use his physical senses, his physical eyes, and ears. For it, however, he beheld with the organs of his spiritual members into the spiritual worlds. He could perceive there if he was outside his body if he was not connected with the physical organs. Then he could behold what lived invisibly in him as the “I am the I-am;” but he could behold it only in the depths of the mysteries. Then he was awoken—as everybody knows who has experienced these things—in his physical body and used the physical senses again. Now he had the full consciousness: I am the I-am, I was in the spiritual world. What has spoken to Moses, the “I am the I-am” faced me, and it is that which refuses eternity to me, which has entered my body. I was connected with it. I was connected with the divine primal bearer of the I-am whose reflection is my I-am.

Thus, the initiate returned to the physical world and bore witness of the fact that something spiritual exists in the ego, because he had beheld it. He could give his listeners news and message of it. However, one could only behold the “I am the I-am” in the spiritual world. By the event of Golgotha, the same being descended to the human beings who had announced himself by Moses in the burning bush with the words “I am the I-am.” This complies completely with the sense of the John Gospel: the ego became flesh in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, lived in it, and walked around among the human beings. This primal force brought the human being to the height on which he stands today. The primal force became a human being; the human being became a divine being and walked around among the human beings. It was possible that on Golgotha that took place as a historical event within the evolution of humankind, which the initiates could behold only in spirit: the fact that the Christ-being carried off the victory over the death of matter.

This is the historical-external-real fact, which the initiates often experienced in the mysteries. This was the course of initiation in the ancient times in the deep darkness of the mysteries with those who left their physical bodies for three and a half days, walked around in the spiritual world and recognised that a spiritual-divine being descends into the physical world, and that this event would take place once as a historical fact. This was the course of initiation. However, the time came now when humankind came to the event of Golgotha turning emotions, sensations, and thoughts to it by faith.

Then the understanding originated from it. It was something new. One got as something external that one could have, otherwise, only by the rapture in the spiritual world. If one assumes this in such a way, we understand why Christ Jesus says: I am the I-am in a completely new figure. He says, look back at the primeval times, at that which lived as the everlasting in the human being that lived in Abraham, Isaac and Jacob that made known itself then in the Law of Moses. Now the time has come when the ego becomes aware in the single person, when the human being has to become aware in his ego, in the divine living in him.

If it was in the old times in such a way that the human being looked up at the God that he beheld and could say to himself: what lives in me lives for generations,—it is now in such a way that he finds the divine in his ego if he beholds into himself. The divine from which any ego originated was embodied in Jesus of Nazareth, and someone understood this who wrote: In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and God was the word.—By these words, the being of the innermost human nature and at the same time the primary source of this innermost being is meant. He lets Christ Jesus say, what lives in me a spark of which is in every human being existed before the Gospel was.—The significant sentence in the John Gospel was “Before Abraham was, I am.”—Before Abraham was, the “I-am” was, this I-am which is not bound to any time which was before Abraham, was already in the spiritual primeval grounds of the human being. While he calls himself the primary source of this I-am, Christ spoke the significant words: “Before Abraham was, the I-am was.”

Therefore, we realise how the sense of human development, which flows through these fundamental books of humankind, the Old and the New Testaments, is brought back to life again by spiritual science. In addition, we realise how to us the most important words become readable first if we fathom the sense of these books, regardless of the words, with the help of spiritual science. I give an example that gives something to think to the materialistic sense. I would like to remind you of the resurrection of Lazarus. There such a man like Gförer says: who asserts that the John Gospel is not written by John, helps himself saying, the writer wrote down a lot, as he experienced and understood it, but the Lazarus miracle must have been told to him. He cannot have been present.

One must understand the Lazarus miracle only correctly. Let us understand it in such a way that Christ when he entered the world took on the body of Jesus of Nazareth. Let us believe, however, that that which prepared in the Old Testaments became expression in the New Testament. He had to have somebody who could understand him completely, who could penetrate in the deepest sense into what he could announce, and that means that he had to initiate a person in his way.

Initiation stories are told to us secretly at all times. The Lazarus miracle is nothing else than the miraculous and tremendous representation how Christ created the first initiate of the New Testament. Christ waked up Lazarus as an initiate recalled the soul of his pupil to the body who was for three and a half days in a state similar to death, after he had walked around in the spiritual world. Someone can simply see through all that who understands something of it, because it is the language in which generally initiation stories are told. “This illness is not to end in death; through it God's glory is to be revealed and the Son of God is glorified” (John 11:4). This means: external appearance as revelation of the inside; so that one has to translate the sentence in truth: “The illness is not to end in death, but that the God manifests as an external appearance, so that He can also be revealed to the senses.”

In Lazarus slumbers the deeper human being who has the ability and the strength that it could be developed in mysterious way in him, could be led up in the spiritual world, so that he could recognise the being of Christ, the Son of God. However, this strength had to develop first. Christ Jesus developed it in Lazarus, so that the divine that rested in Lazarus could be revealed, and could reveal the Son of God. Christ Jesus created in Lazarus the first to know from own inner observation who Christ Jesus is real. At the same time, this miracle shows—because it is to someone a real miracle who wants to accept the external physical principles only—what the pupil concerned has to go through during the three and a half days. Because this can be compared to a real death since the etheric and the astral bodies are raised out of the physical body and only the physical body lies there.

Thus, we have understood even such a miraculous event like the Lazarus miracle—miraculous only to anyone who cannot explain it out of spiritual science. All that reveals itself to you in the Lazarus miracle if you have the light only, which illuminates it with the words: “His illness is not to end in death but to reveal the inside.”—If these abilities are woken in the human being, it is like a birth. As a child arises from the womb, the higher is born by the lower human being. In the same way, the illness of Lazarus is connected with the birth of the new life, of the divine human being, so that the divine human being is born in the physical human being, in Lazarus.

So we could go through the John Gospel step by step and would experience that that which happens in the spiritual initiation had to be described quite different from that which we see in ancient times when with quite different spiritual powers the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is working. If we look into the Bible in such a way, then it is the high universal book again, which lets shine to us what we have now found ourselves. While we must admit—we can say this—that only someone who has developed the higher spiritual forces can come to this truth, we have also to admit and say—if it faces us in the John Gospel—what brought it in these writings. While a new spiritual researcher approached the Gospel and the whole Bible, he learnt to see this and can say: the human beings will come to the true value of this document and recognise that only a materialistic prejudice can speak the words: “the simple man of Nazareth.” However, because of true knowledge we have recognised Christ as an overwhelming world being living in the body of Jesus of Nazareth.

The first three Gospels appear to us in relation to the John Gospel possibly, as if three persons stand grouped on a slope of a mountain and every reports what he sees. Everybody sees a part. Someone who looks down from the higher vantage point surveys more and portrays more from this higher vantage point. We come to know not only what the others below describe, but also what can make the three understandable at the same time. That is why it is not difficult to say, who stood on the higher vantage point, but for us it is in such a way that the first three writers were also initiates in certain respects. However, the deep initiate, who could write much deeper, could look much deeper than the three others could and about the true spiritual facts of the matters, which lie behind the sensuous, this is the writer of the John Gospel. So the Gospels combine harmoniously and show that the Mystery of Golgotha cannot be understood as a usual historical event, but is only explicable by a process as we find it with Paul, who says: “the life I now live is not my life, but the life Christ lives in me” (Galatians 2:20). What the external research shows beside becomes also important in the spiritual research. If we look at Christianity, it is important to us to figure the clairvoyance of Moses out which is shown to us in the vision of the burning bush. It is this what one had to explain. I have to emphasise that this new spiritual science is able to form the picture of the world events of its own accord, to look at Christ, so to speak, spiritually from face to face and to find Him again and, hence, to find Him truly in the Gospels. That biblical scholarship is not really without presuppositions, which says, we want to investigate the Bible like any other story.

For it assumes the dogma that there can be only usual, sensuous, natural facts. Only spiritual science is really without presuppositions, and this leads to a renewed recognition and high esteem of the Bible in all its parts. A time will come when maybe those are disgruntled who want to say today that only the simple mind is able to grasp the Bible. This wisdom must misjudge the Bible. The time will come when just the wisest wisdom estimates the highest what is given to us in the Bible because clairvoyance will face clairvoyance in the Bible. Then some word, which is written in the New Testament, appears in a new light. It will become apparent that a document like the Bible can lose nothing by impartial research. It would be sad if any research cut this Bible of its reputation, of its name. A research that cuts the Bible of its name has only not come far enough. Research that goes until the end will show the Bible again in its greatness.

The human being is allowed to do research freely. Who has the view that by research religion could perish shows with it only that his piety stands on weak feet. The divine being put the impulse of research in the human being, so that he is active. It would be a sin against this impulse if one did not live researching. I recognise God by my research. God recognises Himself in my research. Truth is a good in the human development from which the religious life will never have anything to fear. However, this is a basic truth, which penetrates the New Testament completely.

You should not take those into accounts who want to keep away the human beings from the Bible because of comfort, and who say, if you come to philosophers and interpret the Bible, these say, they want to know nothing about it.—However, such a research is based on comfort. However, that research is justified and right which says: we cannot go deeply enough to understand what is written in the Bible.—That research in the Bible is the right one that goes into it in free research and then understands the Bible in the right sense. These researchers understand the truth of the biblical saying: “you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:32).

Man's striving and searching for the spirit is ancient, as old as the thinking, feeling and sensing of humanity itself. But at the most diverse times in human development, people had to give themselves the most diverse forms of answers to the great riddle questions of existence, which are also precisely the riddle questions about the spirit. In our time, what is called spiritual science or, as it has become accustomed to being called, theosophy, wants to give an answer to these great riddles of existence, and it wants to give an answer that corresponds to the feelings and needs of present-day humanity.

Contemporary humanity wants to know, wants to include in its understanding and knowledge of feelings that which is connected with the higher forms of existence. From the outset, it must be assumed that suspicions and belief in relation to the spirit or, as one can also say, in relation to the supersensible world, will lose nothing when the clarity of knowledge is poured out over what man has to say in relation to these questions.

The fact that behind everything sensual, behind everything physical, there is a supersensible, a superphysical, is basically only denied by a small number of people today. But when we approach these questions, then not only either the admission or the rejection of the spiritual, of the supersensible, mingles in what fills the human heart, but the most diverse feelings mingle in everything that comes into consideration comes into consideration, the most varied feelings mingle, not only in the answers, but already in the questions the most varied feelings mingle: above all, doubt and timidity mingle with what comes into consideration.

There are many people who say: Of course, we have to assume that behind the world that appears to our eyes, that we can perceive with our senses at all, that behind this world there is another one that makes the meaning of this sensual world understandable to us. But we humans cannot penetrate this supersensible world through our own research, through our own science. In recent times, spiritual science or theosophy has emerged as a message to man that shows not only that there is a supersensible world behind the sensory world, but also that man is capable of penetrating into this supersensible world through his own research. In doing so, we have drawn the attention of those present to the question that we shall deal with today: Where and how can we find the spirit at all?

Those who, from the outset, dogmatically doubt the possibility of human knowledge rising up into the spiritual world cannot, in principle, even raise this question properly. Theosophy or spiritual science does not want to bring anything completely new to humanity. If it were to claim to do so, it would be giving a poor account of itself, for who would want to believe that truth and wisdom have been waiting for our present time to be recognized and studied? Therefore, spiritual science or theosophy also shows that throughout all periods of human spiritual development, in the most diverse forms, the one, eternal truth and wisdom has been striven for by people and possessed to a certain degree, that only the perceptions and feelings change in the different ages – and therefore the old truth must approach humanity in ever new forms.

And so, without much preparation, let us approach the question of where and how to find the spirit in this spiritual or theosophical sense. We only need to point out that the search for the spirit depends on man finding the right tool to search for this spirit. You know, my dear audience, that in what is called external science, what is called the science of nature, there are tools, instruments, through which the external riddles of existence are gradually revealed to man. You know how man peers into the life of the smallest creatures through what is called a microscope; you know what wonders of space have been revealed to man by those instruments we call telescopes. These external instruments have indeed brought about something like external wonders in human knowledge for a long time. And you can also appreciate it when you think about the things that man is dependent on to grasp and comprehend the external mysteries of nature through such tools. In terms of the spirit, there are no such external tools; there is only one tool, the one that Goethe refers to in the well-known “Faust” poem with the words:

Mysterious in the bright day
Nature cannot be robbed of her veil,
And what she may not reveal to your mind,
You cannot force from her with levers and screws.

And Goethe points out in this sentence that all those tools and instruments that are composed of external, sensual things – however useful they may be for revealing the outer secrets of the world – cannot reveal the primal secret of existence, they cannot reveal the questions and riddles about the spiritual. But there is an instrument, only this instrument must be prepared. What is this instrument?

This instrument, through which man can penetrate into the spiritual world, is none other than man himself, not as man is in the average life, but as he can make himself when he applies the methods and means of secret science to himself. In this, esoteric science assumes that the magic word that moves so many minds and souls in relation to the outer world today is not taken entirely seriously and honestly. Today, there is much talk of evolution. It is said that the highest of sentient beings, the human being, has gradually developed from imperfect states to its present height. Through the study of natural science, attempts are being made to look back into the distant primeval times of humanity. It is said that in these distant primeval times, man was an imperfect being and gradually developed.

Theosophy or spiritual science in the broadest and therefore most honest sense of the word sees in man not only the powers and abilities that are in this person's normal life today, but it sees in him dormant abilities and powers that can be developed, that can be drawn out of the soul. And so it starts from the premise that this soul of man does not have to remain as it is, but that it can be shaped, and that in this way the abilities and powers that initially lie dormant in the human soul in a normal way can be called out of this soul, and then, when they are called forth, they enable the person to see something completely different in his environment, to perceive something completely different than he can recognize with his sensory eyes, with his sensory organs of perception. And so spiritual science speaks of a possible awakening of the human soul, of an awakening of the forces and abilities slumbering within it, by man applying such means to himself as we will have to cite later. Through this he comes to make such an instrument for the perception of the spiritual world out of himself.

What is an awakening? We can best imagine what an awakening, a development of the abilities lying dormant in the soul, is by first placing an image before our soul. Imagine, ladies and gentlemen, this hall by seeing the colors of the walls, the lights, by perceiving the other objects, these roses here and everything that is around you, what is perceptible, the sound that is recognizable to the ears. We bring a man born blind into this hall. The colors, the perceptions of light, which are evident to you, are hidden from this man born blind. Let us assume that we have the good fortune to operate on this man born blind here in this hall. Gradually, a whole new world would reveal itself to him around him. What he might have been able to deny before is now there for him.

Perhaps, if he had been a doubter, an unbeliever, he could have said before: You tell me about colors, you tell me about lights. There is only darkness around me. I do not believe in the fantastic stuff of light and colors you tell me about. The moment the organs are opened, the world he previously thought was a fantasy is there. It is there in the same space where there was darkness for him before.

Something similar happens to a person when they make themselves an instrument to perceive a higher world. If they apply the methods that will be mentioned below to themselves, then it is not sensory or physical organs of perception that are opened to them, but spiritual and soul ones. And that which was always around them before, which they just could not perceive, becomes perceptible to them. What Goethe called the spiritual eyes and spiritual ears develops from the soul, and a new world opens up before him [the human being]. The great moment of awakening occurs for him, that moment which is described to us in the deeper wisdom of all peoples and all different eras of the various peoples as the one through which the human being could become a messenger from another world.

There have always been people whose soul powers were awakened. In different periods they were called initiates. They were the ones who could tell what is fact in the other worlds, in the supersensible worlds, to the one who was perhaps not exactly in that place. Initiates, awakened ones have existed at all times. They were the seekers, the researchers of the spirit.

Now, one could say, and this objection will always be raised, one could say: Yes, what use is it to other people if there are a few awakened ones who can tell of higher worlds, who bring the message of the supersensible, if not all people can see into these worlds? Now, when today within the theosophical school of thought it is said that this or that is the case in the spiritual worlds, then many a person says: What use is it to me if others can see into the spiritual world but I cannot? I do not concern myself with these spiritual worlds at all, since I would only have to believe what others tell me.

This is not a valid objection. This objection would only apply, my esteemed audience, if supersensible powers of the human soul were just as necessary for understanding and insight as they are for research into the higher worlds. To penetrate into the higher world as a researcher, it is necessary that the person slowly and gradually, with patience and energy and perseverance, makes himself an instrument to look into the other world with spiritual eyes, to listen with spiritual ears. But then, when the one who has looked into the other world comes and tells the secrets of the higher worlds, then everyone is capable, with ordinary human logic, with common sense, if he is only unbiased enough, without being led astray by all kinds of prejudices, of realizing that what is said about the higher world is true. This can be recognized and understood. However, it can only be researched through the development of the human being himself into an instrument of spiritual research. For man, my honored audience, is not designed for error and doubt, but for truth. And when the initiates tell us about what is going on in the higher worlds, and the human being listens and just gives himself to his unbiased soul, then he senses, long before he can see into the spiritual world himself, that what is communicated about these worlds is true.

How can a person now reshape his inner being, his soul, so that these higher worlds become an experience for him, open to observation and direct exploration? If we want to answer this question, we have to delve a little deeper. After all, it is no less a question than this: how does a person develop the ability to see the spiritual world, how does he acquire the abilities that are also called clairvoyant? Let us start with what is an experience for the normal person: the external world of the eyes and the other external organs of perception. You know that a person perceives an object of the ordinary sensory world by directing his sensory organs towards the object, and once he has perceived it, he can retain an idea, an image of this object in his soul.

You are looking at this bouquet of roses. By fixing your eyes on this bouquet, it is a perception for you. You experience its existence, you are with it. You now turn around, and the image of this bouquet of roses remains with you as a mental image. It may be pale compared to the direct perception, but the image remains with you and you may carry this image for a long time until it disappears, so to speak, from your memory. But this is how a person relates to their experiences of the external world in general. We can say: in relation to the external sense world, a person experiences things in such a way that they actually encounter the objects first, and then the image of these external objects forms in their soul.

But precisely the opposite must occur, my dear audience, in relation to the supersensible world and everything that is connected with the great goals of supersensible development, as well as with the dangers that we will point out. All of this ultimately comes down to the fact that man must start by developing a certain kind of inner life, by first bringing about certain changes in his soul, certain experiences that he would otherwise not have in everyday life, in order to see the supersensible world. Then the great moment can come for him when – just as the outer, sensory light comes to the blind-born who have undergone an operation – the spiritual, supersensible world begins to make an impression on him.

The soul is not transformed into such an instrument of higher spiritual experience in an outward tumultuous way, not through outward events, but quietly within itself, in the course of an intimate inner life; and many a person who in life in this or that profession among people, of whom those around him knew nothing but that he had this or that position in life, has led or is leading a second life within himself. This second life consists in the fact that he has transformed his soul into such a characterized instrument of higher perception. When a person has gradually come so far, then he must develop a certain level of knowledge within himself, which external science, external experience, does not know at all. Spiritual science speaks of the fact that all external knowledge is knowledge of objects. It is precisely the kind of knowledge that arises when a person encounters the objects of the world and connects the ideas to them.

The next higher knowledge is called imaginative knowledge in spiritual science, and there is nothing fantastical, as we shall see in a moment, associated with this imaginative knowledge, not even anything that could even approximately be described by the mere word imagination. However, it must be clear that the path is the opposite of that of external experience, of external perception.

There are two means that must be applied intimately to the soul in order to advance it inwardly. These two means consist in man not abandoning himself to the mere outer life, but taking this soul life into his own hands through the inner powers of the soul, and initially directing this soul life through the inner powers of the will.

To fully understand what this is about, let us consider the following: We try to imagine how our soul life would be different if one or other of us had been born not in the year of the nineteenth century and not in the city of Europe, but a hundred years earlier and in a completely different city. We imagine how different objects around the person would affect him, how different ideas, sensations and feelings would then fill his soul. Think for a moment about how much of what fills your soul from morning till evening can be traced back to external impressions of place and time, and then imagine for a moment all the things in your soul that are not somehow connected to some external object in your environment, to some external event of your time. Ask yourself how much remains in the soul of a person, in the soul of many people, if they disregard what affects them in their immediate environment. Everything that affects the soul from the outside, everything that affects us because we were born and develop in a certain time and in a certain place, can contribute nothing, absolutely nothing, to the inner unfolding, to the inner awakening of the soul.

Completely different conceptions must enter into the life of the soul, conceptions that are independent of external impressions; and the most effective conceptions are initially those which are called imaginative or perhaps pictorial-symbolic. Such conceptions were always those which the teachers of supersensible abilities gave to their pupils, and by living in these conceptions, the pupils developed their souls upwards into the higher worlds.

We do not wish to speak in generalities, but to make ourselves understood by means of an example. Let us place before our minds, here and now, a symbol, a picture, which the pupils, under the influence of their spiritual science teachers, have long used to develop their souls higher. This is a picture, of which there are countless numbers, but we wish to make clear, by means of this one picture, how the soul is affected. The picture is simple to describe, and yet it has a magical effect on the soul.

Imagine a black cross. This black cross is adorned at the top, where the beams cross, with roses, with red roses. This is called the Rosicrucian symbol. When the disciple, as it were, becomes blind and deaf to the external environment, when he can, for a while, however short, refrain from all that can make an impression on his eyes, on his ears and on the other senses , when he is completely absorbed in himself and also erases the memory of everyday experiences and now fills himself completely with the one pictorial representation of the Rosicrucian – what happens to the soul?

Let us first answer this question. To do so, we must first understand something that can help us to understand the profound symbol of the Rosicrucian. However, what I am about to say is not what is important for the inner development to clarify this symbol or image, but rather the inner deepening and immersion of the soul. Nevertheless, we must explain the symbol to ourselves.

I will try to present this Rosicrucian symbol to you in the form of a dialogue, as the teacher would have spoken to his student in the field of spiritual science. This conversation, as I relate it, did not take place in the form in which I relate it, because what is implied in it always took place over long periods of time. Nevertheless, by retelling it in this way, we can get a sense of what happened.

Imagine that the teacher says to the student: Take a look at a plant, a plant that takes root in the ground, grows out of the ground, out of the root, with green leaves. And now compare the human being with this plant. Look at the human being in his present form, pervaded by red blood. Look at the plant and see how its life organs, its leaves, are permeated with the green sap, chlorophyll. Compare the two. You find the plant insensitive, immobile; you find the human being mobile, sensitive. You find that the human being has an inner life filled with pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow. You say that the human being stands at a higher level of existence than the plant. How did the human being come to a higher level of existence, how was he able to develop within himself that which could be called self-awareness, his ego? The plant has not developed such self-awareness, such an ego, as it stands before us.

The human being was only able to develop his higher consciousness to the point of self-awareness by accepting something else. In this higher development, the human being accepted the passions, the drives, the instincts, the desires. The plant does not have these. Although the plant does not have an inner life of thoughts and feelings, it stands in a certain respect higher than man in its kind; chaste and pure, without sensual urges and desires, without instincts and passions. And by imagining how the green plant sap flows through it, we say: this green sap is for us at the same time the symbol of the pure, chaste nature of plants. And as the pure, chaste nature of plants develops upward to man, so in man a self-awareness, an inner life, is developed. But this pure chastity is transformed at the same time into the life of desire. Man has partly risen higher, partly sunk lower.

Now the teacher continues to the student: But do not just look at the person as he stands before you in the present; look at a distant, very distant human future, at a human goal! Man has the goal of striving higher and higher, step by step, and overcoming what he had to accept in his development to date: to purify and cleanse the instincts, desires and passions, so that one day, while maintaining his consciousness, his self-aware nature, he is pure and chaste within himself, like the plant being at his level, in his way. What the human being is to achieve again in the future is overcoming, purifying what he had to accept, so to speak, shedding, taking away from himself that through which he has become lower than the chaste plant being, and only in this way can he revive in himself a higher nature, a higher human being, which today slumbers in him. Once again we can refer to Goethe when we want to draw attention to the deepest meaning of this development of humanity. We can say, and we fully capture the meaning of what the spiritual teacher said to his pupil with these words of Goethe's. We can draw attention to the words in Goethe's West-Eastern Divan:

And as long as you do not have this,
this dying and becoming!
If you are only a gloomy guest
on the dark earth.

“Stirb und Werde”: What does that mean? Stirb und Werde is a deeply symbolic word. It expresses approximately that which has now been said in the symbolum, it expresses that man wants to let die that which he has taken on in order to reach a higher level, to bring it to a higher flowering, his lower nature, and a higher nature is to be driven out as a flowering of the supersensible.

If we now look at the plant, it becomes a symbol for us in a certain form, a clear symbol of this human development. We see how the rose plant develops into its red blossom. The green sap of the plant changes before our eyes, so to speak, as it shoots into the blossom, into the red sap of the blossom. If we now imagine, symbolically, that we are always in the conversation between the teacher and the disciple, we think of the human being in terms of the passions and drives that are bound to his red blood, so purified and cleansed that this red blood flows through the veins in chastity and purity, like the red sap through the rose petal. Then we have in the rose itself the symbol of the higher human nature.

This is expressed in the rose cross, the “die and become” of the lower man, the shedding and casting off of what man has taken on in the black cross. The “becoming” at a higher level of development of the innermost spiritual nature of man is also reflected in the pure, chaste plant-juice in the roses that adorn the Rosicrucian cross. Thus we have explained this picture intellectually from one side. Much more could be said about it.

Now someone could, of course, say – and it would be a very easy objection to raise – that everything that has been said about the Rose Cross does not correspond to scientific conceptions. Certainly, my dear audience, it does not correspond to external scientific conceptions, but the Rose Cross is not there to express some outer fact in accordance with truth. What matters is not such a representation of the outer world, but that the person who, precisely because the Rosicrucian cross corresponds to no outer reality, allows this cross to enter his soul, becomes completely absorbed in this Rosicrucian cross and, as if below the threshold of consciousness, feels and experiences everything we have said here. His soul becomes something other than it was before. Such symbols have this effect on the human soul, precisely because they do not correspond to any external reality. They stimulate the soul to so-called imaginative knowledge, to that knowledge which represents the first step in the ascent to the higher worlds.

I have been able to present only the Rosicrucian cross as an example. We could cite a hundred other examples. The disciple must gradually familiarize himself with these symbols, just as someone who wants to learn to read must become acquainted with letters and signs. Only in this way can he attain a higher form of existence, and then such a one, who has the patience and persistence to live himself into the pictorial representations of such symbols, has a special experience.

To get an idea of what kind of experience a person has when they are awakened, we need to gain some insight into human nature. This nature offers man the great riddles of existence, and it is precisely in what he experiences daily, so to speak, and what can present him with the deepest riddles, that he passes by indifferently. These riddles of existence are encapsulated in four words: waking and sleeping, life and death. These four words describe the greatest riddles of life.

Of course, it is not possible in a short hour to discuss in detail how one, in terms of spiritual science, should think about the nature of man in relation to these four words. But what should be mentioned is what the one who is able to explore the spirit in the way described today experiences in man and his changes in everyday life. Is not this everyday life, with its alternation of waking and sleeping, a mystery? We see how, from morning till evening, a person is filled with the impressions of the day, how all his senses are constantly taking in perceptions. We see how the person then processes his external impressions with his mind. But we see how, in the evening, when he falls asleep, the person sees all his impressions of the day and all the experiences of the soul sink away. We see how man sinks, as it were, into the sea of temporary forgetfulness of pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow, but also of all perceptions of everyday life, of sounds, of warmth and so on, which fill his soul from morning to evening, how he sees all his inner soul experiences fade away and, as it were, unconsciousness surrounds him.

Now it would, of course, be foolishness – an easily understandable foolishness – to say that a person ceases to exist in the evening and is reborn in the morning. What is at issue is rather that man is a complex being, a being not merely consisting of those limbs, the eyes with which we see, the hands with which we can feel, but that in addition to this physical body we have even higher, superphysical perceptual faculties. When a person falls asleep at night – and we will now only consider the transition from waking to dreamless sleep, leaving the intermediate state and the state filled with dreams to one side – when a person falls asleep, part of their being remains in bed and another part, the one that cannot be seen with any external eye, withdraws; the very vehicle of joy and sorrow, pain and pleasure and passion, the vehicle of sensory perceptions, withdraws, and during the night it is outside the physical human body.

In spiritual science, we call that which leaves the physical body when we fall asleep the astral body. Don't be put off by this word; it has nothing to do with the stars, it is simply the supersensible part of the human nature, which withdraws in the evening and leaves the physical body to itself. The human being truly exists from the evening when he falls asleep until the morning when he wakes up. He sleeps and the consciousness of which we shall now speak, which is developed here as clairvoyant consciousness at awakening, emerges like a fine but spiritual luminous form as the astral body itself when the person falls asleep. In the spiritual world, the human being is present in his spiritual essence, which is around him.

Why does man not see these facts and entities when he is in his astral body at night among spiritual facts and entities? For the same reason that a blind person does not see colors and light. Imagine your eyes being closed to your physical body! The world around you is dark and gloomy, colorless. Think away the ears! The world is mute and soundless. And if you think away all the organs, the world gradually becomes a nothing. Only that is there for man, for which he has organs, nothing else! When, let us say, the luminous cloud of the astral body withdraws from the physical body at night, the human being has no organs in his astral body with which to perceive in the spiritual world. The result of this is unconsciousness and darkness around him.

What happens when a person does not live an ordinary, normal life, but allows himself to be affected by what has just been described to you through the one symbol, when he devotes himself to such things in his soul , when he develops his soul with calmness and perseverance in such a way that, while becoming deaf and blind to his external surroundings, he is able to immerse himself completely in his inner life, which is called a life of meditation and concentration? What happens then? This is something that clairvoyant consciousness can observe. An indeterminate astral body becomes a definite one. What happens in the astral body is as if the physical body were to gradually develop eyes within it. In the manner described, spiritual eyes and ears are incorporated into the astral body; an indeterminate cloud becomes a structured astral organism. The consequence of this is that the human being now no longer experiences nothing, but that what enters spiritually for the sensual body when the eyes and ears are incorporated into it. This now occurs for the astral body.

What man achieves through patient meditation and concentration in such pictorial and other representations through the corresponding teaching of spiritual science, that was called the process of purification in circles where people knew something about spiritual science. Why purification or catharsis? For the reason that man from now on in terms of his development was no longer dependent merely on external impressions and then must remain unconscious and has no external impressions, but because he now, when he leaves out all impressions, as it is in sleep, nevertheless has a world around him. Because he can be purified and refined and still have experiences, just spiritual experiences. This is the first step, which is achieved by such means as we have described.

But there must also be a second stage in spiritual development if man is to become a real clairvoyant. We will be able to understand this stage, this higher stage, when we realize that when we fall asleep, not only a physical part remains. Even in this physical body, which remains in bed at night when we fall asleep, we have a superphysical, a supersensory. The easiest way to understand this – and today it can only be mentioned – is to go deeper and deeper into theosophy. You will see that this is being elevated to the level of proof despite all the objections of external science. The easiest way to understand this is to compare the human being as he stands before us with some external physical object.

What is the physical body of man is, has the same forces and materials as the external inanimate so-called mineral bodies. But there is a huge difference between the people and a mere mineral being. You can see a mineral being that has a certain shape. How can the form disappear? By being smashed or destroyed from the outside. From the outside, the form must be destroyed. What is the human physical body – and we are now speaking of the human being, otherwise we would have to say that it is the same for every living being – what is the human physical body, it is also made of physical forces and substances, just like the outer nature, but when these forces and substances are left to themselves, what do they do? They dissolve the form, they disintegrate.

What can be called the dissolution of the form of the physical human body occurs at death. When a person dies, what remains before our eyes, before the external senses, is a physical body; this now disintegrates into the physical and chemical substances that are within it. But it is no longer a human body, it is a corpse; and while a stone retains its form through the forces and substances at work in it, the human body will disintegrate and dissolve the moment it is left to its own physical and chemical substances. Spiritual science shows us that from the moment of its formation until the moment of death, an enduring fighter lives in our body, as it does in every living being. This fighter continually works to prevent the physical body from disintegrating during our lifetime. Just as we see the astral body floating out of what remains in bed when the person falls asleep in the evening, so we see that which remains in the physical body during sleep floating out at death. In this way, death differs from ordinary sleep. That which we find in life as a fighter against the disintegration of our body, we call the etheric or life body in relation to the physical, and the difference between sleep and death now becomes clear to us.

During sleep, not only the physical body but also the etheric or life body remains lying, and from these two the astral body rises with self-awareness. So every night. In the morning, when the person wakes up, his astral body descends again into the physical body and into the etheric or life body and uses the organs, the eyes, the ears and so on. When a person passes through the gate of death, only the physical body remains, which is now a corpse, and the etheric body lifts off with the astral body. Such is the difference between sleep and death.

The fact that the etheric body, with what this etheric body has experienced in the earthly, is raised up, enables the human being to pass over into a spiritual world after his death, in which he continues to live. But this question should not concern us, what the human being takes with him from his life into the other existence, but rather what is connected with the where and how of the spiritual researcher.

The etheric body does not emerge even during sleep, but remains with the physical human body. The astral body, on the other hand, floats out during sleep, and when the person wakes up, it re-enters the physical body. At the moment when the astral body, through the contemplation described to you, through that meditative life, when it acquires imaginative knowledge in symbolic and other representations, for example, at that moment when the astral body receives its spiritual and so forth, he brings these into the etheric body in the morning, and the result of this is that the person does not wake up in the morning with the feeling, “You were unconscious.” Instead, when he awakens, he says, I was in a spiritual world among spiritual things and beings, I was in my true home, in that world from which my soul and spirit come just as my physical body is from the physical world.

The second, higher stage of clairvoyant life contributes to the fact that the astral body, with what it develops at night under the influence of the inner life, illuminates the etheric body. This is called enlightenment. These are the first two stages of clairvoyant life.

At first, there is the realization that the person does not wake up from the sea of unconsciousness, but with the memory that he was among spiritual beings during the night. He knows that there was a spiritual world around him; and then he comes further and further so that during the day, in his physical body, he can see around him that which is around us, which fills space just as much as the physical world, that he can see the spiritual world around him between and through physical things. Thus man does not find the spirit through external perception, but he finds it by awakening his soul through precisely defined methods and means, which could only be explained by an example today. He brings the forces and abilities slumbering in him to a higher level, finds the spirit in himself, and thus can perceive the spiritual world in the spirit that he has awakened in himself.

Thus, through the development of a new consciousness, through purification and enlightenment, the human being lives his way up into the spiritual world. And again, imagination, this immersion in images, is only the preparation for the perceptions of the actual spiritual world. For here we are faced with an important fact of inner experience. Someone might raise the question: Yes, but what a person has in his inner life at first are only unreal images, only pictures, only symbols. — Of course, at first they are. But if he assimilates these symbols in the right way in his life, then the time comes when he can say to himself: Now, now I have arrived at the moment when I no longer have only my real ideas, but now, because I have made something specific out of my life, an objective world flows in on me.

Only experience itself, observation, can teach one to distinguish between how long one lives in mere ideas and when one arrives at the spiritual facts and spiritual entities that come from outside. Just as you can distinguish in the sensual life between mere conception and the perception of reality, so too there comes a moment when you can distinguish through experience the inner life of mere conception in the imagination from outer [supernatural] reality.

One could indeed say: In the physical world, the existence of real things can be proven. No, it can only be experienced; it can never be proved by experience. The mere idea in the sensual world is to be clearly distinguished from perception, and if someone wanted to claim, as a false philosophy does, that our world consists only of ideas, he may consider what a difference there is between the idea of a glowing steel and the perception of a glowing steel. He can clearly see the difference that exists. Imagine being in front of a glowing piece of steel and try to determine such clear and correct concepts from it. The philosophical prejudice that the world is our imagination cannot be proven, only the reality of things can be experienced.

Just as things are outside of us and become our ideas when we face them, so too the inner, intimate life that arises through meditation and concentration in those images and in other ideas, which of course cannot be described here due to the limited time, but can only be illustrated by the example of the Rosicrucian , then man, when he practices the inner life, can see the time approaching when he says: I no longer have a Rosicrucian before me, but I have reached the moment when spiritual beings approach me who are just as real as the external sensual things when I imagine them. This is experienced, and what he does is a preparation. This is indeed how the life of the soul unfolds during awakening.

When ascending into the spiritual world, the opposite of what happens in external reality occurs. In external reality, we first have the objects and the experience; then we form the ideas. In the higher, spiritual, supersensible world, we must first transform our imaginative life and then wait patiently until we are able to allow the truth, the spiritual, the supersensible reality to take effect on our soul. And it will depend entirely on whether the person has practised a corresponding development of character, parallel to meditation and concentration, and has maintained such certainty and stability by that time that he can distinguish between imagination, hallucination and reality at the decisive moment. Ultimately, only life can give this distinction. Just as the fool is a fool who mistakes his imagination of the rose for a real rose, so man can naturally hallucinate and have illusions in the spiritual realm, even more easily, of course, if he does not retain inner security until the decisive point. But if he retains his inner strength and certainty, so that he does not waver for a moment, and says to himself: Only when something comes to meet me in my prepared soul is reality, I speak of spiritual reality; everything else I regard only as preparation; only then will he be able to distinguish spiritual reality from deception just as surely at the decisive moment as the outer man can distinguish between imagination and reality.

So, my honored attendees, today we should deal with the question: Where and how can we find the spirit? It is not by constructing some external instrument that one can find the spirit, but by transforming oneself into an instrument for perceiving the spiritual world. And so it is true that the soul's inner powers are capable of development, that, to speak again in Goethe's sense, spiritual ears can develop out of this soul, just as sensory ears and eyes develop out of the body.

Thus man finds the higher world through his own higher development. Even if today only a few can make themselves spiritual instruments for the exploration of the spiritual world, these few can still tell of the facts of the spiritual world. Since the human soul is not designed for delusion and error, but for truth, the communication of the spiritual world can be received by unbiased thinking in such a way that man first receives a presentiment of the truth of the spiritual world. Then there is the hope that, with appropriate instruction, he can gradually make himself such an instrument of spiritual perception over the course of a long, austere life. The best preparation is to begin with, to absorb and understand, in pure, unbiased thinking, in sound mind, what the spiritual researcher can grasp in the spiritual world.

Then, through such intellectual preparation, the presentiment and hope of higher experience will arise, and the human being will have in his feelings that which solves the riddles of the higher worlds and reveals the secrets of these riddles. And he will feel, experience, the truth of Goethe's words, who stood more than is usually believed in these spiritual worlds and secrets, which Goethe also expresses in his life poem, in “Faust”, at the point where he says that the sage speaks. Yes, it is precisely by living in the facts that each of us can find for ourselves within ourselves the confirmation of the words of this wise Goethe, for spiritual science offers messages about the spiritual world and awakens the hope of one day passing through the gate that currently separates human beings from these worlds. And so it will come true, through what is today called theosophy or spiritual science, when it becomes more familiar with humanity, what Goethe has the wise man say in “Faust”:

The spiritual world is not closed;
Your mind is closed, your heart is dead!
Rise up, bathe, disciple, undeterred
The earthly breast in the morning dawn!

In connection with Mr. von Wrangell's description of the materialistic-mechanical world view, I spoke yesterday of the poet Marie Eugenie delle Grazie as an example of someone who really took the materialistic world view seriously, I would even say at its word. One could indeed ask: How must a person who has elementary, strong feelings for everything human that has been instilled in people through historical development, how must such a person feel when they assume the materialistic-mechanical worldview to be true? That is more or less how Marie Eugenie delle Grazie – it was now 25 to 30 years ago – faced the materialistic-mechanical world view. She called Haecke/ her master and assumed that, to a certain extent, Laplace's head with its world view is right. But she did not express this world view in theory, but also allowed human feeling to speak, on the assumption that it is true. And so her poems are perhaps the most eloquent testimony to the way in which the human heart can relate to the materialistic-mechanical world view in our time, what can be sensed, felt, and perceived under her premise. And so that you may have a vivid example of the effect of the materialistic-mechanical view on a human heart, we will first present some of these poems by Grazia Deledda.

[Recitation by Marie Steiner]

At midnight

When tired and half intoxicated
From the day's colorful changing life
In blessed rest the earth dreams,
The moon's bluish glow
The desolate streets flood
And sacred forgetfulness
The gentle wings lifts
In these blessed hours,
So full of bliss and slumber
Why, heart pounding loudly,
Can only you not find any rest?
Why, forehead burning with fever,
Do you so sleep-robbing
And dream-scaring only yourself
Through the tormenting host of thoughts?

Calm change draws
The stars in the sky above,
And motionless lies the city,
The wide, wide city - for behold,
It is midnight and poor as rich, happy
Without distinction of the dream god's enticing cup,
The heavy, poppy-wreathed...

You only moan
And whimper into your pillows at midnight,
Unsel'ge, and weep and brood - because
It is a demon, dark and yet enchanting,
That floats around your bed and chases demon whispers
The dream fairy tale messengers from your proximity,
So that their lovely dance fades away lackluster
And the night fiends of madness encircle you.
And even if the enchantress Phantasie beckons to you with shining eyes,
With her golden wings,
The poppy dance and the rejuvenating fire potion
of enthusiasm – satanically grinning, And longingly, slavishly breathe towards him,
A sacrifice that willlessly surrenders itself.
Then he spreads the black demon wings
And shakes his curls nocturnal splendor,
Kiss frosty love and faith from your soul,
Gently drips the poison of despair into your chest,
Mauls your heart with convulsively twitching predator claws,
Encircles you like a vampire in a rut
And whispers, smiling icily: “My name is knowledge!”

2.

With brazen bands, And chains of dust and decay, Nature, thy witness, holds thee fast;
Nature, the enticing monster,
Sometimes smiling and sun-gilded,
To furious joy of existence inspiring thee, sometimes
Dread and distress giving birth,
Whipping you with the rod of sorrow, But always devastating and enigmatic, always Medusa and sphinx at the same time! Dutch your pulse chases And races in feverish beats Her ruthless law, The eternal law of destruction; She gave you will and strength
To destroy yourself – yourself
But you can never save yourself!
On her triumphal chariot we all pull
– panting, drenched in sweat, and yet
Also blissful: for as a mirage rocks
Hope before us and happiness and every illusion,
Which they created to mock us,
And we, the slave army poisoned by longing,
Call ideals! - So we rush in thirsty haste
And mad chase, until treacherously
The power leaves us, the breath fades and further
For ever our goal on golden clouds floats,
Until helpless and panting we
Break down - then she exults demonically,
Then she cries out her cruel: “Evoe!” and steers
Crushing over a thousand victims away
The brazen spokes of her biga!

3.

What cruel demon
The tormenting urge of love
Written in our throbbing hearts?
What treacherous hellish delusion
It is to tremble longingly and foolishly
To crave and thirst for divine bliss,
To an infinite
Consume itself in feverish heat
And over the seething swamp
The most enticing fairytale realm of dreams
Build – alas! plaintively and unresolved
This anxious question fades away into eternity...

Enchantingly, it smiles and beckons
In those moments of mystery
The divine to us
Alone, we want to grasp it,
And also captivate it, even in the garb of transience
And call, a second, foolish self
Chaining ourselves to our destiny: “Found - found!”

Only gods and fairy-tale heroes are refreshed by
the nectar of eternal folly,
little people are guided by reason,
and reason, the ravenous giantess,
she feeds and strengthens herself only
from shattered ideals!
Demystified and shivering, the heart and the sober everyday soul,
She smiles at the dream that once intoxicated her...
The shining star of divinity,
Not proud and titanic could
She tear it from heaven – no, she reached
And, more foolish than a foolish child,
Reached for its murky reflection
In the puddle of its own kind...

In the circle of the living goes
And wanders from mouth to mouth
A word whispered in terror
Its brazen sound, it makes
The rosy cheeks turn pale,
The jubilant anthems of madness,
The dazzling tales of lies
Of existence are torn apart for him, and
Fade away with him into eternity.
The crown of thorns of suffering,
The rosaries of happiness
And tiaras of glory
They all, all entwined,
Entwined and overgrown
With pale death's asphodel!
He whose wings change color,
Who trembles, and he whose hollow voice is heard,
Has lied for the last time...

Decay and mold ferment
In our veins, decay guides us
According to its law, and what lives and breathes there,
Decay has created it,
Decay destroys it too!
A dirty vortex of mystery and madness circles the glittering lie of existence away
and speaks, for all eternity
pointing to dust and decay,
the only eternal truth: “There is nothing!”

I believe that it is precisely in such an example that one can see where the materialistic-mechanical world view must lead. If this world-view had become the only one prevailing and if men had retained the power of feeling, then such a mood as that expressed in these poems must have seized men in the widest circle, and only those who would have continued to live without feeling, only these unfeeling ones could have avoided being seized by such a mood.

You don't get to know and understand the way of the world in the right way through those merely theoretical thoughts with which people usually build worldviews, but you only get to know the strength of a worldview when you see it flow into life. And I must say that it was a profound impression when I saw, now already a very long time ago, the mechanistic-materialistic worldview enter the ingenious soul – for she may be called an ingenious soul – of Marie Eugenie delle Grazie.

But one must also consider the preconditions that led to a human heart taking on the mechanistic-materialistic worldview. Marie Eugenie delle Grazie is, after all, by her very background, I would say a cosmopolitan phenomenon. She has blood of all possible nationalities in her veins from her ancestors. She got to know the sorrows of life in early childhood, and she also learned in early childhood how to rise to find something that carries this life to a higher power through a higher power; because her educator became a Catholic priest who died a few years ago. The genius of Delle Grazie revealed itself in the fact that she had already written a book of lyric poems, an extensive epic, a tragedy and a volume of novellas by the time she was 16 or 17. However much one might object to these poems from this or that point of view, they do express her genius in a captivating way. I came across these poems back in the 1880s, when they were first published, and at the same time I heard a lot of people talking about Delle Grazie. For example, I heard that the esthete Robert Zimmermann, who wrote an aesthetics and a history of aesthetics and was an important representative of the Herbartian school of philosophy (the Herbartians are now extinct), and who was already an old man at the time, said: Delle Grazie is the only real genius he has met in life.

A series of circumstances then led to me becoming personally acquainted with and befriending delle Grazie, and a great deal was said between us about worldviews and other matters. It was a significant lesson to see on the one hand the educator of delle Grazie, the Catholic priest, who, professionally immersed in Catholicism, had come to a worldview that he only expressed with irony and humor when he spoke more intimately, and on the other hand, delle Grazie herself. From the very first time I spoke to her, it was clear that she had a deep understanding of the world and life. As a result of her education by the priest, she had come to know Catholic Christology from all possible perspectives, which one could get to know if one was close to Professor Mäüllner - that is this priest - who, for his part, had also looked deeply into life. All this had taken shape in the delle Grazie in such a way that the world view she had initially been given by this priest – you have to bear in mind that I am talking about a seventeen-year-old girl – that life brings in the way of evil and wickedness, pain and suffering, so that the idea of a work of fiction arose from this, which she explained to me in a long conversation: she wanted to write a “Satanide”. She wanted to show the state of suffering and pain in the world on the one hand, and on the other hand the world view that had been handed down to her.

Now the materialistic-mechanical worldview fell into such a soul. This worldview has a strong power of persuasion, it unfolds a huge power of logic, so that it is difficult for people to escape it. I later asked Delle Grazie why she had not written the Satanide. She told me that, according to the materialistic-mechanical view, she did not believe in God and thus also not in the opponent of God, Satan.

But she had an enormous power of human experience and that is what shaped her in the great two-volume epic “Robespierre”, which is permeated throughout by such moods as you have heard. I heard her read many of the songs myself while she was still writing it. Two women became sick at one point. They could not listen to the end. This is characteristic of how people delude themselves. They believe in the science of materialism, but if you were to show them the consequences, they would faint.

The materialistic worldview truly makes people weak and cowardly. They look at the world with a veil and yet still want to be Christians. And that, in particular, seemed to Marie Eugenie delle Grazie to be the worst thing about existence. She said to herself something like the following: Everything is just swirling atoms, atoms swirling around in confusion. What do these whirling atoms do? After they have clumped together into world bodies, after they have caused plants to grow, they clump together people and human brains and in these brains, through the clumping together of atoms, ideals arise, ideals of beauty, of all kinds of greatness, of all kinds of divinity. What a terrible existence, she said to herself, when atoms whirl and whirl in such a way that they make people believe in an existence of ideals. The whole existence of the world is a deception and a lie. That is what those who are not too cowardly to draw the final consequences of the materialistic-mechanical world view say. Delle Grazie says: If this world of whirling atoms were at least true, then we would have whirling atoms in our minds. But the whirling atoms still deceive us, lie to us, as if there were ideals in the world.

Therefore, when one has learned to recognize the consequences that the human mind must draw when it behaves honestly in relation to the materialistic-mechanical world view, then one has again one of the reasons for working on a spiritual world view.

To those who always say, “We have everything, we have our ideals, we have what Christianity has brought so far,” it must be replied, Have we not brought about the powerful mechanistic-materialistic worldview through the way we have behaved? Do you want to continue like this? Those who want to prove the unnecessaryness of our movement because this or that is presented from other sides should consider that despite the fact that these other sides have been working for centuries, the mechanistic-materialistic worldview has grown. The important thing is to try to grasp life where it actually occurs. It does not depend on what thoughts we entertain, but on our looking at the facts and allowing ourselves to be taught by them. I have often mentioned that I once gave a lecture in a town on the subject of Christianity from the standpoint of spiritual science. There were two priests there. After the lecture they came to me and said: That is all very well and good what you say there, but the way you present it, only a few understand it; the more correct way is what we present the matter, because that is for all people. — I could say nothing other than: Excuse me, but do all people really go to you? That you believe it is for all people does not decide anything about the matter, but what really is, and so you will not be able to deny that numerous people no longer go to you. And we speak for them because they also have to find the way to the Christ. — That is what one says when one does not choose the easy way, when one does not simply find one's own opinion good, but lets oneself be guided by the facts.

Therefore, as you could see yesterday, it is not enough to simply read the sentences of a work like the Wrangell book in succession, but rather to tie in with what can be tied in. I would like to give you an example of how different writings in our branches can be discussed, and how what lives in our spiritual science can clearly emerge by measuring it against what is discussed in such brochures.

The next chapter in Wrangell's brochure is called:

Forming Concepts

The world around us is multifaceted. Each thing is different from every other. Even if several things have some of their properties in common, i.e., evoke the same or similar sensations, they differ in at least one attribute: each thing that I perceive through my senses currently occupies a certain part of space.

To make this multiform world more manageable, man groups similar things, i.e. things with similar properties, under common designations. He forms words for these concepts that he has created in his mind. He also uses words to describe the same or similar properties, such as red, hard, warm, hot, etc.

Here, Mr. von Wrangell expresses himself on the formation of concepts in a way that is very popular and is very often given. One says to oneself: I see a red flower, a second, a third red flower of a certain shape and arrangement of the petals, and since I find these the same, I form a concept about them. A concept would thus be formed by grouping together the same from different things. For example, the concept of “horse” is formed by grouping a number of animals that have certain similarities in a certain way into a single thought, into a single idea. I can do the same with properties. I see something with a certain color nuance, something else with a similar color nuance, and form the concept of the color “red”.

But anyone who wants to get to the bottom of things must ask themselves: is this really the way to form concepts? I can only make suggestions now, otherwise we would never get through the writing, because you can actually always link the whole world to every thing.

To illustrate how Mr. von Wrangell presents the formation of concepts, I will choose a geometric example.¹ Let us assume that we have seen different things in the world and that we find something limited one time, something else limited the next time, and something else limited the third time, and so on for countless times. We often see these similar limitations and now, according to Mr. von Wrangell's definition, we would form the concept of a “circle”. But do we really form the concept of a circle from such similar limitations? No, we only form the concept of a circle when we do the following: Here is a point that is a certain distance from this point. There is a point that is the same distance from that point, and there is another point that is the same distance and so on. I visit all the points that are the same distance from a certain point. If I connect these points, I get a line, which I call a circle, and I get the concept of the circle if I can say: the circle is a line in which all points are the same distance from the center. And now I have a formula and that leads me to the concept. The inner elaboration, the inner construction actually leads to the concept. Only those who know how to conceptualize in this way, who know how to construct what is present in the world, have the right to speak of concepts. We do not find the concept of a horse by looking at a hundred horses to find out what they have in common, but we find the essence of the horse by reconstructing it, and then we find what has been reconstructed in every horse.

This moment of activity, when we form ideas and concepts, is often forgotten. In this chapter too, the moment of inner activity has been forgotten.

The next chapter is called:

Concepts of Space and Time

The sense of touch in connection with seeing produces the idea of space. The direct experience of the succession of sensations leads us to the idea of time. Space and time are the forms of thought in which our ideas of the world outside us are formed, insofar as we perceive them through our five senses.

The concept of movement, as the change of the position of a thing in space within a period of time, is also an original concept, initially given by the movement of one's own body.

When the things we perceive with our senses evoke the same sensory impressions in us within a certain period of time, we gain the notion of “being” or “existence.” If, on the other hand, the impressions received from the same thing change, we gain the notion of “happening” or “occurrence”.

Thus, in a very neat way, as they say, Mr. Wrangell seeks to gain ideas about the concepts of space and time, of movement, being and happening. Now it would be extremely interesting to study how, in this chapter, everything is, I might say, “slightly pursed” despite everything. It would be quite good for many people - I don't want to say just for you, my dear friends, but for many people - if they would consider that a very astute man, an excellent scientist, forms such ideas and goes to great lengths to form ideas about these simple concepts. At the very least, a great deal of conscientiousness in thinking can be learned from this. And that is important; for there are so many people who, before they think about anything, the cosmos, do not even feel the need to ask themselves: How do I arrive at the simple ideas of being, happening and movement? - As a rule, that is too boring for people.

Now, a deeper examination would show that the concepts, as Mr. von Wrangell forms them, are quite easily linked. For example, Mr. von Wrangell says so offhand: “The sense of touch in connection with seeing creates the idea of space.” Just think, my dear friends, if you do not use the writing board to draw a circle, but draw the circle in your imagination, what does the sense of touch have to do with it, what does seeing have to do with it? Can you still say: “The sense of touch in connection with seeing creates the idea of space”? You cannot. Someone might object, however, that before one can draw a circle in one's imagination, one must have gained the perception of space, and that one gains this through the sense of touch in combination with seeing. Yes, but here it is a matter of considering what kind of perception we form at the moment when we touch something through the sense of touch. If we imagine ourselves as endowed only with the sense of touch and touching something, we form the idea that what we touch is outside us. Now take this sentence: “What we touch is outside us.” In the “outside us” lies space, that is, when we touch an object, we must already have space within us in order to carry out the touching. That was what led Kant to assume that space precedes all external experiences, including the experience of touching and seeing, and that time likewise precedes the multiplicity of processes in time; that space and time are the preconditions of sensory perception.

In principle, such a chapter on space and time could only be written by someone who has not only thoroughly studied Kant but also is familiar with the entire course of philosophy; otherwise, one will always have carelessly defined terms with regard to space and time. It is exactly the same with the other terms, the terms of “being” and “happening”. It could easily be shown that the concept of being could not exist at all if the definition given by Mr. von Wrangell were correct. For he says: “When things that we perceive through our senses evoke the same sensory impressions within a certain period of time, we gain the idea of ‘being’, of existence. If, on the other hand, the impressions received from the same thing change, we gain the idea of 'happening'. You could just as easily say: If we see that the sensations of the same thing change, we must assume that this change adheres to a being, occurs in a being. We could just as easily claim that it is only through change that being is recognized. And if someone wanted to claim that we can only arrive at the concept of being if the same impressions are evoked within a certain time – just think! – then if we wanted to arrive at the concept of being in this way, it would be quite possible that we would not be able to arrive at the concept of being at all; there would be nothing at all that could be connected to the concept of being.

In this chapter, “Concepts of Space and Time,” we can learn how to find concepts that are fragile in all possible places with great acumen and extraordinarily honest scientific rigour. If we want to form concepts that can survive a little in the face of life, then we must have gained them in such a way that we have at least to some extent tested them in terms of their value in life.

You see, that is why I said that I had only found the courage to talk to you about the last scenes of “Faust” because for more than thirty years I have repeatedly lived in the last scenes of “Faust” and tried to test the concepts in life. That is the only way to distinguish valid concepts from invalid ones; not logical speculation, not scientific theorizing, but the attempt to live with the concepts, to examine how the concepts prove themselves by introducing them into life and letting life give us the answer, that is the necessary way. But this presupposes that we are always inclined not merely to indulge in logical fantasies, but to integrate ourselves into the living stream of life. This has a number of consequences; above all, that we learn to believe that if someone can present seemingly logical proofs for this or that – I have mentioned this often – they have by no means yet presented anything for the value of the matter.

The next chapter is called:

The Causality Principle

The principle of causality on which our thinking is based forces us to assume that if something happens, i.e. a change occurs, a cause must have brought it about. All rational thinking is based on the “principle of sufficient reason”. Every thing has a reason why it is; every change in what exists is caused by a cause.

This proposition is not an empirical proposition; it precedes all experience, indeed, it is the very condition for experience, because without the premise expressed in it, coherent thought is impossible.

Mr. von Wrangell is taking the standpoint of the so-called principle of causality here. He says: All rational thinking must assume that everything we encounter is based on a cause. In a sense, one can agree with this principle of causality. But if you want to measure its significance for our vital world view, then you have to introduce much, much more subtle concepts than this formal principle of causality.

Because, you see, to be able to indicate a cause or a complex of causes for a thing, it takes much more than just following the thread of cause and effect, so to speak. What does the principle of causality actually say? It says: a thing has a cause. The thing that I am drawing here [the drawing has not been handed down] has a cause, this cause has another cause and so on; you can continue like this until beyond the beginning of the world and you can do the same with the effect. Certainly this is a very reasonable principle, but you don't get very far with it. For example, if you are looking for the cause of the son, you have to look for complexes of causes in the father and mother in order to be able to say that these are the causes of the child. But it is also true that although such causes may be present, they have no effect, namely when a woman and a man have no children. Then the causes are present, but they have no effect. With the cause, it just depends on whether it is not just a cause, but that it also causes something. There is a difference between “being the cause” and “causing”. But even the philosophers of our time do not get involved in such subtle differences. But if you take things seriously, you have to deal with such differences. In reality, it is not a matter of causes being there, but of their effecting something. Concepts that exist in this way do not necessarily correspond to reality, but they allow us to indulge our imagination.

Goethe's world view is fundamentally different. It does not go to the causes, but to the archetypal phenomena. That is something quite different. For Goethe takes something that exists in the world as an appearance, that is, as a phenomenon - let us say that certain color series appear in the prism - and he traces it back to the archetypal phenomenon, to the interaction of matter and light, or, if we take matter as representing darkness, to darkness and light. In exactly the same way, he deals with the archetypal phenomenon of the plant, the animal and so on. This is a world view that faces facts squarely and does not merely spin out concepts logically, but groups the facts in such a way that they express a truth.

Try to read what Goethe wrote in his essay “The Experiment as Mediator between Subject and Object” and also what I was able to publish as a supplement to this essay. Also try to read what I my introductions to Goethe's scientific writings in Kürschner's Deutsche National-Literatur, then you will see that Goethe's view of nature is based on something quite different from that of modern natural scientists. We must take the phenomena and group them not as they exist in nature, but so that they express their secrets to us. To find the archetypal phenomenon in the phenomena is the essential thing.

This is what I also wanted to imply yesterday when I said that one must go into the facts. What people like us think of the mechanistic-materialistic world view is of little consequence. But if one can show how, in 1872, one of its representatives stood before the assembled natural scientists in Leipzig and said that the task of natural science was to reduce all natural phenomena to the movements of atoms, then one points to a fact that also points to a primal phenomenon of historical development. The reduction of historical development to primal phenomena is demonstrated by pointing out what Du Bois-Reymond said, because that is a primal phenomenon in the materialistic-mechanical worldview process.

If you proceed in this way, you no longer learn to think like in a glass chamber, but to think in such a way that you become an instrument for the facts that express their secrets, and you can then test your thinking to see whether it really conforms to the facts.

I will relate the following not to boast but to tell of my own experiences as far as possible. I prefer to speak of things I have experienced rather than of various things I have thought out. If anyone absolutely insists on believing that what I am about to say is said to boast, let him believe it, but it is not so.

When I tried to describe Goethe's world view in the 1980s, I said, based on what one finds when one immerses oneself in it: Goethe must have written an essay at some point that expresses the most intimate aspects of his scientific view. And I said, after reconstructing the essay, that this essay must have existed, at least in Goethe's mind. You can find this in my introduction to Goethe's scientific writings. You will also find the reconstructed essay there. I then came to the Goethe Archive and there I found the essay exactly as I had reconstructed it. So you have to go with the facts. Those who seek wisdom let the facts speak. This is, however, the more uncomfortable method, for one must concern oneself with the facts; one need not concern oneself with the thoughts that arise.

The next chapter is entitled:

Application of the Idea of Arbitrariness to the Environment

Since our sensation is that from which we, as the directly given, start in all thinking, we also judge what we address as the external world, initially according to what is going on in us.

If I were to read you “Truth and Science,” I could show you the correct thought and the correct understanding, and show you how this is another example of superficial thinking. First of all, I would like to know how there could ever be a mathematics if we were to start from our sensations in all our thinking. Then we would never be able to arrive at a mathematics. For what should our sensation be when we ask: What is the magnitude of the sum of the squares of the two legs of a right-angled triangle in relation to the square of the hypotenuse? But Wrangell says: “Since our sensation is that from which we, as the directly given, start in all thinking, we also judge what we address as the external world, first of all, according to what goes on in us.” - You can't do much with this sentence. We want to see further:

We are aware that those changes in the environment that we ourselves consciously bring about through movements of our limbs are caused by internal processes that we call volitional impulses. Therefore, the unbiased person also initially assumes similar causes for other changes in the environment, i.e. he assumes that they too are caused by volitional impulses of beings similar to himself. The mythologies of all peoples are expressions of this anthropomorphic animation of nature, and the belief in spiritual entities, which even now serves many people to explain many events in their environment, has the same origin. Finally, the observation of the child shows that it even ascribes a will to inanimate objects, similar to its own. It bumps into the table and scolds the table for this bad habit.

I have said before: the child pushes against the table and beats the table because it attributes a will to it. It judges the table as its equal because it has not yet developed the idea of the table in itself. It is exactly the opposite, and the next chapter also suffers from this confusion:

Observation of regular phenomena

Therefore, although man initially attributes many events to free impulses of will, daily observation shows him that he can count on a regular repetition of some phenomena. He knows, for example, that the sun, after setting in the west, will appear again in the east the next day; that light and warmth are connected. He knows that the seasons influence the life of plants in their regular course, etc. This knowledge enables man to organize his actions accordingly. He soon finds that the more closely he observes nature, the more regularities he discovers in it, and the better he can harmonize with nature.

If we wish to speak of the regularities in nature in this way, then we must not forget that we speak of such regularities in quite different ways. I pointed this out in “Truth and Science”. Let us suppose, for example, that I get dressed in the morning, go to the window and see a person walking by outside. The next morning I get dressed again, look out the window again, and the person passes by again. The third morning the same thing happens, and the fourth morning as well. I see a pattern here. The first thing I do is get dressed, then I go to the window; the next thing is that I see the person walking outside. I see a pattern because the events repeat themselves. So I form a judgment, and it should be: Because I am getting dressed and looking out the window, that's why the man is passing by outside. Of course, we don't form such judgments, because it would be crazy. But in other cases it seems as if we do; but in reality we don't even then. But we do form concepts, and from the inner construction of the concepts we find that there is an inner lawfulness in the appearances. And because I cannot construct a causality between my getting dressed, looking out the window and what passes by outside, I do not recognize any causality either. You can find more details about this in “Truth and Science”. There you will find all the prerequisites, including the one presented by David Hume, that we can gain knowledge about the laws of the world from repetition.

The next chapter is called:

The Nature of All Science

This is probably the beginning of all science, the essence of which consists in summarizing facts of experience in a clear and concise way in order to extract rules from them that enable people to know in advance what will happen. Therefore, every science contains a descriptive part, the clear compilation of facts, and a theoretical part, the extraction of rules from these facts and the conclusions to be drawn from these rules.

Goethe objected to such conclusions: Did a Galileo need to see many phenomena like the swinging kitchen lamp in the dome of Pisa to arrive at his law of falling bodies? No, he recognized the law after seeing this phenomenon. That's how he understood it. It is not from the repetition of facts, but from the inwardly experienced construction of facts that we learn something about the essence of things. It was a fundamental error of modern epistemology to assume that we can gain something like the laws of nature by summarizing the facts. This so obviously contradicts the actual gaining of natural laws, and yet it is repeated over and over again.

The next chapter:

Astronomy, the oldest science.

If we take a look around at the vast realm of what we perceive through our senses, we find that the apparent movement of the stars is the group of phenomena in which the laws of what happens are most striking, most easily discovered and expressed. It is therefore understandable that astronomy is the oldest of all sciences based on sensory perception.

Above all, it is the regular apparent movement of the stars, repeating itself day after day, that captivates the attentive observer, inspiring him to observe and forming a vivid imagination. In the cloudless regions of the Near East and North Africa, the external conditions were particularly favorable for the study of celestial phenomena. Following their direct sensory impressions, the astronomers of antiquity assumed that the countless fixed stars, which remain unchanged in their mutual position, are attached to a transparent but firm celestial sphere, at the center of which the Earth rests. The celestial sphere, rotating evenly around an axis, provided a vivid representation of the perceived process.

The chapter is therefore called “Astronomy, the oldest science”. Now one would actually first have to go into what the oldest astronomy was like. Because the main thing to consider is that the oldest astronomy was such that people did not look at the regularity, but at the will of the spiritual beings that cause the movements. However, the author has today's astronomy in mind and labels it as the oldest science. Sometimes it is really necessary to pursue the truth in one's method quite unvarnished, that is, with no varnished method. And when the chapter here on page 13 is called “Astronomy, the oldest science,” I compare it - because I stick to the facts and don't worry about them - with what is on page 3. It says there, “that according to my studies I am an astronomer.” Perhaps it could be that someone who is a mathematician or a physiologist would come to a different conclusion; so one should not forget what is written on page 3. It is of great importance to point out a person's subjective motives much more than one usually does, because these subjective motives usually explain what needs to be explained. But when it comes to subjective motives, people are really quite peculiar. They want to admit as few subjective motives as possible. I have often mentioned a gentleman whom I had met and who said that when he did this or that, it was important for him not to do what he wanted to do according to his personal preference, but to do what corresponded least to his personal preference, but which he had to regard as his mission imposed on him by the spiritual world. It was of no use to make it clear to him that he must also count licking his fingers as part of his spiritual mission when he says to himself: I do everything according to my mission imposed on me by the spiritual world. — But he masked that, because he liked it better when he could present what he liked to do so much as a strict sense of duty.

The next chapter:

Uniform motion

When we speak of uniformity of motion, we mean that the object in question passes through equal portions of space in equal intervals of time.

Do you remember the lecture on speed that I once gave here? [In this volume.]

But to determine this, mere perception is not enough; one must be able to measure both spatial parts and time intervals. Only when we can express both spatial parts and time segments in numbers by measuring, i.e. by comparing with an unchanging, homogeneous size chosen as a unit, only then can the actual uniformity of a movement, as well as the effect of a certain cause, which is always the same in size, be proven by experience.

This is where the learned scientist begins to speak. You only need to look around a little to see what a desire for objectivity permeates scientists, to strive for what is independent of the subjective human being, to strive to apply objective standards. The most objective way to do this is to actually measure. That is why what is gained through measurement is considered real science. That is why Mr. von Wrangell talks about the measurement itself in the next chapter.

Measuring

Every measuring operation is based on the assumption that the unit chosen, for example a meter, a gram, a second, etc., is unchangeable. We cannot prove this unconditionally about our units, but we can be sure that our measuring operations are correct within certain limits that we can recognize. Let us cite a vivid example to illustrate what has been said: We want to compare the length of two objects and measure them with the same meter rule, assuming that it retains its length. However, we know that all bodies change under the influence of temperature, humidity, etc., so our meter rule may also have become longer or shorter. Without knowing the magnitude of the presumed change, we have, however, the well-founded conviction that the change in such a short time cannot have reached the magnitude of, say, 1 mm. We can therefore be sure that we have not made a mistake in this measurement that exceeds 1 mm for each meter measured. Through such a measuring operation, we have obtained an empirical fact – in our case, the ratio of two lengths – which is valid for us within the limits of accuracy established by the Dutch critics.

This is a very nice little chapter, which vividly demonstrates how, through measurement, something can initially be said about size ratios.

The next chapter:

The principle underlying clocks

The situation is similar when measuring periods of time. The instruments used for this purpose, the clocks, are essentially based on the conviction that the same causes produce the same effects. The ancients mostly used water clocks (clepsydras) for this purpose, in which the outflow of water from a container was made under conditions that were as uniform as possible (the water level was kept at the same height, the outflow tube was of a certain shape, etc.), and the amount of water that flowed out was used to determine the length of the time period. Our pendulum clocks are based on the realization that the speed of a pendulum swing depends on the length of the pendulum, all other conditions being equal. By ensuring that the length remains as constant as possible, that the resistance is as low as possible, and that the force that overcomes it acts evenly, a clock will run smoothly. There are methods for testing this, whereby one can precisely determine the maximum extent to which the clock has run too fast or too slow over the course of a day, for example.

You see, this chapter is so good because it allows us to visualize in simple terms how we take shortcuts in life. We can easily see this if we start with the old clocks, with the water clocks. Suppose a man who used the water clock had said, “It took me three hours to do this work.” What does that mean? What does that mean? You would think that everyone understands this. But you don't consider that you are already relying on certain assumptions. Because the person concerned should actually have said, if he had expressed facts: While I was working, so and so much water flowed out from the beginning to the end of my work. Instead of always saying: from the beginning to the end of my work, so and so much water has flowed out, we compared the outflow of water with the course of the sun and used an abbreviation, the formula: I worked for three hours. We then continue to use this formula. We believe we have something factual in mind, but we have left out a thought, namely, so and so much of the water has flowed out. We have only the second thought as an abbreviation. But by giving ourselves the possibility that such a fact becomes a formula, we distance ourselves from the fact. And now think about the fact that in life we not only bring together work and a formula, but that we actually talk in formulas, really talk in formulas. Just think, for example, what it means to be “diligent”. If we go back to the facts, there is an enormous amount of facts underlying the formula “to be industrious”. We have seen many things happen and compared them with the time in which they can happen, and so we speak of “being industrious”. A whole host of facts is contained in this, and often we speak such formulas without reflecting on the facts.

When we come back to the facts, we feel the need to express our thoughts in a lively way and not in nebulous formulas. I once heard a professor give a lecture who began a course on literary history by saying: “When we turn to Lessing, we want to look at his style, first asking ourselves how Lessing used to think about the world, how he worked, how he intended to use it, and so on. And after he had been asking questions like this for an hour, he said: “Gentlemen, I have led you into a forest of question marks!” Now just imagine a “forest of question marks,” imagine you want to go for a walk in this forest of question marks; imagine the feeling! Well, I also heard this man say that some people throw themselves into a “bath of fire.” I always had to think about what people look like when they plunge into a fire bath. You often meet people who are unaware of how far they are from reality. If you immerse yourself in their words, in their word-images, and try to make sense of what their words mean, you find that everything disintegrates and flies apart, because what people say is not possible in reality. So you can learn a great deal from these perceptive chapters on 'Measuring' and on 'The Principle Underlying Clocks', a great deal indeed.

I cannot say with certainty when I will be able to continue discussing the following chapters of this booklet. Today I would just like to note that, of course, I only wanted to highlight examples and that, of course, this can be done in a hundred different ways. But if we do this, we will ensure that our spiritual-scientific movement is not encapsulated, but that we really pull the strings throughout the world. Because the worst thing would be if we closed ourselves off, my dear friends.

I have pointed out that thinking is of particular importance and significance, and therefore it is important that we also take some of what has been placed before our souls in recent weeks, so that we think about it, understand it in the most one-sided way and implement it in life. For example, when people have spoken of “mystical eccentricity,” then that has happened for a good reason. But if people now think that one should no longer speak of spiritual experiences, that would be the greatest nonsense. If spiritual experiences are true, then they are realities. The important thing is that they are true and that we remain within spiritual boundaries. It is important that we do not fall from one extreme to the other. It is more important that we really try not only to accept spiritual science as such, but also to realize that spiritual science must be placed within the fabric of the world.

It would certainly be wrong to believe that one should no longer do spiritual science at all, but only read such brochures in the branches. That would also be an incorrect interpretation. One must reflect on what I meant. But the great evil that I have indicated, that many people write instead of listening, is prevented by the fact that we listen and do not write. Because if only the kind of nonsense that really happens when lectures are transcribed is produced when they are rewritten, and we believe that we definitely need transcribed lectures, then, my dear friends, I have to say, firstly, that we place little value on what has appeared in print, because there is actually plenty of material that has already been printed; and secondly, it is not at all necessary for us to always chase after the very latest. This is a quirk of journalism that people have adopted, and we must not cultivate it here. Thoroughly working through what is there is something essential and meaningful, and we will not spoil our ability to listen carefully by copying down what we hear, but will have a desire to listen carefully. Because scribbling something down rarely results in anything other than spoiling the attention we could develop by listening. Therefore, I believe that those of us who want to work in the branches will find opportunities when they think they have no material, but they do have such material. They no longer have to go to each person who has copied down the lecture to get rewritten lectures, just so that they can always read the latest one aloud. Really, it depends on the seriousness, and the fact that work in this direction has not been very serious has produced many phenomena, albeit indirectly, from which we actually suffer.

So, my dear friends, I don't know yet exactly; but when it is possible again, then perhaps on Saturday I will continue the discussion of the excellent, astute brochure by Mr. von Wrangell, which I have chosen because it was written by a scientist and has a positive and not a negative content.

• 1. This was apparently demonstrated on the blackboard; the drawing has not been handed down.

Yesterday, when we were discussing the threefold order of the social organism from morning till night, the latest issue of the journal Das Reich arrived, in the middle of our deliberations. Under the general title of “Knowledge and Opinion” it contains material that I have never read before and that I have never seen before. These statements, however, stimulated a whole series of thoughts in me, thoughts, however, that are often stimulated in me anyway.

It is in Lower Austria, in a place from which, if you look south, you have a particularly beautiful view of the mountains in the evening glow, the Lower Austrian Schneeberg, the Wechsel, those mountains that form the northern edge of Styria, a small, very inconspicuous house. Above the entrance door was written: “In God's blessing all is included”. I myself was in this cottage only once during my youth. But there lived a man who was outwardly very inconspicuous. When you came into his cottage, it was full of medicinal herbs everywhere. He was a herbalist. And these herbs he packed in a knapsack on a certain day of the week, and with this knapsack on his back he then traveled the same route to Vienna that I also had to take to school back then, and we always traveled together, then walked a bit together through the road that leads from the South Station to the city center, “auf der Wieden” in Vienna. This man was, so to speak, the embodiment of the spirit that prevailed in the area, in everything he said, but how he, as that spirit, had survived from the first half of the nineteenth century, which was not that long ago at the time. This man actually spoke a language that sounded quite different from the language of other people. When he spoke of the tree leaves, when he spoke of the trees themselves, but especially when he spoke of the wonderful essence of his medicinal herbs, one realized how this man's soul was connected with all that made up the spirit of nature in that particular area, but also what formed the spirit of nature in the wider area. This man was a sage in his own way, through his own inner being, and from this inner being spoke much more than the inner being of a human being often reveals. This man, Felix was his first name, had a spiritual bond between his soul and nature, he also spoke a lot from all kinds of reading. For in addition to the medicinal herbs that, so to speak, stuffed his little house, he had a whole library of all kinds of meaningful works, but which were basically all related in their basic nature, in their basic character to that which was the basic character, the basic trait of his own soul. The man was a poor fellow. For one earned very little, extremely little, from the trade in medicinal herbs, which one laboriously gathered in the mountains. But this man had an extraordinarily contented face and was extraordinarily wise inside. He often spoke of the German mystic Ennemoser, who was his favorite reading, and who indeed contains much in his writings of what had passed through the German mind, but precisely through the German mind in the great times when the thought impulses of Lessing, Herder, Schiller, Goethe and those who stood in the background were still alive. For behind these minds there stood the spiritual world, which they allowed to flow over into what they revealed to the world in their writings. But what was printed in the issue of “Reich” that came to me yesterday from the estate of Ennemoser was completely unknown to me until yesterday. It contains the final section of Joseph Ennemoser's “Horoscope of World History” - I note in addition: Ennemoser died in 1854 and this is the first of his works to be published from his estate. I would like to read a little from this work by Ennemoser to introduce today's discussion:

”...The winter that covers the German regions with snow and ice may last a long time before the real spring comes, but it will come, the seed of freedom has been sown and it will grow, the law of nature will not be repealed by either cunning or military power. Just as the idea of Christianity was implanted in the rough trunk of the Germanic nation and absorbed into its life, so will this vigorous trunk unfold green branches into fresh flowers; just as the body of the church in the German architectural style is already complete in its outlines, wherein the finished dogma of faith , the towers that are still missing almost everywhere will also rise to the sky with the incense of true devotion, and the ever-spiritual life and the organization of personal relationships with the divine will only mature into self-aware understanding, the symbolic framework must first be absorbed into the living movement of purpose , the heaviness of the church must be lightened, the stability of the dogma of separateness must be guided into the current of the universally human; just as freedom should move within the laws of justice, so religion must become an enlightened truth with the light of science, and art a cultivator of spiritual beauty in natural material!

Is it not a utopian dream and will Germany be even remotely able to fulfill such a requirement? Germany will fulfill its calling, or perish most ignominiously and with it European culture. The decision is approaching, time is pressing, the wind is blowing from the east and west, a storm can break out! The trunk of old politics stands on rotten roots, the calculations of diplomats would like to be destroyed, their art has become a distorted art that no one understands. Can you pick figs from thistles, grapes from thorns? True life of freedom sprouts only on the green branches of justice and from the warm spring of charity! Or can this unnatural state persist and the disharmony that has spread to all limbs return to the old order of withered bodies?

Evening will come, the first time has passed, but Germany's end has not yet come; so far it has had childish attempts, there will come a second time when it will discard the 'childish' and have 'manly' attempts. The time of a nation is only at an end when it no longer has questions and does not care about life's higher goods, or when it is incapable of engaging in the solution of the issues of the time! The German has lost nothing but his resilience, his mind is clear, his courage firm, and who doubts the strength of his arm? Everywhere, living spirits are at work, not as imitators, but as originals. The true hunger of the Germans is the yearning for a higher freedom of the mind; the thirst and desire for the light of truth and justice are the main driving forces to set the vigorous hands to work, all of which are still unfinished, to strive for a goal that is still far from humanity. Or should the stream flow back to the sources of its origin? Are nations to become the family fiefdoms of princes again, or is it a matter of state and national rights? There is a higher law in nature and history that no nation can escape, none can go beyond its goal, but neither can any disturb the order of the whole and fall short of it, as its abilities and the spirit of language drive it to! And will not reaction guide the wheel back onto the old track? Fools, who delight only in the dreams of their youth! You can extinguish the fire that erupts in many directions, but you cannot extinguish the inner embers once they have been ignited; reaction itself becomes the means to freedom, pressure brings accelerated movement, the hatred of the parties has a stronger effect than love on the events of the future; perhaps only some kind of spark is needed, and the suppressed intellectual power of the whole nation breaks out in bright flames of enthusiasm. “Nescit vox missa reverti,“ the spirits of life slumber under a thin cover; no free action can be taken back by the spirit; foreign spirits, moods and earthly powers act alone or together on the human will, driving it with irresistible power to acts that, according to divine order, lead to the unification of opposites, to the reconciliation of parties and to the final fulfillment of the calling!”

These are the sentences of a man who died in 1854. I also had to think when I visited dear Felix in his little house one time, that I also visited the home of the schoolmaster's widow, the widow of the schoolmaster who had died several years ago, but I visited her for reasons that the Lower Austrian schoolmaster was also a highly interesting personality. The widow still had a wealth of literature that he had collected in his library. Everything that German scholarship had collected and written down about the German language, myths and legends, in order to sink it into the forces of the German people, could be found there. The lonely schoolmaster had never had the opportunity to go public until after his death; only after his death did someone dig up some of his estate. But I still have not seen those long diaries that that lonely schoolmaster kept, in which pearls of wisdom were written. I don't know what happened to those diaries. On the one hand, this lonely schoolmaster worked among his children; but on the other hand, when he left the schoolroom, he immersed himself—like many such people from the old days of German development—in what lived on in this way as the substance of the German essence. When one then went away from them and traveled to Vienna, one could see how the ancient and the most recent times merge. We live in these most recent times, and it is up to us to understand them a little, to understand them in order to find in them the possibility, as far as it is up to us, to participate in the great tasks that this time poses for humanity.

It is truly not an external matter that all these thoughts, in connection with the experiences of which I have given you a hint, passed through my soul yesterday, just after our meeting, because yesterday, too, was basically a piece of what is falling into our time, right out of the great questions that we must have. For the man said: “The time of a people is only at an end when it no longer has any questions and is no longer concerned about the higher goods of life, or when it is incapable of engaging in the solution of the questions of the time.” Yesterday, many things passed us by that could inspire the thought: How many are there still who have real questions about the time, who still care about the higher goods of life? Did we not experience it yesterday that when our Mr. Ranzenberger appeared in a good-natured way with something that could have touched the heart, he had to disappear? As in the Symbolum, one could encounter the treatment that what is anthroposophically intended experiences in the present. He was not allowed to finish speaking. Nor was the next speaker allowed to finish, who had no questions, who really had no questions, who is living out that senile youth that has no questions and which makes one fear for the future when one knows that only that which that has the strength and substance of the spirit behind it, that can only flourish in the present time if it still has questions and is concerned about the higher goods of humanity, that does not reel off abstract phrases about content-free ideals of youth and thinks itself great with them.

These things are worthy of attention. They are just as worthy of attention as when revolutionary phrases and philistinism are combined. For revolutionary phrases and radicalism are a mask for philistinism, for pedantry, for banality, which we have also encountered enough of, especially in recent times. It is necessary in our time not to speak, not even to speak in short sentences, of those things that mean compromise, but to speak in a clearly conceivable way – for one distinction should be written in the hearts of people of the present: the distinction between content and lack of content – that that which can be developed from here is the strongest opponent of lack of content. For, through the impulse of the threefold social organism, together with friends who have devoted themselves to this idea and sensed its substantiality, we have tried to bring into the world that which is backed by spiritual insight. But on the other hand, it must also be emphasized that the spiritual reality must not be confused with the phrase of the time, no matter how beautiful that phrase may be. The same sentences can be said today: one time they are empty phrases, the other time they are spiritual content. The latter must be present as reality; it is not yet present just because the words sound the same. But everything that is mere phrase, even if it ultimately seems to succeed, has no substance of reality. And it is the task of those united in the anthroposophical movement to recognize this difference between spiritual reality and insubstantial, meaningless phrase. It is not enough that people today say that humanity must show courage again, must straighten up again, must glow with new spiritual forces, and that spiritual life must break away from economic and state life and establish an autonomy of the spirit. We must distinguish whether there is any substance behind such things or whether they are mere empty phrases, born of the spirit of empty phrases of our time. No matter how beautiful they may sound, what matters is whether there is any spiritual reality behind them or whether they are just empty phrases.

I have often said here that it is not without reason that what we call anthroposophy has emerged in our time, what we call anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. For decades we have tried to cultivate it in preparation for this serious 'time. But we must also understand it as such: as a preparation for this serious time. This time has very special characteristics. Outwardly, this time bears the mark of materialism, and the sister of materialism is empty talk. The more humanity clings to outward material things, the more that which it says about the outer world becomes empty talk. Empty talk and materialism belong together. Today we can only rise above empty talk by deepening our spiritual life. We can only rise above materialism by deepening our spiritual life. For, however strange it may sound, this age of materialism and empty phrases is the time when the spirit, with its content from the spiritual world, most strongly wants to communicate with humanity. The world lives in contradictions. Never before has man been as close to the spiritual world as he is today, although outwardly he is mired in materialism. Never before have people been so close to the spiritual world, but they do not realize it, they misunderstand it. And it is particularly strange when one is repeatedly told that one can only believe what anthroposophy brings, or that one must accept it on authority. However, there is nothing for which authority is less necessary, nothing for which it is less appropriate than for anthroposophy. For it speaks of that which today wants to enter into every human being, which wants to enter through the senses but is not allowed in by the materialistic attitude of the time. And this anthroposophy speaks of that which today wants to arise from within every human nature, but which people do not let up from the lower body through the heart to the head, and of which they naturally do not notice anything.

Not only do people today want to be approached by sensual external impressions, but these sensual external impressions want to flow in through the human senses in such a way that they become imaginations in the human being. Today, people are inwardly predisposed to develop imaginations, pictorial representations of the world. But he hates it, does not want it; he says: That is poetry, fantasy. He does not realize that science can give him many good things, but never the truth about man, and that he would experience the truth if he could come to his imaginations. And what lives in man's inner being reveals itself continually, only that man does not notice it as inspiration. Never before have people been so tormented by inspirations as they are today. For they notice that something from within them wants to rise to their hearts and minds; but they perceive it only as nervousness because they do not want to let it rise, or they anesthetize themselves with something else against these revelations of the spirit.

We have often spoken here of the fact that, in addition to his physical body, which can be seen with eyes and grasped with hands, man also has his etheric body. They also know that the etheric body can only be recognized by those who devote themselves to real imaginations. But today there is a way to truly grasp the human etheric body. This way consists in taking art in the Goethean sense seriously. Throughout his life, Goethe was convinced that truth comes to life in the artistic perception of reality, that art is a “manifestation of secret natural laws that could never be expressed without it.” But our school system is dripping a poison dew on everything that science should imbue with a productive artistic spirit. Our scientific humanity believes that it is getting closer to the truth by eradicating everything from its content that is imbued with the artistic spirit. In doing so, it is getting further and further from the real truth, not closer to it, and besides, the real truth is gradually being squeezed out of all the individual sciences that we have to hand down to young people. The only truth is what Richard Wahle says – in the sense in which I have expounded it – that in what is called science today, only ideas of a ghostly world live. Take everything that can be known through natural science: it gives man no conception of reality. Nature itself, with its true essential being, does not live in the conceptions of today's natural science, and the other sciences have formed themselves after natural science. What lives in these conceptions is not nature, it is a ghost of nature. The world spirit has taken its revenge on present-day people who no longer want to believe in a spiritual world, so that present-day humanity has fallen into the terrible superstition of taking the spectre of science as real science. Today, those who believe in ghosts are precisely those who call themselves monists, scientifically educated. And how could these ghosts of the world become reality?

This could happen if one seriously develops the artistic sense in oneself, as Goethe wanted to educate it in his nation, if one could absorb what comes to life in a productive capacity for contemplation – Goethe called it “contemplative judgment” – if one could dissolve the specter of contemplating nature into the productive, creative power of the spirit. In the middle of the last century, this creative power of the mind was treated in German intellectual life as the fantasy of the wild man who comes to this fantasy in my fairy tale in the one mystery drama. Thus we live with our ideas today as people in a ghostly world, we are superstitious without knowing it, we mock the superstition of others and are three times more entangled in this superstition than those we mock as superstitious people.

The etheric body of the human being is not built according to what we know as natural laws, but according to artistic laws. No one can grasp it, either in themselves or in others, unless they have an artistic spirit within them. And it is the lack of artistic spirit in the present that is so devastating, so destructive, so devastatingly interfering with the worldviews of the present. And in addition to his etheric body, we know that the human being also carries the astral body within him. This astral body is of particular importance in the present.

My dear friends, I know of no more poignant event for world development than the fact that the most important decisions regarding this world catastrophe were taken on a Saturday, on August 1, 1914 in Berlin, in the late afternoon, even into the night. For those who understand the basic laws of human life from the point of view of anthroposophy, many things are obvious, but for these others stand and mock at the superstition of others, but they are three times as superstitious as those they mock. For these people do not want to know anything about the deeper laws that prevail in the life of the world. They believe that gravity rules, that atomic forces rule. But they do not know that world history is ruled by deep-seated laws, of which the outer phenomena are only symptomatic expressions, that from epoch to epoch people have to enter ever different spheres and live in ever different ways. And so we have arrived in the present time because we, of all times in the development of mankind, are closest to the spiritual world, we just do not realize it yet. We have arrived at the point where we have to take into account man's relationship to the spiritual world. Oh, earlier people did not need to take this into account; their poor brains were still agile enough to receive the spiritual revelations they needed. But in the course of time these revelations have become empty shadows and phrases. And what is called Christianity today is often nothing more than a collection of empty shadows and meaningless phrases, not filled with the spirit. But mankind hates the real spirit; it repeatedly succumbs to its tendency towards complacency, in that which has been called Christianity for centuries and millennia, and which Christ repeatedly and repeatedly repels. It is always said: If you go among today's workers and talk to them about Christianity, they don't want to hear it. I can only say: I believe that. For just as you speak today, so you have spoken and thought for centuries and millennia, and now you want to heal the people to whom you have spoken in this way with the same thing that has brought about the misery of the time and of which you have proven that it has no hope.

Today, man is compelled to take his relationship with the spiritual world seriously, to feel that he really does not only live in the physical world, but also in a spiritual world. And until we take this attitude seriously, rivers of blood will still have to flow over poor Europe. For men hate the truth, and the hatred very often changes into fear; therefore, the people of the present are afraid of the truth. Today it is so that we cannot come to the truth at all when we make our decisions. I am going to tell you something extremely paradoxical, but I am only saying it because it is necessary that these things be said in our very serious times, because today man needs real self-knowledge, not empty self-knowledge. Man today is close to the spiritual world. When he is in his physical body, he is separated from the spiritual world; there he sees through his physical eyes, hears through his physical ears, and feels with his physical sense of touch. From falling asleep to waking up, however, he is in the spiritual world, where he lives the life that remains largely unconscious to him today, and that plays into his daily life with its impulses. But for the modern man it is so that he cannot come to fruitful decisions if he wants to make these decisions in the time from morning to evening, but he must have lived them prophetically the night before. It was not like that in the past, when people, through the different nature of their brains, still had spiritual revelations. Today, the human brain has dried up, even in youth it speaks in a senile way. For man must know: when he wakes in the morning, he has already prepared as an inner prophet what he must decide upon during the day. Only that is of real fruitfulness, what he has ready when he wakes in the morning. Everything else will lead more and more to need and misery for those who live in the superstition that one must come to one's decisions during the day, when one is in the physical body. Man should take this into account. For we live today in a time when he should make his relationship with the spiritual world real. That is why it is so distressing that the decisions leading up to the events that marked the beginning of the world catastrophe for Germany were not prepared by the corresponding personalities through what they could have experienced in the preceding night, but were made under the immediate impressions of Saturday, out of the mind of the day, until late into the evening.

I often said to friends when this war broke out: we will not be able to talk about this war in the same way as about the other wars that have taken place in history. We can talk about these other wars by collecting documents from the archives and then judging the facts. On the other hand, we will not be able to talk about this war and its origins in the same way. For at the time when this tempest broke out, all hell was let loose and the gates were sought by the confused human beings. And it will be possible to prove that of the forty to fifty people who were involved in the events that led to the war in July 1914, a large number did not have full use of their consciousness when they made those fateful decisions during the day. But that is the time when consciousness is silent during the day, and when people are not asleep, that is when the demons hostile to humanity intrude into human consciousness. We are therefore dealing with the playing into the world catastrophe of spiritual causes, and anyone who sees through the laws of the world can recognize how, through the fact that the most important decisions are only made on the basis of the events of the day, disaster occurs. Thus one will find less and less the possibility of getting out of the distress and misery if people do not strive to make their relationship with the spiritual world real, that is, to take their relationship with the spiritual world seriously in the facts that take place within. What use is it if you are a mystic, no matter how good, if you sit down half the day or sometimes the whole day and immerse yourself inwardly, trying all kinds of things to evoke an inner sense of comfort and pleasure What use is it if the spirit does not come to life in you, whereby you create living relationships between yourself and the real spiritual world and its laws, which are then expressed in the destinies in which we humans are involved?

All that is expressed in these words was one of the reasons why reading Ennemoser's words had inspired particular thoughts in me. For it was in the middle of German intellectual life between East and West. Ennemoser himself uses these words: “The wind blows from the east and the west.” He thus points first to a special relationship to the Orient and Occident, which I recently pointed out in a public lecture. He points this out as a man of the old Germanic times and shows that in the old days the German spirit was still connected to the world spirit, and that the German spirit was actually called upon to understand the great world connections a little. Oh yes, it goes to the heart when you read such a sentence in our time, written more than half a century ago: “Germany will fulfill its destiny or perish most ignominiously, and with it European culture.” “ One feels that others in the past have thought the same thoughts that have been expressed here and in other places to you and other people. Because basically much of it was a paraphrase of the words: Germany will either fulfill its destiny or perish, and with it European culture. — This Germany must have questions again, it must regain a connection with the higher goods of life. For this question hangs over us: can we still have questions of deeper significance? Can we still concern ourselves with life's higher goods? The question is one of being or not being. If we concern ourselves with higher goods and can still pose questions to the spiritual world, then we will find a way, starting from Central Europe, to prevent the downfall of world culture. If, on the other hand, we continue along the path of a senile youth and a philistine phrase that masquerades as revolutionary, then we will descend into barbarism. If people in Germany know how to spiritualize, then they are a blessing for the world; if they do not know how, then they are a curse for the world. Today the situation is such that the way that will lead to the salvation of mankind in the future runs between right and left like the sharp edge of a razor, and that anyone who wants to recognize things in their reality cannot love comfort and choose comfortable paths.

Remember that I have been telling our friends for a long time that he certainly counted, clearly counted, on generous historical impulses, but in a sense that was only beneficial in those places where he lived out the nationalistic impulses in such a way that their bearers saw them as universal human impulses. The Anglo-American world has its initiates, its people who appreciate intellectual power. Here you could preach and preach about intellectual power, and those three times superstitious people thought you were superstitious yourself. That is why the three times superstitious people have become the victims of the Anglo-American West, which saw through things. In the 1880s, or perhaps even earlier – I am only familiar with the period up to that time – this Anglo-American West spoke to the public about what it considered appropriate for the intellectual and spiritual state of that public. But he spoke from the lodges of his initiation in such a way that he said: The world war will come - that was a spiritual-scientific dogma among the English-speaking population - and its only goal can be that socialist experiments are being carried out in the east of Europe that we do not want and cannot want in the west. I am not telling you a fairy tale, but what was said in the 1880s by English-speaking people who were connected to those who knew about these things. But here these things were not taken for what they are, namely as explorations of a real reality. And so one was overtaken by what the others knew, who therefore could never draw the short straw, precisely for the reason that they knew. And in these mysterious lodges themselves, what kind of people were there? There were people who had their ramifications into all those areas that were important to work on. One has only to study what has been going on at various points, for example, on the Balkan peninsula, for decades, and try to see the connection. In the lectures I gave in various places during the war, I pointed out many symptoms in this regard. Everything was geared to the socialist experiments in the East coming through the world war and flooding Central Europe. In the lodges of the initiates, these people said: We in the West are preparing everything so that in the future, using all the means that can be gained from the spiritual world – but can be gained in an unlawful way – we will get such people for the exaltation of national honor, who can become their rulers, individual people on a plutocratic basis.

This was prepared by the West. The Ahrimanic spirits were involved in this, and it is in this world that those personalities are to be sought who can wait, who prepare their actions not by years but by decades, if these are the actions of great politics. In these English-speaking areas, there is not the militaristic discipline that is known in Central Europe, but rather a spiritual discipline, but to the highest degree. It is so strong that it can turn men like Asguith and Grey, who are basically innocent hares, into its puppets, into its marionettes. Grey is truly not a guilty person, but what a fellow minister said about him a long time ago is true: he is a person who always makes a concentrated impression because he has never had any thoughts of his own. But such people are chosen if you want the right puppets for the world theater. Things were well initiated and well prepared.

But today it is the case that man must not only take into account that which connects him to the spiritual world, which is so close to him, but he must also know that great cosmic laws are at work in the evolution of the world, in which humanity is enmeshed with its destiny, and that these can also be experienced through a spiritual science. One must only be able to finally break away from that stupidity which today is called history; for this history of today is stupidity. It believes that what follows is always determined by what has gone before.

But such a view is just as if you had a sea in front of you and said of it: Waves are washed up on the shore; each one is caused by the one before; the fifth comes from the fourth, the fourth from the third, the third from the second, the second from the first. But the truth is that forces are at work beneath the surface of the water, causing the individual waves to arise. In the same way that someone today looks at the sea, people today also look at history, and they are still proud to write pragmatic or causal history and to present these spectres to people, who in turn react to them superstitiously and take this stupidity of causal history as reality. But anyone who knows how things really are, how forces work from below, how every single event is driven to the surface, must say to himself: Unless this stupidity, which we call history today, is removed from people's minds and views, no salvation can come into human development and evolution. These are the serious thoughts that should fill the mind of anyone today who is really serious about what is happening today as a result of the fire signs.

Oh, it could be painfully soul-stirring when one tried to bring humanity to its senses on specific issues. In the 1880s, for example, I had to think: Oh, we have a physics that exerts its devastating effects on the whole world view with its absurd atomic theory, and that believes in the spectre of the external world of which I spoke earlier. How can one, I thought, teach this world again that it is a spectre? And I said to myself: If you make the world aware that what reaches us as color and light is not only quantity, as physics today with its atomistic stupidity believes, but also quality in the Goethean sense, then you could bring people from one corner to self-awareness in this regard. And I wanted to make people understand that Goethe's Theory of Colors is not dilettantism, but reality in the face of today's atomistic physical foolishness. But the time for that had not yet come. The German mind was still bowing to the English Newtonian theory of colors, which is just as suited to the Anglo-American mind as Goethe's theory of colors is to the German mind. If we had found the opportunity to take up what we needed, who knows what might have come of it! But we should not have tried to find it by taking the easy way out; instead, we should have taken the path of taking the spirit seriously. And then: Goethe's theory of metamorphosis was already a theory of the connection between humans and the rest of the living world. This theory of metamorphosis should have been developed further. But what happened? People did talk about it, but those who spoke had no idea of the real circumstances: what was said was mere empty phrases. People did not distinguish the phrases from what had substance, and so they adopted Anglo-American Darwinism instead of Goethe's metamorphosis theory.

These are the individual facts in a specific area, by which one can see what we have sinned against the individual facts, and what should be done, for example, with such individual facts. Today is a serious time, and it is necessary that we reflect on the great impulses of the Central European spirit, which gave the signature to the period from the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. If we can summon up the forces that were at work in that time, then there may be hope that we will again see questions arise and that we will again find goals and access to the spiritual forces of the world. For what Ennemoser wrote more than half a century ago is as true for our time as it is for his: “The decision is approaching, time is pressing, the wind is blowing from the east and the west, a storm can break out!” Today you can feel it. “The trunk of the old policy stands on rotten roots, the calculations of the diplomats would like to be destroyed, their art has become a distorted art that no one understands. Can you get figs from thistles, grapes from thorns?” And I ask: Can you make revolutions with philistines who act radically? Can the spirit be emancipated and left to its own devices with senile youth? We need true spiritual substance, not that which merely behaves in a radically phrase-filled manner. We need truly enthusiastic youth for everything that young people can be enthusiastic about, but not a youth that spouts senile phrases and has programs for everything and confuses these phrases and programs with spiritual content. One would like to see a ray of spiritual power penetrating into their hearts, so that it might prepare people to distinguish between thoughtless phrase and substantial content. But when substantial content comes to people, they say they do not understand it, it is not quite clear to them. And when the attitude lives in something: you have to form your sentences in a way that befits the truth - and it is not always convenient for it to fit into every cheap phrase - then people say: you write convoluted sentences. How often have I said: Those who take the truth seriously must write some sentences in such a way that they deal with the next sentence while formulating one, and that they place what is said in one sentence in its proper light with the next. If we take this seriously, we will develop the kind of attitude that enables us to understand anthroposophy in its deepest inner sense. Above all, we will develop the ability to distinguish, to really distinguish. Are people today really able to distinguish between things that are, for example, dawning and things that are setting? They are not. And it is here, in this power of discernment, that the big questions we have to ask ourselves must arise. We must ask ourselves what Goethe wanted for natural science. Was Goethe's theory of colours a morning light to recognize the essence of colour more deeply than physics can, or do we want to turn it into an evening glow that testifies that the sun of Goethean culture has already set? Was Goethe's theory of metamorphosis a morning light, or do we want to turn it into a Darwinian law that makes the sun of Goethean culture set? These things must be thought through and felt through today. Without this, it cannot continue.

Take the experiences of the last few weeks: you can become hopeful and hopeless at the same time. We have begun to work here in the spirit of the threefold social order. We began in such a way that we took no account of a certain stratum of humanity. We spoke to the humanity that makes up the broad masses, and we had found that no one can deny our understanding of the souls of the broad masses. During the war I once spoke a word of warning: We were condemned during the war to have healthy roots of the people, and that out of these roots of the people individualities developed, which were the German greats; but what the middle class was, that was what could fill one with doubt, that was what so easily wanted to take the easy way out in relation to truth and education. And so it came about that in our movement for threefolding, what had emerged from the roots of the people was brought into a rather alarming view: the party leaders. And the party leaders, who no longer belong to the people, are now presenting the people with a choice: either to remain reasonable and listen to what is truly based on spiritual foundations, but what can be understood in a reasonable way by human understanding, like everything that is based on spiritual foundations, can be understood by the mind, if one only wants to, or to follow the leaders and to lead Europe little by little to the fate of the ten to twelve million people who were killed during the war catastrophe, and the so-and-so many millions who were crippled, and to bring ten to twelve more millions to death or to starve them. This choice has been made today. And anyone who cannot grasp this idea cannot raise their thoughts to the level of strength necessary for the seriousness of the times.

A few weeks ago, we tackled what - it may not be aptly described as the cultural council. For three weeks we have been fiddling with the matter, and it has not been resolved. The matter had to be presented in the way it was presented, because it was also necessary to appeal to what remained of healthy instincts in the general wilderness. What was said from this point of view need not be national-chauvinistic, nor need it have the hostile point against another people. The English themselves know very well that as individual Englishmen they are something different than as a people. The man, who I have often quoted, who is one of the finest art critics, once said a beautiful word, in which he said something like the following: Oh, that's where we make history. There you examine how events actually developed and resulted and how peoples get into wars. But all that has been written is only there to praise the one that we need, according to our subjective point of view, and to condemn or defame the other. And it is true that when nations wage war, they wage war everywhere like savages and do not ask why. lerman Grimm says that the moment people wage war, they become savages. When people become a state, a nation, they do not become higher, but lower. This is the great misfortune of our time, that the state or the sense of belonging to a nation is valued higher than the individual human being. But people today are so enmeshed in the esteem of communities rather than of the individual that they feel quite comfortable being dehumanized, being a state template. It is naturally difficult to create something that can truly emancipate intellectual life. But in our time, humanity is closer to the spirit than one might think, despite its materialism. Inspiration and imagination rule in us. But because of our lack of productive imagination, we transform our imagination into all kinds of ghostly images about the world's interrelations, with which we defame the real world's interrelations. If you tell someone: Europe hangs together in such and such a way – as I did a few years before the outbreak of this war in the lecture cycle in Kristiania; if you look at the world in such a way that you judge it with inner psychology, with inner vision, then the dreamers regard it as a superstition, and if you set about putting it into practice, then these same people consider it utopian or ideological. But what matters is that we see clearly in these matters today. In their sense, the members of the Anglo-American world have seen clearly, and we have seen dimly. —- And inspirations also change, turning into wild animalistic emotions that want to live it up in blood. Look at the blood that is flowing today, look when people are lined up against the wall and shot: these are the inspirations that want to come to people with the good will of the spiritual world, which is hated by people and which therefore transforms into wild animal instincts. Because if a person does not want to allow what wants to come to him from the spiritual world as inspiration, then it transforms into wild emotions, into animalistic drives.

This should be borne in mind by those who have been involved with anthroposophically oriented spiritual science for decades. They should bear in mind that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is not just about collecting knowledge. Whether you ultimately know something about the astral body and etheric body and I, purely conceptually, or whether you copy out a cookbook and just juxtapose what is in the cookbook in your mind, it makes no difference; one is no more valuable than the other. Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science must pass over into the human soul as knowledge, but one must not confuse this knowledge with the dull, muffled mystical feeling. Ennemoser has already said this very rightly in this essay, for he says: “Just as freedom should move within the laws of justice, so religion must become an enlightened truth with the light of science.” But people today do not want to illuminate religious feeling with anthroposophical science; they want to have an abstract divinity in the mystical feeling. And above all, they do not want art to become a cultivator of spiritual beauty in natural material.

But this is what anthroposophy must aim to achieve: it must not only impart knowledge; admittedly, knowledge, but knowledge that can become inner enlightenment, that spurs on our power of discrimination. If it can do that, then much will be served in Central Europe. For we must be able to look to the west and to the east with a gaze that sees and recognizes the world. We in the west must be able to distinguish between what rises hostile to us and what is hostile only in the declining. Here too I recall from my boyhood, when I was in the area where the Styrian mountains are, how every week, twice, I had before me in the train that Count Chambord, who lived in Frohsdorf Castle, on whose face lay the most ancient catholicity, the most ancient ultramontane Jesuit education and at the same time that which was the reflection of the French “L'Etat c'est moi”. That was still truth. Everything else is no longer truth. No matter how much France may develop her power today, she is in decline, just as the Anglo-American element is in the ascendant. But these things must be properly assessed. We must see through them so that we can fertilize ourselves with the laws of spiritual life, so that we can transform thoughts into will and find the courage to really place ourselves in the present, which demands so much seriousness and so much significance from us. We must always renew the attempts and make these attempts again and again to knock on the door of our contemporaries: Do you want a free spiritual life, do you want a soil in which a free spiritual life can develop? For these attempts must always be made. If we want to let some truth and wisdom flow into humanity, then we must put it to the test, whether people want to accept it or not; it can very well impair the matter that people do not want to accept it. Therefore, I ask you not to lie down on a lazy bed by saying to yourself, according to Ennemoser's sentence: “Germany will fulfill its destiny or perish in the most disgraceful way, and with it European culture. “ These words are not to be understood in this way; rather, you must say to yourselves that Germany will fulfill her calling if there are people who have enough strength to revive the German spirit in themselves, unchauvinistically, unnationally, as a part of the world spirit, in whose sense we have to work between East and West. And if the world rejects what can come from Central Europe, then the time should have come for us, those who for decades have committed themselves to anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, not only with our heads but also with our hearts and with all our willingness to make sacrifices, to remember and say: We are here! And that we are here to cultivate the spirit should not be a lie of the soul, but should unfold as a truth of the soul! And when others are ready to accept the call for truth, as it can come from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, then, when this understanding occurs, what was intended as the Anthroposophical Society could become what it was intended for. Today, the call for the emancipation of spiritual life goes out to all people of good will. But those people who have laid claim to it from the standpoint of the spirit should be honest about it and say: If the others leave the path of the spirit, if they do not have the courage to do so, then we will take it upon ourselves. We have the courage to do so. We do not want the spirit to be an empty phrase for us; we want it to pulsate as reality in our blood; we want to say what has to be done for the spirit.

[ 1 ] For a long time, many people who are not familiar with the theosophical movement of our time have held the opinion that many followers of this philosophy allow themselves to be deprived of their sound judgment by blind faith in authority. It is imagined that there are a number of people within this movement who, by their behavior and certain characteristics, are regarded by others as “enlightened”, “more highly developed”, “knowing”, and that their assertions are accepted in good faith by a large number of the followers of Theosophy. It is precisely because of such opinions that many refuse to get involved with this movement. They say: we only want to hear what can be “proved” to our powers of judgment; a person who has awakened to mature thinking rejects blind faith in dogmas. And since the claims of the theosophists do not appeal to “common sense”, we will not get involved in them, even if individual “enlightened ones” claim that they can know such things.

[ 2 ] Recently, such an opinion has even gained ground among many personalities who are themselves part of the theosophical movement. There, too, one can hear much said about the fact that “common sense” should not blindly submit to any authority or dogma, but should examine everything for itself. Sometimes, something like concern is clearly evident that one may have gone too far in accepting certain “revelations” by this or that person, whom one has too much revered as a “knower”, as an “infallible authority”. And many would like to urge prudence and examination, so that one does not lose oneself in bottomless fantasies, and one day has to admit that this or that fact destroys the appearance of knowledge that this or that “enlightened” person has assumed.

[ 3 ] Who would deny that such admonitions have much to justify them. Have not enough facts occurred to make people, to whom many looked up as if to sure authorities, lose their reputation and their validity? And have not accusations been raised recently against the most important workers in the theosophical field, which must give many people food for thought? Is it any wonder that many people say to themselves: “I don't want to believe more than what I can see for myself”? Just now, another alarming case has occurred. One of the Theosophical workers who are leading many on the path to higher knowledge, C. W. Leadbeater, has been accused of serious misconduct by some members of the American section of the Theosophical Society. The matter appeared to be so serious that the president of the society, H.S. Olcott, summoned a committee to London, which consisted of the business committee of the British section and delegates from the American and French sections, and which was to examine the situation. Leadbeater would probably have been expelled from the society if he had not already announced his resignation. Thus a personality was removed from the Society who had done untold service for the spread of Theosophy for many years, whose books had been guides for many leaders in spiritual life, and who had acquired a large number of disciples. Immediately before the fateful event, Leadbeater had made a successful lecture tour of America and had made a deep impression in many places through his meaningful work. - Should such a case not make us suspicious of all authorities? (Since a discussion of this case is to follow shortly, ' only this hint' is given here.) Now, in the face of such a case, one can certainly say with full justification that the Theosophical cause is above all persons; and no matter how many representatives of this cause may 'fall': he who is able to separate the cause from the persons cannot be misled by such facts. It is also emphasized that true spiritual “higher development” does not necessarily have to be connected with the ability for a certain “clairvoyant” life. And Leadbeater would have to be considered first and foremost as someone who had developed certain clairvoyant abilities in himself. Theosophy should, however, be less concerned with this than with making the means available to its followers by which they can purify and cleanse their “lower nature” and awaken their “higher self” within themselves. The acquisition of clairvoyant powers is even dangerous as long as the purification and cleansing has not taken place. (The section of this booklet on “The Stages of Higher Realization” contains some information on this very question.) And one can also hear voices that, on such occasions, recommend limiting the cultivation of such insights that are based on clairvoyant abilities and instead advise limiting oneself to what ennobles spiritual life without such reference. It is not important, so it is said, to gain insights into higher worlds, into “spirits”, into the cycles of the world and of life, but rather to acquire a refined, purified view of life.

[ 4 ] There can be no doubt that those who advocate such a view are quite right in a certain respect. Nevertheless, the Theosophical movement will become entangled in fatal contradictions to its mission if such opinions gain the upper hand in the circles of its followers. - Now, an objection is certainly possible here. One can say: who is authorized to consider his opinion of the mission of the Theosophical Movement as somehow authoritative? One person may believe that the dissemination of “higher insights” is the right thing; another may believe that it is not the spread of the results of Herschel's research that matters, but the cultivation of “spiritual and moral life”.

[ 5 ] In itself, this objection is quite correct. And if a majority of the Theosophical Society were to disapprove of the dissemination of so-called secret teachings, then from a certain point of view there would be no objection to it. But basically, from a higher point of view, it is not a matter of discussing what the Theosophical Society should be. It can only be what its members want it to be. What is at stake is something quite different. It is important that the dissemination of esoteric teachings is necessary for the further progress of humanity. And those people who recognize this and are capable of it must do their part to spread them. They must regard this as a task set for them by the circumstances of the times. And therefore the question of what the Theosophical Society should be is not of primary importance to them. If it were to be found that a majority of the votes within this society were against the cultivation of esoteric knowledge, then they would have to seek access to their contemporaries by other means than through this society.

[ 6 ] But a quite different and weighty question arises. Does the Theosophical Society not shake its foundations if judgments like those just mentioned gain the upper hand? This question will become clear if one looks at how this society has gained recognition in the world so far. It owes this prestige not to general teachings that are readily accessible to “common sense”, but to the fact that the founders and members of this society were able to say something to people that is not readily accessible to “common sense”. Insights into the nature of man, into 'his imperishable spiritual essence, into higher worlds: these have been what people have sought through the society ever since. People wanted to satisfy their longing for knowledge of the “spiritual world” through theosophy. The leaders of the theosophical movement did not find the ear of their contemporaries through “generally provable” principles – which are certainly infinitely valuable in themselves – but through the revelation of truths that are only accessible to clairvoyant research. And although there is no one in the world who cannot come to such truths by developing his own dormant abilities, it is nevertheless in the nature of human development that only a few individuals have developed the necessary abilities. If one does not want to listen to what such people have to say about the spiritual world, one would have to renounce knowledge of it altogether. One can indeed say to these few: “We do not want you to tell us what you know; you can only satisfy us if you tell us how we ourselves can come to such knowledge. Do not tell us what is revealed to you through your clairvoyance, but tell us how we ourselves can become clairvoyant.” In this journal, more has been said about the question of how to attain knowledge of higher worlds than can be said publicly at the present time. From the information given, it will be seen to what extent every legitimate aspiration in this direction can find satisfaction. Although Theosophy can open the way for people to access real secret training, the public mission of esoteric research described above is something quite different. People need answers to certain questions that life poses for them. He needs them for the peace of mind that he needs, for inner peace, for security in life and work; only through such an answer can he be a useful member of human society, can he properly fulfill his place in the world. Of course, there are countless people who do not even raise such questions today, who do not feel any longing for their answers. But these people do not do so only because they are not given the opportunity to feel the necessity of it. The moment a person is confronted with certain spiritual matters in the right way, he also immediately feels what is missing in his life if he passes it by, and then every doubt about the necessity ceases. But it is a misunderstanding to believe that the answers to such questions about the higher world are only of value to those who themselves have clairvoyant insight into this world. This is absolutely not the case.

[ 7 ] If one takes in the answers with the right attitude and lives with them, then one will soon become convinced of the truth, even if one still has a long way to go before one becomes clairvoyant. The fact that so many people today are unable to experience this conviction is due solely to the fact that the materialistic spirit of the age places a heavy obstacle in the way of the soul. People believe themselves to be unprejudiced, and yet they have the greatest prejudice against the higher truth. Theosophy seeks to proclaim this higher truth in a way that is relevant to the needs of the present human being, and in a way that is necessary for true progress in the near future. But where else can it be received if not from those who have fathomed it through their own research? If one were to oppose this from the outset with “common sense”, then one would be declaring their entire research unnecessary. One should assume that those who have endeavored to develop higher possibilities of knowledge within themselves have not lost this common sense. It is certain that what the knowledgeable reveal can never contradict “common sense”, but it is equally certain that one can only understand this if one approaches their revelations with the right attitude. Without doubt, everyone can judge, and everyone should only trust their own judgment; but they must first know what they want to judge. Anyone who ponders these simple things for a moment will soon realize how little truth there is in much of what is said against the authorities in matters of the higher worlds. These authorities cannot be a danger to common sense, since they—if they are the right authorities—want to give this common sense precisely that which it is to judge. If the Theosophical Society does not want to cultivate only what its members already know, but to offer the path to higher knowledge, it will not be able to do without the inspiring authorities. It is quite different to judge and to be shown the way to judgment. Either the Theosophical Society will become something completely different from what it has been according to its foundations within the present, or it will have to be a scene for those who have not yet made higher experiences from it.

[ 8 ] Anyone who views the situation in this way will have to think and act differently from the way many members of the Society think today. At the Paris Congress of the “Federation of European Sections”, the danger of authorities in the name of “common sense” was also pointed out in many speeches and discussions. Even the Society's meritorious founder and president, H.S. Olcott, felt it necessary at the present time to emphasize the importance of “common sense” and to stress that no member of the Theosophical Society should rely on anything other than his own powers of judgment and should beware of falling prey to authorities. And to make this warning against authority particularly clear, he cited the authority of Buddha, who said: “Do not believe because it is written in a book, or because it is taught by a wise man, or because it is handed down by tradition, or because it is inspired by a god, etc., but believe only what is evident to you through your own reason and experience.” But these words of Buddha's can be taken as a guide in different ways. One person does so by considering the revelations of the wise to be worthless because they do not appeal to his understanding, while another seeks to develop his powers of perception so that he can form an independent judgment about such revelations.

[ 9 ] The conditions under which the Theosophical movement exists will be better understood than is often the case at present if we consider that the essence of it consists in the publication of some of those truths which were formerly regarded exclusively as so-called secret sciences. Such truths are those now proclaimed in writing and word about the nature of man, that is, his structure from the limbs of the physical, mental and spiritual world, his development and gradual perfection through a series of earthly lives; furthermore, about the law of the connection between cause and effect in the spiritual world, which is usually referred to as karma; and also about certain processes of the earth's development, which are revealed to the open eye of the seer and which must be known if one wants to understand man's higher destiny. In addition, there are certain insights into the higher spiritual worlds, without which one cannot have any understanding of the development of the world, and without which one cannot know anything about what lies hidden behind death, what is to be regarded as the invisible and immortal part of human nature.

[ 10 ] These insights have existed for a long time in the form in which they are disseminated by the Theosophical movement in books, essays and lectures. But they were not publicly announced in this form. They were only communicated to those who had first been carefully tested for their intellectual, spiritual and moral abilities. The purpose of testing for intellectual abilities was to ensure that the teachings only reached those people who were really able to understand them by virtue of their intellectual and rational powers. For the high spiritual truths are such that an imperfect mind can at first even find them nonsensical. If they are presented to such a person, they can only be misunderstood. And apart from the fact that such a communication would be completely useless, it must have a highly unsettling effect on the mind of the person to whom it is communicated. For while, if rightly understood, these teachings bring about the happiness and bliss of man, they must, misunderstood, bring about mischief in the soul. A small truth, if distorted by too little power of judgment, will not cause any particular mischief, for it brings about only slight agitations of the soul. A great truth is felt as something that interferes with the welfare and powers of the soul. If it is distorted or caricatured, it will have the opposite effect of what it should have. If it is properly understood, it will elevate man to a higher way of life; if it is misunderstood, it will lower him to a level below that which he would be without it. Furthermore, a misunderstanding of higher truths leads not only to a useless but also to a harmful discussion of them. Such a discussion confuses the soul, and because the truths are so momentous, it does not remain, as with the discussion of insignificant matters, a mere error of the intellect, but such an error can lead to the disruption of the whole structure of the soul, in other words, to the illness of the whole person. And if such insights are even communicated publicly, then the damage does not only affect individuals, but many.

[ 11 ] Therefore, in the secret schools, it was demanded that the right powers of understanding be present first, and then one imparted step by step what one thought it advisable to impart... The soul forces had to be prepared so that the pupil of the higher secrets could receive them in a worthy mood and frame of mind. For the feeling with which one approaches a truth gives it a certain spiritual coloration. And it is the case with higher truths that they have an incorrect effect if one does not approach them with the right feeling. A truth that relates to physical things is not particularly distorted if one receives it in an incorrect mood. With a higher truth, exactly the opposite is the case... The moral powers of the candidate for higher schooling had to be tested, because the corresponding realizations necessarily tear away the veil that is spread over certain hidden sides of his nature. These hidden sides of the human being are driven to the surface. In ordinary life they are veiled by acquired habits, by what is considered right according to the circumstances of life and by many other things. This is the case for the good of the individual and of all humanity. How many inclinations, drives, affects, passions, which, if they were released, would have a devastating effect, are purely held back by such things.

[ 12 ] One of the first effects of higher truths is that they completely free man from all such things. Everything that softens his nature from the outside falls away. It loses its hold over him, and from now on he can only be his own master. Man does not even need to realize immediately that this is the case. As soon as the higher knowledge approaches him, he will surrender himself. He must now be strong enough to take the guidance of his morals, his inclinations and habits, etc., into his own hands. He can only do this if he can, through his own strength, push back everything that previously brought the beneficial conditions of the outside world into the right track. Let us give just one example from this field. The tendency to vanity is particularly evident in the disciple of the higher mysteries. If he does not have the strength to suppress it, it will grow to an extreme and lead him to the most pernicious paths. It is possible that this vanity will disguise itself in all kinds of masks, even in those of its opposite. And while the person then believes that he is becoming particularly modest, this modesty is nothing but the mask of a terrible vanity... One can see why the old secret societies demanded such strict testing of their pupils.

[ 13 ] In the face of such facts, the question must immediately arise: if that is the case, why are these truths not treated in the same way as before; is it right at all that the theosophical movement should make some of them public? It should be said at once that a great number of those persons who are in possession of such truths are at present observing the principle of secrecy in regard to them, and many of them believe that the Theosophical Movement is really doing an injustice.

[ 14 ] But the matter is as follows: the higher part of spiritual knowledge will have to be kept secret in the manner indicated for a long time to come. What is published through the theosophical movement is the elementary part. But this cannot be kept secret any longer. For humanity has in many of its parts reached a stage of development at which it cannot do without it. It must be published because without it certain soul needs of humanity can no longer be satisfied. Without this publication, the life of the soul would have to become desolate.

[ 15 ] It must not be thought that the knowledge indicated has been withheld from mankind in every form. They have only been kept secret in the form in which they were taught in the secret schools and as they are now being communicated through the theosophical movement. But even people who lived in the most modest circumstances were able to receive them in a form that was appropriate for them. Fairy tales and myths contain these truths in the form of images, parables, etc. It is only out of a materialistic attitude that one does not want to recognize or acknowledge the profound wisdom contained in fairy tales, legends and myths. It cannot be the task here to show what could easily be shown, that legends and myths contain much, much greater wisdom about nature and the secrets of humanity than the explanations of our today's so advanced sciences. It is necessary to give people at certain cultural levels an idea of what must approach man in the form of ideas at a higher level of intellectual development. However, there are still many people today who believe that what the intellect has not grasped is not understood at all. In contrast to this, it must be emphasized that not only the intellect is a cognitive faculty, but that one can also understand things through feeling, through imagination and through other soul forces. And it was a real understanding for certain stages of development when people allowed the secrets of the world to work on them in fairy tales and myths. Indeed, for such stages of development, another form cannot even be considered. The form of higher truths that we find in theosophy today remains for such times the domain of secret teachings and their students. At other stages of development, it is the religions that proclaim the secrets of the invisible worlds to humanity. All religions contain the higher secrets in a form that is suited to the mind and to faith. Those who study religions without materialistic prejudice, but with an open mind and without preconceptions, will find all the secret teachings in them, so that each particular religion contains these teachings, adapted to the character, temperament and culture of the people and the time for whom they are intended.

[ 16 ] Myths, legends, religions are the various ways in which the highest truths have been conveyed to the majority of people. This must continue to happen if it were sufficient. But it is no longer sufficient. Mankind has now reached a stage of development at which a large proportion of it would lose all religion if the higher truths on which it is based were not also proclaimed in a form that would enable even the keenest reflection to recognize their validity. Religions are true, but for many people the time has passed when comprehension was possible through mere faith. And the number of people to whom this applies will increase at an unprecedented rate in the near future. Those who truly understand the laws of human development know this. If the wisdom underlying religious beliefs were not publicly proclaimed in a form that would stand up to perfect thinking, complete doubt and disbelief in the invisible world would soon break out. And a time in which that were the case would, despite all material culture, be a time worse than one of barbarism. Whoever knows the real conditions of human life knows that man cannot live without a relationship to the invisible, any more than a plant can live without nourishing juices.

[ 17 ] In the recently published essay on the education of children, it can be seen how only theosophical truths can have a real practical effect on life in the near future. The same could be shown for the most diverse areas of life.

[ 18 ] The truth is that we must convey to humanity the knowledge of the invisible worlds in the theosophical form, just as it has been conveyed to it in the form of parables and images. Theosophy, properly understood, is not a new religion, nor a religious sect, but the right means for the present time to show the wisdom of religion in a way that is necessary for the people of this time. Theosophy does not found a new religion, for it furnishes the very proofs of the validity of the old one, and thus becomes its firmest support... But Theosophy is not a matter for a few enthusiasts, for it makes man acquainted with the invisible world, from which he must draw the forces for the visible world.

[ 19 ] Thus, Theosophy arises from the realization of what humanity needs at the present time. And it is necessary for humanity to learn some of the truths of esoteric science. Because the facts are as they are, these truths have had such a powerful effect on many souls since they were first published a few decades ago, and that is why the true mission of the Theosophical Movement lies in the tactful publication of such truths. Just try to put the Theosophical Movement on a different basis, and it will have ceased to be of any interest to those who, from the very beginning, have turned to it out of a true present-day human need. Do not say that these truths about the higher mysteries are only valuable to those who can grasp them clairvoyantly. Nothing could be further from the truth. For clairvoyance is only necessary to find these truths. Once they have been found, they can be understood by anyone who really makes sufficient effort with his intellect. It is an empty phrase to say that these things must first be proved. They are proved as soon as one really wants to understand them. If someone finds them unproved, it is not because they must first be proved by special means, but simply because the person in question has not yet thought about them enough.

[ 20 ] Now, for more than thirty years, there has been a Theosophical Society, which is supposed to be a means of fostering the Theosophical movement. This society has three principles: the first is: “To form the nucleus of a universal brotherhood of humanity, without distinction of faith, nation, class, or sex.” The second principle is: “To reveal the kernel of truth in all religions.” Its third rule is: “To explore the deeper spiritual forces that slumber in human nature and in the rest of the world.”

[ 21 ] If we keep to what has been said in this essay about the actual mission of the Theosophical Movement, it will not be difficult to recognize that the Theosophical Society has a right to exist only because of the third goal.

[ 22 ] Let us look at it without prejudice. The establishment of the brotherhood must undoubtedly be the goal of every good person. And that is why there are countless associations and societies that recognize this goal as their ideal. You certainly don't have to become a theosophist to profess such an ideal. The Theosophical Society only makes sense if, within it, people express themselves about this ideal in the following way: Every good person recognizes the ideal of universal brotherhood. It is sought to be realized through various human fraternizations. The only thing that matters is that the right means are chosen for its realization. The most unsuitable means is certainly to talk about it in a sentimental way, to say that people should love each other as brothers, should form a unity and harmony, and whatever other fine phrases are used, which unfortunately are often just thrown around by theosophists. Such talk is not worth more than if someone were to stand in front of a stove and keep saying: Dear stove, you are a good stove when you heat the room at the right time. So just be nice and warm when it's necessary. If you want the stove to really heat up, don't talk about its task, but provide it with fuel. The theosophical movement can only regard the above-mentioned esoteric knowledge as the right “fuel” for human brotherhood. If the soul absorbs these insights, they will have the same effect on it as the heating material has on the stove when it is properly treated. It is in the spirit of theosophical insight to say: Of course, other people besides theosophists are currently pursuing this ideal, but they cannot achieve it because they do not apply the right means of esoteric knowledge. It is undoubtedly easier to keep saying “brotherhood, brotherhood” than to imbibe the knowledge of the occult sciences; but it is also easier for a Christian to keep saying “Lord, Lord” than to imbibe the true Christian content. Moreover, talking about brotherhood is not without danger, because it spreads a cloud of intellectual comfort around the speaker, which can suffocate the serious striving for real knowledge in a kind of mental voluptuousness. Many people are not even aware that it is a kind of intellectual comfort that drives them into the self-intoxication they feel when they repeatedly give themselves the pleasure that lies in the thoughts of brotherhood, unity and harmony. The best way to become an easy prey to certain dark forces is the intellectual intoxication that emanates from the phrases: unity, brotherhood, harmony... Good theosophists should make it their rule to avoid the words brotherhood, harmony, unity as far as possible, and to cultivate instead the real esoteric knowledge, which is the right means of attaining that for which one shows one's appreciation best by not vainly expressing it.

[ 23 ] But the “scientific” study of religious documents as such cannot be an independent goal of the theosophical movement. For that, one needs to be a scholar, not a theosophist. Even the comparative study of the documents: what does it have to do with the theosophical movement other than showing how the esoteric truths are contained in these documents? But that can only be shown by someone who really knows esotericism. A true example of a genuine esoteric examination of religion was given by Edouard Schuré in his “Great Initiates”. He revealed the esoteric core of the great founders of religion. In doing so, he naturally had to go beyond mere scholarly observation. It is only natural that mere scholars should object that he relied less on the documents than on his imagination. It is to be hoped that a 'theosophist' would not make such an objection, for in doing so he would be guilty of two errors: firstly, such an objection is naive, as naive as the objector himself does not even suspect, for to defend that scholarship , which is defended by it, would be a matter of course for a personality like Schuré if he would only stoop to his point of view, and secondly, the objector shows that he does not even suspect that there are really other sources of knowledge than those accessible to him.

[ 24 ] Thus, the fundamental goal of the Theosophical movement can only be recognized as the third principle of the Theosophical Society, the cultivation of the truths of the secret sciences, which are also called spiritual. If it should ever become unfaithful to this goal, then the mission inherent in it must be taken over by another movement, and the Theosophical Society will be one among many other well-meaning human associations that have fraternity, love, the cultivation of all kinds of science and other things on their banners.

[ 25 ] The cultivation of knowledge of the supersensible worlds has been designated as the essential task of the Theosophical Movement in the foregoing. Those who hold this view must not be unclear about the obstacles and difficulties that confront such work, especially in our time. However, it is soon clear that such knowledge is a strong need for an immense number of people in the present day. Many are more or less aware of their desire for it. But many are not. They feel only a deep dissatisfaction in life; they take up this or that which promises to give them a spiritual purpose in life, and then drop it again because after a while the dissatisfaction returns. Such people only feel their lack, but do not arrive at any fruitful thought about what they are actually missing. Those who know life know that insight into the higher worlds is longed for by a great many people, far more than is admitted by many. In the widest circles, what is sought is precisely what a theosophical movement that is walking in the right path can give. Those who understand these “right paths” will also soon realize that the effects of genuine cultivation of higher knowledge extend as far as human life itself. One can be a person whom fate has placed in the most modest position in life, who is occupied in the narrowest circle: through true Theosophy, one will be able to have healthy thinking and a happy, satisfied heart. The very existence in the apparently most commonplace, otherwise most unsatisfactory situation will acquire a deep meaning. And one can be a scientist, artist, businessman, civil servant, etc.: through Theosophy one will gain in every field creative power, joy in work, overview, security.

[ 26 ] It is, of course, only the result of a misunderstanding of the theosophical way of thinking when it becomes alienated from life. True theosophy cannot lead out of life, but only deeper into it. It is certainly true to emphasize that Theosophy is only of any use to a person if he does not stop at a few general thoughts or feelings, but does not shy away from really getting to know what can be known about the nature of man, about the processes and beings of the higher worlds, about the development of humanity and the world. But anyone who gets to know this also learns to understand life in its smallest details, and – what cannot be emphasized enough – to treat it.

[ 27 ] If theosophy is to have such an effect on a person, then a widespread aversion must be thoroughly combated. This is expressed in a certain contempt for what can be attained through theosophy in the way of real knowledge about the areas just mentioned. It is easy to say: “What do I need to know about the basic parts of man, about the development of the world and so on? All that is just intellectual stuff; it is something intellectual. But I want to deepen my mind. The divine foundations of existence cannot be grasped in such “dry concepts; they can only be reached through the living soul” ... If only those who speak in this way would have a little more patience to delve into the true facts of the matter. Through this patience they would be led to recognize that real knowledge in the sense meant here only appears to them as a matter of the intellect, as a mere intellectual matter, because they are afraid of bringing something else into motion than their intellect, their dry, sober thinking. Through such patience, they would realize that what their soul seeks must be found in what they reject as a “mere intellectual matter”. They shrink from the idea that they should devote themselves to the ideas of the higher worlds, and therefore never come to experience how warm and full of life the mind becomes through these very ideas. The immediate fate of such natures will be that their ardent longing for a content for their souls will consume itself within them, because they reject that which could bring them healing. The mere saying, “Man can delve into himself and he will find God in himself,” is really not enough. And it is not enough, either, no matter how many different ways it is repeated. Man has emerged from the world; he is a “small world” in which everything that is contained in the visible world and in a large part of the invisible world is concentrated in a certain way. And one cannot understand man if one does not understand the world. It is not by brooding over one's inner self that one comes to know oneself, but by grasping the true essence of the stones, plants and animals around us; for their essence is concentrated in one self. In the stars, their transformation and metamorphosis, man can read the secrets of his soul. In what happened in the most ancient times, the riddle of what the soul experiences today is solved; and from the way in which the most ancient has become the present, one understands what one is oneself: and from this understanding one can gain satisfaction of the mind and strength to act. True knowledge of the world is at the same time true knowledge of oneself; and it is the only fruitful knowledge of oneself. Those who feel compelled to repeat the saying: “Yes, what Theosophy tells us about the evolution of the world and of humanity is something for the intellect; but we want satisfaction for the emotions,” should delve into such facts.

[ 28 ] Only the energetic advance towards conceptions of higher worlds in this direction can create the necessary bridge for man between thinking, feeling and life.— And in this sense, the knowledge of the supersensible worlds should be cultivated within the theosophical movement. No point of view should be too high for us to adopt in order to gain knowledge. But we must also always seek every possibility of making the highest knowledge fruitful for the most everyday things in life. If the latter were disregarded, then theosophy would have to lead to things that it should lead to the least: to the formation of sects, to narrow-minded dogmatism, etc.

[ 29 ] And from the above indications the way can also be found to the deeper foundations of what has been touched upon in the preceding pages (page 276) regarding the effectiveness of the theosophical movement on ethical life. A true insight into the nature of the human soul reveals that moral behavior in the radical sense cannot be promoted by preaching even the most beautiful moral principles. Virtue does not arise from what one can learn as a moral principle, but rather has its source in noble feelings. There has been much debate among philosophers as to whether virtue can be taught. Now it certainly cannot be taught in the direct sense that one becomes virtuous by memorizing a system of virtues. One can indeed know such a system of virtues quite well, and therefore does not need to be a virtuous person. Yes, one can go even further and say – as has already been indicated in the foregoing – that within the theosophical movement, no matter how beautiful moral principles may be, no matter how many principles may be advocated, as general human love is constituted, nothing essential would be furthered by it. But even if it is absolutely true that virtue cannot be acquired in this way, it would still be quite wrong to think that knowledge cannot be a basis for virtue, and that higher knowledge cannot be a source of the most comprehensive love of humanity. What one takes in from the ideas of Theosophy are not moral principles at all, but, for example, ideas about the development of humanity and the earth. But those who are able to devote themselves to these ideas selflessly, not only with their intellect but with the warmth of their hearts, develop within themselves that source of feelings that by itself allows actions in the sense of universal love of humanity to emerge from within. The right understanding of the first principle of the Theosophical Society – the core of a universal brotherhood – is achieved when one cultivates the knowledge of the higher worlds without reservation, and in doing so lives in the unfailing hope that the corresponding virtues in the visible world will necessarily result from the knowledge of the invisible world. For the morally good follows from the spiritually true.

[ 30 ] What our time really needs, what is longed for by those whose state of soul has been indicated above, is the cultivation of knowledge of the supersensible. And the right effect of the theosophical movement in life can be achieved by the development of spiritual realities. The conditions of life in this society can only flow from two sides: one thing that matters is to cultivate the existing treasure of supersensible knowledge and, if possible, to increase and develop it; the other thing, however, is that those working in the field of theosophy have an open eye for the circumstances of life. They should observe wherever possible where life needs and can be deepened by the theosophical way of thinking. They should let the theosophical light fall on everything that touches the present human being. For example, that someone has insight into the laws of repeated earthly lives and into the karmic chain of fate is only one thing; that meaning and strength are given to life from this, that the person thereby becomes capable of the most everyday tasks and content in his mind: this is the other, the more essential.

[ 31 ] It is also very nice when the study of different religions is pursued in the society that calls itself theosophical, in order to find their core of truth. But the important thing is to find the kernel of truth, not to get to know the many religions; the latter is a matter of scholarship. The theosophical movement will also work most favorably in this direction if the cultivation of supersensible insights is its first concern, and its workers, according to their abilities, spread light from the point of view of supersensible knowledge of the world about what science is able to investigate about the various religious beliefs.

[ 32 ] Those who are convinced by the above arguments will have very definite feelings about the way of working that is necessary within the theosophical movement. For the dissemination of supersensible knowledge requires a different behavior than that of ordinary sensual knowledge. This is already evident from the fact that the bearers of supersensible truths in earlier periods behaved quite differently from the owners of any knowledge related to the sensory world in the present. The latter will usually hurry to share their knowledge with the public as quickly as possible. And in doing so, they are doing the right thing in their field. For what the individual investigates should bear fruit for the whole of humanity. The older 'bearers of supersensible knowledge' at first kept their knowledge secret from the public. They only imparted it to those who, on the basis of certain conditions, had proved that they were 'called'. In doing so, they did not sin against the principle that the knowledge of the individual must serve the whole. For they have found the ways in which this knowledge can bear fruit for humanity. It is not the place here to speak of these ways. But they were there. It has been said in the foregoing (page 272) that the possessor of supersensible knowledge is compelled by the present conditions of the time to make a certain part of this knowledge public. This is done through books, lectures, magazines and in all the ways in which, for example, the Theosophical Society seeks to work. But this gives rise to certain difficulties. On the one hand, those who have taken on the task of cultivating supersensible knowledge feel obliged to ensure that this knowledge is as accessible as possible to those who seek it. On the other hand, they feel a certain obligation to exercise restraint in the face of well-founded old methods. If they have truly penetrated the spirit of supersensible knowledge, they must have become completely familiar with a principle that goes something like this: “The fact that you have recognized some truth, or that you are convinced of it, must not be a reason for you to force this truth on other people. You should only share it with those who are entitled to demand it from you in the right spirit and in complete freedom.” Those who follow this last principle cannot have anything in common with a fanatic or a sectarian. For it is precisely this that characterizes fanaticism and the formation of sects, that people who fall prey to it live in the belief that what they consider to be right must become a conviction for as many people as possible. They consider their views to be the only true ones. This belief often leads them to use every conceivable means to win as many followers as possible. The bearer of supersensible knowledge would prefer to do as little as possible to win followers. The feelings of the fanatic, of the founder of a sect, are quite alien to him. And the more he can adhere to this fundamental attitude in the present, the more he will do so. But, as I said, the conditions of the present forbid him to adhere completely to this principle. He must go public. But he does maintain his convictions to the extent that he does not go public in any other sense than in that he says: “I have this or that to communicate from the realm of the supersensible worlds; I say it because it must be said before the world. Whoever wants to approach these things must do so solely because he wants to. I do not seek to win followers; but I do meet anyone who desires to learn something of the knowledge of higher worlds.” It is then the task of the cultivator of higher knowledge to find the right path between unreserved advocacy of his cause and that reserve which no one wishes to bestow on him with a ‘sole-saving wisdom’. He will do his work best if he has as little as possible of the “fanatical world-enlarger” in him, who sees his essential goal in transferring his convictions to others. One can say: the fanatic seeks followers; the bearer of supersensible knowledge waits quite calmly until they come of themselves. This appears quite simple in theory; in practice it is not at all easy. But it also shows how much value should be placed on certain feelings that the worker in the theosophical field must have; and how much it depends on him to chasten that enthusiasm that arises so naturally in the present man: to share with the world what he himself carries in his heart as his sacred conviction. With regard to certain higher regions of supersensible knowledge, for example, such a - perhaps noble - craving for communication could not have any useful purpose at the present time, for there would be very few people who would not consider these things to be foolishness, the unfortunate products of a sick mind. The bearer of the secret knowledge must be motivated to communicate nothing other than that the individual person, or the people in question, need the corresponding information for the salvation of their soul and their entire being.

[ 33 ] In the following essay on the “Life Issues of the Theosophical Movement”, we will discuss in more detail the difficulties that arise in particular for those who, in the light of current views of the world, understand the work of the “theosophical movement” in the sense indicated.