The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Dearly beloved! Whoever gazes at a cloud, or at a cloudy sky, would never guess that in the next moment lightning will flash out of the cloud and thunder will rumble. Lightning and thunder are phenomena hidden in the cloud. This is an image for the things around us; there is also much hidden that can be awakened from its slumber.

I will now try to characterize this hidden world. In theosophy, it is called the three worlds. These three worlds are not separate from each other, but they rest within each other; they are present within this world of ours, but they only emerge under special circumstances. The physical world is visible, audible, tangible, and so on, for the ordinary person. The other two worlds rest hidden in the physical world; but they can be brought out.

An often-used image can help us to understand what is meant by this. Let us think of a person born blind, whose eyes are opened and who can now see. Until now, he has felt his way around; now he has had an operation and can see. The same objects, whose properties he could previously only explore by touching, take on shine and color now that his eye has been opened to the light. In this sense, one speaks of higher worlds. They are there, but the higher sense, the spiritual eyes, must first be opened in order for them to be revealed to the person.

Another comparison that has been made here before: two naturalists were observing three Moluccan crabs in an aquarium. One of them had fallen on its back and was so unhappily placed under an iron bar that it was unable to right itself. The other two crabs tried in vain to help their comrade back on his feet. After they had tried for a long time without success, they left. The naturalists waited to see what would happen. After some time, the crabs returned and brought two more brothers with them. These four then managed to get the crab back on its feet by working together.

I am not telling this story to give an example of mutual aid in the animal kingdom, although it is a fine testimony to it. It is intended to lead us to a different consideration. Suppose the naturalists had lost their patience and reached into the water and turned the cancer back over; and then imagine the crabs endowed with human intelligence, the following would arise: The cancer society would consider this strange case. First, there would be the orthodox, the conservatives; they would say: A miracle has occurred. Then there would be the monists, the materialists; they would say: There are only cancer forces, no other forces exist; a higher intervention is impossible. They would have to leave the case unexplained. Thirdly, the cancer theosophists would come; they would say: No, there are no miracles, everything is based on law; but there is also a higher law that goes beyond the ordinary comprehension of cancer. We theosophists extend the law into higher realms beyond the ordinary comprehension.

Let us now realize what it depends on to perceive these supersensible things. All our senses are active and serve us to perceive the things around us. But we also become aware that the senses decrease, die, and then the ability to perceive ceases; but life does not stop with that. So you can live in the world without perceiving. Whether or not we perceive things depends on whether we have the senses necessary to perceive them. Admittedly, it is not unacceptable that we live in countless worlds for which the senses have not yet been awakened.

The real purpose of the theosophical movement is to awaken man to these higher senses. Some people go wild when you talk to them about supernatural things. They cannot grasp that one can really gain an insight into these things, that not everything that is said about them is based on hypothesis. But they do not consider that there are many things around us that pass us by without a trace because we do not recognize them.

An example of this: a famous singer was invited to an elegant society event; she was late – as famous personalities sometimes are. She was seated between two gentlemen; one was Mendelsohn, whom she knew and with whom she had a lively conversation. The gentleman on her other side tried repeatedly, in his polite, modest way, to draw her into the conversation, but she didn't like him and asked Mendelsohn quietly, “Who is that stupid fellow?” The famous philosopher Hegel, was the reply. Had she known beforehand that she would meet Hegel there, she would have made every effort to engage him in conversation. Now she had sat with him – and had not recognized him.

Could it not be that many a person who is endowed with higher faculties is merely a “stupid fellow” in the eyes of many people? Let us think of Christ Jesus; now, after all that the Church and time have made of him, it is indeed easy to recognize him. But just imagine he were to enter this hall today. Who would recognize him then?

Therefore, we may admit the possibility that there may be people who are endowed with higher senses than the ordinary ones, without the ordinary man in the street perceiving anything. Such a person is called “one with a higher state of consciousness”.

Actually, every human being lives in these different states of consciousness. We must realize that the human being really lives in different states of consciousness. First, in the physical world during the day, in the normal state, he has the waking consciousness. Second, the dream-filled state of sleep. It is not uninteresting to study the experiences of dreams. If you pay just a little attention to them, you will find a certain regularity in the dream images. Dreams are symbolic. The dream experiences show that we are dealing with rudiments of our daytime consciousness.

I would like to make this clear with a few examples, which, like all the examples I give, are based on real experiences. Someone dreams that they have caught a tree frog, vividly reliving the entire chase until they hold it in their hand. With the feeling of the soft, slippery thing in their hand, they wake up and realize that they had a corner of their bedspread in their hand. There the dream consciousness had symbolized the soft mass of the bedspread and transformed it into a tree frog.

A dream is also a playwright. Example: A woman dreams that she is in church, the preacher is giving an uplifting sermon, gradually his raised hands turn into wings – she finds this quite natural in the dream – then his lofty speech turns into cawing and outside the cockerel crows. - How the dream is a symbolist and a playwright, Schubert described in “The Night Side of Nature” from the hidden side of man. Heinrich von Kleist received many suggestions from him about this matter.

Thirdly: the state of consciousness of dreamless, unconscious sleep. Everyone will admit that a person is present, even when he is unconscious in his sleep, that he does not cease to exist in the evening and come into being again in the morning. And yet his consciousness perceives nothing of what is going on around him. These three states of consciousness change significantly when a person undergoes a spiritual, mental development. Then the divine man is awakened in him. He learns to perceive the mental processes. With the help of higher, more perfect people, mental organs develop in him that change the first two states of consciousness, so that the person not only perceives fleeting images, but a new world opens up to him that speaks to him in symbols. It is not enough for a person to be conscious only in dreams; he now also learns to bring dream consciousness into daytime consciousness, and in this way all irregularities will be regulated. Gradually, the confused dreams become clear symbols. If one receives guidance, one also learns to understand these symbols. Something real may then well occur. For example, it may occur that the student dreams of something ugly that is connected with a particular friend, who moves him; he learns that the friend has fallen seriously ill. A real condition has been expressed in the ugly dream.

In this way, a new world gradually opens up for the dreamer, and he learns to take this spiritual world into the ordinary world. He also perceives the soul in his fellow human beings. He also perceives soul-spiritual beings that he has not usually seen before.

The world that opens up to the human being is the “astral” world. Just as lightning and thunder issue forth from the cloud, so things emerge when the astral senses are awakened. Why is this world called the astral world? Those who understand only one sixteenth of it have quibbled a lot about the name. The people who have always been theosophists, the ancient mystics, used this name for good reason. What is the astral world? It is an expression of the soul world.

What is physical about me, my bones, muscles, and skin, forms the physical body. What is mental about me, my instincts, passions, and desires, is just as real as my hand and my head. These [mental qualities] form the astral body.

A person stands before me. I see his form, his hair, his face, his skin; but just as real as this visible person are his desires and cravings, instincts and passions before me, they are just as real for the astral world as the visible body is for the physical world. It has been suggested that it should be called the “drives-body”, but that is no better; it could lead to the erroneous opinion of the materialists, who believe that the drives emanate from the physical body. Before man was born, the soul of man was there, which has embodied itself in the body. The drives, instincts, passions and so on were there, and they are what shaped the physical body. So we can give a very definite answer to the question of where the physical body comes from.

Imagine a glass of water with a piece of ice floating in it. Ice is water. It is formed from water through cooling. This is roughly how we can imagine the process. The astral is to the physical as water is to ice. Ice is condensed water. The physical is the condensed astral substance. This is the relationship between the desire body and the physical body. Just as water crystallizes into snowflakes, all worlds have been created through crystallization processes. Our visible world has also emerged from the astral one. Goethe knew this process and tells us about it in the words of the world spirit:

In the floods of life, in the storm of action
I surge and surge again,
Weaving to and fro,
Birth and grave,
An eternal sea,
A changing weaving,
A glowing life.
Thus I create at the whirling loom of time
And work the living garment of the Godhead!

Just as our earth was created from the astral matter that surrounds it and consists of it, so the astral matter and the other matter consist of the same matter as the whole world of stars. The physical matter of the earth is related to the physical matter of the stellar world, the astral matter to the astral matter of the same and so on. The astral matter permeates everything. The mineral contains forces and substances. The plant also has substances and forces and life. The animal feels and senses, but more unconsciously. Man, finally, who still has the animal in him, consciously gains control over it and thereby rises above the animal. He is, as it were, a summary of all physical realms and has the essence of all of them within him.

The materialists claim that instincts arise from the physical. Theosophy claims the opposite. Our desire body is related to the world of desire around us.

Thirdly, dreamless consciousness: human consciousness develops ever higher and higher. Then not only dream consciousness emerges from the dark night, but something new emerges that cannot be compared to light images. It speaks to the human being in sounds, as it were. This sound of the higher spiritual world was well known to the Pythagoreans; they called it “the harmony of the spheres” or “music of the spheres”. Goethe also tells us about it in his “Faust”. The “Prologue in Heaven” introduces us to this third world. What Goethe presents to us here is not just a poetic image, but reality. — The archangel Raphael sings:

The sun resounds in the ancient way
In brotherly spheres of song,
And its prescribed journey
It completes with a thunderclap.

What resounds is not the physical sun. This physical sun is only the body for the sun spirit. This “resonance” is perceived by the more highly developed people. From the dark deep sleep, it “resonates” up to him. This is what Goethe means when he says “the sun resounds”. He sticks with this image. In the second part of “Faust” it says:

Tönend wird für Geistesohren
Schön der neue Tag gebören:;

This third world is the mental world, the spiritual world. It can be perceived in its true state with proper concentration. Once man has reached this level, he knows that the mere thought is something real. Heaven – Devachan – can be conjured up.

This state is called the continuity of consciousness. When the ear is opened to this sound, the actual spiritual world, the world of the spirit, opens up to man. Just as man is plant, animal and mineral, he is also astral and mental; it is possible for him to live entirely within himself, in the spirit.

Man lives in the three worlds. During the day he lives in physical consciousness. At night, during sleep, he initially perceives nothing that is perceptible to his senses. How is it that man is unconscious during sleep? There is a very specific reason for this. Man divides his being. During the day, the human being uses the powers of the physical and etheric bodies. The powers for the waking consciousness are taken from these two bodies. These powers must be renewed; this is done during sleep; the actual human being uses his astral and mental bodies and their powers to work on the physical body.

The person who wants to develop himself higher must acquire special moral qualities, whereby he can make the work of the astral and mental bodies superfluous.

How can a person make this possible? When he enters the “Chela path”, which has been discussed in detail here. The qualities that are necessary as preparation for this path have been mentioned here many times. The first main condition is the control of thoughts; one must not let them stray; then comes the control of passions and desires, great composure, and so on. When all this has been achieved, after years of practice, what happens then?

A calmness comes over the physical and astral life, a feeling of well-being, an inner health, and thus the astral and mental forces are released from their work during sleep; they no longer have as much work to do on it. These unused forces are now used to draw out hidden abilities in man and to develop clairvoyant organs, to form the “eyes of the soul”. These organs are called “lotus flowers” or “chakras”; they are described in detail in “Lucifer - Gnosis”. With these organs, the astral world can be perceived.

In this way, a person develops through virtues, especially through calmness and composure. Once he has achieved these, he may use the freed-up energies to develop the higher organs. Those who want to develop these higher organs without these virtues are drawing on physical forces that the physical nature still needs. The result is that the person becomes nervous, even mentally and spiritually ill. In this way, the human being can open up the two higher worlds. The astral matter is thin, thinner than air. It appears in the astral light as a human aura. It is a radiation that extends one and a half times the length of the head. This aura expresses the character of the human being's innermost being in different color tones. The newcomer to the astral plane is struck by the fact that everything is read there as in a mirror image, in a most strange and shocking way. Above all, he sees the mirror image of himself there, which seems to be coming towards him, while in reality it emanates from him. If, for example, one sees the number 164, one must read 461.

What takes place in relation to time also runs in the opposite direction. You first have to learn how to orient yourself in the other world. It is very important to know that the passions show themselves there in an ugly, demonic form; one's own passions pounce on the clairvoyant as demonic figures – in the mirror image.

That is how you get to know yourself. Those who have had experience in this and have previously learned the context know how to judge and deal with this phenomenon correctly. Many a person who has attained abnormal vision without having received proper training, but has broken into the astral unprepared, describes it that way. That comes from materialism. Theosophy is quite serious. It can only confuse those who approach it without understanding. But for those who look deeper into it, theosophy brings spiritual health. Materialism, on the other hand, makes people ill. If the religious element slumbering in every human being is not satisfied, it will eventually break through the brain; the brain does not understand it and becomes ill. The higher worlds break in on man, and he does not understand them. That is the essence of mental illness.

The “sounding” is then the third world.

The human being lives in these three worlds one after the other. After he has ended his life here in the physical, he discards his physical body, then also his etheric body; then the astral body remains, in which he now lives. He really lives in the astral. When we say we live in this or that, we mean that we have something in common with the world around us. Now, one thing in particular is no longer the case. Even during sleep, the astral body is separated from the physical and etheric bodies, but they are still connected by a magnetic bond. This now falls away. The human being now becomes aware of this. It is a very peculiar awareness that confronts him. He is accustomed to perceiving and doing everything through the senses; for example, he is accustomed to enjoying food and delighting in the taste through the palate; the longing for enjoyment has remained with him; he must first get used to doing without these pleasures.

This happens for all the senses. This happens through this deprivation of the senses. Through this deprivation of the senses, two conditions arise violently. First, a burning thirst that arises from the inability to satisfy desire. This acts as a kind of fire — the purgatory of Catholics. He must first get rid of his desires. The other concerns action. He is accustomed to acting; but he lacks the hand to act, the foot to walk, and so on. This feeling of inability causes a state of coldness. This state is called Kamaloka, the place of desires. This state is caused by the desires in man, which are still active and find no satisfaction. It is the state of disaccustoming.

If a person has already become accustomed to living in the spirit during his lifetime, this disaccustomment will not be difficult for him. Christ Jesus says, “The kingdom of heaven is within you” (Luke 17:21), so that a person can already live here in the spirit, in the third, the mental world, in Devachan. If he has then passed through Kamaloka after death, he comes to Devachan. That is the state in which the divine man truly lives in his element. When he is no longer attached to the lower, his own divine self comes to life in his inner being.

I have now shown how man, by opening up the higher senses, becomes familiar with the two hidden worlds, which are hidden only to the extent that colors and light are hidden things for those born blind.

The time has not yet come for everyone to follow this hidden path of knowledge. But people must hear about the higher worlds, become familiar with them, try to grasp them intellectually, and let them tell them about themselves. That is the first step towards finally entering them. Man should create concepts for himself, he is a self-creating being.

We live in an important time, when great movements of a spiritual and intellectual nature are taking place. Much is being told publicly about supersensible facts that used to be kept secret. Then some people come and say: Yes, you are telling us all kinds of things; and we are to believe in you. — Once a personality in Berlin was literally enraged. To this personality I said: You don't need to believe me at all. I don't care what you think about me. If I draw you a map of Asia Minor, indicating the outlines, the rivers with lines and the cities with dots, you can say: 'What are you making up, Asia Minor doesn't look like that. No, it does not look like that, but if you go there, you will see that the drawing was correct. That is how it is with the drawing I have sketched for you of the transcendental worlds. For the time being, you are welcome to think of me as a fraud who is telling you something, but – listen! – after death everyone is in a position to apply what they are now learning.

But culture will soon produce blossoms that will only be understandable to those who understand the occult. Therefore, it is advisable to listen quietly and to process what you hear. If you can do this without inner contradiction, life will open up for you in a completely new way; you will learn to understand it in an unimagined way.

In this way, one struggles upwards to knowledge, to that which never fades, to the realm of heaven. We develop ever higher and higher, through the three worlds first. The first stage is the physical, the second the astral, the third the mental, the spiritual. The first step consists of man's turning from the transitory to the eternal. The astral life of mind and desire turns either downwards to the transitory or upwards to the eternal; it has two sides. The third world, the spiritual world, encompasses what man recognizes as his own spiritual being.

If I have taken the liberty of claiming your interest today for a question that is currently stirring up a great deal of emotion and seems to urgently require an answer, and if I have set myself the goal of putting this question in the light of Goethe's world view, is not intended as a lecture on literary history. Rather, I hope that my remarks will awaken in you the conviction that has been deeply rooted in me for years: that this question can only be properly appreciated from this point of view, from the point of view of Goethe's world view. We Germans have a twofold task in relation to Goethe. One of these was once described by Berthold Auerbach, the much-loved storyteller of village tales, with the witty saying: We must be Goethe-ready. That is to say, we must be able to completely immerse ourselves in the lofty realm of ideas and the incomparably intimate content of feelings of the greatest German genius. We must feel what he felt and think what he thought. But that is only one aspect of our relationship with Goethe. For Goethe marks the beginning of a completely new cultural epoch in the Western world. He has shed new light on all of European culture. He has opened up new senses for us, taught us new ways of looking at things. These senses must soon arise in us, we must rise to these views, in order to continue the cultural work of our people in the direction - of course, as far as this is in the power of each of us - that has been indicated by Goethe. Anyone who does not see in Goethe this beginning of culture, from which everyone must start, who wants to somehow relate to the education of the present, simply does not understand his time. And I must unfortunately confess to you that your brothers in the heart of Europe, especially the younger generation, have by no means grasped their task in relation to Goethe. On the contrary, a certain frivolous way of thinking is asserting itself, one that turns up its nose at Goethe and believes that it has long since progressed beyond him, while in fact it still has a long way to go before it fully grasps him. Goethe is dismissed as an old man who is no longer sufficient for our new times. A new generation believes it has new ideals. Unfortunately, on closer inspection, these ideals usually prove to be quite immature products, which are miles away from the true needs of the time, while they seem to have been born of the time. And this our time, this our living present, is more, than one can believe with superficial observation, a child of Goethe, a child of our classical spirits. Our time is the time in which the individual asserts in every direction the original sovereign rights that divine power has placed in his soul. Man no longer wants to be patronized; no, he wants to be completely dependent on himself, on his insight, on his will. He no longer wants to seek the sacred, the divine self in the outside world, but delves into the depths of his own breast to get the God, to get the strength and courage of life from there.

From this urge of the individual to cast off all fetters and assert his inalienable rights of sovereignty, then also arises the movement that I have placed at the top of my remarks today: the question of the liberation of women from the supposed fetters that, according to the beliefs of certain people, their gender has so far imposed on a prejudiced world. Women no longer want to be tied to the family home, to the house; they want to step out into the open world and be on an equal footing with men in every activity. They want to take on the competition for existence with the male world, they demand a profession like the ones men have. It is an undeniable fact that the German people have so far participated the least in the extensive emancipation efforts of women. While in Russia, Switzerland, England and France, but especially in America, hundreds and hundreds of women have already entered the learned professions, the German people still stubbornly close the doors to higher learned professions to women. Is this just stubbornness or the conservative sense that suits the German so well, which has always been averse to any violent revolution because it did not want to admit that something so unreasonable could arise in history that it had to be overthrown at a stroke? Or is there perhaps a higher realization in this – even if many are completely unaware of it – that full equality for women does not even require complete assimilation, and that the latter contradicts the role and nature of women? That is the big question: are we dealing with a prejudice that must be eradicated over time, or are we dealing with a justified insight that has a right to resist the other peoples of Europe in this movement? Let us now let Goethe be our lodestar! He will guide us safely; for in him, all the depth of the German character is embodied in a single individual. Whatever has emerged in the German people as lofty and great comes to us in a personal unity in Goethe; we are all the more German the more Goethean we are. Wherever we need light, we look up to him with confidence. The turbulent life of the present casts disharmony into our hearts, we are overcome by dark moods, whole crowds of contemporaries fall prey to the gloomy world view of pessimism; we find release from all this only in the blissful calm of Goethe's harmonious world view. And what a deeply satisfying consciousness lies in this absorption in the world of ideas and will of our greatest national poet, when we consider it in the sense of Schiller's saying: And if you yourself cannot be whole, then join yourself to a whole! For man is nothing as an individual, his whole strength is rooted in the nation from which he comes, in the time to which he belongs.

Those who succumb to loneliness soon feel alone,

as Goethe himself says. We can add: They must soon succumb to a spiritual death in their sad, isolated spiritual wasteland. Think with your people, with your time! That is what we must call out to every human being. And we think most harmoniously with our people when we think and feel with Goethe, the full and complete embodiment of all our national and contemporary strength. We have no right to complain that we thereby lose our independence in order to bow completely to a foreign authority; for man can only be free when he rises to the higher ideals of culture, where all the light of education is to be sought. Only then will he consciously participate in the development of his race, only then will he independently determine his goal with great ideals, while otherwise he will only grope blindly below and be dragged along with the others, a serving and certainly unfree member of the body of humanity.

Only by seeking the human perfection of Goethe and, where we find it, joining it, can we work on our great work of liberation. We can only become free with our people and in our time, not individually. To bow down under Goethe's authority when we have recognized its height is not servitude, but the Goethean form of freedom. And it is precisely by taking our lead from Goethe that we can best further this great work of our liberation. For in the great scheme of things, Goethe stands for nothing more than a newer process of purification and liberation from self-imposed fetters. What were these fetters? They were the fetters of unnaturalness, of the desire to imitate what was foreign, of the unfree, over-tender sensitivity from which the Germans languished before his time. He strives back to nature, to direct feeling and thinking. Man has an addiction to remove himself further and further from nature. We know that the only completely naive-natural people in Europe were the Greeks. When Goethe became acquainted with their magnificent works of art in Italy, he fell into a kind of rapture. For these immortal creations had an effect on him like the magnificent works of nature itself. In them, he saw the world spirit at work. The Greeks, as he felt vividly here, had overheard the laws from the creator of the world, according to which he had created the magnificent, sublime works of nature, and had formed their works of art in the manner of men in this Goethean sense. The Romans did not understand how to penetrate into the mysterious portals of the divine world workshop, and they simply imitated the Greeks. This is remoteness from nature, which, as humanity developed further, became ever more pronounced. It may be said that when Goethe appeared on the scene in Germany, very little of what prevailed in poetry, indeed in the emotional and intellectual life of the Germans, bore the stamp of original naive truth. Everything was contrived, everything assumed, everything a cliché. Goethe was the first to seek a direct contact with the spirit of the world. And therein lies the greatness of his mission. But he owes this greatness to a circumstance that we must consider if we want to properly appreciate his relationship to women and his relation to the female nature. This is his deeply ingrained religious trait, a trait that always manifests itself in him through an idealistic belief in the divine in all that is natural and human. From his youth he was dominated by a fundamental trait that is only innate in deeper minds: belief in the supernatural in nature, the presentiment of a higher being, which later became the quest for the idea, for the spirit in all things. The mysterious, this genuine child of science as well as of religion, was what always attracted him. In everything that came his way in life and in history, he sought the point where he could perceive the workings of a higher power. And that is what he always sought in woman, and often found. Man distances himself from nature, from the immediacy of feeling, when he must exhaust his spirit in a one-sided life's work: He becomes dry, pedantic, unnatural. He loses that freshness and naturalness from which all the magic of an unmediated nature emanates. But these are precisely the qualities that women retain, of course only where they remain completely women and do not strive to be like men. For women, it is not one mental or physical quality that comes to the fore, but rather they all develop in beautiful harmony and remain in full force. Thus nature appears purer, fuller, more divine in woman than in man, who has been made one-sided by nature. Thus women are our true messengers from God, in whom man finds what he has lost himself. And herein lies what man seeks; he must seek it with particular longing because he lacks it in himself and can only do without it with difficulty.

And that is what Goethe seeks above all. For him, being with a woman always means a spiritual rejuvenation, a renewed sense of brotherhood with nature, which repeatedly invigorates and fuels his poetic power. Delving into feminine values and female essence always generates renewed artistic ability in him. When he seems to distance himself from nature in a manly way, when the full force of naturalness seems to fade from his heart, then it is always love that envelops him in that mysterious magic that makes him capable of new creativity. In the face of this trait in Goethe's nature, all the reservations that arise again and again against the purity and nobility of Goethe's treatment of female nature must fade. Unfortunately, these reservations are still frequently enough encountered. An unnatural distinction is made between the poet and the man, and only the former is allowed, while so much is desired to attach some human failing to Goethe. But in this mind everything is in undivided unity. Goethe's poetic mission is directly connected with his human mission. And his poems are nothing but direct revelations of his most intimate and purest human nature. Yes, here and there in Goethe's work we can also find individual cynical, seemingly frivolous verses. But this speaks for nothing other than the infinite love of truth that always dominated him. He never wanted to appear as an angel, always as a human being, yes, as a human being with all faults. He preferred an open confession before the whole world. But that is not the point. The main thing is that there is never a frivolous or mean streak in his love, nothing of the bon vivant. It always emanates from the mind, and it is always connected with a deep appreciation of true feminine value. His love never demeans women. He always looks up reverently to feminine value. And that is the very Germanic way. We know from Tacitus that even our ancestors in ancient times revered something in women that foreshadowed the future, and that they honored wise women at springs and in groves. That is the essence of truly religious feeling: it always commands reverence from its bearer. And Goethe worshiped in the dust before the divine in woman. Women, above all, must recognize this. And then the gloomy shadows that still cling to Goethe's lofty personality will dissolve.

It has a powerful effect on Goethe's imagination when a new female figure enters the circles of his activity. His rich inner world then surrounds the revered being with all the magic of which his rich imagination is capable. For him, the beloved is more than another mortal can see in her, because the imagination sees deeper than the mind. It is a kind of halo with which the poet's imagination surrounds her. Then, always, an ideal figure detaches itself from reality. Love becomes a lofty love intoxication, and a new poem struggles from Goethe's breast. This was the case with Friederike in Sesenheim, with Lili in Frankfurt, with Frau von Stein, with Christiane, his wife, and finally with the women who entered his life late in life: Marianne Willemer and Ulrike von Levetzow. In each case, it is the love of a noble, idealistic person, not that of a bon vivant. My esteemed and beloved teacher, Professor Karl Julius Schröer in Vienna, rightly says:

There is a piety in love again, as there was among the Greeks, and thus it is free of frivolity. If that de-divinized love is selfish, then this love, which is based on devotion, is the only passion that is free of selfishness.

To understand the truly spiritual nature of Goethe's love, one need only take a look at his often-challenged relationship with Frau von Stein. How did he see this woman, who led a life of renunciation, who did not want to be taken into account by anyone, who demanded nothing for herself but bestowed benefits on all around her? He writes about her, she appears to him

like a goddess ascending to heaven. In vain that a human being stretches out his arms to her, that his eye craves a glance. She floats, lost in the heavenly radiance that surrounds her, to heaven.

And when we see the calming and blissful effect that this woman has on the young man, who enters Weimar's life full of the most furious passions in his chest, full of high spirits and excessive joy, then we can well understand his devotion to her exalted femininity. Who does not know the follies, the high-spirited pranks that Goethe and his ducal friend played in Weimar, but who does not also know the deep need in both of them to break out of this high-spiritedness and move on to a higher life! It was in such moods that Goethe wrote verses like these:

What is the use of all the pain and pleasure? Sweet peace, come, oh come into my heart!

The sweet peace is brought to him by “the soother”, as he called his wife von Stein. Goethe's relationship with Christiane was also pure and noble. How tender is the following gesture: when he once finds her asleep in the room, he sits down very quietly beside her, lays a fruit and a flower in front of her and is enchanted by the thought that when she wakes up, she will immediately direct her gaze to the things that his loving hand has placed there. And how deeply his words touch our hearts when he speaks them as the one he loves is snatched from him by death: “The only gain of my life now is to mourn her death.” Marianne Willemer is the figure to whom we owe the most magnificent songs in the “Diwan”. Again, we have here the stirring of the poetic mood through the power of love. Even in his eighties, he writes his “Elegy” in the “Trilogy of Passion” out of the glow of passion and the imagination refreshed by the source of holy love, in which, so to speak, an apotheosis of love in the truly Goethean sense is contained. If we understand this magnificent poem, addressed to Ulrike von Levetzow, then we have the key to Goethe's love life in general. Ulrike von Levetzow was a young woman at the time, who was with her mother in Marienbad, where the poet was also staying. He was enchanted by her grace. Once again he was to feel all the bliss and sorrow of love, once again he was to heap the joys and sorrows of the earth on his bosom. The elegy contains the following: The poet has said goodbye; the bliss of the last kiss is still in his heart, and he finds the farewell difficult, he looks up at the sky, from which the star of day, the sun, has also already said goodbye. He sees clouds passing by, and his imagination transforms them into figures, changing figures of his beloved. He wants to hold on to her for a moment; but soon he remembers that the true image of his beloved can only be in his heart. And now he revives this image.

The rift with nature, as it occurs and must occur in man, can lead to bitter degeneration. That which he has lost slumbers in him as an irrepressible yearning, like a homeland that we have lost. Only love can bridge this yearning, only love can balance the conflict of nature that has been touched. If this love does not occur, then man remains for life a renegade, a being who has become estranged from his primal power and wanders a wrong path through life. Blind, selfish passions will then take the place of love. He who at first consumed himself in longing will seek to deaden himself in the frenzy of degrading sensual pleasure. He will never be able to see what is excellent, because, as Schiller said, there is only one power in the face of excellence: love. There you have the necessity of love derived from human nature. If we abolish love, we have done away with the divine self, or, because we cannot do that, we have turned away from the divine. But we carry out this apostasy when we alienate woman from her true nature, when we deprive her of her destiny of being the mediator of the divine, of nature, which appears directly naive. It is no coincidence that the emancipation movement first emerged in those European countries where love in the noble sense, as understood by the Germanic peoples, never took root. Where woman knows that she has her part to play in the whole process of human development in a way that corresponds to her nature rather than to his, and where she knows that she will be recognized and honored by the male world for her work, she does not strive beyond what is allotted to her in the plan of the world. It is a higher vision that seeks satisfaction in the harmony of different forces of action, and a lower one that would like to make everything the same. It is preferably the ideal side of culture that woman is the bearer and propagator of. What can be the reasons that should push woman out of her present position, out of the boundaries that history has drawn for her?

Firstly, the urge not to lag behind man in intellectual education and insight. Secondly, the urge not to be indebted to man for what provides her with the real basis for life.

When I consider that it was so often sensible, imaginative mothers who stood at the cradle of great men, when I look at the old woman Rat herself, Goethe's mother, who first stimulated the poetic sense of young Wolfgang by telling her fairy tales, it seems to me that this can easily be explained by the idea I have just developed about women's nature. If the divine power of nature is more purely and unadulteratedly expressed in women than in men, then it is plausible that the living influence of the mother on a person must be most fruitful at that age where everything is is still nature, everything is still naive, the heart is still whole and the head is not yet at all, the spirit has not yet broken away from its source, from nature, the division between idea and reality has not yet taken place, in a word: in childhood. Here lies a tremendous cultural influence that women have on the development of humanity, an influence that is more valuable than that which they can ever exert as doctors, civil servants or writers.

If there is talk of the practical significance of the invisible, particularly of the invisible in the human being, I would like to illustrate by a comparison what I meant. Those people are practical who turn their look, their view to the supersensible view of existence, and those are impractical who stop at the only exterior, at the mere physical. Is anybody, actually, the true practitioner who has a horseshoe-shaped iron as a magnet before himself and uses this thing for anything that appears useful to him by all appearances? On the other hand, is such a person not impractical in the true sense of the word, and practical only someone who says to himself: in this piece of iron something rests that makes a lot of higher, nobler application possible to me than the mere inspection allows to suppose.—This is, of course, only a comparison, because we are not allowed to compare the higher forces about which we speak today with any natural force. However, practical is only someone who chooses the internal forces from the things and can use the things corresponding to their true values. Compared with those who can be led by a certain practical sense one could quote Fichte's word of the practical significance of ideals. Fichte (Johann Gottlieb F., 1762–1814) tried to explain the determination of the human being using high ideals.

In the introduction to his lectures on The Vocation of the Scholar (1794), he protests that none who speaks from such high idealistic viewpoints knows what can be objected to it, namely, that ideals cannot be shown directly in practical life. Perhaps, those who put up these ideals know this better than the opponents do. “We state only that reality has to be assessed and modified according to them by those who feel sufficient strength in themselves. Assumed, they could also not convince themselves, they lose very little, after they are once what they are; and, besides, humanity loses nothing. It becomes thereby only obvious that one does not count on them in the plan of the improvement of humanity. This will continue its way without any doubt; the benevolent nature may provide for them rain and sunshine, wholesome food and undisturbed circulation of humours at the proper time and—clever thoughts as well!” I want to point to this in particular. We briefly want to imagine the invisible members of the human nature. Spiritual science speaks of these invisible members of the human nature, but not as of anything that is there, as of an adjunct of the visible, but it speaks just of the spiritual as of the creative of the visible.

An almost obvious example is the following: everybody—also someone who cannot see into in the workshop of spiritual life—should imagine the senses of shame and anxiety repeatedly, so that he learns to believe that the supersensible is the reason of the sensuous. What are they? They are soul experiences undoubtedly to someone who does not think complicatedly. Anything, we must say, is there that threatens us; the soul feels threatened. This expresses itself as sensations of fear. Indeed, we could state various physical mediations. This would be easy, of course, and the modern researcher would hardly be able to state anything that the spiritual scientist would not know, too. Nevertheless, the matter is that the blood is forced back from the surface of the body to the centre.

We have a material process resulting from a soul process. The same is the case with the sense of shame. Again, we have a rearrangement of the blood, a change of the circulation caused by something spiritual. What one sees here in microcosm and what one can observe to a bigger extent, if because of a sad event tears are shed shows that the soul can cause bodily processes. Today, of course, there are people under the influence of our not evidently but latently materialistic way of thinking who also assert materialistic views here. I have also quoted the sentence of a certain worldview: one cries not because one is sad, but one is sad because one cries. This sentence came, actually, from somebody who thought idealistically, but one interpreted it wrong.

These are full-grown materialistic ways of thinking. Who has retained a piece of healthy thinking from the materialistic basis of our time sees in such evident connections between physical facts and spiritual-mental facts something that can make him gradually understand that spiritual science must say from its point of view: everything material has a spiritual origin.

Thus, something mental forms the basis of that which we see in the human being, what we can seize with hands with him. It is not the influence of the physical but just the primal ground of the physical. We call that a physical body in the human being, which he has in common with all beings surrounding him, which he has in common with the mineral world. The next, supersensible human member is the etheric body or life body. It prevents the physical body to being a corpse during the whole life, to following the principles of the physical only. Plants and animals also have such an etheric body, which one can deduce by thinking of someone who thinks philosophically only. It is real to the clairvoyant like the physical body.

A spiritual way of thinking defends itself with pleasure to understand the human body as a machine, however, does not need to defend itself if one is not a “carriage pusher of thinking from within.” One can absolutely say, the human body is a complex mechanism if one wants to include the physical and chemical in the mechanic. However, behind any machine, a builder and preserver must be, so also here, and this is the etheric body or life body, that is a loyal fighter against decay. Only at death, it separates from the physical body, and then the physical body follows as a corpse its physical laws. Then it is a corpse. The etheric body is something more certain than the mere physical body.

If we keep on studying the human being, we get to another member of his being, which every human being could already realise if he said to himself, I face a human being, a physical body, and an etheric body. Is there nothing else included in this human being than what one can see from without, what physiology et cetera disclose to us? Oh, there is something else: the sum of emotions, sensations, desires and wishes, pains and sufferings, impulses and passions.

All that represents the astral body. Now one could say, nevertheless, one cannot imagine that these things form a concluded reality. However, the spiritual scientist can perceive this clairvoyantly. There the astral body exists as the physical body exists. Nevertheless, the healthy human mind could also already say to itself that such a thing as an astral body must be there. Why could it say that to itself? I want to give you an example where, so to speak, with hands is to be seized how the astral body works, actually. There are people who say when the human being enters the physical world; he is not yet as developed as later. The external science can determine that, indeed, the senses and their organs exist in the brain that, however, the connections of the single senses in the brain develop relatively late. One can really study how the connecting nerve cords develop from the hearing to the facial sphere and make the human being the thinker finally. So—the materialist concludes—one sees how the internal parts develop bit by bit and then the world of sensations, images, sufferings, joys, complexes of thought et cetera flashes in the human being.—Imagine this development of the human brain. The complex lines of thought, which solve the world riddles, develop bit by bit. Are we then allowed to call that a mere mechanism which has developed, which builds itself up?

One can also admire a marvellous construction, as for example that of a clock. However, he would be a fool who wanted to believe that the clock has originated by itself. Who is able to do something, can develop only what he is able to do. Someone who had seconds, minutes, the principles of the clock in himself has joined it; one has thought ahead what we then reflect. Is there nothing that joins these connecting cords in the brain in such a way that you become a thinker finally? I mean, a healthy thinking would have to realise that for that which develops a master builder must exist who joins the cords, so that you can become a thinker. We are loyal only to ourselves and to our healthy human mind if we say, an astral body has to have constructed the physical brain. In the first weeks, months, years of the child, the astral body constructs the instrument only, which is able later to solve the world riddles. Who does not believe this, acts just as anybody who wants to use a machine, but denies that a constructor was there who has built it. The time will already come when again healthy judgments prevail in the human being, when they say to themselves that first the spiritual master builder must be there if anything should originate. This master builder has been already there before the human being is born.

The third human member is this astral body, that which forms the basis of the material again. The fourth human member is the ego, which makes the human being the crown of creation. The human being has the physical body in common with all minerals, the etheric body with all plants, and the astral body with the animals. He rises above the three physical realms by the ego. Therefore, all religions have probably directed their attention to the fact that there is only one name, which differs from all other. There is one thing that can be never called from the outside: this is in us as our core. No name can come from without that signifies us. Therefore, “I” was in the old Hebrew religion the inexpressible name that was inexpressible for all others.

These are the four lower members of the human nature from which only one is visible. The three others are real, are the primal grounds of the real. Any member is a basic being and cause for the next lower body; the ego-bearer for the astral body, the astral body for the etheric body, the etheric body for the physical body. Any experience of the ego imprints itself on the astral body. Here all experiences of the ego express themselves. Any momentary imagining, judging and feeling originate in the human being that way.

What lives in the astral body, expresses itself, imprints itself on the etheric or life body, and thereby it becomes permanent, not momentary, but keeps itself in a certain way. Let us assume that we pass momentary judgment; we make a mental picture about this or that. If we form a mental picture repeatedly, it becomes a habitual mental picture. Because it becomes a habitual image, it imprints itself in the etheric body. What lives in our memory, what we keep in mind from day to day, lives in our etheric body or life body. The fact that we play a piano piece once is in our astral body; the fact that we acquire the talent, the habit of playing is in the etheric body. All habits are in the etheric body or life body. If we pass moral judgment, it is again an action of the astral body. If a certain direction of judging imprints itself on us by repeated judgments, the moral judgment becomes a permanent once, it becomes conscience. The moral judgment is an experience of the astral body; the conscience is an experience of the etheric body or life body. Thus, we see how by the interaction of the higher members with the lower ones the whole human life builds itself up from within outwardly.

As far as the human being is a mere physical being, he has the etheric body or life body in common with the plants. What allows the humours to ascend in the plants, what causes that they subsist, reproduce, this causes the same in the human being. However, on this etheric body or life body custom, skill, conscience is imprinted top-down. Something mental-spiritual is imprinted on the human beings top-down. The experiences of the higher members are transferred more and more to the lower members. It is important for the human being to know that the higher members work into the denser members. Thus, the human being can work into the lower members in healthy, practical way.

The human being can ruin again, what nature has given him. As with the plant only malformation could originate if the etheric body or life body did not regulate what goes forward, an internal malformation originates in the human being if he works wrong inside, from the ego on the lower members. The astral body must be penetrated by the experiences of the ego in a healthy way. Who does not admit that an astral body builds on the brain of the child will also not realise how important it is that the ego has a proper effect on the astral body. Who realises this, however, says to himself, you are able to keep on working where nature has stopped. If you allow the whole scale of sensations to take place in healthy way, this continues working on your physical body, on your brain, and thus you build up your physical body during your whole life.

How many human beings walk around today with writer's spasm? The human body is wonderfully constructed. The human being adjusts his hand with everything that he does to the world outdoors. This cooperation of the hand with the outside goes adrift in certain ways from him if he is not able to set his hand aglow, to invigorate it with his inner life. This is a similar process, as if one gets artificial teeth. It is essential that all that we can get as our own is set aglow and invigorated by our ego. You get trembling hands only if the hands go adrift from the remaining forces to some degree. These are matters which one takes into consideration most intensely again in a not so distant future, and then one will realise what it means to grasp the spirit of the human being again.

I want to make clear this at an example. We remain in our field. It will become apparent how that which happens in the spirit really seizes the human being and makes him suitable or unsuitable for life, practical or impractical. Let us take a person who is impractical for life because he suffers from certain sensations of anxiety, so that thereby nervousness originates. This word already sounds the whole sum of lacking practice. Any human being who does not control himself completely in any respect is characterised as nervous, or one uses the catchword of genetic predisposition if anything is absent or exists that makes the human being impractical for life. All these things do not originate from a careful observation of the real facts, but because one has no palate for the spiritual due to the materialistic way of thinking.

It is important to pursue whether in the first times of life, when the invisible works so intensely on the visible, everything proceeds properly and is not disturbed. What is omitted here cannot be corrected later. If something is not formed well enough, the manifold discrepancies originate in the whole life. The human being, who is not able to let harmonising experiences surge up and down in the astral body, will always make himself impractical for life in certain ways. Instead of searching for genetic predispositions of fear and anxiety, we should rather look for something that is formed by this or that experience which has a solidifying effect on the physical body. It could be, for example,—however, it needs not always be in such a way—that a considerable part of claustrophobia was caused possibly by a particular way of parenting in the human being. He does not get loose from this evil because he lacks the means to stir it up again. Imagine children who recognise all festivities, actually, all the year round, only because they are showered with presents! They receive more than they can destroy. This abundance of undeserved gifts immobilises certain striving forces, which would generate healthy self-assurance. Such a thing can slumber in the human being during the time when the external education fulfils him or a new occupation absorbs him; but this appears once in the form of claustrophobia.

One cannot realise this if one does not understand what it means that the astral body changes itself bit by bit into that which the human being is in his physical, discernible behaviour. On the other hand, we can find—if particular states of unsuitability appear anyhow—that something presses on his soul. He cannot say it, cannot confess it, and thinks to have to conceal it. Because the human being does not find the way to the word, it seizes the lower members and works on them. What a soothing effect experiences the human being if he can confess such a thing! Then he has the feeling, now it is no longer lying on my heart like a stone, and this feeling of relief works recovering. Confession is an important remedy in this respect. The denominations have known this well. There we realise how the invisible inside of the human being works on the visible. Even certain reasonable doctors already realise that one cannot cure unsuitability for practical life by systematic application of cold water (Kneipp cure), but in such a way that one has to induce a kind of confession, has to detach something from the human being if healing should take place.

We want to look at the reverse now. There are reasonable doctors who say to themselves, one has to turn to the soul of the human being if one wants to know how the human being becomes unsuitable in certain respects. These doctors know that joy and desire are remedies, that they work recovering, that they soften again, what is solidified and ossified, and bring it under our control. However, this is not enough, just as little as it is enough if anybody says, the concealed secret must be detached from the soul of the human being. They do not know that everything that is experience of the inside has a big significance even if it appears wrong. Should we cancel everything mysterious in the human nature because it appears wrong with some persons? Should we make the doctors father confessors, as it one demands here and there? It can also be infinitely recovering for the soul if it is able to draw the veil of secret about some things. A Persian saying says, one saves the time that one uses for silent reflection, before one says something, in relation to the time of remorse about that which one has said thoughtlessly! Goethe pronounced the word of the “obvious secret” not without reason. In everything sensuous that surrounds us, we can realise something mysterious, something that lies so deeply in the things and that one cannot pronounce; however, it still flows from soul to soul. Health spreads out if the human being can feel the secret of life that way.

Spiritual science maintains this secret of life. Indeed, it does not make it easy for the human beings to approach the things. It is not so comfortable to approach them. Spiritual science can only stimulate, only say, this and that exists. Then the human being has to approach and co-operate. It may be uncomfortable, but it is infinitely healthy. The innermost member of the human being is thereby stimulated; spiritual science works immediately on the ego. If we hear anything about the evolution of the planets, if to us is told about the invisible members of the human nature, what goes from life to life with the human being—with all that one appeals immediately to the ego. All these world-enclosing ideas do not remain dry ideas and abstractions. They emit warmth and bliss; warmth and bliss irradiate and penetrate the astral body of the human being. Contentment and bliss originate from that which spiritual science offers. What sets the human being aglow as warmth, as fire keeps moving to his life body. The forces of spiritual science itself penetrate all forces of the etheric body, and the etheric body transfers the forces again to the physical body, it transfers it as a skill, in such a way that, for example, the hand becomes dexterous and practical if the great, elated ideas of spiritual science flow into the physical body.

Spiritual science makes the brain a flexible, pliable tool, so that it can get away from prejudices. Spiritual science works strongly down until the physical body of the human being. Up to the practical movements, he can be immersed in spiritual science. I want to give you an example of that. It helps, indeed, if one makes gymnastics possible to the child. This is an exceptionally healthy exercise if one makes it properly. Already in the talk on education, I have drawn your attention to the fact that it is important to remain aware that the human being is not only a physical apparatus, but is spiritualised by higher members. One should be able to project oneself completely into doing gymnastics to share any emotion of the etheric and the astral bodies. I knew a gym teacher, who was a big theorist. He knew the human physical body to a hair's breadth. He also had to give theoretical physical education. It does not matter that one knows the physical exactly, but that he experiences an increase of the inner ease with any exercise. One should experience purposefully what should be the single exercise. Who has a living feeling, not only an abstract idea of the physical body knows that one can have a living feeling for everything that the child experiences, for example, while climbing up a ladder.

A sort of gymnastics is imaginable that works so harmoniously on the cooperation of the etheric and the physical bodies that the best basis is laid of a good memory in old age. In addition, that which takes action visibly is properly understood only if it is understood from spiritual science. We would have the best means against the dwindling memory in old age in gymnastics if one wanted to do physical education from spiritual science.

Spiritual science is no theory, nothing dogmatic, but bestows something living to life. Once one will realise that only by spiritual science the human being can become a true practitioner of life. Someone only is a practical person who can use this life who is not its slave. The human being should always control his outer nature with his invisible members. The human being becomes a practitioner only down to the last detail of his life if he is the guide of the bodily. That human being is a practical person who can understand out of a true understanding of his members what Fichte said, but what is often misunderstood. This will be the ideal of the human being if he controls the visible from his invisible again: “The human being can what he has to do; and if he says: I cannot, he does not want it.”

Yesterday I tried to show how the confusion in dreams arises from the fact that during sleep a man crosses the so-called Threshold unconsciously or half-consciously. Leaving the physical world of the senses, he enters the spiritual world and there encounters three worlds—a memory of the ordinary physical world, the soul world, and the real world of spirit. Events both inward and outward, experienced in our ordinary earthly life, are gathered together from what these three worlds reveal. But they are split apart when in sleep we enter the super-sensible world, and what we experience is not then related to the world where it belongs. That is why, for the usual memory-consciousness, deceptions and illusions arise in dreams. Imaginative consciousness does not see the dream merely in this way, but makes it an object of observation, just as we look towards a distant point in physical space—though now, with Imagination, we look towards something distant in time. We do not simply remember what is dreamt; we look at it, and so for the first time we arrive at a true conception of what a dream is. Thus we find how a dream is interpreted rightly only when we do not relate it to the physical, naturalistic world, but to the spiritual—above all, in most cases, to the moral world. The dream will never tell what it is expressing if its content is given a physical interpretation, but only when the interpretation is in accordance with the spiritually moral.

To illustrate this, let us turn to the confusion of the dream I told you about yesterday—the dream in which someone going for a walk is suddenly overcome with shame at finding himself without clothes in a crowded street. I remarked how the whole mood of soul in dream-consciousness is due to our confronting three different worlds. Looking at a dream of this kind in the right way, however, we see that although its content appears to belong to the realm of the senses, yet through this medium the spiritual-moral is seeking to reveal itself. Hence, anyone having such a dream ought not to look at the immediate, symbolical course it takes, but should ask himself: Haven't I sometimes had a tendency in daytime consciousness not to be completely truthful about myself with others? Haven't I perhaps been too fond of following the fashion in what I wear—altogether too apt to take refuge in convention? Is it not a characteristic of mine to give people a false impression of what I really am?

When anyone lets his thoughts take this course, he gradually arrives at the moral, spiritual interpretation of the dream. He says to himself: When during sleep I was in the super-sensible world, I met with spiritual beings there—they told me that I should not be present in a cloak of falsehood, but as I really am inwardly, in soul and spirit.

When we interpret dreams in this way, we come to their moral, spiritual truth. A whole host of dreams can be interpreted thus.

People of an older chapter in history, who even in the dreamy symbolism of sleep were conscious of the Guardian of the Threshold, took to heart his warning not to carry with them what belongs to the physical world of the senses when they enter the spiritual world. Had these men dreamt they had no clothes on in the street, it would never have occurred to them that they ought to have been ashamed; this is something that holds good for the physical world, for a man's physical body. They would have given heed to the warning that what holds good for the physical does not hold good in the spiritual world, and that what appears in the spiritual world is being said to human beings by the Gods. A dream, therefore, had to be interpreted as an utterance of the Gods. Only during the course of human evolution have dreams come to be interpreted in a naturalistic sense.

Or let us take another common dream. The dreamer is going along a path that leads him into a wood. After a while he realises that he has lost his way and cannot go any further. He tries to do so, but the path comes to an end and trees block the way. He begins to feel uneasy.

Now in ordinary consciousness this dream is easily taken at its face value. But if on thinking over it we forget all naturalistic associations, the spiritual world will say to us: This confusion you have met with is in your own thoughts. In waking consciousness, however, people are often loath to admit how confused their thinking is and how easily they reach a point where they can make no progress but only go round in a circle. This inclination is particularly characteristic of our present civilisation. People consider themselves enlightened thinkers, but in reality they dance around in a circle with their thoughts—either about conventional trivialities or about atoms, which are intellectual constructions of their own. In ordinary consciousness, naturally, they are not disposed to admit this.

In a series of symbolical pictures the dream brings out a man's true nature, and it is spiritual beings who are speaking through it. When anyone takes his dream experience in the right way, his self-knowledge will be greatly enhanced.

Another common human characteristic is that people allow themselves to be led by their instincts and impulses to do what is most congenial to them. For example, they find pleasure in doing something or other, but they are not ready to admit that they are doing it for their own satisfaction. They invent some way of interpreting it differently for their ordinary consciousness—they say perhaps that they are doing it for anthroposophical or occult or esoteric reasons, connected with a high mission or something of that sort. With this kind of self-justification they cover up—and this occurs with extraordinary frequency—an endless amount of all that rules and rages in the depths of our animal life. A dream—which wishes to reveal through symbolical pictures the forces which really hold sway even in the soul and spirit of the dreamer—may present a picture of the man pursued by wild beasts and trying vainly to escape. We shall interpret truly the moral significance of such a dream, not by looking at its outward events, but by accepting the self-knowledge it offers us. We have to recognise it as a warning to search for the inner truth about our own nature and to consider whether this does not resemble—if only slightly—animal instinct rather than what we ideally conjure up.

Hence it is possible for dreams to warn people in countless ways and to set them right. When a dream is related in the true way to the higher world, it can have a guiding influence on a man's life, and then, when the stage of conscious Imagination is reached, one can see how the dream, which at first naturally offers even to Imaginative knowledge pictures drawn from the sense-world, is metamorphosed entirely into moral-spiritual happenings.

Thus we see how the dream can be said to lead ordinary consciousness into the spiritual world, if only it is taken in the right way. But I have said also that on raising ourselves through Imagination to the spiritual world, we are not in the same state of soul as during our life here on Earth. In this life, I stand here, the table is there outside me; there is a physical gap between me and the table. The moment I enter the spiritual world, this separation ceases. I no longer stand here with the table over there; it is as if my whole being were spreading out over the table and the table were taking me into itself. In the spiritual world we sink right into whatever we perceive. Hence our experience, either in dreams or consciously in Imagination, should not be related merely to our inner life, but we can speak in a spiritual-scientific sense if we say with the poet that the whole world is woven out of dreams. It is certainly not woven out of the play of atoms, which is a dream of the scientists, but out of what I have described as the “chaos” of the Greeks, out of the weaving of our dreams and of our conscious Imagination. I have called it both subjective and objective, for the world is not woven purely subjectively; but we have to explain certain aspects of the world as being woven out of dreams.

For example, if we are looking at a seed, we should not be content to explain it by the laws of physics and chemistry. A scientist who sees nothing more than those laws in a seed, or in an embryo, cannot possibly explain them; for nature is dreaming in seed and embryo—their very essence is the weaving life of a dream. Take the seed of a plant—in it a dream is living and weaving. You can never enter into this with the intellect, for that is limited to nature's laws; you must approach it with the human faculty which lives otherwise in a dream or in conscious Imagination.

The same kind of dreaming that lives thus in the seed is active also in our whole organism throughout our life on Earth. Hence we should not look in our organism merely for the working of chemical and physical forces. When a man is there before us physically, we have to look upon him in his external physical form as a being who is living just for a time in the physical world of the senses. Behind him lives something else, invisible to the eye, inaudible to the ear, in so far as these are physical. But it can be perceived in Imagination, and also in what can be experienced in the unconscious Imagination of a dream. In the whole of a man's body nature is dreaming. Nature's way of thinking is not like man's intellectual thinking—it is a dreaming. Out of this dreaming the forces of our digestion and of our growth are guided, and everything is given form.

When we look back in earthly existence we generally start from this age—what shall we call this age of ours? We could take one of its symptoms and call it the age of the typewriter. Thus we go back from this age of the typewriter to the time when printing was first introduced; and going still further back we come perhaps to the time of the Romans, to the time of the Greeks, and then we arrive at the age in the East from which the Vedic records come. We are then left with no external documents. Many treasures have been excavated from the tombs of the Egyptian kings, but we still come at last to a time with no records, where we have to rely on Imaginative and Inspired spiritual knowledge. There we meet with a frontier beyond which, for ordinary consciousness, the past is vague, very much as sleep lies beyond the dream. By going back in this way through the temporal evolution of the world, we come in fact to that dream-veil we can experience every night.

If we reach that point with conscious Imagination, the further past lights up in a spiritual way. But it appears different from the world we learn about intellectually and from ancient records. This remote past in world-evolution, lying behind a veil of dreams, reveals man in direct connection with divine Spirits. He is himself still a divine soul-being; and the divine-spiritual Beings, whose destiny does not include entering an earthly body, meet together with him while he awaits his incarnation on earth.

When, therefore, we look back through history to this veil of chaos, to the dream-veil of which we have been speaking during the last few days, we see the divine Spirits foregathering with the still spiritual souls of men destined to dwell on Earth.

Moreover, we shall see how these things, connected as they are with human evolution, are at the same time connected with cosmic evolution. Where in a remote past this veil appears to Inspired Imagination, we see, too, how within cosmic evolution—of which we shall have to speak more precisely—the Moon, previously united with the Earth, detaches itself and goes out into cosmic space, there to circle the Earth. Thus we gaze back on a dream-veil, a veil of Imagination, and looking through it we find the Earth united with the Moon, and human beings in direct contact with divine-spiritual Beings. When this dream-veil appears to the retrospective gaze of Imagination, we perceive the momentous cosmic event of the Moon, in a quite different form, sliding out of the Earth and going forth into cosmic space as a separate body. So we look further back to the evolution of the Earth, of mankind, and of the world, when these were all united with the Moon. Man was already there, but as a being of soul and spirit only.

As we gaze further and further back, we find no epoch in cosmic evolution when man was not there, at least in some primal form. So that, from the standpoint of Spiritual Science, we cannot say that for millions of years the Earth was evolving merely inorganically or with creatures of a lower order, with man emerging only after that. We find man in a different form connected at every stage with that cosmic evolution to which we look back when, behind the veil of chaos and the dream, we can rise through conscious Imagination to that which appears to us as the divine-spiritual essence of the world.

As I have said, when we look at a seed or anything in an embryonic state, Imaginative cognition reveals in it the weaving of a dream. We see how something real, though expressed in dream-pictures, holds sway over the material part of the seed. Anyone able to perceive the spiritual in the world will find it everywhere, though in a great variety of forms. It is precisely the spiritual that goes through the most varied metamorphoses. And when we have thoroughly grasped how in the seed of a plant, in the embryo of an animal, this real dream-weaving prevails, we are justified in asking: How is it, then, with the apparently dead world of the minerals? If here we look out of the window or go along the street, we see the bare hills, a world that seems entirely lifeless, and the question at once arises: If in any plant seed we pick up there is a dream-picture ruling, how is it with these rocky mountainous masses, and with all the lifeless substance that forms the ground we tread on in the physical world? If in the plants we see the ruling of spirit, which in the weaving of a dream seizes with comparative ease upon the material element, so in the same way through Imaginative cognition we find the spiritual in these rocky masses, but here the spiritual consists of individual spiritual beings.

These spiritual beings, however, are in a state not of dreaming but of deep sleep. When you look at these rocks and hills you must not think of them as permeated by a slumbering amorphous mist; you should think of individual spiritual beings sleeping there. Presently we shall see how these spiritual beings have come into existence through having been split off from higher beings with a higher consciousness. We shall see how they themselves, having in their present state only a sleep-consciousness, are the result of that separation, and how these elemental beings are asleep everywhere out there in the inanimate world. When we walk over this mountainous mass of rock, we should be aware that all around us there slumbers the creative weaving of the spirit in concrete form. And when we enter further into the sleeping of the spirit-weaving forms in the lifeless world, we become aware in these elemental beings of a certain mood. Imagination shows us these beings, but it is Inspiration that teaches us about their mood. In these elementals of the mountains, the rocks, and the soil, there lives what we can discover in ourselves when we are waiting for something with justified expectation. The weaving and creating of soul and spirit in the seemingly lifeless rocks is permeated by this same expectant mood.

In fact, these beings are waiting to awake from deep sleep into a state of dreaming. We learn this through Inspiration, and more particularly when we enter right into these beings through Intuition. All that confronts us out there, in those hills, is expecting that one day it will be able to dream, and so with dream-consciousness to take hold of earthly substance that is ground down into lifeless matter, and from these rocks and hills to conjure forth once more as embryos, as seeds, living plants. It is indeed these beings who bring before our souls a wonderful magic of nature, a creating from out of the spirit.

And so, as we go about here among these rocks and look at them in the physical light they reflect, they can reveal to us, not in any symbolical sense but as real knowledge, how they are now sleeping, how in the future they will be dreaming, and how, later still, they will come to the fully awake life of elemental nature-beings, who will one day become beings of pure spirit.

The physical material in a plant is still in a condition accessible to the dream-weaving of the spirit. In the rocks, matter is crumbling away. Looking back with Imagination and Inspiration, we realise how everything lifeless has arisen from the living. It is when the living becomes lifeless that the sleeping spirituality can sink into it. This sleeping spirit waits in the lifeless until it can wake into dreams and lead over the lifeless into cosmic embryonic life.

Now the various parts of the Earth show in different ways this sleep of spiritual beings in the mountains, in the firm crust of the Earth. It might be said: The sleep of beings awaiting their future is different in regions such as this from their sleep in other parts of the Earth. Here in Penmaenmawr we find that the particular configuration of the Earth, and the historical character of the rocks, enable these sleeping beings to rise to the aeriform, to interweave even with the light, while in other parts of the Earth this has long ceased to be so. Thus it is that here, if we look on the weaving as due not to the aerial atmosphere alone, but to the prevailing soul-atmosphere, which permeates the air just as the human soul permeates a man's body, then in Penmaenmawr we find that this soul-element in the atmosphere is different from elsewhere. I will give just one example to make this clear.

Suppose that in a certain region Imaginative cognition exerts itself to call up an Imagination of what is really going on there. This Imagination may be more or less easy or difficult to hold on to, for the possibility of retaining an Imagination in consciousness varies in different regions. Here we are in a region where Imaginations continue for a remarkably long time and so are able to become very vivid.

The wise men of the Druids, or others of that kind, sought out regions for their temples and sanctuaries where the conditions were such as to allow Imaginations to remain and not immediately to vanish away like clouds. Hence we can understand how it was that such centres for the holy places of the Druids were still sought for up to comparatively recent times. In this region it has always been felt that the difficulty of holding an Imagination is not so great as in other places. Everything, of course, has a light side and a shadow side. When an Imagination remains, Inspiration is made harder, though it gains in strength. Because of that, whatever the spiritual world has to say in this place streams down with—one might say—greater intensity, but in words which are weightier and more difficult.

Therefore, even where the spiritual is in question, differentiations are to be found throughout the Earth. A map might be drawn indicating the places where, for Imaginative consciousness, there is no difficulty in holding Imaginations. Those regions where they soon pass away could be given a different colour, and we should get an extraordinarily interesting map of the Earth. For the prevailing character of soul-atmosphere here, we should need a particularly strong colour—a sparkling, shining colour, full of life.

Hence I fully believe that those taking part in this lecture-course will be able to perceive here something of what I would call the esoteric mood of the elementals. It looks in at the windows, meets us on our walks, in fact is present everywhere in a quite special way. I am particularly grateful to the organisers of the course for having thus chosen a spot where the esoteric may be said to meet one at every turn. It does so indeed in other places, but not with the same ease and directness. So I am especially thankful for the choice of this place, out of many possible for the holding of a course such as this. From the point of view of the subjects discussed, this course may be said to take its place, in a wonderfully beautiful way, in the whole evolution of the Anthroposophical Movement.

It will be clear from the descriptions I have been giving you that between the physical world of the senses and the spiritual, super-sensible world, there is a barrier which with a certain rightness we call the Threshold of the spiritual world.

I have already pointed out in various ways how necessary it is that we should be able to cross this Threshold, and we have still to speak about it in greater detail. But you will have gathered already from my lectures that in older periods of human evolution this crossing of the Threshold was a rather different matter from what it is at the present day. In those ancient times people were able to cross in another way because even by day their consciousness was dreamlike, but for that very reason more alive to the super-sensible. Thus, in the way I have pictured, they passed the Guardian of the Threshold half-consciously, dreamily, both on going to sleep and on waking.

Here we can see a transition from men of an older type, with little freedom, to those who were becoming increasingly free. This former determinism was bound up with the fact that on going to sleep, and on awaking, men had some perception of the Guardian of the Threshold, who stood there giving warning. Now, in place of this unfree situation, we have the incapacity of present-day consciousness to see into the spiritual world, which signifies an increasing freedom: herein lies a principle of human progress.

Hence we can say that, looked at from the spiritual world, people have lost a great deal precisely because in the course of their evolution they have had to be led towards freedom. What has been lost, however, must be regained, in the way that Anthroposophy, for example, would show. And now is the historical point of time when a striving to regain what has been lost must begin.

But everywhere, among people of very various kinds, there still rises up something inherited from an earlier age, when man's relation to the spiritual world was different. So that to-day, in the consciousness of those given up to intellectualism, there is a strict frontier set up, as a rule, between what they experience in the world of the senses and what lies beyond in the spiritual world. The frontier is in fact so rigorously maintained that even enlightened spirits are unwilling to admit the possibility of crossing it.

In my brief sketch of the way into the super-sensible world, I have indicated that it is possible to cross the frontier and to enter that world in full consciousness. But as a relic from the time when a man entered the spiritual world in a more instinctive, unconscious way, and even in his day-consciousness had more in him of the spiritual world, there still rises up into his evolution to-day a certain heritage from the past. And this is something we must imperatively understand through conscious spiritual cognition. For, if not rightly understood, it manifests itself in many deceptive ways, and in these matters such errors can become very dangerous. Hence in the course of these lectures, intended to describe the evolution of man and of the world, I must speak about this question of a boundary, where what was natural and taken for granted among the people of former epochs re-appears to-day, and can lead to dangerous illusions in those who have not the requisite clear knowledge for dealing with it.

Among these phenomena, situated for ordinary consciousness at the frontier between the sense-world and the super-sensible, are visions. I mean the visions where, in a state of hallucination more or less controlled by the person concerned, pictures arise which have quite definite forms and colours—they may even seem to speak—but correspond to nothing external. For normal perception, the object is outside; the image, in a shadowy way within; and a person is perfectly conscious of how the shadowy, conceptual image is related to the external world. The vision arises of itself, claiming to be a reality on its own account. A person subject to such visions becomes incapable of estimating rightly what reality there is in the pictures which appear before him without his initiative.

How, then do visions come about? They come about because the human being still possesses the capacity for carrying over into his waking world what he experiences during sleep, and of bringing it into conceptual form just as he does with his sense-perceptions. Whether, after perceiving a clock that exists physically for the senses, I make an inner picture of it, or whether, after experiencing in a dream the form and inner reality of an external object, I wake up and make a picture of my experience, the only difference between the two processes is that I am in control of one of them—hence the image of it is more shadowy and flat—while the other process is outside my control. In the latter case I carry nothing of the real present into my conceptual life, but something experienced when the soul was outside in a past—perhaps long past—sleep, and out of this dream-experience I build up a vision.

In an earlier age of human evolution, when the relation of people both to the physical world and to the spiritual world was ruled by instinct, such visions were perfectly natural; it is human progress that has made them the uncontrolled, illusory things they are to-day. We must therefore be quite clear that modern man lacks something: when he has some experience in the spiritual world during sleep and is returning to the physical world, he no longer hears the warning of the Guardian of the Threshold: “All that you have experienced in the spiritual world you should note well and carry back to the physical world.” If he does carry it back, he will know what is contained in the vision. But if the vision appears to him only in the physical world, without his realising that he has brought it back from the spiritual world, so that he fails to understand what it really is, then he is without guidance, and at the mercy of illusion where his visionary experience is concerned. So we can say: Visions come about because a man carries over unawares his sleep-experience into his waking life, and in his waking life he then forms conceptions of the experiences—conceptions which are much richer in content than the ordinary shadowy ones, and these he builds up into vivid visions complete with colour and sound.

Another thing that comes about is this. A man carries over into his life of sleep the feelings and perceptions of the kind he has in physical life. Then, when he is in the act of carrying this over into the open sea of sleep-life, he is warned to be careful not to do anything foolish. If the sleep is very light—a far more common condition in ordinary life than is realised, for we are often just a little asleep when walking about quite normally, and we ought to be more aware of this—we may then, without noticing it, carry over the Threshold our everyday faculty of perception. Then arise those obscure feelings, as if one were inwardly watching something happening in the future, either to oneself or to someone else, and we have a premonition. Thus, whereas a vision comes about when experience during sleep is carried down into waking life and the threshold is crossed unconsciously, premonition comes about when we are in a light sleep without realising it and, thinking we are awake, carry over the Threshold, again ignoring the Guardian, our daytime experience. This, however, lies so deep down in the subconscious that it is not noticed. We are, of course, at all times connected with the whole world; and if we could draw this knowledge up out of the subconscious, we should be able to draw up much else also.

You will now see how, because these legacies from the evolutionary past can still be experienced, visions arise on one side of the Threshold, premonitions on the other. But a man may also halt at the Threshold and still not notice the Guardian. There may then be moments when inwardly, in his soul, he is as if he were enchanted. But the word “enchanted” does not quite meet the case, for he is not enchanted in the sense we generally associate with the term—it is rather that his attitude of soul undergoes a change. When he comes to the Threshold in such a way that he still perceives what is in the physical world while already perceiving what is in the super-sensible, he experiences something which is widespread in certain regions of the Earth—second sight, a half-conscious experience at the Threshold. Hence to sum up these legacies from the past, these phenomena in a man's life when his consciousness is dimmed, we have those appearing on this side of the Threshold as visions; those appearing beyond the Threshold as premonitions; those actually at the Threshold as second sight.

To-morrow I shall have to speak in greater detail of the characteristics of these three regions, going on from these to describe the worlds dimly indicated by vision, premonition and second sight—worlds which new knowledge will have to bring into the full clarity of enhanced consciousness.

It may seem strange that an anthroposophist should feel called upon to speak about practical training in thought, for there is a widespread opinion that Anthroposophy is highly impractical and has no connection with life. This view can only arise among those who see things superficially, for in reality what we are concerned with here can guide us in the most ordinary affairs of everyday life. It is something that can be transformed at any moment into sensation and feeling, enabling us to meet life with assurance and to acquire a firm position in it.

Many people who call themselves practical imagine that their actions are guided by the most practical principles. But if we inquire more closely, it is found that their so-called “practical thought” is often not thought at all but only the continuing pursuit of traditional opinions and habits. An entirely objective observation of the “practical” man's thought and an examination of what is usually termed “practical thinking” will reveal the fact that it generally contains little that can be called practical. What to them is known as practical thought or thinking consists in following the example of some authority whose ideas are accepted as a standard in the construction of some object. Anyone who thinks differently is considered impractical because this thought does not coincide with traditional ideas.

Whenever anything really practical has been invented, it has been done by a person without practical knowledge of that particular subject. Take, for instance, the modern postage stamp. It would be most natural to assume that it was invented by some practical post office official. It was not. At the beginning of the last century it was a complicated affair to mail a letter. In order to dispatch a letter one had to go to the nearest receiving office where various books had to be referred to and many other formalities complied with. The uniform rate of postage known today is hardly sixty years old, and our present postage stamp that makes this possible was not invented by a practical postal employee at all but by someone completely outside the post office. This was the Englishman, Rowland Hill.

After the uniform system of postage stamps had been devised, the English minister who then had charge of the mails declared in Parliament that one could not assume any simplification of the system would increase the volume of mail as the impractical Hill anticipated. Even if it did, the London post office would be entirely inadequate to handle the increased volume. It never occurred to this highly “practical” individual that the post office must be fitted to the amount of business, not the business to the size of the post office. Indeed, in the shortest possible time this idea, which an “impractical” man had to defend against a “practical” authority, became a fact. Today, stamps are used everywhere as a matter of course for sending letters.

It was similar with the railroads. When in 1837 the first railroad in Germany was to be built, the members of the Bavarian College of Medicine were consulted on the advisability of the project and they voiced the opinion that it would be unwise to build railroads. They added that if this project were to be carried out, then at least a high board fence would have to be erected on both sides of the line to protect the public from possible brain and nervous shock.

When the railroad from Potsdam to Berlin was planned, Postmaster General Stengler said, “I am now dispatching two stage coaches daily to Potsdam and these are never full. If people are determined to throw their money out the window, they can do it much more simply without building a railroad!”

But the real facts of life often sweep aside the “practical,” that is to say, those who believe in their own ability to be practical. We must clearly distinguish between genuine thinking and so-called “practical thinking” that is merely reasoning in traditional ruts of thought.

As a starting point to our consideration I will tell you of an experience I had during my student days. A young colleague once came to me glowing with the joy of one who has just hit upon a really clever idea, and announced that he must go at once to see Professor X (who at the time taught machine construction at the University) for he had just made a great discovery. “I have discovered,” he said, “how, with a small amount of steam power and by simply rearranging the machinery, an enormous amount of work can be done by one machine.” He was in such a rush to see the Professor that that was all he could tell me. He failed to find him, however, so he returned and explained the whole matter to me. It all smacked of perpetual motion, but after all, why shouldn't even that be possible? After I had listened to his explanation I had to tell him that although his plan undoubtedly appeared to be cleverly thought out, it was a case that might be compared in practice with that of a person who, on boarding a railway car, pushes with all his might and then believes when it moves that he has actually started it. “That,” I said to him, “is the thought principle underlying your discovery.” Finally, he saw it himself and did not return to the Professor.

It is thus quite possible to shut ourselves up within a shell fashioned by our own thoughts. In rare cases this can be observed distinctly, but there are many similar examples in life that do not always reach such a striking extreme as the one just cited. He who is able to study human nature more intimately, however, knows that a large number of thought processes are of this kind. He often sees, we might say, people standing in the car pushing it from within and believing that they are making it move. Many of the events of life would take a different course if people did not so often try to solve their problems by thus deluding themselves.

True practice in thinking presupposes a right attitude and proper feeling for thinking. How can a right attitude toward thinking be attained? Anyone who believes that thought is merely an activity that takes place within his head or in his soul cannot have the right feeling for thought. Whoever harbors this idea will be constantly diverted by a false feeling from seeking right habits of thought and from making the necessary demands on his thinking. He who would acquire the right feeling for thought must say to himself, “If I can formulate thoughts about things, and learn to understand them through thinking, then these things themselves must first have contained these thoughts. The things must have been built up according to these thoughts, and only because this is so can I in turn extract these thoughts from the things.”

It can be imagined that this world outside and around us may be regarded in the same way as a watch. The comparison between the human organism and a watch is often used, but those who make it frequently forget the most important point. They forget the watchmaker. The fact must be kept clearly in mind that the wheels have not united and fitted themselves together of their own accord and thus made the watch “go,” but that first there was the watchmaker who put the different parts of the watch together. The watchmaker must never be forgotten. Through thoughts the watch has come into existence. Th thoughts have flowed, as it were, into the watch, into the thing.

The works and phenomena of nature must be viewed in a similar way. In the works of man it is easy to picture this to ourselves, but with the works of nature it is not so easily done. Yet these, too, are the result of spiritual activities and behind them are spiritual beings. Thus, when a man thinks about things he only re-thinks what is already in them. The belief that the world has been created by thought and is still ceaselessly being created in this manner is the belief that can alone fructify the actual inner practice of thought.

It is always the denial of the spiritual in the world that produces the worst kind of malpractice in thought, even in the field of science. Consider, for example, the theory that our planetary system arose from a primordial nebula that began to rotate and then densified into a central body from which rings and globes detached themselves, thus mechanically bringing into existence the entire solar system. He who propounds this theory is committing a grave error of thought.

A simple experiment used to be made in the schools to demonstrate this theory. A drop of oil was made to float in a glass of water. The drop was then pierced with a pin and made to rotate. As a result, tiny globules of oil were thrown off from the central drop creating a miniature planetary system, thus proving to the pupil—so the teacher thought—that this planetary system could come into existence through a purely mechanical process.

Only impractical thought can draw such conclusions from this little experiment, for he who would apply this theory to the cosmos has forgotten one thing that it ordinarily might be well to forget occasionally, and that is himself. He forgets that it is he who has brought this whole thing into rotation. If he had not been there and conducted the whole experiment, the separation of the little globules from the large drop would never have occurred. Had this fact been observed and applied logically to the cosmic system, he then would have been using complete healthy thinking. Similar errors of thought play a great part especially in science. Such things are far more important than one generally believes.

Considering the real practice of thought, it must be realized that thoughts can only be drawn from a world in which they already exist. Just as water can only be taken from a glass that actually contains water, so thoughts can only be extracted from things within which these thoughts are concealed. The world is built by thought, and only for this reason can thought be extracted from it. Were it otherwise, practical thought could not arise. When a person feels the full truth of these words, it will be easy for him to dispense with abstract thought. If he can confidently believe that thoughts are concealed behind the things around him, and that the actual facts of life take their course in obedience to thought if he feels this, he will easily be converted to a practical habit of thinking based on truth and reality.

Let us now look at that practice of thinking that is of special importance to those who stand upon an anthroposophical foundation. The one who is convinced that the world of facts is born of thought will grasp the importance of the development of right thinking.

Let us suppose that someone resolves to fructify his thinking to such a degree that it will always take the right course in life. If he would do this, he must be guided by the following rules and he must understand that these are actual, practical and fundamental principles. If he will try again and again to shape his thinking according to these rules, certain effects will result. His thinking will become practical even though at first it may not seem so. Other additional mental experiences of quite a different kind also will come to the one who applies these fundamental principles.

Let us suppose that somebody tries the following experiment. He begins today by observing, as accurately as possible, something in the outer world that is accessible to him—for instance, the weather. He watches the configuration of the clouds in the evening, the conditions at sunset, etc., and retains in his mind an exact picture of what he has thus observed. He tries to keep the picture before him in all its details for some time and endeavors to preserve as much of it as possible until the next day. At some time the next day he again makes a study of the weather conditions and again endeavors to gain an exact picture of them.

If in this manner he has pictured to himself exactly the sequential order of the weather conditions, he will become distinctly aware that his thinking gradually becomes richer and more intense. For what makes thought impractical is the tendency to ignore details when observing a sequence of events in the world and to retain but a vague, general impression of them. What is of value, what is essential and fructifies thinking, is just this ability to form exact pictures, especially of successive events, so that one can say, “Yesterday it was like that; today it is like this.” Thus, one calls up as graphically as possible an inner image of the two juxtaposed scenes that lie apart in the outer world.

This is, so to speak, nothing else but a certain expression of confidence in the thoughts that underlie reality. The person experimenting ought not to draw any conclusions immediately or to deduce from today's observation what kind of weather he shall have tomorrow. That would corrupt his thinking. Instead, he must confidently feel that the things of outer reality are definitely related to one another and that tomorrow's events are somehow connected with those of today. But he must not speculate on these things. He must first inwardly re-think the sequence of the outer events as exactly as possible in mental pictures, and then place these images side by side, allowing them to melt into one another. This is a definite rule of thought that must be followed by those who wish to develop factual thinking. It is particularly advisable that this principle be practiced on those very things that are not yet understood and the inner connection of which has not yet been penetrated.

Therefore, the experimenter must have the confidence that such events of which he has as yet no understanding—the weather, for instance—and which in the outer world are connected with one another, will bring about connections within him. This must be done in pictures only while abstaining from thinking. He must say to himself, “I do not yet know what the relation is, but I shall let these things grow within me and if I refrain from speculation they will bring something about in me.” It may be easily believed that if he forms exact inner images of succeeding events and at the same time abstains from all thinking something may take place in the invisible members of his nature.

The vehicle of man's thought life is his astral body.¹ As long as the human being is engaged in speculative thinking, this astral body is the slave of the ego. This conscious activity, however, does not occupy the astral body exclusively because the latter is also related in a certain manner to the whole cosmos.

Now, to the extent we abstain from arbitrary thinking and simply form mental pictures of successive events, to that extent do the inner thoughts of the world act within us and imprint themselves, without our being aware of it, on our astral body. To the extent we insert ourselves into the course of the world through observation of the events in the world and receive these images into our thoughts with the greatest possible clarity, allowing them to work within us, to that extent do those members of our organism that are withdrawn from our consciousness become ever more intelligent. If, in the case of inwardly connected events, we have once acquired the faculty of letting the new picture melt into the preceding one in the same way that the transition occurred in nature, it shall be found after a time that our thinking has gained considerable flexibility.

This is the procedure to be followed in matters not yet understood. Things, however, that are understood—events of everyday life, for example—should be treated in a somewhat different manner.

Let us presume that someone, perhaps our neighbor, had done this or that. We think about it and ask ourselves why he did it. We decide he has perhaps done it in preparation for something he intends to do the next day. We do not go any further but clearly picture his act and try to form an image of what he may do, imagining that the next day he will perform such and such an act. Then we wait to see what he really does since he may or may not do what we expected of him. We take note of what does happen and correct our thoughts accordingly. Thus, events of the present are chosen that are followed in thought into the future. Then we wait to see what actually happens.

This can be done either with actions involving people or something else. Whenever something is understood, we try to form a thought picture of what in our opinion will take place. If our opinion proves correct, our thinking is justified and all is well. If, however, something different from our expectation occurs, we review our thoughts and try to discover our mistake. In this way we try to correct our erroneous thinking by calm observation and examination of our errors. An attempt is made to find the reason for things occurring as they did. If we are right, however, we must be especially careful not to boast of our prediction and say, “Oh well, I knew yesterday that this would happen!”

This is again a rule based upon confidence that there is an inner necessity in things and events, that in the facts themselves there slumbers something that moves things. What is thus working within these things from one day to another are thought forces, and we gradually become conscious of them when meditating on things. By such exercises these thought forces are called up into our consciousness and if what has been thus foreseen is fulfilled, we are in tune with them. We have then established an inner relation with the real thought activity of the matter itself. So we train ourselves to think, not arbitrarily, but according to the inner necessity and the inner nature of the things themselves.

But our thinking can also be trained in other directions. An occurrence of today is also linked to what happened yesterday. We might consider a naughty child, for example, and ask ourselves what may have caused this behavior. The events are traced back to the previous day and the unknown cause hypothesized by saying to ourselves, “Since this occurred today, I must believe that it was prepared by this or that event that occurred yesterday or perhaps the day before.”

We then find out what had actually occurred and so discover whether or not our thought was correct. If the true cause has been found, very well. But if our conclusion was wrong, then we should try to correct the mistake, find out how our thought process developed, and how it ran its course in reality.

To practice these principles is the important point. Time must be taken to observe things as though we were inside the things themselves with our thinking. We should submerge ourselves in the things and enter into their inner thought activity. If this is done, we gradually become aware of the fact that we are growing together with things. We no longer feel that they are outside us and we are here inside our shell thinking about them. Instead we come to feel as if our own thinking occurred within the things themselves. When a man has succeeded to a high degree in doing this, many things will become clear to him.

Goethe was such a man. He was a thinker who always lived with his thought within the things themselves. The psychologist Heinroth's book in 1826, Anthropology, characterized Goethe's thought as “objective.” Goethe himself appreciated this characterization. What was meant is that such thinking does not separate itself from things, but remains within them. It moves within the necessity of things. Goethe's thinking was at the same time perception, and his perception was thinking. He had developed this way of thinking to a remarkable degree. More than once it occurred that, when he had planned to do something, he would go to the window and remark to the person who happened to be with him, “In three hours we shall have rain!” And so it would happen. From the little patch of sky he could see from the window he was able to foretell the weather conditions for the next few hours. His true thinking, remaining within the objects, thus enabled him to sense the coming event preparing itself in the preceding one.

Much more can actually be accomplished through practical thinking than is commonly supposed. When a man has made these principles of thinking his own, he will notice that his thinking really becomes practical, that his horizon widens, and that he can grasp the things of the world in quite a different way. Gradually his attitude towards things and people will change completely. An actual process will take place within him that will alter his whole conduct. It is of immense importance that he tries to grow into the things in this way with his thinking, for it is in the most eminent sense a practical undertaking to train one's thinking by such exercises.

There is another exercise that is to be practiced especially by those to whom the right idea usually does not occur at the right time.

Such people should try above all things to stop their thinking from being forever influenced and controlled by the ordinary course of worldly events and whatever else may come with them. As a rule, when a person lies down for half an hour's rest, his thoughts are allowed to play freely in a thousand different directions, or on the other hand he may become absorbed with some trouble in his life. Before he realizes it such things will have crept into his consciousness and claimed his entire attention. If this habit persists, such a person will never experience the occasion when the right idea occurs to him at the right moment.

If he really wants this to happen, he must say to himself whenever he can spare a half hour for rest, “Whenever I can spare the time, I will think about something I myself have chosen and I will bring it into my consciousness arbitrarily of my own free will. For example, I will think of something that occurred two years ago during a walk. I will deliberately recall what occurred then and I will think about it if only for five minutes. During these five minutes I will banish everything else from my mind and will myself choose the subject about which I wish to think.”

He need not even choose so difficult a subject as this one. The point is not at all to change one's mental process through difficult exercises, but to get away from the ordinary routine of life in one's thinking. He must think of something quite apart from what enmeshes him during the ordinary course of the day. If nothing occurs to him to think about, he might open a book at random and occupy his thoughts with whatever first catches his eye. Or he may choose to think of something he saw at a particular time that morning on his way to work and to which he would otherwise have paid no attention. The main point is that it should be something totally different from the ordinary run of daily events, something that otherwise would not have occupied his thoughts.

If such exercises are practiced systematically again and again, it will soon be noticed that ideas come at the right moments, and the right thoughts occur when needed. Through these exercises thinking will become activated and mobile—something of immense importance in practical life.

Let us consider another exercise that is especially helpful in improving one's memory.

One tries at first in the crude way people usually recall past events to remember something that occurred, let us say, yesterday. Such recollections are, as a rule, indistinct and colorless, and most people are satisfied if they can just remember a person's name. But if it is desired to develop one's memory, one can no longer be content with this. This must be clear. The following exercise must be systematically practiced, saying to oneself, “I shall recall exactly the person I saw yesterday, also the street corner where I met him, and what happened to be in his vicinity. I shall draw the whole picture as exactly as possible and shall even imagine the color and cut of his coat and vest.” Most people will find themselves utterly incapable of doing this and will quickly see how much is lacking in their recollections to produce a really lifelike, graphic picture of what they met and experienced only yesterday.

Since this is true in the majority of cases, we must begin with that condition in which many people are unable to recollect their most recent experiences. It is only too true that most people's observations of things and events are usually inaccurate and vague. The results of a test given by a professor in one of the universities demonstrated that out of thirty students who took the test, only two had observed an occurrence correctly; the remaining twenty-eight reported it inaccurately. But a good memory is the child of accurate observation. A reliable memory is attained, let me repeat, by accurate observation and it can also be said that in a certain roundabout way of the soul it is born as the child of exact observation.

But if somebody cannot at first accurately remember his experiences of yesterday, what should he do? First, he should try to remember as accurately as he can what actually occurred. Where recollections fail he should fill in the picture with something incorrect that was not really present. The essential point here is that the picture be complete. Suppose it was forgotten whether or not someone was wearing a brown or a black coat. Then he might be pictured in a brown coat and brown trousers with such and such buttons on his vest and a yellow necktie. One might further imagine a general situation in which there was a yellow wall, a tall man passing on the left, a short one on the right, etc.

All that can be remembered he puts into this picture, and what cannot be remembered is added imaginatively in order to have a completed mental picture. Of course, it is at first incorrect but through the effort to create a complete picture he is induced to observe more accurately. Such exercises must be continued, and although they might be tried and failed fifty times, perhaps the fifty-first time he shall be able to remember accurately what the person he has met looked like, what he wore, and even little details like the buttons on his vest. Then nothing will be overlooked and every detail will imprint itself on his memory. Thus he will have first sharpened his powers of observation by these exercises and in addition, as the fruit of this accurate observation, he will have improved his memory.

He should take special care to retain not only names and main features of what he wishes to remember, but also to retain vivid images covering all the details. If he cannot remember some detail, he must try for the time being to fill in the picture and thus make it a whole. He will then notice that his memory, as though in a roundabout way, slowly becomes reliable. Thus it can be seen how definite direction can be given for making thinking increasingly more practical.

There is still something else that is of particular importance. In thinking about some matters we feel it necessary to come to a conclusion. We consider how this or that should be done and then make up our minds in a certain way. This inclination, although natural, does not lead to practical thinking. All overly hasty thinking does not advance us but sets us back. Patience in these things is absolutely essential.

Suppose, for instance, we desire to carry out some particular plan. There are usually several ways that this might be done. Now we should have the patience first to imagine how things would work[s] out if we were to execute our plan in one way and then we should consider what the results would be of doing it in another. Surely there will always be reasons for preferring one method over another but we should refrain from forming an immediate decision. Instead, an attempt should be made to imagine the two possibilities and then we must say to ourselves, “That will do for the present; I shall now stop thinking about this matter.” No doubt there are people who will become fidgety at this point, and although it is difficult to overcome such a condition, it is extremely useful to do so. It then becomes possible to imagine how the matter might be handled in two ways, and to decide to stop thinking about it for awhile.

Whenever it is possible, action should be deferred until the next day, and the two possibilities considered again at that time. You will find that in the interim[,] conditions have changed and that the next day you will be able to form a different, or at least a more thorough decision than could have been reached the day before. An inner necessity is hidden in things and if we do not act with arbitrary impatience but allow this inner necessity to work in us—and it will—we shall find the next day that it has enriched our thinking, thus making possible a wiser decision. This is exceedingly valuable.

We might, for example, be asked to give our advice on a problem and to make a decision. But let us not thrust forward our decision immediately. We should have the patience to place the various possibilities before ourselves without forming any definite conclusions, and we then should quietly let these possibilities work themselves out within us. Even the popular proverb says that one should sleep over a matter before making a decision.

To sleep over it is not enough, however. It is necessary to consider two or, better still, several possibilities that will continue to work within us when our ego is not consciously occupied with them. Later on, when we return again to the matter in question, it will be found that certain thought forces have been stirred up within us in this manner, and that as a result our thinking has become more factual and practical.

It is certain that what a man seeks can always be found in the world, whether he stands at the carpenter's bench, or follows the plough, or belongs to one of the professions. If he will practice these exercises, he will become a practical thinker in the most ordinary matters of everyday life. If he thus trains himself, he will approach and look at the things of the world in a quite different manner from previously. Although at first these exercises may seem related only to his own innermost life, they are entirely applicable and of the greatest importance precisely for the outer world. They have powerful consequences.

An example will demonstrate how necessary it is to think about things in a really practical manner. Let us imagine that for some reason or other a man climbs a tree. He falls from the tree, strikes the ground, and is picked up dead. Now, the thought most likely to occur to us is that the fall killed him. We would be inclined to say that the fall was the cause and death the effect. In this instance cause and effect seem logically connected. But this assumption may completely confuse the true sequence of facts, for the man may have fallen as a consequence of heart failure. To the observer the external event is exactly the same in both cases. Only when the true causes are known can a correct judgment be formed. In this case it might have been that the man was already dead before he fell and the fall had nothing to do with his death. It is thus possible to invert completely cause and effect. In this instance the error is evident, but often they are not so easily discernible. The frequency with which such errors in thinking occur is amazing. Indeed, it must be said that in the field of science conclusions in which this confusion of cause and effect is permitted are being drawn every day. Most people do not grasp this fact, however, because they are not acquainted with the possibilities of thinking.

Still another example will show you clearly how such errors in thinking arise and how a person who has been practicing exercises like these can no longer make such mistakes. Suppose someone concludes that man as he is today is a descendent of the ape. This means that what he has come to know in the ape—the forces active in this animal have—attained higher perfection and man is the result. Now, to show the meaning of this theory in terms of thought, let us imagine that this person is the only man on earth, and that besides himself there are only those apes present that, according to his theory, can evolve into human beings. He now studies these apes with the utmost accuracy down to the most minute detail and then forms a concept of what lives in them. Excluding himself and without ever having seen another human being let him now try to develop the concept of a man solely from his concept of the ape. He will find this to be quite impossible. His concept “ape” will never transform itself into the concept “man.”

If he had cultivated correct habits of thinking, this man would have said to himself, “My concept of the ape does not change into the concept of man. What I perceive in the ape, therefore, can never become a human being, otherwise my concept would have to change likewise. There must be something else present that I am unable to perceive.” So he would have to imagine an invisible, super-sensible entity behind the physical ape that he would be unable to perceive but that alone would make the ape's transformation into man a possible conception.

We shall not enter into a discussion of the impossibility of this case, but simply point out the erroneous thinking underlying this theory. If this man had thought correctly he would have seen that he could not possibly conceive of such a theory without assuming the existence of something super-sensible. Upon further investigation you will discover that an overwhelmingly large number of people has committed this error of thinking. Errors like these, however, will no longer occur to the one who has trained his thinking as suggested here.

For anyone capable of thinking correctly a large part of modern literature (especially that of the sciences) becomes a source of unpleasant experience. The distorted and misguided thinking expressed in it can cause even physical pain in a man who has to work his way through it. It should be understood, however, that this is not said with any intent to slight the wealth of observation and discovery that has been accumulated by modern natural science and its objective methods of research.

Now let us consider “short-sighted” thinking. Most people are unconscious of the fact that their thinking is not factual, but that it is for the most part only the result of thought habits. The decisions and conclusions therefore of a man whose thought penetrates the world and life will differ greatly from those of one whose ability to think is limited or nil. Consider the case of a materialistic thinker. To convince such a man through reasoning, however logical, sound and good, is not an easy task. It is usually a useless effort to try to convince a person with little knowledge of life through reason. Such a person does not see the reasons that make this or that statement valid and possible if he has formed the habit of seeing nothing but matter in everything and simply adheres to this habit of thinking.

Today it can generally be said that people are not prompted by reasons when making statements but rather by the thinking habits behind these reasons. They have acquired habits of thought that influence all their feelings and sensations, and when reasons are put forth, they are simply the mask of the habitual thinking that screens these feelings and sensations. Not only is the wish often the father of the thought, but it can also be said that all our feelings and mental habits are the parents of our thoughts. He who knows life knows how difficult it is to convince another person by means of logical reasoning. What really decides and convinces lies much deeper in the human soul.

There are good reasons for the existence of the Anthroposophical Movement and for the activities in its various branches. Everyone who has participated in the work of the Movement for any length of time comes to notice that he has acquired a new way of thinking and feeling. For the work in the various branches is not merely confined to finding logical reasons for things. A new and more comprehensive quality of feeling and sensation is also developed.

How some people scoffed a few years ago when they heard their first lectures in spiritual science. Yet today how many things have become self-evident to these same people who previously looked upon these things as impossible absurdities. In working in the Anthroposophical Movement one not only learns to modify one's thinking, one also learns to unfold a wider perspective of soul life.

We must understand that our thoughts derive their coloring from far greater depths than are generally imagined. It is our feelings that frequently impel us to hold certain opinions. The logical reasons that are put forward are often a mere screen or mask for our deeper feelings and habits of thinking.

To bring ourselves to a point at which logical reasons themselves possess a real significance for us, we must have learned to love logic itself. Only when we have learned to love factuality and objectivity will logical reason be decisive for us. We should gradually learn to think objectively, not allowing ourselves to be swayed by our preference for this or that thought. Only then will our vision broaden in the sense that we do not merely follow the mental ruts of others but in such a way that the reality of the things themselves will teach us to think correctly.

True practicality is born of objective thinking, that is, thinking that flows into us from the things themselves. It is only by practicing such exercises as have just been described that we learn to take our thoughts from things. To do these exercises properly we should choose to work with sound and wholesome subjects that are least affected by our culture. These are the objects of nature.

To train our thinking using the things of nature as objects to think about will make really practical thinkers of us. Once we have trained ourselves in the practical use of this fundamental principle, our thinking, we shall be able to handle the most everyday occupations in a practical way. By training the human soul in this way a practical viewpoint is developed in our thinking.

The fruit of the Anthroposophical Movement must be to place really practical thinkers in life. What we have come to believe is not of as much importance as the fact that we should become capable of surveying with understanding the things around us. That spiritual science should penetrate our souls, thereby stimulating us to inner soul activity and expanding our vision, is of far more importance than merely theorizing about what extends beyond the things of the senses into the spiritual. In this, Anthroposophy is truly practical.

• 1. See Theosophy: An Introduction to the Supersensible Knowledge of the World and the Destination of Man for a clarification of this, and other, anthroposophical terminology.

I have already spoken of the different states of consciousness which can be developed out of the forces of the human soul. Initiation-knowledge is dependent upon the fact that our knowledge of the world stems from these different states of consciousness.

Today we propose to ascertain how man's relationship to the world is determined by these different states of consciousness. First of all, let us recall that a single level of consciousness, that of daily waking consciousness, suffices to meet the needs of everyday existence. In our present epoch man has the possibility of developing two further states of consciousness in addition to his normal waking consciousness, but initially they cannot serve as valid criteria for immediate purposes of knowledge.

The one is the state of dream consciousness in which man experiences reminiscences of his daily life or faint intimations of the life of the spirit. But in ordinary dream life these reminiscences and intimations are so distorted, so commingled with uncorrelated, grotesque images and symbols that nothing can be learnt from them.

If, with the aid of Initiation-knowledge, we wish to know what realm man inhabits when he dreams, the answer would be somewhat as follows: in normal life man possesses a physical body, the body which is perceptible .to the senses and which is an object of scientific study. This is the first member of man's constitution, the member which everyone imagines he understands, but which in effect, as we shall see later, he understands least of all today.

The second member is the etheric body which is described in more detail in my publications, especially in my book Theosophy. The etheric body or body of formative forces is a delicate organization, imperceptible to ordinary sight. It can be perceived only when man has developed the first state of consciousness which is able to accompany the dead in the first years after death. This etheric body is more intimately linked with the Cosmos than the physical body whose whole organization is more independent.

The third member of man's constitution—it seems best to adhere to the old terminology—is called the astral body. This is an organization that is imperceptible to the senses; neither can it be perceived in the same way as the etheric body. If we were to try to perceive the astral body with the cognitive faculty by means of which we perceive the external world today or with the insights of the next higher consciousness that is in touch with the dead, we should see nothing but a void, a vacuum, where the astral body is located.

To sum up: man possesses a physical body that is perceptible to the senses; an etheric body perceptible to Imagination by virtue of the forces that can be developed through the practice of concentration and meditation in the manner already indicated. But if we try to perceive the astral body with the aid of these forces, we meet with a void, a spatial vacuum. This void is filled with content only when we attain the emptied consciousness which I have described, when we can confront the world in full waking consciousness in such a way that, though sensory impressions are obliterated and thinking and memories are silenced, we remain none the less aware of its existence. We then know that in this void we have our first spiritual vehicle, the astral body of man.

A further member of the human organization is the Ego itself. We perceive the Ego only when the emptied consciousness is progressively developed.

When we dream, our physical and etheric bodies are detached from the astral body and Ego which are in the spiritual world, but we cannot perceive with the astral body and Ego if we possess only normal consciousness. We perceive external impressions of the world around because the physical body is endowed with eyes and ears. At the present stage of man's evolution we find that in ordinary life his astral body and Ego, unlike the physical body, are not endowed with eyes and ears. Thus, when he withdraws from his physical and etheric bodies in order to enter the dream-state, it is as if he had a physical body in the physical world bereft of eyes and ears, so that all around were dark and silent. But it was never intended that the astral body and the Ego should always remain without organs, without eyes and ears of the soul. Through spiritual training of which I have spoken in my books, it is possible to awaken these spiritual organs in the astral body and Ego and thus to see into the spiritual world through the insight born of Initiation. Then man withdraws from his physical and etheric bodies and perceives the spiritual, just as in his physical and etheric bodies he perceives the physical, and in a certain sense, the etheric as well. The man who achieves this insight then achieves Initiation.

Now what is the position of the ordinary dreamer? Try and imagine concretely the process of falling asleep. The physical and etheric bodies are left behind in the bed whilst the astral body and Ego slip out of the physical vehicle. At this moment the astral body is still vibrating in harmony with the physical and etheric bodies. The astral body has participated in all the inner activities of eyes and ears and of the will in the functioning of the physical and etheric bodies throughout the day. The astral body and the Ego have shared in all this. When they quit the body, the vibration continues. But the day experiences, as they continue to vibrate, come in contact with the surrounding spiritual world and there arises a chaotic, confused interplay between the activity of the external spiritual world and the continued vibrations of the astral body. The individual is caught up in all this and is aware of the confusion. All that he has brought with him has left its impact upon him, continues to vibrate and becomes the dream.

It is obvious that this will contribute little to the understanding of reality. What is the position of the Initiate? When he slips out of his physical and etheric bodies, he is able to obliterate the reminiscences and after-vibrations that still persist. He suppresses, therefore, all that proceeds from the physical and etheric bodies. Moreover through concentration, meditation and the development of emptied consciousness, the Initiate has been able to acquire eyes and ears of the soul. He does not now perceive what is happening within himself, but what is happening in the spiritual world outside him. In place of dreams he now begins to perceive the spiritual world. Dream consciousness is a chaotic counterpart of spiritual perception.

When the Initiate has first developed these inner astral organs, clairvoyance and clairaudience, he finds himself in a continual state of conflict and endeavours to suppress these reminiscences, these after-vibrations from the physical and etheric bodies. When he enters into the world of Imaginations, when he has an intuitive perception of the spiritual, he must fight a continual battle to prevent the dreams from asserting themselves. There is a continual interplay between that which seeks to dissolve into dreamlike fantasy and delude him, and that which represents the truth of the spiritual world.

Ultimately every aspirant becomes familiar with this conflict. He comes to realize that, at the moment he strives to enter consciously into the spiritual world, he experiences recurrent after-images of the physical world, disturbing images that intrude upon the true pictures of the spiritual world. Only through patience and persistence can he resolve this intense inner conflict.

Now if we are too easily satisfied when dream images flood our consciousness, we may readily dream ourselves into an illusory world instead of entering into a world of spiritual reality. The aspirant, in effect, must possess an exceedingly strong, intelligent inner control. Imagine what this demands of him. If we are to speak of spiritual investigation, or of methods for attaining to the spiritual world, we must draw attention to these things. If we wish to take the first steps towards an understanding of the spiritual world, we must show real enthusiasm for the task. Inner lethargy, inner indifference or indolence are obstacles in the path of its fulfilment. Our inner life must be active, lively and responsive. But there is a danger of losing ourselves in day-dreams, of spinning a web of illusion. We must be able, on the one hand, to soar into the empyrean on wings of fancy and, on the other hand, we must be able to temper this inner activity and responsiveness with prudence and sober judgment.

The Initiate must possess both these qualities. It is undesirable simply to indulge one's emotions; it is equally undesirable to submit to the dictates of the intellect and to rationalize everything. We must be able to strike a balance between these two extremes. We must be able to dream dreams and yet be able to keep our feet on Earth. As we enter into the spiritual world we must be able to participate in the dynamic world of creative imagination, but at the same time have firm control over ourselves. We must have the capacity to be a poet richly endowed with imagination, yet not succumb to its lures. We must be able, at any moment in our search for spiritual knowledge, to be fired by a creative impulse. We must be able to control the drift towards a world of fantasy and rely upon practical common sense. Then we shall not become victims of illusion, but experience spiritual reality.

This inner disposition of soul is of vital importance in true spiritual investigation. When we reflect upon the nature of dream consciousness and recognize that it conjures up chaotic images out of the spiritual world, we realize at the same time that, in order to acquire spiritual knowledge, the whole force of our personality must now enter into the psychic energy that otherwise persists in a dreamlike state. Then for the first time we begin to understand what ‘entering into the spiritual world’ implies. I said that dream consciousness conjures up the spiritual. This would appear to contradict the statement that the dream consciousness also conjures up pictures derived from the corporeal life. But the body is not only physical, it is wholly permeated with spirituality. When someone dreams that an attractive and tasty meal is set before him and he proceeds to consume it, though he has not a tithe of the cost of the meal in his pocket, then in the symbol of the meal he is presented with a picture of the real spiritual, astral content of the digestive organs. There is always a spiritual element in the dream despite the fact that the spirit has its seat in the corporeal. The dream always contains a spiritual element; but very often it is a spiritual element associated with the body. It is necessary to realize this fact. .

We must understand that when we dream of snakes, their coils are a symbol of the digestive organs or of the blood vessels in the head. We must penetrate into these secrets, for we can only arrive at an understanding of these subtle, intimate elements that must be developed in the soul when we undertake spiritual investigation through the science of Initiation and give the closest attention to these matters.

The third stage through which man passes in ordinary life is that of dreamless sleep. Let us recall this condition: the physical and etheric bodies lie in the bed; outside these bodies are the astral body and Ego-organization. The after-vibrations and reminiscences from the physical and etheric bodies have ceased. It is only in his Ego and astral body that man inhabits the spiritual world. But, having no organs, he cannot perceive anything. Darkness surrounds him; he is asleep. Dreamless sleep means that we live in the Ego and astral body and are unable to perceive the vast, majestic world around us. Take the case of a blind man. He has no visual perception of colours and forms. So far as these are concerned, he is asleep. Now picture a man living in his astral body and Ego, but without organs of perception. In relation to the spiritual he is asleep. Such is man's condition in dreamless sleep. The purpose of concentration and meditation is to develop spiritual eyes and ears in the astral body and Ego-organization. Then man begins to behold the spiritual plenitude around him. He perceives spiritually with that which in normal consciousness is lost in sleep and which he must rouse from its slumber through meditation and concentration. The otherwise uncoordinated elements must be integrated. Then he gazes into the spiritual world and shares in the life of the spiritual world in the same way as he normally shares in the life of the physical world through his eyes and ears. This is true Initiation knowledge. One cannot prepare a person for spiritual perception by external means; he must first learn to organize effectively his inner life which is normally so chaotic.

Now at all times in the history of humanity it was an accepted practice to prepare selected individuals for Initiation. This practice was interrupted to some extent during the epoch of extreme materialism, i.e. between the fifteenth century and today. During these centuries the real significance of Initiation was forgotten. Men hoped to satisfy their quest for knowledge without Initiation and so they gradually came to believe that only the physical world was their proper field of enquiry. But what is the physical world in reality? We shall not come to terms with it if we consider only its physical aspect. We only understand the physical world when we are able to apprehend the spirit that informs it. Mankind must recover this knowledge once again, for today we stand at the crossroads. The world presents a picture of disruption and increasing chaos. Yet we know that amidst this chaos, this welter of dark, obscuring passions that threaten to destroy everything, the intuitives are aware of the presence of spiritual powers who are actively striving to awaken in man a new spirituality. And preparation for Anthroposophy consists fundamentally in listening to this voice of the spirit that can still be heard amid the clamour of our materialistic age.

I said that in all ages men endeavoured to develop the human organization in such a way that they could perceive the spiritual world. Conditions varied according to the epoch. When we look back to ancient Chaldean times, or to the epoch of Brunetto Latini, we find that men were more loosely linked with their physical and etheric bodies than is the case today when we are firmly anchored in those bodies. And this is to be expected; it is the inevitable consequence of our education today. After all, how can we expect to communicate with spiritual beings when we are compelled in many cases to learn to read and write before the change of teeth? Angels and spiritual beings cannot read or write. Reading and writing have been developed in the course of human evolution in response to physical conditions. And if our whole being is orientated towards purely scientific investigation we shall obviously have difficulty in withdrawing from our physical and etheric bodies.

Our present age finds a certain satisfaction in ordering our entire cultural life in such a way that we cannot have any possibility of spiritual experience when we are separated from our physical and etheric bodies. I have no wish to inveigh against our contemporary culture, nor do I wish to criticize it. It is the inevitable expression of the epoch. I shall discuss the implications later; meanwhile we must accept things as they are.

In ancient times the astral body and Ego, even in waking consciousness, were much more loosely associated with the physical and etheric bodies than they are today. The Initiates, too, were dependent upon this loose association of the bodies that was natural to them. Indeed, in the remote past, nearly everyone could be initiated into the Mysteries. But it was only in the far distant times of the primordial Indian and old Persian cultures that everybody could be raised above his human station.

Then, in later epochs, the selection of candidates for Initiation was limited to those who had little difficulty in withdrawing from their physical and etheric bodies—men whose astral body and Ego enjoyed a relatively high degree of independence. Certain conditions were a prerequisite for Initiation. This in no way prevented every effort being made to bring the aspirant to the highest stage of Initiation commensurate with his potentialities. But beyond a certain point success depended upon whether the aspirant could attain to independence in his astral body and Ego easily or only with difficulty. And this was determined by his makeup and natural disposition. Since man is born into the world, he is inevitably dependent upon the world to a certain extent between birth and death.

The question now arises whether man today is subject to similar limitations when embarking on Initiation. To a certain extent that is so. Since I wish to give a full and clear account in these lectures of the true and false paths leading to the spiritual world, I should like to point out the difficulties in the way of Initiation today.

The man of ancient times was more dependent upon his natural endowments when he became an Initiate. Modern man also can be brought to the threshold of Initiation, in fact, through appropriate psychic training he can so fashion his astral body and Ego-organization that he is able to develop spiritual vision and perceive the spiritual world. But in order to complete and perfect this vision he is still dependent today on something else, something of extreme subtlety and delicacy. I must ask you not to come to any final conclusions about what I shall say today until you are familiar with the content of my next lectures. I can only proceed step by step.

In Initiation today man is dependent to a certain extent on age. Let us take the case of a man who is thirty-seven when he begins his Initiation and has good expectations of life. He begins to practise meditation, concentration or some other spiritual exercises, either under guidance, or independently, in accordance with some instruction manual. As a result of repeated meditation on some theme, he acquires, first of all, the capacity to look back over his life on Earth. His earthly life appears before his inward eye in the form of a uniform tableau. Just as in normal three dimensional vision objects are situated in Space—the front two rows of chairs and their occupants here, over there a table and behind it a wall; we see the whole in perspective in simultaneity—so at a certain level of Initiation we see into Time. One has the impression that the passage of Time is spatial. Now we see ourselves at the age of thirty-seven. We had certain experiences at thirty-six, at thirty-five and so on, back to the time of our birth. In retrospect we see a uniform tableau before us.

Now let us assume that at a certain stage of Initiation a man reviews his life in retrospect. At thirty-seven he will be able to look back into the period from birth to the age of seven approximately, the time of the change of teeth.

Then he will be able to look back into the period between the ages of seven and fourteen, up to the age of puberty. And then he is able to look back into the period between fourteen and twenty-one and the rest of his life up to his thirty-seventh year. He can survey the panorama of his life in spatiotemporal perspective, so to speak. If he can add to this perception the consciousness born of the emptied waking consciousness, a certain power of vision flashes through him. He acquires insight, but his insight assumes widely different forms. The experiences from birth to the age of seven, from the age of fourteen to twenty-one, and those of later years evoke different responses in him. Each life-period responds in its own way; each period has its own power of vision.

Now let us consider the man of sixty-three or sixty-four. He is able to look back over the later periods of his life. The period between the ages of twenty-one and forty-two appears relatively uniform. Then follows further differentiation. There are significant differences in his perceptions between the ages forty-two to forty-nine, forty-nine to fifty-six, fifty-six to sixty-three. All these periods are an integral part of his make-up. They represent the spiritual aspects of his life on Earth. If he develops this inward vision, he sees that his different insights are dependent upon the level of his being at a particular age. The first seven years of childhood awaken in him a different insight from that of the years between seven and fourteen. In the period of adolescence, from fourteen to twenty-one, it is again different; the years between twenty-one and forty-two bring further differentiation, to be followed in its turn by the somewhat differentiated powers of insight that belong to the later periods of life.

Let us assume that we have acquired the capacity to have memory-pictures of our life experiences and, in addition, have attained the insight derived from the emptied consciousness which has obliterated the memory-pictures. The forces of Inspiration now become operative, so that we no longer survey our life-periods through the physical eye, but through the spiritual eye, the new organ of vision. Through Inspiration we have reached a point when we no longer conjure up pictures of our life-periods with their separate happenings, but perceive them through spiritual eyes and ears. At one time we see clairvoyantly the life-period between seven and fourteen, at another clairaudiently the period between forty-nine and fifty-six, just as formerly we heard and perceived in the external world when we used our eyes and ears. In the world of Inspiration we make use of the power derived from the period between the ages of seven and fourteen and from the period between the forty-second and forty-ninth years. In this world the life periods become differentiated organs of cognition. Thus we are, to a certain extent, dependent upon our age for the range of our vision. At thirty-seven we are perfectly capable of speaking from first-hand experience of Initiation, but at the age of sixty-three we would speak with deeper knowledge, because, at that age, we have developed other organs. The life-periods create organs. Now let us assume that we propose to describe personalities such as Brunetto Latini or Alanus ab Insulis, not from information derived from books, but from clairvoyant knowledge. (These examples will be familiar to you because we have already spoken of them in the last few days.) If we try to describe them when we have reached the age of thirty-seven, we discover that we are in touch with them spiritually in the awakened consciousness of sleep. We can converse with them, metaphorically speaking, as we do with our fellowmen. And the strange thing is that when they discuss spiritual matters with others, they can only speak with them from their present level of wisdom and inner spirituality. Then we realize how very much we can learn from them. We must listen to them and accept in good faith what they have to teach.

Now you will realize that it is no light matter to stand in the presence of a personality such as Brunetto Latini in the spiritual world. But if we have made the necessary preparations we shall be able to determine whether we are victims of a dream delusion or in the presence of a spiritual reality. It is possible therefore to evaluate the communications we receive.

Suppose, then, at the age of thirty-seven we were to converse with Brunetto Latini in the spiritual world. This should not be taken literally, of course. He would talk to us of many things; then, perhaps, we should like to have more precise, more detailed information. Thereupon he would say: ‘in that case we must retrace our steps from the present, the twentieth century, back through the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries, to the century in which I lived when I was Dante's teacher. If you wish to accompany me along this path you must wait until you are a little older, until you have a few more years behind you. Then I can tell you everything and satisfy your thirst for knowledge. You can become a high Initiate, but, in reality, you cannot accompany me along this path into the past by spiritual volition alone.’—For this to be possible you must have grown older. If you wish to make certain of returning without hindrance to the spiritual world with the person in question, you must have passed your forty-second year at least and have reached the age of sixty.

These things will show you the deeper aspects of man's being and the significant part they play in youth and age. Only when we draw attention to these things are we in a position to understand why some die young and others live to a ripe age in their different incarnations. I shall have more to say about this later.

We have seen how man, as he develops, progressively deepens and extends his perception of the spiritual world. I have shown how his relationship with a being existing as a discarnate soul in the spiritual world, such as Brunetto Latini, changes with the conditions of evolution, depending on whether he uses for spiritual perception the organs developed in youth or in age.

The panoramic survey of the world and its evolution that unfolds before the soul of man in this way can be extended to other fields. The question is: in what way can we enlarge human consciousness, human insight, and give it another direction? Today I will indicate one such direction and enter into further details in the following lectures.

In the normal consciousness of our earthly life we know only the Earth environment between birth and death. If there were an end to our chaotic dream life, if we were to have perception in a state of deep, dreamless sleep instead of normal consciousness, we should no longer experience a purely Earth environment around us. But we are, in effect, endowed with other conditions of perception and consciousness than the normal.

Let us now consider the following: our everyday consciousness is related to our immediate environment. Since we cannot see into the interior of the Earth our immediate environment is the sphere of normal consciousness. Everything else in the Cosmos, Sun, Moon and all the other stars shine into this sphere. Sun and Moon send down to Earth clearer indications of their presence in the Cosmos than the other heavenly bodies. Physicists would be astonished if they could experience in their own way—for they refuse to consider our approach—the prevailing conditions in the sphere of the Moon or the Sun. For the descriptions given in the text-books of astronomy, astrophysics and the like are wide of the mark. They offer only the vaguest indications. In ordinary life when we wish to make a person's acquaintance and later have an opportunity of speaking to him, we do not normally say: I have only a vague impression of this person; he must retreat to a distance where he is almost out of sight. Then I shall have a much clearer impression of him and will describe him.

The physicists of course have no choice; it is the result of necessity and they can only describe the stars when they are a long way off. But a transformed and enlarged consciousness lifts us into the world of stars. And the first thing we learn from this is to speak of these worlds of stars quite differently from the way in which we speak of them in ordinary life.

In normal consciousness we see ourselves standing here on Earth, and at night the Moon over against us in the heavens. In order to see differently, we must enter into another kind of consciousness and sometimes that takes a considerable time. When we have attained this consciousness and are able to perceive our experiences, all that we have lived through from birth to the age of seven, to the change of teeth, with the consciousness that is in touch with the dead, with a consciousness that has achieved Inspiration and so become inner power of vision, then we see a totally different world around us. The ordinary world grows dim and indefinite.

This other world is the Moon sphere. When we have attained to this new consciousness, we no longer see the Moon as a separate entity, we are actually living in the Moon sphere. The Moon's orbit traces the furthest limits of the Moon sphere. We know ourselves to be within the Moon sphere.

Now if a child of eight could be initiated and could review the first seven years of its life, it could live in the Moon sphere in this way. Indeed, a child would not have the slightest difficulty in entering into the Moon sphere because it has not yet been corrupted by the influences of later years.

Theoretically this is a possibility; but, of course, a child of eight cannot be initiated.

When we use the power derived from the first life-period, from birth to the age of seven, for spiritual vision, we are able to enter into this Moon sphere which is radically different nom the sphere perceived by ordinary consciousness. An analogy will help to illustrate my point.

In embryology today the biologist studies the development of the embryo from the earliest stages. At a certain stage in the development of the embryo a thickening of the membrane occurs at an eccentrically situated point on the external wall. Then encapsulation takes place and a kind of nucleus is formed. But whilst this is clearly visible under the microscope, we cannot say: this is nothing but the germ, the embryo, for the rest is also an integral part.

The same applies to the Moon and the other stars. What we see as the Moon is simply a kind of nucleus and the whole sphere belongs to the Moon. The Earth is within the Moon sphere. If the germ could rotate, this nucleus would also rotate. The Moon's orbit follows the boundaries of the Moon sphere.

The ancients who still knew something of these matters did not speak therefore of the Moon, but of the Moon sphere. The Moon, as we see it today, was to them only a point at the furthest boundary. Every day this point changes position and in the course of twenty-eight days traces for us the boundaries of the Moon sphere. When our inner experiences between birth and the seventh year become inspirational vision, we acquire the power to enter into the Moon sphere as our perception of the Earth is gradually lost.

When the experiences of the second life-period, between the change of teeth and puberty, are transformed into inspirational vision, we experience the Mercury sphere, the second sphere. We live together with the Earth in the Mercury sphere. The experiences of the Mercury sphere only become visible through the organ of vision that we can create for ourselves when we look back consciously and with clear perception into the experiences of our life on Earth between the ages of seven and fourteen. With the inspirational vision derived from the years between puberty and the age of twenty-one, we experience the Venus sphere. The ancients were not so ignorant as we imagine; with their dreamlike knowledge they knew a great deal about these things and they endowed the planetary system that we experience after the years of puberty with a name associated with sexual awareness which begins at this period.

Then when we look back consciously on our experiences between the ages of twenty-one and forty-two, we know that we are within the Sun sphere.

When the separate life-periods are transformed into organs of the inner life, they endow us with the power to enlarge step by step our cosmic consciousness.

It would be untrue to say that we cannot know anything of the Sun sphere before our forty-second year. We can learn about it from the Mercury beings for they are fully acquainted with it. But in that event our experience comes to us indirectly, through super-sensible teaching. Now in order to have direct experience in the Sun sphere in our own consciousness, in order to be able to enter into it, we must not only have lived in the period between the ages of twenty-one and forty-two, but we must have passed our forty-second year, we must be able to look back over the past, for only in the retrospective survey are the mysteries revealed.

And again, when we are able to look back upon our life up to the forty-ninth year, the mysteries of Mars are revealed. If we can look back upon our life up to the age of fifty-six, the Jupiter mysteries are revealed. And the deeply veiled, but extraordinarily illuminating mysteries of Saturn—mysteries which, as we shall see in the following lectures, veil the profound secrets of the Cosmos—are revealed when we look back upon the events and happenings between the fifty-sixth and sixty-third years.

Thus you will realize that man is in fact a microcosm. He is related to those things that he never perceives in normal consciousness. But he would be unable to fashion, or to order his life, if the Moon forces were not active within him from birth to his seventh year. He perceives later on the nature of their influence. He would not be able to re-create his experiences between the ages of seven and fourteen, if the Mercury mysteries were not active within him; nor would he be able to re-create his experiences of the years between fourteen and twenty-one—the period when powerful creative forces pour into him, if he is karmically predisposed to receive them—if he were not inwardly related to the Venus sphere. And if he were not united with the Sun sphere, he would not be able to develop ripe understanding and experience of the world between the ages of twenty and forty-two, the period when we pass from early manhood to maturity. In ancient times the system was not very different: the craftsman served his apprenticeship until he reached the age of twenty-one, then he became “travelling man” and ultimately “master.” Thus, all man's inner development between his twenty-first and forty-second years is related to the Sun sphere. And all his experiences during his declining years between the ages of fifty-six and sixty-three can be attributed to the influences of the Saturn sphere.

Together with the Earth we exist within seven interpenetrating spheres, and in the course of our life we grow into them and are related to them. The original pattern of our life between birth and death undergoes a metamorphosis through the influence of the starry spheres which mould us from birth to death. When we have reached the Saturn sphere, we have passed through all that the Beings of the planetary spheres can of their bounty accomplish for us. Then, in the occult sense, we embark upon a free and independent cosmic existence which looks back upon the planetary life from the standpoint of Initiation, an existence that in certain respects is no longer subject to the compulsions of earlier life-periods. However, I shall speak further on these matters in the following lectures.

Pitfalls await those on the path of spiritual knowledge. Dr. Steiner's poignant depiction of self-love can be especially helpful. This love rises like a force of nature in one who follows a spiritual path. He also explores the encounter with the double, the influences of Lucifer and Ahriman, the role of fear, and the polar tendencies toward phenomenology and mysticism.

Lecture 12 of 14 from the volume: Results of Spiritual Investigation The volume of the Complete Edition of the works of Rudolf Steiner containing the original text of the this lecture, among eight others, is entitled: Ergebnisse der Geistesforschung, (No. 62 in the Bibliographical Survey, 1961).

Just as it is of great significance in every realm of human endeavor and investigation to know not only the path of truth but also the sources of error, so it is especially the case in the realm dealt with by our lectures here, the realm of spiritual science, of spiritual investigation. In this realm one has to do not only with sources of error that can be eliminated to a certain extent through judgment and reasoning but with sources of error that accompany every step of the spiritual investigation of truth. One has to do with errors that must be not only refuted but overcome, conquered. Only by knowing them in such a way that one keeps, as it were, a spiritual eye on these experiences in their character as error will it be possible to guard oneself against them. It is not possible in relation to this realm to speak of individual truths or errors, but it is necessary to be clear through which activity of the soul, through which confusion of the soul, man can fall into untruth on the path of spiritual investigation.

It is easy to grasp that one wishing to penetrate to the super-sensible world first needs a healthy organ of perception, just as healthy sense organs are needed for outer sense observation. The second thing one needs, in addition to the organ of perception, is a corresponding development of clarity of consciousness, which can clearly oversee and judge the observations. Even in ordinary sense observation of life it is necessary that we have not only healthy senses but also a healthy consciousness, that is, a consciousness not befogged or confused, not paralyzed in a certain way. Both these qualities of the soul life in a higher stage come to be of even greater significance in the realm of spiritual investigation. A comparison from ordinary sense observation will help us to understand this. Suppose someone has an abnormally developed eye, for example. He will not be in a position to observe objects in as accurate and unprejudiced a way as they should be seen. From hundreds of possible examples let us consider just this one. A very significant natural scientist of our day, who is not in the least inclined to submit willingly to any delusion, had a certain eye condition, and he described in his biographical sketch how this eye condition misled him, particularly at dusk, causing him to see things unclearly and, through this unclear seeing, to arrive at false judgments. He described, for example, how he often walked through darkness and, due to his eye condition, would see a figure that he took to be real but that was nothing other than something called forth by his abnormal eye. He then related how he once went around the corner in a strange city and, because he believed the city to be unsafe, his eye induced him to see someone approaching and wishing to assault him; he even pulled out a weapon to defend himself. He therefore was not in a condition, despite complete knowledge of his organ impairment, to judge the situation correctly, to recognize that what his eye called forth was not there at all. Errors can occur in this way in all our sense organs. I bring this up only as a comparison.

In the recent lectures it was described how the human being, through a certain inner cultivation, evolution, of his soul, can develop into a real spiritual investigator, how he brings into use real organs of spirit through which he can look into the super-sensible world. These spiritual organs must be developed in the right way to make it possible to behold—in an analogy with sense perception—not caricature and untruth but the truth, the reality, of higher spiritual worlds. As we have seen, this development of the higher spiritual organs, which can be brought about by a rightly applied concentration, contemplation, and meditation, depends upon the starting point in ordinary, everyday life. Every human being who wishes to evolve upward to a view of the spiritual world must, and this is quite natural and proper, take his starting point from ordinary soul development, from what is right and normal for everyday life and also for ordinary science. Only from this starting point, by taking into the soul those mental processes (Vorstellungsarten) that we have presented as meditations and as other exercises, can the soul ascend again to an observation of the spiritual world.

The problem now is that at the starting point, that is, before the beginning of a spiritual training, the future spiritual investigator must be in possession of a sound power of judgment, a capacity for judgment proceeding from true conditions. Every starting point that does not result from a sound power of judgment, that surrenders itself to the object, leads to unsound organs of spiritual observation, which can be compared to abnormally developed sense organs. Here we are again at the point that we have often mentioned in previous lectures: the significance of what one can designate as the soul life of the spiritual investigator before he begins his development as a spiritual investigator, his training for spiritual investigation. An unsound power of judgment, lacking ability to observe objects in their reality, leads man to see facts and beings of the spiritual world as distorted or, as we shall see today, in many false ways. This is, as it were, the first important point in all development toward spiritual investigation. Spiritual scientific training makes it necessary to take as one's starting point a sound power of judgment, an interest in the true relationships of existence, even before the path to the super-sensible worlds is embarked upon. Everything that readily surrenders itself to illusion in the soul, that readily judges in an arbitrary way, that represents in the soul a certain unsound logic, leads also to the development of unsound spiritual organs.

The other starting point that is of essential significance is the moral mood of soul. The moral ability, the moral force, is as important as sound logic and intelligence, for if unsound logic, if unsound intelligence, lead to faulty spiritual organs, so will a cowardly (schwachmuetig) or immoral mood at the beginning of the spiritual training lead one ascending into the spiritual world to a certain fogginess, a “stupor”, we could call it. One thus faces the higher world in a state of what one must designate as a kind of paralysis, even a loss of consciousness (Ohnmacht). It must be noted, however, that in the stage of soul development referred to here, that which is called losing consciousness, a stupor, cannot be compared with the loss of consciousness, the paralysis, of ordinary, everyday consciousness. In ordinary consciousness, losing consciousness occurs in relation to the areas of everyday life. Losing consciousness in the spiritual world means a stupor, a fogging; it means the saturation of consciousness with all that can stem from the ordinary sense world or from the ordinary experience of the day. The spiritual investigator who is in error cannot be befogged or unconscious to the same degree as in ordinary consciousness, but he can be unconscious in relation to the spiritual world by being filled in the spiritual field of consciousness with that which has justification only through its properties and way of appearing in ordinary sense and intellectual consciousness.

By taking such elements along into the spiritual world, the spiritual investigator dims his higher consciousness. The matter can be presented in the following way. Dimming of consciousness, impairment of the ordinary behavior of soul in everyday life, is like a penetration of sleep or of the dreams into the clear, everyday consciousness. A stupor, a fogging of the higher, super-sensible consciousness, however, is like a penetration of ordinary, everyday consciousness—the consciousness that we carry around with us in the ordinary world—into that consciousness in which it no longer belongs, into the consciousness that should oversee and judge the facts of the higher, super-sensible worlds purely and clearly. Any kind of immoral or weak moral mood, any kind of moral untruthfulness, leads to such a fogging of super-sensible consciousness. Among the essential and most significant aspects of preparing for a spiritual scientific training, therefore, is a corresponding moral development, and, if you go through my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, you will find special practices for the soul through which this appropriate moral mood can be established. Of particular damage in this striving is everything that overcomes man in ordinary life in the way of vanity, ambition, the ordinary sense of self, and a particular sympathy for this or that experience. Inner tranquility, impartiality, a loving penetration of things and worlds, an attentive interest in everything life offers, but especially a certain moral courage, a standing up for what one recognizes as true, are proper starting points for a spiritual scientific training.

From what has been said in preceding lectures, it should be clear that all spiritual training consists of an awakening of certain spiritual forces that exist in the soul but that slumber in ordinary life and must be developed. The spiritual organs and the super-sensible consciousness can be developed only when forces lying peacefully in the depths of the soul, forces that are weak or not at all developed in ordinary life, are really brought into consciousness.

The following can be seen from what has been said. Two things appear when man, through appropriate meditation, through concentrating his whole life of soul on individual mental images called into consciousness by his free will, tries to draw forth these forces resting in the depths of his soul. First, a quality that is always present in the soul but that in ordinary life can be kept relatively in check will be intensified, along with the other slumbering qualities in the depths of the soul; spiritual development cannot take place in any other way than by the whole soul life becoming in a certain respect inwardly more active, more infused with energy. This quality that is intensified at the same time as the others that one is trying directly to intensify one can call human self-love, sense of self. One could say that one begins to know this human self-love, this sense of self, only when one goes through a spiritual scientific training; only then does one begin to know how deep within the human soul this self-love slumbers. As has been pointed out already, he who engages in the exercises described in past lectures, thus intensifying his soul forces, notices at a certain moment in his development that another world enters his soul life. He must be able to notice, to have the knowledge to recognize, that the first form (Gestalt) in which the new, super-sensible world appears is nothing other than a projection, a shadow image, of his own inner soul life. These forces that he has developed in his soul life appear to him first in a mirror image. This is the reason that the materialistic thinker easily mistakes what appears in the soul life of the spiritual investigator for what can appear in the unhealthy soul life as illusions, visions, hallucinations, and the like. That objections from this side rest on ignorance of the facts has often been pointed out; this distinction, however, must be alluded to again and again. The unhealthy soul life, which beholds its own essence as in a mirror image, takes its own reflections for a real world and is not in a position to eliminate these reflections through inner choice. By comparison, in a true spiritual training it must be maintained that the spiritual investigator recognizes the first phenomena that appear as reflections of his own being; not only does he recognize them as such, but he is able to eliminate them, to extinguish them from his field of consciousness.

Just as the spiritual investigator is able through his exercises to intensify his soul forces so that a new world is conjured before him, so he must be able to extinguish this whole world in its first form; he must not only recognize it as a reflection of his own being but be able to extinguish it again. If he could not extinguish it, he would be in a situation comparable to something that occurs in sense observation and that would be unbearable, impossible in an actual development of the human soul. Imagine in ordinary sense observation that a person directed his eyes to an object and became so attracted to it that he could not avert his gaze. The person would not be able to look around freely but would be tied to the object. This would be an unbearable situation in relation to the outer world. With a spiritual development, it would mean exactly the same in relation to the super-sensible world if a person were not in the position to turn from his spiritual observation and extinguish what presents itself as image to his spiritual observation. He must pass the test expressed in the words, “You are able to extinguish your image,” overcoming himself in this extinguishing; if the image returns, so that he can know his reality in a corresponding way, then only does he face reality and not his own imaginings (Einbildung). The spiritual investigator therefore must be able not only to create his own spiritual phenomena and to approach them but also to extinguish them again.

What does this mean, however? It means nothing less than the need for an immensely strong force to overcome the sense of self, self-love. Why does the abnormal soul life, which arrives at visions, hallucinations, and crazy notions, see these creations as realities and not as emanations from its own being? Because the human being feels himself so connected, so bound, to what he himself brings forth that he would believe himself destroyed if he could not look at what he himself brings forth as a reality. If a human being leaves the ordinary world with an abnormal soul life, his self-love becomes so intensified that it works like a force of nature. Within the ordinary soul life we can distinguish very clearly between so-called fantasy and what is reality, for within the ordinary soul life we have a certain power over our mental images. Any person is aware of this power whose soul has been capable of eliminating certain mental images when it recognizes their error. We are in a different situation in relation to the outer world when we are confronted with forces of nature; when lightning flashes, when thunder rolls, we have to let the phenomena take their course; we cannot tell the lightning not to flash or the thunder not to roll.

With the same inner force, however, the sense of self appears in us when we leave the ordinary soul life; as little as we can forbid lightning to flash so little can we forbid self-love from appearing, developed into a force of nature, if it is only a reflection of one's own being, that which the soul presents as an image of its own being, perceived as a real outer world. From this one can see, therefore, that the self-education of the spiritual investigator must consist chiefly of overcoming piece by piece self-love, the sense of self. Only if this is accomplished at every stage of spiritual development through a strict self-observation will one come to be able at last to erase a spiritual world when it appears as described. This means to be in the position of allowing that which one has striven for with all one's might to fall into oblivion. Something must be developed through spiritual training (one can find this presented more precisely in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds) that actually does not exist at all in man's free will in ordinary life. If man in ordinary life undertakes to do something, he wants to do it if he neglects to do something, he doesn't want to do it. One must say that in ordinary life man is in the position of applying his will impulses. To extinguish, in the way I described, the spiritual world that appears, the will must not only have the described faculties but must be able, after the spiritual world appears, slowly to weaken itself bit by bit, to the point of utter will-lessness, even to the point of extinguishing itself. Such a cultivation of the will is accomplished only when the exercises for the soul, described in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, are followed systematically. When we awaken the slumbering forces in our soul, self-love, the sense of self, are intensified. This intensification leads us under certain circumstances to consider as an outer reality that which we actually are ourselves, that which lies only within us.

Another thing that is necessary when the soul undergoes appropriate exercises for a spiritual training is for man, at a certain level of this development, actually to forsake everything in his consciousness, everything that in his life up to now gave him in outer, everyday life and in ordinary science the content of truth, security in truth, everything that gave him the possibility of considering something as reality. As indicated already in previous lectures, all supports that we have for our judgments in ordinary life, all basic reference points given us by the sense world, which teaches us how we must think about reality, must be forsaken. After all, we want through the spiritual training to enter a higher world. The spiritual investigator at an appropriate stage of his development now sees, “You can no longer have a support in the world that you want to enter; you can no longer have the support of outer sense perception, of the intellectual judgment you have acquired, which otherwise guided you correctly through life”; when he has seen this, then comes the all-important, serious moment in the life of the spiritual investigator when he feels as if the ground is gone from under his feet, as if the support that he has had in ordinary life is gone, as if all security that has carried him up to now is gone and that he approaches an abyss into which with every further step he will surely fall. This must in a certain way become an experience in the spiritual training. That this experience not be accompanied by every possible danger is the primary concern of a true spiritual training today.

An attempt has been made to explain this more fully in the book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. If one undergoes the exercises offered there, one comes step by step to a point at which one feels what has just been described; one feels oneself as if over an abyss. One has already become so tranquil in one's soul, however, that one beholds the situation with a newly acquired, special faculty of judgment; therefore the fear, terror, and horror that otherwise needs must overtake the human soul in a dangerous way—not an ordinary, everyday fear—do not appear. One learns to know the basis of the fear, terror, and horror, but one has already progressed so as to achieve a mood in which one can endure it without fear.

Here we are again at a point at which it becomes necessary for the soul to recognize the truth and not fall into error, because the support that one has in ordinary life has disappeared, and the soul feels itself as if placed over an abyss. This must occur in order that, out of the emptiness, that which is fully spiritual in the world can approach the soul.

What in ordinary life is called anxiety, fear, will be intensified through such a training, expanded, just as self-love and the sense of self are intensified and expanded, growing into a kind of force of nature. Something must be said here that perhaps sounds paradoxical. In ordinary life if we have not struggled through to a certain courage, if we are cowards, we are frightened by this or that event if we have courage, however, we can endure it. In the region of the soul life we have described, fear, terror, and horror will approach us, but we must be in the position, as it were, not to be afraid of the fear, not to be horrified by the horror, not to become anxious with the anxiety that confronts us. This is the paradox, but it corresponds exactly with an actual soul experience that appears in this realm.

Everything that the human being experiences on entering the spiritual world is designated ordinarily as the experience with the Guardian of the Threshold. I tried to describe something concrete about this experience in my Mystery Drama, The Guardian of the Threshold. Here it only need be mentioned that at a certain stage of spiritual development, man learns to know his inner being as it can love itself with the force of an event of nature, as it can be frightened and horrified on entering the spiritual world. This experience of our own self, of the intensified self of that inner being that otherwise never would come before our soul, is the soul-shaking event called the Meeting with the Guardian of the Threshold. Only by having this meeting will one acquire the faculty to differentiate truth from error in the spiritual world.

Why this experience is called the Meeting with the Guardian of the Threshold is easily comprehensible. It is clear that the spiritual world that man enters is always around us and that man is unaware of it in ordinary life only because he does not have the appropriate organs to perceive it. The spiritual world surrounds us always and is always behind that which the senses perceive. Before man can enter this world, however, he must strengthen his ego, his I. With the strengthening of the ego, however, the aforementioned qualities also appear. He therefore must learn above all else to know himself, so that when he is able to confront a spiritual outer world in the same way as he confronts an objective being he can distinguish himself from what is truth. If he does not learn to delimit himself in this way, he will always confuse that which is only within him, that which is only his subjective experience, with the spiritual world picture; he can never arrive at a real grasp of spiritual reality.

To what extent fear plays a certain role on entering the spiritual world can be observed particularly in the people who deny the existence of such a world. Among such people are also many who have different reasons for denying this spiritual world, but a great portion of those people who are theoretical materialists or materialistically tinged monists have a definite reason for denying this spiritual world, a reason that is clearly visible for one who knows the soul. We must now emphasize that the soul life of the human being is, as it were, twofold. In the soul not only does there exist what man ordinarily knows, but in the depths of the soul life things are happening that cast their shadows—or their lights—into ordinary consciousness. Ordinary consciousness, however, does not reach down to this level. We can find in the hidden depths of soul hatred and love, joy and fear and excitement, without our carrying these effects into conscious soul life. It is therefore entirely correct to say that a phenomenon of hatred directed from one person to another, taking place within consciousness, actually can be rooted, in the depths of soul, in love. There can be a sympathy, a deep sympathy, of one person for another in the depths of the soul, but since this person at the same time has reasons—reasons about which he perhaps knows nothing—he is confused about this love, about the sympathy, deceiving himself with hatred and antipathy. This is something that holds sway in the depths of the soul, so that these depths look quite different from what we call our everyday consciousness. There can be conditions of fear, of anxiety, in the depths of the soul of which one has no conscious idea. Man can have that fear in the depths of his soul, that anxiety in face of the spiritual world—because he must cross the abyss that has been described before entering—and yet be aware of nothing consciously. Actually, all human beings who have not yet entered the spiritual world, but who have acquired an understanding of entering, have to a degree this fear, this terror in face of the spiritual world. Whatever one may think concerning this fear and anxiety that are within the depths of the soul, they are there, though they appear stronger with one person, weaker with another. Because the soul might be injured, man is protected by the wisdom-filled nature of his being from being able to look further into the spiritual world, from being able to have the experience of meeting the Guardian of the Threshold until he is ready for it. Before that he is protected. Therefore one speaks of the experience of the Guardian of the Threshold.

We can note that a materialistically or monistically minded person, although knowing nothing of this experience, does have this fear in face of the spiritual world in the depths of his soul. There lives in such a person a certain antipathy to confronting the abyss that must be crossed; and to help him get past this fear, this anxiety in the soul in face of the spiritual world, the monist or materialist thinks out his theories and denies the spiritual world; this denial is nothing other than a self-induced anesthesia in face of his fear. This is the real explanation for materialism. As unsympathetic as it may sound, for one who knows the soul it is evident that in a meeting of materialistic monists, or those who deny soul and spirit, there prevails only the fear in the face of the spiritual world. One could say mockingly that fear-mongering is the basis of materialism, and although it is mocking it is nevertheless true. In materialistic literature, in the materialistic world conception, the spiritual investigator recognizes everywhere between the lines fear and anxiety in face of the spiritual world. What in ordinary life appears as materialism, however, as the soul condition present when a person is a materialist or a materialistically tinged monist, can also be present when a person arrives through definite measures at a certain spiritual vision. One can go through certain exercises in the soul and develop thereby from a more-or-less unhealthy soul condition to a more-or-less spiritual comprehension, yet one need not come by this means to a real understanding of the nature of the spiritual world. In a certain way one can carry up into the spiritual something of this fear about which one knows nothing, which has already been characterized and which underlies the materialistically minded person in the ordinary world.

If one does not grasp this connection, one can carry up into the spiritual world something that is terribly widespread in ordinary life: the love of ease of thinking, the love of ease of feeling. Fear is closely akin to love of ease, to clinging to habit. Why is man afraid of changing his situation? Because he loves his ease and comfort. This love of ease is closely related to fear. We have already described the basis for hatred; in the same way one can also say that lassitude, love of ease, are closely related to fear. One can, however, carry this love of ease up into the spiritual world. No one ought to object that human beings show no evidence of fear or love of ease, for this is again characteristic; it is characteristic that the ordinary mood of soul knows nothing of these things rooted in the subconscious. If man carries fear into the spiritual world, already having developed to the point of acknowledging the spiritual world, then an error arises in a spiritual region, an error that is extraordinarily important to consider the leaning toward phenomenalism.

People who become subject to this leaning become, rather than spiritual investigators, “specterseers” (to express it crassly), those who see ghosts (Gespensterschauer); they become possessed by a leaning toward phenomenalism. This means that they want to see the spiritual world in the same way as the sense world is to be seen; they do not want to perceive spiritual facts, spiritual beings, but something similar to the beings that the sensory eye can behold. In short, instead of spirits they want to behold specters, ghosts. The error of spiritualism (this is not to say that all spiritualism is unjustified) consists of this leaning toward phenomenalism. Just as the ordinary, everyday materialist wants to see only matter everywhere and not the spirit behind matter, so does he who brings to the spiritual world the same soul condition that actually exists in materialism want to see everywhere only ghostlike, condensed spirits.

This is one dangerous extreme of error that can emerge. One must say that this tendency to carry the ordinary field of consciousness up into the super-sensible field of consciousness exists in the widest circles, even among those who fully recognize a “spiritual world” and want “proof” of a spiritual world. The error here, however, lies in considering a proof valid only if it takes place in the realm of phenomenalism; it lies in considering that everything should be like condensed ghosts. Here something arises that was called in the beginning of our study a stupor, losing consciousness in relation to the spiritual world. While losing consciousness in ordinary life is the penetration of a sleeping or dreaming condition into consciousness, losing consciousness regarding the spiritual world means wanting to give worth only to that which appears in the same way as things in the ordinary world, so that one is unconscious in relation to the spiritual world; it is demanded that proof be supplied that can be taken in the way appropriate only in the ordinary world. Just as one brings sleep into the ordinary world if one falls unconscious, so one falls unconscious in relation to the beings and processes of the spiritual world if one takes into the super-sensible world that which is only an extract of sense reality (das Sinnliche). The true spiritual investigator also knows those realms of the spiritual world that condense into the ghostlike, but he knows that everything arriving at such a condensation is merely the dying, the withering in the spiritual world. When, for example, with the help of a medium, something is brought to life as the thoughts of a deceased person, we are confronted only with what remains behind, as it were, of the deceased. We are not dealing with that which goes through the portal of death, which passes through the spiritual world and appears again in a new earthly life. We are concerned in such a case not with what is present in the individuality of the dead person but with the sheath that is cast off, the wooden part of the tree, or the shell of a shellfish, or the skin of the snake that is cast off. In the same way, such sheaths, such useless remnants, are continuously being cast off from the being of the spiritual world and then, by way of a medium, they can be made perceptible—although as visible unreality. The spiritual investigator knows, to be sure, that he is not confronting an unreality. He does not surrender himself to the error, however, that in encountering the described phenomenon he is confronted with something fertile, with something sprouting and budding; rather he knows it as something dying, withering. At the same time it must be emphasized that in the sense world, when one confronts error, one is dealing with something that must be ignored, that must be eliminated as soon as it is recognized as error, whereas in the spiritual world one cannot cope with error in the same way. There, an error corresponds to the dying, the withering, and the error consists of mistaking the dying and withering in the spiritual world for something fruitful or full of significance. Even in the life of the ordinary human being, error is something one casts off; in the spiritual world error arises when the dead, the dying, is taken for something fruitful, sprouting; one mistakes the dead remnants that have been cast off for immortality.

How deeply the best individuals of our time have been entangled in this kind of phenomenalism, considering only such proof as valid, we can see in an individual who wrote so many excellent things about the world and now has written a book about these phenomena, about these different phenomena of spiritual investigation. I am referring to Maurice Maeterlinck and his book, About Death. We read there that he acknowledges a spiritual world but as proof acknowledges only what appears in phenomenalism. He does not notice that he tries to find in phenomenalism that which can never be found in phenomenalism. Then he criticizes the “phenomena” very acutely, very effectively. He does notice, however, that all this actually has no particular meaning and that the human soul after death does not exhibit a very intense vitality, that it behaves rather awkwardly, as though groping in the dark. Since he wants to admit only this kind of proof, he generally does not acknowledge spiritual investigation but remains stuck.

We see how the possibility of error opens itself to someone who would gladly recognize the spiritual world but is unable to do so, because he does not demand spiritual investigation but rather “specter investigation” and does not make use of what reality can give. His newest book is extraordinarily interesting from this point of view.

In the leaning toward phenomenalism we thus have the one extreme among the possibilities for error in spiritual investigation. The other extreme among the possibilities for error is ecstasy, and between phenomenalism and ecstasy, in knowing both, lies the truth, or at least truth can be reached if one knows both. The path of error, however, lies as much on the side of phenomenalism as on the side of ecstasy. We have seen what soul condition leads into the wish to acknowledge only phenomenalism. It is fear, horror, which man does not admit, which he tries to conceal. Because he is afraid to abandon all sense reality and to make the leap over the abyss, he accepts sense reality, demands the specters, and arrives thereby only at the dying, at that which destroys itself: This is one source of error. The other force of the soul, intensified through the exercises often described here is self-love, sense of self; self-love has as its polarity—one would like to say—the “getting out of oneself.” This “enjoying oneself in oneself” (pardon the expression; it is a radical choice but points exactly to what we are concerned with here) is only one side; the other side consists of “losing oneself in the world,” the surrender and dissolving and self-enjoyment in the other and the corresponding intensification of this self-seeking coming-out-of-one's self is ecstasy in its extreme. It is the cause of a condition in which man in a certain respect can say to himself that he has gotten free of himself. He has become free of himself, however, only by feeling the comfort of his own self in the being outside himself. If the one who knows the soul looks at the evolution of mysticism in the world, he finds that a large part of mysticism consists of the phenomena just characterized. As great, as powerful in soul experiences, as deep and significant as mysticism can be, the possibilities of error in ecstasy are actually rooted in a false cultivation of the mystical faculty of the human being. When man strives always to enter more and more into himself, when he strives through this for what is called the deepening of his soul life, strives, as he says, to find “God in himself” this God that man finds in his inner being is usually nothing other than his own I or ego made into God. With many mystics we find, when they speak of the “God within,” nothing other than the God imprinted with their own egos. Mystical immersion in God is at times nothing but immersing oneself into one's own dear ego, especially into the parts of the ego into which one does not penetrate with full consciousness, so that one surrenders one's self, loses one's self, comes out of one's self, and yet remains only within one's self. Much that confronts us as mysticism shows that with false mystics love of God is often only disguised self-love.

The real spiritual investigator must guard himself on the one hand against carrying the outer sense world into the higher world; he must guard on the other hand against the opposite extreme, against false mysticism, the coming-out-of-oneself. He must never confuse “love for the spiritual being of the world” with self-love. In the moment that he confuses these, the following occurs, as the true spiritual investigator, who has developed himself correctly, can verify. Just as one who is compelled by phenomenalism beholds only the remnants, the dying of the spiritual world, so he who surrenders himself to the other extreme sees only individual parts of the spiritual world, not spiritual facts and beings. In the spiritual world he does not do what one who contemplates the flowers in a meadow does; rather, he does what the one does who takes what grows in the field, chops it up and eats it. This comparison is peculiar but absolutely to the point. Through ecstasy the spiritual facts are not grasped in their wholeness, their totality, but only in that which pleases and benefits one's own soul, that which the soul can consume spiritually. It is actually a consumption of spiritual substance that is cultivated in the human being through ecstasy. Just as little as one learns to know things of this sense world by eating them, so little does one learn to know the forces and beings of the spiritual world through giving oneself to ecstasy in order to warm one's own self with what feels good. One thereby comes to a definite knowledge only of one's own self in relation to the spiritual world. One lives only in a heightened sense of self, a heightened self-love, and because one takes in from the spiritual world only that which can be consumed spiritually, which can be eaten spiritually, one deprives oneself of that which cannot be handled in this way, of that which stands apart from the nourishment gained through ecstasy. What one deprives oneself of, however, is by far the greatest part of the spiritual world, and the mystic who clings to ecstasy is deprived more and more. We find with mystics who ascend to the spiritual world through ecstasy that it is exactly as if they were always indulging themselves through repeating feelings and sensations. Many presentations of such mystics appear not as objective presentations of the conditions of the spiritual world but as though the one who gives the presentation were indulging in what he presents. Many mystics are actually nothing but spiritual gourmets, and the rest of the spiritual world, which does not taste good to them, does not even exist for them.

We see again how concepts change when we ascend from the ordinary world into the higher world. If in the ordinary world we occupy ourselves only with our own concepts, we become poorer and poorer, our logic becomes ever poorer. Finally we find that we can no longer find our orientation, and anyone who knows the facts can set us straight. In the ordinary world we correct this meagerness by widening our concepts. In the spiritual world, that which corresponds to ecstasy leads to something else. By taking into us realities, and not something unreal—but taking in only isolated parts, after picking out what suits us—we receive a view of the spiritual world that is only suited to ourselves. We carry ourselves into the spiritual world just as in the other extreme, in phenomenalism, we carry the sense world into the spiritual world. It can always be shown in the case of one who arrives at a false picture of the world through ecstasy that he began from an unsound force of judgment, from an incomplete factual logic.

We thus see how the spiritual investigator always must avoid the two extremes that bring him to every possible source of error: phenomenalism on the one hand and ecstasy on the other. In order to avoid the sources of error, nothing will be more helpful than for the spiritual investigator to cultivate one particular mood of soul, through which he is in a position, when he places himself in the spiritual world, to exist in the spiritual world, to be able to observe calmly in that world. One cannot always remain in the spiritual world, however, so long as one is in the physical body; one must also live with the physical world; therefore this mood of soul that the spiritual investigator must cultivate allows him in the physical world to strive as much as possible to grasp the facts of life with common sense, without sentimentality and untruthfulness. It is necessary for the spiritual investigator, to a much higher degree than is ordinarily the case, to have a healthy sense for facts, a genuine feeling for truthfulness. All fanaticism, all inaccuracy, which make it so easy to skirt what is really there, are harmful for the spiritual investigator. One can see already in ordinary life, and it becomes clear immediately in the realm of spiritual training, that lie who lets himself indulge only the least bit in inaccuracy will notice that it is only a tiny step from inaccuracy to lies and untruthfulness. The spiritual investigator, therefore, must strive to feel himself obliged to hold firmly to the truth, to mix nothing with the unconditional truth that exists in ordinary life, for in the spiritual world such a mixing leads from error to error. In those circles wishing to have anything to do with spiritual investigation, the justified opinion should be spread that an outer, distinguishing characteristic of the true spiritual investigator must be his truthfulness; the moment the spiritual investigator demonstrates that he feels little obligation to test what he says, speaking rather of things he cannot know about the physical world, he becomes flawed as a spiritual investigator and no longer can merit a full trust. This is connected with the conditions for spiritual investigation itself.

It must be brought to our attention again and again that, when the realms of spiritual investigation and spiritual science are spoken of today, it is unjustified to claim that only the spiritual investigator can see into the spiritual world and that one who is not yet a spiritual investigator is unable to know and understand and grasp it. You can learn from the descriptions in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, and from my presentation in An Outline of Occult Science that in our era to a certain degree every person, if only he makes the necessary effort, can become a spiritual investigator, no matter what his position in life is otherwise. Nevertheless, it is also possible for a person to understand the descriptions of the spiritual world without being a spiritual investigator. It is necessary to be a spiritual investigator not in order to understand the communications from the spiritual world but in order to discover them, to investigate what is present in the spiritual world. One must be a painter in order to paint a picture, but one need not be a painter to understand a picture; it is the same with understanding communications from the spiritual world with the sound human intellect. It is in order to investigate the spiritual world that the human being is endowed with the higher organs of observation. If what is investigated, however, is brought into the concepts of the ordinary world, as is often attempted here, the sound human intellect can, if only it is sufficiently unprejudiced and does not create obstructions for itself, grasp what is brought to light through spiritual investigation.

One could say that with spiritual investigation it is the same as it is with what grows under the earth and is found only when one digs into the earth like a miner. Whatever one finds there can originate only as it exists within the earth, developing in those layers of the earth that are covered by layers above it. What is in the depths of the earth cannot develop on the surface of the earth, which is illuminated by the sun during the day. If we then make an opening in the earth, however, and let the sunlight shine in, illuminating what is underneath, everything can appear in the light of the sun. It is the same with what can be gained through spiritual scientific investigation: it can be brought to light only if the soul has transformed itself into an organ of perception for the spiritual world. If it is brought into the concepts and mental images of ordinary life, however, then the human intellect, if only it is sufficiently sound, can understand and illuminate everything as if with spiritual sunlight. All of spiritual science, therefore, can be grasped by the sound human intellect. Just as a painting is not made merely for the painter himself, so the communications about the spiritual world are not only for the spiritual scientific investigator. Nevertheless, paintings are able to originate only through the painter, and the spiritual world can be explored only by the spiritual investigator.

He who believes that what comes from the communications of the spiritual investigator cannot be grasped by means of the ordinary intellect does not perceive at all correctly the nature and essence of the human capacity for thinking. In the human capacity for thinking reside faculties that stand in direct connection with the nature of the higher world. Because man is accustomed to approach only the ordinary sense objects with his concepts, he believes that the ordinary faculty of judgment vanishes in him if super-sensible facts are presented to him. He who develops his capacity for thinking, however, can cultivate this capacity in such a way that it can grasp what is brought to light through spiritual investigation. One must not have some notion beforehand, however, of how one can grasp such matters. This should result from the study itself. If one has a definite notion of how one should grasp these things, one surrenders oneself again to a serious error in relation to spiritual investigation. This is the second aspect that is especially noticeable in Maurice Maeterlinck's new book. He is an individual who wishes to direct his gaze to the spiritual world, who has made some fine observations about various things, and who has also tried to present the mysteries of the spiritual world dramatically; it is especially telling that this individual, in the moment in which he should approach the real science of the spirit, proves himself so inadequate. He demands a certain kind of understanding—not the kind given by the things themselves but the kind he imagines (ertraeumt), which he believes must appear to provide verification. In this way the greatest peculiarity arises: Maeterlinck takes to be merely a belief that which anthroposophy or spiritual science has to say when it speaks today about “repeated earthly lives”—when it speaks with a certain outer justification (not with a merely inner conviction, which would be akin to a certain primitive belief of humanity). He calls it a belief, because he cannot perceive that what we are concerned with here does not have to do with belief but with knowledge. He thus finds that the existence of that which develops further in man, moving from life to life, cannot be proved, because he has a definite idea of what constitutes proof. Maeterlinck can be compared in this realm to certain other people. Until recently, there existed a kind of belief, a certain mathematical-geometrical belief that is summarized in the words, the “squaring of the circle”; that is, one would seek by means of a mathematical-analytical, constructive thinking for that square which equaled the area or the circumference of the circle. This task of transforming the circle into a square was an ideal, as it were, toward which one always strove: the transforming of the circle into a square. Now, no one doubted that there could be a square exactly as large as a circle. In reality, of course, it is entirely possible for such a thing to exist, but it is impossible to show with mathematical constructions or with analytical methods just what the diameter of a circle would have to be to equal a particular square. This means that mathematical thinking does not suffice to prove something that is real, that is physical. There have been countless people who have worked on the solution of squaring the circle, until recent mathematicians proved that it is impossible to solve the problem in this way. Today anyone still trying to solve the problem of squaring the circle is considered not to know mathematics in this realm. Maeterlinck is equivalent to those people trying to square the circle in regard to what he is trying to prove. One can understand the spiritual world, can grasp that what is brought to light through spiritual investigation is real; one cannot prove the existence of this spiritual world, however, if one demands out of prejudice a particular kind of proof; one can prove it in this way as little as one can prove the squaring of a circle mathematically.

One would have to reply to Maeterlinck, therefore, that he tries to square the circle in the spiritual realm, or he would have to be shown how the concepts by which he would like to prove the existence of the spiritual world disappear when man passes through the portal of death. How is one supposed to prove the existence of the spiritual world with concepts such as those taken from the sense world? This, however, is what Maeterlinck is trying to do, and it is extraordinarily interesting that when he gives in to his healthy feeling, he has no choice but to acknowledge repeated lives on earth. It is very interesting how he expresses himself about a knowledge that he calls a belief, and I would like to read to you his own words: ‘Never was there a belief more beautiful, more just, more pure, more morally fruitful, more comforting, and in a certain sense more probable than this. With its teaching of gradual redemption and purification of all bodily and spiritual inequities, of all social injustice, all terrible’ injustices of destiny, it alone gives meaning to life. The goodness of a belief, however, is no proof of its truthfulness. Although six hundred million human beings devote themselves to this religion, although it is closest to the origins that are shrouded in darkness, although it is the only one without hatred, it should have done what the others have not done: bring us indisputable evidence. What it has given us up to now is only the first shadow of the beginning of a proof.” In other words, Maeterlinck is trying in this realm to square the circle.

We see especially clearly in this example how someone who can think that the benefit of spiritual science lies only in an extreme, in phenomenalism (all his writings show this), is totally unable to keep in view the significance and the real nature of spiritual scientific investigation. From such an example as Maeterlinck, we can learn a lot, namely that truth, which must be introduced into the world evolution of humanity, is really, when it first appears, in the position once characterized by Schopenhauer with the words, “In all centuries poor truth had to blush over being paradoxical.” To Maeterlinck, truth appears not just paradoxical but unbelievable, yet it is not the fault of truth. Truth cannot take on the form of the universally reigning error. Thus she looks sighing to her patron god, Time, which promises her victory and glory, but whose vast wings beat so slowly that she dies in the meantime. So it goes with the course of the spiritual evolution of humanity. It is most interesting and instructive that the best individuals today, those human beings who long to have their soul life connected with a spiritual world, are not capable of grasping the core of the actual science of the spirit. Instead, where it involves distinguishing the true path from the two possibilities for error, they stumble, because they do not dare leap over the abyss; they wish either to make use of their dependence on the ordinary world, in phenomenalism, or, if they do not do this, they seek an intensification of the sense of self in ecstasy. We cannot concern ourselves only with recognizing the character of the separate possibilities for error; we must concern ourselves with that which humanity must avoid if one is to recognize and close up the source of spiritual scientific error. From the way in which today's study has been undertaken, one conclusion can be drawn: spiritual investigation must know the sources of error. The temptation is always present in the soul to err in the direction of phenomenalism, and therefore to stand as though spiritually unconscious in relation to the spiritual world, or to err in the direction of ecstasy, which means wanting to enter the spiritual world with inadequate organs of spirit and thus receiving only isolated pieces and not related facts.

The path goes between the two extremes. One must know the possibilities for error. Because they can appear with every step in spiritual life one must not only know them but overcome them. The revelations of spiritual investigation are not only results of investigation but also victories over error, victory by means of a way of looking that has been gained previously, victory over the sense of self and more. He who penetrates more deeply into what we have tried to describe only sketchily today will become aware that—even if everywhere where we embark on the investigation of spiritual life the possibilities for error can lurk frighteningly—we nevertheless must conquer error again and again. He will become aware that spiritual investigation not only satisfies an indomitable yearning for that which man needs for certainty in his life but that its goal must appear, to one who regards this movement with comprehension, as attainable to a sound human sense. To conclude what today's lecture was to offer on the level of feeling, I would like to say that in spite of all obstacles, in spite of all things that can stand in a hostile way on the path of spiritual investigation, those who penetrate with a sound sense into the results of spiritual scientific. investigation feel and sense that these results penetrate—through difficult hindrances of soul, through bewildering darknesses of spirit—to a solemn clarity, to a luminous truth.

You hear repeatedly if one talks about anthroposophy that it originates from the fantastic inspirations of single personalities. Many people at least judge that way who fancy themselves as capable. However, one has to say from the start that this anthroposophic spiritual knowledge wants to cover a research field that contains the most important interests of the human life generally. Hence, isolated attempts were done repeatedly at all times to cultivate this field. But one must say that these were mostly only light flashes in our time which were cast on this field by this or that outstanding personality who contemplated the human spiritual life. These light flashes with which one always has the sensation that they come from quite different origins of the human being than the knowledge that refers to the outside sense perception.

Unsurprisingly, an unaware cognitive instinct makes the human beings illuminate this field by such light flashes repeatedly, because on this field there are the most important soul riddles which the human being has to face over and over again with his feeling, thinking and willing. The human being has to feel: if he does not take a position to these questions, it has an effect on his soul that you can compare with a kind of bodily illness. The soul life becomes banal; it feels exposed to all kinds of “addictions”—I would like to say—if the doubts, the uncertainties emerge concerning these questions. However, in our times the human beings were less eager to satisfy their desire for knowledge, which arises from such impulses, with spiritual food. Who did not know the fashion of those who could afford it to visit the most different sanitariums where, actually, for many people nothing was extinguished but that desire for knowledge of which one liked, actually, to be unaware in the usual life. What the human beings searched in sanitariums and similar institutions, were, strictly speaking, only suggestions with which they did not want to be present, so to speak, with their souls and which should meet those mysterious desires about which I have just spoken and which one does not want to satisfy spiritually.

A picture repeatedly emerges to me if I have to contemplate such questions. When I was—to visit somebody—in a sanitarium just at a time when the different guests were passing and when I found out for myself after the conversation and the sight of single patients that that who mostly needed recovery of his nervous system was the doctor in charge. The others needed much less recovery of their nervous systems than the doctor in charge needed.

On this field, single persons who dealt more intensely with questions of the spiritual life have cast single light flashes that arose to them from the depths of their souls. Besides, one thing always became known that would run like a red thread also today through the considerations of this evening. The fact that in the human being, as he walks on earth today, another human being sleeps and rests who is not perceived due to the conditions of the usual life because he sleeps quieter in the usual human being than dream images exist in him which emerge and disappear.

However, one thing always struck just spirited persons when they found out for themselves how this second human being rests in the usual human being: they could not conceive this sleeping human being without bringing him together with death in any way. More or less instinctively, the one or the other personality recognised that just as the phenomena of the outer sense perceptible physical life are associated with the laws of existence, of growth, of birth and so on, this second human being sleeping in the first is associated intimately with death, with fading. You notice that it is a great, important moment for persons of knowledge if they have to think the higher human being in the usual human being associated with the forces of death.

Such a personality is the philosopher and psychologist Karl Fortlage (1806-1881). I want to take an important statement as starting point that he did in a course of eight psychological lectures in 1869. In these lectures, you can find the following, quite important place:

 “If we call ourselves living beings and attribute a quality to ourselves which we have in common with animals and plants, we inevitably understand by the living state something that never leaves us and always continues in sleep and in the wake state in us. This is the vegetative life of nourishing our organism, an unaware life, a sleeping life; it is outbalanced in the breaks of waking by the life of consumption. The brain makes an exception here because this life of nourishing, this sleeping life, is outbalanced in the breaks of the waking by the life of consumption. In these breaks the brain is exposed to prevailing consumption and gets consequently into a state which would bring about the absolute weakening of the body or death, if it extended to the other organs.”

After Fortlage has come to this strange statement, he continues this consideration with the following, profound words: “Consciousness is a little and partial death, death is a big and complete consciousness, an awakening of the whole being in its innermost depths.”

You realise that such a light flash, emerging from the depths of the soul, illuminates the coherence of death and consciousness what accompanies us during our wake life always and makes up, actually, the human being. Fortlage gets to an idea of the relationship of death and consciousness, realising that that which seizes all human beings at once at the moment of death works in microcosm if we unfold our consciousness during the wake life. Every conscious act is in microcosm the same as death is on a large scale. So that—as to Fortlage—the real death if it occurs is the emergence of an enclosing consciousness, which puts the human being into a supersensible world, while he is put into the physical world if his soul needs the physical body between birth and death.

Fortlage wrote many volumes on psychology. However, such light flashes appear only now and again in his writings. The remaining contents of his writings even deal with that which one finds so normally today in psychology: the association and course of mental pictures, the emergence of desires and so on, briefly, with all those questions on which one ventures solely in psychology and which are far away from that what, actually, interests the whole human being in psychology, which are far away from the main questions of freedom and immortality.

The considerations of this evening deal with the question of immortality while in some weeks here I hold a talk about freedom from the same viewpoint.

Even if Fortlage is concerned with the subordinate questions in his vast psychological research, and in such a way that this kind of activity cannot lead to the highest questions, at least, such light flashes are found with him. However, one reproved him for it. Eduard von Hartmann reproved Fortlage sharply that he would have left the path of science introducing such a coherence into the strict science as that of consciousness and death.

Well, one may say, not only Fortlage but also many personalities produced in single light flashes something of knowledge that refers to this characterised second human being sleeping in the sense-perceptible human being. However, these were isolated light flashes.

Anthroposophy has the task now to systemise, to make methodical that what has come up instinctively in single light flashes like manifestations of higher knowledge from the depths of the human soul, so that that which originates from it can place itself as a fully valid science beside the modern natural sciences. However, it is necessary that that who wants to form an opinion about anthroposophy casts off some prejudices that easily result from certain advantages of modern science.

I had to say, the human being whom spiritual science considers is something sleeping in the normally waking human being. From it, however, it is explicable that everything that refers to this second human being is generally drowned as it were at first in our consciousness by the sensory experience and the needs of our personal life. If in this usual life now and again such light flashes appear, they disappear faster than a dream does. No miracle, hence, that most people once say to themselves after the absolutely entitled judgement of our time: indeed, what emerges there from the soul and will manifest of this low sounding sleeping human being, this does—if it appears with those who call themselves spiritual researchers—the impression of something dreamish, fantastic. Our time does not want to get involved with such phantasms. It has rapidly finished its judgement: nonsense, this is something that has arisen from the imagination of single ones.

However, something else could be right. How would it be if it were right that one could get such weak images as they exist in dream of that what lives in the human being beyond birth and death what is the everlasting of the human nature compared with the transient? If this held true, one would have to renounce either any knowledge of the everlasting in the human being if one did not want to recourse to images of imagination or dream life, or one would have to bring the logical discipline into this world that usually seems to be fantastic, the sense of methodical research that one applies to the sense-perceptible world. One has to raise the images with certain soul forces, so that they do not only scurry like dreams, but also become as distinct and impressive as the images of the usual consciousness are.

Is anyone able to do this? Today it is difficult to bring home to a human being that one is able to do it even in scientific sense because today one regards natural sciences as the only science that has a strictly reasonable methodology. If one distinguishes other sciences, one accepts them, actually, only as far as they are founded methodically after the pattern of natural sciences. One has to say for certain fields: what natural sciences have brought up in modern times as mental pictures, showed that it must be that way if they want to control the area which is assigned to them. However, one must also say that one cannot approach the everlasting life of the human being with these mental pictures.

These images cannot be appropriate to the same extent to solve the riddles of nature and the riddles of the human soul. To the latter one has to add something else. Which means must be applied to make the soul so strong that it can bring up the mental pictures which rest sleeping below in our consciousness and can apply the strict discipline and methodology of thinking to them, about which I have spoken in particular in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?. As in former talks, I want again to emphasise some viewpoints of these writings. One gets no idea of the approach of the spiritual researcher what he has to do, actually, to behold into the spiritual world with his soul if one does not realise what one can experience as a whole human being with the suitable desire for knowledge at certain limiting points of knowledge to which just the modern natural sciences lead.

Modern natural sciences give that who dedicates himself to them not only explanations, which nobody admires more than the spiritual researcher does, of the outer physical course, of various things which have an impact on the practical life, but natural sciences give that who dedicates himself from certain viewpoints an inner education of the soul life. More than one was able in former stadia of scientific cognition, today one is prepared to spiritual research cognitively, actually, just by natural sciences. One should not be restricted by that what natural sciences have to say about the outside world in their own field.

One should rather be able to soar an inner discipline of the soul life by the way one does research in nature. The mental pictures that natural sciences deliver can explain the outer nature only; after their contents, they have nothing to say about the spiritual life. But while one applies them devotedly, they educate that human being by the way who is able to take care of that what goes forward in him, of certain inner living conditions which bring along him to receive a concept, an inner experience of that soul life beyond the body.

I know very well that this concept—living with his soul beyond the body—is for many people the summit of nonsense today. However, this never minds. Everybody can convince himself that the inner experience gives him the certain insight of the life beyond the body if he goes through such soul exercises as I have indicated them in my writings or as I want to pronounce them, in principle, here.

One can experience especially important things if one just arrives at that boundary area of cognitive life to which natural sciences lead so often. You know, many people speak of the big boundary questions of cognition. One speaks of the fact that the human soul comes to a border if it wants to know about whether the world is infinite or limited spatially or temporally, if the soul wants to know whether it is subject to an irresistible constraint in all its actions or whether it is free.

Indeed, these are the highest boundary questions. Du Bois-Reymond put such boundary questions in his famous speech about the limits of the knowledge of nature, about the seven world riddles. You can experience the deepest impression if you feel out of the pain of a person longing for knowledge how such a person stands at such a boundary place.

I could bring in many examples. Such an example is contained in the writings of the famous aesthetician and philosopher Friedrich Theodor Vischer (1807-1887). If one reads his writings, one has often to stop with that what he experiences at such boundary places of cognition. He wrote a nice treatise on a book that the philosopher Johannes Volkelt (1846-1930) had written about the dream fantasies.

In this treatise that reproached Vischer that he had mixed with the spiritists, Vischer states such a place where he shows what he had experienced at the boundary places of cognition. He said, it is most certain that the human soul cannot be in the body; however, it is also most certain that it is not beyond the body. Here we have such a boundary question, which is paradoxical, because it has an entire contradiction in itself, as those are which one meets just always then when one delves devotedly in strict natural sciences, in life generally. The soul cannot be in the body; however, it can also not be beyond the body!—Why does one get to such contradiction?

At such border places where such contradictions appear, the scientific cognition is not at all helpful and it is most annoying if one believes that it helps something. Then, however, most people are soon ready with their judgement. They simply say in such a case, well, up to here just the human knowledge reaches; we are not able to get further.—However, it is not that way. Because Vischer had the prejudice, he experienced the contradiction only. However, he did not experience what one can do to get further with his soul at such border places. Here the usual cognition must stop and a particular experience of the soul has to begin. Here you must be able to forget as it were what the images of the usual life are because they lead you just to this border place only. You must be able to experience this here. Here you must be able to struggle with that what faces you if you let yourself in for such a contradiction. One should experience such contradictions with the whole soul. Then something new faces the soul like from spiritual depths that it cannot experience without this experience of such contradictions.

One has formed mental pictures of how, for example, lower animals that still have no senses develop senses in contact with the outside world. An inner life existed; it is confronted with the outer world, adapts itself to the outer world, and experiences the impulses of the outer world. While before the life pulsates in the organism and then everywhere stumbles against the sensory outside, it develops, we say, a sense of touch. First, it is a kind of internal tunnelling, then bumping against the borders of the externally spatial. Nevertheless, the being learns in the contact with the outside world to adapt itself; it forms a kind of picture of the outside world by the sense of touch; by the collisions with the border, this sense of touch develops.

One can compare to this image of that what develops the outer senses in the lower organisms what the soul experiences if it gets to such border places of cognition. There the soul really experiences in such a way, as if you bump against anything in the darkness that you have outside at first. Then that differentiates itself, which you experience there in such contradictory mental pictures that one forms at boundary places of knowledge. As the sense of touch arises as a physical sense from the undifferentiated cells, a spiritual existence arises from the mental, while the soul bumps against the border of the spiritual world. You really bump against the spiritual world. However, you also adapt yourself to it. You experience the significant that you have the soul first as it were as an undeveloped soul organism, which the outside spiritual world faces, then however, this soul develops spiritual senses of touch and spiritual eyes, spiritual ears in the further process to perceive that with which it is confronted at first.

I gladly believe that today those people who feel the urge to experience something of the spiritual world would prefer if one could teach the ability of perceiving the spiritual world while one imposes them mystically or as the case may be. Some people believe this. Nevertheless, it is not that way. What opens the spiritual world to us is inner soul work. This inner soul work really leads to that which I have indicated. The human being who changes his soul into an organised soul knows that his soul gets free from the body, when pushing against the spiritual and perceives the spirit. Getting free from the body is a result of inner perception. Since also that which I have explained just now appears repeatedly with persons of knowledge.

It is strange, how the course develops which I have described spiritual-scientifically with those who have worked through the longings for knowledge.

Let me bring in an example of Vischer once again, the example of a quotation by him by which he shows how he felt placed repeatedly at those boundary places of cognition where one cannot help perceiving contradictions, but contradictions that cannot be solved while you solve them logically, but while you settle down into them and develop your spiritual organs.

In particular, the following contradiction appeared to Vischer over and over again: the brain should be the organ of the soul, should produce mental pictures as it were; but if one becomes engrossed in the being of the mental pictures, one cannot regard them as cerebral products. This is such a boundary place of cognition; Vischer says referring to it:

“No mind, where no nerve centre, where no brain, the opponents say.”—Vischer himself does not say it—“No nerve centre, no brain, we say if it were not prepared from below on countless levels. It is simple to jibe at a spirit rumbling about in granite and lime—it is not more difficult than if we ask mockingly how the proteins in the brain soar ideas. The human knowledge cannot measure the level differences. It will remain a secret how it appears and happens that nature behind which the spirit still must slumber is such perfect counterblow of the spirit that we get bumps from it. It is a diremption of such apparent totality that with Hegel's alterity and exasperation, as witty as the formula may be, nothing is said; the asperity of the imaginary partition is simply covered. One finds the right recognition of the cutting edge and the thrust of this counterblow with Fichte, but no explanation of it.”

This portrayal is very strange. Friedrich Theodor Vischer feels facing a limit of knowledge; he describes his experience. How has he to describe it?

He gets to the expression: “we get bumps from it.” He gets to the expression: “cutting edge and thrust of the counterblow.”—One sees the soul that wants to differentiate to develop internal spiritual organs by which it can experience the supersensible outside world, in which it lives.

For a long time in the history of humanity, it was an obstacle to soar spiritual organs in the right way because one believed only the human thinking that takes the sense impressions as starting point could solve certain questions, just the questions of God, freedom and immortality.

Well, thinking is important, because strictly speaking a big part of those exercises that one must do to attain spiritual organs consists of a higher development of thinking than the thinking is which one uses in natural sciences. However, if you only abandon yourself to the usual thinking, that originates from the usual human being not from that second human being sleeping in you. This thinking does not lead into the spiritual world; this thinking can only realise that it is in the spiritual world. However, no unbiased person concedes that thoughts are something that lives in the sensory world; however, these thoughts contain nothing but impressions of the sensory world if they are taken from the usual human nature. People with deeper inner life have always felt like in flashes of inspiration where to the human thinking leads if it is left to itself, emancipated from the outer sense perception.

You can find—if you have experience of the spiritual-scientific literature—such light flashes with numerous personalities which sometimes are, however, darkness flashes. With them, one has to stop and observe to which cliffs the human cognitive life leads if this life is sincere and honest to itself and does not fool itself with all kinds of prejudices, and does not apply all kinds of methods taken from other, verified fields to the soul life itself. Again an example of many:

A man who really struggled with knowledge problems and riddles is Gideon Spicker (1840-1912) who taught philosophy at the University of Münster until few years. Gideon Spicker took the education for the spiritual as starting point. The deepest knowledge questions arose to him from theology. Some years ago, he wrote two nice booklets: From the Cloister to the Academic Lectureship. Destinies of a Former Capuchin (1908) and In the Turning Point of the Christian World Period. A Philosophical Confession of a Former Capuchin (1910); in the one he describes his life, in the other his knowledge desire.

At a place, one has to pause particularly where this former Capuchin, who then became a professor, expresses himself about the experience that he had with thinking that he had emancipated from the sensory experience. However, he did not have the courage to go into spiritual science; he did not develop the power of thoughts so far that it wakes the spiritual organs, so that he faced a spiritual world, felt with his soul being in the realm of the supersensible. Because he was at such a border place where he experienced something with the thinking, he expressed himself as follows:

“To which philosophy one confesses, whether to a dogmatic or skeptical, to an empiric or transcendental, a critical or eclectic one: all without exception take an unproven and unprovable proposition as starting point, namely the necessity of thinking. No investigation gets to this necessity, as deeply as it may prospect one day. It must be absolutely accepted and can be founded by nothing”—he means the necessity of thinking—“every attempt to prove its correctness always requires it. Beneath it a bottomless abyss yawns, a nightmarish darkness illuminated by no beam of light. We do not know, where from it comes, neither where to it leads. Whether a merciful God or a bad demon put it in the reason, both are uncertain.”

However, no human being speaks this way who has learnt a little bit only, has maybe learnt very much, and puts up all kinds of philosophy from the learnt concepts. Thus a human being speaks who has worked through what the knowledge researcher can go through if he submerges with his soul forces only deeply enough into that undergrounds of inner experience into which one can submerge where one is confronted with the cliffs, the partitions which one only penetrates if the spiritual organs really awake if they become consciousness.

In my life, I became acquainted with a number of such persons like Gideon Spicker, and I have tried to reflect such characters in the picture of Strader in my mystery dramas. However, I had to experience with it that just those who are often called followers of anthroposophy misunderstood me to the greatest extent. While the persons whom these dramas show are taken out of the real, comprehensive life, from that life that should just show the necessity and the validity of spiritual science from the other areas of modern existence, weird persons believed, I would write such roles that are tailor-made for those who should represent them, whereas I was just a far cry from this.

I could show with a comparison what such a person experiences who does not get to the knowledge of spirit but to the insight of the necessity of thinking. Someone who gets to the knowledge of spirit knows that if one not only wants to consider the thinking but experiences it, he does not experience, indeed, that beyond the thinking that Gideon Spicker describes, the bottomless abyss, the nightmarish darkness illuminated by no beam of light, but he experiences the spiritual world beyond this thinking that bears the sense-perceptible reality. He experiences with his soul in this supersensible area. He also experiences that there is no uncertainty whether a merciful God or a bad demon has been put in the reason, but he experiences and observes the spiritual that penetrates the reason, as the sense perceptible world penetrates the sensory observation.

However, one must say that the thinking—if it is left to itself if it is only thought, and is not experienced—that such a development of the soul life can be compared—you forgive for the somewhat odd comparison—with a hungry organism. If one believes to be able to recognise something of the highest questions by mere thinking—God, freedom, immortality—, then one resembles a person who does not want to still his hunger with food from the outside, but lets the hunger develop. As little as you can develop a hungry organism, so that it balances out its needs in itself, just as little you can attain any spiritual content of the soul and any solution of the questions of God, freedom, immortality if you abandon yourself only to the thinking. As you starve on and on unless you eat, you cannot attain the spiritual development if you think only on and on.

The older philosophical metaphysics wanted this. As hard as it is, it is true: this outdated metaphysics that is something new, however, to some people is nothing but a science that suffers from mental malnutrition.

However, it is not enough that you gain this knowledge only to understand the inner experience correctly. As you have to understand that mere thinking leads to mental malnutrition if this thinking does not brace itself up for inner experience, you have also to understand that much knowledge of the outer sense-perceptible reality and its processing by the intellect, by methodical research do not lead to any knowledge of the soul.

You will convince yourselves if you take common textbooks of psychology that one normally starts speaking about the nervous system. What one says, otherwise, about the human organism is borrowed from physiology, from natural sciences.

Now I have to stress repeatedly not to be misunderstood that spiritual science is a far cry from misjudging what natural sciences have reached concerning the secrets of the nervous life, the secrets of the human organism. I do not want to discount its value. Nevertheless, the value is in another area than in that of the soul knowledge. You may abandon yourself to the mere thinking, then you starve; but abandoning yourself to the outer observation for the knowledge of the soul life only resembles the supply of all kinds of stuff that is indigestible. If you fill your stomachs with stones or the like, the human organism cannot make anything from this indigestible stuff.

Thus you cannot suppose, if you take the scientific results simply in such a way as they are and do not process them mentally, that you receive any enlightenment of the spiritual world, of the life of the soul in the supersensible realm. In our times, people abandoned themselves to the most different mental pictures that should explain how actually the soul relates to the body. Not only that there the oddest fairy tales are bustling about in that what one often calls science. One wants to eradicate fairy tales and superstition from the outer life, in science they often flourish, one only notes it in science just as little as one noted it in the outer life of former times. That fairy tale also belongs to it that the nerves are telegraph wires to the soul that pass on the outer sensory impressions, then again other nerves are there which direct the will impulses to the periphery. About this fairy tale, one would not like to talk at all, because what is meant with this comparison is far away from reality and arises only from an unnoticed scientific superstition.

However, I would like to emphasise two mental pictures that are also widespread today with those who contemplate the relationship of the body and the soul.

Some people believe that they have to regard the body or the nervous system as a kind of tool of the soul, as if the soul is a being that uses the body like a tool. The others who cannot realise how a mental-spiritual being should find a working point to work on something material like the body got even to the weird mental picture of the mental-bodily parallelism. There the processes of the body should proceed for themselves. Without the soul working on the body like a cause or the body reacting on the soul, the soul life should proceed in parallel with the bodily processes. One current always accompanies the other, but the one does not work on the other. Wundt (Wilhelm W., 1832-1920), Ebbinghaus (Herman E., 1850-1909), Paulsen (Friedrich, 1846-1908) and many others dedicate themselves to this weird parallelism theory.

All these theories suffer from the fact that they do not realise what the coherence of the soul with the body is based on. This coherence can be expressed neither by the fact that one says, the body is the tool of the soul, nor that one says, the soul processes proceed in parallel with the bodily phenomena.

However, I am able to bring only forward that what I can say that encompasses a wide field as a result and observation of anthroposophy. Everybody can find the other reasons in my various writings. Nevertheless, I would like to show the essentials briefly today.

If one wants to express the relationship of soul and body correctly, one has to say, as far as one considers the human being, everything bodily of the human being turns out to be for a real observation neither as tool nor as a process running alongside but as a creation of the soul in microcosm and on a large scale.

It is nothing bodily at the human being that is no creation of the soul. However, one has to cast off some prejudices and to take up new concepts from spiritual science if one wants to envisage this far-reaching idea that everything bodily is a creation of the soul.

Already in microcosm, this is in such a way if we form any mental picture if a feeling emerges in us. Yes, only because one has not learnt to observe spiritually and bodily, one believes that there something exterior works on a finished body; the exterior effect spreads to the finished body through the eye or ear, then the effect continues inwardly. Have an unbiased look at the suitable theories. You will find everywhere that they are not at all based on real observations but on prejudices. Since what really goes forward if we perceive if we hear anything, is already carried out, actually, for the most part when we become aware of it, and is strictly speaking always a developmental process in the body. A beam of light hits us and causes something. It is in the same world in which our body is. In our body, something goes forward. What goes forward in it is of the same kind, only in microcosm, as it is if on a large-scale forces form our organism on a large scale. As the forces of growth and other forces form our organism, something is formed in us if a beam of light hits us if a tone hits us and so on. That which is formed there as something subtle in us is reflected in the soul that is not in the body but always in the supersensible realm. We become aware of the reflection. The process, however, which must take place there for the wake consciousness must be a destructive process, a little death.

We cannot completely convince ourselves of the consciousness, of the soul being with the help of the usual consciousness processes, and with bodily-spiritual observation. Nevertheless, if we come on what also accompanies our usual awake life, on the forming of memories, we come already nearer to that which I have just said. Someone who is able to observe what goes forward in the human being knows: what makes a mental picture aware to us does not lead straight away to memories. No, something has always to run alongside, another process has to take place. If you have sense for observation, look at a pupil who studies hard ever so much; what he must perform as auxiliary exercises, so that that which he takes up also goes over into his memory. For a subconscious accompanying process must proceed always. That which we know does not remain to us, but that which goes alongside the consciousness in the subconsciousness. However, that which happens there in our organism by this side flow of the consciousness is still very similar to the growth processes of childhood.

The origin of mental pictures is a growth process in microcosm. Usually we grow like with tremendous power in proportion to the small growth process that takes place in us, unnoticed in the usual life if memory forms. Under the surface of the current of the conscious mental pictures, events happen which carry the memories; and this is very like the growth processes. Do you ask why one can well train the memory just in your youth? Because you still have fresh growth forces in yourselves, because they have not yet withered. However, I can always give such single proofs only; you can prove what I have said with many single observations.

Our usual imagining, feeling and willing intervenes already in such a way that it is reflected not only and makes aware what happens; but in such a way as concerning the memory an undercurrent is there for our conscious life, there is also an upper current. As one does not note the undercurrent—one notes it at most if the pupil studies hard and does movements and knocks its head to support this undercurrent—, one does not note the upper current all the more. However, this upper current belongs above all to that second human being who sleeps there in the usual human being, while we think, feel, and will in our usual life.

Just as the current of memory proceeds beneath the consciousness, something purely mental proceeds above the consciousness, something that does not intervene at all anyhow in the body. Because this conscious soul life has such hyper-experience, I would like to say, the forces of growth are not sufficient for this conscious soul life, for the entire soul life at all. The forces that lead the human being to birth are not sufficient. These forces could only evoke that in the human being that we perceive with the sleeping organism.

At the moment when the consciousness intervenes with its upper currents in the organism, those forces which also destroy this organism finally at death must intervene in the organism. These forces are destructive forces, so that the forces of growth must balance out them in sleep. Only then, one understands the supersensible life of the soul if one knows how far the purely organic reaches subsensibly.

I do not like speaking about personal experiences; what I tell, however, is associated substantially with that which I generally have to bring forward. I confess that I intensely pursued the problems about which I speak today and in my writings since for more than thirty years on all ways that may arise. These ways have to lead the soul into the area of spiritual life and in the coherence of this spiritual-mental life with the bodily life. I have found that—if you go about your work scientifically in the sense of our time honestly and sincerely—you really can obtain many fertile things, while you discipline yourself scientifically. On this way then you just find those questions for whose solution the usual natural sciences do not suffice. Yes, just from scientific thinking one gets other observation results about what is in natural sciences, actually.

The question of the nature of the nervous system was one of the biggest ones to me for decades, which the scientific psychologists, the psychological scientists regard as the organ of the soul who imagine that in the nerves an inner activity takes place, which is similar to other organ activities. Well, such activities also proceed in the nerves, but they do just not serve the forming of mental pictures, of feelings and will impulses. They serve the nutrition of the nerves, the production of the nervous substance if it has been consumed. They just do not serve the soul life; however, they must be there, so that the soul life can take place. I use a comparison that I have used here already once.

If you consider the nervous system as something that must be there for the soul life, you just have something, as if you say, the ground must be there, so that I do not fall into the depth if I want to go. However, if I go and the ground is soft, I leave behind tracks. Then someone will completely err who checks the ground and searches the forces in it, which my footprints have produced from inside. As little as these forces produce tracks from inside, any inner forces of the brain and nervous system produce the tracks that originate from imagining, feeling, and willing. There the mental works which prevails in the supersensible area.

Before one does not realise this and experiences it as real observation, one can generally come to no understanding of the true nature of the soul. That which is on the bottom of the soul life in the nervous life is not the organic processes of the nervous system—they lead to another direction—, this is that which I would like to specify now. I have brought in the preceding personal remark, so that you realise that I do not frivolously pronounce something such substantial that it is hard gained what I say about the nervous life: while organic forces go into the nervous ramifications, the human being goes over from life to death. In the nervous ramifications, the human being dies perpetually, if he uses these nervous ramifications for thinking, feeling, or willing.

The organic life does not continue as the growth conditions do, but it dies away, while ramifying in the nerves. While it dies away, it prepares the ground for the spiritual development, for the purely supersensible mental. As I remove the air with a pump from a container, produce vacuum, and then the air completely flows again into the container by itself, in the same way mental life flows in the dead part of the nervous system perpetually if the organism sends the partial death into it.

Hence, the partial death is the basis of consciousness. If one recognises that the human being does not need to pour his organic forces into his body to make this body the place of the soul, but that the human being needs to kill his organic experience to withdraw this organic life constantly from the places to which the nerves give the opportunity, you notice how the supersensible soul life can develop in the sensory body, however, after it has created this sensory body first. Since the same soul, which thinks, feels and wills in the time from conception to death, exists also before. The spiritual world is not anywhere in a cloud-cuckoo-land, it is there where the sense-perceptible world is also; it penetrates it. Where sensory effects are, they originate from supersensible, spiritual effects. This same soul lives in the supersensible world that has formed the body and has changed it into the apparatus reflecting the processes to it of which you can become aware. Before it came to conception, it lived in the supersensible world, and in this life on earth, it is connected with the supersensible world. This soul exists already since centuries, before it enters the sense-perceptible existence at conception. As in the life between birth and death this soul has created the body as its image and unfolds its life with this image of the body, the life of the soul unfolds the forces that develop the forces of heredity from the supersensible world.

It is correct that that which we pass on originates in the successive generations. However, our soul works already on them. We insert the forces in our ancestors by the effects of our soul that we receive then as inherited. Thus, we develop our whole organism from the spiritual world as we form something with the memory in microcosm; and only the base, the opportunity of it is given by the sensory heredity. The body is completely a creation of the mental-spiritual. As well as the single experience between birth and death is based on a creation of the spiritual, the entire human body is also based on the spiritual-mental. However, there are incorporated not only the forces of growth in this developmental current but also the forces that appear finally in the total sum as death which is only the outside of immortality.

Since while the mental-spiritual puts the body in the world, is reflected with it, it experiences its own life in the supersensible area. However, at the same time it destroys the body because the upper current mentioned just now develops. As every consciousness is based on a partial death, the complete death is nothing but the withdrawal of the soul from the body that is the beginning of a different experience of the soul. We know: as we develop memories between birth and death, we developed the inner human being in the supersensible current who goes through births and deaths who is everlasting.

What I have indicated as soul experience is not anything that the spiritual researcher produces, it is the characterised second human being whom one only oversleeps, otherwise, but is always in the human being. Spiritual research is nothing but making people aware of that what is perpetual and eternal in the human being, so that he can go through death. If you are able to move with your mental in the spiritual in the intimated way as you move with your senses in the physical-sensory, then you know that you live as a human being also in a spiritual world as one lives with the senses in a physical world. As one distinguishes the mineral, plant and animal realms in the physical world, one distinguishes realms in the spiritual world, which are full of beings that become more and more spiritual the higher you ascend to which the human being belongs with his soul, as he belongs with his body to the physical realms. Briefly, the soul consciously enters in the spiritual world.

I would like to call this worldview Goetheanism after its origins, as well as I would call the building in Dornach Goetheanum that is dedicated to this worldview. Since not on some daydreams but on the healthy condition on which the Goethean worldview is based that is also based what I mean as anthroposophy. Goethe differed in his view of the physical things just by such conditions from that what originated later as natural sciences. However, Goethe developed such scientific concepts that these concepts may sit heavily in the soul's stomach like stones, but can be transformed, so that you reach the mental realm with these scientific concepts. Goethe himself did not yet found spiritual science; he did not get around to doing this. Nevertheless, he developed his theory of metamorphosis so that you only need to develop the internal experience from the principles further, then you also attain knowledge of the mental-spiritual experience.

Whereto does the common psychology, actually, come? A very significant philosopher of the present, Franz Brentano (1838-1917), who died recently, had a rich knowledge life behind himself. He was a fighter in this area; last, he found asylum during this war in Zurich. He attempted to cope with thinking, feeling, and willing his whole life through, beside his other profound researches in the psychological field. These three concepts play a particular role in psychology. Franz Brentano did not advance further than to a classification, did not advance where one can grasp the mental itself only as something living. If one clusters imagining, feeling, willing so simply mechanically, one has three classes. To grasp the mental as something living, one has to grasp the mental, now, however, the spiritual-mental, in such a way as Goethe tried to grasp the outer physical things with his theory of metamorphosis, as Goethe imagined the green leaves of the stalk transformed into the petals, even into the fruit organs. As he attempted to explain all organs by a transformation into each other, one must not only leave thinking, feeling, and willing side by side, but also gain the living transition of them.

There I can bring in the research results again which matured in myself for a long time. Our will is not only put so externally beside the feeling and the imagining, but the feeling has simply originated as a metamorphosis of the will in such a way as the petal forms from the stalk leaf; and imagining develops from feeling. At the end the anthroposophist gets to the result that the will is basically a young being which if it becomes older changes into feeling, and if it becomes even older into thinking, into mental pictures. In the imagining the same is always mysteriously contained which is also inside feeling and willing. However, we do not experience how mental pictures arise from feeling.

However, if the soul has developed its spiritual organs, it experiences a mysterious feeling in all its mental pictures, but not a feeling which is bound to our body, but which leads us on the detour of the mental picture into the vastnesses of the spiritual world. You experience—if you are not led by the feeling into your bodily, but are led into the vastnesses of the spiritual world—that supersensible in which we are between death and a new birth. Then you experience the supersensible world with higher knowledge than the usual mental pictures are, with spiritual-mental knowledge.

However, most people would like to experience this supersensible world after the methods of the sensory world. They are not contented to experience it only in pictures, in Imaginations. They would like to experience it with the senses. However, as the body has to die to become pure spirit, one has to cast off the sensory knowledge that combines with the material. Knowledge has to become Imagination, so that in the Imaginative experience which is as subtle as imagination, but not so arbitrary, the sensory-material is cast off, and a picture of that reality is already attained between birth and death that the human being experiences after death.

Hence, nobody can hope to recognise the supersensible who would like to hear voices or to get other material effects like the spiritists do, while because of a weird self-deception these want to tackle, actually, the supersensible and put something sense-perceptible to themselves. With that subtle spiritual experience, which must happen if one wants to experience the imperishable human being, just many people are not content today. Only this supersensible experience can lead us to the real knowledge of the soul being in the supersensible field that leads us to a true view of the relationship of the body to the soul and that of the soul to the body.

As the feeling changes into imagining, the willing does it too. As one can find a feeling mysteriously in every mental picture, one also discovers a will impulse, which does not lead us to the movements of the limbs, to sensory actions, but leads us from imagining into the supersensible world.

If one discovers the young soul being of willing in the old-grown soul being of imagining, one discovers in this willing which is experienced purely spiritually those forces which work from the preceding life on earth on this life on earth. Then the repeated lives on earth and the intermediate lives in the purely supersensible world become real observation; then the human being gets to the real supersensible knowledge.

One could think that the supersensible knowledge is there only to satisfy the human need of knowledge. Let me quite briefly, at the end, only indicate with few words that this does not hold true. One could believe that only the human need of knowledge is satisfied, but this has its deep practical significance. Indeed, one is concerned with progress in the evolution of humanity. The Copernican worldview, the modern natural sciences came only, after humanity had gone through other levels before. Thus, the anthroposophical spiritual science only originates if the urge to recognise the supersensible is strong enough in the human beings. Many people who know that there is a supersensible world still believe that today the human beings are not ripe to develop those free cognitive forces to wake the sleeping human being. The opposite is the case! Today the human being thirsts for supersensible knowledge. He numbs himself only as I have said at the beginning of this talk.

This cannot go on this way for other reasons, too. One can recognise nature without ascending to laws that make the soul life explicable. You can even say that you can recognise nature the better, the more you keep away from any mental-spiritual while developing physical laws. The physical laws will be the more suited for their field, the less one confuses them with laws that refer only to the mental-spiritual. One has already to say this. However, as soon as it concerns the complete understanding of human life, so that our understanding can intervene in the development of this human life, as soon as it concerns the social and political living together, as soon as it concerns generally finding a right relation from human being to human being, something else is necessary. Then the thoughts that are formed only after the pattern of natural sciences are not sufficient.

Unfortunately, humanity has got used very much to thinking life after such thought forms after which one imagines natural processes. Thus people also have instinctively familiarised themselves with the social life, with the political living together in such a way and also to form it as the spirit forms which only is just used to thinking physical laws. More and more this has developed that way during the last four centuries. As it is correct if natural sciences exclude the spirit from their field, it is insufficient for the human living together, for everything that is connected with society, with sociology to develop thought forms that originate only from natural sciences. One does not become ready with how the human beings have to live together all over the world if one wants to develop this living together after political, after social ideals that are produced after the pattern of scientific principles.

One example of many: when this tragic war broke out, one could hear from many sides, just from the people who called themselves experts of the laws of human living together: this war can last no longer than at most four to five months.—In full seriousness, these persons said this from their scientifically developed thinking, which also exists with that who is not a physical scientist. Just the greatest experts spoke this way. How sadly has reality disproved these mental pictures! Nobody who figures spiritual-scientifically out the world can dedicate himself to such mistakes because he knows which difference exists between escapist mental pictures and realistic ones.

What fulfils our souls as spiritual science brings us together with reality; it puts us into the full reality. A social science, which really copes with this living together of human beings around the whole world which should not bring in instincts, impulses to the human beings which discharge as the today's dreadful, catastrophic events discharge—such a social science can arise only from the conditions which spiritual science gives. Since it deals not with a part of life but with the whole life; hence, it only can generate mental pictures and concepts that cope with reality.

If people do not force themselves to build up their social thinking based on spiritual science, humanity will not come out of the calamities that discharge today so frightfully. I can appreciate what goes out from the people who one calls pacifists or similarly. However, such things cannot be decided by mere orders, cannot be decided by the fact that one decrees: this and that must be.

One can absolutely agree with that which must be. However, if one only produces the orders, only the laws of the usual thinking, it is in such a way, as if one says to a stove: dear stove, it is your duty to heat the room; hence, heat the room.—It will not heat the room, without putting wood into it and making a fire.

Just as little all the usual ideas of peacekeeping et cetera are sufficient. It concerns that one not only says, human beings, love each other, but that one puts heating material into the human souls. However, these are concepts that arise from the living conception of spiritual life.

Since the soul does not only belong to the material, it belongs to the spiritual life. One does often not understand even today, what it means that this human soul belongs to the supersensible area. One usually thinks that one is with the laws which one develops today already in the supersensible area. One does not do this.

Just in the fields of serious science one often starts realising already that it is also significant to check for human experience not only that which scientific prejudice has sketched out in the last decades but also that there other concepts, other ideas are necessary.

Did we not experience the strange play in the last time that one of the most loyal disciples of Haeckel, Oscar Hertwig (1849-1922), the famous physiologist, wrote a book in which he says farewell to the whole outwardness of Darwin's theory which wants to explain the evolution only with a sum of contingencies, of coincidences, which does not want that forces intervene in this evolution that one cannot recognise with mere outer observation. Thus, one experienced the strange case that Oscar Hertwig wrote a significant book in the last time: The Origin of Organisms — a Refutation of Darwin's Theory of Chance (1916). In this book in which serious science itself attempts to come out from the only material, to ascend to the spiritual, Oscar Hertwig closes his explanations with the following considerations:

“The interpretation of Darwin's theory which is so ambiguous with its indefiniteness also permitted a versatile use in other fields of the economic, social, and political life. From it everybody could get desired answers, like from a Delphi oracle, concerning its practical applications on social, political, hygienic, medical, and other fields and refers as affirmation of his assertions to the Darwinian biology with its immutable physical principles. However, if now these putative principles are no real ones”—Oscar Hertwig believes to have proved that—, “should there not be social dangers with its versatile practical application on other fields? Nevertheless, do not believe that the human society can use phrases like the relentless struggle for existence, the selection of the fittest, the natural perfection etc. transferring them to the most different fields without being deeper influenced in the whole direction of its ideation. One could easily prove this assertion with many phenomena of modern times. Just therefore the decision of truth and error of Darwinism is beyond the scope of biological science.”

There you recognise how a naturalist realises: what the human beings think and what of their thoughts changes over into their impulses, that prepares and develops what then in the outer reality comes into being; the spiritual is also the creator of the material in the social field.

If the material appears in such figure as today, one has to search other reasons in the spiritual than someone searches them who goes forward with his concepts of the social only after the pattern of natural sciences. Spiritual science that is based on occultism will work different on the social life; it will not speak only of a relentless struggle for existence, but it will figure out what positions itself as something spiritual in that which appears in nature only as struggle for existence. It considers not only the existence after the outside, but after that which the spirit has poured into it; it will not only judge the course of evolution by its functionality but also by that which has been put as something ethical in the course of purposefulness. It will not only speak of perfection by natural selection but of the creative spirit that flows into the developmental current and creates the natural selection as well as the soul creates its body. It will search the bases of the social laws above all in the supersensible.

There we can already realise that spiritual science is not something that satisfies mere knowledge, but something that is intimately associated with the practical need, with the whole course of life. The future will demand those bases of thinking just for the practical life that can originate only from spiritual science.

Why are the human beings reluctant even today to accept spiritual science? Just from that which I have said now one can get an answer. We were mainly concerned this evening how spiritual science pursues the riddle of immortality. However, death separates us from immortality. We have realised that just in the course of life we have to recognise the perpetual intervention of death. In ancient times, one always said, someone who enters into the spiritual world must experience death symbolically.

It is maybe a radical diction, but it is true. Between our world of the senses and the intellect that analyzes the sensory observations and the world of immortality is no world of growth but of death. One has to envisage death; one has to look at the destructive forces that counteract the forces that just natural sciences regard as the forces of growth.

This produces something similar in the area of knowledge, as it is the fear of death in the outer life. One can already speak of the fact that people do not have the courage to penetrate that area through which one must go if one wants to enter into the supersensible. The human beings shrink from it. They do not know it. They deceive themselves with all kinds of theories and prejudices of limits of knowledge, with any only material significance of life. They rather deceive themselves than that they pass that gate courageously through which one can come only from the sensory to the extrasensory world. However, the gate is that by which one must recognise the nature of death. Since it is true: the human being will find adequate harmony of his soul only if he can absorb the secrets of immortality.

Nevertheless, to the fruit of knowledge that can be enjoyed as immortality one gets only if one ploughs over the ground of death. However, one must not be afraid of it. As the human being overcomes the deadly fear of knowledge in the area of cognition, a science of the immortal, of the supersensible will originate. Tomorrow I speak about the fact that this science of the supersensible disturbs nobody's religious confession. I hope that I do not engage your attention tomorrow as long as today; but I was not able to shorten this basic talk.

Dear friends, once again, let us first of all remember those who are out there at the front, in the great arena of present-day events:

Spirits of your souls, guardian guides,
On your wings let there be borne
The prayer of love from our souls
To those whom you guard in the spheres.
Thus, united with your might,
A ray of help our prayer shall be
For the souls it seeks out there in love.

And for those who because of those events have already gone through the gate of death:

Spirits of your souls, guardian guides,
On your wings let there be borne
The prayer of love from our souls
To those whom you guard here on earth.
Thus, united with your might,
A ray of help our prayer shall be
For the souls it seeks out there in love.

May the spirit we are seeking as we work towards spiritual knowledge, the spirit who has gone through the Mystery of Golgotha for the good of the earth, for the freedom and progress of man, be With you and the hard duties you have to perform.

A week ago we gave some consideration to imaginative meditation. We found as a result of our considerations that all insight or perception which is genuine perception of the supersensible worlds has to be won by considering the world in a way that is independent of the body. Our ordinary everyday perception has to make itself independent of the conditions imposed by the body, the senses, the nervous system, etc. Ordinary daytime consciousness is achieved when man's spirit and soul elements use the physical body as a tool. Spiritual perception consists in certain more subtle processes which involve man. Some discussion of these processes will form the first part of today's talk.

I said: ‘More subtle processes’. They are finer, more subtle, than the ordinary processes used for everyday perception, observation, apprehension, because man is only able to base himself on what is familiar to him in everyday life, and can only gradually rise to finer, more subtle processes. We should all be able to achieve the most satisfying, the greatest, knowledge of the spiritual world if there was an easy way of being in full conscious awareness for at least a fraction—just a small fraction, a minute if you lik—of the part of our life we spend between going to sleep and waking up again. (I am speaking of no mere dream-like consciousness but full conscious awareness.) Any form of initiation always consists in making conscious the part of us which during the night, when we are asleep, is unconscious and outside the body.

The process of attaining to genuine higher knowledge always consists in making conscious what otherwise remains in a state of sleep and unconsciousness between going to sleep and waking up again'

There is one part of the human being—and this may surprise you—one part of the physical human being that basically is always asleep. These are things one need not necessarily go into at the very beginning-of one's anthroposophical life—the finer points of spiritual science can only come to our attention gradually. When it is said that man is awake in the daytime and asleep at night we naturally assume his ego and astral body to be fully united with the physical and ether bodies during the day whilst having a separate existence outside the physical and ether bodies at night. It is only gradually that we progress from a rough outline of the facts established through spiritual science to more specific truths. Very generally speaking, it is correct that during sleep man's ego and astral body are outside his ether and physical bodies. There is however a part of the body that is asleep also between waking up and going to sleep, at least essentially so. Oddly enough this is the part of the human body we call the ‘head’. This is asleep when we are awake. You might well think the head to be the part that is most awake. In reality, however, it is the least awake part of us. In his thinking activity, and in head work altogether, man is awake. This is only possible, however, because even when we are awake the relationship of the ego and astral body to the head organs is such that they—that is the ego part of the head, the astral part of the head—cannot unite completely with the physical and ether part of the head. They always experience a life of their own outside the physical and ether part of the head. They always experience a life of their own outside the physical and ether parts of the head, as it were. A close union between the astral and the physical parts of the head occurs only when we have a headache. If we have a powerful headache, the astral, physical and ether parts of the head are very much united. We are least able to think when we have a headache. The reason is that the bond between the astral, physical and ether parts of the head is too strong. Our thinking, in which we are awake, and all other waking soul life bases on the fact that the ego and astral body of the head are in a way outside the head and therefore reflected, mirrored, in the physical and ether body of the head. Similarly we are only able to see ourselves in a mirror because we are outside it. It is this mirroring effect that provides the images for everyday consciousness. Those are mirror images we experience and take note of in everyday life. Living thus outside the head, with the head asleep and ego and astral activity reflected back by the hard skull, we are able to feel the inner ego and the inner astral body to be our own. In the other parts of the body ego and astral activity are still influencing the activity of the physical and ether bodies to a much greater extent. If the same held true for the head we would be conscious of the activity of digestive organs, and perhaps also rhythmical activity like that of the heart, In our heads—or perhaps not be conscious of them—and there could be no question of thinking activity. Thinking depends on activity being reflected, thrown back, and absorbed. The heart and other organs with the ability to absorb take in ego and astral body activity. The organs of the head do not absorb it but rather reflect it; the result is that it can be experienced in the inner soul.

During the night, between going to sleep and waking up, the whole ego and the whole astral body—again this is not entirely accurate but merely an approximation—but by far the greater part of the ego and astral body is outside the physical and ether bodies. Between going to sleep and waking up man is able to relate to a far greater part of his ego and astral body the way he relates to his head when awake. But the rest of the organism has not yet progressed as far as the head, it has not yet reached a point where it reflects the way the is able to reflect. Because of this, there can be no conscious awareness during sleep. Considering the way we move our hands we have to say to ourselves: ‘These hands, in so far as we are able to move them, have of course four elements to them—ego, astral body, ether body and physical body. All of these are present and active when we move our hands.’ Now imagine someone found himself in a position where his hands were tied to his body, tied in such a way that he could never move them, for they would be firmly attached to his body. Let us also assume this person had the gift of moving the ether body, or at least the astral body, of his hands independently whilst his physical hands remained immovable. This would have a highly significant result. He would be extending his astral or ether hands beyond his physical hands which are tied and immovable. We'll never go to the effort of actually executing this manoeuvre; when we move any of the astral or etheric parts of our hands we simply move our physical hands as well.

This is something we would find difficult to do in a natural way whilst on earth, yet in the course of evolution it will be achieved, though in a less crude fashion than just described. It will be achieved as mankind develops further in the course of earth evolution and grows towards Jupiter. Then his hands, his physical hands, will in fact become immovable. On Jupiter human beings will no longer have physical hands that are mobile organs, for they will be fixed. On the other hand their astral and ether hands will in part be able to move outside those physical hands. Only a trace of the physical hands will be left on Jupiter and they will be immobile; the astral or ether hands on the other hand will be able to move freely, like wings. As a result, Jupiter man will not merely think with his brain, for his fixed hands will enable him to reflect into the elements now united with his physical hands. His thinking will be much more alive, much more all-embracing. When a physical organ comes to rest, the spirit or soul element belonging to it will be liberated and able to develop spiritual and soul activity.

You see, it is the same with the brain. When we were still living on the Old Moon we had organs up here [the cranium] that moved like hands. These organs have become fixed. On the Old Moon we did not yet have a solid cranium; the organs now folded up to form the brain were then able to move like hands. Because of this, men living on the Old Moon were not yet able to think the way men do on earth. A clairvoyant assessing thought activity clearly perceives that in a human being who is awake the sleeping organs in his brain do indeed move like wings, the way I have described that astral and ether hands would move if our physical hands could be immobilized. It really happened that with the transition from the OW Moon to the earth state 'hands' were brought under control up here. They are still held fast by the solid skull and because of this the etheric and astral elements are free. Our organs need to be developed further. These hands cannot remain as they are when we develop to the Jupiter state—they will undergo a physical change, just as our brain underwent the change that made it an organ of reflection. This is a process we may consider one of natural evolution.

The initiation process is a different one. Here, we take some mantric meditation or other and make it the centre of our thoughts, entering into it completely. When we do this it is really important that we do not make use of our physical organs in forming and holding the thought. We must withdraw from the physical body, the sphere of our physical senses, with this thought. We must hold on to this thought and have no help from the physical world as we meditate. In our ordinary everyday thinking activity we have the help of the physical body, of the physical world. We think when impressions reach us through the senses. This makes thinking a comfortable process—the world makes both a physical and an etheric impression on us and this provides support for our thinking. When we meditate we must go apart from all that is physical, and that includes all ideas or concepts. Entirely of our own free will we have to make a thought the centre of our conscious mind. As a result something very specific occurs, a process more subtle than the process of perception. We have to reach a point where we forget the rest of the world—as though the rest of the world were not there and nothing really existed in space and time except for the one thought. When we have reached the point where we are indifferent to the whole world, living only in that meditative thought, something occurs which physical science will never be able to demonstrate. This subtle process of meditation causes heat consumption—a very small amount of heat is used, is taken away. It is a process we cannot demonstrate by physical methods but consumption does take place. We may return to the subject on some other occasion.⁴⁸ We shall see then that it is possible to prove too to ordinary scientists, on the basis of processes everyone will be able to observe, that the process of meditation involves a subtle heat process and also a subtle light process.

We use up some of the light we have taken in; we consume light. There is something else we consume, but let us for the moment just consider the fact that we use up heat and light. These things we take in make happen what I spoke of a week ago, that something evolves which is very delicate and alive. When we are thinking in the ordinary everday way, something lives within us that leaves its imprint on the organism, triggering a process that also has to do with heat; it leaves its imprint and the process which takes place causes us to have memory. This, however, must not happen when we meditate. When we live in a pure thought or feeling content, separate from everything else, the heat, light, etc., we consume does not leave its imprint on the body, it leaves its imprint in the general ether. It triggers a process outside us. Dear friends, if you are seriously, genuinely meditating, you are impressing your thought form into the general ether; it will be there within it. And if you then look back on a meditation this will not be the usual way of remembering; You are looking back to something which has left its imprint in the cosmic ether.

It is important to take note of this. It is a subtle process and we perform it in such a way that it establishes a link between us and the etheric and astral world surrounding us. A person wjo develops only the ordinary everyday kind of perception and thinking is only involved with himself; it is a process that takes place entirely within us. On the other hand, someone taking up real, genuine meditation lives in a process that at the same time is also a cosmic process. Something goes on there, though it is exceedingly subtle. What happens is that a small amount of heat is used up during meditation. When heat is used up coolness develops; the general cosmic ether is cooled down when we meditate. Light is used up as well so that it is subdued; darkness arises, subdued light. The result is that when someone meditates in some place in the world and then goes away, he leaves behind in that place a very slight coolness and a very slight reduction in light. The general light state is subdued, has grown darker. A clairvoyant is always able to detect where someone has been meditating, genuinely going through the process of meditation. When the person leaves, a shadow image of him remains and this is also cooler than the surrounding area. A cool dark spectre is thus left in that place; we have engraved it there. In a very delicate and subtle way, something has been done in that place which we may very roughly compare with what happens on a photographic plate. A kind of spectre is produced. This is a process which takes place not only within man but as a cosmic reality; man makes himself part of the cosmos through this.

There is one thought human beings meditate on even if they are of not to meditation, if they know nothing whatsoever of any kind of nonphysical science. There is one thought human beings do meditate of on. It is seemjingly small, but of infinite importance in life: the thought of the I or ego. When we think of the I or ego we always think independently of the body. In so far as we have a relationship to the cosmos through our ego, certain things connected with the ego—even if people are not aware of this in life—are thought in such a way that they are like the branches of a tree, if I may put it like this. Certain thoughts, feelings, will impulses become like branches, or else like feelers mobile feelers. These will be grouped around the ego. All is life, therefore, the human being has trailing behind him what he is thinking as an ego, and this stretches out mobile feelers or tentacles in all directions. Man is always leaving a spectre-like jellyfish behind him, all through his life. This is a very real thing, for at one and the the same it contains everything a person has lived through—in so far he has thought and felt it with his ego. This remains. And when the human being has gone through the gate of death he will gradually learn to look back on what he has left behind. This makes it possible for a link to exist between what a human being experiences after death and what he has left behind.

Being in the earth state we must first of all reach the point in meditation where our organs are held fast through the will; the ability to meditate properly depends on really freeing our thinking, feeling and emotions as we meditate, so that the body is not involved. The result is that we are capable of such powerful inner concentration that we are able to choose what does and does not become engraved, leaving a photographic impression as it were, in the cosmic ether. Something we need to stress again and again is that real, genuine meditation is a very real process, an absolutely genuine process.

If we consider that the human being leaves this behind—that, fundamentally speaking, all his experiences are contained in what he leaves behind and that it remains—we will, of course, realize that when the human being has gone through the time between death and new birth and comes down to earth again he will still find in the cosmic ether what he previously left there. Here we see in real terms how karma comes about. For the spectre of himself which man has produced will now influence him and in conjunction with his later life give rise to what will be his karma.

Such insights can only be gained slowly and gradually. A real process is taking place, one that goes beyond us, having an effect on the cosmos, and because of this the person meditating gets the feeling that meditating is something different from the usual kind of thinking activity. With the latter we have the feeling that it is we ourselves who put the thoughts together, taking one with the other; it is we ourselves who make the decisions. Meditating, we gradually get the feeling: It is not just you yourself who is meditating, for something is going on of which you are indeed part, but it also takes place outside you, as something that has happened and remains. That is the feeling which should arise. If I throw a fragile object across the room I have the feeling that what happens is not only what went on before it flew through the air but also something that followed, once the object has become separate from me. In the same way meditation gives rise to the feeling: It is not just you who is thinking. You fan thoughts into flame but they then whirl away, they whirl and exist in their own right. You are then no longer their master for they enter into a life and identity of their own.

When we thus feel ourselves to be within the atmosphere in which our thoughts are active and have a life of their own as if those thoughts actually moved through our brain in waves—when we begin to feel this we come to feel certain and sure that we are within a spiritual world, that we are merely one element weaving within all that is weaving there. It is important that we really achieve such stillness, such inner calm, in our meditation that we achieve the significant feeling: ‘It is not you alone who is doing this; it is being done. You have started to set these waves in motion but now they spread around you. They have a life of their own in which you are merely the centre.’

So you see, my friends, that it is an experience which actually leads to recognition of the spiritual world. It is an experience we have to wait for, possessing our souls in patience. It is extraordinarily important, yet it needs patience, persistence and self-denial to wait for it. This one experience will be enough to make us fully convinced that the spiritual world does objectively exist.

You will be able to see from what has been said here that a state of alternation between waking and sleeping really is a general necessity. We are asleep and awake here in the way that is familiar to us. We sleep and awake so that our brain, which is active throughout the day, shall also be able to immerse itself in that part of us which by day takes care of the organs and at night is outside us, always remaining unconscious. This rhythm between sleeping and waking has to take place; we have seen that it also takes place in the great process of cosmic evolution. Now our brain is really asleep, to enable us to think, and our hands are awake—that is our whole relationship to our hands is free, awake, whereas we do not move them in sleep. On the Old Moon we were quite awake as far as the brain is concerned but we have since learned to sleep; we have been able to evolve into thinkers on earth because we have learned to let the brain sleep. On the Old Moon the brain was still awake, but here it has achieved the ability to sleep. Because of this man is able to think. The mid-body will learn to sleep on Jupiter and thinking will then become a wider experience. That is how the state of alternation between sleep and waking undergoes its evolution. It is, however, quite a general state which may be found in all kinds of different areas. We may say that wherever we look it is apparent that a state of alternation between waking and sleeping is essential. Let me give you a rather peculiar example, one that is peculiar yet may have special meaning for us at the present time.

If you want to find out what went on in the cultural and literary life of the early 19th century you will of course look up a history of literature. This will tell you which poet was important and which was not; and the record will only go a certain way, for poets who were of no importance at all will not be mentioned. And so a person who knows anything at all will know which poets were important at the beginning or in the middle of the 19th century and which were not. They'll know that. Undoubtedly, there must also have been people who wrote poetry during the 19th century and yet are totally unknown to most if not all people today. I think you will agree that there must have been people of whom nothing at all is known today. But a time will come when the picture people have, say of literary life in the 19th century, will be different, completely different. Then a poet given many pages today will be given just half a page whilst another, who is not even mentioned today, will be given ten or twenty pages. Things are going to change. And, indeed, it will be necessary for thing to change quite profoundly. It is particularly when we consider that spiritual science is an element that now has to enter into the process of civilization, taking hold of human knowledge and entering into it everywhere, that we become aware of how men and women will have to change their approach and learn to think. Let me give you an instance.

I think you will agree that something new has to develop in place of present-day cognition, the process in which knowledge is on the whole obtained by giving validity only to whatever man gains by making use of his physical organisation. The new thing which must develop will give validity also to what may be gained by taking the path of spiritual initiation. Today the situation is such that a genuine scientist only considers valid, considers scientifically proven, what has been gained through a path of knowledge based on the instruments of the physical body. Everything else is considered a figment of the imagination. It may just be accepted as hypothesis, but even this is not allowed to go far or else the hypothesis will be called utter fantasy. So that is the situation today. But a time will have to come when validity attaches to insights gained on the path to spiritual knowledge, and, what is more, insights gained in the physical world are fully illumined and truly fathomed only through spiritual insights. That is how it will have to be.

Well, we are not merely speaking metaphorically but in completely real terms if we say we are now living in an age when men are asleep as far as the gaining of insight is concerned—or at least the majority of people are. Courtesy comes easy here, for we can exclude anyone with an interest in spiritual science—they are of course awake when it comes to the gaining of spiritual knowledge. The rest of mankind, then, is asleep when it comes to spiritual insight; they are sleepyheads. And our most highly esteemed science arises because they are really asleep. We are in an age when this genuine reality is being missed by a human race that is utterly and completely asleep. This has been in preparation for a long time and we might say that just as there is the going-to-sleep stage before we sleep so we are able to observe a kind of dream-state and a struggle against sleep when it comes to gaining spiritual insight. It slumbers sweetly. But it has not been easy to achieve this full sleep-state and a struggle against sleep is apparent in certain major events in the first half of the 19th century when some individuals still has a certain intuition, an inner experience dawning, of spiritual truths, of conditions in the spiritual world. As it progressed the 19th century really could do no other, in its desire to achieve those sweet slumbers, but forget poets who still had special knowledge of the spiritual world. They do not fit into this state of spiritual slumber.

I have once before spoken of the poet Julius Mosen whose Ritter Wahn (Sir Illusion) and also Ahasver clearly showed that Julius Mosen had a living relationship with the spiritual world.⁴⁹ This knight called Ritter Wahn—taken from an earlier legend but given qualities by Julius Mosen which reveal his connection with the spiritual world—this Ritter Wahn is looking for the man on this earth who could tell him about conquering death. The main theme of Julius Mosen's poetic work Ritter Wahn is that Sir Illusion, that is a man in the ordinary state of knowledge, knowledge based on illusion, is looking for someone who is able to tell him how to get beyond the state of illusion connected with physical life. He holds the man able to give him that information in very high regard. Julius Mosen then described the way his knight intended to find the man who will tell him how to gain knowledge that does not depend on the physical body:

Henceforth through all the lands on earth I'll wander,
Eastward, wherever my valiant steed may go,
From king to castle through every land meander.

Until I find the man who will with surety say:
I can preserve your body from the reaper,
I can beat death and can his power stay.

He is the one whom through eternity
I'll serve; these hands grown strong in war
Shall work for him, and wrestle mightily.

Sir Illusion thus wants to learn how knowledge can be attained that is not overcome by the body but itself overcomes the body, continuing through eternities. The longing for this was already there. And the knight then first of all fought the old man Ird, as Julius Mosen called him. This is something people did not understand, this word Ird. But if they could have read it in the original they would not have interpreted Ird as ‘death’, they way Rudolf von Gottschall did who was a professor of literature at Leipzig [1823–1909]. It should have been interpreted as ‘earth’ or ‘world’. So Sir Illusion first of all fought the old man Ird. He overcame him. We spoke of the spirit overcoming the earthly on the last occasion, of the spirit vanquishing earth, time and space. After this the knight overcame the old man Space and arrived at the gates of heaven, that is the spiritual world. He then developed a longing to return to earth because he had not lived life to the full. The whole of this beautiful poetic work tells us that there has been a man once before who wrestled with the problem of initiation, who knew something of the existence of such a problem of initiation. And in his Ahasver Julius Mosen presented a similar theme.

Another German poet who is quite frequently mentioned is Wilhelm Jordan [1819–1904]. Very little mention is made however of the work in which he presented himself at his most spiritual: Demiurgos. This appeared in the 1850s. It is quite a significant work, for in Demiurgos it is really shown how spiritual entities, spiritual powers that may be good or evil, approach man, enter into his soul and manifest here on earth with the help of human beings. So if we see a human being before us we have to remember: 'This person does of course consist of everything we know about, but something acts into him that comes from higher spiritual entities.' Demiurgos basically consists in a description of how man is connected with the spiritual world. In three handsome volumes Jordan shows how spiritual entities are influencing the soul of man.

That was the struggle against sleep, and after this, sleep took over completely. Those were people who still found in their dreams what mankind now has to strive for in spiritual science, emerging from the sweet slumber of purely external, positivist cognition. We must really see this as a process, the way human beings enter into spiritual dreams to end up in a state of idleness, in the sleep of idleness.

We may ask ourselves why there still was such a person as Julius Mosen, a man able to describe spiritual progress and depicting something of an initiation process in the travels of his knight. Where did such things come from? The answer is very strange. Julius Mosen fell ill and for much his life was almost totally paralyzed. What is the significance of such a paralysis? It means that the physical body dried up as it were, separating from the astral and ether bodies. Because of the paralysis the astral and the ether bodies were more free. In this case a disease process had brought about what we have to struggle for in the process of initiation. Such a disease process should not, of course, be seen as one of genuine cognition nor as something desirable to be brought on deliberately. Yet in an age that may be said to have been entering into a state of idleness, the cosmic order caused a man to be born on earth who had been given that particular relationship between his physical and his soul and spirit elements. So there he lay, paralyzed and unable to move his limbs but with a soul and spirit that were alive and active. It was his paralysis that made them free and able to enter into the spiritual world. Something initiation seeks to achieve in a healthy way was here brought about through illness. A man had to spend much of his life Paralyzed and unable to leave his bed, but his soul and spirit triumphed over his physical paralysis and rose in freedom. This is why that man was actually able to write works that strike us as being spiritual by nature. The same could also be achieved in a healthier way than in the case of Julius Mosen, though perhaps it would not have the same depth.

It was possible to achieve it in a healthier way. During the first half of the 19th century it was still possible for a poet to reveal the process of the culture and civilization of man in the course of history by letting shine through everywhere into the figures he describes the connection which exists between the spiritual worlds and man as he walks about on this earth. In the 1830s a beautiful poetic work appeared, Auffenberg's Alhambra.⁵⁰ Auffenberg is a spiritual poet and his Alhambra is a significant work. Thus we have three works—four if we count Ahasver—Ritter Wahn, Ahasver, Demiurgos and Alhambra. There is much more still to be said about such works which are not easy to get hold of nowadays. They show us that in this age everything to do with man's relationship to the spiritual world is fading away like a dream, as it were, in the face of the general materialistic slumber state. Before, mankind was open to things spiritual, though, of course, the people who are now describing the intellectual life of that time fail to mention the men who did have full awareness of the spiritual world. When someone writes a history of philosophy today he will also fail to mention anyone having awareness of the spiritual world, or no mention is made of the way the most outstanding figures were working in•; concord with the spiritual world.

It is interesting to compare Ritter Wahn, a work pulsing With genuine spiritual life, and Jordan's Demiurgos which also contains something of spiritual life. Jordan was probably a healthy man; the spirit and soul element did not separate from the physical and ether bodies the way it did in the case of Mosen whose body was paralyzed. The consequence was that Jordan was only capable of producing a work such as his Demiurgos in his young years, when he was still more flexible, with an inner energy, elasticity and logic capable of grasping things relating to soul and spirit. Later he fell into the crude Darwinism which had come into intellectual life, and this found reflection in his Nibelungen and other works. This man therefore had to join the rest in succumbing to the lullaby of materialism. It is important for us to realize that it is the mission of our age to bring an insight into the intellectual process, the process of human evolution, which arises out of genuinely spiritual perception—an insight the universal spirit may be said to be pointing to in the tragic fate of Julius Mosen:

Man is no longer able to reach the spiritual world simply without his own volition'. There have been times in the past when this was Possible, where the purely natural constitution of man was such that spirit and soul elements, astral body and ether body, were freer and more independent of the physical body. That time has passed, however. In our present materialistic age—and for the rest of earth existence, in the course of which it will grow more and more intensive—man in his normal state will need a compact union between spirit-soul element and physical body. This, however, does not permit man to achieve some form of awareness of the spiritual world simply through natural circumstances. The reason why this has to be so is that the will must be given opportunity to be active. Imbued with the Power of spiritual science, man must be able to use inner will impulses, acting out of freedom, to separate the spirit-soul element from the Physical body during meditation, through concentration. To achieve spiritual insight the way people did in the past we would have to be sick, paralyzed, have our limbs paralyzed in the second half of our life. Our present organization would make this necessary. In the past it was not necessary. Then, man did not have to be paralyzed, for the union between astral body, ether body and physical body was such that people had clairvoyant vision. Today it could only be acieved through illness. What happened in the case of Julius Mosen has been put there more or less as visible evidence.

We really must use spiritual science to bring before our mind's eye the profound spiritual background to what shows itself in the world. At the same time we must come to see how the necessity which now exists for mankind gradually to accept spiritual science is intimately bound up with profound impulses in the history of the spirit. The necessity arises not from arbitrary choice of some individual but from the great cosmic spiritual evolution which has to take its course throughout the period of earth evolution. Man's mission and task is to enter more and more into genuinely spiritual experience as he moves towards the future, so that mankind does not dry up the way the whole of earthly civilization is drying up, and the spirit will truly be able to continue to live on this earth.

One of of many things capable of bringing such insight home to man is something I have spoken of a number of times: the fact that numerous people are now, within a relatively short span of time, bearing their soul principle upwards when they still have unused ether bodies which contain powers that could have gone on to provide for physical life for many years. Because they are now going through the gate of death due to the terrible historical events of our time they are taking their unused ether bodies up into the spiritual world. And these will be the people who in future will make a major contribution to spiritualizing human civilization. Apart from all else, these major events of our time are profoundly significant in human evolution because the creation of unused ether bodies can yield forces that stream out into earth evolution, forces that will be able to prove that the spiritual world is real.

We know, however, that it would not help, dear friends, to have any number of suns in this world if men were unable to receive the light of the sun through their eyes. It is true, as Goethe has said, that if the eye were not of like kind with the sun it could never see the sun.⁵¹ Just as the sun would be shining in vain if there were no eyes to take in its light, so organs will have to come to life out of the souls of men which will really be able to take in the spiritual life which is streaming down from the cosmos and the world where men live between death and new birth, a world which also contains those unused ether bodies. Thus the great sacrifice brought in war must join into the spiritual cosmic sphere; it has to be taken up by human souls receptive for things of the spirit. And it would be a dreadful thing if the only science to survive were to be the one that now considers itself to be the one and only one, a science which does nothing but record the facts perceptible to the outer senses, using them to make intellectual judgements. If science merely repeats what is also there without science, it cannot form a link with divine and spiritual reality. This is something only possible for elements awakening in the human soul that truly go beyond sensory perception. These will be able to unite with the spiritual reality so that the process of earth evolution itself will remain spiritual, alive in the spirit. Any progress for mankind depends on the spiritual entering into the process of human soul development, and the decision as to whether something is true or false can only be made out of the spirit. Today, people think they can decide one thing or another, prove one thing or another, without the spirit; yet the final authority when it comes to making decisions relating also to sense-perceptible truths is living spiritual experience.

When the old experience of the spirit vanished during the first half of the 19th century, evidence was again given, one might say, of what the spirit could bring about in certain people, to demonstrate the non-nature of scientific argumentation concerned only with external, sense-perceptible things. A man who wrote under the name of Dr Mises' did a great deal at that time to show that everything, but everything, can be proved, and that the opposite can also be proved, so that the final authority still lies in the relationship to spiritual life. This man had seen many things happen in science, in medical science—he was a member of the medical profession—he saw new drugs coming up all the time for one disease or another. He lived at a time, for instance, when people started to prescribe iodine for the treatment of goitre. It was a time when this remedy was much celebrated, when people wanted to demonstrate—this was in the 1820s—what a valuable remedy iodine was. So one day Dr. Mises sat down and demonstrated that one could easily prove, using all the scientific principles, that Iodine was an excellent thing. the reason being that the moon consisted of iodine, as could be clearly proven.⁵² And he provided irrefutable evidence in support of this. His intention was to show that it is possible to prove anything we want to prove. And we certainly can. The intellect, which is bound to the brain, really is able to prove yes or no with regard to simply everything. It is almost always the case that some scientific view or other comes to the fore and the opposite comes up at another time; people are able to prove something just as well as the other side is able to disprove it. Anything where we do not have the yes-no wave surging up and down in such Ahrimanic fashion, anything which is real progress in a human evolution which is good and divine, bases on the spiritual.

We must be clear in our minds that the present age has produced its own characteristic cultural features on the basis of being the age when nonphysical science is asleep, and because slumber of the mind has spread to an extraordinary degree over all the things that tend to be regarded as science. This slumber of the mind is necessary. I am not being critical, but merely stating a fact. With all due regard it has to be said, to be emphasized, that it was necessary for the whole of science to go to sleep for a time as far as the spiritual world Was concerned. Now, however, the time has come when there must be an awakening, new vitality, in spiritual life, and we can sense the longing for this which exists everywhere. This, dear friends, will provide the foundation for the feeling that must bring us to life now, in these pain-racked times. We may only be able to have a faint notion that it is possible for man to find the way to the spiritual world, but because we have the feeling we must look for this way. We must seek a way in which our spiritual thoughts can meet with what is streaming down from those unused ether bodies. And a time will come when we shall really be able to look back on these days which are so full of pain and laden with destiny and do so from a certain spiritual elevation. This spiritual elevation will come when more and more people find impulses for spiritual science out of the genuine content of life awareness within them.

I have always from the depths of my soul given you a final thought here in this place in recent times, and this is something which will then come true. Let us make it our hope, a hope anyone who is connected with spiritual science can and indeed should cherish in days like these which are laden with fate.

Out of courage shown in battle,
Out of the blood shed in war,
Out of the grief of those who are left,
Out of the people's deeds of sacrifice
Spirit fruits will come to grow
If souls with knowledge of the spirit
Turn their mind to spirit realms.

• 48. It appears that the theme was not taken up again in this form and that none of the audience returned to it either. For a consideration of the subject from a different point of view. sec the lectures given by Rudolf Steiner in Dornach on 17 December 1920 in Die Brücke zwischen der Weltgeistigkeit and dem Physischen des Menschen, GA 202 (Engl. The Bridge Between Universal Spirituality and the Physical Constitution of Man, trs. not mentioned: New York: Anthroposophic Press 1958) and on 13 January 1924 in Mysterienstätten des Mittelalters. GA 233a (Engl. Rosicrucianism and Modern Initiation, trs. Mary Adams. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1965).
• 49. Mosen. Julius (1803–1867): Ritter Wahn published in 1831 (due to the interest created by Rudolf Steiner. a new edition was published by Der Kommende Tag AG, Stuttgart in 1921). Ahasver published in 1838.
• 50. von Auffenberg. Joseph (1798–1857). Alhambra, an epic work in dramatic form, appeared in 1828–1830 in 3 volumes
• 51. Goethe: Zahme Xenien III.
• 52. Fechner, Gustar Theodor (1801–1887): Beweis, dass der Mond aus Jodin besteht 2nd edn. Leipzig 1932. [Jodin appears to be a spoof word made up by Dr Fechner—it could perhaps be rendered into English as ‘iodene’. (Translator)]

The lecture cycle on the basic elements of Theosophy that I recently announced will have to be given later at a more appropriate time. I have postponed those lectures and decided for now to dedicate Thursdays to the subject of cosmology, the evolution of the world, that is, the teaching about the inception of the world and the shaping of the human being within this world in a theosophical sense.

I am aware that this involves the most difficult chapter of theosophical teaching, and I can inform you that several of our branches have decided not to even touch upon this chapter because it is too difficult. Nevertheless, I have decided to do so, because I believe that the indications I am able to give may be useful to many of you. Even though we cannot cover the subject completely at once, we can nevertheless receive indications that will serve to allow us to penetrate more deeply into the material later.

Those of you who have been involved in the theosophical movement for a long time will know that these questions—How did the world begin? How did it evolve to the point where human beings can inhabit it?—are the first ones taken up in the theosophical movement. Not only one of the first books that brought the attention of the west to the ancient world view, “Isis Unveiled” by H. P. Blavatsky, treated the questions about the beginning and evolution of the world, but also the book to which we owe the majority of our oldest followers, “Esoteric Buddhism”, by Sinnet. How does a solar system form? How did the planets and the star groups come into existence? How did our Earth develop? What stages did it go through and which ones still stand before it? These questions are dealt with in depth in “Esoteric Buddhism”. Then at the end of the 1880s Blavatsky's “The Secret Doctrine” appeared, and in the first volume it deals with the question: How did the world system evolve?—and in the second volume: How did the human race evolve on Earth?

I only need to point to one thing in order to show the difficulties involved. When you open the first volume of Blavatsky's “Secret Doctrine”, you find that certain assertions in Sinnet's “Buddhism” are described as erroneous and are partially corrected. The theosophical writers misunderstood some of these things and some of them were incorrectly described. Therefore Mrs. Blavatsky corrected them. She said that a kind of Babylonian speech confusion occurred and that the leading personalities [of the Theosophical Society] were not really knowledgeable concerning these questions. You all know that exalted masters who are far beyond our average development imparted the teachings in “The Secret Doctrine”. Already before the “Secret Doctrine” a book appeared in which Sinnet, the author of “Esoteric Buddhism”, published a series of letters from a Mahatma. We see from this the difficulties in understanding this secret doctrine, and we understand how Sinnet and Blavatsky, so diligent in receiving this teaching, were downright desperate at the difficulty in understanding it. “Oh”, one of the teachers said, “you are accustomed to grasp things with a different intellect and so cannot understand what we have to say even though you make a great effort to do so”. If we consider this statement, the difficulty becomes apparent. Misunderstandings arise everywhere that cosmology is taught. Having explained all that, I ask your indulgence if I now try to contribute something about this teaching.

I would like to begin by clarifying the position of theosophical cosmology in relation to modern science and its methods. Some could say: look at the advances our astronomers have made; we can attribute that to the telescopes, the mathematical and photographic methods that have given us knowledge of distant stars. Present day science with its thorough methods seems—in their opinion—to be the only reliable source of knowledge about the evolution of the world system. They feel they have the right to ridicule whatever is said from the other side concerning this subject. Many an astronomer will object: What you theosophists tell us about astronomy is ancient wisdom that the Chaldeans or Veden priests taught and that belongs to the oldest stores of wisdom that humanity possesses; but what meaning can what was said thousands of years ago have when it is only since Copernicus that astronomy has acquired a relatively firm basis. Therefore, what Blavatsky says in “The Secret Doctrine” seems only to contradict what our telescopes and so forth make clear to us astronomers. But the theosophist does not need to contradict what the astronomer claims. It isn't necessary, although there are theosophists who think they must fight against present day astronomy in order to make room for their own teaching. I know very well that the leaders of the theosophical movement think they can instruct astronomers. I would like to illustrate the theosophists' [correct] attitude in respect to astronomers with one simple example.

Take a poet whose work gives us pleasure. This poet may find a biographer who will try to explain the inner spiritual aspects of the poet's being. There is, however, another possibility—the physiological, the scientific way. Let's say that a natural scientist studies the poet. He will only take into consideration the poet's physiological and physiognomic characteristics; he studies him from the natural scientific point of view, and will tell us what he can see and combine with a natural scientific understanding. We as theosophists would say that this investigator describes the poet from the standpoint of the physical plane. He won't say a word about what we call the poet's biography—the soul-spiritual aspect. So we would have two coexisting ways of describing the poet, which do not need to contradict each other at all. Why shouldn't the natural scientific and the soul-spiritual coexist and each be relevant in its own way? One doesn't have to contradict the other.

It is the same with natural scientific cosmology, with what our astronomers tell us about the structure of the world and the evolution of the world system. They will say what their physical senses reveal to them. Alongside this, however, the soul-spiritual way of looking at things is possible, and when we look at it this way, we will never collide with astronomy; on the contrary, both ways of thinking will sometimes support each other. When, for example, scientific brain physiology was far less advanced than it is now, there were authors who wrote biographies of important people. The astronomer cannot therefore object that the esoteric way of thinking is antiquated and impossible just because Copernicus gave astronomy a new basis. The esoteric sources are completely different; they existed long before the eye learned to observe the heavens through telescopes and before the stars could be photographed. Copernican and esoteric research have quite different things to say; and the force of the one in the human soul is not dependent on the other. The force that gives us information about the soul-spiritual aspects goes so far back that no historian can tell us when this way of describing the world structure began. It is not possible to discover how the spiritual leaders came upon these esoteric views.

Esoteric schools existed in Europe before the founding of the Theosophical Society in 1875. The knowledge was only disseminated in small circles, however. A strict rule stated that the knowledge was not to pass beyond the walls of the schools. If someone wanted to enter a school, he had to work hard on himself before the first truths were communicated to him. It was held that a person had to make himself ready before receiving these truths. There were many degrees in the schools through which one had to pass—trial grades; and whoever was considered not ready had to prepare himself further. If I described those degrees to you, the strictness of the trials would make you dizzy. The things about the evolution of the world were considered to be the most important and were communicated only to those who had reached the highest degrees. During the 17th century, which had a great influence on culture, this knowledge was in the hands of the Rosenkreuz (Rose Cross) movement, which was originally based on oriental knowledge, and this knowledge was passed on to the European adepts in the various degrees. At the end of the 18th century and especially at the beginning of the 19th century, these esoteric schools disappeared from the European cultural scene and the last Rosenkreuz adepts withdrew to the Orient. It was the era in which men were to organize life according to external knowledge; the invention of the steam engine, scientific research into cell biology and so on came about. Esoteric wisdom had nothing to contribute then and those who had reached the highest points of this wisdom, the highest grades, withdrew to the Orient. Although there were esoteric schools later on, they do not interest us much now; but I must mention them because Mrs. Blavatsky and Mr. Sinnet, when they received cosmological knowledge from the Tibet-Buddhist esoteric schools, went to the basic sources.

A long spiritual development in Europe had brought the European brain, the European thinking ability, to such a point that difficulties arose for the understanding of esoteric truths. These truths were understood only through great exertion. When this knowledge was first made public partly by “Esoteric Buddhism”, partly by “The Secret Doctrine”, the followers of the esoteric schools took notice, and it seemed to them a mistake that the strict rule not to let anything go beyond the walls of the schools had been broken. The followers of the theosophical movement knew, however, that it was necessary to make some of these things known. Western science could not accept what they said because no one was able to prove what Mrs. Blavatsky and Sinnet had written. Especially puzzling was the beautiful cosmological song that comes from the so-called Dzyan verses,¹ which introduce both volumes of Madame Blavatsky's book. The authenticity of these verses, which relate the history of the universe, was challenged; no scientific investigator could make anything of them; it all seemed a slap in the face of everything European scholars knew. There was one researcher, an orientalist named Max Müller,² whom I greatly respect, who energetically stood up for oriental wisdom. Everything he was able to learn about oriental wisdom he made available to Europe. But neither Max Müller nor any other scientist could do anything with what Madame Blavatsky proclaimed. They all said that the contents of “The Secret Doctrine” were pure fantasy. The scholars had never found anything like it in Indian documents.

Madame Blavatsky said that the place where she had obtained her secrets still contained great treasures of ancient literature, but that the most important parts of this wisdom had been kept protected from western eyes. Even the little that was revealed wasn't understood because of the European way of thinking; the commentary that contained the key to understanding was lacking. The books that showed how the individual propositions were to be understood were carefully hidden by the native Tibetan instructors—at least that's what Madame Blavatsky said. But other thinkers claimed that this literature testifies that an ancient wisdom existed that went far beyond anything the world knows about spiritual matters today. The oriental wise men say that ancient wisdom is contained in those books, which they have carefully protected, and that this ancient wisdom has not been handed down by people like us, but they derive from higher beings, that they derive from divine sources. The Orientals speak of a divine ancient wisdom. But Max Müller said in a lecture to his students that it is not possible to verify that such an ancient wisdom existed. When a great Brahmin Sanskrit scholar heard about this from Mrs. Blavatsky, he said: Oh, if only Max Müller were a Brahmin and I could take him to a temple; I could convince him there that a divine wisdom exists.

The things that Blavatsky revealed through the Dzyan verses are in part from such hidden sources. If Mrs. Blavatsky had invented these verses by herself we would be facing an even greater wonder.

We are not obliged, however, to take the esoteric messages about the origin of the world from the old writings. There are forces in man that enable him to observe and investigate the truths himself, when he develops these forces in the right way. And what one can experience in this way agrees with what Mrs. Blavatsky brought from the Far East. It turns out that the occultists in Europe also protected knowledge that the teacher passed on from generation to generation without ever entrusting it to books. The occultists could therefore assess what Blavatsky indicated in “The Secret Doctrine” according to their own knowledge, especially what they had acquired through their own capabilities. It was tested and confirmed,³ but it is nevertheless difficult for the European occultist to come to terms with it. I will just mention one point: European esoteric knowledge is in a very definite way determined by Christian and Cabbalistic influences and has therefore taken on a one-sided character. If we take this into consideration though, and go back to the basis of this knowledge, full agreement with what has been revealed through Mrs. Blavatsky is possible.

Although a kind of verification of what Mrs. Blavatsky told us about cosmology was possible, it is difficult to make the scholars understand what is meant when the origin of the world is spoken of based on esoteric knowledge. It is of course amazing what the scholars have accomplished in deciphering the old documents, how they struggle to decipher the Babylonian cuneiform characters and the Egyptian hieroglyphics; but Max Müller said that these inscriptions give no indication about the origin of the world. We see how the scholars work around the edge of things and don't get to the core. I am not criticizing the great care and the exact mosaic work the scholars have performed. I will only point to the books that have appeared concerning the Bible-Babel arguments.⁴ That is all fine mosaic work, but the scholars are stuck at the periphery. One feels that they have no idea of how to arrive at the key to these mysteries. It is like when one begins to translate a book written in a foreign language. At first it is imperfect. It's the same with the translations of the old creation myths by our scholars. These are mutilations of the ancient teachings that were handed down from generation to generation. Only those who reached a certain degree of initiation could know something about them. At the end of these lectures I will come back to this.

Initiates are those who have attained knowledge of these things through their own experience. You may ask: what is an initiate anyway? In Theosophy and in the esoteric societies so much is said about so-called initiates. An initiate is one who has developed to a high degree the force that slumbers in every person—and which can be developed by every person. The initiate has cultivated these forces and adapted them to the point that he can understand what kind of forces in the universe are the subjects of what I want to explain. Well, you will say: we are always told that such occult forces exist which slumber in men, but that doesn't make it certain. That is the result of a misunderstanding. The mystic, the occultist, does not assert anything that a scholar cannot assert in his field. Let's say that someone tells you a mathematical truth. If you haven't studied mathematics you don't have the necessary knowledge to verify this truth. No one will deny that to judge a mathematical truth the necessary capacities must be attained first. No authority can decide about such a truth, only the individual who has experienced it can judge. And only someone who has experienced an esoteric truth can judge it. Our contemporaries, however, demand that the occultist prove what he says to the satisfaction of every average intelligence. They stand by the sentence: what is true must be provable and everyone must be able to understand it. The occultist, however, asserts nothing else than what any other scholar asserts in his own field, and he demands nothing more than every mathematician also demands.

You could ask: why are occult truths reported today? The previous method used by the esoteric schools was to keep them in small groups. This method is still used by the occultists of the “right”. Whoever has experience and can read the signs of the times, however, knows that this is no longer correct. And the fact that it is no longer correct is the reason for the origin of the theosophical world movement. What is most developed in our times is understanding. We thank the advances in industry and technology to our combining thinking with the senses. This understanding, or intellectualism, celebrated its greatest triumphs in the 19th century. Intellectual thinking has never been so strongly developed as it is today. I said that the oriental wise men possessed an ancient wisdom, but it was in a completely different form than that of today's thinking. The great teachers of the Orient did not have this cleverness of logical thinking, this pure logic; they didn't need it. Therefore it was difficult to understand them. They had intuition, inner vision. True intuition is not acquired through logical thinking; rather a truth appears directly before the spirit of the person concerned. He knows it. It doesn't need to be proven to him.

The Teachers of the theosophical movement now have the right to impart a certain part of this esoteric wisdom. We have the right to clothe in the modern form of thinking the wisdom that has been imparted to us in the form of intuition. Thought is a force like electricity, like steam power, like the power of heat. And whoever receives the thoughts that are taught within the theosophical movement and devotes himself to them without being mistrustful from the start, in him these thoughts are a force. The listeners don't realize it at first; the seed begins to grow later. No theosophical teacher asks anything more than to be heard. He doesn't demand blind faith, only listening. Neither believing acceptance nor unbelieving rejection are correct standpoints. The listener should only consider the thoughts conveyed to him, free from belief or doubt, free from Yes or No. He must be “neutral” and allow the teachings to work “on probation”. Whoever does this has not only thoughts flowing into him, but also a spiritual power that acts.

People find the easiest access through thinking because Western European culture has developed this capacity to such an extent. Even the most faithful church-going Christians cannot imagine to what extent people believed earlier. This source of conviction no longer flows. Today we must fructify our thought in a completely different way. In the past spiritual communications had to be imparted in secret esoteric schools because thinking was not cultivated as it is today. Today we must combine spirituality with the force of thinking, by which we kindle the thoughts so they live. The spiritual speaker speaks in a different way to his listeners than does a common speaker. He speaks so that a kind of spiritual fluid, a spiritual force flows from him. The listener should be objective, without a Yes or No; he should live with this thought, meditate on it and let it work in him. Then a force will be lighted in him.

Today we must announce esoteric truths about the origin and evolution of the world in the form of European thinking and science. These lectures will describe in this way the conditions that preceded the formation of our earth. We will be led back to the most ancient times where, in the grayest light of dawn, those beings formed who later developed into human beings. We will be led to the stage where this human being was imbued with earthly forces, where he was surrounded by earthly matter, to the point where he now stands. We will learn and see the pre-earthly and earthly evolution of our world, and how Theosophy gives us an outlook into the future. We will see where the evolution of the world is going. We want to show all that without opposing the ideas of today's astronomers. If we develop the forces that slumber in us, we will see for ourselves the great goal to which we are heading: the acquisition of cosmological wisdom. We will consider this cosmological wisdom in the next lectures.

• 1. Later, the Tibetologist David Reigel identified these verses as a part of the “Kui-Te” books, probably also as the fifth, esoteric part of the “Kalachakra-Tantra” with the title “Jnana”.
• 2. Max Müller, 1823-1900, one of the most well-known orientalism, speech and religion experts. He was a member of the Theosophical Society, as long as it stood on a purely Indian philosophical basis.
• 3. An obvious reference to “The Transcendental Universe, 6 lectures on occult science, theosophy and the Catholic faith”, London 1893/94.
• 4. Friedrich Delitzsch, 1850-1922, Professor of Assyrology and Semitic languages, found a certain relationship between the Old Testament and Assyrian creation myths (“Bibel und Babel”, Leipzig 1902). His lectures on the subject generated vehement arguments and many articles contradicting him.